81–90 of 159 posts
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How will you know the difference unless you are a bat? You cannot.
I can. You don't have access to my subjective experience to be able to claim I don't.
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> This gestalt isn't just for biological organisms, but any system for which its decision making engages with representations of the external environment unified with a self-representation to form a coherent representation of a persistent entity engaged with an external world. This doesn't seem quite right, or at least underspecified. We can talk about this stuff concretely these days, at least in the context of digi…
> It seems difficult to claim that the computational process that implements this has any more or less of a gestalt then one multiplying two matrices together. So it's not just the existence of certain representations or computational loops that seems to lead to possessing a gestalt. I've thought a lot about what is lacking in modern VLMs that preclude consciousness. In my view the difference is that their talk of "s…
I think we have a pretty good explanation today - it's like embeddings from AI models. Experience is both content and reference, we represent new experience in relation to old experience. That makes representation personal, being made of one's own past experience. This does not explain away pure feeling, but explains how we make discriminations of similarity and difference between our experiences, the contents of qua…
You nailed it. Asking the question is asking to define from the outside what is an inner recursive process. The question is a simple confusion of domains. This is Humbert Maturana’s main point in Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980, now reissued). Recommend the whole book, as does Terry Winograd. The most intense part is the appendix specifically about the nervous system. Nagel and others knew no neuroscience and are clu…
What it's like - the gestalt of a bat (or other thing) as it engages its sensing-deciding-reacting loop. This gestalt isn't just for biological organisms, but any system for which its decision making engages with representations of the external environment unified with a self-representation to form a coherent representation of a persistent entity engaged with an external world. Why do such systems need this gestalt?…
Why would movement towards a goal be incoherent if it happened "in the dark"? Our brains perform many critical functions "in the dark" (and do so coherently) which do not rise to the level of consciousness.
One of the seminal papers of the 20th century. And like any truly good philosophy paper the argument is very clear and a real head-scratcher.
I've read this paper several times, over the years, and I've never understood why its considered such a landmark. I think it could be losslessly compressed to one paragraph of modest length.
What it's like - the gestalt of a bat (or other thing) as it engages its sensing-deciding-reacting loop. This gestalt isn't just for biological organisms, but any system for which its decision making engages with representations of the external environment unified with a self-representation to form a coherent representation of a persistent entity engaged with an external world. Why do such systems need this gestalt?…
I don't think that it is appropriate to use "gestalt" here. The word used in the field is "qualia", it has a precise meaning and is precisely what Nagel was writing about. Gestalt, to my understanding, is quite different, even when used in english psychology writing.
What is it like to feel ill? What is it like to eat vanilla ice cream? What is it like to fall in love? What is it like to solve a math problem for the first time? What is it like to wonder what something is like?
I know what it's like to be a bat. I don't have anqualia, the inability to imaginatively summon what an experience is like. In other words, I have the ability to imagine what an experience is like. Do others not have this?
Which is why we can probably find loads of examples /and/ counter-examples of "consciousness" throughout the animal kingdom.
We already know that our left and right brain hemispheres are quite different and play significant roles in this process. It then seems that we are not, from first principles, even capable of observing all of the individual elements that make up our "minds."
It's sort of like pornography. I can't define it. I just know it when I see it.