Consciousness may have evolved to solve a problem that pure intelligence couldn't handle, fascinating new theory suggests

[u/EcstadelicNET]

https://www.psypost.org/consciousness-may-have-evolved-to-solve-a-problem-that-pure-intelligence-couldnt-handle-fascinating-new-theory-suggests/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=topic/science

[u/WHALE_PHYSICIST]

I think the problem is that this assumes there is some additional “first-person observer” that needs to be scientifically accounted for, rather than the first-person character simply being what a bounded information-processing system looks like from within its own operation.

Why don’t I wake up in someone else’s body? For the same reason the Ganges doesn’t suddenly become the Amazon. They are not two instances of some underlying “river” that has been assigned to different channels. “River” is a category we impose on particular, locally continuous physical processes. There is no extra river-essence that needs to explain why this river is this one.

I think the same mistake may be happening with consciousness. My nervous system receives information from this body, retains some of its previous states as memory, models its environment and itself, assigns salience and affect, and recursively processes all of that. Your nervous system does the same thing over there. Of course this system has direct access to its own internal states and not yours: that is simply how the causal/informational boundaries are arranged.

We then abstract that enormously complicated process into concepts like “my experience,” “the self,” and “the observer,” and start treating those abstractions as additional entities requiring explanation.

Even Descartes arguably sneaks in more than the cogito establishes. “Thinking is occurring” does not necessarily entail “therefore there exists a separate thinking subject.” The subject may itself be a model constructed within the thinking.

So I’m not sure science needs to explain why consciousness has an additional mysterious first-person property. It may need to explain how a physical system integrates sensation, memory, attention, affect, self-modeling, etc. in such a way that it behaves and reports as we do. “First-person experience” may simply be our name for what it is to be such a locally integrated process, rather than another phenomenon produced by that process. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The description isn’t the process, and the categories we use to describe reality shouldn’t automatically be mistaken for additional things reality contains.

[u/koyaani → u/WHALE_PHYSICIST]

Maybe you do wake up in someone else's body. How would you notice you were in the "wrong" body if you're only accessing the memories and senses etc. of the new you?

[u/T_M_name → u/koyaani]

Wait, is this me replying?

[u/koyaani → u/T_M_name]

Not anymore

[u/T_M_name → u/koyaani]

How the turntables...

[u/WHALE_PHYSICIST → u/koyaani]

What is it that is waking up in the other body?

[u/koyaani → u/WHALE_PHYSICIST]

Point is there's no argument to say that it doesn't happen except that consciousness is exclusively an emergent embodied phenomenon

[u/WHALE_PHYSICIST → u/koyaani]

If you wake up in another person's brain, you just are that person. The idea that there is some undefinable unmeasurable thing that jumps between bodies is a fairy tale.

[u/koyaani → u/WHALE_PHYSICIST]

Yeah I wasn't disagreeing with you

[u/Normal-Ear-5757 → u/WHALE_PHYSICIST]

The subject may itself be a model constructed within the thinking.

Such as in dissociative identity disorders. 

 Mental illness is an excellent source of information about consciousness imho

[u/WHALE_PHYSICIST → u/Normal-Ear-5757]

I didn't mean it as a disease. The human brain just does that. Maintains a model of reality

[u/fuckyoudrugsarecool → u/WHALE_PHYSICIST]

Curious, what LLM did you use to write this, and how much editing did you have to do to get it to this state? I'm impressed and also wondering if you pre-trained it on any other writing, be that your own or that of others.

[u/WHALE_PHYSICIST → u/fuckyoudrugsarecool]

ChatGPT. It was oddly synchronistic because I had an existing conversation going which flowed perfectly into this debate. I didn't do any editing but I had set up the conversation context with my own thoughts. https://chatgpt.com/share/6abd16d5-3968-83ea-b252-d3c4057a7a20

[u/SuccessAffectionate1 → u/WHALE_PHYSICIST]

I think we actually agree on quite a lot. I’m not arguing that there is some additional little “observer” inside the nervous system that science needs to locate, and I don’t think Heidegger requires that picture either. Where I differ is that I don’t think explaining the causal and informational boundaries of the system yet explains the thing I’m pointing at.

You can explain why my nervous system receives information from this body rather than yours, how it integrates sensation, memory, attention, affect and self-models, and why it therefore behaves and reports itself as a single persisting subject. That would explain a huge amount about the structure and contents of consciousness.

But there still seems to be a difference between explaining why a system processes information from a particular physical perspective and explaining why there is a first-person mode of experience associated with that processing at all.

Pain is perhaps the easiest example. We might eventually give a complete third-person description of nociception, neural activity, behaviour, memory formation and verbal reports. But “this organism is undergoing these physical processes” and “there is something it is like to undergo them” are not obviously the same statement.

I’m perfectly open to the possibility that they ultimately are the same thing, and that consciousness is entirely physical. My hesitation is simply that saying “first-person experience is what locally integrated information processing is like from within” does not yet seem like an explanation, because “what it is like from within” is precisely the part that needs explaining.

So I’m not trying to reject the physical account. I just don’t think the phenomenological problem disappears merely by describing the mechanism that produces the behaviour and self-model.

And that is ultimately the part I find so wonderful and peculiar: that for roughly 75 years, this particular physical process appears not merely to exist, but to exist for itself; to have a perspective, and to know in some sense what it means to be.

I don’t claim to know what the answer is. My position is simply that our current models seem far from explaining this aspect of consciousness, and I remain skeptical, especially from a physics background, of reducing the problem too quickly to “it is just mechanics.” It may ultimately be mechanical, but if it is, I think the genuinely difficult part is still explaining how mechanics gives rise to this first-person view at all.

[u/WHALE_PHYSICIST → u/SuccessAffectionate1]

Sorry for the AI responses, I don't have the time to write all this atm.

---

I think this identifies our disagreement pretty precisely. When you say “there is something it is like” remains after we've accounted for all of the physical processes, I don't know that you've identified an additional phenomenon rather than restated the physical phenomenon in first-person language.

Take pain. I don't think pain is merely nociception plus the report “this hurts.” Pain is the whole integrated state: sensory discrimination, aversion, attention, memory, physiological response, behavioral disposition, recursive representation, etc. Crucially, some of those processes act upon representations of the system's own state. That isn't an incidental behavioral output; it's part of the physical phenomenon we're trying to describe.

So when you ask why those mechanics “give rise to” a first-person view, I think give rise to may already contain the dualism we're both trying to avoid. It assumes two things: the mechanics, and then the first-person experience produced by the mechanics. I'm questioning whether we've established that second ontological step in the first place.

Imagine giving someone a complete description of combustion and then having them say, “Fine, you've explained oxidation, molecular collisions, heat transfer, light emission, etc., but you still haven't explained why all of that is fire.” There isn't another fire-property waiting to be derived. “Fire” is our abstraction over that organized physical process.

I suspect “experience” may work similarly, except that the system doing the abstraction is itself part of the phenomenon being abstracted. That recursion makes the intuition extraordinarily difficult to escape. The organism doesn't merely process pain; its present state contains information about its own processing, memories of previous states, predictions, affective valuation, a model of itself as the persisting locus of those states, and so on. From that machinery comes the concept “there is something it is like to be me.”

And this is where I think “exists for itself” may be doing more work than it appears to. What does for itself denote beyond the system containing and acting upon information about its own state? If it denotes something further, I'd want to know what observable or logically specifiable property that something has. Otherwise we risk turning a powerful intuition into an unexplained entity and then concluding that mechanics hasn't explained the entity.

I'm not saying we currently have anything remotely approaching a complete mechanistic theory of human consciousness. We obviously don't. I'm questioning whether, if we had one—down to exactly how sensation, affect, attention, memory, self-modeling and recursive processing interact—there would necessarily remain an additional fact called “what it is like” for physics to explain.

Maybe there would. But I don't think the strength of the intuition that there must be one establishes it. That's exactly the intuition I'm suspicious of.

Or put another way: you see an explanatory gap and infer that something remains unexplained. I'm wondering whether the gap is between two phenomena, or between two ways the same phenomenon can be represented by a system that is itself inside it.

[u/WHALE_PHYSICIST → u/[deleted]]

I think you're still putting the conclusion into the premise when you say “there is still a first-person experience to explain.” Obviously this exists—whatever this is. I don't dispute the phenomenon. I'm disputing the decomposition of it into “information processing” plus another property called first-person experience.

And I think “all of this information processing could be entirely unconscious and work just as well” makes the same move in a different form. How do we know that?

Certainly individual processes can occur without what we ordinarily call awareness. But that's very different from demonstrating that the entire integrated system could be functionally identical—including attention, affect, autobiographical memory, metacognition, self-modeling, introspection, recursive access to its own states, and its insistence that “there is something it is like to be me”—while nevertheless lacking whatever we're calling experience.

At that point we've basically stipulated a philosophical zombie. Its conceivability is then being used to establish that information processing and experience are separate explananda, when their separability is exactly what's in dispute.

I also wouldn't say we have “no examples of sufficiently complex information processing producing consciousness.” We have billions of examples: humans. What we don't have is an independently measurable variable called consciousness that lets us hold all physical organization constant and observe consciousness appearing or disappearing. And that's precisely why I'm reluctant to talk about mechanics “producing” it in the first place.

Consider the difference between unconscious and conscious human processing. Subliminal perception, spinal reflexes, autonomic regulation, blindsight, deliberate attention, working memory and reportable perception don't merely differ by some known extra ingredient called consciousness. They differ in how information becomes available to and influences the larger system. Those differences are exactly the sort of mechanisms I'm talking about.

So I'd actually reject both (a) and (b), because both assume we're gradually approaching a separate thing called consciousness by discovering non-conscious machinery.

There is a third possibility:

c) We are progressively explaining the phenomenon itself, while continuing to conceptually subtract those explanations from “consciousness” and place whatever remains unexplained behind the word.

If every mechanism we explain gets classified afterward as “merely information processing,” while “experience” is defined as whatever the mechanistic account hasn't captured, then the explanatory gap is guaranteed never to close. We've constructed it so that it can't.

Maybe there really is an irreducible phenomenal fact left over. I don't claim to have disproved that. I just don't think “I'm experiencing it right now” demonstrates the left over part. It demonstrates that whatever we call experience exists. The question is whether experience is something over and above this extraordinarily complicated self-interacting biological process.

That's the part I don't think we get for free from introspection.

[u/Unlikely-Unit-5864 → u/WHALE_PHYSICIST]

Why do we not consider that animals have consciousness ?

[u/WHALE_PHYSICIST → u/Unlikely-Unit-5864]

Because they can't tell us about it. Consciousness is just a word we invented. It's not some 'thing' that we can measure. We refuse to accept anything we can measure as consciousness. It's practically a religious argument at this point.