Consciousness ​

Consciousness is fascinating. Joscha Bach has some interesting things to say about it.

I practice self reflection (via journaling) & meditation (walks in nature) to get a deeper awareness of myself and my surroundings.

Curious how one would encode consciousness in AI agents.

Notes ​

• Neurons are transition systems which are exchanging and converting and optimizing abstract "resources", from which you can build homotopy types from neural codes representing stimuli spaces and then hopefully qualia.
• You can think of mental computation as two stages: the first activates a set of controllers that activate features (functions) and links them into a network, the second propagates activation patterns through the network. Features are released by deactivating their controller.
• Emergence is a relationship between models. A model is the recreation of an observed pattern as a causal structure. A causal structure is a network of transitions that are conditional on state. An algorithm represents causal structure in a form that can be reasoned about.
• LSD and DMT (Ayahuasca) made me realize that "I" am an illusion. My ego is afraid of death, but I am not my ego. Think about it: anything that is mine is not I. I am the subject, my things are my objects. So I am not my body, my car, my house, my clothes, my ego. So what am I?
• There is no end to consciousness and no end goal.
  • Goals are things that can keep the experiencer engaged in the experience and are creations to add spice to reality and existence.
  • You can have any goal you want. It all is an experience.
• You can have super intelligence without consciousness.
• I do think that there is a plane of greater consciousness that we are all connected to, no matter how tenuously. And this consciousness is perpetual and two-way, i.e. it is a connection not a funnel. We learn from it and it learns from us and then that collective knowledge becomes almost "in the public domain."
• A brain forming by itself at random is so incredibly unlikely that the known universe as we conceive it (a few billion years old and a few billion light years across) certainly contains no such thing. The point is that it's not infinitely unlikely. So a universe in equilibrium (after the "heat death" of our own, for example) would eventually create such a thing at random. And that this creation, as unfathomably improbable as it is, is still unfathomably more probable than the entropy of the whole universe reversing and creating something like we see now. So the argument is that, if an equilibrium state of the universe is possible, it is actually almost certain that you are such a disembodied brain, rather than the universe existing and your memories being true, etc.
• See nature as a harmonic arrangement of particles - music in a cosmic symphony. The composer of that symphony is the eternal spirit - the observer, the traveler, the very spark of existence.
• When we open our eyes and see the world, we don't see it directly, light is photons but what we experience is photons being converted to electrons, sent to our visual cortex(the back of our brain), millions of tiny individual signals get processed into one large cohesive picture which gets sent to the front of our brain where we perceive it.. just like all our sense.
  • When we open our eyes and see the world, we don't see it directly, light is photons but what we experience is photons being converted to electrons, sent to our visual cortex(the back of our brain), millions of tiny individual signals get processed into one large cohesive picture which gets sent to the front of our brain where we perceive it.. just like all our sense.
  • So our brain takes all these signals, which are just conversion/replications of what we assume is a real reality outside ourselves... and then it uses it to simulate the experience we have of reality... our brain has a model of what reality is suppose to be like and our sensory information fills that in on the fly. But we don't have to use sensory information, we can imagine sensory information and when we dream we can see and smell and touch just like in real life... but our brain is just making it up
  • I think we only perceive a limited amount of information that our brain processes, we experience only the "conscious" decision making part of our brain, we aren't privy to most of whats going on in our brain... except in rare cases like when we take psychedelic drugs... Its known that Shrooms/LSD cause parts of the brain that normally don't speak to one another to do so, information leaks out and is experienced by other parts of the brain that normally never happens.
  • So to me we live in a simulation our subconscious creates, normally we don't get to peak behind the curtain, but sometimes we get glimpses of other worlds and realities, entities... but to me it makes sense that these are aspects of the larger mind, the subconscious, that are normally separate.
• Consciousness is unaffected by psychs. Your body/mind can be under the influence of all kinds of substances, yet consciousness simply sits back, unaltered, watching and experiencing.
• Our sense of meaning is a subjective experience (like emotions or thoughts). There isn't anything (at least not that I have found) that is objectively meaningful. Even if your gut instinct is telling you that X is the most important thing there is, that's just a subjective experience.
• Without hope, the human being simply ceases to function. And there is nothing that robs of us of hope quicker than the realization that one day everything will end. So I see religion/spirituality as being an adaptive mechanism to our development of self-awareness. We've become 'too aware' for our own good, so to speak, and as a result we've invented stories which ease that anxiety.
• There are two ways of looking at things: from the outside, and from the inside. But these are two sides of the same coin.
• I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law.
• Free will is an illusion. Volition (the experience of doing something intentionally) is a feeling that can be triggered and disabled at will in lab environments. There's a distinction between an external force causing you to do something and an internal one. Both are deterministic at the end of the day. But that experience has clear evolutionarily adaptive qualities for anything that is good at persisting to exist.
  • Consciousness is simply the experience of being. It doesn't need to accompany an experience of identity, agency, memory, attention, or many other subsets of experience. Those are all just kinds of experiences. None of them are experience per se, ie. consciousness.
  • Consciousness is intrinsic and necessarily exists prior to or at least in perfect concert with the natural material world. There is no logically coherent philosophical defence of epiphenomenalism. I experience, therefore I am. The grounds for defending the existence of experience are far less shaky than the ground for defending the existence of an experienceless physical reality. Dualism grasps at further straws.
• We don't experience reality, we experience our perception. Calling some things reality or objective is a useful ontological framework but experientially It's all perception with assumed objective/reality/other source.
• Predictive processing, a theoretical framework for neuroscience and cognitive science in general arguing that our brains are organs of prediction. Philosopher Andy Clark (author of Surfing Uncertainty) and neuroscientist Anil Seth (author of the forthcoming book on the topic, Being You) have both described perception as 'controlled hallucination'. Anil Ananthaswamy has recently written a great article on the topic as it relates to psychedelics.
• Our perceptions have been filtered by the nervous system in many ways. Most columns in the neocortex receive their input from other columns rather than directly from sensory input. The nervous system has a nested, hierarchical structure and uses inference to process information. Perceptual priors, beliefs, and cognitive biases shape our perceptions.
• I've come to believe that all matter is connected and everything we have is consciousness organizing itself in ways it can experience itself. And it's not like this consciousness is self aware, it's just existence itself, finding new and interesting, infinite ways to exist.

Links ​

• What it means to live a conscious life? - My thoughts on compassion and living a conscious life.
• The Evolution of Consciousness
• Where is our consciousness, and is it a thing that has mass/matter?
• The Origin of Consciousness – How Unaware Things Became Aware (2019)
• Roger Penrose: Physics of Consciousness and the Infinite Universe (2020)
• Can AI Become Conscious? (2020) (HN)
• Electrons May Very Well Be Conscious (2020) (HN)
• Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality (2020) (HN)
• Sir Roger Penrose & Dr. Stuart Hameroff: Consciousness and the physics of the brain (2020) (Notes)
• Consciousness and the Social Brain book notes
• Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality | Anil Set (2017)
• Are the Brain’s Electromagnetic Fields the Seat of Consciousness? (2020) (HN)
• Do we have free will? (2020)
• How does consciousness even make sense? (HN)
• A Theoretical Computer Science Perspective on Consciousness (2020)
• Book Review: Consciousness Explained (2020)
• Electrons May Very Well Be Conscious (2020)
• The Mathematics of Consciousness (2021) (Reddit)
• On the Medium of Thought (2020)
• Do quantum effects play a role in consciousness? (2021)
• What Is Consciousness For? (2021)
• Consciousness Is Just a Feeling (2021) (HN)
• Is Consciousness Everywhere? (2021)
• What is consciousness? Some new perspectives from our physics project (2021) (HN)
• Do you think that advanced AIs like Sophia and GPT-3 are conscious beings? (2021)
• How would we know whether we are hallucinating reality or not? (2021)
• Where and how our internal world pops into existence?
• Making the hard problem of consciousness easier (2021) (HN)
• The Consciousness of Invertebrates (2021) (HN)
• Joscha Bach “Consciousness, Continually Learning Systems, Neuralink” (2021)
• How to access higher states of consciousness without drugs? (2021)
• Is the universe conscious? (Reddit)
• The Interface Theory of Perception (2015) (Reddit)
• Plants Feel Pain and Might Even See (2021) (Tweet)
• Neuroscience of Consciousness | Oxford Academic
• Minimal physicalism as a scale-free substrate for cognition and consciousness (2021) (Tweet)
• The fungal mind: on the evidence for mushroom intelligence (2021) (HN)
• Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy (2021) (HN)
• Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? (2015) (HN)
• Thousands of coma patients may be conscious (HN)
• Запертые в теле: Что на самом деле происходит с людьми «в коме»
• What’s So Hard About Understanding Consciousness? (2022) (HN)
• Consciousness is supported by near-critical slow cortical electrodynamics (2022) (HN)
• The Surprisingly Sophisticated Mind of an Insect (2022) (HN)
• Field theories of consciousness
• Consciousness is not computation (2022) (HN)
• Eben Alexander Explaining that Science shows that the brain does not create consciousness
• Under Anesthesia, Where Do Our Minds Go? (2022) (HN)
• Nick Lane on Origins of Life, Consciousness, Alien Life, Krebs Cycle, and Evolution (2022)
• What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness (2022) (HN)
• The "Hard Problem" of Consciousness with David Chalmers
• Some people who appear to be in a coma may be conscious (HN)
• Roger Penrose: "Consciousness must be beyond computable physics." (2022)
• Consciousness's ability to 'merge' and 'unmerge'
• From Language to Consciousness (Guest: Joscha Bach) (2022)
• What is a Mathematical Structure of Conscious Experience? (2023) (HN)
• Is There Really a Hard Problem of Consciousness? - Joscha Bach (2023)
• My talk on consciousness at the Science of Consciousness 2023