Has consciousness been fully explained?

[rocketdodger]

Does this qualify as a well defined distinction RD?

Yes, but I never needed one from you. I am on your side (in fact I am the most active forum user with regard to actually stating and exploring my position on the computational model -- nobody here has posted more idea on algorithms, though experiments, and research than me. Note that I am also by far NOT the most active forum user when it comes to the actual number of posts ... )

I am asking for the distinction from the people who reject my explanations for the components.

 

[rocketdodger]

And computer chips can reproduce, metabolize, have biochemical control pathways?

No, they don't. We will get to that after you admit that cells do, in fact, exhibit behaviors that are not found in rocks. Such as reproduction, metabolism, etc.

See, here is my strategy, in case you missed it.

1) Establish that a cell and a rock behave differently.
2) Try to explain why they behave differently in irreducible terms.
3) If 2) can be done, then there is a definition for something that is present in the cell and not in the rock. Otherwise, they could not be different.

4) Look for something that satisfies that definition in other systems, such as computer chips. Maybe it will be there, maybe it won't.


Guess what -- I did all the legwork myself, 1-4, and I arrived at the conclusion that yes, there is such a thing in both chips and cells that is not in static rocks -- series of nonlinear internal state changes as a reaction to small changes in the environment. In other words, series of computations.

If you don't accept this, you are free to go through 1-4 on your own. I would be happy to walk through it with you, even.

But you won't do that, will you? You would rather just dismiss all the plausible arguments put forth from your dualistic closet, wouldn't you?

Prove me wrong, westprog.

 

[westprog]

The thing I think I can say here is this:

Earthborn, you are correct that the brain does not run prepackaged programs written in a symbolic logic system and then translated into seperate acts of the processors.

Yet given the conditioned and associative nature of the neural networks, they do develop habitual patterns of response that are an analog to 'programs'.

I usually try to avoid using programming terminology wrt the brain - not because the analogies aren't apposite, but because it leads to the acceptance that they aren't analogies but actual description. I sometimes fail in this, though, because programming analogies come so readily to hand.

 

[Beth]

Or to put it another way - is everybody here claiming that the components of the brain behave exactly as physics says they should?

While the physics of how the brain operates are not completely understood at this point, nobody in this thread is arguing that physics as we understand it today are violated by consciousness.

Read Godel, Escher, Bach.

I have. I don't think it will provide the enlightment on this subject that you seem to think it will. It is however, a marvelous book and well worth reading.

So, insofar as the brain is a reliable computer, it is equivalent to a Turing Machine too. (We're also limited by Godel's Incompleteness theorems - to the extent that we are consistent, we are necessarily incomplete.)

Okay, now, there's an obvious problem here: The brain is not a reliable computer. No real-world computer is perfect, but organic brains are notably sloppy.

However, we can model any physical system with a Turing Machine too. We can reproduce everything except quantum randomness directly with a Turing Machine, and we can produce pseudo-random numbers that approach perfect randomness arbitrarily closely.

If the human brain relies on properties of QM*, which is quite possible as QM has been found integral in some functions of various other biological entities, I don't think this can be assumed. As Penrose supposes, the CNS of humans may have functions that are non-computable. BTW Penrose never suggested anything magical about the brain or consiousness that would violate the laws of physics.

* not necessarily randomness as QM has a number of strange and seemingly spooky properties. Perhaps the synchronization of different types of brain waves (study that Piggy linked to earlier) relies on a property of QM?

 

[westprog]

It is a computer running a program. That is not an unknown technology. It just needs to be a very powerful computer. I am not sure why everyone wants to change the example

The advance in technology would be needed in order to duplicate all the interactions of the human brain perfectly. I'm not sure if this is possible, even in principle.

Of course the question was not - "does it have a Sofia?". The question was - would it behave as though it did?

First, we know it is an algorithm.

We are not asking if it has a Sofia because we can examine both possibilities:

1. It has a Sofia. This would mean that an algorithm can have a Sofia, or

2. It does not have a Sofia. But since we know that any behaviour we observe from it must be a function of the modelled interactions of the same brain architecture that we have, its claim to have a Sofia comes from the same mechanism that produces our claim to have a Sofia.

This would imply that our claim to have a Sofia has nothing to do with the fact that we do have a Sofia

So 1 and 2 both lead to different apparent absurdities.

It's certainly an interesting thought experiment, and there is a question to answer. But the fact that it's a thought experiment only means that we don't know what the outcome necessarily is. We can speculate what it would mean if a certain outcome occurred - but we don't know if it would occur, for certain.

 

[westprog]

Guess what -- I did all the legwork myself, 1-4, and I arrived at the conclusion that yes, there is such a thing in both chips and cells that is not in static rocks -- series of nonlinear internal state changes as a reaction to small changes in the environment. In other words, series of computations.

If you don't accept this, you are free to go through 1-4 on your own. I would be happy to walk through it with you, even.

I don't accept it because I consider that the rock also exhibits non-linear state changes in response to small changes in the environment.

But you won't do that, will you? You would rather just dismiss all the plausible arguments put forth from your dualistic closet, wouldn't you?

Prove me wrong, westprog.

I rather think I have, on a number of occasions.

 

[westprog]

Why? You don't say "a brain plus X."



That other functionality is only present when you have "a brain plus X."

Why the double standard, westprog?

I don't say it because the brain does not need anything additional to be capable of controlling and monitoring a body. Controlling and monitoring a body is what a brain is for. It is not possible for a brain to do this using Turing machine functionality.

Brain + body = working system. Turing machine + body = non-functional system.

 

[westprog]

While the physics of how the brain operates are not completely understood at this point, nobody in this thread is arguing that physics as we understand it today are violated by consciousness.

I have. I don't think it will provide the enlightment on this subject that you seem to think it will. It is however, a marvelous book and well worth reading.
If the human brain relies on properties of QM*, which is quite possible as QM has been found integral in some functions of various other biological entities, I don't think this can be assumed. As Penrose supposes, the CNS of humans may have functions that are non-computable. BTW Penrose never suggested anything magical about the brain or consiousness that would violate the laws of physics.

* not necessarily randomness as QM has a number of strange and seemingly spooky properties. Perhaps the synchronization of different types of brain waves (study that Piggy linked to earlier) relies on a property of QM?

According to RD, QM is magic.

 

[Beth]

I haven't seen anyone in the thread claim consciousness has "magical properties".

Not directly, no.
But the sentiment of denying every single plausible mechanism might be interpreted as such a claim.

That seems a bit biased. First you attribute to someone a claim they never made on the basis of nothing more than your preconceptions. Then you denigrate them for holding the position you have attributed to them.

But could the external behaviour of a human be modelled by a computer program that modelled the interactions of the components of the brain?

Note that people who reply "I don't know" are, by definition, supporters of magic.

This seems even more biased. The fact of the matter is that we simply don’t know at this point. It’s a reasonable supposition that the answer is yes based on our current knowledge, but it requires extrapolation to a much larger and more complex system that we are capable of creating at this point. It also requires an assumption of the emergent behavior that will spontaneously arise from that larger and more complex system.

I don’t see why the declaration of ‘I don’t know’ in answer to that question should be indicative of anything other than an acknowledgement of that.

 

[westprog]

I clearly explain why the way a rock remains stable is very different from the way a cell remains stable -- a cell changes it's internal state as a result of the environment to a much larger degree than a rock.

Do you not agree with that?

Cells divide, they move on their own, they change their metabolism, they change their shape, they change their structure, they change their chemical composition, etc, all due to small changes in the environment that, were such changes to occur in the environment of a rock, there would be little change in the rock.

Do you not agree?

If you are claiming a property that exists to a greater degree in the cell than the rock, then that is different from a claim that something exists in the cell and computer that doesn't exist in the rock at all.

 

[PixyMisa]

While the physics of how the brain operates are not completely understood at this point, nobody in this thread is arguing that physics as we understand it today are violated by consciousness.

I have. I don't think it will provide the enlightment on this subject that you seem to think it will. It is however, a marvelous book and well worth reading.

While I don't claim it answers all the questions, it does provide a basis for the discussion, and we can't really cover 800 pages of introductory material here in the thread. And we certainly can't do it as enjoyably as Hofstadter.

If the human brain relies on properties of QM*, which is quite possible as QM has been found integral in some functions of various other biological entities, I don't think this can be assumed. As Penrose supposes, the CNS of humans may have functions that are non-computable. BTW Penrose never suggested anything magical about the brain or consiousness that would violate the laws of physics.

Quantum mechanics does play a direct role in certain biological processes, most notably in photosynthesis. But it cannot do that in the case of consciousness, for a couple of key reasons. First, consciousness does not show any properties of a quantum-mechanical process; rather, it shows all the properties of a large-scale switch network.

Second, and perhaps even worse, the time scale is hopelessly wrong - it's out by between 10 and 17 orders of magnitude. Penrose's model of consciousness is a violation of the laws of physics, and a particularly horrible one. We had a thread a while back where I gave a list of examples of ideas that were off by that degree, things like trying to take the Atlantic Ocean home with you in a bucket, or eating an omelette made of every egg laid by every chicken that has ever lived.

* not necessarily randomness as QM has a number of strange and seemingly spooky properties.

Yeah, but randomness is the one that is explicitly non-computable and needs to be addressed by a computational approach.

Perhaps the synchronization of different types of brain waves (study that Piggy linked to earlier) relies on a property of QM?

No, even Penrose would point out that this would be physically impossible. I call it the Magic Fairy Field Theory of Quantum Consciousnes, just to let you know where I stand.

Penrose and Hameroff were proposing quantum superpositions within microtubules - just 20 nanometres or so across. Even that is physically impossible; proposing a quantum field across the entire brain is... Well. First thing you need to do is cool the entire brain down to about a millionth of a kelvin. Next thing would be to give up because you just killed your experimental subject. Quantum mechanics has no role to play in the brain on that scale.

 

[PixyMisa]

This seems even more biased. The fact of the matter is that we simply don’t know at this point. It’s a reasonable supposition that the answer is yes based on our current knowledge, but it requires extrapolation to a much larger and more complex system that we are capable of creating at this point.

That's exactly the magical thinking that's the problem here.

We know we can computationally model physical systems. We have had ever-inreasing success over the years modeling ever-increasingly complex systems.

There is no basis in physics or mathematics for supposing there is any fixed limit to how far this process can go. Certainly it becomes very computationally expensive for large systems modeled at small scales, but we can calculate exactly how expensive.

Saying that we can go this far and no farther is the same sort of thinking that creationists use when they claim that evolution only happens within a "kind".

It also requires an assumption of the emergent behavior that will spontaneously arise from that larger and more complex system.

No assumption; observation.

I don’t see why the declaration of ‘I don’t know’ in answer to that question should be indicative of anything other than an acknowledgement of that.

If we establish that 1+1 is 2, and 2+1 is 3, and I ask what is 1+1+1, and the response is that we can't know the answer to that, then we have a problem.

 

[westprog]

That seems a bit biased. First you attribute to someone a claim they never made on the basis of nothing more than your preconceptions. Then you denigrate them for holding the position you have attributed to them.


This seems even more biased. The fact of the matter is that we simply don’t know at this point. It’s a reasonable supposition that the answer is yes based on our current knowledge, but it requires extrapolation to a much larger and more complex system that we are capable of creating at this point. It also requires an assumption of the emergent behavior that will spontaneously arise from that larger and more complex system.

I don’t see why the declaration of ‘I don’t know’ in answer to that question should be indicative of anything other than an acknowledgement of that.

People who confidently predict that a computer simulation will definitely share all the properties of the thing it's simulating are too optimistic to be working in health and safety.

 

[westprog]

I would be interested in what's not so clear about it. I'm not clear on what the advisory on the use of "function" is based on. Though I never personally used that term, it is contained in the claims I objected to the equivalence of.

[The function question]
Mathematically a linear function can be written in the y=mx+b form. Thus nonlinear functions are quiet trivial to define. For systems, such as we are discussing, linearity is characterized by the superposition principle, i.e., the sum of two or more inputs is the sum of the of the outputs of the inputs considered separately. A function merely defines a transform, if any, that takes place between an input and output. For systems, this is merely initial and final states defining how the system evolves.

I described an intensely complex system, at least from a molecular perspective. Yet we know the global system is a product of the molecular system. In fact a conservation law applies to such collisions: Conservation of Linear Momentum in Collisions. I can also resort to authority and points out classical Solitons are by definition nonlinear waves. Yet these waves are fundamentally subsets of collisions. So in what way did I bastardize the concept of functions or linearity?

[The brain question]
By suggesting the operation of the brain is "equivalent to" a Turing machine is tantamount to suggesting that a Soliton is "equivalent to" a bunch of collisions. Nobody is making such a suggestion. Only some people are insisting others are making that claim, solely on the basis of talking about the logical equivalent of collisions involved in producing the logical equivalent of a Soliton.

Does this not make the distinction between an element of consciousness and consciousness itself clear?

I wasn't, to clarify, referring to mathematical functions. I meant that the instantiation of a Turing machine would be fullfilling it's role as brain replacement using solely the properties relating to a Turing machine, not the other properties inherent in a real life instantiation of a Turing machine.

I'm not sure what properties would be common to all instantiations of Turing machines that wouldn't be part of the functional description of a Turing machine, beyond consuming at least some energy.

 

[Piggy]

What's the difference?

That's a very interesting question with regard to the brain, isn't it?

Might be the key to this whole thing.

Unfortunately, I'm headed out of state for the weekend, up into the mountains, no interwebs.

Will return on Tuesday.

 

[Piggy]

The simulation is, as I have said, a detailed simulation of a human brain down to the neuron level. It models the physical interactions of the components of the brain, ie it is how physics says that they should behave. .

So it models the blood flowing through the brain, and the mechanisms controlling temperature, and any inflammation present, everything?

Because, of course, that would be required in order to model all the physical interactions that are going on.

 

[Piggy]

As far as I can tell, Piggy is suggesting that the programmers cheated and programmed in a behaviour of saying "I have a Sofia". However that is just altering the thought experiment, nothing is programmed in but the physical interactions of the components of the brain and the sense data.

What's underlying their questions is an assumption that the mechanism which generates the bodily function of consciousness can be programmed, in the sense that programming can make it happen by itself, because only in that situation would a computer simulation be no different from a complete working model.

But if consciousness, like every other bodily function controlled by the brain, requires some sort of action that cannot be programmed, then there is a difference between computer simulation and working model.

From everything I've seen, there's no evidence for the former, and lots of evidence for the latter.

 

[Myriad]

Place a computer chip, a rock, and a living creature together. All three are different. They possess different properties in the sense that they have different mass, appearance, etc. However, all three of them have a mass, have an appearance, and so on.

You are claiming that the living creature and the computer chip have some property in common, which is not shared by the rock.

That property is the capability for computational complexity, or what Wolfram calls Type IV behavior. The creature (even a single cell of a creature) and the computer chip are computationally universal.

Specifically: to be able to reliably predict the behavior of an arbitrary part of the cell or the computer chip, you need to be able to use another system that is also capable of universal computation, such as predicate logic, a brain, a computer simulation, or a duplicate of the creature or chip. You do not need any such system to predict the behavior of any given part of the rock, which is only capable of Type I or II behavior.

Now, if you have three rocks, and they are orbiting one another in otherwise empty space, via their mutual gravitation -- then your question becomes interesting. Either there is a simple formula for describing their motion that's remained undiscovered in the centuries of searching since the formula for two-body system was found (which appears unlikely since such systems are capable of very complex-looking behavior), or the system of three orbiting rocks is also computationally universal (and thus in principle could generate a consciousness), or there is a class of complex behavior (Type III) which can only be emulated by either another instance of the same system, or by universal computation, but is not itself capable of universal computation. The latter possibility would falsify Wolfram's conjectured Rule of Computational Equivalence but for various reasons also seems unlikely. (That's another 1200 pages to read, after you're done with GEB. )

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[Meed]

The "not a brain wave controller" is somewhat confusing as it is the brain waves doing the controlling, but I take this a saying the brain waves aren't doing the controlling.

The Jedi Force Controller, for example, measures brain wave frequencies and interacts with the console based on changes in those frequencies. If you become relaxed your brain wave frequencies will decrease and the controller will detect this and react accordingly. Like pulse and blood pressure, it's a one-dimensional measurement, though (i.e. your brain waves are either higher or lower frequency with no localization involved). That's what I thought you were referring to.

My point was not specific implementations of brain wave monitoring, nor a claim that it represented mind reading in the sense a proclaimed psychic would imply, nor that it was direct reading of meaning associated with fine scale neural firing, or even that such techniques were direct unabstracted readings of neural activity, which they are not. What it does provide is commonalities in neural activity between brains, and provides enough location and location progression information learn the about the processes and locations involved in various experiences.

To a limited extent, yes. Recall the fMRI scan of a dead fish, where brain activity seemingly went on in response to stimuli and was found to be statistically significant. There is a lot of room for confusion and false positives in fMRI studies.

Single neuron activation:

If you want more info on "juxtacellular stimulation":
http://www-ulpmed.u-strasbg.fr/laec/juxtacellular_techn-UK.html

Thanks for that. I stand corrected on "we can't measure the activity of individual neurons" (paraphrasing myself). We can't measure individual neuron activity with an fMRI though.

I'm less interested in these control devices, which do in fact involve dictionary outputs on very limited resolutions, than what can be learned about the brains operation principles in general. The abstraction between neural firing and the global monitoring techniques do not invalidate the fact that neural activity is being monitored with various levels of resolution and abstraction, and the only important feature between the various methods is the actual resolution to neural activity.

I agree.

The picture quality is about as poor as it gets. The implications are far more interesting than what was actually accomplished, and I have grave doubts about how much resolution is even possible in principle.

What picture quality? Can you link me to what you're talking about? All I could find was very short and vague news articles. The impression I got was that they showed the subjects pictures while scanning their brain activity and then when they were asleep they looked for brain states close to the ones that correlated to certain picture types. Then they made the assumption that this was something the subject was seeing in the dream. I didn't get the impression that there was some sort of actual video recording going on. I could be wrong, but I'd like to see the details.

Back a few post, it was an explanation of why I doubt highly significant increases in resolution is possible, as I just mentioned above. It's certainly not authoritative, and would require an outline of a far more detailed modeling approach to do these assumptions any real justice.

Gotcha.

 

[Meed]

I clearly explain why the way a rock remains stable is very different from the way a cell remains stable -- a cell changes it's internal state as a result of the environment to a much larger degree than a rock.

Do you not agree with that?

That sounds very vague. I'd say it depends on the rock and the environment.

Cells divide, they move on their own, they change their metabolism, they change their shape, they change their structure, they change their chemical composition, etc, all due to small changes in the environment that, were such changes to occur in the environment of a rock, there would be little change in the rock.

Do you not agree?

I agree with that. What the significance of it is as far as some sort of definition of computation goes is beyond me, though.