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I always point to David Chalmers when someone wants to understand the problem of consciousness. I like how casual he is about possible solutions and gives credibility to all the options (unlike eg. Daniel Dennett, who seems almost religious about how revolutionary his "there's no problem at all" approach is).
I really recommend this podcast in which Sam Harris talks with Chalmers about all the options currently in the game: https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-light-of-the-mind
One of the most promising theories (discussed in the podcast) assumes that consciousness is a fundamental attribute of reality, the other side of the coin (matter being the first one). Which leads to the conclusions, that consciousness is everywhere, but not as 'condensed' as in the brain. Seems crazy at first, but the more you think about it the more plausible it seems.
Here's a nice paper about it: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1668/2014...
Within this paradigm it starts to make sense to call the reality "The Mind", as some Buddhist schools do. There's also the crazy part, about how under some conditions it could potentially lead to experiencing other peoples' minds.
For the more adventurous, here's a talk by Culadasa, very experienced meditator and a neuroscience professor, in which he shares some thoughts about the problem and also some of these crazy experiences he had: http://s3.amazonaws.com/dharmatreasure/150430-tcmc--culadasa...
If you believe consciousness exists, and that the universe is real, then it's pretty much tautological that the universe is a system which includes consciousness, which is a very, very tiny step away from stating that the universe itself is conscious --- not by way of mysticism, but simply by redefining your terms. In much the same way, my house can be considered a data processing device, because it contains a computer. (Well. Several computers. Many computers.)
The problem is, what do we do with this now? There's never been any physical evidence that consciousness is a real thing or can effect the world in any way other than via the actions of people who believe they are conscious (which, speaking from my perspective of a person who believes they are conscious, is no small thing); the only real consequences of deciding that we are part of a greater conscious system are going to be philosophical. And there are plenty of existing philosophical systems which believe that already --- you mention Buddhism.
And while I do think that believing that we're part of the world, rather than being somehow separate from it, is definitely a good idea, I'm an engineer. This seems dissatisfying. Is there anything else can we do with this idea?
> the only real consequences of deciding that we are part of a greater conscious system are going to be philosophical
I think the question of consciousness is critical in at least one domain: the question of whether or not consciousness survives beyond the death of the physical body (and, relatedly, whether it precedes the birth of the body). If we bracket away religious doctrine and just focus on the facts of the matter, this debate hinges on how consciousness relates to the physical body it inhabits. Is it created by the body, or does it merely use the body as a conduit?
My boy William James gave a great lecture† in 1897 where he claimed that scientific understanding had not yet ruled out immortality, since it was unknown whether this relationship between mind and body was productive (body creates mind) or transmissive (body filters mind). I could be wrong, but I think this is still an open question, and it very much depends on understanding the true nature of consciousness. That's why the Hard Problem is so awesome.
† https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/jimmortal.html (published in 1898)
I agree that it doesn't have to be in any way mystical and that it comes to redefining what's fundamental and what's merely constructed or emergent (although it's a very tricky term). In the panpsychist approach neither matter nor consciousness can be reduced to the other one.
For more engineering approach to the problem, there's lot we can do. One way would be to study in more and more details the correlates of consciousness to understand the "linking" mechanism better. Anil Seth describes this approach here: https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-....
On the other hand, if consciousness indeed is a fundamental attribute of reality, we should extend the 'engineering' to cover also the 'mind' part of reality. This is exactly what meditation is - to train the mind so that it can see more and more clearly all the components of conscious experience until it reaches the bottom. As a result you come up with a number of 'edge cases' - interesting states that can be used to reason about this reality conceptually.
There are eg. 'experience of space itself', experience of consciousness (so called immaterial Jhanas) or finally experience caused by calming the unconscious mind to the extent that it stops projecting any content into conscious mind, while the latter is still operating. This (supposedly) leads to realisation by the mind itself that the 'experienced world' is nothing but its creation. Of course we all can understand it conceptually, but this experience leads to permanent change in perception (you can't "unsee it") which becomes as objective as the human mind can possibly be. Meaning, that it realises in every moment that each experience is its own creation.
It may all seem mystical, exotic or plain crazy, but there's no other way to understand the mind than through the mind itself, if the discussed hypothesis is true.
EDIT: fixed stupid brain bug
Dennett's approach is absurd. Consciousness is the only thing in the Universe that is self-evident in the strict sense. Everything else is at least second-hand stuff - see the brain in a vat hypothesis. To say that consciousness is an illusion is ridiculous; I can see how he gets there, but the conclusion is absurd. Somewhere along the way there's a mistake; no, I don't know where the mistake is, and I could not even begin to hypothesize. OP's article points out this predicament very well. It is a hard problem indeed.
> One of the most promising theories (discussed in the podcast) assumes that consciousness is a fundamental attribute of reality, the other side of the coin (matter being the first one).
I can hear the objections being raised already, but it's a neat promising step towards solving the hard problem. Suddenly the reducibility paradox vanishes.
It would also relieve another problem. If you can't trivially reduce consciousness to neural activity, then how is it coupled with perception? There would appear to be a gap between the sensory chain and the fact of awareness. And then for consciousness to work, it would already have to be everywhere (in a sense, possibly even a somewhat metaphorical one, or at least non-trivial). The assumption you mention solves this problem.
> here's a talk by Culadasa, very experienced meditator and a neuroscience professor
It's very, very hard to agree with Dennett, and it's getting harder the more you advance in the practice of meditation. As soon as you realize that you can peel off and disconnect layers upon layers of perception (external at first, then the many internal layers too), and also greatly reduce the waves of what is commonly called "thinking", while consciousness does not diminish but instead becomes at once more vivid and more stable, more calm and more intense, less connected to external factors but more broad - all that talk about "the illusion of consciousness" starts to look extremely suspicious. It's not perception, and it's not thinking; it can relate to these things, but it's fundamentally different. It can ultimately exist completely independent of inputs, either external (sensory) or internal (thoughts, mind activity in the trivial sense, even memory).
Don't just read about it. Go ahead and have the experience yourself. It changes a lot of perspectives. You don't even have to go all the way to the highest levels described in the literature - the intermediate stuff is revelatory enough already.
I also practiced meditation (Vipassana) for several years, and, like you, realised that positing the non-existence of consciousness is a dead-end.
Buddhism seemed to go deeper than many other philosophical frameworkss for this reason. However, I looked into many philosophical systems, and I was extremely surprised to discover that the thinker with the most consistent views on reality and consciousness (both self-consistent and consistent with my own experiences) was drumroll Ayn Rand.
Though she's known for her views on egoism and capitalism, she wrote a ton about consciousness, perception and concept-formation. If you look at my comment history you'll see I talk about her a lot on HN, and that's because I think computer scientists will gain immense value from studying her works. Introdution to Objectivist Epistemology and The Romantic Manifesto contain her deepest writings on consciousness and cognition and are the books I'd recommend. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/consciousness.html is a good taster.
http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-works/introduction-to-obj...
http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-works/the-romantic-manife...
I've met a couple of other Objectivists who have practiced meditation - not many but they exist. I was very surprised to discover the connection between the two areas. Hopefully in a thread like this on a site like this, curious minds will read this comment and be persuaded to investigate further. It's a fascinating journey!
Did you mean Dennett, instead of Chalmers? I agree that the Dennett's conclusions seems to be false almost on a logical level. The self is an illusion for sure, the consciousness for sure isn't (EDIT: not saying here that there exists 'pure consciousness without content').
> Don't just read about it. Go ahead and have the experience yourself. It changes a lot of perspectives. You don't even have to go all the way to the highest levels described in the literature - the intermediate stuff is revelatory enough already.
It is indeed. The more you meditate, the more you see that most of the things that you do 'outside' are meaningless, just playing with your representations of the world and pretending they are real. Of course we can't do anything to somehow reach the 'real' world, but at least we can drop the pretending part.
The title of this book may seem both scary and beautiful in this regard: http://www.buddha-heute.de/downloads/treeriver.pdf Not sure I'd recommend it for beginners, but I just love the title.
Dennett's approach is absurd. Consciousness is the only thing in the Universe that is self-evident in the strict sense.
I don't think science should be based to accepting things that are "self-evident", especially things that subjectively self-evident.
The advances of Galileo et al were based on challenging beliefs about the world which seemed self-evident at the time.
The idea that science should begin investigating mental processes based on accepting what is subjectively self-evident seems especially flawed given difficulty that any system has in observing itself.
I don't think that meditation is useful evidence for the hard problem. Personally, I don't need further convincing that the hard problem exists, and I'm sympathetic to the usefulness of meditation as an exploratory tool, but it is a practice that requires you to basically accept consciousness as dogma and then spend a lot of time studying it. Its structure is just too cult-like to be useful for convincing others, and you should be worried about letting it reinforce your own beliefs as well.
It's kind of bad PR. Supporting the existence of the hard problem appears awfully woo to begin with (undeservedly but understandably). When people appeal to meditation and psychedelics, which have even stronger woo connotations, it really doesn't help.
You sound like John Searle.
What are you talking about though when you describe meditation? What is it like to peel away layers? What did you find underneath, can you describe it? Links?
If Dennett claims that he's unconscious then it just provides a reason to dismiss his other claims, too.
> To say that consciousness is an illusion is ridiculous
More likely, you simply misunderstand what is meant by "illusion". What is self-evident is that there are thoughts, and some of these thoughts are "I am experiencing X". It's naive to simply infer from that, that true subjective experience actually exists, just like it's naive to infer that water can break pencils simply because you can see it [1].
You should give Dennet more credit. He's almost certainly right, just like science proved in every other case humans thought they were special in the past. The closest analog of consciousness as a pseudo-mystical property that was eventually simply replaced by a scientific concept is "vitalism", which was eventually superceded by biology. Not by any proof that elan vital didn't exist, but by simple recognition that it was special pleading and provided no explanatory power whatsoever.
[1] http://etc.usf.edu/clippix/pix/refraction-of-pencil-in-cup-o...
I first came upon the consciousness as reality theme when I read “The self-aware universe” [0] by Goswami which introduces the idea of monistic idealism. Penrose also contemplates with the idea in the “Emperor’s New Mind” [1]. I highly recommend both books to anyone interested in exploring alternate theories.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Self-Aware-Universe-Consciousness-Cre... [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Mind-Concerning-Computer...
Just to be clear, what you are talking about is different to what Chalmers and others are talking about. The "idealistic" monism assumes that matter doesn't actually exists, while "neutral" monism assumes that matter and consciousness have similar ontological status as they are irreducible properties of the 'real stuff' [0].
BTW it may be appealing to the HN crowd that Bertrand Russell, the uber geek, subscribed to neutral monism as well.
Scott Aaronson's take on the paper you linked to:
I find reading Chalmers to be irritating. His first premise is dualism. If you read his original paper on the hard problem you'll find basically every statement presupposes this fact and then concludes this fact. It's maddening. Dualism cannot be assumed apriori.
There are several good rebuttals to Chalmers in this collection of essays: Explaing Consciousness: The Hard Problem: https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Consciousness-Problem-Jona...
One of the best IMO is Thomas W. Clark's functional identity hypothesis that says that experience is _equivalent_ to the processing system. Basically, this is what it feels like to be a human brain.
http://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/consciousness/the-expla...
> One of the most promising theories (discussed in the podcast) assumes that consciousness is a fundamental attribute of reality
Did you really mean to say "assumes" there? (As in assumes as aximoatic.) Because that's one hell of an an assumption.
Indeed, it definitely is one hell of an assumption. Just as "matter is fundamental and consciousness is an emergent phenomena" is. Until we find a way to test it in any way (which may not be possible at all) the only thing we're left with is to play with the axioms and get a feel of what the resulting theory can and cannot explain.
However when we accept the 'panpsychist' axiom, we're free to come up with more detailed theories (as Integrated Information Theor) that eg. predict under what conditions physical systems and consciousness coincide in a way we can experience. And indeed they claim they can explain eg. why brain, as opposed to silicon circuits, coincides with it.
To be clear, I'm not saying this theory is correct - I've no idea. I'm just saying that this whole approach is as valid as the physicalist one.
I promised myself I wouldn't follow the Chalmerian rabbit down the consciousness rabbit hole for a while (one eventually gets tired of being dizzy no matter how fascinating the reason). Every time I swear to myself that I'll give it a rest for a few months, something like this pops up on HN and it starts all over again.
Here's as far as I got last time. I'm almost certainly wrong, but hey, when it comes to consciousness, we know so little that being able to pinpoint why someone is wrong is still progress.
- Time is real but not "absolute". The universe exists as a causally connected network of ever-present nows. We aren't "slices of the Minkowski spacetime" experiencing itself. That's a fantastic model of reality at certain scales, but it's not reality.
- Ensembles of causally connected physical systems evolving in the now are "ontoglogically real" in the sense that something about them actually exists above and beyond their parts.
- Certain evolving physical systems have "an interior". It feels like something to be the interior of such a system.
- We don't experience the world, we experience being the interior of a certain kind of evolving physical system whose job it is to create, process, and manipulate representations. "We" at any moment are the interior of the gestalt representation of that moment.
- Evolution selected and maximized interiority for a reason. It has a purpose. How it has a purpose I have no idea, and any solutions smack of dualism. However, the closest thing I have to a hypothesis that isn't completely crazy is that what we call "the physical" and "the mental" are simply two projections of some "actual" underlying structure that is something like a Hilbert space. If that's the case, then it's possible that putting the physical system into a certain state causes the interior of that system to "feel" something which, in turn, causes some kind of "pressure" on the physical again. I have no clue how this could work, but I do like the strategy of starting with the commonsensical but heretical idea that we wouldn't be conscious if evolution didn't find a use for that property, and then going from there.
Anybody else have any crazy thoughts so we can at least talk about why we're wrong about them?
I think saying that "evolution selected consciousness for a reason" is a potential category error. It seems a bit like saying that evolution selected blood pressure. Evolution selected circulatory systems - blood pressure is an inevitable phenomenon of a circulatory system. Similarly, it might be that evolution selected information processing and decision making systems, and that consciousness might be an inevitable phenomenon of sufficiently complex information processing systems.
That's why I labelled the idea "heretical". I think your explanation is by far the most popular one in science. The idea is that consciousness is an "epiphenomenon" - the "steam of the locomotive". It has no functional purpose.
I'm simply suggesting that we try seeing where we go if we reject this hypothesis and instead treat consciousness as a thing that itself has survival utility. Doing so does cause dualism to creep in awfully quickly, but I'm not really so ideologically committed to pure physicalism that I'm unwilling to take the thought experiment seriously.
The novel Blindsight by Peter Watts is great for exploring the relationships between consciousness and intelligence. The characters theorize that consciousness could be an important/easy stepping stone for the evolution of intelligence, but that it may be necessary to keep, and that consciousness could be evolved away from, relegated away like a vestigial organ.
Is your "interior" just the mental model we have of the world (including ourselves)? If so, it's not surprising that evolution selected for it. It's advantageous to be able to make predictions about the world (including ourselves), and to make predictions about a thing you need a model of the thing.
True, but what is surprising is that there is something "it is like" to be that interior. As an example: CPUs can perform calculations on data we consider "representations". The outcome of those calculations, in turn, affect the world. We suspect that they do this without there ever being something it is like to be a CPU.
At first blush, we would suppose that neurons firing this way and that to create actionable representations would have the same property. Evolution would be happy. But there's something extra there: it FEELS like something to be a neural network in a sequence of evolving states. Why? The heretical hypothesis is that the feeling itself had a purpose and was part of the system.
What about the idea often proposed by Graham Hancock where consciousness is not generated in the brain but rather the brain is a sort receiver for it?
That's an idea with zero evidence and thus indistinguishable from fantasy.
That leaves the question of where is consciousness, then.
Hard to square that idea away with observable concepts like how hormones and brain damage affect people. One could say that the brain does all the computation, and the link to consciousness is one-way, but if that consciousness-link isn't affecting the physical computation, then that doesn't explain why our brain makes us talk about being conscious. That consciousness-link-thing would be entirely unrelated to why we talk about being conscious and should be called something else.
Isn't time what we experience because we have memory?
I think my consciousness is the state I got into because of the experiences I had due to interactions. Brain is finite state machine. Finite because it is limited to states of universe. Even if I live near a black hole I may only live 70 years in local time experienced, which may equal to like 1000 years in Earth's local time experienced.
I think its the underlying physics that shapes our thinking. Basically its all physics rules how particles/sub-particles/super-particles interact and the energy flowing through it. Now am "I" in control of making decision to do one thing and not the other? Or was it inevitable that the decision was made as that was the only possible outcome of particles inter acting in my brain at that moment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13012952
I was watching videos of elephants in wild. They are just the same like us. I saw a group of elephants finding a waterhole, but the food was scarce. They could water the plants in nearby area to produce more food. They just haven't figured it out yet. Just like us they pass around information using their language. They do not have language for what they have not figured out yet. They will have that capability once they figure out something and find the need to communicate it. Any organism I take I see behavior that is very much ours if we too lacked such knowledge and technique. Our communication latencies are decreasing steadily with advancement of tech as we figure out more things. Now when we have the tech to naturally communicate with each other the exact same thought with all the context of that thought to somebody instant or in realtime as it happens, then we are essentially a super organism. Each of us can be equated to neurons in brain with each of us having many neurons with each neuron having many molecules interacting with each which has atoms interacting.
HN is like a place where I find information I value more. Many quality ideas from all around Earth. When I try communicate with my sister to clarify some doubt she has, I often tries to explain to her why something is so with all the context. She couldn't intake all the data I provide as fast as I provide it(keep up with me) and within a minute or two she's like STOP! People want just exactly only what they ask for. Everything else is considered noise.
Most of the times I read about this subject I get the feeling that every person in the discussion is talking about different things.
For a prosaic view of consciousness I would recommend the book "Consciousness and the Brain" by cognitive psychologist Stanisas Dehaene. The experiments described in the book do, in my opinion, a good job in delimiting the problem and in facilitating accurate definitions about what conscience is.
We should start there, otherwise we are talking about how many angels can dance in the head of a pin (1).
(1) - Actually that problem has been solved already: http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume7/v7i3/an...
That's one reason why I've started using the term "interiority" to describe the bedrock "existence of a feeling of what it is like" phenomenon. It's the smallest word I can think of that still conveys the essence of the hard part of the hard problem.
Put another way, I'm of the belief (and I think Chalmers and many others share it) that if you can demonstrate to me that C. Elegans feels itself wiggling around, and you can show me why it feels anything at all and why it feels this way vs that way, then you have solved the hard problem. I could take your technical specifications for basic interiority (the solution to the hard problem) and then give you human-level reflective consciousness in a few years given a handful of engineers and sufficiently powerful hardware.
This isn't necessarily a popular opinion, though. I once read Julian Jaynes "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and was really frustrated that the author spent the entire book explaining how we became "conscious" by listening to one half of our brain talking to the other half. How much time did he spend trying to explain how there was anything doing the "hearing" to begin with? Nearly zero. Maddening.
> That's one reason why I've started using the term "interiority" to describe the bedrock "existence of a feeling of what it is like" phenomenon. It's the smallest word I can think of that still conveys the essence of the hard part of the hard problem.
A more widely used term is "subjectivity".
> How much time did he spend trying to explain how there was anything doing the "hearing" to begin with? Nearly zero. Maddening.
This seems like a common sentiment, but I'm not sure it's justified. You're already assuming the existence of a subject just because of an observation, but that needs justification. That belief is just an inference, a chain of thoughts sourced from a thought and yielding the final thought "I experienced X". The question is really whether that chain of inference is valid or fallacious, in which case subjectivity is an illusion.
I suggest reading some scientific attempts to account for subjectivity [1]. Our approaches to consciousness amounts to marvelling at a pencil sitting in a glass of water [2] and trying to figure out how water seems able to break and reconstitute the pencil, when we should really be developing the theory of light refraction. Like biology did to vitalism, all this mysticism surrounding consciousness will soon just fade into history.
[1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
[2] http://etc.usf.edu/clippix/pix/refraction-of-pencil-in-cup-o...
You can cut off any part of the body and still have consciousness as long as blood, oxygen, etc reach the brain. That seems a little stronger evidence of causality than mere correlation.
Still it could be, I suppose, that the brain does not hold consciousness, but is in fact merely an antenna to send and recieve consciousness...
probably from a lab at NASA, via interactions with virtual particles, providing propellentless mental acceleration across space and time
And of course, there's occasionalism, which holds that the mind and the body (Including the brain) match up without the mind actually having a causal influence on the body at all.
I don't think this removes responsibility for actions though, because even if this is true, whatever we choose to do is still what our bodies do,so we can still choose our actions. Like how two superrational players of the prisoners dilemma can choose the action of their coplayer by choosing their own action.
Keep in mind that causality can be understood in multiple ways in your example:
1) consciousness is merely something that emerges from matter (eg. functionalism)
2) consciousness and matter coexist everywhere, but in some configurations of matter consciousness is 'condensed' and gives rise to our subjective experience (eg. Integrated Information Theory by Tononi and Koch)
How can the room I am sitting in be simultaneously out
there and, as it were, inside my head, my experience? We
still have no answer to that question.
Consciousness is a difficult problem, yes, but there's no need to make it seem even more difficult than it actually is.
I share your confusion with this part of an otherwise-excellent article. It was such a surprise to read it that I fear I'm missing something. It seems obvious that what we're experiencing isn't the world or any so-called "objects" in it, but a structured representation of the whole and its parts. The hard part is understanding why:
1. Representations experience themselves at all
2. Representations seem to feel different depending on their structure and relationships to other representations
Does anyone have a better interpretation of this paragraph that highlights the supposed mystery about our connection to "the real world"?
Well if you go down to it then the only thing you know is that you are witnessing your perception everything else is an assumption.
Consciousness is the way your brain self corrects. That is my personal theory.
On a few time scales you brain makes plans. It uses beliefs and a model of the world to make those plans. It stores those plans and the actions it has taken. And then checks if actions had their intended effects, and if plans reached their intended goals. Updating its model of the world, its beliefs, and what useful actions are.
This is a constant process reflecting upon the current situation, and upon the recent past of actions and plans. It is like an observer observing itself. This is the root of consciousness, I think.
Probably abstract thinking and language, enough intelligence, and a theory of mind, leads to self awareness.
If this is correct, we can formulate some necessary parts for a system to be conscious:
* recognition of the environment * a model of the environment * ability to reason about actions, their consequences, and how to achieve goals * memory of past plans and goals and outcomes * a process of executing actions, making new plans, and learning from the outcomes
Self-awareness and consciousness are different things. Sometimes when you wake up you don't know who you are, where you are, what you are, but there is a conscious experience. Consciousness is much more fundamental than your level of reasoning allows to explain.
Here's a list of things that you are adressing and that are not dealing with the hard problem of consciousness ('easy problems'): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#...
Riccardo Manzotti has some pretty cool Philosophical Cartoons on his site:
http://www.consciousness.it/RM_Cartoons.php
His "spread mind" site is great too:
As a "seeker" I sometimes wonder if he figured out something close to what nonduality teaches, only in a more technical language (ie. consciousnsss is not located inside anymore than it is outside, therefore somewhat blurring the lines between I and the world). I think his example of the rainbow is such a great metaphor.
Bernardo Kastrup has his theories as well with his whirlpool" metaphor but to me it sounds like it makes sense only to him, and I don't get much out of his metaphor. Whereas Riccardo's pointers are reminiscent of older teachings in that they really invite the reader to examine direct experience (Just my interpretation of his theory).
A similar discussion that might interest some of you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11956101
According to the article, there are 85 billion neurons in the brain. Bill Gates has a net worth of 85 billion dollars. That's interesting I think. When I read 85 billion neurons I thought that's not really that much considering.... and I wonder how much Mark Zuckerberg is worth - then I Googled who's the richest and saw Bill Gates had 85B.
Is this an ongoing series or something? It stops abruptly at the end...
you can read the thread where I report what I consider to be basic truth about consciousness here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12878939
there are no challenges, and even simple numbers can be conscious. we have sequenced DNA today, you can download it right now: http://www.sanger.ac.uk/resources/downloads/human/
After downloading it go ahead and take a checksum.
within 500 years (a ridiculous overestimation) someone will build a simulation that simulates (emulates) part of the brain that is described in that genome. Whether at full speed or one-tenth speed it will be done, and for test purposes someone might do it in a determinstic VM of sorts. They can take that checksum, let's say it's:
3ad235db427e566bbb31097c77882d20f30db779ff8f3896cb35bb43ebf76dd164e084109bf2bcb8a9ba1bc7477c1eeb3dfcf699bc3f8e7f4d96aceeaa080003
(That's an SHA-512 hash).
I'll tell you what I hashed. All I hashed was "I'm a brain".
Instead of a text string, within 500 years someone will hash a VM that contains as much data as a human brain, is human for practical purposes, and reports the same thing.
For me personally, this is beyond even discussion and I personally consider the matter closed. However, at hte HN link at the top of this comment I report a state of affairs under which I would be wrong. I don't consider it even worth thinking about though.
I don't consider any question around this area to be "open". We just have to accept what we deduced.
if you don't like it or don't agree with it, you can wait until someone simulates an adult brain reporting self-consciousness, and then you will be forced to say, "oh well, I was wrong."
There is no conceivable scenario under which I would have to say, "oh well, I was wrong." (Above, I outline such a scenario though. It's not going to happen.)
Consciousness is a suitcase word, poorly defined. Instead of consciousness, how about we consider more clear notions such as perception, decision, reward, action, memory and attention - all of them developed through learning. Such notions can describe the "mind" completely. They are much more concrete, and are being investigated in AI (reinforcement learning).
We are just self replicating, self preserving processes. The main function is to maintain equilibrium in the face of entropy. We need food, water, shelter and companionship to survive. In order to get those, we need to learn to operate in the world and reason about it. It's nothing magical, just reinforcement learning and other kinds of learning - a little semi-supervised learning, for example, and a lot of unsupervised learning.
All this grand system exists for the sole purpose of protecting its existence. It protects its own life and self replicates, which is another kind of survival. Consciousness is that which protects the body, that is its sole purpose.
If you are not conscious in the morning, you don't drink and eat, and in 3 days you're dead. That's why you need to be conscious every day. That's the greatest miracle of consciousness. Our species would not exist without it. But it's better to work with clear cut notions, like perception, action and reward.
There's an easy and a hard problem of consciousness. You're addressing the easy one.
These are technical terms, you can look them up.