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It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

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Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#171

Post by skirmish »

krzat wrote: post #115
solveiga wrote: post #7

I don’t think consciousness exists, at least not in the way people talk about it. First, there’s no clear definition that everyone agrees on. Second, there’s no way to test whether something has it. Does a cow have it? A dog? A spider? If you can't test for it and even define it, how can you claim its real?

I agree about definition confusion. I like to define consciousness as "capability to suffer". Can cow/dog/spider suffer? - very important question, even if not answerable.

At least mammals do show recognizable signs of pain and suffering. That is good enough for me; I don't know for sure other people can suffer, but I assume they do based on their behavior I see.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#172

Post by daseiner1 »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #163
ben_w wrote: post #154

Copying what I said 9 days ago when this post first appeared but didn't catch enough attention and only got two replies including my own: > I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” This is essentially saying "I don't understand therefore you are wrong". > We do not need to explain why it looks red for the same reason that we do not have to explain why the animal that we call “cat” lo…

> We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats. I believe that this is simply because of the way we train ML, with labelled data. It is quite conceivable that we could get an ML model to recognise cats just by some form of multidimensional clustering of training data.

the quote from the article is just a contrived tautology that misunderstands the nature of the problem. the dualism problem is not about finding an explanation for why what we call a cat is what we call a cat. it's that you can measure anything you want but nevertheless despite confidently establishing the size of a cat, the appearance of a cat, the behavior of cats, a sophisticated taxonomy of related species labeled "felines", surveying people to find out what cats are to them, what a cat is to me is not what a cat is to you

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#173

Post by justonceokay »

trick-or-treat wrote: post #144
barrkel wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't really consciousness, it's qualia. Specifically, pain and suffering. If we create a machine that is able to print on the terminal 'I feel pain', how do we know when to believe the machine is feeling pain? This isn't enough: echo "I feel pain" Is a very complicated set of matrix multiplications enough?

I think it's the same thing. You can't have consciousness without qualia and vice versa.

Ok pain might be a bad example because a robot may not have a sense of it borne of evolution. But what about “red”? If I make a robot that 99.9% correctly identifies red objects, then I think it is fair to me to say it has a concept of “redness”.

Some philosophers believe that our human emotional connection to redness is special. These are the people talking about qualia. My belief after much reading is that it is not special. I /do/ believe that the human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotional and memory is special. My robot cannot write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But now we are talking a matter of degrees, not qualia.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#175

Post by simiones »

suzzer99 wrote: post #98
thepasch wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience You are still presupposing the premise here, in multiple ways: 1) "My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a s…

Here's my question: Is our consciousness fundamentally different than a gorilla's? If the answer is no, then I'd ask if a gorilla's consciousness is fundamentally different than a baboon's? I think that answer has to be no by definition, assuming the first answer is no. And so on, until we get to where a human's consciousness is not fundamentally different than a tube worm, just a continuum of degrees. I'm not sure w…

> consciousness effectively hits zero somewhere around reptiles

Note that at least one species of fish have been shown to very consistently pass the mirror test (they try to clean up a mark on their body they can only see in a mirror, then go back to the mirror to check, and repeat a few times). So, at least if you consider the mirror test to be a sign of consciousness in animals, then you might want to extend this to at least all chordata.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#176

Post by skirmish »

k33n wrote: post #93
thepasch wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a religious argument. If you want to go down that path, then sure; but I suspect that's not what you actually believe.

It’s not a religious argument. It’s a subjective experience argument. As a conscious person, if someone tells me they don’t believe in consciousness, then I’m inclined to believe they have a reason for saying that. They must not be experiencing consciousness the same way I am. Interestingly, a non-trivial number of people have no internal monologue ( https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue... ).…

> It’s a subjective experience argument.

"Earth is flat" is also a subjective experience argument. Yet mostly nobody takes it seriously anymore. I hope "qualia" will be like this soon too.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#178

Post by simiones »

don_esteban wrote: post #161
suzzer99 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my question: Is our consciousness fundamentally different than a gorilla's? If the answer is no, then I'd ask if a gorilla's consciousness is fundamentally different than a baboon's? I think that answer has to be no by definition, assuming the first answer is no. And so on, until we get to where a human's consciousness is not fundamentally different than a tube worm, just a continuum of degrees. I'm not sure w…

Here's my question: Is our consciousness fundamentally different than a gorilla's? > If the answer is no, then I'd ask if a gorilla's consciousness is fundamentally different than a baboon's? I think that answer has to be no by definition, assuming the first answer is no. > And so on, until we get to where a human's consciousness is not fundamentally different than a tube worm, just a continuum of degrees. > I'm not…

The important point is that "not fundamentally different" is probably a transitive function. If A is not fundamentally different from B, and B is not fundamentally different from C, than A is not fundamentally different from C. Here A is human consciousness, B is gorilla consciousness, and C is baboon consciousness.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#179

Post by raffael_de »

altmanaltman wrote: post #169
barrkel wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't really consciousness, it's qualia. Specifically, pain and suffering. If we create a machine that is able to print on the terminal 'I feel pain', how do we know when to believe the machine is feeling pain? This isn't enough: echo "I feel pain" Is a very complicated set of matrix multiplications enough?

Before that, you need to answer whether a machine can even feel pain or not, not whether it is telling the truth or not. We feel pain because we have a nervous system that reacts to the physical world and it is an indicator that something is wrong. That doesn't translate at all to any machine I know of. If we end up building a nervous system and a basic functioning brain and hook it up to a machine then sure its an i…

you can feel pain without an external influence stimulating it. purely mental processes are sufficient to experience suffering.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#180

Post by don_esteban »

zetalyrae wrote: post #71
thepasch wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If all information processing leads to consciousness Did you actually read what you just responded to?

Why some kinds of information processing and not others? As I wrote elsethread: why are some types of information processing "privileged" to create phenomenal experiences, while others run "in the dark"?

What about this:

Let us classify the information processing along two axis: a) low-level (evolutionarily ancient), direct stimuli-response, vs high-level (involving prefrontal cortex) b) processing stimuli from the outside world (sound, light) vs internal stimuli (tactile/pain ... all the way to internal stimuli originating in brain - 'thinking about thinking')

Note that both are continuous scale, not binary.

The consciousness would then be the high-level processing of internal signals. Obviously, consciousness also results being on continuous scale.

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