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A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

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Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#201

Post by Symmetry »

rini17 wrote: post #191
Symmetry wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blindsight was a well crafted book but it sort of underplayed the benefits that consciousness gives us. We're bombarded by a huge number of sensory impressions at any given time. The unconscious parts of our brain do a huge amount of work in processing it and figuring out which bits are important. But without consciousness to synchronize, serialize, and persist it then all that information will just fade away within…

Perhaps the coherently serialized stream of qualia isn't the only possible way to intelligence?

Oh clearly not, GPT-3 clearly produces fairly intelligent responses but by the mechanisms that in a human would be pure reflex. And your unconscious reflexes can produce responses that can be relatively intelligent at times. It's just that creates with brains that evolved on Earth need consciousness to remember anything more than a couple of seconds.

Also, who knows how qualia fit into this, if they exist they might very well exist for subliminal stimuli too. In the scientific study of consciousness qualia aren't a part of the paradigm really. And in philosophical investigations of consciousness don't have subliminal stimuli as part of their paradigm.

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#202

Post by brabel »

throwawayexodus wrote: post #117
brabel wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And your conscious mind can still go back on the decision and "change your mind". No, that's not possible. That's what those experiments are showing, you're just failing to grasp its consequences. If later you report "changing your mind", that will also have happened unconsciously, and you wont' even know why in your conscious experience: but you will be convinced you chose that - when you really haven't.

what's funny is you're ignoring what the experimenter himself concluded about the experiments. he concluded that we have free will to veto these choices, its always rich to see his experiments so badly misused.

> he concluded that we have free will to veto these choices

That's circular. The brain makes a decision, then the brain can choose to veto it? Where does the decision to veto come from?

Free will as you're describing is an impossibility: To even come up with the idea of vetoing something, there must be some process in the brain that's started by "something else", and the something else must be also possible to veto ad infinitum.

Think for yourself instead of just accepting what the experimentallist suggests you should conclude.

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#203

Post by danielam »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #194
danielam wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But abstract things can supervene on the physical. Information, for example, is abstract, but it supervenes on some physical stuff. Granted, information is not identical to any particular instantiation, but the abstract pattern can be manifested by a particular physical instantiation. You're welcome to call information immaterial if you like, but it presents no metaphysical difficulties for physicalism. Example? Th…

Information is state or configuration of one system that tells you something about another system. The pixels on your screen contain information about the state of my brain because the particular pattern of lights communicates the thoughts in my head. Information is abstract because it is independent of the medium: the pixels on the screen, pressure waves in the air, marks on paper, etc, can all be used to carry the…

Okay, so intentionality is essential to information. Let's take your example of the pixels on your screen.

There is nothing intrinsic to those pixels or that arrangement of pixels that points to the state of your brain. That doesn't mean there isn't a causal history the effect of which are those physical pixel states. It is, however, entirely a matter of convention how those pixels are arranged by the designers and how they must be interpreted in conformity with the intended convention. You must bring with you the hermeneutic baggage, so to speak, that allows you to interpret those pixels in the manner intended by the designers. Those same pixels will signify something else within a different context and it is the observer that needs to have the contextual information to be able to interpret them in conformity with the designer's intentions. Furthermore, the designers of the program could have chosen to cause different pixels to light up to convey the same information. They could have instead caused those pixels to resemble, in aggregate, English language sentences that, when interpreted, describe the image of the state in your brain. But there is nothing about those pixels qua pixels that can tell you anything about your brain state. The meaning of each pixel is just that it is a pixel in a particular state, and the meaning of the aggregate of pixels is that they are an aggregate of pixels, each in a particular state. You can call that supervenience in that the meaning of the aggregate follows from the meanings of individual constituting pixels, but none of that changes the fact that the pixel states as such, whether individually or in aggregate, do not intrinsically mean your brain state. This is analogous to written text. A human actor with some meaning in mind causes blobs of ink to be arranged in some way on paper in accordance with some convention. Those blobs of ink are just blobs of ink no matter how many there are or how they're arranged. The reader, which is to say the interpreter, must bring with him a mental dictionary of conventions (a grammar) that relates symbols and arrangements of symbols to meanings to be able to reconstruct the meaning intended by the author. The meaning (or information) is in no way in the text even if it influences what meaning the interpreter attaches to it.

As Feser notes[0], Searle calls this derived intentionality which is different from intrinsic intentionality (thoughts are one example of the latter). So I do not agree that anything abstract is happening in your panel of flashing lightbulbs.

[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/08/fodors-trinity.html

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#204

Post by brabel »

radarsat1 wrote: post #181
brabel wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And your conscious mind can still go back on the decision and "change your mind". No, that's not possible. That's what those experiments are showing, you're just failing to grasp its consequences. If later you report "changing your mind", that will also have happened unconsciously, and you wont' even know why in your conscious experience: but you will be convinced you chose that - when you really haven't.

I hear what you're saying, but I'm still not sure that consciousness over a decision is what determines whether it was done of free will. Conscious or not, it was your brain making that decision. Not someone else telling your brain what to think. Your brain thought about it, considered the options, made a decision, and then informed your consciousness of it. That doesn't undermine the idea of free will, it just chang…

> Conscious or not, it was your brain making that decision. Not someone else telling your brain what to think.

If you accept free will, there IS something else telling your brain what to think. Unless you explain what this something else might be, your hypothesis is not scientific.

If you accept your brain, and your brain alone, makes the decision, then you accept that, given the condition of the brain before that decision was made, then the brain MUST make that same decision regardless of anything external to it. Hence, no free will.

Even when you consider quantum physics (which most neuroscientists, from the books i've read on the topic, say have almost certainly very little effect on brain processes outside of normal chemistry), you will still end up with only a probability of possible decisions you could've made.

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#205

Post by danielam »

comex wrote: post #195
danielam wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The mind is not a physical object. It cannot be observed or experimented with in a systematic way. > So clearly false if you read the article, or have ever looked at an optical illusion. "Mind" vs. brain. For example, you will never observe the concept "triangularity" or the number 8 or the color "red" in a brain scan. You will see brain activity correlates between what is most likely someone perceiving an instanc…

> "Mind" vs. brain. For example, you will never observe the concept "triangularity" or the number 8 or the color "red" in a brain scan. Nor will you see Shape::TRIANGLE or the number 8 or Color::RED if you put a CPU under a microscope, but computer programs are capable of reasoning about all of them. What's your point?

Shape::TRIANGLE, 8 or Color::RED aren't concepts. They're merely symbols. In principle, you will find them encoded in some way under a microscope (as some arrangement of physical states, though it will depend on the particular physical medium what the particular arrangement will look like). Your computer program can process that physical state to mimic some aspects of reasoning, but that's entirely a matter of how the program is designed to operate with these physical arrangements. You cannot analyze or derive anything from the symbols qua symbols themselves because there's no meaning there to analyze or from which to derive things.

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#206

Post by rini17 »

Symmetry wrote: post #201
rini17 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the coherently serialized stream of qualia isn't the only possible way to intelligence?

Oh clearly not, GPT-3 clearly produces fairly intelligent responses but by the mechanisms that in a human would be pure reflex. And your unconscious reflexes can produce responses that can be relatively intelligent at times. It's just that creates with brains that evolved on Earth need consciousness to remember anything more than a couple of seconds. Also, who knows how qualia fit into this, if they exist they might…

And how do you call the stuff which gets filtered by consciousness so that it can remember more than a couple of seconds? That's what I meant by the qualia.

As an example what I mean and it was recently on HN, too: apparently the perception of "now" is a hack supported by delays so that input from various senses is perceived as synchronized even if it does not arrive synchronized to the brain, plus compensating the temporary blindness while doing saccades. Aliens could have different "hack" there, resulting in profoundly different perception of time.

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#207

Post by montjoy »

danielam wrote: post #174
montjoy wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come now. > The mind is not a physical object. It cannot be observed or experimented with in a systematic way. So clearly false if you read the article, or have ever looked at an optical illusion. > ... because buildings and minds are not physical, natural things. They're unnatural things, conjured up by human invention and imagination Then likewise Ecology, Geology, Biology and all other sciences that cover syste…

>> The mind is not a physical object. It cannot be observed or experimented with in a systematic way. > So clearly false if you read the article, or have ever looked at an optical illusion. "Mind" vs. brain. For example, you will never observe the concept "triangularity" or the number 8 or the color "red" in a brain scan. You will see brain activity correlates between what is most likely someone perceiving an instanc…

Sorry most of your argument here is going over my head. My mind gets the glazed over feel as soon as I hear the word “epistemology”.

It seems like you are using the word “mind” as a specific technical word within the field of philosophy rather than the general usage of the word so I’ll just defer to you for any philosophical context of the conversation. I’m not interested in that.

What got my goat was the implication that complex systems like the mind and the brain or any other complex system aren’t a “science” because it somehow isn’t pure enough/reduced enough.

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#208

Post by baja_blast »

radarsat1 wrote: post #95
pulkitsh1234 wrote: post #70

Somehow this is not surprising for me, I have heard about experiments related to free-will wherein the brain already made a decision even before the conscious mind became aware of it. Thus putting doubts on our conscious experience of free-will. Also, in terms of problem solving, there are experiments which show that the brain calculates the answers and "presents" the answers later on to the consciousness. It's not l…

> the brain already made a decision even before the conscious mind became aware of it. Thus putting doubts on our conscious experience of free-will. Seems to conflate consciousness and free will. Just because you're not conscious of it, your brain still made that decision. And your conscious mind can still go back on the decision and "change your mind".

> your brain still made that decision

This is what I have always said when hearing these arguments. Our brain is us, what we see and decide is that part of the brain being broadcasted through out our mind. But people often times change their mind, stop them selves from doing something all the time which means our minds kinda run on a consensus.

IMO thoughts are like the interplay of various regions of the brain broadcasting it's say. For example when I contemplate something it's like a debate from a multitude of differing perspectives. So sure each thought was decided by a different region beforehand, but that's like saying words were spoken before being transmitted over the wire.

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#209

Post by danielam »

montjoy wrote: post #207
danielam wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The mind is not a physical object. It cannot be observed or experimented with in a systematic way. > So clearly false if you read the article, or have ever looked at an optical illusion. "Mind" vs. brain. For example, you will never observe the concept "triangularity" or the number 8 or the color "red" in a brain scan. You will see brain activity correlates between what is most likely someone perceiving an instanc…

Sorry most of your argument here is going over my head. My mind gets the glazed over feel as soon as I hear the word “epistemology”. It seems like you are using the word “mind” as a specific technical word within the field of philosophy rather than the general usage of the word so I’ll just defer to you for any philosophical context of the conversation. I’m not interested in that. What got my goat was the implication…

> What got my goat was the implication that complex systems like the mind and the brain or any other complex system aren’t a “science” because it somehow isn’t pure enough/reduced enough.

That wasn't the implication, but perhaps more needs to be said. The first distinction I made was between brain and "mind" (here understood as "intellect", that is, the faculty responsibly for conceptualization, or, abstraction from particulars enountered in the senses) by appealing to a classic Aristotelian argument for the immateriality of the intellect. So you can study the physical brain using various empirical methods and through the lenses of various empirical science, sure, but if the intellect is immaterial, then obviously you can't subject it to any direct empirical experimentation. That doesn't mean it cannot become the object of a science (i.e., psychology as classically understood), nor does it mean you can't make observations about human beings to gather supporting evidence of some kind to draw certain conclusions. An immaterial intellect just isn't something you can look at under a microscope or at which you can fire subatomic particles.

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#210

Post by hackinthebochs »

danielam wrote: post #203
hackinthebochs wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Information is state or configuration of one system that tells you something about another system. The pixels on your screen contain information about the state of my brain because the particular pattern of lights communicates the thoughts in my head. Information is abstract because it is independent of the medium: the pixels on the screen, pressure waves in the air, marks on paper, etc, can all be used to carry the…

Okay, so intentionality is essential to information. Let's take your example of the pixels on your screen. There is nothing intrinsic to those pixels or that arrangement of pixels that points to the state of your brain. That doesn't mean there isn't a causal history the effect of which are those physical pixel states. It is, however, entirely a matter of convention how those pixels are arranged by the designers and h…

>Searle calls this derived intentionality which is different from intrinsic intentionality

But what makes derived intentionality not abstract? What definition of abstract are you using that excludes derived intentionality while including intrinsic intentionality?

But lets look more closely at the differences between derived and intrinsic intentionality. Derived intentionality is some relation that picks out a target in a specified context. E.g. a binary bit picks out heads/tails or day/night in my phone depending on the context set up by the programmer. Essentially the laws of physics are exploited to create a system where some symbol in the right context stands in a certain relation with the intended entities. We can boil this process down to a ball rolling down the hill along one track vs another track is picking between two objects at the bottom of the hill.

How does intrinsic intentionality fare? Presumably the idea is that such a system picks out the intended object without any external context needed to establish the reference. But is such a system categorically different than the derived sort? It doesn't seem so. The brain relies on the laws of physics to establish the context that allows signals to propagate along specific circuits. The brain also stands in specific relation to external objects such that the necessary causal chains can be established for concepts to be extracted from experience. Without this experience there would be no reference and no intentionality. So intrinsic intentionality of this sort has an essential dependence on an externally specified context.

But what about sensory concepts and internal states? Surely my experience of pain intrinsically references damaging bodily states as seen by my unlearned but competent behavior in the presence of pain, e.g. avoidance behaviors. But this reference didn't form in a vacuum. We represent a billion years of computation in the form of evolution to craft specific organizing principles in our bodies and brains that entail competent behavior for sensory stimuli. If there is a distinction between intrinsic and derived intentionality, it is not categorical. It is simply due to the right computational processes having created the right organizing principles to allow for it.

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