Has consciousness been fully explained?

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Earthborn said:
Really? I like to see your evidence. Has there ever been a brain that dreamt while not getting any input from the body?
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No, but there surely have been billions of brains that have dreamt while no recognizable input from the body was being fed into Sofia.
 
cornsail said:
I pretty much see it the same way. But this seems to mean that we cannot describe conscious experience in terms of physics. Yet for something that cannot be described in terms of physics to have such a seemingly direct cause/effect relationship with a physical system seems bizarre. If it is only effect, but not cause then it seems unlikely for it to have evolved since it would offer no evolutionary advantage.
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Well, here's the thing, though.... We'll be able to describe our conscious experience in terms of physics once we develop the right instruments to measure whatever's going on.

And we'll be able to look at other species and observe the physics correlating to conscious states we don't experience.

So we'll be able to determine which species share certain experiences -- for example, however magnetic fields appear to birds -- but we'll never be able to participate in those experiences, so we will have to reluctantly accept, I believe, our limitations when it comes to understanding how other critters experience things, just as we have to understand the tragic limitations on our ability to observe what's happening in the wider universe at this moment.
 
cornsail said:
I pretty much see it the same way. But this seems to mean that we cannot describe conscious experience in terms of physics. Yet for something that cannot be described in terms of physics to have such a seemingly direct cause/effect relationship with a physical system seems bizarre. If it is only effect, but not cause then it seems unlikely for it to have evolved since it would offer no evolutionary advantage.
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That second point is very important, and I think I mentioned upthread that it's quite likely Free Will's last stand.

But as I just said, there will be an iron-clad cause/effect relationship with the underlying physics, no one expects otherwise.

What's curious, at least at first glance, is the growing body of research demonstrating that consciousness is a "downstream" function. In other words, we begin to respond to what we're seeing a split second before we're aware that we've seen it -- or, from Sofia's perspective, that we're seeing it.

We find that we can predict behavior fairly accurately by measuring what the daemons are doing upstream. And some of the actual delivery pathways have been identified (e.g. Marvin's brain).

This has led some to propose that consciousness is simply a side-effect of how our brains are built, a sort of freeloader that's just "along for the ride".

But consciousness is a resource-intensive function, so evolution is clearly invested in it. It's certainly not a peacock's tail, so it must be doing something pretty darn important.

Which means that our consciousness, the experience which literally is who we are, must be having some sort of influence in the loop.

In physical terms, you could say that Sofia events feed back into the system.

So what's going on while the brain is going to the trouble of generating an instance of conscious experience at a particular time and location?

One thing is that several different kinds of highly pre-processed information are being coordinated, and this somehow involves several particular clusters of neurons at various locations and more than one brain wave simultaneously.

While that's happening, we have this experience of being us and being somewhere, whether we're awake or dreaming or hallucinating. (Although the sense of self or of somewhere can be lost during hallucinations.)

Why does the body bother to do this?

It must serve a highly useful purpose. In my opinion, the most likely purpose was to call the shots when multiple daemons came up with conflicting answers.

But how does that happen physically, and what role could an "experience" possibly have in all of that?

I have no clue. I don't think anybody else does right now, either.
 
Earthborn said:
You haven't explained how computer connected to a body running a very good simulation of a human brain cannot possibly be a functional model of a human brain.
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Yeah. That's the dualism fail that we're stuck on. The answer is apparently "because", and we're not allowed to ask "because why?"
 
PM, are you sure you know what dualism is? I'm starting to have flashbacks of A.A.Alfie posting "group think!" incessantly in the global warming threads.
 
PixyMisa said:
Yeah. That's the dualism fail that we're stuck on. The answer is apparently "because", and we're not allowed to ask "because why?"
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Excuse me coming late to the party, but I have read the whole thread (and Goedel, Escher, Bach). I thought the answer to this was 'Sofia'. The problem for me comes when anyone asks 'what's Sofia'.
 
Guybrush Threepwood said:
Excuse me coming late to the party, but I have read the whole thread (and Goedel, Escher, Bach). I thought the answer to this was 'Sofia'. The problem for me comes when anyone asks 'what's Sofia'.
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"Sofia" is just another word for "because". Apparently if you're going to reinvent dualism you're required to invent new words to hide the fact.
 
PixyMisa said:
Ding! Dualism.
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Yarp. Not perfect, but you are pretty close to correctly applying the label this time. Technically it is an argument against materialism rather than an argument for dualism. I tend to lean more toward idealism or neutral monism than dualism, although all the philosophical stances have major flaws.
 
Piggy said:
No, but there surely have been billions of brains that have dreamt while no recognizable input from the body was being fed into Sofia.
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Surely there would still be sensory information and control signals passing back and forth, though? Otherwise alarm clocks wouldn't work.
 
Guybrush Threepwood said:
Excuse me coming late to the party, but I have read the whole thread (and Goedel, Escher, Bach). I thought the answer to this was 'Sofia'. The problem for me comes when anyone asks 'what's Sofia'.
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It's certainly difficult - if not impossible - to define the elements that make up consciousness. It would be a grave error (though tempting to the philosophers) to dismiss its reality simply because it has no sound definition. For most of us, it doesn't need a sound definition.
 
westprog said:
It's certainly difficult - if not impossible - to define the elements that make up consciousness. It would be a grave error (though tempting to the philosophers) to dismiss its reality simply because it has no sound definition. For most of us, it doesn't need a sound definition.
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While I agree we can happily be conscious without a definition, surely a reasonably sound, mutually agreed definition is required before we can sensibly discuss whether it's been explained. If we don't have that we'll just end up with a 28 page thread of people talking past each other.

Oh wait, sorry....

I'll go back to lurking.
 
Piggy said:
No, but there surely have been billions of brains that have dreamt while no recognizable input from the body was being fed into Sofia.
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True, the input is still there and being scanned at some level aside SOFIA, otherwise alarm clocks would be worthless. Even during SOFIA much input is ignored or not attended to.
 
Guybrush Threepwood said:
While I agree we can happily be conscious without a definition, surely a reasonably sound, mutually agreed definition is required before we can sensibly discuss whether it's been explained. If we don't have that we'll just end up with a 28 page thread of people talking past each other.

Oh wait, sorry....

I'll go back to lurking.
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Some of us mentioned the medical defintion earlier, it is sort of boring.
 
westprog said:
It's certainly difficult - if not impossible - to define the elements that make up consciousness. It would be a grave error (though tempting to the philosophers) to dismiss its reality simply because it has no sound definition. For most of us, it doesn't need a sound definition.
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And the rest may well be P-Zombies, in which case no definition will be adequate.
 
cornsail said:
Yarp. Not perfect, but you are pretty close to correctly applying the label this time. Technically it is an argument against materialism rather than an argument for dualism. I tend to lean more toward idealism or neutral monism than dualism, although all the philosophical stances have major flaws.
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Hi. Universe, this is cornsail. cornsail, this is the Universe. I understand that you two have never met.
 
Guybrush Threepwood said:
While I agree we can happily be conscious without a definition, surely a reasonably sound, mutually agreed definition is required before we can sensibly discuss whether it's been explained. If we don't have that we'll just end up with a 28 page thread of people talking past each other.

Oh wait, sorry....

I'll go back to lurking.
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I certainly agree that a fairly sound, mutually agreed definition is necessary if we are to claim that "consciousness has been fully explained". The lack of a definition doesn't preclude investigation of the subject, though.
 
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