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.

And plenty of evidence that conscious experience of doing/being lags tens-hundreds of milliseconds behind the brain actually doing stuff. Which is a pretty interesting problem to think about - almost like we have to wait for the activity to cohere into something at the right scale to "experience".

that lag could reasonably correspond to memory retrieval. if you only accept master consciousness as a linguistic narrative, then that narrative requires the memories corresponding to the words and their referents. I'm not a fan of ascribing consciousness only belonging to the part that can speak, but if you were a judge awarding an inheritance to one half of a split-brain patient, would you give it to the one with the functioning language centers or the other one who can catch a baseball that the linguistic side doesn't seem to know was pitched right at it?

You can have false memories, memories of things you didn't actually experience. You can have no memory of things you truly did experience. So I don't know why it makes sense to conclude that memory=consciousness.

And plenty of evidence that conscious experience of doing/being lags tens-hundreds of milliseconds behind the brain actually doing stuff. 

when the 'stuff' is as simple as deciding when or with which hand to press a button, yes. is there any similar evidence for more complex processes? perhaps many day-to-day decisions are that simple and reflexive, but many are not and require more conscious input.

a false memory in the process of construction is experienced. in re-ifying that false memory you experience it over and over. if anything, you are more conscious in the construction of a false memory than in one which was so trivially discarded.

I don't regard consciousness as an agent outside-the-box which influences brain activity. I regard experience as the slightly-lagged apperception of the coherently conscious system's activity. As in the conscious brain does stuff, but it takes a moment to feel that. Like the wake thrown off a speedboat. So yeah I think there is behaviour that we need to consciously think about, but that the thought process is sub-experiential, solutions or alternatives arise from neural activity which is part of consciousness but is not explicit. We become aware of its products, not the process. You can't feel or experience the dozens of potential threads spawned by contemplating a possible strategy, you only "experience" whichever one(s) were strong enough to cohere and suppress the others.

Idk man saying memory equals consciousness is to me akin to saying a live broadcast is the same as a recording. Not recording something doesn't mean you didn't see it.

And it's theoretically possible to insert false memories into a brain rather than a brain actively creating them itself.

only a very small portion of the human visual field is of any reasonable acuity -- the rest is a blur that is filled in by memory, so you literally would not be able to experience an entire picture without memory. Limiting experience to the pure raw sensory information available at any given time means you probably didn't "see" much of anything.

If that's "memory" maintaining a seamless sensory world, it's "memory" in the sense of sustained coherent activity or sustained attention (aka "working memory") only, which is not what most people would mean when using the word "memory".
I find it helpful to think of our sensory experiences as models which are updated by inputs from receptors as often as they're available.

Begging the question of what a "representation" might be, I think it's intuitive that it is simpler and more efficient to maintain a seamless representation informed by the best available sense data, than to log and deal with every raw input. That's the point of having a brain - to ride the sea of sensory information at a more coherent level. Allows us to strategise rather than simply react.

and to return to the thing I said earlier about planning and threads, there is also quite a lot of evidence that representations / activity patterns compete with each other, often within the same networks of neurons / glia, and dominate when they cohere better than their competition. To experience a unified self one has to wait for the winner to emerge before folding it into the narrative. Which pattern "wins" may depend on both external evidence, and internal states like behavioural goals, so that we reach the interpretation which is the most use to us at that moment. Oops getting pretty handwavey here, I'll stop now.

I like the idea of neuron wars, it’s pretty metal

I think it might be a bit like the game go where if you outflank the competition they fall into line with you.
(which reminds me of a Sunday afternoon once when I was visiting Tokyo and realising they televised go matches, literally static shots of the board and two people thinking intently for minutes at a time, with occasional excited breakaway to commentators playing out possible scenarios on magnet boards)

this is all good stuff, i'm sure i'm too taken by the idea of a unified all-seeing all-powerful consciousness. this though:

I regard experience as the slightly-lagged apperception of the coherently conscious system's activity. As in the conscious brain does stuff, but it takes a moment to feel that. Like the wake thrown off a speedboat. 

reads like pure epiphenomenalism, which to me is a repugnant conclusion. i want to be driver not a passenger! i know that's not an argument against it, just an incentive to find one. what evolutionary purpose does this passive experience serve? is it just a side effect?

happy to be sat in the back of the limo dozing off

Maybe it's just handwaving "I can't believe it's not epiphenomenalism" but to me the conscious-actor and the conscious-experiencer are one and the same entity. I think the consciousness that drives the boat feels the wake as well - the two are not in sync but I think this allows us to "own" our bodily actions regardless of their driver - if I roll my ankle, stumble and recover I still feel like "I" did it when my awareness catches up and processes it all. Even though my body would have performed the same movements if the descending pathways were cut at the midbrain (more or less). So I think the stuff we do ranges from the purely-automatic stretch-reflex type stuff, up to actions and strategies which are the result of consciously setting up conditions and mental states which lead to outcomes we want. I think of awareness as the feedback loop from that process - what are we doing now, what's next. And I think it's possible to be conscious and volitional without being aware in that way, whether you're a goat or just really stoned.

as a super clumsy dude i totally disown the majority of bodily actions.

This thread has gotten really good. Some very evocative musings on consciousness here.

in all seriousness can you guys recommend some books on this? i find this fascinating.

Probably something by Daniel Dennet

know yr enemy

I should probably read Dennett’s big consciousness book even though he seems to say baffling things in interviews. I suspect materialists and dualists are saying similar things just in a different language. It seems like arguing about that turns into a shouting match and misses the nuanced texture of conscious experience that both sides could agree on.

the oliver sacks books aren't explicitly about consciousness but are pretty good in illustrating the aspects of consciousness that maybe shouldn't qualify as consciousness (which lends support to the idea that almost none of it should qualify). It's really odd he never mentions his own face-blindness in them.

recommended reading

http://i.imgur.com/SaTCn8x.jpg

PASCAL LEMAITRE sounds like suitable name for this kind of thing.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-consciousness/

A quick search of that article shows it contains neither of the phrases, "freaky shit" or "no big deal".

Scientists are beginning to unravel a mystery

uh-huh, go on...

I shouldn't be too dismissive, it's easy to be scornful of scientists doing philosophy but there there is actually some interesting and useful science in that article, and in this particular subject I don't think you can say that philosophers are any better informed or their theories less wildly speculative.

otm

ITT seems intriguing, borderline panpsychist plus this prediction: a sophisticated simulation of a human brain running on a digital computer cannot be conscious - I think they mean at a very high level - even if it can speak in a manner indistinguishable from a human being. And it puts Fela Kuti in my head.

Peter Watts, sci fi author and Biology PhD:

http
://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I

Trying again:

Peter Watts, sci fi author and biology PhD:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I

starts really well, ending is perhaps slightly disappointing

mind-blowing as the "Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect" study sounds, it seems it's been hard to replicate the findings

anyone read his books?

I enjoyed that, especially the ending! He was suitably sceptical about current theories & informative of the current state of the art in actual neural augmentation. Just wish he hadn't repeated the old canard of driving somewhere and arriving with no recollection of how you get there = you were unconscious. Not remembering being conscious doesn't mean you were unconscious.

I have read blindsight, I don't recall anything about it. Does that mean I wasn't conscious when I read it?

Blindsight is really good

Just wish he hadn't repeated the old canard of driving somewhere and arriving with no recollection of how you get there = you were unconscious.

lol yeah I guess I was unconscious during several lunches last week then

hope it wasn't soup or a big plate of spaghetti

Wow- thanks for posting that video. I thought it started well and ended well (the part where Elon Musk made a surprise cameo as the advance guard of the cyber-borg was a real-life lol).

Yo consciousness is wild shit

on the whole it's a great tool, but it's sneaky as hell and tells a lot of lies

O Tru Mind

enjoyed that Peter Watts talk, however terrifying

Good, sceptical, pessimistic piece about understanding the brain in general:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/27/why-your-brain-is-not-a-computer-neuroscience-neural-networks-consciousness

Reverse engineering a computer is often used as a thought experiment to show how, in principle, we might understand the brain. Inevitably, these thought experiments are successful, encouraging us to pursue this way of understanding the squishy organs in our heads. But in 2017, a pair of neuroscientists decided to actually do the experiment on a real computer chip, which had a real logic and real components with clearly designed functions. Things did not go as expected. [...] Eric Jonas and Konrad Paul Kording – employed the very techniques they normally used to analyse the brain and applied them to the MOS 6507 processor found in [the Atari 2600] [...] As Jonas and Kording put it, the techniques fell short of producing "a meaningful understanding"

That’s an awesome paper, they do recordings and try to correlate the activity with what’s happening onscreen in Donkey Kong

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268

The Visual6502 team reverse-engineered the 6507 from physical integrated circuits [11] by chemically removing the epoxy layer and imaging the silicon die with a light microscope. Much like with current connectomics work [12, 13], a combination of algorithmic and human-based approaches were used to label regions, identify circuit structures, and ultimately produce a transistor-accurate netlist (a full connectome) for this processor consisting of 3510 enhancement-mode transistors. Several other support chips, including the Television Interface Adaptor (TIA) were also reverse-engineered and a cycle-accurate simulator was written that can simulate the voltage on every wire and the state of every transistor. The reconstruction has sufficient fidelity to run a variety of classic video games

I find this pretty amazing in itself!

They’ve done that with a few CPUs outside of this context - I think there is an online Intel 4004 simulator showing voltage changes on every line as it runs.

Ledge that Guardian book excerpt is so fucking otm, thank you for linking it