Earlier quoted context omitted.
intelligence is not the target I take it. The target is self-experience/qualia
intelligence creates and experiences all that
Most of the time "intelligence" lags behind experience, I doubt it's a superset.
What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
21–30 of 181 posts
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#22Right off the bat it seemed like it was saying experts have changed their tone recently. Saying "we're further from understanding consciousness than we thought we were". It never goes on to elaborate this point. Great book review. If I had more time, I would snap up the book immediately. The review left me wondering if the book elaborates on the above ^^^. I might make the time to read it.
> Right off the bat This might not be a deliberate reference to Nagel (as mentioned in the article) but at least it's thematically appropriate.
Perhaps. Or a strategy of the author to keep me reading until the end (it worked!)
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#23Aeon just had a great article on the consciousness, "Seeing and somethingness" https://aeon.co/essays/how-blindsight-answers-the-hard-probl... It argues that consciousness evolved out of sensation, where we developed an "inner self" to predict how sensations would affect us, and it's that inner self that became our conscious. Don't miss out on the comments section, the author answers a lot of question in there.
Like Dennett's book "Consciousness Explained", the Aeon article falls into the category of explaining what we are conscious of , not how it is possible to be conscious of anything at all. It does not really tackle Chalmers "hard problem of consciousness", despite the subtitle.
People fundamentally disagree about whether there is anything besides the “of”. My personal introspection tells mere there is only “of”, because what I perceive as my consciousness, is, by virtue of being a perception, in the end just an “of” itself. There is some sort of recursivity involved in the whole construct of consciousness, which makes it hard to get a grasp on. In some sense, consciousness is just that, being the perceptor and the perceptee at the same time. This recursitivity or fixedpointness will probably be key to a precise understanding of the whole shebang.
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#24Consciousness vs awareness vs sentience are terms that really need some society-scale effort to nail down what we mean by one or another. The conversation circles round and round because many folks talk past each other or interpret discussions in ways that the writer didn't intend. (I'm not saying the answer is available today if only we solve this dialectical issue.) Philosophers of consciousness define "consciousne…
What I rarely see / hear articulated well enough, and am not even sure that I can, are questions around why _I_ have consciousness. I understand the reasons why a body might develop meta cognition, and how it's advantageous for a being to be aware of it's thoughts. But none of this explains why my body is attached to _this_ consciousness and not another. 'Experience' is the key term I feel when the phenomenal aspect of consciousness is discussed, but I feel many don't understand this view point and attempt to explain it away as something reducable or inevitable.
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#25Consciousness vs awareness vs sentience are terms that really need some society-scale effort to nail down what we mean by one or another. The conversation circles round and round because many folks talk past each other or interpret discussions in ways that the writer didn't intend. (I'm not saying the answer is available today if only we solve this dialectical issue.) Philosophers of consciousness define "consciousne…
What I rarely see / hear articulated well enough, and am not even sure that I can, are questions around why _I_ have consciousness. I understand the reasons why a body might develop meta cognition, and how it's advantageous for a being to be aware of it's thoughts. But none of this explains why my body is attached to _this_ consciousness and not another. 'Experience' is the key term I feel when the phenomenal aspect…
If you accept that certain bodies have metacognition, then this arguably predicts that each body’s metacognition will perceive itself (the metacognition) and the body as two separate but connected entities. That is, your own perception that “you” are separate from your body would be predicted by the theory. That is, this perception would be predicted by the theory. But it is a mere perception, because the metacognition “machine” (within the brain) is physically part of the body, and hence inherently bound to it, even if its own internal perception differs from that.
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#26Consciousness vs awareness vs sentience are terms that really need some society-scale effort to nail down what we mean by one or another. The conversation circles round and round because many folks talk past each other or interpret discussions in ways that the writer didn't intend. (I'm not saying the answer is available today if only we solve this dialectical issue.) Philosophers of consciousness define "consciousne…
> need some society-scale effort to nail down
I think a good approach would be for people to build things that exhibit consciousness according to whatever their model is and claim "this is conscious". Then let people debate whether it is or not.
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#27This is a reminder that, in the end, House's book is not about consciousness — it is about a set of ways for looking at it.
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#28"How rare and beautiful it is to even exist." --some song lyric
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#29Just blindly bought this book because I think consciousness is one of the most fascinating unexplained aspects of our universe.
Maybe I'm a p-zombie then, because I just don't get it.
I've spent hours upon hours thinking about thinking and observing my own thought processes and I don't see anything that couldn't be explained scientifically.
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#30Right off the bat it seemed like it was saying experts have changed their tone recently. Saying "we're further from understanding consciousness than we thought we were". It never goes on to elaborate this point. Great book review. If I had more time, I would snap up the book immediately. The review left me wondering if the book elaborates on the above ^^^. I might make the time to read it.
I am glad, because for years the prevailing attitude was that there's nothing special or interesting about consciousness at all, that it doesn't really exist, it's an illusion, etc. I don't think we'll ever be able to fully explain it in scientific terms, because not everything is in the realm of scientific knowledge.
What scares me is that some leading AI researchers hold this view (that consciousness in general is nothing special) and it makes them come across as unempathetic, as if all conscious beings---meat or AI---are simply computers and in turn pain is just some kind of computation and therefore that it's silly to even discuss taking precautions to prevent any kind of AI suffering.