Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002) • Hacker News Board

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#51

Post by pmoriarty » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 2:56 PM UTC

red75prime wrote: post #35

pmoriarty wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's it. The real problem is that no science (whether physics, chemistry, biology, or even psychology -- if you deign to call the latter a science) describe what it's like to experience anything. Certainly there are measurements (like the wavelength of light), or even observations (ex: that a certain light was in the red spectrum), but the actual subjective experience of any phenomena seems to be comp…

> For instance, no scientific theory can tell you what seeing the color red is like. Science doesn't stand out here. Nothing can tell you what it is like to see infrared. Modifying your retinal cells and waiting, while your brain teaches itself to process new information, is a way to know how it will look like for you. But you still will be unable to convey this information, which raises a question: is it still an in…

I think it is information if it can not be conveyed. The other day I was sitting at a table and reading, and my attention happened to be drawn to the table top as I tried to think of the name for its color, but I was momentarily stumped. I couldn't think of a name for the color, as it wasn't a primary color but was kind of a mix of colors.

I spent a few seconds in this state, where I was clearly aware of the color and consciously thinking of it, and was in no sense puzzled by the color itself but only lacking a name for it. Then I decided it was a mix of colors that was kind of blue-green. To me it seems the pre-linguistic, conscious awareness that I had of the color of the table was information that I had, but information that I could at least momentarily not communicate.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#52

Post by pmoriarty » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 3:02 PM UTC

fmoralesc wrote: post #33

pmoriarty wrote: post #13

Analytic philosophers love to talk of qualia, but Continentals (Phenomenologists in particular) were on to the idea of the "lifeworld" well before (late 19th century) the Analytics came up with qualia (1929). I'd love to see the two concepts compared and contrasted. If anyone knows of such a comparison, I'd love to read about it.

The concepts of 'qualia' and 'lifeworld' are not directly comparable. Qualia are qualitative aspects of experiences, but lifeworlds are complexes of objects associated to a 'perspective' which operates on them (and possibly constitutes them) - essentially subjective worlds. The point of contact between those ideas is this: different lifeworlds could include the same objects but have a different qualitative character.…

It sounds like with the lifeworld concept, the Phenomenologists were coming up with another way to talk about solipsism. Would I be mistaken in thinking about lifeworlds like that?

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#53

Post by eli_gottlieb » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 3:07 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #49

FeepingCreature wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically there's also "The brain thinks it's conscious, but has no reason to believe that. Separately, it is also conscious." Ie. Epiphenomenalism.

The problem with epiphenomenalism is that we are wired to behave in ways that optimize the pleasure our consciousness experiences. If consciousness was just a byproduct, there wouldn't be such a strong relationship between conscious experience and survival value.

We're wired to do a whole lot of things, and hedonic reward-seeking is only one of them. That said, you'd have to do the experiment to see whether a reward can be subconsciously experienced.

I'd guess no, but that's just since a few experiments so far have shown that conscious experience seems to accompany the brain's processing of action rather than just passive perception.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#54

Post by eli_gottlieb » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 3:09 PM UTC

riesnerd wrote: post #47

I wonder why NYU Professor of Philosophy Thomas Nagels 2012 book "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False" until this point hasn't been mentioned in this thread? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_and_Cosmos https://books.google.de/books?id=pOzNcdmhjIYC&printsec=front...

Because, let's be frank, Nagel's work is bad and he should feel bad. There's ongoing work in producing naturalistic explanations for both consciousness and morality, so Nagel doesn't get to use those as, "Therefore we need to throw out all our existing science for a theory of teleology that makes no actual predictions other than that Thomas Nagel's intuitions should come out one way."

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#55

Post by ppod » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 3:10 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #45

joe_the_user wrote: post #8

"Conscious states include states of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, mental imagery, emotional experience, occurrent thought, and more. There is something it is like to see a vivid green, to feel a sharp pain, to visualize the Eiffel tower, to feel a deep regret, and to think that one is late. Each of these states has a phenomenal character, with phenomenal properties (or qualia) characterizing what it is lik…

> I'm not getting why this is suppose to be "hard". Because that's not what's hard. Explaining the physical processes of the brain is very, very difficult for the brain is an extremely complex machine (one could say, bar aliens, it is probably the most complex object in the universe). But it's surely not "hard" in a fundamental level. We know the rules of physics applicable to physical systems like the brain. Technic…

I don't see any advance in this debate since things that Dennett and Hofstadter wrote 20+ years ago (both independently and in their co-authored book "The Mind's I").

Is it really surprising that we have a first person subjective experience? We know that we are incredibly complex things, constantly integrating and acting on very complicated external stimuli. Such a system should have references to its own body and its own neural states, its train of reasoning should frequently include itself, its focus will drift forward and backwards in time... this is just how a system like this would work. If the system communicates about its state then its language should have referents to these internal states, referents like "experience", and "feels like", and "I understand". Is that surprising? Wouldn't it be surprising if it wasn't like that?

I think that Tononi's approach is a good approximation, but it can't be a full solution because the word 'consciousness' is too anthropocentric. One criticism of IIT showed that a seemingly uninteresting complex artificial system could have a very high IIT complexity quotient. The problem is that the things we use to define the term 'consciousness' are things that can be approximated to varying degrees by chimps or dolphins or generative adversarial networks or antfarms or thermometers. But behind our use of the word 'consciousness' there is still almost always a very slightly disguised dualism that uses it as a substitute for the word 'soul'.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#56

Post by eli_gottlieb » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 3:17 PM UTC

themgt wrote: post #18

joe_the_user wrote: post #8

"Conscious states include states of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, mental imagery, emotional experience, occurrent thought, and more. There is something it is like to see a vivid green, to feel a sharp pain, to visualize the Eiffel tower, to feel a deep regret, and to think that one is late. Each of these states has a phenomenal character, with phenomenal properties (or qualia) characterizing what it is lik…

Always hilarious to me how many educated humans will actually go argue that they are p-zombies rather than face the paradoxes of consciousness. I guess all I'll say is, physics seems capable of explaining the evolution of our universe and e.g. the emergent complex phenomena of solar systems and planets and such. Physics and the other hard sciences do not seem to lend a lot of clarity as to how a self-organizing piece…

>Physics and the other hard sciences do not seem to lend a lot of clarity as to how a self-organizing piece of the universe developed into beings that believe themselves to be conscious

Look, the theories aren't definitive yet, but we've definitely got them: http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/86/2013047... https://www.umsu.de/wo/2013/600

>believe they in some sense have the power of mind-over-matter

Any reasonably embodied mind is going to rightly believe that it has a measure of control over its body.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#57

Post by eli_gottlieb » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 3:20 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #45

joe_the_user wrote: post #8

"Conscious states include states of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, mental imagery, emotional experience, occurrent thought, and more. There is something it is like to see a vivid green, to feel a sharp pain, to visualize the Eiffel tower, to feel a deep regret, and to think that one is late. Each of these states has a phenomenal character, with phenomenal properties (or qualia) characterizing what it is lik…

> I'm not getting why this is suppose to be "hard". Because that's not what's hard. Explaining the physical processes of the brain is very, very difficult for the brain is an extremely complex machine (one could say, bar aliens, it is probably the most complex object in the universe). But it's surely not "hard" in a fundamental level. We know the rules of physics applicable to physical systems like the brain. Technic…

>Technically we were able to image it at a very high resolution, and if we had massive computers to solve the equations, we could explain everything going on in the brain.

That wouldn't explain the brain any more than simulating a car's engine at a molecular level explains the Carnot Cycle.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#58

Post by danielbigham » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 3:57 PM UTC

chronolitus wrote: post #37

I've always been more on the materialist side. Reading this, I finally managed to put a finger on something that's been bothering me. Our brain knows it is conscious. If consciousness is an immaterial phenomenon, emerging from those processes, how can the brain know it is conscious? What way could a brain possibly have to measure consciousness? When I refer to brain, i mean the physical, scientifically measurable com…

In university I wrote an essay arguing that consciousness was something in another dimension of reality and that the brain "projected" it's perceptions into that dimension. I also argued that that other dimension didn't pass any data back to the brain -- it was a one way street. ie. I argued that behavior wasn't influenced by the other dimension. However, like yourself I realized that my theory was false. The very fact that I spent so much time sitting around thinking about consciousness (behaviour) proved my theory false by counterexample. So we know that consciousness, in addition to adding an experiencial aspect to humans also has a computational / behaviour-affecting aspect to it.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#59

Post by 13of40 » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 3:58 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #50

newuser3000 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without language there is no consciousnesses. That's it. The brain does what it does. We think, occasionally, then imagine that we cause brain to function. All animals are just dandy without complex language, it's not really a miracle that we are conscious, just a different too.

Language is a learned behavior. Consciousness is a property of the learner. Language may influence conscious experience, but it certainly doesn't create it.

I think the development of complex language and the internal feedback mechanism it enabled might have led to a higher level of consciousness in humans.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#60

Post by andrepd » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 4:05 PM UTC

ppod wrote: post #55

andrepd wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not getting why this is suppose to be "hard". Because that's not what's hard. Explaining the physical processes of the brain is very, very difficult for the brain is an extremely complex machine (one could say, bar aliens, it is probably the most complex object in the universe). But it's surely not "hard" in a fundamental level. We know the rules of physics applicable to physical systems like the brain. Technic…

I don't see any advance in this debate since things that Dennett and Hofstadter wrote 20+ years ago (both independently and in their co-authored book "The Mind's I"). Is it really surprising that we have a first person subjective experience? We know that we are incredibly complex things, constantly integrating and acting on very complicated external stimuli. Such a system should have references to its own body and it…

RE: second paragraph. But that explains, for example, the physical phenomenon of language. A complex system has reference points to itself, and structures in the brain organize to speak about things, including about itself, using terms like "experience" and "feels like, etc". But it does not explain the conscious "internal" phenomenon of language, of preparing a speech, of grasping for words, etc. See what I mean? Like p-zombies. Someone else describes their stream-of-consciousness. But that speech, those patterns in the brain, etc, are but a physical phenomenon. They tell us nothing about the subjective conscious experience. We could have a robot not have consciousness and replicate that speech the same.