Has consciousness been fully explained?

[Third Eye Open]

There you go, asked and answered.


Call it what you like. I know what I mean, and I strongly suspect that everyone else does too.


I'm glad it works for you. As far as I'm concerned, it's not even wrong.

So... qualia are generated by nervous systems?

 

[AlBell]

So... qualia are generated by nervous systems?

So materialists aver.

Or, "it's an illusion" or "it doesn't exist".

 

[Third Eye Open]

So materialists aver.

Or, "it's an illusion" or "it doesn't exist".

I was being serious. I've never exactly understood 'qualia' as anything other than experience. Do animals have qualia? Or can qualia be boiled down to 'human experience' just like you seem to want to define consciousness as 'human consciousness.'

 

[Malerin]

I was being serious. I've never exactly understood 'qualia' as anything other than experience. Do animals have qualia? Or can qualia be boiled down to 'human experience' just like you seem to want to define consciousness as 'human consciousness.'

Subjective experience. Not restricted to humans though. An alien might experience pain or the color red completely differently than we do. Qualia would still apply, though.

 

[Third Eye Open]

Subjective experience. Not restricted to humans though. An alien might experience pain or the color red completely differently than we do. Qualia would still apply, though.

Right, because they would presumably have brains and nervous systems that were put together differently.

Is subjective experience supposed to be 'unexplained'? I had assumed that there was some subtle difference between subjective experience and qualia that I was missing.

 

[Malerin]

Once again, Pixy, are you going to support your claims with anything other than Wikipedia? Even the Wikipedia article doesn't support your claim, but I think its poorly written and we both know it's not even sourced. Now I've provided other sources to support my claim. If you disagree, you must state why you think the sources are wrong or provide sources of your own.

Or we can establish necessary and sufficient condition in modal terms. Please answer the following questions:

1. Is there any possible world where consciousness occurs without SRIP occuring?
If No, then SRIP is a necessary condition for consciousness.
2. Is there a possible world where consciousness occurs if just SRIP occurs?
If Yes, then SRIP is a sufficient condition for consciousness.

If (no) and (yes) to 1 and 2, respectively, then SRIP is a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness. Just as being an unmarried man is a necessary and sufficient condition for being a bachelor.

If you have different answers for 1 and 2, I think your opponents would be really interested in that.

OK, Pixy, since you're unable to support your claim that SRIP is not a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness, we have to conclude you're wrong and your claim "SRIP IS consciousness" is equivalent to "SRIP is a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness".

So let's see what that entails:

The first objection is the easiest: there are unconscious processes at work in our brains all the time (e.g., regulation of digestion). These processes involve information processing and are self-referential. Therefore, these processes are SRIP.

It follows from the claim that SRIP is a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness, that these processes are conscious processes. However, we are not conscious of them. There's a contradcition. Therefore, SRIP is not a necessary and sufficient for consciousness.

Over to you.

 

[Frank Newgent]

Correct. But earlier you wrote

"if there is a strict turing machine brain, obviously the entire world the brain lives in must be computed as part of the same tape on the turing machine. Then the brain is actually only a subset of the total tape and total computations going on."

You seem to be contradicting yourself at almost every opportunity.

I don't think the act of simply repeating something I said and then exclaiming "aha -- a contradiction" is ample evidence of an actual contradiction.

Can you actually describe why I am contradicting myself? Because I am not aware of any contradiction.

I'll repost it and bold those parts. It's right after the part of that same post that you didn't address.

Your computations would encompass the full external world? Without leaving anything out? Sounds difficult.

In a trivial sense, yes that would be the fallback case. But the idea is that perhaps not everything in the universe has a relevant effect on a given consciousness. For example, a supernova in another galaxy, or even what a Chinese woman is doing right now, probably has no effect on my consciousness.

Which presents a problem considering your fallback position.

Would Godel describe such a system as inconsistent?

No, incompleteness still applies. In fact incompleteness is even more intuitive and obvious in such a case, because you can't find any arrangement of information that can simultaneously reference all of itself -- it is a simple case of there not being enough resources.

Correct. But earlier you wrote

"if there is a strict turing machine brain, obviously the entire world the brain lives in must be computed as part of the same tape on the turing machine. Then the brain is actually only a subset of the total tape and total computations going on."

You seem to be contradicting yourself at almost every opportunity.

That an arrangement of information cannot simultaneously reference all of itself while, at the same time, a turing machine's entire world is computed on the turing machine seems contradictory to me.

Have I misunderstood you RD?

I asked because you said earlier that your "computations might need to encompass the full external world". Seems to me that full external world would encompass that which is not yet understood/defined.

Rather than contradict yourself again this time you choose to answer a question different than the one asked.

It is quite simple frank. If the set of operations available for computational use includes everything needed to compute the behavior of any particle to an arbitrary level -- and mathematics tells us that the basic operations of computation I.E. arithmetic is sufficient -- then any behavior of any combination of particles can also be computed.

In other words, if you can compute the behavior of 16 particles then in principle you can compute the behavior of 16 zillion, notwithstanding issues of computing resources.

Now I don't know if we have a canonical description of all particle behavior -- I suspect not. But in any case, I doubt we will discover a particle behavior that requires a breach of mathematics and is not computable in the traditional sense. At least, we haven't encountered a single one yet.

That is kind of how math works, Frank. Remember how you would see all those fancy physics equations in school, that looked alien, but it turned out that when you applied them it was just math as usual? Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, of terms? Yeah....

My question would the full external world encompass that which is not yet understood/defined was really nothing more than a tangent.

Still, related to your saying that mathematically describing mental content partly dependent on the mind's relationship to the external world - such as shared meaning and the contents of communications - would involve computations needing to encompass the entire world.

Again, contradicting what you said earlier about any arrangement of information simultaneously referencing all of itself.

Have I misunderstood you RD?

 

[Clive]

The fundamental concept you are missing is that SRIP occurs when the pattern is what is doing the interpreting, and it recognizes itself.

Does it say "hello" when it "recognises itself"? You see, that all seems pretty vague and hand-wavey to me. What does it mean for a pattern to recognise itself? Pixy agreed that a BF self-interpreter running a copy of itself running a BF quine met the criteria for SRIP/consciousness although he seemed a little less sure about a BF quine running "on its own". Do you agree with him?

Either way, can you provide up with a cleaner/simpler/smaller example that we can talk about more easily?

If you don't believe such a thing happens in some systems and not others, then I have to ask you how you think bacteria are able to behave like bacteria when meteor showers are not able to behave like bacteria.

Before we can say whether such a thing happens in some systems and not in other we have to know exactly what that "thing" is meant to be. As already noted above, I'm still waiting for a precise and clear definition and some actual examples to illustrate exactly what you mean by "a pattern interpreting and recognising itself".

I don't know why are you asking about bacteria acting like a meteor showers or vice versa. I talked about what might be encoded in a meteor shower. I didn't mention bacteria, but I suppose you could arrange for a "shower of bacteria" flying through space in a pattern that was isomorphic to the pattern seen in the meteor shower. I suppose you might want to claim the two groups were "behaving" similarly then? How about if some pattern in the meteor show happens to be isomorphic in some sense to the pattern of atoms in the bacteria? Does that mean anything?

After all, you do believe the "pattern" of neurons firing in your brain is ultimately completely described only by matter and energy interacting according to the "rules of our universe", right? Same for the pattern of movements and interactions between atoms and molecules in a bacteria? Ditto for the lumps of stuff found in a meteor shower?

But anyway, please show me one of these SRIP patterns so we know exactly what you're talking about. Something specific. Right here, in this thread, so we can talk about how and why and when you think it has the specific properties you claim that must make it logically equivalent to subjective experience.

 

[Clive]

The involvement of certain areas and structures is required for consciousness. When you turn on the ignition in your car, the electrical system becomes functional, but you can't go anywhere until the engine is started.

...

Well a possible facile answer is that you simply may not remember the state of consciousness you were in - e.g. dreams are typically are forgotten within seconds of waking. A better answer is probably that the areas/structures needed for consciousness are not active at that time.

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 guess it's the principle of functional equivalence - if you replace the components of a system by functionally equivalent components connected in functionally equivalent ways, then the system itself will function in the same way.

That's not really what I getting at though. What I'm talking about is why (apparently) only a bunch of neurons firing in some particular pattern generates subjective experience of the kind that I am (mostly) so pleased to be able to have. Now it may be that consciousness (as in subjective experience/qualia) has no function (in which case a whole bunch of people say, well, why worry about it then). But I still want to know HOW/WHY it's there (for me at least). At the very least I'm curious about that.

We know how neurons work, how they connect together. We understand how they work together on a local level and something of their wider connections. We know the roles of the other stuff in there, e.g. glial cells, blood vessels, glands, etc. We know that when neurons in certain areas are stimulated, subjective experience is modified, we know that if they are damaged, consciousness and subjective experience can be permanently affected. We know that when people have particular subjective experiences, their neurons show particular patterns of activity across particular areas. It doesn't seem far fetched to me to suggest that our subjective experiences are embodied in the activity patterns of our neurons. That's what the evidence points to.

I largely agree with most of what you say here. "We" know a lot and the brain certainly seems to be intimately connected to consciousness. But I don't see any particular reason to just leap to the conclusion (which is how it looks to me) that means those patterns ARE consciousness, without at least wondering if there might be something else going on.

Not sure how meteor showers or rocks moving are self-referential or processing information, but many neural pathways show the feedback connectivity required for SRIP, and biological homeostasis itself is based on a multiplicity of feedback loops, so it's no great surprise to find it there. The brain is an information processor, and consciousness is self-referential by definition (self-awareness)... as I previously said, I think consciousness is based on SRIP, but in my opinion it requires a brain-like functional architecture to be the sort of conciousness we are familiar with.

The rocks being moved is a long range reference back to the discussion of Wolfram's rule 110 (around page 50ish if I recall) as depicted in the XKCD strip. My point is that if consciousness is computable (discrete/digital/Turing) there are an infinite number of ways the pattern of neurons firing could be mapped onto some other pattern in another "physical" medium. And yet supposedly they will all produce the same "I" and some subjective experience for that "I" up there somewhere. So, harking back to Wolfram's rule 110 again, I can be sitting here looking out at the arrangement of stones, scanning the rows and mentally checking that rule 110 has in fact been faithfully implemented. The only physical thing going on is in my own brain and yet this could be generating a conscious entity and subjective experiences or even ("slowly") a whole universe. Or so it is claimed. I recall you "provisionally" agreed to this 50+ pages ago. (I haven't checked back so please forgive me if I've confusing you with someone else.)

That's right, it hasn't yet been clearly defined.

Do you think Pixy and RD agree with you here? The only reason I'm asking is that it seems you might be following a slightly different path of your own in this discussion in some details at least and I'm just wondering if that's correct or if I'm reading too much into some of your statements.

Well we know the brain is an information processor comprising a large number of interconnected neural networks; its activity gives rise to consciousness and subjective experience. Now if you can suggest a way to get 'self-awareness' or 'self-consciousness' without some form of self-reference, then please do so.

My position is that we don't truly understand how consciousness/subjective experience/qualia work yet. I'm quite comfortable with saying "I don't know". If I do come across a theory that has more explanatory power than "it's SRIP" then I'll be very happy. I don't say that the SRIP idea is necessarily incorrect, but I don't find it particularly convincing as 'explained" so far.

Ultimately, there's always going to be the metaphysical divide between the subjective and the objective - I think to expect a complete objective explanation for purely subjective experience is a category error. As Chalmers said:By 'substantial principle' he means some fundamental assertion or assumption.

That's the problem with the subjective - someone else can't understand it for you

Perhaps nobody else can feel it for you but I don't see any reason why (in principle at least) someone couldn't understand it in terms of a theory that had more explanatory power than "Consciousness is SRIP, and that's all we can really say about it". Somehow that feels to me almost as lacking as a stone age scientist exclaiming, "Aha! Wood is fire".

 

[Clive]

Because the patterns are different.

The grain of a pine tree is different from from that of an oak but they can both burn.

No, it's not. While we can't evaluate non-existence, we can evaluate things like general anaesthesia, which has distinctly different effects on subjective experience than sleep.

Are you trying to tell me that you (not someone else) can tell the difference between being in a deep sleep and being fully anaesthetised while you are in either of those states?

Information is substrate-independent.

But who decides which encoding to use before you can do anything with it? Where's the SRIP in the BF quine? Or the BF self-interpreter running a copy of itself running the quine? Do we need the copy of the self-interpreter in there?

Rocks being moved about? Meteor showers?

We're talking about information processing. That's a physical process resulting in objectively distinct behaviours.

Let's say you spot a simple machine pushing some rocks around. Is some "I" feeling pain because of that, or is it simulating a power station, or is it just pushing rocks around? Where's the information? Who knows about it?

In other word, you define conscious to be self-referential information processing too.

No. I have no idea why you think that.

 

[dlorde]

It follows from the claim that SRIP is a necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness, that these processes are conscious processes. However, we are not conscious of them. There's a contradcition. Therefore, SRIP is not a necessary and sufficient for consciousness.

Interestingly, some brain/consciousness researchers are now of the opinion that there are multiple conscious subsystems in the brain and the consciousness that we seem to experience is a partial superposition or aggregate of these (much like Dennett's 'Multiple Draft' hypothesis). Whether the subsystems you mentioned are believed to be among this group, I don't know.

 

[dlorde]

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

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. 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. 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).

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.

What I'm talking about is why (apparently) only a bunch of neurons firing in some particular pattern generates subjective experience of the kind that I am (mostly) so pleased to be able to have. Now it may be that consciousness (as in subjective experience/qualia) has no function (in which case a whole bunch of people say, well, why worry about it then). But I still want to know HOW/WHY it's there (for me at least). At the very least I'm curious about that.

Me too, and I can't answer that, although I believe consciousness has a function - for us to have evolved the sophisticated level of self-awareness that we have suggests some selective advantage. I suspect it is co-evolutionary with complex society and culture. I also think it may be more productive to think in terms of interacting neural subsystems rather than 'a bunch of neurons'

... But I don't see any particular reason to just leap to the conclusion (which is how it looks to me) that means those patterns ARE consciousness, without at least wondering if there might be something else going on.

Something else - such as what? I don't see it as a 'leap' - we've taken the brain apart, looked at the components, and how they interact with each other. We've probed it in vivo, and scanned it while active. We've looked at the simpler brains of simpler creatures, and we see a progression in terms of complexity, but not in terms of new elements. I know of no experimental evidence that anything else is involved and I really can't see any reason to suspect there may be anything else going on besides the coordinated firings of neurons within, across, and between multiple subsystems. There is considerable evidence to indicate that this activity constructs consciousness. Quite how consciousness is constructed by this activity, I can't say, but until there's evidence to suggest otherwise, I'm going with what is suggested by the evidence we do have.

...My point is that if consciousness is computable (discrete/digital/Turing) there are an infinite number of ways the pattern of neurons firing could be mapped onto some other pattern in another "physical" medium. And yet supposedly they will all produce the same "I" and some subjective experience for that "I" up there somewhere. So, harking back to Wolfram's rule 110 again, I can be sitting here looking out at the arrangement of stones, scanning the rows and mentally checking that rule 110 has in fact been faithfully implemented. The only physical thing going on is in my own brain and yet this could be generating a conscious entity and subjective experiences or even ("slowly") a whole universe. Or so it is claimed. I recall you "provisionally" agreed to this 50+ pages ago. (I haven't checked back so please forgive me if I've confusing you with someone else.)

There is a complication in having a conscious creature involved in the process, and major level of abstraction, but yes, in principle, the continuing process of implementing the rule generates the entity(s) or universe and consciousness therein. The rocks are just the arbitrary substrate, it is the coherent patterns of activity and the interactions between those patterns that constitute the 'reality' of that universe. I find the interactions between patterns in Conway's Game Of Life to be a useful (if overly simplistic) analogy.

Do you think Pixy and RD agree with you here? The only reason I'm asking is that it seems you might be following a slightly different path of your own in this discussion in some details at least and I'm just wondering if that's correct or if I'm reading too much into some of your statements.

You'd have to ask them. We're all considering the same problems, and we've come to similar possible solutions. I think I understand what Pixy has done, and why, and I think it's a valid and useful approach. My views aren't fixed, and they have changed and developed since I got involved here - I've learnt a lot of new stuff.

My position is that we don't truly understand how consciousness/subjective experience/qualia work yet. I'm quite comfortable with saying "I don't know". If I do come across a theory that has more explanatory power than "it's SRIP" then I'll be very happy. I don't say that the SRIP idea is necessarily incorrect, but I don't find it particularly convincing as 'explained" so far.

I empathise with that position. I think the problem is more about what kind of SRIP implementation gives rise to high level reflective consciousness (i.e. higher mammals, primates, us), and how; and yes, I don't know either, beyond what the evidence indicates (as I explained above).

Perhaps nobody else can feel it for you but I don't see any reason why (in principle at least) someone couldn't understand it in terms of a theory that had more explanatory power than "Consciousness is SRIP, and that's all we can really say about it". Somehow that feels to me almost as lacking as a stone age scientist exclaiming, "Aha! Wood is fire".

Agreed. But I don't think the claim is "Consciousness is SRIP, and that's all we can really say about it". I think it is more "Consciousness is SRIP, let's investigate how this is implemented to generate high level consciousness". Personally, when I make apparently bald assertions, such as "subjective experience is the patterns of activity of our neurons", it's partly because I suspect that's the case, but I express it that way to provoke some constructive discussion and, possibly elaboration. Unfortunately, the typical response is simple negation, or juvenile sarcasm, etc. Meh

The semantics of 'consciousness' are a major problem, we do seem to have a tendency to revert to interpreting it as 'human consciousness' (which is itself a variable feast), at awkward moments, and this tends to disrupt constructive discussion. In this thread, there is also a quite unnecessary amount of puerile sniping, ad-homs, insults, and deliberate misunderstanding, that tends to degrade the discussion.

 

[Belz...]

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

You then disagree with Westprog that they are a synonym of experiences, then ?

[QUTOE]Its quite the reverse, actually. I even racall you using the excuse that English is not your 1st language [/QUOTE]

Well, what's YOUR excuse, then ?

 

[Belz...]

There you go, asked and answered.

So you're now retracting your claim ?

Call it what you like. I know what I mean, and I strongly suspect that everyone else does too.


I'm glad it works for you. As far as I'm concerned, it's not even wrong.

I'll take that as a complete unwillingness to answer because you know qualia don't exist, then.

When you feel like actually answering me, go right ahead.

 

[Belz...]

I was being serious. I've never exactly understood 'qualia' as anything other than experience.

Don't worry, qualia proponents don't exactly understand qualia either.

 

[rocketdodger]

Have I misunderstood you RD?

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.

 

[rocketdodger]

Does it say "hello" when it "recognises itself"? You see, that all seems pretty vague and hand-wavey to me. What does it mean for a pattern to recognise itself? Pixy agreed that a BF self-interpreter running a copy of itself running a BF quine met the criteria for SRIP/consciousness although he seemed a little less sure about a BF quine running "on its own". Do you agree with him?

Either way, can you provide up with a cleaner/simpler/smaller example that we can talk about more easily?

I have no idea wtf a BF quine self-interpreter is.

I think in terms of systems of particles.

Suppose you have three systems of particles A, B, and C. Further suppose that C can be anything in the rest of the universe if need be, it doesn't affect the argument.

Suppose the behavior of A is dependent upon the behavior of B such that when B is in a certain subset of states the state of A converges to state a1 and when B is in another subset of states the state of A converges to state a2. In other words

State of B is in { 1, 2, 3, 4, .... n } == A converges to state a1
State of B is in { n + 1, n + 2, ..... m } == A converges to state a2
(for the sake of convenience the states are merely labeled as integers above )

Further suppose that B is in a certain configuration that allows it to "interface" with other systems -- maybe like an enzyme interfaces with molecules that may or may not be one of the substrates they catalyze, whatever. And suppose that when B interfaces with a certain set of systems -- any one of which can be called C, above -- B is put in one of the states belonging to the first set above, { 1, 2, 3, 4, .... n }.

Finally, suppose that B is put in a state belonging to the second set above, { n + 1, n+2 .... m } IF AND ONLY IF B interfaces with A.

What does this mean? It means A will ONLY ever be in a state that converges to a2 if B is interfacing with A itself.

That is the fundamental idea of self reference. In this situation B is the "reference" and it can be referencing "self" or "non-self" from the point of view of system A. Of course A doesn't think "self" because it can be a very simple system that doesn't think at all -- it just behaves differently when B is interfacing with itself vs. anything else.

Note that there MUST be the second set of behaviors -- when B is NOT referencing self -- for self reference to apply. There is no such thing a self when there is no non-self. Both must exist.

Please ask if you have any questions.

 

[AkuManiMani]

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

You then disagree with Westprog that they are a synonym of experiences, then?

I don't think we necessarily disagree. Saying that qualia are the "paint" that compose the "paintings" of experience is perfectly congruent with westprog's definitions of the terms.

Its quite the reverse, actually. I even racall you using the excuse that English is not your 1st language

Well, what's YOUR excuse, then ?

Uhm...Because English isn't your first language...?

 

[westprog]

So you're now retracting your claim ?

Which claim? Could you quote it back, please?

I'll take that as a complete unwillingness to answer because you know qualia don't exist, then.

When you feel like actually answering me, go right ahead.

It's funny, because everyone who reads this knows that qualia exist. There's all kinds of digressions about whether we should use the term when there's a perfectly serviceable equivalent, or that when qualia is used it means something else which is magical, or mysterious.

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.

 

[!Kaggen]

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.

It takes a lot of self-denial to be right all the time.