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What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

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Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#31

Post by uoaei »

dqpb wrote: post #26
uoaei wrote: post #7

Consciousness 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.

There is the notion of panpsychism: that consciousness defined in the basic sense is extant everywhere, all the time, in many varied forms and scopes. By the definitions above, awareness would be restricted to those systems which could reasonably be considered "cognitive", and sentience would belong only to those who can conceptualize "cogito ergo sum".

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#32

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

layer8 wrote: post #23
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, bei…

The argument you're making is just eliding the "hard problem".

We can trivially imagine an electronic circuit that registers different current levels when exposed to red or blue light. Nobody (that I'm aware of) suggests that there is an experience within the electronic circuit, despite the fact that it "senses" different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. The circuit is qualia-free.

You, on the other hand, are qualia-full. Whether the experience you have when a red object is in front of you derives purely from your optical sensory apparatus, or if it derives from a self-reflective awareness that your brain is dealing with "red" really makes no difference to the central point: you have an experience.

We have no explanation for how there can be experiences/qualia, and possibly, because they are either extremely or completely subjective, we may never any means of studying their existence.

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#33

Post by sdht0 »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #17
lifefeed wrote: post #4

Aeon 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.

Just as handwavy as any other explanation of consciousness. I can make an electronic device that runs a Python program that predicts how input affects the device. That doesn't make the device conscious.

A sufficiently advanced such Python program will probably actually be conscious.

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#34

Post by gjm11 »

lifefeed wrote: post #4

Aeon 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.

For anyone who's wondering why the strange title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#35

Post by zasdffaa »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #32
layer8 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, bei…

The argument you're making is just eliding the "hard problem". We can trivially imagine an electronic circuit that registers different current levels when exposed to red or blue light. Nobody (that I'm aware of) suggests that there is an experience within the electronic circuit, despite the fact that it "senses" different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. The circuit is qualia-free. You, on the other hand,…

We don't know what qualia are so it's an acceptable possibility to me (unprovable, mind) that such a circuit may 'experience' something. It would be unutterably basic if it happened, nonetheless I'm ok with that.

There's also a view that consciousness is intrinsic to everything (ah, here you go https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-consciousnes...) which is a cheap, cheesy and IMO totally unacceptable way to 'explain' consciousness and I reject that as an explanation, but it doesn't make it actually wrong.

Edit: missed your last line "We have explanation for how there can be experiences/qualia" - I'm surprised, you can explain it, got any links?

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#36

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

zasdffaa wrote: post #35
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument you're making is just eliding the "hard problem". We can trivially imagine an electronic circuit that registers different current levels when exposed to red or blue light. Nobody (that I'm aware of) suggests that there is an experience within the electronic circuit, despite the fact that it "senses" different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. The circuit is qualia-free. You, on the other hand,…

We don't know what qualia are so it's an acceptable possibility to me (unprovable, mind) that such a circuit may 'experience' something. It would be unutterably basic if it happened, nonetheless I'm ok with that. There's also a view that consciousness is intrinsic to everything (ah, here you go https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-consciousnes... ) which is a cheap, cheesy and IMO totally unacceptable way…

Sure, pan-qualism/pan-psychism may well turn out to be a respectable postion.

[ fixed the missing "no" in the GP ]

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#37

Post by zozbot234 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #32
layer8 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, bei…

The argument you're making is just eliding the "hard problem". We can trivially imagine an electronic circuit that registers different current levels when exposed to red or blue light. Nobody (that I'm aware of) suggests that there is an experience within the electronic circuit, despite the fact that it "senses" different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. The circuit is qualia-free. You, on the other hand,…

The thing about experiences/qualia is that they aren't just subjective, but momentary. Any sense of permanence, continuing identity or indeed of experiences being "about" something in particular is ultimately linked to our memory, which is not part of the "hard problem" itself; it fits solidly within the structure of causal relations we usually call "reality", or just "the physical universe". So the hard problem is hard, but it's also very tightly constrained; it "only" has to explain tiny fragments of subjective experience that float in and out of existence.

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#39

Post by [deleted] »

sdht0 wrote: post #33
TaupeRanger wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as handwavy as any other explanation of consciousness. I can make an electronic device that runs a Python program that predicts how input affects the device. That doesn't make the device conscious.

A sufficiently advanced such Python program will probably actually be conscious.

[deleted]

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#40

Post by namero999 »

53r3PB9769ba wrote: post #29
oldstrangers wrote: post #3

Just 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.

One must explain how the jump from quantities to qualities works.
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