Is Consciousness Just the Result of Electrical Activity in Our Brains?

[Pavel]

Status, yes, I'm sorry I haven't read your previous posts, as there were a LOT of them. I figured I'd read the last few before I jump in and be up to speed. Thank you for the summary though.

Unfortunatelly, you're still arguing on a highly abstract level involving a lot of questionable assumptions every time you make a point. Of course your argument makes sense then, but again, that's because you involve quite a few concepts at once that you presume to be true, but you avoid digging into them. I asked you a specific question about reducing the quality of pain and you start talking about zombies again. I accepted your notion of experience as a necessary condition for being conscious. Now, please explain to me, specifically, how you would verify that an artificial being in fact is experiencing pain. Note, you didn't build a human, you built an artificial "conscious" thing, call it Status Junior.

Thanks,

Pavel.

 

[Les Sleeth]

Unfortunately or not, such component is ruled out a priori by a physicalst with the only answer as "we'll give a physical explanation in the future". Isn't that a metaphysical statement as well?.

Yes, absolutely. That's why some of the debates here with physicalists are so frustrating. They understand the physics, but they don't realize they are arguing from a priori metaphysical assumptions.

 

[StatusX]

Status, yes, I'm sorry I haven't read your previous posts, as there were a LOT of them. I figured I'd read the last few before I jump in and be up to speed. Thank you for the summary though.

Unfortunatelly, you're still arguing on a highly abstract level involving a lot of questionable assumptions every time you make a point. Of course your argument makes sense then, but again, that's because you involve quite a few concepts at once that you presume to be true, but you avoid digging into them. I asked you a specific question about reducing the quality of pain and you start talking about zombies again. I accepted your notion of experience as a necessary condition for being conscious. Now, please explain to me, specifically, how you would verify that an artificial being in fact is experiencing pain. Note, you didn't build a human, you built an artificial "conscious" thing, call it Status Junior.

Thanks,

Pavel.

All I intended to do is summarize what I've said so far, with a couple of new illustrations to back up my arguments, so that we'd have a common ground to work from. Now your question was how could we determine what a being is subjectively experiencing. This is a tough one, and there is obviously no real answer at this point. However, like I said, I think there are laws that relate conscious experience to a configuration of matter, and we could use these laws to predict the conscious experience that a given body is feeling.

It seems odd to say "a given body," like were talking about projectile motion problems or something. But Chalmer, for one, argues that consciousness may be a result of information, and that any system which contains information has some kind of conscious experience, with the complexity of the experience corresponding to that of the information. The human brain is one of the most complex information processing systems in the universe, and is probably one of the most conscious. Other animals are less conscious, down to single celled organisms which have a more basic experience than we can imagine. Even a thermostat, (Chalmers example) has some extremely limited form of experience. His ideas are hard to accept at first, but I find them really appealing. They assert that there are simple rules that relate consciousness to some aspect of the physical. Here is a link to the article, which someone had provided earlier in the thread:

http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/facing.html

But how could we be sure something has a conscious experience? At first, it seems that we can't be. The rules about where consciousness arises may turn out to be so simple they compel us to believe them, but you can't prove anything about the external world. But think, for a minute, about the reason you can't experience what someone else is. If you could get inside their head, you would have access to all the information in it. But clearly, there is no physical link from their brain to yours. But what if you could create some kind of link, so that you could access any part of their brain, and they could do the same to you? I think any separate individuality would disappear, and the consciousnesses would merge into one. This is highly speculative, and I don't expect anyone to buy it with what little argument I've provided here, but I just thought of it and I'm still working it out. Basically the conclusion is, there is only one consciousness, but it is divided up among the different systems. If you could join the information flow of two systems, the separate consciousnesses would disappear, and if you could somehow join all systems, there would be one consciousness remaining. Well that's all I have for now. I'll try to build on this (or realize how wrong it is) later.

 

[Canute]

First of all, the whole reason I'm even talking about zombies is because of the possibility we could be them. Zombies, just to be clear, are hypothetical beings that have the same exact physical makeup as us, but are not conscious.

Sorry, but I still find this argument rather muddled. Zombies are useful in thought experiments but it's another thing entirely to suggest that they can exist. We are conscious, ergo we are not zombies. If we were not conscious then there would be no need to define zombies as being 'like us physically but not conscious'. That is, if we are not conscious then we can just say zombies are like us. Why add the 'but not conscious' bit?

I'm sorry you feel that way. I try my best to respond to any valid arguments I see, but I do seem to be alone in this corner, and it gets tiring to rebut every argument myself. That being said, this is philosophy. Obviously I have no proof of anything I've said. It is based on a combination of evidence from experience and experiments and my own opinions. I try to explain why I feel the way I do, but I can't convince you if your opinion is fundamentally and irrevocably different. And when you say, "how do you know" or "I don't think so" I just don't feel a need to respond. Explain why you think my arguments are wrong, or what you think is right.

Fair point. I was asking 'how do you know' in order to highlight the fact that it is pure conjecture to suppose that a non-conscious being can behave like a conscious one. Because you were being a bit dogmatic I hadn't realized that you already accepted this. My mistake.

Fliption is right. All I was saying is that it is coherent (ie, not an inherent contradiction) to talk about non-conscious beings which behave exactly as we do. I am making no claim about whether they really do or could exist.

I'd say that if this idea is logically coherent then there's no reason that non-conscious beings which behave exactly like conscious ones could not exist. However, the question remains - is the idea logically coherent?

I feel that if you want to say that it is then you have to give an explanation of how and why a non-conscious being would conduct research into consciousness. A zombie could have no evidence that consciousness exists. Also I find it hard to imagine that it could conduct such research into consciousness without knowing that it is conducting it. Perhaps a simpler question would be why would they go 'ow' when they stick their hand in a fire?

Many human philosophers have espoused philosophical idealism. It's hard to imagine how a being without a mind could conclude that mind is more fundamental than matter. As for a zombie becoming a Taoist or Buddhist and concluding that consciousness is more fundamental than mind, it seems hard to imagine. Surely it would be sent back to the repair shop by its colleagues.

 

[Pavel]

Here is a link to the article, which someone had provided earlier in the thread:

http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/facing.html

Nice! Seems like a very beneficial article for me to read. Thanks for ruining my weekend. Did you have to do it on a Friday night? Hehe, seriously though, thank you for the reference, I'll definitely read it.

Pavel.

 

[shintashi]

Being conscious is not 'consciousness'. Consciousness includes being both conscious and unconscious.

To me, my consciousness is that part of my persona I use to observe a given reality. I assume that we exist on many, many levels (dimensions) of the greater reality. I use my consciousness to focus my attention on any of the given levels. It seems quite possible, even probable, that for one nano-second it is focused on what I am seeing, the next on what I communicate to myself, the next on what I communicate to others and the next funneling the information to my mind, etc ...

Consciousness is the ability focus my mind and or spirit on my experiences.

love&peace,
olde drunk

ps: awareness is being able to understand the experience, information.

I agree. What I find sad today is the fact that the manyof greatest minds of the old world, Such as Abraham, Moses, Socrates, Plato, Krsna, Plotinus, and Lao Tsu, for example, all believed and studied on the precept of a source of "me" or "I" that was more than the material element.
There is no scientific fact proving or non disproving the corporeality and materiality of the human mind, for in every experiment, there is a counter experiment to create a different result. Nevertheless, I broke it down, for my own use, in this way:
Assume for a minute only three processions... from top to bottom.

At the top you have ideas & philosophy, Thought, and Intelligence, Truth.
The Second layer directly beneath it is Spiritual, Musical, Geometric, Harmony.
The third layer is Physical, Material like Democritus and obvious as Aristotle.

Assume each layer is a triangle of equal size in a directly linear observation. The triangles are all pointing down. The can go up and down, but not side to side.

now the bottom layer represents science: that being "the study of the physical universe"

The middle layer represents Theology and Religion, Music and Art.

The top layer represents dialectic, consciousness, Intelligence, wisdom, Truth, the root of philosophy, mysteries of Ethics and Imagination.


So here we have three groups, Scientists, theologians, and Philosophers; Doctors, priests, and psychics; all trying to understand what's going on.

But what if I told you that from a view point, in this 2D geometry, that science can never know the truth without going through the spiritual?
That a philosopher will never have an understanding of the physical world without the application of musical theory and geometry?

Science tries to reach for the Truth of the First world, it tries to reach the secret of philosophy, and empower its creator as a would be "Q" or "Akira" literally trying to take upon itself the reins to define what God is, completely devoid of any measure of spirituality, saying, as the Nihilist, and the Buddhist, that there is no soul, there is no atman, there is no afterlife.

"Meat Machines" as Tesla would say.
When science attempts to do this - attempts to bypass truth to create its own, it is no longer "Physic" as outlined by Thales, Heraclitus, Anaximander, Parmenides, down through Socrates and Plato. No. It becomes bastardized and turns into a religion.

Such people will try to hide behind the scientific method, scientific facts, and scientific proofs. These methods themselves are also nothing but rituals of a religion. They are the mantras of the believers. The Lab coats are merely the ceremonial robes.

As I sat in my friends house weeks ago, he asked me to prove that a certain social group existed. He said that I could not prove it to him. He wanted evidence, in the most scientific of terms. I walked out of his house, looked up at the cloudy night sky, and said "Prove to me that the sun exists. For certainly I do not see it, and it will not be around for another 12 hours...Come on, in the same time you have given me to prove this, with the materials available, prove to me there is a Sun"

He couldn't do it. He knew he couldn't do it. Next time you are in a forrest, camping, and its night time, when you think you know there is no real consciousness, only meat machines... try to prove to yourself there is a sun before it starts to rise.

 

[Les Sleeth]

Even a thermostat, (Chalmers example) has some extremely limited form of experience. His ideas are hard to accept at first, but I find them really appealing. They assert that there are simple rules that relate consciousness to some aspect of the physical. Here is a link to the article, which someone had provided earlier in the thread:

http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/facing.html

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My take on Chalmers' meaning there was that a theromstat has some form of awareness, not experience. At one point in the paper he suggests subjectless sensing, or the easy problem of consciousness, may be generalized as "awareness." But he clearly distinguished "experience" from awareness.

But how could we be sure something has a conscious experience? At first, it seems that we can't be. The rules about where consciousness arises may turn out to be so simple they compel us to believe them, but you can't prove anything about the external world. But think, for a minute, about the reason you can't experience what someone else is. If you could get inside their head, you would have access to all the information in it. But clearly, there is no physical link from their brain to yours. But what if you could create some kind of link, so that you could access any part of their brain, and they could do the same to you? I think any separate individuality would disappear, and the consciousnesses would merge into one. This is highly speculative, and I don't expect anyone to buy it with what little argument I've provided here, but I just thought of it and I'm still working it out. Basically the conclusion is, there is only one consciousness, but it is divided up among the different systems. If you could join the information flow of two systems, the separate consciousnesses would disappear, and if you could somehow join all systems, there would be one consciousness remaining. Well that's all I have for now. I'll try to build on this (or realize how wrong it is) later.

It's a pretty good point to say that if everyone had access to everyone else's information, it would seem to diminish individuality.

But I would like to suggest to you that while you are intensely looking at the mechanisms and functions of the brain, you don't seem to understand how you yourself "work" as consciousness. When you say, "you could access any part of their brain, and they could do the same to you," what is that "you" to which you refer?

Here's how I see the problem. Consciousness is something that goes around doing things, and when you decribe consciousness you mush together the doer with the things done. They are not the same! Many people define themselves by what they do. That's why someone says "I'm a physicist" or "I'm a lawyer" or "I'm a parent." And quite often they are so focused on what they do, they have never stopped to check out what it is about them that "does." So far, no model you have offered accounts for the self, the doer. That's why it is called the "hard problem" of consciousness.

 

[Les Sleeth]

He wanted evidence, in the most scientific of terms. I walked out of his house, looked up at the cloudy night sky, and said "Prove to me that the sun exists. For certainly I do not see it, and it will not be around for another 12 hours...Come on, in the same time you have given me to prove this, with the materials available, prove to me there is a Sun" ... try to prove to yourself there is a sun before it starts to rise.

Without commenting on the rest of your post, I would argue that you did not prove anything, one way or the other. You don't know if the sun will rise in the future, you only know it has risen in the past. Unless one is experiencing something in the moment, there is no proof it exists.

Of course, there is common sense, so we rely on textbooks and other sources to say "even though we can't see how reality is somewhere, it's been such and such a way consistently long enough to conclude reality is likely the same as it's been in the past." We consider that kind of evidence "proof" even though technically it isn't.

 

[siliconhype]

“The Soul” you are talking about does not exist, consciousness / awareness “is” the chemical reaction going on / in your biological brain hardware. Actually it’s very simple to test, just give yourself some SSRIs; citalopram, fluoxetine, fluvoxamine, paroxetine and or sertraline and see how your soul reacts. LOL! But I do believe the energy (biological energy, energy found in cells) is not just simple energy this energy actually has memory. As for multiple existences, to me they are more like “memories carryovers” …
only occur in very rear instances, else we will all be copies of mommy and daddy, remembering all what they did and saw up till conception and then a branch off from that.

The antidepressants you mentioned are ****. The most effective one is MDMA or (C11H15NO2) or (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), but it is illegal in most places. But i think it causes neuron damange if used often.

See what THAT dos to your "soul".

I agree with your version of the soul, i don't think there is such thing as a spirit or soul that transcends material reality. If it did, currenly all theory is speculation, since we have not yet discovered any hint of any universe which does not function according to laws of phyisics. That does not mean any such thing may not be discoverd in the future, so i keep my mind open.

 

[siliconhype]

Fliption:Do you not think that there is electrical activity in your brain when you are asleep? I think we know very little about consciousness.

Rothie M:
Dreams can be seen as a form of consciousness because we are aware of space and time in them.I would say that the correct definition of consciousness is an awaremess of space and time.Electric pulses in the brain are not continuous phenomena but magnetic fields in the brain are.So one can imagine a magnetic field
being the brain's creation of continuous conscious experiences such as
a straight line - electric fields could only produce a dotted line.
In other words the space and time we experience is created by our brains.
It reflects what the atomic world around us really looks like but can never
give us a true experience of that world.We are probably conscious because
our brains are producing particles of very small mass which differ from the
particles found in normal physics.For example they could be moving faster than light.
We have five senses so we need five groups of particles.For a sense like colour where humans can experience 16000 different colours,there will have to be lots of different particles with lots of different properties in one group.So in my view particle physicists have got rather a lot of work to do!They speak of quarks and leptons:in future they will need to speak of a lot more categories.
If the brain produces particles that create consciousness then what we are seeing may exist in our brains and not outside them.For example,the human eye can see a galaxy at a distance of 10^23 metres and it takes about 10 seconds to focus on it properly. .So if we are to see the galaxy where it is, the particles that create consciousness have to travel from our brains to the galaxy in ten seconds.This means they need to have a speed of 10^22 metres per second - at least.This is way faster than light.I do not think consciousness is so mysterious if you accept that a soul
with mass exists in each of us and that the brain creates new kinds of particles that
exist in space and time relative to a soul particle.When we are dead or unconscious we are "soul inactive" when we are dreaming or awake we are "soul active."

That is the craziest theory if i ever did see saw a crazy theory. Hmm, I think current science has a few things to argue against your theory. First, we don't know that the brain, or anything, creates samaller particles than the currently discovered ones, so you seem to be speculating a lot, and well, if there is no proof how can i believe you? That is not to say science know all or best, it just means that I'm not sure that you know best either.

On the topic of far off galaxies, i imagine you speack of staring at the sky, and focusing on the least visible star you can see.

It is know that those stars or galaxies you see are seeable because they emit light, this light travels a long distance and because it is bound by the laws of physics, it is an outdated image of the galaxy, so what you see is in effect and old verison of the galaxy, not an image of how it today, for all reasonable purpose, it may not even exist anymore, yet, its light keeps on traveling unitl it reaches its last photon. So, there is no need to invent faster than light magic.

 

[siliconhype]

"Perhaps we shouldn't boil vegetables."

That's ok, we do not associate feelings or pain to things we do not visibly see responding to us. So, in theory you could boil a paraplegic blind mute person without having any remorse... except that it has a physical resemblance to humans and thus you associate an entity to it which is similar to yourself meaning: you may be able to "feel for" the unlucky boiling man.

 

[siliconhype]

"Sense-experiences do not live in isolation.Show me an example where they do."

Well, depends, here memory leaps into help. Let's say one is not able to experience anything but one stimuli. he will know what that is because he has experienced it in the past, or not and he will be able to copare with memories of past experiences similar or different. Thus you will have to specify that memory should also be nonexistent in a person which is only able to feel one stimuli in order for your theory to have a ground. But then, if we have no memory what are we? If we have to memory we do not perceive time. And if we consider ourselves as time-space entities, we would be practically dead if we cannot perceive time. In fact, this theory of time expoerience can be taken to further inquiry, one can say that there is difference between subconsicous time perception and conscious time perception. For example, one canot consciously (directly) control a hearbeat, yet the heart has a tremendous timing mechanism which coordinartes itself depending on needs of the body, it is in constant adjustment. Time can also be said to exist subconsciously through training, if a person is alwasy trianed to wake up at a certain time, that person will experience that during unconscious sleep, the mind will bring itself to consciouslness at the exact moment that it knows it would have been woken up by the clock. Thus, i think there is a subconscious timing mechanism which operates on many differen tlevels and directs many different human nctions, and thus time affects consciousness. Yet, time is also relative. Dream time may be differen than wakinglife time - yet both are part of consciousness, as in the case of lucid dreaming, or dreaming where you remember what you dreamt after you wake up.

 

[siliconhype]

Electrical impulses?



In which we are aware I believe.




I agree, but then again we're all different and so are the masses and charges.

We all think about it, are we really alive? thinking? what is thinking? what about seeing? the vision is perhaps the most doubtful consiousness of it all.

You sleep on the same bed for 50 years.

You emigrate = new house = new bed included.

In the morning you wake up, your brain becomes confused because you still thinking of the old house, walls, colours etc...

Your brain immediately adjusts this confusion.

There is conscious, no doubt about it.

Good topic!

Good example, i have experienced New Immigrant Phenomena myself, when i first immigrated to Canada, I was sometimes lost when i woke up, forgetting where i was, but of course after a few dazed seconds memory kicks in and one is able to transpond expectations of old world reality to expectations of new world reality.

 

[siliconhype]

Now all you have to do is demonstrate that this isn't just a pipe dream. Because if it is, then I have a counter-proposal. What if consciousness is transferred by Carrol's snarks, which you can only detect if they happen to be boojums, but of course if they are boojums and you detect them you will silently fade away. So that explains why science does not detect them.

WTF?

1234567890

 

[siliconhype]

"To that I say, for anything of substance to be exactly the same as something else, they not only have to share all properties and aspects, but must inhabit the same place at the same time, meaning that a single consciousness cannot inhabit two bodies. Aside from this, the likeliness that two consciousnesses (is that right?) WOULD be the same is ridiculously small, considering that they would have to have the same physical composition down to a tee, and also have to have shared the exact same past in order to have been exposed to the exact same sensory input."

Agreed.

Grade 10 Math will show you exactly why two identical consciousnesse may exist, but are actually inseparable.

Take this equasion:

2y = 6x+4

and

y = 3x+2

They are different, yet when graphed, the lines overlap, thus while they are separate lines, they are identical and thus indisctinguishable when projected in time and and space.

One can certainly argue that identical consciousnesses may esist, but what they may not realize is that these same consciousnes are all one. There are an infinite numbers of me, yet you count tell, because all me's overlap and thus are indistinguishable form each other, thus do not affect time and space separately, but as one, thus its pointless to talk about multiple self consciousness or out of body experiences as they are as good as nonexistent.

 

[siliconhype]

I have seen arguments on this topic which side with physical explanations of the conscious and arguments which side with the metaphysical explanation of consciousness (and everything in between)

I think these arguments boil down to arguments of the parts defining the whole or the whole is more than its parts.

Currently i believe the whole is more than its parts. But its parts define how the whole works. The mechanism for consciousness may well be similar among all humans, and i believe they are, this doesn't mean the everyone is the same. A bike can be ridden up the hill, or down the hill, or left or right or not ridden at all, yet all bikes are basically the same. So the two theories are not contradictory at all.

 

[siliconhype]

StatusX


I agree that our own consciousness is all we can know for certain. But on what evidence do you say that knowing is a physical process of our brains? By assuming that this true you are in effect assuming that consciousness is caused by brains, which is exactly what we are not yet able to prove.

Also the zombie argument shows us nothing at all about the nature of consciousness. It would show us a lot about it if we ever came across a real zombie, but as yet they are hypothetical creatures, so we cannot deduce anything about consciousness from their hypothetical existence, any more than we can from their hypothetical non-existence.

Would someone who is autistic be similar to the general definition of a zombie?

"A rare syndrome, appearing in childhood, characterized by a withdrawn state, a lack of social responsiveness or interest in others, serious communicative and linguistic impairments, and a failure to develop normal attachments, all frequently accompanied by a variety of bizarre ways of responding to the environment, usually including a fascination with inanimate objects and an insistence on routine, order, and sameness. Onset prior to 30 months of age. Sometimes the term is only used to refer to autistic disorder but more often it refers to all of the autistic spectrum or as a general term for developmental disorders in the pervasive developmental disorders category of the DSM-IV."

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=deskbar&q=define:autism

I have heard that it is believed that autists are not able to associate a personality to another living thing.

I would really like to know how the consciousness of someone who is autistic works, or if perhaps autistic people are humans in everyway but perhaps they do not have consciousness? Hmm...

 

[siliconhype]

If the life (the thought activity of our brain) does not start with its birth, we need to know at what stage it starts. I mean the evolution of our thought process starting from zero thought in the begining.

It seems to me that you equate life with consciousness, which is false. Life starts at the creation of the first cell, eg, sperm and egg meet. Consciousness (self-consciousness) starts after birth, and is not something which just "clicks" in place as soon as you exit your mothers womb. It is a gradual development. Memory has nothing to do with consciousness. The mind is made up of many different (if apparently similarly looking) mechanisms for processing stimuli, both internal and external. I can see and i can imagine, the first is an external experience and the second internal, yet both use the same vision consciousness engine. consciousness is nothing more than the amalgamated processes of the brain which have been put together in order that we make decisions on them. The subconscious is part of the conscious, but i think that we are falling into many miss-understanding traps if we do not decide what kind of consciousness we should discuss. Self consciousness, subconsciousness, etc. So what's it going to be?

 

[siliconhype]

Yes, photons are discrete, but there are so many of them per cell that we couldn't possibly make out individual ones, and so light appears continuous.

If our brain was electrically stimulated in the right way, I believe we could have all the experiences we have in everyday life: color, sound, heat, pleasure. I don't see any reason to doubt this. So there is nothing actually traveling between us and the object we are looking at that causes the subjective experience of color. All that happens is photons hit our eye and cause a chemical reaction which causes electrical impulses in our brain. These impulses gives rise to conscious experience. I think the brain is the only place we should look to if we want to find the cause of consciousness.

I don't agree, take a baby, would you be able to have a discussion with the baby about consciousness? According to you you would because consciousness is not effected by external stimuli. Yet, in reality we know that you can't have a discussion with a baby on consciousness because of many reasons. One of them being that the baby cannot speak. I have another question, can anyone remember a memory before one was able to speak? I believe speech or communication, not necessarily through words, is a throughout process without which self consciousness could not exist, simple because the means of defining it or describing it do not exist.

Consciousness is very much defined by external stimuli and experience, while the mechanism does exist independent of external stimuli, consciousness is a process which relies on both being present.

Once enough external stimuli has effected the mind, so that the mind can perceive itself as an independent entity and thus attribute itself self consciousness, then if all stimuli is removed, consciousness could still exist, as you say, independent of external factors. It will only exist in the mind of the individual, and may yet evolve independently of any external factors through various processes such as imagination, etc. These are internal stimuli, which have been defined by external stimuli, without initial external stimuli they could not exist.

 

[siliconhype]

Well, the problem here is that you are reasoning based on "what we know not". Every so often someone comes along with a 'scientific theory' that they say predicts all the equations of physics, and therefore is the 'right' theory (and they are usually not the humble types in their proclamation). Of course, ask them to produce equations that are not known which we can experiment, they are usually mum. What they have done is predict the past successes of science, and even though it is an admirable task if done correctly, such kind of 'theories' do not tell us that a revolutionary theory has been discovered. Rather, all we can do is look at them and say "does it make butter too?".

Well, I think this is a very similar situation to your thought experiment. What are we supposed to do with such computational results other than scratch our heads and pick up our discussion right before we were interrupted? The fact of the matter is, a theory might be right, but if it does not show us how it is right or if it is right in experiments that we can perform, such a theory is generally not useful to science.

In the case of a super computer having all these abilities, all we can ask at the end of the day is whether it is simply under the spell of Searle's Chinese room thought experiment. You might recall in that thought experiment that a person who does not know a lick of Chinese is put inside a room (we don't know that he doesn't know Chinese). While in the room, someone comes along and slips through the door a question written in Chinese characters. A few minutes later out spews the answer in English. Now, to most of us, we would assume that the person in the room is fluent in Chinese. But, we would be wrong. If we could look inside we would see that the person has a pretty substantial filing system that they can match the Chinese characters, stroke by stroke, until find a file that contains the answer in English for that question written in Chinese. The 'translator' has no understanding of Chinese, but everyone on the outside is confident that the guy is fluent in Chinese.

What this thought experiment shows is not that AI is impossible, rather it shows that to know that AI is possible we must have a much better philosophical understanding of language, theory of learning, theory of meaning, and a theory of truth (among a few others). We need to demonstrate how a proposition can be encoded into symbols and then decoded such that no information is lost (or very little information). We can translate the contents of a sentence into 1' & 0's, but we cannot translate the meaning. Without demonstrating how it is possible, we might just as well be talking Chinese to the guy in a Chinese room.

Actually your thought experiment falls appart right here:

"The 'translator' has no understanding of Chinese, but everyone on the outside is confident that the guy is fluent in Chinese."

What makes you think that i could not assume that there is a translating system in the room and thus the person was able to translate the writing? It's a silly experiment proving nothing.

The experiment assumes that everyone reacts the same way to the person translating the characters. In reality this experiment can easily be proven wrong, such is the issue with thought experiments, they assume too much.

 

[siliconhype]

Status, I want to be more specific about what Les said about "human activities", as I'm also struggling to understand how you would simulate them, at least conceptually.

Very simple: let’s say I’m holding a fork and all of a sudden I make a decision to drop it. Let’s examine this decision making process. My brain must be in a certain state before the drop, say state A. You can brake down this state to a quantum level, to anything you want. The bottom line is there is a physical state that can be expressed in a matrix of certain values for each neuron, synapse, electron, photon, etc. Now comes the point in time when the decision making neuron must fire to cause the “drop the fork” reaction chain. My question is what specifically causes that neuron to fire? Yes, you can reduce that cause to a quark spin or a wave function, if you will, but that’s just begging the question. The ultimate question is what causes the system to be transformed from state A to state B (firing of the fork dropping neuron). I can think of only two causes. First, randomness / spontaneity. Whether it’s the electron’s undetermined position in the carbon atom, nuclear decay, gust of wind in your face, other natural random phenomena, whatever it is, the prime mover is random. (that’s assuming spontaneity exists, of course, which is a subject for another thread). The other cause is determinism. The transformation from state A to state B is strictly determined by natural laws. Whether the neuron will fire or not completely depends on the current state, state A, all incoming input from other neurons, and the rules (brain fabric which determines thresholds etc.) which dictate what to do. Without going into metaphysics, is there anything else?

Whether you choose randomness or determinism, there’s a problem. If the neuron firing is caused by a random act, all our decisions are nothing but a roll of a dice. I find it hard to swallow since it would make this very idea an outcome of randomness in someone’s mind….. Determinism doesn’t make things better. If my decision making is the outcome of strict deterministic rules, we’re nothing but a cog in a huge machine following the rules, we don’t really think or make decisions. I find it also hard to believe because, again, that would mean your very idea of determinism is not the outcome of your independent thinking, it’s the outcome of some physical state and some rules, you couldn’t “think” otherwise, you’re programmed to say “we’re determined”. The third option is the combination of the two of course, but again, the same criticism applies. So, how, conceptually, would you simulate the transformation from one state to the next?

Regards,

Pavel.

Good argument, a similar discussion was posed by a character in the phylosophical movie "Waking Life".

"The ultimate question is what causes the system to be transformed from state A to state B (firing of the fork dropping neuron)."

My resonse, first, the two theories you mention are both invalid. And also, i think you question is incorectly posed, which explains its unaswerability. Thought isnever a neuron simply firing and creating a cascade which eventually results in an effect on the body. Thought is a continuous process which never stops since the creation of the first neuron in the human embrio. Thus there is no State A, there is only a continuation of thought. The system transformation from state A to B does not exist, transformation is continuous. But to sort of answer the question, which i said beofore cannot be clearly answere the wasy it was posed, and thus i should reword it:

What is the difference between state A and state B and how did the mind get there.

Well, the neuron which created the cascade to drop the fork is unidentifiable, there is no one neuron associated with the command "drop fork". In other words a process created the action to drop the fork. Once this is assumed to be the case, the question is more easilly answerable. The process is an evaluation of thought, to evaluate thought more processes must be taken into consideration, some baing external stimuli. in essence there are many reasons why one would let go of a fork. One could find the fork too hot to hold. Or the fork too heavy, or one may have simply made a decision to let the fork go. The result in essence was created by a process not by a state. The decision to drop the fork may have well been thought over many times. One may have though, "when" to drop the fork, so then where can you pinpoint the neuron to cause the dropping of the fork? You can't; there is no neuron that thinks, thougth is a process. i'll stop here because I am starting to sound repetitive.

 

[evagriselda]

Conciousness is the interface of the mind.

Hi Smurf: In physical chemistry or computer science?

 

[StatusX]

Sorry, but I still find this argument rather muddled. Zombies are useful in thought experiments but it's another thing entirely to suggest that they can exist. We are conscious, ergo we are not zombies. If we were not conscious then there would be no need to define zombies as being 'like us physically but not conscious'. That is, if we are not conscious then we can just say zombies are like us. Why add the 'but not conscious' bit?

We are conscious, ergo we are not zombies? If this isn't using your conclusion as a premise, I don't know what is. And the only way to talk about zombies is to emphasize how they are different from the way we perceive ourselves. Obviously its just a matter of semantics that I say that theyre like us but not conscious. My conclusion was that whatever they are, theyre the same as us. But you can't start from this point.

I'd say that if this idea is logically coherent then there's no reason that non-conscious beings which behave exactly like conscious ones could not exist. However, the question remains - is the idea logically coherent?

I feel that if you want to say that it is then you have to give an explanation of how and why a non-conscious being would conduct research into consciousness. A zombie could have no evidence that consciousness exists. Also I find it hard to imagine that it could conduct such research into consciousness without knowing that it is conducting it. Perhaps a simpler question would be why would they go 'ow' when they stick their hand in a fire?

Many human philosophers have espoused philosophical idealism. It's hard to imagine how a being without a mind could conclude that mind is more fundamental than matter. As for a zombie becoming a Taoist or Buddhist and concluding that consciousness is more fundamental than mind, it seems hard to imagine. Surely it would be sent back to the repair shop by its colleagues.

Again, you have to understand that I believe that all behavior is explainable in purely physical terms. What you're talking about is just behavior (responding to pain, writing books about buddhism, meditating). I've already explained why I believe this, but just to reiterate: how can a "mental world" influence the physical world? If it did, there would be some experiment we could perform where we would see physical events that arent physically explainable (eg., a neuron spontaneously fires). The physical realm wouldn't be causally closed. I don't like this idea, and there isn't any evidence for it.

My take on Chalmers' meaning there was that a theromstat has some form of awareness, not experience. At one point in the paper he suggests subjectless sensing, or the easy problem of consciousness, may be generalized as "awareness." But he clearly distinguished "experience" from awareness.

I'm glad you've read that paper, and I'd like to talk about it. To start, I'm not sure I understand the difference between experience and awareness. Awareness seems to require the ability to reason, that to be aware is to understand what's going on around you, where as experience could conceivably take place in the absence of it. But maybe I've misinterpretted these terms.

It's a pretty good point to say that if everyone had access to everyone else's information, it would seem to diminish individuality.

But I would like to suggest to you that while you are intensely looking at the mechanisms and functions of the brain, you don't seem to understand how you yourself "work" as consciousness. When you say, "you could access any part of their brain, and they could do the same to you," what is that "you" to which you refer?

Here's how I see the problem. Consciousness is something that goes around doing things, and when you decribe consciousness you mush together the doer with the things done. They are not the same! Many people define themselves by what they do. That's why someone says "I'm a physicist" or "I'm a lawyer" or "I'm a parent." And quite often they are so focused on what they do, they have never stopped to check out what it is about them that "does." So far, no model you have offered accounts for the self, the doer. That's why it is called the "hard problem" of consciousness.

Would a conscious being have a sense of identity in the absence of rational thought? Could a thermostat know it was separate from everything else? I think self-awareness is just a aspect of consciousness present in intelligent beings, and not something fundamental to it. The hard problem is how to explain experiences. The experience of red, the experience of fear, the experience of self. Its called the hard problem because it can't be explained functionally. But I think that self-awareness could be.

You know you aren't someone else because you don't have access to their thoughts. This is a deduction youve made, even if its at an extremely basic level. I know I'm saying "you know" again, but this is hard to avoid because the experience of self is so central to our existence, and so also to our language. A frog would, in my opinion, have conscious experiences, but I don't think it would understand it was separate from the rest of the world. This is all just my take on it, and I haven't really read much about the self-identity aspect of consciousness. If you know any other articles that go into this kind of stuff more, I'd love to read them.

 

[StatusX]

Yes, photons are discrete, but there are so many of them per cell that we couldn't possibly make out individual ones, and so light appears continuous.

If our brain was electrically stimulated in the right way, I believe we could have all the experiences we have in everyday life: color, sound, heat, pleasure. I don't see any reason to doubt this. So there is nothing actually traveling between us and the object we are looking at that causes the subjective experience of color. All that happens is photons hit our eye and cause a chemical reaction which causes electrical impulses in our brain. These impulses gives rise to conscious experience. I think the brain is the only place we should look to if we want to find the cause of consciousness.

I don't agree, take a baby, would you be able to have a discussion with the baby about consciousness? According to you you would because consciousness is not effected by external stimuli. Yet, in reality we know that you can't have a discussion with a baby on consciousness because of many reasons. One of them being that the baby cannot speak.

You answered your own question. You can't talk with a baby about consciousness because it can't talk, and even if it could, it wouldn't understand it. I don't really understand what you were trying to say.

I have another question, can anyone remember a memory before one was able to speak? I believe speech or communication, not necessarily through words, is a throughout process without which self consciousness could not exist, simple because the means of defining it or describing it do not exist.

Consciousness is very much defined by external stimuli and experience, while the mechanism does exist independent of external stimuli, consciousness is a process which relies on both being present.

Once enough external stimuli has effected the mind, so that the mind can perceive itself as an independent entity and thus attribute itself self consciousness, then if all stimuli is removed, consciousness could still exist, as you say, independent of external factors. It will only exist in the mind of the individual, and may yet evolve independently of any external factors through various processes such as imagination, etc. These are internal stimuli, which have been defined by external stimuli, without initial external stimuli they could not exist.

I think you misinterpretted my argument. One thing Ill respond to right away is that I don't think speech is at all necessary for consciousness. For one thing, some people do have memories from before they learned to talk, and there are conscious people who never learn any form of communication.

But when you say that "consciousness could exist, as you say, independent of external factors," that's not what I was talking about at all. When I said you could electrically stimulate the brain to have experiences, I meant experiences identical to the ones we have in ordinary life. My point was to refute a ridiculous claim about "color particles." These are not necessary because color could conceivably exist without any real object, ie, if you just stimulated you brain so you thought you were looking at a colored object. Actually, this isn't far fetched at all, and all you have to do to disprove the "color particle" theory is eat some acid. That is, unless you claim that acid has some spiritual connection to the rest of the universe, and causes color particles to come from nowhere. But then I wouldn't really want to talk to you any more.

 

[Mohsen]

In my view, consiuosness is a separate entity from central nervous system and all of the physiologic processes which is happening in it. To make it more clear, look at the analogy of motion and legs. Motion is a separate entity but we can adopt it because we have moving organs. The more advanced organ we have the more complex motions we can perform.
Although this belief is as old as Plato's time or even older, more and more scientific evidences are appearing to support it.

 

[Les Sleeth]

And the only way to talk about zombies is to emphasize how they are different from the way we perceive ourselves. Obviously its just a matter of semantics that I say that theyre like us but not conscious. My conclusion was that whatever they are, theyre the same as us. But you can't start from this point.

I know this wasn't addressed to me, but since you are trying to understand Chalmers . . . his zombie argument is meant to show what's missing from physicalist theory. When you create your consciousness program, you think "they're the same as us," but that's not correct. The point of the argument is, you cannot create subjectivity with a computer program. Now, you might say one day it will be done, and then that will prove the computing model of consciousness was correct all along. But as of now, all that can be created are zombies . . . which is something that can mimic behaviors, but has no sense of "self" while it does it. There is calculation ability, but no understanding; there is sensing ability, but no actual appreciation; their is detection of the the color red, but no personal sense of what red "is like."

Again, you have to understand that I believe that all behavior is explainable in purely physical terms. What you're talking about is just behavior (responding to pain, writing books about buddhism, meditating).

Above you accused Canute of using his conclusion as his premises, but you are guilty of that in every point you make. You have assumed consciousness is epiphenomenal, yet that is what we are arguing. Neither you nor anyone else knows if subjectivity or advanced consciousness ability such as "writing books about buddhism, meditating" arises from physical causality. What we do know is that nobody can reproduce subjectivity with physical processes. Until someone does, then the question of all the causes of consciousness is open.

. . . how can a "mental world" influence the physical world? If it did, there would be some experiment we could perform where we would see physical events that arent physically explainable (eg., a neuron spontaneously fires). The physical realm wouldn't be causally closed. I don't like this idea, and there isn't any evidence for it.

There you've done it again, used your conclusion as a premise. Of course all the physical steps of a physical event is explainable in physical terms. What you do not know is what is setting those physical events in motion. You cannot assume it is another physical event!

I'm glad you've read that paper, and I'd like to talk about it. To start, I'm not sure I understand the difference between experience and awareness. Awareness seems to require the ability to reason, that to be aware is to understand what's going on around you, where as experience could conceivably take place in the absence of it. But maybe I've misinterpretted these terms.

Yes you did misinterpret. What he said was just the opposite. The ability of, say, a motion detector can be said to be "aware" of motion, but it has no understanding, as you say, that it is detecting motion. Chalmers called that awareness which understands, or (using Nagal's approach) has a sense of what motion "is like" as having conscious experience (and then Chalmers said, "or experience, for short.) So experience is what we are talking about that defines consciousness, while awareness is simply the ability to detect information.

Would a conscious being have a sense of identity in the absence of rational thought?

In my opinion, yes. I've described in other threads how in meditation I achieve a no-thought experience almost every morning (for awhile at least). Instead of a loss of identity, I am very much MORE aware of my existence. I find non-stop thinking takes one away from self. And believe I see the sense of identity in most all lower life forms too.

I think self-awareness is just a aspect of consciousness present in intelligent beings, and not something fundamental to it. The hard problem is how to explain experiences. The experience of red, the experience of fear, the experience of self. Its called the hard problem because it can't be explained functionally. But I think that self-awareness could be.

Experience/self awareness . . . you are talking about the same thing. Experience is self awareness, that is the definition of experience. That's what you can't explain functionally, physically, etc.

I know I'm saying "you know" again, but this is hard to avoid because the experience of self is so central to our existence, and so also to our language.

YES! Now you've got it.

A frog would, in my opinion, have conscious experiences, but I don't think it would understand it was separate from the rest of the world. This is all just my take on it, and I haven't really read much about the self-identity aspect of consciousness. If you know any other articles that go into this kind of stuff more, I'd love to read them.

I agree. One of the things that evolving consciousness seems to do is develop a stronger and stronger sense of self, or what I call "individuate." Read more of Chalmers, it's his big point.

As for me, I have learned more about self by looking at my own consciousness. I would recommend contemplating one's "self" in silence to anyone.

 

[selfAdjoint]

The point of the argument is, you cannot create subjectivity with a computer program.

This is why I think these philosophers are misunderstanding AI. They assume that subjectivity is something that, in order to have it, you must deliberately program in. But the AI view, or anyway mine, is that subjectivity will happen when the "perfect" consciousness porgam executes. Similarly the perfect simulation of a bat will experience "what it's like to be a bat" when it runs. Thus my definition of consciousness: The experience of being a running consciousness progam.

 

[Paul Martin]

"information carrying strings according to a vibrational pattern across a dimension of consciousness that gets translated by our brain to resemble memory, knowledge and subjective truth to the individual.

consciousness is a place, we tap into it and project it's "image" onto our universe in 4d spacetime.

could it be so simple ?"

I think that it could be so simple, Ringo. Although I don't necessarily agree with some of your details or descriptions.

" To me the real question to ask is this; why it is that neither of us (and nobody else) can prove our case about the relationship between consciousness and brain?"

I think it is because we are making some false, implicit, unacknowledged assumptions. Some of you assume that there is nothing in reality outside of the physical world, and most of the rest of you assume that consciousness, if not actually seated in the brain, is associated in a more-or-less one-to-one relationship with the brains of live humans as well as maybe some, or many, other animals.

I propose that we consider both of these assumptions to be suspect, deny them, and then try to come up with a hypothesis that might offer answers to all the questions you have been debating in this thread. I have made a modest attempt to do that and I'll try to explain it here.

Along the lines of Ringo's proposal, I propose that consciousness is something completely separate from the physical world, that comes into contact with the physical world via brains. (I am indebted to Gerben for this particular wording.)

" You propose that consciousness is something completely separate from the physical world, that comes into contact with the physical world via brains.

ok

and then?"

And then we proceed to flesh out the hypothesis. In order to be clear about what it means to be separate from the physical world, we must be clear about what we mean by 'the physical world'. For the purposes of this post, let me define the physical world to be the familar 4D space-time continuum which is more-or-less accessible to our senses and instruments, along with its contents of fields and/or particles which might be there. Now, if string theory is correct, and there are additional dimensions, then we would have to discuss whether or not the extra space-time which comes with them is also part of the physical world.

This is strictly a semantic question. If we say that all those extra dimensions are part of the physical world, then if indeed consciousness were seated in those extra dimensions but not present in our 4D space-time, then we would have Ringo's conditions, consciousness would be inaccessible to conventional experiments, and yet consciousness would still be part of the physical world.

If we say that those extra dimensions are not part of the physical world, then we are denying the truth of string theory without any real justification for doing so.

Either way, my proposal is that consciousness is seated, i.e. resides or exists, wholly outside of our 4D space-time continuum in some sort of space-time environment spanned by extra dimensions. (Incidentally I think that those dimensions are astronomically large and that there is no cogent reason to suppose that they are curled-up, as they are commonly considered to do. I have discussed this point in another thread and received no convincing rebuttal.)

Next, I propose that consciousness comes into contact with brains in a way similar to the way in which a human listener comes into contact with a human speaker. Or in a way similar to the way in which two cell phones come into contact when a call is established between them.

In all these cases, the contact is established via some sort of wave that propagates information transfer between the two parties to the communication. In the case of speech, the waves are compression waves in air; in the case of the cell phones the waves are EM waves; in the case of communication between consciousness and the brain I can only guess. My guess is that, in the environment offered by those additional dimensions, there may be additional fields, analogous to electric, magnetic, or gravitational fields, which serve as the medium for the waves. The analogy doesn't have to be very close but instead it might be something completely new, just as the probability density waves of QM aren't very much like the familiar EM or sound waves.

In short, I see the brain as analogous (try to imagine a diagonal frog) to a cell phone. Cell phones these days can produce not only sounds from a distant source, but also images. It's not much of a stretch to suppose that the cell-phone-brain can not only transmit perceptions to the remote consciousness, but also receive willed instructions from consciousness which initiate and drive physiological processes such as muscle movement and hormone secretions.

In other words, living bodies are physical vehicles which are driven by a remote consciousness with a two-way communication path allowing for the consciousness to perceive the sensory impressions of the body and for the consciousness to deliberately cause willful and purposeful activity of the body.

I think this proposal suggests answers to nearly all the hard questions being discussed here. What I would like to solicit is any cogent reason why this proposal could not be true. In the meantime, let me take on some of those questions.

"What is so special about the particular arrangement of matter in our brain that prohibits simulation? We could simulate a pendulum, a solar system, gas in a container, but not this? Why?"

The same thing that prevents the simulation of a cell-phone by, say, a Martian who might have taken one of ours back to Mars to investigate it. Without the working cell-phone system of towers, transponders, relay stations, and EM field, not to mention another cell-phone on the other end with someone to talk to, the Martian investigator would get nowhere examining that cell-phone in all its detail down to the quarks and leptons.

" take a brain slice and put it into the most powerful e-microscope, show me a memory cell or the residue of an abstract thought, please."

Good point! Take a cell-phone slice and examine it the same way and show me a sound or the residue of a conversation, please.

" Just on a side note, those of you who claim all these functions of the brain, like knowledge, thought, etc., are a result of non-physical consciousness: what is the brain for?"

The brain is a communication device that connects consciousness with a body. It performs the same vital function as the transponder and computer inside a UAV (I think that's what they call those remote controlled airplanes) that enable a pilot many miles away to "fly" the airplane and be aware of what the airplane is doing and what the environment looks like from the perspective of the airplane.

"All that happens is photons hit our eye and cause a chemical reaction which causes electrical impulses in our brain. These impulses gives rise to conscious experience. I think the brain is the only place we should look to if we want to find the cause of consciousness."

I don't think that's "All that happens". I think you will have trouble trying to explain the "gives rise to" part. I think that looking only at the brain to explain consciousness is like looking only at one cell-phone in order to explain its function and capability.

"If we cannot explain how the brain produces consciousness then how the hell are we going to explain the how the brain produces the illusion of it? I'm not even sure what the difference is. It seems the same problems remain. I always thought certain aspects of illusions were a function of consciousness to begin with. How can you have an illusion without consciousness? Who is it that is experiencing the illusion? And how do they experience it if consciousness is just an illusion? This one just seems messy to me."

I think my proposal clears up the mess completely. First, we cannot explain how the brain produces consciousness because it doesn't. Now the brain probably (in fact I think almost certainly) can produce illusions simply by distorting some of the sensory perceptions before transmitting them to consciousness. As you point out, only consciousness can experience an illusion. In my view, the illusion that is going on here is that consciousness, in some circumstances, has the illusion that it is seated in a human brain. In the same way, I suppose that the remote pilot of a UAV during a period of intense concentration on an intricate maneuver might seem to be actually seated in the airplane.

"Consciousness is the ability focus my mind and or spirit on my experiences."

I agree. In my view, however, we have to be careful about the use of the word 'my'. In my scheme, mind, spirit, and consciousness are all remote, not only from the body and brain but from the physical world itself. The experiences, on the other hand, happen to the physical body but are known only to the consciousness.

"I believe as experience integrates, it establishes a non-intellectual certainty with past events we call knowing. "

I agree. It is the consciousness which knows the past events of experience.

"So experience is what we are talking about that defines consciousness, while awareness is simply the ability to detect information."

Not quite -- in my scheme. I haven't yet defined 'consciousness', but I would say that experience is the history of a body as reported to, and perceived by, consciousness. Awareness is the ability of consciousness to know that history, and, yes, consciousness acquires that knowledge by detecting information transmitted by the brain.. (I deliberately left out the word 'simply' because I consider this ability to be profound.)

"Experience is self awareness, that is the definition of experience. That's what you can't explain functionally, physically, etc."

I agree that you can't explain experience or self awareness functionally, physically, etc., but using self awareness as a definition of experience begs the question of what we mean by 'self'.

" It seems to me that this integrative quality of consciousness is what most establishes self, or subjectivity. (A computer can do all the rest, but not that.) Examining humans, it seems there is a very high realization of the integrative thing because we can function single-pointedly doing complex tasks. It's like all that's integrated into consciousness is right there guiding the focused human even though he might not be thinking about everything that's contributed to his knowing pool."

I agree. I think you put it well. In my view, however, keep in mind that the integrative quality and consciousness itself are outside the brain and the physical world.

"I say there is no possible way to know anything without being conscious...The experience of knowledge is precisely what we are talking about."

I agree. In fact, if I had to pick the one attribute which I think most completely describes consciousness, I would say it is the ability to know.

"The integrative function is absolutely the most crucial factor of consciousness because it creates the singular aspect which comes to control, oversee, know . . . and one of the things it "knows" is that it exists! That is what self/subjectivity is: self knowing."

I agree completely. I like the way you put it. I especially like your choice of the word 'singular'. It suggests what I think is an important question: How many distinct consciousnesses are there? Is there one for each living brain? Is there one for each brain that ever lived? My answer is that, no, there is only ONE consciousness in all of reality. That one consciousness drives all the bodies of all organisms and always has.

"But what if you could create some kind of link, so that you could access any part of their brain, and they could do the same to you? I think any separate individuality would disappear, and the consciousnesses would merge into one. This is highly speculative, and I don't expect anyone to buy it with what little argument I've provided here, but I just thought of it and I'm still working it out. Basically the conclusion is, there is only one consciousness, but it is divided up among the different systems. If you could join the information flow of two systems, the separate consciousnesses would disappear, and if you could somehow join all systems, there would be one consciousness remaining. Well that's all I have for now. I'll try to build on this (or realize how wrong it is) later."

I think you're close here, StatusX. In my view, your first sentence would make sense if by "you" you mean the one consciousness, and by "their" you mean individual human bodies. Then the answer to your "What if" question is that you would get something very like my proposal. You would get a single, non-physical consciousness accessing and communicating with organic brains via some kind of link. And, with this mechanism, the consciousness would be in a position to deliberately drive each organism through its history of physical experiences.
In this case, as you say, any separate individuality would disappear, not that "consciousnesses would merge into one", because there is only one consciousness. There would still be individuality among the various human bodies, but there would only be one self if by 'self' we mean qualities or attributes of consciousness.

"To understand consciousness, we first need to understand how do we ourself work. Human brain is that biological body part which drives our life"

I agree with both assertions. I'm not saying that I understand how our self works, but I think that my proposed hypothesis provides a way to come up with a logical and believable explanation.

I'll try to make sense of this explanation. Just as in a cell-phone, there is some specific part of the structure which generates the EM radiation which encodes outgoing information, and another specific structure which can detect incoming information from EM waves, there are probably corresponding structures in the brain. And, just as in a cell-phone where you would be able to locate and identify those specific circuits without the involvement of EM radiation, I think it should be possible to locate and identify specific structures in the brain which generate outgoing signals and which detect incoming signals. In my view, Hammeroff and Penrose have suggested the most promising possibility. I think the "antennas" are the dimers in the microtubules in the neurons. These little things can flip between two stable states in response to the local state of nearby dimers, but more importantly, in response to supposedly random quantum events. In my humble opinion, and I think this is in line with what Einstein thought, these events are not truly random but instead can be influenced by some hidden variable. I propose that the hidden variable is the deliberate action of the one consciousness which causes certain waveform collapses to occur in such a way as to start a cascade of classical particle interactions starting with the subatomic constituents of the dimer atoms, and ending with the flexing of muscle cells. Of course, it continues beyond that to, say, the pressure applied to the accelerator pedal, but those consequences are well known.

" One way around this is to say that these random collapses aren't truly random, but are affected by our consciousness. This is a very interesting idea, and I definitely accept it as a possibility."

Hmmm. Sounds like there is a possibility you might buy into part of my proposal, StatusX.

"Here's how I see the problem. Consciousness is something that goes around doing things,"

I would change that only to say, "Here's how I see the solution. Consciousness is something that goes around doing things."

I would appreciate any comments, especially those that point out my errors.

 

[Les Sleeth]

This is why I think these philosophers are misunderstanding AI. They assume that subjectivity is something that, in order to have it, you must deliberately program in. But the AI view, or anyway mine, is that subjectivity will happen when the "perfect" consciousness program executes. Similarly the perfect simulation of a bat will experience "what it's like to be a bat" when it runs. Thus my definition of consciousness: The experience of being a running consciousness program.

I think I remember Mentat arguing that the perfect consciousness algorithm will create subjectivity. Myself, I always assumed AI enthusiasts and epiphenominalists believed something synergistic happens which causes “self” to rise up above programming or physical processes.

 

[Les Sleeth]

Not quite -- in my scheme. I haven't yet defined 'consciousness', but I would say that experience is the history of a body as reported to, and perceived by, consciousness. Awareness is the ability of consciousness to know that history, and, yes, consciousness acquires that knowledge by detecting information transmitted by the brain.

First off, welcome to PF Paul. Yours was a thoughtful post.

In terms of my description of "experience" and "awareness," I was trying to explain how Chalmers seemed to define them in the article StatusX referenced. He appears to make awareness synonomous with simple detection. I admit I use the term "awareness" the same way myself.

However, I am not sure I can agree that experience is "history" (unless you are talking about being "experienced"). The actual present moment of conscious experience is what we have been debating about.

I agree that you can't explain experience or self awareness functionally, physically, etc., but using self awareness as a definition of experience begs the question of what we mean by 'self'.

I meant, awareness that knows it is aware (as opposed to awareness that doesn't, like a motion detector). You have to admit, the idea of subjectivity is VERY difficult to translate into concepts.

In my view, however, keep in mind that the integrative quality and consciousness itself are outside the brain and the physical world.

I suspect that is true myself, but I don't believe anyone can demostrate it is true. Until someone can, I am not sure you can make that statement any other way than as an opinion.

I especially like your choice of the word 'singular'. It suggests what I think is an important question: How many distinct consciousnesses are there? Is there one for each living brain? Is there one for each brain that ever lived? My answer is that, no, there is only ONE consciousness in all of reality. That one consciousness drives all the bodies of all organisms and always has.

Again, I suspect something like that myself. Let's assume there is ONE consciousness behind all the individual consciousnesses. Don't you think that the human body seems to be individuating, let's say, Points within that greater consciousness? If not, then I'd have to see my own conscious realization as illusory, and I don't believe that for a second. Isn't it possible for there to be both singularly conscious Points and for them to exist within a greater consciousness whole?

 

[meteor]

This paper is interesting
http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0303042
Towards a theory of consciousness: Proposal for the resolution of the homunculus fallacy with predictions
It argues thet any theory of consciousness must be able to deal with the "homunculus fallacy"

 

[Mohsen]

Why do we need to suppose consiousness is in any kind of space-time at all? our thoughts are non-local and are not time bond.

 

[Paul Martin]

Hi Les,

First off, welcome to PF Paul. Yours was a thoughtful post.

Thank you. Thank you.

In terms of my description of "experience" and "awareness," I was trying to explain how Chalmers seemed to define them

Yes, I understand that and I'm sorry. I quoted quite a few of you out of your contexts and tried to fit them into my context. I hope it was obvious that I did not intend to try to put words in your mouths nor to try to distort what you wrote. What I tried to do was to suggest that your thinking on a particular point might be close to what I was thinking. By quoting you directly, I hoped to elicit either an agreement or a disagreement, but at least to try to help each of us understand the other. If it came across any other way, I apologize.

I am not sure I can agree that experience is "history" (unless you are talking about being "experienced"). The actual present moment of conscious experience is what we have been debating about.

Actually, I was trying to expand the notion of experience into the past and so the past tense would be appropriate. I understand that the crux of the debate is what goes on in the present moment and I don't want to diminish or water down that idea. So rather than use the term 'experience' to refer to the past (as is common in vernacular when we ask, "Do you have experience?") I chose to use the word 'history'.

So I am not asking you to agree that experience is "history". Instead what I said was "that experience is the history of a body as reported to, and perceived by, consciousness". In the present moment, consciousness perceives whatever stimuli are being reported by the body at that instant. That is the experience you are talking about. But, since there seems to be a flow of "time" over the course of which these experiential moments follow one another in a "stream of consciousness", I wanted to expand the scope to include a set of experiences over a period of time. I think there are some significant relationships among the present moment, that stream of consciousness, the flow of time, and the notion of time in the physical world in which there is no such thing as "now" or the present moment. I have some ideas on how those things might be related in reality that maybe we can discuss sometime.

[By 'self'] I meant, awareness that knows it is aware (as opposed to awareness that doesn't, like a motion detector). You have to admit, the idea of subjectivity is VERY difficult to translate into concepts.

I think we agree. I certainly agree that the idea of subjectivity is VERY difficult to translate into concepts. And for the first part, in my view, the ability to know is the most essential aspect of consciousness or self, so I have no argument with what you said.

Paul: "In my view, however, keep in mind that the integrative quality and consciousness itself are outside the brain and the physical world."
I suspect that is true myself, but I don't believe anyone can demostrate it is true. Until someone can, I am not sure you can make that statement any other way than as an opinion.

I agree. That's why I prefaced my remark with "In my view".

Paul: "one consciousness drives all the bodies of all organisms and always has."

Again, I suspect something like that myself. Let's assume there is ONE consciousness behind all the individual consciousnesses. Don't you think that the human body seems to be individuating, let's say, Points within that greater consciousness?

I'm not sure I have a good grasp of what you mean by "individuating Points within consciousness". It is obvious that human bodies are separate and distinct individuals. Making the natural assumption that human bodies are one-to-one with individual consciousnesses, one could conclude that consciousnesses are also individual. If you assume that a greater consciousness somehow fractionates into individual pieces which seem to be autonomous then that would explain how a single consciousness drives all these apparently individual bodies. The problem is, how could it fractionate like that?

I think that a hundred years ago, the suggestion that one consciousness is driving all these bodies would have seemed unimaginable. But now, it is easy to imagine. We have time-sharing computers which host many individual, seemingly separate and unrelated, simultaneous threads of activity. At the risk of suggesting another diagonal frog, I think it is easy to imagine how a single consciousness could drive all these organisms "simultaneously" using some sort of time-sharing algorithm. I put "simultaneously" in quotes because I don't think they are really simultaneous. This probably should wait for another discussion at another time, but I think that in addition to multiple extra spatial dimensions, there are multiple extra temporal dimensions as well. This would open up several new possibilities for the illusion that all of us organisms are thinking and acting simultaneously when we may not be. A crude analogy would be a movie film with its own dimension of time as represented by the succession of frames. That dimension would be completely different from and separate from the time dimension in which the film was made or shown, or the time dimension in which the story of the film takes place. There are lots of possibilities.

If not, then I'd have to see my own conscious realization as illusory, and I don't believe that for a second.

Maybe we could work on that. If you accept my premises, then your own conscious realization would be illusory. You would be under the illusion that your consciousness belonged to the body of Les Sleeth when in fact you would actually be the one and only consciousness in reality. The illusion would be just like that of a user at a time-sharing terminal who thinks that the activity going on at that terminal is the only thing the host computer is doing. I admit that this proposition leads to staggering and sobering consequences. And I can understand that it might take several seconds for you to reflect on it and agree. But unless someone can point out to me why it cannot be true, the logic and simplicity of it compel me to consider it as a strong possibility.

Isn't it possible for there to be both singularly conscious Points and for them to exist within a greater consciousness whole?

Again, depending on how I interpret your question, I think I have described a way in which that can happen. I think that what you are calling singularity is explained by limitations on consciousness imposed by the act of driving an organism. It would be like the limitations on you if you put on goggles and gloves connected to a VR game. You would have the illusion that you were in the VR game environment, but your sensory inputs and your actions would be limited by the capabilities of the VR equipment. If you really got engrossed in the game, you might actually (if only for a second) imagine that you were that virtual player inside the game and nothing more. A friend once described this to me as the experience of a race car driver who is so focused and pre-occupied with the demands of high-speed driving, that all thoughts of his home or family or of anything outside that race car at the moment are completely absent. I think that driving a human being during waking hours is like that. I have a hunch that in sleep, and even in successful meditation, consciousness can access information from outside the body and its environment. Now I'm rambling and speculating so I'll stop.

Good talking to you, Les.

 

[Paul Martin]

Why we need to posit space-time for consciousness

Why do we need to suppose consiousness is in any kind of space-time at all? our thoughts are non-local and are not time bond.

Let's talk about space and time separately. I think time is easiest.

I think thoughts are time bound. Thoughts change from time to time, and there is a distinct ordering. That is if you think of a red maple leaf, and then think of a pink panther, you can't reverse that sequence. You can think those two thoughts in a different order later, but by doing so later you have made them into new and different thoughts. And they will both be later than those original thoughts. By introspection, I think we can observe that thoughts change in a dimension of time.

Space might be a little trickier. First of all, if consciousness were indeed resident in the brain, then it would be pinned to the locations in space in which the brain was located. So, for the physicalists among us, consciousness would definitely be tied to space.

But for those of us who think consciousness is outside of our 4D space-time continuum, we have a hard time even making the case that consciousness is the type of thing that could be localized at a point in space-time. Maybe that's what you are getting at. If so, maybe we see eye-to-eye.

Here's how I see it. I see consciousness as primordially fundamental. That is, I see consciousness as not only the very first thing that ever existed in the cosmos, but I see it as the only thing that ever existed even up to the present moment. I agree with Bishop Berkeley that what we think of as physical reality is nothing more than a very complex set of some of the thoughts of this consciousness. So, in this view, consciousness would be outside of space and our space-time continuum of however many dimensions is nothing but a set of concepts held in that consciousness.

Just one man's opinion.

 

[RingoKid]

Now, if string theory is correct, and there are additional dimensions, then we would have to discuss whether or not the extra space-time which comes with them is also part of the physical world.

What extra spacetime ?

Incidentally I think that those dimensions are astronomically large and that there is no cogent reason to suppose that they are curled-up, as they are commonly considered to do. I have discussed this point in another thread and received no convincing rebuttal.)

which thread man ?..I'd be well keen to check out how you come to think that. As far as I understand it, the all encompassing 11th dimension is the only astronomically large one, a virtual field of strings or sea of energy. The quantum foam which changes to accommodate the universe as it passes over it like a ripple in a spherical pond.

 

[Canute]

Paul Martin

In regard to consciousness as one or many I don't think it's right to say that we could not imagine it being one until recently, even for those with a scientific bent. Here's Erwin Schroedinger on the topic:


"How does the idea of plurality (so emphatically opposed by the Upanishad writers) arise at all? Consciousness finds itself intimately connected with, and dependent on, the physical state of a limited region of matter, the body… Now, there is a great plurality of similar bodies. Hence the pluralisation of consciousness or minds seems a very suggestive hypothesis. Probably all simple ingenious people, as well as the great majority of western philosophers, have accepted it.

It leads almost immediately to the invention of souls, as many as there are bodies, and to the question whether they are mortal as the body is or whether they are immortal and capable of existing by themselves. The former alternative is distasteful, while the latter frankly forgets, ignores, or disowns the facts upon which the plurality hypothesis rests. Much sillier questions have been asked: Do animals also have souls? It has even been questioned whether women, or only men, have souls.

Such consequences, even if only tentative, must make us suspicious of the plurality hypothesis, which is common to all official western creeds. Are we not inclining to much greater nonsense if in discarding their gross superstitions, we retain their naïve idea of plurality of souls, but "remedy" it be declaring the souls to be perishable, to be annihilated with the respective bodies?

The only possible alternative is simply to keep the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that, what seems to be a plurality, is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian MAYA); the same illusion is produced in a gallery of mirrors, and in the same way Gaurisankar and Mt. Everest turned out to be the same peak, seen from different valleys.

... Yet each of us has the undisputable impression that the sum total of his own experience and memory forms a unit, quite distinct from that of any other person. He refers to it as "I". What is this "I"?

If you analyse it closely, you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely, the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by "I," is that ground-stuff on which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones. Less and less important will become the fact that, while living your new life, you still recollect the old one. "The youth that I was," you may come to speak of him in the third person; indeed, the protagonist of the novel you are reading is probably nearer to your heart, certainly more intensely alive and better known to you. Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death. And even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out entirely all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore.

Nor will there ever be."

Erwin Scrödinger
The I That Is God

The illusion would be just like that of a user at a time-sharing terminal who thinks that the activity going on at that terminal is the only thing the host computer is doing. I admit that this proposition leads to staggering and sobering consequences. And I can understand that it might take several seconds for you to reflect on it and agree. But unless someone can point out to me why it cannot be true, the logic and simplicity of it compel me to consider it as a strong possibility.

I agree completely, but I have to admit it took me a few decades longer than several seconds to make sense of the idea.

 

[Fliption]

First of all, the whole reason I'm even talking about zombies is because of the possibility we could be them.

You may be a zombie but I am not. There is nothing that I am more certain of than this. This point you keep making is the one point that I just don't see. The only evidence that I have of consciousness is my own experience. The zombie illustration is pointing out a problem of epistomology about what we can know outside of our own consciousness and that it seems to be relegated to subjective knowledge only. It doesn't come close to questioning our own consciousness. You're taking this illustration too far I think.

Like Canute, I would argue that a planet of zombies would never contemplate the concept of consciousness. But because of the inability to functionally study consciousness, we have to concede that a zombie could find itself in the physical states required to discuss this topic.

 

[Les Sleeth]

Actually, I was trying to expand the notion of experience into the past and so the past tense would be appropriate. I understand that the crux of the debate is what goes on in the present moment and I don't want to diminish or water down that idea. So rather than use the term 'experience' to refer to the past (as is common in vernacular when we ask, "Do you have experience?") I chose to use the word 'history'. So I am not asking you to agree that experience is "history". Instead what I said was "that experience is the history of a body as reported to, and perceived by, consciousness".

I suppose I’d say that the history of our experience is what establishes knowing, and is the basis of memory of course.

In the present moment, consciousness perceives whatever stimuli are being reported by the body at that instant. That is the experience you are talking about.

Mostly, yes. I also believe consciousness can experience itself, apart from any external stimuli. In fact, I’d even go so far to say that the more self experience consciousness has, the more conscious the human being.

I think there are some significant relationships among the present moment, that stream of consciousness, the flow of time, and the notion of time in the physical world in which there is no such thing as "now" or the present moment.

As far as I can tell, there is nothing but “now.” It has always been now, and it will always be now.

I'm not sure I have a good grasp of what you mean by "individuating Points within consciousness". It is obvious that human bodies are separate and distinct individuals. Making the natural assumption that human bodies are one-to-one with individual consciousnesses, one could conclude that consciousnesses are also individual. If you assume that a greater consciousness somehow fractionates into individual pieces which seem to be autonomous then that would explain how a single consciousness drives all these apparently individual bodies. The problem is, how could it fractionate like that?

There is no need for the greater consciousness to fractionate. Imagine the ocean is consciousness, and let’s say a “point” in the ocean is a molecule of H20. At first the ocean is generally conscious “as a whole.” Then it finds a way to create little ice brains in its waters that one of its molecules of water can live in temporarily, until the ice brain melts. What being consciously separated (i.e., not essentially separated) from the whole does for the point is to make it individually conscious within the greater whole. When the ice brain melts, the molecule realizes that it has been part of the ocean the entire time, and that its temporary participation in the ice brain helped to “wake it up” to what and where it is.

I think that a hundred years ago, the suggestion that one consciousness is driving all these bodies would have seemed unimaginable. But now, it is easy to imagine.

I am guessing you mean unimaginable to science thinking. I am sure you know this is basis of the mystical aspects of all the major spiritual paths.

Maybe we could work on that. If you accept my premises, then your own conscious realization would be illusory. You would be under the illusion that your consciousness belonged to the body of Les Sleeth when in fact you would actually be the one and only consciousness in reality. The illusion would be just like that of a user at a time-sharing terminal who thinks that the activity going on at that terminal is the only thing the host computer is doing. I admit that this proposition leads to staggering and sobering consequences. And I can understand that it might take several seconds for you to reflect on it and agree. But unless someone can point out to me why it cannot be true, the logic and simplicity of it compel me to consider it as a strong possibility.

We have plenty of time to discuss this, but I disagree that individual consciousness must be illusory. If one, for example, has experienced and realized his place in the greater consciousness continuum, then that person is under no illusion that he is the consciousness of this body. Using the ocean-molecule analogy above, let’s say the water molecule learned a technique where instead of looking through his brain all the time, he turned his attention inward and experienced his connection to the ocean. After years of practicing this everyday, the water molecule “wakes up” and merges consciously with the ocean, but also experiences that greater aspect as an individual molecule, or "point" as I like to call it.

I think that what you are calling singularity is explained by limitations on consciousness imposed by the act of driving an organism.

Although I think the brain does help teach consciousness singularity, what you’ve depicted isn’t what I am talking about. Singularity is what I use to describe how the integrative aspect of consciousness functions. Watch a talented musician sing and play the guitar, and you know a great many understandings are all operating together as he exerts his will to achieve singing a song. He does that without having to think about each and every element that goes into his expression. That integrative aspect of consciousness is what I’ve been postulating is the basis of subjectivity.

It would be like the limitations on you if you put on goggles and gloves connected to a VR game. You would have the illusion that you were in the VR game environment, but your sensory inputs and your actions would be limited by the capabilities of the VR equipment. If you really got engrossed in the game, you might actually (if only for a second) imagine that you were that virtual player inside the game and nothing more. A friend once described this to me as the experience of a race car driver who is so focused and pre-occupied with the demands of high-speed driving, that all thoughts of his home or family or of anything outside that race car at the moment are completely absent. I think that driving a human being during waking hours is like that. I have a hunch that in sleep, and even in successful meditation, consciousness can access information from outside the body and its environment.

Yes, those are similar to the well-known analogies used to describe the illusion of thinking this body is the whole deal. The mistake I think a lot of people make is to believe either we must be nothing but the whole, or we must be the individual. From my own personal experience and studying the rich history of “self-realized” individuals, I am quite certain that both whole and individual consciousness are simultaneously possible if one learns the secret of the experience.

 

[StatusX]

since you are trying to understand Chalmers . . . his zombie argument is meant to show what's missing from physicalist theory. When you create your consciousness program, you think "they're the same as us," but that's not correct. The point of the argument is, you cannot create subjectivity with a computer program. Now, you might say one day it will be done, and then that will prove the computing model of consciousness was correct all along. But as of now, all that can be created are zombies . . . which is something that can mimic behaviors, but has no sense of "self" while it does it. There is calculation ability, but no understanding; there is sensing ability, but no actual appreciation; their is detection of the the color red, but no personal sense of what red "is like."

That isn't the point of the argument at all. It is impossible to know whether a computer program had conscious experience or not. For all we know, windows media player has a subjective experience. Chalmers never says what you just did. What I was talking about was that, given a system, it either has consciousness or it doesn't; two physically identical systems can't be different in any way.

Above you accused Canute of using his conclusion as his premises, but you are guilty of that in every point you make. You have assumed consciousness is epiphenomenal, yet that is what we are arguing. Neither you nor anyone else knows if subjectivity or advanced consciousness ability such as "writing books about buddhism, meditating" arises from physical causality. What we do know is that nobody can reproduce subjectivity with physical processes. Until someone does, then the question of all the causes of consciousness is open.

I think there is a big difference between what he said and what I said. He used "we are conscious" as a premise to conclude that "we are conscious." I argued that if consciousness was causal, there would be physically unexplainable events, like particles in the brain moving spontaneously in response to no physical force. I can't prove this is impossible, but I've done as much as I can with philosophy. Just to make this clear, are you saying that physical events like this do happen? Are there at least rules for when the physical laws do and do not apply?

There you've done it again, used your conclusion as a premise. Of course all the physical steps of a physical event is explainable in physical terms. What you do not know is what is setting those physical events in motion. You cannot assume it is another physical event!

Just to reiterate, you need to start somewhere in philophical arguments. I start from the point of view that there are physical laws that are unbreakable. I can't prove this, but I use it to make arguments, just like you use whatever your base philosophy is to make your arguments.

Yes you did misinterpret. What he said was just the opposite. The ability of, say, a motion detector can be said to be "aware" of motion, but it has no understanding, as you say, that it is detecting motion. Chalmers called that awareness which understands, or (using Nagal's approach) has a sense of what motion "is like" as having conscious experience (and then Chalmers said, "or experience, for short.) So experience is what we are talking about that defines consciousness, while awareness is simply the ability to detect information.

These are very vague terms, and I'm going to try to find another article by Chalmers to see if he gets more specific. But from what I've read so far, his main conclusion was that systems, like thermostats, are either aware or have experience, depending on your terminology. If you took this as meaning that they could detect information, then what did you think was the point of his paper? Thats trivially true.

As for me, I have learned more about self by looking at my own consciousness. I would recommend contemplating one's "self" in silence to anyone.

Maybe, but I think that we can't really figure ourselves out without getting outside the system. It would be like sitting in a windowless room and trying to figure out where it came from by staring at the walls.

This is why I think these philosophers are misunderstanding AI. They assume that subjectivity is something that, in order to have it, you must deliberately program in. But the AI view, or anyway mine, is that subjectivity will happen when the "perfect" consciousness porgam executes. Similarly the perfect simulation of a bat will experience "what it's like to be a bat" when it runs. Thus my definition of consciousness: The experience of being a running consciousness progam.

Exactly. That's what I've been trying to say. If you build a brain from scratch, atom by atom, will it be conscious when your done? If so, then consciousness automatically arises as a byproduct of certain physical systems. If not, what is it about the process of being born that endows a chunk of matter with some mysterious, non-physical property?

 

[StatusX]

I think it is because we are making some false, implicit, unacknowledged assumptions. Some of you assume that there is nothing in reality outside of the physical world, and most of the rest of you assume that consciousness, if not actually seated in the brain, is associated in a more-or-less one-to-one relationship with the brains of live humans as well as maybe some, or many, other animals.

I propose that we consider both of these assumptions to be suspect, deny them, and then try to come up with a hypothesis that might offer answers to all the questions you have been debating in this thread. I have made a modest attempt to do that and I'll try to explain it here.

Along the lines of Ringo's proposal, I propose that consciousness is something completely separate from the physical world, that comes into contact with the physical world via brains. (I am indebted to Gerben for this particular wording.)

And then we proceed to flesh out the hypothesis. In order to be clear about what it means to be separate from the physical world, we must be clear about what we mean by 'the physical world'. For the purposes of this post, let me define the physical world to be the familar 4D space-time continuum which is more-or-less accessible to our senses and instruments, along with its contents of fields and/or particles which might be there. Now, if string theory is correct, and there are additional dimensions, then we would have to discuss whether or not the extra space-time which comes with them is also part of the physical world.

This is strictly a semantic question. If we say that all those extra dimensions are part of the physical world, then if indeed consciousness were seated in those extra dimensions but not present in our 4D space-time, then we would have Ringo's conditions, consciousness would be inaccessible to conventional experiments, and yet consciousness would still be part of the physical world.

If we say that those extra dimensions are not part of the physical world, then we are denying the truth of string theory without any real justification for doing so.

Either way, my proposal is that consciousness is seated, i.e. resides or exists, wholly outside of our 4D space-time continuum in some sort of space-time environment spanned by extra dimensions. (Incidentally I think that those dimensions are astronomically large and that there is no cogent reason to suppose that they are curled-up, as they are commonly considered to do. I have discussed this point in another thread and received no convincing rebuttal.)

Next, I propose that consciousness comes into contact with brains in a way similar to the way in which a human listener comes into contact with a human speaker. Or in a way similar to the way in which two cell phones come into contact when a call is established between them.

In all these cases, the contact is established via some sort of wave that propagates information transfer between the two parties to the communication. In the case of speech, the waves are compression waves in air; in the case of the cell phones the waves are EM waves; in the case of communication between consciousness and the brain I can only guess. My guess is that, in the environment offered by those additional dimensions, there may be additional fields, analogous to electric, magnetic, or gravitational fields, which serve as the medium for the waves. The analogy doesn't have to be very close but instead it might be something completely new, just as the probability density waves of QM aren't very much like the familiar EM or sound waves.

In short, I see the brain as analogous (try to imagine a diagonal frog) to a cell phone. Cell phones these days can produce not only sounds from a distant source, but also images. It's not much of a stretch to suppose that the cell-phone-brain can not only transmit perceptions to the remote consciousness, but also receive willed instructions from consciousness which initiate and drive physiological processes such as muscle movement and hormone secretions.

In other words, living bodies are physical vehicles which are driven by a remote consciousness with a two-way communication path allowing for the consciousness to perceive the sensory impressions of the body and for the consciousness to deliberately cause willful and purposeful activity of the body.

I think this proposal suggests answers to nearly all the hard questions being discussed here. What I would like to solicit is any cogent reason why this proposal could not be true. In the meantime, let me take on some of those questions.

This is an interesting idea, and definitely the kind of explanation I would look for. Like I said, I think consciousness is physically explainable, albeit with a kind of physics we have never seen before.

That being said, I don't know what real content your theory has. Often people say things exist in "other dimensions" without really addressing what that means. Are these dimensions of space, or time, or something else? What else could there be a dimension of? And what about the fact that our conscious seems to travel in one direction in time?

I think that whatever the explanation is, I doubt it will agree much with our common sense, to an even worse degree than quantum mechanics. Most physics problems we deal are related to events we see everyday, and have seen everyday throughout the course of our evolution, so it is not surprising that our brains can deal with them. But there is no reason to assume our brains have evolved to be able to comprehend the real explanation of consciousness. Maybe there's even some kind of applicable form of Godel's incompleteness theorem that states that we physically can't understand it. But that doesn't change my opinion that there are definite rules that govern it. Maybe the only way we'll find out is to create some kind of AI that is capable of understading it, and when it figures it out it can explain it to us in some simplistic way we can comprehend.

You may be a zombie but I am not.

I was waiting for someone to say this.

There is nothing that I am more certain of than this. This point you keep making is the one point that I just don't see. The only evidence that I have of consciousness is my own experience. The zombie illustration is pointing out a problem of epistomology about what we can know outside of our own consciousness and that it seems to be relegated to subjective knowledge only. It doesn't come close to questioning our own consciousness. You're taking this illustration too far I think.

Like Canute, I would argue that a planet of zombies would never contemplate the concept of consciousness. But because of the inability to functionally study consciousness, we have to concede that a zombie could find itself in the physical states required to discuss this topic.

I agree, and I'm starting to doubt the possibility that we aren't really conscious. Its what makes things real. This is far from my only opinion, and in fact I've been mentioning it less and less. Now I'm trying to focus on consciousness as something non-causal that arises as a byproduct of a physical system. However, I'm not completely abandoning the idea, and I'm going to read some of Dennett's work to see what his arguments are. And I disagree that they wouldn't study consciousness. As I've said again and again, that's just behavior, and I think its physically explainable.

 

[Fliption]

I agree, and I'm starting to doubt the possibility that we aren't really conscious. Its what makes things real. This is far from my only opinion, and in fact I've been mentioning it less and less. Now I'm trying to focus on consciousness as something non-causal that arises as a byproduct of a physical system. However, I'm not completely abandoning the idea, and I'm going to read some of Dennett's work to see what his arguments are.

Dennett will simply get around the hard problem by defining it away. His views seem desparate to cling to a classical universe and they're no where near some of the ideas you have proposed yourself. So be prepared to be disappointed.

And I disagree that they wouldn't study consciousness. As I've said again and again, that's just behavior, and I think its physically explainable.

Read my words very carefully. This is a tricky subject. I agree that the behaviour demonstrated by a zombie who claims he is conscious can be physically explained. However, I do not believe that a zombie would ever casually find itself in such a physical state. It's like saying, it is possible for me to win the lottery. But I don't believe it will ever happen.

I believe some of the problems we're having is again with the way you are using the word physical. In an earlier response you said:

two physically identical systems can't be different in any way.

It's obvious from your conclusions from this statement that everything is physical to you. This is what Les SLeeth was trying to get across earlier I believe. By defining everything as physical from the beginning, you have no choice but to conclude that ...everything is physical! and therefore consciousness is a byproduct of a physical process. Of course you have already admitted this by saying that you believe everything follows determinable rules and that makes it physical. I just don't believe that's the definition that many here are using.

 

[Fliption]

Originally Posted by selfAdjoint
This is why I think these philosophers are misunderstanding AI. They assume that subjectivity is something that, in order to have it, you must deliberately program in. But the AI view, or anyway mine, is that subjectivity will happen when the "perfect" consciousness porgam executes. Similarly the perfect simulation of a bat will experience "what it's like to be a bat" when it runs. Thus my definition of consciousness: The experience of being a running consciousness progam.


Exactly. That's what I've been trying to say. If you build a brain from scratch, atom by atom, will it be conscious when your done? If so, then consciousness automatically arises as a byproduct of certain physical systems. If not, what is it about the process of being born that endows a chunk of matter with some mysterious, non-physical property?

Selfadjoints comment seems like a cop-out to me. Can you think of any scientific concepts where a satisfactory explanation is "If we mix A with B we magically get C" with no reductive explanation as to how or why that happens? You have said yourself that in order for this to happen, there would need to be some rules that are being followed. What are these rules? What Chalmers arguments claim is that these rules cannot be determined by materialism. So either they are not there or there are rules of engagement beyond materialism.

Chalmers arguments would claim that we can't reductively explain consciousness, not because we are ignorant. Rather, it is because there is no reductive explanation to be had. This would mean there are no "rules" that lead to consciousness as a by-product of brain processes. If the rules existed then there should be a way to describe them. Chalmers and others claim this can't be done, in principle.

So I think selfadjoints theory is fine to agree with. But he has a "hard problem" to solve before it will be convincing. And that will be quite a task. There's a reason Dennett chooses to ignore the problem by defining it away.

 

[Les Sleeth]

I argued that if consciousness was causal, there would be physically unexplainable events, like particles in the brain moving spontaneously in response to no physical force.

I can't see your point at all. How does consciousness being causal lead to physically unexplainable events?

I, at least, am not saying consciousness isn't causal. I am saying I don't believe it is caused by any known physical factors.

Just to make this clear, are you saying that physical events like this do happen? Are there at least rules for when the physical laws do and do not apply?

I doubt it, and there certainly are rules for when physical laws do and do not apply . . . but I don't see what relevance any of that has to this debate.

Just to reiterate, you need to start somewhere in philophical arguments. I start from the point of view that there are physical laws that are unbreakable. I can't prove this, but I use it to make arguments, just like you use whatever your base philosophy is to make your arguments.

Assuming physical laws are unbreakable doesn't mean physical laws are all there are, it doesn't mean the consciousness realm is 100% physical, and it doesn't mean that the physcial and the non-physical aspects of consciousness (if they exist) can't interact. You don't just "start somewhere" that's physical -- your start, middle, and end are physical! Don't you understand we are debating if consciousness is purely physical?

If you are going to argue everything is physical, that's fine. But you can't argue that point by saying "if it isn't a physical attribute then it doesn't exist." That's like arguing if the Bible is the absolute truth with somebody who only believes in the Bible, and to every point you make he answers, "well, if it is not in the Bible, it cannot be true." The whole point of the debate is to decide if there is reason to give the status of "absolute truth" to the Bible. So how can he use the Bible to justify itself?

These are very vague terms, and I'm going to try to find another article by Chalmers to see if he gets more specific. But from what I've read so far, his main conclusion was that systems, like thermostats, are either aware or have experience, depending on your terminology. If you took this as meaning that they could detect information, then what did you think was the point of his paper? Thats trivially true.

You haven't understood him, and when you do you will find out he isn't in your corner. I think you'll find Dennett more to your liking.

Look, this idea can be simplified. Consciousness has aspects which CAN be explained by physical factors. Simple detection ability is one of them, even a thermostat can do that. The computing aspects of thinking and emotional states can be too. Chalmers talks about all the things that CAN be explained with physiology as the "easy problem" of consciousness. With the easy or physical aspects of consciousness all you get is a zombie.

Yet we know there is a subjective aspect to human consciousness too. Since there are no known physical qualities that can cause that, it leaves the door open to the possibility that there is something also non-physical about consciousness. Someone like Dennett might argue that conscious experience really is a potential of physicalness, it's just one never seen before it was manifested for the first time by a brain. Okay, maybe he is right. If anyone produces conscious experience through AI, I'd say the chances are that Dennett is right. Personally I don't believe AI will produce conscious experience.

Maybe, but I think that we can't really figure ourselves out without getting outside the system. It would be like sitting in a windowless room and trying to figure out where it came from by staring at the walls.

Sounds like the voice of experience. But you are right, that is exactly what you are doing, staring at the walls instead of looking at that which is staring!

 

[StatusX]

Read my words very carefully. This is a tricky subject. I agree that the behaviour demonstrated by a zombie who claims he is conscious can be physically explained. However, I do not believe that a zombie would ever casually find itself in such a physical state. It's like saying, it is possible for me to win the lottery. But I don't believe it will ever happen.

But getting into that state is a physical process too. A zombie from birth who has all the "experiences" a human does (I'm using that word differently here) will manifest the same behavior as that person. And anyway, when I say "the same physical structure" I'm including whatever state the brain were copying is in. But we're getting off track.

I believe some of the problems we're having is again with the way you are using the word physical. In an earlier response you said:

two physically identical systems can't be different in any way.

It's obvious from your conclusions from this statement that everything is physical to you. This is what Les SLeeth was trying to get across earlier I believe. By defining everything as physical from the beginning, you have no choice but to conclude that ...everything is physical! and therefore consciousness is a byproduct of a physical process. Of course you have already admitted this by saying that you believe everything follows determinable rules and that makes it physical. I just don't believe that's the definition that many here are using.

The physical world, to me, is anything that follows rules. This isn't restricted to space, time, matter, or energy. I'd be thrilled if we could find a new fundamental "substance" and rules it obeys that explains these aspects as well as consciousness.

Selfadjoints comment seems like a cop-out to me. Can you think of any scientific concepts where a satisfactory explanation is "If we mix A with B we magically get C" with no reductive explanation as to how or why that happens?

Every theory makes assumptions at the bottom. Mix space-time and matter with these rules and you get gravity. I can only assume the most fundamental rules that we'll find will make some kind of assumption. But at least once we know what it is, we'll be in a much better position to question the truth behind the rules with philosophy.

You have said yourself that in order for this to happen, there would need to be some rules that are being followed. What are these rules? What Chalmers arguments claim is that these rules cannot be determined by materialism. So either they are not there or there are rules of engagement beyond materialism.

Again, I'm not sure what you mean by materialism. Does this mean we'll never know them? Or that they won't follow the basic rules of logic? Or that we'll never verify them experimentally, but we could conceivably come to them by rational reasoning alone?

Chalmers arguments would claim that we can't reductively explain consciousness, not because we are ignorant. Rather, it is because there is no reductive explanation to be had. This would mean there are no "rules" that lead to consciousness as a by-product of brain processes. If the rules existed then there should be a way to describe them. Chalmers and others claim this can't be done, in principle.

Can you point me to where he explains why the rules can't be found, even in principle? I'm not saying your wrong, I just don't remember reading that in this article.

I can't see your point at all. How does consciousness being causal lead to physically unexplainable events?

I, at least, am not saying consciousness isn't causal. I am saying I don't believe it is caused by any known physical factors.
...
I doubt it, and there certainly are rules for when physical laws do and do not apply . . . but I don't see what relevance any of that has to this debate.

I think you're misunderstanding me. By causal, I mean having an observable, physical effect on the world. And I know I'm getting confusing now, but by physical here I mean just the atoms, forces, etc.

This isn't a contradiciton with what I said before. There may be new laws we find that reference the mental world, and maybe the first of these is the wave collapse I mentioned earlier. But I think Newtonian laws and the laws of relativity, at least, can never be violated. And if consciousness had an effect on the physical world, they would have to be. (again, unless this effect is only at the quantum level, but then I can't see how it would affect our macroscopic behavior.)

Assuming physical laws are unbreakable doesn't mean physical laws are all there are, it doesn't mean the consciousness realm is 100% physical, and it doesn't mean that the physcial and the non-physical aspects of consciousness (if they exist) can't interact. You don't just "start somewhere" that's physical -- your start, middle, and end are physical! Don't you understand we are debating if consciousness is purely physical?

If you are going to argue everything is physical, that's fine. But you can't argue that point by saying "if it isn't a physical attribute then it doesn't exist." That's like arguing if the Bible is the absolute truth with somebody who only believes in the Bible, and to every point you make he answers, "well, if it is not in the Bible, it cannot be true." The whole point of the debate is to decide if there is reason to give the status of "absolute truth" to the Bible. So how can he use the Bible to justify itself?

I want to make sure you understand that I believe consciousness can be real. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm saying it doesn't have an effect on the physical world, because if it did, we would be able to observe particles moving spontaneously under no force, and similar violations of the laws of physics.

You haven't understood him, and when you do you will find out he isn't in your corner. I think you'll find Dennett more to your liking.

I don't have a corner. I'm open to any plausible ideas.

Look, this idea can be simplified. Consciousness has aspects which CAN be explained by physical factors. Simple detection ability is one of them, even a thermostat can do that. The computing aspects of thinking and emotional states can be too. Chalmers talks about all the things that CAN be explained with physiology as the "easy problem" of consciousness. With the easy or physical aspects of consciousness all you get is a zombie.

Yet we know there is a subjective aspect to human consciousness too. Since there are no known physical qualities that can cause that, it leaves the door open to the possibility that there is something also non-physical about consciousness. Someone like Dennett might argue that conscious experience really is a potential of physicalness, it's just one never seen before it was manifested for the first time by a brain. Okay, maybe he is right. If anyone produces conscious experience through AI, I'd say the chances are that Dennett is right. Personally I don't believe AI will produce conscious experience.

We'll never know if it does. And also, Chalmers does talk about the thermostat when he is addressing the hard problem. He does want to assign some kind of experience to it. Here's are a few quotes from the article. First, how he defines experience (the same way I do):

"The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience."

The main thesis of his paper, as I took it:

"... that information (or at least some information) has two basic aspects, a physical aspect and a phenomenal aspect. This has the status of a basic principle that might underlie and explain the emergence of experience from the physical. Experience arises by virtue of its status as one aspect of information, when the other aspect is found embodied in physical processing."

And next, the famous thermostat quote:

"perhaps a thermostat, a maximally simple information processing structure, might have maximally simple experience?"

I really don't think I'm misinterpretting this. He is saying there would be something that its like to be a thermostat. This is, more or less, a panpsychic theory. It says that it should be taken as a basic law that, given the right information configuration, phenomanal experiences will arise. If I'm way off on my interpretation of the paper, please tell me, but even if I am, this is the stance I'm taking.

Sounds like the voice of experience. But you are right, that is exactly what you are doing, staring at the walls instead of looking at that which is staring!

Way to be obnoxious and completely miss my point at the same time. Maybe its good that I don't have your "experience," that ideas aren't so firmly imbedded that I'm not open to the possibility they could be completely wrong.

 

[Les Sleeth]

Way to be obnoxious and completely miss my point at the same time. Maybe its good that I don't have your "experience," that ideas aren't so firmly imbedded that I'm not open to the possibility they could be completely wrong.

I'll start with this. After I recommend self reflection, it seems to me you answered rather shallowly. So I was trying to tease you for having an opinion without really seriously considering my proposal. No insult intended.

I think you're misunderstanding me. By causal, I mean having an observable, physical effect on the world. And I know I'm getting confusing now, but by physical here I mean just the atoms, forces, etc.

This isn't a contradiciton with what I said before. There may be new laws we find that reference the mental world, and maybe the first of these is the wave collapse I mentioned earlier. But I think Newtonian laws and the laws of relativity, at least, can never be violated. And if consciousness had an effect on the physical world, they would have to be. (again, unless this effect is only at the quantum level, but then I can't see how it would affect our macroscopic behavior.)

How do you know that? How do you know that Newtonian laws and the laws of relativity would be violated "if consciousness had an effect on the physical world"? All it might mean is that the core of consciousness operates a little differently than physical laws. But because we can see consciousness moving the body, it must also mean there is some sort of interface possible.

Before we knew about relativity, did it exist? If I proposed it as a theory to you, would you reject it because it violated Newtonian phyics? Actually, Newtonian physics works fine for certain situations, and relativity is needed for others. There's no "violation" necessary.

I don't have a corner. I'm open to any plausible ideas

.

So far all you've shown is being open to any plausible physical ideas.

Chalmers does talk about the thermostat when he is addressing the hard problem. He does want to assign some kind of experience to it. Here's are a few quotes from the article. . . .

"perhaps a thermostat, a maximally simple information processing structure, might have maximally simple experience?"

I really don't think I'm misinterpretting this. He is saying there would be something that its like to be a thermostat. This is, more or less, a panpsychic theory. It says that it should be taken as a basic law that, given the right information configuration, phenomanal experiences will arise. If I'm way off on my interpretation of the paper, please tell me, but even if I am, this is the stance I'm taking.

.

Okay, he confuses me too sometimes. If you were right, you'd think he would agree with his arch rival, Dennett, yet the two disagree regularly. However, if it's your position that phenomenal experience arises from information configurations, then as an empiricist, all you have left to do is demostrate this truth, right? I'll be waiting for your test results.

 

[Canute]

What I was talking about was that, given a system, it either has consciousness or it doesn't; two physically identical systems can't be different in any way.

Physically they can't be any different, I agree. Not if they're defined as physically identical. And when you can show that your consciousness is made out of matter you'll have clinched your argument. However, as it is not possible to show that matter is made out of matter, a well known problem, or to show that consciousness exists, this won't be easy.

Maybe, but I think that we can't really figure ourselves out without getting outside the system. It would be like sitting in a windowless room and trying to figure out where it came from by staring at the walls.

Yes, or chained to a bench in a cave, staring at the shadows. I didn't expect you to hold this view, and I couldn't agree with you more. But there's a contradiction between this and your other views. If consciousness is matter then there is no way for us to transcend the system. It is only by allowing consciousness to be more fundamental than matter - than the appearances, the shadows, the walls of the room etc. - that a reasonable resolution to this logical and practical problem, most clearly stated by Kurt Goedel, can be found. And it is only by personal practice, as Les was saying, that its truth or falsity can be detirmined. After all, you'll never be able to explore anyone else's consciousness.

 

[Pavel]

Les, I can see your description of the integrative function quite well and it certainly makes perfect sense to me, but it doesn’t explain what I perceive to be the cornerstone of consciousness. When I say subjectivity is a necessary component, I’m not referring to a collection of individual experiences nicely organized and retained. While I can see how such collection gives rise to the atomicity or unity of one state that you refer as the “self”, or “self-awareness”, I don’t see the subject, or the driver that filters, connects, and finally transcends or contemplates over those experiences. The process of accumulating those experiences is still in the realm of object manipulation, if that makes any sense. Why, in your example, is a good looking tree retained more firmly than other objects? It’s either because “the driver” chooses to retain it, or it’s because the biological neural network is structured/conditioned to react that way to a give stimulus. If it is the former, then the driver has to be accounted for, if it is the latter, then we’re back to zombies and artificial neural networks which can also retain external stimuli differently, but yet unable to transcend them. It is this transcendental quality that makes me believe there’s the “I” that cannot be viewed as an object or a collection of experiences. I think we’d be committing a logical fallacy if we reduce the entity that does manipulation to an object being manipulated upon. It’s the same type of fallacy that determinists commit when they assert “what we think is completely determined”. The statement is transcending the system of which it is part of, but that system is determined by definition, so how can it transcend it? I know my terminology is horrible here and I apologize for it, as I’m not up to speed on all of the philosophical jargon or the buzz words. But I hope I’m articulate enough to be understood. The point is, the way I read your account for consciousness explains how the constituents come together but I don’t see how it gives rise to a facility that transcends, infers, and most importantly generalizes experiences or even better, some abstract forms. You do mention what creates the facility:

The integrative function is absolutely the most crucial factor of consciousness because it creates the singular aspect which comes to control, oversee, know . . . and one of the things it “knows” is that it exists! That is what self/subjectivity is: self knowing. That is why the oneness aspect of consciousness cannot be reproduced by a physical thing made of zillions of atoms or 1s and 0s.

But I think it’d be fair to ask to explain how it creates it. In your statement, there’s a jump between retention and the singular aspect which knows itself. To me, a pretty big jump, and because of how I perceive the subjectivity of consciousness, I don’t think that kind of “object -> subject” jump is even possible. Or maybe, again, that’s just because I totally missed what you were trying to say

StatusX and somebody else suggested the subject springs into existence epiphenomenally, or even better, as an emergent property when you turn on the whole system of neurons. I’d like to address the emergent property in a separate post, but for now, isn’t that an ad hoc explanation? It is as rational to suggest that there are brain controlling green men being born as an emergent property when you turn on the system. So, do we allow metaphysics in the explanation for consciousness or not? I can solve a lot of mysteries with an emergent property explanation.

Thanks,

Pavel.

 

[Pavel]

If consciousness is matter then there is no way for us to transcend the system. It is only by allowing consciousness to be more fundamental than matter - than the appearances, the shadows, the walls of the room etc. - that a reasonable resolution to this logical and practical problem, most clearly stated by Kurt Goedel, can be found. And it is only by personal practice, as Les was saying, that its truth or falsity can be detirmined. After all, you'll never be able to explore anyone else's consciousness.

Heh, Canute, you read my mind why I was trying to formulate my post. Maybe there's one consciousness after all

 

[Pavel]

"The ultimate question is what causes the system to be transformed from state A to state B (firing of the fork dropping neuron)."

My resonse, first, the two theories you mention are both invalid. And also, i think you question is incorectly posed, which explains its unaswerability. Thought isnever a neuron simply firing and creating a cascade which eventually results in an effect on the body. Thought is a continuous process which never stops since the creation of the first neuron in the human embrio. Thus there is no State A, there is only a continuation of thought. The system transformation from state A to B does not exist, transformation is continuous. But to sort of answer the question, which i said beofore cannot be clearly answere the wasy it was posed, and thus i should reword it:

What is the difference between state A and state B and how did the mind get there.

Well, the neuron which created the cascade to drop the fork is unidentifiable, there is no one neuron associated with the command "drop fork". In other words a process created the action to drop the fork. Once this is assumed to be the case, the question is more easilly answerable. The process is an evaluation of thought, to evaluate thought more processes must be taken into consideration, some baing external stimuli. in essence there are many reasons why one would let go of a fork. One could find the fork too hot to hold. Or the fork too heavy, or one may have simply made a decision to let the fork go. The result in essence was created by a process not by a state. The decision to drop the fork may have well been thought over many times. One may have though, "when" to drop the fork, so then where can you pinpoint the neuron to cause the dropping of the fork? You can't; there is no neuron that thinks, thougth is a process. i'll stop here because I am starting to sound repetitive.

Wait a second, slowly and clearly . First of all, please define “thought” in your argument. I get an impression you’re talking about some abstract form that transcends the physical brain, in which case you defeat your argument with your own premise - thought is immaterial. If it’s physical, then what exactly do you mean by “Thought isnever a neuron simply firing and creating a cascade which eventually results in an effect on the body”. Then what is it, and how does it affect the body, physically? Please elaborate.

Second of all, I’d like to see some more meat behind your continuity argument. I don’t see a problem of creating a snap shot of the brain at any given point of time. Yes, technologically it’s impossible, but conceptually, just like I can pick a point on a continuous function, I think I can pick a point on a time line at which I can record values of all the subatomic particle-constituents of the brain. Now I’m not going to debate the continuity hypothesis and the whole Cantor set with real vs rational numbers problem (because I'm not good at it), but I'm sure of one thing - your assumption that time and matter transformation are continuous is just that – an assumption. Besides, if you successfully argue that they are, in fact, continuous, then, by implication, you effectively kill all the AI hopes of replicating consciousness with 1’s and 0’s, do you not?

So, until further clarification, I still think it’s fair to ask what causes the brain to be transformed from one state to another. The deterministic rules + random quantum events have been suggested. If that’s the case, I don’t buy into a single word you said about it for one simple reason – you said so because the it was a rainy day which obviously made you depressed, which made you conclude “we’re determined”, in a crude manner of speaking. Had it been a shiny day, you’d theorize that we’re all free and immortal. If you add randomness on top of that, then I’d have to calculate how many days in a year you’d come to the deterministic conclusion, and how many to something else, given the precipitation statistics, of course

Thanks,

Pavel

 

[Canute]

A zombie from birth who has all the "experiences" a human does (I'm using that word differently here) will manifest the same behavior as that person.

Could you cite a reference or two in support of this hypothesis?

The physical world, to me, is anything that follows rules. This isn't restricted to space, time, matter, or energy. I'd be thrilled if we could find a new fundamental "substance" and rules it obeys that explains these aspects as well as consciousness.

You seem to have a non-standard view of what constitutes the physical. If your definition is that anything that follows rules is physical then you need to make that very clear to avoid confusion. It'd probably better if you used a different term entirely.

Mix space-time and matter with these rules and you get gravity.

Lol. What are the rules made out of by the way?

This isn't a contradiciton with what I said before. There may be new laws we find that reference the mental world, and maybe the first of these is the wave collapse I mentioned earlier. But I think Newtonian laws and the laws of relativity, at least, can never be violated. And if consciousness had an effect on the physical world, they would have to be.

I'm not sure Newton's were a good choice of inviolable laws.

I want to make sure you understand that I believe consciousness can be real. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm saying it doesn't have an effect on the physical world, because if it did, we would be able to observe particles moving spontaneously under no force, and similar violations of the laws of physics.

It is perfectly possible to suppose that consciousness is causal without supposing that it violates any laws of physics. All it violates is the metaphysical assumptions of some, but by no means all, physicists.

I don't have a corner. I'm open to any plausible ideas.

It's no good just saying that.

We'll never know if it does. And also, Chalmers does talk about the thermostat when he is addressing the hard problem. He does want to assign some kind of experience to it.

"perhaps a thermostat, a maximally simple information processing structure, might have maximally simple experience?"

I really don't think I'm misinterpretting this. He is saying there would be something that its like to be a thermostat."

I think this is taken a bit out of context. If I remember right he was saying that this was a consequnce of a certain way of thinking, rather than arguing that thermostats were conscious. Also, he talks of minimal consciousness, which may be taken to mean that matter/energy at even the most microscopic level level embodies consciousness. I don't think he holds this view (it's known sometimes as microphenomenalism) but it's a more sensible way of thinking of conscious thermostats than as if they could be conscious as thermostats.

Microphenomenalism is quite popular by the way, with an excellent paper in a recent issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies.