Has consciousness been fully explained?

[Frank Newgent]

Your response is to ask me if I can describe something mathematically? I can't describe those things mathematically. I haven't thought about it. I don't want to waste 10 years of my life detailing a mathematical description of something that complex. But so what? Does that mean it is impossible?

The argument to ignorance is a logical fallacy of irrelevance occurring when one claims that something is true only because it hasn't been proved false, or that something is false only because it has not been proved true. A claim's truth or falsity depends on supporting or refuting evidence to the claim, not the lack of support for a contrary or contradictory claim.

http://www.skepdic.com/ignorance.html

Are you Bill O'Reilly? Do you always debate by simply repeating a question that has nothing to do with what the other participants are discussing?

Can you prove I'm not Bill O'Reilly? Shut up! We're doing it live!


All in fun, RD. But seriously please don't shoot off your mouth if you're so unwilling to take the time to address issues you attempt to raise.

 

[rocketdodger]

All in fun, RD. But seriously please don't shoot off your mouth if you're so unwilling to take the time to address issues you attempt to raise.

I did address the issue. In plain language. Is your problem that you are so used to the obscure and cryptographic communication style you rely upon to gracefully dodge questions that you don't recognize the meaning behind plain language when you see it?

We can mathematically describe particle behavior. As far as we know, everything in the universe is particle behavior. By mathematical induction, then, we can mathematically describe everything in the universe as far as we know.

On the flip side, there exists a human created mathematical description of a pentium 4 CPU. Neither you, I, or anyone else could hope to understand the entire description, or even a good part of it. The best we can do is understand a little of it, or the larger chunks of it, and trust that -- again, by induction -- the other parts are similarly understandable.

That is how induction works Frank. It takes a certain kind of person to claim that mathematical induction doesn't hold in certain cases -- a religious person.

Am I wrong? Are you not the least bit religious?

 

[dlorde]

I'm still not sure if you would classify thinking/consciousness as meta-physical or not. I'm not sure if thinking can be reliably detected (there are some fairly sophisticated machines to scan brains, but I'm not knowledgable about whether they can determine if someone is conscious versus comatose in all cases). At any rate, while we might be able to tell that someone is thinking, we cannot tell the contents of their thoughts. While thinking or consciousness can't be measured objectively, it certainly affects the 'real world' in many different ways via thoughts which are acted upon.

Real-time scans revealing brain activity show characteristic patterns of activity across the brain corresponding to the mental tasks being undertaken. Many of these patterns are broadly similar between individuals, and sufficiently consistent in a single individual that they can be used to tell which of a limited set of objects the individual is visualising. Pretty crude at the moment, but it's a start.

This is not helpful in delineating what is information and what is not. This only indicates that different sorts of information are recognizable by different systems. I don't think it is possible to objectively distinguish between patterns containing information and patterns that don't. I think, like others have indicated, that all patterns can be considered to contain information. Some is meaningful to some creatures, most is not.

Doesn't a pattern necessarily contain information? How else does one recognise it as a pattern?

 

[Meed]

Real-time scans revealing brain activity show characteristic patterns of activity across the brain corresponding to the mental tasks being undertaken. Many of these patterns are broadly similar between individuals, and sufficiently consistent in a single individual that they can be used to tell which of a limited set of objects the individual is visualising. Pretty crude at the moment, but it's a start.

Keep in mind the "limited set" is actually just two images (at least in the study I've seen). And successfully determining which object they're visualizing, just means "right more than 50% of the time", according to a statistical significance test.

 

[Piggy]

Is model water wet?

It would depend on what was used to model the water, which would depend on your purposes.

For some purposes, one would use a liquid, but I can imagine that for other purposes a liquid would not be necessary.

It would depend entirely on what characteristics were necessary to the model.

Why do you ask?

 

[Piggy]

So, for the computationalists, let's say that instead of running a sim of one person, you have your computer run a sim of several people.

Now, your computer is conscious of several different minds at once.

Oh noes! Your computer would go insane!

Would this also mean that the people in the sim could read each other's minds?

When I'm conscious, my locus of awareness is consistently in the area of my cranium. So for a computer that's simultaneously conscious of many different brains, they would certainly all be centered around the same phyiscal region of the computer mechanism.

Unless the computer has a way of divvying them up into different regions. But how would that be accomplished?

 

[Piggy]

I wonder if you'll ever stop thinking that people disagreeing with you expect computers to turn into water or animals or something.

But this is the logical extension of their claims.

Unless, of course, they can explain why consciousness is some sort of exception.

Which so far, no one has.

 

[Piggy]

I agree that if you choose to program a simulation of diseases, water currents, environmental conditions, blood pressure, and heart rate that you will not produce a program that acts conscious, because consciousness is not something that diseases, water currents, environmental conditions, blood pressure, and heart rates do.

Yes, but no one is claiming that a heart rate generates consciousness.

On the other hand, if you claim that a machine running a sim of a human body itself becomes conscious by virtue of running the sim, then you're claiming that the machine running the sim does in fact adopt the behavior of the thing being simulated despite the fact that it is not doing any of the physical stuff that the actual human body physically does.

If that's the case, then it's impossible to understand why the computer would not start exhibiting all of the behaviors of the human body. Or, for that matter, all of the behaviors of anything that it simulates.

So if a computer running a sim of a racecar does not go zooming down the road, or have an oil pressure, then there's absolutely no reason to claim that it somehow begins to exhibit one particular (and only one) behavior of the human body when that system is simulated.

 

[Piggy]

That's what this argument boils down to. What do you think consciousness is? Do you think it's along the lines of soul-based dualism or is it the functioning of the brain? If you believe the first, then certainly a conscious simulation is impossible. If you believe the second, then in a perfect simulation of the brain, consciousness is inevitable.

What do you think a pulse is? Do you think it's along the lines of Platonic dualism or is it the functioning of the body? If you believe the first, then certainly a simulation with a pulse is possible. If you believe the second, then in a perfect simulation of the body, a pulse is inevitable.

See how ridiculous that is?

Consciousness is a bodily function. The phyiscal body uses resources to crank it up and sustain it. We don't know how yet, but it does it.

A conscious machine will have to do something equivalent physically, whatever that turns out to be.

On the other hand, if you only use enough resources to run a program, that's all you're going to get.

Saying you can program a computer to engage in real-world behavior is ridiculous, whether you're talking about pumping blood, regulating temperature, or turning the process of conscious awareness on and off.

 

[Piggy]

Why not?

Of course you can't get it through programming alone -- meaning the abstraction that is the program doesn't do anything itself. But the program is just our way of interacting with machine code to make the machine do what we want it to do. What is the barrier to creating a program that causes the computer to perform the same actions that a brain performs?

Nothing, as long as the programming is controlling some process that actually makes the behavior happen.

You can program a computer to play a CD, or to run a fan, or paint cars. But you can't get any of these real-world behaviors (or any other) via programming alone.

And yet the computationalists make a magical exception for the behavior of consciousness. That, they say, can be done with no direct physical cause -- without ever explaining how this can be achieved.

 

[Piggy]

Who ever said there was going to be a conscious program?

QuixoteCoyote, for one. Very recently, in fact.

And, iinm, also PixyMisa, rocketdodger, and drkitten, to name a few.

 

[Piggy]

Once again, I'll use the bottom-up, top-down analogy. Brains work because neurons are set in place by various factors. The flow of 'electricity' and information in brains is determined by where neurons are and how they link together. Those rules are set bottom-up. The function of the brain, through the way that the neurons are placed and linked together, can produce consciousness. We know that is true.

All that a program does is help direct the opening and closing of logical gates and direct the flow of electrons. What is the barrier to a program being able to direct the flow of electrons and open logic gates in a way that functionally duplicates the flow of 'electricity' and information in a brain?

Well, if you want to be grounded in physical reality, you're going to have to dispense with abstractions such as "logic" and "information". There be monsters.

The program can certainly be part of the mix, but it can't be the whole shebang, no matter which bodily function you want the machine to mimic.

 

[Piggy]

If I have a simulated neuron, and I hook it up to real neurons via real I/O devices, is it still a simulated neuron or is it now a model neuron?

Would you care to describe this "simulated neuron" as well as the method you will use to graft it into the brain?

 

[Piggy]

Why should I bother to explain when you don't even read my posts?

I said "vague, non-human way."

Meaning, any of the computationalists who think a sufficiently advanced toaster can be "conscious" obviously think a cockroach can be "conscious."

What does "vague, non-human way" mean when it comes to consciousness? (Yes, I read that, too.)

And what's your design for the conscious toaster?

 

[Piggy]

The computational position is that the function of a system required for consciousness is the ability to recognize itself and act accordingly.

Which is unrecognizable in terms of the actual study of consciousness.

 

[Piggy]

The anti-computational position is that the function of a system required for consciousness is some elusive "physical" essence that neurons have and transistors do not, even though isolated neurons are not conscious.

Wrong again. No one legitimately studying how the brain does consciousness is looking for any "essence".

I don't know of anyone researching the brain who believes that building a conscious machine is theoretically impossible.

 

[Piggy]

I find this laughable, given that traditionally the notion of consciousness stems from the way humans behave and interact with each other.

Wrong yet again. Consciousness is a behavior of the gross anatomy, and does not require any interaction with other humans.

 

[Piggy]

I hold that if commander Data is able to speak with me like a conscious human, and pass a genuine Turing test, he is conscious.

Then you hold an indefensible position.

Consciousness is something the body does.

It doesn't matter if anyone is able to produce something which fools you into thinking it's conscious when it's not.

I mean, really... this is flawed thinking at the most basic level.

You might as well say that the test for whether or not someone's being honest with me is if they can convince me that they're being honest.

Or that the test for how fast an object is traveling is how fast it makes me think it's traveling.

 

[Piggy]

Why are you even in this discussion if you think consciousness is tantamount to "all the functions of a human brain?"

First, I could ask you why you bother to chime in about consciousness when you apparently understand nothing about the study of the brain.

But besides that, I have never claimed that consciousness is tantamount to all the functions of the brain, and in fact I've been extremely explicit in discussing functions of the brain which are not involved in conscious awareness.

I've mentioned this many times in various contexts, and have cited several studies demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that consciousness is one specialized function of the brain.

 

[Frank Newgent]

I did address the issue. In plain language. Is your problem that you are so used to the obscure and cryptographic communication style you rely upon to gracefully dodge questions that you don't recognize the meaning behind plain language when you see it?

We can mathematically describe particle behavior. As far as we know, everything in the universe is particle behavior. By mathematical induction, then, we can mathematically describe everything in the universe as far as we know.

On the flip side, there exists a human created mathematical description of a pentium 4 CPU. Neither you, I, or anyone else could hope to understand the entire description, or even a good part of it. The best we can do is understand a little of it, or the larger chunks of it, and trust that -- again, by induction -- the other parts are similarly understandable.

That is how induction works Frank. It takes a certain kind of person to claim that mathematical induction doesn't hold in certain cases -- a religious person.

Am I wrong? Are you not the least bit religious?

Your induction has failed you. I am quite agnostic.

In response to your challenge I don't recall asking you for a mathematical description of a pentium 4 CPU. Instead, I asked you to mathematically describe how your sentence "there is not a single thing that we have encountered that cannot be described by mathematics" ought to be true (assuming oughts exist given the existence of goals).

Never said I believed that this can't be done. Merely responded to your challenge with what I hoped was a difficult response.

In response to a possible similar challenge next time I'll try to stick to asking for maybe the mathematical description of a couple falling dominoes