This puts me in an uncomfortable spot w/regards to abortion. My go to argument was always 'the lights aren't on yet'.
If I'm understanding correctly they might be, albeit dimly, and each day getting brighter.
Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
111–120 of 191 posts
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#112Lets challenge this. What if baby can be born alive without having consciousness? It's not impossible since we can't detect consciousness. Maybe it occurs in some babies born with brain development problems, maybe not. Besides title says "Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think". Sounds clicky-baity and it assumes that reader is dumb.
If you don't have consciousness you cannot interact with the world around you in a 'human' manner. So yes, when we see minds that did not develop correctly we see what we consider animal like behavior, or no behavior at all.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have long been of the opinion that consciousness is not a 'thing' or 'state' so much as property. I think Douglas Hofstadtler gets closest to my thinking on the matter in his book 'I Am A Strange Loop'. Just as a single molecule cannot have a temperature, since temperature is a property of multitudes of molecules, any degree of looking at the components will not elucidate their overall interactions and at the end y…
Temperature is the aggregate of the energy of many individual particles, modulated by the tendency of those particles to transmit that energy. Thus a single molecule does have a temperature in a sense, you just need an incredibly sensitive detector to register it. Temperature is a fully reducible property. Consider the possibility that consciousness isn't a distinctly human phenomenon, as there is no reason to believ…
In a very big molecule [1] that doesn't move, you have so many parts that you can have a reasonable good definition of the temperature.
But in a very small molecule/atom, let's pick a single helium atom, you don't have a good definition of temperature. You can define the temperature of a gas of Helium using the average kinetic energy of the atoms, but you must consider that the whole gas is not moving.
If you put a balloon with Helium in a car, and the car moves at 100mph, the Helium is not hotter, it is moving. So if you can only see a single atom of Helium, you can't be sure if it's moving because it's hot or all the gas is moving. So you don't have a good definition of temperature. [2]
For a molecule with a few atoms (let's say 5 or 10) it's more difficult to be sure if there is a good definition of temperature or not, so I prefer to ignore the intermediate case.
[1] My first idea of a big molecules was DNA, because it's big and well known. But DNA is usually surrounded by water, lots of water, and ions and auxiliary proteins, and a lot of stuff. It's very difficult to isolate a true molecule of DNA alone.
An easy example of a big molecule is bakelite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakelite that is the plastic of the old phones. Your old phone case was a gigantic single molecule, and the tube case was another. So they clearly had a temperature.
[2] At low temperatures you can assume that a Helium atom is a ball without internal structure. If you increase the temperature of the gas enough (200000K?), the electrons in each Helium atom start to jump between levels and you have some interesting internal structure and may try to define a temperature. But it's still too few parts and too short lived to make me comfortable to define the temperature of a single atom.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" is perhaps the most egregious offender. Can you expand on this? I am reading this book at the moment, but I don't quite follow your criticism. He doesn't seem to me to be talking about phenomena related to "consciousness of consciousness", but rather about how consciousness arises as a functional process, and as a consequence of our lingu…
Note the distinction between: 1. consciousness as "awareness" or "experiencing existence" 2. consciousness as "mind" or what we experience that doesn't seem to correspond to the outside world. The former is certainly not a result of language, and that is what is referred to as consciousness in Buddhist/Hindu philosophy. The latter is definitely influenced by language and seems to be what many modern scientists are re…
> The former is certainly not a result of language, and that is what is referred to as consciousness in Buddhist/Hindu philosophy.
I recommend reading Jaynes' book (assuming you haven't already) before you draw any firm conclusions on the role of language.
I really don't think I can do him justice, but his thesis seems to be that humans were, until relatively recently (4000 years ago, perhaps?), non-conscious - they would not have "experienced existence".
He goes on to discuss consciousness as a product of metaphor, and thus with decidedly linguistic origins. That is terrible summary, though, so I recommend reading the book and forming your own view - I have found it quite enjoyable so far.
As an aside, he starts the book with a list of things that consciousness is not, from his perspective:
* Consciousness Not a Copy of Experience
* Consciousness Not Necessary for Concepts
* Consciousness Not Necessary for Learning
* Consciousness Not Necessary for Thinking
* Consciousness Not Necessary for Reason
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#115This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me. We could similarly write articles about all the qualities and properties of phlogiston, and we'd have learned just as much. What thing are we actually trying to explain here? What is the extensive meaning of the word "consciousness"? How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses con…
> How is "consciousness" not just a modern word for "soul", minus the afterlife stuff?
There's actually an interesting analog with intelligent design. In both cases (evolution, the brain) it's clear that what's happening is that the emergent properties from incredibly complex systems is creating surprisingly complex results (surprisingly complex to the average observer). In both cases this bothers people because it means that humans aren't anything particularly special (just matter that happens to go through certain processes), and because it's hard for them to grasp the scale and complexity of the systems involved. So an invisible non-material explanation is theorized instead which sets humanity above the "mere" material world.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consciousness does not have to mean being "mentally" (intellectually) aware of what's going on. It's about experiencing stuff, and having a _sensation_
Does a thermostat have a _sensation_ of temperature? Why or why not?
A thermometer senses temperature, much like the human skin does. But we would not consider it conscious because it is a reactionary device.
Of course at some point along our development of machine intelligence that may change. At some point in the past all life was reactionary, then as it evolved that changed. My take on it is the first consciousness in life occurred when creatures started making predictions on when they would eat something or get eaten and act before it occurred.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#117This puts me in an uncomfortable spot w/regards to abortion. My go to argument was always 'the lights aren't on yet'. If I'm understanding correctly they might be, albeit dimly, and each day getting brighter.
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Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#118I wonder what consciousness would be like if our brains had the size of our solar system. Would we be conscious if our neurons took on the order of minutes to communicate with each other?
[Nitpicking alert] The giant squid have the fastest axons to try to coordinate their giant body. They use some tricks to make the transmission faster, so I'm not sure if you can use this speed inside a brain successfully.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_giant_axon the speed is 25m/s, so in a minute you the signal could travel 1500m ~= 1mile.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. I don't believe we can get to the root of this "hard problem" by first trying to agree on a definition of the word before we can say anything about it. We will also need to admit the possibility that the question "are we conscious?" may be as vacuous at the end as "is Pluto a planet?".
Being unable to agree on a definition for consciousness is a huge problem. I think this happens because consciousness is being studied at a too abstract (high) level. Instead, we should switch to the low level dual of this problem - game theory and reinforcement learning. Fortunately, at this level definitions are exact and concrete - agent, environment, goal, actions, values. At this level we can understand and simu…
>switch to the low level dual of this problem [...] reinforcement learning.
But that is itself a theory about the problem of consciousness! So why not do both? There's no obvious short cut through the confusion, but discoveries in one field may guide questions in the other. In general I think it helps to have one's feet on the ground as well as one's head in the stars (for instance Newton ground his own lenses).
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#120This puts me in an uncomfortable spot w/regards to abortion. My go to argument was always 'the lights aren't on yet'. If I'm understanding correctly they might be, albeit dimly, and each day getting brighter.
Why would this be related to abortion? I don't see anything in the article mentioning human embryos, only newborns...