Has consciousness been fully explained?

[Dancing David]

Yes, also very similar to primates. I can't begin to conceive what the subjective experiences of a monkey are like.

yes but the issue is that a person themselves does not have a scientific model of that experience, the experience is the brain events, there is nothing else. At least that makes sense.

 

[Dancing David]

Going by this reasoning, there would be no reason to think that behavior would vary much between people. After all, if we all have the same nervous system, skeleton, circulatory system, etc. we should all behave pretty much the same way, right? A little thing called the DSM-IV seems to contradict this line of reasoning.

Excuse me but your line is bent, you have structure that grows into place, are you going to say a red oaks tree is not a red oak tree because its shape is different than another red oak tree?
Yes the organic structures vary, that does not mean that 'consciousness' is not based upon the organic biochemistry of brains.

the issues are exactly the same, the tree has processes, morphology, contingent history and genetics, but the philosophers do not run around talking about the Hard Problem of Treeing. Or the Hard Problem of Biomes/Ecosystems and Biological Systems. The Hard Problem of Why There are Fish in the Ocean?

Yet they are immensely more complex diverse and chaotic than human brains.

 

[Dancing David]

You might like this poll:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=162192&highlight=conscious

Almost 30% of the respondents here aren't sure they're conscious.

And as always most of us who said that said one thing:
i am consious under the medical defintion, give us your defintion and I can answer the other question.

 

[Dancing David]

That's total baloney.

Simply amplifying a phenomenon doesn't necessarily produce an entirely different phenomenon.

And if such amplification does produce a new phenomenon, then we need to understand why.

This is no kind of explanation at all.

the neural network self sorts as well. it is not just amplification it is also positive (potentiation) and negative (amplification), it seems to be stuctures that sort data and regulate data.

(Not that that solves the details)

 

[Dancing David]

Subjective Experience. The sense of self.

Which part of that is not a sensation, perception, memory or cognition?

 

[Dancing David]

The problem is, that's no sort of explanation at all. It's merely a grocery sack full of stuff with no structure to it.

If you want to claim that it's a problem of not being able to crunch the numbers, then you're going to have to explain why that is, and -- more to the point -- explain how in the world it could be that a simple critical mass of neurons could produce a very specific physical phenomenon: conscious experience.

Do you agree that we have a fait understanding of visual perception?

What if I tried to explain shivering to you by saying "when you have enough neurons, shivering happens"? Would you buy that as an explanation? I hope not.

Your argument amounts to this: When you get enough neurons together, they create consciousness.

You might as well say, "when you get enough cells together, they create circulation".

 

[Piggy]

Consciousness is self-referential information processing. This is happening in the brain. The thing is, it's happening in many places; for a very practical definition of consciousness there is more than one consciousness in the brain. There are clear patterns of brain activity leading up to, for example, awareness of visual stimuli. We are mapping these in ever-greater detail.

Oh, there's no doubt we're getting closer to figuring out how the brain does this, and the studies you're talking about will surely bring us closer.

But labeling it "self-referential information processing" doesn't get us anywhere.

There are many types of self-referential information processing, and except for whatever the brain is doing, they don't produce the phenomenon of conscious awareness.

So tell me, how does the "self-referential information processing" in the brain generate the phenomenon of felt experience, and what differentiates these particular self-referential processes from others in the brain which are not involved in the generation of felt experience?

 

[Piggy]

Because. That. Is. Where. It. Happens.

Wow. Now there's an answer. You can remove all but the first word and it would mean the same thing.

 

[Piggy]

Yes there is. And that paper provides confirming evidence.

From the article:

"The present work suggests that, rather than hoping for a putative unique marker – the neural correlate of consciousness – a more mature view of conscious processing should consider that it relates to a brain-scale distributed pattern of coherent brain activation," explained neuroscientist Lionel Naccache, one of the authors of the paper.

 

[Piggy]

Because we - that is, rational people, a.k.a. not David Chalmers - already know that.

We know that consciousness simply arises like fog when we have a large enough mass of neurons?

I'm sorry, but, no... we do not know any such thing.

Feedback loops. Also already established.

Which feedback loops, and how do these particular ones generate the physical phenomenon of conscious awareness whereas others do not?

 

[Piggy]

What observed features of consciousness are not accounted for by my definition?

Please be precise.

Its very existence, to begin with, because your definition does not seem able to distinguish between processes which generate the phenomenon and those which do not.

But maybe I'm misreading.

Would you mind posting the definition again so that I'm sure I'm responding to the correct post?

 

[Piggy]

What entirely new phenomenon?

Conscious awareness.

The problem with the pure info-processing approach is that when we use it, consciousness drops off the radar.

It's like if we're looking at a large building and you ask, "What do they do there?" and I say, "They process oranges -- some are crated, some are juiced."

"Oh," you say, "how are oranges juiced?" and I reply, "Well, oranges that are unblemished and fit in a certain size range get crated, all the rest get juiced."

Obviously, I haven't answered your question, because simply focusing on which oranges go where doesn't (and can't) tell me anything about the mechanical process of juicing.

From what I've seen, folks in your camp discuss consciousness in this way, which leads to absurdities such as calling consciousness a "data set" or claiming that a thermostat might be conscious or that working out the brain's computations on pen and paper would generate an instance of conscious awareness.

But none of these absurdities seem to make a dent in y'all's faith.

 

[PixyMisa]

And yet in spite of that, we all know what we're talking about when we talk about qualia.

If you know what the term means, then please define it. No-one else has been able to.

Edit: Sorry, reading ahead:

We already have a term for subjective experiences. We call them subjective experiences. They happen in the brain.

What does the word "qualia" add to the discussion?

You don't find that interesting?

Not really, no.

 

[!Kaggen]

What I find sad about Pixy Misa's approach is how he is prepared to lower his standards so as to fit consciousness into the "data".

What I find disturbing is that if enough Pixy Misa's, Rocket Dodger's and DD's persuade us that we need to lower our standards by appealing to The Wisdom of Crowds^WP then eventually thermostats will be our equals and the next step is mass suicide by transporter.

And what I find tragic is that this process is already in motion as teenagers learn to limit their consciousness to what the social networking interweb can project......

The thing many don't want to admit about the Turing Test is that it cuts both ways....

 

[PixyMisa]

You might like this poll:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=162192&highlight=conscious

Almost 30% of the respondents here aren't sure they're conscious.

Thanks for reminding me of that thread. You do love to commit the Black Knight fallacy, don't you?

 

[PixyMisa]

What I find sad about Pixy Misa's approach is how he is prepared to lower his standards so as to fit consciousness into the "data".

What standards, precisely, have I lowered? What, precisely, do you mean by 'the "data"' here?

What I find disturbing is that if enough Pixy Misa's, Rocket Dodger's and DD's persuade us that we need to lower our standards by appealing to The Wisdom of Crowds^WP then eventually thermostats will be our equals and the next step is mass suicide by transporter.

What standards, precisely, would we be lowering and why would we need to do this, and how then would it follow that thermostats "would be our equals"?

Particularly in light of the fact that by my definition, simple mechanical thermostats are not conscious.

And what I find tragic is that this process is already in motion as teenagers learn to limit their consciousness to what the social networking interweb can project......

What teenagers are doing what that leads you to the conclusion that they are learning anything about limiting their consciousness in any way, and why, even if this were a coherent statement, much less a true one, would it be in any way tragic?

The thing many don't want to admit about the Turing Test is that it cuts both ways....

Who is it that's not admitting this? As usual, I'll ask you to be precise.

I'm nothing if not patient.

 

[Piggy]

the neural network self sorts as well. it is not just amplification it is also positive (potentiation) and negative (amplification), it seems to be stuctures that sort data and regulate data.

(Not that that solves the details)

Details of what? We don't even have a firm outline in which details can be filled in.

And I don't know what you mean when you say our brains "self sort".

 

[Piggy]

Do you agree that we have a fait understanding of visual perception?

Perception and conscious awareness aren't the same thing.

There's a lot you can see, process, and respond to without being aware that you've seen anything.

To explain consciousness, we're going to have to be able to describe what's happening to the information that we become aware of versus what's happening to the information that we don't become aware of.

Some of it is crated, some of it's juiced. So what is juicing?

That's what we have to answer. What exactly (or even generally) is the brain physically doing with that information which makes us overtly aware of it?

How is the physical phenomenon produced?

 

[westprog]

And unless I misunderstand Dennet, he says it's not actually possible for the processes to happen without the attendant experience.

I've heard it said that to a physicist, everything is just physics. Chemistry, biology, etc., are just stamp collecting.

That's kind of the way I look at consciousness. It's just neuron biochemistry piled up into a giant heap. It has all been explained in terms of neurons - we can explain the details of how they work. The rest is just semantics of how we refer to things they do in large numbers.

But the physical processes don't involve consciousness at all. The reason that Dennet is pronouncing on this is that he is a philosopher. If he were a physicist, he'd have to say that there is nothing in the physical description of what happens with the neuron biochemistry that explains the attendant experience. The best that the physicists can do is just ignore consciousness as an issue. There is no physical theory of consciousness - not even the beginnings of one. There's a bit of vague conjecture, but generally it's left to the philosophers, neurologists, computer scientists and the rest of the stamp collectors. When the physicists have an explanation, then it will have been explained.

 

[westprog]

Yeah, it seems that the only way to get a reasonable answer out of the whole "consciousness" mess is to assume that the consciousness doesn't really exist.

It's certainly a timesaver.