The unending quest to explain consciousness

Post by BlueTemplar » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 1:18 PM UTC

normalnorm wrote: post #59

verytrivial wrote: post #31

My pet theory is there is nothing to explain. It is emergent. Over the next couple of decades, hardware performance improvements and specializations plus algorithmic breakthroughs will make AI start to crawl up the chain from useful pattern matching from messy data to useful dullard able to reason. And we still won't know why because the "insight" is buried in the network state and our little human brains cannot deal…

Consider all emergent phenomena that you know of. Let's say: stock market prices, ant hills, biological organisms, ecosystems, etc, etc. What all these have in common, is that they are too complex to explain in terms of individual interactions, but you can point at the individual interaction . We know that financial markets are made of transactions, of that biological organisms are made of molecular interactions, but…

Post by BlueTemplar » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 1:21 PM UTC

pygy_ wrote: post #74

roenxi wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an emergentist perspective there is nothing to explain - qualia are an illusion created by having a certain level of complexity in the stimuli fed into a brain. Emergentism has a lot of easy outs once the initial assumption - that it is possible for the self to be an illusion of complexity - is made. If that is palatable then any niggle can be explained away as just part of the illusion. And that initial assumpt…

That sounds plausible. Another issue I have with emergentism and other functionalist theories is that they don’t seem to account for the persistence of identity across consciousness discontinuities. Your consciousness sometimes vanishes the re-emerges as yourself. Where (or when) is your mind during the leap? Does it perform discrete time travel?

Post by BlueTemplar » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 1:30 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #13

pygy_ wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are theories that equate information processing (integration/differentiation) with consciousness. It maps well with what happens in your brain, where too little or too much functional connectivity maps to loss of consciousness (think anesthesia and epilepsy).

Rocks also have complex internal structure that responds to external influence, e.g. atoms vibrating in their crystal lattices depending on heat and pressure. Maybe there is a Boltzmann consciousness inside the rock when you're picking it up. What is "information" and what is noise is a matter of interpretation.

Post by jhrmnn » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 1:34 PM UTC

AlexAltea wrote: post #91

paraschopra wrote: post #75

Something that blows my mind: we can use our understanding of physics and math to predict the trajectory of a rocket to the moon without actually going there.. But we can’t predict what new color we’d get by mixing two colors. We just have to mix them to find out.

> But we can’t predict what new color we’d get by mixing two colors. Can you elaborate more on this point? Links as to why this is impossible would be appreciated. If paint absorbs certain wavelengths while reflecting others (which are the perceived color), wouldn't the mixture of two colors absorb two subsets of the spectrum, and reflect everything else? And if so, why can't it be simulated?

Post by bildung » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 1:37 PM UTC

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #93

bblpeter wrote: post #3

If the Human Brain Were So Simple That We Could Understand It, We Would Be So Simple That We Couldn’t

I personally don't think so. A computer could simulate / emulate itself, for example.