111–120 of 255 posts
The really hard problem of consciousness is giving a definition that allows me to tell whether a rock is more or less conscious than a person.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This topic deserves a little more than a dictionary definition. There's no reason to believe self-driving cars has any more of a subjective experience, qualia, than radiators.
There's also no reason to believe that our own "consciousness" is any more than a significantly advanced algorithm. It's a very human trait to put ourselves on a pedestal.
You'd need to rely on dualism/metaphysics to support the view that consciousness is just an algorithm. Without some medium to implement it, an algorithm is just an abstract idea. The implementation could in principle be arbitrary.
I belive consciousness can be explained within a monist, materialistic worldview. I see it as the result of a biological process, much like digestion. To stretch this analogy (perhaps a tad too far): You can simulate digestion on a computer but it will never produce a real shit for you.
I think John Searle got this right and can recommend his book The Mystery of Consciousness.
The closest we will ever come to describing consciousness is simply describing the correlates of consciousness. The "ultimate cause" of it will forever be a mystery, behind the veil. Consciousness appears to exist outside of the physical world, in that we can describe a physical process entirely without invoking consciousness. Because of this, consciousness is beyond the scientific method and our fundamental understa…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Why can't they point to "interactions of neurons"?
The closest we will ever come to describing consciousness is simply describing the correlates of consciousness. The "ultimate cause" of it will forever be a mystery, behind the veil. Consciousness appears to exist outside of the physical world, in that we can describe a physical process entirely without invoking consciousness. Because of this, consciousness is beyond the scientific method and our fundamental understa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it reasonable to assume that for thought processes to occur, there must be some processing, so rocks are out. A more interesting example would be, say, trees, which do communicate with each other to some degree. Is that accompanied by some form of awareness? What's the lower bound of complexity at which consciousness kicks in? What about supraorganisms such as insect hives? Human cities? An ecosystem as a whol…
See this paper: “If Materialism is True, the United States is Probably Conscious” https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.ht...
1. According to materialism, consciousness is purely a result of physical processes.
2. Our consciousness is complex.
3. Therefore, materialism says that any physical entity with a complexity comparable to us is probably conscious.
At best, going from the two premises to the conclusion involves a tendentious and useless definition of 'consciousness' that equivocates over the specific features of the consciousness of genus Homo that make it distinctly interesting. Tononi's IIT makes the same mistake.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not entertain the notion that matter is consciousness? It doesn't just feel like something to be a particular atom, that particular atom exists because it feels like something to be that particular atom.
I'm happy to entertain it, but that particular atom exists because it feels like something to be that particular atom seems to beg the question somewhat - where is "feeling like something" coming from?
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…
So much of our consciousness is our own bodies and the environment we live in. My knees ache, my head hurts because I slept lousy, it's freezing, I'm hungry, I'm preventing myself from freaking out about various things going on at my job, etc.
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.