Pixi,
Thanks for the detailed response to my questions. It was extremely enlightening about your views and the way you think.
Frankly, I was floored by your response. I’ve never seen a seemingly very intelligent person twist their own tail in so many knots as I intend to point out. I’ll be watching to see if anyone comes to your defense since you care so deeply about pointing out who wins and loses debates. In this case, I think it’s clearly game over. To paraphrase you about UE, perhaps I haven’t won, but you’ve just lost.
You know that you have to actually demonstrate this, not assert it? You do know that, right?
Let’s start with your first response in your post: In fact, I’m going to dedicate this entire long post of mine to your first two sentences.
Sure, go ahead.
Holy cow, Bingo, right off the bat… Game over.
Sorry, epic fail, right off the bat.
Generally, when people like you define the problem by their conclusion, they always get the right answer. It’s a tautology. It’s also nonsense.
Fail. I demonstrated that this is in fact how we define consciousness. I'll do it again: Decarte's
cogito.
I think, therefore I am. I
think - process information - therefore
I - self-reference -
am - exist, as a conscious entity.
When you trim away the nonsense and unpack the uncertainties, this is really what all our definitions of consciousness as beings (not trivialities like being awake) reduce to.
As you know, I agree with you that consciousness is self-referential processing.
Good. We're done then.
Well, wait, from reading the rest of your stuff I don’t.
Then you have a problem. Not me.
I believe consciousness is a form of self-referential processing.
So you're shifting your definition. That's fine. What it doesn't do is make me wrong, or you right. It makes our definitions different.
Do you realize the huge mistake in logical argument you’ve made here?
No.
It also violates the very process of empirical science you claim to champion.
No.
I’m going to assume you don’t see it and hope your blinders are not so tightly affixed that you might actually understand why.
No blinders. If you would care to point out the mistake? I'll wait.
If not, I know some people who’d be happy to sell you something called “The Ontological Argument for God” – it’s based on the same tautological reasoning.
No, the ontological argument is simply invalid - it commits the logical fallacy of equivocation. All you have offered so far is that you disagree with my definition. As I said, you can do that, but it doesn't make me wrong.
Consciousness is and was an observable phenomena long before humans had little if any understanding of computation and self-referential programming.
So?
In that sense it is a somewhat unique form of observable because long before Turing Machines were ever mentioned or understood (which put self-referentiality on deep formal footing for the first time via recursion less that a century ago), both ancient scientists and philosophers noticed it was a subjective observable, as opposed observing the external environment that everyone can experience.
So?
I guess in order to avoid being accused of the same mistake as you, I need to point out that I’m assuming your materialist stance for objective reality to make things easier for me to explain to you and to prevent distracting tangents.
Well, good.
I can see now why you have such a hard time accepting the idea of qualia, or allowing for my fairly basic attempts to define it.
Actually, you have made no real attempt to define it, merely wave your hands about. What do qualia
do? You agreed that things need to be defined in terms of function. So what do qualia
do?
Because to a large and possibly exclusive extent, qualia IS the subjective observable the ancients wanted to explain just as we do.
Well, that's just peachy. Not only can you not demonstrate they exist, you can't even tell me what they are, and yet they
exclusively constitute subjective experience.
Well, let me suggest this: Subjective experience is made up of
experiences. We need no new term, particularly not one so laden with immaterialist connotations - and utter lack of meaningful definitions.
That’s all it is. “Consciousness” didn’t magically appear on the scene only once somebody could define it as self-referential processing like you.
Really? I am shocked, shocked to find gambling... Material processes going on before they are understood.
Am I getting through to you yet?
I understand you just fine. You have a subtly different definition to me, which is fine, though you haven't explained why.
Still waiting for the point where you tell me I'm wrong, though.
I’ll assume no and try to give you a concrete example to think about.
Go on.
Let’s look at the process of digestion, something I think we’ll agree is a lot less controversial than consciousness.
I don't consider consciousness as controversial at all.
Why is it less controversial?
I don't think it is.
Because from multiple perspectives it’s is safe to say we really deeply understand digestion, at least it’s most essential elements. It’s been explained. We have learned from painstaking science over centuries that digesting is the process of well-definable biochemical dissolution and absorption of well-definable nutrients conveyed from food in our gut to our bloodstream and the concomitant elimination of waste.
You mean the digestive tract is less complex than the brain? Well, yes. Yes it is.
Am I entitled to use this explanation as a definition for digestion? Yes. Why? Because logic and empirical science has essentially proven it. All the essential gaps have been filled yet it is always possible via science that we will discover that digestion actually does other things too (and in fact, it does).
Yes. Your point?
And furthermore, before digestion was explained, it was still a purely observable phenomena that could be defined categorically if less completely in a number of ways. In this sense, digestion can be defined as the sequence of events that can be observed as food entering the stomach, getting really mushy, moving to and getting more icky in something we call intestines as various bodily glands add juices, and then comes out as poop and pee. What else is happening in there. Before modern science all we could do was hypothesize.
Well, before modern science we didn't hypothesize so much as guess, but otherwise, yes.
Would Plato have been correct in arguing with Socrates centuries ago that the definition of digestion is as I first stated above (involving biochemistry)? No, because even if Plato had a decent intuition of what biochemistry might be there was then insufficient evidence to prove that the explanation could be taken as a definition. I’m sure there were many competing ideas at the time and they lacked the science and knowledge to resolve it.
So you're arguing that the correct definition is incorrect if you can't also define your terms correctly?
What do qualia do?
As far as consciousness is concerned, the debate may be over in your mind but it clearly isn’t in the scientific community or in philosophy.
Two entirely different problems.
First, self-referential information processing is the correct minimal conceptual model of consciousness, not an explanation for everything that goes on in the brain. The point is that not only do we know from observation that immaterial and dualist approaches are wrong, but now we have a workable model of how consciousness can come about from unconscious matter, so we know those approaches are both wrong and unnecessary. That still leaves all the actual detail to be filled in by neuroscience, and neuroscience is happily doing exactly that - and confirming and reconfirming the computational model along the way.
Second, the fact that something is still debated in philosophy has no immediate relevance to the real world. Philosophers still debate the cosmological and ontological arguments, despite the fact that they are easily demonstrated to be invalid. They still debate Searle's Chinese Room and Jackson's Mary's Room despite the fact that they are likewise easily shown to be invalid. The philosophy department has no wastepaper baskets. They occasionally toss up an excellent idea - Hume, Popper, Dennett - but they never throw out the bad ones - Searle, Jackson, Chalmers.
Strange loops still have the status of hypothesis, not established theory or law.
They don't have the status of hypothesis because they are a conceptual model, not a scientific one. Consciousness is self-reference? Well, yes, sure, we all know that; now let me get on with my work.
The concept of self-referential information processing or strange loops gives us the mental tools to think clearly about consciousness and to construct clear definitions, rather than just waving our hands about. You're free to say that consciousnss as you define it is self-referential information processing
and language; self-referential information processing of at least
this order of complexity; self-referential information processing
and interaction with the world. I have no problems with any of that. But you'll notice a certain common element to all of those.
There is as yet no consensus that “strange loops” are an answer to consciousness much less the definition.
Sorry, consensus is irrelevant, because this is indeed how we define consciousness. Our early intuitive understandings, predating this concept, unpack to precisely this concept. That's why it's so powerful.
There is no conclusive proof for it as a theory nor does it yet make abundant predictions capable of confirmation or deeper elucidation at present.
Proof? You just gave it the status of a scientific hypothesis and now you speak of proof? Okay, let's assume that you just chose your words carelessly.
Predictions? Sure. It predicts that all conscious information processing systems will be self-referential - and that no unconscious information processing system will be. That's a
huge prediction. (Of course if you shift your definition of consciousness you have to shift the terms of the prediction likewise, otherwise you're falling into the fallacy of equivocation.)
We cannot yet even characterize or succinctly formalize all the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to act as a strange loop.
Of course we can.
Self-reference. Done. Easy.
Did you really read Hofstadter?
We don’t understand the principles sufficiently to engineer AI of comparable conscious sentience to our own.
Well, of course we don't. Whoever suggested that we did? The human brain is the third, or fifth, or thereabouts depending on how picky you want to be, most complex system we know about. We're still exploring how it works, and tinkering with simulations of the brains of the smaller mammals. Give it the eternal twenty years and we'll be there.
For all these reasons and many more, you’re not entitled to define consciousness purely as a strange loop yet my friend or by the more amorphous and incomplete concept of self-referentiality that takes many forms known and possibly unknown.
Sure I am.
Firstly, because you have produced not a single valid objection.
Second, because that's already how it's commonly defined - once you unpack the definitions.
Third, because your description of self-reference is laughable. Self-reference is simple and well-defined.
I state this with confidence despite the fact that like you, I believe it will be proven to be the cause and explanation eventually.
So I'm right, but I'm wrong because
you can't define your terms?
Wonderful.
