51–60 of 82 posts
See, if a neuroscientist went and had an opinion on sub-atomic physics, people would say "that's nice" and pat them on the head in a patronizing way. But the problem is general. A scientist outside their field is a layman .
I have no evidence or proof, but personally, I believe that the whole consciousness thing is an illusion. There's certain level of abstraction required for a bran as advanced as human's, but in the end, it's just matter following the laws of physics, same as everything else.
I agree with you. It certainly is following laws of physics (known and unknown) because everything is. It is a useful abstraction for a complicated system. However, it doesn't make it any less interesting for me.
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>> following the laws of physics The question is, which laws of physics, and are the interaction between those laws of physics, interactions we already know, or new ones we have not discovered yet? Otherwise we might as well say consciousness follows the will of God.
In terms of brain, it seems that the classical physics and electromechanics is quite enough — we don't really need to invoke quantum physics to explain the basic neurons (except as by proxy with all chemical reactions), and current progress with neural networks shows that these structures can indeed result in extremely complicated behaviour.
In my experience all those "consciousness is otherworldly magic" people are at least heavily influenced (1) by the religious interpretation of the "magical uniqueness" of the humans compared to the all other living beings. Wishful thinking. Then comes the "free will" and other also "magical" thinking. Especially easy to sell in the US (2) And we aren't made of anything other than what all the animals are made of, and…
Exactly. Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sense... ).
Why do some digger wasps only count their own contribution to a nest ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245965580_Do_Digger... ), and why do some perform redundant nest-checking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphex#Uses_in_philosophy )?
For the same reason we don't calculate exact solutions to large travelling salesman problems; it's much more economical and evolutionarily advantageous to use heuristics, even if they have quirky side-effects and edge-cases.
On a personal note I have never been very impressed with arguments over the importance of consciousness. I have had too many experiences in life where consciousness is grey to feel it is anything other than a just-so story of what happened.
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I can't tell whether you are being sarcastic or not. Machine learning has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness. From where people get that connection?
Nothing? How do you mean that? Sure, it's not in the vicinity, e.g. machine learning has more to do with statistics and AI but nothing? I'm surprised by that statement, maybe I'm taking it too literal perhaps. I mean, the way neural nets behave in computer vision implies some form of attention. On some benchmarks neurons and deep learning have almost the same biological output (poorly phrased, was from a talk that NG…
This reminds me rather of Roger Penrose's foray into consciousness in The Emperor's New Mind. If you wade your way through it, you'll find the tl;dr is 'consciousness must be a quantum thing because quantum things are mysterious and so is consciousness- oh and look at those microtubules in those neurons - you might get quantum effects in there.' Rather disappointing for such a brilliant man.
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In terms of brain, it seems that the classical physics and electromechanics is quite enough — we don't really need to invoke quantum physics to explain the basic neurons (except as by proxy with all chemical reactions), and current progress with neural networks shows that these structures can indeed result in extremely complicated behaviour.
Consciousness must exploit growing entropy somehow - otherwise we'd be completely deterministic and consciousness (as an orthogonal consequence of free will) could not exist.
Why? The engineering definition of deterministic implies predictable outcomes given a known internal state. Are you suggesting that we're already at the level where we can accurately and fully measure a human brain's internal state?
However, I think there are a lot less fuzzy questions that are strongly connected with consciousness that I'm hoping can be find answers for - and that could shed some more light on what consciousness is and what it isn't. Such as:
- what are memories? Could we build some machine to extract or even manipulate them? Is it possible to compare memories of different people?
- what are dreams?
- different parts of our body are affected differently by our consciousness: Some things we can control directly, like hands, feet, speech, etc; some processes we cannot control but we do experience them, such as hunger or sleep; and some we neither control nor experience such as digestion, homeostasis etc, even though they are also regulated by the brain. Even more couriously, many of those autonomous processes are greatly affected by conscious thoughts even though we don't experience them as directly controllable - such as fear and arousal. Inversely, conscious actions often have autonomous "sub routines", such as walking. So what what mechanism in the brain governs which processes are conscious and which are not?
- Suppose we could actually do brain transplants. Assume we put an adult human brain in a jar and connect it with some kind of VR. Could the brain learn to control a non-human body such as a spider? How about a human body with different proportions?
Personal opinion: I can imagine that the reason of how we experience consciousness might be unsolvable, much as the question how the color blue feels is hard to answer objectively. However, I think there are a lot less fuzzy questions that are strongly connected with consciousness that I'm hoping can be find answers for - and that could shed some more light on what consciousness is and what it isn't. Such as: - what…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousnes...