CONSCIOUSNESS is similar to energy in the matter

schip666!

Someone mentioned emergent tomatoes in this thread. I would say, of course some properties of sufficiently complex systems probably emerge from the system itself. Someone else mentioned "downward causality" which is another way to describe this phenomenon. There isn't just one instance of emergent behavior, like tinkerbell, if you believe, it's all around you... It's not much yet, but it's the best explanation I know.

Emergence is a slippery thing. It means different things to different people and I haven't seen a fully worked and quantified example anywhere. On one hand you can say that the laws of thermodynamics emerge from statistical mechanics. Without an energetic system of molecules there is no such thing as "temperature". On the other hand we can hand-wave away the dualistic idea of spirit by saying, "Ah, it just emerges from the brain." It is a path to extricate ourselves from reductionism without giving up scientific method. We might have to re-examine Causality, but that has been a bit flimsy since Hume anyway.

These conference proceedings are interesting, although perhaps too broad:
http://www.ctnsstars.org/conferences/conferences_3.html
I found the Paul Davies to be useful even though he is a Believer.

Now I have a little thought experiment, like Chalmer's Zombie argument... What is the inner experience of a thermostat? Does it feel hot or cold and respond accordingly? Is it "conscious" in that respect? Compare and contrast to your observations of another human's (or animal, and maybe plant for that matter) behavior. Can "consciousness" be externally verified or only self-reported? What about experiences with a concussion or under anesthesia? -- I ask this because I have had multiple experiences of people reporting me to be conscious or responsive where I have no memory of such (some would say that holds most of the time for me anyway).

heusdens

Now this can't be true, if there is no difference between a human and a machine, we would need to claim that machines are conscious too. Of course there are differences. Like there is no machine yet that reaches the level of complexity of the human brain.
I'm not denying that at some appropriate level the inner working of our mind and body have machine like aspects, but it is certainly not true that we are 'just' machines.

apeiron

Of course I agree that modelling does not give you the ultimate "what it is like to be" first person perspective - although it may give you "a little bit of what it might be like".

So if you asked me to explain why red looks like red, then I can't see any way that a verbal or mathematical model would account for that in some final completely satisfactory fashion. But we know enough about the visual system to say why brown does not look like blackish yellow, why neon colours look neon, etc. Or about the western social construction of identity to say why Georg insists on taking a particular view of freewill.

But then this links back to the reductionist vs systems debate. The demand that we should be able to explain naked properties like redness or I-ness is based on the reductionist presumption that naked atomistic local additive properties exist. You have qualia which are then glued together to construct subjective fields of experience.

The systems view is that nothing can exist locally except via the shaping hand of top-down constraint. So that is why I can explain the experience of brownness instead of blackish yellow (which is about contextual mechanism), but not brownness all on its ownsome.

The same with I-ness. If you demand that it be explained as a local naked qualia, then a systems approach cannot do that because that is insisting all the formative context be stripped out of the explanation. When that is the basis of the explanation.

JDStupi

Alrighty Then, we are in complete agreement. I didn't think you would host that view, but I figured I would just make sure. Beyond that, I do not know as many specifics regarding systems as it seems you do, but I too hold a view that happens to believe that the universe and all of its interactions/complexity cannot be accounted for by simply the "constituents" of Reality, but must take into account the dynamic interaction aspect and its qualities as well. And I also agree regarding the two expressions/explanations of experience/reality are inherently of different "modes' and if we insist upon a first person explanation for something that can only be explained further through systematic analyzation then we lose understanding, I also agree that the second-person explanation of reality obviousley has the potnetial to change the way we perceive reality and conceive reality, and to act as tools for further understanding of the (perceived?) relations between observed experience.

And regarding the original question, no the view that "conscioussness" is some type of substance akin to energy is entirely too simplistic to account for the complexities behind conscious experience and under what circumstances it arises. I too agree that "emergence" is a slippery issue that is hard to simply point to and define, tohugh it seems evident that a mathematical framework and richer understanding of "emergence" will be needed at some point. "Emergence" is, to me, essentially a concept based on interaction and different degrees of interaction that give rise to other levels of systems that can in turn give rise to emergence; Emergence, novelty, creativity, interaction, and temporality are all extremely intricate and related subjects

Ferris_bg

I personally sympathize the IIT (link, more links) of consciousness by Giulio Tononi. It has really a lot of pros and very few cons as compared to other theories. The brain is not in the center anymore (as any other materialistic theory suggests), it's the information processing.

schip666!

Tononi's understanding of information theory is a bit shaky, IMHO. I think he wants a measure of Complexity rather than Entropy per-se. Finding the appropriate Complexity Measure is the issue however.