91–100 of 216 posts
Really? Most people I know would throw self-awareness into the mix. When you make such a bad start, the rest of your article isn't worth reading.
Consciousness is a suitcase word, which makes it challenging to debate. From [1]: "In The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky discusses suitcase words—words that contain a variety of meanings packed into them, such as conscience, emotions, consciousness, experience, thinking, morality, right, and wrong. "The word ‘consciousness’ is used to describe a wide range of activities, such as “how we reason and make decisions, how…
This implies the naive premise that consciousness the thing is not a suitcase itself (and thus, that an umbrella world is unsuitable to name it).
So, it basically presupposes the reductionism that it's supposed to prove.
Consciousness is a suitcase word, which makes it challenging to debate. From [1]: "In The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky discusses suitcase words—words that contain a variety of meanings packed into them, such as conscience, emotions, consciousness, experience, thinking, morality, right, and wrong. "The word ‘consciousness’ is used to describe a wide range of activities, such as “how we reason and make decisions, how…
This sounds similar to thought-terminating cliche .
"Human conscious experience is wholly a matter of physical goings-on in the body and in particular the brain." Is there any proof of this? The while article seems to hinge on this assumption and then go on from there. We can't see or measure consciousness (brain activity yes, consciousness no). We only experience it. The article makes far to many naive assumptions without any proof.
All the proof you need is the existence of psychoactive chemicals, the effectiveness of transcranial magnetic stimulation, evidence from fMRI studies, and the selective personality alterations that occur in cases of localized brain damage.
One could argue that consciousness is a field phenomena and that our (gross) material brain is a device that interacts with this field. Modify the device and you modify the local effect.
That's sidestepping the issue. Of course we know what consciousness is in this sense.
What we don't know, and what we actually mean when we say we don't know what consciousness is, is what causes it and how it emerges.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is, though, that even if "physics" did have an answer to this, it's not a given that we would understand it. Our incapability to wrap our head around reductionist explanations of qualia does not entail that they are inaccurate, only that they fail to satisfy us. I mean, let me put it this way: what do you expect from an answer? For example, in order to understand why atoms moving in certain ways produce a t…
What I expect from an answer to the hard problem of consciousness is a basic high level explanation for how the moving of atoms in certain ways can actually give rise to qualia. You seem to be starting with the presumption that it does. But I'm not convinced that the moving of atoms alone can possibly give rise to qualia, because our knowledge so far about how atoms move seems completely different from our experience…
I don't think it does per se. In a world where computers didn't exist you would probably not be able to say whether a MacBook Pro is a thing that could possibly exist or not just from fundamental knowledge of physics. If I gave you the most low-level possible description of physics, it'd probably take you some time to figure out whether it supports solid macroscopic objects. If I just give you the rules to the Game of Life cellular automaton, it's far from obvious that it supports replicators, let alone that it's Turing complete.
Most of these things are only obvious in hindsight, and the understanding is made easier by the lack of cognitive dissonance: we know we made them using certain principles, so of course it works.
> That is simply not true for qualia.
I don't know about that. My own high level knowledge of physics does provide me with sufficient assurance and understanding of how qualia happens. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I do feel like I understand it: what defines or distinguishes, say, my qualia of red, is how it primes my brain into thinking about red things, how it changes my mood, how it behaves relative to every other concept, which makes it about as complex as my entire brain would be. I also imagine that there is a continuum of "qualia" such that basically any physical system has some, but they are so trivial we don't make the connection.
Again, that could be nonsense, but it makes perfect sense to me -- about as much as a MacBook does. The hard problem that you see flat out does not exist to me, and presumably the reason is that we are satisfied by different explanations.
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Feedback loop is a very abstract concept and I honestly do not see any connection to consciousness.
Feedback loops aren't that abstract. There are many examples in the physical world, especially in the brain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback#Applications
If consciousness is just a complicated computation, which seems the simplest explanation, then it can be analogous to the attitude toward "old computer science beliefs". As a side issue, someday much like people make furniture using 300 year old technology there will be craftsman making programs using no algorithm discovered (learned? found? created?) post 1970. Its a good thing we invented computers in recorded hist…
The problem with claiming that consciousness is just a complicated computation is not merely that we simply haven't advanced our study enough to understand it. The problem is that what we know so far about the nature of computation seems to directly contradict and falsify the notion that consciousness is just computation. To put it simply: our knowledge of computational complexity, algorithms, and general problem sol…
This only holds if you presume those operations are being performed in the same way as a computer, rather than the incredibly imprecise rule-of-thumb heuristics they actually use.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Saying that conciousness isn't real because it's an emergent phenomenon of non-conscious processes is like saying that turbulence isn't real, because it's an emergent property of non-fluid particles. I mean sure, at the level of atoms, it's just particles interacting locally, but that doesn't mean that at certain scales, turbulence isn't a better way of looking at their group behavior.
Technically though describing consciousness as emergent property of neural functioning is a conjecture, though a very credible one. Unlike turbulence, I only have one case where I have ever seen this consciousness which I am trying to explain as an epiphenomenon, namely my own. All others consciousness (if they even exist which I can't prove directly) are not remotely observed in the same way, they are self reported…