Has consciousness been fully explained?

[westprog]

So you're now retracting your claim ?



I'll take that as a complete unwillingness to answer

I'll take that as an acceptance of the complete wrongness of your case and an offer for free beer anywhere in the world.

 

[rocketdodger]

The fact is that everyone posting here knows what it is like to be a human being, and while they are posting here denying that there is any such thing as the experience of posting here, they are actually experiencing it. Which is bizarre in the extreme.

Nobody is denying experience.

We are denying that the experience of experience is a different kind of experience than experience. And furthermore that the experience of experience of experience is a different sort as well.

If qualia are different from experiences, then what about the experience of qualia? Is there a meta-qualia for the experience of qualia of experience?

Lets just keep making stuff up -- it is fun!

 

[AkuManiMani]

Nobody is denying experience.

We are denying that the experience of experience is a different kind of experience than experience. And furthermore that the experience of experience of experience is a different sort as well.

If qualia are different from experiences, then what about the experience of qualia? Is there a meta-qualia for the experience of qualia of experience?

Lets just keep making stuff up -- it is fun!

Wow, dude...You're really lost, aren't you?

 

[westprog]

Wow, dude...You're really lost, aren't you?

It's a weird twilight zone where the responses don't seem to have anything to do with what's posted.

Really, the concept of what it's like to experience something isn't complicated - just difficult.

 

[rocketdodger]

Really, the concept of what it's like to experience something isn't complicated - just difficult.

Why is it difficult?

"what it is like to X " == "experience of X"

Fill in X with anything you like.

Thus "what it is like to experience something" == "experience of experiencing something"

My question is, what do you call "what it is like to experience experiencing something?"

Qualialia?

How about "what it is like to experience what it is like to experience what it is like to experience something?"

Qualialialialia?

 

[AkuManiMani]

Why is it difficult?

"what it is like to X " == "experience of X"

Fill in X with anything you like.

Thus "what it is like to experience something" == "experience of experiencing something"

My question is, what do you call "what it is like to experience experiencing something?"

Qualialia?

How about "what it is like to experience what it is like to experience what it is like to experience something?"

Qualialialialia?

Qualia are to experiences of objects as quanta are to objects of experience

To examine one's own qualia is called reflection -- aka introspection. If you prefer to use the awkward nomenclature of..."qualialialialia"....that is ofcourse your perogative. However, regardless of the labels one may choose you employ, the reality of the phenomena in question remains the same.

 

[Belz...]

Which claim? Could you quote it back, please?

The claim that qualia = experience, remember ?

It's funny, because everyone who reads this knows that qualia exist.

Can't wait to see everyone jump in to agree with you.

The fact is that everyone posting here knows what it is like to be a human being, and while they are posting here denying that there is any such thing as the experience of posting here, they are actually experiencing it. Which is bizarre in the extreme.

Only to a philosopher. Actually, if you want to play that silly game, I only know what it's like to be me, so I can't say I know what it feels like to be westprog. Not that I'd want to.

 

[Belz...]

I'll take that as an acceptance of the complete wrongness of your case and an offer for free beer anywhere in the world.

You really are one of the most annoying posters here. How you can simultaneously refuse to support your claim and then somehow try to turn that on me is baffling.

 

[Belz...]

Wow, dude...You're really lost, aren't you?

Not fun when someone points out how ridiculous your position is, is it ?

Qualia are to experiences of objects as quanta are to objects of experience

That's a nice thing to say at a party, but what does it mean, really ? How do you even know that you can have quanta of experience ? Do you even know what experience is ? You speak with such certainty and yet you seem unable to even define your terms clearly.

 

[immaterial]

Why do you think it would be the same?

It's the most probable, since we're basically all functioning the same way.

 

[normdoering]

Nope. It can't even be defined consistantly.

I like the definition Marvin Minsky gave here:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/minsky/minsky_p2.html

I also like the ideas expressed in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77XBZHJcoK4

 

[immaterial]

Nobody is denying experience.

We are denying that the experience of experience is a different kind of experience than experience. And furthermore that the experience of experience of experience is a different sort as well.

I'll second that. Experience is the common denominator, there is either experience or there is not. Experiences can however be categorized into different categories according to the content of the experience.

 

[westprog]

The claim that qualia = experience, remember ?

It's a definition, not a claim. As such, it hardly needs much in the way of justification.

 

[westprog]

Not fun when someone points out how ridiculous your position is, is it ?



That's a nice thing to say at a party, but what does it mean, really ? How do you even know that you can have quanta of experience ? Do you even know what experience is ?

Of course we don't. That's the whole point.

You speak with such certainty and yet you seem unable to even define your terms clearly.

This is absurd. There are people claiming that the topic subject is true.There are people claiming it is false. It's the people claiming that consciousness has been fully explained who are speaking with certainty.

The only claim I've made with positive certainty is that I do have experiences. I don't even claim that I've had them in the past. It might be that the experience I'm having right this second is real, and that my memories of previous experiences are false. It is not possible that my experience is an illusion, not real in some way, because an illusion of an experience is itself an experience.

I really don't care about the details of breaking down experiences into sub-experiences, or if the experience of an experience is different to an experience. That's a way of dodging the main issue - something extremely common in this topic.

 

[westprog]

It's the most probable, since we're basically all functioning the same way.

But we are all considerably different. How these differences manifest themselves in different people is unknown, and possibly unknowable.

I have no way of knowing if someone else has the same experience of "blue". Trying to communicate this is the purpose of art.

 

[westprog]

You really are one of the most annoying posters here.

But I'm still pushing for that #1 spot.

 

[Malerin]

The trouble I have the suggestions that the areas and/or structures needed for consciousness (in the context of the "Consciousness is SRIP" declaration) are not active when you're deeply asleep is that it seems extremely unlikely to me that in a brain of approximately 100 billion highly connected neurons and with all the stuff that must still be happening (including possibly some kind of unconscious reorganisation of memory and some level of monitoring for things that trigger "wake the self now!" and who knows what else) that there is apparently no SRIP going on - especially if SRIP is as easy to find and produse as Pixy seems to think it is. (He claims to have written conscious programs and also that a couple of levels of BF self-interpreter with a quine on top is also conscious.) Of course, your notion of SRIP may be somewhat different from his.

I'm sure there are multiple instances of SRIP happening throughout the brain at many levels, whether we're conscious or not.

If SRIP IS consciousness, then we're never unconscious because, as you say, our brains are constantly performing SRIP. Pixy has admitted this before. I think it's absurd.

It seems pretty clear that SRIP is at the core of consciousness, it is fundamentally necessary.

There's the rub. None of us have a problem with SRIP being a necessary condition for consciousness. Pixy goes much further: SRIP is both necessary AND SUFFICIENT for consciousness; SRIP and consciousness are logically equivalent the same way bachelors are unmarried men.

Quite what level of complexity is required in the SRIP system to that to get to a minimum consciousness as we experience it, and what structures/functions are essential to that, I don't exactly know - partly because (human) consciousness is so ill-defined.

I take you to mean there are additional structures/functions than SRIP required for consciousness.

Many of us think consciousness is ill-defined (or very hard to define). It is not very well understood. Beware of people who try to define their way out of a problem. Not that anyone around here does that.

The evidence indicates that human consciousness is in some way composite, e.g. by progressively removing structures or functions, you can progressively reduce consciousness. There are structures that seem critical, and can turn consciousness on or off, but they seem to be facilitators rather than the essence.

How do you "reduce" consciousness? Would removal of the visual cortex result in "lesser" consciousness?

I can't speak for Pixy, but my interpretation is that he has decided that the only thing we can say for sure about consciousness in general is that it is based on SRIP.

Pixy would disagree with the word "based". Cosnciousness IS SRIP. "Based on" implies SRIP is merely a necessary condition.

In systems of differing levels of complexity, it gives rise to correspondingly differing levels of consciousness. So perhaps it is reasonable to define consciousness as SRIP and say that the level of complexity of its implementation corresponds to the level of consciousness. The difficulty arises with a minimal implementation of SRIP (e.g. in a simple computer program), in that it doesn't seem capable of anything like consciousness as we experience it; and of course, it isn't - our consciousness is the result of an extremely complex and sophisticated multi-SRIP system. The minimal implementation of SRIP doesn't and can't do anything 'useful' - it's minimal consciousness seems pointless - more potential that actual. Also, there are possible sub-cellular SRIP implementations, e.g. gene expression, that may be difficult to accept as examples of consciousness.

Exactly.

But move up to, for example, a simple arthropod, with a simple nervous system using SRIP and hooked up to sensors and effectors. Perhaps here we can begin to recognise a more familiar form of consciousness (i.e. there are the kinds of behaviours we can anthropomorphise and interpret as potentially conscious, to some degree as we experience it).

What is it like to be a bat?

I do have some doubts about defining consciousness as SRIP - I prefer to think of consciousness as a particular kind of implementation of SRIP, but I can't be precise about it. ISTM at the very least, the idea of SRIP as consciousness provides a useful base for thinking about what we mean by consciousness, the different forms it may take, where we draw the line between conscious and not conscious, and helps avoid the pernicious anthropomorphic perspective that tends to cloud our assessment of non-human behaviours. It would be interesting if more contributors here were prepared to take this idea more seriously and see where it takes us, rather than dismissing it with juvenile invective.

We don't dismiss consciousness is a FORM of SRIP. We dismiss consciousness IS SRIP. The absurdidies of the latter are pathetically easy to generate (e.g., unconsciously conscious anesthetized patients).

 

[AkuManiMani]

Wow, dude...You're really lost, aren't you?

Not fun when someone points out how ridiculous your position is, is it ?

Erm, not quite...I just find RD's arm-flapping histrionics over a such a cut and dried issue a bit perplexing.

Qualia are to experiences of objects as quanta are to objects of experience

That's a nice thing to say at a party, but what does it mean, really ? How do you even know that you can have quanta of experience ? Do you even know what experience is ? You speak with such certainty and yet you seem unable to even define your terms clearly.

I'm not sure if there is a legitimate misunderstanding between us or if you're being willfully obtuse. For me, it is an indubitable given that I have experiences. My experiences can be broken down into combinations of elementary subjective qualities such as "blue", "cold", "sweet", "bright", "rough", etc. Its those basic subjective qualities brought together into an experience at any given time that we're referring to as "qualia".

"Qualia" isn't a postulated hypothetical but a categorical label of for an indisputable given: We experience and our experiences can be reduced to combinations of subjective qualities. Period. Its that simple.

 

[Frank Newgent]

Yep.

I apologize for not making it clear, but there are two scenarios floating around.

The first is of a "turing equivalent" machine, like a computer, being set up basically like we are now -- you have some interface with the external world and the machine walks around and does stuff and the only thing that is "computed" in a strict sense is whatever is inside it, kind of like the only things that are "thought" are inside your head.

Now even in this case, it is impossible to have full self reference -- you are not aware of the individual neurons in your brain. In fact you are not even aware of your brain at all. All you know is that you have a head and you seem to see and hear from it.

Also in that case, however, you don't need everything to be calculated. Obviously, the real world provides the vast majority of information needed, just like your brain doesn't "think" about all the stuff reaching your senses before it gets there. A tree falls independently of you -- you just observe it.

But this isn't a strict turing machine. It is just "turing equivalent," which means it can't do anything a strict turing machine couldn't do given a tape of infinite length -- which is impossible. So it just means "it can pretty much be rigged up to follow any set of instructions and make any set of computations you can think of."

It isn't a "strict" turing machine because the ideal notion of a turing machine includes only the machine and a very long tape that represents both input, output, and memory. In other words, you can't continually feed it input in real time because the tape is set at the beginning of the run -- everything that would be input has to already be on the tape somewhere. Thus the tape is a little self contained world of information -- there is no way in or out once the run starts. That is why even a very simple "turing equivalent" machine in the real world -- like a small collection of neurons wired up a certain way -- would require an infinite amount of tape to account for all the stuff they could encounter in the real world. Everything "else" in the real world needs to be included in that initial tape. Clearly not realistic, but it is supposed to be abstract anyway.

In that case -- a strict turing machine -- the machine cannot reference itself. In fact the machine cannot reference anything. What references stuff is whatever is on the tape. It only makes sense to say some information on the tape references information somewhere else on the tape. The machine itself is not included in the information any of the calculations have access to. If you want to talk about Godel and incompleteness, it is "outside" the system. Anyone in the tape has no access to it and could not explain its existence any more than we could explain what the first cause of the universe was.

In such a scenario, if the machine were running the tape and making the computations that represent a brain in some world, it is not the machine itself that is conscious but rather the information on the tape. This is analagous to you being conscious instead of the universe being conscious even though the universe is the thing "making the calculations" to move particles around in your brain.

The way these two scenarios -- the robot vs. the ideal turing machine -- are linked is that *if* a robot is conscious, then because all of its input must be converted from the real world into digital signals -- things that can be computed -- in principle all of that input could just originate as a computation to begin with. In other words, you could take the computations being performed in the robot brain, move them to the tape of an ideal turing machine, then move all of the input data as well to the tape of the turing machine, and start a run. How would the robot know the difference? It wouldn't. Kind of like how we can't tell if we are in a simulation or not.

Maybe not.

What I've bolded, that "all of its input must be converted from the real world into digital signals" seems to violate what you said earlier, namely that "you can't find any arrangement of information that can simultaneously reference all of itself."

Keeping that in mind, what if there were something else existing in the real external world in addition to that input - input which cannot simultaneously reference all of itself - say that is that oranges are not just a round citrus (as per the input) but that they are also the color orange.

And that in our complicated real external world our conscious being can know that "oranges" are either features in a simulation or that "oranges" are not features in a simulation.

So our conscious being can (correctly) deduce: if I am in a simulation then it's not true that if my word "orange" does mean something, then it means orange oranges.

If my word "orange" does mean something , then it means orange oranges.

Therefore I am not in a simulation.

Two can play this RD

 

[Belz...]

It's a definition, not a claim. As such, it hardly needs much in the way of justification.

If you define qualia as experiences, then you're not talking about the same qualia as Aku or others. And since it's a synonym, there's no reason to have two words.

Of course we don't. That's the whole point.

The whole point is to make stuff up then, it seems.

I really don't care about the details of breaking down experiences into sub-experiences, or if the experience of an experience is different to an experience. That's a way of dodging the main issue

What rocketdodger is doing is illustrating that the concept of qualia represents just another turtle -- one that isn't necessary.