On Consciousness

[Dancing David]

What's the difference between a conscious phenogram and a simulation in which the interpreting 'other' is itself?

Same:Same

You interpret your other perceptions through verbal cognition and translate them here, amazing, yes!

 

[Piggy]

I will say of the current research into consciousness what Niels Bohr said of quantum mechanics... if it hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.

 

[AlBell]

Now all we lack is a "No." from Pixy.

 

[Piggy]

Now all we lack is a "No." from Pixy.

Yes.

 

[Piggy]

To follow up on my crib from Bohr, I'll give you an example of how the world looks to me now.

Today I was out mowing the lawn, and it was a truly gorgeous day -- great billows of white clouds rolling in a brilliant blue sky, trees and flowers in bloom, the smell of newly mown grass and hay and the aroma of barbecue wafting in from somewhere.

I used to see such scenes and stand in awe of the wonder of the natural world.

Now I understand that although whatever's out there must indeed be truly wonderful, I have no way to access it, and I instead stand in awe of what this little lump of wet electrochemical fiber inside my skull can concoct.

It's one thing to think that the whole big universe can produce such wonders. But it's even more astounding to know they can be produced by such a tiny insignificant piece of it.

 

[Prometheus]

Sooo, if a tree falls in the forest and there's no integrated phenogram with an implied point of view around to perform "hearing"....?

 

[tsig]

To follow up on my crib from Bohr, I'll give you an example of how the world looks to me now.

Today I was out mowing the lawn, and it was a truly gorgeous day -- great billows of white clouds rolling in a brilliant blue sky, trees and flowers in bloom, the smell of newly mown grass and hay and the aroma of barbecue wafting in from somewhere.

I used to see such scenes and stand in awe of the wonder of the natural world.

Now I understand that although whatever's out there must indeed be truly wonderful, I have no way to access it, and I instead stand in awe of what this little lump of wet electrochemical fiber inside my skull can concoct.

It's one thing to think that the whole big universe can produce such wonders. But it's even more astounding to know they can be produced by such a tiny insignificant piece of it.

You replaced universe gazing with navel gazing?

 

[Dancing David]

Sooo, if a tree falls in the forest and there's no integrated phenogram with an implied point of view around to perform "hearing"....?

Then there may be a noise but there is no sound.

 

[Piggy]

Sooo, if a tree falls in the forest and there's no integrated phenogram with an implied point of view around to perform "hearing"....?

Exactly. Although I would say, to perform "sound".

There's only molecules moving around. But no sound. That old saw has finally been answered.

If we go back to light, consider what the actual properties of light are -- amplitude, frequency, wavelength, speed.

None of these are directly perceptible by us.

What happens when light hits our eyes? Our brains manufacture color and brightness. (True, the word "brightness" can also refer to a property of light, but I'm talking about the sensation that makes you squint.)

The stone never touches the shore. Our experience is a translation of a translation. None of the properties of the stuff out there make it into our conscious experience.

If both I and my dog are looking at the sky, my brain performs blue, his brain performs probably some shade of gray. But that's not because he can't "perceive" blue… there's no blue out there to perceive… it's because his brain isn't built to perform blue.

Neither the blue nor the gray are properties of light.

Ditto for everything else in our conscious experience. The properties of the stuff outside cannot transfer to it -- the laws of physics don't allow that -- it can only invent something new which is a good enough stand-in to allow our bodies to navigate whatever-is-out-there by navigating what's in our heads.

But this ain't that. And never has been. And can't be.

 

[Prometheus]

To follow up on my crib from Bohr, I'll give you an example of how the world looks to me now.

Today I was out mowing the lawn, and it was a truly gorgeous day -- great billows of white clouds rolling in a brilliant blue sky, trees and flowers in bloom, the smell of newly mown grass and hay and the aroma of barbecue wafting in from somewhere.

I used to see such scenes and stand in awe of the wonder of the natural world.

Now I understand that although whatever's out there must indeed be truly wonderful, I have no way to access it, and I instead stand in awe of what this little lump of wet electrochemical fiber inside my skull can concoct.

It's one thing to think that the whole big universe can produce such wonders. But it's even more astounding to know they can be produced by such a tiny insignificant piece of it.

That kind of makes waking consciousness sound like a lucid dream.

 

[Piggy]

That kind of makes waking consciousness sound like a lucid dream.

Yeah, except you can't walk through walls.

But yes, the way we usually think of it is that dreaming is some kind of imitation of our "real" perceptions of the world while awake.

Actually, our waking experience is caused by pretty much the same mechanism as our dreams. In other words, if it were impossible for us to do something like dreaming, we also could have no waking experience at all.

The big differences are that in waking consciousness our body isn't paralyzed and there's a whole lot more coordination with our sensory apparatus.

The latter allows the hologram-in-our-heads to line up with what's going on around us in ways that our bodies can work with. The former allows our bodies to work with it.

But in both cases, the experience is entirely enclosed in our skulls, and its apparent extension outside our bodies is completely illusory.

Like I said, anyone who's new to these ideas and is not profoundly shocked by them hasn't fully understood them yet.

 

[nosho]

But in both cases, the experience is entirely enclosed in our skulls, and its apparent extension outside our bodies is completely illusory.

The location of the experience (inside the skull or wherever) is completely beside the point. It's distracting to ask where the experience is occurring. Consciousness is connected with all the senses. I'm pretty sure a computer would need sense data as one ingredient for consciousness to be present, if such a thing is even possible.

 

[Prometheus]

The location of the experience (inside the skull or wherever) is completely beside the point. It's distracting to ask where the experience is occurring. Consciousness is connected with all the senses. I'm pretty sure a computer would need sense data as one ingredient for consciousness to be present, if such a thing is even possible.

Not during a lucid dream.

 

[Piggy]

The location of the experience (inside the skull or wherever) is completely beside the point. It's distracting to ask where the experience is occurring. Consciousness is connected with all the senses. I'm pretty sure a computer would need sense data as one ingredient for consciousness to be present, if such a thing is even possible.

I'm not talking about hypothetical "computer consciousness".

As Prometheus points out, consiousness need not be connected to any senses at all.

In actuality, of course, in the evolutionary world, conscious critters do indeed have their phenogram-producing apparatus connected to the sensory apparatus, to a small degree during dreaming (e.g. the phone rings in your house and you dream of a phone ringing, or you dream that you need to pee when your bladder is actally full).

Now, keep in mind, when we're talking about consciousness, that includes dreaming. Anytime you're having some sort of "felt experience" -- that is, if color and flavor and sound and pain and pleasure and such are going on -- then for the purposes of consciousness research, consciousness is going on.

The times when consciousness is not occurring are when you're asleep and not dreaming, or when you're totally "out" under general anesthesia.

But it's now known that sensory apparatus is not required for consciousness. In theory, a conscious machine could be built with no sensory apparatus whatsoever.

The basic components of consciousness -- what philosophers have called qualia -- are built in. A dog has a certain set of qualia, and a human has a different set. We share many in common, but not all. Dogs don't appear to have our color palette, and appear to have a much more robust olfactory palette. Cats do have a color palette, but it seems to be much less important to them than it is to us.

But here's the thing, there is no all-programming solution to consciousness. Can't be done.

Consciousness is a bodily function, a real event in spacetime. All spacetime events have causes rooted in matter and energy.

If you want to build a conscious machine, it may well have a computer as a component, but you can't simply program consciousness, for the same reason that programming alone could not have produced the hologram of Tupac that was produced recently at a concert. computers can be part of that system, but you need hardware components to produce real spacetime phenomena.

Consciousness cannot be programmed.

 

[PixyMisa]

I'm not at home right now so I can't give you a quote from The Cognitive Neurosciences, but Tononi uses the example of a digital camera. For the digital camera, there is no ingegration, the diodes do their work separately.

That's only true of the sensor. The camera is all about integration. It's like mistaking the retina for the visual cortex.

 

[PixyMisa]

But here's the thing, there is no all-programming solution to consciousness. Can't be done.

That's an objection without meaning.

Consciousness is a bodily function, a real event in spacetime. All spacetime events have causes rooted in matter and energy.

So do computer programs.

Consciousness cannot be programmed.

Abject non-sequitur.

 

[Piggy]

That's only true of the sensor. The camera is all about integration. It's like mistaking the retina for the visual cortex.

You've said this before, and you were wrong then, and you're wrong now.

Go read Tononi and Balduzzi first, then comment on their ideas.

There is nothing in the camera that produces a truly unitary point of view, or truly integrated information.

 

[Piggy]

So do computer programs.

Yes, computers work in the real world.

But if you want to see what a computer is doing in the real world, open it up and look.

What you're doing -- as always -- is confusing the system which includes a computer and a knowledgable interpreter of its action with a system including the computer alone.

If I build a tornado box, I create a real tornado which behaves like a tornado in the real world. The "world of the tornado box" is real.

If I simulate a tornado, there is no tornado. To understand that a simulation is going on, it requires an interpreter whose brain responds correctly to the virtual output.

As has been established, consciousness is a real process in spacetime. It has location and extension in space and time. The hologram-like-thing being produced inside my skull by my body isn't being produced a hundred years from now in Paris, but rather inside my skull right now.

If I want to build a machine that produces a tornado or a hologram, or any real spacetime event, I can't get away with pure programming; instead, I have to build a machine whose actions in spacetime produce an actual tornado or hologram in spacetime.

The hologram-like-thing which is the mind, which is consciousness, which is the phenomenology, is no different. It requires direct and real physical causes, not virtual ones.

A virtual simulation of a tornado isn't a real tornado in spacetime. You can inspect the actual material and energy apparatus of the computer and you will find no real tornado.

And if you want a hologram, you can't program a general purpose computer and dispense with all other hardware except what's needed to run a program. If you want a real hologram which acts in real space and time, you need to connect that computer to some sort of physical apparatus to make the real spacetime phenomenon occur.

The laws of physics demand this, without exception.

That includes all bodily functions, without exception.

If you want real digestion to occur in the real world, if you want a real pulse in the real world, and if you want real consciousness in the real world, a programming-only solution is simply impossible.

What you're doing is changing horses in mid-stream.

You say that the computer can produce a real-world effect, but when I say, OK, examine the real-world computer and show me, you then pull a switcheroo and move your frame of reference away from the physical world and into a virtual world which has no independent reality but which depends on an interpretation by a 3rd party observer.

Obviously, neither your phenomenology nor mine is dependent on someone else observing our brains.

That's why you continue to be 100% wrong about this point.

 

[tsig]

Yes, computers work in the real world.

But if you want to see what a computer is doing in the real world, open it up and look.

What you're doing -- as always -- is confusing the system which includes a computer and a knowledgable interpreter of its action with a system including the computer alone.

If I build a tornado box, I create a real tornado which behaves like a tornado in the real world. The "world of the tornado box" is real.
]
If I simulate a tornado, there is no tornado. To understand that a simulation is going on, it requires an interpreter whose brain responds correctly to the virtual output.

As has been established, consciousness is a real process in spacetime. It has location and extension in space and time. The hologram-like-thing being produced inside my skull by my body isn't being produced a hundred years from now in Paris, but rather inside my skull right now.
If I want to build a machine that produces a tornado or a hologram, or any real spacetime event, I can't get away with pure programming; instead, I have to build a machine whose actions in spacetime produce an actual tornado or hologram in spacetime.

The hologram-like-thing which is the mind, which is consciousness, which is the phenomenology, is no different. It requires direct and real physical causes, not virtual ones.

A virtual simulation of a tornado isn't a real tornado in spacetime. You can inspect the actual material and energy apparatus of the computer and you will find no real tornado.

And if you want a hologram, you can't program a general purpose computer and dispense with all other hardware except what's needed to run a program. If you want a real hologram which acts in real space and time, you need to connect that computer to some sort of physical apparatus to make the real spacetime phenomenon occur.

The laws of physics demand this, without exception.

That includes all bodily functions, without exception.

If you want real digestion to occur in the real world, if you want a real pulse in the real world, and if you want real consciousness in the real world, a programming-only solution is simply impossible.

What you're doing is changing horses in mid-stream.

You say that the computer can produce a real-world effect, but when I say, OK, examine the real-world computer and show me, you then pull a switcheroo and move your frame of reference away from the physical world and into a virtual world which has no independent reality but which depends on an interpretation by a 3rd party observer.

Obviously, neither your phenomenology nor mine is dependent on someone else observing our brains.

That's why you continue to be 100% wrong about this point.

There is no hologram. That's why you continue to be 100% wrong about this

 

[Belz...]

As Prometheus points out, consiousness need not be connected to any senses at all.

What would you be conscious of without senses ?

Now, keep in mind, when we're talking about consciousness, that includes dreaming.

Itself entirely dependent upon prior sensory data.

But here's the thing, there is no all-programming solution to consciousness. Can't be done.

Assertion.

Consciousness is a bodily function, a real event in spacetime. All spacetime events have causes rooted in matter and energy.

Computer programs that run are also real events in spacetime.

If you want to build a conscious machine, it may well have a computer as a component, but you can't simply program consciousness, for the same reason that programming alone could not have produced the hologram of Tupac that was produced recently at a concert. computers can be part of that system, but you need hardware components to produce real spacetime phenomena.

Consciousness cannot be programmed.

Running cannot be programmed.

And yet it can.