On Consciousness

[Piggy]

Ah, you must have missed it then. Here you go.

Admittedly it's not the answer you want, but I don't think that's altogether my problem.


There can't be multiple layers of consciousness? You can't be more or less conscious of something, only conscious versus un-?

It's just as easy to throw up a screen of special pleading for SRIP as it is for other definitions of consciousness. They're all equally terrible. That is the point of SRIP, as I understand it.

No, I didn't miss it, and it has nothing to do with what I do or do not want.

It's a matter of science and reason.

I hate to be repetitive, but I'll go back to my example of the properties of gravity.

It's true that gravity is a force that weakens in proportion to the square of distance between objects, but that is not, and cannot be, an explanation of why.

And that's true for all questions in science.

Nobody is disagreeing with you that the action of brain tissue causes conscious experience (aka phenomenology or qualia).

But here's the thing... you can shout all you want that the physical brain state correlated with (or causing) an experience of red is the experience of red, and that's true enough (although in other ways inaccurate or at least imprecise) but no matter how many times you repeat that statement, it will never become an explanation of why that particular neural state does, in fact, produce an experience of red rather than, say, green... or the sound of static... or the odor of woodsmoke... or nothing at all.

In other words, post-Newton but pre-Einstein, we could only say that gravity is an attractive force which weakens proportionally with the square of distance.

But nobody could answer the question of why that value was not, instead, the distance or the cube of the distance or the square root of the distance.

Observing is not the same as explaining.

And that's where we are with conscious experience. We now know that consciousness is not metaphysical or spiritual or "the soul" or any of that. We know it's brain activity. So we're post-Newton when it comes to consciousness.

But we're pre-Einstein because at the moment there exists no theory which can explain why the qualia line up with the brain behavior in the exact way in which they do.

There is simply no way to deny this fact.

 

[tsig]

Special pleading.

Beat me to it.

At this point he seems to be asking why we call a certain wavelength "red" instead of "blue" but there's really no reason we use that particular sequence of sounds rather than another sequence and in fact different languages use different sequences.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Consciousness is not just any old sort of "information processing" -- it is a specific brain function which, like all bodily functions, demands its own dedicated physical mechanism to accomplish. Of course, in the brain, there's a lot of crossover, with many bits of real-estate participating in multiple functions, e.g. perception and imagination.

I call strawman on the highlighted text.

Tell us about the dedicated physical mechanism of consciousness.

 

[Belz...]

No, not at all. The point is that a so-called "unconscious" process could, in reality, be separate but fully conscious in its own right.

There are multiple conscious processes running in your brain. You are one of them, or, to put it another way, one of them is you.

Ah, I see. Thank you for the clarification.

It'd suck if "me" had been one of those other SRIP nodes, then. I'd have a very boring existence.

 

[Belz...]

I hate to be repetitive, but I'll go back to my example of the properties of gravity.

It's true that gravity is a force that weakens in proportion to the square of distance between objects, but that is not, and cannot be, an explanation of why.

Did you mean "how" ? Because "why" presupposed an intelligent agent behind the process.

 

[Piggy]

Those upstream processes do have something to do with color--they're a subset of all the data that makes up a color.

I don't disagree with you, except for the "data" language which I find counter-productive, not because it's inaccurate but because it's dangerously abstract and incomplete.

The upstream processes do have something to do with what happens downstream, clearly. What I meant was simply that at that point in the process they have nothing (yet) to do with color, because color has not been generated.

 

[Piggy]

The question contains assumptions I don't find valid, so I've been addressing those assumptions. I'll try to respond in a way that doesn't come across as a dodge.

BTW, you seem to keep suggesting the idea of "tiger" is subconscious.

I surmise that, if the brain can produce 6 million color qualia, a seemingly infinite number of sound qualia, likewise for smell, taste, touch, emotion, that the brain is most likely able to synthesize new qualia as a result of input from its environment, including combining more than one sense, e.g. 6 million colors that are combinations of just three primary colors.

So, to answer your question, this person would be experiencing a tiger quale which the brain had synthesized from instinct and environmental experience.

I hope that suffices.

You know, the guy who thought his mother was an imposer is a better example. Let's play with that one, shall we? Would it not be valid to say this person who sees and hears a woman who, despite actually being his mother, experiences the stranger quale rather than the mother quale? Remember, the formal definition of qualia says nothing about the five senses. Only the subjective experience.

I'm not assuming that the "idea of 'tiger'" is subconscious.

I don't see that the notion of an "idea of 'tiger'" is particularly meaningful or useful here.

And I can't figure out what you mean by "synthesizing a tiger quale" in any clear terms.

I would agree that we could call the conscious sense of identity as a quale, btw. Clearly, the human brain has a rather specialized function of knowing "who this person is" regardless of their appearance. Good thing, too, or costume parties would be total chaos.

Normally, a certain level of confidence triggers that sensation, but in these persons for some reason that trigger never goes off, and despite all the evidence being in favor, they simply don't have the conscious sensation that "this is that person".

Emotions are a similar case. As I mentioned, in people with emotional blindness, they witness their bodies smiling, laughing, scowling, and so forth, but they don't consciously feel the emotions which their bodies are clearly performing. (Full disclosure, my brain does this to some extent, although I don't have complete emotional blindness, as can be triggered by a stroke in the area of the brain where feedback impulses link to the area of the brain involved in synchronizing that feedback with our integrated conscious experience.)

 

[Piggy]

Piggy, a question for you:

Where do you find the confidence in, or evidence for, your assertion that a computer, ordinary in design but extraordinary in size and speed, could not ever be conscious?

Consciousness is behavior, real behavior in spacetime. To get a machine to do the same thing, we're going to have to build a machine that performs that same behavior in spacetime.

What other bodily functions do you think can be programmed?

 

[Piggy]

Tell us about the dedicated physical mechanism of consciousness.

I already have.

It occurs when we see certain coherent brain waves and rapid synchronized pulses distributed across brain real estate which have the effect of producing a hologram-like thing I'm calling the phenogram.

In experiments with simultaneous conflicting visual exposure, the non-conscious systems in the brain can handle both neural patterns. Consciousness cannot, and is forced to flip back and forth between the two patterns.

Somehow, the synchronized firings (or something else causing the firings) do something in addition to what the "neural chain" system is doing, and produce this integrated simultaneous experience melding vision, hearing, emotions, etc.

Consciousness is something which some types of brains are specifically evolved to do, specifically built and designed to do. It doesn't just happen.

 

[Prometheus]

I don't disagree with you, except for the "data" language which I find counter-productive, not because it's inaccurate but because it's dangerously abstract and incomplete.
The upstream processes do have something to do with what happens downstream, clearly. What I meant was simply that at that point in the process they have nothing (yet) to do with color, because color has not been generated.

What language would you prefer?

 

[Fudbucker]

It occurs when we see certain coherent brain waves and rapid synchronized pulses distributed across brain real estate which have the effect of producing a hologram-like thing I'm calling the phenogram.

My SRIP's are swimming

Feels like we're rowing upstream and not really going anywhere.

 

[Mr. Scott]

It [consciousness] occurs when we see certain coherent brain waves and rapid synchronized pulses distributed across brain real estate which have the effect of producing a hologram-like thing I'm calling the phenogram.

In experiments with simultaneous conflicting visual exposure, the non-conscious systems in the brain can handle both neural patterns. Consciousness cannot, and is forced to flip back and forth between the two patterns.

All of that I can picture programming a Von Neumann architecture computer (the most common type) to do. What part, again, is beyond data processing?

 

[Piggy]

What language would you prefer?

Physics, chemistry, biology.

When we begin to abstract into "information" and "data", it's easy to make mistakes and not notice.

 

[Piggy]

All of that I can picture programming a Von Neumann architecture computer (the most common type) to do. What part, again, is beyond data processing?

Can you produce a hologram, for example, with pure programming, rather than a software/hardware solution?

 

[Beelzebuddy]

The brain real-estate responsible for non-conscious behavior can handle both neural responses at the same time, and we can observe this neural behavior. But the electro-mechanical brain processes which are tasked with producing conscious experience cannot. They can only produce / perform a conscious response to (i.e. awareness of) one at a time.

The result is that our "Observer A" has the experience of an image which "flips" back and forth between the two, as if a pair of images were being displayed intermittently.

This fact, and the blindsight experiments, effectively puts the kibosh on informational opportunism.

Attentional mechanisms strengthen local cortical inhibition. Two weak patterns compete and one emerges stronger, until homeostasis kicks in to silence it enough for the other to take control for a while. Any introductory neurobiology textbook should contain this material.

Please don't call things a "kibosh" if you don't know what you're talking about.

In other words, post-Newton but pre-Einstein, we could only say that gravity is an attractive force which weakens proportionally with the square of distance.

You keep bringing this up, and I kept hoping you'll do a little research and find it on your own, but Einstein never explained the why of gravity either.

Moreover, as much as you like your little analogies, consciousness isn't gravity. Nor is it the northern lights, nor any of your other examples of something that's objective and falsifiable. You know what it's like, the way you describe it? It's like a soul. Can't demonstrate it, can't prove it, can't quantify it, but damn if it ain't there and real enough to make unambiguous statements about what it is and (more often) isn't.

If you don't believe me, please describe "red" to me. The qualia. Not the wavelength reflected by red objects, the actual color that you seem to think exists. Describe it to me in a way that demonstrates it's more than your visual cortex seeing one pattern instead of another. Objectively. I want to know that you're seeing red instead of green, or any other color, or no color.

What you're after is not science, nor reason, but confirmation.

Physics, chemistry, biology.

When we begin to abstract into "information" and "data", it's easy to make mistakes and not notice.

Can you produce a hologram, for example, with pure programming, rather than a software/hardware solution?

Can you produce the part of the brain that relies on the interference of light?

When we begin to rely on "unrelated analogies" and "invented jargon," it's easy to make mistakes and not notice.

 

[Prometheus]

Physics, chemistry, biology.

When we begin to abstract into "information" and "data", it's easy to make mistakes and not notice.

Well, unfortunately I don't really speak any of those languages beyond a few travellers' phrases. But just because it may be easier to notice one's mistakes in concrete as opposed to abstract language is no reason to avoid the latter. That smacks of the old saw about searching for one's lost keys under a lamplight because that's where the light is better rather than where they're most likely to have been lost. Abstraction is useful however hard it is to use correctly. I think this is actually exemplified in the parts of my post you didn't quote above. By approaching the brain as a sort of ad hoc analog computer, and realizing the difference between analog and digital data, it's easier to see why the task of emulating a brain may be quite a bit more difficult than many computationalists seem to suspect.

 

[Piggy]

Attentional mechanisms strengthen local cortical inhibition. Two weak patterns compete and one emerges stronger, until homeostasis kicks in to silence it enough for the other to take control for a while. Any introductory neurobiology textbook should contain this material.

Please don't call things a "kibosh" if you don't know what you're talking about.

There's nothing about that mechanism which contradicts the physicalist position, or the point I was making, speaking of not knowing what one is talking about.

You keep bringing this up, and I kept hoping you'll do a little research and find it on your own, but Einstein never explained the why of gravity either.

Pardon?

I'm sorry, but Einstein explained gravity as curvature of spacetime, which accounted for its rate of diminishing effect.

Do you really not know this?

The only reason there is a problem of "quantum gravity" at all is because Einstein did propose a theory of gravity which works on large scales.

Moreover, as much as you like your little analogies, consciousness isn't gravity. Nor is it the northern lights, nor any of your other examples of something that's objective and falsifiable. You know what it's like, the way you describe it? It's like a soul. Can't demonstrate it, can't prove it, can't quantify it, but damn if it ain't there and real enough to make unambiguous statements about what it is and (more often) isn't.

This is just patently bizarre.

Not only do you seem to have entirely missed the point of why I mention those discoveries -- it was not to compare the phenomena to consciousness -- but now you claim that somehow phenomenology, which we all observe, is "like a soul" despite the fact that it's known to be caused by brain activity.

If you don't believe me, please describe "red" to me. The qualia. Not the wavelength reflected by red objects, the actual color that you seem to think exists. Describe it to me in a way that demonstrates it's more than your visual cortex seeing one pattern instead of another. Objectively. I want to know that you're seeing red instead of green, or any other color, or no color.

Look at a stop sign. When you do, you'll see red as the sign's background. There you go. Done.

But you don't "see red" when you look at a stop sign because the object "is red" or because the wavelength of light reflected from it "is red". You see it because your brain's response is to perform red, just as your body's response to being stabbed is to perform pain, even though there's no pain in a knife.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

Pardon?

I'm sorry, but Einstein explained gravity as curvature of spacetime, which accounted for its rate of diminishing effect.

Do you really not know this?

The only reason there is a problem of "quantum gravity" at all is because Einstein did propose a theory of gravity which works on large scales.

He only described the phenomenon in more precise terms. He didn't explain why it occurred.

Look at a stop sign. When you do, you'll see red as the sign's background. There you go. Done.

But you don't "see red" when you look at a stop sign because the object "is red" or because the wavelength of light reflected from it "is red". You see it because your brain's response is to perform red, just as your body's response to being stabbed is to perform pain, even though there's no pain in a knife.

You're going to have to do better than that. I think you're colorblind, and don't see red at all. Prove me wrong. Describe the qualia to me. No objects, no wavelengths, no neuroscience. Qualia only, final destination.

 

[tsig]

I already have.

It occurs when we see certain coherent brain waves and rapid synchronized pulses distributed across brain real estate which have the effect of producing a hologram-like thing I'm calling the phenogram.

In experiments with simultaneous conflicting visual exposure, the non-conscious systems in the brain can handle both neural patterns. Consciousness cannot, and is forced to flip back and forth between the two patterns.

Somehow, the synchronized firings (or something else causing the firings) do something in addition to what the "neural chain" system is doing, and produce this integrated simultaneous experience melding vision, hearing, emotions, etc.

Consciousness is something which some types of brains are specifically evolved to do, specifically built and designed to do. It doesn't just happen.

Who did the designing?

 

[steenkh]

Can you produce a hologram, for example, with pure programming, rather than a software/hardware solution?

Why do you think that would be a problem?

What do you think a hologram is? You are clearly not talking about actual holograms that are recordings of light fields on a (more or less) two-dimensional medium. The storing of multidimensional data in a computer is something that youngsters were taught to do within their first year of computing classes. The more dimensions, the more storage you need.

Building a hologram or 'phenogram' should be no particular problem given sufficient storage and power.