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Objects of consciousness
41–50 of 69 posts
Re: Objects of consciousness
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not hard to argue that materialism implies emergentism, since materialism assumes nothing but physical properties and processes exist. No one really believes that individual neurons are conscious, yet no one disagrees that brains are conscious. Brains are made of neurons and thus have a property their parts do not; ergo, emergent behavior. So it's either emergentism or woo, by my reckoning. YMMV.
> Brains are made of neurons and thus have a property their parts do not; ergo, emergent behavior. I think you're being too quick. Let's think about things that we know to be emergent structures/behaviors: cities, societies, the human body, ecosystems, etc. In all of them, you can recognize that the network of interactions is too complex for human intelligence to fully grasp, but you can pin-point the building blocks…
Platonism still has to explain why that fundamental consciousness arises only in particular material configurations, ie., if it underlies mater, why isn't all mater conscious? What are the building blocks necessary to channel that underlying consciousness?
Re: Objects of consciousness
#43For the more audio-visual oriented - here is a talk covering the same topic. http://youtu.be/dqDP34a-epI
Associated with IRVA (International Remote Viewing Association)
http://www.irva.org/conferences/speakers/hoffman.html
and Deepak Chopra
http://www.choprafoundation.org/speakers/donald-hoffman/
So why not go the whole hog, and listen to Rupert Sheldrake explain to you why materialism is bunk?
Re: Objects of consciousness
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Brains are made of neurons and thus have a property their parts do not; ergo, emergent behavior. I think you're being too quick. Let's think about things that we know to be emergent structures/behaviors: cities, societies, the human body, ecosystems, etc. In all of them, you can recognize that the network of interactions is too complex for human intelligence to fully grasp, but you can pin-point the building blocks…
Platonism still has to explain why that fundamental consciousness arises only in particular material configurations, ie., if it underlies mater, why isn't all mater conscious? What are the building blocks necessary to channel that underlying consciousness?
There is no known experiment one can perform that tests if something is conscious or not. We know we are ourselves conscious, so we assume that entities resembling us also are, and entities that are too different are not. Maybe that's the truth, but for now it's just a personal belief, not a scientific theory. For something to be a scientific theory it must be testable and falsifiable.
Some people actually believe that all mater is conscious -- this position is referred to as panpsychism. Some people believe they are the only conscious entity in the universe -- this is solipsism.
These positions may sound absurd, but they are not more or less scientifically credible than the mainstream one. They all fit the observable reality, and none of them can be tested.
We all have our intuitions and personal beliefs, but from a scientific standpoint I think that the only rigorous attitude is to remain agnostic on this. Otherwise we fall into the same intellectual traps as mysticism. The scientific attitude is above all to doubt, not to blindly believe.
Re: Objects of consciousness
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
The eerie thing is that as far as we can tell, our brains are no more than models of consciousness, and yet they are conscious. The line is very blury between a model of consciousness and the point where it can not only be described as conscious but truly has that ethereally, hard to define quality that we "feel" as consciousness. Would the first truly general AIs simply be working models of consciousness, or would t…
> The eerie thing is that as far as we can tell, our brains are no more than models of consciousness, and yet they are conscious. Wow. That is an extremely good description of the problem of consciousness. Is this your own formulation? If not, where did you run into it?
I've been thinking about it a long time and hadn't heard it from anyone else. I'm glad to get feedback :)
Re: Objects of consciousness
#46They lost me at "there is reason to disbelieve in preexisting physical truths". Conclusion: Psychologists shouldn't play with quantum theory unless their goal is merely masturbation.
Re: Objects of consciousness
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you apply the same force as you would to a cup handle it order to pick up the cup, to a single atom of the surface of the cup, couldn't that remove the atom? "Can be removed using a specific level of force" is then not sufficient for determining whether a collection of particles form an object. Perhaps if one instead uses some amount of force applied on the collection of particles which depends on the mass of the…
> If you apply the same force as you would to a cup handle it order to pick up the cup, to a single atom of the surface of the cup, couldn't that remove the atom? No, because the forces holding the atoms of the cup together are much stronger than the forces holding the cup to the floor. That's the underlying physical reason why it makes sense to consider the cup as an "object".
More to the point, if someone decides to reject that the chair is an object, that’s entirely fine, it’s just a semantic dispute, not a dispute about the underlying reality.
The individual atoms (or really, electrons and quarks) which make up the chair and the floor and the air around it don’t behave differently based on what object boundaries some person attaches in their mind.
Some of the atoms which the human considers to be “part of” the chair get left behind on the floor, while the bottoms of the chair legs pick some atoms up from the floor. Water molecules are constantly being traded between the chair surface and the air. And so on.
The object boundary is in some sense arbitrary and porous. The way we define it is based on our own practical use and experience, and the aggregated/emergent properties which are relevant to us, since we don’t have the means to simultaneously apprehend every individual particle in our surroundings.
Re: Objects of consciousness
#48I gave this a chance (seeing there were equations), but after reading the whole thing I still don't understand what they're talking about. It just doesn't make any sense. What would be the one paragraph summary of this paper? The math in particular seems inappropriate to present in a Psychology journal, even a frontier one. I question the authors' motivation to cover such advanced mathematical topics, from so many di…
Let's start with this question: What makes an object an object? Find an object in the room, say a chair. What imbues the chair with "chairness"? Why is it considered separate from the floor? If you investigate this you will find that all objects are mind created. There is no essense or Platonic form of an object inherent to the object. The object cannot be said to have inherent existence apart from the mind perceivin…
The chair's "chairness" is just the ways in which it can participate in causality. This includes being mulched or burned, thus having its mass, energy, and information rearranged in other ways. "Chair", in particular, is an abstraction that explains a large amount of the variance in the behaviors of that particular lump of mass and energy while having exponentially fewer free parameters than modelling the complete physics and chemistry of the chair from the subatomic level upwards.
Re: Objects of consciousness
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll chime in with this conceptual map of the article (as far as i read it anyway): Perception->Visual perception->Ontology of visual perception and consciousness->Quantum physics->No. edit: Actually, when i think about it, there's something analogous to Goodwin's law in papers/articles about the mind and consciousness. Whenever quantum physics becomes a topic the whole article just unravels into nonsense. This is of…
It is true that a lot of woo is produced by people who appeal to quantum weirdness without having a basic understanding of modern physics. This article seems to be no exception (I did not have the patience to read it all). What you say, however, is dogmatic. You assume the emergentist theory of consciousness: that consciousness somehow emerges from the complex physical interactions in the brain. This theory is itself…
Actually, I assume abstraction not emergentism but my assumptions are beside the point. My point is that quantum weirdness is not observed on scales that are not quantum-sized and quantum-whatever is therefore a poor candidate for analogous reasoning. In addition, the gap between the physical components (I do assume physicalism) of the brain and the properties of the mind is so far removed from the quantum-sized(weird) phenomena of quantum physics that some reconciliation(read: major breakthrough) must happen in the field of physics before quantum physics becomes a viable scalpel with which we can try to dissect the mind-brain problem.
I agree that emergence-flavoured theories of consciousness are essentially woo woo, or non-explanations. I am therefore not very exited about massive statistical simulations trying to achieve intelligence, because even if Watson were to become self aware after stuffing it with even more megahertz, we would just have another "brain" on our hands and we will have nothing but the turing test to discern its "brain-ness". That is to say - I am exited, because Watson is really cool and useful, but not exited about what neural nets, genetic algorithms or statistical data analysis will tell us about consciousness.
Re: Objects of consciousness
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you apply the same force as you would to a cup handle it order to pick up the cup, to a single atom of the surface of the cup, couldn't that remove the atom? "Can be removed using a specific level of force" is then not sufficient for determining whether a collection of particles form an object. Perhaps if one instead uses some amount of force applied on the collection of particles which depends on the mass of the…
> If you apply the same force as you would to a cup handle it order to pick up the cup, to a single atom of the surface of the cup, couldn't that remove the atom? No, because the forces holding the atoms of the cup together are much stronger than the forces holding the cup to the floor. That's the underlying physical reason why it makes sense to consider the cup as an "object".
Really? Not just per mass? Huh. I am somewhat surprised.
Hmm, but one can scratch a cup fairly easily, can one not? (depending on the type of cup). This is removing some part of the cup. Hmm, I guess that still might take more force than picking it up?
But what if one has like, a really big thing of uh, I want to say talc but I don't know how much of that one could hold up without part of it breaking off...
uh, google tells me gypsum can be scratched with a fingernail, and when I try to look up its tensile strength (which I assume would be the relative measure when considering hanging a thing of it from one end of it), I get the answer of between 1 and 2 MPa at ambient temperature. Also it says gypsum board, which I assume is just a board made of gypsum?
Also, I am assuming that expressing the tensile strength in MPa is force per cross section. No other interpretation comes to my mind, but I could be interpreting this number wrong. I'll call the tensile strength P.
I find for the density of gypsum 803 kg/m^3 .
Then, for a block of gypsum hanging from the top end, with cross section area A, with g=9.8 m/s^2 , the longest height h it could be before breaking would be found by :
hAdensityg=AP
hdensityg=P
h=P/(densityg) h=2 MPa / ((803 kg/m^3)(9.8 m/s^2)) h=2 MPa / (8039.8 N/m^3) h=2 MPa / 8039.8 Pa/m) h=254.1 meters.
So, if one had a column of gypsum 254.1 meters tall, and picked an atom at the top of it to pull up with force more than that of the whole weight of the pillar, certainly the whole pillar would not rise into the air, because its weight would be too much for the tensile strength.
So, certainly it would break somewhere.
If I was standing next to it near the top of it, I could scratch it with my fingernail, and so remove a part of it. But if it had much cross sectional area, the force I would need to do this would certainly be less than the force I would need to lift it. If the cross sectional area was one square meter, its weight, and so the force needed to hold it up, would be 2 million newtons (wolfram alpha tells me this is about 1/6 of the thrust of a space shuttle rocket booster at liftoff).
So, I would be able to remove a small part of it, but would be clearly unable to lift it. If the force that would be needed to lift it were all applied to some atom at the top of it, it would remove some smaller part of it.
I expect if enough force to lift it were to be applied to a single atom at the top, that, while it perhaps would not remove only a single atom, the part which it would remove would be quite small (perhaps only a few molecules?).
Yet it certainly seems like this would be termed an object.
(I guess if it was that thin it would fall over, but it can easily be imagined to be much wider, which I think would allow it to sit on the ground properly.)
So then, it seems like the force needed to pull it apart is significantly less than the force needed to hold it up, yet it still seems to be an object.