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Is Consciousness Everywhere?

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

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Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#161

Post by bigpumpkin »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #53

My consciousness (I won't speak for yours) is integrated yet contains many parts. It is hierarchical — and I am aware that there is much that I am not aware of. For instance, with some effort I can notice that a white wall is made of millions of blinking colored neuropixels. But normally that is below my awareness. When I meditate, sometimes I can notice that I'm thinking verbal thoughts—suggesting that verbal though…

"For instance, with some effort I can notice that a white wall is made of millions of blinking colored neuropixels. "

This I cannot achieve unless I'm staring at a white computer screen up close.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#162

Post by someguyorother »

geophile wrote: post #62
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good place to start, if you are a firm skeptic and not willing to even attempt faith or your own empirical experiences, is a book called Entangled Minds. There is not a single claim made in this book which does not have a reference to a proper peer-reviewed paper attached to it, iirc several hundred papers in all. It firmly supports consciousness being in at minimum earthworms, and probably even ,,lower,, creatures…

I have no doubt that lots of organisms are conscious, maybe even earthworms. And I certainly believe that I am! My only point is that in the popular articles I've seen on consciousness, that discuss IIT, I have not, over many years, seen any description of a test of the theory, or even a statement of how it could be tested.

There's probably a hard limit to how much you can know about consciousness in general.

Say, for instance, that what IIT measures isn't consciousness but memory. It tells you that when you take general anesthetic, the IIT measure in the brain decreases. But it's hypothetically speaking possible that when you get anesthesized, you're still aware and feel everything that's happening to you (in the sense of having qualia), only that it never gets recorded to memory.

The result is the same: it appears, in retrospect, that you lost consciousness. But you can't prove that you actually did, only that your memory of the past behaves as if you did.

This seems fundamental, unless we through some future discovery can nail down what consciousness is. The consciousness-status of past me is just as opaque as that of other people.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#163

Post by TrispusAttucks »

Here is a link to Panpsychism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

As an aside to all the comments regarding a definition and defining consciousness:

It's possible for things to not be reducible to objective language constructs. The nature of subjectivity is that it can't be defined. I fear (at least in science contexts) we will chase our tails forever!

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#164

Post by proc0 »

randomsearch wrote: post #91

What is consciousness? I have the feeling of experiencing things. Is it not possible that such a phenomenon can be produced within a machine? When I try to answer this question, after coding for decades I can’t tell you how this phenomenon can be possible within a Turing machine. So it seems obvious to me that (a) brains must be machines and (b) a machine cannot be conscious and so I conclude that (c) I don’t know wh…

Lol, I was thinking along those lines... we are talking about consciousness with language... which was created by it long before we posed the question. I'm trapped trying to explain to myself how explaining to myself is even possible without language which was created by that which I'm trying to explain with language.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#165

Post by someguyorother »

mehphp wrote: post #118
tomComb wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I think there is a degree of consensus that that is how it works, and this is used as evidence for the lack of free will.

I'm not sure how free will would work, even in theory. If the universe is completely deterministic then of course there isn't freedom of will in that. If it is random, then that still wouldn't be freedom because it would still be out of our control. I can't think of a way that it could work without invoking the metaphysical.

It'd have to be like the libertarian incompatibilists envision it: that free will gives everybody a capacity to, to some degree, be a first cause.

From https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-arguments...

"Free will…is the power of agents to be the ultimate creators or originators and sustainers of their own ends or purposes…when we trace the causal or explanatory chains of action back to their sources in the purposes of free agents, these causal chains must come to an end or terminate in the willings (choices, decisions, or efforts) of the agents, which cause or bring about their purposes. (Kane 1996: 4)"

That might be metaphysical, but I don't see any other way free will could operate - that is, if it exists.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#166

Post by dr_dshiv »

engineer_22 wrote: post #100
dr_dshiv wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a single neuron? After all, a single neuron is far more complex than a worm—just like a company is far less complex than the people who compose it.

Earthworms actually have a well developed nervous system, containing many neurons.

Yeah, but if this (below) is happening inside a single cell, doesn't it seem much easier to model a single worm than to model a single cell?

Inner life of a cell: https://youtu.be/wJyUtbn0O5Y

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#168

Post by Hammershaft »

geophile wrote: post #12

I have been hearing about Koch, and Tononi, and panpsychism, and phi for years now, in these articles summarizing consciousness for laymen, (a group that includes me). And these very long articles bloviate but never go any further than giving a facile description of phi, claiming that this IIT "theory" is testable, and then not saying how it could be tested. The articles from five years ago and this one seem intercha…

How do you even define the boundaries of a 'system' under IIT?

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#169

Post by _y5hn »

n4r9 wrote: post #136
slibhb wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, you can also choose to remain in the safe comfort of materialism. To me it seems that materialism (or physicalism or any monism) inevitably leads to panpsychism. If there's only one kind of substance, it's either conscious or it's not, so everything has consciousness or nothing does. Panpsychists go with the former, probably because they think they are conscious, material beings.

I don't follow... where does this argument fail when you replace "conscious" with "blue"?

The former is universal while the latter is limitation of perception.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#170

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

morpheos137 wrote: post #127
mehphp wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on consciousness not being a thing? You mean it doesn't exist at all or it isn't a physical thing?

I don't believe consciousness exists in a meaningful way in the real world. It certainly exists as a word in a dictionary and as something for philosophical types to have woo debates over. I think the word is vague term that signifies different somewhat independent things that living organisms have to a greater or lesser extent (memory, emotion, thought, embodiment, etc). I believe attempting to have a scientific deb…

I find that a very strange statement for a supposedly conscious being to make. Consciousness does absolutely objectively exist, or at least I can say it does for me. That its existence is not objectively measurable doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just means that the philosophy of empiricism is not complete.
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