This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me.
Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
61–70 of 191 posts
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#62This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me. We could similarly write articles about all the qualities and properties of phlogiston, and we'd have learned just as much. What thing are we actually trying to explain here? What is the extensive meaning of the word "consciousness"? How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses con…
Have you heard it said that you can never know if another being is really conscious, and yet you can know that you are? Presumably you disagree? This is what, in essence, it means to be a subjective fact rather than an objective one, and why it's hard to pin it down as a "thing."
While it is a curious question about why my consciousness exists instead of not existing (maybe not in the same way as my brain exists), I find it is worth pursuing as much as a question "Why anything exists at all?"
Other questions about human consciousness can be formulated in terms of observables.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#63Like defining "athletic" or "smart" or even "stress" or "eating" - all go deeper than we think.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. the universe isn't math. The universe is matter. Math is a part of the universe. Therefore math is simply material. Nothing more, nothing less.
Math isn't anything but matter. Math is just another thought construct. A powerful thought construct, but a thought construct nonetheless. As a thought construct it too is material. The electronic impulses on you computer are no different than the ones in your brain. So yes. Math is also a material manifestation. Life is a material manifestation. Thought is a material manifestation. The problem is with you trying to…
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Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#65I wonder what consciousness would be like if our brains had the size of our solar system. Would we be conscious if our neurons took on the order of minutes to communicate with each other?
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#66This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me. We could similarly write articles about all the qualities and properties of phlogiston, and we'd have learned just as much. What thing are we actually trying to explain here? What is the extensive meaning of the word "consciousness"? How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses con…
To me consciousness is the ability to re-engineer our existing models of the world based on new incoming data. Sentience is the ability to do this in the abstract.
I realize that this just shifts the discussion to "What, exactly is 'our existing models of the world'?", but I think that question can have much more traction, especially to an engineer, than the current state of the language over on the philosophy side.
It also implies that there is a spectrum: the complexity of the model(s), the speed at which we can re-engineer them, our ability to hold multiple models in mind at once, and the degree of abstract indirection we're able to employ are all variable. I'd suggest that future work with questions such as "What defines a sentient being?" proceed along those lines, and using these definitions would be much more valuable than trying to stratify consciousnesses into various semantic tiers that still remain quite abstract.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#67My 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.
It's other way around. The existence of our egos makes the claim that we are more than dirt true.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#68This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me. We could similarly write articles about all the qualities and properties of phlogiston, and we'd have learned just as much. What thing are we actually trying to explain here? What is the extensive meaning of the word "consciousness"? How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses con…
Have you heard it said that you can never know if another being is really conscious, and yet you can know that you are? Presumably you disagree? This is what, in essence, it means to be a subjective fact rather than an objective one, and why it's hard to pin it down as a "thing."
But that's the problem with the philosophy of mind. They have all these subjective notions like consciousness, self-consciousness, analytic and synthetic I, the accompanying such-and-such feeling (e.g. I-feeling), self-awareness, awareness, attention, qualia, qualitative experience vs. content of qualitative experience vs. phenomenal experience vs. sense data vs. innr experience, cognition, embodied cognition, stream of consciousness, and so forth. Each of them comes with many fine-grained additional distinctions, but they are all subjective and cannot be measured easily and every author promotes his own vocabulary.
Then they wonder why they can't agree on a common theory, quibble endlessly about the adequacy of their various subjective definitions, and most if not all of their arguments are based on 'intuition-pumping'.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#69The issue presented at the beginning of the article is (as most philosophical issues are) one of semantics. Philosophers as I understand it use "consciousness" as the quality shared by things that are able to have experiences. A rock gets wet by the rain, but humans "feel" wet when it rains. A bat might not self-reflect but it feels /something/ when it uses echo-location. On the other hand, conciseness in our everyda…
Listening to Marvin Minsky on Closer To Truth on Youtube was a revelation for me. As in many philosophical debates, before you even start to begin to think about and communicate about a subject you have to get your terminology clear and accurate.
Conciseness is a suitcase term that contains within it a mass of different mental processes. It's just not useful to talk about it much in general, except that it's so general a term which frankly we just don't understand yet. If we did, we'd at least have a general idea of how to design one and we don't. Rather than try and make any more pronouncements about this, I'll just refer to what he has to say on the subject as he does a much better job than I ever could.
This is a good primer on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r70jzcmMxU&list=PLFJr3pJl27...
Here's a great explanation of this in the form of an apparently simple example scenario and the very many different faculties of the brain that in entails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPeVMDYodN8&list=PLFJr3pJl27...
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. I don't believe we can get to the root of this "hard problem" by first trying to agree on a definition of the word before we can say anything about it. We will also need to admit the possibility that the question "are we conscious?" may be as vacuous at the end as "is Pluto a planet?".
Being unable to agree on a definition for consciousness is a huge problem. I think this happens because consciousness is being studied at a too abstract (high) level. Instead, we should switch to the low level dual of this problem - game theory and reinforcement learning. Fortunately, at this level definitions are exact and concrete - agent, environment, goal, actions, values. At this level we can understand and simu…
>> Instead, we should switch to the low level dual of this problem - game theory and reinforcement learning
This sounds a bit naive.