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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

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Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#111

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

imtringued wrote: post #67
hnfong wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the "hard" qualia question can potentially be answered by the emergence argument. The much more difficult part of "why do I have qualia" is not the qualia part, but why am "I" attached to this body's consciousness, as opposed to the billions of other candidates?

This isn't just relevant to other people. The question is also 'why does a human form a single consciousness?'. If consciousness emerges purely from information exchange in a complex system, then consciousness would be primarily driven by communication interactions between regions of the human brain and the rest of the body. This in turn means that there should be a way to merge or split consciousnesses. For example,…

> The question is also 'why does a human form a single consciousness?'

The answer should be obvious to anyone earnestly thinking about the question: it doesn't. The "single consciousness" is just the abstraction we apply. We can, and often do, apply that same model to entire groups of people from cliques, to communities, to cultures, to nation states and just about any cross section of humanity one cares to. With a little effort we can apply the same model to internal mental processes[0].

The human mind is good at abstraction, which is fortunate because abstractions are useful. Unfortunately, it is often so preoccupied with any given abstraction that it forgets that abstractions are only useful contextually, because abstractions are not reality.

[0] As in Internal Family Systems, a model sometimes used in therapeutic contexts.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#112

Post by detourdog »

htag wrote: post #49
detourdog wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if anybody has graphed how long and how many genetic mutations have taken place between the miasma of life and 500,000 years ago. It seems that tracking the genetic mutations would provide an approximation of the computing complexity needed. One could also look at the death rate as error rate for the success of computations.

> It seems that tracking the genetic mutations would provide an approximation of the computing complexity needed. How are those two even approximately related? 1. If you want to know about the amount of information inside of our genome then you can just look at the genome directly. You don't need to count the number of mutations. 2. A genetic mutation isn't a computation. It's a random event. 3. Why did you choose a…

1. Each generation was a branch based on the reaction not necessarily a genetic mutation as we understand them.

2. I'm not sure if that is what I said but I believe that. * I did state it but I plead sloppy articulation rathe than believe each branch is a genetic mutation(an increment smaller than a mutation).

3. I figured it was far enough away to be a valid timeframe for sophisticated consciousness but not so close that the thread would be distracted by historical interpretations.

4.Something manifested consciousness and my thinking it based on some sort of survival reward system.

5.A genome maybe too much for a consciousness.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#113

Post by detourdog »

imtringued wrote: post #68
detourdog wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if anybody has graphed how long and how many genetic mutations have taken place between the miasma of life and 500,000 years ago. It seems that tracking the genetic mutations would provide an approximation of the computing complexity needed. One could also look at the death rate as error rate for the success of computations.

You don't know how much biological consciousness relies on quantum effects we don't understand. We don't have large scale quantum computers so our computational models are too weak to approach it from that angle.

Maybe your consciousness:)

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#114

Post by mannykannot »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #86
imtringued wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this argument is that everything is conscious at that point. The consciousness may operate at geological or faster than human time scales but who is to say that we operate very quickly or slowly to begin with? Your computer is already conscious before you even loaded software into it, before you added your fancy machine learning AI. The software merely gives the conscious processor its ability to exp…

Is that a problem? Panpsychists don't seem to think so. Why must human beings believe that, in all the universe, they are a particularly special arrangement of energy?

Panpsychism is also, at this point, just a placeholder for anything resembling an explanation, and it is not necessary for dispelling the notion that humans are unique (in fact, it is quite plausible that other (now extinct) hominids also had self-aware, theory-of-mind-holding, language-using consciousness.)

As to whether there is something special about it, I personally feel that the difficulty of explaining it is enough to regard it as such.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#115

Post by Ralfp »

4ad wrote: post #69
Ralfp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if its a software, then how and where is it stored and where is the execution logic for it?

> how and where is it stored I don't know, but it doesn't matter, just like it doesn't matter if the code on your computer is on a HDD or SSD. > and where is the execution logic for it? I don't know, but it doesn't matter either. It's a question about the workings of the computer, not of the software. Electronic computers make it really easy to separate the software from the hardware, and make it easy to dump the sof…

> I don't know, but it doesn't matter, just like it doesn't matter if the code on your computer is on a HDD or SSD.

But it does matter! You arbitrarily dismiss the brain as "wrong level of abstraction" then bring up the computer which internals we know and understand as an example of parallel system.

If both are same, where's the hard drive in the brain? Which part of the brain is the CPU dedicated to consciousness? We know regions of brain are specialized in function, like the computers.

> But nevertheless, until people realize that this is what they should attempt, or research how it can be done, I feel we won't make any progress on the nature of consciousness.

This reminds me of the famous Andy Grove's fallacy. To paraphrase:

    The engineers tend to apply knowledge and concepts of their field to biology because they think both engineered and organic systems are the same. In doing so they miss the elementary difference that engineering is about creation and development of new systems, and biology is about researching and understanding existing systems we have no prior knowledge of.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#116

Post by mannykannot »

hnfong wrote: post #57
tunnuz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we even have a sound definition of what consciousness is / looks like from the outside? How do we recognise it?

Short answer is no. The working definition is "I am conscious, I know it. Anything that looks sufficiently like me is presumed to have consciousness."

There is a bit more to it than that, although still nothing close to a rigorous definition. Consciousness encompasses things like an ability to model the world and the causes acting in it, an awareness of oneself as an entity in that world, a theory of mind about other people, the ability to contemplate counterfactuals, and having general-purpose language skills.

It is sometimes suggested that we cannot study it without a definition, but definitions are written (and rewritten) as we acquire knowledge. It is plausible that studying the above will lead to explanations.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#117

Post by liamwire »

hnfong wrote: post #53
hcks wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an emergent phenomenon resulting from any sufficiently powerful cognitive system This is a meme that gets thrown around a lot but if you think about it you’ll realise it’s meaningless. Also it’s not possible to measure consciousness (in the ”hard“ sense, as in ”why do I have qualia”, obviously you can assert something respond to external stimuli easily), therefore the question won’t ever be answered.

I think the "hard" qualia question can potentially be answered by the emergence argument. The much more difficult part of "why do I have qualia" is not the qualia part, but why am "I" attached to this body's consciousness, as opposed to the billions of other candidates?

Something akin to the anthropic principle seems relevant here. Feeling that ‘I’m’ attached this body is what it feels like to be these atoms. If I were instead composed of your atoms, it follows I might find myself wondering the exact same question.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#118

Post by adverbly »

Godel, Escher, Bach was almost 20 when they made this bet, and it is still the most influential piece I've read on the possible mechanisms behind consciousness.

Not only would I say we haven't solved anything, an argument could be made we moved further in the 50 to 25 years range than we did in the last 25.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#119

Post by civilized »

zvmaz wrote: post #81
civilized wrote: post #14

Consciousness is not a well-scoped object of scientific investigation. It doesn't have a definition or characterization based on observable things or behavior. If I were a natural scientist, I wouldn't take a bet that I can scientifically explain a phenomenon which I can't even describe in terms of observable things.

> If I were a natural scientist, I wouldn't take a bet that I can scientifically explain a phenomenon which I can't even describe in terms of observable things. Conscious experience is an observable thing, meaning that we can subjectively experience it and infer its existence in other sentient beings (including in cows and pigs), and it is part of nature. The problem is, we still have no good idea how it comes to be.

I don't think you experience or observe consciousness. It's a property you have. You are conscious.

It's not like how you can experience or observe redness by looking at something red.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#120

Post by wilonth »

Trying to understand how the 86 billions of neurons in humans achieve consciousness is like trying to understand how the billions of weights in ChatGPT interact with each other.

Basically impossible impossibility. For a system which derives its behavior from complex interactions between those billion components, you can only understand its origins how it was tuned, and some high-level concepts of its workings. (Which we already achieved both for human brain and ANN).

Not sure what the neuroscientists are even researching at this point, has there been any major findings from neuroscience in the last 10 years? (With similar kind of impact as Transformers in 2017?)

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