No. Barring a force, life is the label of that behaviour.
That’s to do with identity, not life. You can observe the life, not live it. But there’s no advantage to living that life, unless there’s a “force”. However, you can’t observe consciousness. because to observe consciousness, you have to assume that identity, this is the crucial difference, between the two phenomenas. If you could assume the identity, you could verify is the consciousness contents were similar to yours.
But I don’t. Life is a term given to arbitrarily-delimited behaviour. If there’s a “force” then I can’t have confidence in the delimiters (intuitive or otherwise).
The word ‘phenomenon’ seems to be at fault here. It doesn’t mean the same notion for constitutional-dispositional emergences as consciousness-type emergences.
If you can explain consciousness the phenomenon, please, by all means.
It is a wondrous process, but the mystery is logical, not wonder-maintained.
I don’t know if you are conscious. If I did, this debate wouldn’t be.
But I don’t dismiss the vitalist. There is no additional element that requires explaining beyond the physical observations. If there are, then vitalists have a point. Consciousness itself is an additonal empirical yet privately empirical element.
And consciousness is my label for your behaviour. As you later say yourself: “I don’t know if you are conscious. If I did, this debate wouldn’t be.”
I don’t understand how “advantage” is relevant.
I do not understand (is there any literature, say in the Stanford source, you can direct me to where this is explained, or is it your own personal formulation?) The “identity” of a thing is what it is. I cannot be what something else is - at the very least, the Pauli exclusion principle states that I cannot occupy the same volume of spacetime at the same energy level. I cannot have the identity of a rock any more than I can directly live its life or experience its consciousness. This still does not impugn the geological, biological or cognitive science of rocks.
And why can I not give the term “consciousness” to similarly arbitrarily delimited behaviour given that I cannot experience something else’s consciousness any more than I can live its life?
Are you asserting that the meanings switch or arguing so?
Just as a life scientist sets forth an explanation of life the phenomemon by reference to physical biological processes, a cognitive scientist sets forth an explanation of consciosuness the phenomemon by reference to physical computational processes, specifically the processing in working memory of sensory input via various cognitive modules shaped by evolution.
You are asserting this distinction, not arguing it. Can I not simply assert the opposite?
But there are all kinds of things in life science which still require explanation - that’s why universities still have biology departments!
Except consciousness is used to refer to something else, not the behaviour. The behaviour is taken as evidence of consciousness, but actually isn’t.
A new perspective is provided if you could observe my consciousness. No such advantage is forthcoming if you “live my life” (assuming consciousness isn’t part of that bundle).
There is no way for you to observe my consciousness unless you were me. You can observe my life, without being me, unless you believe life has a “force”.
You just contradicted yourself. Your second use of the term is proper, refering to the phenomena, whilst the first instance, seeks to reassign its meaning.
Argument.
For the nth time, HOW???
You already did, although disguised as a question to me. But I have given you the reason why your analog of life is different from consciousness.
Gyan, I think the time might have come to draw this exchange to a close, since I’m afraid I still have no idea how I might defend the cognitive scientific models and explanations of consciousness in the way you ask. It seems that to even suggest what they might be is, according to you, to assume that they are correct. Indeed, I struggled to discern a promising approach even when you took the role of an emergentist (albeit for a different emergent phenomenon), since instead of explaining how, say, replication ultimately had a physical basis (eg. in the splitting of a spiral molecule called DNA each half of which subsequently attracts the necessary proteins to make it whole again), you simply stuck with asserting that life is explained by physical mechanisms. In which case, attempting to explain memory formation in carbon computers in a similar manner to how I would explain memory formation in silicon computers is, apparently, irrelevant from the very outset even if this only the starting point of the scientific explanation of consciousness as a whole.
It seems that I can only speak of the science of working memory if I first agree with you that rocks, photons and corpses are conscious - propositions which I’m afraid I can only characterise as positively lekattian given that these entities show precisely zero indication of possessing anything like what characterises an insect, let alone a waking homo sapiens (be that life or cognition). You even suggest that kites and robots are alive since they move! Nor, apparently, can I even use the word “unconscious” when describing those so dosed with anaesthetic that they’re about to die from it, nor even “less conscious” since dead and anaesthetised people are merely “differently conscious” (talk about PC gone mad!), despite the fact that they are exactly the same matter in which activity is merely absent. (Quite how that presence or absence of physical activity causes a change in consciousness if consciousness is not physical is, by your reckoning, an “enigma” rather than a fundamental logical flaw).
Nevertheless, thanks for your contribution here. I feel I understand the direction you’re coming from a great deal more, if not some of the specific positions you hold.
The exact machinations are irrelevant. Life is completely physical, as we both agree. Explaining life is a matter of filling in the details. What is the difficulty, sincerely?
Go ahead and explain it. Make sure you end with how consciousness arises.
You have paired life with consciousness. According to you, everything alive need not be conscious, need it?
Mischaracterization. I explicitly stated all that moves isn’t labelled life. The converse, actually. Also, I didn’t agree to calling robots alive, and I said that a floating kite might appear to be on the fuzzy threshold of life/non-life since it wouldn’t move predictably. Possibly to an animal, it might just lump it as alive, like birds.
But the matter’s not the same. The activity in a dead brain is not the same as in a live one (of course there is activity, motion still occurs).
[ul]
[li]you’re aware of the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness? What do you understand it to be?[/li][li]What’s the cutoff for consciousness? I suppose you believe that a rat is conscious. What about a squid? Insect? What’s your rough guess of a cutoff, on the plant/animal classification tree, at which, those above, are conscious, those below, aren’t?[/li][/ul]
No problem at all: I say that the answer to the hard problem is the collection of answers to the easy questions, that experience is what something has when all of those vastly complex cognitive modules are connected together.
Roughly, insect (carbon) or camcorder-Doom player (silicon). These are characterised by sensory input to working memory, which can access past states and thus not behave solely in reaction to its external environment, like an amoeba, plant, rock face or database must.
None, but then again I believe that consciousness has a physical computational basis whose explanation is a matter of filling in the details.
OK. Just as memory formation in silicon computers is a matter of sensory input being encoded by the configuration of a physical substrate, so could it be in some carbon lifeforms. Taking visual processing as an example, the filtering and memorising of the sensory input could form the basis of “what it is like to see”. Now, of course, this bare bones of visual memory is only the basis, perhaps corresponding to what it is like for, say, an insect to see: vertebrates have vastly more cognitive modules connected to the visual cognitive modules, such as those which filter and memorise other senses such as sound, vibration or molecular environment (smell). Mammals have yet more complex modules such as chemical emotional moderators (correlated with large amygdala), all of which are yet more computationally intractably interconnected with the others, giving rise to a consciousness which is more powerful, intense or whatever superlative we might rather arbitrarily choose. Finally, a kind of ape might evolve the ability to associate memories with sounds and thus necessitate all kinds of analytical coginitive modules (or vice versa - an evolutionary ‘cat-and-mouse’ game of cognition growing more complex as the cognitive modules grow more complex and interconnected) until what it experiences is so incredibly intense and powerful that even educated, intelligent 21st Century humans cannot believe that it is fundamentally computational in basis since it is now so unlike the digital silicon computation taking place under their desks.
But the matter is irrelevant if consciousness is not physical, surely?
Are you claiming that humans aren’t completely a product of physical non-conscious laws? If so, how does couching the explanation in terms of memory, make a difference. It’s just physics, like that applicable to an amoeba.
[quote]
None, but then again I believe that consciousness has a physical computational basis whose explanation is a matter of filling in the details.
How?
No. Matter seems to correlate. Think of it as a reflection in the water.
No, because I explicitly admit that it might be wrong. If I was asserting, I would say that panpsychism can’t be right.
Of course: I claim that amoebae and humans are physical, just that amoeba aren’t conscious. After all, life is just physics too, but I can say that humans and amoeba are alive but robots aren’t.
This is where, in my OP, I can only ask you to use your imagination, since the solipsist simply refuses to countenance the possibility that anyone or anything else can “see”. I can only ask you whether you agree that having a visual field, like even the insect or the camcorder-Doom computer, could be the basis for “sight”. When we ask “How do birds see?”, these are the kind of answers which cognitive science gives.
But reflections are physical processes in which photons of light are absorbed from one direction and re-emitted in others. How can consciousness even correlate with physical processes if it is not physical?
No, I meant that you didn’t provide an argument, but just said it is so.
Then, how do you figure that a physical memory substrate is necessary for consciousness?
Despite this being GD, I have to say, you are trolling. The solipsist does not refuse to acknowledge the possibility or rather affirm the impossibility of other minds. Only that due to the nature of consciousness, other minds can’t be verified and hence solipsism is a valid belief, and someone may choose to adopt it.
Of course, assuming I’m understanding the phrase “having a visual field” correctly. Because that’s a tautology. a ‘visual field’ is a conscious phenomena.
Cognitive neuroscience says photons hit the ocular surface, an action potential runs down the optic nerve, and a series of neural activity occurs in various parts of the CNS. Again, how do birds see?
Well, if it is not physical, it apparently does. Yes, but there appears to be no necessity. I’ve to assume that a physical world exists “outside” and that my conscious experience of it is representative.
Proposed that it might be so, on the understanding that you can ask me why I do so.
In the same way that I figure that a physical cellular structure is necessary for life.
Duly reported.
And I could not argue with them. If one refused to believe that anything other than themselves had a mind, I simply could not see any approach whereby they might be convinced by anything in cognitive science.
Yet a camera also has a visual field, and most people (including me) do not ascribe consciousness to it even at the fuzzy borderline. I am setting forth how processing of what is in the visual field might form the basis of experience.
I am suggesting that this is seeing, for the bird, just as the cellular processes and motion etc.are its “life”.
Can you explain this again, another way? I don’t understand any of it.
Find a better way to challenge your opponent, then, because accusations of trolling are not permitted in any Forum on the SDMB. If you differ on a definition, then challenge the definition or point out a reference that disproves the definition; do not assume (and do not accuse your opponent of) bad faith, particularly by claiming your opponent is trolling.
What? If you delimit life to objects showing replication, then Yes. But you haven’t shown that consciousness is connected to the brain.
It’s not about refusing to believe. It’s about not believing. May the nature of the universe change and prove me wrong. Most people who hold the world as real, do so without acknowledging it as an assumption. If they see it as an assumption, they don’t communicate it. It is the norm and hence taken for granted as “truth”.
Everything’s a visual field, then. So, your use of visual field is different than I thought.
Labelling neurochemical activity “processing” does not make it so. Besides, I completely agree that neurochemical might form the basis. You, as the physicalist, believe it does.
We call the cellular processes & motion “life”. We don’t call neural activity “seeing”, you call it that. We call the experience of vision, seeing. You are equating them.
Rephrase of
If consciousness is not physical, apparently, it does correlate with mental activity. But there appears to be no necessity that it should correlate. The physical world is assumed to exist independently of conscious experience of it, and that my conscious experience represents it. Clearer, I hope.
If you have followed this debate, you’ll know that we are retreading the same ground for virtually the entire thread (70+ posts). It is my sincere belief that I’ve been clear enough, and yet the same counterpoints abound. Either SM is stupid/dense or asserting beliefs as mine that I didn’t put forward. I don’t believe the former, so reasonable for me to believe that he’s trolling, even if he’s not.
Correction: If you have followed this debate, you’ll know that we are retreading the same ground for virtually the entire thread (70+ posts). It is my sincere belief that I’ve been clear enough, and yet the same counterpoints abound. Either SM is stupid/dense or just reasserting the same old. I don’t believe the former. He also ascribed beliefs to me, that if one has read the thread, one would know, aren’t true. It is a reasonable belief that he’s trolling, even if he’s not.
And the appropriate response to indications that a poster is trolling is to use the “report” button to notify the staff.
The appropriate response to perceived deliberate mischaracterization of one’s own posts is (depending on one’s personality and patience) to either repeatedly point out the errors and mischaracterizations so that the folks at home can distinguish between what one has posted and what has been misattributed to one, or to note a clear example of mischarcterization with a declaration that one will no longer continue a discussion carried out in bad faith. One does not begin hurling names at the opposition in GD, particularly not “troll” but not to exclude “stupid” or “dense.”
Not unfairly, no - he, like Gyan simply asserts that consciousness cannot be explained by connectionist functions, that it just is different to the vital spirit. He says cognitive science ducks the question, when actually it is he who conveniently avoids all mention of the alternative: that rocks and corpses are conscious. All cognitive science can do is propose an explanation of its emergence, and leave intelligent people to choose between it and the panpsychism which Chalmers advocates (although he never comes right out and says so - like Young Earth Creationists, he does everything he can to ensure the conversation remains an attack on the science rather than a defence of the propositions which most philosophers consider absurdly ludicrous.)
In all of these “ifs”, I am taking the position that the basis of consciousness is the processing of sensory input in working memory - that is how I’m delimiting consciousness.
Very well, I could not argue with someone who believed only they had a consciousness.
Can we agree that labelling the electronic activity in the computer under your desk “processing” is a justifiable step?
Excellent, I think we’re making progress. You no longer seem to be suggesting that processing of sensory information in working memory cannot be what consciousness is, merely that you prefer the option that rocks and corpses are conscious. Is this fair?
To clarify, it’s not just the activity, it’s the sensory input (ie. the photons) as well that makes up the process of seeing.
But that doesn’t explain how a mental (ie. not physical) entity can even possibly be affected by physical things like molecules (of eg. alcohol, LSD or sevofluorane). Consciousness must at least have a physical element if physical things affect it so drastically, yes?
As for the rather unsavoury accustions, please, my friend, let us continue this in an amicable spirit. It may be that we must agree to disagree, and I’ll understand at any point if you wish to draw this to a close. I also apologise if I ascribed beliefs to you which you do not hold - I assure you I was only working from things you’d said, and I’m sorry if I misinterpreted them.
Perhaps a new example might unravel a few knots, since going from the ‘top down’ (the biology and neuroscience) doesn’t seem to be getting us far? How about the ‘bottom up’ of Artificial Intelligence? Do you think discussing Shakey the Robot and his ability to recognise objects in his visual field would be worthwhile?
You haven’t explained why such activity and such activity only.
You could argue why that belief is wrong.
Yes.
SM, I already have had somewhat of a warning. Read my earlier posts where I agreed that physicalism might ultimately be true. You’re doing the same thing again. Although your phrasing is still wrong. Processing cannot be consciousness. It may give rise to it. If you’re arguing that processing is it, then you’re arguing for panpsychism.
Doesn’t matter. It’s all activity. Particles from one position to another, albeit in some co-ordinated manner.
Of course. Sounds like you’re confused about panpsychism. Panpsychism argues that physical entities have a mental component. Your gestalt conscious experience is an emergence of all that constitutes you. That emergence is less problematic than the arising of consciousness from non-consciousness, which is equivalent to Universe being created from Nothing.
Go ahead.
Note: I’ll be out of town till Sunday evening. So Monday afternoon (GMT) is when I’ll be back here.