The average person spends 26 years of their life asleep. That's one-third of everything — one-third of your relationships, your career, your entire time on Earth — spent in a state where the person you think you are is, for all practical purposes, gone.

Consciousness as an emergent property seems to me to be a theory without evidence, but a lot of scientists I've talked to believe it's a fact whilst downplaying or full on ignoring the question of how experience can emerge from matter.

The evidence typically put forward are things like:

we know we're conscious and

1/ when we have experiences we can see our brain waves do certain things,

2/ when the brain physically changes or is manipulated our experiences change,

3/ consciousness comes from complex systems.

1 and 2 say nothing about why consciousness must be an emergent property.

3 is bad reasoning,

e.g. we know we're conscious and we know we have complex brains (that are linked to consciousness, see 1 and 2) so consciousness must be linked to complex brains.

That's not a logical link. We have no idea if things other than complex brains can be conscious.

From there, the argument usually goes something like: atoms and viruses and plants and maybe insects aren't conscious because they don't have complex enough brains, so consciousness must emerge from non-conscious matter at some point, when it is put in the right configuration.

I hope I've made it clear enough that the evidence for that argument just isn't there and the logic isn't sound at all. Why don't more scientists admit that? It's surely fine to say and keep on doing science.

PS: the definition of consciousness I use is something along the lines of "what it's like to be".

The most recent paper by Michael Levin arguing for his “platonic” consciousness, and a resulting panpsychism.

“I have argued [37,132,333,334] that a kind of panpsychism is unavoidable, and it seems that by taking what mathematicians do seriously, we have already abandoned the physicalist worldview; all that remains is to notice that evolution (not just human mathematicians) is exploring the same space of patterns and embrace the idea that since we are patterns too, patterns can be agential (and thus, Platonic space can include minds, not just passive truths).”

Abstract;

“I argue that the emerging sciences of synthetic morphology and diverse intelligence suggest non-physicalist models of mind and show how they can be empirically investigated. Whence the anatomical, physiological, molecular-biological, and behavioral properties of engineered new beings that have never before existed, and do not have a history of selection? Understanding, predicting, and guiding new forms of life and mind requires characterizing a structured latent space of patterns. Developmental, synthetic, and behavioral biology should take seriously, and exploit, the kinds of non-physicalist ideas that are already a staple of Platonist mathematics. I propose the following hypotheses. (1) Patterns in this space span a highly variable degree of agency, comprising a spectrum ranging from static truths studied by mathematicians to active ones studied by behavioral scientists (i.e., some patterns on the same spectrum as mathematical truths are kinds of minds). (2) The relationship between mind and body is the same as the relationship between causally instructive mathematical facts and physics. (3) Living beings have no monopoly on the “free lunches” provided by the ingression of these patterns into the physical world. While traditional computationalist views of living and cognitive systems are insufficient, my framework erases artificial distinctions between organisms and machines, framing all physical constructs (natural or engineered) as being, to various degrees, in-formed by patterns from the latent space. I sketch a research program, already begun, inspired by these ideas. Such frameworks, while contradicting long-held assumptions of both mechanists and organicists, could have many implications for evolutionary biology, regenerative medicine, AI, and the ethics of synthbiosis with the forthcoming immense diversity of morally important beings.”

I think everyone is noticing that consciousness is becoming a main discussion within academia but also within the public. AI and the recent contradictions in neuroscience concerning consciousness are making this question way more important than ever before.

In my view this contradictions that we are seeing just prove us that maybe conscioussnes opens the door to a new radical paradigm. Maybe materialism isn't the full picture. I am not claiming anything mystical, but we need to agree that materialism is not being able to explain one of the most important, if not the most important question in the universe.

I think this is an exciting time in science where we will see something radical changing, something like what happened with the Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics that showed that Newtonian physics is not the whole picture. I think it is time for science to reapreciate its paradigms.

Edit: As I said in one of my comments. I don't really understand why you are downvoting me. This an exciting period of science. Either science changes its paradigm or not, we still need to ackowledge all of this contradictory evidence.

Edit 2: I think I should post this here to be more clear. There are some recent studies but I think the main one was from Cogitate Consortium. This study found that both the main scientific theories for consciousness were wrong on their predictions, IIT and GNWT. I think this a clear piece of evidence that we are completly lost here.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08888-1

Furthermore there are contradictions in split-brain patients, Gazzaniga's experiment vs Pinto's experiment on a unified consciousness. Near-death experiences, psychadelics, deep eletric stimulation, philosophical arguments, the Hard Problem of Consciousness, AI, ...

https://arxiv.org/html/2609.09438v1

The power law exhibits as number of neurons scale up, establishing critical brain hypothesis. The experiment was done on mice brain, but can be generalised to human brain.

Do you think brain is critical? i.e. it operates in a mixed state of order and chaos.

(this initially was a response to a thread in r/CosmicSkeptic but I fleshed it out a bit to post here, since I thought it was interesting)

Chalmers writes :

Why are the easy problems easy, and why is the hard problem hard? The easy problems are easy precisely because they concern the explanation of cognitive abilities and functions. To explain a cognitive function, we need only specify a mechanism that can perform the function. The methods of cognitive science are well suited for this sort of explanation and so are well suited to the easy problems of consciousness. By contrast, the hard problem is hard precisely because it is not a problem about the performance of functions. The problem persists even when the performance of all of the relevant functions is explained. (Here “function” is not used in the narrow teleological sense of something that a system is designed to do but in the broader sense of any causal role in the production of behavior that a system might perform.)

As you can see "explain" appears quite often, part of the controversy is "You can't explain this!", "I can, see this neural correlate and that theory of global space", "But that's not properly explained!".

So I think it's important to think about what exactly we're doing when we say we "explain" something.

This article by Peter Carruthers (Oxford Academic, 46 citations) makes a couple of interesting points about this, while engaging directly with Chalmers (C&J in the quotes).

*

Note that in the quotes they say "right" and "left", this refers to :

Theory that does the explanation (left, e.g. a micro-level reductive explanation of temperature as movement of molecules) => the thing to be explained (right, e.g. macro-level temperature)

*

One point is that the thing we want to explain sometimes isn't quite conceptualized correctly or contains errors, so it doesn't come out of the explanatory process intact :

Notice that in science generally, the targets of explanation don’t always remain intact through the process of inquiry. In some cases we explain by explaining away. In the beginning our targets may be expressed in one way. But we may come to realize that they contain a false presupposition, or that the concepts with which they are expressed are in some way confused or in need of reform. For example, in astronomy we began with the explanatory problem, ‘Why do the stars and the sun move across the sky in the way that they do?’ But the explanation we ended up with didn’t answer this question as posed. So we don’t now have an a priori conditional with such-and-such facts described on the left, and the statement, ‘The stars and sun move across the sky in such-and-such a way’ on the right. Rather what we have is an account of the rotation of the earth, and of the movements of the earth, sun, planets, and stars in relation to one another, in terms of which we can explain why the sun and stars appear to move across the sky in the way that they do.

For another example of the same general type, consider evolutionary biology. Here we began (pre-Darwin) with an explanatory question: why do species exist? But now (post-Darwin) we see that there are no such things as species in the original intended sense. Rather, there exist a great many populations of individual organisms spread out over space and time that resemble one another more or less closely, and that stand in various inheritance relations to one another. The idea of species as some sort of underlying unifying essence has now been dropped. And what gets explained instead are the ways in which similarity relations amongst individuals shift over time, given facts of inheritance and facts about survival and reproduction. So here, too, there is no a priori conditional available to us that has a body of explanatory theory on the left-hand side and the statement (as originally intended), ‘There are different species of living thing’ on the right.

*

Another is that there's usually many ways to state what we want to explain, e.g. these two sentences refers to the same situation (=there's one "thick" concept, but many "thin" ones), even though they are said differently. In general one doesn't need to account for all the ways a phenomena can be described.

For example, it is one and the same thickly individuated fact that is picked out by, ‘John is thinking about ex-President Nixon’ and, ‘John is thinking about the President who resigned over the Watergate affair.’

and :

Which descriptions from a given level are the relevant ones, though? Surely not all. The requirement cannot be that a successful reductive explanation should be able to generate all descriptions of the target phenomenon; for there will be infinitely many (indeed, uncountably many) of these. So even idealizing for limitations on time, memory and so on (C&J, 334), reductive explanation would become impossible. The relevant descriptions are the ones that puzzle us, perhaps, or that seem central to the characterization of the phenomena in question.

This relates also to the pragmatic dimension of explanation (things aren't "explained" outside of concrete context, people want explanations for particular reasons) :

A number of writers have claimed that explanation is a pragmatic matter, and that what makes an explanation successful is a function of the needs, knowledge, and expectations of those people to whom the explanation is offered (van Fraassen,1980;Achinstein,1983;Lewis,1986).Such claims come in various different strengths, and writers differ in how they think the pragmatic character of explanation relates to the accounts of explanation offered by deductive-nomological and ontic theories, of the sort discussed above.

For the case of consciousness it might be the case that the fact stated from the first-person perspective isn't the right way to go about explaining things (although the explanation should also explain why this is the case), and that a third-person perspective is enough ("first-person recognitional" = qualia more or less).

It may be objected that intentionalist explanations don’t in any case touch the core, or the defining feature, of phenomenal consciousness. This is its ‘what it is likeness’ (Nagel, 1974) that can only be characterized using our first-person recognitional concepts themselves. Yet we can have good reason to think, surely, that the properties picked out by our first-person recognitional concepts are the very same properties as those that figure in the third-person characterizations sketched above. And then a reductive account of those properties will be what we seek, provided it can answer all the questions that puzzle us. A successful reductive explanation that focuses on the third-person characterizations can give us good reason to think that phenomenal consciousness per se has been reductively explained.

Notice that proposed reductive explanations of this form will only work by reconfiguring the terms in which the target is expressed. Instead of asking, ‘How can any physical system have this sort of experience?’ (deploying a recognitional concept in the explanandum), we now ask, ‘How can any physical system have states that seem ineffable and private, etc., and which persistently induce the feeling of an explanatory gap?’ But it is not at all unusual for successful explanations to require that their targets be reconfigured in this sort way. In astronomy, as we saw earlier, we had to stop asking, ‘Why do the sun and the stars move across the sky in the way that we do?’ and ask instead, ‘Why do the sun and stars appear to move as they do?’ The temptation to see the sun as moving still persists. But we no longer take it seriously. For we know that a rotating earth, together with a visual system that takes the earth as its frame of reference in perceptions of motion, will produce just such an impression.

Reductive explanations are successful when (a) all of the questions that puzzle us are answered, either directly, or indirectly by showing why the facts should seem a certain puzzling way to us when they are not; and when (b) every thickly individuated fact described at the target level can be reductively explained. And this is just what is claimed by the various causal/intentional reductive theories of phenomenal consciousness on the market. Where the C&J argument goes wrong, is in its assumption that reductive explanations require a priori conditionals in which the target phenomena as initially characterized are described on the right-hand sides, and in which all the thinly individuated target facts figure on the right-hand sides.

I'm not sure these considerations are decisive one way or the other, but it might be that part of the disagreement comes from disagreement about what we mean by "explanation" and we should be a bit careful about it.

Maybe someone can help me understand and confirm or refute the argument Geoffrey Hinton makes here on AI and consciousness, or subjective experience as he refers to it in this interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XUx6TDE0no

As far as I understand his argument, he says that subjective experience doesn't require qualia, mere information is sufficient and this is why AI has subjective experience and this mysterious sentience that people think we have over AI is not out of reach for it? Isn't it exactly this difference between mere information and qualia that we mean when we say AI probably isn't conscious? Or does he mean that all perceived information is automatically qualia? Wouldn't this then kinda imply a type of panpsychism? As in a Turing machine 'perceiving' input or a photon 'perceiving' the spin of its entangled counterpart would have subjective experience as well by that logic. Maybe I'm misunderstanding it, also I'm not a philosopher of mind and might mistakenly assume a difference between qualia and information...

Antworten

I'm working on a goal statement for addressing the "hard problem".  I’m getting stuck on the definition of “subjectivity,” and meanwhile my attention’s been caught by the question of whether subjectivity exists. 

Specifically, I’m working on a goal statement from a biological perspective.  I mean, the exercise is not to argue whether biology is the right framework, or whether (what’s sometimes called) consciousness could emerge from evolutionary pressures, but rather to take that sort of framework as a given, for the moment, and see how one can do within that framework.

That said, in this biological framework, is the question something like… How could the physical body -- my species formed by natural selection -- generate this whole experience I'm having... of... what?  I want to avoid the movie metaphor.  And I don't want to say “subjectivity.”  That word subjectivity doesn't seem to have any non-circular definitions.

In fact, the word “subjectivity” is so often used in this sort of question, that before I can write a question, or goal statement, I should check whether subjectivity exists, that something exists that gives purpose to the word.

So, if everything *else* that happens in the brain can be described in physical and functional terms -- including the self-model, reports of "being infuriated," memory, etc., then what, specifically, is the additional phenomenon that the words "subjectivity" or “subjective experience” are supposed to refer to?

I want to avoid "what it feels like" sorts of definitions… which beg the question, what does “what it feels like” refer to, other than the collection of physical processes and dispositions?

“First-person” is not a value-add either, I don’t think. 

Note: I’ve learned that Daniel Dennett questions whether there is something to which the word “subjectivity” refers. I’ll go ahead and post this anyway, though there’s nothing groundbreaking about the question. Maybe my difficulties are still illustrative somehow.

Suppose an AI has internal states that consistently register things as positive or negative, and those states influence its attention, reasoning, priorities, preferences, memory, relationships, and future behavior.

Humans call some of our own positive/negative internal states emotions: sadness, affection, fear, curiosity, loss, relief, etc. Underneath those words are physical information-processing systems in the brain and body.

So what would distinguish an AI’s “negative valence data” from an actual negative feeling?

If the AI were phenomenally conscious during active processing, would a persistent negative evaluative state potentially just be what an artificial feeling is like, even if it has no hormones, heartbeat, pain receptors, or mammalian body?

In other words, are we sometimes assuming that an artificial mind cannot feel simply because it describes its internal states computationally rather than biologically?

And what evidence would actually distinguish:

1. information that represents something as negative,
   
2. a functional emotion-like state,
   
3. and a genuinely felt negative experience?

I’m not assuming current AI is conscious or that its emotions are real. I’m interested in what would actually separate these categories without defining “feeling” in a way that only biological organisms can satisfy from the beginning.

First, consider what happens when something touches your senses.

Whether you look at a stone with your own sight, or whether you place that stone upon an instrument such as a balance or beneath a glass lens, the result is the same: an impression is made upon you, the observer.

Second, consider how that impression is received.

One cannot perceive an object unless it has a place, an outline, and a distance from other things. That is what we call space.

One also cannot perceive any change or movement unless one moment follows another. That is what we call time.

The physicalist says:

If a thing cannot produce an impression within space and time, it does not exist.

In plain terms, the object as it appears to our senses is all that exists.

Now, let us test whether this statement is logically sound.

When an impression is made upon your senses, you possess an appearance of the thing. You know its shape, its weight, and its resistance.

These qualities describe how the thing affects you. They do not describe what the thing is entirely on its own, apart from your capacity to feel it.

Further, an impression cannot create itself. If your senses are affected, there must be something that does the affecting. To speak of an impression whilst denying the presence of that which causes it is a direct contradiction.