On Consciousness

[Fudbucker]

Bzzzt! Sorry, but thank you for playing!

A horse is a mammal.
A horse is a quadruped.
A horse is a domestic animal.

Again, you are making equivalency errors. If you want to be precise, you should say the following:

Bzzzt! Sorry, but thank you for playing!

A horse is a KIND of mammal.
A horse is a KIND of quadruped.
A horse is a KIND of domestic animal.

Otherwise you run into the problem Bodhi demonstrated:

Your mom is a mammal.
A dog is a mammal.

Your mom is a dog???

Stop playing fast and loose with language.

All factual statements, but mammal, quadruped, and domestic animal, while they are overlapping sets, are merely that.

Factually, a horse is Equus ferus caballus. Do you think a horse is a radiator?

More to the point, when you claim the Brain IS a radiator, you are not using precise language. So let's introduce some precision. Is your claim the following:

For any X, if X is a brain, X is a radiator?

How about

For any X, if X is a radiator X is a brain?

I'm guessing you'll say "yes" to the first and "no" to the second. The reason the second doesn't follow from the first is because brains are LIKE radiators (that is, they belong to at least one overlapping set: things that shed heat). Brains are not EQUIVALENT to radiators. If they were, you would say "yes" to both.

This is why your claim that "brains are computers" falls apart:

For any X, if X is a brain, X is a computer.

You are claiming an equivalence between brains and computers. But if that were true, we should be able to make the following claim:

For any X, if X is a computer, X is a...brain?

You see the problem now? Brains and computers are not equivalent.

Brains also belong to many overlapping sets (can think, is made of neurons, is mostly water, etc.) Know what else is mostly water? A diet coke. So a brain is a diet coke?

No, a brain is a brain. That's why we have a name for it. It's not a computer, not a radiator, not a hard drive.

No. That is wrong.

The precise way of saying what I want to say is the brain radiates.

And a car engine vibrates when it runs. Is a car engine a vibrator?

The brain is a computer.

You countinually assert this, but have yet to back it up with anything, or respond to the obvious point that brains do things computers can't even hope to accomplish. I'd like to see the science behind this. Do any neurologists agree with this? If so, who? Let's have some citations. Your opponent in this debate has cited many authorities. I don't remember you citing anything except some wiki articles. So step up to the plate!

Of course.


Certainly.


Many are.

The motherlode! Rather than modify your claim that "brains are computers", you go down the path of reductio ad absurdum: computers can think, feel, and are conscious! I'm curious: who won the Nobel for creating the first thinking feeling conscious computer? Because I missed that particular one. Or, far more likely, you are wedded to a pet theory to such an extreme that rather than shy away from the absurd conclusions of said theory, you embrace them with the zeal of a religious fanatic.

What, things evolve over time?? Certainly not! Take this banana, which has been perfectly designed for us to eat!

Well, played Kirk- I mean Pixy

Seriously, does anyone else think that any of the current computers we have now are thinking feeling conscious machines?

Anyone at all?

 

[Modified]

Stop playing fast and loose with language.

Is English your native language? I don't think you know what "is a" means. It does not mean "is equivalent to", it means "is an instance of" or "is a type of". A dog is a mammal. A mammal is an animal. This is the way "is a" is used in both logic and formal CS lingo, as well as in normal conversation.

 

[Belz...]

Err... No. The iPhone includes a GPS unit.

The brain includes a radiator and a computer.

 

[Belz...]

Otherwise you run into the problem Bodhi demonstrated:

Your mom is a mammal.
A dog is a mammal.

Your mom is a dog???

Stop playing fast and loose with language.

Says the guy who plays fast and loose with language. Wow 2 posts in and already you're into logical fallacies.

You know full well that "the brain is a computer" meant "the brain is part of the set of computers".

 

[Piggy]

If you don't mind my saying, this is where you start off your response like every other post you make -- explicitly declaring everyone else to be wrong.

We disagree. We're talking about the things we disagree on. But I'm not just "declaring" you wrong, I'm explaining why that's so.

So you are saying imagination plays no part in consciousness. Kind of a non-starter, since it is such an absurd proposition...

That's not at all what I said.

What I said, quite clearly, was this: Imagination operates in our brains independently of consciousness. In fact, we now know that our brains are unconsciously imagining the next moment all the time.

We can consciously imagine -- which looks a little different neurally, just as conscious and non-conscious attention look a little different neurally -- but just because a brain (or machine) is imagining doesn't mean it is conscious.

So if you've designed a machine to imagine, that's important, but unless you've also designed it to be conscious, the experiment has nothing directly to do with the study of consciousness.

Again -- you are claiming that this implies those circuits have nothing to do with consciousness ...

Nothing has to be implied. We can observe brains while this is going on, and we can talk to those brains to get information about the experience, and we can watch how the body responds to everything that's happening.

So we know that imagination acts independently of consciousness, and that consciousness is a process that sometimes is involved with imagination and sometimes not.

Which stands to reason, because if you experienced your brain's predictions about what's going to happen in the next moment, the world would look very weird.

But the upshot is that re-creating imagination in a machine doesn't have anything to do with consciousness unless you've also designed the machine to be conscious and you can show that the two processes are synched up in your machine.

You know what is funny, in my last post I had actually made a sarcastic comment about how you will run back to some vague "evolution selecting for consciousness" argument the first chance you get, but I edited it out to be polite.

So you think that is odd that evolution has produced animals whose brains constantly imagine the next moment, but fail to make that process available to the animal's conscious experience?

You didn't even read the paper, and you wouldn't understand it if you did, so don't patronize me.

First of all, I'm not patronizing you. It really is cool, I wasn't being sarcastic.

But unless your description is wrong, I don't need to read the paper to know that getting a machine to imagine isn't the same as getting it to be conscious. We know this because we've observed objects we know to be conscious (human brains) performing that task and it doesn't require consciousness.

Of course maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's something about that in there. If there is, point me to it, please.

I think you misunderstand my intentions. I didn't expect you to change your position, or even think of changing your position, because I know you don't do that. In fact I expected you to just write off this real research as somehow irrelevant in your quest for the magic bean. Thanks for being so predictable !

The reason I posted that was so any observers would see that you are consistently dishonest when it comes to your representation of the opposition, and furthermore to show that there is real research that illustrates that the majority of your arguments don't hold much water.

I'm not really interested in a long discussion because I would rather read *actual research* than get bogged down in a typical piggy-esque merry-go-round of walls-of-text that, once fully parsed, contain zero new information for the reader. I also don't really care to be told, after I spend the time understanding some research that some very smart person has done, that "I don't understand why it is irrelevant." Hey, piggy, I'm the AI programmer, I'm the one that actually read the paper, I get to decide whether it is relevant or not.

I'm sorry, but research on non-conscious machines is not research on consciousness.

Until and unless we figure out what the brain's doing when it performs consciousness, we can't even imagine designing conscious machines to study, much less building them.

Yes, you're the AI programmer. But you are not a cognitive neurobiologist. And intelligence is not the same thing as consciousness.

When you make a claim that getting a machine to do something is relevant to studies of consciousness, I'll take the word of the neurobiologists regarding whether that particular task requires consciousness or not.

 

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

The brain includes a radiator and a computer.

Hilarious!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


wait... you are not joking.

 

[Piggy]

So the Blue Brain Project^WP, for example, which started out with modelling a rat neocortical column at the molecular level and intends to continue scaling up until it models an entire brain (still in molecular detail). To quote project lead Henry Markram, "If we build it correctly it should speak and have an intelligence and behave very much as a human does." Which quote does nothing to establish my position, but does point out that researchers in the field believe that this sort of simulation will produce a conscious mind. (That's not Markram's primary reason for studying the brain, but it's his position.)

Thanks for the video post.

My understanding is that this is not his position, actually, although I can't swear to that.

Gazzaniga discusses Blue Brain in "Human", and he says this (italics from original):

Markram and his institute, collaborating with IBM and their Blue Gene/L supercomputer, have now taken on the task of reverse engineering the mammalian brain. This project has been dubbed the Blue Brain Project, and it rivals the human genome project in its complexity. To begin with, they are creating a 3-D replica of a rat brain with the intention of eventually being able to create on of a human brain. "The aims of this ambitious initiative are to simulate the brains of mammals with a high degree of biological accuracy and, ultimately, to study the steps involved in the emergence of biological intelligence." It is not an attempt to create a brain or artificial intelligence, but an attempt to represent the biological system. From this, insights about intelligence and even consciousness may be drawn.

It's interesting that your quote from Markram, which is probably later, expresses the opinion that you would have "intelligence" from such a machine, as well as behavior.

I would agree with him here against Gazzaniga... but then again, I can't be sure how Gazzaniga was using the word "intelligence".

I'd have to see a direct quote from Markram, tho, to accept that he would posit that the simulator would become conscious.

After all, we can imagine all sorts of machines (biological or synthetic) which could respond in adaptive ways to the sky without producing blue... or any other type of experience.

 

[Piggy]

About 12 minutes into that talk, Markram covers the point I was stressing earlier: That computational neuroscience is about building computational models at varying levels of granularity and testing them against each other, against real behaviour and against real biology.

Simulating a human brain at the molecular level will be enormously expensive, but it will allow us to derive more abstract models that accurately represent particular functions - to test and confirm what behaviours can be abstracted out without affecting the resulting behaviour.

And this is where you and I firmly agree.

It's nice that there are some points like that.

 

[I Ratant]

You can't build a computer out of nothing but rope, so Piggy's objection there is nonsensical.

But timing is syntax. Or if that's too hard to swallow all at once, timing can be expressed as syntax. So that objection is also null.

.
Build a computer out of rope.
The nautical term "knots" comes from timing the movement of a ship relative to knots on a rope. The knots/rope are the computer.
Anything pretty much can be a computer.
Need to measure a distance now, but lack any scale or ruler?
Use a dollar bill, then at your leisure convert the dollars into the usual units of length.

 

[I Ratant]

heh I love that STFU acronym...

.
I posted that as "stfu,a" on The Big Bang Theory forum, describing how normal people would react to a long-term exposure to Sheldon.

 

[Piggy]

I get a whiff of potential circular logic there, but I think it's just wrong. Maybe computer science is not really science.

Is pixy's central claim that the brain is a computer?

I love it when tasks that are notoriously difficult for computers are cracked by computers simulating neural networks.

Please don't suggest that not knowing how to do something means it can't be done.

I just read How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000. Thanks for the link, guys!

One cool thing about computers is that any type of universal computer can simulate/emulate any other type. For example, an Apple can emulate a PC and vice versa, a PC can emulate a Nintendo, etc. Indeed, general purpose computers can emulate special purpose computers without difficulty.

Would someone explain again why a computer couldn't emulate a brain? Is it just because, if one could, we'd feel less special?

I wasn't sure exactly what Belz meant by "PixyMisa's central claim", so I started with the claim that it was widely accepted that the brain is a computer.

I've been frustrated with that claim because I've never gotten a satisfactory answer to the question "What exactly does that mean?"

I accept that it's a computer in the Wolfram sense, but in that case so are oceans and trees and stars.

But I haven't seen a definition yet that disallows everything like that, but includes my brain and my PC.

And even if computers are brains -- the inverse claim -- what would it mean, for example, to say that your leg is a prosthetic? So I want to know precisely what this means and what the implications are for consciousness.

But I can't cite any research demonstrating that the brain is not a computer, for the same reason I can't cite any research demonstrating that the brain is not a rocking chair.

Nobody in neurobiology is trying to disprove the claim that the brain is a computer.

And regarding those tough tasks cracked by computers... do you think it makes them more functionally similar to brains if they are very good at tasks which brains are not that good at?

Regarding a computer emulating a brain, why not ask me why a computer couldn't emulate my truck and get me to work every morning?

 

[Piggy]

A computer is any system that performs computation.
The brain is a system that performs computation.
Therefore the brain is a computer.

Well, this brings us back to Wolfram.

The entire universe performs computations, and so does everything inside it.

Everything moves from state to state according to the laws of physics, so you have rule-governed transformations between states.

The brain is a physical object which obeys the laws of physics, so it's performing computations all the time, and these are the computations that make the difference between, say, recognizing that it's not dark and recognizing the moon.

If you want to say, however, that the lump of matter in your skull is performing symbolic calculations -- that is, that the actual nerve tissue is doing this -- that's a whole nother ball of wax.

The difference between the type of computer which my PC is, and the type of computer which a brain or a spleen or a star is, is that in order for the PC to be an "information processor" a user/programmer must also be part of the system.

This is not true of the brain, so it's in the other category, as far as is known.

 

[I Ratant]

Nice try. The iPhone IS a GPS. It doesn't act like one. It IS one. It IS also a phone. That seems to negate the argument that the brain cannot BE a computer and BE a radiator at the same time.

.
It's a hammer.
A door-stop.
Not much of a floatation device.. (voids the warranty)
It isn't -only- one of these attributes, and these don't make anything with the use an iPhone.
Like a shoe. It can be a hammer and a door stop. And a toy.
The brain radiates.
But that's not all it does (for most people).

 

[Piggy]

I don't think introspection is the right word - in my experience introspection refers to redirecting the focus of attention from the sensorium to the internal model of self, i.e. it's a higher level of abstraction, consciousness reflecting on itself.

The self-referencing that I see as the basis of consciousness involves feedback - feeding back the evaluated results of behavioural responses to environmental stimuli into the process that selects or generates behavioural responses. This permits adjustment of behavioural response based on the results of previous behaviour, leading to behavioural flexibility. At a minimally conscious level, this might just be a positive or negative association between environmental stimulus and behavioural response that biases subsequent behaviour selection. At a higher level of complexity, an accumulated history of such information can be used as an internal model of the organism's interaction with the environment, allowing the development of an ongoing sense of self, predictive 'what if' modeling, and at the highest levels, theory of mind and introspective self-awareness, self-referencing at a higher level of abstraction.

It's the amount and detail of the information accumulated and the sophistication of the evaluations involved that determine the level of consciousness, but it's all based on self-referential feedback.

I suppose the fly in all this ointment is the definition of consciousness itself. You may agree or disagree with some or all of the model I outlined, but if we each mean something different by consciousness, we're going to talk past each other anyway.

I agree with that last point.

But maybe we can use your example there to tease that out.

Let's look at this bit:

The self-referencing that I see as the basis of consciousness involves feedback - feeding back the evaluated results of behavioural responses to environmental stimuli into the process that selects or generates behavioural responses. This permits adjustment of behavioural response based on the results of previous behaviour, leading to behavioural flexibility.

Essentially, we're talking about responding and learning here.

We now know, from studies on subliminal learning, that our brain cells are capable of reshaping themselves into new behavioral patterns in response to interaction with the world, without bothering to involve consciousness.

This conclusion is drawn from research such as studies on people who are exposed to series of images, including some that did not appear long enough to be consciously perceived, and yet they manage to alter their responses to the images in various ways by learning the associations, such as how to predict that a giraffe would come up next, for example, after a subliminal red square.

Consciousness is built on that, but at the end of the day, what defines consciousness is the generation of phenomena/behavior such as color, sound, texture, and the like.

All these things that are often called qualia are simply behaviors of one of our bodily organs.

We can't accept any substitutes. That's the message we have to take away from all the failed attempts to make consciousness equal anything else, whether that's perception, memory, attention, learning, or imagination.

Consciousness is what happens when we dream, and when we wake up, and it consists of brightness and color and sound and smell and hot and cold and pain and emotions.

We don't know how that happens yet.

We do know that it happens, though.

But we don't know how, and today we know even less than ever before why.

We know consciousness is on time-delay, so it can't be influencing responses in real-time, so I agree that it must be involved in planning, at the least.

 

[Piggy]

Having said that, timing and architecture are crucial to the effective function of many computer systems, and syntax or semantics, it seems to me that computational equivalence is the essential issue.

Well, I've always said that I don't see why only biological machines can be conscious.

In fact, I suspect that the answer will turn out to be simpler than we suspect -- that the answer will make the apparent chaos much less chaotic.

So when you say "computational equivalence", what exactly do you mean?

I agree, as long as we're using Wolfram's definition of "computation".

If you're using another, I think we might begin to differ in how we think about it.

 

[Piggy]

Rocketdodger has already mentioned the square vs rectangle thing. When someone says the brain is a computer, he or she is not saying that it's a pentium, and you know it.

Yes, I do know that. Been quite clear about it, in fact.

To say "the brain is a computer" cannot mean "your brain is a PC". It can only mean that your brain and your PC are both computers.

I don't think there's any doubt about that.

The problem is, we've been asking for quite some time for a reasonable definition of "computer" which will include my brain and my PC, yet exclude stars and oceans and rocks.

Church-Turing doesn't provide it.

Wolfram doesn't provide it.

So what is it?

And yet they both do the same kind of work: computing.

Be specific, please.

If you mean they both change states according to a set of rules, well, everything in the universe does that.

If you mean they both allow information to be encoded by a programmer and decoded by a user, then no, they don't both do that.

No. See, if I want to say that helicopters are aircraft, I don't have to show you that they are identical to planes.

That's right. The "aircraft" category only requires the functional equivalence of being flying (air) machines (craft). Those 2 subcategories each have more narrow functional equivalences (if they have any... you might only be dealing with structural equivalences there).

Again, how ? They do the same kind of work.

Do they really?

Not in the world I live in.

In the world I live in, they do very different types of work, or when they do the same work they do it differently.

According to wiki, computation is a form of calculation, which is "a deliberate process for transforming one or more inputs into one or more results, with variable change." Personally I'd add that it has to include some form of abstraction.

Well, minus your addition, then the entire universe is a computer and so is everything in it.

And I'm not sure how your addition would function, so I can't comment on it.

We've been there before. It's like saying running is a process, and then some philosopher jerk comes in and point out that everything, down to elementary particles, is a process. We know that, but we can use the narrower definition for the purposes of talking about running, can't we ? I don't know why we can't do it with computing.

Wolfram is not a "philosopher jerk", btw.

And this point is actually crucial.

If you're going to say, as you do, that brains and PCs are both computers because they both compute, then you're going to have to use a definition other than Wolfram's, and other than the definition which applies to PCs as info-processors (because that demands a programmer/user in the system who understands the symbology).

And if you're going to do that, then you need to say what this definition is.

 

[Piggy]

You can't build a computer out of nothing but rope, so Piggy's objection there is nonsensical.

But timing is syntax. Or if that's too hard to swallow all at once, timing can be expressed as syntax. So that objection is also null.

Rocket Dodger claimed, in the Robot Consciousness thread, I think, that you could build a conscious brain out of rope.

Dunno if he's reconsidered that position.

As for timing being expressed as syntax, that's fine, but for real-world physical processes like consciousness (or any other bodily function) you have to reproduce the timing in a sufficiently robust medium in order to make the same thing happen.

 

[Piggy]

Makes sense to me, since it's what we usually mean with the word.

You can study self-awareness, and that's very interesting, but it's not a useful definition of consciousness itself.

At the moment, we have no reason to believe -- and every reason not to believe -- that self-awareness is necessary for the production of color, sound, pain, and so forth.

And indeed it does matter if you know which parts of the brain handle what, and when these areas developed in the process of evolution.

It's not an accident that core consciousness is handled in the physical core of the brain, an evolutionarily early area, and self-awareness involves real-estate that developed much later.

 

[Piggy]

I'd like to do the bolded part. Saying that the mechanism is not known is fine, but not quite true because we do know quite a bit about it, even if we don't understand it completely.

Actually, that's not accurate.

We have no clue what the mechanism is, and currently no theory on which to base hypotheses.

We have learned quite a bit about the neural correlates due to neurobio research, but as Ned Block says, we have no way even to "fantasize" about why any given neural state is associated with any given conscious state, and not some other, or none.

The mechanism is indeed utterly mysterious, and it is important that we recognize that this is the current state of the science.

 

[Fudbucker]

Says the guy who plays fast and loose with language. Wow 2 posts in and already you're into logical fallacies.

You know full well that "the brain is a computer" meant "the brain is part of the set of computers".

It's not clear at all. There are three ways (maybe more) "is" can be used:

Definitional:

Water IS H20.
They are one and the same. All instances of water are instances of H2O and vice-versa.

Property:

Water IS clear.
One of the properties of water is that it is clear.

Member of a set:

Water IS a liquid.
Water belongs to the set of all things that are liquid.

So, no it's not clear what "A brain is a computer" means. However, it can't be an equivalence claim. I think you agree with that. Computers aren't brains.

The only thing that makes even remote sense is "Brains are a kind of computer", like you suggested. So let's look at that claim.

First of all, what does "computer" even mean? Is an abacus a computer? What about an electronic calculator? Are my fingers a computer (I can count on them)? Is everything a computer? There's been no clear definition of "computer" that's been offered. If there's been one, I apologize for missing it and would like the post number (as long as it's more robust than "something that computes"!)

Second of all, what KIND of a computer is the brain? If I say a cow is a KIND of mammal, you can rightly ask "What kind of mammal?" and I can tell you: the kind with four legs, multiple stomachs, herbivore, etc. It's not clear what KIND of computer the brain is. Is it like an abacus, a Babbage machine, a Turing machine, a Dell tower?

Third, it's just wrong. A functioning brain really is nothing like a computer:
- is made of neurons
- utilizes trinary
cbcl.mit.edu/cbcl/news/files/liu-tp-picower.
- communicates in digital AND ANALOGUE sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/04/060412223937
- is self aware
- is conscious
- can imagine
- can feel
- thinks
- no software/hardware distinction

And probably a bunch of other differences that are more sophisticated. Google has many results.

Saying a brain is a kind of computer is like saying a Cheetah is a kind of car because they both can go highway speeds.

Unless you think thinking feeling conscious machines already exist. Do you think that? Are you preparing for the Butlerian Jihad!!