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The unending quest to explain consciousness

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Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#221

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

yohsii wrote: post #217
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very fact that a physical substance can affect your consciousness tells us it isn't eternal or fundamental - you can literally change how your perceive it with drugs.

psychedelics are a shortcut for those who don't want to spend time meditating, you can achieve the same result without drugs. it's difficult to convince somebody who hasn't had the experience and of course if you'd had the experience you wouldn't need convincing but i'd suggest you stay open minded and at least try to explore these things when the time is right. and if you won't, it's alright, you'll remember everyth…

> and if you won't, it's alright, you'll remember everything once you die

Just like we remember everything from before we're born? Or will we get all that back once we die as well? Why do we lose it all in the middle? What a series of empty, meaningless, unverifiable claims.

This is all just drug-fueled pseudo-spiritualism brought on by hallucinations.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#222

Post by KillahBhyte »

abnry wrote: post #216
KillahBhyte wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just reading through this sub thread and I agree. I immediately started comparing the statements against Russell's Teapot ("...can't get bogged down...") and God of the Gaps ("...lack of explanatory power physical theories...") type issues.

When I say can't get bogged down I mean I don't have the energy to get into a big long discussion. You baited me into starting one... but I'll be brief. The sensation of seeing blue is clearly, to me, unrelated to the material aspects of blue light or the interaction of that light on the cells in my retina, or the electric signals of neurons in my brain. I could imagine myself as the same person except for the percep…

Glad to have pulled you back in, however unwillingly. =) It's an interesting topic to kick around.

On the first, could we not say the same about how an image is rasterized from a set of points, to a polygon, to a shape, to a set of pixels displaying the images on your very screen? Before it was displayed, way down the stack, it was just a series of switches being turned off and on. Electrical impulses that viewed from an ignorant outside source would just appear as random noise. And yet we can easily ascribe the material manner in which it made its way from one to the other. Just because we currently can't directly encode\decode the exact means in which the mind creates these scenes, it's not hard at all to build mental models that a network of synapses could be responsible for a very similar thing from my perspective.

Also decoupling 'blue' from it's physical properties would inherently remove any relevance of the color between us. I agree with and also wonder do two people see 'blue' as the same color sensation, but the only means we have to compare that experience between two separate minds is both looking at a light source in the 450nm spectrum. We have no means to convey the experience itself, only the relation of understanding any further experiences with the first. I'm not sure that it matters much though. Another computer analogy, although Linux and Windows differ a good bit on how they would internally configure a PDF document to be displayed on the screen from it's initial bits, the end result should be close enough that we can both agree on the information the screen displays.

On the second, I'd stand beside my original complaint. This to me draws from the God of the Gaps issues, that somehow if the way we've described the world in every other recognized way is unable to put forward a valid reasoning for a phenomenon with our current level of understanding, we should instead ascribe a non material or physical level of power to explain it that has never been shown or proven to offer a provable valid reasoning for anything. That to me sounds rather optimistic.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#223

Post by CharlesColeman »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #135
yohsii wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

consciousness does not require a brain. consciousness is fundamental to the universe

Indeed. To go even farther, I suspect that there is nothing other than consciousness. There are no particles and forces, only awareness and will. The stuff of physics is emergent from statistical properties of consciousness over a large scale.

> Indeed. To go even farther, I suspect that there is nothing other than consciousness. There are no particles and forces, only awareness and will.

I believe the word for that is idealism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#224

Post by incompatible »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #99
incompatible wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because consciousness requires some kind of underlying mental processes, which take time to achieve. I can only guess that it's similar to an instance of a computer program such as a web browser, i.e., it isn't a "thing" itself but is built out of a multitude of underlying calculations on a physical computer. This also implies to me that consciousness, not being a physical thing itself, comes and goes within…

= emergent ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism, yes it's clear that a lot has already been written about this kind of idea.

A difficulty is that it may interact with questions about the nature of existence and the nature of time. Would consciousness work properly in a deterministic block universe? What would be the relationship between my consciousness now and my consciousness of 10 seconds ago, do they both exist independently? Could you have consciousness that worked in a spacial dimension instead of time, by writing out the relevant calculations on a sheet of paper?

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#226

Post by CharlesColeman »

ghjyui wrote: post #176
bblpeter wrote: post #3

If the Human Brain Were So Simple That We Could Understand It, We Would Be So Simple That We Couldn’t

That's easy to disprove. A calculator isn't sophisticated enough to simulate itself, but a modern computer can perfectly simulate itself.

> That's easy to disprove. A calculator isn't sophisticated enough to simulate itself, but a modern computer can perfectly simulate itself.

What you say is pretty obviously false: a computer with finite memory cannot simulate itself in a general case because that would require more memory than it actually has or a compression algorithm that's effective on random data, because its memory would need to contain the emulation program plus a full memory image. Computers with infinite memory do not exist and random data is not compressible, therefore modern computers cannot perfectly simulate themselves. QED.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#227

Post by hoseja »

Yajirobe wrote: post #115
hoseja wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't they point to "interactions of neurons"?

Because then you could also point to 'interactions of transistors' and claim that a computer can be conscious. But this claim has been refuted already.

Why not? You just don't nearly have enough transistors and connections.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#228

Post by 2snakes »

toasterlovin wrote: post #170
abnry wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me turn that question on its head and ask you why should it be sufficient? Just because it interacts with matter doesn't mean we default to assuming a materialistic approach is sufficient. I can't get bogged down with arguing why it seems obvious to me that it isn't sufficient. As I wrote earlier, it still boggles my mind that people think otherwise.

FWIW, I believe your stance is the one that requires justification. After all, you seem to be positing (although it’s hard to tell, since you’re not committing to anything specific) that the default assumption about a phenomena we observe which takes place in a universe which otherwise follows the laws of physics, is that the phenomena is somehow not explainable using the laws of physics.

physics is incomplete. It was niels bohr who said, “Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience.” without including psi and cogent six sigma data from consciousness studies it is not complete, nor can it pancomputationally bc of godel. not to mention exceptional human experiences like OOBE and cosmic consciousness. mass and energy make up 5% of the observable universe. to account for the rest with massless particles and dimensionless points and other made up stuff shows the inherent contradiction and metaphysical bias of materialistic monism philosophically. ironic that the big bang is something from -nothing- which makes no sense: there is no such thing as absolute nothingness and the first receptor had to be nonphysical. see vernon neppe and ed close on iqnexus, reality begins with consciousness on brainvoyage, and interviews on new thinking allowed. also see bernardo kastrups works for a computer scientists arguments for idealism in the context of many scientific experiments and the loss of local realism.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#229

Post by [deleted] »

ghjyui wrote: post #187
Tenoke wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have good reasons to believe that everything is under the streetlamp, and little reason to think that there is something immaterial or irreducible. This is a totally different debate though - 'Is materialism/phyiscalism/reductionism etc. correct?'.

Irreducibility may be a thing, e.g. turbulence. For example, we can easily make an ML model that recognizes an image or speech and we can explain every little detail about how it works, but we can't explain the high level emergent dynamics of this model and thus can't really explain how it works. I believe we'll build a real AI soon, it'll exceed all expectations, and we still be puzzled by the complexity of it's tur…

[deleted]

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#230

Post by tim333 »

erokar wrote: post #69
tim333 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you Google "conscious", the dictionary definition starts: "aware of and responding to one's surroundings" I'd suggest self driving cars do that better than radiators.

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.

Maybe not. To move to a situation where the self driving car is asking itself "I wonder if my experience of the red of a traffic light is the same as other self driving cars experience" you'd have to add language, thinking and feelings however I think even present cars are further down that road on the whole than radiators.
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