Has consciousness been fully explained?

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AlBell said:
"What is this magic that makes consciousness different from everything else in the Universe?" is no more known to us today today than it was to the ancient Mesopotamians. Before trying to explain consciousness, maybe seeing if we can answer "What is this magic that makes Life different from everything else in the Universe?" would offer a starting place.
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A better starting place would be to figure out if consciousness, or even life, is magical and different from everything else in the universe.

But thanks for letting all of us know that you aren't even here for serious discussion, since you assume apriori that magic is involved. You just stated it.

Gracias!
 
rocketdodger said:
A better starting place would be to figure out if consciousness, or even life, is magical and different from everything else in the universe.

But thanks for letting all of us know that you aren't even here for serious discussion, since you assume apriori that magic is involved. You just stated it.

Gracias!
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Sorry, but no. PixyMisa asked the question.
 
AlBell said:
maybe seeing if we can answer "What is this magic that makes Life different from everything else in the Universe?" would offer a starting place.
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I don't understand again. We do know that answer in broad outline -- a particular set of biochemical processes. Stop the chemistry and we stop life.

Or are we returning to an elan vitale argument now?
 
AlBell said:
But, but, see the character in that game module scowl? Isn't that passion?
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I sincerely hope you know why that is a totally inadequate response. I certainly hope that you do not think that anyone in this thread has ever argued that the behavior of any game character even remotely approximates a conscious entity.
 
Ichneumonwasp said:
I sincerely hope you know why that is a totally inadequate response. I certainly hope that you do not think that anyone in this thread has ever argued that the behavior of any game character even remotely approximates a conscious entity.
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The issue here is that many people have, including myself, yet have been explicit about said consciousness being nothing like what a human has, other than being built upon self reference.

And apparently readers are incapable of understanding that "no similarities other than self reference" really means no similarities other than self reference. They think we are saying a programmable thermostat or a video game character will cry when it watches "I Am Sam."

Which is why it is pointless to even include them in the discussion.
 
Ichneumonwasp said:
I'm sorry, but that is wrong. Philosophy, from its inception, has depended critically on definitions. Essentially that is what Plato's dialogues primarily concern, and that is precisely what Aristotle spends so much time on at the beginning of virtually all of his tracts; and why most people don't bother to read him because he bores them to death.

It is reason that philolosphy has concerned itself with for the past 400 years almost exclusively, not imagination. That, in fact, is one of the problems in discussions about consciousness. Consciousness concerns awareness and feeling -- or what has historically been called "the passions". Philosophy has relegated the passions to second class citizenship historically because the passions were felt to be "animal" while philosophy tried to concentrate on what it considered human -- reason.
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We're talking PM definitions, i.e. ones that can be studied scientifically.


Now what is it about Plato's invisible forms, Bergson's elan vital, Schopenhauer's will and Kant's thing-in-itself that does not require a healthy imagination?
 
!Kaggen said:
We're talking PM definitions, i.e. ones that can be studied scientifically.


Now what is it about Plato's invisible forms, Bergson's elan vital, Schopenhauer's will and Kant's thing-in-itself that does not require a healthy imagination?
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All, for philoophical discussion, depend on the definitions. Discussion of any of those entities cannot proceed intelligently without clear definitions. Plato's forms, Schopenhouer's will and Kant's thing-in-itself all critically depend on the way that they are discussed in terms of language; imagination is not particularly useful for any of them when it comes to discussion. The elan vitale is simply wrong and merits no further discussion.

What is it that you guys are worried about? That the word 'science' has been bandied about?

Plato's dialogues generally begin with definitions of words and proceed with further refinements of those definitions, generally displaying the ignorance of the person providing the original definition -- that they think they know what the word means when they clearly do not, as the dialogue reveals. Imagination is not the key -- reason and definitions are. That is what western philosophy has largely concerned itself with for the past 2500 years.
 
Ichneumonwasp said:
I don't understand again. We do know that answer in broad outline -- a particular set of biochemical processes. Stop the chemistry and we stop life.
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So is it fair to conclude "Start the chemistry and we start life."? I haven't seen the press release, nor at our current understanding of physics and chemistry do I expect to.

Or are we returning to an elan vitale argument now?
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Elan vital doesn't fit well within our current understanding of life up to and including consciousness. How and why the self-determination that characterizes life occurs is yet be to understood.

Vitalism is now considered an obsolete term in the philosophy of science, most often used as a pejorative epithet.[4] Still, Ernst Mayr, co-founder of the modern evolutionary synthesis and a critic of both vitalism and reductionism, writing in 2002 after the mathematical development of theories underlying emergent behavior, stated:

It would be ahistorical to ridicule vitalists. When one reads the writings of one of the leading vitalists like Driesch one is forced to agree with him that many of the basic problems of biology simply cannot be solved by a philosophy as that of Descartes, in which the organism is simply considered a machine…..The logic of the critique of the vitalists was impeccable. But all their efforts to find a scientific answer to all the so-called vitalistic phenomena were failures.… rejecting the philosophy of reductionism is not an attack on analysis. No complex system can be understood except through careful analysis. However the interactions of the components must be considered as much as the properties of the isolated components.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism
 
AlBell said:
So is it fair to conclude "Start the chemistry and we start life."? I haven't seen the press release, nor at our current understanding of physics and chemistry do I expect to.
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Surely you did notice that I said "in broad outline" and not "down to every last detail", but to answer your question -- yes, start the chemistry and we start life. I'm surprised you missed the press release since it is a part of every good college level biology and biochemistry text. Most even have discussions about the history of vitalism. And most do mock it to some degree. I know the text I used in college did.
 
Ichneumonwasp said:
Or more succinctly, as Pixy said, it's a category error, or a framing error. The simulated orange is an orange within the simulation. A real orange is an orange in the real world.
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No, that would make it a category accuracy.

"In the world of the simulation" means in someone's imagination, but I don't believe this thread is about imaginary consciousness.
 
rocketdodger said:
Yeah, it does, actually.

That threshold is when the internal flow of information in Compy's circuits starts to mimic the flow of information in the brains of conscious people.

Get it?
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Yeah, I get what you're saying perfectly fine.

It's just that what you're saying is wrong.

This would be correct: That threshold is when Compy's machinery starts to mimic the necessary behaviors in the brains of conscious people.

To assert that the "flow of information" by itself could make this happen -- unless you are defining "information" in such a way as to refer to the electro-physical workings of the brain, which is possible of course -- you either have to deny that the phenomenon of conscious awareness (an observable event locatable in spacetime) has a direct physical cause, or you have to claim that the "flow of information" can result in real-world objects or events or energies.
 
Piggy said:
No, that would make it a category accuracy.

"In the world of the simulation" means in someone's imagination, but I don't believe this thread is about imaginary consciousness.
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Wrong.

The particles of the orange are very real. Just as real as you and I. They are the particles of the semiconductors in the computer hardware where the data for what we imagine as an orange resides.

There is a real behavior change when anything happens to the orange in the simulation -- the particles in the computer change accordingly.

Everything about the orange is real. We can't smell it, or touch it, or even see it without help, but it is a real thing.

The only thing that is in our imagination is the word "orange."

But that can be said for a real orange as well.

So yeah, you are wrong.
 
PixyMisa said:
No. Synchronous brain waves are no more involved in consciousness than 2.4GHz RF noise is in running my computer. In fact, they're exactly as involved - they're the electromagnetic signal of the clock speed of the circuit.
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We know they're engaged during conscious perception, but not at other times, so they're involved somehow. Even if that involvement is noise.
 
Piggy said:
or you have to claim that the "flow of information" can result in real-world objects or events or energies.
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Of course it does.

What on Earth do you think information actually is?

Lets just get this straight, right here, right now:

NOTHING EXISTS EXCEPT PARTICLES. EVERYTHING IS PARTICLES. THERE IS NOTHING ELSE. JUST. PHYSICAL. PARTICLES
 
rocketdodger said:
Wrong.

The particles of the orange are very real. Just as real as you and I. They are the particles of the semiconductors in the computer hardware where the data for what we imagine as an orange resides.
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Wrong. The particles of the semiconductors in the computer hardware are the particles of the semiconductors in the computer hardware. The orange is the orange.
 
rocketdodger said:
Of course it does.

What on Earth do you think information actually is?

Lets just get this straight, right here, right now:

NOTHING EXISTS EXCEPT PARTICLES. EVERYTHING IS PARTICLES. THERE IS NOTHING ELSE. JUST. PHYSICAL. PARTICLES
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Like I said, if you want to use "information" in a way that refers to the actions of waves/particles, that's fine.

In that case, when a star explodes, it's all a flow of information.

And in that case, to make a machine do the same thing the brain is doing, we get the particles to move in such a way as they achieve the same goals.

Same thing we do if we want a machine to walk.
 
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