On Consciousness

[Frank Newgent]

The maths problem transcends science.
[snip]

Unmitigated drivel.

Your response reminds me of the observation Mark Twain made with a friend about a cat who sat on a hot stove once and never sat on a hot stove again.

"What's wrong with that?" his friend asked.

"Stupid cat never sat on a cold stove either" Twain replied.

 

[blobru]

Creativity involves pleasure, maybe. Pleasure involves flesh, embodiment, working juices.

I can try to explain what I meant.

This is because I think it's better to try to be responsive, but not because I think I can do an adequate job of explaining myself.

Also, I regret entering the discussion, even whimsically. This stuff is so important to me that almost anything anyone -- including me -- says can make me pretty upset and screw me up for days. Skin too thin, kitchen too hot. So go easy on the snark.

My field is music composition, and I've hung around MIT for a couple years and some of the Kurzweil people in the distant past.

I don't think that some aspects of creative activities -- composing music, writing stories -- are completely mysterious.

There are rules, traditions, habits, patterns that can be analyzed.

http://www.psmag.com/culture/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/


David Cope did a very sophisticated program that could do a pretty good imitation of so-so original compositions by Mozart, and a lousy imitation of bad Stravinsky.

I will eat something unpalatable, however, if Cope's program ever spits out a new Mozart piano concerto that gives me chills when I listen. What Cope's program is doing is a combination of stored patterns and some more abstract rules. If Cope succeeded in coding the most abstract of these rules to the degree that it can sound like late Mozart at his best, he has musical insight close to Mozart. Or maybe not. However, I don't think he has succeeded.

Now, what I say next is not an argument from incredulity, it's simple incredulity, or incomprehension of my own processes, desires, and projects.

If I'm anything like other composers, I judge what I'm doing from a variety of different perspectives. One very important basis of judgement is whether listening to what I've done gives me pleasure. This response of pleasure is the end result of many complex judgments -- most of which are not entirely conscious, although some are conscious. It manifests, at best, as hair-raising, or chills. It involves my whole body. It relates to the whole history of prior attempts, which have everything to do with my projects in life -- who I want to be, who I've tried to be.

Same with my response to any composers whose work I've come to know very well and love. (Or jazz improvisers.) Not only do I respond to amazing harmonies, rhythms, melodies, textures, (ingredients that can be heard as the piece unfolds), but the piece I love by some composer is understandable in terms of her life's work -- against the background of her other pieces and her life's projects, her purpose. What is this 'purpose' of which I speak?

Just a comment - not to validate, or invalidate, what you're saying - this reminds me of the Don Giovanni scene from Amadeus. Salieri is watching from his opera box, and because he is a fellow composer and knows Mozart's life, he recognizes in the character of the death-figure (the ghost of the Commendatore) Mozart's recently-deceased father - or believes he does: the point being not whether his interpretation is 'correct'; but how Salieri's knowledge of and empathy with the source of the music deepen its meaning for him. Now imagine a reworking of Amadeus with a Mozart-bot that couldn't possibly have had those experiences and been drawing on them as inspiration, conscious or otherwise, which creates the Mozart canon. It's the same music, yet Salieri sitting in his opera box isn't as bowled over by it, lacking the epiphany: Comm ghost = Mozart's dad; the music, for all its formal wonderfulness, can't possibly be as meaningful, in the sense of "meaning" as a mapping from one domain to another, for Salieri, because there is no biographical-human-emotional domain for it to map to. And even supposing Salieri hadn't known anything about Mozart except he was human: take away that humanity, replace Mozart with Mozart-bot, and any emotional meaning that the listener might infer the composer was trying to share vanishes. I wonder if part of our enjoyment of music is what it might communicate about the composer, about her and our shared experience; take away the emotions, the struggle and joy of creating, from the composer, and there's not much left to share (although still its abstract brilliance to appreciate of course, the quality of organized sound whether transcribed from a human composer's imagination or an AI's search-space or poo that a monkey flung onto a page; I don't know of any experiments, but I wonder how people listening to music without knowing it was computer-generated would be affected to find out).

(I'm not talking about pop or other dilute forms of music.)

What -- bad trends aside -- must drive formal innovation is a pleasure response. That sounds good. That's exciting.

The Rite of Spring must have sounded good to Stravinsky as he was composing it. What is this 'good' of which I speak? What is this pleasure?

Marvin Minksy said that emotions would be easy to program in AI, so I'm aware that even in the distant past of AI, some of the heavy thinkers didn't think there was anything sacred about emotions.

I've only seen humans compose good music worthy of the name, and I've only seen humans (as opposed to animals or computers) respond to it at a high level. To do so, they have to have musical training, intelligence, and emotions and desires in good working order. (This rules out The Sex Pistols, I'm afraid.) So I simply have no other examples of how creativity of a non-human, non-pleasure-based kind could work. Maybe it could.

In observing myself -- and this is why I care to try to explain, and why I care very deeply -- I'm terrified when my emotions seem to stop working properly, and my pleasure responses stop working. I'm desperate to know why. I spend almost all my time trying to figure this out these days, searching for the answer. It's really not a question I could ask a doctor, either.

It's like the joke about the bacon and eggs. The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. I'm the pig in this scenario.

Rather than shoot this down, take it as a stuttering, not-too-willing attempt to at least step up and explain what I mean.

Now I'll leave the thread. Sorry for this post, as well. I simply don't want to always be a blurt-and-run type.

Why want to do anything? What is wanting?

Well, now we're getting back to consciousness. What role do pleasure and pain and emotional affect in general play in consciousness; and what the heck are they anyway? They sure feel like motivation, yet they don't fit easily, if at all, into chains of material cause-and-effect (the underlying physical changes we observe when someone feels something could account for all of that, as epiphenomenalism^WP notes); they're more like a xmas bonus the accounting software accidentally added to our existence stub; and which, even if it shouldn't be there, there's no way we're giving back.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Creativity involves pleasure, maybe. Pleasure involves flesh, embodiment, working juices.

OK, so why and how do we create?

I've discovered that what motivates me more than anything else to create is being in love.

The evolutionary reason is to impress mates or prospective mates.

When I compose music, I am very conscious of how I'm doing it. I hate it when people tell me my music comes from God, because I remember the details of how I come up with nearly every note, chord, phrase, and rhythm. It's me doing it, bitch! I know well enough how I do it I could create a machine to do it, too.

The whole game, which has been very effective and quite instinctive, is to create music that expresses to mates or prospective mates how they make me feel (emotional communication). In one particular instance, I got a girl who dumped me to come back to me after I played her music I wrote that expressed how I felt about her.

Making music has always been my most effective chick magnet.

This is all easily explained by evolution: to communicate and impress the opposite sex. That's why we do it. When we do it for other reasons, it's the creative impulse misfiring. We're doing what peacocks do. Our culture glorifies it in the extreme (because it works), but the brain module that causes our music culture does the same thing whether it's Mozart or Beiber.

We make music (or the other arts) to impress prospective mates, but, evolution working the way it does, gives us creativity modules that misfire much of the time. They were not planned designs.

 

[!Kaggen]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtdKBOebO5E&sns=em

Is Arvo Part trying to impress a potential mate?

 

[blobru]

I think art as meaning is sufficient to explain art, even from an evolutionary perspective. If the art in one's life, including the joy of creating and communicating meaning through art to others, enhances the feeling one's life is meaningful, one side effect among many of that good feeling would be friskiness, and the desire to chance passing on those artful genes. But it (lust, or in the many cases where it isn't obviously lust, lust misfiring [great grunge band!]) needn't be the prime motive for art to reconcile it with evolution.

 

[!Kaggen]

I think art as meaning is sufficient to explain art, even from an evolutionary perspective. If the art in one's life, including the joy of creating and communicating meaning through art to others, enhances the feeling one's life is meaningful, one side effect among many of that good feeling would be friskiness, and the desire to chance passing on those artful genes. But it (lust, or in the many cases where it isn't obviously lust, lust misfiring [great grunge band!]) needn't be the prime motive for art to reconcile it with evolution.

Then again group selection may play a role, seeing that art is almost always for a wider audience than one.

My well participated thread below brings up this topic.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=8776953

 

[Mr. Scott]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtdKBOebO5E&sns=em

Is Arvo Part trying to impress a potential mate?

His "impress potential mate with art" brain module is misfiring, like everyone else's on that stage. I know you prefer not to believe this. Mastery in the arts is sexy. Profoundly un-sexy people get laid because they produce great art. You can deny it for the purpose of feeling you win against me on this thread, but it's so freaking obvious it tries my patience to feel I have to remind you of this.

(biography.com celebrity couples Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett)

 

[!Kaggen]

His "impress potential mate with art" brain module is misfiring, like everyone else's on that stage. I know you prefer not to believe this. Mastery in the arts is sexy. Profoundly un-sexy people get laid because they produce great art. You can deny it for the purpose of feeling you win against me on this thread, but it's so freaking obvious it tries my patience to feel I have to remind you of this.

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/673650b0cbc5ca64a.jpg[/qimg]
(biography.com celebrity couples Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett)

Human evolutionary success is not solely dependent on individuals finding a mate.
Group selection also plays a role in social species such as humans.

 

[Mr. Scott]

The genetic/anatomical difference between chimp and human brains responsible for symphonies:

(4 minute video)

 

[quarky]

I think art as meaning is sufficient to explain art, even from an evolutionary perspective. If the art in one's life, including the joy of creating and communicating meaning through art to others, enhances the feeling one's life is meaningful, one side effect among many of that good feeling would be friskiness, and the desire to chance passing on those artful genes. But it (lust, or in the many cases where it isn't obviously lust, lust misfiring [great grunge band!]) needn't be the prime motive for art to reconcile it with evolution.

I'm confused.
Are you a gay hippy negro communist?

 

[blobru]

You wish.


Just another big-brained chimp.

 

[Mr. Scott]

A brain teaser I thought of while watching a video of a robot playing catch and juggling. You look in the robot's face, and it's obviously sculpted with a smile, so it's no trick to give yourself this gut feeling that it is conscious. In fact, I can look at a rock and convince myself that it's conscious. Give this tendency to delude ourselves into seeing consciousness anywhere we choose to see it, what makes us so confident we can see consciousness in ourselves?

 

[Mr. Scott]

A brain teaser I thought of while watching a video of a robot playing catch and juggling. You look in the robot's face, and it's obviously sculpted with a smile, so it's no trick to give yourself this gut feeling that it is conscious. In fact, I can look at a rock and convince myself that it's conscious. Give this tendency to delude ourselves into seeing consciousness anywhere we choose to see it, what makes us so confident we can see consciousness in ourselves?

I know, that seemed a bit weird, but what occurred to me was that, for a lot of people, the word or idea of consciousness is, by definition, supernatural. That is, some kind of magical, super-mechanical entity of consciousness emerges from a working brain, or a part of the universe or God, implicitly by definition. Therefore, the very idea of a conscious machine would not make sense. Perhaps, when we look at a robot or puppet and FEEL that it embodies that magical quality of consciousness, when it does not, we do the same when we look at our minds and FEEL we have that magical quality even though, again, we do not.

The only evidence we have that consciousness is "special" (not due to known laws of physics) is the feeling, and these feelings never pass any critical thinking tests.

If we can project it (that supernatural or non-mechanical consciousness field) into a statue, how do we know we aren't projecting it into ourselves?

 

[Dancing David]

Human evolutionary success is not solely dependent on individuals finding a mate.
Group selection also plays a role in social species such as humans.

[/lurk]
No reproductive success is all that matters in the ToE
[lurk]

 

[!Kaggen]

[/lurk]
No reproductive success is all that matters in the ToE
[lurk]

Really? So how do you explain homosexuality?

 

[quarky]

Aunties.

Sacrifice for the overall group gene pool.
Not an entirely bad strategy to seeing that some of your dna moves on.
This is fairly common in social animals.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Really? So how do you explain homosexuality?

This is off topic, but the best explanation today, at least for the common type of male homosexuality, is Sexually Antagonistic Selection, for which there is good scientific evidence.

Evolution is really about survival of the gene. The features of consciousness result from genes that produce modules in our brain that, on balance, help reproduce those genes. For example, the module that identifies animals is a great advantage to the genes that produce it. Likewise, for the genes responsible for musical masterpieces, love, jealousy, and arguing on the Internet.

The buck stops with survival of the gene. Our genes, and the modules they produce, may misfire, but the genes will survive if, on balance, the misfires are outweighed by the advantages.

There's no real mechanism for survival of the species. In fact, genes can come up that, while advantageous to themselves, are disastrous to the species (sorry don't have time to google this point for y'all).

 

[quarky]

I'm hetero, yet liberal enough to see the value, in terms of dna's agenda, in non-reproducing members of a group.

It's not a mis-fire.
It's more people involved in raising less kids.
This works in social animals. To their ultimate advantage.

 

[Modified]

[/lurk]
No reproductive success is all that matters in the ToE
[lurk]

I'm not sure what that means. Group selection exists.

 

[quarky]

Even altruism, as viewed from dna's agenda, is quite self-serving.
Oddly enough, one of the mammals that shows the highest degree of altruism is the vampire bat.

Cool stuff.