Explain consciousness to the layman.

[Leumas]

So you're just arguing from incredulity, Leumas. "I can't think of any reason why it can't happen, but I'm pretty sure it can't happen."


Course here it just loses conherency entirely. What if you put the "critical mass" of silicon chips into a single silicon chip? Because that sort of thing can happen very easily.

And you seem to be arguing from credulity.


If I argue that a god is impossible.... a theistic person would use precisely the same argument you use above.....exactly the same.

He is arguing from credulity....just like you seem to be.... and would lose sight of the fact that he is just as IGNORANT AS I AM.... so if I am arguing from ignorance....so is he..... and since there is no way to know if there is a god FOR SURE....then I am arguing out of incredulity based on THE FACTS AT HAND....while he is arguing out of credulity based ON NOTHING BUT IMAGINATION and WISHFUL THINKING…. He WISHES god exits…he loses sight of that… and thus BELIEVES it to be fact….and then maligns ones who try to remind him that just because he wishes and imagines something does not make it fact and there is no need to malign and use ad hominems against a person trying to remind him of the difference between imaginative wishful thinking and REALITY.

 

[Piggy]

Probably because that is how it would be implemented.

In which case the supposed "simulation" is redundant, and performs no function.

 

[Piggy]

No offense but I am convinced now that you honestly think the more sentences you type the more correct your logic becomes.

It doesn't work that way piggy.

If you have no substantive objections, I suppose that will have to suffice.

 

[Piggy]

No, it does not rule out a pure-programming solution. What if the minimal work turns out to be the controlled manipulation of symbols which are invariant?

Symbols?

Symbols determined by whom, and interpreted by whom?

It seems to me you're taking the post office metaphor of the brain literally here.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

And you seem to be arguing from credulity.


If I argue that a god is impossible.... a theistic person would use precisely the same argument you use above.....exactly the same.

He is arguing from credulity....just like you seem to be.... and would lose sight of the fact that he is just as IGNORANT AS I AM.... so if I am arguing from ignorance....so is he..... and since there is no way to know if there is a god FOR SURE....then I am arguing out of incredulity based on THE FACTS AT HAND....while he is arguing out of credulity based ON NOTHING BUT IMAGINATION and WISHFUL THINKING…. He WISHES god exits…he loses sight of that… and thus BELIEVES it to be fact….and then maligns ones who try to remind him that just because he wishes and imagines something does not make it fact and there is no need to malign and use ad hominems against a person trying to remind him of the difference between imagination and wishful thinking and REALITY.

Are you so used to railing at theists you feel the need to couch every argument you have in those terms? 'Sides, you're the one positing some mysterious element that makes human consciousness special. Neurons are neurons. If you have enough of them in the proper organization, with a properly structured interface, they'll start making sense of it. Doesn't much matter if the neurons are biogoop, nanomachines or chip states, they should (if emulated correctly) behave the same in all cases.

 

[Piggy]

Which law of physics?

If you propose a real phenomenon in spacetime, it has to be associated with some quantity of matter and/or energy.

If you implement a system with only enough hardware to run the logic -- or in other words to make the machine wiggle in ways that mimic something else real or imaginary -- that's all you're going to do.

If you want to do that, and you want to generate a real instance of consciousness in spacetime -- as happens when a very young human body develops consciousness -- then you're going to have to come up with some more matter and energy from somewhere.

This is true, but it's not fatal. You're not taking into account that an environment can be programmed.

Doesn't matter.

If that process really did generate consciousness in and of itself, we'd have no way to explain why we are not conscious of all sorts of things our brains are doing which we know we're not aware of.

 

[Piggy]

Yep, just like I thought.

You really need to condense your arguments into just a few sentences piggy.

If you think all this can be understood, or even discussed, in bumper stickers, you're mistaken.

If you don't have time to read the posts, then don't.

 

[Leumas]

But why a physical neural network, instead of a simulated one? Why a neural network instead of a system that processes information in the same manner?

Because I suspect that the physical processes required to bring about consciousness would not be realized in a simulated system.


I could be wrong..... but a conjecture to the contrary does not constitute a proof that I am wrong.

 

[Leumas]

Are you so used to railing at theists you feel the need to couch every argument you have in those terms?

Faulty reasoning gives rise to all sorts of asinine conclusions.

Theism is just one prominent and UBIQUITOUS example of faulty reasoning and since we are in a site for skeptics, one way to point out the type of faulty reasoning you seem to be falling for is to draw the analogy that most subscribers to this forum are aware of and can easily recognize.

'Sides, you're the one positing some mysterious element that makes human consciousness special. Neurons are neurons. If you have enough of them in the proper organization, with a properly structured interface, they'll start making sense of it. Doesn't much matter if the neurons are biogoop, nanomachines or chip states, they should (if emulated correctly) behave the same in all cases.

Learn to read posts before you comment on them..... one type of faulty reasoning is to formulate hasty conclusions based on partial facts.


So go read my posts and you MIGHT recognize where you have stumbled.

 

[PixyMisa]

I am going to try to see if maybe I could EXPLAIN to you how asinine your straw man airplane is.... I have stated numerous times that emulating a brain will entail building a NEURAL NETWORK that has a critical mass of complexity and interconnectivity that would bring about the necessary emergent properties of synergetic interaction to realize consciousness.

Any process that can be carried out by a neural network can be carried out by a program running on a general-purpose computer, and vice-versa. You are wrong.

 

[yy2bggggs]

Symbols?

Symbols determined by whom, and interpreted by whom?

Physical symbols. Let's say we use wolves as a symbol.

ETA: Oh, and we're building the "whom". If you need this "whom" to build the "whom", you have a problem.

 

[Piggy]

Not quite. A computer simulation cannot be conscious if consciousness requires any physical work on the part of the brain which is not also done by the computer.

Given what we know, we can safely conclude this is the case. (If it weren't, then it's difficult to see how consciousness could be postponed until after binding, and so forth.)

Maybe we can safely conclude this is the case. But that's the whole point--we need to safely conclude it. And I have seen no argument from you so far that allows that to happen.

We can safely conclude that consciousness is a result of physical activity in the brain.

As an observable phenomenon locatable in spacetime, some sort of physical/energetic cause is required. That's not optional.

And all our studies clearly point to brain activity as the cause of every aspect of conscious experience.

If you want to go off road and assert otherwise, you're leaving physics and diving into metaphysics (and I mean that in the sense of crank physics).

And if you do, where are you to go?

You can't assert that consciousness is caused by any use of "symbols" because if there is no consciousness to begin with, how can there be any "symbols"? Who do you think determines the values and reads the outputs?

You have to recruit the homunculus inside the head to do that.

And if consciousness cannot be ginned up symbolically (and no real phenomenon can) then all we're left with is physical activity of some sort.

If you want to propose an alternative scenario, it better be good!

 

[Leumas]

Any process that can be carried out by a neural network can be carried out by a program running on a general-purpose computer, and vice-versa. You are wrong.

No!

 

[Piggy]

Alright.

Now assume that we have a magical machine which is capable of the following:

1) It can apply an arbitrary spatial/temporal transformation to any number of particles.

2) It keeps a record of all such transformations that have been applied.

3) It alters the behavior of spacetime in a way that results in the interactions between any two particles remaining normal, as if neither of them have had any spatial/temporal transformations applied to them.

This may be hard to follow, so let me provide an example. You are sitting at your computer typing, and the machine decides to apply a 3 meter spatial translation to all the particles within a 0.3 meter diameter sphere, centered at the middle of your head, in a direction roughly "upwards" relative to you.

However, your perception of your space remains normal, and you remain living, because the machine magically insures that the particles in the sphere and the particles outside the sphere end up producing the same results when they interact, or rather "would have" interacted were it not for the translation. For example if a quark inside the sphere would have collided with a proton right outside the sphere, even though it is now 3 meters off target, the machine "fakes" it and applies effects identical to the collision on both the quark and the proton in question. Thus from the perspective of the quark and proton, they really did collide.

Note that the machine doesn't actually alter causation, it merely applies a sort of inverse transformation to any relevant behaviors of the particles so that the results are identical to what they would have been without any funny stuff going on.

Do you agree that such a machine would result in your continued existence in a manner that was totally transparent to you if it applied such a transformation to your head?

Exactly.

The magic defies Einstein, but hey, if we don't complain about his arbitrarily high elevator, I hope he won't complain about this.

 

[Piggy]

So we can plug an artificial brain made of multiple processors into a human body, but we can't plug in a single computer in the same way?

Odd, isn't it?

But true.

 

[yy2bggggs]

If you propose a real phenomenon in spacetime, it has to be associated with some quantity of matter and/or energy.

And if you build a simulator that has four marbles in it, where four is somehow significant, you need to have some quantity of matter and/or energy to represent that there are four marbles, and it had better be different than the quantity of matter and/or energy representing three, two, and one marble.

We're going round and round in circles. "Imaginary simulations" are things like pretend simulations, hypothetical simulations, a simulation that a fictional character runs. The kind of simulations we actually build, are real. If I hire you to build a simulation, and you can't put your hand on something real, you're fired.

And "real" here requires "physical", because that's the only reality we have.

If you implement a system with only enough hardware to run the logic -- or in other words to make the machine wiggle in ways that mimic something else real or imaginary -- that's all you're going to do.

If you want to do that, and you want to generate a real instance of consciousness in spacetime -- as happens when a very young human body develops consciousness -- then you're going to have to come up with some more matter and energy from somewhere.

But you're just rationalizing your position. It's a "just so" argument. You're feeling your way through it--you're not presenting cold hard logical facts.

And you need to present cold hard logical facts.

If that process really did generate consciousness in and of itself, we'd have no way to explain why we are not conscious of all sorts of things our brains are doing which we know we're not aware of.

Uhm, this "we" you're talking about is an integrated planning element that retrieves information about its environment in a useful form to it; basically, anything you can consciously conceive is the type of information you have. What you are aware of is, well, whatever information goes into that integrated planning element. By definition, if you are not aware of something, it is not information that went into your integrated planning element (it very well may be in your planning element but not integrated with enough things for you to report on it, reflect on it, compare it to other things, and so on).

Will that explanation do?

 

[Piggy]

And it can if it does. What's the point ?

The point is that for the body to do anything, whether that's growing toenails or moving muscles or cranking up awareness in the morning, it's gotta be doing something.

Which means that we can't bypass the real brain with a machine that runs sims (rather than doing what the brain does) if we want the apparatus to be conscious, for the same reason that we can't beam Major Tom back to the ship if we want him to kill the space squid.

Transporter beams don't kill space squids, and simulator machines don't produce conscious experience. (Don't forget, the "world of the simulation" is not anywhere in the machine.)

And that's true even if we include programming into the transporter device so that Tom is put through the transformations he would have gone through if he did fight and kill the squid.

He'd beam aboard with his muscles tired, suction cup marks on his space suit, and a memory of having killed the squid.

But the squid would still be alive outside the porthole.

Similarly, we can run the inputs and outputs through a program that sends them out the other side as if they had run through a working brain... but notice that we have to say "as if".

(At this point, a paradox enters the scene which has tremendous implications for consciousness, but we can't move onto that until we get clarity here.)

The cost of doing that is this: No physical work actually done by the brain in spacetime will be done by the machine we've replaced it with, except probably some accidental similarities in heat emissions and such.

No brain or functional replica of it, no consciousness.

This really should be as easy to understand as "No lungs or functional replicas, no breathing".

If you wouldn't try to replace your lungs with a computer, then why any other organ?

If your answer is that the brain and a programmable computer like the kind that can run sims are equivalent, then you've got a helluva defense ahead of you for that claim.

 

[Piggy]

Yes, the magic bean theory of consciousness. Which you cannot support in any way whatsoever - or even coherently define.

We don't know what that work is yet.

If we did, we'd have an explanation for the phenomenon, which we don't.

That real phenomena involve work of some kind, though, is not in question.

At least, that I know of.

 

[Piggy]

I think it's only ever likely to be a hypothetical on even the smallest brains we think may support consciousness. Smaller brains, maybe.

I think once we figure it out... and this will be a very frightening time to be alive... we'll be able to make it happen on a very small scale with very little "information".

I mean, that's been the history of our exploration of the universe, hasn't it?

Once we finally perceive the right patterns in the swarm, we find out that even the richest phenomena can have astoundingly simple causes.

I hate to bring this up, but once we crack it, given the level of mechanical precision we have these days, I can see basement sadists whipping up conscious bots just to starve and torture.

The day we figure it out... whoever gets it will have a power more stunning than Oppenheimer's.

 

[Piggy]

It seems likely - I've seen a number of articles that suggest synchronised waves across large areas of the cortex are a key feature of conscious mental states.

They're pretty much the only game in town now.

And I just can't convince myself that they're noise, because if so, then noise from what?

I mean, we can measure them, so it's difficult to imagine that there's some other process emitting these fields as noise which we cannot also identify, even in patients with deep-brain probes.

It's possible, but it's almost like saying I can be looking under the hood of my truck and wondering where all the racket is coming from.