On Consciousness

[steenkh]

OK, so there is there are the following types of red:

1. Certain frequencies of light.
2. The activation of certain structures in the eye.
3. Particular patterns of activations in the brain.
4. The first person experience that we get when those activations in the brain occur (which may very well just be 3 from a particular point of view).
5. The label that we put on things that are "red".

Clearly it is possible to swap the colours around by meddling with 1.

No,mthat is not clear at all. You cannot swap the colours so that the sky becomes green, or leaves become blue. The colours are there because of physics.

Likewise if you mucked around with the eye, you could presumably swap colours about. It's not as if L-cones activating for red and S-cones activating for blue is "the correct" representation of reality, is it?

Again, I do not see how you can make any swapping here. The cones activate because they have the physical properties to react to those exact frequencies of light. You cannot use a cone sensitive to red light react on blue light.

Same with the patterns of activation in the brain for red. Let's swap blue and red. It would be confusing if it happened, but it wouldn't be any more correct or wrong than the normal mapping. No?

Finally, I do not see the point of swapping at all: those data structures that have been connected with red light are also connected with "heat", and "stop (in stop lights)". While the choice of red for "stop" is decided by humans, and is arbitrary, the same is not the case for "heat". If you were able to swap green and red in the mind, the sight of glowing coals would no longer be red, and you would no longer have the connection to heat.

In other words, the data structures in our heads do have a connection to the physical world around us, so they are not arbitrary. Besides, the data structures have been built by a learning process, which again does not make them swappable.

Piggy's example of colour-blind people experiencing different colours is right and wrong at the same time. It is true that because of a lack of appropriate cones in their eyes, these people have different physical input, but the physical colours are unchanged, and R-G people will still have data structures for red green, even if they look more or less the same to their eyes. These data structures have been built by experience: as children they have been told what is red, and what is green, and they make the same associations with the colours (such as "ripe", and "unripe", or "go" and "stop") as everybody else, but the colours are just more difficult to tell apart for them.

Some women apparently are quadrochromatical, which means that they can see a fourth colour. We trichromatical beings cannot imagine what it is like to see four colours. As far as I understand, the fourth colour is in the green area of light, and quite close to the 'old' green. Since our world is dominated by trichromaticals, the quadrochromaticals will be taught the same colours as the trichromaticals, and make the same associations, and they might never realise that they can see an extra colour. However, they will be able to distinguish green nuances far better than we can.

So how is it to experience 'red', and will all people have the same or a different experience? My answer is that most of the data structures will be exactly the same, such as the connection to red apples of glowing coals, and that we might never know what mental picture we have internally of a colour, and if they would look the same. My first guess would be that no two people would 'see' a colour in the same way, but I am sure they will all call the colours the same. However, in this very thread, a link was posted to a paper that claimed to have found a smart way to determine if everybody saw colours in the same way, and that the answer was that we do. I do not have the time to dig up the link now, but it is quite a long time since it was brought here in this thread.

If the paper is right, it would seem counterintuitive to me, and it would imply that our inner colours are much less arbitrary than we think. For a computer model, it would imply more hardware, or hard-coded code, and less software.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Mr Scott, so long as it's possible to do a whole bunch of image processing, classification, identification wrt memory etc... without having to produce a qualia, I don't see where this line of reasoning is going. If my brainstem wanders off, eats a madeline, (let's imagine I have some terrible brain injury resulting in blindeating) and I get some kind of qualia representation of my aunt with whom I ate madelines long ago, all the work done by my brain to draw up the qualia of my aunt is still unconscious, surely?

I've never said anything about unconscious qualia. You may be getting that from Piggy's misinterpretation of my remarks.

I'm holding in reserve where I'm going with this line of reasoning.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Yes, the conscious experience of seeing a tiger or a face is an integration of many different types of qualia, including not just color but shape as well and even the emotional response.

But perhaps I have misunderstood what you were claiming.

You appeared to be claiming that the blindsighted person's ability to guess that they'd seen a tiger indicated that qualia were present which the blindsighted person was not consciously experiencing.

If I misread you, then my apologies.
Let's use the face as an example, if you don't mind, b/c we actually have experimental data on those cases.

In that case, the subject's brain produces no qualia of shape or color. However, it does produce emotional qualia. (There are people with emotional blindness, however, who don't "feel" their emotions even though their bodies produce emotional responses such as blushing, laughter, grimmacing, etc.)

What I objected to was the notion that there might be "unexperienced" qualia.

We could refer to other experiments in which blindsighted persons learn mazes. In that case, only the non-conscious processes in the brain are handling the spatial navigation.

I never said, implied, or thought about unconscious qualia.

I think you filled in gaps with something in your mind and ended up with a straw representation of what I was saying. My hypothesis is a blind sighted person looking at a tiger doesn't make a guess from the subconscious, but is experiencing a tiger quale without experiencing an image. This would be the inverse of a person who lost the ability to identify animals experiencing the full image of a tiger, but not the tiger quale.

But then, there's a related phenomenon I find interesting. Say, I'm trying to remember a movie actor's name, and it's not coming to me. I change the subject, but five minutes later the name pops into my head. Presumably, some unconscious part of my brain was working on the name search, and when finished, sent it to me, pretty much qualia-free. Perhaps when a blind-sighted person guesses a tiger is in front of him, it's via a channel like that -- apparently qualia-free, unless you want to see the word "tiger" as a quale.

 

[Belz...]

I have not taken the opportunity to make factually incorrect statements.

There are not two kinds of red.

 

[Piggy]

My hypothesis is a blind sighted person looking at a tiger doesn't make a guess from the subconscious, but is experiencing a tiger quale without experiencing an image.

Then you are saying what I thought you said.

Again, I say you're conflating conscious and non-conscious processes.

Which quale do you think this person would be experiencing? Not shape, certainly. Perhaps an emotional reaction, but that might be fear or beauty or who knows what.

So what exactly do you think this person is consciously experiencing about that visual image of a tiger?

(Yes, I am reading your posts.)

 

[Fudbucker]

I have not taken the opportunity to make factually incorrect statements.

There are not two kinds of red.

Red only exists inside the skulls of animals, as far as anyone can tell.

Outside, there is light, but color is not a quality of light. There's wavelength, speed, frequency, amplitude… but not color.

Projecting color onto light as an inherent quality is a mistake.

We're all having problems with this. There's the standard usage of "red", which refers to a particular wavelength, and then there's the mental state "red", which is caused, partly, by seeing a red object.

ETA: "we're all" refers to the people who think there are more than two kinds of red.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Then you are saying what I thought you said.

Again, I say you're conflating conscious and non-conscious processes.

Which quale do you think this person would be experiencing? Not shape, certainly. Perhaps an emotional reaction, but that might be fear or beauty or who knows what.

So what exactly do you think this person is consciously experiencing about that visual image of a tiger?

(Yes, I am reading your posts.)

Maybe you're too visual to conceive of a tiger sans image. Or, you're so focused on the five senses that you can't expand the concept to non-sensory subjective experiences and therefore label them as unconscious. Interesting.

 

[Fudbucker]

Yes it isn't decision making, or yes it is ?



Well if consciousness is the act of SRIP or the effect of it, it's not, itself, doing any SRIP... I think. It gets confusing at this point.



Absolutely. In one experiment (I'm telling this from memory) they blinded one eye, and showed a picture of, I think, Hitler to the subject. One side of the brain got the visual cue, and reacted with disgust, but only the other side of the brain has the speech center. So when asked why they reacted this way, the subject has no way to know. So the other brain (left, in this case) takes a wild guess and blurts out an answer that is reasonable but inaccurate.

This ^^

There was also the split-brain patient who's left arm was "hostile" towards his wife (he would have to sit on it so it wouldn't strike her). I forget who the researcher was, but he was able to isolate the hemispheres of the brain in these patients who'd had the corpus callosum removed. Patients were then asked questions (or, more accurately, their hemispheres were asked questions) and often, different hemispheres of the brain would give totally different answers.

From those studies, it's hard not to conclude there are two consciousnesses at work. The corpus callosum allows the two hemispheres to communicate (and produce a unified consciousness?). This supports Pixy's theory, in a way: if there are at least two consciousnesses the brain produces, why can't there be more? A bunch of SRIP's with an over-arching "unifier" (someone gave an excellent post pages back along those lines).

A point against Pixy is that we're not actually conscious of all these SRIP's going on. The SRIP that needs our immediate attention seems to be the one we "attend" to. Some SRIP's we're never conscious of (e.g., digestion). But we must be aware, on some level, of all these processes going on, else how could we decide which one to pay attention to?

 

[Fudbucker]

That would mean every instance of self-referential information processing is an instance of consciousness.

Yes.

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.

Why is any of that a problem? Anaesthetised patients may well have conscious processes still operating in their brains.

That's a problem right there. Properly anesthetized patients are unconscious. There are brain functions going on, but we're not conscious of any of them.

There's also the problem of insects (and possibly one-celled organisms) where SRIP is going on. We know conclusively that certain animal brains can produce consciousness. It is highly speculative whether insects are conscious, yet your definition of consciousness asserts they are.

Their minds are not conscious. Nothing there has changed.

This doesn't make sense. During anesthesia, a lot has changed- the patient IS unconscious during anesthesia. That's the whole point.

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

They don't need to be satisfying, merely correct.

By "very satisfying" I meant your answers seemed wrong.

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

You'll get a lot of agreement on that, I think.

Sure. But since we have no agreement and indeed few coherent suggestions on any expanded definition, for now I'm sticking to the one I have.

Fair enough.

 

[Piggy]

We're all having problems with this. There's the standard usage of "red", which refers to a particular wavelength, and then there's the mental state "red", which is caused, partly, by seeing a red object.

ETA: "we're all" refers to the people who think there are more than two kinds of red.

As I've said before, conventional language is fine if you're talking about everyday things, like what color to paint a wall, or which roses to buy.

But if we want to discuss what consciousness is and how it works, we have to be precise.

To say that "red" or "redness" is somehow an inherent quality of light -- of any type of light at all -- is to make a fundamental mistake that will lead to errors in conclusions.

The most common problem which arises on threads like these is that folks will say, well, as long as a brain -- organic or machine -- distinguishes among various wavelengths of light, then we've got a brain which "sees color".

This is incorrect, however.

If that's all you've done, then you've done nothing with color whatsoever.

You can build a machine, for instance, that distinguishes among various types of objects striking it, for example, and responding differently to them, but you have not thereby created a machine which feels pain.

The pain of being struck by a bullet, hit by a hammer, and injected with a needle are all different. (Similarly, a throbbing toothache feels different from a piercing stab wound or a sunburn.) But designing a machine which responds differently to these does not mean you've designed a machine that feels pain, because pain is not "information" contained in the hammer or bullet or needle, so it is not "information" which can be received from them.

This is important. Crucial, in fact.

By the same token, there is no information about color in photons / light waves. Therefore there is no "information" about color to be received from light.

Color is something produced by the brain, specifically by the processes in the brain which are dedicated to producing conscious experience.

No brain processes upstream from those particular processes have anything to do with color, and neither does light.

So if you want to understand what consciousness is, and what the brain is doing when it performs consciousness ( = qualia = phenomenology ) then you can't make the mistake of believing that color is somehow a property of light, or that the brain is in any way "perceiving color" merely by having distinct responses to different wavelengths of light.

If you want a brain or a machine that feels pain, you have to build one that feels pain, not one that simply responds differently to being hit by different things.

Similarly, if you want a brain or a machine that "sees colors", then you have to build one that produces colors (which are qualia, or phenomenology) not one that simply responds differently to different wavelengths of light.

This is not an academic point. If you don't understand it, then you haven't yet understood consciousness.

 

[Piggy]

Maybe you're too visual to conceive of a tiger sans image. Or, you're so focused on the five senses that you can't expand the concept to non-sensory subjective experiences and therefore label them as unconscious. Interesting.

How about you simply respond to the question I put to you?

"Which quale do you think this person would be experiencing?"

How about that?

If you answer that question, then we have something we can talk about.

ETA: If you want to know why I sometimes lose patience, it's the question-dodging that's a large contributor.

 

[AlBell]

Maybe you're too visual to conceive of a tiger sans image. Or, you're so focused on the five senses that you can't expand the concept to non-sensory subjective experiences and therefore label them as unconscious. Interesting.

I understand the concept fine, but don't understand how a materialist/physicalist could.

 

[Belz...]

This supports Pixy's theory, in a way: if there are at least two consciousnesses the brain produces, why can't there be more?

Right. There could be more in discrete areas of the brain, or maybe if we split a brain physically and along arbitrary lines, we'd get new, "incomplete" minds.

Properly anesthetized patients are unconscious.

Are they at all aware of the passage of time ? If not, definitely not conscious. An uncle of mine had a cardiac arrest in his hospital room. Upon reanimation, he said there was no elapsed time between the two events.

Of course, no oxygen to the brain will do that.

 

[Belz...]

As I've said before, conventional language is fine if you're talking about everyday things, like what color to paint a wall, or which roses to buy.

What are you talking about ? Paint and roses don't have colours !

I understand the concept fine, but don't understand how a materialist/physicalist could.

Why not ?

 

[Perpetual Student]

...
...

Red only exists inside the skulls of animals, as far as anyone can tell.

Outside, there is light, but color is not a quality of light. There's wavelength, speed, frequency, amplitude… but not color.

Projecting color onto light as an inherent quality is a mistake.

Yes and no.
Yes, redness is not some inherent quality of all light, since what we call light involves a spectrum of electromagnetic radiation that includes other visible wavelengths that we would not identify as red.
However, we do not live in the dark ages, so we have some helpful information from the findings of modern science. Specifically, we know that the mental exoerience of red coincides with a very specific frequency range of light. So color, say redness, can be said to be very definitely a quality of light in that it specifies a narrow range of frequencies within the electromagnetic spectrum.
Using the term red when referring to light is no different than using the term microwaves when referring to another range within the broader spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. One can also say being micro is not an inherent quality of electromagnetic radiation. But, that would be mere sophistry, as are your comments about color.

 

[Piggy]

Yes and no.
Yes, redness is not some inherent quality of all light, since what we call light involves a spectrum of electromagnetic radiation that includes other visible wavelengths that we would not identify as red.
However, we do not live in the dark ages, so we have some helpful information from the findings of modern science. Specifically, we know that the mental exoerience of red coincides with a very specific frequency range of light. So color, say redness, can be said to be very definitely a quality of light in that it specifies a narrow range of frequencies within the electromagnetic spectrum.
Using the term red when referring to light is no different than using the term microwaves when referring to another range within the broader spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. One can also say being micro is not an inherent quality of electromagnetic radiation. But, that would be mere sophistry, as are your comments about color.

It might be "sophistry" if we were discussing any other topic.

But in this case, it is anything but.

The only reason we speak of "red light" or any color light is because of what that light (sometimes) does inside our skulls.

If the topic at hand is that very behavior inside our skulls, then it is important for us to understand that "red" is (sometimes) our brains' response to light, and that this response is in no way implicit in the physical properties of the light itself.

ETA: If you'd like to explain the physics of how red can be a property of light, or of how it can be determined which brains' particular response is the inherent quality and why all others aren't, or how red could be predicted from the neural activity or the wavelength by an observer with a brain that doesn't respond the way ours do, then be my guest.

 

[Fudbucker]

Right. There could be more in discrete areas of the brain, or maybe if we split a brain physically and along arbitrary lines, we'd get new, "incomplete" minds.



Are they at all aware of the passage of time ? If not, definitely not conscious. An uncle of mine had a cardiac arrest in his hospital room. Upon reanimation, he said there was no elapsed time between the two events.

Of course, no oxygen to the brain will do that.

When I was put under, I woke up instantaneously, with no sense of any time passing. Much different than going to sleep.

 

[Belz...]

It might be "sophistry" if we were discussing any other topic.

But in this case, it is anything but.

Special pleading.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

Well I've given him a few days, but I guess Piggy dropped our conversation thread. I shall have to rein in my disappointment.

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.

The feedback loop thing goes way waaay back in this thread. To summarize: "consciousness" is a crappy term that means something slightly different to absolutely everybody, yet everbody will swear up and down that they know it when they see it. Pixy's SRIP was a counterargument: ridiculous as it is, you cannot prove it wrong because it's just as unfalsifiable as everyone else's definition.

(by the way, a purely subjective definition means it's pretty damned useless as a concept to study scientifically, and should honestly be thrown out entirely until someone can find something falsifiable to demonstrate about it)

Regarding your change, I'd object to it even if we weren't talking about the color thing. Calling all subjective experiences "subjective experience" implies they're a unified whole, which we've learned enough to say is completely false.

Again, I do not see how you can make any swapping here. The cones activate because they have the physical properties to react to those exact frequencies of light. You cannot use a cone sensitive to red light react on blue light.

I think the idea behind shuttit's post was that, if the networks could be exchanged wholesale, if you could take the world's finest tweezers and swap the red cones for green (or something infinitely more complex downstream), you would see red for green, and vice versa. I agree, but I don't feel that detracts from the point I think most others are making; that "red" and "green" are entirely arbitrary distinctions that mean nothing more or less than "this population" versus "that population." If the two were swapped and you didn't already have a facebook of associations linking them to their respective (and now out-of-) contexts, you'd never know the difference.

When I was put under, I woke up instantaneously, with no sense of any time passing. Much different than going to sleep.

Unconsciousness comes with a small period of retrograde amnesia. Aided by anesthesia you go down quick and stay there, so the last thing you remember is a bit before the gas really hits you, with no periods of light sleep/dozing awakeness to give you a sense of time.

 

[Piggy]

Well I've given him a few days, but I guess Piggy dropped our conversation thread. I shall have to rein in my disappointment.

Last I heard, it was you who hadn't answered my questions, and I had observed that nothing in your cited article contradicted the physicalist position.

In fact, I was wondering when you were going to get around to posting anything that actually supported your position or responded in a meaningful way to the questions you've been dodging.

Odd interpretation of events on your part.