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We Are Beast Machines

nautil.us

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Re: We Are Beast Machines

#71

Post by nickelpro »

GlennS wrote: post #53
CuriouslyC wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Magnetic scanners. Strong evidence in my opinion.

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

The idea being that none of this is direct evidence of consciousness. These give you evidence for answers to soft problems, a block of steel cannot see because it does not have eyes to see. If you attached eyes it would not see, because it would not have an optical cortex. If you gave it an optical cortex it would not see because it does not have... etc.

You can solve all of these soft problems, but they would never tell you how the block of steel experiences the color red, the "qualia" of vision. That's the hard problem. All of the soft problems are "minor" by comparison.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#72

Post by Dudeman112 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #49
adriand wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One obvious difference between computers and humans is that only one of them is an animal. So far as we can tell, consciousness only arises in animals. This sounds like a truism, but I wonder if using phrases like “complex system“ masks it: both humans and computers are complex systems, and only one of them is conscious, and therefore what could possibly be the difference? Well, the list of differences between the tw…

You think your computer isn't conscious? How do you know? Just because it's not demonstrating free will? How many layers of error correction are built into computers to stifle the "randomness" of electronic equipment? Do you think you could still exercise free will locked in a padded room and strapped to a bed with a straightjacket?

I don't think free will matters at all for consciousness.

How is a world where your will is decided by quarks randomly zagging instead of zigging any more open to free will than a deterministic world?

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#73

Post by Hayarotle »

NoGravitas wrote: post #58
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 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…

I like that option. You don't have to find something that would give a hard border between "conscious" and "unconscious" entities, nor claim qualia doesn't exist, nor claim a rock has a level of consciousness equivalent to that of humans.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#74

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

bondarchuk wrote: post #19
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…

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…

My question is simply "why am I me?" Why and how is my personal point of view fixed to this particular lump of meat and I never wake up one day as you?

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#75

Post by Dudeman112 »

mabub24 wrote: post #52
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>the colour qualia question essentially dissolves away as irrelevant

And yet, I still wanna know.

The question is IMO as valid as "if I poke you with this pen, do you feel it different enough than what I feel if I poked myself?"

If we go through the exercise of breaking down the physiology, neurology and linguistic, I still wanna know if they feel it any different and how different.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#76

Post by dougmwne »

jerf wrote: post #63
dougmwne wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't do a darned thing to the problem. It just moves it around; the question becomes "If the entire universe is 'conscious', for whatever your definition is, why are some configurations of matter more able to express it and others less?" How can we build an identifier that says what will be more expressive and less by inputting the configuration? How can we engineer configurations of matter that are more expres…

To me, all those questions are much closer to creating a testable hypothesis than trying to ask how to go from 0 to 1, from the inert to the conscious. "Consciousness expression" sounds like something you could develop a measurement of based on an observable behavior. I'm not sweeping the problem under the rug, rather presenting a scenario in which trying to discover the origin of consciousness is like trying to discover the origin of energy.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#77

Post by esarbe »

Consciousness is nothing more but the final arbiter of attention. As such it must have a way to evaluate situations, including our own internal state and this is done by emotions. Emotions are our default approach interpret a given situation.

I think the 'beast machines' analogy is a good one. We're reproduction machines. We're not thinking machines. We do not evaluate our environment using logical thinking and although some may learn to use this tool (logical thinking) to justify paying attention to something in particular, it's emotions that guide our eyes and our attention.

Anything that has attention to guide has a consciousness. It might not use words or other symbols to reinforce attention but the basic mechanism, the cycle of emotion, evaluation and attention stays the same.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#78

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

the8472 wrote: post #56
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Suppose that I see red the way you see green. Then, when I see a stop sign or a fire extinguisher, I'm seeing the color that you would call "green". But of course, I have been told since birth that fire extinguishers, stop signs, etc. are red, so I would naturally call that color red. And in the same way, if I see green the way you see red, when I look at grass I would be perceiving the same color that you see when you look at a stop sign. But I would call it green, because everyone knows grass is green, what else would I call it?

There would be no disagreement between us about what objects are red, no way to tell that we see them differently, and no real-world consequences that would force to rewire any neurons, because our ways of perceiving the world would both be coherent and equally valid.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#79

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

FactolSarin wrote: post #48
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't see why two people experiencing red differently causes a problem for consciousness. Can't we both be conscious even with very different qualia?

Of course we can be all conscious but with different qualia. But the thing is that if consciousness was merely a physical phenomenon, we should be able to determine qualia purely by looking at the physical system, just as we determine any other property. However, we could be in a situation where we have understood our behaviors down to particle level, and I would still have no idea how you perceive colors.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#80

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

mabub24 wrote: post #52
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand the point: we could both be seeing a red car (which is objectively red, in the sense that it has a wavelength of 625–740 nm) but we could be perceiving it radically differently (for example, maybe my perception of red is exactly like your perception of blue) and language would never help us find out.

In my world, that car, stop signs, fire extinguishers or chili peppers would look like the clear sky or sea water in yours. But we would never find out, because I would point at the car and say "red" (I have learned that all objects that look that way from my point of view are "red"), and you would agree that it's "red". There is no way to find out that our perception is different.

But I guess my lack of understanding is because I haven't read Wittgenstein, so I hope to do so when I get the time. Thanks!

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