Its not so much that fields lend special explanatory power to consciousness, per se, but that it makes sense to try and understand exactly what field processes are the sufficient correlates of consciousness.
We can make EMF fields form a physical instantiation of a universal turing machine. Done. Nothing special there.
Not good enough. Not nearly good enough. I've metnioned before my criteria for a legit theory of consciousness. It must, at bare minimum, be able to adequately answer these questions:
"What is it about particular neural processes that causes some sensory input to be felt as a particular sensation or experience? What physical property differentiates the quality of these experiences? How is this process expressed thru the biochemistry of neurons? What part of the system actually has the experience(s) and what are the relevant physical properties of this portion of the system that causes it to be subjectively sensible?"
Any alleged scientific model of consciousness that cannot address these questions is just handwaving bull, as far as I'm concerned.
There must be some objective means of discerning whether a given physical system is conscious, or capable of supporting consciousness, without having to rely on guessing, indirect inference, or intuition.
Why must there be an objective means? Pixy's metric of self-referential information processing aside, I rely on my messy subjective intuition to do so -- I know it when I see it.
Yea, we all rely on your intuitions when deciding whether or not a given entity is conscious. My point is that we require a scientific means of objectively discerning consciousness if we're ever going to have a legitimate claim to producing it artificially.
What does it mean, in physical terms, for there to be a subject experiencing things "the redness of red", "the bitterness of bitter", or "the loudness of loud"?
Dunno, I am one of those people who think that looking for a unique physical explanation for subjective experiencing is a fool's game -- I think the brain is a computational engine, and that the Church/Turing hypothesis applies.
The problem is that every known phenomena is computable, or atleast capable of being roughly described, by Turing computation. The thing is, there is more to reality than simply abstraction & computation. One can compute the behavior of any given physical system but that computation is not a recreation of the physical process it serves to describe. Its not enough to create a computer simulation of the brain's IP features. We have to understand actual consciousness and how biological brains produce it.
What is it thats having those experiences?
The conscious system of course.
Again, the question is: what does it mean, in physical terms, for a system to be conscious?
Physically speaking, when does processed information become experienced?
Good question. Let's build a nonhuman conscious entity and find out,
Can't do that until we atleast figure out exactly what makes
-us- conscious.
although I suspect that the question itself may be incoherent -- you are implying that there is a separate part of a conscious system that does the experiencing, rather than the system as a whole.
The entire universe is one vast interacting system. A "system" is just a slice of the world that we have under our consideration. In our case, the question is: where is the physical boundary or cutoff point where unconscious processing ends and conscious processing can be said to begin?
We each personally know that these phenomena are real; the scientific challenge is to identify what they are exactly. What I'm proposing is that what are referred to as qualia must be physically identifiable in theory atleast, if not in practice.
If the phenomena you refer to as qualia are real and substrate independent, there may not be a physically identifiable thing that uniquely correlates to them at all.
If we can physically identify the elementary constituents of something as ephemeral as light, I'm sure we can do the same for our own consciousness.
And the question still remains: Exactly how does consciousness fit into that milieu?
And the question still remains: Why is this a question for physics and not biology? What makes consciousness so special that we have to address it in terms of EMF field interactions directly, unlike every other biological process?
Because there is clearly a physical difference between the EMF interactions of biological processes that produce consciousness, and those that don't. I personally wanna know what that difference is and how -- or if -- we can instantiate that in an artificial system.
The problem with that reckoning is that neurons themselves are just part of a larger network of cells we call the body.
I do not think it is fair to characterize the rest of the body as a network in the same sense we characterize the nervous system as one.
Why not? IP-wise, the basic principles are the same. The only difference is that of the underlying physics of how they are carried out.
They are all "wired" together, they all network and process information collectively, and they do so to a degree that dwarfs even the most advanced technological systems we have available today. Yet, for some reason, it is only the activity of a certain neural cells that seems produce consciousness, and even then only for limited time periods.
I do not agree (how does a liver cell summate it inputs and decide to fire or not?), but giving it to you makes your emphasis on looking at the field processes look even sillier -- we don't need the full power of QED to examine how neural cells operate and what makes them different from the other cells, classical chemistry and neurobiology will do just fine.
Its absolutely required if we're going to solidly and unambiguously pin-down the SOB we call consciousness. Computational abstraction ain't gonna cut it -- not in the least bit.
Neuroscience has not yet established what it is about these particular cells that gives them the capacity to produce consciousness while the rest of our body's cellular network doesn't.
Because neurons have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to specialize in summing their inputs and using that as a decision to fire or not fire as part of as elaborate network at high speed, instead just using chemical diffusion to communicate with their closest neighbors.
Those all are very germane facts, but the problem is that that general knowledge is not nearly rigorous enough to tell us how to create subjective experiences in an artificial entity, how to specify the quality of those experiences, or even how to verify if a given entity is conscious to begin with.
We simply do not know what the necessary physical conditions are for consciousness so what in the world makes you believe that it's justified to assume that we can produce consciousness in any substrate just by employing network computation?
Because neural networks are a tighter necessary precondition than the Standard Model and GR are.
The goal should be to fit consciousness into the framework of our physical description of the world and not just be content to have it as an ad hoc conceptual shoe-in. Such is necessary if we're ever to have a legitimate claim to understanding consciousness.
IMO,
-all- of our scientific understanding should integrate and cohere.
What makes you think that the current efforts of the field of AI to produce consciousness are anything more than a cargo cult enterprise?
Substrate independence of information processing (as proven by Church and Turing) coupled with the observation that we can emulate neural networks using universal turing machines.
So what? We can emulate electrical power generation with Turing computations but that does not mean that they are actually producing electrical power. We have to stop thinking about consciousness just in terms of functional abstraction and appreciate it in terms of being the
physical phenomena that it actually is.
