131–140 of 191 posts
This puts me in an uncomfortable spot w/regards to abortion. My go to argument was always 'the lights aren't on yet'. If I'm understanding correctly they might be, albeit dimly, and each day getting brighter.
the lights start the moment there is attraction between 2 people..
This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me. We could similarly write articles about all the qualities and properties of phlogiston, and we'd have learned just as much. What thing are we actually trying to explain here? What is the extensive meaning of the word "consciousness"? How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses con…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> .. that perhaps 'our ability to think about the issue is constrained by our language' and '[consciousness] workings being inaccessible to introspection' are the same thing. I like to think about it that way, but it makes the problem feel intractable. The problem is that we want to describe consciousness as "that thing that allows an organism to describe consciousness as 'that thing that allows an organism to descri…
"Consciousness is the ability of an organism to predict the future" The problem of looking at human consciousness is similar to someone that knows little about computer processors pulling apart an I7 and trying to figure meaningful things about what is going on inside. Without knowing the history of processor design, there will be huge information gaps on why some parts work the way they do. That said, I believe cons…
I don't think the analogy is adequate. A processor is an object - it "objects" to all of us. It appears to have an existence independent of the thing that recognizes it as such. When we embark on an empirical investigation of something, we make a distinction between the scientific observer and the scientific object. We come to an agreement about the boundaries of the object. This does not appear to be the case if you want to call consciousness "that special [condition, or process, or property, or pattern, etc.] of being a scientific observer" (which we would ideally want because it seems to encapsulate all those special things that distinguish human beings from other organisms with nervous systems).
In that domain, we cannot make a distinction between subject and object. In order to even speak intelligibly about things, we must all draw the boundary of the thing we're talking about - but we are in the peculiar position of being the very act of drawing the boundary.
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The fact that you have no memory of time while you are asleep does not prove that consciousness is absent. The fact that your brain's executive network are unaware of the workings of "autonomous" activities does not indicate that those activities lack consciousness. You are also unaware of my consciousness but I assure you that it exists.
> The fact that your brain's executive network are unaware of the workings of "autonomous" activities does not indicate that those activities lack consciousness. I'm lost. To me it means those activities lack consciousness. It's also the opinion stated in Jaynes' book, which was mentioned by user breckinloggins . It's not the same as me being unaware of your consciousness. Your consciousness is foreign to me. It's al…
Understand that I'm defining consciousness as the property of having awareness, not as the human mind. The human mind is what it is like to be a cerebral cortex with our given structure. Think of consciousness as being like a computer screen, and the mind as a picture displayed on that screen. That screen could display a very different image, but that wouldn't change what the screen itself is.
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…
Well, the problem is to give some definition of "what it is like to be X" we can cleanly separate from the "mere" sensorimotor statistics of X.
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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 simu…
>switch to the low level dual of this problem [...] reinforcement learning. But that is itself a theory about the problem of consciousness! So why not do both? There's no obvious short cut through the confusion, but discoveries in one field may guide questions in the other. In general I think it helps to have one's feet on the ground as well as one's head in the stars (for instance Newton ground his own lenses).
No it's not! It's a computational theory of motivated action.
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> 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.
I would figure that this isn't the problem of consciousness, but it is the problem of why we don't "see" a "ghostly world of equations, theories and data".
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> 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 simu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>switch to the low level dual of this problem [...] reinforcement learning. But that is itself a theory about the problem of consciousness! So why not do both? There's no obvious short cut through the confusion, but discoveries in one field may guide questions in the other. In general I think it helps to have one's feet on the ground as well as one's head in the stars (for instance Newton ground his own lenses).
>But that is itself a theory about the problem of consciousness! No it's not! It's a computational theory of motivated action.
This puts me in an uncomfortable spot w/regards to abortion. My go to argument was always 'the lights aren't on yet'. If I'm understanding correctly they might be, albeit dimly, and each day getting brighter.
I'd encourage anyone to examine their conscience, read about the viability of babies born prematurely, and consider that even post-birth a baby is not self-sufficient. We don't have good criteria for what makes something alive or conscious, yet many draw an arbitrary line at birth. I'm not looking to continue this discussion, but I'm glad you're thinking about this.
I used to support abortion, but more and more I'm sliding towards being maybe against it, because (some of) the anti-abortion side arguments are logical too. No matter how you draw the line based on some argument, you can use the same logic to kill adults. That includes viability, lack of pain, etc.
On the other hand, our technology is at the level where you can turn any cell in your body into sperm:
https://phys.org/news/2016-04-scientists-skin-cells-human-sp...
So if you're against abortion based on the "viability", every time you scratch your nose, you commit genocide.
It's a hard question.