171–180 of 216 posts
"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.
Do we have proof of any phenomenon being non-physical?
If consciousness is just matter, why isn't yours accessible to me. There is something deeper at play. I have a hypothesis that a consciousness is a function of a universe. Each universe has just one consciousness. Another person's consciousness is inaccessible because it's in a different universe. Only the matter part of that is projected in your universe, not the actual identity. Without a hypothesis like this, we a…
> If consciousness is just matter, why isn't yours accessible to me. Because my matter and your matter aren't in close enough physical proximity or the appropriate configuration to have any communication with one another. Same way that you and I both live in houses, but my front door doesn't open into your living room.
I think that being locked to a particular consciousness and having no access to another one is on par with not having access to parallel universes. I'm going to click Update right now. In another universe, a parallel me closes the page without clicking Update. I have no access to that.
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Everything in the brain is natively probabilistic. Representations which have low to zero mutual information with the current sensory input are simply not computed-with. You could say that almost all representations will have nonzero mutual information with almost all real-world sensory input, but the sensory input is precision-weighted, so it will take both a sufficiently high degree of mutual information and suffic…
> Representations which have low to zero mutual information with the current sensory input are simply not computed-with. Who decides that a particular representation in the brain has zero mutual information with current sensory input? This requires a comparison of some sort (i.e. computation).
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If you assert that consciousness has no physical cause, then that's all you can say about it. You're skyhooking. you can take the wrong turn Penrose took and posit that it's due to quantum effects, as a sort of middle ground. My way of looking at it is that we use "consciousness" as a default bucket for things we don't have instrumentation to measure, or otherwise have a functioning predictive model for.
I've always wondered if anyone has pointed out to Penrose that asserting all behavior is random is not better than the alternatives, philosophically speaking.
The reason it's bad, using a Dennet frame of mind, is that it's a sort of left-handed "skyhook" - throwing "quantum" in the resolve the longstanding divide between Mechanists and those who believe in a Prime Mover or deity. It's an Ex Deux Machina of sorts.
I can sympathize with Penrose; his entire career was about measuring the information transforms of things like black holes, so why not apply the same basic recipe to consciousness? It's still an interesting idea, but it's not, SFAIK, testable.
Perhaps I'm just not smart enough to understand what the hell this article is driving at. But I'm pretty confident in my personal understanding of "consciousness": it's a word that we use to describe our "experiencing" of the physical world, which is an emergent property of our incredibly complex neurological infrastructure. Is this article agreeing with me, or disagreeing with me? I can't honestly tell.
I think the article finds "emergent property" mysterious. It intuits that there is a link between knowing what the "stuff" is that behaves as physics describes it, and "consciousness", by which we know there is something rather than nothing. I think that's a mistake: it's like thinking you couldn't understand an article on the web without directly observing all the electronics that created it. I don't believe that fundamental particles (e.g., quarks) have any identifier attached to them to distinguish them from other fundamental particles, except those that describe their behavior: (probability distribution of) location, (probability distribution of) momentum, (probability distribution of) mass, etc. There is no "stuff" that is not behavior. Physics works to refine our model of the fundamental particles; everything after that is "emergent property". A sorting algorithm in a high level language doesn't depend on what CPU it runs on, given sufficient RAM and that there are no hardware faults. It may have been designed by a human, but it may also have been generated by simulated evolution (genetic algorithm). Fundamental particles/waves don't have hardware faults, but they do have probability distributions. Atoms are an emergent property of their constituents and decay when their constituents reach a low probability state incompatible with the constitution of the atom. Molecules are an emergent property of atoms and become different molecules when their constituents decay or their components react to some external force (usually the electromagnetic forces of another molecule). Cells are an emergent property of some kinds of molecules, and so on up the complexity scale. Consciousness is perhaps the top of the pyramid.
This is terrible. Is is even an argument? I was reading "Hard problem of consciousness" Wikipedia article this morning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness I'm not sure this adds anything to that. The author seems to want to say that consciousness is primary and that the physical universe, matter, is consciousness somehow, so poof no more mystery. But this doesn't touch the "hard problem" so w…
Where else would it come from? If we break a conventionally physical object into smaller and smaller bits we find that: 1) There's mostly nothing there - a whole lotta nothing inside of most "stuff", and 2) What is there seems to simply be a (very fast) movement, and doesn't follow the behavior of conventional objects. Whatever it is probably can't even properly be described as noun-stuff doing verb-stuff.
So, there appears to be something out there, but if in fact there is, it clearly isn't made out of conventional objects. That "objectivization" and the languageing of the objects of awareness is created in awareness. Who is the master who makes the grass green and all that...
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> I'm referring to something that is completely independent of its outputs. Is it not conceivable that a man who is missing both his arms and legs, mute, blind, and deaf, can still have a conscious ego? The brain has many internal inputs and outputs, even more of them than external ones. Even if you imagine a completely isolated brain that can't see, hear or move, it's still exchanging signals internally. For instanc…
It seems once again that you're defining the qualia in terms of some input/output formula. But that's missing my point; I used "external" inputs/outputs merely as an example. At what point do those inputs and outputs, whether they be internal or external, become qualia? In other words, from where does the "ability to experience" the inputs and outputs come from? Does the mere fact that the brain receives input make i…
A brain is made out of billions of neurons, each of which has its own inputs and outputs, and so does each part of each neuron, down to the atomic level. Every physical entity is a kind of IO machine, so in a sense, any physical definition I may give of qualia will reduce to IO patterns. That is, however, missing the bigger picture, which is the structure of the system: how the information flows within it, and how certain conditions modify that flow. That's where the meat is.
In my mind, consciousness and qualia are structural properties. When experiencing a qualia, the information flows in a particular way in your brain, like a mode of operation, and that's what the qualia is.
I think of it this way: you experience "anger" when your brain is put in an "anger mode", which taints everything it sees or does -- anger is not an "input" or an "output", it is a "mode" that your whole brain is in. It makes you "different", although not in a way that makes you lose your sense of self (well, usually). And in a lesser way, when you see red, your brain enters a "red mode", when you eat nougat it is put in a "nougat mode", and when you think about red or nougat your brain also enters a "recall" version of red or nougat mode that has similar properties.
So what happens is that your brain can enter billions of subtly different "modes" that correspond to different stimuli (real or not). Each of these "modes" makes you think a bit differently, in a way that's adapted to the stimuli you received. These are the "experiences" it can have: they are not inputs or outputs, they are ways of thinking, triggered by stimuli or memories or sometimes random noise.
I guess I would say a qualia is a bit like a protein fold, it's a functional reconfiguration.
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This quantum biology stuff is just a way for dualists to hang on to their religious or mystic beliefs.
Not exactly. We've pushed determinism down to the level of quantum mechanics. Bell's theorem strongly implicates that the universe is fundamentally non-deterministic. The way I see it, you can interpret this non-determinism as randomness, or you can interpret it as choice. The thing I find ironic is that most scientists - who espouse parsimony and deduction based on observation - choose the random explanation. If qua…
This is terrible. Is is even an argument? I was reading "Hard problem of consciousness" Wikipedia article this morning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness I'm not sure this adds anything to that. The author seems to want to say that consciousness is primary and that the physical universe, matter, is consciousness somehow, so poof no more mystery. But this doesn't touch the "hard problem" so w…
One could flip it - There's no matter, only awareness. All awareness, when devoid of the body, the thoughts, emotions, memories, are identical. Now, make that leap, where `identical == expressing an identity`, where it is all one universal awareness, and that is reality. You now have a pass to: Hindu (Brahman): "Brahman (/brəhmən/; ब्रह्मन्) connotes the highest Universal Principle, the Ultimate Reality in the univer…
Wait. My main issue with religion is that it forces the belief that one is separate from source/God/universe and creates a life long relationship of separation thus perverting humanity's relationship with ourselves and with our own "sacredness" or "divinity" in order to become a middleman to and sell something that was never separate from us. It's really insidious from that standpoint.
unless we speak of Daoism or Advaita, both nondualistic practices, both nonreligious.
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Even though solipsism is considered unfalsifiable, it can't explain why the world is so regular and yet complex, much more complex than human imagination. We can feel the limits of our imagination, but reality is much more complex. So there is the proof that there is an external world. It's not all in our imagination, because our imagination is less complex than the world we experience. If we said that our own imagin…
In what way do you feel the limits of your imagination?
If there ever was a man trying to imagine something hugely complex, then he was surely Tolkien with LOTR. He imagined languages, countries and peoples in an amazing detail. But that shows how hard it would be to try to imagine something as complex as the real world.
Our minds don't have such generative powers, thus the world doesn't come from our imagination.