Consciousness / sentience researchers barely mention the core mystery | by Paul Pallaghy, PhD | Oct, 2023 | Medium

Consciousness / sentience researchers barely mention the core mystery

Paul Pallaghy, PhD

4 min read

4 days ago

By consciousness I don’t mean being awake. I mean the fact most of us claim to be ‘sentient’, aware of our thoughts & senses.

We feel things. Experientially.

Thoughts. Sights. Sounds. Pain.

Unlike a robot that just responds to objects identified, we can actually, see the . .

. . entire visual field. Experientially.

Think about that for a moment.

Does an autonomous FSD car experience that? Nobody thinks they do.

Why us but not an object-identifying AI?

Neural correlates

Almost all consciousness researchers are focused on identifying ‘neural correlates’ of consciousness.

What parts of our brain are required they ask? The cortex? Thalamus? Claustrum? Even the cerebellum?

But necessary doesn’t have to mean . . sufficient.

It’s necessary we’re awake.

But so is an oyster. Or arguably, an amoeba.

Alt angles

Few (see Roger Penrose below however) are working on actual plausible physical mechanisms of consciousness.

And others are going kind of new-age-ish: to them consciousness is a fundamental thing that ‘all things have’ in part. Like Star Wars almost.

Then we have the Elon Musk-ish angle: maybe this is not base-level reality? We’re in a simulation and either we’re just AIs or we’re genuine souls on the outside? The latter is indistinguishable from religious God-created souls.

And then some say: what are you talking about? Of course it’s some emergent phenomenon or just an illusion so who cares?

My thesis

But here I argue that consciousness is undoubtedly one of the most profound phenomena in the universe.

Yet, apart from a few people like Nobel Prize-winning Roger Penrose, few are attempting to propose actual, concrete mechanisms of consciousness. Like microtubules and quantum mechanics.