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What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

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Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#61

Post by nathias »

Definitions are not magical bindings that would guarantee the adequacy of a representation but the fixed points assumed to aid communication, science is not a 'search' for definitions, it uses definitions to communicate what it has discovered.

The mathematical structure of phenomenology is kind of a weird specific task, because it's traditionally equated to the structure of the world or representation in general. This is because in theory 'consciousness' means very little when abstracted from the theory of its implementation, on the other hand if we try to preserve the relation of consciousness with the implementation we already have to choose between several. I think the best candidate for the existence of some of most rudimentary sentience is the gamma oscillations that function as coordinator functions of different neural populations, so the math to represent this would be take that as a basis.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#62

Post by Nevermark »

epgui wrote: post #57
Nevermark wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That view seems pessimistic without any strong argument, other than critiquing people for not yet understanding something we all agree we don’t understand yet. > Consciousness" is not a thing. It's a collection of things, […] A collection of things is a thing. > The truth is consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, […] I don’t think that is controversial at all. We have unraveled the workings of many emergent phenome…

It's only a thing if you can define it, but there is no agreed upon definition of what collection of things comprise consciousness. We have all the pieces, and we know we have all the pieces (note: this doesn't mean we don't have a lot more to learn, both can be true). There is little controversy over how it all roughly works together. The only real controversy is semantics: what do we mean when we say "consciousness…

A phenomena can be defined by a pattern, even if it’s not well defined in a technical sense.

And a pattern is a thing.

Consciousness is an everyday experience that appears to be reliably shared by billions of entities who communicate about it to each other. And have done so for at least millennia.

To use a colloquialism: It’s a thing

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#63

Post by alexvoda »

inphovore wrote: post #60

Consciousness is a quantum phenomenon. The mathematical structure is geometric in some way. The quantum domain acts as a sieve. Constructive and distinctive interference perturbs the quantum substrate, which is the existential universe itself. Consciousness is thus the universe peering back into itself, and living systems are the biotechnology which animate this phenomena. The unique properties of this are: Our “comp…

All you've said beeing a hypothesis. We have yet to see proof of any of it.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#64

Post by b800h »

conrod_ wrote: post #37
ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the "Universe in a nutshell" version overview of neuroscience, I'll plug my own book Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos (more on that below) Anil Seth's Being You is a recent one that does a good job of summarizing the most popular theories in consciousness. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53036979-being-you The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness ( https://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Handbook-…

Thanks for the reply! I have to say, I am quite giddy. When I posted this question, I wasn't expecting to get a reply from an author and researcher on this very topic. I am a software engineer by profession, but this is a topic that has been on the back of my mind for many years. Even when I read popsci books about the universe and the big bang and so on, i felt spiritually unsatisfied because they often do not addre…

You might be waiting a long time. Things like Tarski's Undefinability Theorem (moreso than Gödel) make it rather unlikely that this will turn out to be possible.

But I agree with your assertion.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#65

Post by wruza »

dvt wrote: post #34
kilgnad wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Unless we reduce models of consciousness to purely stochastic processes, this is trivially false. And no one seriously reduces consciousness to probabilistic pattern recognition. Most things in this universe have mathematical models that can describe it. We have models for virtually everything. Thus it is reasonable to say such a model also exists for consciousness. To say what you said definitively without even kno…

> Again you don't know what you're talking about. I think that's a bit uncharitable. You're acting like people haven't been grappling with these problems for thousands of years. Searle, for example, makes a pretty good argument why symbol-processing systems will never produce consciousness (you'd have to prove that the Chinese room is conscious, etc.). It's clear, for example, that a toaster doesn't have any consciou…

It's clear, for example, that a toaster doesn't have any conscious experiences

So anthropic. We can agree that it is on the opposite end of a spectrum though. A spectrum that we define out of a single point (“us”, and mostly “I”). We can also say that a toaster is a part of your consciousness instead, like e.g. your arm but less noisy. But then you are a part of a dog’s consciousness as well.

Consciousness is probably best described as just a field in a complexity space, not a discrete set of localized phenomenons. It has a near-zero value in a physical projection of a toaster’s concept, but is that projection even useful?

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#67

Post by prox »

ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #16
conrod_ wrote: post #13

Is there a book or resource that describes the state of the art in our knowledge and understanding about the nature of consciousness (Not cognition) and provides a survey of the popular and promising theories? Readable by someone who isn't in the field(s). Maybe even a good popsci book on the topic that is the neuroscience's equivalent of "Universe in a nutshell"

For the "Universe in a nutshell" version overview of neuroscience, I'll plug my own book Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos (more on that below) Anil Seth's Being You is a recent one that does a good job of summarizing the most popular theories in consciousness. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53036979-being-you The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness ( https://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Handbook-…

Doesn’t your nickname chaitanya mean “consciousness” ?

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#69

Post by techno_tsar »

conrod_ wrote: post #37
ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the "Universe in a nutshell" version overview of neuroscience, I'll plug my own book Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos (more on that below) Anil Seth's Being You is a recent one that does a good job of summarizing the most popular theories in consciousness. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53036979-being-you The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness ( https://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Handbook-…

Thanks for the reply! I have to say, I am quite giddy. When I posted this question, I wasn't expecting to get a reply from an author and researcher on this very topic. I am a software engineer by profession, but this is a topic that has been on the back of my mind for many years. Even when I read popsci books about the universe and the big bang and so on, i felt spiritually unsatisfied because they often do not addre…

There has been a turn in consciousness research in the last in the decade towards some kind of panpsychism for precisely your sentiment: a completed physics should also be a completed phenomenology. David Chalmers has written extensively and seriously entertained panpsychism in recent years.

Galileo’s Error, published in 2019, by Phillip Goff traces the history of the mind-body problem and illustrates how we divorced our consciousness from the physical world during the development of early modern science and philosophy.

Last century, Ernst Mach and Bertrand Russell argued in favour for neutral monism, a stance which holds that the mental and physical are two sides of the same coin. It seems like these ideas are coming back after a long stretch of dogmatic physicalism.

Panpsychism gets a bad rep for sounding like it has associations with vacuous or flimsy New Age beliefs, but it means a totally different thing in the context of philosophy of mind and consciousness studies. It is the claim that consciousness might be a building block of the universe.

The main problem with panpsychism is not that it is incredulous, but that it currently lacks a compelling explanation for our individual subjectivity. If consciousness and mental properties are ubiquitous in the universe, why do I have my consciousness and you have yours? The main motivation to believe in panpsychism seems to be its incredible elegance and self-consistency. That alone does not make it true, but it might be a very big hint on where to look for answers.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#70

Post by geysersam »

mxkopy wrote: post #22
goatlover wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the strange loop explain how sensations like color and pain come from the isomorphic self-description?

The book doesn't really go that much into the hard problem of consciousness, as much of the ideas are orthogonal to that discussion. If Nagel asks, "What is like to be a bat?", Hofstadter asks "If the mind of a bat were a program, what characteristics would it have?" IMO the hard problem is not posed to be solved. I think of it like this. The world in which we are p-zombies is categorically indistinguishable from the…

In my opinion, it's unlikely that p-zombies are physically indistinguishable from conscious beings.

It's like saying "a computer that works, but where the CPU is replaced by a piece of stone is physically indistinguishable from the real thing".

We have not yet found a physical distinction. It seems likely that there is one.

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