Are You Conscious?

[Belz...]

If when we are less conscious, we are less time dependent, then yes.

Not sure what you mean by "less conscious", here. And since pretty much everything is time dependant, I don't see where you're going with this "more conscious = more time dependent" deal.

 

[Dancing David]

Ok DD…………the meat of the matter….

There is only one significant data point sufficient to qualify a system as being conscious and it's currently the one that is out of our epistemic scope: subjective sensibility.

As long as subjectivity lacks a solid theoretical frame in the physical sciences the quest for artificial consciousness really amounts to nothing but a modern incarnation of alchemy.

At some point we're going to have to deal with the actual physics of what the brain is doing instead of arrogantly -- lazily -- chalking it up to "computation/information processing/SRIP/etc." because the prospect of unknown science makes our brains hurt.
The problem is that you're putting the cart way before the horse. We have not yet identified what physically constitutes our consciousness and computational descriptions are not a sufficient substitute. At this point, computation has just become a "god of the gaps" explanation. Computationalism isn't science, its a placative ideology serving to distract AI researchers from the fact that they really have no idea what consciousness is. They're Columbus’s who fervently want to believe that they've found the western route to the East Indies when, in actuality, they've really been completely sidetracked.

It's entirely unjustified to assume that merely emulating the computational functions of our neurons is sufficient to produce consciousness -- especially when we have not yet discovered what consciousness is or how it is produced in the first place.

It’s a flat fact that we do not know what consciousness is or understand how the chemistry/physics of the brain produces subjective experience.

The question science can't answer isn't about how brains store information, it is about why consciousness should be needed at all as part of the process. Why couldn't brains store information without generating any "consciousness"?



So have I demonstrated the ‘uniqueness of consciousness’? Is it still just a ‘magical association’?

Answer whenever…..

As for me, I don’t have the background to explore the chemistry/physics of how subjective experience occurs (except in general terms). I do, though, explore it in other ways. I explore what might be described as the character of it. Other aspects of what makes it unique as a physical phenomenon.

Subjectivity is the equivalent of a rock (or tree, or ant, or bee…or galaxy), discovering its rockiness, developing a vocabulary of rockiness, and then rockily describing itself to itself, or other rocks. A human being is nothing more than complex matter (to put it very simplistically)….that can talk about itself. Do you know of any other varieties of talking matter…that can talk about how ‘they’ feel about talking about talking? Unique…in a unique kind of way. We are, essentially, a piece of the universe that can talk about its experience of being a piece of the universe, in a language that is itself a piece of the universe (the 'idea' that 'I' am 'me' is also nothing more than a function of that same universe).

One of the characteristics of human subjective reality is its ability to control its own ‘thingness’. IOW, its ability to define the dimensions of its own reality. Quantify, in some ineffably qualitative way, itself.

…so have you met any rocks recently that can decide their own ‘rockiness’? Or dogs, that can decide their own ‘doginess’?

…just slightly unique, in unique kinds of ways.

We are the only (known) phenomenon in the universe with the ability to control the degree to which it will be the phenomenon that it is (while the mass of men may be merely, as Pedro Almodovar caustically observed, animals with coats…..we do aspire to be Shakespeare…..and we do sometimes achieve it). Consciousness, therefore, has functions of degree, as well as kind (it would be called mind over matter if it weren’t such an incendiary statement). Maybe it’s no wonder that conventional science doesn’t want to touch this one with a ten foot pole. It implies a whole range of issues…from Rand to Rumi.

So I ask: what are the implications...
-that the question (of subjective sensibility) is so impenetrable
-of the relationship between the issue and our ability to understand it (because there quite obviously is one; we ask what subjective sensibility is by being what we are asking about)
-of the unique characteristics of the issue involved
-that human reality / consciousness / subjective sensibility appears to include functions of degree, as well as kind (because, though it may be nothing more than a circumstantial conclusion, anyone with a brain would have to be deaf dumb blind and stupid to come to any other conclusion….the mass of men really are nothing more than animals with coats, while some dudes are ‘somehow’ so much more….what, and how, are not merely ‘psychological’ or metaphysical questions….they can be articulated within whatever vocabulary of consciousness that has as yet to be discovered) (wild speculation…yeah, of course)

Thanks for the answers, there is a lot there, more later.

 

[annnnoid]

BTW….a lot of those points are not mine. They are Aku’s, but they pretty accurately describe the ‘meat of the matter’…IMO.

 

[rocketdodger]

No, from our reference frame the event happens when we see it happening.

Nonsense. What utter nonsense. This is a completely arbitrary assertion and furthermore nobody in their right mind would make such an assertion.

I know it is arbitrary -- and utterly stupid -- because I know for a fact that when mission controllers receive information broadcasts from space probes they do not interpet the broadcast event as "happening when we see it happening," they interpet it as happening some time in the past, and the information just took that long to reach Earth.

Or are you asserting that every human in the history of human space exploration is stupid enough to think that events occur at the edge of the solar system the instant the events are perceived here on Earth?

There's no "now" that applies across the universe. There's just what we see.

There isn't even an order of events which are seperated in distance and time.

A brief discussion of this stuff.

What do you mean "there's just what we see?"

Are you being purposefully absurd? As reasoning creatures, we are able to supplement "what we see" with what we know. In particular, if we know the mathematics of relativity, we can use "what we see" to infer things about what we don't see.

Just like I said above. We aren't stupid (well, not all of us) and if we know about just the speed of light, never mind relativity, we can infer that if the signal from a space probe takes 6 hours to reach us then whenever we get a signal it was actually broadcast from the probe six hours prior.

And if we know about the mathematics of relavitivty then we can do even more amazing things, from the perspective of a cave-man, such as infer the order of events as perceived from any reference frame given information about the relative states of the systems in which the events occur. Just like the animated GIFs in that wiki page you link to above -- if one knows their relative velocity, and the state of events A, B, and C, then they can use the timing of events A, B, and C from their reference frame to deduce what the timings would be from any other reference frame.

The idea that "there's just what we see" is nothing but nonsense.

 

[westprog]

Nonsense. What utter nonsense.

When you said you hadn't learned anything you weren't kidding, were you? No matter how much effort it takes to avoid it.

If you want, you can read the actual Einstein paper where he explains the "Relativity of simultaneity" principle. There are plenty of articles explaining it, but really the train-struck-by-lightning example is still the best one. And there are also plenty of crank articles explaining why Einstein was wrong.

Cling to the folk-physics idea of the Universal Now if you want, but it's about a hundred years out of date.

I'll reiterate the main points because it's very easy to get tangled up in the details. (Not for RD, of course. He's learned nothing so far, and he's proud of that).

There is no universal Now. The time at which things happen is a local phenomenon.

It's also the case that the order in which things happen is not fixed either. Depending on your point of view, different events may happen in different a order. And it's a fundamental axiom of the Special theory that no one point of view is privileged.

It's very easy to get into a tangle about this stuff - trying to figure out what the "now" is for any given frame of reference - so it's a good idea to go to the original source, or something close to it.

Or, alternatively, you could rely on some vague recollection of what someone at mission control might have said.

Again, the Wikipaedia summary - no better than Einstein, but Einstein doesn't sum it up in one sentence:

According to the special theory of relativity, it is impossible to say in an absolute sense whether two events occur at the same time if those events are separated in space.

It's actually a simple enough statement.

 

[westprog]

Not sure what you mean by "less conscious", here. And since pretty much everything is time dependant, I don't see where you're going with this "more conscious = more time dependent" deal.

I don't regard it as especially significant in either direction. The important thing is that time dependence is essential for brain function, and that is absent from the computational model.

 

[rocketdodger]

When you said you hadn't learned anything you weren't kidding, were you? No matter how much effort it takes to avoid it.

If you want, you can read the actual Einstein paper where he explains the "Relativity of simultaneity" principle. There are plenty of articles explaining it, but really the train-struck-by-lightning example is still the best one. And there are also plenty of crank articles explaining why Einstein was wrong.

Cling to the folk-physics idea of the Universal Now if you want, but it's about a hundred years out of date.

I'll reiterate the main points because it's very easy to get tangled up in the details. (Not for RD, of course. He's learned nothing so far, and he's proud of that).

There is no universal Now. The time at which things happen is a local phenomenon.

It's also the case that the order in which things happen is not fixed either. Depending on your point of view, different events may happen in different a order. And it's a fundamental axiom of the Special theory that no one point of view is privileged.

It's very easy to get into a tangle about this stuff - trying to figure out what the "now" is for any given frame of reference - so it's a good idea to go to the original source, or something close to it.

Or, alternatively, you could rely on some vague recollection of what someone at mission control might have said.

Again, the Wikipaedia summary - no better than Einstein, but Einstein doesn't sum it up in one sentence:



It's actually a simple enough statement.

What really bothers me about your debate style, westprog, and what has convinced me over time that it is fundamentally dishonest, is how you reply to select statements of my posts and then correct strawaman arguments that I never made, putting on an act the entire time as if this is some political campaign debate where you need to swing the opinion of stupid voters that buy into rhetoric instead of actual logically valid content.

In this case, I provided very good reasons for why what you said is nonsense. Or at least I thought they were good, but if they aren't, then you should be able to refute them easy enough, eh?

But what do you do? Instead of actually addressing the content of my post, you quote only the first sentence, which was entirely devoid of content, and then knock down a strawman of your own construction that has nothing to do with the post you are responding to.

And you wonder why Pixy has such short answers? What do you expect when you cherry pick statements and throw dishonest rhetoric around like a Fox News correspondent? Nobody wants to have an actual discussion with you because of such dishonesty.

I can't call you yourself dishonest because that is against forum rules, but I am allowed to say that your posting here is clearly dishonest. And it is. Because when you quote a single sentence of an entire post, and then purposefully omit the rest of it because not doing so would clue any readers in that you aren't addressing the point of contention at all, it is dishonest.

 

[Belz...]

I don't regard it as especially significant in either direction. The important thing is that time dependence is essential for brain function, and that is absent from the computational model.

Yes, yes, and I'm trying to understand why you keep saying it is so. Merely saying it doesn't make it true.

 

[Belz...]

It's also the case that the order in which things happen is not fixed either.

I'd be surprised if an event can occur after its effects.

 

[rocketdodger]

I'd be surprised if an event can occur after its effects.

Well, apparently it is a feature of westprog relativity.

"Westprog relativity" being what you get when you read a few sentences about general relativity, utterly fail to understand the math behind them, and then try to recover from obvious logical blunders made in internet forums by throwing those sentences around like a passage from the Bible.

In this case, since a wiki says "According to the special theory of relativity, it is impossible to say in an absolute sense whether two events occur at the same time if those events are separated in space," we are to assume that it is impossible to order events in any absolute way ... even if one event causes another ...

 

[Frank Newgent]

And you wonder why Pixy has such short answers?

No.

 

[Dancing David]

Thanks for the response: I am not sure where this is going, but that is part of the process, I am here to learn how other people think, and to challenge my own thought. (And to reinforce my need for speel check.)

Ok DD…………the meat of the matter….

There is only one significant data point sufficient to qualify a system as being conscious and it's currently the one that is out of our epistemic scope: subjective sensibility.

Hmmm, considering you haven't defined 'consciousness' or 'conscious' that seems interesting. But I do not see why 'subjective experience' is beyond the scope of inquiry or study.

That seems to be a popular stance, but it is also not true to my understanding.

As long as subjectivity lacks a solid theoretical frame in the physical sciences the quest for artificial consciousness really amounts to nothing but a modern incarnation of alchemy.

Two points, both will bear repeating.

As stated before sensation and perception (which are usually part and parcel of most definitions of consciousness), are not complete mysteries. Now you have made a statement, and you have not backed it up. So I will ask you, what do you mean?

Second, I am not worried about the creation of artificial consciousness, you will note that I am not discussing that. My take is that we can model things that way and it is useful, such as the possible fuzzy logic of how insect legs might work. But it is a form of modeling, which is what words, thoughts, theories and science is about. (My POPV)

At some point we're going to have to deal with the actual physics of what the brain is doing instead of arrogantly -- lazily -- chalking it up to "computation/information processing/SRIP/etc." because the prospect of unknown science makes our brains hurt.

I can and will discuss the chemistry, physics of neurology if you wish, I have, it is not some mystery and it is getting better understood. So what are you referring to?

At this point the understanding of the action of the brain as a whole is not modeled, but the way many parts interact and form is.

The problem is that you're putting the cart way before the horse. We have not yet identified what physically constitutes our consciousness and computational descriptions are not a sufficient substitute.

Nice assertion there, what is your definition of 'consciousness' and 'conscious' and what parts do you know about? What parts of neurology have you studied, to make this claim, I mean.

I have not said that computation is sufficient. I might argue that we can model consciousness and the sub processes.

At this point, computation has just become a "god of the gaps" explanation. Computationalism isn't science, its a placative ideology serving to distract AI researchers from the fact that they really have no idea what consciousness is. They're Columbus’s who fervently want to believe that they've found the western route to the East Indies when, in actuality, they've really been completely sidetracked.

Not really relevant, you are talking about things I have not addressed.

It's entirely unjustified to assume that merely emulating the computational functions of our neurons is sufficient to produce consciousness -- especially when we have not yet discovered what consciousness is or how it is produced in the first place.

Maybe you should start with the definition?

It’s a flat fact that we do not know what consciousness is or understand how the chemistry/physics of the brain produces subjective experience.

Now see , this is just a bald assertion, is shows that you have committed what I would call a definitional category error. You have not presented a definition of consciousness, you do not have an understanding of the study of it, and you just make this open assertion without understanding.

So let’s discuss two things, the definition and what you know about the study of the parts of the definition.

BTW many posters in this respect are wrong, we do know how neurons work, are refining that knowledge, and the processes in some areas are getting well understood.

So this categorical statement is just, strange.

Just because you do not understand something does not mean it doesn't exist.

The question science can't answer isn't about how brains store information, it is about why consciousness should be needed at all as part of the process. Why couldn't brains store information without generating any "consciousness"?

Now you are just conflating concepts and making vague arguments, how much of memory are we talking about here? What kind of retrieval and what time frames? Memory is also not modeled in many ways as 'storage' like a hard disk, it is more fragmented and reconstructed in many models.

So have I demonstrated the ‘uniqueness of consciousness’? Is it still just a ‘magical association’?

Your magical assertion was that through vague allusion 'consciousness' and 'QED' were linked.



Answer whenever…..

As for me, I don’t have the background to explore the chemistry/physics of how subjective experience occurs (except in general terms).

Yet you make very broad statements from your lack of knowledge?

Interesting.




More later.

 

[Dancing David]

And you wonder why Pixy has such short answers?

No.

Funny.

 

[westprog]

What really bothers me about your debate style, westprog, and what has convinced me over time that it is fundamentally dishonest, is how you reply to select statements of my posts and then correct strawaman arguments that I never made, putting on an act the entire time as if this is some political campaign debate where you need to swing the opinion of stupid voters that buy into rhetoric instead of actual logically valid content.

In this case, I provided very good reasons for why what you said is nonsense. Or at least I thought they were good, but if they aren't, then you should be able to refute them easy enough, eh?

But what do you do? Instead of actually addressing the content of my post, you quote only the first sentence, which was entirely devoid of content, and then knock down a strawman of your own construction that has nothing to do with the post you are responding to.

And you wonder why Pixy has such short answers? What do you expect when you cherry pick statements and throw dishonest rhetoric around like a Fox News correspondent? Nobody wants to have an actual discussion with you because of such dishonesty.

I can't call you yourself dishonest because that is against forum rules, but I am allowed to say that your posting here is clearly dishonest. And it is. Because when you quote a single sentence of an entire post, and then purposefully omit the rest of it because not doing so would clue any readers in that you aren't addressing the point of contention at all, it is dishonest.

So, you could have just said, "Yes, it appears that in fact the idea of a universal 'now' applying across spatial seperation is, in fact, not correct". But learn something? Admit you were wrong, on even the most trivial point? No, if you're shown to be wrong, it must be due to dishonesty. You were misrepresented, your posts were trimmed, you never said what you said.

Forget it, then. Pixy was bad enough, but at least his posts were usually brief.

 

[westprog]

Well, apparently it is a feature of westprog relativity.

"Westprog relativity" being what you get when you read a few sentences about general relativity, utterly fail to understand the math behind them, and then try to recover from obvious logical blunders made in internet forums by throwing those sentences around like a passage from the Bible.

In this case, since a wiki says "According to the special theory of relativity, it is impossible to say in an absolute sense whether two events occur at the same time if those events are separated in space," we are to assume that it is impossible to order events in any absolute way ... even if one event causes another ...

It's something I've noticed about RD - whenever he accuses someone of dishonesty, it's usually because he's working himself up to a major piece of misrepresentation.

I've said all along that Relativity (general or special theories) has nothing to do with computation or brain function, because it occurs in a particular frame of reference. If we were to assume relativistic effects, then the order of events would indeed be affected.

So Rocketdodger has managed to turn my claim that the effects of relativity had nothing to do with computation into a claim that relativity means that we can't order events at all.

There's really no point in talking to him any more. He prefers his own errors to anybody else's truth.

 

[westprog]

I'd be surprised if an event can occur after its effects.

It's the order of events in different frames of reference that can be ordered differently depending on the point from which they are observed.

Not every two events can be considered in arbitrary order. That's why I gave the reference to the Wiki article, which explained in some detail (with pictures) how spatial seperation is necessary for events to have different ordering.

My interpretation would be that if an event causes another event, then it cannot be viewed as happening after that event. (That's just my layman's view, though. Please check the references, that's why I gave them.) That's essentially why, as I said, general relativity simply doesn't apply in the case of computation, because computation takes place in a single frame of reference. If we had a computer stretched across the galaxy, with messages passing across interstellar distances, we would have to consider relativistic effects. For the one on our desk, we don't have to.

The only reason I've delved into the area of relativity was to correct the mistaken view of a universal "now" - a kind of freeze-frame view of the galaxy in which every star has a current "real" position, today. That's a common sense, everyday working view of what the universe is like, and it's wrong - proven wrong for the last hundred years.

 

[Belz...]

It's the order of events in different frames of reference that can be ordered differently depending on the point from which they are observed.

How could the ball reach its destination before being thrown in ANY reference frame ???

because computation takes place in a single frame of reference. If we had a computer stretched across the galaxy, with messages passing across interstellar distances, we would have to consider relativistic effects. For the one on our desk, we don't have to.

Special pleading. There is distance between the computer parts, ergo, a time differential.

 

[rocketdodger]

So, you could have just said, "Yes, it appears that in fact the idea of a universal 'now' applying across spatial seperation is, in fact, not correct". But learn something? Admit you were wrong, on even the most trivial point? No, if you're shown to be wrong, it must be due to dishonesty. You were misrepresented, your posts were trimmed, you never said what you said.

Forget it, then. Pixy was bad enough, but at least his posts were usually brief.

Err... you still haven't addressed the content of my post.

To jog your memory, you said :

No, from our reference frame the event happens when we see it happening.

and

There's no "now" that applies across the universe. There's just what we see.

to which I replied:

I know for a fact that when mission controllers receive information broadcasts from space probes they do not interpet the broadcast event as "happening when we see it happening," they interpet it as happening some time in the past, and the information just took that long to reach Earth.

Or are you asserting that every human in the history of human space exploration is stupid enough to think that events occur at the edge of the solar system the instant the events are perceived here on Earth?

and

Are you being purposefully absurd? As reasoning creatures, we are able to supplement "what we see" with what we know. In particular, if we know the mathematics of relativity, we can use "what we see" to infer things about what we don't see.

Just like I said above. We aren't stupid (well, not all of us) and if we know about just the speed of light, never mind relativity, we can infer that if the signal from a space probe takes 6 hours to reach us then whenever we get a signal it was actually broadcast from the probe six hours prior.

And if we know about the mathematics of relavitivty then we can do even more amazing things, from the perspective of a cave-man, such as infer the order of events as perceived from any reference frame given information about the relative states of the systems in which the events occur. Just like the animated GIFs in that wiki page you link to above -- if one knows their relative velocity, and the state of events A, B, and C, then they can use the timing of events A, B, and C from their reference frame to deduce what the timings would be from any other reference frame.

Would you care to respond, or are you going to just dodge the issue like you always do?

 

[rocketdodger]

If we were to assume relativistic effects, then the order of events would indeed be affected.

But you are wrong.

If events are ordered according to cause --> effect, then relativity does not affect the order of events.

It doesn't matter how spatially separated the events are, or which frame they are viewed from. Cause always comes BEFORE effect. Remember that word, BEFORE? BEFORE BEFORE BEFORE

There is a reason I kept repeating it to you -- you don't seem to understand what it means.

BEFORE

BEFORE

BEFORE

 

[Frank Newgent]

Sorry rocketdodger. You just lost the thread.