My definition of consciousness - non recursive

[SDetection]

But the language scaffolded human mind has already been agreed as having this capacity to break with the present tense observer status to "remember" and "imagine". That is to generate anticipations of what it would be like to be elsewhere in the past, elsewhere in the future, and not locked into located responses to immediate circumstance.

Remember I'm referring to "recalling" and "memorizing" as happening unconsciously.
So if you are generating imaginations of what it would be like to be elsewhere in the past, at the same moment you are also unconsciously memorizing them, and in the next state of your mind, you will be able to recall these imaginations. So based on those prior states of mind, you will be able to generate anticipations of what it would be like to be in the future. And hence my definition applies to this too.

A monkey is conscious but indeed cannot talk about yesterdays and tomorrows - words which by learned habit rouse states of perceptual expectation.

yes, the example of "yesterdays and tomorrows" was just for humans, it was for the sake of clarification, here is one that applies to monkeys:
When a monkey sees a banana at a distance, at the same moment, he is also unconsciously memorizing the banana position, then at the next state of his mind ,he will be able to recall that, and as he doesn't need to find out the position of the banana anymore, he will make a decision to move in the direction of that banana, he is now anticipating that he will get it at the end. So the monkey is using prior states of his mind to behave accordingly, and hence by my definition the monkey is conscious.

Actually it's the other way around, computers are just more powerful simulation of some aspects of our mental abilities.

How is it the other way round if the way computers (von Neuman machines being the kind you are talking about) do it is nothing like how brains do it?

Notice that, we simulate some functions of our brains, we are not trying to create similar brains, so we don't need to do it like the actual brain does it.

Perhaps if you want to strain the analogies, computers do do it the way symbolic and grammatical language does it

But using languages are also functions of our brains.

. So computers simulate the software. But they don't simulate the hardware.

I think by the definition of simulation, we are also simulating parts of the hardware.

 

[SDetection]

But note that there is a dependency problem here, no one can anticipate , predict or make a decision without knowing its previous state.
For example:
You will not be able to say "tomorrow will be Sunday" if you don't recall yesterday as being Friday.
Even more than that, the sentence "tomorrow will be Sunday" itself, you must be able to recall the state of saying every word before saying the next one.
Even further than that , the letters themselves, you can't say any letter without recalling the state of saying the previous one.
You can go even more extreme in regard to the muscles of speech.

All the memorizing and recalling happen unconsciously, and if at any certain moment you are unable to recall any aspect of your prior state, you'll just fall to the ground, because this is by my definition the state of being unconscious.

I think that medically speaking "being oriented in time and space" is not required for being conscious. Mentally ill people can lose both abilities but they are still conscious.

Hi, Being able to tell the time was just an example, it's not my actual definition of consciousness.

Also, when you wake up from a deep coma asking yourself "who am i? where am i?" you are conscious, right?

Yes, if you ask yourself "who am i? where am i?", that indicates that you are recalling the state of seeing yourself and the surroundings. So you are using prior states of your mind, and hence by my definition ,you are conscious.

Qualia (and the hard problem is talking about it) is not a result of our intellectual work: you can lose all your memory and still being conscious, you can be conscious on the last stage of Alzgeimer...

I don't think Qualia exist here.
And I think ,if anyone loses all of its conscious memory , he/she could be still able to use his/her unconscious memory to become conscious again and then generate new conscious memory.
But if an entity lost its unconscious memory forever, it will never become conscious again as it was. This entity will just have to start from the beginning as unconscious matter :).

An interesting experiment: (don't do it at home :) ) stand up quickly from the very hot bath and your vision becomes blurry and you can't even stand. So, brain hardware starts to malfunction - even the low level hardware like vision or orientation in space, but still you can think "I need to sit otherwise I can fall!" So qualia is something very very ancient in our brain (or not in a brain at all)

No, qualia doesn't explain anything in this situation:
What is happening here is, because you stood up too quickly, you didn't give your brain a chance to memorize all the aspects of your previous positions . And hence, when you are at the final position, you will not be able to recall all aspects of the states of your prior positions, and so you are losing consciousness in regard to your position, and as you can't recall all of your prior positions information, you don't know how to instruct your muscles so you can stay balanced. At the same moment there is other thought thread in your brain which is recording all of the action, and at the next state of your mind, you will know that you are unbalanced, and accordingly you will decide to sit down to protect yourself from falling.

Whuu whuu that sounds interesting, how about letting me see it instead ?Millions of words.

of course, here it is :

 

[ConradDJ]

2) We have no examples of "radical emergence" in the universe - radical emergence being the emergence of a new category of being from a different category of being.

3) Ergo: experience must be present in some form from the very beginning of the ontological chain of being.

Hi Tam -- I'm puzzled about this. I would have thought that the emergence of life on Earth surely qualifies as "radical"... and though we don't know exactly how it happened, there's nothing really mysterious about it. To the extent that self-replication gets going somehow, by accident, if you're very lucky, you have systems that can evolve. At no point do you suddenly go from one type of entity to another... what's radical / unprecedented is the new evolutionary dynamic.

These ideas are maybe a matter of intellectual taste, until there's a breakthrough that can really illuminate things in a new way. But to my taste, it's much more interesting to use the well-understood example of biological emergence as a starting-point for understanding how really new and unprecedented things can come into being in this world -- human subjectivity, for example, or atoms.

I can't imagine getting very far by taking human subjective consciousness as the model for a universal "inner experience"... since we know human consciousness requires both the most complex biological system in the known universe (brain) and a unique communications system (language) to function the way it does. I realize that human brains are not that dissimilar from ape brains, and there are animal precursors for language. But again, what's "radically emergent" here are not brains or languages per se, but the new evolutionary dynamic that develops them.

 

[Tam Hunt]

Apeiron, my feelings aren't hurt - what I find objectionable is your casual dismissal of others and their thoughts, those who I think deserve at least a modicum of respect, just as all matter enjoys a modicum of experience.

As far as systems science approaches to consciousness, can you post some links to relevant works? If you disagree that the hard problem is a problem then we'll simply have to agree to disagree and that's fine. But as far as systems/physical approaches to consciousness and a TOE approach, I'd suggest reviewing Reg Cahill's work on "process physics." He's a maverick physicist from Flinders University in Australia and he's developed a new physics based explicitly on Whitehead's process philosophy - similar in some ways, at least philosophically, to Bohm's approach. Both Cahill and Bohm take a big think approach to a unified theory of reality that includes consciousness. They both arrive at - as Freeman Dyson also did - an explicitly panexperientialist view of consciousness.

For Cahill, here's a link to a long paper, but I also recommend his 2005 book Process Physics:

http://www.scieng.flinders.edu.au/cpes/people/cahill_r/HPS13.pdf

I'm curious what you think of his approach.

For Bohm, his best works are 1980's Wholeness and the Implicate Order and 1993's The Undivided Universe.

 

[Tam Hunt]

Hi Tam -- I'm puzzled about this. I would have thought that the emergence of life on Earth surely qualifies as "radical"... and though we don't know exactly how it happened, there's nothing really mysterious about it. To the extent that self-replication gets going somehow, by accident, if you're very lucky, you have systems that can evolve. At no point do you suddenly go from one type of entity to another... what's radical / unprecedented is the new evolutionary dynamic.

Conrad, life is not radically emergent in my view. First, life is very difficult to define. I define it like this: life is first and foremost a continuum - not an either/or feature. Life is matter that acts against the statistical laws of nature. As such, life is present in some degree in all matter. This view is known as hylozoism and is an idea that is flirted with by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan in their 1997 book What Is Life? I suspect you will find this view hard to swallow - most do - but if that's the case I challenge you to define life in such a way that you arrive at a bright line between what is life and what is not life. With self-replicating RNA, prions, viruses, etc., we are now seeing vivid examples of the fuzzy border of what is traditionally viewed as "alive." We can avoid such parsing and intellectual timidity by simply accepting that life is not a special "all or nothing" feature that appeals to the vitalist impulse in all of us. Rather, we accept that life is present in some degree in all matter and we, as humans, are lucky enough to represent the pinnacle of life in the known universe.

[/QUOTE]These ideas are maybe a matter of intellectual taste, until there's a breakthrough that can really illuminate things in a new way. But to my taste, it's much more interesting to use the well-understood example of biological emergence as a starting-point for understanding how really new and unprecedented things can come into being in this world -- human subjectivity, for example, or atoms.[/QUOTE]

I certainly agree that intellectual taste is a big factor. But I think if we are attempting to create a comprehensive and rational approach to the universe and all its phenomena, we are practically forced to accept panexperientialism and hylozoism (and pantemporalism and panentheism, but those are topics for a different post). I'm not questioning emergence as a useful concept - we have myriad examples of emergence. But these are all examples of weak emergence, not radical emergence. How do we explain subjectivity - the inside of things - without putting it there at the beginning or somewhere else in the chain of being? If we choose not to put it there in the beginning, we need very good reasons to posit its emergence at some later point. We know that the universe generally operates as a continuum (with quantum mechanics the marked exception, which is a necessary feature of the universe as we get down to the very very small realm). As such, we need to avoid what I call the fallacy of qualitative distinction - this is the fallacy we often indulge in by positing a sharp break in nature when a continuum approach is usually better. The two examples I've given, re life and consciousness, are good examples.

[/QUOTE]I can't imagine getting very far by taking human subjective consciousness as the model for a universal "inner experience"... since we know human consciousness requires both the most complex biological system in the known universe (brain) and a unique communications system (language) to function the way it does. I realize that human brains are not that dissimilar from ape brains, and there are animal precursors for language. But again, what's "radically emergent" here are not brains or languages per se, but the new evolutionary dynamic that develops them.[/QUOTE]

This goes to the distinction between consciousness and experience. I'm not suggesting (and no other serious thinker has to my knowledge) that rocks or bacteria have anything approaching the richness of human consciousness. Rather, what I'm suggesting, basing my views on Whitehead and Griffin's panexperientialism, is that all matter has at least some tiny iota of pure experience - what it is like to be that little piece of matter from the inside. When we think through the implications of this view we arrive at some very satisfying conclusions re the nature of human consciousness, matter, energy, time, space, and an accompanying spirituality that is life-affirming and compassionate. These are all topics in my in-progress book.

 

[SDetection]

To Dmitry67:
Hi, do you have more examples of experiences that don't have explanations ?, if you do, post as many as you can.
thanks.

 

[Dmitry67]

SDetection, so you don't believe in qualia?
Can I put a hot iron on your stomach? You will cry from pain, but as qualia does not exist it is just a reaction of your brain to stimulus which help humans to avoid damage to your body and thus gave benefits for the natural selection, right? You don't FEEL pain, well, you REGISTER it as a computer, but it is not PAINFUL?

But seriously, how can we talk about something non falsifiable like qualia? Why if I tell you about non falsiable pink dancing elephants filling the whole space, elephants which do not interact by all 4 fundamental interactions including gravit and thus can not be detected in principle, everyone (including me) would laugh?

Why qualia can not be denied even it is unfalsiable? An answer is obvious. Do you still deny that qualia exists?

 

[Dmitry67]

To Dmitry67:
Hi, do you have more examples of experiences that don't have explanations ?, if you do, post as many as you can.
thanks.

Yes, a tricky question.
You know, there are some patients which can not tolerate some anesthetics or even all of them. So the only solutions is to hypnotize them during surgery. My question is: do then feel pain when they are hypnotized not to feel pain? An obvious answer is NO, but could you analyze this from the position "Hard problem does not exist"?

 

[SDetection]

SDetection, so you don't believe in qualia?
Can I put a hot iron on your stomach? You will cry from pain, but as qualia does not exist it is just a reaction of your brain to stimulus which help humans to avoid damage to your body and thus gave benefits for the natural selection, right? You don't FEEL pain, well, you REGISTER it as a computer, but it is not PAINFUL?

Hi,
Although I think we can virtually simulate any function of our brains (including feeling pain), let me think about the definition of pain for a while.

I don't think qualia exist.

But seriously, how can we talk about something non falsifiable like qualia? Why if I tell you about non falsiable pink dancing elephants filling the whole space, elephants which do not interact by all 4 fundamental interactions including gravit and thus can not be detected in principle, everyone (including me) would laugh?

Why qualia can not be denied even it is unfalsiable? An answer is obvious. Do you still deny that qualia exists?

I didn't read about all aspects of qualia. I meant that, it doesn't exist as an explanation of any of our conscious experiences.
I'm not denying qualia itself, and I hope you explain more about why you think Qualia involves in the state of consciousness.

Yes, a tricky question.
You know, there are some patients which can not tolerate some anesthetics or even all of them. So the only solutions is to hypnotize them during surgery. My question is: do then feel pain when they are hypnotized not to feel pain? An obvious answer is NO, but could you analyze this from the position "Hard problem does not exist"?

Well, if this could actually happen, I think hypnotizing could be also considered as a special type of anesthetics.
Anesthetics temporarily suppress the unconscious function that makes us memorize aspects of our state at any certain moment, and hence, because we cannot recall any prior state of sensing the knife, we won't feel any pain, we are actually unconscious in regard to our sense of touch.

 

[apeiron]

life is first and foremost a continuum - not an either/or feature. Life is matter that acts against the statistical laws of nature. As such, life is present in some degree in all matter.

Successful modelling of the hierarchy of reality must both "see" the causal continuity, and the important discontinuities.

It is indeed very logical to say all must be connected all the way down. Hence mind and life (bios) must in some sense be present all the way down. But then you also have to be able to say why there are also the major "phase transitions" we also see as being obviously there.

Ice is not water, yet it is also water. We do not expect to go all the way down to H2O molecules and see icyness or even liquidity and gassiness at that level of modelling. Yet the potential must exist in some way in certain properties of the molecule.

So I actually agree that we must have a pan- something point of view. Any pan- philosophy based on the vitalism or mentalism is obviously wrong as it treats life and awareness as substances - the entification fallacy. But many would be comfortable treating life and mind as complex forms, processes, global types of organisation.

So let's take the real process view, the systems science approach. The best pan- I've come across would be the pansemiosis story rooted in the metaphysics of CS Peirce. If you read Peirce, you will see how he does indeed start with human mental processes and then moves to a general view of the universe coming into being through a "self-knowing".

Then moving forward into modern era, we have more concrete models of fundamental semiotic form.

You could say that what connects all forms of organised matter in the universe - every level from atoms to minds - is the notion of dissipative structure. This is the theory of self-organising systems, based on thermodynamics, information theory, far from equilbrium systems, all that stuff.

So take a dust devil or tornado spinning across a landscape. These are in some sense alive and mindful. Alive because they are self-sustaining (for a while). Aware (admittedly at a stretch) because they negotiate a path and respond to obstacles.

As if happens, Sagan co-wrote Into the Cool with one of the key dissipative structure theorists.

Anyway, there are bodies of thought that seem to do a good job of modelling the continuum. But they are pan-form or pan-process, not pan-substance or pan-entity.

The hard problem is only a problem for pan-substance approaches. The reason is that substance (chora) is the local formless stuff. The discrete atoms. The H20 molecules. If you have your mind focused on this kind of vision - the atoms of reality - then any kind of higher organisation must catch you out as an emergent surprise.

Next, having agreed there is a pan- story of some kind all the way down, we must then have theories about the major discontinuities. We must be able to see why life and mind were phase transitions.

The simple answer here is genes, neurons, words.

Several times dissipative structures struck on new memory mechanisms, coding devices that could carry local information which could be used to act as systems boundary constraints.

Genes have this power because they discovererd the mechanical trick of sequencing. A complex 3D protein (a continuous form) could be created from a chain of atoms (amino acid sequences). This digitisation of boundary conditions - the constraints under which a protein would self-organise - allowed for recombination and so natural selection. Statistics could tinker with one little link in the chain at a time and see what happened to the global protein forms.

Neurons were also a digitisation move, but not quite as dimension-reducing as genes. Before neurons, cells communicated through diffusion of neuro-transmitters. Locality ruled. With neurons, there was a sudden removal of real life space and time issues - the need to diffuse. The processing of information could suddenly step outside these local constraints. The whole body was connected up "instantly", creating new possibilities for co-ordination and response.

So genes and neurons give you animal minds. We have a similar deal each time to mark a phase transition. The localisation of control over global boundaries. A digitisation move that creates control over dissipative structure.

The human mind was another phase transition due to words. Again like genes, a digital sequential code that allowed for a system's memory, a place to store information about global boundary constraints.

So intelligent theory can see both the fundamental continuity and the reasons for the major phase changes.

If I am impatient with Tam, it is because he talks up process yet thinks as an entifier. That is just such a boring mistake in the 21st century.

 

[Tam Hunt]

Apeiron, I think you are ignoring a key feature of the universe in your version of process explanation: yourself. Under your arguments thus far you are simply ignoring experience (subjectivity). Everything you've talked about thus far is explanation of the behavior of matter and information, which could at least in theory be exactly the same in the proverbial "zombie universe." I know - more than I know anything, literally - that I am not a zombie. I assume you are not a zombie. Accordingly, a comprehensive explanation of the universe would need to include an explanation of experience. Yours does not.

Experience, in my discussion thus far, can be thought of as a separate stuff (ontological category), and I've suggested that perhaps information itself is synonymous with experience, thus any theory of information systems and flows would necessarily be a theory of experience. I've also suggested that experience can be thought of as a property of all matter. These aren't really exclusive theories, unless we are very strict with our philosophizing. I'm not at this point decided as to which approach is better. But I do know that either of these approaches does at least explain in some manner a rather key feature of our universe: experience.

Discussion of genes, neurons and words is certainly important, but these are all part of the "easy problem." They simply go to how matter and information move. Without the key addition of explaining how mind and matter relate, we are left with only half an explanation of the universe.

 

[apeiron]

It is your choice to bang your head against the wall of the hard problem. If you insist on reifying experience, then you will always be troubled by its "existence".

I see it the other way round. My knowledge of social constructionism, psychophysics and neurology have shown me just how much this "solid thing" of an experiencing self breaks up into a complex process. Knowledge of the actual science does help dissolve that good old sense of mystery. Few people can even give an accurate account of "what it is like to dream", "what it is like to remember". People make grand claims about their subjective selves, yet they cannot even describe what is taking place.

And before jumping on the information theory bandwagon, it is worth understanding what that is all about. Simply the atomisation of global form. It is about accounting for form (ie: process, organisation, structure, systemshood) in terms of a substance ontology.

Again, it is falling into the trap of treating form as substance rather than seeing form as equally fundamental. Equally fundamental as a modelling perspective - we don't want to fall into that other elephant trap of dualism either.

So you are making all the familiar beginner's mistakes in consciousness studies.

You have to remember that what happened in science was that consciousness was a forbidden subject for decades. Then when it was allowed back in again in the early 1990s - largely because brain scanners came along and it suited many people to drum up a hunt for the neural correlates of consciousness to get these wonderful new machines and research empires funded - most people had forgotten what Victorian thinkers had already realized.

The community started from scratch, from scientific naivety. Thus we had Chalmers and Hameroff (and Crick and Edelman). We had a cartoon divide into the two opposing "schools of thought" science always requires to look as though it permits credible debate.

On the one hand, there were those shouting the slogan, hard problem means all your solutions are only the easy answers. On the other side were the reductionists who claimed no hard problem existed.

Both positions are childish extremes. If you want to get away from the simplicities of dualism vs monadism, you have to rise up another dimension to the triadic world of systems science, pansemiosis and hierarchy theory! The place where middles are no longer excluded, but instead bounded.

 

[SDetection]

to Dmitry67:
Hi, do you have more examples of conscious experiences ?.
thanks.

 

[Tam Hunt]

Apeiron, I love your consummate confidence. But I'd suggest you read a little more consciousness studies from before the 1990s before you conclude that considering experience real is reification. For example, maybe actually read some of Whitehead's work? I recommend his Process and Reality. It's difficult but worth the slog. His is a highly sophisticated TOE that actually includes the rather important half of our universe that I label "experience" - following Griffin's terminology. It is not reification to conclude that experience exists. Frankly, I don't see how any thinking person can conclude such - pardon the pun. Whitehead harps much on the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, so he's well attuned to the trap of reification. But you, my friend, seem to have gone off the deep end away from ification of anything.

It's also good to be cognizant of the distinction between experience and self/identity. I struggled mightily with Hoftstadter's works, in which he follows the Dennett view that consciousness doesn't exist. You seem to be echoing much of what Hoftstadter and Dennett have written. The mistake/confusion I finally realized was that Hoftstadter and Dennett are using the word "consciousness" to mean what I call self/identity. I agree with H/D that the self is largely an illusion - it's another one of these slippery terms that isn't really an all or nothing quality; rather, it's a quantitative "matter of degree" something. I am largely the same person I was a second ago, but just a little different as my body and thoughts have changed. I'm barely at all the same person I was when I was three and really all I have in common with that person is my name and some shared memories.

Experience, however, is quite different. Experience is instantaneous and doesn't actually require memory to exist. Self/identity is, however, durationally fattened experience.

Anyway, it seems highly unlikely that we're going to convince each other of our views, but I do appreciate the dialogue. I would also appreciate some links or titles for works along the lines of the semiotic/information process approach you've been discussing. You've mentioned Peirce, but I suspect there are many others you could refer me to.

 

[apeiron]

Thanks for recommending Whitehead. It sits on my shelf about six foot away. Yes I have read it. As I said, there is a lot I liked about it.

Authors I would recommend, off the top of my head...

Ulric Neisser
Stan Salthe
Stephen Grossberg
Walter Freeman
Lev Vygotsky
Alexander Luria
Fritjof Capra
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Robert Rosen
Howard Pattee
Ilya Prigogine
Robert Ulanowicz
Humberto Maturana

 

[apeiron]

Experience is instantaneous and doesn't actually require memory to exist.

How can you talk such garbage? Where is your evidence that experience is instant? As I'm sure you know from your extensive research, the fact that it is non-instant was about first fact that got psychology going - Donders and Wundt ring any bells with you?

 

[baywax]

If scientists are able to fight apoptosis(programmed cell death), our human bodies may become nearly eternal.

Sorry buddy... cancer mutation beat us to the punch. That's why cancer cells are called immortal cells, they've shut off apoptosis. If you want to be a walking, talking, ever expanding tumour for eternity... be my guest!

 

[Tam Hunt]

Apeiron, thanks for the reading suggestions - could you narrow your recommendations a tad?

Re experience as instantaneous, I wasn't as clear as I should have been: "instantaneous" in this context means "occurring in an instant," not the mathematical sense of instantaneous. So experience may at least in theory be quantized, though I suspect there are different quantizations for each type of experience. For example, a subatomic particle's quantum of experience is probably many orders of magnitude shorter than an ant's, which is probably a good order of magnitude shorter than human experience. This is the case because by the time a higher level "actual occasion" (with a "drop of experience" to use Whitehead's phrase) may be realized, as the product of many levels of constituent actual occasions, the informational "prehensions" take a bit longer to complete (in the "satisfaction"). So, in sum, experience is instantaneous in terms of each actual occasion's satisfaction. Self/identity is the apparent continuity of experience, but it is in my view a matter of degree, not one of kind. This is what I meant by self/identity is durationally fattened experience.

 

[apeiron]

Apeiron, thanks for the reading suggestions - could you narrow your recommendations a tad?

That was the narrow version.

For example, a subatomic particle's quantum of experience is probably many orders of magnitude shorter than an ant's, which is probably a good order of magnitude shorter than human experience.

Oh my gawd!