[quote=Gyan]
You haven’t explained why such activity and such activity only. OK - I’ll try from the other direction instead (AI) later in this post.
But I would be wasting my breath: the solipsist would simply retort at every turn that everything but himself just displays behaviour rather than concsiousness, which only he has.
So processing might cause consciousness, yes? If consciousness is explained by physical causes, it is itself physical, yes?
Not just any kind of “processing”: only that of sensory input in working memory (ie. via access to past states). It is this IF-THEN-ELSE kind of processing I was referring to.
Watch out with that word emergence: panpsychism and emergentism are fundamentally opposed, as the Stanford page on panpsychism makes clear.
Well, I’d suggest that the equivalent is life from non-life, but we won’t go down that road again.
Quite! But I do not go on to say that just because particles are there makes them conscious: only certain arrangements characterised by working memory, just as some arrangements are computers or living things, and some aren’t.
OK. In the sixties, [url=http://www.sri.com/news/releases/07-12-04.html]Shakey the Robot** was essentially a computer attached to a video camera on wheels. It could identify boxes in its environment by processing the visual information into edges and contours and performing IF-THEN-ELSE rountines in the working memory in order to find the vertex of a corner. If a vertex was found, it would output “it’s a box!”, if not, “not a box”.
Now, do we agree that Shakey’s visual recognition of boxes is a purely computational process, no more mysterious than what the computer under your desk is doing? Of course, Shakey has not the cognitive modules we have and so when we see the box our experience is clearly different to Shakey’s when he sees the box, and I doubt whether a robot will ever be built which has anything like a human experience, but can we at least agree that Shakey does see boxes?
OK. Given that you agree solipsism is not falsifiable, you still reject it.
Only by extension. Our (humans, in general) current conception of physical entities assigns certain properties and essence to them. Location, mass, history…etc, but not mental attributes. If you extend physicalism to support mental attributes in certain configurations, then Yes. But in an intuitive sense, no. It remains nonphysical.
You haven’t shown what’s so special about such active physical arrangements that can loop back into a similar state, and why only such states.
Not really. The word ‘emergentism’ has been overloaded, to use programming language parlance. The emergentism of ‘liquidity’ from aggregation of H2O molecules is fundamentally different than consciousness from aggregation of neurons. I use ‘emergentism’ to mean properties that are evident only at different hierarchies, rather than within different realms.
Life and non-life both exist within the same realm.
Yes.
Do you mean a conscious experience? If so, yes. Else, no. The word ‘see’ only holds meaning if ‘seeing’ is occuring. By which, I mean, we refer to a conscious modality. You’re extending the term to mean ‘We, conscious beings, **observing ** responses to visual input, reminiscient of our own interactive behaviour, vis-a-vis visual input, if given a similar task’.
I reject a whole host of positions which are not falsifiable largely because they are not falsifiable, such as the existence of fairies. As I asked in the first few posts, “Because one can’t be certain they’re not there” is not a very good reason to do believe in things, even things like consciousness in rocks, wouldn’t you say?
Computational attributes have physical measures such as rate, complexity and number of connections, and psychological research abounds with physical measurements of “mental attributes” such as reaction time and statistical memory accuracy. Humans can and do assign properties to mental attributes. Heck, that’s what the science of psychology is all about.
Please, can we stop with these “ifs”? I understand what the options are: I’m asking you which options you choose, and why. In this case, I already know that your intuition differs from mine. I am wondering why your intuition is that explaining the physical causes of consciousness are not enough even in theory, rather than it being a case of “filling in the gaps”.
Well, OK, let’s examine the alternatives: How else could memories be formed, would you suggest? Are there even any speculative mechanisms which don’t involve configurations of a physical substrate? I am suggesting that these IF-THEN-ELSE mechanisms (which we agree can be executed by solely physical charges and gates) explains how these individual objects behave (such as that ‘unmathematical’ motion which explains life) and thus are differentiated from things which don’t show that behaviour, just as you label my consciousness “dead” or “alive” based on my body’s behaviour.
I disagree.
Could you tell me what the difference is between a hierarchy and a realm? If the answer is “they just are”, colour me unenlightened.
Again, this seems dependent on consciousness being defined as a “different realm”, whatever a “realm” is. Am I right?
So we agree that Shakey’s conscious experience is explained by, is caused by, the computational processing which is no more mysterious than that under your desk?
On the contrary, it is a good reason to not be certain about your beliefs.
Those are physical properties of behavioural attributes. How much does consciousness weigh? Where is the perception of the things I dream about, located in physical space?
Because consciousness itself, is not physical.
First off, lack of alternatives, by itself, isn’t a reason to positively believe what you do. Second, we need to know what else possesses memories in order to demarcate commonalities.
Supplying the answer beforehand?
Hierarchy just refers to a scale. An individual molecule is at a different level in the hierarchy of size from the aggregate it is a part of. Both exist within the same realm. A table exists in the ‘real physical world’ and its (putative) perception exists within a consciousness. Two different realms.
If Shakey is conscious, and physicalism is true. I don’t believe the latter.
And I’m not, but I didn’t ask that question. I’m not asking whether we can be 100% (or 0%) certain of anything (and I agree we can’t, really), but whether that inability to be certain causes us to believe (ie. ascribe >50%) in things. I assume that you, like me, don’t believe in fairies despite not ascribing literally zero probability to their existence. Again, “Because one can’t be certain they’re not there” is not a very good reason to do believe in things, agreed?
Waves, or accelerations, or computer programs don’t necessarily weigh anything or have spatial co-ordinates either. I am suggesting that consciousness is, effectively, a running program.
See above. Is it not reasonable to keep working consclusions in mind given an utter lack of alternatives?
OK, what do you suggest, in your opinion, has no memory?
Forgive me for considering all of these “they just are” answers - I’ll try another tack:
You said earlier that everything, including molecules, had a mental component. And so, presumably, the physical components of molecules of LSD or sevofluorane have effects on the physical brain, while the difference in consciousness they cause is due to their mental components. (And presumably, molecules of, say, water have physical effects but no mental effects, and thus we could never decide whether water had any mental component at all.)
You see, what I suspect is that what you call the “consciousness” of molecules is what I merely call their potential to form part of a conscious system, just as molecules potentially form part of a living, climatic or computational system but neither of us call those molecules themselves “life”, “weather” or “computers”. And so when you call a dead body “differently conscious”, all you are doing is setting thresholds of “difference” where I set thresholds of “is/is not”. My “matter” versus “same matter + activity” treatment might even convince you that one could reasonably label the dead body less conscious than the living one: my “is/is not” threshold would then be comparable to yours of “is/is less”. And
If so, our positions would not really be so far apart after all, perhaps even as insignificant as our pronunciations of the word “tomato”. Do you think this is a fair (or even interesting:)) analysis?
Except that consciousness is tangible. A wave is a label given to a dynamic arrangement whose components are physical. Particles A, B, C in nodal positions or energy, D,E,F in antinodal positions, G,H,I somewhere in between. Consciousness may be caused physically, but none of its components are physical themselves, including the phenomenon.
Working conclusions define framework and narrow field of vision.
I don’t know.
I’m not so sure, water has no mental effects. Depends on the circumstances. Even LSD does not provokes its characteristic reaction if taken continuously for 5 days in a row.
Only if I define a ‘conscious system’ as somehow isomorphic, even rudimentarily, to human consciousness. A conscious system is not the same as consciousness.
This debate has gone on long enough, without any discernible breakthrough. It’s best if some lurking third-party can comment on our debate and clarify, if needed. Also, if Aeschines can be notified. A new pair of eyes might provide a new perspective.
I thought you said its whole mystery is that it isn’t, that you can’t touch it or hold it? It sounds like your use of ‘tangible’ is different to mine.
And this is, ultimately, what I can’t understand. A process, such as a tree falling or a computer running, cannot be picked up and weighed, and yet we still call them physical processes.
This is promising, I think. It sounds like we might debate whether physical processes are as physical as objects on this basis (as I eventually convinced other-wise of, I think). Of course I agree that a falling tree is not the same as “falling”.
So be it, my friend. I hope I may have convinced you that skepticism regarding the explanations of consciousness provided by cognitive science does not require you to call corpses and molecules “conscious” any more than skepticism regarding abiogenesis has you calling corpses and molecules “alive”. Indeed, like I say, it might well be that your “conscious/differently conscious” (or “is/is less conscious”) threshold is actually equivalent to my “is/is not conscious” threshold, and we’re just using different words. Thanks again for your contribution.
We must be very careful here. What it “feels like” to be me depends on my human cognitive apparatus which, at any waking moment, receives information from billions of nerves all over my body and involves feedback to and from emotional and analytical cognitive modules which were shaped by billions of years of evolution, all of which is absent from Shakey (or indeed animals or babies at some arbitrary threshold in evolution or gestation).
But to answer your question as honestly and forthrightly as I can, yes. I believe that on some rudimentary level, it does just about “feel like” something to be Shakey just as I suggest that it just about “feels like” something to be a honey bee, and I suggest that a virus is just about “alive”.
And to clarify, only when Shakey is switched on and thus the program comprising the activity in the chips and memory is running (ie. causes him to continually ask the question *is it a box? is it a box? is it a box? is it…)
“just about”? Huh? To me, this implies that it just about feels like something to be a thermostat, and by extension of the same principle that all matter sorta, kinda, in a way, experiences stuff.
Well, I 've said all along that the reason Shakey can label things even when he’s not looking at them right now is by storing those states in memory, to be continually processed while other input comes in. It is this working memory which I consider the crucial difference between the simplest examples of actual cognition (like, say, Shakey, the bee, or the 7 week foetus) and things which simply react to their environment like molecules, amoebas, blastocysts and thermostats.
Now, I’m happy to accept that “experience” might require more than this (perhaps even some emotional moderation which only occurs in the amygdala of mammals, say) just as I accept that viruses might not really constitute “life”. But labelling viruses “just about” alive does not have me saying that rocks or molecules are sorta, kinda, in a way, alive. We must all choose such arbitrating criteria if we are not to be panvitalists, or pancomputationists, or whatever.
I agree that your functional criteria for cognition are reasonable. And I agree that cognition is a phenomenon arising from the configuration of neural systems.
But . . . There’s still this puzzlement about experience. I’ve read Dennett, and sometimes I think, while I’m reading him, that I’m starting to get a feel for his argument. But so far, his intuition pumps haven’t generated sufficient pressure to flush the confusion from my system. Don’t you ever feel anything like this?
Earlier, you expressed a wish to get into some of the scientific work about the nature of cognition. Could you give us a critical review of what you consider some of the most interesting stuff?
Certainly I do. Consciousness Explained is by no means an easy read. It is made out to be for the general public, but is actually far more geared towards Dennett’s peers: it first took me over a month and I’ve recently read it again in a similar time frame. Don’t forget that he is (bravely, or recklessly, YMMV) trying to take on human consciousness and all (or most of) its myriad complexities.
Don;t get me wrong, Hoodoo, I’m no expert! I can only point to a few interesting experiments and discuss their implications and interpretations, and I 've largely only read popular books which many others here have.
Still, for what it’s worth, Stephen Pinker is rather easier than Dennett in that he leads us along an evolutionary timeline, allowing an intuition that “I’ve got more of what the bee’s got” to form more gradually. Jerry Fodor encouages similar gradual intuition from an AI perspective (and his disagreements with Pinker are insightful themselves!) George Lakoff and his cognitive science of mathematics is pretty much “cutting edge”, I think.
Because they are labels given to physical change. There are no privileged entities or processes associated with them. If you can theoretically describe all physical activity associated with those two events, you have described everything there is to know. Not so with a human brain. The phenomenal character of the neural activity is still missing.
Not again. I’ve maintained that nothing, so far, requires me to call anything as anything. Panpsychism is a less arbitrary assumption than physicalism. That’s all.
I hope you guys are still up for a debate, because I never saw this thread up. I am going to do the right thing, take notes, and then come back and take numbers.
Who knows, maybe Gyan’s having gone first all the way through will end up producing a better debate.
I can clarify a few things about my position, though. I would say that the Divine is a principle within That Which Is/Reality/All Things; it is not merely equivalent to them. I would agree that my philosophy is monist, similar to that of Plotinus (though I would not claim to be well-read in his works). I also admire Avicenna and Averroes in certain respects (again, won’t claim to be well-read). Some Leibniz, too.
Anyway, I’ll do some reading, and let the games begin again… tonight!
Post #1: Responses to Sentient Meat’s original arguments. Throughout I will paraphrasing closely for compactness.
I agree that the status of your consciousness would change at midnight; however, it would not diminish to nothing, as there is life after death. In fact, according to NDExperiencers, consciousness sharpens and increases in the Afterlife.
Yes, that sounds right.
I would agree that the consciousness of the current you intensified during that period if you say so; I think that’s the general trend. It probably didn’t emerge out of nothing; it would seem that most of us transition from another existence to this world when we are born. I.e., reincarnation.
I basically agree. Caveats: Some animals may share a group soul, and some may be more highly self-aware than we are while not as intelligent. There are many possibilities.
Sounds reasonable.
No, this makes no sense whatsoever. A computer is a consciously created tool, and a living thing is not. And what does “functionally” mean in this context?
Post #8: Sentient responding to Gyan:
Gyan said his understanding of consciousness was that it was universal. I think he’s right, but here’s the twist: The Universe as a whole is conscious, while at the same time there can be local pockets of consciousness. The base state of That Which Is is Sat-Chit-Ananda, or Being-Conciousness-Bliss. It is the One, equivalent to Nothing and Everything at once. This beer bottle here (empty: I drank the beer) is an unconscious part of Universal Consciousness. But remember: My hands are not conscious; my cerebellum is not conscious; even my brain cannot be conscious without my body. Yet all these things are integral parts of a conscious system.
I’m still not getting the especial value of the Doom analogy, but I basically agree with what you say here: Human consciousness is a type of pattern, or “operation” if you will.
Post #11: Sentient responding to Gyan:
According to NDExperiencers, that’s exactly what happens: Once brain activity ceases they “leap up” into an out-of-body state characterized by acute mental clarity (but not everyone has an OBE; some remain in the “diminished” state).
I think sleep is a better example. We get to experienced altered consciousness that way every day. In sleep the ability for self-reflection goes nighty-night (especially reflecting on our own thoughts–I call this a “loop,” and we can have more than one at one time. Sleep pretty much takes away the loop. High-level meditation can take it away too, but in the reverse direction).
Post #12: Gyan responding to Sentient:
I agree with this. I think differences in consciousness tend to be qualitative rather than quantitative. Sure, it’s not much of a stretch to refer to sleep as “diminished” consciousness, though it would probably be a mistake to think that the sleep state is brought about by a particular thing becoming less and less. According to what I’ve heard (and experienced), you pretty much snap right into a theta state, at which point you’re out, and then go on to delta and REM/dreaming. So I would say it’s a matter of all/nothing and not less/more.
Post #15: Sentient describes his version of physicalism (I think Gyan proves nicely that this is not standard physicalism with his link):
In other words, this version takes everything that we know of, labels it “physical,” and asks whether there is another that we don’t know about that could possibly explain consciousness. We don’t largely agree that cells and computers are “physical” unless there is something out there non-physical that makes the distinction worth making.
Post #15: Sentient explains his physicalist interpretation of consciousness:
[quote]
here is no singular “physical theory of consciousness” as such, rather there are different variations on a mode of explanation. The general mode is that mind is a computational phenomenon, in which sensory input is processed in working memory via various modules shaped by evolution. If you can imagine that animals or Sonic the camcorder Doom-player have a “Point of View”, we can discuss which modules, and of what general kind, might be required in order for them to develop into what might approach waking human consciousness.
[quote]
In other words, stripped of the chrome and fins, “The brain does it.” Not that it’s not important work, but I’ll repeat what I’ve said many times: We are not even at the phlogiston-vs.-oxygen stage of understanding how the mind/brain works.
BTW, the Sonic analogy is completely worthless for understanding mind. I might as well ask how the two Hungry Hungry Hippos feel about their struggle for marbles or what it’s like for Woody Woodpecker to live inside a cartoon. There is no evidence at all that the brain functions like a digital computer. In fact, since we know for a fact there are no transistors in it , we can conclude that it does not function like a computer. We may imagine, if we like, that neurons are like semiconductor devices, but the evidence from cognitive science is that human cognition is not based on a digital model (holographic memory, etc.).
We then start getting more and more into the nits of the debate. I was intending to write a GD post outlining my philosophy, but here are the basics as I see them vis-a-vis what has been discussed in this debate:
The rules of pattern and number are the foundation of the That Which Is. There is no personal “God” who created things at first (although intelligences later could and did [at least humans] create things). All things are derived from these principles; all things are pattern and number.
Mind and matter are also patterns.
We know some things about That Which Is, but this is just an infintissimal percentage of the knowable. Some things may be completely beyond the understanding of our minds.
Human consciousness is a semi-self-aware pattern. We know it depends on the human body and especially the brain for its existence, but we also know that it outlives the body. How any of this is possible is unknown to us. We are not even at the stage where we know what we don’t know; we are merely assembling a few facts at a time in preparation for the next stage.
Also, to clarify, I don’t call my overall philosophy “pantheism,” although that’s not too far from the truth. I call myself a pantheist on the Spirituality Axis in order to answer the question “Is there a God?” I say, yes, basically, the things people believe about God are out there, but they are contained by the whole Universe, not by a single being.
“All things are pattern” sounds tautological. “All things are number” sounds false. I’m not a number, as the song goes. Since this seems to be your core metaphysical position, some expansion seems in order.
It seems the only testable, empirical consequence you’ve mentioned of your views is life after death. You seem in the past to have been ambivalent about literal reincarnation, that is, souls popping directly from the dying to the next born. Again, more detail is requested.
OK, just for future reference, I’ll say what I said to Gyan: I understand what the options are. Throughout, I’ll be interested in which alternative you choose, and why. At any point, I’ll be happy to try and explain which gun-to-head fence jump I would make.
So, given all available evidence including the testament of these NDErs (and temporal lobe epileptics), do you believe in a sharpened, increased consciousness after death?
Given that there are humans alive today than at any other single time in history, and that a few billion years ago there was no life on Earth of any kind, surely some consciousnesses must emerge from nothing? Or are there an infinity or near-infinity of souls waiting to be born, in your opinion?
Could you possibly try and express your general feeling of where on the timeline of evolution the first individual conscious life-form appeared? (My own is roughly at the level of bees, which can process sensory information in working memory and “choose” to write the word for “near” or “far” on the honeycomb with their dance.)
I don’t quite see why the mechanism for how the machine (be it silicon or carbon) is built is so fundamentally important. If the camcorder-Doom player processes sensory information via working memory in order to accomplish tasks essential for its survival (and crucially, succeeds), it is doing exactly what a squid, or an insect, or a lizard is doing, yes? If it were somehow able to replicate itself, it could hold its own in the evolutionary fight for survival alongside its biological bretheren, could it not? I’m interested in the fundamental difference you are proposing between animals and machines.
Just to clarify, I agree that it is possible (but unlikely) that the universe is conscious (there’s no working, accessible memory in my book). Would you afford me the same courtesy and agree that it is possible that there are only local pockets of consciousness?
(A&-A) is true? Perhaps it would be better to avoid this path for now.
Note that, in that case, it might be said that all of those elements of the conscious system are “a little bit” conscious. Like I said, we might all be saying similar things using different words.
Would you be willing to admit that human consciousness is a process, a temporal arrangement of particles and forces entering a device which filters, memorises and sorts those inputs?
But they’re not actually dead then - the ECG’s are still registering massive brain activity. I’m asking about cephalic necrosis (which nobody has ever recovered from) in which the brain activity utterly and irrevocably flatlines after that activity which characterises Near Death Experiences.
In any case, surely I am also experiencing that acute state right now in addition to my brain-activity correlated state?
So the theta state is one of diminished consciousness? Could we agree that this state of diminished consciousness is caused by inactivity in certain brain regions?
Well, you think that there are mental entities which are not physical. I’m simply asking whether such entities could result solely from physical processes. I’m not too concerned about what word we use to describe them if that’s the case. You can call cells and computer games “God” if you like - to me, that would just be to tomato-tomahto.
As I asked Gyan, would you characterise biology as “the cells do it”? Again, what fundamental difference between cognitive science and biological science are you proposing? I assume you’re not a panvitalist either.
I tried to avoid the word “feel”, since this may well require complex feedback with chemical glands connected to a significance-judgement module in the limbic system (which, of course, insects or the camcorder-Doom player simply don’t have). And the Hungry Hippo or Woody don’t process sensory information in a working memory, so I don’t consider them conscious either.
And all through the thread, I have continually made it clear that there are indeed powerful disanalogies. But they are alike in that they process, filter and store inputs from the wider world, and can communicate with other devices via encoded messages. This is why I hope to start with a discussion of memories, and the evidence that memories are stored via tiny changes in a physical substrate in both (silicon computer and carbon human) instances. Rather than chemists and phlogistons, I’d suggest that neuroscientists are like WW2 codebreakers studying the Enigma machine, examining the outputs given known inputs.
Could this not be paraphrased “All things, including mind and matter, are temporal arrangements of fundamental particles and forces in spacetime”?
Agreed, given that our mindbrains evolved in the region of the universe having three dimensions of space and one of time.
And you know that we do not “know” this. It is what you believe based on the testament of others and the epiphanic outputs of your own limbic system (which I have also experienced, you’ll recall). I could just as well say that we know that consciousness begins at some point after conception, disappears occasionally throughout life, and ends at cephalic necrosis. But I wouldn’t, because that would be unhelpful grandstanding.
