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The unending quest to explain consciousness

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Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#81
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it. We can't prove other humans are conscious, I don't see how AI will help clarify anything there.

You could use an MRI machine to show that their brain activity is the same as yours, and if you know you are conscious then that should be evidence enough. Or you could just ask them.

> Or you could just ask them.

I can easily make a computer program which, when asked "Are you conscious?", will reply with "Yes", but that doesn't mean that it is conscious. Conversely, you can ask someone who doesn't speak English, "Are you conscious?", and they will only stare at you confusedly, but that doesn't mean that they're not conscious.

Therefore, "just asking" is not a reliable method at all to find out whether an entity is conscious.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#82
post #11

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.

We'll never build conscious AI, purely because we'll never admit that "a mere computer" is conscious.

I think we're more likely to inadvertently prove that qualia don't really exist in us any more than they do in computers.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#83

My personal preference is for panexperientialism (essentially a bare bones panpsychism), with the idea that the phenomenon is somehow connected with change, and belongs to anything capable of change in some way and is probably a fundamental property of nature, as fundamental as space or time. It's important to divorce consciousness from all ideas of "thought", "will" etc. to consider it's essence which is more connec…

Why not entertain the notion that matter is consciousness? It doesn't just feel like something to be a particular atom, that particular atom exists because it feels like something to be that particular atom.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#84

My personal preference is for panexperientialism (essentially a bare bones panpsychism), with the idea that the phenomenon is somehow connected with change, and belongs to anything capable of change in some way and is probably a fundamental property of nature, as fundamental as space or time. It's important to divorce consciousness from all ideas of "thought", "will" etc. to consider it's essence which is more connec…

Why not entertain the notion that matter is consciousness? It doesn't just feel like something to be a particular atom, that particular atom exists because it feels like something to be that particular atom.

I'm happy to entertain it, but

that particular atom exists because it feels like something to be that particular atom

seems to beg the question somewhat - where is "feeling like something" coming from?

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#85

My personal preference is for panexperientialism (essentially a bare bones panpsychism), with the idea that the phenomenon is somehow connected with change, and belongs to anything capable of change in some way and is probably a fundamental property of nature, as fundamental as space or time. It's important to divorce consciousness from all ideas of "thought", "will" etc. to consider it's essence which is more connec…

Probably because consciousness requires some kind of underlying mental processes, which take time to achieve. I can only guess that it's similar to an instance of a computer program such as a web browser, i.e., it isn't a "thing" itself but is built out of a multitude of underlying calculations on a physical computer.

This also implies to me that consciousness, not being a physical thing itself, comes and goes within the brain, with the sleep cycle or just through lack of attention. The only interaction between one instance of consciousness and the following one would then be via memories.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#87

Something that blows my mind: we can use our understanding of physics and math to predict the trajectory of a rocket to the moon without actually going there.. But we can’t predict what new color we’d get by mixing two colors. We just have to mix them to find out.

? I think a lot of colour theorists would disagree with you on the latter.

Or are you referring to non-uniform perception of colour: colour blindness on one hand, tetrachromats on the other?

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#88

My personal preference is for panexperientialism (essentially a bare bones panpsychism), with the idea that the phenomenon is somehow connected with change, and belongs to anything capable of change in some way and is probably a fundamental property of nature, as fundamental as space or time. It's important to divorce consciousness from all ideas of "thought", "will" etc. to consider it's essence which is more connec…

Why not entertain the notion that matter is consciousness? It doesn't just feel like something to be a particular atom, that particular atom exists because it feels like something to be that particular atom.

If my consciousness is only the consciousness of a particular atom, or more likely a fundamental particle like an electron, why do I have the illusion that I'm an entire human animal? How would my vision, for example, be sent to every election in my body, for it to be independently conscious?

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#90
Sorry, my guy, but the notion that out-of-body experiences could actually represent one's sentience jumping loose and decoupling itself from the flesh that ordinarily frames it must certainly be twaddle and poppycock.

There's no concrete basis upon which to buy or trade in such tall tales.

Anyone waking from a vivid or even lucid dream will inform you of the mind's power to use the various perceptive cortices within the brain's organ structure, to fabricate experiences out of whole cloth.

It usually doesn't work that way, but the brain can do it, and some people can unlock that variety of auto-hallucinatory talent. Dreams so immersive (complete with degrees of autonomy) they feel like memories.

The only thing that often flags such experiences as obvious mental flights of fancy is that, unbound by the constraints of reality, the brain digresses into absurtities. Environments become funhouse mirror versions of genuine cognitive experience, interpersonal interactions become distorted caricatures of the real thing.

The last domino to fall, in your posit of out-of-body experiences, would be the premise of how hallucinations unfold. We know, by studying schizophrenics, that the throes of any hallucination will find limits according to the real experiences of the individual, and what they've learned and how they've been socialized.

In other words, a person generally will not hallucinate complexities they have not directly witnessed. They can't hallucinate objects unknown to them, nor languages unheard of. Those born totally blind and without sight cannot hallucinate vision. Those born deaf cannot hallucinate auditory sensations. Neurological cross-talk phenomena like synthesthesia will only produce platonic effects, pulsating gradients, dense checkerboard visuals, tinnitus like tones, buzzing, ringing.

So, we see these same boundaries boxing in all the out-of-body experiences people frequently describe. When someone says they've been to a place that looks like Alex Grey artwork from the liner notes of a music album, it's really just platonic nouns mixing together to represent combinatorial outcomes. Nothing truly new, and practical arises from the froo-froo of such visuals. Psychedelics can never produce concrete, functional mechanical architecture, in the same way that you can't read a book in a dream.

It's important to understand these sorts of facts within the context of a hypothetical feral child. A child raised by wolves, without language, beyond a certain age, cannot summon true mastery of the spoken word in any language, and is doomed to a life of gestural, formless grunts and moans. Borrowing this awareness of what childhood socialization truly imbues us with, it becomes obvious that past a certain point the reality of our symbolic cognizance, psychologically, will not soar beyond certain heights. The dreams a feral child might hallucinate, will be no less vivid, but their focus will be directed differently by their lack of socialization. Their cognition of what a dream or hallucination truly is, will be hampered, stunted and confused without the benefit of exchanging ideas through structured language, to communicate the particulars of sensation and experience. A feral child might believe that a memory of a dream were spiritual fact, as plain as remembering the waking experience of a thunderstorm, since they cannot speak to peers and compare notes about what a dream feels like.

So, we cannot claim anything without evidence, and we have a hard time providing evidence of the simple truths of sensation during subjective waking experience, or even induced somatic delusions assisted by substance and medicine. If you think you stepped from your corporial form, to try something out somewhere else, you probably can't prove it, no matter how accurate your recollection and capacity to describe it is.

Only the organ trapped in your cranium can perceive experiences. Anything beyond ordinary grounded reality, that you claim to know, is untethered magical thinking. Lobotomies and other forms of brain damage can provide handy evidence of this, across a wide array of well-documented history.

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