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We Are Beast Machines

nautil.us

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Re: We Are Beast Machines

#51

Post by CuriouslyC »

GlennS wrote: post #43
nickelpro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how someone can not understand the problem. You and I have conscious experience, we have a meaningful sensation of qualia. A billet of 4140 steel does not, or so we assume. Both are governed by physical laws of the universe, so there must be some distinction beyond these physical laws that differentiate them. In this framing, there are typically four camps, three of them line up with your camps: 1)…

I think the opposite problem - or rather the assumed explanation - is harder. Start with empiricism: conciousness appears when we add other mental capacities, so probably it is built upon them. The idea that conciousness (or abstraction) is a fundamental building block (as espoused by neoplatonists) is a much more unlikely explanation to me. > I am not like a block of steel, but I don't know why. Let's start from her…

That's a nice looking dead end, because your subjectivity biases you. Instead, step outside your own consciousness.

Based on objective observation, you are dynamic and reactive, steel is static and mostly unreactive. Beyond that, you might as well be the same. You claim to experience your existence, but what evidence do you have? And what evidence do you have that a bar of steel doesn't experience something of some sort?

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#52

Post by mabub24 »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #25
bondarchuk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are going to demand a precise, non-handwavey answer to the hard problem, then you must first give the hard problem in a precise, non-handwavey way, or at the very least prove in a precise, non-handwavey way that there even is such a thing as the hard problem. As far as I've seen nobody has really done this, it's always just "what breathes fire into the equations?" "what is it like to be a bat?" "I just feel it…

I find the classical argument with color qualia very convincing (in fact, I thought about it before even knowing what qualia were...). Nothing you can find out about wavelengths, cones, rods, neurons and so on will tell you why you see red the specific way you do, and whether my perception of red corresponds to yours or my "red" is actually your "green". So there is a gap there, something that doesn't follow from the…

There is a very fruitful line in philosophy of mind and language that addresses the colour qualia question: anti-cartesianism and anti-skepticism.

Wittgenstein's arguments on seeing-as is the best example of this line. He argues, quite convincingly I think, that a lot of the kind of skepticism, of a cartesian sort, implicit in the colour qualia question arises out of conceptual confusions in language. The goal isn't to solve the debate, or directly refute it per se, but to dissolve the entire conceptual confusion upon which it relies by making clear how it is essentially a house-of-cards.

For instance, we know that humans have a relatively uniform perceptual landscape. Physiological realities in the eye limit the variations in human visual perception to a certain set wavelength band. With all the correct parts working correctly, we see and we all see in relatively the same way. We don't see our seeing. We don't perceive our perceptual experience from the inside out. We see. The variations in "what people see" are more in language, which is to say that people report seeing different things. As Wittgenstein would put it, we often "see-as" just as much as we "see-that", which are ways of "seeing" that intersect and mix in language.

Colour is interesting because in our language it is heavily dependent on ostensive definitions, which is the linguistic way of saying colour is reliant on pointing at examples. Often quite literally pointing with your hand, or directing someone to look at something in particular. So if there is a red car in front of you and both people say the car is "red" then they are seeing the same red because the colour is not the result of empirical validation of an internal private perceptual experience, but because the colour is in language. They are reporting the same colour.

Viewed in this line, the colour qualia question essentially dissolves away as irrelevant.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#53

Post by GlennS »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #51
GlennS wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the opposite problem - or rather the assumed explanation - is harder. Start with empiricism: conciousness appears when we add other mental capacities, so probably it is built upon them. The idea that conciousness (or abstraction) is a fundamental building block (as espoused by neoplatonists) is a much more unlikely explanation to me. > I am not like a block of steel, but I don't know why. Let's start from her…

That's a nice looking dead end, because your subjectivity biases you. Instead, step outside your own consciousness. Based on objective observation, you are dynamic and reactive, steel is static and mostly unreactive. Beyond that, you might as well be the same. You claim to experience your existence, but what evidence do you have? And what evidence do you have that a bar of steel doesn't experience something of some s…

> That's a nice looking dead end, because your subjectivity biases you. Instead, step outside your own consciousness.

Don't understand, sorry.

> You claim to experience your existence, but what evidence do you have?

Others also make that claim. We appear to each-other to be similar.

> And what evidence do you have that a bar of steel doesn't experience something of some sort?

Magnetic scanners. Strong evidence in my opinion.

I think you shouldn't start with steel, you should start with chemicals that produce nervous signals.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#54

Post by state_less »

We may have body consciousness at times, though conscious doesn’t depend on body consciousness or is required to be embodied. When I dream I often am not conscious of breathing or my body for example.

I once had a strange dream that exemplifies this. I was dreaming in Wisconsin of being on a subway train in NYC. A man in the train crouches down near me. I follow him down. He asks, “What is your name?” I tell him, “it’s Seth.” “That’s an old name”, he responds.

I am thinking, who is this guy?

Then as if to show me something, he pantomimes a mallet and strikes an imaginary bell, except I hear the bell ring out as clear as if I were awake. A disembodied voice says something in German, which I don’t understand, though I wish I could remember it now. Then I wake.

See I was conscious of the bell, though none was struck. I didn’t hear it in my ear, I heard it in the mind. So I don’t think vibration is sound and EM waves aren’t color, though they are the most common precursors to this sort of consciousness.

We can go to places in our minds where our bodies can not follow. I think it’s a hopeful vision of what might be possible some day. That we might find a way to transform ourselves into a world less inhabited with fears and self loathing to world of wonder and discovery.

P.S. I understand I’m not solving the hard problem of consciousness in this passage. Though I wanted to add some notes of what I’ve learned about consciousness along the way.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#55

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

adriand wrote: post #39
n4r9 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we take a human and replace one of their neurons with a silicon chip that exactly replicates its electrical activity, is the human any less "conscious"? Presumably their conscious experience is the same (if not why not?) If the human is still conscious, what if we continue one by one to replace all the neurons with silicon chips in the same way? Where does this thought experiment fail?

My house is made of bricks. I can confidently remove one of the bricks and replace it with a Kleenex box. The house is still standing, it’s perfectly liveable and no one can tell the difference. Now what happens when I replace all the bricks with Kleenex boxes?

You have a honey-comb structure. Maybe put exactly fitting X-shaped stabilizers into them, before. For safety, and such :)

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#56

Post by the8472 »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #25
bondarchuk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are going to demand a precise, non-handwavey answer to the hard problem, then you must first give the hard problem in a precise, non-handwavey way, or at the very least prove in a precise, non-handwavey way that there even is such a thing as the hard problem. As far as I've seen nobody has really done this, it's always just "what breathes fire into the equations?" "what is it like to be a bat?" "I just feel it…

I find the classical argument with color qualia very convincing (in fact, I thought about it before even knowing what qualia were...). Nothing you can find out about wavelengths, cones, rods, neurons and so on will tell you why you see red the specific way you do, and whether my perception of red corresponds to yours or my "red" is actually your "green". So there is a gap there, something that doesn't follow from the…

> I find the classical argument with color qualia very convincing (in fact, I thought about it before even knowing what qualia were...). Nothing you can find out about wavelengths, cones, rods, neurons and so on will tell you why you see red the specific way you do, and whether my perception of red corresponds to yours or my "red" is actually your "green".

Red being green makes no sense. Let's simplify a bit and say you have a neuron for hearing the word "red", one for the visual stimuli "red" and then a sensory fusion/abstract concept of red. Several layers up you'll also have one for a "stop sign" (which also takes inputs like octagon shapes and some white letters). There are many other, more distant associations of course, we have many neurons after all.

The spoken words, physical wavelengths and stop sign design are more or less physically or socially fixed. If you magically swapped some red and green neurons then those physical stimuli wouldn't change. The brain would be forced to rewire all the associations until it arrived at the original connections again. Or it would suffer from observable mispredictions such as being more likely to respond to a green rather than a red stop sign. Why would there be a free-floating "qualia green" neuron connected to "visual red" that is yet somehow disconnected from "physical green" and why wouldn't it update once it became miswired?

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#57

Post by disambiguation »

nickelpro wrote: post #6
joeberon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far the only answer I've seen people give to the question is "what problem? There's no problem". Basically, there are many people who don't (or also have convinced themselves that they don't) perceive an incongruity between their personal subjective experience and the idea that consciousness is just an emergent phenomena of a physical system. I haven't found a good way to explain it, I just know that there's somet…

I don't understand how someone can not understand the problem. You and I have conscious experience, we have a meaningful sensation of qualia. A billet of 4140 steel does not, or so we assume. Both are governed by physical laws of the universe, so there must be some distinction beyond these physical laws that differentiate them. In this framing, there are typically four camps, three of them line up with your camps: 1)…

I think (4) gets more interesting if we replace "block of steel" with "fetal tissue" at various stages of development

i personally lean towards (4) for this reason. if we say "soul assignment" is not the answer, then we have to explain how some unconscious cells eventually acquire consciousness, and then go back to unconscious again. one solution is that its been there all along, and is every where.

Perhaps the human brain (any brain?) is just a lens for something quantum, or a radio for some signal? or maybe there are some immaterial forces that we can never observe under a microscope.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#58

Post by NoGravitas »

nickelpro wrote: post #6
joeberon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far the only answer I've seen people give to the question is "what problem? There's no problem". Basically, there are many people who don't (or also have convinced themselves that they don't) perceive an incongruity between their personal subjective experience and the idea that consciousness is just an emergent phenomena of a physical system. I haven't found a good way to explain it, I just know that there's somet…

I don't understand how someone can not understand the problem. You and I have conscious experience, we have a meaningful sensation of qualia. A billet of 4140 steel does not, or so we assume. Both are governed by physical laws of the universe, so there must be some distinction beyond these physical laws that differentiate them. In this framing, there are typically four camps, three of them line up with your camps: 1)…

I agree about the best parties. But what about the idea that consciousness exists on a continuum — that everything that processes information has a scope of consciousness that corresponds to the complexity of what it processes? A block of steel doesn't really process any information, but a thermostat does, and so does a paramecium. I'm happy to grant qualia to a paramecium, even if I don't think those qualia are very substantial or interesting in human terms. I feel a little weirder about the thermostat, but, um, sure, why not, I guess?

I guess I'm siding with group 4, but just saying that quantity has a quality all its own. Or that universal consciousness doesn't have to be spooky.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#59

Post by dougmwne »

nickelpro wrote: post #3

Nothing in this essay addresses the single most prominent question of contemporary philosophy of mind, which is the hard problem of consciousness. It only addresses the soft problems, which everyone agrees are solvable "merely" with enough time, funding, and initiative. Nothing about the "beast machine" addresses how qualitative experience arises from physical phenomena, or as Chalmers puts it, "Why are we not philos…

To turn this on it's head, maybe the problem is assuming that everything else in the universe is without consciousness aside from certain classes of matter organized in a particular configuration of a brain. If we instead assume that consciousness is an intrinsic property of all matter and space, then the problem goes away. Or to state it another way, either everything is conscious or nothing is.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#60

Post by [deleted] »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #45
nickelpro wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, you have a handwave. A vague idea that when a system becomes "complex" enough it suddenly becomes conscious. There's no mechanism, no rigor, no cause and effect. With the browser you can chase down every bit through the hardware, down to the quantum tunneling effect dictating what's happening in the silicon and come up with a concrete explanation based in physical laws. With the browser example, at no level…

The problem in your stating (and many others) is that the notion of consciousness has self-awareness is baked into it. It's odd to think that the ability to experience qualia magically occurs for sufficiently complex systems, but it's not odd to think that self-awareness just arises once a system that can experience qualia reaches a sufficient complexity level. Unfortunately, people latch on to the reasonableness of…

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