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Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

thenewatlantis.com

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Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#51

Post by lawpoop »

jldugger wrote: post #32
lawpoop wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't think it's a problem, then it's not. There's no real way, presently, to prove there isn't a difference. Likewise, I could say there is no difference between my experience of satiation after eating, and the experience of a garbage can being filled full. If you don't think there's a problem with that, fine. No way to show there isn't. However, people inclined to agree with your film example might not be in…

> Is there any difference between light falling in your eyes and your experience of vision, and light falling in a corpses eyes, and its experience of vision? One would argue that there's more chemistry going on in neurons feeding to the optic center, but I'm not well versed in neuroscience to tell you where the signal stops.

Is the amount of chemistry, then, or length of signal transmission, the measure of consciousness?

What is the implication for the conscious experience of the camera?

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#52

Post by taxicabjesus »

n4r9 wrote: post #47
taxicabjesus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dennet is a reductive materialist. "Materialism: 1a: a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter. scientific materialism" [1] [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/materialist Materialism became the guiding philosophy of Science in ~1845. Reductionism was all the rage. I think materia…

That article is in no way an attack on materialism. Quantum chromodynamics still constitutes a materialist understanding of the universe. Are you perhaps confusing "matter" and "mass"?

My point was that this old Philosophy is preventing progress. The stranglehold is most evident, to me, when self-appointed thought-leaders apply Materialism/Reductionism to medicine.

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#53

Post by yters »

erasemus wrote: post #28
yters wrote: post #11

It's impossible to objectively explain the subjective. To do so is a category error.

How about positing a one-to-one correspondence between our subjective experiences and patterns of neuronal firings in our brains?

That would not explain why there is a matching.

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#54

Post by erasemus »

yters wrote: post #53
erasemus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about positing a one-to-one correspondence between our subjective experiences and patterns of neuronal firings in our brains?

That would not explain why there is a matching.

But that's a different problem.

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#55

Post by jldugger »

lawpoop wrote: post #51
jldugger wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there any difference between light falling in your eyes and your experience of vision, and light falling in a corpses eyes, and its experience of vision? One would argue that there's more chemistry going on in neurons feeding to the optic center, but I'm not well versed in neuroscience to tell you where the signal stops.

Is the amount of chemistry, then, or length of signal transmission, the measure of consciousness? What is the implication for the conscious experience of the camera?

> Is the amount of chemistry, then, or length of signal transmission, the measure of consciousness?

Sure, but we're gonna limit ourselves to neurons and the degree of connectivity between them. A camera has none, QED. The more challenging comparison is between a comatose patient and one with locked-in syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome. There, we can't exactly come up with some 'an agent capable of sensing the world, and responding to changes in its environment' that an outside observer might use.

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#56

Post by dwaltrip »

dvt wrote: post #48
pdonis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're willing to draw a distinction between "denying the existence of qualia" and "denying the existence of subjective experience", then yes, I agree that "denying the existence of qualia" can be taken in its usual sense--"they aren't a thing", as you say. Everything Dennett says about qualia has to be interpreted with this distinction in mind. However, I'm not sure the poster I was responding to would agree with…

> However, I'm not sure the poster I was responding to would agree with allowing that distinction. Certainly many commentators on Dennett have interpreted "denying the existence of qualia" as "denying the existence of subjective experience", which Dennett does not do. For a person who refuses to allow the distinction, I think one has to simply disagree that Dennett denies the existence of qualia; he just says they ar…

> Qualia are phenomenal properties of experience. Presumably, one could have subjective experiences without these phenomenal properties.

Care to elaborate on this? From my angle, arguments if this sort tend to veer towards wild speculation. I understand others feel differently.

I usually can't help but read it as unnecessary leaps of logic spurred by some presupposed metaphysics. I hope I'm not projecting too much here -- you may have a more considerate take on things.

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#57

Post by dwaltrip »

n4r9 wrote: post #47
taxicabjesus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dennet is a reductive materialist. "Materialism: 1a: a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter. scientific materialism" [1] [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/materialist Materialism became the guiding philosophy of Science in ~1845. Reductionism was all the rage. I think materia…

That article is in no way an attack on materialism. Quantum chromodynamics still constitutes a materialist understanding of the universe. Are you perhaps confusing "matter" and "mass"?

"Mass" is well defined. "Matter", less so.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-mass-an...

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#58

Post by dwaltrip »

xyzzyz wrote: post #30
starchild_3001 wrote: post #22

What's the big deal with consciousness? Isn't it an obvious trait of any human like, animal like, robot like semi-intelligent being? I'd expect it to emerge automatically, once correct base instincts & abilities are programmed.

The big deal is that there's no observable difference between the world where your robot is conscious of itself and has subjective experience of its surroundings, and between the world where your robot merely behaves as such, speaks to you trying to convince you that it indeed has subjective experience, but in fact it has none, its experiences are just a movie screened in an empty cinema where nobody is watching. Thi…

Why is the philosophical zombie a useful thought experiment? What reason is there to believe such a thing could actually exist in our universe, any more than 2+2 could ever equal 5?

To me, it seems immensely unlikely.

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#59

Post by starchild_3001 »

starchild_3001 wrote: post #22

What's the big deal with consciousness? Isn't it an obvious trait of any human like, animal like, robot like semi-intelligent being? I'd expect it to emerge automatically, once correct base instincts & abilities are programmed.

Here's my obvious explanation of consciousness: You have an ego/intelligent being inside of you. Call that a Turing machine that observes your sensory world, takes notes, makes deductions, takes action (consciously---excuse the word). Your conscious self is the Turing machine (or intelligent person) that talks to yourself. So, consciousness is yourself, consciousness is your ego, consciousness is the Turing machine that does the thinking and self talking. It's the higher level of intelligence, the observed part of intelligence (i.e. your memory and your notes about the world) vs your neural network's weights or lower layer's representations (which are unobservable). So consciousness is the last layer of neural net. It's the attention mechanism. It's your explicit memory. It's you.

If consciousness is the machine itself (the most higher level representation), once you build an AGI with this self-talk, self-decide, self-observe mechanism, it'll be there by design.

Voila, there's nothing to explain here :) Move on?

(Move on as in let's engineer the machine itself, rather than discuss the philosophy of it).

Re: Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

#60

Post by ci5er »

escape_goat wrote: post #31
ci5er wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We absolute can be aware of subjective experience/awareness. Hawkins posited in "On Intelligence" that consciousness is simply the feeling of having a neo-cortex. While I am as baffled as any/many at having subjective qualia appear so "real", I really don't have any basis for believing/thinking that they could arise from anything else other than from physical quanta hitting my senso-sphere and being interpreted by a…

It's a bit tricker than it sounds, though. We cannot be aware of the absence of awareness. This could imply that we can only be aware of a sense of 'awareness' insofar as it was in fact differentiated from awareness itself, though a missing second step that is probably familiar to you (but it's a bit late at night for me to articulate it coherently).

Are you referring to nothingness?

I think that most of us can remember being 'nothing' (this might be wrong), and it baffles me why people are afraid to die, which is simply returning to 'nothing'.

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