Are You Conscious?

[Limbo]

Where does retrocausation fit into your logical connection between consciousness and IP? Is retrocausation given a place at your table? Or is it left out in the cold? Can you have causation without retrocausation?

 

[UndercoverElephant]

This is debatable UE because in my view information and computation are essentially physical - but I've never been very interested in labels - its too easy to get bogged down in nebulous semantics.

Unfortunately, words are the only thing we have with which to communicate, especially here. Their precise meaning has to be nailed down, especially in contentious examples like "consciousness".

What I find satisfying about an information theory-centric philosophy is that you can actually use it to dissolve distinctions between various competing philosophies that have been at each other's throats for centuries. My form of neutral monism doesn't really negate materialism at all. It merely says there is a deeper physical explanation than matter and energy, i.e., the physicality of information and information processing which I would guess emerges from some form of cellular automata that really gave rise to everything there is.

Neutral monism, by definition, contradicts materialism. I don't understand why you are trying to get them to be the same thing. I can understand you defecting from materialism to a form of neutral monism which shares most or all of the features of materialism that you think are important, but that doesn't mean it's materialism.

Have you ever written about your 0/1 philosophy here?

Probably at some point, but I didn't call it that. In fact I'm not sure what my "0/1 philosophy" is. You'll have to remind me.

But what rather stunned me is that as I recall it, my ideas would map onto it quite well. You really had no idea, when it came down to it, what your 1/0's really were. Well, it's information pal.

Sorry, but I don't know whether to agree with that or disagree, because I'm unsure which specific claim you are refering.

First let me say I enjoyed the irony that you didn't seem to realize that the example you gave is a form of analog information processing - in its parts and entirety ;-) It is the totality of the analogu computational system that produces the image we see on the screen. The same with the brain. The brain is the entire theatre with the screen, the projector, the film, the electricity, etc. Are you trying to suggest that some of the missing pieces for generating consciousness lie outside the brain?

At this point I'm not saying anything at all about the missing parts of the explanation, apart from that a brain alone does not appear to be enough. "Lies outside the brain" would seem to refer to some physical thing which a location outside of the brain. I'm not suggesting an additional physical part of the explanation. I'm suggesting something non-physical, which consequently will have no location at all.

Are you like some Christians I've argued with that the brain is really a transmitter/receiver for consciousness from God or elsewhere? If so, show me some evidence as I'm not aware of any.

I think that is an unhelpful analogy. I do believe something not so different to what it is aiming at, but I think it is an unfortunate choice of analogy because it sounds too much like we are talking about concepts with which science already deals. As you say, if the brain really was acting like a transmitter/reciever then we would expect to find physical evidence of it. The only sort of physical evidence that might help resolve this would be if somebody like Penrose or Hameroff manage to demonstrate some quantum mechanical property of brain tissue.

In this sense, trying to break consciousness down into component parts may be meaningless and incoherent. It may only exist as a whole sum of parts - as I believe - another reason why I believe p-zombie arguments are incoherent. It's like a chair in that sense, how much can you take away from the chair before it isn't a chair anymore? I think consciousness is like that.

I'm not sure I'm learning much from that analogy either. Yes, sort of, but I'm not sure how it affects my own arguments.

We both believe that qualia are not information - at least in the sense that they cannot be conveyed as a message beyond the "I". I am surprised you didn't see the deeper implications of what i was trying to prove. If so, I must believe that information can give rise to something that is not information. This is a paradox i don't know the answer to but suspect will be found as we explore what is at the essence of self-referentiality - whether it be based on recursion, mirroring, halting, or some, as yet unknown computational process we have not yet formulated but which I believe must still be consistent with being a Universal Turing Machine. (e.g., you can't extract information from an infinite loop).

I think you are right that it has something to do with self-referentiality, but not merely self-referentiality within a brain. I suspect it is to do with self-referentiality on a wider scale.

Again, I assert you are confusing ontology with epistemology. One can argue and provide lots of empirical evidence that brain activity is a form of information processing and that such activity gives causal rise to consciousness.

Can you support the claim that brain activity is sufficient cause, or just a necessary cause? Crucial difference.

We know we can empirically stimulate and depress brain computation and impact conscious experience in predictable ways. But we both agree that qualia contain no information. Without information there can be no knowledge. Yet somehow, you appear to believe that there is another realm or substance that explains it.

Actually, I dispute that the material realm that the materialists believe in exists in the first place, not that there is another realm on top of it.

All you can potentially absolutely explain about consciousness is its causation - in my case by empirical inference. Materialistically, we can perhaps go beyond this to some degree if it were possible to create a mind-meld machine. Here, the necessary condition would be that our brains are sufficiently similar in architecture that we could infer that we experience qualia in the same or similar ways. Probably a safe assumption in most cases. Otherwise, if you had a identical twin brother UE and neither of you had ever had any sort of trauma do you think it probable that his blue might look like your red?

I think there may be a logical problem preventing the creation of such a machine. I don't believe I can experience your qualia without actually being you.

Let's discuss an alternative analogy UE. Let's look at the IP that generates the image on the screen you're looking at right now. I'm sure you'd agree that software acting in real-time (a process like digestion to address your other issues) "gives rise" to these images you're viewing.

It is one of several things required, yes. Another is electricity. Another is parts of the computer hardware.

The software and these images can be mapped onto each other but they really aren't the same "thing" (this is dangerous reification) are they?

They are absolutely not the same thing.

So what? Why don't you find that a huge mystery? Because it isn't one...

Of course not.

and neither is consciousness in that sense.

Yes it is. The software and the images on the screen are just two parts of a larger system in which information gets copied and transformed. Consciousness and brain activity are also two parts of a larger system where information gets copied and transformed. The difference is that consciousness, conceptually, isn't physical.

The thing that is still mysterious (unknown to science) about consciousness is simply that we don't yet know how software can be made self-referential to be aware of the images it's creating in the same way you can see and think about what's on this screen.

If you are claiming that science already knows that consciousness is caused by self-referential information processing then you are making pseudoscientific claims. Science knows no such thing. If you got a bunch of cognitive scientists together you'd be lucky to find one in ten that would agree with the claim you just made.

I heard of your banning from Dawkins after I left. As far as I can tell their reasons were unfair and unjustifiable and their move towards censorship was a big reason why I resigned from there before you left.

Oh, I thought it was quite amusing. After I resigned as forum admin and moderator there was a power struggle in the admin team between those who wanted me out (can't have a dangerous woo-woo on the loose, especially one who has a bit of a clue what he's talking about, can we?) and those who realised it would look rather bad to ban me and recognised the quality of my posts. Eventually the mob won the power struggle and I was banned for collecting far more warnings than any normal person would have been allowed to do. The fact that most of the warning were the result of biased moderation had nothing to do with it of course...

Your problem at Dawkins, in my view, is that you tried too hard to control debate and pigeonhole arguments. To some extent that was warranted because many people made little or no effort to understand the references and paradigms you brought to the table. But with the few who did, myself included, if somebody didn't buy your interpretation of Kant or Wittgenstein etc. or, even worse, argued they were wrong, you wouldn't engage in an open-minded or respectful dialogue. I hope that has changed.

I think you'll find that I have always been willing to engage in open-minded and respectful dialogue but that it is quite difficult when you are in an environment like this. My threads were usually intentionally derailed unless I made a lot of effort to "control the debate". The problem is that I don't allow people to get away with talking nonsense.

As you may recall, I also tendered my apologies to you for how I treated you when you infuriated me before I left. That still stands and I hope we can engage with each other here in good spirits.

I hope so too. This board is a bit of a free-for-all compared to Dawkins'. There is only one rule which is ruthlessly enforced: do not use rude words. Last time I got suspended from here it was for only *******ing out 6 of the 7 letters of a swear word (not aimed at a person). Bizarre, eh?

 

[FedUpWithFaith]

Where does retrocausation fit into your logical connection between consciousness and IP? Is retrocausation given a place at your table? Or is it left out in the cold? Can you have causation without retrocausation?

I don't see any need for it and frankly haven't thought about it much. However, retrocausation would not necessarily be inconsistent with my larger views. In fact, retrocausality enjoys a sort is a sub-genre in digital physics via the "Fredkin Gate" who postulated that the universe is a fully reversible Universal Turing Machine. Fredkin brilliantly demonstrated that such a symmetric form of computation is possible, i.e., reverse computation, and the associated entropy makes it the simplest form. So given Occams Razor and assuming Fredkin is right, retrocausality could be possible. It would also be consistent with Tegmarks ideas concerning the possibility that there is no "net" information in the universe.

 

[Limbo]

In fact, retrocausality enjoys a sort is a sub-genre in digital physics via the "Fredkin Gate" who postulated that the universe is a fully reversible Universal Turing Machine.

So, if the entire universe were somehow reversed, then retrocausality would suddenly become worth thinking about, but until then there's no need for thinking about it? In other words it's an all-or-none thing - the entire universe is reversed or none of it is?

 

[FedUpWithFaith]

UE, this forum's inabilty to provide nested quotes makes it difficult to pursue multiple dialogue paths. So I'm going to break them down one by one.

Neutral monism, by definition, contradicts materialism. I don't understand why you are trying to get them to be the same thing. I can understand you defecting from materialism to a form of neutral monism which shares most or all of the features of materialism that you think are important, but that doesn't mean it's materialism.

I'm am doing nothing of the sort. I don't feel any need to be called a materialist. But I am trying to convey to you how regarding the monistic essence as information/computation yields special dividends in contrasting and combining the various monisms. Before I go further, I hope we can agree on this preamble from Stanford Encyclopedia:

"Neutral monism is a monistic metaphysic. It holds that ultimate reality is all of one kind. To this extent neutral monism is in agreement with idealism and materialism. What distinguishes neutral monism from its better known monistic rivals is the claim that the intrinsic nature of ultimate reality is neither mental nor physical. This negative claim also captures the idea of neutrality: being intrinsically neither mental nor physical in nature ultimate reality is said to be neutral between the two."

Many if not most philosophers introduce the "supernatural" to account for the the ultimate one "kind" that is the essense of everything. Or they introduce nebulous concepts with little or no real complete meaning (which I would argue the "supernatural" is too). Or they just hold their hands up and say they don't know what the **** it is and we can never know what it is. I have now set forth for you what the neutral monistic essense at the core of both mind and matter is in my view and it is definitely not supernatural and it is accessible to our understanding and potentially various forms of empirical testing as well.

If you're somebody like Wheeler, T' Hooft, Fredkin, Tegmark, Wolfram, Lloyd, Schmidhuber, Zuse, Chaitin and an ever growing list of scientists, mathematicians and philosophers you'd say that information at a certain level is physical. Then neutral monism collapses onto information-based materialism rather than simply contradicting matter-energy-based materialism. This is where the semantics become 6 of 1 half a dozen of the other in my view. You could call me a physical-information based materialist or a neutral monist who believes information/computation is the monistic essence. But if information (e.g., via the Zuse cellular automata "computing space") is truly physical why do we need to make this distinction? Or is there something about the idea of information being physical you don't get? In the later case I'd have to dig up a lot of references for you to read. You might want to look at t'Hoofts holographic hypothesis for describing black holesor some of Lloyd's descriptions of string theory, i.e., we've broken down what seems to be energy or matter into "stuff" that is really no more than equations. What is a string made of? It is a purely mathematical entity. It seems to me as we continue to break the universe down into smaller and smaller pieces we ironically find out it's made of...nothing. Nothing but math. I find the idea appealing at the Platonic level. I can understand how one needs to ask where matter or energy came from. But 1+1=2 requires no "creation".

UE, if you haven't seen them before, do yourself a favor and view Chaitin's Lisbon Lectures on YouTube. Things get even more interesting in the empirical nature of math itself where there are truths that are true for no reason.

Probably at some point, but I didn't call it that. In fact I'm not sure what my "0/1 philosophy" is. You'll have to remind me.

If you don't recall it I'm not going to try to jog your memory since I only recall it vaguely - it was 2 years ago!

 

[Limbo]

I don't feel any need to be called a materialist.

But you are 'fed up with faith,' right? Therefore whatever you call yourself, it must be a word that is in opposition to your notion of faith, correct?

What is faith?

Not to side-track you from post #524.

 

[FedUpWithFaith]

So, if the entire universe were somehow reversed, then retrocausality would suddenly become worth thinking about, but until then there's no need for thinking about it? In other words it's an all-or-none thing - the entire universe is reversed or none of it is?

Limbo, there are many views on this subject and in the case of retrocausality, I have not yet staked a position. As it is, as a believer in digital physics or whatever this area is best called, I'm already on the fringe of what science can speculate about.

I tend to think whatever it is it will be a marvel of simplicity. So I have a tendency to believe that everything sums to zero and that time is symmetric and possibly unity. That doesn't mean that symmetry can be made accessible to us or that it plays any role in our lives or consciousness. I see no evidence of that. But conceptually, if Zuse and Fredkin are right whose to say what forms of dimensionality are possible? It could be analogous to what it would be like we had computers powerful enough to simulate our own universe. Whose to say that time is not unified and that what will happen has already happened in a sense. Non-locality implies that possibility.

 

[Limbo]

Limbo, there are many views on this subject and in the case of retrocausality, I have not yet staked a position.

Ok, it looked to me like you had staked a position regarding consciousness and causality. "The logical connection between consciousness and information processing (IP) you claim doesn't exist is causation." If there is a logical connection between consciousness and causality, and a connection between causality and retrocausality, then don't these connections demand that there also be a connection between consciousness and retrocausality, even if indirectly?

 

[FedUpWithFaith]

But you are 'fed up with faith,' right? Therefore whatever you call yourself, it must be a word that is in opposition to your notion of faith, correct?

What is faith?

Not to side-track you from post #524.

The faith I'm fed up with is belief that is not supported by evidence and logic, like the faith of "the little child' that the New Testament considers a virtue. I would like to see skepticism replace faith as a virtue in my (American) culture.

 

[FedUpWithFaith]

Ok, it looked to me like you had staked a position regarding consciousness and causality. "The logical connection between consciousness and information processing (IP) you claim doesn't exist is causation." If there is a logical connection between consciousness and causality, and a connection between causality and retrocausality, then don't these connections demand that there also be a connection between consciousness and retrocausality, even if indirectly?

Not necessarily. Unfortunately, I may have been mistaken in introducing my cosmological philosophy in with my philosophy of consciousness. While there is isomorphsim the two are not identical. The computation that underlies consciousness can be viewed as a second-order process based on materialistic underpinnings that themselves a underpinned by a first-order information/computational essence. In this sense, its Turing Machines, not elephants, all the way down.

 

[Limbo]

Not necessarily. Unfortunately, I may have been mistaken in introducing my cosmological philosophy in with my philosophy of consciousness. While there is isomorphsim the two are not identical. The computation that underlies consciousness can be viewed as a second-order process based on materialistic underpinnings that themselves a underpinned by a first-order information/computational essence. In this sense, its Turing Machines, not elephants, all the way down.

Ok.

Forgive me if I'm taxing your patience, I'm just trying to understand. I googled "retrocausality Turing machine" and got 168 hits. I googled "retrocausality consiousness" and got 22,100 hits. Quite a difference.

It seems that retrocausality doesn't have much to do with Turing machines, but it does with consciousness google-wise. How do you explain that?

Can you do me a favor? Use the words Turing machine, consciousness, causality, and retrocausality in a sentence.

 

[FedUpWithFaith]

Can you do me a favor? Use the words Turing machine, consciousness, causality, and retrocausality in a sentence.

OK, here it goes:

Limbo asked me to use the words Turing machine, consciousness, causality, and retrocausality in a sentence.

 

[Limbo]

Rather glib, but ok.

What about my first question?

 

[UndercoverElephant]

UE, this forum's inabilty to provide nested quotes makes it difficult to pursue multiple dialogue paths. So I'm going to break them down one by one.



I'm am doing nothing of the sort. I don't feel any need to be called a materialist. But I am trying to convey to you how regarding the monistic essence as information/computation yields special dividends in contrasting and combining the various monisms. Before I go further, I hope we can agree on this preamble from Stanford Encyclopedia:

"Neutral monism is a monistic metaphysic. It holds that ultimate reality is all of one kind. To this extent neutral monism is in agreement with idealism and materialism. What distinguishes neutral monism from its better known monistic rivals is the claim that the intrinsic nature of ultimate reality is neither mental nor physical. This negative claim also captures the idea of neutrality: being intrinsically neither mental nor physical in nature ultimate reality is said to be neutral between the two."

Many if not most philosophers introduce the "supernatural" to account for the the ultimate one "kind" that is the essense of everything. Or they introduce nebulous concepts with little or no real complete meaning (which I would argue the "supernatural" is too). Or they just hold their hands up and say they don't know what the **** it is and we can never know what it is. I have now set forth for you what the neutral monistic essense at the core of both mind and matter is in my view and it is definitely not supernatural and it is accessible to our understanding and potentially various forms of empirical testing as well.

If you're somebody like Wheeler, T' Hooft, Fredkin, Tegmark, Wolfram, Lloyd, Schmidhuber, Zuse, Chaitin and an ever growing list of scientists, mathematicians and philosophers you'd say that information at a certain level is physical. Then neutral monism collapses onto information-based materialism rather than simply contradicting matter-energy-based materialism. This is where the semantics become 6 of 1 half a dozen of the other in my view. You could call me a physical-information based materialist or a neutral monist who believes information/computation is the monistic essence. But if information (e.g., via the Zuse cellular automata "computing space") is truly physical why do we need to make this distinction? Or is there something about the idea of information being physical you don't get? In the later case I'd have to dig up a lot of references for you to read. You might want to look at t'Hoofts holographic hypothesis for describing black holesor some of Lloyd's descriptions of string theory, i.e., we've broken down what seems to be energy or matter into "stuff" that is really no more than equations. What is a string made of? It is a purely mathematical entity. It seems to me as we continue to break the universe down into smaller and smaller pieces we ironically find out it's made of...nothing. Nothing but math. I find the idea appealing at the Platonic level. I can understand how one needs to ask where matter or energy came from. But 1+1=2 requires no "creation".

UE, if you haven't seen them before, do yourself a favor and view Chaitin's Lisbon Lectures on YouTube. Things get even more interesting in the empirical nature of math itself where there are truths that are true for no reason.



If you don't recall it I'm not going to try to jog your memory since I only recall it vaguely - it was 2 years ago!

FUWF,

The basic claim that reality is "made of" information was one I first made on this board nearly a decade ago and it is basically the position I have defended ever since. I don't understand why you are telling me that you now believe reality to be made of information as if it wasn't something I already believe.

Many if not most philosophers introduce the "supernatural" to account for the the ultimate one "kind" that is the essense of everything. Or they introduce nebulous concepts with little or no real complete meaning (which I would argue the "supernatural" is too). Or they just hold their hands up and say they don't know what the **** it is and we can never know what it is. I have now set forth for you what the neutral monistic essense at the core of both mind and matter is in my view and it is definitely not supernatural and it is accessible to our understanding and potentially various forms of empirical testing as well.

If you consider reality to be made of information then you have an alternative situation regarding "supernatural" phenomena. Some things that get this label remain just as implausible or impossible as before - it doesn't help the creationists, for example. But it does open up certain other sorts of possibilities which materialism (though not science) would appear to rule out.

Geoff

 

[Jeff Corey]

The trouble with this claim is that we have no scientific-standard evidence that any system can experience anything. We have evidence that brains process information, but the only "evidence" we have that consciousness even exists is our own direct experience of consciousness (and that's not a scientific claim). We also imply from the behaviour of other animals that they too experience things, but that's not scientific either. Without a non-controversial, physical definition of consciousness, we can't provide any non-controversial scientific evidence about it...

You almost sound like a radical behaviorist here.
Almost.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

You almost sound like a radical behaviorist here.
Almost.

That's not accidental. I have certain things in common with people like radical behaviourists and eliminative materialists that none of us share with mainstream materialists. I consider those people to have acknowledged some of the key defects I see with materialism but to have chosen the wrong escape route from the problem. I nevertheless respect them for being closer to understanding the true nature of the problem than the mainstream materialists, and for at least trying to find a solution.

 

[FedUpWithFaith]

FUWF,

The basic claim that reality is "made of" information was one I first made on this board nearly a decade ago and it is basically the position I have defended ever since. I don't understand why you are telling me that you now believe reality to be made of information as if it wasn't something I already believe.

Can you direct me to some of those ancient posts please? If you believed the essence of reality is information why did you treat me like an idiot at RD for arguing this less than 2 years ago? I was the first and only one for a long time to argue this position there. I remember you posting that this idea was ridiculous and you never gave the slightest indication you accepted any part of it then. The philosophy you said you espoused at RD.net, though I felt it could be adapted to this view never explicitly made any such claim - I would have remembered that quite clearly despite neither of us now being able to recollect it in detail. I do recall it was very namby-pamby.

If you consider reality to be made of information then you have an alternative situation regarding "supernatural" phenomena. Some things that get this label remain just as implausible or impossible as before - it doesn't help the creationists, for example. But it does open up certain other sorts of possibilities which materialism (though not science) would appear to rule out.

Geoff

Yes, I agree with this, but we have no good evidence for a ny such phenomenon, if you're referring to some sort of woo like telepathy or ghosts. However, I would not be surprised if universes existed where such things were possible.

I have little doubt that some forms of advanced beings in our universe decided to play god and created their own computed universes to observe and/or interact with. And depending on how capricious those gods are, who knows how much trouble sentient beings evolved in those universes will have figuring out the essence of their reality?

 

[FedUpWithFaith]

Rather glib, but ok.

What about my first question?

I don't care what Google "thinks". At least not yet

 

[Limbo]

I have little doubt that some forms of advanced beings in our universe decided to play god and created their own computed universes to observe and/or interact with.

Some might call that faith.

Yes, I agree with this, but we have no good evidence for a ny such phenomenon, if you're referring to some sort of woo like telepathy or ghosts. However, I would not be surprised if universes existed where such things were possible.

Maybe there is better evidence for "sort of woo like telepathy" than there is for "advanced beings in our universe [who] decided to play god and created their own computed universes to observe and/or interact with."

 

[Limbo]

I don't care what Google "thinks". At least not yet

Eh, it looks to me like there are some things, which there is evidence for, which you just don't want to invite to your table.