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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

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Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#241

Post by kuhewa »

skybrian wrote: post #235
kuhewa wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My philosophy professor had a multi-volume (non-English-language) textbook called “Introduction to the science of philosophy”, so, uh, I dunno. I too am not sure what you are implying there. The enterprise, assuming it had some merit, sounds like evidence of complementarity? > it brings along the burden of pointing out some holes in the scientific enterprise, a general conception of how to fill them, and at least s…

I'm not sure "underpins" is the right word here. A theory of ants wouldn't "underpin" the behavior of ants. If the ants behave differently than the theory, then the theory is wrong and should be changed. The ant theory is something in the minds of outside observers, not the ants, and ant behavior doesn't rely on it. The dependency goes the other way: the observers modify their theory to better describe the ants. The…

Underpins is the correct word. There is no comparison of observations of any behaviour to a theory or hypothesis about any behaviour outside of an epistemological framework that makes certain assumptions, even if it is unwittingly. Neither those assumptions nor the framework itself can be derived from science itself.

> Is a philosophy of science similar? Or does it have a practical effect on scientific work?

Absolutely, what a p value is depends on your philosophy of science. Whether your statistical analysis even involves p values also depends on it.

> Also, perhaps different scientists might learn different philosophies without practical effect.

Yes, if you stumble upon some simple causal relationship of such massive effect size it is undeniably present beyond a reasonable doubt, it may not matter if a Bayesian or frequentist practitioner came across it. However it certainly can matter what framework evidence gets analysed, considered and aggregated when the observable data themselves are essentially the same.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#242

Post by kaba0 »

skybrian wrote: post #235
kuhewa wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My philosophy professor had a multi-volume (non-English-language) textbook called “Introduction to the science of philosophy”, so, uh, I dunno. I too am not sure what you are implying there. The enterprise, assuming it had some merit, sounds like evidence of complementarity? > it brings along the burden of pointing out some holes in the scientific enterprise, a general conception of how to fill them, and at least s…

I'm not sure "underpins" is the right word here. A theory of ants wouldn't "underpin" the behavior of ants. If the ants behave differently than the theory, then the theory is wrong and should be changed. The ant theory is something in the minds of outside observers, not the ants, and ant behavior doesn't rely on it. The dependency goes the other way: the observers modify their theory to better describe the ants. The…

Science is not an observable thing in itself like ant behavior is. Science (especially the scientific method) is a framework/pattern of thought that can be used to state/observe things about the universe.

Why that pattern of thought is correct in stating anything is absolutely part of philosophy.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#243

Post by kaba0 »

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,…

I think that biology does limit these questions down — it is entirely likely that the answer to that is as simple as “there is a biological structure for that, and we only have one of those”.

Or even if it’s not such a hard limit, there are still likely similar bottlenecks that prefer a single one from arising, etc.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#244

Post by kaba0 »

tonymillion wrote: post #224
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question is also 'why does a human form a single consciousness?'. It doesn't seem to. When dreaming, it's possible to carry out conversations with other "people" in the dream which are indistinguishable from conscious beings you meet when awake. There's usually a single "self" in dreams, but the brain certainly seems to form extra consciousnesses on demand which react as though they had a sense of "self".

Is that different from having an imaginary conversation "in your head" with an imagined person? i.e. I often imagine conversations I'm about to have in my "mental pre planning" phase, usually when dealing with government officials - many of whom are belligerent officious jobsworths. They're obviously not "me" and their responses aren'y something I "think" about before they respond "in my mind". Could that be a tempor…

It’s just time sharing, we can’t really do parallel thought. But signal processing does happen in parallel obviously, often times not even having to “interrupt” the CPU (e.g. reflexes can react before the signal reaches the brain, but the brain itself also has different parts, so coordinating walking won’t disallow thought)

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#245

Post by scotty79 »

anotheryou wrote: post #208
scotty79 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what would be a minimal test for consciousness? I think episodic memory and ablitity to simulate reality to plan are huge part of it. For me, whatever dreams is conscious.

so gpt is in for you, right?

Nope. I never saw it sleeping, let alone dreaming.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#246

Post by kaba0 »

oefnak wrote: post #132
gizajob wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re mistaken, in that it’s naturally the same consciousness but different identities and recognisably different/altered personality states that come in and out in DID. The consciousness itself is always the same and continuous.

So they share the same memories?

From the famous split-brain experiment I would conclude that they don’t share every memory. We are just very good at filling in the blanks, like we can bullshit forever about why that apple happened to be in our hand, even though we have no idea.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#247

Post by kaba0 »

piloto_ciego wrote: post #202
imtringued wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Does a human form a single consciousness? I’m not so sure it does what with being able to hold conflicting ideas simultaneously.

I don’t completely get your second sentence, but we can surely hold multiple conflicting ideas simultaneously — we are absolutely nowhere near rational.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#248

Post by kuhewa »

jdietrich wrote: post #238
kuhewa wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My philosophy professor had a multi-volume (non-English-language) textbook called “Introduction to the science of philosophy”, so, uh, I dunno. I too am not sure what you are implying there. The enterprise, assuming it had some merit, sounds like evidence of complementarity? > it brings along the burden of pointing out some holes in the scientific enterprise, a general conception of how to fill them, and at least s…

>Also, philosophy underpins science. Whenever a hypothesis is tested, there is are philosophically-grounded assumptions being made. The epistemological implications for any given scientific finding depend on the underlying philosophical framework being assumed. P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B). To the extent that philosophy underpins science, it does so because scientists are bad at math.

Your comment appears to imply Bayes theorem is all you need for a scientific framework and outside of that is just inadequate mathematical know-how to deploy it. I find it amazing really, a quintessential straight-from-the-summit [1] HN comment for a couple reasons:

First, it appears to imply that such a probabilistic inductive approach to science would be free of any philosophical baggage or assumptions, when deploying Bayesianism requires an interpretation about what a probability itself is. Don't take it from me though, perhaps from Andrew Gelman, the guy who wrote the book on Bayesian data analysis [2,3].

Then, wrt the charge that those who do not use such an inductive approach (or outright rejected it, e.g. in favour of falsificationism) are bad at math. Which would include the statisticians who developed the null hypothesis significance testing framework that is still pretty dominant in science today: Jerzy Neyman, Egon Pearson, Ronald Fisher (who literally coined the term 'Bayesian') etc. There's a lot of criticism worth making about Fisher, but I'm not sure if anyone has called the guy that developed linear discriminant analysis bad at math before.

[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-12-28

[2] Bayesian Data Analysis http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/book/

[3] Philosophy and the practice of Bayesian statistics http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/phil...

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#249

Post by s4i »

pa7x1 wrote: post #7

I wouldn't be surprised if consciousness ~conscience~ is just an emergent phenomenon resulting from any sufficiently powerful cognitive system (either biological or artificial) with sufficient inputs of its environment and, crucially, of itself. So as to be able to develop a rich model of itself and its relationship with its environment, and that thing will resemble a whole lot what we call consciousness ~conscience~…

> I wouldn't be surprised if consciousness ~conscience~ is just an emergent phenomenon resulting from any sufficiently powerful cognitive system

But does a system exist which we would describe as ”cognitive” but not also ”conscious”? To me this definition gets nowhere.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#250

Post by number6 »

pmarreck wrote: post #210
number6 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blindsight is a brilliant book exploring will free intelligences

Is this the book you're referring to? The one by Peter Watts? Looks fascinating https://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640

Yes that's the book. It is great and uncanny. Definitely not an easy read
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