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Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#171

Post by mirekrusin »

dilap wrote: post #27

An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…

It's interesting we don't have much idea about it yet.

It probably helps to think about some edge cases to get some insight.

What happens when you sleep and you loose sense of conciousness?

What happens in cases of brain injury where concousiness goes into weird failure modes - thinking it wakes up on the same state every day, thinking it's -1month or so, collapsing etc.

What happens in cases of distorted/malfunctioning brain schizophrenia etc.

I've read somewhere that if you put implant which mimics neuron activity, your brain will build structure around it just like with normal neurons. What would happen if you take 1 square mm of brain and replace it with implant, slowly replacing the whole brain? What happens when you attach brain to larger structure/orders of magnitude more complex one, will conciousness transfer there? Can you disconnect original brain leaving conciousness?

As we don't have powerfull computers yet to compete with brain, is it possible to connect two brains instead?

Memory is likely playing central role. You are what you remember it seems. Can you boost memory capacity with some implants, will it make more-conciousness?

There are many not yet feasible experiments, but some should be. Also completely brutal in many cases.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#172

Post by hazeii »

dilap wrote: post #27

An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…

There is an extension of that idea, which is to suppose that we could make a silicon neuron that can perfectly replace an organic one (state and all). Then you can replace neurons in the brain one by one, and the brain carries on functioning exactly like it always has.

Eventually the brain is entirely silicon, but to the owner subjectively nothing has changed, they are as 'conscious' as they ever were.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#173

Post by [deleted] »

excalibur wrote: post #166
keiferski wrote: post #73

Heh, that's a funny coincidence. I was just reading about panpsychism (and some variations of it) earlier today, specifically this article on forgotten philosopher James Ward: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james-ward/ It seems really alien to our current mental metaphysical model, but if you study the subject and analyze the arguments, it's not as absurd as it seems. It's important to realize that when philosoph…

> I'm not sure if panpsychism is necessarily a path forward in terms of describing the universe , but I think it seems promising in terms of a prescriptive use of creating, or attempting to create, new consciousness with machines. If panpsychism is correct, then all of our machines would already be conscious. Creating new consciousness wouldn't be possible except maybe in the sense that matter itself can be created u…

[deleted]

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#174

Post by marcAKAmarc »

mapcars wrote: post #148
adwn wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be misunderstanding the question of consciousness. It's not about how you observe others to appear conscious, but about how you yourself observe your own consciousness. > It's a lie our brain tells us [...] Who is "us"? Or, to be more precise, if your brain tells you that you're experiencing pain, than what is " you ", and what is " experiencing "? That's the question of consciousness. This is not somethi…

>you can only observe it in yourself I don't think you can really observe it either. I doesn't look like I can name any property of "it", I can only be aware of "it".

I think you can definitely observe it in yourself. Try this (copy and pasting from a separate response I made):

Think about experiencing pain and what it feels like to you. Really try to simulate it in your thoughts. Probably sucks. Now think about happiness and what that feels like to you. Probably doesn't suck as much. Without watching a scan of your brain, and without collecting any sort of quantifiable data about your nervous system, you were most likely able to recall those two feelings and (much more importantly) discern the difference between those two feelings just now. You didn't do this by any type of measurement of quantity, just by quality of experience (qualia). If you were able to identify and discern the separate feelings you have internally assigned to happiness and pain without quantifying them, I would call that proof of consciousness within yourself maybe.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#175

Post by jaldhar »

arnoooooo wrote: post #129
ArtWomb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am really pleased you name dropped "advaita vedanta" (literally translated from Sanskrit as "non-secondness"). From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on advaita vedanta: Brahman—the ultimate, transcendent and immanent God of the latter Vedas—appears as the world because of its creative energy (māyā). The world has no separate existence apart from Brahman. The experiencing self (jīva) and the transcenden…

advaita vedanta as I understand it is the actual scientific approach to consciousness, as it focuses strictly on experience.

Advaita Vedanta accepts six pramanas (means of justified knowledge). Pratyaksha (sensory perception), anumana (inference), shabda (the words of the Vedas), upamana (comparison), arthapatti (presumption), and abhava (negation). Experience (anubhava) is NOT pramana.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#176

Post by zyxzevn »

dilap wrote: post #27

An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…

Your computer simulation does not solve the "stopping problem". This means that the artificial brain does not know what is good or what is bad. It can not know everything about itself. So the brain will be completely unstable and fail after a while.

On the other hand, if there is some guiding (like a programmer), the artificial brain can be functional. If the real brain would be guided by some kind of consciousness, this would work the same.

The consciousness needs to be in a different dimension, in a way that physics does not change. So it would be like a 2D pool table, where we can describe exactly the movement of every ball. But sometimes a ball gets hit by a player, outside the table. And this gives us events that bring the balls to a certain direction.

In similar sense the brain can be played by a consciousness to get it working. In a way that is very hard to detect with physical instruments.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#177

Post by criddell »

phn wrote: post #134
dilap wrote: post #27

An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…

We probably are not yet able to tell if we can simulate a brain fully, with something we call a computer nowadays. If we can, then indeed consciousness comes from the collective function of individual cells. But maybe there's more to the workings of the brain?

Or maybe there's less to consciousness.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#178

Post by appstateguy »

brazzy wrote: post #163
adwn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To build on your thought experiment: > So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? If you answer "yes" to this question, what happens if you split the computations of that simulated brain over a million people equipped with pen and paper? Where is its consciousness happening now? I have yet to hear a satisfying answ…

My take: consciousness is an emergent property of the system as a whole as it becomes sufficiently complex. Yes, that million people (you'd probably need more) working with pen and paper create, in combination, an additional new consciousness, albeit an absurdly slow-thinking one.

What differs this scenario from individual neurons firing together in order to make the human mind? Can you keep taking that line of thinking down to the subatomic properties of the neurons themselves? I'm guessing this is the argument for panpsychism. The emergent property of human consciousness could be seen as the culmination of all the individual parts themselves have some form of primitive consciousness.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#179

Post by SubiculumCode »

Gatsky wrote: post #114
kypro wrote: post #84

Am I the only one who thinks the consciousness question is really quite easy to understand and answer? The illusion of consciousness is obviously beneficial. For example, I could tell a computer, through the use of sensors, to report that it's in pain when it's hit. But you wouldn't take it seriously, or care for its suffering, because it hasn't also declared that it is under the illusion that its suffering has a kin…

Well I think the tricky thing about consciousness is that it can’t be an illusion. There is no doubt that you and I have the subjective experience of consciousness. Whether it is an illusion or not doesn’t really matter, you are just making a judgement about the legitimacy of the process which leads to consciousness. I think what you are getting at is the zombie concept. This is where we construct a being which has s…

What a strange concept: My Ryzen AMD CPU is maybe experiencing suffering.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#180

Post by kypro »

danharaj wrote: post #97
kypro wrote: post #84

Am I the only one who thinks the consciousness question is really quite easy to understand and answer? The illusion of consciousness is obviously beneficial. For example, I could tell a computer, through the use of sensors, to report that it's in pain when it's hit. But you wouldn't take it seriously, or care for its suffering, because it hasn't also declared that it is under the illusion that its suffering has a kin…

How do you define an illusion without first positing a being that can experience (hence conscious) an illusion? What does it mean that consciousness is a 'lie our brain tells us', who are we? Are you assuming some form of cartesian dualism, or perhaps you are making a sort of homunculus argument? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument

By illusion I just mean there isn't really a physical pain (sub atomic elements don't feel pain) but our brains still act as if we experience pain from the perspective of a self. From this perspective the self is a real thing, you are a conscious human, not a collection of atoms - you matter more than your matter.

Let me try this another way... Imagine an identical universe with one difference - no one is conscious. If I decide to kill in this hypothetical universe is it wrong? And even if you say yes, is it equally as wrong as in a universe with conscious beings? This is the explanation for consciousness and why the illusion is important.

We think we're aware of our senses and in control of our actions, but we know we're not. We know what we consciously obverse is different from the input we get from our sensory organs - which is the reason things like optical illusions exist. We also know that we subconsciously make our decisions a fraction of second before we're consciously aware of them. In my opinion this all points towards consciousness being an illusion, rather than an actual awareness of self.

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