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

[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.

 

[StatusX]

OK. I'm going to try to put my views aside for a minute and ask some unbiased questions. I'm not going to say my answer to them yet, I'm just curious what others think, if anyone cares enough to respond.

1. If you took a person, scanned their every atom, and then assembled an exact copy atom by atom, would this copy be conscious?

2. If so, would it, in any sense, be the same consciousness as the first person?

3. Say you decide to snap your fingers at a random instant. Could this have been predicted in advance by someone else with sufficient knowledge of the physical state of your brain a few seconds prior?

4. If not, does this necessarily mean that some particles or fields acted in a spontaneous way, in violation of the laws of physics as we know them? (eg., a neuron fires with no physical cause)

5. Could a computer ever have conscious experiences, in any sense of the word?

 

[StatusX]

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

I'm claiming that two physically identical systems in physically identical enviroments will physically behave identically. (at least qualitatively, since quantum mechanics introduces randomness) This is the basis of physics. If you disagree, it is your burden to provide evidence why the brain should be any different.

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.

Any suggestions? Maybe, the "natural world"?

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

I was explaining how a theory can't explain why its correct. All general relativity does is define terms and give us equations relating them. I'm not saying its all there is to gravity, its all there is to our current theory of gravity, and they'll probably be similar limitations to any theory.

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

Maybe not, but that avoids the question.

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.

If you mean the traditional laws of physics, as in QM and GR, then I disagree. These are deterministic, and causally closed.

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.

Well I don't think it was. If you do, are there some quotes from the article that support this?

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

This is interesting, and I think basically what I'm saying. I'll look into it.

 

[Fliption]

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.

The experience of a zombie isn't in the definition of a zombie. A zombie is defined as a being that is physically identical to a conscious being but it is not conscious. The point of this illustration is not whether or not this is possible or whether or not we are really zombies. It is simply trying to illustrate one thing of epistomology:

1) I cannot know whether a being is conscious by studying the physical makeup of that being.

Couple that with this:

2) I know consciousness exists because I am conscious.

And there's the dilemma. It appears that consciousness does exists and it isn't physical.

I do not believe that a conscious being would ever find itself questioning it's consciousness because it CANNOT have the same experiences of a conscious being. But to me none of this is relevant once you understand the point of the illustration.

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.

OK perhaps I misunderstood what you meant the first time. I can see another interpretation of your comments that I may can agree with. I could entertain a theory that says when certain physical processes are activated then it becomes possible for the property of consciousness to occur. I distinguish this view from one that says these physical processes create consciousness. My earlier remarks apply to this latter view(which is probably what selfadjoint really believes). Which one did you mean?

As long as we're inserting assumptions why not just make consciousness a fundamental element of reality(like Chalmers suggests) and all the problems are solved?

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?

It simply means that the current method of science which is to reductively explain everything as a consequence of interactions of energy, matter, etc etc cannot, in principle, explain "what it's like to be". So the suggestion is that consciousness should become a fundamental element of nature. This would not be materialism and would require some changes in the way we look at things. The current materialist paradigm is attempting to build a hammer out of houses.

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.

The rules I was referring to are the rules that direct matter to create consciousness. To know these rules is the same thing as having a reductive explanation for consciousness. Claiming this cannot be done is what Chalmers is all about.

I wasn't really referring to the set of rules that would govern the interface between consciousness and matter. I, like you, suspect that those rules DO exist and Chalmers does NOT make any claim on these rules that I am aware of.

 

[Les Sleeth]

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.

I am impressed you took the time to think about it. I respect that. I don’t know if my model is correct, but I can tell you haven’t quite understood it. So let’s straighten that out and see if the model then makes better sense.

First, keep in mind that the model as I am presenting it to you is being taken from reflection on my and other consciousness (mostly my own). I am sticking as closely as possible to what I hope is perfectly obvious to anyone who will take the time to examine how their own consciousness is functioning. I am discarding all the grand metaphysical “problems” thinkers throughout history have come up with, and just looking. So for me, this is only a process of 1) looking at it, 2) describing what is seen, and 3) arranging what’s seen in the natural order they appear to occur.

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.

Here is the first misinterpretation, or lack of communication on my part. You’ve mixed up the singularizing integrating function with the many things that can be integrated. I didn’t say subjectivity was a “collection of individual experiences,” I said that in consciousness there is an aspect which integrates; it is an aspect that allows us to collect related experience and integrate for singular activity. I gave examples of how the integrating function works on other things so I could go on to say,this is the same aspect of consciousness which establishes subjectivity.

Before explaining further, do you see this? Again, I’m not theorizing, I am looking right at it at this very moment trying to describe what I see. Right now I am typing and it’s flowing and I am not thinking much, just letting what I understand come out. My typing, my knowledge of the computer, my life experience . . . all of it is at the ready and contributing to my single-pointed production of this explanation. I know for a fact that I am seeing this in myself, and that I have had it as long as I can remember. I also see it in others, even animals.

So if you can “see” the integrative thing in your own consciousness, the next question is how could that have first established, and continue to develop, subjectivity. But before we can do that, I have to clear up another question you raised.

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.

I did explain this before, but I realize it’s a new concept. Again, look at your own consciousness while you think about this to see if it jives with how yours works. Aren’t there “events” happening all around you right now, whose details you aren’t paying much attention to? My computer makes a noise, it has been since I’ve been typing this, but I do not remember every second of that noise. Yet right now, while I am paying attention to it, I DO remember it. I am not inventing this explanation, I am simply describing to you what’s going on. When I pay attention to information, I can see quite clearly that I remember it more than when I don’t, even though there is a lot of information crossing the paths of my senses. So clearly, paying attention to in info/stimuli strengthens retention.

If you want to say that because the “driver” decides to pay attention he “chooses” retention, then I suppose you are correct. But you’ve left the realm of function and entered the realm of intent or will. I am strictly talking about function or how consciousness “works.” Regarding the neural network consciousness is dependent upon to receive information, that isn’t relevant to this aspect. Yes, the neural network feeds conscious information from the outside world; I say that one can obtain information from the “inside” world too. But in either case, retention still works the same exact way which is, pay attention and retention increases.

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.

Okay, so we are back to the integrative function. You say, “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 agree with you totally, and as I said in the first part of this post, a “collection” is not what my model suggests. To reiterate, I didn’t say subjectivity was a collection, I said the trait of integration which allows a collection of experiences to singularize for a complex focused task, is the same integration that establishes self. Analogy time.

The sun is an awesome team of specific mass and gravity counterbalanced by the nuclear conversion of hydrogen into helium. That’s the main thing a star is. But it doesn’t mean that plants here on Earth can’t use radiation for photosynthesis, and over billions of years of evolution be responsible for billions of different life forms.

Similarly, the part of us which establishes “self” also seems to have been harnessed for more complex processes, like integrating experiences for “understanding.” What we are trying to see is how and why the integrative function creates the absolute most basic feature of consciousness, which subjectivity. It just so happens, that’s your next question!

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.

Here’s where I challenged StatusX to contemplate his own being, and why I said my model has a problem because apparently not that many people take a very deep look at themselves.

How can you tell you exist? I know the mind can go off into fantasy about this, and imagine Matrix scenarios or some trip derived from idealism. But, again, just look and feel yourself. Isn’t that how you know you exist? You can actually sense your own self, it’s really amazing!

Here’s what I am proposing. I am suggesting that the very first experience a being has, the absolute most basic experience a being has, and the most continuous, non-stop experience a being has from the moment of birth and through each every moment one is alive is that of existing. That’s what feeds the integrative function of consciousness earliest, most basically and continuously, and that is what integrates most deeply and centrally. It is what we come to know as “me.”

The other integrative stuff comes later and is peripheral to the central core, like the sun, of what defines and maintains a consciousness.

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.

Well, we are talking metaphysics, whether is physicalism or “something more.” Here, the objective is to offer models that account for the most characteristics without violating a single instance of what is known to be true, and/or discrediting models because of what they fail to account for or principles they violate.

 

[anuj]

The mind disassociated with the body and having no thought what-so-ever except the one and only one that we still exist. Is it what we call consciousness?

 

[Les Sleeth]

The mind disassociated with the body and having no thought what-so-ever except the one and only one that we still exist. Is it what we call consciousness?

I'd put it, consciousness (whether disassociated from the body or not) is minimully the awareness of one's own existence. Thinking isn't necessary to experience existence.

 

[Canute]

1. If you took a person, scanned their every atom, and then assembled an exact copy atom by atom, would this copy be conscious?

Don't know, but personally I doubt it.

2. If so, would it, in any sense, be the same consciousness as the first person?

Same again.

3. Say you decide to snap your fingers at a random instant. Could this have been predicted in advance by someone else with sufficient knowledge of the physical state of your brain a few seconds prior?

There may not be a clear answer to this, since it may depend on the circumstances. I have no problem with the idea that many, perhaps most, of our actions are mechanical, and agree with Gurdjieff on this (who said that most people were machines, but that they didn't need to be if they woke up). Also, as Llibet's experiments slightly suggest, it may be that freewill consists in deciding not to do things rather than in doing them. (Also, it may be that consciousness is in part responsible for that previous brain-state).

There's an important issue here. It may be that brain processes are necessary to explain human behaviour, but not sufficient.

4. If not, does this necessarily mean that some particles or fields acted in a spontaneous way, in violation of the laws of physics as we know them? (eg., a neuron fires with no physical cause)

Believeing that consciousness is causal doesn't entail any violation of the 'laws' of physics as far as they are known. Don't forget that the doctrine of causal completeness is not a law, not yet anyway.

5. Could a computer ever have conscious experiences, in any sense of the word?

Don't know, but there's no evidence that we can manufacture consciousness, except the old fashioned way.

 

[Canute]

I'm claiming that two physically identical systems in physically identical enviroments will physically behave identically. (at least qualitatively, since quantum mechanics introduces randomness) This is the basis of physics. If you disagree, it is your burden to provide evidence why the brain should be any different.

I don't feel any need to provide evidence. I'm arguing that there is no conclusive evidence either way.

Any suggestions? Maybe, the "natural world"?

Something like that. I doubt that anyone here is arguing that consciousness is not part of the natural world, and subject to its laws. The question is whether the natural world is exhaustively described by physics, or whether physics misses things out. It's not hard to show that physics cannot exhaustively describe the world, (as Stephen Hawking says in his online essay 'The End of Physics').

I was explaining how a theory can't explain why its correct. All general relativity does is define terms and give us equations relating them. I'm not saying its all there is to gravity, its all there is to our current theory of gravity, and they'll probably be similar limitations to any theory.

I agree. Theories are not knowledge.

If you mean the traditional laws of physics, as in QM and GR, then I disagree. These are deterministic, and causally closed.

The physical world is conjectured to be causally closed. However there may be more to the world, and more laws operating in the world, than physics presumes. Don't forget that Buddhists and Taoists also say the world is governed by laws, and they are more extensive than the current list of the laws of physics. These are laws that operate across infinite numbers of universes for all time, not restricted to our little universe. That is to say, believing that there is more to reality than physics can describe does not entail giving up the idea of laws governing causation.

Well I don't think it was. If you do, are there some quotes from the article that support this?

Maybe you're right, I forget.

This is interesting, and I think basically what I'm saying. I'll look into it.

I can't give you a reference at the moment, can't find the paper, but you may find it listed at the JCS site. Quite often Chalmer's republishes JCS articles on his site. Related to this is Vol. 10 No 3, 2003, which is devoted to papers on panpsychism. Bear in mind this is a refereed scientific journal, so it might give you pause for thought that it should be devoting so much space to publishing papers on microphenominalism, panpsychism and other such 'unscientific' approaches to consciousness.

 

[Rader]

Jcs

http://www.imprint.co.uk/jcs.html

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs;jsessionid=ed89pcw7bl3l.victoria?

 

[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.

I agree. What I meant to say was that familiar mechanisms which might serve as analogies (e.g. computers, multiplexors, time-sharing, virtual reality) are more abundant recently.

Here's Erwin Schroedinger on the topic:

Thank you. That was very encouraging to read. I don't feel so far out in left field with my ideas after reading it. Do you have a link to the entire essay?

Paul