Has consciousness been fully explained?

[westprog]

No, I am not.

If you are able to say that with confidence, then you must have an alternative explanation than mine. Care to share?

Of course you won't share, because you don't have anything better. I know you don't because people have been asking you for your side of the story for 4 years now and you still haven't produced a single statement -- not a single one -- with any explanatory power.

Well, since my contention is that this subject has not been explained, and possibly cannot be explained, then demanding that I produce an alternative explanation is nonsensical. Does the absence of a sensible explanation for consciousness mean that we have to accept whatever confused ill-thought-out idea is put forward?

When something isn't understood, it's very important to accept that it isn't understood, because if you accept the wrong explanation - even in principle - then that will block off progress towards the right explanation.

That's why, in real science, scientists welcome questions and objections about their theories, because that's how they are tested and made stronger. Viewing objections and questions as signs of bad faith and unfriendliness are the sign of pseudo-science.

I didn't ask you to rephrase the distinction I am making.

I asked you to provide your own distinction.

Are you going to, or not?

There is no distinction between active and passive behaviour, in the examples given.

How is that the same form?

Have you take any biology and/or geology at all? Do you really think the chemical composition of a fossil is in any way similar to that of a living cell?

I never said that it was. I said that the trilobite managed to achieve a stable form. It clearly did. And it looks a lot more like a trilobite that a computer simulation of a trilobite.

Please provide an example of a behavior exhibited by a block of granite that falls under the category of a sequence of physical processes that prevents it from becoming a non block of granite.

The chemical (electromagnetic) bonds between the Silicon and Oxygen. The strong force holding the nucleus in place. The gravitational forces keeping the block anchored to the Earth.

Whereas the cell has... oh, it has exactly the same forces operating. Exactly. The. Same.

I clearly stated that the concept of "stability" in this context has to do with continued existence. How, then, are living things not stable in the same sense as solid objects -- since both categories exist longer than many other categories of things?

Remember, the cells of your body are descendants of the very first proto-cells on Earth from billions of years ago. How is that not a long existence?

Everything is made up from matter and energy that is billions of years old. The nature of the continuity of form of the process of life - which doesn't mean identical form, or the same material content - is complex. I.e. it is not easy to describe precisely what is preserved. The stability of life is a very difficult thing to quantify.

Not exactly. The assumed implication is that if you continually -- for 4 years, to be precise -- insist that there is a difference between a lava flow and a mouse but you just can't be bothered to think of what it could possibly be, then you really can't tell the difference between a lava flow and a mouse.

Or prove me wrong. Just come up with some distinction that you yourself would use to determine if an object was a lava flow as opposed to a mouse. It really isn't that hard, westprog.

It's very, very easy to tell the difference between a lava flow and a mouse. One is molten rock pouring down the hill, the other is a furry mammal that runs around the floor squeaking. That works for me. However, I accept that there are common properties possessed by the mouse and the lava, which are also common to the computer in the corner. Where the disagreement occurs is when someone insists that there's a property or process - "computation" or "stability" or "stabilutation" which is possessed by the mouse and computer, but not by the lava flow. So I ask what this property actually is, and then say - "oh, but this property is clearly also shared by the lava flow" - or the granite, or the unplugged computer. And then RD insists that this proves that I can't tell a mouse from a lava flow. Well, I can, quite easily. I can also tell a mouse from MOUSE V2.1 simulation software.

 

[Dancing David]

Dancing David,
It's true that brain function, including consciousness, cannot develop in absentia of sensory input, including feedback from body states. However, that does not mean a developed brain cannot continue to function, and remain conscious, in the absents of these inputs.

I stated that the sensory inputs were needed for devolpment and to some extent I would say some manitainence of some brain functions. Therefore to say that the 'brain does it all by itself is to ignore teh contingent hostory that led to that brain doing it.

At least in the short term. Your brain would in fact remain conscious if cut off from all sensory inputs, or bodily functions other than the brain. Yet it would begin to degrade in that capacity fairly quickly.

I know, and my point was that the brain functions based upon that history, a car can roll down the road without the engine on as well.

The reason for this is that consciousness involves a subset of the brain for which the sensory inputs is not defined by external sensory data, but by the state of the brain (neurons), that do have external sensory inputs among other things.

If you admit that we haven't defined consciousness for the purpose of this thread, i will admit that is one possible defintion.

A developed brain then has a set of ordered states, stored experiences, etc., that the mind

Not to be argumentative but there is no mind.

can continue to access and remain conscious, even in the total absence of, or connections to, an external body or sensory data. Once the sensory memories began to relax, which begins happening fairly quickly, the conscious mind will begin degrading in direct proportion.

I think we mostly agree.

Thus when PixyMisa said:

it was absolutely correct. The notion that the loss of sensory data, or the brain extensions throughout the body (sensory, entails an immediate loss of consciousness is false.

Not what i said either.

So long as the brain section limited to inside your skull can burn sugar to remain powered up, then even removed from your body may remain conscious for the short term. As the memories associated with the neural connections to sensory data fail to be maintained by new sensory data they began to fade. As these fading states are the sensory inputs of the conscious mind, not inputs from the nervous system in the body or external sensory data directly, the conscious mind will only fade in proportion to the degradation of memories of the external world.

Except for the use of the word mind, I agree.

What's funny is that for some people who self reference their own consciousness will reference the totality of their visual sensory data. Others will reference their spacial location wrt the world. Then others will reference their mental states, feelings, thoughts, etc. I tend to fall in the latter as a default. Yet your individual reference to consciousness is not absolute nor even a requirement of consciousness. Your conscious model of the world doesn't even have to be realistic, only an operationally valid one for maximizing interactions with and opportunities in an external world. The reason two identical colors can appear totally different in color on the same image is because our consistent modeling of the world is more important than perceptual accuracy. It makes it easy to discern certain patterns that would otherwise be camouflaged, even at the expense of seeing qualities in those patterns that don't exist to make pattern itself more noticeable. Much of what you are 'conscious' of in your sensory data is not even in the sensory data, but in what the brain added to highlight certain patterns. In many cases these pattern cues are added when it shouldn't.

I know.

 

[Dancing David]

Yep. I don't think that last is necessarily inherent in conscious systems, but it's certainly true for us squishies.

Excellent post.

Mmmm squishies.

 

[Frank Newgent]

Form as in the shape and structure of an object. As opposed to content/composition.

But you knew that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MagrittePipe.jpg

Whereas a computer simulation of a trilobite would be what? The same thing? Something else altogether?

Ask a trilobite collector

 

[rocketdodger]

Well, since my contention is that this subject has not been explained, and possibly cannot be explained, then demanding that I produce an alternative explanation is nonsensical. Does the absence of a sensible explanation for consciousness mean that we have to accept whatever confused ill-thought-out idea is put forward?

When something isn't understood, it's very important to accept that it isn't understood, because if you accept the wrong explanation - even in principle - then that will block off progress towards the right explanation.

That's why, in real science, scientists welcome questions and objections about their theories, because that's how they are tested and made stronger. Viewing objections and questions as signs of bad faith and unfriendliness are the sign of pseudo-science.

Your contention is that life has not been explained?

There is no distinction between active and passive behaviour, in the examples given.

Um, I asked you for a distinction between life and non-life.

Not between active and passive behavior.

I never said that it was. I said that the trilobite managed to achieve a stable form. It clearly did. And it looks a lot more like a trilobite that a computer simulation of a trilobite.

If the form changes, then stability is out the window. That is the whole point of my definition -- things are stable if they remain in the same form, so that other systems can interact with them in the same ways for longer.

I don't care about thermodynamic stability, that has nothing at all to do with computation.

The chemical (electromagnetic) bonds between the Silicon and Oxygen. The strong force holding the nucleus in place. The gravitational forces keeping the block anchored to the Earth.

Whereas the cell has... oh, it has exactly the same forces operating. Exactly. The. Same.

I didn't say anything about the forces. I specifically asked about the processes. If you don't understand the distinction between a force and a process, of if you simply want to call everything a process, then let me explain it in terms even you will grasp: A cell and a block of granite are different. Somehow. Because if they were not, you would not be able to distinguish between the two. I don't care what you want to call the difference -- it exists.

Everything is made up from matter and energy that is billions of years old. The nature of the continuity of form of the process of life - which doesn't mean identical form, or the same material content - is complex. I.e. it is not easy to describe precisely what is preserved. The stability of life is a very difficult thing to quantify.

No it isn't. Life continues. It has for billions of years. There is a cell in existence that is billions of years old. That is a very stable entity.

It's very, very easy to tell the difference between a lava flow and a mouse. One is molten rock pouring down the hill, the other is a furry mammal that runs around the floor squeaking. That works for me. However, I accept that there are common properties possessed by the mouse and the lava, which are also common to the computer in the corner. Where the disagreement occurs is when someone insists that there's a property or process - "computation" or "stability" or "stabilutation" which is possessed by the mouse and computer, but not by the lava flow. So I ask what this property actually is, and then say - "oh, but this property is clearly also shared by the lava flow" - or the granite, or the unplugged computer. And then RD insists that this proves that I can't tell a mouse from a lava flow. Well, I can, quite easily. I can also tell a mouse from MOUSE V2.1 simulation software.

So then at what point do the properties and processess that the mouse and lava share become the difference between the behavior of being molten and pouring down a hill versus being a mammal and running around the floor squeaking?

How do you explain the fact that a mouse and a lava flow are clearly different despite your assertion that there is not a single property or process that is not shared between them?

 

[my_wan]

I stated that the sensory inputs were needed for devolpment and to some extent I would say some manitainence of some brain functions. Therefore to say that the 'brain does it all by itself is to ignore teh contingent hostory that led to that brain doing it.

I know, and my point was that the brain functions based upon that history, a car can roll down the road without the engine on as well.

If you admit that we haven't defined consciousness for the purpose of this thread, i will admit that is one possible defintion.

Not to be argumentative but there is no mind.

I think we mostly agree.

Not what i said either.

Except for the use of the word mind, I agree.


I know.

When I read back to you response to PixyMisa, I could take it in a manner you represented here. Except that when PixyMisa responded with:

Which in no way contradicts what I just said.

You responded with:

Yes.
It
does.
It
means
that
the
brain
can
not do
it
in
isolation
or
by
itself.

Note: When I said mind I meant it as interchangeable with the physical brain contained in our heads. Sloppy I know, but I don't get the esoteric distinctions people tend to make in that direction.

Now I may misunderstand your meaning of "it", but if you didn't mean a disconnected brain couldn't remain conscious in the short term without sensory inputs or connections, what was the point of the response after PixyMisa clearly expressed a lack of contradiction in her post?

In fact the loss of consciousness in the long term is a normal brain process identical to what your connected brain is doing right now. It's the same thing happening to your brain now at the same rate, except now your brain is reinforcing and/or replacing that experiential data. In fact, a fully developed brain doesn't lose consciousness as a result of a loss of sensory inputs, it loses it as a result of forgetting old ones as your normal connected brain does constantly as a standard operational procedure. Contrary to your dead car rolling downhill example, the brain motor is still working. It just got stuck in the mud and can't supply new data as the car can't supply new locations.

So clarify your position:
1) Is consciousness dependent on sensory input, or only the development of consciousness dependent on it?
2) If a disconnected brain could maintain its preexisting memory store indefinitely, would it still lose the capacity for consciousness?
3) How does your answers relate to a contradiction in PixyMisa's statements?

I've provided a fairly detailed personal take, which I base on a huge pool of empirical data. It doesn't prove I'm right, but I'm pretty certain you can't find any empirical data that is not consistent, and there is a LOT, much less falsify it based on that data.

 

[Dancing David]

When I read back to you response to PixyMisa, I could take it in a manner you represented here. Except that when PixyMisa responded with:

You responded with:

I was also poking fun at PM and the
No
Wrong
Not even wrong
Absurd

sort of responses.

Note: When I said mind I meant it as interchangeable with the physical brain contained in our heads. Sloppy I know, but I don't get the esoteric distinctions people tend to make in that direction.

Now I may misunderstand your meaning of "it", but if you didn't mean a disconnected brain couldn't remain conscious in the short term without sensory inputs or connections, what was the point of the response after PixyMisa clearly expressed a lack of contradiction in her post?

As I have stated many times perception is a large amount of what is conflated in the rubric of consciousness. Perception is dependant upon sensation, so much of consciousness, not all, would be gone.

In fact the loss of consciousness in the long term is a normal brain process identical to what your connected brain is doing right now. It's the same thing happening to your brain now at the same rate, except now your brain is reinforcing and/or replacing that experiential data.

yes.

In fact, a fully developed brain doesn't lose consciousness as a result of a loss of sensory inputs, it loses it as a result of forgetting old ones as your normal connected brain does constantly as a standard operational procedure. Contrary to your dead car rolling downhill example, the brain motor is still working. It just got stuck in the mud and can't supply new data as the car can't supply new locations.

yes, part of teh isue is the confusing morrass of what we label consciousness.

So clarify your position:
1) Is consciousness dependent on sensory input, or only the development of consciousness dependent on it?

No and yes, the two are part and parcel.

2) If a disconnected brain could maintain its preexisting memory store indefinitely, would it still lose the capacity for consciousness?

It would be hard to gauge any sort of behavioral criteria for it. Certainly not for the medical definition. I suppose if you reconnected the brain then you could ask for a self report.

3) How does your answers relate to a contradiction in PixyMisa's statements?

I was just disagreeing, I do not think that there is any part of the brain that is not part of the body. Many parts of 'consciousness' are dependant upon sensation. Some things I agree with, others I don't.

I've provided a fairly detailed personal take, which I base on a huge pool of empirical data. It doesn't prove I'm right, but I'm pretty certain you can't find any empirical data that is not consistent, and there is a LOT, much less falsify it based on that data.

I am fairly certain you haven't disconnected brain yet. And I am fairly certain that sensation and perception are part of developing consciousness. And part of what gets labeled as consciousness.

I am not making an absolute statement.

 

[AlBell]

I am fairly certain you haven't disconnected brain yet.

Ya think?

I was more curious about how the perpetrators measured the 'continuing consciousness' after disconnecting them.

 

[Piggy]

Yes but this is quite a different position to be in from the state of cluelessness your posts seem to suggest you believe science to be in right now.

Seem to suggest?

I don't know why they would.

After all, I've cited studies that shed light on the topic -- for instance, Marvin, and the "signature" waves.

It's not that everybody is clueless. It's just that we do not yet know the mechanism.

 

[Piggy]

That howl would be the intentional expression of what your sound equipment accepts as of ultimate importance, be that existence, knowledge, or truth, while acting to increase the magnitude of the encompassing set of narratives, symbols, and practices

Thanks, Frank. My doctor said my postmodernism levels were getting dangerously low.

 

[Piggy]

Does it? What a strange thing to claim that it does; without most organs the brain wouldn't even be alive, and without the sensory organs it wouldn't even have anything to be conscious of. The whole body aids in consciousness.

Of course. But as far as we can tell, the spleen is not involved in the direct mechanism that generates Sofia events.

I mean, if you take that thinking far enough, then the entire universe is part of the organ that creates consciousness. I find that sort of thinking unproductive.

 

[Piggy]

I don't think that is true either. Many other tissue types are used in behaviour, most notably muscles.

All those attempts to claim that consciousness is a localised phenomenon in the brain seem as ridiculous to me as claiming that "communication" is localised in the telephone exchange. I think consciousness is best understood as a process rather than a thing that needs a specific location.

We know that it's possible to be consciously aware without any external sensory input, and without any input from the bodily extremities. It's called dreaming.

Sometimes the outside world intrudes, but not always.

The thing is, you can damage any area outside of the brain, and as long as the body stays alive, there's no indication it has any effect on consciousness.

The only damage that appears to affect consciousness is damage to the brain. So we say that the mechanism is in that organ.

 

[Piggy]

Well considering there are more neurons in a brain than stars in our galaxy, I don't think we have done more than examine the shell.

The number of neurons isn't important by itself.

The answer will lie in the configuration of large-scale neural structures, and other supra-neural (if I may coin a term) activities.

At the end of the day, the neurons don't matter, strange as that may seem to say, because if you could design a machine that did the same thing with some other base unit, you'd get the same result.

It's like, if you get two fronts of different pressure and temperature interacting, they form the same sorts of dynamic shapes, regardless of what the underlying components are.

Swirls of stars, swirls of air, swirls of water... these share some qualities despite being composed of very different sorts of components.

Consciousness is not in the neuron.

 

[Piggy]

Do you think that there actually is a purely physical explanation for why life is different from non-life?

I wasn't aware that there were any other sorts of explanations available.

 

[Beth]

Of course. But as far as we can tell, the spleen is not involved in the direct mechanism that generates Sofia events.

I mean, if you take that thinking far enough, then the entire universe is part of the organ that creates consciousness. I find that sort of thinking unproductive.

Unproductive but interesting. It could end up with some logical support of pantheism.

The number of neurons isn't important by itself.

The answer will lie in the configuration of large-scale neural structures, and other supra-neural (if I may coin a term) activities.

At the end of the day, the neurons don't matter, strange as that may seem to say, because if you could design a machine that did the same thing with some other base unit, you'd get the same result.

It's like, if you get two fronts of different pressure and temperature interacting, they form the same sorts of dynamic shapes, regardless of what the underlying components are.

Swirls of stars, swirls of air, swirls of water... these share some qualities despite being composed of very different sorts of components.

Consciousness is not in the neuron.

If consciousness is not in the neuron, then I think we are hardpressed to define objectively what is conscious and what it not. Our current cues are behavioral, which is very much dependent on our size and speed.

I wasn't aware that there were any other sorts of explanations available.

I wasn't aware there were any. It's basically the same problem as consciousness. The cue's we normally apply are not easy to define objectively and abstractly.

 

[rocketdodger]

I wasn't aware there were any. It's basically the same problem as consciousness. The cue's we normally apply are not easy to define objectively and abstractly.

I provided such an explanation some posts ago. Westprog doesn't understand it. Perhaps you would have more luck?

 

[Piggy]

What bodily function?

Consciousness

Why do you believe that anything is required beyond information processing, and what is it?

Simple. Because it makes as much sense to say that IP causes consciousness, or that consciousness is IP, as it does to say that mathematics causes black holes or that black holes are mathematics.

Without mathematics, we could have neither deduced the existence of black holes nor found any evidence that they are real. But black holes are physical entities described by mathematics. The relationship does not go any farther than that.

When thinking in terms of information processing, it's very easy to forget that we're dealing with an abstraction.

For instance, if you write a program, you're dealing with a human-engineered interface that presents things to you in arrays of pixels that your mind interprets as variables and values and such. So it's very tempting to fall into the trap of thinking that when the computer operates there really is, say, an n which really does have the value 123,456.78.

And this way of thinking gets reinforced when we run the program and look at yet another human-engineered interface with still more arrays of pixels which our minds interpret as being the result of a processing of the (entirely symbolic) "information" we plugged into it.

But if we simply examine what's going on in objective physical reality (OPR) we find that it's merely a chain reaction of physical states. There is no objectively-existing variable, and no objectively-existing amount of 123,456.78 of anything at all.

All we've done is to rig up a system -- like a great grand abacus -- to facilitate the symbolic process. But the actual physical computer has no symbols in it, no amounts of anything (except its actual physical components like wires and chips and discs and such), and no "results" that resemble in any way the symbolic take-aways that we get from it.

Our brains are no different in that regard.

They're just globs of physical stuff doing what physical stuff does.

Yes, it's very useful and convenient and powerful to model much of the brain's activity as IP. But IP cannot "cause" anything physical to happen. Only physical processes in OPR can cause other physical processes to happen.

Consciousness -- although it's certainly a very strange type of phenomenon -- is some sort of physical process. We dream, it cranks up. We stop dreaming, it shuts down. We wake up, it cranks up again. We take a hard hit on the football field and are knocked out, and it shuts down once more.

After all, if it's not a physical process of some sort, then it must be some sort of supernatural process, and no one here is arguing that.

So the brain must have some sort of physical functioning that generates this phenomenon, this behavior.

It is certainly not caused by IP, for the same reason that black holes are not caused by math.

Even when we look at behavior which can, in part, be modeled by IP, we don't find a single one that can be modeled in its entirety by IP. For instance, if you ask me to add 3 and 4 and I answer "7", that exchange requires processes -- such as the movement of the fine bones of the ear and the muscles of the tongue -- that we would not describe in terms of information processing.

(Ditto when it comes to computers, actually.)

So the overt behavior -- this thing that begins when I wake up, stops when I sleep, begins again when I dream, stops again when the dream is over -- has to be executed somehow physically. There's simply no other alternative.

It doesn't matter that a casual observer can't actually see that behavior happening, because they also can't see my body regulating its own temperature, and that is certainly a process requiring a physical executory (perhaps that's a better term than executive) mechanism.

Bottom line, consciousness is a behavior of the body, and like all other behaviors, it is fundamentally physical in nature and is carried out by purely physical processes.

In the real world, there is no alternative.

 

[Piggy]

Hopefully this 'toy' model will help some think about the issue of consciousness more realistically. Trying to get a sense of it from the raw math is generally problematic. Often our mathematical models fall short when even a modicum of self organization and chaotic behavior is involved.

Thank you for the thought experiment there. Quite interesting and a good read.

But it seems to me that it does not at all disagree with my stance on this.

I haven't made any claims regarding the actual mechanism that's responsible for generating Sofia events. I've only stated that there is some sort of mechanism.

 

[Piggy]

If consciousness is not in the neuron, then I think we are hardpressed to define objectively what is conscious and what it not.

I don't think so. It's really no different from saying that the heartbeat is not in the muscle cell. You can't see it at that level. The heartbeat is a pattern of contraction.

Each cell is doing exactly the same thing during a normal heartbeat as it is doing during fibrillation. The former keeps you alive, the latter kills you. But you cannot detect fibrillation at the cellular level. And if the heart were made of something different which had the same aggregate behavior, it would still keep us alive when contracting properly and kill us if allowed to fibrillate too long.

 

[Third Eye Open]

I don't think so. It's really no different from saying that the heartbeat is not in the muscle cell. You can't see it at that level. The heartbeat is a pattern of contraction.

Each cell is doing exactly the same thing during a normal heartbeat as it is doing during fibrillation. The former keeps you alive, the latter kills you. But you cannot detect fibrillation at the cellular level. And if the heart were made of something different which had the same aggregate behavior, it would still keep us alive when contracting properly and kill us if allowed to fibrillate too long.

But what is the mechanism for the heartbeat?