Has consciousness been fully explained?

[Piggy]

This is somewhat misleading.

The argument is between people who think that every behavior, both private and public, exhibited by entities that are known to be conscious could also be exhibited by any other computational process of sufficient complexity and organization, and those that believe this is unproven, unlikely, or wrong.

You are painting this argument as "A toaster has dreams, I am sure of it" vs. "I don't think you have checked your math correctly."

It is more like "Why can't a robot as complicated as a human have dreams?" vs. "becase, sofia, nyah na na na nyah na na, and Roger Penrose said so."

Lets not get confused about who is in which camp, and the apparent education levels here. Everyone in the first camp is either knowledgeable in these fields or else humble enough to not make claims. Everyone in the latter camp is ... neither.

Do you dispute this? Are there any professionals in any relevant field, be it computer science, neuroscience, behavioral science, biology, or anything like that, in the latter camp on this forum?

I don't think anyone is arguing that a robot couldn't have dreams. Well, maybe Al Bell, but certainly not me or westprog.

Your problem is with this phrase:

could also be exhibited by any other computational process of sufficient complexity and organization

There is an incorrect assumption here that consciousness is a computational process.

It isn't, except in the sense that hurricanes can be considered computational processes.

Consciousness is something the body does, like maintaining blood pressure or regulating blood sugar. It's a real-world event. We don't know how the brain does it, but we know it's doing it, that this lump of physical matter is somehow making consciousness occur in 4-D spacetime.

Which means it's not any kind of computational process, unless hurricanes are also computational processes.

Someone upthread said that the difference between his brain and his leg muscle is that his brain has information in it and uses rules. But in fact, for any given definition of rules or information, either they both follow one and have the other, or neither does.

They're both lumps of matter that obey the laws of physics. And at the end of the day that's all they do, either one.

So the operation of physics in the real world causes consciousness to occur, we know that. Otherwise it's an event in spacetime with no physical cause, and that's an absurdity.

I had to know that much at least in school. By now the process is a little more fleshed out, but still, there's no 4-D spacetime event being caused by computation itself. Consciousness is not a computational process.

But that doesn't mean robots can't be conscious. Some sort of conscious machine must be possible in theory. But it will have to use a model brain. Can you make that out of computer parts? Well, sure, if you use the right materials and include the right peripherals, but you're sure not going to calculate your way into a conscious machine, unless the calculation directs some 4-D spacetime process that's designed to make the event really happen.

 

[Piggy]

Then you're not only wrong, you're professing to a logically incoherent belief system.

It's either a precise simulation or it isn't.

If it is, the simulation produces all the behaviours of the system being simulated.

If it's not, you contradicted the premise you had just accepted.

If you're asserting that simulated oranges don't contain physical Vitamin C, then you're committing a category error.

Wait a minute, hold the phone.

You're talking about digital simulations of oranges, here?

Or are you talking about using some sort of manufacturing process to physically produce an artifical orange?

Because if you're talking about the former, you would have to be fundamentally confused to believe it contained "physical vitamin C".

If the latter, then the analogy is to a model brain, which is a trivial observation.

 

[PixyMisa]

I am the only person to bother to address the "turing model can't account for time" nonsense that is being ressurected as of late, taking the time to make many posts regarding how time reduces to event order.p

I've addressed that one too. Not that it made any difference.

 

[PixyMisa]

Do intelligent people usually spend a lot of time telling people how intelligent they are?

He's talking about the intelligence displayed - i.e. the quality of the argument. Since the anti-computationalist side is represented almost entirely by the arguments from incredulity and ignorance, they give themselves little opportunity to display any signs of insight or intellect. Most of the time they don't even try.

You are something of an exception there. Still wrong, though.

 

[rocketdodger]

I had to know that much at least in school. By now the process is a little more fleshed out, but still, there's no 4-D spacetime event being caused by computation itself. Consciousness is not a computational process.

I have already explained, in great detail, how computation isn't something that happens in textbooks but rather a real world behavior that is exhibited by certain systems of particles.

I don't know why you keep insisting that computation is limited to the abstract world of computer science textbooks.

It is a real thing.

And neurons do it.

There isn't really anything else to be said, unless you want to claim that neurons don't act the way science has known them to act for 50+ years now.

 

[Piggy]

Now, if we can take a break from discussing conscious machines which no one's ever built or even designed, how about a little look at actual consciousness.

The McGurk effect....



This is just another indication that the daemons working behind the scenes are making a slew of non-conscious (or pre-conscious or co-conscious) decisions which construct this world that we live in and who we are while Sofia is active.

Everything we experience is to some extent an illusion, but it's an illusion that's in live connection with reality and served up in a very particular way that our brains are designed to do.

The coordination of this sense of unified experience through time is quite a feat.

There's not much time lag between what's bombarding our senses and our experience of events, but there's a lot of routing and remembering and combining going on in the interim.

 

[rocketdodger]

I've addressed that one too. Not that it made any difference.

We forgot the whole relativity thing, too, since that is related to the time == order of events lecture we had to give.

 

[Piggy]

I have already explained, in great detail, how computation isn't something that happens in textbooks but rather a real world behavior that is exhibited by certain systems of particles.

I don't know why you keep insisting that computation is limited to the abstract world of computer science textbooks.

It is a real thing.

And neurons do it.

There isn't really anything else to be said, unless you want to claim that neurons don't act the way science has known them to act for 50+ years now.

That's great. If neuronal activity is computation, then computation is involved in generating consciousness.

 

[rocketdodger]

No, it also depends on the axioms you take as fact being true.

Are the strength of the axioms not part of the strength of the argument?

If you don't think so then yes, I also mean the axioms. My point is that whether or not my arguments correspond with objective fact, insofar as it would be possible for them to, is only dependent upon the argument and objective reality.

If I am stupid, or insane, or anything else, that has no direct bearing on the arguments I make except to increase the likelihood that they just aren't very good arguments.

 

[rocketdodger]

That's great. If neuronal activity is computation, then computation is involved in generating consciousness.

Thank you for finally understanding our position, at least in part.

 

[Piggy]

Thank you for finally understanding our position, at least in part.

Hey, no problem.

 

[Dancing David]

They're working on it - e.g. the Blue Brain project. We could probably simulate a whole human brain now - at least, construct a molecular simulation of our best knowledge of all the brain structures.

The reason no-one is even trying to do that is that it would cost as much as the LHC, and by the time you got the hardware up and running, much less the software, the price would have fallen by a factor of ten. So much saner to model the rat neocortex and try something bigger with each new generation of hardware.

Oh sure, I would start with the insects before the mammals, in terms of modeling. And in fact start with the know visual abilities of the insects, with some back engineering at every step. Model, study insects, model again.

I was just saying that to eliminate the possibility of modeling consciousness would take a lot more power than most people imagine. So if they tried with some huge arrays and did it over and over and could not at least make a p-zombie, then I would say that it was not possible to model consciousness with the methods tried.

 

[Meed]

Be aware of itself and its environment, to start with. Just the fundamentals of an intelligent agent that anyone with any knowledge of A.I. should be familiar with.

Look I am not an A.I. researcher, I wouldn't claim as much. But do you know that people here have seriously questioned notions as simple as self reference?

People like nick227 claim there is no self, so how can self reference exist in code. People like westprog claim that computation isn't different from cheese, so how can self reference exist in machines?

And in the face of clear examples to the contrary, their tune is always the same -- well, that isn't "real" self reference. Or "that just begs the question of what the self is to begin with."

That is how it goes down in here.



Not relatively, no. What they prefer to do instead is provide clear examples of why their arguments are correct, and then hope for responses that address the specific issues in question.

Why don't you go over my post history and determine the percentage of statements to the effect of how much smarter I am vs. statements where I provide evidence to support my arguments?

Why don't you go over the responses to such posts, and determine the percentage of relevant replies vs. issue dodging and outright omission?

Relax.

 

[Meed]

He's talking about the intelligence displayed - i.e. the quality of the argument. Since the anti-computationalist side is represented almost entirely by the arguments from incredulity and ignorance, they give themselves little opportunity to display any signs of insight or intellect. Most of the time they don't even try.

You are something of an exception there. Still wrong, though.

Given that most of your posts have consisted of little other than "Nope.", "Dualism." or "Read GEB." I don't think you're in a position to criticize other posters. Piggy, westprog and others on the "anti-computationalist side" have been posting perfectly well. Robin's posts (on the "computational side") were high quality in my opinion. RD's posts would be fine if it weren't for the hostility and assertions of intellectual superiority. And I think your own posts are fine when you actually put in the effort, rare as that may be.

Now can we stop talking about posters and go back to substance? Can you elaborate on how "how old is the Earth?" indicates a counter-example to the idealist arguments? Also can you answer my question about the TM-simulated orange? If I simulate an orange with a symbol manipulator box and tape can I eat it and reduce my risk of gout?

EDIT: GED = GEB (fixed)

 

[AlBell]

Point of order (or is it ordure?): it's Godel, Escher, Bach.

 

[Meed]

Now, if we can take a break from discussing conscious machines which no one's ever built or even designed, how about a little look at actual consciousness.

The McGurk effect....



This is just another indication that the daemons working behind the scenes are making a slew of non-conscious (or pre-conscious or co-conscious) decisions which construct this world that we live in and who we are while Sofia is active.

Everything we experience is to some extent an illusion, but it's an illusion that's in live connection with reality and served up in a very particular way that our brains are designed to do.

The coordination of this sense of unified experience through time is quite a feat.

There's not much time lag between what's bombarding our senses and our experience of events, but there's a lot of routing and remembering and combining going on in the interim.

Yeah. Conscious processes do seem to be a relatively small part of the overall activity of our brain. Much of the brain activity seems to function to process information (e.g. sensory input) and then send that information to the conscious processing systems.

It's interesting how poor our conscious processing is when it comes to carrying out computation and manipulating bits of information. Examples would be conscious reasoning, doing a math problem or just remembering a series of numbers. It's indicated by studies that our "working memory" (which roughly indicates conscious processing) has a capacity of only about 3-4 "chunks" of information. That is it can only work with about 3 or 4 pieces of information at a time. It is also ridiculously slow and error-prone compared to other processing carried out by the brain.

There was a guy on "Stan Lee's Superhumans" who could carry out complex math sums instantly in his head. While most people have to use conscious processing to do math problems, an fMRI scan revealed that an area of his motor cortex was particularly active when he was doing math. This makes some sense, because complex motor activity quickly becomes "automatic" through practice and repetition. We don't have to consciously perform calculations on which parts of our body need to move where in order to maintain balance. Somehow this guy's brain came to treat math problems the way most of our brains treat motor activity.

What is it about our conscious processing systems that makes them so much slower and more limited in capacity than other systems? Given our billions of neurons, lightning fast brain, seemingly complex equations should be at least potentially trivial to compute. But it's not so with this type of processing.

One area it could be argued that conscious processing excels is in inductive reasoning. Selecting what to process, selecting which information to draw on, making seemingly non-tractable evaluations and so on. A top Go player can supposedly beat any Go AI program. With chess this is not quite the case, but a top player can certainly beat most chess AIs, just not the ones using supercomputers. Since they know which potential sequences of moves to pay attention to, they require assessing only a tiny fraction of the potential permutations the computer must carry out. Also they can assess the relative value of strategic positions far better than the computer.

That is not to say that it's impossible a computer could be developed that displays strong "inductive" reasoning ability. It's just a look at what strengths and weaknesses conscious processing seems to posses.

 

[Guybrush Threepwood]

Now, if we can take a break from discussing conscious machines which no one's ever built or even designed, how about a little look at actual consciousness.

The McGurk effect....



This is just another indication that the daemons working behind the scenes are making a slew of non-conscious (or pre-conscious or co-conscious) decisions which construct this world that we live in and who we are while Sofia is active.

That's a very strange choice of clip to choose to illustrate consciousness, since it seems to be, by your definition an entirely unconscious process, and doesn't help me understand what it is you are arguing.

 

[AlBell]

Anyone know what non-english speakers hear? Always bah?

As to the effect being conscious or unconscious, about all that says is we don't understand what separates them.

And dreaming? Another huh? how'd that happen? As one of my favorite writers asked, Do androids dream of electric sheep?

SRIP, indeed; and maybe in some far distant future programmers might buy a clue as to what they're 'programming'.

http://news.discovery.com/animals/worm-human-brain.html
Of course one could try to replicate a worm brain. Unfortunately no-one will ever know 'what it's like to be a worm' (conscious even perhaps)' so our programmer will never know if that simulation was successful either.

 

[Piggy]

What is it about our conscious processing systems that makes them so much slower and more limited in capacity than other systems? Given our billions of neurons, lightning fast brain, seemingly complex equations should be at least potentially trivial to compute. But it's not so with this type of processing.

Well, obviously, evolution wanted it that way. So consciousness must be primarily designed to do something other than solve complex math problems and things like that.

In fact, as you mention in the example, there's a lot of very rapid stuff going on as the impulses sluice around their neural courses (changing those courses as they do) including "decision points" at which things generally go one way or another depending on the strength of the traffic at the roundabout.

If, for example, consciousness evolved to make decisions -- or create the environment for decisions -- that the daemons could not handle by themselves, then because it's a high-maintenance bodily function you'd want to keep resource-use low, and it would be dealing with real-time interactions which means real-world timeframes for the kinds of things we'd need to be doing during the bulk of our evolutionary history.

Our brains do a lot of fill-in. We're not actually sensing most of what we experience. And the information is very highly filtered and very highly processed before it's made available to whatever process generates that experience.

It's interesting that there's a minimal time threshold for conscious awareness of an event -- if it doesn't take a certain amount of time to occur, we can't be aware of it, even if our brain perceives it, remembers it, even learns from it.

Which means that a "moment" might be an objective unit of time, if it turns out that our brains take samples of the neural activity available to it over certain lengths of time (microseconds) and create something like a "frame" from each sample, each frame being a multi-dimensional omni-sensory impression of "everything we're aware of" during that somewhat smeared timespan.

If so, our consciousness would actually flicker, like a movie, but we'd be unaware of the micro-gaps.

The more we can work from stored memory -- which we appear to do as we age -- the lower this "sample rate" can be, so the body saves resources by slowing it down, and as a result time appears to speed up because during a day we experience fewer "frames" than we did when we were younger, especially very young, and spend more time in the gaps.

It would slow down again during times of extremely focused attention, such as life-threatening emergencies or painful experiences. (Why it would slow down during times of boredom, though, I don't know.)

If that were true, then it would be interesting to see if there were a relationship b/t the patterns of simultaneous brain waves and the flicker rate.

 

[Piggy]

That's a very strange choice of clip to choose to illustrate consciousness, since it seems to be, by your definition an entirely unconscious process, and doesn't help me understand what it is you are arguing.

Well, that's the point. It's about both. It's about what we consciously experience, and its dependence on non-conscious brain processes which generate that experience.

We're conscious of hearing one sound or the other. But we don't get to choose what we're conscious of, even when we know (consciously) that we're experiencing an illusion.

This helps demonstrate how the brain does consciousness, where consciousness lies along the chain, what the brain includes and excludes, and the power of the non-conscious parts of the brain, which is the majority of what's going on with that organ.

ETA: When listening to the audio of that clip, I find that I can switch back and forth from BA to FA by imagining the video, or imagining my own mouth moving, or thinking of the letters B and F, and so forth. Is there some sort of feedback mechanism lingering there, giving Sofia some means of control?