Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#141

Post by MacsHeadroom » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 6:11 AM UTC

jeremyjh wrote: post #137

DennisP wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's often people's assumption, that at some level of complexity, qualia just show up. But we don't actually have a clue why that might be the case, or how it happens, or why a pile of atoms banging against their neighbors should be considered a larger whole which thus has complexity and therefore consciousness. People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems ther…

> People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism. What other explanation is there? A magic fairy unicorn in the sky is making the qualia possible? How does that solve the problem you are pointing to, wouldn't we still want to get there via "first principals" ? And if we did find a m…

If you start at first principles you don't find support for a fundamentally material reality. Idealist monism is the alternative.

i.e. the universe and everything in it is fundamentally mental phenomena (qualia) which may only appear to have material properties by the extent of their disenfranchisement from more connected phenomenal clusters.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#142

Post by Teever » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 6:29 AM UTC

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #31

TheHideout wrote: post #8

Tangent by PhD student in Cognitive Science here - My current belief is that consciousness arises at the cross section of 3 core skills: Theory of Mind [0], Autobiographic Episodic Memory [1], and Embodied Cognition [2]. Principally, recognizing that other people have intentions and beliefs different from your own, being able to understand that you have experienced a timeline of personal experiences and these contrib…

That doesn't sound right to me at all. To your first point: consider a hypothetical person who is unable to recognise other people as being similar to themselves, i.e. as having minds of their own. We would treat this person as having a serious social disability. We certainly wouldn't conclude that the person lacks consciousness entirely. They could still be capable of experiencing pain and pleasure, and could still…

> To your first point: consider a hypothetical person who is unable to recognise other people as being similar to themselves, i.e. as having minds of their own. We would treat this person as having a serious social disability.

It sounds like you're describing psychopaths.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#143

Post by dr_dshiv » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 6:41 AM UTC

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #141

jeremyjh wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism. What other explanation is there? A magic fairy unicorn in the sky is making the qualia possible? How does that solve the problem you are pointing to, wouldn't we still want to get there via "first principals" ? And if we did find a m…

If you start at first principles you don't find support for a fundamentally material reality. Idealist monism is the alternative. i.e. the universe and everything in it is fundamentally mental phenomena (qualia) which may only appear to have material properties by the extent of their disenfranchisement from more connected phenomenal clusters.

Right. See Bernard Kastrup's work.

Or, Plato. Or Max Tegmark.

In my experience, most people can't follow their arguments because their woo detector turns on and their rational faculty turns off.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#144

Post by ncmncm » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 8:03 AM UTC

hackinthebochs wrote: post #140

ncmncm wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that has the slightest bit to do with how brains work to weave the activity you have chosen to noun as "consciousness". Minding is activity brains perform, exactly as motion is activity cars perform. To imagine that mind can't come out of brain cells being brain cells is woolly mysticism that is pointless even to write: rejecting reason, you reject language and communication, and there is nobody to talk to an…

>Minding is activity brains perform, exactly as motion is activity cars perform. This is a contentious claim, for which you have provided no arguments. Unsupported assertions are entirely useless in this discussion. My argument is very clear and straightforward. If you disagree, you should point out which premise you disagree with and why. Unspecific incredulity does not make an argument. Note that my claim that cons…

You appear to imagine that something you think of as "EM fields" can achieve things that cannot be done with wires or axons and transistors or nerve cells.

EM fields are linear. That means you can't get any information out of EM interactions [except in ferromagnetic materials] that you didn't put in. It makes them useful for communication, but not for computation, or "consciousness", whatever woowoo you imagine that to be. That you don't understand electromagnetics utterly fails to endow electromagnetics with divine powers.

Information processing with nonlinear computational elements such as transistors and nerve cells is stuff we (like every living creature, and your thermostat) use all day, every day. Magickal "consciousness" processes that don't depend on nerve cell operations are an extraordinary claim that demands actual, you know, evidence, which would require words that have actual, you know, definitions. If you imagine that you have this "consciousness" magick that bonobos, ravens, and elephants don't, it is on you to demonstrate it. Good luck.

I find "consciousness" mysticism actively disgusting, overwhelmingly worse than Martian UFO fantasies, homeopathy scams, claims of quantum-based ESP powers, or even Ayn Rand objectivism. Even to bring it up is an insult to thinking persons.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#145

Post by raducu » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 8:09 AM UTC

ShellfishMeme wrote: post #97

raducu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with qualia, as I understand it, is that we can build machines that process images, and in the future let's say, can exceed what cat is capable of, but that machine will never actually have sensations. So there are two issues: what sensations actually are and why was it necessary for life to have those sensations, after all, a robot cat would do just fine without any sensation, just processing the inputs…

You say the machine wouldn't have sensations. Yet a cat and a human also are just complex machines. Maybe being a sufficiently complex machine is all that is needed to have sensations. And if we could imagine for example that an ant or a fly actually experiences things, if it too has some sort of degree of what we as humans have when we see or hear things, maybe there actually already are machines that "see" and "exp…

Complex is a very tricky question.

I think people already simulated a worm's neural nets, but we simulated just high level abstractions of what those "simple", 200 neuron networks are. Sure, by simulation tickling part of the worm, we get the exact reflex reactions a living worm would, but surely the simulated worm does not have sensations, I can do the same worm simulation with if-else statements, just because I see a worm realistically wiggling on the screen I do not believe it can suffer pain, or else I would never play Worms Armageddon.

I believe there is something to the chemical processes themselves that we will not be able to replicate in pure software.

That brings the question, what if we could simulate the quantum particles themselves, not just some high level representation of cells, would that simulated being have sensations/feelings?

If we perfectly simulated, at the quantum particle level a cat, would the cat behave like a real cat?

That is mindboggling to me; unfortunately we cannot do that yet.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#146

Post by raducu » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 8:25 AM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #94

raducu wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) The issue of what perceptions "actually" are will be impossible to answer because qualia are ireductible. Let me explain: you feel pain in your foot. As a scientist I cut your foot and you no longer feel pain in your foot. Or I cut the pain nerves, or the spinal cord, or give you pain medicine. Or I find a brain receptor and a chemical responsible for pain. Or in the future, we find a couple of brain networks that…

> But WHO is actually feeling that sensation? This reminds me of a story from Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls. An early multiuser computer system did fine with a small number of users, but choked when one more was added, above a certain threshold. "No problem", said some wag "just find where that threshold is stored and increase it." The joke, of course, is that the number didn't exist as an explicitly-realized valu…

I'm not saying it is incorrect, but the emergent theory of self-awareness is a bit hand-wavy.

Surely a primitive man could say an airplane flying is an emergent property of the airpland, like Aristotle said about many things?

I was just questioning the level of satisfaction we would get as science would reach the best explanation of what sensations are.

I think right now we are nowhere near that scientific knowledge.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#147

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 8:58 AM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #92

captainmuon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Franky, I have never understood the problem of qualia - or why it is something in need of explanation at all. Maybe the correct answer is an "anthropic principle"-style non-answer: External stimuli have to affect the human brain and body somehow . There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve. Now we have the capability of reflection. To some extent, we can think about how we think, and we can…

There has to be an internal representation for the organism to function properly. E.g. if light with a 450nm wavelength hits your retina, certain neurons fire. You get a pattern of electrical impulses. There's your internal representation. But why does that representation also carry with it an experience of the color blue? Why isn't it just the electrical impulses and that's it? The organism would still work. We coul…

Is the question about qualia even a meaningful one? It feels to me like running a program twice and asking whether it's really the same program that was run, given that each time, the addresses of library functions the program used were different[0].

It could be that when you see 450nm light, the pathways in your brain that process this information correspond to the pathways that respond to 700nm light in my head. But it doesn't matter; our experiences are adjusted to match, because they're synchronized, thanks to shared environment and language. In both of us, despite invoking different neuron groups, seeing a blue sky will evoke images of water, or Windows error codes, and not of roses or rust. If we talk, both of us will use the word "blue" to describe what we're experiencing.

Whether the rainbow is upside-down or not in your head doesn't seem to be a meaningful question, if through all imaginable ways to observe and communicate it, it seems you perceive it the same way as the rest of us.

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomiza...

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#148

Post by boxed » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 9:54 AM UTC

bserge wrote: post #2

Well it's an easier read than this: https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa016/5909853 but it lacks details. Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Would humans not have been able to achieve unprecedented control over the environment without it? Everything I read about self-control (which is a major problem of mine) points to an eternal battle between the conscious self and…

Like always it would be better to start with trying to define what the word consciousness even means BEFORE such speculation.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#149

Post by namero999 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 9:56 AM UTC

jeremyjh wrote: post #137

DennisP wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's often people's assumption, that at some level of complexity, qualia just show up. But we don't actually have a clue why that might be the case, or how it happens, or why a pile of atoms banging against their neighbors should be considered a larger whole which thus has complexity and therefore consciousness. People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems ther…

> People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism. What other explanation is there? A magic fairy unicorn in the sky is making the qualia possible? How does that solve the problem you are pointing to, wouldn't we still want to get there via "first principals" ? And if we did find a m…

It's not much different than the magic unicorn in the sky that makes fermions pop into existence out of thin air (our current understanding of fundamental physics postulates just that). Every ontology gets a free miracle, you can't reduce everything in terms of something else, either you'll never stop or you'll get into circular reasoning. You get to choose your ontological primitive. A "particle" or "consciousness" do not have different woo-factor. But by choosing consciousness as a primitive you can explain much more of what we observe in nature (and as a nice side effect, there might be positive existential implications with such a worldview).

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#150

Post by MaxBarraclough » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 10:03 AM UTC

Teever wrote: post #142

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound right to me at all. To your first point: consider a hypothetical person who is unable to recognise other people as being similar to themselves, i.e. as having minds of their own. We would treat this person as having a serious social disability. We certainly wouldn't conclude that the person lacks consciousness entirely. They could still be capable of experiencing pain and pleasure, and could still…

> To your first point: consider a hypothetical person who is unable to recognise other people as being similar to themselves, i.e. as having minds of their own. We would treat this person as having a serious social disability. It sounds like you're describing psychopaths.

I suppose so, but I imagine psychopaths can still understand it at the intellectual level. Not something I know much about.