121–130 of 216 posts
I didn't realize until reading this comment section that there's an entire demographic of intelligent people in denial about why we are conscious (generic cognition is an evolutionary advantage in responding to circumstances that are too dynamic to be accounted for by a process measured in generations) and whether it persists beyond death (no, because it's hooked up to the brain). And by the way, it clearly worked :…
"Human conscious experience is wholly a matter of physical goings-on in the body and in particular the brain." Is there any proof of this? The while article seems to hinge on this assumption and then go on from there. We can't see or measure consciousness (brain activity yes, consciousness no). We only experience it. The article makes far to many naive assumptions without any proof.
Guess we can all just move along now.
I feel like a lot of the replies here are missing what's actually a quite subtle, thoughtful argument: The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz made the point vividly in 1714. Perception or consciousness, he wrote, is “inexplicable on mechanical principles, i.e. by shapes and movements. If we imagine a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and be conscious, we can conceive of it being enlarged in suc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ordered a copy, thank you.
FWIW, this book gave me the idea that consciousness could be some sort of feedback loop involving the whole Universe (including you and me and everybody else) possibly via quantum entanglement. I know that's terribly hand-wavey and soupy, sorry about that, just felt I should mention it. Related: meditation (at least some kinds) seems to operate by turning the subjective awareness back onto itself, becoming aware of b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ordered a copy, thank you.
FWIW, this book gave me the idea that consciousness could be some sort of feedback loop involving the whole Universe (including you and me and everybody else) possibly via quantum entanglement. I know that's terribly hand-wavey and soupy, sorry about that, just felt I should mention it. Related: meditation (at least some kinds) seems to operate by turning the subjective awareness back onto itself, becoming aware of b…
Then this book sounds like it's not worth reading. There is absolutely no need to invoke pseudo-quantum mumbo-jumbo to investigate consciousness. We don't understand the chemical operation of neurons well enough to say whether quantum effects are necessary for neural functioning (although they probably aren't). Most "quantum-looking" (i.e. obviously non-classical) processes happen at much smaller space and energy scales than the chemical processes we know are involved in cognition.
Quantum entanglement almost certainly isn't involved because it can't be used to transmit information and it requires high degrees of precision to make use of in the first place.
The brain's thermal noise floor is vastly larger than the scale of most "interesting" quantum effects.
I didn't realize until reading this comment section that there's an entire demographic of intelligent people in denial about why we are conscious (generic cognition is an evolutionary advantage in responding to circumstances that are too dynamic to be accounted for by a process measured in generations) and whether it persists beyond death (no, because it's hooked up to the brain). And by the way, it clearly worked :…
You are talking about behavior. Qualia is something else. Why does it exists?
If consciousness is just a complicated computation, which seems the simplest explanation, then it can be analogous to the attitude toward "old computer science beliefs". As a side issue, someday much like people make furniture using 300 year old technology there will be craftsman making programs using no algorithm discovered (learned? found? created?) post 1970. Its a good thing we invented computers in recorded hist…
The problem with claiming that consciousness is just a complicated computation is not merely that we simply haven't advanced our study enough to understand it. The problem is that what we know so far about the nature of computation seems to directly contradict and falsify the notion that consciousness is just computation. To put it simply: our knowledge of computational complexity, algorithms, and general problem sol…
This is not true.
I wish I could respond with something more interesting, but that's all there is to it. You are just saying something that is incorrect. Our brains are information-theoretically and complexity-theoretically entirely reasonable.
> The reply is simple. We know what conscious experience is because the having is the knowing: Having conscious experience is knowing what it is. That's sidestepping the issue. Of course we know what consciousness is in this sense. What we don't know, and what we actually mean when we say we don't know what consciousness is, is what causes it and how it emerges.
Why is consciousness in need of being explained in that manner, is what I think the author would ask. It's similar to saying that physical matter or energy are hard problems, as we don't know what causes them or how they emerge - not in the sense of conversion from one form of energy or matter to another, but what generated matter or energy in the first place.
(With that said, I do think there are strong arguments for favoring the physical world, and that pose a challenge for the author's position.)