They are highly dismaying, to say the least. It’s clear what the average HN commenter thinks of the subject:

"Sophomoric philosophy" "Not a useful concept" "[An] evolutionary advantage"

and last but not least:

"I wish we could send out a memo to the world that says ‘Please do not draw metaphysical conclusions from math or science unless you are an expert on the field you are drawing conclusions on.’"

My response: who said anything about metaphysical?

Consciousness? We solved that, didn’t you get the memo? You might as well talk about The Ether. An antiquated concept; a dead end. In general, the implication is that if you think there is anything left to be discovered here, it serves only to showcase your own inability to think rationally. What discourages me is that the overall tone of the HN commenters is: Get with the program. Instead of acknowledging that it is an open question and saying something like, “Interesting hypothesis, my own thoughts are that X, Y, Z, but have you read A, B, or C, which indicate Q…”, the response is: (chuckle)In general, the implication is that if you think there is anything left to be discovered here, it serves only to showcase your own inability to think rationally.





I let myself get riled up about this because I expect more from HN commenters. These are not the people you find on YouTube. Typically they are rationally-minded, intellectually curious individuals, but what we see here in black and white is that, when presented with a decent article about a legitimate, yet unexplained problem, they recite the party line.

I respectfully submit that this attitude should be considered harmful, for several reasons, not the least of which is that it stifles investigation into a subject that is still open, regardless of what Dawkins , Dennett, Kurzweil, and xkcd (all of whom I respect for other reasons) think.

Part of the reason behind the mud-flinging lays within a misinterpretation which is visible in the last quoted comment — the idea that by using the word “consciousness,” we are implying something trans-rational, spiritual, magical, etc. But consciousness is not magic, it’s a phenomenon like light or gravity. So, henceforth, let’s substitute the word “observer” for consciousness, since that’s what is being discussed — the observer and the observed.

As Gopi Krishna wrote:

“Now a material scientist may argue that, well, we have gained this consciousness by experience. Why has not the ox or the cow or the fish gained it?

“Then he will argue that, well, man’s consciousness took a leap , but when we ask him how did it take a leap, he is dumb. He knows nothing. Even Darwin had to admit that we could give no definite explanation for it except that it is part of natural selection. So you see the whole structure of materialistic philosophy has been built on suppositions and premises, not on realities. The first reality we come across is consciousness. The world comes later. We know first ourselves and then the world.

“So the wiser course is first to understand the knower. What modern thinkers have done is to ignore or bypass the knower, forgetting that it is the knower that is doing it.”

The other issue is one I consider to be more dire, and I don’t know what to call it except a fear of the unknown which manifests itself as hostility, ridicule, or scorn. I call this dire because this is exactly the kind of attitude that a scientist should reject — in a situation where a root cause is murky and escapes testability, we must keep an open mind. To do otherwise is to be dishonest to oneself. If the answer is “we don’t really know,” then saying the problem is solved or can be explained away is false.

I don’t mean to say that all the comments are negative or hostile — there is some good food for thought, however, it’s interesting to me that so far, none of them addresses the points made by the author; they simply recite the prevailing idea that the problem has been explained away. If it weren’t obvious, my own opinion is that this is not so, and I’m more than happy to engage in a discussion about why I think that.