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Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#51

Post by andybak »

sriku wrote: post #33
breckinloggins wrote: post #5

This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bica…

> If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. I don't believe we can get to the root of this "hard problem" by first trying to agree on a definition of the word before we can say anything about it. We will also need to admit the possibility that the question "are we conscious?" may be as vacuous at the end as "is Pluto a planet?".

And yet as I awake for yet another day as me, there's something in need of explanation.

Unlike Pluto - this isn't just a debate about labels.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#52

Post by mehh »

nsxwolf wrote: post #48
marccantwell wrote: post #20

It is hard to take the author seriously, or as an authority, when he rejects materialism and states something like "Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness", and he believes in the afterlife.

Why does that make the author hard to take seriously? Because of your bias toward materialism?

Complete lack of evidence to support his "belief" that sounds very much like supernatural religious magic.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#53

Post by Marazan »

nsxwolf wrote: post #48
marccantwell wrote: post #20

It is hard to take the author seriously, or as an authority, when he rejects materialism and states something like "Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness", and he believes in the afterlife.

Why does that make the author hard to take seriously? Because of your bias toward materialism?

Well, when it comes to consciousness the alternative is dualism and dualism is the belief in magic.

Given how discredited dualism is it is amazing how far people will go to deny hey are dualists whilst spouting all the arguements and beliefs of dualists.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#54

Post by [deleted] »

thevardanian wrote: post #41
sjeohp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. the universe isn't math. The universe is matter. Math is a part of the universe. Therefore math is simply material. Nothing more, nothing less.

Math isn't anything but matter. Math is just another thought construct. A powerful thought construct, but a thought construct nonetheless. As a thought construct it too is material. The electronic impulses on you computer are no different than the ones in your brain. So yes. Math is also a material manifestation. Life is a material manifestation. Thought is a material manifestation. The problem is with you trying to…

[deleted]

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#55

Post by goatlover »

sriku wrote: post #33
breckinloggins wrote: post #5

This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bica…

> If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. I don't believe we can get to the root of this "hard problem" by first trying to agree on a definition of the word before we can say anything about it. We will also need to admit the possibility that the question "are we conscious?" may be as vacuous at the end as "is Pluto a planet?".

Pluto is a taxonomy problem. Consciousness is reconciling how we explain the world (science & objectivity) versus how we experience the world (subjectivity). Consider that the world looks colored, is full of sounds, smells, tastes and feels. But the scientific explanation leaves all that out. The scientific world is the ghostly world of equations, theories and data. It's Plato's cave inverted.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#56

Post by narag »

Sawamara wrote: post #44
thevardanian wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Math isn't anything but matter. Math is just another thought construct. A powerful thought construct, but a thought construct nonetheless. As a thought construct it too is material. The electronic impulses on you computer are no different than the ones in your brain. So yes. Math is also a material manifestation. Life is a material manifestation. Thought is a material manifestation. The problem is with you trying to…

Ideas are not material. Even if they are stored in material brains. Especially not when they can be independently rediscovered without having any trace of them stored anywhere.

Ideas are not material, but thevardanian has a point in the context of this thread. Unless you believe in some kind of supernatural force, all you have is matter and matter-based thought. Ideas are not material but they still need a brain to be held. And a very conscious one.

About rediscovering, you can simply argue that ideas are matter properties so an intelligent being can recognize them.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#57

Post by visarga »

sriku wrote: post #33
breckinloggins wrote: post #5

This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bica…

> If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. I don't believe we can get to the root of this "hard problem" by first trying to agree on a definition of the word before we can say anything about it. We will also need to admit the possibility that the question "are we conscious?" may be as vacuous at the end as "is Pluto a planet?".

Being unable to agree on a definition for consciousness is a huge problem. I think this happens because consciousness is being studied at a too abstract (high) level. Instead, we should switch to the low level dual of this problem - game theory and reinforcement learning. Fortunately, at this level definitions are exact and concrete - agent, environment, goal, actions, values. At this level we can understand and simulate what it means to be a worm, or a bat - as agents playing games.

I think what the current philosophic theory of consciousness lacks is a focus on the game itself. The agent is but a part of the environment, and the game is much more than the agent. The whole environment-agent-game system is what creates consciousness and also explains the purpose of consciousness (to maximize goals for agents).

Analyzing consciousness outside its game is meaningless (such as p-zombies) - the game is the fundamental meaning creator, defining the space of consciousness. The Chinese room is not part of a game, it is not embodied in the world, and has no goals to attain, that is why it is not conscious, it is just a data processing system.

On the other part, a bacteria can be conscious on a chemical, electric and foto level even if it can only process data with its gene regulatory network (which is like a small chemical neural net). A bacteria has clear goals (gaining nutrients, replication) thus its consciousness is useful for something - all consciousness needs to have a clear goal otherwise it would not exist in the first place - something rarely emphasized in consciousness articles.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#58

Post by narag »

colordrops wrote: post #38
thevardanian wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. the universe isn't conscious. The universe is matter. Consciousness is a part of the universe. Therefore consciousness is simply material. Nothing more, nothing less. It's just that our egos are too big to accept that we are nothing more than dirt.

Have you ever considered that objective reality is seated in consciousness rather than the other way around? Look into Plato's allegory of the cave. The world around you is actually a simulation created in your brain by synthesizing inputs from your sensory organs - you aren't experiencing it directly. That model includes the conception that you have a brain and sensory organs which simulate an objective reality. In…

The possibility of "objetive" reality coming from the mind is indeed a common theme from Plato to The Matrix. Very fun to explore, but actually useless, if not actively harmful.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#59

Post by goatlover »

Marazan wrote: post #53
nsxwolf wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does that make the author hard to take seriously? Because of your bias toward materialism?

Well, when it comes to consciousness the alternative is dualism and dualism is the belief in magic. Given how discredited dualism is it is amazing how far people will go to deny hey are dualists whilst spouting all the arguements and beliefs of dualists.

Dualism is the belief there is more than one fundamental substance in the world (mind & matter). There's nothing magical about that, it's just an ontological position. But it does have the problem of how mind & matter interact.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#60

Post by mmjaa »

breckinloggins wrote: post #5

This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bica…

>We need new words - or wider usage of existing ones.

Agreed - trouble is, though, whenever you start to enforce this particular aspect of the discussion, you end up either being accused of starting a cult, or following one...

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