41–50 of 255 posts
An 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.
I doubt it. We can't prove other humans are conscious, I don't see how AI will help clarify anything there.
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…
Emergentism doesn’t explain qualia. You won’t be able to explain the difference between green and magenta to a blind person.
An 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.
Manzotti’s account (as described in the article) ignores dreams, or the fact that directly zapping the brain elicits experience (e.g. magnetic stimulation of the visual cortex triggers colorful flashes known as phosphenes). Graziani’s approach is more interesting, as a theory of attention, but falls short on qualia, and focuses on peculiarities of the human brain, assuming that a cerebral cortex is necessary for gene…
What makes you believe that your conscious perceptions have any specific (let alone regularizeable) kind of relationship to reality at all? In all likelihood, conscious perceptions are guided entirely by evolution, emphasizing those aspects of reality needed to keep us alive and filtering out those we can safely ignore. https://www.nature.com/articles/544296a?WT.mc_id=FBK_NA_1704...
I know it has anything to do with the rest of the world through the impact of my actions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Emergentism doesn’t explain qualia. You won’t be able to explain the difference between green and magenta to a blind person.
I've been researching and thinking about consciousness (and specifically the hard problem) for a while now, and while the whole discussion is interesting, it seems to me that invoking qualia as evidence for the existence of the hard problem (or for there being something "to explain") doesn't really make much sense. Its perfectly plausible, if not likelly, that qualia is also part of the emergent phenomenon . I'm sayi…
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…
Emergentism doesn’t explain qualia. You won’t be able to explain the difference between green and magenta to a blind person.
The really hard problem of consciousness is giving a definition that allows me to tell whether a rock is more or less conscious than a person.
I find it reasonable to assume that for thought processes to occur, there must be some processing, so rocks are out. A more interesting example would be, say, trees, which do communicate with each other to some degree. Is that accompanied by some form of awareness? What's the lower bound of complexity at which consciousness kicks in? What about supraorganisms such as insect hives? Human cities? An ecosystem as a whol…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you know that the rock is not aware of stuff? if you say consciousness is just neurons firing in certain patterns you have also given an answer to the traditional "hard" problem of consciousness, with hundreds of pages of philosophical thought that refutes your answer.
If you're not a dualist, thoughts necessarily have to be accompanied by some change of state of the material substrate.