How does consciousness even make sense?
niklasbuehler.com
How does consciousness even make sense?
1–10 of 38 posts
Re: How does consciousness even make sense?
#2>I can’t really grasp that. Do my thoughts make sense? Where’s the flaw?
That is called argument from disbelief. It is a common fallacious argument form.
The only mystery about consciousness is why anyone insists there is one.
Re: How does consciousness even make sense?
#3I read it. How does this article even make sense?
Re: How does consciousness even make sense?
#4>I can’t really grasp that. Do my thoughts make sense? Where’s the flaw?
This is the "Argument from Incredulity by Implausible Consciousness Substrate"[0]. Other examples include Searle's Chinese Room, and the China Brain thought experiment (what is it with China?). To your credit, you've immediately spotted the problem - how is the actual human brain any different? It's also some sort of broadly mechanistic physical system, unless you're into divine spirits (but that just moves your problems).
The flaw is that there is no flaw, the only actual argument is your personal incredulity. And the reason your intuition is giving you bad results is that scale matters. The implausible substrates are far, far too small to realistically encompass the computation that a brain does, and this makes them poor "intuition pumps" (a useful phrase coined by Daniel Dennet). Your field of rocks looks more like a football field of sand, ankle deep. And of course, manipulating them one by one according to a tiny set of rules is absurdly distorting in time - to properly capture the sheer amount of parallel information processing, perhaps you should instead imagine them buzzing and vibrating and bouncing around and exchanging information and state with the grains around them in highly nonlinear ways. Does this start to sound a bit more of a plausible?
[0] A subtype of the "argument from bad analogy", which goes: 1) make absurd analogy, 2) point out that analogy is absurd, 3) wave hands
Re: How does consciousness even make sense?
#5> I can’t really grasp that. Do my thoughts make sense? Where’s the flaw? That is called argument from disbelief. It is a common fallacious argument form. The only mystery about consciousness is why anyone insists there is one.
what?
obviously there is one, its the force driving the typing of these words. It isn't the machinery typing them but the fundamental quality of the machinery that feels like it does.
Of course I can't prove my consciousness to you, but I operate on the assumption that p-zombies are nonsense, so, it should be entirely possible to prove your consciousness to yourself, albeit difficult due to lack of meaningful language labels for subjective experiences.
Re: How does consciousness even make sense?
#6> I can’t really grasp that. Do my thoughts make sense? Where’s the flaw? That is called argument from disbelief. It is a common fallacious argument form. The only mystery about consciousness is why anyone insists there is one.
what? obviously there is one, its the force driving the typing of these words. It isn't the machinery typing them but the fundamental quality of the machinery that feels like it does. Of course I can't prove my consciousness to you, but I operate on the assumption that p-zombies are nonsense, so, it should be entirely possible to prove your consciousness to yourself, albeit difficult due to lack of meaningful languag…
From a scientific point of view, there is exactly one objective observation that needs explanation, which is that from time to time humans like to claim they're something called "conscious". This is not nothing! It is quite a peculiar phenomenon. But it needn't imply any great philosophical dilemma.
(We do have meaningful language for subjective experiences - we call eggplant "purple" and sugar "sweet" and music "groovy" - these correspond not to any physical property, but how they influence our minds.)
Re: How does consciousness even make sense?
#7>I can’t really grasp that. Do my thoughts make sense? Where’s the flaw? This is the "Argument from Incredulity by Implausible Consciousness Substrate"[0]. Other examples include Searle's Chinese Room, and the China Brain thought experiment (what is it with China?). To your credit, you've immediately spotted the problem - how is the actual human brain any different? It's also some sort of broadly mechanistic physical…
First of all, thanks for mentioning those other examples to me, I haven't heard of them before and will definitely engage with them further.
You're right that I can't just dismiss the possibility of the stones or the paper developing a consciousness. However, this fallacy wasn't unnoticed by me, I just don't see a way to approach this question in a more scientific way than by using my intuition.
So you're proposing that there is actually no difference between human brains and computers in respect to the ability to be conscious, did I get that right?
I don't understand your argument about the stones "buzzing and vibrating and bouncing around [...] in highly nonlinear ways" though. That doesn't resemble the computations made by a discrete computer anymore, does it? Or are you hinting at precisely those differences between computers and brains (i.e. mathematically discrete vs. mathematically continuous)?
Also, why do you think parallel information processing matters? Does it really matter in a computer?
Could you elaborate on your argument that scale (in terms of calculation speed; in terms of memory it surely matters) does indeed matter? I don't think it's any more plausible for a huge pool of fast-moving "magic sand" to be conscious (excuse me for once again committing a scientific fallacy here, I'm open for suggestions on methodology).
Re: How does consciousness even make sense?
#8Thought experiment.
An entity is conscious if:
- it has external inputs and a facility for creating a symbolized account of them,
- it has a facility that stores these accounts,
- it can order those accounts roughly by time,
- it can place or relate a symbol representing itself in these accounts.
The quality of consciousness varies widely, a program that has an object that references itself and can do the above things is very technically conscious but likely nowhere near to the depth of a human being.
Re: How does consciousness even make sense?
#9Good luck defining consciousness..
Re: How does consciousness even make sense?
#10Arguably this is saying that machine learning does not easily and directly yield consciousness as one might expect. If consciousness instead is focused on time and sequences then the machine learning needs to be used more to construct and compare narratives of sequences of observations and actions. That would enable machine learning to derive representations of causality and potentially reason that itself exists. Most machine learning focuses more on raw data and the environment rather than the nature of change over time. Just some thoughts.