Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

need something between can't remotely be accounted for and nbd, going with fascinating new theory

i hope it's weird shit but i'm afraid it may turn out to be nbd

what I want to know is, if that exact combo of nuerons were to reappear somehow, would I be two people at once

uncomfortable and terrifying

not sure if I believe in it completely

whatever "you" is it isn't just a configuration of undifferentiated neurones

consciousness is an "I" we all share, maaaaan, you are your circumstances

its cool to think that we wouldn't exist if not for that one in a trillion chance that our sperm actually winds up making it to the goal line. we're all winners

Answer one is equiv of: ME! ME! ME! WONDERFUL ME!

Answer two is equiv of: I am Eeyore.

I'll go for number three.

Should've guessed everyone on here will have their own 'fascinating' theory.

haven't seen a fascinating theory yet? isn't the "truth" basically "we understand quite a lot but the big picture might be elusive for a while yet?"

Can a consciousness understand how that consciousness works? I think we'll need to build another one to understand it for us.

i vote weird shit given that the universe as a whole is kinda "weird shit" as far as I am concerned.

stuart kauffman has a pretty "fascinating" and totally weird theory about it being something like a "quantum state" (going from memory here) in which, like a kind of boundary line, consciousness is the liminal state that actualizes the possible. or the interface or membrane of a negentropic system--something that arranges the universe into analytic facts sort of "after the fact" of their unaccountable "thereness." or something.

and here's a great place for one of my favorite quotes, from George Spencer-Brown:

But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself. We may take it that the world undoubtedly is itself (i.e. is indistinct from itself), but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself. In this condition it will always partially elude itself.

ah sorry i cut off first part of that:

Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself.

This is indeed amazing.

Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all.

who was that dude that took acid and thought he was a rare species of lizard? then he started rattling off previously unknown facts about said lizard?

oh that was me

also I was reading an essay by Anthony Wilden on "analog" vs. "digital" communication yesterday and it occurs to me that part of the issue is that it's impossible to translate one into the other--actual consciousness sort of becomes the analog "environment" or excluded condition of digital communication about it (language, science, logic, etc). therefore "distinct from, and false to" the very phenomenon being discussed.

i think that other thread could be a good thread where scientists talk about how (some of them anyway) hold some non-scientific convictions they have based on higher intuitions but i'm getting kinda fatigued with the *big brains* trying to explain things i already know

this seems like a false dichotomy...

how do we not have a bunch of images with pot leaves on them in this thread by now, is what I'm saying

consciousness is no big deal to me. It's awareness that has always given me fits.

Niklas Luhmann has another one on this that I like a lot:

“If we were to make an effort to really observe our own consciousness in its operations from thought to thought, we would certainly discover a peculiar fascination with language, but also the noncommunicative, purely internal use of linguistic symbols and a peculiar, background depth of the actuality of consciousness, a depth on which words swim like ships chained in a row but without being consciousness itself, somehow illuminated, but not light itself”

voting weird shit

Nbd

The Krisna Consciousness people in my neighborhood would def vote 3, and I have seen them getting down to some epic ragas lately so I'm going wherever they're going.

Consciousness being weird shit isn't precluded by it being a bunch of neurons. It's weird shit caused by a bunch of neurons.

"caused by" doing an awful lot of work there.

but i'm not going over all this again!

my 'fascinating' new theory nicked from a bunch of ppl is that it's a curious causally effective epiphenomenon. so, weird shit.

rad quotes, ryan!
but please double check that you are not cutting off any of the text from now on, i got slightly headachy staring at a quote that began Thus before scrolling down to work it out.

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y55/silverbeam/A%20CSM%20Blog/epee.jpg

l to r: language, consciousness, mind

epee phenomenon

yep

nbd, had to happen somehow if it exists.

Fail to see eeyore connection tbh

More quotes, pls, ryan

No pithy quotes but two of the great papers in the 'freaky shit' school are pretty short and easy to read.

Thomas Nagel, What is it Like to be a Bat: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/nagel.htm
David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness: http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

I haven't found any similarly digestible papers from the 'ndb' school yet but here's a page on master consciousness-denier Dennett:
http://www.consciousentities.com/?page_id=322

i'm a Dennett stan and am quite happy with the "echoes of pre-formed decisions theory", thoroughgoing materialism is happily consistent in a way that metaphysics can't hope to reach

iirc you're a pretty aggro anti-theist ledge? not sure how that sits with wishful magic consciousness? no snark, just saying the logical answer is anti freaky shit

Not freaky at all, I love consciousness. What a gift. Damn.

Putting the talk of magic to one side, I think consciousness is completely natural, it's just of a natural kind that current science is completely incapable of dealing with. My argument for this is from direct personal experience. I know that I'm aware, that I have experiences, they are subjective & phenomenological, and they can't be reduced to an objective, materialist description. That's all covered by the two papers above. Yes I'm an aggressive die-hard atheist but to anticipate one possible objection, there's no analogy between what I've just said and someone saying they have direct personal experience of God. The latter is a particular instance of experience that is peculiar, far from universal, and potentially illusory (in terms of what it represents). My argument is from experience itself which is universal (assuming solipsism is false) and incontrovertible. It doesn't make logical sense to say all experience is illusory - an illusion is still an experience!

fair enough and i wdn't - can't - refute what you say but you realise a believer could equally claim their experience of belief is real and very far from singular yeah?

plus i'm not sure how you can argue that the experience of consciousness can't be accounted for directly by material causes?

dennett is a big fan of nagel and nozick and borges and freaky shit fyi

I don't think the believer's argument works because they're arguing about the reference of their experience. I don't deny their experience, but it doesn't represent what they think it does. Any individual experience can be illusory, but experience itself can't.

Have you been reading Fear of death.? I don't wanna go over all that again, it just seems self evident to me that subjective phenomenological experience cannot be captured by an objective materialist description. cf. Nagel's bats, Frank Jackson's Mary the Neuroscientist, etc etc.

I think therefore ILX

it's because the meaning of "accounted for" is extremely vague

xxxp

me too - i don't think a materialist accounting of consciousness is less freaky than others, in the same way that i don't think a determinist accounting of existence is less freaky than free will. Borges strikes me as pretty deterministic in partic. and Nozick is my favourite libertarian.

i been avoiding fear of death because altho the turn it's taken has been right up my alley i'm terribly affeared of death

also ok i can see that you can argue with the objective conclusions that the believer wants to draw from their experience. in fact that seems like the only objection you can draw, to me. the experience itself is difficult to refute, which is why most theism post enlightenment has retreated into subjectivism and given up the pre-enlightenment ontological bollocks.

i don't know nozick. free will i find an even more intractable problem - the consciousness problem seems 'merely' physical, science might have to change radically but i think the truth is out there. free will seems like a logical problem - either determinism, or randomness. neither a good fit, no room in between.

ps A real life Mary the Neuroscientist!
http://obscureandconfused.blogspot.co.uk/2006/07/something-else-about-mary.html

the consciousness and free will problems are interconnected for me, in both cases i struggle to imagine an agent that's outside of determinism but capable of acting deterministically.

love this thread, this debate and these links btw

I've been posting pictures of pot leaves all week in the Fear of Death thread, but I've been using those tags that can't be seen by stoners.

also, read Anarchy, State and Utopia by Nozick, i think it's my favourite book that i disagree with the major arguments of

good use of time andrew farrell

what i find funny about the fear of death thread is the pejorative use of "leap of faith". soren kierkegaard said we either take that leap of faith or sink into existential despair and a lot of deep thinkers have deeply thought that the leap of faith is heroic. so what, leap of faith is good enough for kierkegaard but not good enough for you?

:D

also thank you for prompting me to get down with Nozick again

what if this is all just a dream...in the mind of a child

what?

that would be stupid

has IlX been connected to the Tommy Westphal universe

consciousness is just the mind noticing it has thought something and seen/hear d something

you wanna unpack that a little bit?

what is the edge of time? do we ride it like a wavecrest? or is it a continuum unfolding? can we know the future? no. can we know the past? yes, in memory. can we know the present? no - it is just an abstraction

http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/jarofthoughts/20254817/3207/original.jpg

i can't avoid coming down somewhere between weird shit and nbd, which is to say that i have a theory. tbh, i wrote nearly 1,500 words on it last night, but then decided that was too long to post to the fear of death thread, so i filed it for later non-use. so here's some other speculative crap, occasioned by ryan's mention of stuart kauffman's theories. i invite anyone who actually knows something about kauffman and/or quantum physics to set me straight:

i sometimes think that wave-function collapse cannot exist in the material sense that some seem to say it does. i think it must instead be a mathematical metaphor describing the point where that which we do not yet know (an infinite sea of possibility) transitions into that which we do know (a finite reality). this is related to the way that the endlessly shifting present might be said to "collapse the wave functions" that constitute the not-yet-present. the former depends on the observer effect, while the latter seems to depend only on time.

how can we say that observation causes wave form collapse - and not, for instance, that wave form collapse allows observation - when these two things (observation and collapse) suddenly coexist in the indivisible present? isn't it possible that we're simply talking about the way what reality somehow congeals from nothingness, continually, in the ever-shifting, nonexistent present that somehow, "magically" contains all of reality? i wonder how we pretend to know what is cart and what is horse in the creation of the now. we can only say that reality is forever becoming on the infinitely narrow edge of the now, with nothing ahead but the void of possibility, and nothing behind but our unreliable memory of what was. perhaps this generative process only exists in our perception of it, and perhaps it would go on just the same if there were no one present to perceive any part of it. it seems impossible to say.

lol, questions asked much more efficiently by latham green.

how can we say that observation causes wave form collapse - and not, for instance, that wave form collapse allows observation
ooh, nice

truth cannot be known at all in a jar. why do you ask such questions? do you WANT freaky shit?

Id want a higher level of abstraction and merely call observation the drawing of a distinction. otherwise you're constructing an overly materialist "ground up" account that assumes the very thing it's purporting to describe: ie, how is observation possible?

moreover, I'd follow Niklas Luhmann and say it's a self-referential distinction (ie, that what is distinguished is both the same and different). as someone like Spencer-Brown (quoted above) would insist, it's that vacillation that in fact creates the rudimentary experiences of space and time. Luhmann has a great essay on this called "The Paradox of Form."

contenderizer if wave function collapse didn't exist you wouldn't have diffraction slit experiments

what is the edge of time? do we ride it like a wavecrest?

Pretty much. Given the speed of light, everything we look at is light traveling from the past, and the farther away, the farther in the past that light is from.

i think the issue that's obscure is what constitutes an observation and whether it involves consciousness

some german speaking physicists did and rejected physicalism entirely!

i think most people agree now not necessarily and that it's an artifact of the concept of intention that is not particular to quantum mechanics

time to break out the CTMU!!!

http://www.ctmu.org/

adam b i dispute your interpretation

if you are two light seconds away from me, events i observe happening in your zone are simultaneous with my observation, much as events in san Diego and London are simultaneous, but you're in the two light seconds off time zone, so your clock is two seconds slow, just like east Greenwich or whatever

time is relative motion - even Quasars fuck up sometimes

http://www.ctmu.org/

I smell time cube.

tesseractilingus

Holopantheism is the logical, metatheological umbrella beneath which the great religions of mankind are unknowingly situated. Why, if there exists a spiritual metalanguage in which to establish the brotherhood of man through the unity of sentience, are men perpetually at each others' throats? Unfortunately, most human brains, which comprise a particular highly-evolved subset of the set of all reality-subsystems, do not fire in strict S-isomorphism much above the object level. Where we define one aspect of "intelligence" as the amount of global structure functionally represented by a given sÎS, brains of low intelligence are generally out of accord with the global syntax D(S). This limits their capacity to form true representations of S (global reality) by syntactic autology [d(S) Éd d(S)]

Can't spell metatheological without lol

somehow methinks this whole discussion ties into the idea of whether we have freewill too

Hint: we don't.

Like, what would it even mean if we did? It's incoherent.

I took two entire philosophy classes in college btw.

pfft college is one long philosophy class

college life, dude, life.

the more you pick apart tihs dish of reality, the more secret shells lies waiting inside to be removed and faced as well - imagine a higgs boson in the shape of an armadillo

contenderizer if wave function collapse didn't exist you wouldn't have diffraction slit experiments

sure you could. diffraction slit experiments observe physical phenomena, and wave function collapse is a mathematical model that purports to describe what is happening "behind the scenes", so to speak. the physical phenomena do not depend on the mathematically modeled description we attach to them.

unless that's a sly joke, in which case ha

'Free will' is about as internally coherent as 'free market'.

there is no way to prove free will is not internally coherent without willing it freely to be so in which case you were destined to think that

in which case you were destined to think that

As a child I learned that classic gambit of asking a question, then whatever answer I got, I would ask "why?", then whatever answer I got, I would ask "why?", then whatever answer I got, I would ask "why?", then whatever answer I got, I would ask "why?", then whatever answer I got...

This line of reasoning merits the same consideration.

i sometimes think that wave-function collapse cannot exist in the material sense that some seem to say it does. i think it must instead be a mathematical metaphor describing the point where that which we do not yet know (an infinite sea of possibility) transitions into that which we do know (a finite reality).

see this is not correct

if it were so - that the electron really were in one state, rather than a superposition of two possibilites - humans would not see the interference patterns they do when they do diffraction slit experiments

there's probably a different experiment that negates this idea, but you could imagine a light packet leaving some kind of wake in the ether as it traverses space that accounts for the interference pattern.

As a child I learned that classic gambit of asking a question, then whatever answer I got, I would ask "why?", then whatever answer I got, I would ask "why?", then whatever answer I got, I would ask "why?", then whatever answer I got, I would ask "why?", then whatever answer I got...

This line of reasoning merits the same consideration.

similarly, attempts to disprove free will remind me of zeno's paradoxes. yeah, okay, the logic is cool, gold star for that, but the arrow and still moves from point a to point b and the hare still overtakes the rabbit. meanwhile, i freely decided that your argument is meaningless and that i will have a taco.

if it were so - that the electron really were in one state, rather than a superposition of two possibilites - humans would not see the interference patterns they do when they do diffraction slit experiments

wave function collapse is a mathematical explanation of the observed phenomena. it is not the phenomena itself, and it is not necessarily "correct" in any but an abstract, mathematical sense. though seemingly valid, it may be incomplete or even incorrect in light of what we do not yet know.

Speaking of weird theories surprised no one has mentioned Julian Jaynes--so I'm gonna mention him! Totally nuts but one of the more fascinating books I've ever read, and I came across a recent defense of it that deals with a lot of these problems, mentions Nagel, etc.

"we are spirits in the material world"

The Sting

though seemingly valid, it may be incomplete or even incorrect in light of what we do not yet know.

magic FTW

if it were so - that the electron really were in one state, rather than a superposition of two possibilites - humans would not see the interference patterns they do when they do diffraction slit experiments

Waveform collapse isn't superposition. The many worlds theory thinks it can get by fine without the collapse.

came across a recent defense of it

would love to see that, jaynes always struck me as insane, but wonderful

It's from a subscription only journal I think but it's called "What is it like to be nonconscious?" by Gary Williams

think back to those days in 1656 - what was it like?

smells like clean spirit: nonconscious effects of scent on cognition and behavior (utrecht university)

what if the voice in my right brain ... is god?

why did albrecht always make all those men have such weird asses in his engravings - herein lies the center of the riddle of time itself

The bicameral stuff is wonderful and insane. I love the image of these glazed early humans wandering about being commanded by the voices in their mind. (Very Snow Crash, that, too)

http://www.backtoclassics.com/images/pics/albrechtdurer/albrechtdurer_hercules_at_the_crossroad.jpg

His reading of the old testament is characteristically wild but actually kinda profound and moving if you take it as literary rather than "literal."

It's from a subscription only journal I think but it's called "What is it like to be nonconscious?" by Gary Williams

does this link work outside .edu access?

i voted 'freaky' but i don't really want to talk to anybody else about it, sorry but this headspace is mine and i'm not sharing

doesn't look like it ;_; xp

yeah, no

magic FTW

― the late great, Monday, July 16, 2012 12:41 PM (22 minutes ago)

harrumph. to admit that we don't know everything and that the map may not be a perfect representation of the territory is not to introduce "magic" into the equation. i don't dispute the mathematical validity of waveform collapse. i do, however, think it might be a mistake to equate the math too closely with what it attempts to describe. to the extent that they attempt to describe material realitity, mathematical constructs are abstract analogies, after all. we risk the pitfalls of argument by analogy (to refer back to our previous discussion) when we rely too heavily on abstract mathematical modeling as the provider of "real truth" about what is actually happening in the concrete, material world.

wait what is this conversation even about now?

fuck if i know

ok then let's start over

yeah, good plan. i'm going with "freaky shit" this time. shit is some freaky shit.

holy shit, i can't believe gary came up in this thread. dude is the husband of one of my best friends. i always found his affinity for jaynes quirky at best, but he is dedicated and works hard at his fascinating new theories, gotta give him that.

does this link not work?: http://wustl.academia.edu/GaryWilliams/Papers/156099/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_Nonconscious_A_Defense_of_Julian_Jaynes

"disagreeing with Ned Block" must be one of the #1 most popular philosophical activities

That link works, and yeah I got some issues. Ok it's a semantic problem but his use of 'consciousness' is highly unorthodox. 'J-Consciousness' might be a useful distinction but to call that and that alone consciousness and say that animals are non-conscious and so are we 90% of the time is highly misleading and unhelpful. And his dismissal of the explanatory gap/hard problem is perfunctory and unconvincing.

but to call that and that alone consciousness and say that animals are non-conscious and so are we 90% of the time is highly misleading and unhelpful.

yeah, this was my main problem with it when i first read it, iirc. i think he claims that only consciousness + language/symbolic thinking is actually consciousness, and then uses bicamerality to bypass an actual rigorous history of humanity's development of language and how that would've developed the human mind (i.e. a genealogy of language.)

I've never read Jayne directly but I can see why people think the bicameral stuff is wonderful & insane, some of the just-so stories in that paper lean heavily towards the latter though.

By essentially telling ourselves through a linguistically structured neural command to “keep at it” when engaged in a time consuming task (such as sharpening rocks), humans were able to develop cultural skills unparalleled throughout the rest of the animal world.

orly_owl.jpg

orly is a god

yeah, i'm really bothered that he was only mentioned and not actually pictured there. he looks like this:

http://anongallery.org/img/3/5/o-rly-orly-owl.jpg

that should be the blurb on the back of Jaynes' book.

i've always meant to read TOOCITBOTBM (pronounced "toccitibottom") cuz my parents were impressed by it once upon a time. same with godel, escher, bach.

i think both of those are great and the kind of books i wish were written more often.

I am actually pretty receptive to parts of Jaynes' theory. particularly the idea of consciousness as a product of cultural conditioning. but I love that book most of all because it's this imaginative engagement with the dawn of civilization, a period of history i just find so mysterious and fascinating. i remember being in Hawaii and seeing a display about how they think the first humans arrived there like 6000 years ago and i thought what it must have been like to sail across the ocean back then and their view of just what the world is must have been so different from ours. like, everything must have been so unimaginatively vast. of course there were gods, and magic, and all that.

Well I can certainly recommend GEB unequivocally; reading it pretty radically changed my adolescent mind about some stuff. Though some of Hofstadter's stances about cognitivism are less popular in the cognitive science world than they were 30 years ago. It's still a really delightful and informative book.

my stepdad told me about the general gist of jaynes' book when i was 13 or so, and because he was very learned, i just accepted the idea as sensible people consensus. i didn't question it until many years later when one of my professors gave me a funny look in response to my mention of how, once upon a time, everyone went around obeying the dictates of voices in their heads.

"i think he claims that only consciousness + language/symbolic thinking is actually consciousness"
is there anything really wrong with that claim? you'd need to propose a model of ego-consciousness that is devoid of linguistic processing, and i'm not sure if that's possible.

seems reasonable to think that consciousness could exist without language and symbolic thinking, but that gets into how we define consciousness.

i guess i'm just opposed to the idea that consciousness doesn't exist without language, or that consciousness w/o language is some whole other non-human type of process

agree

it's fine to be politically opposed to it, but you'd need to come up with a reasonable alternative. also why would you think non-humans don't have some kind of language?

Oh god let's not have a semantic argument. I think most people are pretty clear that whatever animals have, it ain't language.

i'm not "politically" opposed to it, i don't even know what that means. and i doubt that the consciousness that, say, cats experience is mediated by various types of meows running through their mind. xpost

or yeah, what ledge said.

i don't know how you can avoid a semantic argument when defining what consciousness is seems to be nothing but a semantic argument. (i don't think cats have a secret meow-based language, but they'd need some kind of abstractive mechanism to do anything clever)

I thought we'd been doing pretty well at defining - well discussing - what consciousness is (phenomenal, physical, illusory, magic, etc) not how we apply the term (awareness, introspection).

Do you think language is necessary for a conceptual schema?

i'd wager it is, but mostly because I can't fathom how you could devise a mechanism for holding concepts without it looking an awful lot like a language.

can you guys introspectively come up with any examples of what you feel is a conscious experience that isn't affected by a linguistic process in some way?

I find it hard to conceive of consciousness without a language-type structure. Parents to thread, there has been quite a lot of research into the early stages of mind and their relationship to language development, istr.

Were there real cases of "raised by wolves" types? Did any of them have anything they could articulate about their pre-language interiority?

i don't think cats have a secret meow-based language, but they'd need some kind of abstractive mechanism to do anything clever

i don't know about this. some birds know how to open electric doors by flying in front of the sensor. this is clearly not a dumbly programmed behavior that evolution has "selected for". it's something they've individually learned by observing and doing. but i'm not sure that it requires abstract, conscious thought. the system could work on nothing more than stored memory and desire: desire for food + awareness that food is <there> (in that direction, w/e) + knowledge that doing <this> allows access. the second part of that might not even be necessary.

I think it's best to consider bare consciousness as the perceptual ground or "environment" to any communicational process---that communication doesn't "represent" conscious experience but in fact excludes it as the very basis for it to be communication.

like, the owl might not actually be saying "oh, really?" it could be something that just sounds like that.

communication doesn't "represent" conscious experience but in fact excludes it as the very basis for it to be communication.

ooh, nice. i like that.

maybe "exclusion" is alone is misleading, though. you mean "exclusion of the thing itself (awareness of conscious experience) in favor of an abstracted representation of it (linguistic communication)", right?

which is funny because we remain consciously aware during linguistic thought and communication, even of linguistic thought and communication itself

Sorta--in semiotic or communication theory the first step for something to be communication is the introduction of the possibility of "not"--ie, this is the word "frog" and not a frog.

so the reason i wouldnt want to say "exclusion of the thing itself" is because we're then talking about the thing itself. it's more the boundary that's at issue.

yeah, that's what i thought you meant. i wonder, though, cuz that (second) formulation makes the negation seem so active. perhaps in the most primitive forms of symbolic communication, there's no awareness of the separation between the symbol and the thing. that's sort of a tangent, though...

Gregory Bateson has a famous essay on what he calls "meta-communication" in animals. As when dogs play fight it means "this bite is not a bite."

if you're talking about bare consciousness to be the summation of perceptual input, i'm not sure in most people that that would count as consciousness at all, since most of it is largely discarded. it'd be interesting to see how people with photographic memory operate, if they operate on entirely different modes of consciousness. a lot of people with really good facility at this seem to have pronounced synaesthesia (which again points to linguistic mechanisms at work)

can you guys introspectively come up with any examples of what you feel is a conscious experience that isn't affected by a linguistic process in some way?

Introspection can be pretty misleading, but it often feels like I can form a complex thought in my head far faster than I can select (not say) the individual words needed to convey it. If you said there was still a linguistic structure underlying it though I couldn't argue against that. How about going in the other direction, simple sensations, sights, sounds, smells? I might think "mmm frying onions!" but the sensation comes first, it seems to me.

if you're talking about bare consciousness to be the summation of perceptual input, i'm not sure in most people that that would count as consciousness at all, since most of it is largely discarded.

base consciousness needn't be so entirely base, though. it could be a combination of raw sensory input, a focus on the part of that input that seemed the most interesting/relevant from moment to moment, and a wash of triggered feelings and memories to give sense and texture to the moment (fear, desire, intention, hunger, affection, etc). i'd perfectly willing to describe such a combination as "consciousness", even if it lacked language and abstractive ability.

perhaps in the most primitive forms of symbolic communication, there's no awareness of the separation between the symbol and the thing.

this is an interesting idea that i've thought about before not so much in terms of total lack of awareness of the separation, but in terms of empathy, like the way a good drawing of something can make you feel something towards what is depicted. i'm thinking of cave paintings as early symbolic communication, and the idea of the paintings having a kind of talismanic power, a symbol as an expression of desire for what is depicted.

can you guys introspectively come up with any examples of what you feel is a conscious experience that isn't affected by a linguistic process in some way?

any time you learn to accomplish complex tasks without linguistic structure underlying it, say through muscle memory in a video game, or athleticism, or drawing. i suppose words can act as signposts for learning these things, but when it comes to really doing them, language can actually impede you.

stuff like repetitive learned tasks seem designed to pass these conscious experiences into the un/subconscious realm, so it's consonant with language's reduced role in those things.

Is this base level of awareness/sensation parsing (or even relatively complicated interactive motor control) the same "consciousness" Jaynes is describing as coming from the bicameral mind, tho

I mean, I don't want to beg the question by defining consciousness as something that is at a level that requires language just to show consciousness requires language, but it seems that there are certain mental abilities (deception, for instance) that can't be explained without the kind of structure that could map pretty well to a language.

Jaynes is writing about the "internal theater" of the mind--so kinda like the voice you use to talk to yourself.

"consciousness" is a notoriously fraught term--kinda laden from the start with what we could call Cartesian biases. I'm sure some would say we'd solve a lot of these problems by simply ceasing to use that word at all.

for fun, here's a bit from the first page:

A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns exclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror.

well there's a board description if ever i

animals have simple language, just as we have simple echolocation

at least when neuroscience types are talking about it they mean something with a grammar of a certain complexity. using that usage, anyway, no animals have language.

note that this is from informal conversations, might not be settled doctrine or anything.

I voted "freaky shit" - though of course there's nothing "weird" about consciousness itself. What could be more natural to us than the fact of our own consciousness? It only seems "weird" when you consider it from a certain point of view (ie., the "objective" view).

chomsky and o.nate otm

wouldn't you think the limits animals have w/r/t language also limits the quality of their consciousness? i wonder if depressed pets bounce back really quickly compared to their depressed owners because of this lack of depth to their depression.

quite the opposite, my dog can sit and stare glumly out the window all day

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

poll? huh? oh, yeah, this thread was a poll

wouldn't you think the limits animals have w/r/t language also limits the quality of their consciousness?

Maybe. But i would not say 'limits' because there are differences in sensory reception that in some animals perhaps produce an even more vivid awareness of the world than human have. If language is a way of sending and receiving signals to/from the outside world, it seems that a lack of human-sounding spoken language is more than made up for in other signals. Also most of their signals presumably deal with life & death, fight or flight, the natural environment, etc. rather than abstract arbitrary modern human noise so really who is the one with the lower quality of consciousness?

Not freaky at all, I love consciousness. What a gift. Damn.

― windjammer voyage (blank), Monday, July 16, 2012 10:40 AM (2 days ago)

This.

And, I wanna hug the late great's depressed dog.

why is dog bummed? is this chronic?

With all this demolition work at hand, why do the vast majority of physicists hold on to any kind of physicalist explanations? First, because the mathematics works. Second, because the alternative isn't taught in grad school. The alternative is to include consciousness in the mix. If the observer makes the difference between a wave and a particle, and if the universe displays itself to us as matter (which is all particles), then perhaps the observer is needed to make the universe appear as we see it. This possibility is logical and by no means outlandish. It occurred to some quantum pioneers (although not Einstein) almost a century ago, because in some ways consciousness is inescapable.

The universe does need molasses, or even glue, as forces holding protons together are sometimes called. There are huge complexities and mysteries that we are skipping over, yet the existence of the universe isn't a technical question open only to specialists with advanced scientific degrees. "Why are we here?" is a universal question, and to answer it, you must ask "Why are we conscious? Where did mind come from?" After all, if the observer plays such a key role in turning waves into particles, you can't get very far if you don't know what the observer is actually doing.

In the alternative explanation, the entire universe is imbued with consciousness. Just as there are force fields, invisible but all-pervasive, a consciousness field can exist to uphold the activity we call "mind." The universe evolves, regulates itself, takes creative leaps, and exhibits exquisite mathematical rigor and beauty. The hallmarks of intelligence are there, waiting for the next paradigm shift. At the moment, the word "intelligence" brings up the red herring of intelligent design, which no one except religious fundamentalists wants to be associated with. "Consciousness" gives us a less-tainted word, and there is a growing community of theorists seriously thinking about a conscious universe.

If it exists, then you and I are embedded in the consciousness field. It is the source of our own consciousness. Which means that we are not alone. As one physicist said, "The universe knew that we were coming." An infinite consciousness that spans all of creation sounds like a new definition of God. If so, then we are part of God's mind, and that includes science. The whole argument leads to a wild conclusion by most people's standards: It is God who is discovering the God particle. Infinite consciousness has created individual consciousness to go out into creation and look around. As it does, individual consciousness -- meaning you and I -- has been given free will and choice. We don't have to see our link to the infinite consciousness field. We can take our time discovering who we are and where we come from. But the day seems very near when it will seem quite real and quite natural to say that the conscious universe saw us coming.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/god-particle_b_1674717.html

i actually prefer to think of consciousness as a kind of blindness as much as awareness. attributing "consciousness" to God is just....hubris? at the very best it's a facile humanism.

fuckin deepak...

This thread needs Hegel to lay a smackdown on it, and explain that consciousness is both weird shit and no big deal, and the two are not opposed to each other.

he's in decent company at least. Gregory Bateson proposed a similar form of immanentism or holism:

The individual mind is immanent, but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind, of which the individual is only a subsystem. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by ‘God,’ but it is still immanent in the total inter-connected social system and planetary ecology. Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind inward to include the whole communication system within the body—the automatic, the habitual and the vast range of unconscious processes. What I am saying expands mind outward. And both of these changes reduce the scope of the conscious self. A certain humility becomes appropriate, tempered by the dignity or joy of being part of something bigger. A part - if you will - of God.

the problem or flaw with this point of view is that its claiming an observational position where the "whole" becomes visible at the same time it is disavowing it (we are "part" of that whole).

xpost haha at which point yeah Hegel becomes somewhat relevant (though i refuse to get into a debate about the dialectic...)

how is that a problem (xp)? the point of observation is conceptual and so can easily shift. or am i missing something

Bateson's view of the "Larger Mind" that he claims he is part of is (imo, of course) a metaphysical gesture because he's making claims about something as a whole that he only (necessarily) has partial views of. it's the same problem with his gesture towards "meta-communicational" discourses because those discourses are, by his own definition, subject to the same double binds he obverses in lower discourses--it's a horizontal move, not a vertical one, in other words.

so basically im saying he can't jump outside of the universe and see it from another position.

(cf Richard Rorty about our inability to jump out of our own heads or even our cultures!)

(though i refuse to get into a debate about the dialectic...)

That would be rather self-defeating, wouldn't it?

[not responding]

so basically im saying he can't jump outside of the universe and see it from another position.

...(cf Richard Rorty about our inability to jump out of our own heads or even our cultures!)

― ryan, Wednesday, July 18, 2012 10:55 AM (8 minutes ago)

this is probably a tangent, but one of the nice things about consciousness is that we are not strictly limited to our own point of view. i mean we are, of course, but also not. my consciousness is an island, and i am limited to and by it, but it is an island that contains all of reality. my consciousness models reality, and within that modeled reality is a model of my own consciousness which contains all of reality, which contains etc. so at some level, i can see "the whole system". of course, it's just a model, limited by its extrapolative nature, but that doesn't make it useless.

how do you know you consciousness is actually your own and not an illusion?

or a douglas adams fish-type thing you mean? wokka wokka? yeah, sure, that would be hilarious.

i actually agree contend, and i see that paradox as generative. "How can the world be in my head, and my head in the world?" that's kind of the frission of difference that make discussions like this one possible (and so maddeningly difficult). Not for nothing does Peirce model his semiotics on the map paradox. (ie, the map so perfect it includes itself, which then includes a map of the map, etc).

"How can the world be in my head, and my head in the world?"

love this. a couple years ago, i read a short novel by victor pelevin called the helmet of horror. it's about exactly that paradox. funny, too.

sounds right up my alley! gonna check it out.

any recommendation comes with an asterisk. it's basically a field in which long-winded symbolic characters exchange theories (and far too concerned with the novelties of the internet besides), but i had fun with the ideas involved.

is that the minotaur chat book? i looked for the audiobook version because i suspected voice actors speaking chat texts would be hilarious.

yup. the chat conceit generates some cringeworthy moments, but allows the characters to pontificate constantly, which seems to be the point.

did we solve the mystery of the depressed dog yet? i think that will be easier or at least a precursor to solving the mystery of consciousness

i just mean when he's left home alone, he's not like that all day every day

although when i first rescued him off the street he *was* like that for about a week

http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4099/4928943154_6e2aaf1036.jpg

what was his life like before? 1 week sounds like a really fast recovery time.

his life before seems to have been two to four weeks of running loose on the street in east LA, eating garbage and fighting rats

before that, no idea

i *think* he might have escaped or been let go from a puppy farm, he is apparently quite purebred but carries enough breed defects (localized alopecia in his case) to disqualify him as a show dog

at first i was like nbd but i just saw a picture of a 12 hour old kitten and now i'm freaking out

does the dog get happy about anything?

yeah yeah he's not a depressed dog!

i just meant that when he's depressed he's much more single minded about it than a person, ditto hungry or itchy

he can lick himself for an hour if he's feeling like it, i get bored after 20 mins or so

oh, well that just sounds like he's living in the moment.

i think that is exactly right as far as the big difference between humans and animals, not so much language as grammar, i am not sure if animals have as strong a sense of past and future as we do

living in the moment entails a lack of consciousness though, at least a lack of some transphysical governor that has the wherewithal to override base impulses.

There's no such thing as a transphysical governor.

unless you're a substance dualist in 2012

oh i don't know, my senile grandfather lives in the moment, breaking into songs and jokes in french whenever the base impulse seizes him. i know he's confused but he's definitely conscious.

Songs are kind of interesting in that people with severe impairment can seem to come alive for the duration of performing a song.

also, weirdly, surgery. (there's this surgeon with severe tremors who is able to control them during the concentration of surgery, but as soon as it over, the tremors come back with a vengeance)

he's alive all the time, just also in the moment, like a toddler

maybe alive's not the best word for it. continuity maybe?

I have a theory. Actually it's more than a theory, it's a growing conviction. Everything points to this, in my view. It's overwhelmingly likely.

All the phenomena we perceive through our senses are mere illusions. Reality is elsewhere. Through meditation, I have become familiar with this "elsewhere". It's a room containing a moth and a turtle. The turtle just sits in the middle of the room thinking about a difficult chess problem. The moth flutters around laying eggs. These hatch into caterpillars, which then make processions up and down the turtle's back. The caterpillars perform a miniature version of Joseph Haydn's opera The World on the Moon, composed in 1777. The turtle just ignores them, thinking about its intractable chess problem.

By intensifying my meditations, I have learned that in an early version of reality the turtle was thinking about Tetris, while the caterpillars were singing hits by The Brotherhood of Man. So I think we can safely say that reality is getting better. However, the room is not without its dangers. If the turtle ever solves the chess problem, the entire universe will vanish in a puff of smoke.

Luckily it's a very, very difficult problem. White only has a chance if black can be forced into zugzwang. I should probably shut up; the turtle can hear everything we're saying.

bingo

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I havent read this yet but it's entitled "Are We Living in the Matrix?" and looks pretty cool.

http://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/2012/07/living-in-the-matrix.html

Bostrom's simulation argument is a winner.

Counting this as a win for the anti-reductionists. Disappointing lack of actual fascinating new theories posted on thread though.

Hugh Pickens writes "Humans have pondered their mortality for millennia. Now the University of California at Riverside reports that it has received a $5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation that will fund research on aspects of immortality, including near-death experiences and the impact of belief in an afterlife on human behavior. 'People have been thinking about immortality throughout history. We have a deep human need to figure out what happens to us after death,' says John Martin Fischer, the principal investigator of The Immortality Project. 'No one has taken a comprehensive and sustained look at immortality that brings together the science, theology and philosophy.' Fischer says he going to investigate two different kinds of immortality. One is the possibility of living forever without dying. The main questions there are whether it's technologically plausible or feasible for us, either by biological enhancement such as those described by Ray Kurzweil, or by some combination of biological enhancement and uploading our minds onto computers in the future. Second would be to investigate the full range of questions about Judeo, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and other Asian religions' conceptions of the afterlife to see if they're theologically and philosophically consistent. 'We'll look at near death experiences both in western cultures and throughout the world and really look at what they're all about and ask the question — do they indicate something about an afterlife or are they kind of just illusions that we're hardwired into?'"

http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/08/04/230241/university-receives-5-million-grant-to-study-immortality?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29

i'm only halfway thru this, but it's directly relevant to the thread topic. so far it's one of the most brilliant things i've ever read, but be warned it's long and by no means easy. basic argument is that subjective experience constitutes a "transjunctive" or "reflective" operation as opposed to "conjunctive" or "disjunctive."

Gotthard Gunther, "Cybernetic Ontology and Transjunctional Operations"

http://vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/gg_cyb_ontology.pdf

I think maybe you meant to ask about "self-consciousness" as opposed to plain ol' consciousness. Is a baby conscious? Yes, certainly. Is it self-conscious? No, or at least not the way an older child or an adult is. Memory and self-consciousness are inextricably linked. Do you have any memories from before you were self-conscious? You don't, not really. You may have the odd isolated memory of an incident from when you were very small, perhaps even an infant (although more likely you only think you remember such incidents when in reality you were told about them after the fact and subsequently "created" a memory) but such memories are anomalous and in a case where such a memory is legitimate, I'd say the memory exists due to an isolated incident of self-consciousness before its time had really come.

Consciousness is not so terribly strange, but self-consciousness rather is... yeah.

I could be way off here and you really did mean to ask about consciousness, in which case, ignore this post.

Put another way, one can't ponder consciousness without possessing self-consciousness. So the question, "is consciousness strange or not" is really about self-consciousness. If you weren't self-conscious you would lack the ability to ask the question.

Sure only self-consciousness is aware of its own strangeness but it's the consciousness part that is strange, not the self part. Ok maybe the self part is an extra level of strangeness. Subjective awareness just is strange, one assumes other animals have it too even if they don't know it.

I think every living thing must be conscious, on some level, even plants. Self-consciousness, on the other hand, only seems reasonable to attribute to some animals, e.g. cats. Probably dogs too, though maybe not. Apes, definitely. The whole thing about it is that if you don't know it, you don't have it. Self-consciousness is knowing that you know. "Just knowing" isn't much more than moment-by-moment sensory awareness like even dumb animals have - consciousness. Once you know you know, things become interesting. "An extra level of strangeness"... how 'bout the primary level of strangeness.

dogs are so obviously more conscious than cats

Can self-consciousness be observed in third person?

"Just knowing" isn't much more than moment-by-moment sensory awareness

yeah but sensory awareness is just weird. this is my basic hobby-horse, that subjective experience is irreducible, and therefore weird simply by virtue of not fitting in with the objective scientific picture of the world.

Can self-consciousness be observed in third person?

with a robust idea of the neural correlates of consciousness and a decent brain scanner i don't see why not, in principle. would still be weird though.

re: gunther pdf, bits from the schrodinger paper sound v interesting but my eyes glaze over at formal logic and If we assume that subject and object are the inverse unit elements of an enantiomorph system, then it is possible to make empirically conjunctive statements about subjects and objects in a context where all terms are uniformly designated.

i had to look up "enantiomorph" and having done so i think his assumption is kinda groundless

i think it's grounded in the phenomenon we are trying to observe. i'd take the question of consciousness to be at the very least related to, if not identical to, the question of: how does the universe observe itself? in that respect talking about enantiomorphs seems relevant.

<i>with a robust idea of the neural correlates of consciousness and a decent brain scanner i don't see why not, in principle.</i>
seems like saying you can listen to the music by reading the bitstream from the CD player, imo. Depends on what you want from "observed", I guess.

Cats get embarrassed, right? Can you have embarrassment without self-consciousness?

"yeah but sensory awareness is just weird. this is my basic hobby-horse, that subjective experience is irreducible"

What's weird about it? That it's irreducible? It seems totally reducible and subject to deconstruction by any number of experiments that don't even require fancy equipment.

Frank Jackson (1982) formulates the intuition underlying his Knowledge Argument in a much cited passage using his famous example of the neurophysiologist Mary:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’.… What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/

The main thing to take away here is that philosophers love subjecting imaginary people to terrible circumstances.

"Depends on what you want from "observed", I guess."

^^this

it's probably not in the spirit of the argument but you can simulate color using a black and white set using some clever optical illusion-y effects.
Actually, I take it back -- that kind of optical illusion, or any kind of illusion shows how you can manipulate and deconstruct conscious sensory perception.
Those magic eye mall posters basically give you the power of Cartesian devils.

First of all not sure i agree with 'but she had all the physical information'.

I just read a passage in Carl Sagan's book "Boca's Brain", about the history of hypotheses about the magnetosphere of Jupiter. Over a number of decades all they had was spectral analysis of the light, and yet they were able to calculate within some amount of accuracy the displacement of the magnetosphere from the equator, the tilt of the axis, and so on. When Pioneer 10 spacecraft physically visited the Jovian atmosphere and took readings, they realized that the hypotheses were correct to a remarkable degree of accuracy. It validated their methods.

Why did it validate something that was already 'proven' by the hard science of mathematics? Maybe there is something inherently 'right' about multiple points of view agreeing with each other. It can be an agreement between two people in person. Or an agreement between two scientists using different methods to study the same thing over different periods of time. Or maybe even an agreement with yourself, your present self confirming an experience that your past self as observed.

It seems totally reducible

I agree that consciousness is somehow produced by - or supervenient on at least - neuronal activity. But I would love an explanation of how such activity can produce felt experience, subjective awareness. How similar looking activity can produce such varied sensations as the sweet sharp burst of a cherry tomato on the tongue; the fingernails down the blackboard feeling; sadness; the sudden feeling that someone is watching you. The best we could ever do (it currently seems) is just correlation - brain area A produces B. Causation - how that area, that neuronal activity, gives rise to subjective experience - is still a complete and utter mystery. And yeah Mary the colour scientist as a classic example, even if you had a complete map of the correlation of neuronal activity to experience, how would you know what something felt like unless you had experienced it yourself?

1. a lot of what people think they are experiencing aren't what they are actually experiencing (given the malleability of memory) so this notion of a privileged, impenetrable subjective world is already on shaky ground.
2. the experiences of synesthetics points to personal experience being completely arbitrary, so in fact we don't know what anything feels like, regardless of experience.

If the best that subjective experience can offer is arbitrary shaky models of things, then why isn't that, at least in the abstract, a reasonable explanation for how subjective experience arises? I.e. through shaky modeling?

1) they are still experiencing. a hallucination of redness is still red.
2) seems like a point to me, if anything. i know what my experience is like and i know there must be a "what is it like" for other creatures, yet it is inaccessible to me.

i don't know how this magical bootstrapping from a model of reality to subjective experience is meant to happen. really the idea of a model is meaningless without already supposing an agent who can identify the correspondences. it begs the question.

Is it not equally tricky to say you can have the model without the agent? The idea of the agent is meaningless without supposing the model.

The bootstrapping of both the agent and the model maps pretty well to infancy, istm. Both increase in complexity in complementary and symbiotic ways.

I think of the chess-playing machine as my go-to in these cases, and the only neat difference is that the observer of the game (the viewer who gives the mechanical operations their meaning) is running on the same hardware.

yes i guess that's equally tricky. ie very tricky! and complexity doesn't really add anything significant to the equation.

i feel like i (and y'know some actual real philosophers, i'm not a lone nut) am shouting about the elephant in the room and y'all are saying "what fucking elephant" and i don't think i'm the crazy one. but i can't be certain.

No! I mean, you're basically asking The Hard Problem, if I read you correctly, right? And that's still the big dog of consciousness questions afaik

Aye The Hard Problem. But Philip seems to be denying that it's a problem at all (and y'know that's basically Dennett's line so he's not a lone nut).

Dennett is usually having a pop at Chalmers when he does that, and Chalmers's claim that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe is a ripe target, I agree. But stripping that aside, Dennett's core is that the easy problems are all there are, and I can't buy that. You don't get to the poetry by examining the typesetting.

I'm on Chalmer's side tbh.

one of the nice things about the gunther piece i linked above is that it explores how and why these discussions tend to go in circles. our options, dictated by the logical structure of our language and thinking, seems to run down to

1) the world is entirely subjective (pure consciousness, idealism)
2) the world is entirely objective (realism, cause and effect, etc....this is the assumption we have to make to do "science")
3) there is a symmetrical relationship between the two--but this is unstable: the world is in my head and my head is in the world.

what's not really possible in classical logical formulation is to posit an asymmetrical relationship between the two and even to suppose that it's possible to say that there are degrees of subjectivity or objectivity in different experiences--or that experience can actually shift in one direction or the other over time, so that an "objective" happening with only the slightest element of subjectivity needed to experience it can then shit to greater degrees of subjectivity until its in the realm of fantasy, memory, narrative. and vice versa.

shift not shit! haha

" i know what my experience is like and i know there must be a "what is it like" for other creatures, yet it is inaccessible to me."
I'm saying you don't know what your own experience is like, but through outside manipulation, you can get a clearer picture of what it is you are actually experiencing (and probably more important, when you are experiencing it -- given how poorly we are able to sense the passage of time)

I don't buy the model/agent distinction -- if the model functions as well as the agent, then why don't you grant same agency privileges?
If the entire subjective experience of an organism can be modeled by three inanimate rocks, then why would you say the three rocks do not also share this experience?
re: the world, everyone's experiential world is purely subjective, but the degree with which we can manipulate it gives primacy and legitimacy to the objective world -- global warming doesn't go away by imagining it so.

I'm saying you don't know what your own experience is like

i know experience is in some sense highly fictional, e.g. the brain filling in details at the edge of the visual field, retrospective editing of consciousness etc. But do you not think that in another sense it's infallible? I cannot be mistaken that there is a patch of red in my visual field.

idk if this model business is a red herring. it's just another arrangement of particles, it gets us no closer to how experience arises.

You can totally be mistaken about a patch of red through any number of optical illusions.
Philosophers were able to deduce/predict a surprising number of physical mechanisms behind visual processing by examining the differences between what we see and what is there, without the fancy technology to confirm it.
I disagree that models are just another arrangement -- they are a particular arrangement corresponding with equivalent states of cognition with the thing they are modeling -- why not consider that experience doesn't have to arise from modeling because it is the modeling? That modeling and experiencing are synonyms?

You can totally be mistaken about a patch of red through any number of optical illusions.

you don't understand. it doesn't matter if i'm hallucinating, if there's an illusion, i'm not talking about what is out there in the world, i'm talking about the content of my experience. that there is a red patch in my visual field is undeniable. what causes it is open to question.

saying modeling and experiencing are synonymous is a million miles from e.g. saying liquidity and molecular motion are synonymous. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that we currently have *no idea* how that might work. it takes little insight to see it in the case of liquidity. it seems utterly inconceivable in the case of experience.

What constitutes a visual field? there's a lot of steps in visual processing and the "error" of seeing red could take place in any number of areas, any of which can be denied.

Introspectively, when you think about what it is to contemplate something, can you do it in such a way that you cannot also be said to be modeling that thing?

no, there is obviously correlation. it's a leap from that to causation (or identity).

what happens if there is spontaneous activity in my primary visual cortex such that i seem to see a patch of red? how is my experience mistaken?

It can be "mistaken" by further processing down the visual pipeline (or in another area of processing altogether) contradicting that, ultimately leading you to say "I saw blue" -- what is it you actually experienced then?

Putting it like that, what I experienced was the spontaneous fluctuation in my visual cortex, nothing more. So yes there will always be a physical correlation, but you can't say "you didn't see blue" - yes I did! It was right there in my (personal subjective private experiental) visual field!

Nah, we're pretty unreliable narrators in that regard.

Not if phrased "I remember seeing blue". How do you challenge that, exactly?

like if a light was red, and you drove past it, but you're utterly convinced of being a good, law-abiding citizen, you can resolve this by editing your master experiential narrative to having seen a yellow light.

oh sorry, i missed the step you were making from visual cortex producing red -> seeing blue, just thought you were changing colour terms for variety. also i erred saying primary visual cortex, i meant the last step in the visual pipeline (assuming for simplicity's sake that there is one).

so.

assuming there is spontaneous activity in v5, or whatever the final step in the colour processing chain is, which would correspond with seeing red in my visual field, then i will always see red. there can be no mistake there.

xposts.

well what do you consider the arbiter of what you, as a coherent identity, experienced? is it whatever controls speech? because I'd make the case that what we say (in internal monologues as well) would very likely contradict any number of activities that are actually going on in the brain.

as far as visual experience goes it is its own arbiter, i guess. yes there could be errors of speech or memory after the fact.

memory is a kind of conscious experience. so i can be sure *now* i'm seeing red, and be sure ten minutes later that i remember seeing yellow. but i shouldn't claim to be sure that i saw yellow. i don't think that's sophistry, not sure if it's useful.

if you allow that memory retrieval is equivalent to experience, why not modeling?

I'm not so sure there is anything you don't experience through memory. Even stuff you claim to be experiencing "now".

there are some interesting experiments w/r/t very short term memory which I think give a clue to the constraints of what's necessary for cognition. (the 5 +/- 2 thing etc...)

if you allow that memory retrieval is equivalent to experience, why not modeling?

I would distinguish between the subjective experience of memory retrieval and the brain mechanisms of memory retrieval. No different from the visual experience case.

let's try a different angle: if an entity is performing recognizable mechanisms of memory retrieval, would you allow that the entity is having a subjective experience?

Perhaps, perhaps. I'm basically a panpsychist u kno. Would you?

I'd say so, too, but if we accept that, why isn't that enough?

Because I don't know what it is like to be a bat. Or a bloody hard drive. Because Mary doesn't know what it's like to see red. Because phenomenal subjective experience is nothing like anything in physics. Because http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

I'd say you could know what it is like to be a bat insofar that the bat doesn't know what it's like to be a bat either, so you're both on equal bat-ground.

I mean going back to the entity question, if it's performing a recognizable memory retrieval mechanism, the fact that it is recognizable means you are performing an analogous retrieval yourself, so you are more or less experiencing the same thing.

A feedback loop signifying self-awareness?

I dunno. y'all could just be thinking about peanut butter.

I mean going back to the entity question, if it's performing a recognizable memory retrieval mechanism, the fact that it is recognizable means you are performing an analogous retrieval yourself, so you are more or less experiencing the same thing.

So I can only know (questionable even whether this analogically reasoning is enough for knowledge) what it is like to experience something I have already experienced? That's the point of Mary the colourblind neuroscientist. Scientific knowledge alone is insufficient or incomplete.

Feedback, models, complexity, none of these bridge the gap.

You can have false memories so you don't have to have first-hand experience of something.

A false memory is a first-hand experience!

The Mary problem is particularly weird and egregious in that in her scenario, she's probably the only person in the world who actually knows what the experience of "red" is like for anyone else.

The premise is Mary has been gifted with supernatural knowledge (i.e. implanted with false memories)

She knows no such thing! Aargh! WHY CAN'T YOU SEE THE ELEPHANT?!

xp

food writing is generally pretty bad, but a sufficiently gifted food writer could describe a novel food you have never eaten before and you would be able to recognize it upon eating it (because in a sense you have already eaten it)

In what sense?

I mean going back to the entity question, if it's performing a recognizable memory retrieval mechanism, the fact that it is recognizable means you are performing an analogous retrieval yourself, so you are more or less experiencing the same thing.

Wait, you're begging the question here. Whether you are experiencing the same thing when the same recognisable mechanisms are operating is entirely the point in question

If you don't accept that you are both experiencing the same thing, then there's no basis to say that you can experience anything "red" because red is a referent to an experience performed by an entity that is different from you in the present.

No it isn't. Unless you're talking about my prior self as a distinct entity. (Are you?) Otherwise the referent of "red" is my own prior redness experience.

If you're claiming that my experience of red is necessarily the same as, say, yours on pain of meaninglessness then you're again begging the q.

Yes your prior self is a distinct entity that ought not be afforded privilege over a stranger provided the recognition is there

It has inherent privilege over a stranger in that both of us share the same referent for red. The memories of the referent may be unreliable or faulty, but it's possible to hypothesise an instance where they are reliable and accurate.

There is no similar instance than can be posited between us and the other non-us agents that don't have access to that referential experience at any time, even hypothetically.

Why not? you are as much a stranger to yourself as you are to someone else, given sufficient time.

The ship of Theseus might have all new wood, but it still isn't the Titanic

Same shit different boat

293. If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word “pain” means a must I not say that of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?

Well, everyone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! —– Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a “beetle”. No one can ever look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. a Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have some- thing different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing con- stantly changing. a But what if these people’s word “beetle” had a use nonetheless? a If so, it would not be as the name of a thing. The thing in the box doesn’t belong to the language-game at all; not even as a Something: for the box might even be empty. a No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

— Uncle Ludwig, PI

whoops, graf continues:

That is to say, if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and name’, the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.

Let's all go read PI and then reconvene, I've been meaning to do that for a few years here…

I will if you tell me:

what he means by "drops out of consideration as irrelevant"
his intended level of irony
what we are to take from this passage

Dude it's Wittgenstein, figuring out what he means is the whole game.

hahah ok

i guess what i take from that is: "we all in practice act as if we know what pain is, so stop theorizing about private unsharable experiences"

i think we are entering a realm where we no longer have to theorize because the private unsharable experiences are becoming less private and more sharable, to the point where we can reasonably say lobsters feel pain so we should probably stop cooking them that way.

I was going to say, I think the way we experience pain is highly socialized behavior.

Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a “beetle”. No one can ever look into anyone else’s box

Terrible analogy. Pain has many visible corrrelates such as wincing and other facial expressions, grunting, swearing or other noises, limping, jerking the affected area away from the cause of the pain. These are largely reflexive actions and they appear to be fairly universal.

The existence of these universally-shared pain-reflex actions does not prove that the underlying experience of the pain that causes them is also constant and universal. But this situation is a very long way from a "thing in a box that no one can see".

That may be Witt's point. In context, the beetle in the box has something to do with addressing the possibility of a private language. To Witt, if pain were a beetle in a box, talking about pain would be meaningless. So pain, in the language game, must be something else. NB I am not a Wittgenstein scholar nor do I play one on TV. I can email one though and see if he can remind me what the private language argument actually means.

From Russell's Problems of Philosophy, chapter 4, "Idealism":

The word 'idealism' is used by different philosophers in somewhat different senses. We shall understand by it the doctrine that whatever exists, or at any rate whatever can be known to exist, must be in some sense mental. This doctrine, which is very widely held among philosophers, has several forms, and is advocated on several different grounds. The doctrine is so widely held, and so interesting in itself, that even the briefest survey of philosophy must give some account of it.

There is no mention of materialism in the index.

i think we can suss out the hard problem of consciousness in a few hours if we just try really really hard

It's signal feedback.

lol crut

the more i read and think about this the harder the hard problem gets

which is comforting, somehow

Sometimes I forget what the actual problem is. Then I try to explain my position...

i think we can suss out the hard problem of consciousness in a few hours if we just try really really hard

Bedtime over here soon but go ahead, I'll check your working in the morning.

here goes: it is a very complex process involving a vast number of physical ingredients.

Ok do these o

Oops

Do these physical ingredients individually have intrinsic phenomenal qualities? Or do such qualities somehow arise when some level of complexity is reached? Or are there no such things as intrinsic phenomenal qualities? Or option d which is...
(Genuine non rhetorical q despite appearances. )

Could you elaborate on what exactly you mean by phenomenal qualities?

i was convinced by at the very least the debunking part of 'consciousness explained.'

Xp you know, good old qualia. The only thing we have direct experience of. I've linked to it before but I can't put my position re: physicalism better than this:
http://guidetoreality.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/quotes-on-key-mindbody-insight.html?m=1

I suppose I should read Dennett in a spirit of know your enemy but I can't get over how willing people are to deny their own direct experience.

dennett is a good read

xp

tbf philosophy has got a long tradition of considering the possibility of being mistaken about direct experience

I'd consider engaging NV et al about determinism as applied to individual actions in conscious organic beings but luckily enough I can choose to go and make coffee instead

or at least you think you can

philosophy has got a long tradition of considering the possibilty of many crazy things. which is fine, i'm a crazyist myself. more curious about the popularity of this opinion among lay people. although it's not as if philosophers have a monopoly on crazy.

OK I read your link ledge and I'm still struggling to apply meaning to the use of the word "intrinsic" there. Reason perhaps being that I'm not defining the result of the complicated process of constantly firing neurons that is consciousness as something distinct from the physical, if that's what you're saying (please be kind because I may have misread it entirely)? Same way with a computer I wouldn't confuse a functioning operating system as a distinct force from the physical pieces that make up the hardware. Am I way off?

no i agree that emergent behaviour isn't distinct from the physical. i'm talking about the 'what it is like', the felt nature of consciousness. maybe 'intrinsic' is misleading or needlessly obscure, but i guess it comes from the idea we know what consciousness feels like from the inside, and it's this feeling that isn't captured by the physicalist picture. physical systems, including complex emergent ones, are fully explicable from the outside, consciousness isn't - cf. nagel's 'what is it like to be a bat', frank jackson's 'mary the colour scientist' (i know he changed his mind but i didn't :)

the hard problem is actually figuring out why some people don't think there's a hard problem.

It seems to me that this all just comes down to technological limits in our ability to measure these things, no? The mystery is the process but not the origins as far as I can tell. How qualia is defined is still kind of vague to me.

how do we measure red? red is not a wavelength or a neurotransmitter or an action potential, it is a sensation, intimately and mysteriously bound up with those other things but nonetheless qualitatively entirely different.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/21/-sp-why-cant-worlds-greatest-minds-solve-mystery-consciousness

i think that's a decent summary of David Chalmers' setting the question, don't know if it'll make the problem clearer

xp and different too from a system of neurons, no matter how vastly complex. emergent systems are just behaviour emerging from behaviour, and it's never an extraordinary leap to see how they arise. sensation is not behaviour, or like anything else it supposedly emerges from.

good article, except for this bit :

Everything we know about the universe tells us that reality consists only of physical things: atoms and their component particles, busily colliding and combining.

everything we know about the universe if you ignore all the direct evidence from your senses, sure!

different kind of "knowing" is intended i think.

it's not a perfect article, the speculation on imminent solutions to the hard problem or the claims about "advances" in AI are highly debatable. but it sets out the problem pretty well.

or maybe even saying that consciousness(es) aren't part of the universe in an additive sense

Time is a key to this discussion of what is consciousness. I think you would have a hard time finding many people willing to say a rock is conscious and that is because a rock will not change form for millions and possibly billions of years. A living thing, a conscious entity with a sensory experience, is the concerted effort of millions of cells, organs, bodily systems, microbes, electro-chemical processes, etc. If these systems/entities fail to work in harmony, the entire meta system fails, and the conscious entity presumably dies and loses their consciousness. Consciousness is an expression of a functional dynamic system, it is the underlying law/moral code followed on the micro level by the living entities in/on/of your body.

Maybe a more successful expression of consciousness is Peak Community Harmony, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few", the same kind of selfless love religions preach about.

Consciousness must be sustained over time, and can outlast life-death cycles, at least on the micro level.

the hard problem is actually figuring out why some people don't think there's a hard problem

You appear to be using 'a problem' in the sense of 'a puzzle'. Consciousness is very puzzling. But mine seems to be functioning all on its own, so it hasn't been presenting me with any real difficulties in a practical sense.

no i agree that emergent behaviour isn't distinct from the physical. i'm talking about the 'what it is like', the felt nature of consciousness. maybe 'intrinsic' is misleading or needlessly obscure, but i guess it comes from the idea we know what consciousness feels like from the inside, and it's this feeling that isn't captured by the physicalist picture.

n each of them we can point to certain ligands (hormones, peptides), parts of the brain lighting up, etc. we can even treat certain affects pharmaceutically. but these physical profiles don't capture the intense /internal/ phenomenology of sadness

seems like a 'grains of sand on the beach' kind of question: we know there *is* an answer, but we can't count it exactly, and our ways of mapping and estimating it are always approximate. unless and until our technical command of time and space becomes a lot more god-like

how do we measure red? red is not a wavelength or a neurotransmitter or an action potential, it is a sensation, intimately and mysteriously bound up with those other things but nonetheless qualitatively entirely different.

― ledge, Thursday, April 9, 2015 12:00 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How is red not a particular reading of physical wavelengths the brain is programmed to interpret with physical tools (eyes, brain receptors in general). How is a sensation not just a word for the way the brain uses its tools to read physical information?

We're phenomenological probes that feel the need to expound on the phemomena we're recording. Like a thermometer that won't shut up about how the variations of temperature make it feel and that thinks it's special because not everything in the universe measures temperature in the exact same way it measures temperature, and, like, hey man, what if there are temperatures beyond what any of the thermometers are even capable of recording. But those musings have subjective value, which is all that really matters in the end.

ledge I feel your pain here

How is red not a particular reading of physical wavelengths the brain is programmed to interpret with physical tools (eyes, brain receptors in general). How is a sensation not just a word for the way the brain uses its tools to read physical information?

"Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’. [...] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? [4]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

Dennett also has a response to the "Mary the color scientist" thought experiment. He argues that Mary would not, in fact, learn something new if she stepped out of her black and white room to see the color red. Dennett asserts that if she already truly knew "everything about color", that knowledge would include a deep understanding of why and how human neurology causes us to sense the "quale" of color. Mary would therefore already know exactly what to expect of seeing red, before ever leaving the room. Dennett argues that the misleading aspect of the story is that Mary is supposed to not merely be knowledgeable about color but to actually know all the physical facts about it, which would be a knowledge so deep that it exceeds what can be imagined, and twists our intuitions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

She'll learn to associate an internal thinking process w/ an external body of knowledge but I don't know why that means seeing red requires a soul.

dunno who said anything about a soul? just arguing that subjective experience is fundamentally different than objective understanding, and not explained by the latter.

"that knowledge would include a deep understanding of why and how human neurology causes us to sense the "quale" of color. Mary would therefore already know exactly what to expect of seeing red ..."

The argument is specifically that qualia include information beyond the "why and how", at best this rebuttal was poorly summarized.

qualia, as such, are not really isolatable phenomena outside of the signifying (or informational, if you prefer) processes that produce them imo. my own wacky theory is that they are the entropy produced by the self-organizing processes of cognition (informational processing of an environment or "umwelt").

It's just that in the sense that learning can be as simple as a color or image hitting yr retina for the 1st time i don't know how that gives any insight into whether consciousness can be fully generated by determinative physical processes or whether there's a lacuna within which 'the mind' lives as a separate entity from the body?

sorry i used soul bc that's like my personal get-out-of-mind/body-question-free card, but obv you can believe in non-physically determined processes (like free will) w/out believing in divinity/souls. i mean obv ppl do. i don't really understand how.

Yeah fair to call that lacuna "soul" I guess. I'm probably not being fair to the other side here but it's frustrating when people don't share my intuition (right or wrong) - that qualia weirdly sit outside of our explanatory frameworks. It seems so basic!

that qualia weirdly sit outside of our explanatory frameworks.

see, this is why my "consciousness = entropy" theory is so brilliant.

We're phenomenological probes that feel the need to expound on the phemomena we're recording. Like a thermometer that won't shut up about how the variations of temperature make it feel and that thinks it's special because not everything in the universe measures temperature in the exact same way it measures temperature, and, like, hey man, what if there are temperatures beyond what any of the thermometers are even capable of recording. But those musings have subjective value, which is all that really matters in the end.

rings true. seems very fishy: theory that there must be something supernatural/superspecial/beyond physical/whatev about subjective experience of consciousness when that theory is being posited by minds which are an example of said consciousness.

obv you can believe in non-physically determined processes (like free will) w/out believing in divinity/souls. i mean obv ppl do. i don't really understand how

aiui we don't really have a firm grasp on what "causality" is, which leaves plenty of wriggle room

but the simpler answer is probly once again "because people feel as tho they have free will"

it would be weird if qualia and subjective experience of consciousness DIDN'T exist. how could the experience of seeing red or tasting something sour NOT produce a certain nebulous (to the being experiencing it) feeling/sensation? how could there ever be an objective reading of that subjective experience? how could it not seem mysterious, ultimately indescribable and possibly magical to the one experiencing it?

but these physical profiles don't capture the intense /internal/ phenomenology of sadness - which doesn't feel like peptides smashing into one of my brain receptors, but like my heart being torn in half.

how would we know what peptides smashing into one of your brain receptors "should" "feel" like? how would we know if our experience of sadness differs from the experience of peptides smashing into brain receptors? [not really directed to Mordy; think I'm agreeing with him]

theory that there must be something supernatural/superspecial/beyond physical/whatev about subjective experience of consciousness when that theory is being posited by minds which are an example of said consciousness.

Self-referal methods inducing self-awareness, this is a common art technique,, using repetition to draw out meaning.

just that it's felt in a more complex way than what that description "peptides into receptors" suggests. some of this is bc human culture has developed complex discourses around affect that color all our experiences (narratives/metaphors/expressions) and that might feed back into our phenomenology of sad (i want to sit by myself, it feels like a rainy day, my facial features display in certain ways). anyway tho all i meant was that it could be entirely attributable to prior causes. i used that example bc i think it's easier to agree at this point that affect could possibly be entirely attributed to determinate causes.xp

if we can get to the point where you can "replay" some ineffable experience by some mechanical means, and also reliably reproduce that experience in others, then yes why wouldn't some of the magic be gone?

i don't think introspection can give us meaningful information about the big questions of consciousness, sadly. fortunately, it's still lots of fun ^_^

this is the paradox that "does it" for me. looking backwards at human evolution, we can rewind far back enough to a point where we weren't conscious. that's uncontroversial, right? in that case, you either have 2 options, one that allows for "consciousness" and the other that doesn't. the former requires some kind of discontinuity: a conscious mutant daughter born to non-conscious mother. this is really hard for me to believe, and implies all kinds of silly ideas about consciousness that dennett has lots of good smackdowns for. (otoh, you can apply the same argument to life, which definitely does exist, so maybe nature is just crazier than we think and these discontinuities arise all the time.) the alternative is you invoke, like, intermediate value theorem: if we started at not conscious, we're either still not conscious or at some point we passed through the critical value, below which is non-consciousness and above consciousness. but in that case, the "most conscious" non-conscious human would be an epsilon away from the "least conscious" conscious human, so they'd be basically indistinguishable and consciousness becomes meaningless. therefore we must still be not conscious.

using consciousness here as like, different from just some deterministic complex physical process

(<3 this entire thread)

Consciousness is an expression of a functional dynamic system

Would you say there is some degree of complexity at which consciousness arises? That seems no less magical, and more arbitrary, than saying it's a fundamental feature of the universe. Is a nematode worm conscious? Or a vastly more complex computer - let's say the Google car, which exists in and responds to a complex and dynamic environment? (Not that I'm advocating meatism... my own intuitions pull in different directions here, but that's intuitions for you.)

do you find it equally unlikely that science can ever fully account for these emotions

Yep!

seems like a 'grains of sand on the beach' kind of question: we know there *is* an answer, but we can't count it exactly, and our ways of mapping and estimating it are always approximate

There isn't any approximation that I can see. The phenomena in need of explanation seem to be entirely orthogonal to the phenomena proposed as an explanation.

How is a sensation not just a word for the way the brain uses its tools to read physical information?

There are plenty of human-constructed tools that read physical information. Do they have sensations?

looking backwards at human evolution, we can rewind far back enough to a point where we weren't conscious. that's uncontroversial, right?

Not if you're a panpsychist, yo!

Would you say there is some degree of complexity at which consciousness arises? That seems no less magical, and more arbitrary, than saying it's a fundamental feature of the universe. Is a nematode worm conscious? Or a vastly more complex computer - let's say the Google car, which exists in and responds to a complex and dynamic environment? (Not that I'm advocating meatism... my own intuitions pull in different directions here, but that's intuitions for you.)

Yes maybe there are thresholds where consciousness arises where it was not there before. But even in that case there would still be gradations between the thresholds, so even if a worm did not qualify for Grade A Consciousness he could maybe score somewhere along the graph. A Google Car is not conscious because I draw the line between organic and mechanic systems for a number of reasons. An organic being is comprised of vast communities and ecosystems of other smaller beings that are in turn vastly complex, and whether those smaller parts have consciousness (if we can even measure that) it seems like they contribute or are in some large way related to the consciousness of the macro Human Being.

A mechanic being is comprised of vast communities and mechosystems of other smaller beings that are in turn vastly complex, and whether those smaller parts have consciousness (if we can even measure that) it seems like they contribute or are in some large way related to the consciousness of the maco Mechanic. All things are made up of smaller things. The smallest things that make up everything are even the same things.

face it, consciousness is just a bunch of complex mechanical reactions that hubristic humans have invented a mythology to describe not unlike believing the sun circles the earth, or that god exists.

right, no evidence for anything weird going on here except maybe the primary content of experience

but hey

"the primary content of experience"

elaborate?

but when the time comes when that experience can be deconstructed as easily as a gastropub can deconstruct a BLT sandwich...

why would you deconstruct a perfectly good BLT

A machine's individual parts only do one thing, they are built for a single function, to fulfill the centralized goal. A conscious or organic being's parts all seem interconnected, self-aware (self-repairing, self-replicating), decentralized. A living being is able to withstand and address malfunctions from within but a machine requires the technical skills of the operator or engineer.

A BLT has components with their own integrity, yet do we not agree that the constructed BLT is an entity in its own right?

"but a machine requires the technical skills of the operator or engineer."

this is only due to our current limits with technology

like a doctor? xxp

Yes w the onward march of technology the lines will get blurry and are already starting to. As for doctors it is only in the past couple hundred years that they have been helpful in a practical way, and for the most part medical success lies in keeping the body/wound clean from infection and able to do it's own self-repairing functions. If the doctor prescribes a medicine to take internally, it is the body that takes in that medicine and applies it, not the doctor.

As for doctors it is only in the past couple hundred years that they have been helpful in a practical way

hahah what

right, no evidence for anything weird going on here except maybe the primary content of experience

this primary content of experience argument is exactly the same as the explanation my father gives for how he knows there is a god. it's just obviously so.

what if we found a tribe somewhere that said that this condition of thinking abstractly about things is a function of unflageit which is something all humans share and it travels between all ppl linking their consciousness together like stretchy string. We would rightly be skeptical and ask them to show us the physical properties of this string. But consciousness has the same problems. It doesn't explain the problems of experience it purports to solve, it isn't measurable or detectable, etc. it's just a mythological model to account for some sensations that humans made up.

consciousness doesn't account for anything. precisely the point of the hard problem is that consciousness describes a set of experiences which seem to be common to almost all human beings, but we have no mechanistic model that accounts for these experiences and not much idea of how a mechanistic model might account for these experiences.

i agree that this is seems relatable to e.g. the concept of religious faith, but consciousness seems to be near-universal in a way that no definition of religious faith can be claimed to be.

i also agree that one of the answers to the hard problem might be "well we are all very mistaken about the nature of consciousness is", but at this point i think you're arguing that abstract data tell us more about what it is to be alive than the experience of being alive does. and that, at least, is a tough sell.

excuse shonky typos

Well I don't think the world is about to stop believing in divinity either so our discussion really shouldn't be predicated on what ppl are likely to agree w

not because it matters whether people are right or wrong so much as because a model for explaining consciousness ought to be convincing, if it's going to explain consciousness. we can imagine that you could conclusively prove that Deity X doesn't exist without destroying the notion or experience of faith per se.

it's also perfectly possible that such a model or such an understanding might be impossible. it's not that anything urgently hangs on understanding what consciousness is, it's just that the dogmatic answers we have now are at the very best unsupportable guesswork. (tbf i'd say much the same of dogmatic theological arguments)

or maybe i wdn't, maybe i would argue that in both cases most arguments are applications of the wrong kinds of ideas to the wrong subjects

I cannot help but wonder whether a physical explanation of consciousness is valuable for anything besides confirming the worldview of those who already expect that consciousness is a physical phenomenon. The major accomplishment would be to increase the conviction of materialists that they are smarter than dualists.

Does anyone think that the inability to imagine thoroughly not existing after death plays a part in forming arguments that say consciousness is much more complex and mysterious than simply the result of the vast and complex physical network of the mind? Like saying "How can all of these layered thoughts/memories/experiences and the resulting personality just vanish?" is similar to saying "consciousness cannot just be the result of mundane physical parts, that doesn't account for how multilayered it is" etc while using the lack of a full scientific understanding of the process to reinforce.

I cannot help but wonder whether a physical explanation of consciousness is valuable for anything besides confirming the worldview of those who already expect that consciousness is a physical phenomenon. The major accomplishment would be to increase the conviction of materialists that they are smarter than dualists.

― Giant Purple Wakerobin (Aimless), Friday, April 10, 2015 2:12 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Isn't having an understanding of anything valuable beyond rubbing it in the face of those who had different theories???

i don't know, you tell me

how is it valuable beyond ideological production

How about helping to advance medical understanding? It's ridiculous to say that striving to learn how the universe works in any way holds no value other than to prove someone else wrong.

if it's all mechanistic then no problem, it'll happen when it's supposed to

Perhaps value is not something you create yourself but something created in collaboration with others. A brick of gold on its own is worthless without a market in which is spend it.

you could construct novel forms of consciousness the same way BLT has been enhanced by sriracha and aioli

Usually the benefit of greater understanding works its way into the betterment of society for all sorts of reasons.

OK. How might a physical explanation of consciousness work for the betterment of society?

Consciousness itself seems to me to be partly built in collaboration. Just as we seem to need other minds to create a theory of mind as a child, we need to learn how to introspect about our feelings and shape our understanding of qualia.

Just having nameless undefinable impulses happening to you in a stream (as, say, a baby does) seems a very basic form of consciousness, at least. And it seems plausible that the interaction we know children need is also a necessary part of the creation of more adult consciousness.

This still leaves me thinking of consciousness (or at least free will, which I know is a separate argument) as a kind of epiphenomenon, though.

As I said, deeper medical understanding. Nobody researching the subject is specifically trying to find out whether it is physical or not, with a thumbs up once they get an answer. They're simply researching how it all works.

xp

as vague and naive as any religious belief i've ever heard.

reliably putting people in hypnotic states would be awesome for eliminating anesthesia issues.

true but i don't think it would solve the problem of billions of people being able to afford it.

a $5 machine would probably be more affordable than a trained anesthesiologist

good 2 know

OK. How might a physical explanation of consciousness work for the betterment of society?

― Giant Purple Wakerobin (Aimless), Friday, April 10, 2015 2:53 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Obviously conjecturing here but I think a physical explanation would be describing the underlying lattice that drives the life of the conscious being. Not the physical matter itself, but in the process that drives it, sustains it, repairs it, regulates it, sees everything working in concert together on the job of Life. For a conscious, living entity to successfully exist over a sustained period of time, each part must work for the good of the whole, at least to a large extent. This kind of selflessness, scaled up on a macro level, could be a huge benefit to society.

also sleeping pills, SSRIs etc... all eliminated by some gysin machine that actually works is totally worth destroying whatever privileged impenetrability of consciousness anyone holds dear.

May I suggest that any ability to reliably manipulate and control the consciousness of others will raise a sufficient number of deeply troubling problems that the possible benefits could not be separated from the potentially severe drawbacks?

Among other things, it would bring new meaning to the idea of owning someone else.

when you're the same collective consciousness that issue goes away.

as vague and naive as any religious belief i've ever heard.

― Epic Verry (mattresslessness), Friday, April 10, 2015 3:00 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Greater scientific understanding in general has resulted in all of the medical equipment and practices we have today. Are you and Aimless saying that we shouldn't try to... learn anything anymore?

If we get to the point where consciousness is understandable and scientifically controllable and ego is a fluid concept not tied to any local geography then what purpose would "ownership" have at all?

It doesn't explain the problems of experience it purports to solve, it isn't measurable or detectable, etc. it's just a mythological model to account for some sensations that humans made up.

the point of the philosophical zombies argument is that imagining a human being without qualia is inherently weird/unacceptable (because it violates universally shared experiences.)

the difference to me between that and the existence of god is that even for those people (like my mom) who believe in god because of some claimed direct experience, that experience of god is not the primary experience and basis for _every_ experience that person has ever had, or ever will have. that's what makes qualia distinctive for me.

Understanding how consciousness works doesn't necessarily mean we'll be able to control people. That's one sci-fi horror worst case scenario, sure.

Understanding how consciousness works doesn't necessarily mean we'll be able to control people.

By the same token, understanding how consciousness works doesn't necessarily mean we'll be able to accomplish any medically meaningful goals or the betterment of society.

Having a better understanding about how the brain works likely brings helpful medical advantages, but not as likely to create slaves through mind control...

Are you against the progression of scientific understanding in general?

Are you and Aimless saying that we shouldn't try to... learn anything anymore?

Far from it. I was only pointing out that I find it difficult to see how arriving at a description of consciousness as a purely mechanistic and externally observable process will be some kind of game-changer for humanity or answer some Eternal Question for All Time. It would just be another turn of the wheel.

To bring in a very personal and personally emotional example, my daughter is wholly unable to communicate her thoughts. If, by some leap of science, it became possible to access her consciousness and project it into a rich and meaningful communication with the world, it would be an answer to one of my most cherished desires. But I am not such a fool as to think that, even as it fulfilled my dreams and solved many thorny practical problems, it would not raise just as many complications, problems and disappointments in its wake. They'd just be a different problem set and just as painful, difficult and intractable as the set we now have.

if we have found logical, materialistic explanations for 9999999999957 of the 1000000000000 phenomena in the universe, it seems likely that there are similar explanations for the remaining 43 phenomena.
given that things like matter/energy exist as well as infinite spacetime, and that some of this matter/energy became trapped on a thing we call a planet, causing it to become denser still, causing it to become more complex, causing it to become what we call "alive", the fact that some of this matter/energy arranged in a a particular way to develop the super cool trick of becoming aware of its awareness requires no magical explanation. the pressure cooker (for matter/energy) of earth's environment caused some of the matter/energy to obtain the ability to fly around with purpose, to use gas venting from the planet's core to sustain certain forms. awareness and then awareness of that awareness...yes, super cool trick but just one of trillions of super cool tricks this pressure cooker crucible has given rise to.

99% certain we are brains in jars at this point tbh

if we have found logical, materialistic explanations for 9999999999957 of the 1000000000000 phenomena in the universe, it seems likely that there are similar explanations for the remaining 43 phenomena.

One interesting thing about those logical, materialistic explanations has been that, as they progress from "if I hit this with a rock, it smashes" into more and more abstruse and deeply fundamental layers of the universe, the less those explanations appear to describe anything normally considered logical or material. It makes the whole process very fun to watch.

Consciousness itself seems to me to be partly built in collaboration. Just as we seem to need other minds to create a theory of mind as a child, we need to learn how to introspect about our feelings and shape our understanding of qualia.

Language is such a huge factor in development of homo sapiens. I don't many people say our ability to create and use language must be supernatural, and yet consciousness seems to be an almost direct result of it.

the extent to which 'consciousness' is a historical concept is another wee complication on top of the points of focus here. if super-detailed philosophical philology is ur thing then http://www.versobooks.com/books/1497-identity-and-difference is a good read

"I was only pointing out that I find it difficult to see how arriving at a description of consciousness as a purely mechanistic and externally observable process will be some kind of game-changer for humanity or answer some Eternal Question for All Time. It would just be another turn of the wheel."

Oh, yeah. I was never really talking about how it would be a game-changer as much as I was merely saying it would be beneficial to have greater understanding of the process, which I am confident is nothing more than a series of physical parts interacting, regardless of it's complexity.

i thought mordy's speculation (on a thread that apparently wasn't this one) that the sensation of consciousness is created by the mind's interpretation+explanation of physically determined actions already taken was compelling + classically dramatic, plus "identity is performance" is nowhere near postmodern enough a notion for 2015 imo when "identity is criticism" is just lying around

^from the Atheism vs. Christianity thread

alternatively consciousness is a contingent process constantly justifying the actions you are already determined to take (and there is some science that suggests this is the case). in which case maybe free will occurs in the creative explanation for why you did what you were already going to do. that would be funny if the only thing we freely controlled were interpretations of our bodies.

― Mordy, Wednesday, April 8, 2015 7:33 PM (3 days ago)

Will have an idle stab at stating my position from another angle, although it's of broadly the same character as what I've said before and neurologically highly speculative, so unlikely to win new converts.

What is extraordinary to me is not just the gap between felt experience and what the physicalist picture tells us, but the diverse nature of experience itself. The sweet and sharp tang of a ripe cherry tomato as it bursts on the tongue; the almost tangible sensation of nails down a blackboard; the raw and raucous sound of an electric guitar which for me seems to inject itself directly into my pleasure centre; the brutal pummelling of a strobe light; the luscious and soothing feel of cashmere. These and thousands more are all, it seems to me, (warning! speculation) broadly primary sensory experiences, likely to involve mechanisms that are highly similar neurologically and functionally. To me it beggars belief that such similar systems could lead to such diverse experiences. You might argue that the inputs should be considered part of the system and that is the source of the diversity. My intuitions about brains in vats and rewired brains tell me different. If you want to dismiss my idle speculation and wait for neuroscience to give us firm answers here then fair enough, but as with the original hard problem I can't conceive of anything it could say in terms of biological or functional organisation that would satisfy me.

part of the problem (and why this thread goes in circles imo) is that the experiences at issue here are things primarily not available to language, to memory (the memory of a sensation is fundamentally not the sensation), and to scientific description. it's not even available to time, but exists in the vanishing point between the past and the future. our sensations are always being re-constructed cognitively in our neurological pathways, a breaking up of wholeness into a system of interlocking mechanical parts.

again, the thing itself, in this case, is fundamentally unavailable to description. all of these sensations, however, are still produced internally by the nervous system. every single one. they are produced by a nervous system interpreting an environment that is not itself in terms of itself. what this means is that, in the language of entropy, there is within the system a certain amount of energy that is not available to the system, it escapes its self-organizing processes and cannot be recuperated. (you might even argue a rudimentary sense of time is at issue here.) it is, quite literally, what we are continually losing in the process of cognitively mapping our world and our memories. I've quoted this bit from peirce a lot on this board but i can get away with it one more time:

The First must therefore be present and immediate, so as not to be second to a representation. It must be initiative, original, spontaneous, and free; otherwise it is second to a determining cause. It is also something vivid and conscious; so only it avoids being the object of some sensation. It precedes all synthesis and all differentiation: it has no unity and no parts. It cannot be articulately thought: assert it, and it has already lost its characteristic innocence; for assertion always implies a denial of something else. Stop to think of it, and it has flown!

“The famous law of increase of entropy describes the world as evolving from order to disorder; still, biological or social evolution shows us the complex emerging from the simple. How is this possible? How can structure arise from disorder? Great progress has been realized in this question. We know now that nonequilibrium, the flow of matter and energy, may be a source of order."

i've always liked niklas luhmann's assertion that even if we were able to describe consciousness all it would look like is utter chaos. to describe "the sweet and sharp tang of a ripe cherry tomato" is to have already imposed order on it. so i guess my challenge to the hard problem partisans is to be a bit more exact in what they think they are describing.

TLDR: sensations are not prior to cognitive activity but produced simultaneously as the dissipative energy unavailable to it.

yet another way to put this is to state that by the time we are talking about "the sweet and sharp tang of a ripe cherry tomato" we are already talking about a linguistic construct. literally every single form of qualia proposed on this thread is already a linguistic construct. we've already passed the problem by in talking about it.

sorry for thread bombing.

i guess my challenge to the hard problem partisans is to be a bit more exact in what they think they are describing.

But you already seem to have decided that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent! My workmanlike prose is not intended to define, merely to describe enough to produce a glimmer of recognition. Agree with some of yr points about the primacy and pre-linguistic nature of all this but surely the medium in which we are so inescapably immersed can't be so hard to discern.

oh im not for being silent--i simply get frustrated by some versions of "hard problem" talk because i think they actually reify it. they've invented, you might say, a whole army of metaphors for talking about it which strikes me, sometimes, as mystagogic. as you see in my own posts im "talking" about it.

surely the medium in which we are so inescapably immersed can't be so hard to discern

i think my point is that it is, by my definition, impossible to "discern"--it's more like the possibility of discernment in the first place. i do not believe one can grasp or consciously hold in your mind a "qualia" or immediate sensation of consciousness. so whatever we're talking about when we talk about the "hard problem" i dont think it's consciousness.

again, that's why im actually trying to say it's not pre-linguistic because that would assume it's some baseline state from which we extrapolate our cognitive experiences. im saying it's produced conjunctively with those cognitive experience as what is the "other" unavailable side of its distinctions.

it's like those experiments where they give people a 10 dollar bottle of wine and say it costs 600--and then people really rate the wine better! my thinking on this has always been that the wine in fact tastes better. there's no separation possible between our immediate qualitative experience of something and the more abstract informational processing of that thing. but this is not, crucially, to say they are the same thing.

http://open-mind.net/papers

if anyone has lots and lots of time this could be of interest

how could spike trains that were so alike in their physical properties and patterning underlie such “phenomenally” different phenomena as sight, hearing, touch, and smell?

Uh oh, Dennett is on to me.

so whatever we're talking about when we talk about the "hard problem" i dont think it's consciousness.

I like Galen Strawson's point that the thing that makes the hard problem hard is not that we don't understand consciousness, after all that's the only thing that we can be sure we do understand, it's that we don't understand matter. The fact that it's hard for us to imagine how matter can be conscious shouldn't surprise us, because we actually know very little about what matter is.

To me it beggars belief that such similar systems could lead to such diverse experiences.

so what are you saying then?
it beggars belief that a bunch of 1s and 0s can produce every sound and image known to exist when plugged into the proper system, yet here we are...

but ultimately there has to be a conscious observer to encode and decode the sound and vision, to make the correspondence meaningful. Any number of arbitrary patterns produced by natural processes a long time ago in a galaxy far far away could be said resemble or encode human works, with the appropriate decoding algorithm. but they wouldn't represent those works unless there were a human observer there to note the resemblance.

it's that we don't understand matter.

aye that's the thrust of the link i posted upthread.

Yes, thanks for that link, that led me to the Strawson essay that inspired my post.

Do we consider the internet/virtual world to be a part of consciousness?

The internet? I think beetles and carrots, as life forms, are in front of it in line, but the internet may be more conscious than granite slabs or buckets of sand.

i think of comment threads as the collective unconscious

How do I know you all aren't just bots?

youtube comments are basically primal scream therapy

"When I squint just right," Dennett writes in 2013, "it does sort of seem that consciousness must be something in addition to all the things it does for us and to us, some special private glow or here-I-am-ness that would be absent in any robot... But I've learned not to credit the hunch. I think it is a flat-out mistake, a failure of imagination."

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/

The last couple mornings I've been having that "how strange it is to be anything at all" doubt on the walk to work brought on by slightly out of body experiences. I've always felt my "consciousness", or at least my abstract thoughts, as a a sort of activity in the occipital area whereas the rest of my head feels empty. These last couple days that occipital "thought generator" has felt a little unplugged. Probably brought on by my bad sleeping patterns this week.

when i read things like that and think for a second i get these weird full body spasms - i get them in lots of other situations when i'm contemplating non/existence tbf - i think i've developed a reflex response to observing my own objectivity

love2GalenStrawson tho

"that" being fionnland's post btw

great piece, this for me is the crux:

Crucially, though, there’s no reason to give the way the brain appears to physics or neurophysiology priority over the way it appears to the person having the experience. Rather the reverse, as Russell pointed out as early as 1927: he annoyed many, and incurred some ridicule, when he proposed that it was only the having of conscious experience that gives us any insight into the intrinsic nature of the stuff of the brain. 

If I think about this I get into a loop: if we define consciousness as a distinct thing, but it's actually a number of behavioral factors working in concert, then maybe that distinct thing is a gestalt of behavioral factors?

It's not as if we have any way to define the entire list of behaviors/qualia/whatever.

a nice floaty cloud that hardens under pressure iirc

Crucially, though, there’s no reason to give the way the brain appears to physics or neurophysiology priority over the way it appears to the person having the experience.

well sure, no reason to if you're willing to discard scientific method

Bad logic there, granny. There is nothing in that statement that requires or even suggests discarding scientific method or even disregarding it, but only failing to prioritize it when discussing consciousness. The fact that observation itself is a function of consciousness makes observation of consciousness a paradoxically recursive activity.

um no, bad analysis Aimless. if you're giving subjective experience equal footing with scientific method, you are in essence discarding it. which is fine! just don't pretend otherwise.

Is there a school of thought that sees consciousness as a field that our brain/mind is adapted to like our eyes and the visible spectrum, or is that just stoner-think?

Sounds like stoner-think, but maybe I don't quite get what you're saying. Overall there are all sorts of fun hypothetical ways to frame it I suppose.

That it's outside of us and something we tap into (and experience subjectively) rather than something we generate. Admittedly, this may be little more than a head-of-a-pin idea.

if you're giving subjective experience equal footing with scientific method, you are in essence discarding it.

In logic this is called "asserting the conclusion".

i thought giving subjective experience equal footing with scientific method was called bro science?

nbd

Q: How can it be proved that consciousness is what is being measured when you measure consciousness?

A: You can only correlate the subjective experience reported by the subject with whatever you are measuring. This can lead to a hypothesis about consciousness, but not a hypothesis that is falsifiable, because the subjective experience of the subject is unverifiable. All the subject needs to do is to lie and the experimental data becomes worthless. And you cannot decide if the subject is lying.

arah its all relative lads ynow at thn end of the day an egg is still eggshaped isnt it lads

drop the egg and look again

this is your brain on drugs

if u drop an egg u have butterfingers

That it's outside of us and something we tap into (and experience subjectively) rather than something we generate. Admittedly, this may be little more than a head-of-a-pin idea.

― dinnerboat, Wednesday, March 14, 2018 1:36 PM (fifty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What about it makes you consider this possibility? Always curious. Not meant as snark at all.

collection unconscious, right

collective, darn autocorrect

Q: How can it be proved that consciousness is what is being measured when you measure consciousness?

A: You can only correlate the subjective experience reported by the subject with whatever you are measuring. This can lead to a hypothesis about consciousness, but not a hypothesis that is falsifiable, because the subjective experience of the subject is unverifiable. All the subject needs to do is to lie and the experimental data becomes worthless. And you cannot decide if the subject is lying.

― A is for (Aimless), Wednesday, March 14, 2018 1:58 PM (fifty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't think you're 100% wrong here, but we can also, e.g., use fMRI to allow an AI to draw an image it's never seen before straight from someone's brain. That seems to me to run straight past an individual's subjective description of their experience and into their "consciousness." I suppose they could like about what they were thinking of, but that just weights the results more towards the objective observation than the subjective one.

yea but even then, idk if just "thinking about stuff" is necessarily tied into the nature of consciousness. obviously physical changes such as pounding a bottle of gin alter the way our consciousness works. but you're still 'present' in there somehow.

xp or we put human assumptions of perception into the process that creates the image that aren't universals, or the image created by the AI maps to the image we see visually but to non-humans there's no relation

imo those are both ridiculous hedging arguments but that may be my consciousness talking

This can lead to a hypothesis about consciousness, but not a hypothesis that is falsifiable, because the subjective experience of the subject is unverifiable

this to me is the core of the "freaky shit" argument. there is no reason why we can't be "philosophical zombies" - essentially robots with no real consciousness, just a set of programmed responses to stimuli. and yet (if we reject solipsism) we all have the sensation of consciousness. we all have a subjective experience that can't be - or hasn't yet been - explained by materialist views of consciousness.

if we allow that lobsters have consciousness, why not robots?

https://pics.onsizzle.com/why-why-was-programmed-to-feel-pain-4118663.png

if you're giving subjective experience equal footing with scientific method, you are in essence discarding it.

but you can't have the scientific method without subjective experience. every single thing that we know to be 'objectively' true is filtered through subjective experience.

tbh you have to draw a line where you're willing to accept things as objective otherwise you end up with something worse than the simulation hypothesis

In that case, back to solipsism I go!

the other day I was thinking, how can we be sure we will die if we can't really be sure if we are not dead already?

there is no reason why we can't be "philosophical zombies" 

i think there are reasons why zombies may not be possible but i find zombies confusing. like, dennet thinks they're impossible even though in his view that's basically all we are? idk they just seem like an extra layer of unjustifiable intuitionism so i prefer not to think about them.

In logic this is called "asserting the conclusion".

I think you mean "affirming the consequent"? Anyway the statement was "there’s no reason to give the way the brain appears to physics or neurophysiology priority over the way it appears to the person having the experience." And I'm saying yes there is a reason: if you want to follow the scientific method. If you don't, cool!

Where is the cutoff between life that has consciousness vs life that doesn't? If we grant that it's an actual thing and humans have it, what else has it? Chimps? Dogs? Toads? Fleas? Trees? Bacteria? Amoeba? Does all life have it or just animal life? Does all animal life have it or just some animal life? How would we know? What would be the hypothesis for why some life has it and some life doesn't? Does it even matter?

iirc dennett hypothesizes that all animals do to some extent, based on the idea that no animal, no matter how low, will devour part of itself to feed itself. for example, a hungry lobster won't chew off it's own claw. so he claims all animals have some self-consciousness, i.e. some sense of self and not-self

every single thing that we know to be 'objectively' true is filtered through subjective experience

The subjective experience of many humans. Consensus. Repeatability. Scientific method is just best means we've come up with to reduce subjective bias.

So if a robot was programmed to not devour (destroy? salvage?) itself and to recognize "it" vs "environment", it automatically has consciousness? Idk that seems like stretching the definition of consciousness to point where it's a useless concept.

xp don't you think it sounds a bit odd to say my conscious experience gives me reason to doubt i have conscious experience? for one thing it saws off the branch you're sitting on.

xp in fact in the same paragraph dennett does suggest that such a robot would, in that case, have something like a self-concept and a rudimentary consciousness

this is my favorite book about consciousness

https://alexandria-library.space/files/Ebooks/WorldTracker/Physics/Consciousness%20Books%20Collection/Hofstadter,%20Dennett%20-%20The%20Mind%27s%20I.pdf

?? no idea where you got that from, ledge

the relevant bit on lobsters and robots begins on pg 265 (the reflection)

Does it even matter?

Excellent question.

no animal, no matter how low, will devour part of itself to feed itself

I'm not sure if this is absolutely and universally true, e.g. eating the placenta might present a problem for this assertion. But point taken.

?? no idea where you got that from, ledge

eh? that's the whole crazy hardcore materialist view in a nutshell! we must be talking at cross porpoises.

my cat doesn't even know its tail is part of its body

my cat does

why is your cat concerning itself with my cat's tail

every day i take my cat on "the trip of the 4 mirrors", carrying him around my apartment. he hasn't recognized himself yet but i am determined to freak him out.

I had a cat that grew to hate its tail so much that its vicious attacks on it eventually became life-threatening and it had to have said tail amputated. It was a freaky scene, man.

seems like even a rudimentary pain reflex would prevent an animal from devouring part of itself without it necessarily differentiating a sense of 'self' from 'other'.

hmm that's a rudimentary self-concept too, though!

"if i bite something and feel pain, then it's myself. if i bite something and don't feel pain, then it's not myself"

My inclination is there's a spectrum of consciousness, and it's a large enough spectrum that the far left end of it is so different from the far right end as to appear like it's two separate phenomena. Humans are on the far right side, as far as our current knowledge and experience goes. That gives the illusory impression that it is unique, or "freaky shit". But when you follow the spectrum incrementally to the left, it doesn't seem quite as mysterious.

every day i take my cat on "the trip of the 4 mirrors", carrying him around my apartment. he hasn't recognized himself yet but i am determined to freak him out.

― Karl Malone, Wednesday, March 14, 2018 1:57 PM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my cat doesn't have any reaction to mirrors, but i try not to anthropomorphize too much - he's not as visually focused as a human, he recognizes me by smell, sound of voice, and general size and shape rather than facial recognition. and navigates using whiskers, his tail etc. why should he recognize a mirror?

i think you

yes you

are only imagining your consciousness

including all of the imaginary interactions with the imaginary ppl

"if i bite something and feel pain, then it's myself. if i bite something and don't feel pain, then it's not myself"

I think this is anthropomorphizing. Animals don't have thoughts like that (or at least I don't think they do! Def not in English, I'm pretty confident of that). They don't need a concept of "myself" in order to respond to pain.

"if i bite something and feel pain, then it's myself. if i bite something and don't feel pain, then it's not myself"

vs.

"if i bite something and feel pain, it is painful. if i bite something and don't feel pain, then it's not painful"

i don't want to speak for dennett or the lobster since i can't do them justice

here's the relevant excerpt

"Could a machine have a self-symbol, or a self-concept? It is hard to say. Could a lower animal? Think of a lobster. Do we suppose it is self-conscious? It shows several important symptoms of having a selfconcept. First of all, when it is hungry, whom does it feed? Itself. Second, and more important, when it is hungry it won't eat just anything edible; it won't, for instance, eat itself-though it could, in principle. It could tear off its own legs with its claws and devour them. But it wouldn't be that stupid, you say, for when it felt the pain in its legs, it would know whose legs were being attacked and would stop. But why would it suppose the pain it felt was its pain? And besides, mightn't the lobster be so stupid as not to care that the pain it was causing was its own pain?

These simple questions reveal that even a very stupid creature must be designed to behave with self-regard-to put it as neutrally as possible. Even the lowly lobster must have a nervous system wired up in such a way that it will reliably distinguish self-destructive from other-destructive behavior-and strongly favor the latter. It seems quite possible that the control structures required for such self-regarding behavior can be put together without a trace of consciousness, let alone self-consciousness. After all, we can make self-protective little robot devices that cope quite well in their simple environments and even produce an overwhelmingly strong illusion of "conscious purpose" ...

But why say this is an illusion, rather than a rudimentary form of genuine self-consciousness-akin perhaps to the self-consciousness of a lobster or worm? Because robots don't have the epts? Well, do lobsters? Lobsters have something like concepts, apparently: what they have are in any event enough to govern them through their self-regarding lives. Call these things what you like, robots can have them too. Perhaps we could call them unconscious or preconscious concepts. Self-concepts of a rudimentary sort. The more varied the circumstances in which a creature can recognize itself, recognize circumstances as having a bearing on itself, acquire information about itself, and devise self-regarding actions, the richer (and more valuable) its self-conception this sense of "concept" that does not presuppose consciousness."

yeah sounds to me like he's down with the "spectrum of consciousness" position. Lobster has a degree of consciousness. But dogs have a greater degree than lobsters, chimps greater than dogs, humans greater than chimps.

Strawson makes a good point in the article that consciousness itself isn’t nearly as mysterious as the intrinsic nature of matter/energy:

One of the strangest things about the spread of the naturalism-based Denial in the second half of the twentieth century is that it involved overlooking a point about physics that was once a commonplace, and which I call “the silence of physics.” Physics is magnificent: many of its claims are either straightforwardly true or very good approximations to truth. But all of its claims about the physical are expressed by statements of number or equations. They’re truths about quantities and relational structures instantiated in concrete reality; and these truths tell us nothing at all about the ultimate nature of the stuff of reality, the stuff that has the structure that physics analyzes. Here is Russell again (in 1948): “the physical world is only known as regards certain abstract features of its space-time structure… we know nothing about the events that make matter, except their space-time structure.” Stephen Hawking agrees in 1988: physics is “just a set of rules and equations,” which leaves open the question “what… breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.” Physics has nothing to say about things that can’t be expressed in general rules and equations.

This is the silence of physics—a simple point that destroys the position of many of those today who, covertly or overtly, endorse the Denial. When we grasp the silence of physics, and ask, with Eddington, “what knowledge have we of the nature of atoms that renders it at all incongruous that they should constitute a thinking [i.e., conscious] object?” The answer is simple: none. The false naturalists appear to ignore this point. They rely instead on an imaginative picture of the physical, a picture that goes radically beyond anything that physics tells or could tell us. They are in Russell’s words “guilty, unconsciously and in spite of explicit disavowals, of a confusion in their imaginative picture” of reality. This picture is provably incorrect if materialism is indeed true because, in that case, experience is wholly physical yet excluded from the picture.

yeah the "true nature" (for lack of better term) of matter/energy is the ultimate "freaky shit" for me

yeah sounds to me like he's down with the "spectrum of consciousness" position. Lobster has a degree of consciousness. But dogs have a greater degree than lobsters, chimps greater than dogs, humans greater than chimps.

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Wednesday, March 14, 2018 9:23 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I’m not sure if a chimp or a dog is necessarily less conscious than a human. Intelligence isn’t the same thing as subjective experience. Is a child’s pain any less real than an adult’s?

Intelligence is not the same as consciousness.

my cat doesn't have any reaction to mirrors, but i try not to anthropomorphize too much - he's not as visually focused as a human, he recognizes me by smell, sound of voice, and general size and shape rather than facial recognition. and navigates using whiskers, his tail etc. why should he recognize a mirror?

i'm not sure. i guess my question is, why shouldn't he? i've thought that maybe he doesn't react to the mirror because his reflection doesn't have a scent or make a sound. but he does recognize other animals when i project films onto the wall - he'll chase them around and paw at them and it's the best thing ever. so like you say, he recognizes general sizes and shapes at least - so why doesn't he recognize a general cat shape in the mirror? instead, when he looks at a mirror it's like he stares right back through himself. it's not that he doesn't recognize himself in the mirror, it's that he doesn't even see what's in it. there's just no desire at all to pay attention at this small, handsome animal a few inches from the mirror.

Sorry for the redundant sentence there.

X-post

I’m not sure if a chimp or a dog is necessarily less conscious than a human

That's not a good way of phrasing it. All animal life is conscious. Chimps and dogs possess fewer of the hallmarks of consciousness than a human does. A housefly possesses less than chimps and dogs. They all feel "real pain", they are all conscious.

Intelligence is not the same as consciousness.

Absolutely. But they are related. An adult does have a greater degree of what we would label consciousness than a child; its internal monologue is much richer. How many children are contemplating the nature of self and the universe?

And they are related because the same brain structures + neurochemistry give rise to both

An adult does have a greater degree of what we would label consciousness than a child; its internal monologue is much richer. How many children are contemplating the nature of self and the universe?

disagree w all of these points lol. for one children are contemplating space/time constantly whereas adults can go on autopilot, distracted with abstractions like work or bills or whatever

i remember as a kid wondering if i could kill myself, will myself to die. i tried not breathing a few times and found myself unable and unwilling to not breathe. i used to "play dead" sometimes to fool my brothers. even if children don't know what death is they are still investigating (and btw no adult definitively knows what death is)

it's when you're not alive anymore iirc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJky8YuTr4

i had lots of thoughts about consciousness when i was a kid. my worldview was a bit unusual because of my circumstances so i can't universalize at all for children as a whole and still i remember some things very clearly. like finding my teacher's explanation of god very unsatisfying and rejecting it in my mind. i didn't know the answer, but i knew what she just told me wasn't it. i was 7. i think a lot of kids have deep thoughts, they just don't let them out all the time.

i also wanted to recommend this book if it hasn't already been discussed -- it's about consciousness as it manifests in an array of interesting circumstances, including out-of-body/autoscopic experiences.
http://www.anilananthaswamy.com/the-man-who-wasnt-there/

yea I think when I was 8 or 9 I saw an old man and thought "when I'm his age, nearly every single person I know will be dead" and that thought continues to haunt me today

when I was in high school I spent a lot of time researching accounts of out of body experiences, usually in hospitals where someone is on the operating table and wakes up seeing something they possibly couldn't have seen

sometimes there were plausible explanations given but there were others that were just freaky - people seeing or hearing things that were physically impossible for them to have experienced, describing things in more detail than I would have been able to while totally conscious. most of the time these stories get handwaved away because they're 'unverified', just anecdotal stuff that you can't really prove scientifically one way or the other, so they just give up. certainly a lot of this is just made up. but you really only need one such story to be true...

When I was in elementary school I used to do this thing where I'd be daydreaming and would start thinking about what it meant to be a human and try to picture seeing myself like other people did and then I would think about how bizarre it was that we exist and would always wind of getting freaked out and have to think about something else. I remember this happening pretty frequently.

out of body experiences are basically hallucinations caused by xyz factor (drugs, trauma, brain malfunction from being near death) iirc from reading that book + some other stuff about autoscopic experiences

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoscopy

right - they've been able to reproduce parts of it through stimulating parts of the brain or finding people ingesting large amounts of ketamine or whatever. they're similar but not entirely like what gets reported during a quote-unquote "real" OBE. for example they can produce the feeling that you're floating on the ceiling but those people only see their lower torso and legs, not everything around them in 360 view like what gets reported, not weird stuff like shoes on the roof or whatever. but there are enough similarities to make me feel like there are a few major breakthroughs yet to occur.

the problem is that there tends to be zero objectivity either way. you read about it on "astralbrain.net" or "skeptic.org" and most of the 'evidence' involves bizarre fringe cases that can't be reproduced. a lot of the people involved are by nature a bit unreliable. you have a lot of patients who say "no no, well it was kind of like that but totally different", and from a scientific pov what do you even do with that?

they can produce the feeling that you're floating on the ceiling

woah, what a feeling

I think a lobster would eats its legs if it could reach them

most of the time these stories get handwaved away because they're 'unverified', just anecdotal stuff that you can't really prove scientifically one way or the other, so they just give up. certainly a lot of this is just made up. but you really only need one such story to be true...

Every scientific study into this has turned up nothing.

If you're 7 you're capable of having more meta thoughts than a 2 year old. If you're, 14 you're capable of even more. Brain has developed even more, as have language abilities which supercharge this capability. And obv the difference between a 7 yr old and an adult on the consciousness spectrum is miniscule compared to human vs, say, dog. This is really a ILXian tangent tho, taking 1 small part of an argument you feel like poking holes at that really doesn't have much to do with the main point.

Examining the validity of the reports that consciousness can be detached from the physical body usually associated with that consciousness is a wholly different matter than answering the question of what consciousness is.

not if one of the subquestions is "is consciousness a wholly physical/material process?"

this was the one I remember the most from high school

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pam_Reynolds_case

the anesthesiologist's explanation makes some sense though it doesn't really explain how she was able to hear exact conversations despite being brain dead & having noise blasted into her ears

strikes me as suspicious that those experiences basically never get reported by any of the billions of humans during their combined trillions of life-hours...but are frequent for people who are given powerful drugs.

"is consciousness a wholly physical/material process?"

Even matter is not wholly physical/material in the sense we normally think of it. We know there are forces and they interact; beyond that language rapidly fails and math takes over.

However, if there were unknown forces that do not interact with the 'material' forces we can observe, it seems to me that physics would have no way of determining their existence. Even the word 'existence' would have no real application. By the same token our sense would not detect them, and our ignorance of those forces would necessarily be so complete that we could not form any statements about them that weren't random nonsense.

My own conclusion is that, if consciousness had no point of contact with the 'material' forces studied by physics, it could have no ability to act upon our bodies. Therefore, logically, consciousness must be a manifestation of material forces and subject to ordinary physical laws. I also expect the statistical methods of quantum mechanics are going to be much too crude to describe human consciousness, except in terms that people will find unrecognizable in relation to their own experience of it.

People love the idea of unexplainable, supernatural things. Love trying to find things that "science can't explain". I remember being fascinated by ESP as a kid. I really really WANTED it to be true. There were a few cases I read about that totally had me convinced it was a real thing. I still think some types of it may be possible, cause who knows right? and wouldn't it be so cool if it did exist...

at this point it seems like our understanding of the brain and the nature of consciousness is just not evolved enough to get what's going on. certainly there is a scientific explanation for the Reynolds case - she was under anesthetic awareness, maybe the speakers in her ears were not quite working, and she made some educated guesses as to the nature of the surgical instruments.

these explanations can sound far-fetched (for example, anesthetic awareness is almost always described as a terrifying experience, but Reynolds described her experience as being the opposite), but from a scientific point of view they're plausible, and given our current understanding they're the only explanations that make sense. there's no "supernatural" in the scientific method so therefore all those things have to be true. and the circumstances that led to the Pam Reynolds case are so unique and un-reproducable, there's nowhere further you can go.

supernatural is fine for science so long as it is reproducible. we're just not trying hard enough. tally ho, necronauts! for science!

I took that to mean that once something is "proven" by the scientific method, it ceases to be supernatural. A corollary to the ol "what do you call alternative medicine that works? 'Science'".

Alternative medicine that works is called medicine that works. It may be purely empirical with no clear theoretical grounding in accepted science, but if it survives double blind testing, it doesn't matter.

what would it be like to be a carrot?

ha no I meant it's called medicine. Not science.

xp i have thought a lot about vegetable consciousness, and i have decided it must be quite mellow and slow paced compared to animal consciousness

even more so w/ mineral consciousness ... i believe, as pynchon put it, in "a soul in ev'ry stone"

what part of their anatomy is producing consciousness?

their soul?

nothing annoys me more than talk about the soul

why?

xposts

same spot as usual

https://i.imgur.com/XiH1wVr.jpg

Every complex organism can be viewed as a cell colony, including a human or a carrot plant. There's no reason to doubt that a carrot plant senses how its environment impinges upon it or that it uses that information for its benefit. Whatever mechanisms a carrot plant uses to coordinate its activities is the analog for consciousness. But what that 'feels like' to a carrot would be impossible to translate into human terms.

why?

― the late great, Friday, March 16, 2018 12:49 PM (twenty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's just an idea that is completely alien to my way of perceiving or understanding things and it seems extraneous

There's no reason to doubt that a carrot plant senses how its environment impinges upon it or that it uses that information for its benefit.

There's no reason to assume that an organism that doesn't have a brain does have consciousness. "Analog for consciousness"!= consciousness

No assumptions are needed.

Consciousness can be defined very narrowly or very broadly, in much the same way that human language shades off into communicative vocalizations among primates, or even more remotely into bees dancing out directions to blossoming flowers. The question is where you draw your line. Any definition of consciousness that includes carrots would be very broad indeed.

yeah quit being brainist.

or at least: what is so special about brains?

What's so special is they produce subjective experience, ie consciousness. That brain states at the very least correlate with states of subjective experience can be demonstrated. Go drop a tab of LSD and see for yourself. I can't see what evidence there is, or could be, that carrots have consciousness. Yes, a carrot is a complex organism that responds to its environment, but I don't see in what way that implies consciousness. There are non-organic complex systems that also respond to their environment. Are they conscious? Is a hurricane conscious?

don't want to live in a universe where everything isn't conscious

Well, the philosopher David Chalmers says even a thermometer has a basic consciousness ... not that I agree!

Being a conscious human with a brain, of course you can infer that brains > consciousness. Not being a carrot with a not-brain, it is not legitimate to infer that not-brains do not > consciousness.

You could argue for emergence at a certain level of complexity, but iirc that implies epiphenomenalism which I'm not into so yeah I'm with Chalmers. It's crazy, but then so is every other option.

No. Assuming that brains=consciousness is the least crazy option, sorry.

What part of the carrot is producing consciousness?

I think its like Treebeard - vegetable consciousness is very SSSSLLLLOOOOWWWW - like it takes them a year to think "hmm, yummy earth to eat!"

what part of anatomy is producing that thought?

Realize that root vegetables are much deeper than others

carrot brain is producing carrot consciousness

latham otm EXCEPT plants don't eat earth they eat air (well, the CO2 in air ...)

pretty simple stuff. basic knowledge

ah and so carrot eyes are producing carrot sight, carrot ears producing carrot hearing

exactly!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CHowiwZVAAAV4mO.jpg:large

Don't bend over in the garden, Granny, you know them taters got eyes

Question to all: What would you personally say it means to romanticize consciousness?

I'm not familiar enough with the behavioral philosopher lineage Strawson cites to know how fairly he's rendering their case, but I am somewhat familiar with Dennett and I think Strawson's being reductive. Dennett imo doesn't "deny" consciousness as a phenomenon that living creatures experience -- as noted above, he actually broadens its range, biologically. He just doesn't think it's something separate and ineffable, he thinks it arises from the biological systems it governs. It's an emergent property, not some outside or extricable force.

xp I think romanticizing consciousness is to see it as a gateway to the mystical/eternal/supernatural. That consciousness is a manifestation of the soul.

No. Assuming that brains=consciousness is the least crazy option, sorry.

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Monday, 19 March 2018 14:41 (two hours ago) Permalink

What part of the carrot is producing consciousness?

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Monday, 19 March 2018 14:49 (two hours ago) Permalink

Well the panpsychist or protopanosychist argument isn’t that brainless things are conscious per se, it’s more that consciousness as we know it is a subset of a larger category of properties that are in everything. This gets back to Strawson’s article bringing up Russell’s argument about the intrinsic weirdness of matter.

We think in terms of a network of peripheral sensors connected to a central processor because that's what we believe _we_ have. The sensors out _there_ feed data into _here_, where it is interpreted and the decisionmaking happens. This is the metaphor that dominates our thinking. Client/server. Spoke/hub. Drone/queen. Parish/diocese/archdiocese. City/county/state/nation.

But is there a real qualitative difference between the neurons that are all over your body and the neurons that make up your brain? (Other than clustering and proximity.)

Surely a hypothetical hyperintelligent carrot would answer that the sensor network IS the brain and the brain IS the sensor network. The boundary between sensors and processor is an illusion. What you think of as "brain" is just a particularly concentrated bit of your entire nervous system. Your brain actually reaches out to your fingertips and into your toes.

A plant can detect a threat and mount a plant-wide response. Its network of sensors doesn't need a CPU; the network of sensors is its brain.

YMP super otm

that the sensor network IS the brain and the brain IS the sensor network. The boundary between sensors and processor is an illusion.

could not have said it better

the network of sensors is its brain.

No, it isn't. It is its network of sensors. It doesn't have a brain.
Certain chemicals affect consciousness, but only once they cross the blood-brain barrier. That seems to suggest certain things to me...

Ok lemme cut off that processor and see how well your sensors function

But is there a real qualitative difference between the neurons that are all over your body and the neurons that make up your brain? (Other than clustering and proximity.)

There are other cells in the brain besides neurons

there are lots of animals that don't have brains

i think it's unfair to suggest they don't have consciousness just because they don't have a brain

There are, of course, differences in body plan at work. Doesn't mean a distributed network of sensors can't "think" collectively in a way that is comparable to (but different from) a hub/spoke model.

Plenty of creatures can lose a tail and go on with their day, but not a head. Cut a person in half and you have two halves of one dead person. Cut a worm in half and you can get two worms, but it depends on the worm and it depends on where you cut.

The internet's a widely distributed network too. Seems to be working out okay - we are able to have this conversation node-to-node, mostly without the approval of a central processor. Perhaps a carrot's cells are doing something like sending LOLcats to each other all day, until there's a viral meme that makes them all sit up and pay attention to something.

fair?? fair??? do you think it's unfair to suggest they don't have sight because they don't have eyes?
wait you're the one who believes in souls huh.

hey i'm just being a scientist here

i don't think it's unfair to suggest they don't have sight, sight is the action of the eyes, if they don't have eyes they can't have sight

have we established that consciousness is the action of the brain? no

yes perhaps! but there's so far no reason to think consciousness exists without a brain-like structure and chemistry to provide it. strikes me as a reaction against us all knowing about times scientists have been dismissive of the capabilities of other lifeforms. we don't want to be *that guy* so let's error on the side of caution and say every single thing in the universe has consciousness.

xps

have we established that consciousness is the action of the brain? no

The evidence we have clearly leads to this conclusion

consciousness just means ... you're aware of your surroundings? a starfish is certainly aware of its surroundings yet doesn't have a brain, why can't we extend that to a carrot or a tree?

well sure we can, if that makes you feel better. to me, it broadens the meaning of the term to a point where it loses its utility.

Not to nitpick but the worm thing is a myth:

https://www.livescience.com/38371-two-worms-worm-cut-in-half.html

xps

are you certain about a starfish? what does it mean to be "aware"? if you react to your surroundings, does that constitute awareness?

Evan - as I said, depends on the worm

xp imo yes

not sure what the utility of a narrow definition of consciousness is vs a broad one

also i searched through the thread granny and i see you have not suggested an alternate definition of consciousness (unless i missed it)

perhaps you care to present your definition of consciousness that rules out a carrot?

oh boy, definitions

can't have a reasonable dialogue without shared definitions

utility=people can discuss a concept better and more precisely when words have more narrow meanings. If you say "consciousness is a subset of properties held by all matter", then ok what are we actually discussing here? Are we better off using another term? A different concept?

ok I don't think consciousness=reacting to surroundings so I guess we're done here?

maybe! what's your definition of consciousness?

also no offense but I struggle to take someone seriously when they reply "their soul" when asked what part of an organism's anatomy produces consciousness.

that's fine, i don't Insist that you take me seriously

tbf i struggle to take you seriously too, your definition of consciousness seems hopelessly circular (consciousness is what brains do, therefore only brains can have consciousness)

There are non-organic complex systems that also respond to their environment. Are they conscious? Is a hurricane conscious?

Assuming that brains=consciousness

i struggle to see how this is a more useful definition than "reacting to surroundings"

a hurricane is probably more conscious than terry schiavo was, terry schiavo had a brain, have you considered that?

No. Consciousness is an emergent property of brains, not "what they do". Could there be consciousness without a brain? I think it's possible. I also see no reason at this point to think it does, and so people being adamant in the other direction puzzles me.

yes and her brain was DAMAGED. do you see??

a hurricane reacts to its surroundings in a much less purposeful way than a starfish does though

a rock reacts to its surroundings by rolling downhill, but rolling downhill is not a very purposeful reaction, so it probably doesn't have a very developed consciousness

ditto a hurricane

that wasn't a definition. That was shorthand for "brain is required for consciousness", so far as it has been proven to this point.

purposeful? a hurricane has purpose?

no, a hurricane has little purpose, therefore one might infer that its consciousness is quite limited

haha i fail to see how you can move toward a proof of that if you don't even have a non-circular definition of what consciousness is!

(besides "an emergent property of brains")

so now we're assigning purpose behind any reaction to environment. so your definition has changed?

no. my definition is the same, consciousness is reaction to environment. but there are more or less purposeful and more or less complex reactions to an environment, so i figure there are more or less complex and more or less focused levels of consciousness.

It's a very tricky thing to define, and I am not going to attempt it. You seem very keen on very broad definition on it, and seems like it hurts you somehow to even consider that many many organisms are incapable of it. Just very puzzling to me!

So a hurricane does possess some low level consciousness?

maybe? though i am starting to question whether it really reacts to its environment in a purposeful way.

xp

just because i've rejected that conclusion doesn't mean i haven't considered it

jeez, how condescending can you get?

Judging the "purposefulness" of a reaction seems much more problematic than presuming that consciousness is an emergent property of brains.

oh I can get much more condescending, Mr Soul

i actually don't think rolling downhill counts as a reaction to one's environment, and a hurricane doesn't do much more than that

so no evidence that a hurricane has consciousness

xxp not to me, it doesn't

xp no doubt you can

lol and I'm the one using circular definitions

yes

i only suggest we judge purposefulness as a binary, things that happen can either be purposeful or non-purposeful, only a purposeful event can be counted as a reaction to the environment

that's all

why do you discount the evidence of alterations to brain structure/chemistry leading to alterations in consciousness? wouldn't this lead one to believe the 2 are related?

ok now define purposeful

i'm not sure i can construct a great definition of a purposeful event on a first try but i figure if i tried it would have something to do w/ entropy or potential energy

for example a fish swimming upstream would be purposeful, a fish floating downstream would be non-purposeful

if i pour caffeinated drinks on a plant it will alter how its cells responds to its environment, so there

so your definition has changed, no? "consciousness is purposeful reaction to an environment"? and so the reaction is what consciousness is? rather than the chemical reactions and whatnot that spurred the reaction?