What is Hamlet? I mean really, what is it? When shakespeare wrote it into his first manuscript, was Hamlet that manuscript? Did it exist before then?
To stretch your analogy a bit, I think that words are the first approximation of what Hamlet is, certainly more so than a piece of paper or a bit of ink, but that the analysis cannot really end with words.
[..]
Hamlet in one sense existed as soon as Shakespeare composed most of the words in his head, and in another sense is still coming into being today.
I think we would agree then that the ‘substance’ of Hamlet is a pattern of ideas—information. As is a mind.
Likewise, your consciousness and my consciousness is certainly made up of neurons
Err no! No more than Hamlet is made up of ink! Our consciousness is a pattern of information, in the same sense as Hamlet. It is encoded in the synaptic junctions, in the same sense that Hamlet can be encoded on your computer’s hard drive. The neurons have an active computational role, but are also mainly the energy engine—the great bulk of the computation is done right at the storage site—in the synapses.
if we essentially have no idea of how it is that the neurons in our brain give rise to consciousness
We do have ideas, and this picture is getting increasingly clear every year. Understanding consciousness is synonymous with reverse engineering the brain and building a brain simulation AI. I suspect that many people want a single brilliant idea that explains consciousness, like an e=mc^2 you can write on bumpersticks. But unfortunately it is much more complex than that. The brain has some neat tricks that are that simple (the self-organizing hebbian dynamics in the cortex could be explained in a few equations perhaps), but it is a complex engine built out of many many components.
If you haven’t read them yet already, I recommend Daniel Dennet’s “Consciousness Explained” and Hawkin’s “On Intelligence”. If you don’t have as much time just check out the latter. Reading both gives a good understanding of the scope of consciousness and the latter especially is a layman-friendly summary of the computational model of the brain emerging from neuroscience. Hawkins has a background that mixes neuroscience, software, and hardware—which I find is the appropriate mix for really understanding consciousness.
You don’t really understand a principle until you can actually build it.
That being said, On Intelligence is something of an advertisement for Hawkin’s venture and is now 6 years old, so it must be taken with a grain of salt.
why should we expect a model that is accurate only to the nearest millionth of a picometer to capture us in enough fidelity to replicate consciousness?
For the same reason that once you understand the architecture of a computer, you don’t need to simulate it down to the molecular level to run it’s software.
A similar level of scale separation exists in the brain, and moreover it must exist for our brains to perform effective computation at all. Without scale separation you just have noise, chaos, and no computational capability to accurately simulate and predict your environment.
I think we would agree then that the ‘substance’ of Hamlet is a pattern of ideas—information. As is a mind.
Err no! No more than Hamlet is made up of ink! Our consciousness is a pattern of information, in the same sense as Hamlet. It is encoded in the synaptic junctions, in the same sense that Hamlet can be encoded on your computer’s hard drive. The neurons have an active computational role, but are also mainly the energy engine—the great bulk of the computation is done right at the storage site—in the synapses.
We do have ideas, and this picture is getting increasingly clear every year. Understanding consciousness is synonymous with reverse engineering the brain and building a brain simulation AI. I suspect that many people want a single brilliant idea that explains consciousness, like an e=mc^2 you can write on bumpersticks. But unfortunately it is much more complex than that. The brain has some neat tricks that are that simple (the self-organizing hebbian dynamics in the cortex could be explained in a few equations perhaps), but it is a complex engine built out of many many components.
If you haven’t read them yet already, I recommend Daniel Dennet’s “Consciousness Explained” and Hawkin’s “On Intelligence”. If you don’t have as much time just check out the latter. Reading both gives a good understanding of the scope of consciousness and the latter especially is a layman-friendly summary of the computational model of the brain emerging from neuroscience. Hawkins has a background that mixes neuroscience, software, and hardware—which I find is the appropriate mix for really understanding consciousness.
You don’t really understand a principle until you can actually build it.
That being said, On Intelligence is something of an advertisement for Hawkin’s venture and is now 6 years old, so it must be taken with a grain of salt.
For the same reason that once you understand the architecture of a computer, you don’t need to simulate it down to the molecular level to run it’s software.
A similar level of scale separation exists in the brain, and moreover it must exist for our brains to perform effective computation at all. Without scale separation you just have noise, chaos, and no computational capability to accurately simulate and predict your environment.
Thanks for the reading recommendations! I will get back to you after reading both books in about 3 months.