Has consciousness been fully explained?

[Ichneumonwasp]

I think most proposed definitions for consciousness in this thread revolve around "information processing", so that's likely how the discussion got to: "what is information?" Whether it helps distinguish rocks and mud from computers and brains, I'm not sure.

I think it does. What I have been grasping at is just the idea you have expressed, because the difference is not absolute but relative to the type of information processing. Rocks and mud deal with what amounts to near noise -- still information but not very useful.

Animal nervous systems are endowed with selective receptors that respond to a limited range of stimuli, and it is this specificity that helps 'refine' the information so that it is useful for survival. None of the receptors are perfect, but the range of stimuli to which they can respond is so restricted that they can much more easily define 'this, not that'. Rocks and mud cannot.

We design computers to deal with specific types of information.

 

[Meed]

I would think that meaning in any context is dependent on mental abstraction. Your father must be a deep thinker. Did he ever arrive at any insights or conclusions on the meaning of meaning?

I don't remember to be honest, I must have been 11 when he was working on that.

 

[Frank Newgent]

I like that very much. (But take out the muscle cell -- photoreceptors link to bipolar cells in the retina). I know why you use it -- it shows something more dramatic -- but it sounds confusing.

Oops, good catch (didn't know that label was taken). I meant photo-sensitive cell, or something less ambiguous, in the context of some simple phototaxis.

ETA:

And this fits very nicely with my instinct about what the definition should be -- that there should be constraints on the system to help refine it. I guess there is some general definition of information, but the important thing for complex system is specificity of information.

Maybe think of it not as a vague thing but as a measure of the quality of [environmental] inference: from perfect information (A must have happened!) to random info/noise (anything might have happened). That frames it best for me... I think.

In consciousness that measure would be of assigning value?

Assigning value to what has been verified (or what is true), what is relevant (especially in reference to what the goals are in respect to which something is relevant), and doing so in the most elegant way.

Simulate that

 

[Beth]

I think it does. What I have been grasping at is just the idea you have expressed, because the difference is not absolute but relative to the type of information processing. Rocks and mud deal with what amounts to near noise -- still information but not very useful.

Animal nervous systems are endowed with selective receptors that respond to a limited range of stimuli, and it is this specificity that helps 'refine' the information so that it is useful for survival. None of the receptors are perfect, but the range of stimuli to which they can respond is so restricted that they can much more easily define 'this, not that'. Rocks and mud cannot.

We design computers to deal with specific types of information.

I agree. Thanks Bloblu That is helpful. Specificity is key to understanding information - the 'decoding' of it.

In consciousness that measure would be of assigning value?

Assigning value to what has been verified (or what is true), what is relevant (especially in reference to what the goals are in respect to which something is relevant), and doing so in the most elegant way.

Simulate that

It's an interesting idea for the usefulness of consciousness. Plants wouldn't need it as their possible responses to stimuli are so limited that it isn't required in order for them to make the best choices.

 

[Piggy]

A drawing isn't a simulation. A fish simulated to the last detail can easily be placed in a simulated ocean. Add more fish. Add similarly simulated people. You can have a simulated world.

You can draw them in increasing detail, too. (And yes, a drawing is a simulation.)

In each case, you never hit some magical moment when there miraculously appears some actual entity which has some experience and therefore "can't tell" that it's in a simulation and not the real world.

Elaborate your simulated world all you want to. It still remains an abstraction.

 

[Piggy]

Not true. There would be massive resemblance. How the various simulated parts of a human interacted with each other in the simulation would be the same as an equivalent version in reality. This resemblance is WHY it is useful to simulate things on a computer to begin with.

Doesn't matter.

Maintaining the relationships in a representation doesn't mean you're making a functional real-world model.

 

[Piggy]

Again, if you were a simulated person and that was a simulated computer, you could not tell the difference.

That's nonsense.

The digital simulation is just a computer doing what a computer does. Which is essentially the same, no matter what sort of sim it's running.

Go ahead and simulate a tornado. Nothing with any of the characteristics or behaviors of a tornado is thereby created in reality.

Ditto for your simulation of a human.

And since no characteristics or behaviors of a human have thereby been created in reality, there is nothing which "cannot tell the difference" or can tell the difference.

There is no referent here for what you're talking about.

 

[Piggy]

Category error.

Creamy nougat.

 

[Piggy]

With two rocks that you pick up you must be there to see the action as addition. That is an action that is observer depedent.

Non sequitur.

Yes, I must be there to see that action as addition.

But I don't have to be there in order for it to be a fact that two objects have indeed been aggreggated with two other objects to create a group of four objects.

 

[Piggy]

What? It has to correlate. The simulation is not some random process -- it's expression directly correlates to the actions of the computer. Of course those actions don't have physical presence (aside from the physical aspects of electrons and movement) and no one argues that they do. But the action patterns are there. Consciousness is another type of action pattern created in the movements of ions across channels and symaptic transmission. Comparing an action pattern to a physical presence is simply wrong.

Although the computer is certainly behaving differently in a detailed way when running different sims, it is not behaving differently in a way that mirrors the difference between the real-world systems it's simulating.

Have a machine run a sim of a power plant, an aquarium, and a racecar. In each case, the computer will simply be acting like a computer.

As for the brain, I'm not comparing its behavior to a physical presence.

 

[Piggy]

Your distinction between a model and a simulation is arbitrary.

Mathematically, there is no difference.

Mathematically?

Do you think we live in math world?

Tell you what, run a simulation of air, then try to breathe it.

 

[Piggy]

So if I create a "conscious" program that is limited to the software of a computer and has access to sensors and output devices, and is able to interact with you like an intelligent human, we can assume it is a model consciousness instead of a simulated one?

This is begging the question, assuming your conclusions.

A conscious program cannot be created, because one cannot get consciousness in a machine by programming alone, just as one cannot get a pulse out of a machine by programming alone.

 

[Piggy]

Ok, lets play your stupid game.

Given that a neuron does nothing but respond to the impulses of other neurons, for the analogy to work your leg needs to be sitting still. And given that you can't touch neurons, or detect they are there in any way other than them responding to impulses, you aren't allowed to touch your leg either.

So supposing the analogy holds, and you are lying in bed perfectly still, and we remove your leg and hook up a simulated one to the stump with an interface so that all your leg neurons don't know the difference, and all the fluids are flowing properly, etc, how would you know that your leg wasn't still real?

How would you know that the interface with your body was controlled by a detailed computer simulation of the rest of your leg, and not just a real leg?

This is such a fog of confusion and conflation, it cannot be logically responded to.

By imposing these conditions, of course, you're simply avoiding point altogether, because I wasn't discussing your perception of a leg, I was discussing your leg.

 

[Piggy]

Perhaps because before we can decide whether consciousness has been fully explained, we need to decide exactly (or more precisely) what we mean by it. If we agree that it is computable, we are a step closer. If we agree it is not computable then... we've eliminated a possibility. Of course, the chances of everyone actually agreeing are remote, but we might make progress with limited or provisional agreement.

Sorry, but we first have to figure out what's going on in the brain before we can begin making speculations like that.

 

[Piggy]

You know, it's funny that we always get this onslaught from folks who want to think about consciousness in terms of conscious computers, which don't exist and have not even been designed and don't even have a theoretical underpinning, when we don't even yet understand how the brain generates conscious experience.

I suppose it's easier when you don't have to deal with the messy reality of things.

But the simple fact is, if we want to understand consciousness, we must first understand what the brain is doing. No way around it.

To believe we can understand it instead by discussing computers, which are not conscious, is laughable.

Yes, computers can help us in our efforts to understand the brain, but they can also help us understand weather, and no one thinks that you can actually create weather by programming.

 

[quixotecoyote]

Go ahead and simulate a tornado. Nothing with any of the characteristics or behaviors of a tornado is thereby created in reality.

Must be a pretty crappy simulation. I'd want my money back if it failed that badly.

 

[quixotecoyote]

By the way. I'm not actually a person living in the American Midwest.

My dark secret is that I'm actually a simulation of a human running on an advanced supercomputer built by a mad scientist at an undisclosed location.

My software is an extremely accurate physics simulation of what you call brains (among other things), down to the tiniest level of detail. The only differences between me and the hypothetical simulation you've been discussing is that I'm aware of my status and my hardware is hooked up to the internet in what you consider the 'real' world, allowing you see some of the simulation output in this forum.

Now, if you accept that I'm conscious yet deny I'm a simulation, there are a few approaches you can take to this claim.

You can disbelieve me because the technology doesn't yet exist to make such a thing, rendering my existence a current impossibility.

You can disbelieve me because there's some mystical undefined property of the human condition that makes consciousness impossible outside of meatsacks.

Or you can disbelieve me because you think I'm creating a silly story to support an argument, which rather misses the point.

 

[Piggy]

Must be a pretty crappy simulation. I'd want my money back if it failed that badly.

By "simulation" I mean specifically "digital simulation", which is how I've been consistently using the term here.

If you actually create a functional scale model with real air, then you've made a "model".

If we don't keep those terms straight somehow, then we can't have a clear conversation.

So indeed, a model tornado does generate actual wind speed, an actual funnel cloud, in reality. But a digital simulation of a tornado does not.

 

[Piggy]

Now, if you accept that I'm conscious

More begging the question.

If you want to claim that a digital simulation can actually be conscious, then you're simply going to have to explain how that would work.

 

[quixotecoyote]

More begging the question.

If you want to claim that a digital simulation can actually be conscious, then you're simply going to have to explain how that would work.

My point about tornado simulations is that if it's an accurate physics simulation it would create a digital tornado with the same behaviors as a non-digital tornado, thus creating the same behaviors in the 'real' world (eta: even if the consequences of those behaviors are vastly different). However, I'd rather set that aside and not argue that point, as I'm sure you're more intrigued by this newly revealed advance in computer science.

I'm conscious, and I find it rather offensive for you to imply that I'm not. Don't my responses indicate consciousness to you? What kind of definition of conscious are you using that would exclude someone who could hold this level of conversation with you?

Now, I take no offense to you disbelieving my claims to be a simulation. That's the kind of skepticism we value here. My creator had his hands on some very advanced technology that allowed a crazy degree of computing power to recreate every tiny subatomic component of the human brain in software form, so I recognize it's hard to believe it's ACTUALLY happening. What I want to know is why you can't accept that I could IN PRINCIPLE exist?