On Consciousness

[Mr. Scott]

Can you de-abstract this whole process for me, please, and let's talk in terms of matter and energy, rather than "data"?

Hmmm... I will try to work with you on that one.

Not sure what your problem with data and information is.

Neuron action potential spikes are well covered in other articles as matter and energy.

Spikes come to the neuron via neurotransmitter chemicals. Spikes leave the neuron via neurotransmitter chemicals. Spikes are information, such as, the information that a rod has received a photon.

Now, suppose we pick a neuron in the brain, and replace it with a tiny electric circuit that does exactly what the neuron did, and can receive and transmit spikes to and from the same neurons same as the real neuron, etc. (we can already do this with sensory and motor neurons), with all other things like growing new connections as needed. Let's call it a robot neuron. I'd say the brain would work just the same. Now, we replace one of the neurons it's connected to with another robot neuron. Same brain, same behavior.

I assert that if we continued this to duplicate the whole brain with robot neurons, we'd still have a conscious brain. Do you disagree?

 

[Piggy]

It's strange to say Watson didn't understand the questions. We're back to the Chinese Room. In fact, one of the errors Watson made during development was a result of Watson not understanding roman numerals, which they subsequently taught Watson. The developers really used the word "understand." I've not asserted Watson is conscious, so that's a straw attack. Remember, even though Watson made errors, he completely demolished his conscious opponents.

If you're not asserting that Watson was conscious, then it's irrelevant, isn't it?

ETA: Personally, I chalk up Watson's win more to quickness on the buzzer than anything else.

 

[Piggy]

Not sure what your problem with data and information is.

None at all, as long as we recognize that we're dealing with abstractions (which necessitates a loss of precision) and that neither can exist in a system without an interpreter.

To keep things simple, and to allow us to deal with systems that lack interpreters, let's stick to physics.

There's only one set of laws for this universe as far as I know, and that's the laws of physics. There aren't two sets, one for physics and one for "information".

 

[Piggy]

Now, suppose we pick a neuron in the brain, and replace it with a tiny electric circuit that does exactly what the neuron did, and can receive and transmit spikes to and from the same neurons same as the real neuron, etc. (we can already do this with sensory and motor neurons), with all other things like growing new connections as needed. Let's call it a robot neuron. I'd say the brain would work just the same. Now, we replace one of the neurons it's connected to with another robot neuron. Same brain, same behavior.

I assert that if we continued this to duplicate the whole brain with robot neurons, we'd still have a conscious brain. Do you disagree?

If you do this with all the brain tissue, and you replicate the behavior exactly, all the behavior with no bias toward eliminating what anybody guesses is "junk" or "noise", then you have a working model. Which is trivial.

 

[Piggy]

Ah, you mean something with a bit of magic in it?

So holograms are "magic" on your planet.

Interesting.

 

[GraculusTheGreenBird]

You can stop there.

You're assuming your conclusions.

You're trying to put red at the beginning of the process, before it's been produced.

If you do this, and you're thinking in terms of "data" and "information", then you'll make the mistake of assuming that "red" is some sort of "information" about light that's being passed to the brain.

So if you don't mind, let's back up and get more precise.

Also, I don't know what it might mean to say that a "quale exists as some physical thing".

The physicalist point of view is not that conscious experience is a type of matter, but rather that conscious experience is the result of purely physical-energetic processes in the brain.

Can you de-abstract this whole process for me, please, and let's talk in terms of matter and energy, rather than "data"?

Pathetic dodge. You know exactly what was meant. Red light being that consisting of the wavelengths commonly agreed upon and labelled as "red" by humans. If you dont like the term data, change it to "activity" or "neural activity".

Why are the elements 4, 5 and 6 which reference what is typically referred to as qualia necessary at all?

And, incidentally as you have mentioned a few times, there is no such thing as software only or pure programming without hardware. All software runs on something physical, and is completely physical in nature.

 

[PixyMisa]

None at all, as long as we recognize that we're dealing with abstractions (which necessitates a loss of precision) and that neither can exist in a system without an interpreter.

No.

To keep things simple, and to allow us to deal with systems that lack interpreters, let's stick to physics.

We are sticking to physics. You're the only one who seems to have a problem with it.

There's only one set of laws for this universe as far as I know, and that's the laws of physics. There aren't two sets, one for physics and one for "information".

Exactly our point.

You can stop there.

You're assuming your conclusions.

You're trying to put red at the beginning of the process, before it's been produced.

Red light is red, Piggy. It doesn't matter how many times you deny it; this is physics, the same physics you were insisting on just a moment ago. (Well, a moment later in the sequence of posts.)

Please at least try to be consistent.

 

[PixyMisa]

If you do this, and you're thinking in terms of "data" and "information", then you'll make the mistake of assuming that "red" is some sort of "information" about light that's being passed to the brain.

Just to add: This is not any sort of mistake. This is established fact, and has been explained to you in great detail in this very thread. Denying this fact is the greatest mistake you could make if your goal is to ever understand consciousness.

 

[Mr. Scott]

If you do this with all the brain tissue, and you replicate the behavior exactly, all the behavior with no bias toward eliminating what anybody guesses is "junk" or "noise", then you have a working model. Which is trivial.

Yes, as I said, the robot neurons would behave in every way like real neurons, junk and noise included.

You're conceding a brain made up of robot neurons would be conscious?

 

[Mr. Scott]

If you're not asserting that Watson was conscious, then it's irrelevant, isn't it?
ETA: Personally, I chalk up Watson's win more to quickness on the buzzer than anything else.

If you are not asserting holograms are conscious, then they're also irrelevant. You used holograms as an analogy for consciousness, asserting that neither can be produced by computers. I indicated your analogy was similar to Pixar and Watson.

Yes, Watson was too fast on the buzzer. To be fair, they should have introduced a delay equal to an average human seeing the light to activating the finger muscle. Rutter's pre-Watson advantage was he could anticipate the timing of the person turning on the light. When a different operator took over, Rutter's buzzer performance faltered. Watson could also have been implemented to hear the question's reading and optically see the light.

As it was done, though, the ratings for the show, and the publicity for IBM, were huge, and that's what really mattered to those involved. The point for IBM was how well Watson understood the questions and reference material. If Watson had beaten them on the buzzer but didn't have the right answers, he'd have been creamed.

 

[Belz...]

I wonder if Watson pushed the button _before_ he calculated the answer, or was programmed to push the button only when he had it.

 

[Mr. Scott]

I wonder if Watson pushed the button _before_ he calculated the answer, or was programmed to push the button only when he had it.

Watson was programmed to push the button as soon as he had an answer he was at least 50% confident was correct.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

No, it's a calm, reasoned attempt to keep you on the subject.

First, it's already been explained, in terms of neurology, why red cannot be described to someone who doesn't already understand what it is.

Second, since neither you nor I are either blind or color-blind, there's no need for us to describe what it is. We both see it, we both experience it, we both know what it is, we both agree we see red when we look at stop signs or traffic lights, for instance.

And we both agree that brain activity is responsible for this fact -- not magic, not a soul, not divine beings, not any of that.

You're simply failing to address the questions put to you. Then you're coming back with utterly irrelevant questions in order to distract from this fact.

The fact is, you have no theory which explains why the experiences of red and green result from exposure to the particular wavelengths of light which (sometimes) trigger those experiences, and not the other way around.

If you did, you would have offered it by now.

ETA: If it were true that our conscious experience -- our phenomenology, or qualia -- were truly and entirely non-different from the activity of our brain tissue, then we wouldn't have to go to such great lengths to observe said brain activity... we could simply observe it by introspection. But we can't.

Well gents, I think this is as stark a denial of reality as we're likely to get. It's barely one step above "I know you are but what am I," making this a pretty good stopping point.

Oh, I could point out the terrible, terrible flaws in your arguments, but to what end? I'm not going to convince you, I think I've sufficiently swayed most of the peanut gallery, and any point I could make would not be as effective as rereading your post in context.

I may chime back in a few pages from now if I catch you trying to snow someone else with your piss-poor logic, passive-aggressive pejoratives and magic bean shenanigans all asserted as a twisted mockery of science, as you were with Prometheus this round.

In the meantime I'd be happy to talk to anyone else interested in the topic, who isn't part of the Piggy vs reality debate.

 

[Mr. Scott]

In the meantime I'd be happy to talk to anyone else interested in the topic, who isn't part of the Piggy vs reality debate.

I assume you mean who's not on Piggy's side in that debate?

Really, only the peanut gallery matters, because debate participants are almost always in "have to win" mode, not "let us together drill down and find the truth" mode.

We are, after all, a tournament species.

 

[tsig]

Well gents, I think this is as stark a denial of reality as we're likely to get. It's barely one step above "I know you are but what am I," making this a pretty good stopping point.

Oh, I could point out the terrible, terrible flaws in your arguments, but to what end? I'm not going to convince you, I think I've sufficiently swayed most of the peanut gallery, and any point I could make would not be as effective as rereading your post in context.

I may chime back in a few pages from now if I catch you trying to snow someone else with your piss-poor logic, passive-aggressive pejoratives and magic bean shenanigans all asserted as a twisted mockery of science, as you were with Prometheus this round.

In the meantime I'd be happy to talk to anyone else interested in the topic, who isn't part of the Piggy vs reality debate.

I more or less gave up when I realized he was determined to make color an esoteric, hidden function of the brain.

How can you argue with someone who says we don't know why we see red instead of smelling bacon?

 

[Beelzebuddy]

I assume you mean who's not on Piggy's side in that debate?

Really I just mean Piggy. Most everyone else in this thread, even if they may not agree with me, are at least willing to listen and consider other arguments. With Piggy, it just goes in one ear and out the other, and if he's ever backed into a corner with no way out, he declares uncontested victory and tries to start over from scratch.

How can you argue with someone who says we don't know why we see red instead of smelling bacon?

On the face of it (i.e. no question-begging), that's a valid and interesting question. Since subjective experiences and concepts presumably all operate on the same physical basis, why don't our metaphorical wires get crossed, and how would we know when that happens? (They do, and we know this because nine starts to smell all funny-colored).

 

[Piggy]

Well gents, I think this is as stark a denial of reality as we're likely to get. It's barely one step above "I know you are but what am I," making this a pretty good stopping point.

Oh, I could point out the terrible, terrible flaws in your arguments, but to what end? I'm not going to convince you, I think I've sufficiently swayed most of the peanut gallery, and any point I could make would not be as effective as rereading your post in context.

I may chime back in a few pages from now if I catch you trying to snow someone else with your piss-poor logic, passive-aggressive pejoratives and magic bean shenanigans all asserted as a twisted mockery of science, as you were with Prometheus this round.

In the meantime I'd be happy to talk to anyone else interested in the topic, who isn't part of the Piggy vs reality debate.

So you can't answer any of it.

You say that the phenomenology which is our undeniable everyday experience just is the neurology, and requires no explanation why, and yet we cannot observe our phenomenology and tell what the brain activity is -- we have to go to extreme measures -- and we can't observe the brain activity and predict what the phenomenology is unless we're of the same species with the same brain and already know it.

Experiments on people with blindsight and emotional blindness demonstrate clearly that phenomenology isn't a given where "information processing" is present, but is a specialized process in the brain, yet you dismiss that.

Actual neurobiologists specializing in consciousness all agree that we have no theory, or even the basis of a theory, to explain consciousness (beyond knowing that it's the result of brain activity, and involves 3 signature processes: in the brain stem, in deep brain waves, and synchronized oscillations across the brain in higher level cortex) and yet you claim that you do have a theory. You should notify the editors of standard graduate-level texts such as "The Cognitive Neurosciences" and the heads of departments and professors who purchase those texts and inform them that they have no idea what they're doing.

You not only can't answer the question of why a given wavelength of light results in our seeing a particular color, or any color at all, but you don't even seem to understand enough to comprehend the question, continually misinterpreting it as a philosophical question along the lines of "How do I know you see red?"

If I were you, I would probably also exit the conversation and stick to talking with fellow travelers. Can't blame you one bit.

 

[Piggy]

Yes, as I said, the robot neurons would behave in every way like real neurons, junk and noise included.

You're conceding a brain made up of robot neurons would be conscious?

I don't use the word "robot" because it has anthropomorphic overtones. I prefer "machine".

But yes, if you reproduce a brain in its entirety with synthetic materials that carry out identical functions, then that brain will behave just like the brain it models.

But that is merely a tautology, and tells us nothing about how the brain operates.

You can say the same about every organ in the body, and every object in the universe.

 

[Piggy]

Just to add: This is not any sort of mistake. This is established fact, and has been explained to you in great detail in this very thread. Denying this fact is the greatest mistake you could make if your goal is to ever understand consciousness.

No, it has been asserted, but never explained. It can't' be explained, because it's clearly wrong. Red is a brain's response to light. Photons and waves can't be red. Or any color. And since we know we can wire brains to instead respond to light with the sensation of sound, and in theory we could rewire them to respond in all sorts of ways, the attribution of "red" to a light wave that's distant from the brain is entirely arbitrary.

That actually has been explained, yet you simply ignore it and continue to assert your convenient fiction.

 

[Mr. Scott]

If you do this with all the brain tissue, and you replicate the behavior exactly, all the behavior with no bias toward eliminating what anybody guesses is "junk" or "noise", then you have a working model. Which is trivial.

You are conceding that a duplicate of the brain made of robot neurons would be conscious?