Has consciousness been fully explained?

[rocketdodger]

I'll bite. How is a newborn like a programmable thermostat?

Well, you could say thermostats have involuntary reactions to external stimuli, and that is about it.

Seems to me thats all a newborn has as well.

Now the other side of the question is "how is a newborn like an adult human?"

Besides the basic involuntary reactions to environmental stimuli, which thermostats have as well, I can't think of much that adults can do that a newborn will do.

Do you disagree?

 

[westprog]

Please, let's stop with the shell game.

This is your definition of computation we're working with.

By the definition you gave, grandfather clocks and hearts are computers, as well as brains. That was my only point.

And maybe that's true, which is fine.

But to say that I'm somehow attempting to compare Deep Blue with, say, a program that prints "Hello World" is to either fundamentally misunderstand or misrepresent what I've written.

This is a dance we've been through with RD many times. He makes a definition, we explore what the implications of the definition are, then he ridicules whatever was implied by what he said in the first place.

 

[rocketdodger]

Please, let's stop with the shell game.

This is your definition of computation we're working with.

By the definition you gave, grandfather clocks and hearts are computers, as well as brains. That was my only point.

And maybe that's true, which is fine.

But to say that I'm somehow attempting to compare Deep Blue with, say, a program that prints "Hello World" is to either fundamentally misunderstand or misrepresent what I've written.

You said "no different."

If your point was *only* that grandfather clocks and hearts are also computers by this definition, you should have said so.

And in that case -- so what? Grandfather clocks and hearts are also made of nothing but subatomic particles. Does this imply, in any way useful to the current conversation, that they are "no different?" No, it does not.

In fact, the only reason anyone should care about what the label "computation" actually means is if they are on some silly quest to determine whether human consciousness is somehow special in a divine way. That is westprog's whole game, for instance -- show me a property that neurons have that soup doesn't have, because if you can't then neurons are "no different" from soup, and this is absurd, so clearly we have a soul. What is the point to that kind of thinking?

When we say what neurons do is a form of switching, it is just a convenient way to describe the behavior of the particles of the neuron system. Thats it. If clocks and hearts and anything else also behaves like this it doesn't matter one bit.

God, I am so tired of having to explain this.

 

[rocketdodger]

This is a dance we've been through with RD many times. He makes a definition, we explore what the implications of the definition are, then he ridicules whatever was implied by what he said in the first place.

You mean the implication that neurons are equivalent to a bowl of soup?

Yes, I ridicule that implication. Because it is utterly stupid.

 

[rocketdodger]

Again, you would do well to put down the general philosophy for a moment and look at the brain, if you don't mind my saying so.

Tinker toys are so physically different from the components of the brain that it would be rather silly to attempt to build a functional brain out of them.

Who cares if it would be silly?

I am concerned with if it would be possible.

I wasn't aware that science, in particular theoretical science, had any concerns about "silly."

 

[rocketdodger]

Funny you should mention that.

As it turns out, a newborn, just hours old, will initiate sympathetic crying when it hears other newborns cry.

However, it will not initiate sympathetic crying when it hears itself crying, or when it hears older babies crying.

Pretty impressive for a brain just a few hours old.

You underestimate the power of the newborn brain.

I mean, really, you should try studying the brain sometime. It's an amazing thing.

Do you think this external behavior implies a self-awareness similar to our own, and the baby is thinking "I hear those other babies, so I am going to start crying too, because I like to communicate?"

Or do you think the organizing neural network in the baby's brain is just doing something like a development "sound test?"

You accuse me of paying too much attention to external behavior -- well I think you are assuming too much about possible internal behavior. Why would a newborn be thinking any thoughts at all, let alone thoughts comparable to those of you and me?

 

[westprog]

So what?

The very reason we use flight simulations is so that no one gets hurt when the plane "crashes" -- i.e., it ain't real, it's just designed to trick a human brain into perceiving a phony reality that ain't there.

Yet for some reason, some folks want an exception whereby a simulation of a brain is real.

No one that I've seen -- here or anywhere else -- has offered any explanation of why that might be the case, or how.

This topic takes some bizarre twists and turns, but one of the weirdest has been the idea that simulated worlds are just as real as the one we live in - and this is supposed to be based on materialism!

 

[westprog]

Yes, for real-life consciousness.

If it were accepted that simulated consciousness would not in fact be real-life consciousness, then some agreement would be possible. It's the insistence that there's no distinction between them that is the issue.

IMO, there's no reason to suppose that simulated consciousness is any more "real" than simulated flying.

 

[westprog]

Strawman and analogy fail. We're talking about behavior.

I think you need to be precise about what you mean by programming. The difference between a real-time control program which interacts with the material world, and a data-processing program that is essentially a Turing Machine is profound. If we are at cross purposes, then it's necessary to clarify what we are talking about.

 

[westprog]

That's a fascinating question, and largely unanswered, but back to my point, they clearly do not run digital simulations of brains.

What they do is interact with the real world in real time. Any simulation that doesn't do that will not be doing what a brain does, and hence any claim that consciousness will be produced is somewhat dubious.

If a computer were to be programmed so that is was able to control a robot body, and perform similar functions for the robot body that the brain performs for human beings, then it could reasonably be argued that it was doing the same thing as a brain, and hence might be conscious. Such a computer would not be following the Turing model, of course, and hence theories relating to the Turing model wouldn't apply.

 

[westprog]

Nope. Hours.





I know of no developmental biologist who believes that.

Care to name one?

I think the question here relates to whether consciousness is pre-natal or not. Whether or not it is is an interesting question, but peripheral.

 

[westprog]

Characters in the simulation can get hurt by the simulated plane.

Er... no. No, no, no. If that were in fact the case, running the simulator would be a cruel and wicked thing. Nobody is getting hurt, simulated or otherwise. And there is no "in the simulation".

 

[bruto]

Has Consciousness been fully explained yet? The short form for those disinclined to read all 5013 posts is: apparently not.

 

[Belz...]

Er... no. No, no, no. If that were in fact the case, running the simulator would be a cruel and wicked thing. Nobody is getting hurt, simulated or otherwise. And there is no "in the simulation".

Fascinating.

 

[laca]

If it were accepted that simulated consciousness would not in fact be real-life consciousness, then some agreement would be possible. It's the insistence that there's no distinction between them that is the issue.

There's no real distinction. Just as you are not able to tell whether you're in a perfect simulation, the simulated consciousness would have no way either. As far as it's concerned, it's all real.

 

[laca]

I think you need to be precise about what you mean by programming. The difference between a real-time control program which interacts with the material world, and a data-processing program that is essentially a Turing Machine is profound. If we are at cross purposes, then it's necessary to clarify what we are talking about.

See my previous reply: the difference might be profound to you, someone observing the Turing Machine. But for the consciousness(es) running inside the Turing Machine, it's the same. Hey, maybe they invent a Turing² Machine and start arguing whether the simulated² consciousness is real or not! Of course, they would not be aware of the second power... Wouldn't that be funny?

 

[westprog]

There's no real distinction. Just as you are not able to tell whether you're in a perfect simulation, the simulated consciousness would have no way either. As far as it's concerned, it's all real.

Why on Earth would I believe that there's anything there in the simulation to have a consciousness? That's a massive leap of faith.

 

[Frank Newgent]

If it were accepted that simulated consciousness would not in fact be real-life consciousness, then some agreement would be possible. It's the insistence that there's no distinction between them that is the issue.

There's no real distinction. Just as you are not able to tell whether you're in a perfect simulation, the simulated consciousness would have no way either. As far as it's concerned, it's all real.

Knowing you are unable to tell whether you are in a perfect simulation... do you live your life differently from somebody who finds the idea absurd?

 

[Piggy]

You said "no different."

If your point was *only* that grandfather clocks and hearts are also computers by this definition, you should have said so.

With all due respect, I wouldn't have to keep clarifying all of this if your half of the conversation wasn't stateless.

This makes it very hard to have a dialog, because we're off in a new direction at every stage.

In fact, that last sentence of yours up there is totally off the mark.

Look, I think -- I hope -- that we can all agree that you can't make a computer get up and walk across the room by having it run a sim of a human body standing up and walking across the room.

And I think/hope we can all agree that programming alone will not make a computer play music or produce a printout or display photographs. To do these things, we need hardware that's designed and built to do them.

But when it comes to being conscious, some folks contend that this one behavior is an exception, that it can result purely from programming, and that running a perfect sim of a brain will result in the computer being conscious. (Nevermind that the folks doing just that don't believe any such thing.)

When asked why, the reason given is that consciousness is a behavior resulting from computation, which makes it different.

Now, computation is defined as taking inputs, applying rules, and obtaining predictable outputs based on the application of those rules to the inputs.

The problem with this claim is that we can describe the real-world behavior of every organ and system in our bodies -- in fact, every cell and molecule -- in the same way.

We can also describe the action of pendulums on grandfather clocks in this way.

There's been an extended discussion about whether or not rocks can be switches, and I don't have anything to say about that, but I do know that piles of grass can be switches, because natures uses them as switches. The gender of alligators is determined by their incubation temperature, and the incubation temperature is determined by the state of the nest, which is a pile of grass.

In short, the notion of computation, as it has been described here by the very people defending it as a game-changer for the brain, is in no way unique to the brain at all.

So, just like the Church-Turing argument, this one also fails to pan out.

At the end of the day, the brain is an organ which obeys only one set of rules... that is, the same laws of physics which all other organs, indeed all other physical systems, also obey.

The fact that we can describe its high-level behavior in terms of algorithms does not make it any different from anything else.

So we still do not expect that any of its biological functions can be achieved by pure programming, or that running a sim of a brain on a computer will cause the computer itself to adopt any of its behaviors.

If you want an artificial leg that acts like a leg, you're going to have to build a functional model that performs that behavior in real spacetime. Ditto for an artificial heart that pumps fluid, or an artificial gut that digests food, or an artifical brain that produces conscious experience.

And that's really all there is to it.

 

[Piggy]

So they have reflexes. A spider's leg has reflexes.

I wasn't using that as an example of consciousness, just to point out that the poster is not at all familiar with what newborn brains can and can't do.