Why Do We Have Conscious Thought?

[FeDeX_LaTeX]

Hello;

I was wondering why we have conscious thought. We have clarified (have we?) that atoms and molecular structures have no conscious thought at all. Why, then, do we possesses conscious thought, if we are (and this is a very simple way of putting it) simply giant molecular structures? Could this mean that, for example, in a quartz rock, it is undergoing conscious thought?

Another thought I had was that, if it were possible to reconstruct my body with an identical molecular structure, would I be the same?

Thanks.

 

[imiyakawa]

This is still an open question.

 

[apeiron]

We have clarified (have we?) that atoms and molecular structures have no conscious thought at all. Why, then, do we possesses conscious thought, if we are (and this is a very simple way of putting it) simply giant molecular structures? Could this mean that, for example, in a quartz rock, it is undergoing conscious thought?

There are some who want to argue that even rocks might have awareness of some kind if consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter - google panpsychism. Philosopher David Chalmers is one proponent.

But the better way to think of things is that complex structures have both their substance and their form - both what they are made of, and the organisation they enjoy.

So consciousness arises as just the way it is to be a collection of materials with a specific kind of organisation. You need both the substance and the form of course, which would rule out souls too.

Being a giant molecular structure does not mean having the right organisation. A theory of consciousness would largely be a theory of the correct organisational descriptions (as a description of the substances, the chemistry and even the biology, does not seem so challenging).

The best theories of organisation are all varieties of systems thinking - complex adaptive systems, anticipatory systems, hierarchy theory, dissipative structure theory. This sounds like a bunch of different theories, but in fact they all share common self-organisational properties.

People are always saying science cannot explain consciousness, it is not even close. Actually we have a bunch of models that do make much of it feel explained. But the models are not widely taught. They are certainly not part of the public "consciousness".

 

[Freeman Dyson]

There are some who want to argue that even rocks might have awareness of some kind if consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter - google panpsychism. Philosopher David Chalmers is one proponent.

But the better way to think of things is that complex structures have both their substance and their form - both what they are made of, and the organisation they enjoy.

So consciousness arises as just the way it is to be a collection of materials with a specific kind of organisation. You need both the substance and the form of course, which would rule out souls too.

Being a giant molecular structure does not mean having the right organisation. A theory of consciousness would largely be a theory of the correct organisational descriptions (as a description of the substances, the chemistry and even the biology, does not seem so challenging).

The best theories of organisation are all varieties of systems thinking - complex adaptive systems, anticipatory systems, hierarchy theory, dissipative structure theory. This sounds like a bunch of different theories, but in fact they all share common self-organisational properties.

People are always saying science cannot explain consciousness, it is not even close. Actually we have a bunch of models that do make much of it feel explained. But the models are not widely taught. They are certainly not part of the public "consciousness".

This is a question I was wondering about and I'm sure you have some insight on it. First, what field or subfield is most responsible for our current knowledge about consciousness and is most qualified to talk about it? Neuroscientists? And is there a consensus? Like if you asked 10 random experts what consciousness is would all their answers basically be the same? Would they give the same definition? It often seems to be thrown around as some enigmatic term by non-experts.

 

[Pythagorean]

This is a question I was wondering about and I'm sure you have some insight on it. First, what field or subfield is most responsible for our current knowledge about consciousness and is most qualified to talk about it? Neuroscientists? And is there a consensus? Like if you asked 10 random experts what consciousness is would all their answers basically be the same? Would they give the same definition? It often seems to be thrown around as some enigmatic term by non-experts.

Consciousness is making the transition from philosophy to neuroscience right now, so both are highly involved in it. You won't get the same answer from asking 10 random experts (from either field).

Electrical engineers are jumping in on it (Theoretical Neuroscience). Really, a lot of different science subjects are becoming interested (my background is in Physics).

But still, it's quite up in the air, it's a new frontier for science, and the scientific study will open new frontiers for philosophers (who are helping to lay down concepts and examine the validity of claims currently).

 

[apeiron]

This is a question I was wondering about and I'm sure you have some insight on it. First, what field or subfield is most responsible for our current knowledge about consciousness and is most qualified to talk about it? Neuroscientists? And is there a consensus? Like if you asked 10 random experts what consciousness is would all their answers basically be the same? Would they give the same definition? It often seems to be thrown around as some enigmatic term by non-experts.

The funny thing is that people made more sense about 100 years ago than they do today. If you read James, Wundt, Kohler, Luria and other old timers, they seem far less confused.

So extra "knowledge" is not necessarily the issue here. In fact it is the fracturing of expertise, the fragmentation of any big picture, holistic view - along with the rise and rise of mechanicalism, the false computational model - which has made it more difficult for most to see the wood for the trees.

One thing which I think is fundamental to getting to grips with consciousness is that you have to be willing to make the break between neurology - the naked animal awareness of brain biology (which is actual "consciousness" in terms of the production of qualia, a flow of experience) - and the socially-constructed aspects of human mental processes (the way that language scaffolds a bunch of higher abilities such as self-awareness, recollective memory, reasoning, socialised emotion, etc).

If you cannot divide "the mind" into its biological and social aspects, they you can't begin to makes sense of it. And sadly, neither neuroscience, nor psychology, as disciplines respect this fundamental divide. So it just causes endless conceptual confusion.

Consciousness is not one thing. It is a biological ability or process, extended, transformed even, by human language and the socialised mental habits and skills that the logical structuring of language allows.

For this reason, I found the study of sociology and anthropology just as important as the study of neurology, psychophysics (v. important in fact) and cognitive psychology.

If we are then just talking about the biology of consciousness, then this is where a systems perspective - drawing in the general models of anticipation, dissipation, hierarchy, complexity, etc - start to create a clear view of the abundant data.

So there is no one place to start the study. You need to be studying at least four levels of science (neurology, psychology, sociology and anthropology). In fact, child development and human paleo-evolution are very important too. Then as I say, you have a variety of systems science disciplines to give you some maths rigor.

Computer science and quantum mechanics you can skip. (Only neural networks are useful). Philosophy would also be better avoided. There are only rare exceptions such as Evan Thompson.

Consciousness was of course a forbidden subject in the 1970s and much of the 1980s. Then it became possible to talk wildly about it within computer science because people were going to do something useful - build artificial intelligence. What a crock that was (in the UK, most of the Alvey AI grants got diverted to building Ada software engineering environments).

It then became an official subject known as consciousness studies for a combination of reasons. One important one was Crick and Koch putting forward a soundly reductionist paradigm for research (and so one almost guaranteed to fail) - the hunt for the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC).

This made sense at the time as experimenters were just able to do the first single cell recordings from the brains of awake and unanaethetised animals. So actually conscious animals. And also PET scanners were arriving, allowing brain recordings on conscious humans. (No matter EEG had been around a long time - it arose in the wrong era).

So in the early 1990s, it was all coming together in a hopeful way. The Woodstock moment was the first Tucson Towards a Science of Consciousness (yes, I was there). This turned out to be more a QM-fest orchestrated by Hameroff. But everyone thought that was OK. It gave you the duality science requires - the official view (Crick's reductionism) and the loyal opposition (the quantum consciousness merchants).

For me, the standout guy at Tucson was Walter Freeman - a systems guy of course. Others like Bernard Baars were OK too.

Anyway, consciousness studies did become a "sub-discipline" in its own right with conferences, journals, forums, university courses.

As to consensus, there is a general agreement that the hunt for the NCC is important to the field being scientific. There is a consensus that there is a "hard problem" of qualia - material description on its own would seem to have no way of giving a satisfactory theory. There is a lot of consensus (among those in the sub-discipline that is consciousness studies) that the mind is probably a quantum phenomenon, or something else bizarre to science like a coherent EM field.

You can guess how little I appreciated this consensus and why I disengaged from involvement with "consciousness studies" to instead spend my time talking to theoretical biologists and systems thinkers instead.

 

[Freeman Dyson]

thanks for the info guys. It is even more complicated than I thought.

And yes Apeiron, I have seen your disdain for QM in consciousness and people like Penrose getting involved in the subject. It is interesting to hear that this view is popular. I thought it would be fringe. Quantum consciousness sounds like new age stuff. QM is basically being invoked because part of consciousness can't be explained by materialism? So they reduce it to QM?

You say there is general agreement that NCC is important to the field being scientific. But think it is being overemphasized at the expense of the other fields you mentioned and what they add to the understanding of this subject?

 

[apeiron]

You say there is general agreement that NCC is important to the field being scientific. But think it is being overemphasized at the expense of the other fields you mentioned and what they add to the understanding of this subject?

It does seek to reduce the notion of consciousness to localised material actions - whether this is thought of as synaptic activity or QM processes in microtubules or whatever. Whereas I take the view that the reduction must go in both directions - downwards to the substances out of which reality is constructed, but also upwards to the forms that are the constraints on those materials.

So a search for the NCC does yield something. A view of the material substrate. But it is not approaching the question from the global organisational perspective which is just as much (probably more) a part of the scientific equation (more, as less well understood so far).

This is why I switched tracks to systems science where the "laws of form" are taken seriously. Understanding neurons and synapses is pretty easy. Understanding self-organisation, adaptive hierarchical structure, anticipatory processing, semiosis, autopoiesis, etc, is the interesting frontier stuff to me.

 

[Freeman Dyson]

I see, that makes sense. The whole is obviously constrained by the sum of its parts but the parts when brought together form their own, new restraints. The parts are constrained by the whole as well. It's a push from the bottom and top. Like two forces acting on an object.

 

[Pythagorean]

yes Apeiron, I have seen your disdain for QM in consciousness and people like Penrose getting involved in the subject. It is interesting to hear that this view is popular. I thought it would be fringe. Quantum consciousness sounds like new age stuff. QM is basically being invoked because part of consciousness can't be explained by materialism? So they reduce it to QM?

I would actually disagree with apeiron here (not about QM, but about the consensus). QM Consciousness is considered fringe by the majority of neuroscientists that I've encountered.

Understanding neurons and synapses is pretty easy.

I would also disagree about synapses and neurotransmission in general. As it is taught in my neurobiology class, the neuroscience community really has little understanding of how synapses work. Many consider the medicinal treatment of mental illness to be a sort of empirical guesswork.

Even what we do know about the events that take place in synapses isn't very straightforward. There's lots of intermediate steps in receptor activation.

 

[apeiron]

I see, that makes sense. The whole is obviously constrained by the sum of its parts but the parts when brought together form their own, new restraints. The parts are constrained by the whole as well. It's a push from the bottom and top. Like two forces acting on an object.

That is the radical part of holism. The whole makes the parts and the parts make the whole. It is the success in the way that the whole shapes its own constituent parts, and that these parts self-assemble to recreate that whole, which makes it a "system".

A computer clearly does not make its own processing parts. But the global constraints placed on a developing brain (from the need to interact with, and thus predict, an environment) shapes up the micro-circuitry to do the job.

So yes, the totality of the system emerges from two scales of action in interaction - downward constraint and upwards construction.

We could also talk about this as synergy, mutuality, strange loops, holons - a number of descriptions exist. But I don't believe the logic of systems has been completely worked out in a fully mathematical way yet. Which is why so many earlier descriptions sounded right, but also can be dismissed as too hand wavey.

 

[apeiron]

I would actually disagree with apeiron here (not about QM, but about the consensus). QM Consciousness is considered fringe by the majority of neuroscientists that I've encountered.

Yes, not many neuroscientists would take a QM approach these days (though you have Eccles, Libet, Pribram and other well-known, well-respected, neuroscientists who were quite convinced of some kind of coherent field explanation).

But I was talking of the sub-discipline of consciousness studies that arose in the 1990s - the decade of the brain - where there were many physicists, anaethetists, mathematicians, computer scientists, etc, etc, who bowled up at the various conferences or published in journals like the Journal of Consciousness Studies.

So at a big consciousness conference, there always had to be a quantum session. But there was never an equivalent holism/systems session, or a social constructionism/Vygotskean/anthropological session.

I would also disagree about synapses and neurotransmission in general. As it is taught in my neurobiology class, the neuroscience community really has little understanding of how synapses work. Many consider the medicinal treatment of mental illness to be a sort of empirical guesswork.

I don't know. I just give my impression of how easy I found it to cut through the various disciplines. So psychology, computer science, anthropology - that kind of stuff is dead easy. Neuroscience - a little more difficult. Systems science - now things begin to get conceptually challenging.

 

[pftest]

But the better way to think of things is that complex structures have both their substance and their form - both what they are made of, and the organisation they enjoy.

Everything has a form, yet not everything is conscious.

So why would some forms be just forms, while other forms (brains) are forms that are also conscious?

 

[apeiron]

Everything has a form, yet not everything is conscious.

So why would some forms be just forms, while other forms (brains) are forms that are also conscious?

The way to approach that question would be through a model of the appropriate form. The form of consciousness is obviously going to be the most complex we would have to model. But the best model would also be the most general. We would want to explain consciousness as a very particular (and more complex) example of some process or structure (ie: some form) that is general to nature (and can be found in much simpler examples too).

So that is the shape of the task. And I've frequently mentioned the body of models that I consider useful. Anticipatory systems, complex adaptive systems, hierarchy theory, semiosis, dissipative structure theory...and there are more. There is quite a bit of overlap between all these, but each arose in their own domain and so have different terminologies, somewhat different focuses, and they also have different levels of generality. So some apply really only to bios - systems with life and mind - others to a-bios as well (material systems in general).

Should we have many theories then, or just one model of the form of consciousness? And how general should its level of description be? Should the grain of resolution just capture the mental processes of higher animals, all life, or all dissipative structure (dust devils for example)?

There are many such questions if you want to do this properly.

But anyway, a quick answer to give a flavour is that consciousness is anticipation. It is what it is like for a system to model its future and have a running state of expectation about its world, encoded in an intentional way (so purposes and plans are part of the shape of what is being represented in a focused web of predictions).

A rock does not really anticipate anything in this sense.

A dust devil does anticipate in some very rudimentary sense. Its own whirling shape predicts its next step, its next state. It encodes a purpose of sorts and it is exploring a landscape of entropic gradients in some (admittedly weak) sense.

A bacteria anticipates its world both in having some persistent structure, but more through the information stored its genes. It is a living expectation of a set of opportunities and the actions that will be appropriate. Though that state of "mental expectation" does not change much. It takes many generations of bacteria to shift its genetic "state of mind" about the actions and opportunities of its world.

A frog now is reacting more "in the moment". It has the neural complexity to encode a variety of anticipatory states. It can see what is happening around it and become selective among a remembered repertoire of purposes and responses.

But the frog's awareness is still very reflexive. It does not see a fly as a fly but as a jerky movement that triggers a targetting activity. But we still see an awareness in the frog, especially in the way it watches, waits, and then makes a prediction about the moment to lunge.

So we come to higher animals like humans with the mental dexterity to have complete "in the moment" awareness of the world. Or rather, develop and execute anticipatory states with a high degree of novelty in fractions of a second rather than developing them over lifetimes and even multiple generations of genetic adaptation.

So if I hear the door latch click, I am already expecting one of my kids to walk in the door. And that makes me all the more prepared to react when I am wrong and it is some stranger. Seeing a stranger, I have the mental complexity to generate a fresh state of expectation and anticipation. It takes only around a third to two-thirds of a second to reorientate my running state of mind.

So purely in the language of anticipatory processing - in the language of that form - I can say something sensible, capture the essence, of "minding" all the way from rocks to humans.

I am sure you will say, well that is not what I mean by consciousness. But to me, it does capture the "what it is like to be aware" quite successfully. For example, it does explain the frozen pause we often experience when something like a stranger walking into the room does happen. It explains the aha! moment of radical reorientation. It explains how I can hit a tennis ball. It explains why computers and rocks are not conscious in any interesting way.

The Hard Problem of consciousness, the qualia argument, is the standard objection to any such "material" explanation of consciousness. It is said that we can imagine a brain doing all these things and yet being also unaware, an unfeeling zombie.

That seems possible if you just take a mental representation approach to neural activity. But to be in a state of anticipation is different. There is first what you were expecting, then what actually happens. A forward model of the world has to feel like something to the modeller. I can't imagine going to all the effort of forming a state of neural expectancy, a living model of my reality that is constantly updating, without it having something "that it is like to be".

A zombie that is predicting its world no longer sounds like a zombie, does it?

 

[pftest]

I don't think "anticipation" sounds material, its not mentioned as a physical property in physics and if you are just talking about motion, then i would call it that.

But i will go along with what you described. You describe this anticipation as something that gets more complex over time, so the dust devil, bacteria, frog, all have a degree of it.

But there is still the gap between the rock and the dust devil. What is it that the rock completely lacks, but that the dust devil has some of?

 

[apeiron]

I don't think "anticipation" sounds material, its not mentioned as a physical property in physics and if you are just talking about motion, then i would call it that.

It is material in the sense that all forms must be instantiated via substance to actually exist. So I am talking Aristotle rather than Plato here (well, actually Plato also saw the necessity of the chora if you read all the way through to the Timeaus).

But there is still the gap between the rock and the dust devil. What is it that the rock completely lacks, but that the dust devil has some of?

Well, anticipation surely?

But not completely. When we get down to the level of a-biotic descriptions of nature's forms, the language of dissipative structures becomes more appropriate. All material structure is constrained by the laws of thermodynamics. And even a rock is a dissipative structure.

For example, a rock could once have been part of a flow of lava (a motion that was dissipating heat, just as a dust devil dissipates the heat of an atmospheric gradient). The rock has now done its work and cooled to an unchanging form.

So here we can see a difference at the level of form, of purpose. One is still active (in the moment), the other is dormant, a now frozen configuration (ruled by the third law of thermodynamics). This is why the rock seems less interesting, less remarkable.

The rock is still doing some micro-dissipating of course. It may be warmed by the sun and releasing the heat in degraded fashion. It is being weathered and so contributing to the entropy of the universe in that way.

So a rock is doing the second law's bidding at a low level tick-over while the dust devil is doing it in a more vigourous, landscape exploring and mobile, way.

You can then create a hierarchy of dissipative structure. And pound for pound, humans are the greatest dissipative devices ever developed under the constraints of the second law.

Just think of all that fossil fuel that was locked in the ground like inert rock, going nowhere much, until we came along - the organised dissipative structure of consumer society - willing to dig it up and waste it to entropy in accordance with the desires of the second law.

If you need proof that "consiousness" is something special, yet also natural, then that would be it.

 

[magpies]

By what device do I determine something does or doesn't have consious thought?

 

[pftest]

Well, anticipation surely?

But not completely. When we get down to the level of a-biotic descriptions of nature's forms, the language of dissipative structures becomes more appropriate. All material structure is constrained by the laws of thermodynamics. And even a rock is a dissipative structure.

And that would mean the rock has a bit of anticipation/consciousness.

 

[apeiron]

And that would mean the rock has a bit of anticipation/consciousness.

Sounds silly, but the modelling approach I suggest would allow that. Though to make things sound more sensible, you might say a rock is a good example of some object which has the least possible degree of these qualities.

 

[Thetom]

By what device do I determine something does or doesn't have consious thought?

Maybe you could look at how proactive the system is.

A rock, a dust-devil are both purely reactive (it seems). They can only react to stimulus, like a strong wind, and only in a 'mechanical' fashion. Note it is not black and white, and they react to varying degrees.
A frog will also react to the wind - by hiding from it. But a frog, who i propose has a degree of consciousness, may also proact to the wind. It will make it's nest in a sheltered area to avoid the wind, before the wind has even come.
Humans react too. But we have a greater degree of proaction born from our awareness of the environment. We may react to the wind by pulling up our coller, but we can also proact to the wind by watching the weather reports a deciding to stay in today and visit PF. This really fits in quite well with the idea of a self-organising systems. A greater awareness of the external system allows greater pro-action of our internal system.

It is interesting that a more complex the physical system seemingly affords a greater level of consciousness or awareness. Consider a simple system - elementary particles have no proactive qualities. The atomic structure of the elements are more complex but still no proaction. Molecular structures the same. Proteins, etc the same.
Not until you get to very complex systems involving combinations of all these things, like insects, mammals, etc do you get apparent consciousness. I suspect that the higher complexity of the system allows a higher 'level of consciousness'. All guess work but I have been writing a science fiction story based on this and it makes for quite a good story.

[consciousness] often seems to be thrown around as some enigmatic term by non-experts.

That would be me then.

 

[Pythagorean]

By what device do I determine something does or doesn't have consious thought?

That's one of the main goals of a scientific approach to consciousness. To be able to design a test that can answer questions like "are single cells conscious?", "are insects conscious", "can non-living things be conscious?"

 

[magpies]

No no no I don't think you understood I mean what device do we use? Like do we use a yardstick or what? My point being that we really have no device that will say something has consiousness outside of just picking something up and looking at it and saying "Aww yes this does have consiousness because it has xyz and abc." My point being that our thoughts about if it has consiousness or not don't really matter as much as the fact of if or not it has consiousness. Let's suppose god turns out to be a being living on the Earth in the shape of a tree... what's he gona think when we try to chop him down? Now of course that sounds silly but you might at least want to think about it once in your life.

 

[Pythagorean]

No no no I don't think you understood I mean what device do we use? Like do we use a yardstick or what? My point being that we really have no device that will say something has consiousness outside of just picking something up and looking at it and saying "Aww yes this does have consiousness because it has xyz and abc." My point being that our thoughts about if it has consiousness or not don't really matter as much as the fact of if or not it has consiousness. Let's suppose god turns out to be a being living on the Earth in the shape of a tree... what's he gona think when we try to chop him down? Now of course that sounds silly but you might at least want to think about it once in your life.

If by device, you mean the actual instrumentation: threre's EEG, PET, fMRI, and electrode analysis of single neurons. But we also have to rely on reporting from test subjects. There's a lot of methods to do this.

Anyway, consciousness is a process, not a variable, like distance. Distance can be measured quite easily, being one variable. A process is a more dynamic interplay between many variables.

Of course, we still don't know exactly what physical processes give rise to consciousness. But once (if) we do, we can begin to investigate where else that process occurs in nature, whether it's trees or the weather, or an AI.

 

[pftest]

Sounds silly, but the modelling approach I suggest would allow that. Though to make things sound more sensible, you might say a rock is a good example of some object which has the least possible degree of these qualities.

I don't mind if something sounds weird, as long as it makes sense. I just thought i spotted a problem with how you approached the issue earlier in the topic. This bit:

There are some who want to argue that even rocks might have awareness of some kind if consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter - google panpsychism. Philosopher David Chalmers is one proponent.

But the better way to think of things is that complex structures have both their substance and their form - both what they are made of, and the organisation they enjoy.

So consciousness arises as just the way it is to be a collection of materials with a specific kind of organisation. You need both the substance and the form of course, which would rule out souls too.

 

[apeiron]

I don't mind if something sounds weird, as long as it makes sense. I just thought i spotted a problem with how you approached the issue earlier in the topic. This bit:

I would dub my own approach pansemiosis rather than panpsychic.

Panpsychicism is a substance ontology (rock would have consciousness as a property of its material existence - though only weakly).

Pansemiosis would be a form ontology (rock would have consciousness as a property of its material organisation - though again only weakly).

(And semiosis is CS Peirce's general theory of meaning, his theory of the self-organisation of systems.)

 

[Pythagorean]

From another point of view, Chalmers argument may be that we're no more conscious than a rock, which I find more palatable than saying a rock has consciousness. I think one general issue is that word consciousness has a lot of connotation in it and it makes us very selfish about it.

 

[apeiron]

From another point of view, Chalmers argument may be that we're no more conscious than a rock,

I don't recall this being his argument.

The panpsychic view is that every fragment of substance would have a proportionate amount of consciousness in the same way they might have other local material properties like force and mass. So brains just collect sufficient material to have richer states of experience.

 

[pftest]

From another point of view, Chalmers argument may be that we're no more conscious than a rock, which I find more palatable than saying a rock has consciousness. I think one general issue is that word consciousness has a lot of connotation in it and it makes us very selfish about it.

That is just a linquistic preference.

If we arent conscious, then apparently nonconscious things can have the vivid experiences that we do. A nonconscious rock too. Its still panpsychism or pansemiosis.

 

[Q_Goest]

There are some who want to argue that even rocks might have awareness of some kind if consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter - google panpsychism. Philosopher David Chalmers is one proponent.

From another point of view, Chalmers argument may be that we're no more conscious than a rock, which I find more palatable than saying a rock has consciousness. I think one general issue is that word consciousness has a lot of connotation in it and it makes us very selfish about it.

Chalmers is a computationalist and dualist, and certainly doesn't contend that rocks, by themselves, are capable of conscious experience. See for example, http://consc.net/papers/rock.html" in which he suggests that physical states can not be arbitrarily selected as suggested by Putnam and others. Chalmers says:

The problem, I think, is that Putnam's system does not satisfy the right kind of state-transition conditionals. The conditionals involved in the definition of implementation are not ordinary material conditionals, saying that on all those occasions in which the system happens to be in state p in the given time period, state q follows. Rather, these conditionals have modal force, and in particular are required to support counterfactuals: if the system were to be in state p, then it would transit into state q. This expresses the requirement that the connection between connected states must be reliable or lawful, and not simply a matter of happenstance.

In other words, Chalmers argues that the physical states an FSA (or CSA) goes through are somehow isomorphic with the behavior, and of course, isomorphic with any experience that FSA posesses. I don't think Chalmers has made this point effectively however, and the argument remains open. The problem is still being argued today, and I'd tend to agree with Putnam. There is nothing intrinsic about the physical states an FSA passes through, which leads computationalism to predict the worst possible form of panpsychism - that every computational device posseses every possible experience. The conclusion then is that since this is obviously false, computationalism is false.

 

[magpies]

Back to the Op question. I don't honestly believe that there is a reason to why consciousness exists instead I think it just does because that's the way it is. It's kinda like the question of how conciousness exists in the first place... In the fact that it's not really answerable because we humans lack the ability to figure it out entirely.

 

[apeiron]

Back to the Op question. I don't honestly believe that there is a reason to why consciousness exists instead I think it just does because that's the way it is. It's kinda like the question of how conciousness exists in the first place... In the fact that it's not really answerable because we humans lack the ability to figure it out entirely.

Pythagorean is right that to ask a good question, you need a good definition. This will then make it clear what kind of measurement is to be made in the name of that definition. That is the basis of reality modelling.

Consciousness is a much-used, much-abused, term. If for example your definition includes the idea of an immaterial property, how could you ever be happy with a materialistic answer (even if the question has been framed in a good materialistic ways, and good material measurements had followed)?

For example, it can be said that the essence of consciousness is "attention". That is the standard scientific operational definition. It seems to capture the meaning of what we are talking about in good material language - already we are thinking of a brain process. And it can be opposed to other brain states or processes such as subconscious, preconscious, habitual, automatic, reflexive, unconscious.

The usual response to this is that "attention" does not really deal well enough with the "what it is like" issue. We can imagine a computer that has been designed to have an attentional process but cannot see why that would be an experiential state.

This is where I argue that the more refined notion of "anticipation" is better. Anticipation implies a particular kind of "computational" process - one where output precedes input. Many good theorists do use anticipatory models (Neisser, Grossberg, Friston) but - perhaps because of the cultural dominance of the input-output computational model over the output-input one - the majority stick to the roving spotlight of selective attention as their operational definition of awareness as a process.

 

[Pythagorean]

For example, it can be said that the essence of consciousness is "attention". That is the standard scientific operational definition. It seems to capture the meaning of what we are talking about in good material language - already we are thinking of a brain process. And it can be opposed to other brain states or processes such as subconscious, preconscious, habitual, automatic, reflexive, unconscious.

The community has begun to differentiate a bit between attention and consciousness. I'm currently reading a textbook that my neuro teacher let me borrow Cognition, Brain, and Consciousness by Baars and Gage, that talks about this a little bit (for instance, attention has an unconscious aspect to it that can "force" stimuli onto your consciousness).

There's also an idea of directionality proposed in the book that basically states that attention is the inverse operation of consciousness, utilizing information flow maps. A gross simplification would be that attention is directed inward toward the self, consciousness is from the self directed outward. So attention and consciousness share some overlap, at least conceptually.

Personally, I feel that "awareness" would be the operational definition. I don't really think there's a difference between consciousness and awareness besides the connotation.

 

[SMERSH]

Interesting posts by apeiron and others, but I have a few thoughts.

I consider the term "consciousness" to involve TWO fundamental properties:

(1) The "process" aspect of it (for lack of a better word) - such as the dissipative structures, various computational/mathematical and other systems models that have been discussed in this thread.

AND

(2) The "identity" aspect of it or DIFFERENCE aspect.

What I mean by identity part is let's say we have an essentially complete model of the "process" aspect of consciousness such as dissipative structures or what have you.

There still needs to be a LAW, SYSTEM or MODEL to explain why YOU happen to be THAT particular dissipative structure or conscious system and why I happen to be a different dissipative structure in this PARTICULAR body. Why not vice versa? (This is NOT the same idea as "what it's like to be a bat" question this is instead "why is that unique specific conscious entity in the bat and why not in that dolphin over there").

From our point of views this would be a MAJOR change in the world as we percieve it if we switched bodies for example.

There is SOMETHING that specifies that my experience is tied to a specific conscious process DIFFERENT from yours. In principle any system has to have a way of DISTINGUISHING the subsets of the system from each other to have any logical consistency (like memory address in a computer's memory).

But that way distinguishing these subsets of the system either has to be (a) Random with no rules to follow (ie I'm just randomly "me" in this body) or (b) There is some ADDITIONAL complex set of rules that decide the identity of system subsets.

The problem with explanation (b) is that this leads to an endless recursion of additonal rules to explain why those rules must apply but not other rules, as well it's not consistent with oczam's razor. I'm not ruling out some version of (b) however.

Some may say aspect 2 of consciousness does not apply and we're all the same "thing" or "form" whatever it is. I beg to differ because even if our DIFFERENCES in conscious experience and our subjective space/time locations are ilusions, there must be some MECHANISM for that ilusion, that DIFFERENCE, ergo that arises from SOMEWHERE.

Any overarching SYSTEM whatever it is needs some way of clearly distinguishing it's subsets in a very fundamental fasion with some RULES or in a RANDOM manner.

I think a lot of focus has been on consciousness aspect 1 but not consciousness aspect 2 as described above.

 

[apeiron]

There is SOMETHING that specifies that my experience is tied to a specific conscious process DIFFERENT from yours. In principle any system has to have a way of DISTINGUISHING the subsets of the system from each other to have any logical consistency (like memory address in a computer's memory).

Isn't the simple answer that we are all different because we have undergone separate histories of development? I am my set of memories and experiences and habits, you are yours.

If you are making analogies, software like Windows XP is designed so that it will look and feel the same on any available hardware - it can even run on Macs. But that just confirms that machines are different from biology.

 

[SMERSH]

Isn't the simple answer that we are all different because we have undergone separate histories of development? I am my set of memories and experiences and habits, you are yours.

If you are making analogies, software like Windows XP is designed so that it will look and feel the same on any available hardware - it can even run on Macs. But that just confirms that machines are different from biology.

I respect that opinion, but the problem I see with this is that your explanation is not logically complete.

There was a starting point (let's say time 0) at which our "histories" or "development" were identical a priori. So at that point, how was this overarching system of laws (including the downward causal laws) distinguish us as different? Presumably although we were essentially identical at that point, the global system still distinguished us using some "internal" address system of it's own.

I think there is a lack of deep understand of what "identity" is in ontology and current philosophy. The global constraints may be there, but these global constraints still need a consistent "ID" or "address" system to distinguish the local subsets within the global whole.

However any possible "mapping" between the subsets of the whole and their corresponding identities (or "addresses") as recognised by the global constraints seems arbitrary/incomplete.

 

[apeiron]

There was a starting point (let's say time 0) at which our "histories" or "development" were identical a priori. So at that point, how was this overarching system of laws (including the downward causal laws) distinguish us as different? Presumably although we were essentially identical at that point, the global system still distinguished us using some "internal" address system of it's own.

So taking a concrete example, what do you take as the starting point for a human? The fertilisation of an egg? When are we ever identical in any exact fashion?

 

[SMERSH]

So taking a concrete example, what do you take as the starting point for a human? The fertilisation of an egg? When are we ever identical in any exact fashion?

I think this goes back to your previous posts about vagueness.

I think the greater the vagueness of any two systems, the more similar and indistinguishable they are.

At some point in "time" in the past, either we presumably did exist but had no "history" to speak of because this was at *exactly* time 0. In principle at this exact time, there is no difference between these identities (a sort of vague existence). However, the global constraints/laws still were able to distinguish us in order to create different histories. The difference had to be something akin to an unchanging index of "selves" that the global constraints maintained regarless of the sameness of our local selves at that point.

I think this vague existence began earlier than an egg fertilization, perhaps somewhere in the causal fabric of events before the fertilization event occured.

 

[apeiron]

I think this goes back to your previous posts about vagueness.

I think the greater the vagueness of any two systems, the more similar and indistinguishable they are.

At some point in "time" in the past, either we presumably did exist but had no "history" to speak of because this was at *exactly* time 0. In principle at this exact time, there is no difference between these identities (a sort of vague existence). However, the global constraints/laws still were able to distinguish us in order to create different histories. The difference had to be something akin to an unchanging index of "selves" that the global constraints maintained regarless of the sameness of our local selves at that point.

I think this vague existence began earlier than an egg fertilization, perhaps somewhere in the causal fabric of events before the fertilization event occured.

An egg or seed is a good example of the notion of vagueness and a developmental (as opposed to constructive) notion of logic. But what you suggest here is really trying to see one through the lens of the other still.

So a logic of vagueness would say there cannot be an exact t=0, because that would of course be a crisply definied instant. The "first instant" must itself be vague (though perhaps approximately located in some useful sense).

The other thing a logic of vagueness (in my view of it perhaps) asserts is that both the local and the global are all mixed in together in this particular view of "initial conditions". So global constraints are not themselves in existence at this first stage. The laws, or forms, or other terms used to denote global constraints, are also "yet to be born".

If you take the simple example of the development of a tree from a seed, while it is still a seed, all kinds of future are possible. The future is vague because the seed encodes an undeveloped potential.

Now if we take a packet of seeds, or collect up a handful of acorns, we can get a sense of this. Each one seems indistinguishable in that we could chose to plant anyone of them. But once one is planted and begins to express its potential, then it begins to individuate and become some crisply actual example of some more general idea.

No two oak trees are identical. The soil, the wind, the water, the ravages of insects, lightning strikes, shape each individually. Even the same tree planted twice may end up with different branching patterns because of tiny accidents or fluctuations of genetic control, hormone systems, the evironment again.

A reductionist would say we could in principle track every tiny accident back to t=0. But in a non-linear world, where butterfly wing flaps show that measurement errors compound exponentially, is this really so? Can we look backwards in time to recover exact initial conditions (as opposed to vaguely approximate ones) from a process of development?

Now the seed of course is a package of global constraints in representing a genome - an evolutionary history of learning that specifies what generally makes good sense when you want to be something like an oak tree. The genome predicts a generalised environment and even a range of genetic responses (adaptations to the variety of habitats and challenges that may be encountered). But each seed is also a slight variation on the general mixture. So also already individuated from its fellow seeds by the fertilisation process. A pre-fertilised germ cell in a flower is in an even vaguer state.

Anyway, if we accept that consciousness develops along with the nervous system that is its physical expression, then there can be both moments of obvious transition, yet no actual crisp transition moments. Local and global interactions are so entangled - as between the genes of a seed and the multiple choices force upon it by fate and the environment - that they are never clearly separated. Especially right at the beginning.

When does a foetus become conscious? Does it matter that a baby is born with its cortex still largely unwired and non-functional? When does a child first learn to introspect through social learning and the scaffolding tool of self-addressed language?

A logic of vagueness, of development, is about letting go of the need for crisp certainty in terms of either micro-causes, and even the global macro-causes, during first moments. Once things are developed, through the synergistic interaction of local and global potential, then they do become irreversibly crisp particular things, like this oak tree, or that person.

 

[petm1]

By what device do I determine something does or doesn't have consious thought?

Glasgow Coma Scale is the test we give for consciousness, a tree will score a three, a rock will not score because it is not alive. This common test is a quick easy way to test a persons awareness of their present, which I see as the only part of a living being that exists solely in the present.

 

[SMERSH]

An egg or seed is a good example of the notion of vagueness and a developmental (as opposed to constructive) notion of logic. But what you suggest here is really trying to see one through the lens of the other still.

So a logic of vagueness would say there cannot be an exact t=0, because that would of course be a crisply definied instant. The "first instant" must itself be vague (though perhaps approximately located in some useful sense).

A logic of vagueness, of development, is about letting go of the need for crisp certainty in terms of either micro-causes, and even the global macro-causes, during first moments. Once things are developed, through the synergistic interaction of local and global potential, then they do become irreversibly crisp particular things, like this oak tree, or that person.

I have a great deal of regard for the general concept of vagueness, however I think it lacks a "completeness" to it. It's hard to describe clearly but it in seems to completely abandon any unchanging universal "absolutes".

Yes, a lot of modern physics seems to chip away at any "absolutes" in terms of for example time/space etc, but I think carrying this relativism too far results in a sense of "areality" - there is no real, there is just the relative, in sense therefore nothing really matters at all. Also relativism seems forever trapped within the limitations of "time".

However, I think "relatives" and "absolutes" are a sort of symmetry that must coexist equally for reality to both "have an absolute truth" and simultaneously allow "change" and allow time to exist. Forgive the cliche but a sort of "yin/yang" duality.

By "absolutes" I mean unchanging perfectly conserved "things" that have always been and will always be - timeless. By "relatives" I mean the set of all changing, unconserved and emergent "things" such as included in the concept of vagueness.

These "absolutes" in my mind are an unchanging index that ultimately distinguish all subsets of the universal "multiverse" or "whole" whatever this may be. These "absolutes" would be in my mind the part of the multiverse that is INDEPENDENT of time and steps outside the relevance of time.

 

[apeiron]

I have a great deal of regard for the general concept of vagueness, however I think it lacks a "completeness" to it. It's hard to describe clearly but it in seems to completely abandon any unchanging universal "absolutes".

Good point, but in fact a logic of vagueness does give you universals. Vagueness is your raw initial potential (the unbroken symmetry that stands the beginning of "time" or change) and then absolutes arise as your crisp limits of the resulting breaking of this symmetry, of the process of change or development. So absolutes are reached "at the end of time". Or when the phase transition that is breaking the symmetry has run its course to some new equilbrium in other words.

So, as Peirce argued, absolutes develop into crisp actuality. They are where you eventually arrive.

So in vagueness, there is neither flux nor stasis (but by definition, the potential for both). Then in a crisply developed realm like our universe, there is a definite separation into spatial and temporal dimensionality - the static locations and the global changes.

And modern physics even treats space and time, stasis and flux, as complementary limits of a developed state of things. That is where relativity comes in.

It is all yin~yang as the ancient taoist and buddhist traditions came to the same early conclusions as ancient greek philosophy. When metaphysical symmetries break, the most complete possible breaking is always dichotomistic or complementary. To crisply have something, you must then just as crisply have everything that it is not.

So to have well defined stasis, you must have exactly what stasis is not - which is flux.

Or to have well defined continuity (to use another standard greek example) you have to have also the opposing limit state of everything continuity is not - the discrete.

To attempt to imagine vagueness then is to attempt to imagine a realm which has restored an original symmetry, a realm in which you can't tell the difference between stasis and flux, the discrete and the continuous, etc.