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Consciousness

Belz... said:
I'm not sure but apparently it's made of a special, presumably spiritual, substance called "being".
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Jabba used over 50 different terms for it in his attempts to smuggle a soul into his strawman of materialism, but he never came up with “a model of their existence”.
 
Myriad said:
If I asked you to tell me about a conscious experience you've had, and you decided to try to answer, you'd tell me a narrative.

If I suggested you remember a conscious experience you've had, and you decided to try to do it, you'd remember a narrative.

Conscious experiences are narratives.

Your smart phone can record video, but it can't process it as a narrative of things happening in a world. You can't set it up in a room and leave it recording for half an hour and then ask it, "now tell me what's been going on," or "just show me the important parts of the video to get me up to speed." There's no program that can do that. Not yet. (And not anytime soon.)
…snip…
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That’s now, already have smartphones with huge amounts of “AI” usually based on deep neural networks that can extract “meaning” out of video streams. I’ve personally seen demonstrations of (not on a smartphone) a system being asked “what happened” in a video and it answers with “a small child walked across the room”.

The difference I think between our “AI” development and our consciousness is not a matter of degree but of type. We have no need to duplicate/simulate the areas of our brain that build up into consciousness to develop the technology we want so I doubt any systems currently being developed will be conscious in the way we are.
 
Darat said:
The difference I think between our “AI” development and our consciousness is not a matter of degree but of type. We have no need to duplicate/simulate the areas of our brain that build up into consciousness to develop the technology we want so I doubt any systems currently being developed will be conscious in the way we are.
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Which of course, doesn't mean they won't be conscious in a different way. And we all know where that leads to...

 
With a term already as completely (and intentionally) non-defined as "consciousness" throwing "Well what if they are conscious in a different way?" on the on the pile just makes the whole thing pointless on top of pointless.
 
JoeMorgue said:
With a term already as completely (and intentionally) non-defined as "consciousness" throwing "Well what if they are conscious in a different way?" on the on the pile just makes the whole thing pointless on top of pointless.
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Well at least it's probable. In fact you and I are probably conscious in different ways. I'm not going to speculate as to what can be conscious, but I won't discount the possibility, either.
 
Darat said:
That’s now, already have smartphones with huge amounts of “AI” usually based on deep neural networks that can extract “meaning” out of video streams. I’ve personally seen demonstrations of (not on a smartphone) a system being asked “what happened” in a video and it answers with “a small child walked across the room”.
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That's impressive, provided it's truly general and not functioning in some limited "proof of concept" domain (like {small child|teen|adult, walked|ran|bicycled, across the room|down the street|in a field}) which could prove very difficult to generalize.

The difference I think between our “AI” development and our consciousness is not a matter of degree but of type. We have no need to duplicate/simulate the areas of our brain that build up into consciousness to develop the technology we want so I doubt any systems currently being developed will be conscious in the way we are.
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Consciousness as we understand it requires the self to have a role in the ongoing computed narrative, which is what makes it adaptive in nature. An AI that performs purely passive "third person" analysis, no matter how sophisticated (e.g. a system able to monitor a video feed and report if it detects illegal activity) would not produce consciousness. But when the machine is intended and equipped to involve itself in the narrative, as for instance the computations of a self-driving car should, consciousness comparable to ours (or at least, to a dog's) becomes more likely, as it would then have the same kind of utility for engineered systems as it does for natural organisms.
 
JoeMorgue said:
With a term already as completely (and intentionally) non-defined as "consciousness" throwing "Well what if they are conscious in a different way?" on the on the pile just makes the whole thing pointless on top of pointless.
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The term consciousness seems to muddy the waters,

p0lka said:
It would be so much easier if people called it 'internal experience', rather than being conscious n stuff.
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p0lka said:
The term consciousness seems to muddy the waters,
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Internal would imply a spatial relationship between the thing-in-and-of-itself, and the phenomena of it, to borrow Kant's terms.

Conscious experience seems clear enough to me. Subjective experience even better.
 
Mike Helland said:
Internal would imply a spatial relationship between the thing-in-and-of-itself, and the phenomena of it, to borrow Kant's terms.

Conscious experience seems clear enough to me. Subjective experience even better.
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It depends on the context.
It's not a spatial relationship as such, more a comparison between externally watching the hardware, versus being of the hardware.

The term consciousness though, has an implicit assumption built in that defines it as different from the hardware.

I will stick with 'Internal experience', as on a descriptive basis it seems to work better, imo.
 
p0lka said:
I will stick with 'Internal experience', as on a descriptive basis it seems to work better, imo.
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You can say this all you want as many times as you want. It still doesn't address a single one of the issues brought up.
 
p0lka said:
It depends on the context.
It's not a spatial relationship as such, more a comparison between externally watching the hardware, versus being of the hardware.

The term consciousness though, has an implicit assumption built in that defines it as different from the hardware.

I will stick with 'Internal experience', as on a descriptive basis it seems to work better, imo.
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Fair enough.

1 : existing or situated within the limits or surface of something: such as
a(1) : situated near the inside of the body
(2) : situated on the side toward the median plane of the body
b : of, relating to, or occurring on the inside of an organized structure (such as a club, company, or state) internal affairs
2 : relating or belonging to or existing within the mind

I was thinking of the first definition.

The second refers explicitly to the mind, so there you go.

I think your statement "versus being of the hardware" rings the most for the me.

The hard problem of consciousness is where does the "being" come from.

My solution is that the world is fundamentally made of being.
 
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