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What is it like to be a bat?

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Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#281

Post by GoblinSlayer »

geye1234 wrote: post #152
the_af wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow the reasoning at all. Why is human experience not the neurological firing? Why can't a thought be reduced to neurons firing, what about that would make it absurd? I promise I'm not being dense or rhetorical, I truly don't understand that line of thought. It seems to me like begging the question, almost like saying "experience cannot be this, because it'd be absurd, because it cannot be this."

Here's something I posted a while ago, I'm copying and pasting with a few slight edits: It is wrong to claim that brain states (neurons firing) are the same as mental states (thoughts). There are several reasons for this. One is that reducing thoughts to brain states means a thought cannot be correct or incorrect. For example, one series of mental states leads to the thought "2+2=4"; another series leads to the thoug…

Correctness is evaluated by comparison to an etalon. Here you compare to two different etalons. Thought is formed correctly in terms of laws of motion of particles, then you find it incorrect in terms of mathematics. the results of comparisons are different because etalons are different.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#282

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

ars wrote: post #258
rcxdude wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this matches which most people's definition of consciousness. The ability to decide rarely enters into such conversations.

If you can't do anything with your self awareness it's equivalent to not having it. What's the distinction between knowing I exist, but all my actions are pre-programmed vs not knowing I exist? You're essentially describing a detached observer, who watches their own body do stuff without influencing it. The whole point of being conscious is being aware of yourself, and then using that awareness to direct your actions…

Consciousness and free will are two different things. Free will is an illusion - basic physics should tell you that the molecules in your head can no better bend the laws of physics than the molecules in a brick.

Our brains are all about prediction - ability to predict (based on past experience) what will happen in the future (e.g. if I go to X I will find water) which is a massive evolutionary advantage over just reacting to the present like an insect or perhaps a fish.

Consciousness either evolved for a reason, or comes for free with any brain-like cognitive architecture. It's based on the brain having connections giving it access to its internal states (thereby giving us the ability to self-observe), not just sensory inputs informing it about the external world. The evolutionary value of consciousness would be to be able to better predict based on the brain having access to its internal states, but as noted it may "come for free" with any kind of bird or mammal like brain - hard to imagine a brain that somehow does NOT have access to it's own internal states, and would therefore NOT be able to process/predict those using it's cognitive apparatus (lacking in something like an LLM) just as it does external sensory inputs.

Of course consciousness (ability of the brain to self-observe) is responsible for the illusion of having free will, since the brain naturally correlates it's internal pre-action planning ("I'm choosing between A or B ..." etc) with any subsequent action, but that internal planning/choice is of course all a function of brain wiring, not some mystical "free will" coming in and bending the laws of physics.

You and your dog both are conscious and both experience the illusion of free will.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#283

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

glenstein wrote: post #267
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I understand that we may not have demonstrated to a level of absolutely provable certainty that bats are definitely conscious, but they We haven't even demonstrated some modest evidence that humans are conscious. No one has bothered to put in any effort to define consciousness in a way that is empirically/objectively testable. It is a null concept.

Said this in a different comment but I want to paste it here as well, since a lot of people seem to think "we don't even have a definition" is a show-stopping smackdown. But it isn't. You can't, and honestly don't need to start from definitions to be able to do meaningful research and have meaningful conversations about consciousness (though it certainly would be preferable to have one rather than not have one). Ther…

Dark matter is easily defined as "mass that cannot be detected by the current technology except that it affects the gravitation of galaxies". It is a detectable phenomenon. It is a measurable phenomenon.

Not having a definition is the show-stopping smackdown you say it is not. You are not a conscious being, there is no such thing as consciousness. You believe in an uninteresting illusion that you cannot detect or measure.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#284

Post by glenstein »

jibal wrote: post #190
glenstein wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoheartedly agree. I think what they're stressing though if I'm understanding correctly, is we do kind of start in a Cartesian space, and branch out via inferences to the presumption of an external world. And, from a certain philosophical perspective, one could point to that and insist that at any moment that connection could be the weak link that brings all of epistemology crashing down. We could get unhooked from…

See their comment just above where they say "I'm afraid the physicalist position is absolutely impossible." ... it's the worst argued rubbish imaginable.

No disagreement from me that it's not a strong argument.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#285

Post by glenstein »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #283
glenstein wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Said this in a different comment but I want to paste it here as well, since a lot of people seem to think "we don't even have a definition" is a show-stopping smackdown. But it isn't. You can't, and honestly don't need to start from definitions to be able to do meaningful research and have meaningful conversations about consciousness (though it certainly would be preferable to have one rather than not have one). Ther…

Dark matter is easily defined as "mass that cannot be detected by the current technology except that it affects the gravitation of galaxies". It is a detectable phenomenon. It is a measurable phenomenon. Not having a definition is the show-stopping smackdown you say it is not. You are not a conscious being, there is no such thing as consciousness. You believe in an uninteresting illusion that you cannot detect or mea…

That's not a real definition, that's a placeholder for effects downstream of the real thing that isn't yet defined, the very kind of working definition I was talking about to begin with. We still don’t know if it’s WIMPs, axions, modifications of gravity, or something else entirely. If we do figure that out its something like those, that would be the definition, and you would be able to tell the difference between that and the thing you are presently calling a definition.

And, thankfully, a future physicist would not dismiss that out of hand because they would appreciate it's utility as a working definition while research was ongoing.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#286

Post by bondarchuk »

antonvs wrote: post #271
bondarchuk wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are many things that set me apart from a game of Tetris! For example, I'm not made up of falling puzzle pieces, I enjoy drinking a cup of coffee every now and then, I was not invented by Alexey Pajitnov in 1985... The difference between an unconscious and a conscious thing could be a difference of this order, which does not at all amount to saying that consciousness does not exist.

We're not discussing whether you're identical to a game of Tetris. We're discussing a way of characterizing the nature of the conscious experience that you presumably have, that a game of Tetris doesn't. The way Nagel would put this is that "there is something it is like to be bondarchuk" - i.e., you have an experience of your existence that you can describe, because you're consciously aware of it. We can ask the que…

>We're discussing a way of characterizing the nature of the conscious experience that you presumably have, that a game of Tetris doesn't.

By talking of a different "nature" you already place the discussion on dualist grounds.

>you have an experience of your existence that you can describe, because you're consciously aware of it.

Certainly. But the way Nagel phrases it, "the experience" becomes akin to a "thing", and the absence of this "thing" in physical nature becomes an argument for the hypothesis that it's highly unlikely (maybe even impossible) to give a physicalist account of consciousness. That is what I disagree with.

>There is, presumably, nothing it is like to be a Tetris game, because a Tetris game has no consciousness.

What does saying this get you over just saying "a Tetris game has no consciousness"?

>This is a standard, widely accepted characterization in consciousness studies. Even if you object to it, you should at least understand what it's saying.

I understand what it is saying only insofar as it is simply another way to say "consciousness". But it is clearly taken to be more than just an alternative phrase we can use in lieu of the words "consciousness" or "subjective experience" to vaguely gesture in the direction of these ill-defined concepts we are all familiar with. I disagree that "there is something it is like to be bondarchuk" has greater descriptory power than "bondarchuk is conscious", therefore I don't think we should draw any conclusions regarding consciousness from this phrasing, especially the conclusion Nagel draws which is that consciousness is highly likely to be non-physical or at least that our current understanding of "the physical" is insufficient to ever approach the problem of consciousness (because we can never hope to give proper account of "the something that it is like to be bondarchuk").

>And if you do object to it, the onus is on you to provide a better description, which I note you've declined to do on multiple occasions now.

Not really; my rejection of Nagel's argument can stand on its own regardless of whether I can offer an alternative argument.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#287

Post by bondarchuk »

sethev wrote: post #247
bondarchuk wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would you phrase the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't? You just did! Why would we need to rephrase this and then attach special importance to that new sentence construction, when "the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't" is perfectly adequate?

That's just a label, though, it makes no attempt to describe the difference. You could say a conscious object has subjective experience, but that's open to the same observation that it implies there are two things (the subject and the experience).

I can only use a label to vaguely point at the concept of consciousness, and thus the disctinction between conscious and non-conscious objects. This is not infinitely precise, because noone really understands what's going on. What you call "describing the difference" would in fact be making further claims about consciousness. If one is not in the position of making further claims, it is better to not make any claims and stick to vague but commonly understood labels, instead of making claims implicitly by using complicated labels without further examination.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#288

Post by tooheavy »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #279
tooheavy wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could probably look at them differently if you tried. I wouldn't make a strong argument as I wasn't leaning strongly on a precise distinction in the moment, but to at least connote more maturity and activity and knowledge building in how, while why appears more conceptual, distant, more philosophical, idea-driven, than scientific. It may be viewed as similar to asking why there is something rather than nothing. W…

> It may be viewed as similar to asking why there is something rather than nothing. The answer to that is a description how something happened to exist. A possible difference is that "how" asks for a full description, while "why" asks for an abbreviated description only of the relevant part, the rest assumed to be irrelevant. Experience of time a good example, because it happens differently depending on nature of tim…

It's more appropriate to ask you 'why' you do what you do, than 'how'.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#289

Post by geye1234 »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #274
geye1234 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's what I just posted to the other person. Perhaps you can tell me where I'm going wrong, because it seems to me that physicalism is impossible. The UMD paper you link to elsewhere describes the central proposition of mind-brain identity physicalism as follows: > a pain or a thought is (is identical with) some state of the brain or central nervous system or > ‘pain’ doesn’t mean ‘such-and-such a stimulation of th…

5. If the reference exists, it doesn't disappear if you don't see it. You should see better. Reference has a corresponding material fact too.

Point 5 is sound, and it's actually impossible for a configuration of neural fibers to refer to something outside itself (and therefore, if physicalism is true and thought = neural fibers, it's impossible for a thought to refer to something outside itself, which would falsify point 2). Here's why:

The reference can't exist in the thought if "thought" and "a particular stimulation of neural fibers" refer to the same thing. There is no reference in the fibers. You can't "encode" a reference to something else in the physical brain (or any part of the body).

This is because a reference must in some way refer to its object (obviously). But a reference can only be referred to its object by something else. The word "tiger", or a picture of a tiger, refer to an actual tiger only when there is a mind to give them that meaning. But "a particular stimulation of neural fibers" cannot refer to any object, because there is nothing that can give it that meaning. A word or a picture or anything extra-mental can be given meaning by a mind, but when we are talking about the mind itself, this is impossible.

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