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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

#151

Post by namero999 »

RHSman2 wrote: post #132
mlsu wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Check out Peter Russell. The person closest to the mark for me. If you know of him the above is that but if not, he is amazing.

Nice to see him mentioned. He's very little known, yet one who can argue properly and one of the few that make much sense.

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

#152

Post by nicoburns »

bnralt wrote: post #91
nicoburns wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point. A brain could encode "pleasure", and respond appropriately to that and other complex stimuli without there being anyone actually feeling that pleasure. But there is, and that's unexplained. That's not just a defect in our understanding of brains, it's something which we don't understand on the level of physics.

> A brain could encode "pleasure", and respond appropriately to that and other complex stimuli without there being anyone actually feeling that pleasure. It could, but would that be a more efficient way to interact with the world? We see more complex brains coinciding with a greater ability to create abstractions about the world and leading to a greater flexibility when it comes to problem solving. Hard coding things…

> Hard coding things occurs in simpler life forms with very limited to no ability to solve problems.

Hard coding also occurs frequently in humans. There are countless things that are universal (or almost universal) human experiences. Smiling, laughing, pain, walking, kissing. Even things like language seem to be based universal constants (although the specifics vary).

> We see more complex brains coinciding with a greater ability to create abstractions about the world and leading to a greater flexibility when it comes to problem solving

Yes, but the question is whether that ability to create flexible abstraction relates in any way to the ability to have conscious experience. And if so, then how. We can see from deep learning AI models that it's possible to create flexible abstractions artificially. They don't match humans at the moment, but we've yet to hit the limits.

> It could, but would that be a more efficient way to interact with the world

More efficient than what. The point is that we really have no clue what phenomenal experience is.

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

#153

Post by namero999 »

jamiek88 wrote: post #72
namero999 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not. And sorry if I've missed the sarcasm :)

Why of course not?

What makes you think that a simulation of a process is the process itself? If you were to simulate on silicon kidney function down to sub-particle precision, would you expect your computer to pee on your desk? So why would you expect consciousness to be present in a simulation of brain activity or brain complexity? Can you point to _any_ instance of presumed consciousness in a non-biological complex?

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

#154

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

qudat wrote: post #149
spoonfeeder006 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are describing regarding inputs, brain activity on data stream, and how its just a recursive ETL function and such, is describing behavior and computation though You have some input that goes into the brain, and produces neural firings that trigger actuators to respond to that stimulus What I don't understand is why are we conscious beings instead of extremely complex bio-computation machines exhibiting memo…

> What I don't understand is why are we conscious beings instead of extremely complex bio-computation machines exhibiting memory, inputs, and complex behaviors such as attention and decision making models, all with behavioral actuators, and all this simulating thought and intelligence but really have no entity whatsoever thats actually experiencing stuff? Subjective experience and the "self" are just emergent propert…

> Subjective experience and the "self" are just emergent properties of the system

There are other systems with emergent properties where we can explain how the emergent properties are a function of the other properties of the system.

As of now, we can't do that with consciousness and brains/bodies.

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

#155

Post by namero999 »

zasdffaa wrote: post #147
namero999 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you argument your desire for a quantifiable evidence without begging the question? There is research compatible with these claims. It's mentioned and linked in the link I've previously provided.

> Can you argument your desire for a quantifiable evidence without begging the question? Don't fall back to sophistry. Is there evidence? yes or no, if yes then show me. > There is research compatible with these claims. It's mentioned and linked in the link I've previously provided. I'm downloading the single video which mentions the word evidence. If there is any more evidence links, please show me them, especially…

It's not sophistry, it was a preemptive question anticipating your response, which in fact showed up: you asked what consciousness _is_. This is the sort of question Babbage would have replied to with his famous remark. "What is" is a philosophical, in fact metaphysical, question. You know what consciousness is. Just pinch yourself.

To ask what something _is_ implies reduction. You want a description of experience in terms of something else. So you are begging the question, having already concluded that it's not fundamental. In idealism experience is the reduction basis, so the question makes no sense. On the contrary, one should try to explain everything else in terms of experience (and if you don't accept a reduction basis, then you won't be able to explain anything, even with materialism).

Now, the explanations need to be consistent with empirical evidence and they need to have explanatory power. I submit to you that AI succeeds, and the empirical adequacy of those claims is abundantly linked in the description of the material you are downloading.

Science and scientific theories are concerned with the behaviour of nature, not its essence. They tell us how it behaves, not what it is. We build models out of observations and given the chance, we should stand by a model with the most explanatory power.

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

#156

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

prng2021 wrote: post #123
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's literally all he wrote, that sounds more like a polite way of saying "you're wrong, and I have better things to do than argue with you about it."

Yea. "I suppose in some real sense"... What does that even mean?

That his book Consciousness Explained did not explain how there could be consciousness, but instead explained what we are conscious of. It's not that what the book does is not explaining consciousness, but it's only explaining it at a specific level, presupposing its existence and understandibility. Dennett was conceding that the explaining "the hard problem" was a real goal, and that his book did not tackle it.

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

#157

Post by namero999 »

rogerclark wrote: post #54
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,…

This argument is not "eliding" the hard problem. This argument is saying that Chalmers' hard problem does not actually exist. We have many explanations for what people describe as "the hard problem". But nobody who believes in "the hard problem" accepts these explanations, which have been given for decades by philosophers like Dennett. There is no way to reconcile your view, that there IS a hard problem and that no p…

Dennett's argument is that consciousness is an illusion. Where would such illusion take place? I'm genuinely convinced that Dennett is a troll.

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

#158

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

namero999 wrote: post #155
zasdffaa wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you argument your desire for a quantifiable evidence without begging the question? Don't fall back to sophistry. Is there evidence? yes or no, if yes then show me. > There is research compatible with these claims. It's mentioned and linked in the link I've previously provided. I'm downloading the single video which mentions the word evidence. If there is any more evidence links, please show me them, especially…

It's not sophistry, it was a preemptive question anticipating your response, which in fact showed up: you asked what consciousness _is_. This is the sort of question Babbage would have replied to with his famous remark. "What is" is a philosophical, in fact metaphysical, question. You know what consciousness is. Just pinch yourself. To ask what something _is_ implies reduction. You want a description of experience in…

> To ask what something _is_ implies reduction. You want a description of experience in terms of something else. So you are begging the question, having already concluded that it's not fundamental.

This is not true. When people have asked "what is gravity" and they determine that its a fundamental, non-decomposable force within the universe, they are not disappointed. That's still an answer.

"Consciousness is a fundamental property of in our universe" is a perfectly fine answer to the question "What is consciousness". It's just not the answer that most people currently find most likely.

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

#159

Post by alok-g »

qudat wrote: post #121
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.

How is consciousness possible? Here's my naive answer with just a bachelors in neuroscience. There are some "business requirements" as far as I know. We need: - space and time - memory - inputs - decision making models - attention You need space and time because thinking is a verb. Action is required which needs the passage of time. You need memory in order to link past events with current ones. I'm not strictly talk…

Going by this, what more do we need to make machines conscious, if anything?
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