On Consciousness

[tensordyne]

Don't say that ! I just gave you a compliment !

Haha, you are only a real master when you know how little you know, or some such.

 

[Zeuzzz]

So much reacting.. so little critical thinking

Regardless, I love you all.

 

[Belz...]

 

[Zeuzzz]

Explain.

 

[Belz...]

You say "so little critical thinking." It's ironic, coming from you who said that taking drugs gives you some special knowledge.

 

[Zeuzzz]

Have you not spent nearly half of your life in an altered state of consciousness?*

Have you not appreciated the fact that I showed before that you have endogenous psychedelics in your bloodstream now that alter your consciousness?

*Dreaming/sleep

 

[PixyMisa]

So much reacting.. so little critical thinking

Zeuzzz, take a look at your own posting history. You present us with claims, and when those claims are shown to be fabrications, you resort to logical fallacies, most commonly special pleading.

Your premises are false and your arguments are invalid. At this point you should be abandoning your earlier beliefs, not doubling down.

Have you not spent nearly half of your life in an altered state of consciousness?*

Have you not appreciated the fact that I showed before that you have endogenous psychedelics in your bloodstream now that alter your consciousness?

*Dreaming/sleep

Yes. So? Psychoactive drugs still do nothing more than cause your brain to malfunction.

 

[steenkh]

The existence of the experience of sensation is a self-evident fact.

Of course. I see nobody disputing that. The point that we are making is that this is a trivial fact of the computational model.

For the data processing type hypothesis I do not see at what point something is predicted to be experienced. Will it be experienced after 10,000 computations, or 20,000? More? One computation?

Why is the number of computations relevant? Perhaps you should consider what you mean by "experience"? As I see it, you have the "experience" as soon as the relevant data structure has been formed, ie after zero computations. I am open to the concept that you only have the "experience" if you are conscious about it, ie the subsystem that constitutes your awareness has registered that the data structure has appeared. That would mean a certain amount of extra "computations", but there is no telling if it is a small amount or a large amount. (We know that the brain can make decisions that the awareness part of the brain only registers a little while later; if we know the number of computations per millisecond, then we could infer the number of computations it takes to be aware of something.) Finally, the experience can be extended by including language, memories, experiencing the experience and so on, so everything really depends on what your definition of an experience is.

How does one determine if something counts as a computation that leads to experience of sensation? Is the computing done by your liver less important than the computing done by your brain ... why?

The liver is not a computer, but to answer your question in general, as I said above I do not see the relevance of the number of computations for the model. The whole question of how experiences are treated in the computational model is secondary to the question if the computational model can account for consciousness itself, and I think that few with insight into computers doubt this. The question is only how.

Compare the above with CEMI, as an example. In this hypothesis, the EM field inside your brain is directly related to experiencing sensation. This is testable. Change the field and see what happens. There is a point in CEMI when experience of sensation occurs and it is clear where that point is.

There is no doubt that being a physical entitity, the brain can be influenced by physics, such as EM fields, but I think it is more a question of malfunctioning, because the EM fields messes with the normal working of the brain. But even if it is not, it would not alter the computational model, but merely change our view of how the biological computer works, how it stores its data etc. A computer model that models the actual physics of the brain would not only need representations of neurons and hormones, but also EM fields. More complicated, but still doable.

There exist multiple ways to create logic gates in various physical systems. This should tell us that computation is something apart from physics.

Eh? I am tempted to say that this sentence "does not compute"!

The idea that computation is an essential part of how consciousness works butts up against the above.

There is also the fact that computation is ubiquitous in nature, so why the special pleading for computation in the brain causing consciousness?

Nobody are claiming that computations per se cause consciousness. You cannot have a computer without appropriate hardware, and in this case, the hardware is a brain. Computers with other kinds of hardware exist, notably our electronical computers, and it is conceivable that other kinds of computers may exist.

Thank you for your opinion, but experience of sensation is what we all are, so I do put some emphasis on that term.

It seems to me that you are evading the issue of describing what the "experience of sensation" is. My honest view is that the term is void, and could be replaced by "sensation" alone. Please try to explain why the term makes sense without resorting to emotion.

General data structure is an interesting set of terms.

It is vague because I do not have the faintest idea how the data is stored in the brain. As far as I know, we know to some precision where it is stored, but not how. I have read about research where researchers could tell what a person was thinking about, but only by recording the patterns in advance. We seem to be close, but there is still some distance to go.

If you think about something and a picture forms in your mind then you are using your imagination. Imagination involves as its primary aspect experience of sensation, not a complex data structure.

Why do you think that imagination does not involve complex data structures? The reason why some people cannot tell the difference between reality and imagination is that the data structures are essentially the same.

Whether you are a baby or can recognize red as a concept, there is no good reason to expect that the experience of the sensation of red is different. Babies have the same kinds of rods and cones, etc. etc.

I was speaking about the connection to language. A baby that has no language yet will not be able to pin the word "red" to the colour "red".

You do not explain experience of sensation, it is just a fact of life. I dismissed Rocketdodger's experiencing experiencing... because it does not make sense. Experience of sensation is unitary and atomic (at least in a non-altered state of consciousness). You do not experience experiencing sensation, or any other more recursive statement. There is nothing outside of experience for it to experience itself.

I am rather disappointed with this emotional argumentation. Are you claiming that "facts of life" are inscrutable to science? On what grounds do you claim that the experience of sensation is unitary and atomic? I would not be surprised if the word "soul" would crop up in a future post

Being aware is asking for too much. Awareness is needed to answer questions about what experience of sensation is being had or has been had, but there is no need to be aware of every aspect of your consciousness for all sorts of sensations to be there. Talking about being aware of red is just another way to make a topic about experiencing sensation into other more abstract ideas.

Please explain how you get out of an experience that you are not aware of? Actually I thought you would prefer to include awareness in the frame, because as I told you above, I do not think the concept of experience is doing much good otherwise in this discussion.

 

[PixyMisa]

Compare the above with CEMI, as an example. In this hypothesis, the EM field inside your brain is directly related to experiencing sensation. This is testable.

Yes. It's been tested. It's wrong.

 

[Jeff Corey]

Sure we do. All experience is computation...

Nonsense.
March Hare: …Then you should say what you mean.
Alice: I do; at least - at least I mean what I say -- that's the same thing, you know.
Hatter: Not the same thing a bit! Why, you might just as well say that, 'I see what I eat' is the same as 'I eat what I see'!
March Hare: You might just as well say, that "I like what I get" is the same thing as "I get what I like"!
The Dormouse: You might just as well say, that "I breathe when I sleep" is the same thing as "I sleep when I breathe".

All computation is experience.

 

[PixyMisa]

Nonsense.

1. The brain is a computer.
2. Computation is what it does.
3. One of the things it computes is experience.

At which point do you disagree, and why?

 

[Belz...]

Have you not spent nearly half of your life in an altered state of consciousness?

Less than a third, actually, but that's nitpicking. Yes, I have, but I have never thought dreams were a gateway to a better understanding of myself because that would be nonsense. Dreams are an interesting, narrative mishmash of recent memories. At that, they are good entertainment. But they are otherwise useless.

Have you not appreciated the fact that I showed before that you have endogenous psychedelics in your bloodstream now that alter your consciousness?

And this is relevant, how ?

 

[Belz...]

I think it's clear that some people will never accept the conclusions of science no matter what happens in the future in that field. If we have conscious computers in 16 years, they will not believe it. If we understand precisely how consciousness works, they won't accept it, because they have a predetermined conclusion, an emotional attachment to it, and a need to see it as "special", somehow.

 

[Belz...]

All computation is experience.

That is a bit silly, as that would mean that pocket calculators have experience. That's using a very broad definition of the word.

 

[PixyMisa]

All computation is experience.

All squares are rectangles.

 

[!Kaggen]

Before you put me on ignore note that a model is not the same as the thing itself (even if people like to talk that way). Can we even know the thing in itself, or do we really only ever know of the experiences associated with them? This is not Kantian metaphysics, it is just a recognition that experience of sensation is primary to what and how we know about things (aside from the abstract mind of course).

The things you take as real, as absolutely given, to me are provisional models waiting to be falsified. A chair is not a thing to me (an abstract thing 'out there') but a concept related to a series of sensations. I can understand the other way of thinking about chairs, and even use it quite often (the model of the chair 'out there'). It is just that there is another mode of thinking about a chair -- in terms of the sensations associated with it -- which is also just as legitimate a way to consider a chair as the abstract "thing in the world" way is. The other way of thinking about a chair I am not even sure comp.lit can seem to understand, unfortunately.

This way of thinking about physical things in terms of the sensations they produce requires a mind-shift (I have argued at length with my roommate to explain this shift and finally he recently got it, although he likes to relate it to Existentialism for some reason, even though it really is just Empiricism). The shift is from mental abstraction (living in abstract model world as happens with Hard-AI proponents) to thinking in terms of perception. It says that the naturalistic world-view we have is a model. A well established model, but still a model (in several places they have the poorly designed model of unseen spirirts... who knows, science in the future may make the way we look at things now seem as antiquaited as unseen spirits do to us now, you have to be at least open to the possibility).

The mind-set of PixyMisa is fine if you want to think about science as it has traditionally been done, but it does not quite work when applied to studying p-consciousness (p is for phenomenal PixyMisa). The reason is that when thinking in terms of abstract pictures you imagine yourself in systems in such a way that your sensation is not important to figuring out how those systems operate. It does not matter that I am seeing when thinking about a physics problem, as an example (aka, the physics problem should never depend on my own particular sensations, it should only depend on the system at hand).

When it comes to p-consciousness versus m-consciousness (m for model, PixyMisa's version of consciousness, which is internally consistent, so I have no problem with it) the m-consiousness is insensible. Sensation as a consideration is just not needed in m, but it is needed for p.

Step outside of your abstractions for a minute and consider experience of sensation as a topic in and of itself. Then you will know what me, piggy and perhaps a few other posters have been talking about. Or not, go back into your dimly lit cave of abstraction (I understand, I like the ambience in there too). Your choice.

m, meet p, p already knows you.

Yes

 

[PixyMisa]

The mind-set of PixyMisa is fine if you want to think about science as it has traditionally been done

Actual science, as opposed to nonscience.

but it does not quite work when applied to studying p-consciousness (p is for phenomenal PixyMisa).

We don't care about this "p-consciousness" of yours. We care about real consciousness in the real world, and real science works just fine for that.

 

[Belz...]

Yes

No.

 

[tensordyne]

Yes. It's been tested. It's wrong.

I guess you did not notice the part in the video where he cited recent results confirming parts of his model. PixyMisa, I understand every once in a while people putting on forums a quick, "Your wrong" non argument, but you literally do it over and over again. If you do not have an argument, could you please just shut up then? It takes time to scroll past your annoying non-arguments.

For instance, how has it been tested? By whom? What where the results? Why do you think that falsifies McFadden's model? None of that in the above. I just would have to take your word for it. At the very least you made an argument above, even if it was one of the lamer ones I have seen on this site. So at least you made one, which is better than your usual "No" response.

BTW, I used comp.lit after it was stated that the phrase should be "supporter of the computational model." That is the phrase I will use from here on out.

 

[tensordyne]

We don't care about this "p-consciousness" of yours. We care about real consciousness in the real world, and real science works just fine for that.

OK, tell me how you show that the way I experience red is the same as the way you do using what you think science is about.