On Consciousness

[Piggy]

We observe it: It's red; it's round. It is a red ball by definition.

As I said earlier, if you have to redefine the entire English language to have your argument make sense, this would suggest that there is a problem with your argument.


I checked, and yes I do.

I know it's non-intuitive, PixyMisa. A lot of modern scientific discoveries describe a real world that's profoundly non-intuitive to our everyday experience.

And yes, we do have to develop new ways of talking about thing when these discoveries are made. At first, we're forced to use the existing language, and that always leads to conflict and confusion. The current discoveries about consciousness are no exception.

We say that we see a "red ball" because that's how we experience it.

Nevertheless, modern physics clearly shows that "red" cannot be a property of the ball itself, because (a) our brains only produce red after the light has moved away from our eyes, and there can be no faster-than-light communication between our brains and the light, and (b) different brains can respond to the same light with different colors, so the assignment of a color to any kind of light would be arbitrary.

Now, do you actually experience the sphere? No. It's close, but because of the vanishing-point distortion implicit in your phenogram, you're not actually experiencing the thing as it is.

Therefore, there is no "red ball" out there. That's only how you end up experiencing things. There's something out there, but it doesn't have redness as an inherent property, and you don't experience its shape as it actually is.

Yes, this is non-intuitive, but in 2013, if you're running on intuition, you're going to make mistakes.

 

[tsig]

"They're the same thing" is the explanation. It is your answer to why. By rejecting that you're implying an extra step. I don't know how many more ways I can describe this.

There's a subjective experience we're trying to find the physical cause of. There's a physical behavior that perfectly correlates, near as we can tell, with the subjective experience. Eureka. We're done. Why is that not a satisfactory answer? If you truly do think that subjective experiences are purely physical in origin with no metaphysical causes, why is a physical system with perfect correlation (which is, incidentally, as good a relationship as we will ever hope to find given the unfalsifiable nature of subjective experience) not good enough evidence for you?

I can give you one reason someone might reject it: they believe in a soul, where consciousness actually resides. Or spirit, or quantum woo consciousness or however they want to disguise it. They would say the subjective experiences are on the spiritual side of the dualism, and that the perfect correlation is really just the final material input interface, that it's necessary but insufficient, for the final final cause is whatever crosses the material/metaphysical barrier in their hokum. Inversions of the great universal pyramid. Thetans winging the neural activity there and back.

Why are you inserting an additional step, if not to bridge your way to dualism with a magic bean?

Exactly, some just want to be special and they think that just being materiel is somehow debasing to themselves personally. They see themselves as special because, well, they feel special and they think that the only way to retain that specialness is to place consciousness outside of the physical world in some never-never land of qualia. This leads them to denying that the evidence of the senses is real but that sensing colour is some esoteric function of the brain instead of a simple "signal received, signal recognized" function.

 

[Mr. Scott]

You'd also think that, since he doesn't like being labeled, he'd be careful not to make the same mistake.

Why do you suppose that when the informationalist or computationalist or reductionist labels are applied, there's little to no emotional response, but when the dualist label is applied to the anti-informationalists, they get all prickly? Insecurity?

 

[Piggy]

Look for the self-referential information processing.

Self-referential information processing occurs all throughout the brain, including in areas which do not produce any phenomenlogical response, which is to say no conscious response.

Also, observing the information processing does not allow us to predict what the phenomenological response will be. The only way we can know it is if we as observers have similar enough brains that we can observe it directly in ourselves, but that doesn't answer the question of why any neural state produces the specific conscious experience which it produces, and not some other one, or none at all.

 

[tsig]

I know it's non-intuitive, PixyMisa. A lot of modern scientific discoveries describe a real world that's profoundly non-intuitive to our everyday experience.

And yes, we do have to develop new ways of talking about thing when these discoveries are made. At first, we're forced to use the existing language, and that always leads to conflict and confusion. The current discoveries about consciousness are no exception.

We say that we see a "red ball" because that's how we experience it.

Nevertheless, modern physics clearly shows that "red" cannot be a property of the ball itself, because (a) our brains only produce red after the light has moved away from our eyes, and there can be no faster-than-light communication between our brains and the light, and (b) different brains can respond to the same light with different colors, so the assignment of a color to any kind of light would be arbitrary.

Now, do you actually experience the sphere? No. It's close, but because of the vanishing-point distortion implicit in your phenogram, you're not actually experiencing the thing as it is.

Therefore, there is no "red ball" out there. That's only how you end up experiencing things. There's something out there, but it doesn't have redness as an inherent property, and you don't experience its shape as it actually is.

Yes, this is non-intuitive, but in 2013, if you're running on intuition, you're going to make mistakes.

I do wonder how you get along each day groping in a world of amorphous, non colored blobs.

Piggy, red balls exist, get over it.

 

[PixyMisa]

I know it's non-intuitive, PixyMisa.

It's intuitive just fine. It's non-true.

 

[Piggy]

Piggy, nothing in your response suggests to me that you actually read what I wrote, beyond the first sentence or so. I figure you think that, since you've pegged me as an "informationalist" you don't need to be conscious of my ideas.

Explain how my hypothesis conflates conscious and unconscious processes. You keep saying it but it strikes me as a bare assertion which doesn't match what I'm actually saying.

The bandwidth of this conversation is quite low because of the aggression, defensiveness, and meanness of the anti-informationalists.

Since you and annnnoid bridle when the dualism label is applied, maybe it would be helpful to explain exactly how you are not dualistic.

For reference purposes, here's wiki's definition so we can be on the same page and get past semantic quibbles:

I'm sorry if simply pointing out errors strikes you as mean, aggressive, and defensive. I don't know what sort of kid-glove treatment you want, so I'm afraid I can't provide it.

And when you base a set of ideas on an error, we have to stop at the error.

So let's go back to blindsight, say the case in which certain blind people are able to correctly guess the emotions in faces in photographs which their eyes are pointed at but which they cannot have any conscious experience of seeing.

If a person is blind because of damage to the eyes or optic nerves, this will not occur. It only occurs in limited cases, in which the damage is very far down the chain, in the areas of the brain which are responsible for producing the conscious experience, or qualila, by which time the rest of the body (the non-conscious "bounce-back" system, which predates consciousness in evolutionary terms) is already responding to whatever the eyes have reacted to.

In these cases, the neural response to the face is not only routed up to the visual cortex, but also off to areas designed to respond specifically to emotions in faces -- evolution, it seems, deemed this response too important to depend on our conscious conclusions about the world.

For this reason, folks with blindsight have a sympathetic neural response to the patterns of light bouncing off the photos of the faces, and by their own emotions they are able to guess the emotions of the people whose faces have been photographed.

This process does not involve at all the areas of the brain responsible for producing color, brightness, dimness, and phenographic shape. In other words, this process has nothing to do with qualia at all. The areas of the brain which do that -- those areas we see firing in rapid synch when qualia are performed -- just aren't involved.

What you've done is to conflate those functions of the brain with non-conscious functions elsewhere in the brain. You've slapped the "qualia" label onto processes which have nothing to do with performing qualia.

That is a fundamental error.

If we start calling non-conscious processes conscious, then we're simply ignoring the difference which we're studying when we study consciousness in the first place.

The simple fact of the matter is that people with blindsight have no conscious experience of visual qualia, despite the fact that their brains are still responding non-consciously to neural activity originating in their eyes.

And that's not some philosophical position, it's proven biology.

You're simply trying to sweep this under the rug and claim that the non-conscious processes somehow qualify as qualia as well.

That's informationalist opportunism, classic example, and it's factually incorrect, as has been demonstrated clearly by direct observation of brains in the lab.

I hope that explanation was not too aggressive, mean, or defensive for you, but no doubt it is way too "long winded" and "repetitive" for others on this thread.

 

[Perpetual Student]

I know it's non-intuitive, PixyMisa. A lot of modern scientific discoveries describe a real world that's profoundly non-intuitive to our everyday experience.

And yes, we do have to develop new ways of talking about thing when these discoveries are made. At first, we're forced to use the existing language, and that always leads to conflict and confusion. The current discoveries about consciousness are no exception.

We say that we see a "red ball" because that's how we experience it.

Nevertheless, modern physics clearly shows that "red" cannot be a property of the ball itself, because (a) our brains only produce red after the light has moved away from our eyes, and there can be no faster-than-light communication between our brains and the light, and (b) different brains can respond to the same light with different colors, so the assignment of a color to any kind of light would be arbitrary.

Now, do you actually experience the sphere? No. It's close, but because of the vanishing-point distortion implicit in your phenogram, you're not actually experiencing the thing as it is.

Therefore, there is no "red ball" out there. That's only how you end up experiencing things. There's something out there, but it doesn't have redness as an inherent property, and you don't experience its shape as it actually is.

Yes, this is non-intuitive, but in 2013, if you're running on intuition, you're going to make mistakes.

This is all wrong! The ball is red because of its reflective properties. Physicists can confirm that by examining the spectrum of incident radiation and comparing it to the reflected radiation, which is within the range of radiation that our neural systems recognize as red, a word we have tacitly agreed to denote that range of radiation.
There are a number of objective ways we can confirm the spherical shape of the ball. A sphere is a precisely described mathematical object. We have tacitly agreed to use that word when objects approximate that shape.
When we say, "red ball," we are describing that objective reality.
It seems the only non-intuitive aspect of all this is your own lack of intuition.

 

[shuttlt]

There's a subjective experience we're trying to find the physical cause of. There's a physical behavior that perfectly correlates, near as we can tell, with the subjective experience. Eureka. We're done. Why is that not a satisfactory answer? If you truly do think that subjective experiences are purely physical in origin with no metaphysical causes, why is a physical system with perfect correlation (which is, incidentally, as good a relationship as we will ever hope to find given the unfalsifiable nature of subjective experience) not good enough evidence for you?

Personally I'm not so far off agreeing with this. I don't see where one can go beyond observing the corrolation. I don't know why people insist on saying that they know it's feedback loops or what ever that are the cause of it all. It's untestable. None of us have any way of testing where the boundary of subjective, first person, qualia, phenomenological etc.... experience is.

I would change the first line of your paragraph to "we are trying to find the cause of subjective experience". Unless we are getting back into the whole colour thing again.

I can give you one reason someone might reject it: they believe in a soul, where consciousness actually resides. Or spirit, or quantum woo consciousness or however they want to disguise it. They would say the subjective experiences are on the spiritual side of the dualism, and that the perfect correlation is really just the final material input interface, that it's necessary but insufficient, for the final final cause is whatever crosses the material/metaphysical barrier in their hokum. Inversions of the great universal pyramid. Thetans winging the neural activity there and back.

Personally, the existence of phenomonology seems miraculous to me regardless of the explanation. I don't think there's much in it in terms of wonder between any of the explanations. Some are simpler than others of course.

 

[shuttlt]

This is all wrong! The ball is red because of its reflective properties. Physicists can confirm that by examining the spectrum of incident radiation and comparing it to the reflected radiation, which is within the range of radiation that our neural systems recognize as red, a word we have tacitly agreed to denote that range of radiation.
There are a number of objective ways we can confirm the spherical shape of the ball. A sphere is a precisely described mathematical object. We have tacitly agreed to use that word when objects approximate that shape.
When we say, "red ball," we are describing that objective reality.
It seems the only non-intuitive aspect of all this is your own lack of intuition.

I think perhaps what Piggy means is that the red we experience corrolates with, but is not at all the same as, the red property of the physical ball. Swap the qualia of the colours around, or with some other qualia, doubtless you'd have some rewiring to do, and the new mappings wouldn't be any more right or wrong than the current ones. The qualia we experience as red is an evolutionary coincidence.

 

[Belz...]

I know it's non-intuitive, PixyMisa. A lot of modern scientific discoveries describe a real world that's profoundly non-intuitive to our everyday experience.

You are basing your entire argument on intuition, Piggy, by assuming that your experiences represent a real "layer" of reality i.e. "red" as something we haven't found yet. If you think science can lead to unintuitive discoveries, a point with which I agree, how about considering your assumption about "redness" wrong ?

I'm sorry if simply pointing out errors strikes you as mean, aggressive, and defensive.

You really should consider stepping down from that pedestal.

 

[Belz...]

I think perhaps what Piggy means is that the red we experience corrolates with, but is not at all the same as, the red property of the physical ball. Swap the qualia of the colours around, or with some other qualia, doubtless you'd have some rewiring to do, and the new mappings wouldn't be any more right or wrong than the current ones. The qualia we experience as red is an evolutionary coincidence.

Yeah, assuming that's what he means (he hasn't been super-clear on that), but he still hasn't demonstrated that "red" is something more than what we know about the brain already.

 

[tsig]

You are basing your entire argument on intuition, Piggy, by assuming that your experiences represent a real "layer" of reality i.e. "red" as something we haven't found yet. If you think science can lead to unintuitive discoveries, a point with which I agree, how about considering your assumption about "redness" wrong ?



You really should consider stepping down from that pedestal.

After many threads I have deduced two rules about discussions with Piggy:


1. Piggy is always right.

2. If you disagree with Piggy refer to rule #1.

 

[shuttlt]

Yeah, assuming that's what he means (he hasn't been super-clear on that), but he still hasn't demonstrated that "red" is something more than what we know about the brain already.

I can't tell you what a relief it is to communicate with somebody from the opposition camp and at least agree on what we both mean in so few words. I feel like Mr Memory after he's unburdened himself at the end of the 39 Steps, only without the bullet.

I guess you could say we know the subjectivity of our brains, and we know lots about the information processing angle of our brains (without getting into whether they are different). We know that some of our information processing leads to qualia and some doesn't. If we implement different information processing in different hardware perhaps it would be phenomenologically conscious, or perhaps it would just be doing some more advanced version of blindsight. I don't know. It isn't immediately obvious to me, even theoretically, how one would go about making a determination.

 

[shuttlt]

Yeah, assuming that's what he means (he hasn't been super-clear on that), but he still hasn't demonstrated that "red" is something more than what we know about the brain already.

Just to clarify, I think this is one layer of what he means. He takes it some way further than the point that I think we have just agreed, as you indicate.

 

[Belz...]

After many threads I have deduced two rules about discussions with Piggy:


1. Piggy is always right.

2. If you disagree with Piggy refer to rule #1.

Impossible. Here are the three laws of the universe:

1. The universe is messed up.
2. Belz... is always right.
3. If Belz... is wrong, see #1.

 

[Belz...]

If we implement different information processing in different hardware perhaps it would be phenomenologically conscious, or perhaps it would just be doing some more advanced version of blindsight. I don't know. It isn't immediately obvious to me, even theoretically, how one would go about making a determination.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that we can't determine it, we'd have to assume it from behaviour only. Which is already what we do with other people, in fact.

 

[Fudbucker]

Look for the self-referential information processing.

That would mean every instance of self-referential information processing is an instance of consciousness. You're going to run into trouble wrt to anesthetized patients, regulation of involuntary systems, and I think there can be a strong case to be made that even the simplest organisms engage in self-referential information processing.

These have all been brought up before, and your answers weren't very satisfying.

Do you still believe

As I've noted, I'm amenable to a definition of consciousness that holds SRIP as necessary but not sufficient

http://www.internationalskeptics.co...06666&highlight=unconscious+brain#post8506666
You'll get a lot of agreement on that, I think.

 

[shuttlt]

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that we can't determine it, we'd have to assume it from behaviour only. Which is already what we do with other people, in fact.

I agree, we have to assume it. It kind of feels to me though as if, if we have to go around assuming it, then we clearly don't have a theory. We've got a broad brush strokes hypothesis. Surely we are getting to quite a long chain of assuming once we get to some artificially implemented brain doing complicated, but different, information processing in complicated, but different hardware.

I'd have thought it would be less trouble just to explicitly cut this type of non-testable, non-blindsight consciousness out of our theory.

 

[Mr. Scott]

I hope that explanation was not too aggressive, mean, or defensive for you, but no doubt it is way too "long winded" and "repetitive" for others on this thread.

That one was not aggressive, mean, or defensive, but it shows you don't get what I'm saying, again, as if you hadn't read what I said.

There are unconscious processes between the eyeballs and where the mind appreciates the performance of a color. There are simply more unconscious processes to turn a pattern of colors into a conscious tiger quale.

Why couldn't a shape have a quale? It's certainly performed for the mind, just as a color is, though after more unconscious processing. Check out the Bouba/kiki effect^WP for an example of what I mean.

From wiki:

Qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/; singular form: quale (Latin pronunciation: [ˈkwaːle]) is a term used in philosophy to refer to individual instances of subjective, conscious experience.

Notice it does not limit qualia to the five sense. Does a tiger not produce its own unique subjective conscious experience? Or the anger in a face? Or a spiky shape?