[ExI] What is Consciousness?

[Jason Resch]

I posted this to the everything-list, but thought it would be relevant to
some current discussions. I am looking for other's input regarding their
own theories for "what consciousness is", and what is required to realize
it. Below is what I think consciousness is:


First we might attempt to dissect the word "consciousness" itself:

The word *"con•scious•ness"* has three parts:

   - con- <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/com-> meaning *"with"*
   - scious <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scious> meaning *"knowledge"*
   - -ness <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ness> turns an adjective *'X'*
   into a noun meaning *"the state of being X"*

So the meaning of *"con•scious"* is simply *"with knowledge." * And just as
*'happiness'* means *"the state of being happy,"* adding *-ness* to
*conscious* implies *"con•scious•ness"* is *"the state of being with
knowledge."*

So consciousness is anything which has a state of being with knowledge.
Next, what is knowledge? The oldest definition is that knowledge is a "true
belief". But here we run into a problem. Truth is not definable, not even
in mathematics. This was proven in Tarski's *undefinability theorem*
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theorem>. So if
consciousness is being with knowledge, and knowledge is true belief, then
the undefinability of truth, means we will never have a complete definition
of knowledge of consciousness. The best we can do is understand the
relation between them.

The next question that poses itself to us, is what is belief? What is
required to have a belief? Is it a particular structure or state of matter,
or is it a mathematical or functional relationship or property, might it,
in either case, be related to information or information processing
(computation)?

I don't have a firm answer on this, and will instead leave you with some
speculations by others on this question of what consciousness is:

Douglas Hofstadter in "Godel Escher Bach" (1979):
"My belief is that the explanations of “emergent” phenomena in our
brains–for instance, ideas hopes, images, analogies, and finally
consciousness and free will–are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an
interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards
the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself
determined by the bottom level. In other words, a self-reinforcing
“resonance” between different levels–quite like the Henkin sentence, which
by merely asserting its own provability, actually becomes provable. The
self comes into being at the moment it has the power to reflect itself."

Daniel Dennett in “Consciousness Explained” (1991):
"Anyone or anything that has such a virtual machine as its control system
is conscious in the fullest sense, and is conscious because it has such a
virtual machine."

David Chalmers in "The Conscious Mind" (1996):
"Given the laws of coherence, we have a partial answer: consciousness
arises in virtue of the functional organization associated with awareness.
We can even arrive at a fairly specific understanding of parts of the
supervenience relation by virtue of the principle of structural coherence:
not only does consciousness arise from awareness, but the structure of
consciousness is determined by the structure of awareness."

David Darling in "Zen Physics - The Science of Death, The Logic of
Reincarnation" (1996):
"But there is also an interior view, to which you alone are privy. In
mechanistic terms, as well as the appearance of the brain-body machine,
there is the feeling of what it is like to be that machine — the subjective
experience of being a certain someone. Consciousness, we might say, is the
symmetry-breaking factor between the objective and the subjective."

Gerald Maurice Edelman and Giulio Tononi in "A Universe of Consciousness"
(2000):
"For the first time in evolution, information acquires a new potential–the
possibility of subjectivity. It is information “for somebody”; in short, it
becomes consciousness itself."

Bruno Marchal in discussion list (2020):
"Consciousness is just anything simultaneously true, non provable,
knowable, even indubitable (knowingly for “rich" entities) and non
definable, and indeed the logic of machine self-reference shows that all
machine looking inward, in the way allowed by mathematical logic
(theoretical computer science) will bring a term to describe this, and is a
good candidate to be called consciousness."

Stephen Wolfram in “What is Consciousness” (2021):
"In a sense what’s important is that it seems we may have a realistic way
to formalize issues about consciousness, and to turn questions about
consciousness into what amount to concrete questions about mathematics,
computation, logic or whatever that can be formally and rigorously
explored."


We see recurring themes of information, recursion, computation, and
machines and logic. I think these are likely key to any formal definition
of consciousness. I also think part of the difficulty rests in the fact
that there are infinite possibilities of different realizable conscious
states, and creating a single definition to cover all these cases is as
hard as making a single definition to  cover all possible mathematical
objects, or all possible universes in an ensemble type multiverse theory.

Jason
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