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Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

nytimes.com

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Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#191

Post by callesgg »

RivieraKid wrote: post #48
callesgg wrote: post #2

My personal theory of what consciousness is that it is a feedback loop. I have major issues explaining why i think that but somehow it fits my model. When thinking of consciousness as a feedback loop, stuff sort of makes sense. I have been unable to poke holes in the theory but also unable to add strength to it.

Feedback loop is a very abstract concept and I honestly do not see any connection to consciousness.

If thoughts that you have can go back in the beginning of the thought cycle, you remember that you have had them you don't actually need to be "conscious" to think you are "conscious".

Well technically you will be conscious, but the meaning/description of conscious in your head wont fit what it actually is.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#192

Post by tim333 »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #121
sp527 wrote: post #120

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?

Probably because Qualia are part of the process.

My dictionary has qualia "a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person"

Take an example like something tasting good. That has obvious evolutionary advantage for getting fed.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#193

Post by _1tem »

breuleux wrote: post #177
_1tem wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I never brought up inputs and outputs, though, you did, and ultimately I feel it's kind of a strawman of my position. 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, howe…

I understand that you view qualia as structural properties, and can map trillions of physical brain-configurations to trillions of subjective brain-states. However there is still a massive discrepancy between our subjective experience of such states, and the physical configurations that are claimed to represent it - which is why it is not a satisfactory answer to the hard problem of consciousness for many people.

The 2 big discrepancies I see are this: 1. We have the subjective perception of free will: I can choose to write these sentences or not. Where does that intention originate? If our consciousness is just neuronal computation, then it is completely deterministic or probabilistic. That is entirely contradictory of most people's experience, because we can choose what we want to do, and do things that strongly contradict our "mood". Some people can even go further to consciously modify their brain states. If you claim that is also just a product of complex structural properties, you get into an infinitely regressing claim.

2. Despite being able to create incredibly complex connected structures, arguably even more complicated than a single person's brain, such as the Internet, we have no evidence of such an entity having a subjective feeling of consciousness. There is simply no parallel in our current knowledge for how subjective experience can arise from system configurations. You seem to be simply assuming that an experience is such a configuration, but we have no evidence of that. If such a configuration could be consciousness itself, then we have examples of other entities which are connected in similarly complex ways, yet we don't believe they are concious. This argument is explained here: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#194

Post by walter_bishop »

"It’s ironic that the people who are most likely to doubt or deny the existence of consciousness (on the ground that everything is physical, and that consciousness can’t possibly be physical)"

We don't doubt that consciousness exists, what we do call into question is the assertion that it is of a non-corporeal nature. Therefore it has to be physical in nature.

panpsychism: 'the doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness.'

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#195

Post by _1tem »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #173
_1tem wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

It's a distributed computation that has been mostly precomputed, ie: brain connectivity. And a very popular theory of the brain says it does calculate second-order (precision/entropy) statistics about what it models.

The combinatorially explosive amount of information that we deal with at every single moment is too large to be dismissed as "precomputed by brain connectivity". If such a large amount of computation could be "precomputed", it has massive implications on our understanding of complexity-theory. Besides it contradicts our subjective feeling of free will, which is why it is not a satisfactory answer for most people.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#196

Post by dTal »

espadrine wrote: post #107
paulsutter wrote: post #64

Consciousness is a suitcase word, which makes it challenging to debate. From [1]: "In The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky discusses suitcase words—words that contain a variety of meanings packed into them, such as conscience, emotions, consciousness, experience, thinking, morality, right, and wrong. "The word ‘consciousness’ is used to describe a wide range of activities, such as “how we reason and make decisions, how…

> Consciousness is a suitcase word, which makes it challenging to debate. It is worse: it carries with it connotations of discarded science, such as levels of consciousness (aka. "animals have a lower level, Buddhist monks a higher one"), and the mind-body separation — it is fairly clear by now that whatever could be called a mind is a part of our body. There was a time where the majority belief was that emotions and…

Have they? A rhetorical tone can be hard to convey over the aether, but humor me for a minute...

The point is that even after words (and whole concepts) fall out of favor scientifically, they can still have a metaphorical meaning. Sometimes it's the best we've got even though we know it's wrong. We might like to describe someone's personality in terms of serotonin levels and amygdala response, but we really don't know enough - so we call them hot-blooded, even though that theory died many a long age ago.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#197

Post by acqq »

Biganon wrote: post #149
sp527 wrote: post #120

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 :…

If we don't have free will, what advantages does the illusion of free will grant, evolutionary speaking?

The "free will" as it is used by those who insist on it existing is something that is based on the needs of religious thought. It's a concept invented to explain the problem of (paraphrasing) "if good is all-powerful and good, why is there evil," to which the magical answer is "the people have free will" to mean, the God doesn't decide what people will decide. And this is just nonsense invented to explain the starting nonsense problem in the "demon haunted world"(1) of those who believe in a "good God."(2)

Our decisions are simply the function of the "stored state" in our body and outside influences in the moment up to the decision. Animals function the same. Of course, there are so many influences and the process of thinking(3) is dependent on so many variables that we can actually make different decisions based on, for example, our same experiences up to the moment of the decision but depending on if it's 9 AM or 9 PM, or if we drunk the coffee one or two hours before etc. So it appears to be a "free" decision but is still just a function of the state(4) and the input.

------

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

2) No every religion has a "good for everybody" god, so for these religions it's not even a problem. If the god is there just to favor your group when he is not distracted by something else (yes, there are religions where the god has a limited attention span), he can smite everybody else and he doesn't have to be absolutely "good." For those who believe in a "good God" the shock is, of course, when something like this happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake#Effect_...

3) which we surely believe to posses, in some aspects more complex than what we understand the animals do, simply because we don't know their language and they can't write

4) not just of our neurons but also of the exact amount of the traces of different chemicals

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#198

Post by mcguire »

visarga wrote: post #180
mcguire wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way do you feel the limits of your imagination?

It's easy: there are many systems that are more complicated than what we usually can imagine. For example, the detailed structure of a material, or the internal structure of a language. We don't usually imagine coherent systems of such complexity. 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.…

Are you imagining the detailed structure of a material or are you imagining someone telling you about the detailed structure of a material? How much is first-hand sensing and how much is second hand reports?

Also, that which does the imagining, your subconscious, say, has to be more complex than what you might perceive it to be.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#199

Post by mcguire »

armitron wrote: post #167
visarga wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is no proof of an external world, since nobody has ever experienced it. Everything you consider to be a part of that external world is mediated through your mind. In short, you exist in virtual reality which is really manifested by your mental map which is layer upon layer of memories, personality traits, beliefs and thoughts. That does not necessarily mean that "you" create _the_ world, only that your mind giv…

Absolutely. That's the point of the solipsism argument: you have to assume there is an objective external world or you get into a trivial corner.

At which point you need to explain consciousness in other people, which you cannot perceive directly.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#200

Post by armitron »

mcguire wrote: post #199
armitron wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no proof of an external world, since nobody has ever experienced it. Everything you consider to be a part of that external world is mediated through your mind. In short, you exist in virtual reality which is really manifested by your mental map which is layer upon layer of memories, personality traits, beliefs and thoughts. That does not necessarily mean that "you" create _the_ world, only that your mind giv…

Absolutely. That's the point of the solipsism argument: you have to assume there is an objective external world or you get into a trivial corner. At which point you need to explain consciousness in other people, which you cannot perceive directly.

Well the assumption of an objective external world I find a bit silly. We can assume that other minds exist since we have direct experience of our own. It's a small leap from one mind to many (a leap nonetheless).

But to assume an objective external world exists when nobody has ever experienced such a thing, is a leap of quite different proportions, akin to believing in a bearded man in the sky.

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