The Hard Problem of Gravity

AkuManiMani said:
Apparently, because the process of your consciousness is mediated/generated by the activity of your neurons and not identical to them.
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That doesn't make any sense at all.

A self-refering system does not need to know how it self-refers to self-refer.
 
westprog said:
That's it, really. There is no objective test for consciousness. If there were, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
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Yet you are confident that other humans are conscious.

Let's just get to the bottom of this once and for all, westprog.

Answer this question please: If some uber-scientist manufactured, cell by cell, using extremely advanced technology and without following an existing template (I.E. the brain created is original, not a copy), a complete adult human, such that upon examination by you it was found to be indistinguishable from a natural born and grown up adult human in both external and internal behavior and appearance, would you consider it to be conscious?
 
westprog said:
How does a thermostat "derive new facts" in a sense that the rock does not?
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A rock sits there and gets hot or cold.

A thermostat gets hot or cold, and then derives the fact "it is hot enough to turn on the AC" or "it is cold enough to turn on the heat," -- facts a rock never derives because there is no physical correlate in a rock to "hot enough for AC" or "cold enough for heat."

Don't forget, a thermostat is a device that regulates temperature, not just the simple material that expands when it is heated. They use a material that expands when heated to encode external temperature information in a way they can use. There is a physical correlate to each fact it derives.

Rocks don't have those correlates, so they don't derive those facts. A thermostat could use a rock instead of a more thermally expansive material -- it would be a lousy thermostat but it would still reason. A rock can't use a thermostat in the opposite way, though.
 
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rocketdodger said:
A rock sits there and gets hot or cold.

A thermostat gets hot or cold, and then derives the fact "it is hot enough to turn on the AC" or "it is cold enough to turn on the heat," -- facts a rock never derives because there is no physical correlate in a rock to "hot enough for AC" or "cold enough for heat."

Don't forget, a thermostat is a device that regulates temperature, not just the simple material that expands when it is heated. They use a material that expands when heated to encode external temperature information in a way they can use. There is a physical correlate to each fact it derives.

Rocks don't have those correlates, so they don't derive those facts. A thermostat could use a rock instead of a more thermally expansive material -- it would be a lousy thermostat but it would still reason. A rock can't use a thermostat in the opposite way, though.
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If we look at what the thermostat and the rock actually do we see that they take in information from the environment and pass on information to the environment in a vast number of ways. Every air molecule in contact with the rock exchanges information. There's nothing special about the AC. The information exchanged with a microbe on the surface of the rock or the thermostat is just as significant.

I'm not sure what information in this sense has in common with reasoning in the human sense.
 
rocketdodger said:
Yet you are confident that other humans are conscious.

Let's just get to the bottom of this once and for all, westprog.

Answer this question please: If some uber-scientist manufactured, cell by cell, using extremely advanced technology and without following an existing template (I.E. the brain created is original, not a copy), a complete adult human, such that upon examination by you it was found to be indistinguishable from a natural born and grown up adult human in both external and internal behavior and appearance, would you consider it to be conscious?
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I probably would think it was probably conscious. It's not a matter of certainty. It's a matter of how probable. The only thing I'm one hundred percent certain of is my own momentary sense of consciousness. I don't trust my memory of five seconds ago for sure.
 
westprog said:
Ah, I see. "Process information" means "read data and act on it".
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Well, that's the way I understand it. One could argue that "process information" is what happens between reading the data and acting on it, though from a programming standpoint that's not the bulk of the process.

So let's take another step through the thesaurus and define "read data". Remember, the thermostat reads data, and the rock doesn't.
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Indeed. The thermostat reads the temperature.
 
westprog said:
If we look at what the thermostat and the rock actually do we see that they take in information from the environment and pass on information to the environment in a vast number of ways. Every air molecule in contact with the rock exchanges information. There's nothing special about the AC. The information exchanged with a microbe on the surface of the rock or the thermostat is just as significant.

I'm not sure what information in this sense has in common with reasoning in the human sense.
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That's because you're still seeing human reasoning in dualistic ways, probably without realizing it.
 
Belz... said:
That's because you're still seeing human reasoning in dualistic ways, probably without realizing it.
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I can see how someone would class what goes on in a brain, a thermostat and a rock as being the same thing. But classifying a human and a thermostat as doing something different to a rock makes no sense to me at all.
 
westprog said:
If we look at what the thermostat and the rock actually do we see that they take in information from the environment and pass on information to the environment in a vast number of ways. Every air molecule in contact with the rock exchanges information.
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Yep.

westprog said:
There's nothing special about the AC. The information exchanged with a microbe on the surface of the rock or the thermostat is just as significant.
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Ahh, see, this is where you go completely wrong.

There is something extremely special about the AC -- in the thermostat there is a physical correlate of the facts "the AC should be turned on" and "the AC should not be turned on."

There is no such physical correlate in microbes at the surface of the rock. In other words, microbes don't give a darn about the AC in your house. Your thermostats do.

Conversely, there is no physical correlate to the fact "this rock has a satisfactory temperature for feeding" in a thermostat. In a microbe there is.

westprog said:
I'm not sure what information in this sense has in common with reasoning in the human sense.
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Because you think all information processing is equal -- it isn't.

All information is equal. The processing is vastly different from case to case.
 
rocketdodger said:
To say that we "experience the quality of redness" doesn't mean anything.
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Sure it does.

The very notion of "red objects" is an equivalence class of objects based on whether or not said objects influence us in such a way that we have a particular sort of percept about it. The "quality of redness" is simply another term for the "particular sort of percept" that we associate with the word red. The fact that this is authoritative, has a form of consistency across normal sighted people that applies to completely novel situations ("completely novel" here meaning outside the frame of normal experience versus mere "novel" which merely refers to something else within this frame; i.e., optical illusions, as opposed to "yet another flower"), correlates to the very mechanisms we have for color vision (L-M), etc, should be major clues that this particular form of consistency by which we are able to tie the label "red" to, in order to form an equivalence class of "red objects", is perceptual in nature and has to do with the common way our minds are influenced by physical phenomenon (as a direct result of common ways that our brains work). Furthermore, we can apply this sort of consistency of percepts... this "quality of redness", to things other than objects (such as entire scenes, lasers shining through smoke, etc).

As such, this is an experience (perceptual in nature), with an authoritative and unique form of consistency ("quality"), associated with redness in itself. I.e., it is "experience" of the "quality of redness".

Makes perfect sense to me.
To say that we "reason about reasoning about the color red" means something.
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I'm not convinced this is different than the former phrasings, unless you're ignoring particular aspects of the above (which we could include and still phrase this way).
 
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westprog said:
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.
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Belz... said:
How does a rock process information ?
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If we look at a simple bimetallic strip thermostat... one piece of metal expands disproportionately to the piece to which it is joined, causing the pair to bend and connect or disconnect and electrical circuit which switches on or off a heating system.

So, if we take the strip out and just let it bend without switching anything on or off...is it still conscious?

Nick
 
westprog said:
I can see how someone would class what goes on in a brain, a thermostat and a rock as being the same thing. But classifying a human and a thermostat as doing something different to a rock makes no sense to me at all.
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It's been said more than once in this thread. In fact you continue to disagree with the definition that makes humans and thermostats do things differently than rocks. So if you disagree with it you probably can make sense of it, after all.

I am right now.
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No, you're not. You'd like to think so.
 
Nick227 said:
If we look at a simple bimetallic strip thermostat... one piece of metal expands disproportionately to the piece to which it is joined, causing the pair to bend and connect or disconnect and electrical circuit which switches on or off a heating system.

So, if we take the strip out and just let it bend without switching anything on or off...is it still conscious?
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Does it still do information processing ?

If I take out part of your information-processing system, are YOU still conscious ?
 
rocketdodger said:
A rock sits there and gets hot or cold.

A thermostat gets hot or cold, and then derives the fact "it is hot enough to turn on the AC" or "it is cold enough to turn on the heat," -- facts a rock never derives because there is no physical correlate in a rock to "hot enough for AC" or "cold enough for heat."
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So...if the stat is not connected to a heating system it is no longer conscious?

Nick
 
Belz... said:
Does it still do information processing ?
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Sure, if I observe and measure its behaviour.

So...you're saying that if I measure the behaviour of a rock under different physical conditions, the rock is now conscious? And if I stop observing or measuring it then it ceases to be conscious?

Nick
 
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yy2bggggs said:
Sure it does.

The very notion of "red objects" is an equivalence class of objects based on whether or not said objects influence us in such a way that we have a particular sort of percept about it. The "quality of redness" is simply another term for the "particular sort of percept" that we associate with the word red. [snip]

As such, this is an experience (perceptual in nature), with an authoritative and unique form of consistency ("quality"), associated with redness in itself. I.e., it is "experience" of the "quality of redness".

Makes perfect sense to me.
[snip]
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Time to post this article again (pdf).
 
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