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Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#141

Post by visarga »

pixl97 wrote: post #109
visarga wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think consciousness has the role of protecting the life of the organism and reproduction. It's not a "soul" thing, it's a "body" thing, or more exactly, it's a "world+agent+game" thing.

My belief is that consciousness is the ability of an organism to model the world and predict the future. Any organism that doesn't just react is on the consciousness spectrum. When a creature is presented with two or more choices and has to decide which will have the best outcome, it is making a conscious choice. The problem with starting at human consciousness is our consciousness is to advanced to easily grasp. We…

We also have AI agents. By creating robots we gain a lot of insight into the difficulties solved by the brain. With AI agents we can experiment much more freely than with animals or humans, we can peek into their workings and try variations.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#142

Post by the_af »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #134
the_af wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You are making a special distinction between stuff that is "part" of you, and stuff that is not "part" of you. In actuality there is no such clear distinction, there is only correlation in state, which is not binary but rather occurs on a spectrum. 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 g…

> You are making a special distinction between stuff that is "part" of you, and stuff that is not "part" of you

But this a crucial distinction when talking about consciousness, it's not arbitrary. Consciousness requires a subject to be conscious.

Splitting awareness from the human mind seems weird to me. It's not very useful to consider, say, my liver to be conscious. Even worse, there's no way to prove or disprove the assertion that it is conscious; it's even less falsifiable than talking about other people's consciousness!

The whole point of Jaynes' book is that consciousness is not required for most activities. He argues that not only are your body organs not conscious, but also that most activities you engage in every day aren't conscious either.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#143

Post by CuriouslyC »

gus_massa wrote: post #113
CuriouslyC wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Temperature is the aggregate of the energy of many individual particles, modulated by the tendency of those particles to transmit that energy. Thus a single molecule does have a temperature in a sense, you just need an incredibly sensitive detector to register it. Temperature is a fully reducible property. Consider the possibility that consciousness isn't a distinctly human phenomenon, as there is no reason to believ…

In a very big molecule [1] that doesn't move, you have so many parts that you can have a reasonable good definition of the temperature. But in a very small molecule/atom, let's pick a single helium atom, you don't have a good definition of temperature. You can define the temperature of a gas of Helium using the average kinetic energy of the atoms, but you must consider that the whole gas is not moving. If you put a b…

Since we measure temperature by the transmission of energy, and that process occurs in an entropic manner, if you have a moving reference frame, that prevents measurement of the increase in energy by the detector. The particle itself definitely has increased in energy, we just lack the ability to detect it. This is entirely analogous to our inability to measure mass using a scale in free-fall.

I suppose it comes down to whether you define temperature as "what thermometers measure" or the average potentially transmissible energy of an ensemble. I prefer the latter definition for its clarity, but like the idea of kolmogorov complexity, it is sometimes unwieldy in practice.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#144

Post by visarga »

mannykannot wrote: post #84
visarga wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect that there isn't anything to the experience of being like a worm Even a worm has goals to attain - food and reproduction. In order to attain those goals, it needs to have perceptions and to rank those by the estimated return value. That is what it's like to be a worm.

Talking about a worm as if it had goals is a teleological analogy that makes discussing its behavior easier, but I think it is a mistake to take this usage literally. If you do, you must also conclude that a thermostat has a goal, and therefore (by your argument) that there is a something that is what it is like to be a thermostat. I can only see this line of argument as a distraction that will only confuse any attem…

Yes, you can draw a very clean line. It's the line of self-replication. Self-replicators have an internal goal - that is to maintain their existence by growing and replicating. The more advanced ones develop complex responses to changes in their environments. Humans are just the apex of this process. A toaster or a thermostat don't self reproduce, so they have no goals. Having no goals, means no consciousness, because goals are shaping the development of consciousness.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#145

Post by [deleted] »

the_af wrote: post #142
CuriouslyC wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making a special distinction between stuff that is "part" of you, and stuff that is not "part" of you. In actuality there is no such clear distinction, there is only correlation in state, which is not binary but rather occurs on a spectrum. 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 g…

> You are making a special distinction between stuff that is "part" of you, and stuff that is not "part" of you But this a crucial distinction when talking about consciousness, it's not arbitrary. Consciousness requires a subject to be conscious. Splitting awareness from the human mind seems weird to me. It's not very useful to consider, say, my liver to be conscious. Even worse, there's no way to prove or disprove t…

[deleted]

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#146

Post by CuriouslyC »

the_af wrote: post #142
CuriouslyC wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making a special distinction between stuff that is "part" of you, and stuff that is not "part" of you. In actuality there is no such clear distinction, there is only correlation in state, which is not binary but rather occurs on a spectrum. 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 g…

> You are making a special distinction between stuff that is "part" of you, and stuff that is not "part" of you But this a crucial distinction when talking about consciousness, it's not arbitrary. Consciousness requires a subject to be conscious. Splitting awareness from the human mind seems weird to me. It's not very useful to consider, say, my liver to be conscious. Even worse, there's no way to prove or disprove t…

Decoupling awareness and its contents is a necessary prerequisite to a much more parsimonious philosophical viewpoint. Without taking that step, you're stuck with the idea that human awareness is somehow different in kind from the physical awareness that drives the evolution of everything else in the universe.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#147

Post by language »

thevardanian wrote: post #124
narag wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can not distinguish ideas from material reality. That is sensory perception, and your ideas that result are basically the accumulation of material structures, or simply knowledge. So ideas are not anything more than the knowledge that you have which interprets, and reinterprets the sensory perception.

Is difference (the distinction in question) something intrinsic to the world, or something imposed upon the world?

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#148

Post by the_af »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #146
the_af wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are making a special distinction between stuff that is "part" of you, and stuff that is not "part" of you But this a crucial distinction when talking about consciousness, it's not arbitrary. Consciousness requires a subject to be conscious. Splitting awareness from the human mind seems weird to me. It's not very useful to consider, say, my liver to be conscious. Even worse, there's no way to prove or disprove t…

Decoupling awareness and its contents is a necessary prerequisite to a much more parsimonious philosophical viewpoint. Without taking that step, you're stuck with the idea that human awareness is somehow different in kind from the physical awareness that drives the evolution of everything else in the universe.

> Decoupling awareness and its contents

What do you mean?

I don't understand what you mean by "the evolution of everything else in the universe", either. Consciousness isn't required for the evolution of living beings. Or do you mean something else?

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#149

Post by ThomPete »

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…

I actually think Jaynes approach is the right one. Consciousness isn't a thing in itself anymore than love is.

It's a concept but it has no destination.

I don't think it's presented as the hard problem it's just hard to think about something which isn't as if it is.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#150

Post by ThomPete »

visarga wrote: post #57
sriku wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

We don't really need to agree on a definitions of consciousness. All we need is to be able to use the knowledge we do have however phrased, for the things we want to use it for.
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