Has consciousness been fully explained?

[Piggy]

Yeah, I'm about done too I think.

Piggy you keep saying the same things and it's really not helping me much more than the first time you said it. I do, now, understand what your opinion actually is, just not WHY you hold it. Which is ok with me for now.

You think that in order for something to be conscious with something other than a human brain, it would have to be built exactly like a human brain which is basically saying that only humans can be conscious.

I agree that to be conscious in exactly the way I am, to 'feel' like I do, then yes, my brain would have to be rebuilt pretty damn exactly the same. But I don't really care about that.

For me to call something conscious, it needs to be aware of it's environment or what it perceives to be it's environment, and aware of its self or what it perceives to be its self

This is why I would be comfortable calling computers conscious. They may not be aware of things in the same way as me, or 'feel' like me, but so what? That is not what consciousness is, that is specifically whathuman consciousness is. It is also different, I'm sure, than what rabbit consciousness is, etc.

It sounds to me like you are pulling a 'no true scottsman' fallacy, and saying that 'only things conscious in exactly the way I am, are conscious'

I don't really know if there is much more to say about this, but I have learned a lot about my own opinions chatting with you, thanks for that

I've enjoyed the chat, too. It also helps me clarify my thinking about the issue.

About model brains, they would not have to be identical to human brains, but they'd have to do the same general stuff somehow. Like an artificial leg has to provide support and move naturally. One cannot use a computer simulation of a leg as an artificial leg.

So simulated brains are another issue, too... they're no more useful in actually doing anything (like generating consciousness) than are simulated power plants or refrigerators.

But perceiving the environment or the state of one's body is not the same as consciousness. We know this because we can observe both of these things happening in brains without the conscious awareness of the people whose brains are being studied.

Consciousness is its own specialized function, which our brains are specifically designed for. A model brain will have to do whatever the critical functions are in order to make that really happen (e.g. the signature brain waves).

So far, no one has any idea how to make a machine do that. But one thing's for sure — simply "running the logic" won't make it happen, for the same reason that "running the logic" describing any other bodily function won't make it happen.

Machines that incorporate computers can perceive their environments, store memories, respond to their environments, even change behavior through experience. But that doesn't generate Sofia events. Sofia is produced by some mechanism -- whatever it turns out to be once we crack it -- responsible for performing that behavior.

Marvin (the guy who suffers emotional blindness) is just one example of how that works. He has emotions, and even behaves accordingly, but he has no awareness of them, because the circuitry leading to an area that makes emotional information available to the Sofia mechanism has been destroyed.

Rabbit consciousness is probably the same as human consciousness on a fundamental level, but the experience of being a rabbit would undoubtedly be very different b/c of the different mix and processing of the various inputs, the heightened role of emotions, and a reduced role of higher-level cognition.

 

[Dancing David]

So Piggy, what behaviors do you have that make you feel SOFIA?

 

[AlBell]

The same ones you have that no one else will ever see. Yes, we may see correlates to some of them.

Conversely, maybe you and everyone except myself (and apparently Piggy) are P-zombies.

 

[Third Eye Open]

Machines that incorporate computers can perceive their environments, store memories, respond to their environments, even change behavior through experience. But that doesn't generate Sofia events.

Still not sure how you came to that conclusion that it doesn't generate it, or how a 'sense of felt individual awareness' can even be measured, or how a 'sense of felt individual awareness' is different than perceiving an environment, storing memories, responding to environments, and changing behavior through experience... all this requires you to be aware of some kind of 'self'.

 

[Frank Newgent]

So Piggy, what behaviors do you have that make you feel SOFIA?

Searching for a cure to epiphobia

 

[Frank Newgent]

Still not sure how you came to that conclusion that it doesn't generate it, or how a 'sense of felt individual awareness' can even be measured, or how a 'sense of felt individual awareness' is different than perceiving an environment, storing memories, responding to environments, and changing behavior through experience... all this requires you to be aware of some kind of 'self'.

Perceiving an environment, storing memories, responding to environments, and changing behavior through experience are behaviors described from a 3rd person perspective while Sofia is experienced from the 1st person. The distinction is sometimes overlooked in the back and forth of threads such as this.

 

[Third Eye Open]

Sofia is experienced from the 1st person.

So are all of the above. How do you experience anything any other way than in 1st person?

 

[Frank Newgent]

Sofia is experienced from the 1st person.

So are all of the above. How do you experience anything any other way than in 1st person?

That one doesn't directly experience "behavior" is my point.

Behavior is described from a 3rd person perspective.

 

[Third Eye Open]

That one doesn't directly experience "behavior" is my point.

Behavior is described from a 3rd person perspective.

Wait... please don't tell me I've been arguing about 'qualia' all this time. WTF piggy.

 

[Piggy]

So Piggy, what behaviors do you have that make you feel SOFIA?

The behavior of the brain. Like the behavior of the lungs makes me breathe.

We don't know exactly what that behavior is yet, but we can safely conclude that it is contained entirely within the brain, it involves neural activity in specific zones of the brain (such as the zone in Marvin's brain that was cut off when he lost his awareness of his emotional states), and it appears to be correlated with the simultaneous creation of 4 "signature" brain waves. Whatever else may be going on, we don't know.

But whatever the full picture turns out to be, there is 4-D spacetime behavior in my brain that turns Sofia on and off.

 

[Piggy]

Still not sure how you came to that conclusion that it doesn't generate it, or how a 'sense of felt individual awareness' can even be measured, or how a 'sense of felt individual awareness' is different than perceiving an environment, storing memories, responding to environments, and changing behavior through experience... all this requires you to be aware of some kind of 'self'.

You might think it would, but actually it doesn't.

It's easy to build small creatures that perceive and respond to the environment, and trickier but do-able to build ones that remember it and learn from it.

And our brains do all these things, all the time, without our ever being consciously aware of what's going on.

Sofia is something that the brain does with only a select portion of the neural activity, which includes the outcomes (based on lots of happenings in-route) of whatever bombardment our bodily sensors got, as well as patterns of firings triggered by what's coming in (associations in various types of memory -- which are more like riverbanks than databanks) and whatever the brain just happens to be doing.

We don't know what triggers those brain waves to kick in, but when they do, it also happens that our brains are "consciously aware" of something.

But meanwhile, neural firings are going off all across your brain, in areas that have nothing to do with generating Sofia. Only a portion of the firings are in those areas. The bulk of your brain's work is done in areas that don't feed into that process.

(There must be output from Sofia, btw, or else it wouldn't be worth evolution's while to maintain it. Whatever that is, it's probably our best shot at scientifically defining "free will" if such a thing exists.)

So theoretically, anything the brain does except what's specifically done by Sofia can be done without Sofia's awareness. But what's so odd about it is that it creates this "I'm here" sensation we all have, but which our computers don't.

Right now, Sofia is judged by people's reports of having it. That's because we all see it in ourselves, and we all have the same sorts of brains, so there's no reason to doubt that we're not all having the same sort of experience.

We're getting closer to being able to measure it, btw. The deep brain probes allowed us to measure it in brand new ways, but that was very invasive (the folks already had the brain implants for medical reasons). As we figure out better ways to observe what the brain is doing during Sofia events -- especially the things it's doing then which it's not doing at other times -- we'll improve our ability to observe and measure it.

 

[AlBell]

That one doesn't directly experience "behavior" is my point.

Behavior is described from a 3rd person perspective.

Wait... please don't tell me I've been arguing about 'qualia' all this time. WTF piggy.

Whatever you name the indescribable it's the 3rd person to 1st person hurdle science can't jump. I call that hurdle NOMA. (No religion is required; sorry, Gould.)

 

[Piggy]

Perceiving an environment, storing memories, responding to environments, and changing behavior through experience are behaviors described from a 3rd person perspective while Sofia is experienced from the 1st person. The distinction is sometimes overlooked in the back and forth of threads such as this.

There's actually a way out of that, tho.

Or there will be, once we get better at discerning what's happening in the brain during Sofia. Once we do that, we'll be able to take a 3rd person perspective there, too.

 

[Piggy]

Wait... please don't tell me I've been arguing about 'qualia' all this time. WTF piggy.

No, not with me, you haven't.

I actually do think there's a sensible use for that word, but I'm not about to get into that discussion on this thread. Not now, anyway.

At any rate, qualia are not something I've been meaning to talk about.

 

[Piggy]

There is no information in your brain. (Or your computer.)

That's going to sound bizarre to a lot of people, but it's true. Even though it's also true that there is information in our brains (and our computers).

"Information", "data", and "information processing" are entifications -- which is a tool our brains use (and which we borrowed back for object-oriented programming) to make the world more manageable by treating abstractions as things.

Entifications include marriage, being sheriff, and a father-son relationship. (That last one is particularly difficult to see as an entification at all.)

There's been so much discussion about the (non)similarities between brains and computers, maybe we've forgotten that we have no conscious machines yet.

It's the brain that makes consciousness, so that's where we have to look to answer the OP. We're tempted to think of it in computer-science terms, because that's the contemporary metaphor, but that convenience comes at a price, especially if we get so accustomed to our entifications that we come to think of them as real.

In reality, the brain has more to do with riverbanks than databanks. (Not coincidentally because riverbanks are physically real, whereas only the hardware of databanks is physically real but the information is not.)

There are large-scale channels determined by the bedrock of the brain's genetically-determined architecture. These are the standard lobes and structures (medulla, hippocampus, etc.) that every neurologically normal person shares.

Within that, there are webs of intersecting rivulets which are constantly changing through the erosion of the water (or electro-chemical traffic). That's how they're built. Traffic determines territory. If one area stops using its portion, in fact, an adjoining area -- if it's of the same tissue -- might acquire the real estate.

The portions of the brain handling the fingers and hands of master guitarists, for example, are larger than they are in your average person's brain.

The brain accomplishes everything it does by keeping a proper balance of resiliance and plasticity.

Anyway, let's say you get a barrage of biochemical reactions from the senses, these go down the neural pathways that have literally been worn by experience, and all of these pathways are connected, so that the neural-impulsive stream rushing through one channel goes gushing into the connected channels and washes back with effluvient of whatever is lodged in those channels.

No data banks. Just a flow of chemicals and electricity.

That's how the brain does it, more or less, although in such complex ways that we are having one hell of a time figuring it out.

So when we recite the alphabet, for example, our brains don't apply a rule to an array -- instead, we "slosh" from one letter to the next, since their neural connections are strong; literally, physically strong. If we're learning the alphabet, we might slosh out of the series where our connections are weak, then slosh back into it somewhere down the line (although for us there may be no intervening line) and pick up from there, or slosh in and out without noticing because our channels were just as strong in one direction as another.

This is not an error which caused us to skip in an array. Our brains don't appear to use arrays. That would be difficult to do, given the physical medium that's accomplishing the task.

Our brains are habit machines, association engines.

And portions of that sloshing around are made available to a process which apparently involves several brain waves and we don't know what all else, and one result of that electro-physical process is that you feel like you're sitting in a room looking at a computer.

You were born to feel like this. So was I.

And like all other phenomena in the real world, this Sofia is associated with some physical/energetic process(es). Because it cannot happen if it is not. And these processes have to go on -- in some real-world form -- for us to feel like we exist.

But given the fact that we're on this forum, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise to anybody here that our bodies make us. Because that's the inevitable conclusion of everything we know about the world.

Another inevitable conclusion is that there's nothing special about us, and other sorts of creatures (or even machines) could be conscious, too.

But however they're built, those machines will have to perform the real-world fundamentals that generate the phenomenon, because no phenomenon is free, it's got to happen somehow. Performing calculations can't make the things they describe happen, no matter how you slice it.

In the meantime, the study of the brain is what is always going to reveal the next level of understanding of what's going on when we are us.

ETA: I'm not saying that this can't be simulated. It already is being simulated. I'm also not saying it can't be modeled.

 

[Meed]

Still not sure how you came to that conclusion that it doesn't generate it, or how a 'sense of felt individual awareness' can even be measured, or how a 'sense of felt individual awareness' is different than perceiving an environment, storing memories, responding to environments, and changing behavior through experience... all this requires you to be aware of some kind of 'self'.

My computer is doing all of these things as I type this. It's not impossible that it is aware of a having a "self", but I doubt it.

ETA: more importantly, it doesn't need a sense of self to do these things

 

[Meed]

Why, no discussion at all, of course. If you can't properly define what you're discussing, there can be no discussion. Whose problem is that, do you suppose?

Any definition can be deconstructed to the point that it appears not to capture anything meaningful. If I asked you to properly define, let's say, "game", "furniture", "dog" and "happiness" how would you fare do you think?

If you look up "happy" in a dictionary you will wind up with a bunch of synonyms for happy. If you look up the synonyms you will wind up with a bunch of synonyms for the synonyms. Carry on with that and you'll just go in circles.

Words are, of course, symbols. What they represent are concepts in the mind of the speaker. When I say (or type) a word to you, I assume or at least hope that it will trigger a roughly equivalent concept to "light up" in your mind. Then we can say understanding has taken place.

However, there is never any guarantee that a string of words will trigger the concepts in the listener that they represent for the speaker. Certainly these concepts are far more complex than the words that are intended to represent them. Thus, understanding is never guaranteed. The ability to successfully convey an idea is never guaranteed. And this is not necessarily mendable with definitions, because our concepts are not merely linguistic definitions. In most situations, this is not a big problem (or at least one that is not easily overcome through clarification), but in discussions over topics such as consciousness, it is very often a problem.

What is the point of all this? It's that sometimes you do all you can to convey the meaning of a concept to someone and it just doesn't happen -- that does not make the concept invalid or nonexistent.

I probably could have just limited my post to that last sentence. You got the adderall version.

 

[Meed]

Piggy, if I could steer this in a different direction, do you think that it's actually possible to describe consciousness in terms of "physical" processes? Let's say we get to the point that we are able to pinpoint the processes that lead to the generation of consciousness. We know which physical systems would result in consciousness and which would not. And we can give a detailed description of the distinction and of how these conscious systems work structurally and mechanically. Could such a description adequately tell us what consciousness is? Or, to put it another way for example, could a detailed description of a rabbit's conscious system tell us what it is like to be a rabbit? That is, can that "what it is like" be described in terms of physical processes by biological science?

I ask, because this is where the mind/body problem rears its head for me. I'm not a dualist (due to major problems I see with dualism), but I have to answer no to this question.

 

[!Kaggen]

There is no information in your brain. (Or your computer.)

That's going to sound bizarre to a lot of people, but it's true. Even though it's also true that there is information in our brains (and our computers).

"Information", "data", and "information processing" are entifications -- which is a tool our brains use (and which we borrowed back for object-oriented programming) to make the world more manageable by treating abstractions as things.

Entifications include marriage, being sheriff, and a father-son relationship. (That last one is particularly difficult to see as an entification at all.)

There's been so much discussion about the (non)similarities between brains and computers, maybe we've forgotten that we have no conscious machines yet.

It's the brain that makes consciousness, so that's where we have to look to answer the OP. We're tempted to think of it in computer-science terms, because that's the contemporary metaphor, but that convenience comes at a price, especially if we get so accustomed to our entifications that we come to think of them as real.

In reality, the brain has more to do with riverbanks than databanks. (Not coincidentally because riverbanks are physically real, whereas only the hardware of databanks is physically real but the information is not.)

There are large-scale channels determined by the bedrock of the brain's genetically-determined architecture. These are the standard lobes and structures (medulla, hippocampus, etc.) that every neurologically normal person shares.

Within that, there are webs of intersecting rivulets which are constantly changing through the erosion of the water (or electro-chemical traffic). That's how they're built. Traffic determines territory. If one area stops using its portion, in fact, an adjoining area -- if it's of the same tissue -- might acquire the real estate.

The portions of the brain handling the fingers and hands of master guitarists, for example, are larger than they are in your average person's brain.

The brain accomplishes everything it does by keeping a proper balance of resiliance and plasticity.

Anyway, let's say you get a barrage of biochemical reactions from the senses, these go down the neural pathways that have literally been worn by experience, and all of these pathways are connected, so that the neural-impulsive stream rushing through one channel goes gushing into the connected channels and washes back with effluvient of whatever is lodged in those channels.

No data banks. Just a flow of chemicals and electricity.

That's how the brain does it, more or less, although in such complex ways that we are having one hell of a time figuring it out.

So when we recite the alphabet, for example, our brains don't apply a rule to an array -- instead, we "slosh" from one letter to the next, since their neural connections are strong; literally, physically strong. If we're learning the alphabet, we might slosh out of the series where our connections are weak, then slosh back into it somewhere down the line (although for us there may be no intervening line) and pick up from there, or slosh in and out without noticing because our channels were just as strong in one direction as another.

This is not an error which caused us to skip in an array. Our brains don't appear to use arrays. That would be difficult to do, given the physical medium that's accomplishing the task.

Our brains are habit machines, association engines.

And portions of that sloshing around are made available to a process which apparently involves several brain waves and we don't know what all else, and one result of that electro-physical process is that you feel like you're sitting in a room looking at a computer.

You were born to feel like this. So was I.

And like all other phenomena in the real world, this Sofia is associated with some physical/energetic process(es). Because it cannot happen if it is not. And these processes have to go on -- in some real-world form -- for us to feel like we exist.

But given the fact that we're on this forum, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise to anybody here that our bodies make us. Because that's the inevitable conclusion of everything we know about the world.

Another inevitable conclusion is that there's nothing special about us, and other sorts of creatures (or even machines) could be conscious, too.

But however they're built, those machines will have to perform the real-world fundamentals that generate the phenomenon, because no phenomenon is free, it's got to happen somehow. Performing calculations can't make the things they describe happen, no matter how you slice it.

In the meantime, the study of the brain is what is always going to reveal the next level of understanding of what's going on when we are us.

ETA: I'm not saying that this can't be simulated. It already is being simulated. I'm also not saying it can't be modeled.

Piggy, Have you ever read anything by Owen Barfield?

His book, Saving the Appearances-A Study in Idolatry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saving_the_Appearances:_A_Study_in_Idolatry

is a critique of exactly what you have been pointing out to the computationalists on this forum.

Idolatry is when perceptions are characterized as independent of the percipient.

And as you have been pointing out consciousness is a perception.

A rock is a real rock (not a simulation) when the collective individuals agree on there perceptions of a rock.

The aim of any Idolatry is to convince the collective of what it is they perceive (metaphysically) not to discuss the individual perceptions (qualia, consciousness, SOFIA) and convince each other through rational argument (science).
This is useful because then you can get individuals to worship the idol you have defined into existence, in this case conscious machines, which apparently exist independent of our individual perception.
In the past this might have been a big bearded man in robes with lighting bolts in his hands...
In history we have: the dead, archetypes, forms, numbers.....etc
In fact just about any abstractions have been worshiped one way or the other.

Why are humans hardwired to take abstractions more seriously than the real thing?

Good question that nobody wants to investigate because the answers cut right to the bone(literally).

Perhaps Prof. David Lewis-Williams is the first brave explorer in this territory.

He certainly makes a better argument for atheism than Dawkins.

Check out his new book: Conceiving God: The cognitive origin and evolution of religion

http://www.amazon.com/Conceiving-God-Cognitive-Evolution-Religion/dp/050005164X

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K4_7h1lajE

 

[Earthborn]

Like an artificial leg has to provide support and move naturally. One cannot use a computer simulation of a leg as an artificial leg.

So simulated brains are another issue, too... they're no more useful in actually doing anything (like generating consciousness) than are simulated power plants or refrigerators.

That's because those computer simulation don't physically perform the same task. A simulated power plant doesn't produce power, it only outputs information about how a power plant produces power.

But take for example an artificial heart: assuming it works properly it performs the same function as a natural heart. It pumps blood. It takes in blood and puts out blood. The way I see it, the brain is a sort of information pump. It takes in information from the senses and the rest of the nervous system, and it outputs information to the rest of the nervous system, the muscles and other actuators. If it is possible to create a computer simulation of that brain, and that computer feeds all that information from a real body into the simulation and sends out the output of the simulation back to the body the same way the brain would do, then computer and simulation together function in exactly the same way as a brain would. They would physically perform the same task as the brain.

If my brain was replaced with such a computer running such a brain simulation program, the new computer controlled me would certainly not be any less confused about what you mean with "Sofia" as I am now. I see no reason why it would suddenly say "Piggy, I now understand what 'Sofia' is/are. Previously when I was a brain I had them, but now that I am a computer program I suddenly notice that they are missing." I am pretty sure it would consider your Sofia concept the same way as I do now; basically you just gave problematic concepts such as "consciousness", "awareness", or "soul" new name.