The Hard Problem of Gravity

[westprog]

I don't recognise my own neurons.

That's what I said further on. I don't think that the self-reference thing is particularly applicable at either end.

 

[westprog]

I don't understand what you mean. Could you clarify ?

We have direct access to exactly one persons consciousness - our own. We don't have direct access to the consciousness of other people - so we have to infer it.

 

[Belz...]

Can you give a precise definition for "processing information" which includes thermostats and not rocks?

Er... well a thermostat reads data and acts upon it. A rock doesn't do either. That's no definition but it's a distinction. And before you say that it's the same physics, guess what I'll answer.

I'm not sure what you mean about the claim of dishonesty. I don't believe that thermostats are conscious. I do believe that they share the same physical characteristics of rocks.

Do you believe that humans share those same characteristics, as well ? If so, why bother saying it ?

I can define consciousness as meaning "purple cushion", but it wouldn't be helpful in any way.

But the definition given here IS useful, because it allows us to observe behaviour and replicate it. How is that not useful ? Your "definition", or lack thereof, of consciousness helps us not one bit.

Describing consciousness as self-referential information processing is not a definition, it's a claim. It's also a claim that lacks evidence.

Not, it isn't. You said yourself that it was based on behavior that we could infer consciousness.

 

[Belz...]

Until you can give a precise definition for "information processing", then you will have to accept that rocks process information every bit as much as thermostats.

How does a rock process information ?

 

[Belz...]

Even if the nerve impulse created by the heat is considered to be part of the conscious experience, it does not result in an experience until the brain patterns appear.

So says you. You are still equating "brain" with "person", but I think "person" is all of you, not just part of you. You artificially exclude all the non-brain parts of you from "experience for no reason". Do you think that the nerves that sent the information to your brain aren't part of the experience ?

Nor does it make it false.

I knew you were going to say that. It's very indicative that you didn't understand what I said when you just knee-jerk a response like this.

 

[westprog]

Now can we have some indication of the objective physical description that does not apply to rocks and thermostats but does apply to brains?

Well, from the objective viewpoint of the Robots from Yarg observing us from afar, human beings are the only things in the universe that assert consciousness.

From a subjective point of view, I can experience my own consciousness.

That's it, really. There is no objective test for consciousness. If there were, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

 

[Belz...]

We have direct access to exactly one persons consciousness - our own. We don't have direct access to the consciousness of other people - so we have to infer it.

I don't think that's quite correct. Mercutio pointed out that your very ability to talk about what you experience is based on what you observe in others, not the other way around.

 

[lupus_in_fabula]

We have direct access to exactly one persons consciousness - our own. We don't have direct access to the consciousness of other people - so we have to infer it.

From a 3rd PP it can be said that you are also only inferring your own consciousness.

 

[westprog]

As to why anything is experienced at all? I think that has a simple, trivial explanation -- it's a way of providing value. Think about what it is when we speak of an 'experience'. What we mean is that the information being processed is accompanied by some form of value, not simply pain and pleasure but nuanced feeling that provides 'meaning' along with the percept. That is essentially what 'meaning' means -- that something has value in some sense, that it resonates with us.

That is the function of our 'feeling' systems -- emotion, mood, motivation. They run all the time in the background and give us a sense of what is valuable, what is not. We tend to recall those percepts that are associated with positive value (or highly negative value) and forget those that are associated with no particular value at all. You actually visually process stuff all the time that you place no value on, but you don't know it because that stuff never enters consciousness; this is the part of the world that is just on autopilot.

If we didn't have this system to value things, then we would never be able to order our lives -- there would be no sense in which we could decide to do one thing rather than another since nothing would matter.

We know that this is the function of these 'feeling' systems because the association of emotion, mood, motivation with thinking/planning can be disrupted. People with significant frontal lobe damage cannot order their lives because they cannot process value for future actions (they do not lack valuation in all aspects of life but only as it relates to future motor planning, so they are still conscious -- I am not using this example to show someon who is not conscious or robot-like).

That's a reasonable explanation as to why. I'm not sure it totally solves the problem of whether the whole thing would work without subjective experience, but it's quite plausible.

What it doesn't explain is the how, which is of course the big question of science in general.

 

[cyborg]

Well, from the objective viewpoint of the Robots from Yarg observing us from afar, human beings are the only things in the universe that assert consciousness.

10 PRINT "I assert consciousness! Damn you westprog!"

From a subjective point of view, I can experience my own consciousness.

There is no objective test for consciousness.

Can't have an objective test for something if you can't formalise what it is irrelevant of the thing in question.

 

[cyborg]

That's what I said further on. I don't think that the self-reference thing is particularly applicable at either end.

I don't need to know I have neurons to self-reference them. I can believe anything I want about the mechanisms of the brain it's still be self-reference.

Self-reference is NOT "the thing knowing the true nature of itself," self-reference is "the thing talking about itself," even if what it says is utter nonsense.

 

[AkuManiMani]

I don't recognise my own neurons.

Apparently, because the process of your consciousness is mediated/generated by the activity of your neurons and not identical to them.

 

[westprog]

Er... well a thermostat reads data and acts upon it. A rock doesn't do either. That's no definition but it's a distinction. And before you say that it's the same physics, guess what I'll answer.

Ah, I see. "Process information" means "read data and act on it". So let's take another step through the thesaurus and define "read data". Remember, the thermostat reads data, and the rock doesn't.

 

[AkuManiMani]

Ah, I see. "Process information" means "read data and act on it". So let's take another step through the thesaurus and define "read data". Remember, the thermostat reads data, and the rock doesn't.

Meh... It seems the big problem here is that the semantic and ontological framework a lot of people are operating from in this discussion are a shambles. >_<

 

[rocketdodger]

I'm not quite sure it matters whether you call these "qualia" or "other reasoning", as behaviorally they amount to the same thing. So for now I'm going to call these qualia, though I'm very wary of the singular "quale".

To say that we "experience the quality of redness" doesn't mean anything.

To say that we "reason about reasoning about the color red" means something.

 

[Mercutio]

I don't mind toying with the concept that reasoning is stimulus-response - though I don't actually agree with it. It's simply that such stimulus response is so universal that we must accept that if it's reasoning, then the whole world is doing it. There's nothing going on in the thermostat that isn't going on in the rock. There's stimulus-response going on at every level. There are feedback systems.

It seems to me a first step to a physical theory that if the claim is that reasoning equates to stimulus-response, we have to be clear just what a stimulus-response system consists of. And if we look at the universe, at almost any scale, we have galaxies attracting one another, and electrons repelling one another, and everything in between.

And some of these systems exhibit different types of behavior than others--all stimulus response (actually, we have selection going on, too, but for the sake of this post I will go with S-R), none magical. So what is "conscious"? A fuzzily-defined (depending on verbal community) set of these behaviors. Ask a horse owner if her horse has a personality. Ask a dog owner if his dog is smart or dumb. We use "consciousness words" all the time with non-humans. Hell, we use consciousness words with non-living entities. My computer always chooses the worst possible time to crash. My car hates cold mornings. That front wheel on the shopping cart has a mind of its own.

The common factor is behavior. More clearly, it is behavior and ignorance. When we know the stimulus in the S-R relationship, we are likely to say that a behavior was automatic, and not conscious. When we are ignorant of the causes (the stimuli), we attribute the behaviors (responses) to the acting entity, whether human, animal, or machine. Unexpected results lead us to make more attributions of this sort--we may even blame the nail for bending when we hit it wrong, and last time I saw, nails have only a very primitive nervous system.

"Consciousness" arises from the language we use to attribute causation to our and others' behavior. And yes, I will even go so far as to claim the bits of consciousness we call simple "awareness" are amenable to the same analysis. There is a reason there is not "a set of neural actions" that corresponds to consciousness; the definition of consciousness (the use of the term) arose long before any understanding of neurons. There is no requirement that something have a brain for us to speak of it in consciousness terms. And so, no brain-centered definition will ever encompass all of what we mean when we speak of consciousness.

 

[AkuManiMani]

To say that we "experience the quality of redness" doesn't mean anything.

To say that we "reason about reasoning about the color red" means something.

I've been giving this issue a great deal of thought. From what I've been able to tell reasoning, is the processing of representations of 'things' while experience is the direct apprehension of a 'thing'. Quanta are the means of formally conveying descriptions of things and qualia are the direct experience of what quanta merely describe. In other words, quale and quantum are complementary aspects of reality.

 

[rocketdodger]

I suppose we come back to definitions again. How do you define the word "reasoning" to include what a thermostat does? As far as I can tell, a thermostat expands and contracts due to heat, as does a rock. Where does the "reasoning" come in? Does it leak in from the human being who made it?

As far as I can tell, there is no physical meaning for the term. But I remain to be convinced.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_reasoning

Reasoning is simply the process of deriving new facts using existing facts and rules of inference.

"Human" reasoning is a type of reasoning.

There are others: http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/Reasoning

 

[rocketdodger]

I've been giving this issue a great deal of thought. From what I've been able to tell reasoning, is the processing of representations of 'things' while experience is the direct apprehension of a 'thing'. Quanta are the means of formally conveying descriptions of things and qualia are the direct experience of what quanta merely describe. In other words, quale and quantum are complementary aspects of reality.

No.

You are using dualistic definitions and approaching the concept from an already dualistic standpoint.

Stick with "reasoning == generating new facts using existing facts and rules of inference," and remember that your neural networks are going to reason whether you realize it or not.

Now, tell me if you think there can be "direct apprehension" without reasoning. Is it possible to apprehend something without generating any new facts? No, because at the very least the apprehension constitutes a new fact.

 

[westprog]

10 PRINT "I assert consciousness! Damn you westprog!"

If those Robots from Yarg ever see that program they might not be able to tell the difference. When they take over the planet they might give BASIC programs equal rights.

From a subjective point of view, I can experience my own consciousness.



Can't have an objective test for something if you can't formalise what it is irrelevant of the thing in question.

Yes, that's probably the case. Now we'll see how the discussion about "process information"/"read data" progresses.