151–160 of 604 posts
For all we know, it might be that consciousness is not fully contained in the physical structure of the brain. It might as well be something that partially exists on another layer of reality we have no idea about yet.
Human consciousness has logically to be a product of the physical structure of human beings.
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I've read once they determined the mechanism by which a.o lsd 'works', is by lowering/disabling a lot of the filtering between neurons. This leads us to recognise all kinds of patterns that are not really there. Visual hallucinations being the obvious form of this, but I suppose the same applies to other things like our personalities and self; that's neither here nor there anyway. Now I'm not 100% sure how temperatur…
That's not really correct. default mode network activity is somewhat disrupted, but LSD works primarily by interaction with the 5-HT2A receptor subtype, this is multiple neurotransmitter systems, including serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate, and in many examples it's via excitement not inhibition/lowering/disabling. Excitatory neurotransmission in glutamate is looking like the the most important of the work in the 5-…
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Julian Jaynes theory of consciousness is very interesting. At a high level, his thoery was that consciousness is A) much smaller in scope as far as what it actually is than a lot of people like to think, and B) it is not actually innate in humans, it is something we learn as we grow.
I don't see how we can learn to experience qualia. If the author means self awareness instead of consciousness that would make more sense.
If that sounds like intellectual activity above the level of qualia, the same is true for something as simple as the taste of food. We learn what apples taste like by tasting lots of apples and tasting things that aren’t apples and reflecting on and focusing our attention on experience of apples.
I’m writing this comment so that people who want to know more about alternative theories of consciousness (to materialism/physicalism [1]) can know where to go to find well-argued positions on the topic. (To be clear, I’m not here to argue about the topic or try to persuade anyone of any position – that’s a waste of everyone’s time). I recommend seeking out discussions involving: - Federico Faggin: inventor of silico…
Any reason why you don't recommend discussions/lectures with Roger Penrose? Or are his theories considered conventional? Genuine question.
Whereas the three I mentioned all embrace discussions about the nature of reality and consciousness and happily engage in lengthy discussions and debates about it.
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But how do you know another human is “conscious”? Certainly there is an intuitive sense to it that would be very difficult to put into words, but that is the crux of the matter. Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to…
You don't. But it's solipsism to think otherwise, and while solipsism is hard to argue against logically it's not a very interesting or useful way of navigating the world we experience. We can't prove other people aren't p-zombies but the value bet is definitely that, appearing like us in every other way, they also experience like us.
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I know that at least one other human is conscious, otherwise the term would never have been invented. But you have no way to tell if I am as conscious as I claim to be, or if I'm just a large language model trained by humanity :P
In thinking about this perennial problem it's worth bearing in mind that human beings pick up and process an immense amount of data on a continuous basis, that is currently unavailable to any LLM.
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Bacteria cells absolutely have types of memory. And by your definition a Python program written by any random undergrad in CS 101 has consciousness.
In order for my definition to make sense, the organism or program must be able to observe the memory of the state. In the case of the bacteria and the Python program, I doubt they are able to do that in any meaningful way. But I would not mind if a slightly more involved program, or a system of plants for that matter, would be considered conscious. The basic definition seems fairly irrelevant, and it obviously matter…
I want to open a side thread about your definitions or descriptions of what "consciousness" is. I think that could be pretty interesting after reading all the comments, and I think there's a lot of knowledge hidden here that we could throw together. Some things that I understood, in my words: - consciousness is probably not reducible to smaller, non-conscious parts of which it is composed. You could maybe say it is i…
I think this is distinct from "ability to perceive green, which doesn't exist". A neural network trained to distinguish green in the output of a spectroscope will perceive green without ever knowing there is something like a "neural network" or "thoughts".
Also, this probably can be detected from the outside via debugging. What cannot be detected may be the thing that distinguishes a hypothetical "philosophical zombie" from a truly conscious human, but I don't think anything like a philosophical zombie exists. Once it is physically identical to the human, it will also be thinking identically.
As a next step, you may observe humans around you and realize that the thoughts you perceive seem to be running inside the head of one of these humans (which you will call "me"). However, I don't think knowing what you look like from the outside is necessary for consciousness.
Randomness created consciousness from a single cell...why would that be the most efficient solution?
I think it’s a good thing.