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Is Consciousness Everywhere?

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211–220 of 230 posts

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#211
post #25

By what possible commonly agreed upon definition could consciousness be equal to experience? The only result of accepting that definition would be having to invent a new name for what I (and I believe many with me) call consciousness, as badly defined as it is. To put it in the words of Syndrome: if everything is conscious, nothing is.

> By what possible commonly agreed upon definition could consciousness be equal to experience? I'll turn the question around: What aspect of your consciousness is not an experience? What aspect of your experience is not a part of consciousness?

I don't have an issue with experience being a necessary part of consciousness. My problem is that it doesn't seem to be sufficient, by a long shot.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#212
post #39
post #25

By what possible commonly agreed upon definition could consciousness be equal to experience? The only result of accepting that definition would be having to invent a new name for what I (and I believe many with me) call consciousness, as badly defined as it is. To put it in the words of Syndrome: if everything is conscious, nothing is.

> To put it in the words of Syndrome: if everything is conscious, nothing is. I think what you're using as a counter argument is really a foundation of buddhist emptiness or vedanta brahman. i.e. that the percieved duality is an illusion

You're reading too much in my words, but I don't agree, I think: if it's perceived as X, there is something in it that makes it stand out as X. It may not be exactly what we think it is, but it does exist.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#213
post #25

By what possible commonly agreed upon definition could consciousness be equal to experience? The only result of accepting that definition would be having to invent a new name for what I (and I believe many with me) call consciousness, as badly defined as it is. To put it in the words of Syndrome: if everything is conscious, nothing is.

Metacognition may be a better term to differentiate from the lazy use of consciousness.

IMO, that's just relabeling, and in a strict sense only part of what I consider consciousness. E.g., self-awareness is not implied by meta-cognition.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#214

I have one problem with consciousness is everywhere argument. Namely, if everything down to ants is conscious - how lucky are we to end up experiencing the world as humans? The chances are just too small for me to accept it at face value.

Despite other comments dismissing this, I do think this is a compelling and humbling question. I think its best answered with a few related questions to consider what makes us lucky: 1) Longevity clearly matters, but the relativity of it is hard to assess: some sea mammals with emotionally-rich lives live twice as long. 2) Quality of life clearly matters. It's easy to imagine (and hopefully you personally know some!)…

Point 3 is rather interesting. I’d even go as far to say that the ‘marvellous’ evolutionary end-result that is us humans is the result of relentless chiselling over millions of generations by tragedy, suffering and death. Perhaps the more aggressive the chiselling the faster the evolution?

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're missing anything. Tononi made a formula related to how complicated a system is, and claimed that its measures consciousness. And what are you supposed to say to that, when no one can agree on what the word "consciousness" means, but people are still so attached to the word? For Scott Aaronson's take on "Integrated Information Theory": https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

Being able to model consciousness mathematically opens up some grotesque possibilities. Human suffering presumably has some sort of limit based purely on our physical makeup. Suppose though the very concept of subjective suffering could be modeled in some way. Is there any law in the universe that says there is a limit to suffering, pain (or pleasure)? Could an investigator of the future test out an algorithm on a co…

I imagine an unfortunate and unwilling architect of a genocide thinking softly, "Lucky for me suffering is limited by the exclusion axiom. Suffering can never exceed the Whole."

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#216
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a reason you think consciousness can't simply be explained as brain activity?

My thoughts on this: 1) Your brain cells are just a special type of cell. How these brain cells send and receive signals, interact and make connection, is coded at the cellular level. Software without hardware to run on, is just text. 2) You are born with certain conscious behaviours that you don't need to learn. This behaviour must be passed between generations using DNA/RNA. Therefore the coding for that later beha…

So I guess it depends on how you want to define consciousness. It's a biological reality that once sperm meets egg, you will have all the genetic information required to create your central nervous system represented there. But in my mind, this represents the potential for consciousness, not consciousness itself.

In my mind consciousness implies self-awareness and subjective experience. You might then be able to say that a phagocyte has some rudimentary form of consciousness, because it has a "behavior" of pursuing and destroying undesirable bacteria and particles in the body, so it must have some level of "perception" over which entities are to be targeted, and which to ignore. But at that level you can trace the behavior to chemical signaling and sub-cellular machinery, and it's possible to trace the phagocyte's behavior to simple cause-effect relationships in terms of physics and biochemistry. So I think it's hard to imagine that a phagocyte has "experience" in any real way.

I think when we talk about human consciousness, the content on which our subjective experience operates includes things like sensory information, verbal information and memories. And these types of information have neural representations which are quite clearly understood. And even for the task of consciousness, which is to interpret and contextualize all the sensory information coming into the brain, you can point to a brain region like the thalamus, which contains inputs from your senses, along with almost every other brain region, and make a reasonable argument that this might represent the physical manifestation of what we call consciousness.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that our minds automatically turn to the worst possibility, even though this also implies that we could find out what the mathematical limit of joy is. Chances are, there would be a lot more processes simulating joy than pain.

Why would there be more of those if it's "just" a simulation after all?

I would suspect that the pleasant simulations are where research money gets poured into, to figure out how to replicate the feeling of joy in regular humans

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are people actually independent self-replicating organisms. We are all parts of a superorganism, no? Each of our experiences are composed of the experiences of (billions?) of other people. We aren't islands.

Do you suppose neurons consider the super organism they are part of? No. So why should humans. Yes "we" are all fragments of the unified human experience, but our role, as individuals is to live as individuals.

Hmm, not sure I agree. I think our role is to create a harmonious global society. But to do that, we need to take care of yourself, our friends and family, etc.

And do neurons know about us? Well, they only know what they know. I think what they know could potentially be an empirical question. Some neurons are far more complex and connected than others.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#219
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was creating an operational definition. Of course others disagree. That is how words work. They have narrower and broader meanings to different people or in different contexts. The fact the others disagree with my operational definition does not invalidate my operational definition which stands on its own. Gp asserted "We don't know how to define life." I put forth a closed definition of life that makes sense. Othe…

The difficulty I think is not in proposing a coherent definition, but in capturing precisely the shared understanding of what people mean when they say something is "alive".

There isn't a shared understanding, people's intuitions disagree.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#220

Before we can ask intelligent, falsifiable questions about consciousness we need a rigorous definition of what consciousness is. Personally I think the word is a vague term and that a rigorous definition is impossible. Therefore, if my hypothesis is true, we can not not scientifically investigate "consciousness" any more than we can scientifically investigate "divinity" or "spookiness." If you disagree with my hypoth…

There can be no rigorous definition of what consciousness is, just names (experience, subjectivity, awareness, self, you) because it has no qualities. Consciousness is impossible to describe. It is neither hot nor cold, it has no size, and it experiences no passage of time as it is always now, eternal. There are no sides to it and no parts. It has no extent. It cannot be pointed to. It is beyond all possible signific…

TBF: I'm sure people felt the same way about space and time before good descriptions came around. There are plenty of things that seem way too abstract to allow for a precise description, but I think we should be relatively open to the possibility that there is a good description of consciousness, as it turned out there is for space and time. However, I'm pretty sure IIT is not it.
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