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Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

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Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#91

Post by arunix »

visarga wrote: post #71
mannykannot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. I am not convinced - I suspect that there isn't anything to the experience of being like a worm; that the very question presupposes self-awareness of some sort. I suspect the hard problem of consciousness might lie in the self-referentiality of self-aware consciousness (though alternatively or in addition, it might be on account of its workings b…

> I suspect that there isn't anything to the experience of being like a worm Even a worm has goals to attain - food and reproduction. In order to attain those goals, it needs to have perceptions and to rank those by the estimated return value. That is what it's like to be a worm.

Such goal attainment does not require consciousness. Even in our species, functions like breathing and blood circulation are autonomous, and they continue even in our sleep when consciousness is absent.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#92

Post by mannykannot »

visarga wrote: post #81
bladecatcher wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Instead, we should switch to the low level dual of this problem - game theory and reinforcement learning This sounds a bit naive.

Well, defining the "hard problem" hasn't gotten us any closer to understanding consciousness in the last 22 years. The hard problem just moves consciousness problem into an unfruitful direction. It's time for more practical approaches.

I think attempts to rule out physicalism with arguments about qualia and such have gotten us nowhere, and I have no problem with studying game theory and experimenting with reinforcement learning, but the idea that these alone will fully explain consciousness is conjecture at this point - a conjecture that I, personally, am not ready to make.

Quite a few people on either side of the physicalism - dualism debate seem to be more keen on declaring victory and cutting off further discussion than they are in getting to the bottom of the issue.

BTW, on Searle's 'Chinese Room' argument, I have always been in the 'the system as a whole would be conscious' camp.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#93

Post by mrow84 »

breckinloggins wrote: post #5

This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bica…

> Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" is perhaps the most egregious offender.

Can you expand on this? I am reading this book at the moment, but I don't quite follow your criticism. He doesn't seem to me to be talking about phenomena related to "consciousness of consciousness", but rather about how consciousness arises as a functional process, and as a consequence of our linguistic heritage (though I haven't finished the book yet, and I find it all quite confusing, so I'm not really sure).

For reference, I found the entry for "Consciousness, defined" in the index, and the paragraph on the referenced page that most closely corresponds to a definition seems to be this:

> Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#94

Post by otakucode »

breckinloggins wrote: post #5

This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bica…

It seems to me that if you extend 'conscious' to cover things outside a persons attention, you've made the word 'conscious' meaningless. If I take away all of the things that you claim to be 'conscious' of but not actively aware of, would you be comfortable with me saying you were no longer conscious? Sure you actively thinking about things, but you don't have that sensation of the bottom of your big toe in your shoe somewhere in the background, therefore you must be less than conscious. The idea of meta-consciousness I think still has plenty of merit, but extending 'conscious' to everything you are unaware of is useless and also can never stop. Why not include the things that are stimulating your nerves as well as the stimulation of the nerves itself? Why not extend it out to blanket the whole of the universe?

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#95

Post by otakucode »

goatlover wrote: post #55
sriku wrote: post #33

Earlier 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?".

Pluto is a taxonomy problem. Consciousness is reconciling how we explain the world (science & objectivity) versus how we experience the world (subjectivity). Consider that the world looks colored, is full of sounds, smells, tastes and feels. But the scientific explanation leaves all that out. The scientific world is the ghostly world of equations, theories and data. It's Plato's cave inverted.

I have long been of the opinion that consciousness is not a 'thing' or 'state' so much as property. I think Douglas Hofstadtler gets closest to my thinking on the matter in his book 'I Am A Strange Loop'. Just as a single molecule cannot have a temperature, since temperature is a property of multitudes of molecules, any degree of looking at the components will not elucidate their overall interactions and at the end you will simply have to admit 'this is what we call it when that happens' rather than identifying a binary test that can be weighed with complete objectivity.

I also think a great deal of the things the scientific explanations omit are things which are expressely stated as the things science does not pursue. I mean that science is inherently dedicated to finding the things which are true regardless of the personal experience of the observer and which would be true without a human observer. So when you want to look at the human observer itself, and at something which is intimately and inextricably linked to the exact biological and historical state of a human animal... you've just left the field. Not that it makes the study any 'less', you just need different tools and there are different pitfalls. We still have all the same cognitive flaws due to our own brain structure, so we do have to try to be rigorous about it.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#96

Post by CuriouslyC »

mrow84 wrote: post #93
breckinloggins wrote: post #5

This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bica…

> Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" is perhaps the most egregious offender. Can you expand on this? I am reading this book at the moment, but I don't quite follow your criticism. He doesn't seem to me to be talking about phenomena related to "consciousness of consciousness", but rather about how consciousness arises as a functional process, and as a consequence of our lingu…

Note the distinction between:

1. consciousness as "awareness" or "experiencing existence" 2. consciousness as "mind" or what we experience that doesn't seem to correspond to the outside world.

The former is certainly not a result of language, and that is what is referred to as consciousness in Buddhist/Hindu philosophy. The latter is definitely influenced by language and seems to be what many modern scientists are referring to when they talk about consciousness. The conflation of the two definitions does a great disservice to understanding what consciousness "is".

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#97

Post by mannykannot »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #68
monktastic1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, strea…

The topics you mention are mostly arguments against physicalism, rather than being for something. There seems to be a lot more effort expended (on both sides of the physicalism-dualism divide) in trying to disprove the other side, rather than on explaining consciousness, though perhaps that's just what the general-interest coverage focuses on.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#98

Post by CuriouslyC »

otakucode wrote: post #95
goatlover wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pluto is a taxonomy problem. Consciousness is reconciling how we explain the world (science & objectivity) versus how we experience the world (subjectivity). Consider that the world looks colored, is full of sounds, smells, tastes and feels. But the scientific explanation leaves all that out. The scientific world is the ghostly world of equations, theories and data. It's Plato's cave inverted.

I have long been of the opinion that consciousness is not a 'thing' or 'state' so much as property. I think Douglas Hofstadtler gets closest to my thinking on the matter in his book 'I Am A Strange Loop'. Just as a single molecule cannot have a temperature, since temperature is a property of multitudes of molecules, any degree of looking at the components will not elucidate their overall interactions and at the end y…

Temperature is the aggregate of the energy of many individual particles, modulated by the tendency of those particles to transmit that energy. Thus a single molecule does have a temperature in a sense, you just need an incredibly sensitive detector to register it. Temperature is a fully reducible property.

Consider the possibility that consciousness isn't a distinctly human phenomenon, as there is no reason to believe that is the case. In fact, there is no logical reason why it would even be a distinctly biological phenomenon. It appears to me that consciousness isn't so much out of the purview of science as it is intractable to its methods, and thus unattractive as an area of study despite its fundamental character.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#99

Post by slfnflctd »

rullelito wrote: post #89
creo wrote: post #73

Lets challenge this. What if baby can be born alive without having consciousness? It's not impossible since we can't detect consciousness. Maybe it occurs in some babies born with brain development problems, maybe not. Besides title says "Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think". Sounds clicky-baity and it assumes that reader is dumb.

There's nothing saying a fully functional human must have consciousness. It could just be that some people are machines acting on biologically coded rules, and that they don't have an inner experience of their self.

It seems to me, though, that this would eventually come up in conversation. Much of human discourse is centered around the concept of individuals' inner experiences.

The thought that someone who seems on the outside very similar to me could be completely missing the "inner experience of self" that I (think I) have certainly feels wrong-- it's deeply uncomfortable and rather frightening. Furthermore, espousing such an idea opens the door to those who would attempt to use it to discriminate (likely by applying existing bias with a flimsy illusion of accuracy).

This one doesn't have much use to me beyond tangential thought experiments. It can be cited to justify terrible things in the hands of bigots, and I suspect it's fairly easily invalidated for all practical purposes.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#100

Post by CuriouslyC »

arunix wrote: post #91
visarga wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect that there isn't anything to the experience of being like a worm Even a worm has goals to attain - food and reproduction. In order to attain those goals, it needs to have perceptions and to rank those by the estimated return value. That is what it's like to be a worm.

Such goal attainment does not require consciousness. Even in our species, functions like breathing and blood circulation are autonomous, and they continue even in our sleep when consciousness is absent.

The fact that you have no memory of time while you are asleep does not prove that consciousness is absent.

The fact that your brain's executive network are unaware of the workings of "autonomous" activities does not indicate that those activities lack consciousness. You are also unaware of my consciousness but I assure you that it exists.

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