Explain consciousness to the layman.

[yy2bggggs]

I re-read your response to my thought experiment and I see only red herring dismissals. Sorry.

Look, Mr. Scott.

If you were to somehow actually be able to carry out the experiment, I would think you'd be interested in what would actually be the outcome.

That's not red herring, and it's not a dismissal. I have no clue what motivates you to say that it's either. It is, in fact, the experiment you have designated.

ETA:

You didn't respond to my final reworking of the experiment:

You're right. I didn't respond. So?

 

[PixyMisa]

Yes, the god of the gaps in the mind.

The god of the gaps is a logical fallacy.

Either side of this debate should realise that the existence or not of gods or the spiritual world does not hinge on how things in the world work, or the ideas that humans come up with.

Begging the question.

Might I remind the materialists that everything is in a rather large gap to begin with.

No.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Look, Mr. Scott.

If you were to somehow actually be able to carry out the experiment, I would think you'd be interested in what would actually be the outcome.

That's not red herring, and it's not a dismissal. I have no clue what motivates you to say that it's either. It is, in fact, the experiment you have designated.

ETA:

You're right. I didn't respond. So?

Your ego is showing.

The point of a thought experiment is to reveal a principle or problem. Whether or not the experiment is practical is irrelevant. That's why it's called a thought experiment.

You claimed you responded materially, which I don't think you did, you asked me to rework the experiment, which I did, though you ignored the rework, apparently with pride. Naturally, I suspect the issue the thought experiment exposes is too difficult for materialists (like me) to refute.

 

[Mr. Scott]

duplicate

 

[tsig]

Have you studied color vision? Color is in the mind, not in the physical world.

Tell me where the red wavelength of light is when we are looking at an afterimage of a green, black, and yellow American flag.
Then watch Dennett's video about consciousness where he discusses this illusion.

An afterimage or ghost image or image burn-in is an optical illusion that refers to an image continuing to appear in one's vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased. One of the most common afterimages is the bright glow that seems to float before one's eyes after looking into a light source for a few seconds.

Have you studied vision?

 

[PixyMisa]

I re-read your response to my thought experiment and I see only red herring dismissals. Sorry.

You didn't respond to my final reworking of the experiment:

I think it gets close to the nub of the issue. If you are so sure it doesn't, convince me. I'm listening.

The brain is equipped with fairly standardised mechanisms for sensing and processing colour, which is why when it goes wrong it goes wrong in fairly standardised ways.

For example, the McCollough effect lets you temporarily reprogram your colour vision by hijacking a circuit in the brain that apparently evolved to calibrate colour vision.

 

[tsig]

Your ego is showing.

The point of a thought experiment is to reveal a principle or problem. Whether or not the experiment is practical is irrelevant. That's why it's called a thought experiment.

You claimed you responded materially, which I don't think you did, you asked me to rework the experiment, which I did, though you ignored the rework, apparently with pride. Naturally, I suspect the issue the thought experiment exposes is too difficult for materialists (like me) to refute.

You can determining his emotions from a post he never made?

The issue is that your thought experiment has no basis in reality.

If the moon were made of Limburger cheese the astronauts would have died of the stench.

 

[westprog]

How can you even pretend to know this? If we allow qualia that exist beyond the grasp of scientific inquiry, how can you possibly know that they wouldn't exist in simulations of biological systems?

I certainly don't know that qualia won't exist in (computer) simulations of biological systems. I know that no other biological systems operate in such simulations, and that there is no evidence that qualia exist in computer simulations. It is also possible that certain accidental properties of the computers running the simulations coincide with certain biological processes, but this is nothing to do with the simulation. One should not confuse a simulation with the thing itself.

 

[westprog]

Did you even read the rest of my post ?

Why assume that pain has any substance rather than just being a behaviour ?

What do you mean by "substance"? I find it absurd to claim that pain might not exist. It seems like an extreme form of mysticism. Anyone can refute it with ease, using the experiment I proposed.

To accept the world as mediated through the senses - and through the senses alone - and to deny that the senses themselves are "real", requires a convoluted view of reality that doesn't correspond at all with our experience of it.

 

[yy2bggggs]

Your ego is showing.

Ad hominem.

The point of a thought experiment is to reveal a principle or problem.

And the one you keep harping on does not show a problem.

Whether or not the experiment is practical is irrelevant.

But whether or not it actually has the outcome is relevant. Somehow you want to make it irrelevant.

You claimed you responded materially, which I don't think you did, you asked me to rework the experiment, which I did, though you ignored the rework, apparently with pride.

Ad hominem. Talk about ego, why is it that you keep insisting that you know my mental states? Or for that matter, why do you presume my mental states are even relevant?

Who do you think you are?

Your point is yours to make, not mine. I'm not obliged to give you responses. I'm not out to prove anything, and I'm not your monkey. This is your imagination.

Incidentally, with your dying experiment, I really don't see any issue with materialism. After all, whatever outcome would result would be based on how the brain reacts to that environment--so what difference would it make if the result were a green qualia or a red one? Unless, of course, you're more interested in what you want to imagine the results would be than you are in what the results would actually be.

As for what would be the outcome, I don't know. But I'm not going to decide it's a particular way without a reason to decide it. I think that's probably just a personal problem I have, though. Apparently not everyone is so limited in their ability to say what will happen in thought experiments if they don't know what will happen.

Naturally, I suspect the issue the thought experiment exposes is too difficult for materialists (like me) to refute.

Argumentum ex silentio.

FYI, I've never called myself a materialist.

 

[Mr. Scott]

An afterimage or ghost image or image burn-in is an optical illusion that refers to an image continuing to appear in one's vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased. One of the most common afterimages is the bright glow that seems to float before one's eyes after looking into a light source for a few seconds.

Have you studied vision?

Actually, I have, and there are two kinds afterimages: a negative we see when looking at a white field, and a positive we see when looking at a black field. Have you listened to Dennett's explanation of the flag effect? It actually contradicts articles I've read on afterimage hypotheses, so I'm open minded about their causes and implications.

My point was that colors in the mind do not require wavelengths of light. The bright glow you see after a light is gone is now sans photons, and the impressions of light and color can happen in the brain at many levels without corresponding physical light images entering the eye. Optical illusions expose this principle.

Dennett's lecture covers this with many examples. Get back to me after you've watched it.

Check out this cool optical illusion and tell me where the physical wavelengths of color are in the second half of the video. Start by focusing on the black dot in the center.

 

[Wowbagger]

Are you saying that qualia can exist without consciousness, or not ?

Strictly speaking, no, it cannot.

But, hypothetically, there can be an even more vague sense of proto-qualia that could be experienced without consciousness.

Oh, that's an interesting assertion. Why is evolution necessary to produce a conscious machine?

First, I should mention that the word "evolution" is being used rather generically, here. It need not be Darwinian-style Natural Selection. Strictly Lamarckian evolution could, hypothetically, allow consciousness to emerge, assuming such a process could even kick off naturally.
(Though, as a matter of probability, the method of evolution would most likely be Darwinian.)

But, my assertion comes from that fact that consciousness, if it is to emerge from natural processes at all, needs to emerge somehow. There needs to be some sort of evolutionary process that can take inanimate matter, and grant it conscious awareness, over time.

Think about the pebbles thought experiment: If we moved a bunch of pebbles around to simulate the specific processes that lead to consciousness, I do not think the pebbles would qualify as conscious. But, if there were (hypothetically) some way in which the pebbles would figure out how to move themselves in the proper manner, then they would represent a conscious entity. The process by which they would figure all of this out, I would generically refer to as "evolution".

This does not apply to the direct Creation approach. If humans figured out what the conscious "algorithm" was, we could code it into a computer directly. The need for an evolutionary process applies only to natural occurrences of consciousness.

 

[westprog]

You have much computer science to learn, Luke. Turing Machine.

I am also skeptical that turing machine could produce the type of consciousness we have. We know a neuron machine can. We just aren't sure how.

We know that the human brain can operate as a Turing machine. (Precisely what kind of Turing machine we can leave aside for the moment). We also know - as a fact - that the human brain has other functionality as well.

If we look at the evolution of the brain and nervous system, we see that its primary function was as a communication and control system. The proponents of the Turing machine hypothesis tend to ignore this functionality as in any way important or relevant. I believe that this is due to the course of development of computer science as a discipline, where producing computers that simulated Turing machines was a vital initial stage. Now, when computers are used to control and monitor on a routine basis, a different theory might seem appropriate.

 

[PixyMisa]

Think about the pebbles thought experiment: If we moved a bunch of pebbles around to simulate the specific processes that lead to consciousness, I do not think the pebbles would qualify as conscious.

The pebbles wouldn't, but the system would. The pebbles alone are like the RAM without the CPU.

 

[PixyMisa]

We know that the human brain can operate as a Turing machine. (Precisely what kind of Turing machine we can leave aside for the moment). We also know - as a fact - that the human brain has other functionality as well.

Name one.

If we look at the evolution of the brain and nervous system, we see that its primary function was as a communication and control system. The proponents of the Turing machine hypothesis tend to ignore this functionality as in any way important or relevant.

Nope. We just note that this is not "other functionality".

I believe that this is due to the course of development of computer science as a discipline, where producing computers that simulated Turing machines was a vital initial stage.

That never happened.

Now, when computers are used to control and monitor on a routine basis, a different theory might seem appropriate.

Nope. That's mathematically baseless.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Your point is yours to make, not mine. I'm not obliged to give you responses. I'm not out to prove anything, and I'm not your monkey. This is your imagination.

Argumentum ex silentio.

Yikes! An egorama! I wasn't using ad hom to dismiss your arguments. It was a hypothesis for why your arguments had zero traction. You are invited to make better arguments.

Argumentum ex silentio? Sometimes, silence makes the loudest sound.

 

[!Kaggen]

Any system that can perform calculations and select what calculations to perform.

That does not seem a very useful definition since to calculate and to compute are pretty much synonymous. Saying a computer is something that computes is pretty redundant although I can see how it would be a useful definition for your purposes

 

[westprog]

Maybe I just feel it's impractical. The brain is just so massively parallel, and a turning machine is so tediously sequential, that it feels like a TM would have to be the size of the universe and run for the lifetime of the universe to produce one subjective experience.

From what I know about computers and the brain, thinking about a conscious turing machine gives me the subjective experience of impossibility

AFAIAA, the hypothesis being proposed (or in many cases, asserted as a proven fact) is that the functionality of the brain could, in principle, be unambiguously decomposed into a set of Turing operations. (It's certainly the case that a number of parallel Turing machines can be shown to be equivalent to a single Turing machine). If the same Turing operations were to be hypothetically executed on any kind of device, from electronic computers to pebbles in the sand, then the same subjective experiences would be produced.

I find this highly implausible, chiefly because the idea of brain-as-Turing-machine doesn't really address how the brain works, or what its real function is.

It's certainly the case that a Turing machine could simulate a brain, but simulations of biological processes do not, as a rule, produce the actual biological phenomenon, and we would be astonished if they did.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Nope. It's been proven for every well-defined method of computation.

Consciousness is computationally well defined?

 

[Mr. Scott]

the McCollough effect lets you temporarily reprogram your colour vision by hijacking a circuit in the brain that apparently evolved to calibrate colour vision.

That's awesome!

[McCollough effects] can last much longer than that, however. Jones and Holding (1975) found that 15 minutes of induction can lead to an effect lasting 3 months