Is Consciousness Simple or Complex?

Ryan_m_b

By what metric are you suggesting the brain is so much more complex?

apeiron

You are making an issue of it, so you supply the evidence.

I never said that "life" was not complex. Just that "mind" is of another order of complexity.

But if you are now struggling to back up your nit-picking, or worse still, now actually claiming that legs and brains are of the same order of complexity, then try the metric of negentropy.

Ryan_m_b

You and I have different definitions of issue. Apparently for you a pleasant query in a discussion means one is making an issue out of something.
Apeiron: chill out. It's pretty hard to have an enjoyable discussion if you are going to act in a passive aggressive/insulting manner.

I'm not claiming anything, I don't have a firm position. I was highlighting you claim that the brain is far more complex than a leg by suggesting that personally I wouldn't say that. Reason being the increased number and diversity of tissue types found in a limb over just the brain. I'm unaware of the MoN, perhaps you could explain it.

Number Nine

Music continues to exist without radio.

The range of Human experience that can be attributed to "the Universe" is rapidly shrinking. Does consciousness encompass memory? Does it encompass learning? Reasoning? The brain is already entirely responsible for these processes. How do we know? Because we can construct biophysically realistic models of the brain (I'm working on one right now), and when we do, we get these things for free. Things like memory emerge automatically whenever we build something that behaves like the brain. This whole line of argument reeks of ID style God of the gaps reasoning.

apeiron

There was no question. You simply stated that "you would not go so far as that."

When all I had done was agree with Pythagorean and others in the thread that the arrangement, the information, was the critical issue.

So can you supply sources to show a) that legs actually do have a greater diversity of tissue types than brains, and b) that that would be valid metric of complexity?

I doubt both, but especially b. In my opinion, complexity is not merely differentiation but also integration. Brain clearly wins there. And complexity is not merely structure but also dynamics. Again the brain clearly wins.

Pythagorean

I am aware of no such calculation between limb and brain of the negentropy, but I would assume Ryan is mostly right. The negentropy of ANY living animal tissue is going to demonstrate magnitudes of complexity over non living tissue. Comparison between tissues (brain vs limb) aren't going to share the same disparity.

The brain is just one organ. A limb is several interacting organs. And consder the immune system alone (that doesn't exist in the brain; the brain has a simpler immune system since it has a blood-brain barrier to do a lot of the work) but the limbs are under constant exposure to immune threat.

It really is a nontrivial question of which is more complex.

Number Nine

It may be more accurate to say the the information processing capabilities of the brain are considerably more advanced ("complexity" is fairly vague term...though I would still argue that the brain is orders of magnitude more complex than a limb for almost any conceivable definition of complexity).

Ryan_m_b

Then perhaps we're facing a misunderstanding of language. I wasn't claiming you were wrong, I was suggesting that I wouldn't necessarily agree.
It seems looking at Pythagorean's post immediately above that you and he aren't in agreement.
Regarding A, I'm not 100% sure (and never claimed to be) but the various anatomy modules I have taken over the years indicate to me that this is the case. Limbs contain a multitude of organs and tissue types such as vasculature, lymphatic system, musculoskeletal system, peripheral nervous system, various layers of skin etc etc. I'm not going to bother quoting chunks of anatomy books at you but if I do find something short and simple confirming it I'll be sure to post.
Why is the brain more integrated or more dynamic than a limb?

pftest

I disagree, virtually everything about the human body can be attributed to the universe. The electrons, particles, spacetime, the four interactions, the way they behave (by universal laws), etc. The human brain really isnt as special as we'd like it to be.

And lets look and what a radio does physically. It receives EM waves and outputs airwaves. Neither EM waves nor airwaves originate in or are limited to radios, so yes they continue to exist without, and have existed long before radios.

Some scientists think that even microbes have memory. And even that would be an arbitrary definition of the word. A rock that gets cracked might be considered having memory just as well. Emergence is a problematic concept, unless it simply refers to increasing levels of complexity, which is what can be readily observed throughout nature. So if we want to talk about the emergence of memory, it would be that of simple memory getting more complex. Memory popping up just in brains does not fit the type of emergence that nature offers.

Ryan_m_b

I don't understand what you mean. A radio detects radiowaves and converts them into sound, a brain generates a mind internally.

apeiron

Just compare the resting metabolic rate of the two for starters. Brain's is 200x that of muscle. And dissipation is payment for maintaining organisation.

pftest

Do the both of you agree that the differences between brains and limbs are quantitative?

Pythagorean

I agree with apeiron's statement about arrangement/information. But I think there's plenty of that going on in limbs too. The core genetic operations are really quite complex on their own. I think we all might be having very different connotaitons in mind though for words like "complexity" and "information".

I suspect apeiron is focusing more on types of information available to consciousness, where you and I are thinking more generally of the arrangement and operations of particles. I specifically think of Kolmogorov's analyses.

Ryan_m_b

I agree with this analysis.

Pythagorean

More energy is not always more complexity. Especially in a dispersive system where the foot is on the gas and the break at the same time.

Number Nine

That doesn't seem to me to be a defensible position. Almost any cellular or genetic process that occurs in the foot occurs in the head, so the differences we're looking for are large scale, emergent properties of tissues and cellular networks. Most of these (e.g. blood flow) occur in both the brain and the foot, so we're left with the fact that the brain performs large scale parallel, distributed information processing, whereas the foot does...what? Incredibly fine and detailed muscle contractions, yes, that are programmed by the brain. The statistical procedures performed the brain alone would fill many a textbook, each with fairly sophisticated mathematical prerequisites. Did you know that an ensemble of neurons, each experiencing Hebbian synaptic changes, can perform principal component analysis? Your brain is literally deriving optimal basis vectors to best express the information fed to it by the outside world.

Pythagorean

That't not correct. The foots has bone and skin for starters.

The brain takes no part in decisions on:
how to grow bones so that they'll support the structure
how to align muscles right
regulate and respond locally to environmental signals

I'm sure someone more experienced directly in biology could come up with thousands more of organized processes that don't require a brian. Cellular metabolic and genetic signaling is really quite complex, especially between such diverse cells as skin, bone, muscle, and blood. The brain is one organ with a relatively tight diversity of cells compared to a limb (which consists of several different organs and many more types of cell differentiations).