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Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#161

Post by freeflight »

Chathamization wrote: post #121
tpeo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No new words are needed. What you need is that people stop conjuring new words to explain the same things over and over again, using and re-using words under different meanings without ever bothering to either listen or read their predecessors properly, which only leads to feelings of ineffectualness and a strange sensation of déjà vu. When authors in the philosophy of mind stops rehashing ideas that could and most l…

> When authors in the philosophy of mind stops rehashing ideas that could and most likely have occurred to 17th century philosophers for the sake of attaching their names to a publication, then it will see some progress. I doubt people involved in philosophy of the mind will ever be useful here. If one keeps up to date on neuroscience, they'll see a lot of progress being made, but none of it is coming from the "philo…

In that regard I always find it odd how much philosophy and religion seem to have in common. Large parts of most religions basically boil down to convincing people of something for which there's no actual evidence solely by the use of philosophical and rhetorical devices, it's de-facto large scale social engineering.

Which basically makes religion something like the original "science of philosophy"?

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#162

Post by [deleted] »

visarga wrote: post #71
mannykannot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. I am not convinced - I suspect that there isn't anything to the experience of being like a worm; that the very question presupposes self-awareness of some sort. I suspect the hard problem of consciousness might lie in the self-referentiality of self-aware consciousness (though alternatively or in addition, it might be on account of its workings b…

> I suspect that there isn't anything to the experience of being like a worm Even a worm has goals to attain - food and reproduction. In order to attain those goals, it needs to have perceptions and to rank those by the estimated return value. That is what it's like to be a worm.

[deleted]

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#163

Post by bbctol »

visarga wrote: post #144
mannykannot wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking about a worm as if it had goals is a teleological analogy that makes discussing its behavior easier, but I think it is a mistake to take this usage literally. If you do, you must also conclude that a thermostat has a goal, and therefore (by your argument) that there is a something that is what it is like to be a thermostat. I can only see this line of argument as a distraction that will only confuse any attem…

Yes, you can draw a very clean line. It's the line of self-replication. Self-replicators have an internal goal - that is to maintain their existence by growing and replicating. The more advanced ones develop complex responses to changes in their environments. Humans are just the apex of this process. A toaster or a thermostat don't self reproduce, so they have no goals. Having no goals, means no consciousness, becaus…

Fire self-replicates. It maintains its existence by consuming fuel and spreading itself. It's not as skilled at this as a human, but neither's a worm. What about an individual bacterium? Does it have a goal? Are they conscious in a way a humble virus is not?

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#164

Post by CuriouslyC »

the_af wrote: post #148
CuriouslyC wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decoupling awareness and its contents is a necessary prerequisite to a much more parsimonious philosophical viewpoint. Without taking that step, you're stuck with the idea that human awareness is somehow different in kind from the physical awareness that drives the evolution of everything else in the universe.

> Decoupling awareness and its contents What do you mean? I don't understand what you mean by "the evolution of everything else in the universe", either. Consciousness isn't required for the evolution of living beings. Or do you mean something else?

When I say evolution here I mean a change in state, not Darwinian evolution.

I'm drawing a distinction between humans, who seem to have the ability to make choices, with the prevailing scientific world view, that everything is the result of mindless causal forces.

I suppose you could hold the epiphenominalist view that consciousness is a side effect with no causal agency, but then you have to explain why things that hinder survival/reproduction feel bad, and things that aid it feel good. If consciousness was truly an epiphenomenon there is no reason why there should be any concordance between survival value of events and their phenomenal character.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#165

Post by CuriouslyC »

gus_massa wrote: post #159
CuriouslyC wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we measure temperature by the transmission of energy, and that process occurs in an entropic manner, if you have a moving reference frame, that prevents measurement of the increase in energy by the detector. The particle itself definitely has increased in energy, we just lack the ability to detect it. This is entirely analogous to our inability to measure mass using a scale in free-fall. I suppose it comes down…

Temperature is defined as 1/T = dS/dU, where U is the energy of the system and S is the entropy of the system, i.e. S = k * ln(#states that have energy U) The temperature is proportional to the energy of the system only for ideal monoatomic gases. (Ideal diatomic gases, are slightly more complicated.) So a "hot" Helium balloon where all the particles are moving in random directions has a different temperature than a…

Thanks for the pleasant pchem memories.

So, to get back to the original point, your position is that a single particle in isolation can't have a temperature because its entropy (or rather the change thereof) is 0, so the equation breaks.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#166

Post by the_af »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #164
the_af wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Decoupling awareness and its contents What do you mean? I don't understand what you mean by "the evolution of everything else in the universe", either. Consciousness isn't required for the evolution of living beings. Or do you mean something else?

When I say evolution here I mean a change in state, not Darwinian evolution. I'm drawing a distinction between humans, who seem to have the ability to make choices, with the prevailing scientific world view, that everything is the result of mindless causal forces. I suppose you could hold the epiphenominalist view that consciousness is a side effect with no causal agency, but then you have to explain why things that…

I think you have it backwards: if there is no reason for consciousness to have any concordance, then it can go either way. And there is evidence of lots of evolved traits that have indeed gone "either way". Or it could be that consciousness is not a blind side effect but actually provides survival value. Or maybe it is a side effect but it's harmless. There are lots of possibilities.

In any case, it seems this is a diversion from the main argument: if you aren't aware of a process, then it's not a conscious process on your part by definition.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#167

Post by johndoe489 »

thevardanian wrote: post #27
erikpukinskis wrote: post #18

My best at guess is that the universe itself is conscious, and we'll eventually let go of the idea of individual consciousnesses. An ant hive sees a larger field more clearly than I do, maybe at a slower refresh rate but not by much. Are individual ants conscious? Somewhat. Are we conscious when we're receiving reality through memes beyond our comprehension? Somewhat. Are our rods and cones conscious? Our brain stem?…

No. the universe isn't conscious. The universe is matter. Consciousness is a part of the universe. Therefore consciousness is simply material. Nothing more, nothing less. It's just that our egos are too big to accept that we are nothing more than dirt.

Let's not even get into "matter" and modern science which already undermines the notion that things are solid...

Let's just get to the point:

If EVERYTHING in the universe, everything in reality is "matter"... then what does "matter" mean anymore?

It may as well be magic. Harry Potter material. No difference. Because this "matter" exists in nothing.

You are in a building, in a city, in a country, in a continent, on planet Earth, in solar system, itself floating in a galaxy, itself floating in the "universe" ... itself floating in ... what?

Nothing.

At which point you call it matter, I could call it "consciousness" (in the author Bernardo Kastrup's meaning then, as a underlying field to everything), some may call it "god". We can also just call it magic. Poof! Here we are.

PS: Also see

The mental Universe

http://deanradin.com/evidence/Henry2005Nature.pdf

The Physicalist Worldview as Neurotic Ego-Defense Mechanism https://www.instapaper.com/read/811142201

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#168

Post by smaddox »

speedplane wrote: post #78
goatlover wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pluto is a taxonomy problem. Consciousness is reconciling how we explain the world (science & objectivity) versus how we experience the world (subjectivity). Consider that the world looks colored, is full of sounds, smells, tastes and feels. But the scientific explanation leaves all that out. The scientific world is the ghostly world of equations, theories and data. It's Plato's cave inverted.

Consciousness is at it's heart irrational. Using reason or science to explain it won't work.

Ironically, you are stating a hypothesis which is fully within the purview of reason and science. While it is in principal possible that the answer is undecidable with existing logical systems, there's certainly no existing proof that it is undecidable.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#169

Post by smaddox »

stult wrote: post #157
breckinloggins wrote: post #5

This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bica…

>This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself I think this trend is bound up inextricably with our efforts to di…

I couldn't agree more!

Furthermore, as also pointed out by others above, all discussions about consiousness tend to conflate what appear to me to be distinct phenomenon. The first could be described as a persistence of thought or "low-level" consiousness, which is likely explained by the evolution of a working memory. The second could be described as self awareness, which is likely a small, nearly-inevitable leap from "low-level" consiousness. The third could be described as meta-consiousness, whos origin is likely explained by your social evolution hypotheses.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#170

Post by Schizotypy »

bladecatcher wrote: post #82
visarga wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, defining the "hard problem" hasn't gotten us any closer to understanding consciousness in the last 22 years. The hard problem just moves consciousness problem into an unfruitful direction. It's time for more practical approaches.

Not sure where your 22 years estimate comes from. I think man has been trying to understand it for much longer maybe thousands of years ? - and has found answers through techniques that are outside of the mind - such as meditation.

From an empirical standpoint, meditation gives us no information whatsoever. Just thinking about something will not lead you to some sort of mystically revealed truth
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