Conscious

Good Introduction to the Hard Problem

If you are familiar with Sam Harris' work or with philosophy of mind, this book will seem fairly elementary. It basically summarizes some of the more basic mysteries surrounding consciousness and doesn't have much in the way of new ideas.

4 personnes sur 4 ont trouvé cette évaluation pertinente

A great book

Equal measures accessible and important. You need this book. It's of such a high quality that it's hard not to resort to hyperbolic cliches when describing it. It's a wonderful synthesis of both the science and philosophy of consciousness, laid out in clear and concise language. It's seriously great.

13 personnes sur 15 ont trouvé cette évaluation pertinente

Fascinating!

A really great introduction to and overview of the subject of consciousness! Although I thought I knew already a lot about the subject, it gave me some new insights to ponder.

4 personnes sur 5 ont trouvé cette évaluation pertinente

This is a great spring board...

A huge fan and member of Sam Harris’ “Making Sense/Waking Up” podcast/website... so of course I was curious after their recent podcast together.

So that was my catalyst... I have not yet gone too deep into what is “conscious” for all the reasons plus my own anecdotal experiences.

As one who has just become a new convert as an “hopeful agnostic” I have stirred away from this subject on purpose... I am still going through the “grieving process” as I continue to progress through my faith/human development.

This was a fantastic, coherent— just what I needed to help me gain more insight... I want to now go deeper and start to ask questions I have shelved.

I highly recommend this quick, broad and very rational perspective!

4 personnes sur 5 ont trouvé cette évaluation pertinente

A great primer on consciousness

While not adding so much new to my burgeoning understanding of consciousness it presents a great summary of the leading thinking in the field and is a highly recommended listen.

7 personnes sur 10 ont trouvé cette évaluation pertinente

Too brief, too fundamental.

Very simple and straightforward, but not super interesting or provocative. Might work as a book for kids or youths, maybe not so much for adults.

5 personnes sur 8 ont trouvé cette évaluation pertinente

thoughtful and enlightening

this read adds depth to ones understanding of the mystery of so- called consciousness. outstanding.

Explores a complex topic with elegance and clarity

In this long-form intimate essay Harris explores the many facets of a complex topic with remarkable elegance and clarity, presenting a nuanced and expansive perspective on consciousness that synthesizes philosophy and neuroscience. Her viewpoint is profound and inspired despite her strict materialism, moving beyond the reductionist view that consciousness is nothing more than an emergent phenomenon of electrochemical networks one step removed from an anthill. For the sake of clarity and precision, some alternative arguments are quickly dismissed based on exceptions and edge cases, but this is a delightfully condensed and sweepingly broad summary of advanced thinking for the general audience as well as the expert. Narrated by the author with a voiceover tone that is warm, effortless, unforced, polished and delightful to hear.

Missing some fairly obvious counterpoints...

First, this is a very decent short summary of the current state of the discussion around consciousness, which by itself is worth the short time spent in first half of the book. It is well researched and well read and time well spent if you don't know it. If you do, skip to the second half for a proposal to take seriously and examine the theory of panpsychism as related to consciousness. The author, without good reason or argument essentially argues that it should not be dismissed out of hand for consciousness to be a basic property of matter itself. She also argues, with much better arguments that human centric definitions of consciousness are counterproductive. So in the rest of the review, I'm going to mention the arguments author has missed or did not think of.

First of all, the basic definition of consciousness has a clear flaw. It does not allow to determine if anyone at all is conscious. A definition of predicate that does not lend itself to determining if the predicate is true for anything is just useless.

Now author's argument that consciousness is property of matter will reveal itself as absurd if you replace the word consciousness with the word chair. "If you remove a small piece of wood from a chair, it will still be a chair. If you have a little piece of wood, it clearly is yet not a chair, somewhere between it turns from not chair to a chair. Maybe that means that chair is the property of matter itself and it is distributed even in the smallest bit of matter." It is pretty obvious that chair is a property of the ordering of the atoms. That is the part that the author is missing. Something can be missing in every single bit of matter as it is a property of the pattern, not the substrate.

Why cannot be consciousness property of matter? Well it sort of depends on circumstances. Let me explain. For something, anything to have experience - so there can be something the thing is like - it has to change state. Somewhere locally has to occur a change in entropy. The smaller the matter is, the more difficult the conditions are for there to be a change in entropy at that level of matter. Quarks could only change entropy until 1 / 1,000,000th of a second from Big Bang. Hadrons until about a second, leptons until about 3 minutes. It takes a Large Hadron Collider and extreme amounts of energy to change entropy of single Hadrons. We can possibly talk about consciousness of atoms inside huge stars, but in normal conditions the smallest matter we can consider are molecules and crystals, in particular organic molecules are good candidates because of wide range of possible changes. That's just limitations from physics.

Now if there should be something that it is to be like, you imply that some experience can be recognized while repeated, other wise there is nothing but ever changing chaos with no pattern and there is nothing distinct from it to point to as that something. For that you need the local entropy of the open system to decrease, at the expense of the environment as total entropy will always increase due to 2nd thermodynamic law. So there has to be some process, which decreases local entropy of a system, increases the ordering of the matter. That is your best minimal candidate for consciousness, the process by which matter is ordered. Not just the ordering itself. That also gives you clear distinction as even ordered matter with no process to change entropy is not conscious. There might be other conditions on the process, but at minimum there has to be one. Outside of singularities like Big Bang, Black Holes and Large Colliders consciousness can naturally exist as low as organic molecules, but there is nothing preventing its existence in orderings of carbon nanotubes or movement of electrons in silicon matrices. But it is decidedly not the property of the matter itself.

Conscious Concepts Highlights

This was my first excursion into concepts of consciousness. Like a stone skipping over a pond, the author touches on various concepts that I found intriguing and helpful. Her kind and gentle narration help the more dense concepts go down more smoothly. Four stars because I was left a bit wanting about the implication(s) of her conclusion. Definitely worth a listen.