Explain consciousness to the layman.

[tsig]

I don't think it can be determined what awareness a primitive cellular animal has of its environment. Other than by observing its behavior and chemical activity. It is by this stage in its evolution an organism, an individual entity or being. Not just the aggregation of a few million chemical reactions.

I am regarding consciousness as an emergent property of the organism as a whole not just the computation going on in its nervous system. However I accept that this computation is necessary for the development of consciousness from more simple awareness.

It does not follow for me that machines controlled by programs are anything other than automatons, however complex the activity involved. If it were demonstrated that they were conscious entities I would reconsider.

No I'm not restricting it to life as we know it. I don't think we can even begin to understand how an alternative life form may be composed.

Life as we know it results in the only example of consciousness we have. I am open to other forms of consciousness, however I regard the living organism as a whole to be a prerequisite for the emergence of that consciousness.

Probably not, a computer would beat me hands down at chess.

I know it might come across that way. My difficulty is that I am used to discussing these issues in an entirely different language which is regarded as nonsense of the first order on this website.

I think there are a few gibberish speakers here.

 

[tsig]

There is a difficulty in explaining what I mean when I use "know" and "being". I have not yet found a language or way of words which you guys will find palatable.

Let me define my meaning in the way I am used to discussing this and perhaps you will see the difficulty.

I consider an ontology in which the primary existence or substance is being or self (atman). In which all other forms in existence are subtle or concrete expressions or manifestations of aspects of atman. As a whole the entirety of existence is one being, all parts in existence are the equivalent of cells or molecules in the body of this being.

From this perspective consciousness is an emergent property of being an entity.

I am therefore I think.

 

[tsig]

Well, then, I have no idea what your definition of "physical" is.



That's not digital.



Last time you weren't very keen on what we could interpret things as. Why do you now reverse your position ?

As far as I can tell Westprog's position is that there's some non physical component of consciousness so any argument that will allow him to deny that consciousness has a solely materiel basis can be used. His arguments are merely tactical maneuvers to enable him to defend his position so while they may look contradictory they all work to the purpose of diverting your arguments and disrupting your position.

 

[tsig]

Still having trouble with the concept, punshhh?

He's still jousting against the windmills of the infinite.


They can be found somewhere beyond the event horizon of the formless.

 

[Complexity]

As far as I can tell Westprog's position is that there's some non physical component of consciousness so any argument that will allow him to deny that consciousness has a solely materiel basis can be used. His arguments are merely tactical maneuvers to enable him to defend his position so while they may look contradictory they all work to the purpose of diverting your arguments and disrupting your position.

He's merely another damned dualist who thinks he can sneak up on us from behind.

 

[punshhh]

I disagree. For very simple organisms it is possible to enumerate their sensory gamut and this gives you a measure of their awareness in terms of response to the environment. A simple organism is a self-sustaining aggregation of a few million chemical reactions; it is the organisation of the components and their reactions that is important.

You are throwing the entity out with the bath water. I am considering that the entity is more than the sum of its chemical reactions.

Are you saying that if one assembles the appropriate chemicals in the correct configuration, it would naturally rise up and walk?

Presumably you knowwhat the spark of life is? of course there is no spark we are all automatons.

OK - a brain of some sort (a neural plexus) is necessary for the neural interactions that give rise to consciousness, and requires a body for support and sensory I/O, so your regard seems superficially reasonable, pending an explanation of what you mean by 'an emergent property of the organism as a whole'.

The precise relation and emergence of consciousness in an animal is not known, correct me if I'm wrong. I am not attempting to explain it. I am simply making an observation of the conscious entities which we have to observe.

We've been round the 'all life is conscious' and even 'everything is conscious' roundabout elsewhere, and it leads nowhere useful; it emasculates the concept and leads to mystical universal consciousness woo. I'm quite happy to accept 'awareness' as a measure of response to environmental stimuli, but this is very different from conscious awareness.

Yes I agree it is a primitive ability, rather like the ability current robots exhibit. I regard such a life form to have an embryonic self awareness, entirely unconscious.

But you feel that a biological cell is not an automaton (an entity that follows or responds to coded instructions)? When Craig Venter's team assembled Synthia, a synthetic DNA sequence in a denucleated bacterial cell, which replicated just like a natural bacterium, did they create an automaton? If not, why not?

I am not denying the physical material realities of how biological life operates/behaves. I am considering aspects of a living entity which are in a sense virtual rather like the way our ego is virtual.

What would you accept as a demonstration of consciousness?

I see this as a science of the future and is not something I have given much thought.

At least you now appear to accept that a non-biological consciousness could be demonstrated. I did find it curious that you (elsewhere?) posited consciousness in simple biological creatures, but were not prepared to accept consciousness in an arbitrarily complex artificial computational system, emulating, for example, a mammalian brain. Yet you still seem unable to articulate why. Something about organic chemistry?

Again if the synthetic entity is alive, I have no doubt it could be conscious. I repeat that the only life form we know of is life as we know it on earth. Have we any idea at all how to construct a different life form or conceive of it?

OK - I take it that means you accept my minimal definition for life (posted earlier).

Provisionally, I was accepting the definition in terms of the qualities of biological cellular life.

So you are open to consciousness in any dynamic self-organising, self-sustaining, structured system that responds coherently to its environment (my minimal definition of life) - even if it was a non-biological construct?

No, I doubt life is fully understood as yet.

What has that to do with anything? Chess doesn't require consciousness.

I meant a robot could hoodwink me into thinking its conscious.

There's your problem. We try to use critical thinking to translate unconventional non-scientific ideas and concepts into science. This gives us a common language for investigation and analysis. For this we need evidence and or detailed explanation. I suggest the problem isn't the language per se, but the ideas and concepts expressed in it.

I see no problem other than translation into another ontology.

 

[punshhh]

He's merely another damned dualist who thinks he can sneak up on us from behind.

He says, blind to his own ingrained duality.

 

[punshhh]

Plain old English is as expressive as any language on the planet, and more so than many. Feynman said, "if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough". Rutherford and Einstein made similar statements.

Can you conceive of an ontology of atman?

OK, let's try to translate into common language for investigation and analysis. What is 'atman' in physical terms? what evidence is there for it? how is it measured or observed? how do you (or anyone) know it exists? Does it have any physical reality, or is it metaphorical or metaphysical?

Given the atman ontology it is real and is that part of each of us which knows/experiences, and everything in existence including matter is a construct embodying a manifestation of some aspect of atman.

I think we discovered earlier that that description has no useful meaning or explanatory or predictive value in this discussion. Using the definitions you gave for 'entity' and 'quality of being', etc., my computer satisfied all the requirements for a living conscious animal, or at least living and conscious (assuming 'animal' wasn't part of the definitions).

My definitions were inadequate and life and consciousness are not well defined or agreed on.

 

[westprog]

Well, then, I have no idea what your definition of "physical" is.

There's nothing esoteric about this. A physical interpretation of computation would be one that appeared in the Physics text book, alongside the definitions of magnetism and electric charge, with an explanation of how to detect it was going on in terms of other physical quantities, in an objective fashion.

That's not digital.

Then nothing is digital. Which is certainly a valid way of looking at things.

Last time you weren't very keen on what we could interpret things as. Why do you now reverse your position ?

I never objected to being able to interpret something as a digital operation. However, it is a subjective interpretation, and any system can be subdivided into a finite number of states, and the behaviour of that system interpreted as a transition between those states. It's always possible to select a different set of subdivisions, and interpret the system as a totally different set of transitions, none of which are any more real than another*.

*There's an exception for the transition between quantum states, which are apparently digital on a fundamental level. That doesn't affect the general case.

 

[tsig]

You are throwing the entity out with the bath water. I am considering that the entity is more than the sum of its chemical reactions.

Are you saying that if one assembles the appropriate chemicals in the correct configuration, it would naturally rise up and walk?

Presumably you knowwhat the spark of life is? of course there is no spark we are all automatons.

The precise relation and emergence of consciousness in an animal is not known, correct me if I'm wrong. I am not attempting to explain it. I am simply making an observation of the conscious entities which we have to observe.

Yes I agree it is a primitive ability, rather like the ability current robots exhibit. I regard such a life form to have an embryonic self awareness, entirely unconscious.

I am not denying the physical material realities of how biological life operates/behaves. I am considering aspects of a living entity which are in a sense virtual rather like the way our ego is virtual.

I see this as a science of the future and is not something I have given much thought.

Again if the synthetic entity is alive, I have no doubt it could be conscious. I repeat that the only life form we know of is life as we know it on earth. Have we any idea at all how to construct a different life form or conceive of it?

Provisionally, I was accepting the definition in terms of the qualities of biological cellular life.

No, I doubt life is fully understood as yet.

I meant a robot could hoodwink me into thinking its conscious.


I see no problem other than translation into another ontology.

The spark of life is energized by the ignition coil of nothingness that is powered by the battery of bafflegab, since batteries get power from chemical reactions it's all nothing but physics in the end.

 

[tsig]

He says, blind to his own ingrained duality.

You do think there's a duality in consciousness, then, that it isn't just
electro-chemical reactions

 

[westprog]

As far as I can tell Westprog's position is that there's some non physical component of consciousness

My main argument is that the computational theory is flawed precisely because it doesn't have an adequate physical definition. How that gets turned around to an insistence that consciousness is non-physical I don't know.

so any argument that will allow him to deny that consciousness has a solely materiel basis can be used. His arguments are merely tactical maneuvers to enable him to defend his position so while they may look contradictory they all work to the purpose of diverting your arguments and disrupting your position.

So what? Say that I have a hidden agenda to disrupt and divert. If you meet my position with sound, well-founded counter-arguments then that will make your theory stronger.

Don't you think it strange that so much effort has gone into tracking my supposed agenda and plans, rather than simply stating either what the physical theory of consciousness is, or why it isn't necessary to have one, or why the theory as stated is physical after all? (I'll except Belz from this, in that his "cursor moving across the screen" example was at least an argument, though I still have no real idea what he was getting at).

 

[Mr. Scott]

What other metric do you have to determine it ?

Well, we don't have a metric per se. It's one of those "I know it when I see it" things.*

Besides testimony from internal subjective experience, I'm not aware of any criteria.

If I asked a p-zombie if it were conscious, it'd say it was, and how would I be sure it was lying? Dennett asserts that a p-zombie that behaved exactly if it were conscious would have to be conscious.

I'd propose that if a machine in question, which understood the capabilities of computers, spontaneously surmised that it's internal subjective experience had a dualistic quality that seemed incomputable, then it would most certainly be conscious. If it asserted, like Dennett, that there didn't seem to be anything special about it that was incomputable, then** it was not conscious

*"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [hard-core pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."
—Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964), regarding possible obscenity in The Lovers.

**Dr. Gumby, my brain hurts!

 

[Belz...]

There's nothing esoteric about this. A physical interpretation of computation would be one that appeared in the Physics text book, alongside the definitions of magnetism and electric charge, with an explanation of how to detect it was going on in terms of other physical quantities, in an objective fashion.

It has to appear in a physics text book to be physical ?

Then nothing is digital. Which is certainly a valid way of looking at things.

DNA is digital or nothing is digital. You'll forgive me but this sounds like the biggest false dichotomy ever.

I never objected to being able to interpret something as a digital operation. However, it is a subjective interpretation, and any system can be subdivided into a finite number of states, and the behaviour of that system interpreted as a transition between those states. It's always possible to select a different set of subdivisions, and interpret the system as a totally different set of transitions, none of which are any more real than another.

In other words it's fine when you do it.

 

[Belz...]

Well, we don't have a metric per se. It's one of those "I know it when I see it" things.*

Besides testimony from internal subjective experience, I'm not aware of any criteria.

So why did you say "It seems that some people believe that if an entity seems conscious then it is conscious." if "seems conscious" is the only way we have to determine whether something is conscious ?

 

[Minoosh]

The encoding system for DNA is an excellent example of digital encoding. Each base has four possible values ...

There are only 2 possible pairings, which makes it binary, which may or may not be a synonym for digital. We don't know how to make a human from the genome, but the genome will lead to a human and nothing else.

 

[Complexity]

westprog's problem is that he thinks there are things that aren't physical.

He is a dualist and utterly wrong.

Everything is physical.

There is nothing that is not physical.

 

[Complexity]

westprog is using 'digital' when he should be using 'discrete'.

westprog - 'digital' refers to fingers (digits) and things that are finger-like. When used to discuss encoding and representation, it usually implies base 10.

The sequence of a DNA strand is in base 2 - in each position of the sequence, one of four 'symbols' may be found.

 

[Donn]

There is nothing that is not physical.

Even the thought holding that to be wrong is physical.

 

[Complexity]

Even the thought holding that to be wrong is physical.

Of course.

He can't bear for that to be true, hence the endless gyrations.