Is Consciousness Just the Result of Electrical Activity in Our Brains?

[Fliption]

Excellent post StatusX.

There are two possible interpretations of such a machine:

1. It is not conscious, but still behaves exactly as we do. The conclusion? Consciousness is not causal. Easy, right?

2. It is conscious, and behaves exactly as we do. This says nothing about the causal nature of consciousness.

Yep

1. Consciousness is an illusion.

So how do we really know we aren't just simulations, or zombies, or some other non-conscious entities that believe we are conscious?

I agree with the two possibilities you have posted. This first one, however, is not my favorite. First of all, the fact that I cannot know whether this machine is conscious or not does NOT mean that I cannot know whether I am conscious. This I know to be the case. Which leads to the first point about consciousness being an illusion. I've never liked this one because it doesn't really explain anything. If we cannot explain how the brain produces consciousness then how the hell are we going to explain the how the brain produces the illusion of it? I'm not even sure what the difference is. It seems the same problems remain. I always thought certain aspects of illusions were a function of consciousness to begin with. How can you have an illusion without consciousness? Who is it that is experiencing the illusion? And how do they experience it if consciousness is just an illusion? This one just seems messy to me.

2. Consciousness is real, and it exists everywhere there is a complex system to sustain it. I obviously don't know what they are yet, but I assert that there are strict rules that relate some aspect of the configuration of matter to consciousness. Just like hooking up a battery to a circuit gives rise to current, hooking together the right components, whether theyre neurons, computer chips, or whatever, gives rise to conscious experience. This is usually called dualism, but I've extended the terminology to call any theory of reality in which everything obeys derivable rules a physicalist theory.

This one I like much better. My only comment here is that your use of the word physical may not be consistent with others posting here. I have come to similar conclusions as you and I don't consider myself a physicalist.
I can make the argument that everything obeys rules at some level and I have always argued that if everything is physical by definition then what good is the word? It doesn't distinguish anything from anything else. But this is all semantics. Maybe some of the other people participating here can tell us what they think a physicalists is. You may find that you are not one based on their definitions. This might explain some of the heated debate happening here for no apparent reason.

I personally believe the distinction between physical and non-physical is the method one uses to gain knowledge of it. This is why people claim that the scientific method as it current exists, cannot explain consciousness.

Now is consciousness causal in this view? I don't know yet. There are two variations that result:

a) If it is causal, I say it is only at the quantum level.

b) If it isn't causal,

I agree with these as the possibilities. Don't have a clue which one is closer to truth.

So my point is, if you believe the supercomputer argument, and you believe physicalism, in the broad sense I've defined, then you are pretty much limited to the three views above. Of course you can arbitrarily claim the rules are different for brains than for anything else, but I find such a claim inelegant and unsupportable. I'm not yet prepared to decide among these three.

Again, I will say that I agree with all your choices and I don't believe in physicalism. I think we just need to make sure we're all using the same definition.

 

[Pavel]

Possibly a better term for me to use would be self-forming or self- establishing or something like that.

Les, I'm of the opinion that it doesn't matter what you call it, as long as it's clear what you mean by it, which you well explained. I suspect that it could be argued that sensitivity to stimuli, retention, and integration can be exhibited in neural networks. When you train a net, you provide feedback to it, which could be viewed as stimulation in some context. The retention of “memory” is the adjusted weights which consequently allow to recognize patterns. On some level of abstraction, that’s being “smart” and possibly conscious. I will not argue that’s the case, I’m merely saying it’s easier to debate those qualities. I want to pick something very obvious and yet challenging for a materialist to handle. For the sake of progress in this argument, I want to stick with one apparent quality that we all attribute to consciousness, agree on the criteria that will allow us to apply it to an instance and say “yeap, that one is conscious”, and finally simulate the property and see if it satisfies our condition or criterion. If StatusX or anybody will be able to demonstrate such simulation, so be it, I’ll be glad I learned something new. If not, I’d like to discuss possible accounts for this “mysteron” in our brain that couldn’t be simulated by randomness or deterministic rules.

I think “intentionality” is a very good candidate, what do you think? When I say “I intend to graduate from college”, you know precisely what I mean. It’s not “I will graduate”, it’s not “I’m thinking about graduation”, it’s just that - intend. It’s hard to explain it in other terms, and yet you have no problems understanding my state of mind. StatusX, if you’re willing to play along, do you accept that “intention”, as illustrated, is an inherent quality of a human mind, which is we define as conscious. If so, I’ll offer criteria which we can use to determine if somebody is in the state of “intending”. I probably won’t be able to offer any reductionistic criteria, because inability to do so is the precise point of the argument, but I think there are plenty of reasonable ways that allow us to observe somebody being in the state of “intention”.

In a nutshell, where we are. StatusX, or anybody with similar views, claims that all human conscious activities can be reduced to particles governed by natural deterministic laws, and some random quantum events. Such view would allow us to simulate consciousness. We, whoever doesn’t buy it, claim there is something unaccounted in that picture. As a proof, I offer a specific quality of consciousness that I will challenge you to reduce and simulate in principle.

Thanks,

Pavel.

I’m sorry if I’m being too particular, detailed, and slow in my approach. This is because it’s very easy in these conversations to digress and jump all over the place without getting anywhere. I just want to stick to the point and make this productive, not a waste of time. I hope you share the same feeling.

 

[Pavel]

Status, I didn't read your post before posting my own... So, you don't like intention as the pick. Very well, let's stick with experience, as I have similar doubts in that area as well. Let's define the criteria that will allow us to conclude that the thing, whatever it is, is experiencing color, or better yet, pain. The only way I see to do it is to believe the "experiencer" of his experience and being able to relate it to your own experience. After all, color is not the frequency of light when I get hit on the head and see blue spots (no, it doesn't happen too often :) ). You can also put electrons through my brain and cause me to experience red, but I'm not experiencing electrons, I'm experiencing RED. Similarly, if say, an alien with different physiology is pleading for help because he's in pain. How can I verify that he's not faking it and is indeed in a state of pain? Even if I study his physiology, how do I know it's the same type of experience? How do I know that his own pattern of neuron firing causes PAIN?


Thanks,

Pavel.

BTW, when I said our consciousness is 99% determined, I meant that I strongly believe that our decisions about choices we make in our lives are almost completely determined by social conditioning, biological and physical laws. Almost! :)

 

[Canute]

Canute,
"How do you know?" and "I don't think so" are not very convincing arguments.

I agree. The first is a question and the second a simple observation. I note that you always dodge my questions. You state your opinions and expect everybody to agree. Unfortunately your arguments do not hold water, which you'd know if you read the scientific literature on consciousness. When I ask you how you know all these things you assert you don't answer. This leaves me unable to say very much in reply except to point out that you're guessing.

All I'll say is that it is DEFINITELY logically coherent to imagine a non-conscious being acting as a conscious one because we don't know anyone else is conscious, and yet they act just like us. "Logical" doesn't mean "consistent with your preconceptions."

Well, here you go again. It isn't logically coherent as far as many people, including many scientists and philosophers, are concerned until someone has shown that it is. You won't acknowledge that the idea of non-conscious beings behaving like conscious ones is an ad hoc conjecture. What you are doing is making an assumption and then using it as an axiom from which to derive the truth of your assumption. That doesn't work. You need to come up with some reason why you or anybody else should believe that a non-conscious being would behave like a conscious one. Obviously you believe it, but as yet I don't know why you do. I don't want to just argue about your opinions, it won't get us anywhere.

 

[Fliption]

You need to come up with some reason why you or anybody else should believe that a non-conscious being would behave like a conscious one.

Canute, I have interpreted StatusX to mean that there is no reason to believe why a non-conscious being wouldn't act like a conscious being. And he is right about this. If there were a reason to believe that, then there would be no hard problem.

But if he is saying that a non-conscious being would indeed act like a conscious being then obviously he cannot know this for the very same reasons. I may have misunderstood StatusX but it sounds like he is claiming the first and not the latter. StatusX am I correct?

 

[Canute]

Canute, I have interpreted StatusX to mean that there is no reason to believe why a non-conscious being wouldn't act like a conscious being. And he is right about this. If there were a reason to believe that, then there would be no hard problem.

But if he is saying that a non-conscious being would indeed act like a conscious being then obviously he cannot know this for the very same reasons. I may have misunderstood StatusX but it sounds like he is claiming the first and not the latter. StatusX am I correct?

Maybe you're right. If so I apologise for the misunderstanding. I have no problem with the idea that this question cannot be decided by inferrence from the evidence of our senses or by pure deduction. It's what seems to be the case.

 

[Pavel]

Canute, I have interpreted StatusX to mean that there is no reason to believe why a non-conscious being wouldn't act like a conscious being. And he is right about this. If there were a reason to believe that, then there would be no hard problem.

Of course there is no reason to believe that a non-conscious being wouldn’t behave as conscious, because you haven’t provided a clear definition on either of those. We can argue till the blue in the face in that manner. As I said, and StatusX actually agreed, let’s leave behaviorism out of this. There’s no point debating whether it can act. Yes, it can, my radio talks and sounds intelligent, yet nobody would argue it’s non-conscious.

Instead, I don’t mind adopting a suggested notion of experience by Status, that renders necessary to being qualified as “conscious”. So, my question remains, tell me how you would determine if your artificial silicon child is in fact experiencing pain. To be more articulate, your plastic creature complains that it is experiencing pain and asks you to terminate its existence because of it. You check the circuitry, voltages, blah blah blah, and to your amusement you find that artificial neurons that responsible for pain are firing properly… what do you do, is you child faking it?

Thanks,

Pavel.

 

[StatusX]

My only comment here is that your use of the word physical may not be consistent with others posting here. I have come to similar conclusions as you and I don't consider myself a physicalist.
I can make the argument that everything obeys rules at some level and I have always argued that if everything is physical by definition then what good is the word? It doesn't distinguish anything from anything else. But this is all semantics. Maybe some of the other people participating here can tell us what they think a physicalists is. You may find that you are not one based on their definitions. This might explain some of the heated debate happening here for no apparent reason.

I personally believe the distinction between physical and non-physical is the method one uses to gain knowledge of it. This is why people claim that the scientific method as it current exists, cannot explain consciousness.

To be more specific, I believe there is something that explains both the physical world and the mental world in terms of rules. Maybe this is something we don't have yet, and maybe its just a different way of looking at the physical theories. But the reason I call myself a physicalist is because I believe that a system is completely described by its physical state. This obvisously means either zombies aren't possible or theyre the only thing possible. Looking at a system, you should be able to predict whether or not it's conscious.

Status, I didn't read your post before posting my own... So, you don't like intention as the pick. Very well, let's stick with experience, as I have similar doubts in that area as well. Let's define the criteria that will allow us to conclude that the thing, whatever it is, is experiencing color, or better yet, pain. The only way I see to do it is to believe the "experiencer" of his experience and being able to relate it to your own experience. After all, color is not the frequency of light when I get hit on the head and see blue spots (no, it doesn't happen too often :) ). You can also put electrons through my brain and cause me to experience red, but I'm not experiencing electrons, I'm experiencing RED. Similarly, if say, an alien with different physiology is pleading for help because he's in pain. How can I verify that he's not faking it and is indeed in a state of pain? Even if I study his physiology, how do I know it's the same type of experience? How do I know that his own pattern of neuron firing causes PAIN?

Well now that you see what I mean by consciousness, you're free to go back over any of the old posts in this thread, because that definition was the one I was using all along. However, I know that's a lot to go through, so I'll sumarize some of my arguments briefly here, and you can go back and find where they were first brought up for more detail. Theres some new stuff here too.

First of all, the whole reason I'm even talking about zombies is because of the possibility we could be them. Zombies, just to be clear, are hypothetical beings that have the same exact physical makeup as us, but are not conscious. I assert that because there physically identical, they would behave identically, and that's why I've been mentioning behavior. This may be a controversial stance, and I know that Canute, for one, probably disagrees. Before I get into why I think behavior is entirely physically explainable, I'll just wrap up the zombies with the point from my first or second post in this thread, which was this: Zombies would try to understand consciousness just like us, but they would fail because it isn't really there or them. So how can we know that its really there for us and that well succeed? Keep in mind, a zombie behaves exactly like us, so he can explain what he's experiencing, he can argue about consciousness, and he will claim till the day he dies that he's a conscious being, but there would be no substance to these statements.

Now this argument only holds water if you believe my assertion that our behavior is physically explainable. Surely, you'd say, our decision to do something or our experience of pain is a mental event, and can't be explained in terms of atoms and forces. Well maybe that's true, but the fact is we have an extremely powerful physical computer in our head, and it must be doing something. I say that every decision we make, and every color we see has a direct correlation in the physical brain to something like a set of neurons firing. These are what really cause all the physical results of our actions, and our experiences are just by-products.

To make this more clear, think about the physical process that leads up to you deciding to randomly drop a fork. Work it backwards. The muscles in your hand moved. This must have been in response to neurons in your spinal cord firing. This was caused by some signal from your brain which coordinated the various signals that caused your fingers to move fluidly. But what caused this signal? A non-physical mental event? So particles just started spontaneously moving in our brain? What about conservation of momentum? I say that a physical event caused it, and we just had an experience of this event. There have been experiments where people's brains were scanned, and they were told to tap there finger at a random time. About a third of a second before the conscious experience of the decision to tap, activity began in the unconscious regions of the brain. What caused this activity? It isn't yet known, but it wasn't conscious thought, and I believe it is still physically explainable.

I agree. The first is a question and the second a simple observation. I note that you always dodge my questions. You state your opinions and expect everybody to agree. Unfortunately your arguments do not hold water, which you'd know if you read the scientific literature on consciousness. When I ask you how you know all these things you assert you don't answer. This leaves me unable to say very much in reply except to point out that you're guessing.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I try my best to respond to any valid arguments I see, but I do seem to be alone in this corner, and it gets tiring to rebut every argument myself. That being said, this is philosophy. Obviously I have no proof of anything I've said. It is based on a combination of evidence from experience and experiments and my own opinions. I try to explain why I feel the way I do, but I can't convince you if your opinion is fundamentally and irrevocably different. And when you say, "how do you know" or "I don't think so" I just don't feel a need to respond. Explain why you think my arguments are wrong, or what you think is right.

Well, here you go again. It isn't logically coherent as far as many people, including many scientists and philosophers, are concerned until someone has shown that it is. You won't acknowledge that the idea of non-conscious beings behaving like conscious ones is an ad hoc conjecture. What you are doing is making an assumption and then using it as an axiom from which to derive the truth of your assumption. That doesn't work. You need to come up with some reason why you or anybody else should believe that a non-conscious being would behave like a conscious one. Obviously you believe it, but as yet I don't know why you do. I don't want to just argue about your opinions, it won't get us anywhere.

Canute, I have interpreted StatusX to mean that there is no reason to believe why a non-conscious being wouldn't act like a conscious being. And he is right about this. If there were a reason to believe that, then there would be no hard problem.

Fliption is right. All I was saying is that it is coherent (ie, not an inherent contradiction) to talk about non-conscious beings which behave exactly as we do. I am making no claim about whether they really do or could exist.

 

[Les Sleeth]

I’m sorry if I’m being too particular, detailed, and slow in my approach. This is because it’s very easy in these conversations to digress and jump all over the place without getting anywhere. I just want to stick to the point and make this productive, not a waste of time.

Not at all. I appreciate anyone’s efforts to keep things on target (unless the target is boring, and then diversions are welcome ).

I want to pick something very obvious and yet challenging for a materialist to handle. For the sake of progress in this argument, I want to stick with one apparent quality that we all attribute to consciousness, agree on the criteria that will allow us to apply it to an instance and say “yeap, that one is conscious”, and finally simulate the property and see if it satisfies our condition or criterion.

That’s what I’m after as well. Some who post here seem to prefer what I consider a more rationalistic type of argument (e.g., Chalmers). It appears you believe you can make “intention” challenging to the physicalist. I have another approach, which I’ll elaborate on more below.

I suspect that it could be argued that sensitivity to stimuli, retention, and integration can be exhibited in neural networks. When you train a net, you provide feedback to it, which could be viewed as stimulation in some context. The retention of “memory” is the adjusted weights which consequently allow to recognize patterns. On some level of abstraction, that’s being “smart” and possibly conscious.

I noticed you accounted for sensitivity and simple retention with the neuronal model of consciousness. In my post I acknowledged that was possible too. However, you did not offer a neurological explanation for integration.

I think “intentionality” is a very good candidate, what do you think? When I say “I intend to graduate from college”, you know precisely what I mean. It’s not “I will graduate”, it’s not “I’m thinking about graduation”, it’s just that - intend. It’s hard to explain it in other terms, and yet you have no problems understanding my state of mind. . . . do you accept that “intention”, as illustrated, is an inherent quality of a human mind, which is we define as conscious. If so, I’ll offer criteria which we can use to determine if somebody is in the state of “intending”. I probably won’t be able to offer any reductionistic criteria, because inability to do so is the precise point of the argument, but I think there are plenty of reasonable ways that allow us to observe somebody being in the state of “intention”.

We are about to have our first disagreement ( . . . just kidding, I’m sure you will welcome an opportunity to defend your ideas, or to change your mind if you agree with my view).

To me, intentionality seems perfectly explainable by brain physiology. Remember the movie “The Terminator”? He was rather intent wasn’t he? And he was from being programmed to be so. In fact, it seems to me intent is one of the easiest traits of consciousness to account for with a computer model of consciousness because that’s pretty much what programming is (i.e., giving intent to an otherwise intentless piece of equipment). If by “intent” you mean free will, that’s better but will can still be explained as only appearing “free” because so many programming choices are available.

Subjectivity is a great counterargument to physicalism, and the zombie analogy has proven effective. The weak spot in that approach, in my opinion, is that it doesn’t offer a model of it’s own. The physicalists have science on their side, and through that they are tendering a lot of facts about the brain. At least they have a model that non-physicalists can take potshots at, and in a way that makes their case more substantial than simply making a strong argument against functionalism.

That’s why I like to refute the physicalist model with an alternative model, one which explains the presence of subjectivity in consciousness. I believe the concept of retention is a consciousness trait with the potential to explain subjectivity, and thereby give us a model which better fits how consciousness works. I have argued this model quite a bit both at the old Physics Forums and here, and I realize there is a problem with it. The problem with my model is that to understand it, a person needs to contemplate his own consciousness, and not many people seem to have done that.

Just think about how your own consciousness works for a second. Doesn’t it seem like your body is surrounded by a field of sensitivity, sensitivity to light, sound, pain, smells, tastes, heat, cold, etc. Now, all that offers the potential to perceive tons of information that is in your environment every instant, and also to remember it. Do we remember it all? No, we only “retain” certain information. Why? Try out this little contemplation of retention I recently posted in another thread.

Say someone takes a walk in the woods to think about something important. The majority of sense data which peripherally floods his perception – the environmental sights, sounds, smells, etc. of where he is walking – is usually only retained briefly; although his subjective aspect of consciousness is present, he is not paying attention to all that info. But if he concentrates on something like a beautiful tree showing of its Autumn colors, then he will usually retain that perception more strongly. If we do something that requires a variety of elements to do well, say ride a bike, and we do it often, that may be retained in a way I’ve described as “integration.” In other words, the more what we sense/feel is concentrated upon and/or repeated, the more it “integrates.” I believe as experience integrates, it establishes a non-intellectual certainty with past events we call knowing.

Now, you have to stop here to reflect carefully on the integrated aspect of consciousness. We all rely on it incessantly, but few people I’ve talked to actually have looked squarely at it in themselves to see how it functions. Consequently, when I talk about it mostly I get a sort of “huh?” response.

If you are reading this now and comprehending it, that is because of integration. You don’t have to think about how to read before you perceive each word, and if you are familiar with my ideas, you don’t have to think about them again for comprehension to happen. You hear your cat at the door, get up and let her in, collect the mail, grab a banana to eat, and return to reading without having to think about how to walk, or use your hands, or why the cat wants in, or how to eat, etc. A HUGE amount of ability and understanding is present in your consciousness right now, and much of it is merged into a “singular” part of consciousness that is interacting with the world.

I am suggesting that the “self” has come about in consciousness exactly through that route. When information integrates, in a very important way it becomes distinct from the multifaceted aspects of consciousness. It is unified, it is “one,” while all the rest are “parts” that feed it new information it can integrate (I also believe the integrated aspect is centered within the multipart aspects that occur on the periphery of consciousness). The integrative function is absolutely the most crucial factor of consciousness because it creates the singular aspect which comes to control, oversee, know . . . and one of the things it “knows” is that it exists! That is what self/subjectivity is: self knowing. That is why the oneness aspect of consciousness cannot be reproduced by a physical thing made of zillions of atoms or 1s and 0s.

In case you found any this interesting, I am posting a drawing representing the retention-integration model of subjectivity.

See Diagram 1

The picture represents a disembodied consciousness. The idea is that the most outer aspect of consciousness is outward-oriented sensitivity; it detects by being impressed with information. It is counterbalanced by a more inward concentrative aspect which when initiated causes the impressions sensed to be drawn deeper into consciousness where they will be embedded (memory); how deeply embedded depends on the strength of concentration, repetition, etc. With more experience information may integrate into the singular aspect. Since existence was our first, is our longest-running, and is a non-stop experience, in this model that knowledge is what has integrated at the very center of consciousness to become the "self."

 

[Pavel]

We are about to have our first disagreement ( . . . just kidding, I’m sure you will welcome an opportunity to defend your ideas, or to change your mind if you agree with my view).

To me, intentionality seems perfectly explainable by brain physiology. Remember the movie “The Terminator”? He was rather intent wasn’t he? And he was from being programmed to be so. In fact, it seems to me intent is one of the easiest traits of consciousness to account for with a computer model of consciousness because that’s pretty much what programming is (i.e., giving intent to an otherwise intentless piece of equipment). If by “intent” you mean free will, that’s better but will can still be explained as only appearing “free” because so many programming choices are available.

Hehe, no problem, I've always been a strong believer that it's through the disagreement that you learn the most. In fact, you convinced me that “intention” might not be a good example. I perceive the state of intention as a modal attribute, not merely as the overall [desired ?] goal, which would seem to me to be the case with the Terminator. But I’m afraid trying to show this aspect of “intention” and then reducing it would shift the conversation into a different direction. But some time, I’d like to get back to it, as I suspect modality brings a lot of trouble to materialism as well.

Subjectivity is a great counterargument to physicalism, and the zombie analogy has proven effective. The weak spot in that approach, in my opinion, is that it doesn’t offer a model of it’s own. The physicalists have science on their side, and through that they are tendering a lot of facts about the brain. At least they have a model that non-physicalists can take potshots at, and in a way that makes their case more substantial than simply making a strong argument against functionalism.

I like this point, didn't think about it. Although, when a physicalist can't explain a phenomenon resorting to the science, a non-physicalist can offer an explanation just as rational. If you can't provide a physical explanation for my experience of pain, introduction of a metaphysical component might not be the best, but it is just as rational as attributing the pain to something physical under the presumption that it's physical. Unfortunately or not, such component is ruled out a priori by a physicalst with the only answer as "we'll give a physical explanation in the future". Isn't that a metaphysical statement as well?

Anyhow, I want to take some time and think about what you said wiht regards to "intergration". It sounds interesting, but I need to chew on it for a bit and see how it settles with me. Thank you for your time explaining it!



Pavel.

 

[Pavel]

Status, yes, I'm sorry I haven't read your previous posts, as there were a LOT of them. I figured I'd read the last few before I jump in and be up to speed. Thank you for the summary though.

Unfortunatelly, you're still arguing on a highly abstract level involving a lot of questionable assumptions every time you make a point. Of course your argument makes sense then, but again, that's because you involve quite a few concepts at once that you presume to be true, but you avoid digging into them. I asked you a specific question about reducing the quality of pain and you start talking about zombies again. I accepted your notion of experience as a necessary condition for being conscious. Now, please explain to me, specifically, how you would verify that an artificial being in fact is experiencing pain. Note, you didn't build a human, you built an artificial "conscious" thing, call it Status Junior.

Thanks,

Pavel.

 

[Les Sleeth]

Unfortunately or not, such component is ruled out a priori by a physicalst with the only answer as "we'll give a physical explanation in the future". Isn't that a metaphysical statement as well?.

Yes, absolutely. That's why some of the debates here with physicalists are so frustrating. They understand the physics, but they don't realize they are arguing from a priori metaphysical assumptions.

 

[StatusX]

Status, yes, I'm sorry I haven't read your previous posts, as there were a LOT of them. I figured I'd read the last few before I jump in and be up to speed. Thank you for the summary though.

Unfortunatelly, you're still arguing on a highly abstract level involving a lot of questionable assumptions every time you make a point. Of course your argument makes sense then, but again, that's because you involve quite a few concepts at once that you presume to be true, but you avoid digging into them. I asked you a specific question about reducing the quality of pain and you start talking about zombies again. I accepted your notion of experience as a necessary condition for being conscious. Now, please explain to me, specifically, how you would verify that an artificial being in fact is experiencing pain. Note, you didn't build a human, you built an artificial "conscious" thing, call it Status Junior.

Thanks,

Pavel.

All I intended to do is summarize what I've said so far, with a couple of new illustrations to back up my arguments, so that we'd have a common ground to work from. Now your question was how could we determine what a being is subjectively experiencing. This is a tough one, and there is obviously no real answer at this point. However, like I said, I think there are laws that relate conscious experience to a configuration of matter, and we could use these laws to predict the conscious experience that a given body is feeling.

It seems odd to say "a given body," like were talking about projectile motion problems or something. But Chalmer, for one, argues that consciousness may be a result of information, and that any system which contains information has some kind of conscious experience, with the complexity of the experience corresponding to that of the information. The human brain is one of the most complex information processing systems in the universe, and is probably one of the most conscious. Other animals are less conscious, down to single celled organisms which have a more basic experience than we can imagine. Even a thermostat, (Chalmers example) has some extremely limited form of experience. His ideas are hard to accept at first, but I find them really appealing. They assert that there are simple rules that relate consciousness to some aspect of the physical. Here is a link to the article, which someone had provided earlier in the thread:

http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/facing.html

But how could we be sure something has a conscious experience? At first, it seems that we can't be. The rules about where consciousness arises may turn out to be so simple they compel us to believe them, but you can't prove anything about the external world. But think, for a minute, about the reason you can't experience what someone else is. If you could get inside their head, you would have access to all the information in it. But clearly, there is no physical link from their brain to yours. But what if you could create some kind of link, so that you could access any part of their brain, and they could do the same to you? I think any separate individuality would disappear, and the consciousnesses would merge into one. This is highly speculative, and I don't expect anyone to buy it with what little argument I've provided here, but I just thought of it and I'm still working it out. Basically the conclusion is, there is only one consciousness, but it is divided up among the different systems. If you could join the information flow of two systems, the separate consciousnesses would disappear, and if you could somehow join all systems, there would be one consciousness remaining. Well that's all I have for now. I'll try to build on this (or realize how wrong it is) later.

 

[Canute]

First of all, the whole reason I'm even talking about zombies is because of the possibility we could be them. Zombies, just to be clear, are hypothetical beings that have the same exact physical makeup as us, but are not conscious.

Sorry, but I still find this argument rather muddled. Zombies are useful in thought experiments but it's another thing entirely to suggest that they can exist. We are conscious, ergo we are not zombies. If we were not conscious then there would be no need to define zombies as being 'like us physically but not conscious'. That is, if we are not conscious then we can just say zombies are like us. Why add the 'but not conscious' bit?

I'm sorry you feel that way. I try my best to respond to any valid arguments I see, but I do seem to be alone in this corner, and it gets tiring to rebut every argument myself. That being said, this is philosophy. Obviously I have no proof of anything I've said. It is based on a combination of evidence from experience and experiments and my own opinions. I try to explain why I feel the way I do, but I can't convince you if your opinion is fundamentally and irrevocably different. And when you say, "how do you know" or "I don't think so" I just don't feel a need to respond. Explain why you think my arguments are wrong, or what you think is right.

Fair point. I was asking 'how do you know' in order to highlight the fact that it is pure conjecture to suppose that a non-conscious being can behave like a conscious one. Because you were being a bit dogmatic I hadn't realized that you already accepted this. My mistake.

Fliption is right. All I was saying is that it is coherent (ie, not an inherent contradiction) to talk about non-conscious beings which behave exactly as we do. I am making no claim about whether they really do or could exist.

I'd say that if this idea is logically coherent then there's no reason that non-conscious beings which behave exactly like conscious ones could not exist. However, the question remains - is the idea logically coherent?

I feel that if you want to say that it is then you have to give an explanation of how and why a non-conscious being would conduct research into consciousness. A zombie could have no evidence that consciousness exists. Also I find it hard to imagine that it could conduct such research into consciousness without knowing that it is conducting it. Perhaps a simpler question would be why would they go 'ow' when they stick their hand in a fire?

Many human philosophers have espoused philosophical idealism. It's hard to imagine how a being without a mind could conclude that mind is more fundamental than matter. As for a zombie becoming a Taoist or Buddhist and concluding that consciousness is more fundamental than mind, it seems hard to imagine. Surely it would be sent back to the repair shop by its colleagues.

 

[Pavel]

Here is a link to the article, which someone had provided earlier in the thread:

http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/facing.html

Nice! Seems like a very beneficial article for me to read. Thanks for ruining my weekend. Did you have to do it on a Friday night? Hehe, seriously though, thank you for the reference, I'll definitely read it.

Pavel.

 

[shintashi]

Being conscious is not 'consciousness'. Consciousness includes being both conscious and unconscious.

To me, my consciousness is that part of my persona I use to observe a given reality. I assume that we exist on many, many levels (dimensions) of the greater reality. I use my consciousness to focus my attention on any of the given levels. It seems quite possible, even probable, that for one nano-second it is focused on what I am seeing, the next on what I communicate to myself, the next on what I communicate to others and the next funneling the information to my mind, etc ...

Consciousness is the ability focus my mind and or spirit on my experiences.

love&peace,
olde drunk

ps: awareness is being able to understand the experience, information.

I agree. What I find sad today is the fact that the manyof greatest minds of the old world, Such as Abraham, Moses, Socrates, Plato, Krsna, Plotinus, and Lao Tsu, for example, all believed and studied on the precept of a source of "me" or "I" that was more than the material element.
There is no scientific fact proving or non disproving the corporeality and materiality of the human mind, for in every experiment, there is a counter experiment to create a different result. Nevertheless, I broke it down, for my own use, in this way:
Assume for a minute only three processions... from top to bottom.

At the top you have ideas & philosophy, Thought, and Intelligence, Truth.
The Second layer directly beneath it is Spiritual, Musical, Geometric, Harmony.
The third layer is Physical, Material like Democritus and obvious as Aristotle.

Assume each layer is a triangle of equal size in a directly linear observation. The triangles are all pointing down. The can go up and down, but not side to side.

now the bottom layer represents science: that being "the study of the physical universe"

The middle layer represents Theology and Religion, Music and Art.

The top layer represents dialectic, consciousness, Intelligence, wisdom, Truth, the root of philosophy, mysteries of Ethics and Imagination.


So here we have three groups, Scientists, theologians, and Philosophers; Doctors, priests, and psychics; all trying to understand what's going on.

But what if I told you that from a view point, in this 2D geometry, that science can never know the truth without going through the spiritual?
That a philosopher will never have an understanding of the physical world without the application of musical theory and geometry?

Science tries to reach for the Truth of the First world, it tries to reach the secret of philosophy, and empower its creator as a would be "Q" or "Akira" literally trying to take upon itself the reins to define what God is, completely devoid of any measure of spirituality, saying, as the Nihilist, and the Buddhist, that there is no soul, there is no atman, there is no afterlife.

"Meat Machines" as Tesla would say.
When science attempts to do this - attempts to bypass truth to create its own, it is no longer "Physic" as outlined by Thales, Heraclitus, Anaximander, Parmenides, down through Socrates and Plato. No. It becomes bastardized and turns into a religion.

Such people will try to hide behind the scientific method, scientific facts, and scientific proofs. These methods themselves are also nothing but rituals of a religion. They are the mantras of the believers. The Lab coats are merely the ceremonial robes.

As I sat in my friends house weeks ago, he asked me to prove that a certain social group existed. He said that I could not prove it to him. He wanted evidence, in the most scientific of terms. I walked out of his house, looked up at the cloudy night sky, and said "Prove to me that the sun exists. For certainly I do not see it, and it will not be around for another 12 hours...Come on, in the same time you have given me to prove this, with the materials available, prove to me there is a Sun"

He couldn't do it. He knew he couldn't do it. Next time you are in a forrest, camping, and its night time, when you think you know there is no real consciousness, only meat machines... try to prove to yourself there is a sun before it starts to rise.

 

[Les Sleeth]

Even a thermostat, (Chalmers example) has some extremely limited form of experience. His ideas are hard to accept at first, but I find them really appealing. They assert that there are simple rules that relate consciousness to some aspect of the physical. Here is a link to the article, which someone had provided earlier in the thread:

http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/facing.html

[/URL]

My take on Chalmers' meaning there was that a theromstat has some form of awareness, not experience. At one point in the paper he suggests subjectless sensing, or the easy problem of consciousness, may be generalized as "awareness." But he clearly distinguished "experience" from awareness.

But how could we be sure something has a conscious experience? At first, it seems that we can't be. The rules about where consciousness arises may turn out to be so simple they compel us to believe them, but you can't prove anything about the external world. But think, for a minute, about the reason you can't experience what someone else is. If you could get inside their head, you would have access to all the information in it. But clearly, there is no physical link from their brain to yours. But what if you could create some kind of link, so that you could access any part of their brain, and they could do the same to you? I think any separate individuality would disappear, and the consciousnesses would merge into one. This is highly speculative, and I don't expect anyone to buy it with what little argument I've provided here, but I just thought of it and I'm still working it out. Basically the conclusion is, there is only one consciousness, but it is divided up among the different systems. If you could join the information flow of two systems, the separate consciousnesses would disappear, and if you could somehow join all systems, there would be one consciousness remaining. Well that's all I have for now. I'll try to build on this (or realize how wrong it is) later.

It's a pretty good point to say that if everyone had access to everyone else's information, it would seem to diminish individuality.

But I would like to suggest to you that while you are intensely looking at the mechanisms and functions of the brain, you don't seem to understand how you yourself "work" as consciousness. When you say, "you could access any part of their brain, and they could do the same to you," what is that "you" to which you refer?

Here's how I see the problem. Consciousness is something that goes around doing things, and when you decribe consciousness you mush together the doer with the things done. They are not the same! Many people define themselves by what they do. That's why someone says "I'm a physicist" or "I'm a lawyer" or "I'm a parent." And quite often they are so focused on what they do, they have never stopped to check out what it is about them that "does." So far, no model you have offered accounts for the self, the doer. That's why it is called the "hard problem" of consciousness.

 

[Les Sleeth]

He wanted evidence, in the most scientific of terms. I walked out of his house, looked up at the cloudy night sky, and said "Prove to me that the sun exists. For certainly I do not see it, and it will not be around for another 12 hours...Come on, in the same time you have given me to prove this, with the materials available, prove to me there is a Sun" ... try to prove to yourself there is a sun before it starts to rise.

Without commenting on the rest of your post, I would argue that you did not prove anything, one way or the other. You don't know if the sun will rise in the future, you only know it has risen in the past. Unless one is experiencing something in the moment, there is no proof it exists.

Of course, there is common sense, so we rely on textbooks and other sources to say "even though we can't see how reality is somewhere, it's been such and such a way consistently long enough to conclude reality is likely the same as it's been in the past." We consider that kind of evidence "proof" even though technically it isn't.

 

[siliconhype]

“The Soul” you are talking about does not exist, consciousness / awareness “is” the chemical reaction going on / in your biological brain hardware. Actually it’s very simple to test, just give yourself some SSRIs; citalopram, fluoxetine, fluvoxamine, paroxetine and or sertraline and see how your soul reacts. LOL! But I do believe the energy (biological energy, energy found in cells) is not just simple energy this energy actually has memory. As for multiple existences, to me they are more like “memories carryovers” …
only occur in very rear instances, else we will all be copies of mommy and daddy, remembering all what they did and saw up till conception and then a branch off from that.

The antidepressants you mentioned are ****. The most effective one is MDMA or (C11H15NO2) or (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), but it is illegal in most places. But i think it causes neuron damange if used often.

See what THAT dos to your "soul".

I agree with your version of the soul, i don't think there is such thing as a spirit or soul that transcends material reality. If it did, currenly all theory is speculation, since we have not yet discovered any hint of any universe which does not function according to laws of phyisics. That does not mean any such thing may not be discoverd in the future, so i keep my mind open.

 

[siliconhype]

Fliption:Do you not think that there is electrical activity in your brain when you are asleep? I think we know very little about consciousness.

Rothie M:
Dreams can be seen as a form of consciousness because we are aware of space and time in them.I would say that the correct definition of consciousness is an awaremess of space and time.Electric pulses in the brain are not continuous phenomena but magnetic fields in the brain are.So one can imagine a magnetic field
being the brain's creation of continuous conscious experiences such as
a straight line - electric fields could only produce a dotted line.
In other words the space and time we experience is created by our brains.
It reflects what the atomic world around us really looks like but can never
give us a true experience of that world.We are probably conscious because
our brains are producing particles of very small mass which differ from the
particles found in normal physics.For example they could be moving faster than light.
We have five senses so we need five groups of particles.For a sense like colour where humans can experience 16000 different colours,there will have to be lots of different particles with lots of different properties in one group.So in my view particle physicists have got rather a lot of work to do!They speak of quarks and leptons:in future they will need to speak of a lot more categories.
If the brain produces particles that create consciousness then what we are seeing may exist in our brains and not outside them.For example,the human eye can see a galaxy at a distance of 10^23 metres and it takes about 10 seconds to focus on it properly. .So if we are to see the galaxy where it is, the particles that create consciousness have to travel from our brains to the galaxy in ten seconds.This means they need to have a speed of 10^22 metres per second - at least.This is way faster than light.I do not think consciousness is so mysterious if you accept that a soul
with mass exists in each of us and that the brain creates new kinds of particles that
exist in space and time relative to a soul particle.When we are dead or unconscious we are "soul inactive" when we are dreaming or awake we are "soul active."

That is the craziest theory if i ever did see saw a crazy theory. Hmm, I think current science has a few things to argue against your theory. First, we don't know that the brain, or anything, creates samaller particles than the currently discovered ones, so you seem to be speculating a lot, and well, if there is no proof how can i believe you? That is not to say science know all or best, it just means that I'm not sure that you know best either.

On the topic of far off galaxies, i imagine you speack of staring at the sky, and focusing on the least visible star you can see.

It is know that those stars or galaxies you see are seeable because they emit light, this light travels a long distance and because it is bound by the laws of physics, it is an outdated image of the galaxy, so what you see is in effect and old verison of the galaxy, not an image of how it today, for all reasonable purpose, it may not even exist anymore, yet, its light keeps on traveling unitl it reaches its last photon. So, there is no need to invent faster than light magic.

 

[siliconhype]

"Perhaps we shouldn't boil vegetables."

That's ok, we do not associate feelings or pain to things we do not visibly see responding to us. So, in theory you could boil a paraplegic blind mute person without having any remorse... except that it has a physical resemblance to humans and thus you associate an entity to it which is similar to yourself meaning: you may be able to "feel for" the unlucky boiling man.

 

[siliconhype]

"Sense-experiences do not live in isolation.Show me an example where they do."

Well, depends, here memory leaps into help. Let's say one is not able to experience anything but one stimuli. he will know what that is because he has experienced it in the past, or not and he will be able to copare with memories of past experiences similar or different. Thus you will have to specify that memory should also be nonexistent in a person which is only able to feel one stimuli in order for your theory to have a ground. But then, if we have no memory what are we? If we have to memory we do not perceive time. And if we consider ourselves as time-space entities, we would be practically dead if we cannot perceive time. In fact, this theory of time expoerience can be taken to further inquiry, one can say that there is difference between subconsicous time perception and conscious time perception. For example, one canot consciously (directly) control a hearbeat, yet the heart has a tremendous timing mechanism which coordinartes itself depending on needs of the body, it is in constant adjustment. Time can also be said to exist subconsciously through training, if a person is alwasy trianed to wake up at a certain time, that person will experience that during unconscious sleep, the mind will bring itself to consciouslness at the exact moment that it knows it would have been woken up by the clock. Thus, i think there is a subconscious timing mechanism which operates on many differen tlevels and directs many different human nctions, and thus time affects consciousness. Yet, time is also relative. Dream time may be differen than wakinglife time - yet both are part of consciousness, as in the case of lucid dreaming, or dreaming where you remember what you dreamt after you wake up.

 

[siliconhype]

Electrical impulses?



In which we are aware I believe.




I agree, but then again we're all different and so are the masses and charges.

We all think about it, are we really alive? thinking? what is thinking? what about seeing? the vision is perhaps the most doubtful consiousness of it all.

You sleep on the same bed for 50 years.

You emigrate = new house = new bed included.

In the morning you wake up, your brain becomes confused because you still thinking of the old house, walls, colours etc...

Your brain immediately adjusts this confusion.

There is conscious, no doubt about it.

Good topic!

Good example, i have experienced New Immigrant Phenomena myself, when i first immigrated to Canada, I was sometimes lost when i woke up, forgetting where i was, but of course after a few dazed seconds memory kicks in and one is able to transpond expectations of old world reality to expectations of new world reality.

 

[siliconhype]

Now all you have to do is demonstrate that this isn't just a pipe dream. Because if it is, then I have a counter-proposal. What if consciousness is transferred by Carrol's snarks, which you can only detect if they happen to be boojums, but of course if they are boojums and you detect them you will silently fade away. So that explains why science does not detect them.

WTF?

1234567890

 

[siliconhype]

"To that I say, for anything of substance to be exactly the same as something else, they not only have to share all properties and aspects, but must inhabit the same place at the same time, meaning that a single consciousness cannot inhabit two bodies. Aside from this, the likeliness that two consciousnesses (is that right?) WOULD be the same is ridiculously small, considering that they would have to have the same physical composition down to a tee, and also have to have shared the exact same past in order to have been exposed to the exact same sensory input."

Agreed.

Grade 10 Math will show you exactly why two identical consciousnesse may exist, but are actually inseparable.

Take this equasion:

2y = 6x+4

and

y = 3x+2

They are different, yet when graphed, the lines overlap, thus while they are separate lines, they are identical and thus indisctinguishable when projected in time and and space.

One can certainly argue that identical consciousnesses may esist, but what they may not realize is that these same consciousnes are all one. There are an infinite numbers of me, yet you count tell, because all me's overlap and thus are indistinguishable form each other, thus do not affect time and space separately, but as one, thus its pointless to talk about multiple self consciousness or out of body experiences as they are as good as nonexistent.

 

[siliconhype]

I have seen arguments on this topic which side with physical explanations of the conscious and arguments which side with the metaphysical explanation of consciousness (and everything in between)

I think these arguments boil down to arguments of the parts defining the whole or the whole is more than its parts.

Currently i believe the whole is more than its parts. But its parts define how the whole works. The mechanism for consciousness may well be similar among all humans, and i believe they are, this doesn't mean the everyone is the same. A bike can be ridden up the hill, or down the hill, or left or right or not ridden at all, yet all bikes are basically the same. So the two theories are not contradictory at all.

 

[siliconhype]

StatusX


I agree that our own consciousness is all we can know for certain. But on what evidence do you say that knowing is a physical process of our brains? By assuming that this true you are in effect assuming that consciousness is caused by brains, which is exactly what we are not yet able to prove.

Also the zombie argument shows us nothing at all about the nature of consciousness. It would show us a lot about it if we ever came across a real zombie, but as yet they are hypothetical creatures, so we cannot deduce anything about consciousness from their hypothetical existence, any more than we can from their hypothetical non-existence.

Would someone who is autistic be similar to the general definition of a zombie?

"A rare syndrome, appearing in childhood, characterized by a withdrawn state, a lack of social responsiveness or interest in others, serious communicative and linguistic impairments, and a failure to develop normal attachments, all frequently accompanied by a variety of bizarre ways of responding to the environment, usually including a fascination with inanimate objects and an insistence on routine, order, and sameness. Onset prior to 30 months of age. Sometimes the term is only used to refer to autistic disorder but more often it refers to all of the autistic spectrum or as a general term for developmental disorders in the pervasive developmental disorders category of the DSM-IV."

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=deskbar&q=define:autism

I have heard that it is believed that autists are not able to associate a personality to another living thing.

I would really like to know how the consciousness of someone who is autistic works, or if perhaps autistic people are humans in everyway but perhaps they do not have consciousness? Hmm...

 

[siliconhype]

If the life (the thought activity of our brain) does not start with its birth, we need to know at what stage it starts. I mean the evolution of our thought process starting from zero thought in the begining.

It seems to me that you equate life with consciousness, which is false. Life starts at the creation of the first cell, eg, sperm and egg meet. Consciousness (self-consciousness) starts after birth, and is not something which just "clicks" in place as soon as you exit your mothers womb. It is a gradual development. Memory has nothing to do with consciousness. The mind is made up of many different (if apparently similarly looking) mechanisms for processing stimuli, both internal and external. I can see and i can imagine, the first is an external experience and the second internal, yet both use the same vision consciousness engine. consciousness is nothing more than the amalgamated processes of the brain which have been put together in order that we make decisions on them. The subconscious is part of the conscious, but i think that we are falling into many miss-understanding traps if we do not decide what kind of consciousness we should discuss. Self consciousness, subconsciousness, etc. So what's it going to be?

 

[siliconhype]

Yes, photons are discrete, but there are so many of them per cell that we couldn't possibly make out individual ones, and so light appears continuous.

If our brain was electrically stimulated in the right way, I believe we could have all the experiences we have in everyday life: color, sound, heat, pleasure. I don't see any reason to doubt this. So there is nothing actually traveling between us and the object we are looking at that causes the subjective experience of color. All that happens is photons hit our eye and cause a chemical reaction which causes electrical impulses in our brain. These impulses gives rise to conscious experience. I think the brain is the only place we should look to if we want to find the cause of consciousness.

I don't agree, take a baby, would you be able to have a discussion with the baby about consciousness? According to you you would because consciousness is not effected by external stimuli. Yet, in reality we know that you can't have a discussion with a baby on consciousness because of many reasons. One of them being that the baby cannot speak. I have another question, can anyone remember a memory before one was able to speak? I believe speech or communication, not necessarily through words, is a throughout process without which self consciousness could not exist, simple because the means of defining it or describing it do not exist.

Consciousness is very much defined by external stimuli and experience, while the mechanism does exist independent of external stimuli, consciousness is a process which relies on both being present.

Once enough external stimuli has effected the mind, so that the mind can perceive itself as an independent entity and thus attribute itself self consciousness, then if all stimuli is removed, consciousness could still exist, as you say, independent of external factors. It will only exist in the mind of the individual, and may yet evolve independently of any external factors through various processes such as imagination, etc. These are internal stimuli, which have been defined by external stimuli, without initial external stimuli they could not exist.

 

[siliconhype]

Well, the problem here is that you are reasoning based on "what we know not". Every so often someone comes along with a 'scientific theory' that they say predicts all the equations of physics, and therefore is the 'right' theory (and they are usually not the humble types in their proclamation). Of course, ask them to produce equations that are not known which we can experiment, they are usually mum. What they have done is predict the past successes of science, and even though it is an admirable task if done correctly, such kind of 'theories' do not tell us that a revolutionary theory has been discovered. Rather, all we can do is look at them and say "does it make butter too?".

Well, I think this is a very similar situation to your thought experiment. What are we supposed to do with such computational results other than scratch our heads and pick up our discussion right before we were interrupted? The fact of the matter is, a theory might be right, but if it does not show us how it is right or if it is right in experiments that we can perform, such a theory is generally not useful to science.

In the case of a super computer having all these abilities, all we can ask at the end of the day is whether it is simply under the spell of Searle's Chinese room thought experiment. You might recall in that thought experiment that a person who does not know a lick of Chinese is put inside a room (we don't know that he doesn't know Chinese). While in the room, someone comes along and slips through the door a question written in Chinese characters. A few minutes later out spews the answer in English. Now, to most of us, we would assume that the person in the room is fluent in Chinese. But, we would be wrong. If we could look inside we would see that the person has a pretty substantial filing system that they can match the Chinese characters, stroke by stroke, until find a file that contains the answer in English for that question written in Chinese. The 'translator' has no understanding of Chinese, but everyone on the outside is confident that the guy is fluent in Chinese.

What this thought experiment shows is not that AI is impossible, rather it shows that to know that AI is possible we must have a much better philosophical understanding of language, theory of learning, theory of meaning, and a theory of truth (among a few others). We need to demonstrate how a proposition can be encoded into symbols and then decoded such that no information is lost (or very little information). We can translate the contents of a sentence into 1' & 0's, but we cannot translate the meaning. Without demonstrating how it is possible, we might just as well be talking Chinese to the guy in a Chinese room.

Actually your thought experiment falls appart right here:

"The 'translator' has no understanding of Chinese, but everyone on the outside is confident that the guy is fluent in Chinese."

What makes you think that i could not assume that there is a translating system in the room and thus the person was able to translate the writing? It's a silly experiment proving nothing.

The experiment assumes that everyone reacts the same way to the person translating the characters. In reality this experiment can easily be proven wrong, such is the issue with thought experiments, they assume too much.

 

[siliconhype]

Status, I want to be more specific about what Les said about "human activities", as I'm also struggling to understand how you would simulate them, at least conceptually.

Very simple: let’s say I’m holding a fork and all of a sudden I make a decision to drop it. Let’s examine this decision making process. My brain must be in a certain state before the drop, say state A. You can brake down this state to a quantum level, to anything you want. The bottom line is there is a physical state that can be expressed in a matrix of certain values for each neuron, synapse, electron, photon, etc. Now comes the point in time when the decision making neuron must fire to cause the “drop the fork” reaction chain. My question is what specifically causes that neuron to fire? Yes, you can reduce that cause to a quark spin or a wave function, if you will, but that’s just begging the question. The ultimate question is what causes the system to be transformed from state A to state B (firing of the fork dropping neuron). I can think of only two causes. First, randomness / spontaneity. Whether it’s the electron’s undetermined position in the carbon atom, nuclear decay, gust of wind in your face, other natural random phenomena, whatever it is, the prime mover is random. (that’s assuming spontaneity exists, of course, which is a subject for another thread). The other cause is determinism. The transformation from state A to state B is strictly determined by natural laws. Whether the neuron will fire or not completely depends on the current state, state A, all incoming input from other neurons, and the rules (brain fabric which determines thresholds etc.) which dictate what to do. Without going into metaphysics, is there anything else?

Whether you choose randomness or determinism, there’s a problem. If the neuron firing is caused by a random act, all our decisions are nothing but a roll of a dice. I find it hard to swallow since it would make this very idea an outcome of randomness in someone’s mind….. Determinism doesn’t make things better. If my decision making is the outcome of strict deterministic rules, we’re nothing but a cog in a huge machine following the rules, we don’t really think or make decisions. I find it also hard to believe because, again, that would mean your very idea of determinism is not the outcome of your independent thinking, it’s the outcome of some physical state and some rules, you couldn’t “think” otherwise, you’re programmed to say “we’re determined”. The third option is the combination of the two of course, but again, the same criticism applies. So, how, conceptually, would you simulate the transformation from one state to the next?

Regards,

Pavel.

Good argument, a similar discussion was posed by a character in the phylosophical movie "Waking Life".

"The ultimate question is what causes the system to be transformed from state A to state B (firing of the fork dropping neuron)."

My resonse, first, the two theories you mention are both invalid. And also, i think you question is incorectly posed, which explains its unaswerability. Thought isnever a neuron simply firing and creating a cascade which eventually results in an effect on the body. Thought is a continuous process which never stops since the creation of the first neuron in the human embrio. Thus there is no State A, there is only a continuation of thought. The system transformation from state A to B does not exist, transformation is continuous. But to sort of answer the question, which i said beofore cannot be clearly answere the wasy it was posed, and thus i should reword it:

What is the difference between state A and state B and how did the mind get there.

Well, the neuron which created the cascade to drop the fork is unidentifiable, there is no one neuron associated with the command "drop fork". In other words a process created the action to drop the fork. Once this is assumed to be the case, the question is more easilly answerable. The process is an evaluation of thought, to evaluate thought more processes must be taken into consideration, some baing external stimuli. in essence there are many reasons why one would let go of a fork. One could find the fork too hot to hold. Or the fork too heavy, or one may have simply made a decision to let the fork go. The result in essence was created by a process not by a state. The decision to drop the fork may have well been thought over many times. One may have though, "when" to drop the fork, so then where can you pinpoint the neuron to cause the dropping of the fork? You can't; there is no neuron that thinks, thougth is a process. i'll stop here because I am starting to sound repetitive.

 

[evagriselda]

Conciousness is the interface of the mind.

Hi Smurf: In physical chemistry or computer science?

 

[StatusX]

Sorry, but I still find this argument rather muddled. Zombies are useful in thought experiments but it's another thing entirely to suggest that they can exist. We are conscious, ergo we are not zombies. If we were not conscious then there would be no need to define zombies as being 'like us physically but not conscious'. That is, if we are not conscious then we can just say zombies are like us. Why add the 'but not conscious' bit?

We are conscious, ergo we are not zombies? If this isn't using your conclusion as a premise, I don't know what is. And the only way to talk about zombies is to emphasize how they are different from the way we perceive ourselves. Obviously its just a matter of semantics that I say that theyre like us but not conscious. My conclusion was that whatever they are, theyre the same as us. But you can't start from this point.

I'd say that if this idea is logically coherent then there's no reason that non-conscious beings which behave exactly like conscious ones could not exist. However, the question remains - is the idea logically coherent?

I feel that if you want to say that it is then you have to give an explanation of how and why a non-conscious being would conduct research into consciousness. A zombie could have no evidence that consciousness exists. Also I find it hard to imagine that it could conduct such research into consciousness without knowing that it is conducting it. Perhaps a simpler question would be why would they go 'ow' when they stick their hand in a fire?

Many human philosophers have espoused philosophical idealism. It's hard to imagine how a being without a mind could conclude that mind is more fundamental than matter. As for a zombie becoming a Taoist or Buddhist and concluding that consciousness is more fundamental than mind, it seems hard to imagine. Surely it would be sent back to the repair shop by its colleagues.

Again, you have to understand that I believe that all behavior is explainable in purely physical terms. What you're talking about is just behavior (responding to pain, writing books about buddhism, meditating). I've already explained why I believe this, but just to reiterate: how can a "mental world" influence the physical world? If it did, there would be some experiment we could perform where we would see physical events that arent physically explainable (eg., a neuron spontaneously fires). The physical realm wouldn't be causally closed. I don't like this idea, and there isn't any evidence for it.

My take on Chalmers' meaning there was that a theromstat has some form of awareness, not experience. At one point in the paper he suggests subjectless sensing, or the easy problem of consciousness, may be generalized as "awareness." But he clearly distinguished "experience" from awareness.

I'm glad you've read that paper, and I'd like to talk about it. To start, I'm not sure I understand the difference between experience and awareness. Awareness seems to require the ability to reason, that to be aware is to understand what's going on around you, where as experience could conceivably take place in the absence of it. But maybe I've misinterpretted these terms.

It's a pretty good point to say that if everyone had access to everyone else's information, it would seem to diminish individuality.

But I would like to suggest to you that while you are intensely looking at the mechanisms and functions of the brain, you don't seem to understand how you yourself "work" as consciousness. When you say, "you could access any part of their brain, and they could do the same to you," what is that "you" to which you refer?

Here's how I see the problem. Consciousness is something that goes around doing things, and when you decribe consciousness you mush together the doer with the things done. They are not the same! Many people define themselves by what they do. That's why someone says "I'm a physicist" or "I'm a lawyer" or "I'm a parent." And quite often they are so focused on what they do, they have never stopped to check out what it is about them that "does." So far, no model you have offered accounts for the self, the doer. That's why it is called the "hard problem" of consciousness.

Would a conscious being have a sense of identity in the absence of rational thought? Could a thermostat know it was separate from everything else? I think self-awareness is just a aspect of consciousness present in intelligent beings, and not something fundamental to it. The hard problem is how to explain experiences. The experience of red, the experience of fear, the experience of self. Its called the hard problem because it can't be explained functionally. But I think that self-awareness could be.

You know you aren't someone else because you don't have access to their thoughts. This is a deduction youve made, even if its at an extremely basic level. I know I'm saying "you know" again, but this is hard to avoid because the experience of self is so central to our existence, and so also to our language. A frog would, in my opinion, have conscious experiences, but I don't think it would understand it was separate from the rest of the world. This is all just my take on it, and I haven't really read much about the self-identity aspect of consciousness. If you know any other articles that go into this kind of stuff more, I'd love to read them.

 

[StatusX]

Yes, photons are discrete, but there are so many of them per cell that we couldn't possibly make out individual ones, and so light appears continuous.

If our brain was electrically stimulated in the right way, I believe we could have all the experiences we have in everyday life: color, sound, heat, pleasure. I don't see any reason to doubt this. So there is nothing actually traveling between us and the object we are looking at that causes the subjective experience of color. All that happens is photons hit our eye and cause a chemical reaction which causes electrical impulses in our brain. These impulses gives rise to conscious experience. I think the brain is the only place we should look to if we want to find the cause of consciousness.

I don't agree, take a baby, would you be able to have a discussion with the baby about consciousness? According to you you would because consciousness is not effected by external stimuli. Yet, in reality we know that you can't have a discussion with a baby on consciousness because of many reasons. One of them being that the baby cannot speak.

You answered your own question. You can't talk with a baby about consciousness because it can't talk, and even if it could, it wouldn't understand it. I don't really understand what you were trying to say.

I have another question, can anyone remember a memory before one was able to speak? I believe speech or communication, not necessarily through words, is a throughout process without which self consciousness could not exist, simple because the means of defining it or describing it do not exist.

Consciousness is very much defined by external stimuli and experience, while the mechanism does exist independent of external stimuli, consciousness is a process which relies on both being present.

Once enough external stimuli has effected the mind, so that the mind can perceive itself as an independent entity and thus attribute itself self consciousness, then if all stimuli is removed, consciousness could still exist, as you say, independent of external factors. It will only exist in the mind of the individual, and may yet evolve independently of any external factors through various processes such as imagination, etc. These are internal stimuli, which have been defined by external stimuli, without initial external stimuli they could not exist.

I think you misinterpretted my argument. One thing Ill respond to right away is that I don't think speech is at all necessary for consciousness. For one thing, some people do have memories from before they learned to talk, and there are conscious people who never learn any form of communication.

But when you say that "consciousness could exist, as you say, independent of external factors," that's not what I was talking about at all. When I said you could electrically stimulate the brain to have experiences, I meant experiences identical to the ones we have in ordinary life. My point was to refute a ridiculous claim about "color particles." These are not necessary because color could conceivably exist without any real object, ie, if you just stimulated you brain so you thought you were looking at a colored object. Actually, this isn't far fetched at all, and all you have to do to disprove the "color particle" theory is eat some acid. That is, unless you claim that acid has some spiritual connection to the rest of the universe, and causes color particles to come from nowhere. But then I wouldn't really want to talk to you any more.

 

[Mohsen]

In my view, consiuosness is a separate entity from central nervous system and all of the physiologic processes which is happening in it. To make it more clear, look at the analogy of motion and legs. Motion is a separate entity but we can adopt it because we have moving organs. The more advanced organ we have the more complex motions we can perform.
Although this belief is as old as Plato's time or even older, more and more scientific evidences are appearing to support it.