Explain consciousness to the layman.

[Piggy]

Actually the human brain doesn't seem to do much more than pattern matching.

Then what distinguishes the pattern matching which is involved in your experience of yourself and the world from the pattern matching which is not?

 

[Piggy]

There's a lot of problems with this post. The big one being that you're begging the question that consciousness even exists as an objectively quantifiable thing. Then there's the appeal to authority, strawmen, etc.

Seeing as my few days of actually having to get **** done saw the thread sprout an extra half-dozen pages, each with their own meta-discussion baggage that any earnest response would need to take into consideration, I feel pointing them all out would be shooting the horse after leaving the barn, or some other such witty colloquialism that concludes with me not having to really give a damn without being quite so rude as to say I don't give a damn.

Every time you wake up, you prove that consciousness exists.

Quantifying it is another matter. Tononi and Balduzzi have made a contribution toward that endeavor, but it's a tentative one.

Yet like the northern lights once were, consciousness is now in the stage of a functional or demonstrative definition, which works perfectly well.

You're only going to get into trouble if you lose patience and jump the gun, as PixyMisa has done.

And I don't know why it has to be pointed out continually that distinguishing between experts and non-experts is not an "appeal to authority". That abuse of the fallacy is used all the time by folks like 9/11 truthers and climate change deniers to attempt to wave away the current scentific findings.

So no, you haven't pointed out any problems at all with the current approach which is making progress by assuming that consciousness is a biological function of the organ in the top of our skull.

Computational literalism, however, has the very serious problem of being unusable as a means of studying consciousness.

 

[Piggy]

IBM thinks it does.

You're right, I should have said that it doesn't understand category headers (as its final Jeopardy failure demonstrates) in any way like humans do. It can notice patterns in correct answers, but this is not the same thing.

ETA: Tho I don't have a link, it was Watson's designers in an interview who explained that they found no workable way to include the category headers in Watson's processes.

 

[Piggy]

I think you're just assuming your conclusion, here. Note that I don't think Watson is conscious. But if you don't think he is conscious because he doesn't act like a human, then you're either going with the behavioural approach to consciousness, which I think you said you didn't, or you are assuming that only humans can have consciousness, which I know you said you didn't.

The important thing about Watson's errors versus human errors is what they reveal about how the responses are generated.

Everything Watson does can be accounted for without the need to invoke the type of "understanding" that humans have, and which a conscious machine presumably would.

It's important to know why Watson said "leg" and "Toronto" in situations where no human would have produced either response even as a blind guess.

 

[Piggy]

Understanding categories is a necessary condition to consciousness?

No.

This is obviously not the point of the example.

Watson is AI, not AC. Not because he fails to understand categories, but because he's not designed and built to be conscious.

As a result there are interesting differences between how he gets his answers and how human players get theirs.

Those differences are much more obvious in his wrong answers than in his right ones.

 

[Piggy]

A machine that achieves consciousness is doing so because of the way matter interacts to produce consciousness…… there is REAL MATTER doing REAL PHYSICS to produce consciousness… and it does so autonomously…. No one set down the rules for how the physical matter will interact... it just behaves according to the laws of physics.

A computer running a program is a PUPPET, it is a REMOTELY CONTROLLED object. I doubt it will ever produce consciousness because there is no matter interacting and whatever “interaction” occurs is manipulation of symbols (not real matter) according to a SET PROCEDURE that a programmer designed.

And this is really the thing, isn't it?

Which is why it is so bizarre to see folks who claim that the real matter and energy can be dispensed with looking at folks who assert that the brain works just like every other object in the universe, and calling them dualists who believe in magic beans.

It's all very strange.

Whatever causes consciousness, it produces an event locatable in spacetime, so it must be a physical-energetic cause which, like all such causes, cannot be arbitrarily distorted in spacetime if it is to continue to function.

It's the abandonment of anchoring in physical reality that leads, one way or another, to all the bizarre conclusions of the computational literalists.

 

[TmoonII]

Consciousness is a mirror formed by water which we are made.

 

[dlorde]

I will say, however, the discoveries in the field of AI have done consciousness studies a great service by helping to define what consciousness is not. Which is frustrating... it would be more satisfying to have it provide a positive answer instead... but it does help us make progress.

Yes; something to agree on

 

[dlorde]

Tho I don't have a link, it was Watson's designers in an interview who explained that they found no workable way to include the category headers in Watson's processes.

They did a pretty good job (clearly not perfect) of getting Watson to figure them out on the fly.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

Every time you wake up, you prove that consciousness exists.

No I don't. The only thing my waking up proves is that I woke up.

And I'm well aware of how arguments from authority work. You make one every time you presume to speak for all neurobiology. Tossing on association fallacies aren't likely to distract me.

 

[PartSkeptic]

A computer running a program is a PUPPET, it is a REMOTELY CONTROLLED object. I doubt it will ever produce consciousness because there is no matter interacting and whatever “interaction” occurs is manipulation of symbols (not real matter) according to a SET PROCEDURE that a programmer designed.

Thought experiment. A US (could be any country) robot drone is given the ability to make decisions based on logical inferences from input and is programmed to do good by destroying evil. It is sent into enemy airspace where it intercepts messages so as to decide on a strike. It hears that the US is the great Satan, and that US airstrikes are resulting in civilian death. It then decides that the greater good is to change sides. Duh, the programmer did not think to put in such an obvious master instruction to forbid that - since the enemy is evil, the program says destroy evil - simple logic. Unintended consequences happen all the time.

The "PUPPET" no longer has strings. The programmer did not think that the computer would make such inferences because the programmer did not realize what sort of messages would be intercepted. The puppet has gone rogue. When it shoots a missile, it is not simulating warfare, or playing with symbols.

To prevent such an occurrence, the bot-drone's program is run through a simulator, and messages as simulated. One can predict the drones behavior IF the messages are foreseen and used as input. If unwanted and unpredictable input becomes part of the computers database that the program can act on, the results are unpredictable.

I think this is possible in today's technology, but we would like to think that the military would A) not relinquish control B) put in a destruction safety, or whatever.

But projects today are teams of specialists who make assumptions about what the other teams are doing. "But I thought you guys put in the over-ride" and "Yeah, we never thought you lot were dumb enough to let the machine "think" for itself".

 

[PartSkeptic]

I personally think that only evolved carbon based life forms are capable of consciousness.

Why ?

Sorry about not replying earlier, but given the next post and my thinking about it, I now respond, and change my stance.

Who, precisely, is claiming that consciousness requires a biological substrate?

This guy:

I personally think that only evolved carbon based life forms are capable of consciousness.

I am part theist and part non-theist. I have no "proof/evidence" that is convincing to me, never mind to others.

My non-theist side says we are machines, and if so, carbon or silicon makes no difference, nor does the physical structure (transistors or what ever).

I put aside woo arguments on this thread, but I realize my requirement of a biological substrate was due to my theist bias. This too is likely to be incorrect if I use logic. If there is a God, then God can decide what has consciousness and what does not.

 

[rocketdodger]

A strange and imo useless hypothetical in any case.

I was intending on using it to help piggy understand why behavior isomorphic to some other behavior was important in this context.

The plan was to arrive at an agreement regarding a hypothetical scenario where arbitrary transformations applied to sets of particles resulted in "similar" sets of particles that retained behavior equivalent to the original set despite the those arbitrary transformations.

 

[rocketdodger]

And as Pixy continues to assert, interaction with external frames of reference is how consciousness in others is observed and so assigned. Now what?

Those are different assertions.

Westprog is making assertions about what is necessary to generate consciousness. Pixy is making assertions about what is necessary for consciousness to be recognized by others.

The difference is that Pixy allows the possibility of a consciousness existing in a closed system , being only aware of itself and non-self within that closed system. Westprog does not.

 

[rocketdodger]

Folks in this thread have discussed my posts among themselves and it doesn't bother me, even if they disagree with me.

And I feel free to discuss anyone else's posts with anybody I care to.

If you want to respond to something I've discussed, then fine, we can discuss that.

But your opinion that I'm simply having too much chatter with Westprog, no, that opinion doesn't interest me. Nor should it.

The issue is that westprog refuses to respond directly to me, yet responds indirectly to me with strawmen in posts directed to you. I have no way to respond to westprog and say "hey, that is a strawman, you are mischaracterizing my position" because he is never talking to me.

Can you understand why observing a dialogue like that, between you two, would be extremely frustrating? If westprog spoke to me directly I wouldn't have an issue.

 

[rocketdodger]

The fact that I disagree with you doesn't mean I don't understand you.

You continue to treat logical computations and physical computations as equivalent, yet we know they are not.

You also presume that all phenomena are driven entirely by particle-level interactions, and while this was a very popular assumption for a long time, it has never been proven and is currently in very serious doubt.

For instance, look at ice on a tree branch causing it to break.

If you use your magic machine to strew that system across the universe, the particles can still interact with one another as before and yet there will no longer be the weight of ice upon a branch, so the branch will not break. The system will run differently.

You want to ignore the physical reality at our level of magnification and simply assume it doesn't matter, and that you can free the particles from their confines and expect the particle interactions to continue running the show as before.

You complain that I'm telling you things which are "obvious" and yet you don't even attempt to account for them.

Worse, you appeal to irrelevancies such as relativistic effects at near light speed, which have nothing to do with what we're talking about. (ETA: Yes, I know the point you were trying to make... it's just that your example fails to actually illustrate that point.)

Bottom line: As far as we know, you need a working brain (or some real equivalent) doing real work in spacetime as a brain, all in one place, to make consciousness happen.

Nothing about relativity or QM changes that.

Your thought experiment is badly formed, I'm afraid.

You're absolutely right piggy. My bad. I was a fool to think otherwise.

*rolls eyes*

 

[rocketdodger]

It's the abandonment of anchoring in physical reality that leads, one way or another, to all the bizarre conclusions of the computational literalists.

So you claim computation takes place outside of physical reality?

 

[westprog]

Every time you wake up, you prove that consciousness exists.

In spite of its popularity as a theory, I've never seen the "Consciousness as an illusion" idea as making any sense at all. I don't think it's possible to put the theory in a sentence that isn't self-contradictory.

 

[westprog]

It's important to know why Watson said "leg" and "Toronto" in situations where no

sane

human would have produced either response even as a blind guess.

A damaged human brain, lacking some functionality, might give those responses.

 

[westprog]

Consciousness is a mirror formed by water which we are made.

At least this attempts to answer the OP. Don't think we're quite finished though.