My pet theory is there is nothing to explain. It is emergent. Over the next couple of decades, hardware performance improvements and specializations plus algorithmic breakthroughs will make AI start to crawl up the chain from useful pattern matching from messy data to useful dullard able to reason. And we still won't know why because the "insight" is buried in the network state and our little human brains cannot deal with that level of detail.
The unending quest to explain consciousness
31–40 of 255 posts
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#32An interesting thing to me is the unending quest may somewhat end during our lifetimes through us being able to build conscious AI and see how it works.
Seen as we still can't even define and measure consciousness how do you think this is going to work exactly? AI is not some kind of magic box despite what a lot of "thought leaders" might lead you to think.
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are theories that equate information processing (integration/differentiation) with consciousness. It maps well with what happens in your brain, where too little or too much functional connectivity maps to loss of consciousness (think anesthesia and epilepsy).
Rocks also have complex internal structure that responds to external influence, e.g. atoms vibrating in their crystal lattices depending on heat and pressure. Maybe there is a Boltzmann consciousness inside the rock when you're picking it up. What is "information" and what is noise is a matter of interpretation.
There may be some consciousness in the rock.
The gist of these theories is that consciousness is isomorphic to specific aspects of information processing that can be quantified.
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#34"Unending" is right. We'll not solve this because the problem is beyond reason.
Explicate please
Any adequate description of consciousness will break down in to "does this thing have an internal life of the mind, a subjective experience of reality, so to speak, or is it merely an extremely convincing automaton?"
Of course, this applies to other people too if you want to be solipsistic about it.
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#35If the Human Brain Were So Simple That We Could Understand It, We Would Be So Simple That We Couldn’t
Yes.
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#36My pet theory is there is nothing to explain. It is emergent. Over the next couple of decades, hardware performance improvements and specializations plus algorithmic breakthroughs will make AI start to crawl up the chain from useful pattern matching from messy data to useful dullard able to reason. And we still won't know why because the "insight" is buried in the network state and our little human brains cannot deal…
Emergentism doesn’t explain qualia. You won’t be able to explain the difference between green and magenta to a blind person.
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#37"Unending" is right. We'll not solve this because the problem is beyond reason.
The existence of the world, and of myself as a subjective being, are beyond reason. Understanding how either work provided they exist isn’t a priori unsolvable.
A core challenge is to grasp your own subjectivity/qualia/mind. If you can grasp it then you can write it down in some form. But the tough part is that "grasping" is a thought production. So how can a specific thought production represent the whole functioning of thought? And if it's not a thought production how can it be 'understanding'? This is where the mystics come in, who present us with a different definition of "understanding" which doesn't involve thought productions, as in an intuitive "getting it". That may well be, but it's useless for science and engineering.
So I think we're limited to speculation, which may well be fine.
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're not a dualist, thoughts necessarily have to be accompanied by some change of state of the material substrate.
Don't underestimate the complexity of a rock's internal state. There is a unfathomable number of atoms in complex crystal lattices in there. Defects in that lattice alone can encode a ton of information. Then you have a bunch of quantum state for each elementary particle. All of that reacts to external stimuli like temperature, pressure, or the occasional cosmic ray.
Thoughts are a process, so if they were supported by a crystal lattice, that lattice would have to go through changes.
As to your other point, the ergodicity of the system at the very least places a limit on the timescales over which consciousness may persist. I'm fairly confident in my belief that a rock cannot be conscious in any appreciable way.
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#39And yet we constantly hear losers try to techno-babble their way into conversations about things like:
CAN'T WAIT TO UPLOAD
MUH BRAIN HURRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
HELL YEAH I WANNA
UPLOAD MAH CONSCIOUSNESSSSSS
YEEEEEE-HAAAWWWWWWW!!!
Promise not to delete ur upload, bro! Honest injun!
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#40The fact that crackpottish nonsense such as Manzotti's gets any mainstream attention at all shows that we're not even remotely there yet.