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Objects of consciousness

journal.frontiersin.org

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Re: Objects of consciousness

#21

Post by kleer001 »

orasis wrote: post #19
ivansavz wrote: post #4

I gave this a chance (seeing there were equations), but after reading the whole thing I still don't understand what they're talking about. It just doesn't make any sense. What would be the one paragraph summary of this paper? The math in particular seems inappropriate to present in a Psychology journal, even a frontier one. I question the authors' motivation to cover such advanced mathematical topics, from so many di…

Let's start with this question: What makes an object an object? Find an object in the room, say a chair. What imbues the chair with "chairness"? Why is it considered separate from the floor? If you investigate this you will find that all objects are mind created. There is no essense or Platonic form of an object inherent to the object. The object cannot be said to have inherent existence apart from the mind perceivin…

> Why is it considered separate from the floor?

Because it can be easily moved. That is the property all objects share. There are a few exceptions, but they are illustrative. Consider a rusted on bolt. Can it be moved? Not without a lot of effort. However a fresh new loose bolt of the same kind demonstrates movable-objectness. What about a chair bolted to the floor? It was once loose, it's an object. What about a chair welded to the floor? Same thing. What about a chair that's constructed of the floor its self, like a large lump or bend up from steel or molded? I would submit that that's the floor acting like a chair, and not an object chair, but a chair like part of the floor.

An even more technical definition would be along the lines of "Objects are the static locus of continuity within a sharp boundary." And by static I mean to include floppy objects like plants or leather. And by sharp boundary I mean in relative space to the observer and their understanding of their environment. From the ground a cloud looks like it has a relatively sharp boundary, sure, it's complex, but the difference in the color and shading from the sky gives it away. If you're IN the cloud it just looks like fog. Is fog an object? Sure, it's in high contrast to the regular state of the air. Is air an object? Sure, it's in high contrast to the ground, and from a certain perspective interstellar space.

Does liver fit this definition? If it's separated from the organism, sure. If it's still in a living body, it's an organ, not an object.

>all objects are mind created.

I would go even further and say that "All patterns are mind events."

Phurpa drop!

(A phurpa is a triple sided ritual dagger which in Buddhism symbolizes the slaying or destruction of foe or obstructions.)

Re: Objects of consciousness

#22

Post by titzer »

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #10
enord wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll chime in with this conceptual map of the article (as far as i read it anyway): Perception->Visual perception->Ontology of visual perception and consciousness->Quantum physics->No. edit: Actually, when i think about it, there's something analogous to Goodwin's law in papers/articles about the mind and consciousness. Whenever quantum physics becomes a topic the whole article just unravels into nonsense. This is of…

It is true that a lot of woo is produced by people who appeal to quantum weirdness without having a basic understanding of modern physics. This article seems to be no exception (I did not have the patience to read it all). What you say, however, is dogmatic. You assume the emergentist theory of consciousness: that consciousness somehow emerges from the complex physical interactions in the brain. This theory is itself…

It's not hard to argue that materialism implies emergentism, since materialism assumes nothing but physical properties and processes exist. No one really believes that individual neurons are conscious, yet no one disagrees that brains are conscious. Brains are made of neurons and thus have a property their parts do not; ergo, emergent behavior.

So it's either emergentism or woo, by my reckoning. YMMV.

Re: Objects of consciousness

#23

Post by icebraining »

Lambdanaut wrote: post #9
based2 wrote: post #7

"How can consciousness be cast in a mathematical formalism without losing something essential? The mathematics does lose something essential, viz., consciousness itself. Similarly, mathematical models of weather also lose something essential, viz., weather itself. A mathematical model of hurricanes won't create rain, and a mathematical model of consciousness won't create consciousness. The math is not the territory.…

The eerie thing is that as far as we can tell, our brains are no more than models of consciousness, and yet they are conscious. The line is very blury between a model of consciousness and the point where it can not only be described as conscious but truly has that ethereally, hard to define quality that we "feel" as consciousness. Would the first truly general AIs simply be working models of consciousness, or would t…

Isn't a brain an implementation of a model of consciousness, rather than a model itself? I don't see how they are "no more than models of consciousness". Of course, this is using "model" as "mathematical/scientific model", not as "reproduction".

Re: Objects of consciousness

#24

Post by soneca »

kleer001 wrote: post #21
orasis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's start with this question: What makes an object an object? Find an object in the room, say a chair. What imbues the chair with "chairness"? Why is it considered separate from the floor? If you investigate this you will find that all objects are mind created. There is no essense or Platonic form of an object inherent to the object. The object cannot be said to have inherent existence apart from the mind perceivin…

> Why is it considered separate from the floor? Because it can be easily moved. That is the property all objects share. There are a few exceptions, but they are illustrative. Consider a rusted on bolt. Can it be moved? Not without a lot of effort. However a fresh new loose bolt of the same kind demonstrates movable-objectness. What about a chair bolted to the floor? It was once loose, it's an object. What about a cha…

I would consider a wall an object. Why a plant and not a dog?

Myself I would consider any physical body without life an object.

Re: Objects of consciousness

#25

Post by lgas »

titzer wrote: post #22
TelmoMenezes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that a lot of woo is produced by people who appeal to quantum weirdness without having a basic understanding of modern physics. This article seems to be no exception (I did not have the patience to read it all). What you say, however, is dogmatic. You assume the emergentist theory of consciousness: that consciousness somehow emerges from the complex physical interactions in the brain. This theory is itself…

It's not hard to argue that materialism implies emergentism, since materialism assumes nothing but physical properties and processes exist. No one really believes that individual neurons are conscious, yet no one disagrees that brains are conscious. Brains are made of neurons and thus have a property their parts do not; ergo, emergent behavior. So it's either emergentism or woo, by my reckoning. YMMV.

The problem is that saying that consciousness emerges from neurons, or the configuration of neurons in the brain, or whatever doesn't provide any actual explanation. It doesn't give us any more information than we had before.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/

Re: Objects of consciousness

#26

Post by deciplex »

based2 wrote: post #7

"How can consciousness be cast in a mathematical formalism without losing something essential? The mathematics does lose something essential, viz., consciousness itself. Similarly, mathematical models of weather also lose something essential, viz., weather itself. A mathematical model of hurricanes won't create rain, and a mathematical model of consciousness won't create consciousness. The math is not the territory.…

> A mathematical model of hurricanes won't create rain

What about a detailed simulation of global climate at a granularity of, let's say, individual quarks. Is there a point at which a map is so detailed that it becomes, in some sense at least, itself a territory?

Re: Objects of consciousness

#27

Post by TelmoMenezes »

titzer wrote: post #22
TelmoMenezes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that a lot of woo is produced by people who appeal to quantum weirdness without having a basic understanding of modern physics. This article seems to be no exception (I did not have the patience to read it all). What you say, however, is dogmatic. You assume the emergentist theory of consciousness: that consciousness somehow emerges from the complex physical interactions in the brain. This theory is itself…

It's not hard to argue that materialism implies emergentism, since materialism assumes nothing but physical properties and processes exist. No one really believes that individual neurons are conscious, yet no one disagrees that brains are conscious. Brains are made of neurons and thus have a property their parts do not; ergo, emergent behavior. So it's either emergentism or woo, by my reckoning. YMMV.

> Brains are made of neurons and thus have a property their parts do not; ergo, emergent behavior.

I think you're being too quick. Let's think about things that we know to be emergent structures/behaviors: cities, societies, the human body, ecosystems, etc. In all of them, you can recognize that the network of interactions is too complex for human intelligence to fully grasp, but you can pin-point the building blocks. It's not magic. We know how DNA directs the synthesis of proteins, how proteins fold, how they combine to form larger structures, etc. It's not possible to fully grasp the full mechanism that is a human body, or a society, but this is because it's too complicated, not because we don't know the components.

With conscious we don't have that. It's an all-or-nothing proposition. What is your consciousness made of? Can you identify building blocks? If not, then you just have faith in emergentism, but you don't have a serious scientific theory.

If eventually you can identify building blocks, and emergentism is correct, then surely these parts will belong to smaller chunks of the system. Eventually neurons are part-conscious. Otherwise how could the big thing emerge? So, in this case, there is something fundamental about matter that we know nothing about.

Or, consciousness is more fundamental than mater. Serious people have also proposed this throughout the ages -- call it platonism maybe. This is an unfashionable philosophical position theses days, but as valid as materialism. Both are perfectly compatible with current scientific theories.

Re: Objects of consciousness

#28

Post by drdeca »

kleer001 wrote: post #21
orasis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's start with this question: What makes an object an object? Find an object in the room, say a chair. What imbues the chair with "chairness"? Why is it considered separate from the floor? If you investigate this you will find that all objects are mind created. There is no essense or Platonic form of an object inherent to the object. The object cannot be said to have inherent existence apart from the mind perceivin…

> Why is it considered separate from the floor? Because it can be easily moved. That is the property all objects share. There are a few exceptions, but they are illustrative. Consider a rusted on bolt. Can it be moved? Not without a lot of effort. However a fresh new loose bolt of the same kind demonstrates movable-objectness. What about a chair bolted to the floor? It was once loose, it's an object. What about a cha…

If you apply the same force as you would to a cup handle it order to pick up the cup, to a single atom of the surface of the cup, couldn't that remove the atom?

"Can be removed using a specific level of force" is then not sufficient for determining whether a collection of particles form an object.

Perhaps if one instead uses some amount of force applied on the collection of particles which depends on the mass of the collection?

That seems like it could be tricky, because I don't think I would generally consider fluids to be objects (in the sense we are speaking of), but I would not be too surprised if some fluid could be removed from a glass with a given level of force depending on the mass of a portion of the liquid, applied evenly over the portion, while keeping the portion of the liquid contiguous.

Which would seem to indicate that and portion of the liquid is an object.

However, maybe that is actually a solution, by adding the additional restriction that no part of an object is an object? (In a particular sense of object). Or alternatively, the intersection of any two objects is empty?

So, the section of the liquid is not an object, because a smaller part would then also be an object, and therefore, the individual molecules would be the objects.

That seems plausible to me...

Re: Objects of consciousness

#29

Post by visarga »

orasis wrote: post #19
ivansavz wrote: post #4

I gave this a chance (seeing there were equations), but after reading the whole thing I still don't understand what they're talking about. It just doesn't make any sense. What would be the one paragraph summary of this paper? The math in particular seems inappropriate to present in a Psychology journal, even a frontier one. I question the authors' motivation to cover such advanced mathematical topics, from so many di…

Let's start with this question: What makes an object an object? Find an object in the room, say a chair. What imbues the chair with "chairness"? Why is it considered separate from the floor? If you investigate this you will find that all objects are mind created. There is no essense or Platonic form of an object inherent to the object. The object cannot be said to have inherent existence apart from the mind perceivin…

Google, in 2012, made a neural net that "discovered" the concept of cat on its own, by unsupervised training, the same way we form our concepts. A neural net compresses data, and in this process, the concept of "chair" emerges.

There is no such thing as "chariness" outside our brains, it's just a compressed form of representation of many perceptions.

Re: Objects of consciousness

#30

Post by joshuacc »

orasis wrote: post #19
ivansavz wrote: post #4

I gave this a chance (seeing there were equations), but after reading the whole thing I still don't understand what they're talking about. It just doesn't make any sense. What would be the one paragraph summary of this paper? The math in particular seems inappropriate to present in a Psychology journal, even a frontier one. I question the authors' motivation to cover such advanced mathematical topics, from so many di…

Let's start with this question: What makes an object an object? Find an object in the room, say a chair. What imbues the chair with "chairness"? Why is it considered separate from the floor? If you investigate this you will find that all objects are mind created. There is no essense or Platonic form of an object inherent to the object. The object cannot be said to have inherent existence apart from the mind perceivin…

> There is no essense or Platonic form of an object inherent to the object.

While I understand that Platonism isn't popular, the Platonic form thesis needs a bit more refutation than "this is obviously false" in a serious discussion. But then, maybe you weren't trying to have a serious discussion. :-)

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