I wrote an article [1] on the topic of considering your brain 'the significant other'. On a personal level, I think there are significant productivity advantages to be had if you consider your brain as not your 'self'.
[1] http://humbleware.com/the-runaway-brain/
Consciousness is worth thinking about
51–60 of 85 posts
Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am I the only one who thinks mirror test is stupid? You won't realize your recorded voice is yours. You won't realize it's you on a CCTV footage. It's not granted. On the other hand, it's trivial to make robot pass the mirror test, indeed necessary in the environment where mirrors are common.
> Am I the only one who thinks mirror test is stupid? It's pretty reliable, and the scientists who measure it have a number of ways to be sure they're witnessing what they think. One way is to put a colored spot on an animal's forehead in advance of the test. If the animal looks in the mirror, sees the spot, and then reaches to his own forehead to remove it, we can be pretty sure he grasps that he's looking at a refl…
While the mirror test isn't a positive test for consciousness, for a species not to be able to pass the mirror test indicates that their 'mental model' of the world is lacking in something that would seem to be a necessary component of self-awareness and (therefore?) consciousness.
Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#53Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#54To put it kindly, I'd say this is sophomoric philosophy. The OP suggests that "a more simple and elegant resolution to this paradox is that there is simply one consciousness, and that it alone observes (possibly, decides) these quantum states.". This raises obvious the question: where does that consciousness come from? The author makes no attempt to address that problem. The answer he gives "the UNIVERSE is like ALL…
And: > Around this same time I became aware of the problem of observation in quantum mechanics. At it’s basic level the issue is that you can affect particles by simply observing them. That's simply because you can only measure by adding energy to the system, which obviously changes the state of the system.
That makes it sound like a straightforward classical effect. It's weirder than that. In the two-slit experiment, if you measure which slit a photon (or other small particle) passes through, then after a bunch of particles you get two spots on the wall. If you don't measure, you get an interference pattern, as if the particle were a wave that passed through both slits.
This is true even if you make the decision about whether to measure, after the particle has already passed through the slit. Check the measurement after the particle passes the slit, but before it hits the wall, and the interference pattern goes away.
Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#55Consciousness is just an illusion. It is not a useful concept either. It won't help you to program robots, for example. I was very surprised to learn that according to Less Wrong, the concept of "Zombies" is accepted by a lot of researchers of consciousness: http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/ A zombie here is defined as a person that is exactly like a conscious person, down to every atom, but is not consciou…
The problem I have with saying "consciousness is an illusion" is sort of similar to saying "God was the first cause". It pushes the question one layer away, because then the next obvious question is "an illusion to what, exactly?" How do you produce the illusion of qualia to something that does not experience qualia?
Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#56Consciousness is just an illusion. It is not a useful concept either. It won't help you to program robots, for example. I was very surprised to learn that according to Less Wrong, the concept of "Zombies" is accepted by a lot of researchers of consciousness: http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/ A zombie here is defined as a person that is exactly like a conscious person, down to every atom, but is not consciou…
The statement "consciousness is an illusion" has always struck me as a contradiction, since the nature of illusion is that there's something perceiving it.
Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Am I the only one who thinks mirror test is stupid? It's pretty reliable, and the scientists who measure it have a number of ways to be sure they're witnessing what they think. One way is to put a colored spot on an animal's forehead in advance of the test. If the animal looks in the mirror, sees the spot, and then reaches to his own forehead to remove it, we can be pretty sure he grasps that he's looking at a refl…
While the mirror test isn't a positive test for consciousness, for a species not to be able to pass the mirror test indicates that their 'mental model' of the world is lacking in something that would seem to be a necessary component of self-awareness and (therefore?) consciousness.
I think the mirror test, and consciousness, are separate issues.
1. As someone else here pointed out, a computer can be programmed to pass the mirror test, indeed a sophisticated robot must be able to do this, to be able to successfully navigate a complex environment. But that robot need not be conscious to do so.
2. A conscious creature (a creature that shows classic signs of being conscious) isn't necessarily able to pass the mirror test. In this article --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test
-- we read that "Primates, other than the great apes, have so far universally failed the mirror test." I think many primates would meet various criteria for consciousness, but can't pass the mirror test.
Interestingly, in the linked article, birds of the family Corvidae (crows, ravens, European magpies, gray jays (aka "camp robbers"), and others) pass the mirror test, possibly the only bird type that can. Corvids are very smart birds.
Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#58I think ultimately this will be resolved by experiment.
If progress continues far enough, then eventually people will want to upload their minds to computers, probably using Moravec's method of gradually replacing neurons with hardware.
The prudent way to do this would be to ask the person how it's going as you progress, and try it in various different sequences.
So if, say, you replace the visual cortex, and the person reports that their perception of color and depth has disappeared, but they still know where things are, then you know that the new hardware is correctly reporting information, but for some reason isn't supporting conscious perception of that information.
And then you can try to debug it. Maybe your algorithms are wrong, or maybe consciousness requires some physical effect.
Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#59I remember an aside in a neuroscience textbook which asked if, one day, a mystery like "where consciousness comes from" might seem as oddly posed as "where life comes from". Once you've broken "life" into its biological and chemical components - cells, proteins, chemical reactions - incredibly complex as they all are, the notion of "life", or of some kind of essential "life force" just kind of disintegrates. Once you…
But with life, everything is physically observable. How you would observe conscious experience in something other than yourself? I don't mean the behaviors associated with consciousness, but conscious awareness itself? People do a lot of handwaving around this issue and claim we've got it cracked just because we sorta know how the brain works, and yet we don't have a way even to detect whether this thing we're talkin…
I think the point is that we perhaps should not expect to find a particular mechanism for consciousness, any more than we should expect to find a life-force.
It could be that the "feeling" of consciousness is just something that comes from being a massively-parallel, unsupervised learning machine.
Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#60Years ago I had a good talk with David Chalmers at a Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness conference. That prompted me to read his book. Roger Penrose and others also have interesting ideas of what is really consciousness. Most people probably never experience expansive meditation, but for those of us who do that seems like further evidence that consciousness is not all in our physical brains.
Frankly, Penrose's thesis that consciousness stems from the quantum effects in microtubules, and the pseudo-"proof" based on a scammy reductio-ad-absurdum showing that consciousness can not be a computable function, are one of the biggest piles of horsesh*t in this whole field. I'm amazing he hasn't lost all credibility from such kind of deceitful thinking.
Penrose has credibility because of his numerous other achievements. His views on philosophy of mind are not regarded as serious positions in academic philosophy, neuroscience, or physics.