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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

#81

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

gjm11 wrote: post #50
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.

I would be interested in your response to the following thought experiment: After years of heroic work and ingenious insights, along with a lot of technological progress, we "solve" the "easy" problem of consciousness in the following (I admit implausibly in any foreseeable future) strong sense: (Note: I'm going into quite a lot of detail because I think that when people say things like "understanding how the machine…

There's too much here to really reply to, but I will say this:

1. the existence of GPT3 and its cousins I think comes close to, if not actually proving, then severely tilting the scale in favor of "you do not need consciousness or qualia to participate in relatively human conversation and self-reporting". This means that scenarios where you interrogate a system to see what it thinks are going to rapidly become less and less interesting and less and less convincing as an indication of anything interesting.

2. The problem with qualia is that their subjective nature (coupled with the self-reporting dilemma mentioned in 1. above) means that it is essentially impossible to know whether a given system/individual is experiencing them or not. Do I think that the system you've described could exist without qualia? I do. Do I think it could report qualia without actually having them? I do. Do I think it might actually have qualia? Yes, possibly, but with a lot of caveats.

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

#82

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

mlsu wrote: post #77
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,…

Really? + Human beings + Dogs + Bugs + Plants + Eukaryotes + Viruses + Proteins + Molecules + Atoms + Subatomic Particles + ??? + Pure Information, ones and zeros Here is a line (--------). Place it so that above it, things are conscious, and below it, things are not conscious. It seems very obvious to me that there is nothing special about human beings, (or dogs, or bugs, or plants, or wherever you draw the line), t…

> because consciousness is either shared by all things; or, shared by no things.

Alternative: it is shared by 192 kinds of things, and nothing else.

Why not?

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

#83

Post by [deleted] »

petemir wrote: post #57
gjm11 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested in your response to the following thought experiment: After years of heroic work and ingenious insights, along with a lot of technological progress, we "solve" the "easy" problem of consciousness in the following (I admit implausibly in any foreseeable future) strong sense: (Note: I'm going into quite a lot of detail because I think that when people say things like "understanding how the machine…

One thing that surprised me about ‘A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence’ by Jeff Hawkins was how many different types of computer simulations currently exist for approximations and parts to your experiment’s steps.

[deleted]

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

#84

Post by sweetbacon »

smusamashah wrote: post #76

If we had a system that can show us our thought process and we could explain every aspect of it, will we still call it being conscious? (took this question from Westworld where Maeve gets her hands on the tablet showing what she is thinking at that moment)

I feel like yes, or at least have a new name. Nature seems to love emergence at different levels, with little clear delineation beween, and very different rules in between (particles to elements, elements to chemistry, etc).

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

#85

Post by goodthenandnow »

namero999 wrote: post #47
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, pan-qualism/pan-psychism may well turn out to be a respectable postion. [ fixed the missing "no" in the GP ]

Panpsychism is untenable because it trades the hard problem of consciousness for the composition problem. The only consistent and coherent game in town is analytical idealism.

> the composition problem

Would these be like the “easy problems” then?

Besides, wouldn't that be exactly like our current physics? (Where we reduce until we find something fundamental like “electric charge just is and has this properties”, similarly for Quantum fields and the like -- and then how that composes and interacts with other fundamentals is the whole business.)

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

#86

Post by mistermann »

gjm11 wrote: post #50
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.

I would be interested in your response to the following thought experiment: After years of heroic work and ingenious insights, along with a lot of technological progress, we "solve" the "easy" problem of consciousness in the following (I admit implausibly in any foreseeable future) strong sense: (Note: I'm going into quite a lot of detail because I think that when people say things like "understanding how the machine…

I will take a shot:

> Question 1: Do you agree that something along these lines is possible in principle?

Seems reasonable.

> Question 2: If it happened, would you think there is still a "hard problem" left unsolved?

Yes.

> Question 3: If you think there would still be a "hard problem" left unsolved, is that because you think someone in this scenario could imagine all the machinery revealed by the simulator operating perfectly without any actual qualia?

If I see an amazing demo of something, and then they try to sell me something that is capable of only a small subset of what was just shown in the demo, I am going to balk. I suspect if the topic was most anything other than consciousness (which is one of those topics that seems to cause the mind to behave anomalously for some reason), I think most people would agree.

EDIT: thinking about it more....if you could start to make amazingly accurate and precise predictions about how the mind is going to react under a wide variety of scenarios, I would be much more impressed...although, my intuition is that this is far less complex than it may seem for normal behaviors (fine-grained precision is where I'd have to surrender my skepticism).

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

#87

Post by CloudRecondite »

gjm11 wrote: post #50
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.

I would be interested in your response to the following thought experiment: After years of heroic work and ingenious insights, along with a lot of technological progress, we "solve" the "easy" problem of consciousness in the following (I admit implausibly in any foreseeable future) strong sense: (Note: I'm going into quite a lot of detail because I think that when people say things like "understanding how the machine…

Your answers all suggest you think consciousness is computational. If we could simulate the complex computations of the brain there’s nothing else there. I’m of the opinion that consciousness is not computational but a fundamental property of the universe that we can’t explain with current physics. I believe this because I can’t adequately explain what I experience otherwise.

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

#88

Post by uptownfunk »

CloudRecondite wrote: post #87
gjm11 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested in your response to the following thought experiment: After years of heroic work and ingenious insights, along with a lot of technological progress, we "solve" the "easy" problem of consciousness in the following (I admit implausibly in any foreseeable future) strong sense: (Note: I'm going into quite a lot of detail because I think that when people say things like "understanding how the machine…

Your answers all suggest you think consciousness is computational. If we could simulate the complex computations of the brain there’s nothing else there. I’m of the opinion that consciousness is not computational but a fundamental property of the universe that we can’t explain with current physics. I believe this because I can’t adequately explain what I experience otherwise.

This is really interesting, really interested in learning more about this. Is this an opinion specific to your own understanding or a belief held by a broader group of academics?

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

#89

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #15
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.

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.

Dennett most certainly tackles the "hard problem", by convincingly arguing the problem is ill-defined and not a real problem.

The "hard problem" is not some Riemann Hypothesis of philosophy. Its status as a problem to be solved is highly contentious.

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

#90

Post by bobobob420 »

agitator wrote: post #58
notfed wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For starters: - Why is there something rather than nothing? - Does a universe with no one in it to observe it count as something or nothing? Then, imagine we're building an AI and want to know whether it's reached our level or not: - How can we determine whether the AI experiences qualia the same (or similar) way we do, and isn't lying? - Where to draw the line between conscious being and computer?

How do you know if the people to your left or right experience sensations the same way you do? When they look at the sky does their mind paint the sky with the same color?

Scientific method was created for this
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