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On Consciousness

Is consciousness physical or metaphysical?

  • Consciousness is a kind of data processing and the brain is a machine that can be replicated in othe

    Votes: 81 86.2%

  • Consciousness requires a second substance outside the physical material world, currently undetectabl

    Votes: 3 3.2%

  • On Planet X, unconscious biological beings have perfected conscious machines

    Votes: 10 10.6%
  • Total voters
    94
  • Poll closed .
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steenkh said:
Well, a human brain is not ready for the world the moment it is born. It needs upbringing and education over many years.

If a successful simulation of a brain is to work, it will need the same, or you will have brain of a newborn baby, or a foetus to deal with.

On other words, our simulation needs parents, and schooling :)
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A very good point. A human brain doesn't just boot up and run a pre-existing program. For the first some odd years of its life, it's using much of its processing power and a lot of its sensory input data to program itself. The "program" being run by an adult brain has been continuously tweaked for years to become what it is. What would it take to speed up that process?
 
Prometheus said:
A very good point. A human brain doesn't just boot up and run a pre-existing program. For the first some odd years of its life, it's using much of its processing power and a lot of its sensory input data to program itself. The "program" being run by an adult brain has been continuously tweaked for years to become what it is. What would it take to speed up that process?
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"None but ourselves can free our minds" Bob Marley
 
Prometheus said:
I'm not sure it's necessary to go that far, after all, how easy is it to predict what individual humans (or their brains) will do, except in extremely limited circumstances?
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I'm talking about general prediction, not specific prediction.

A good computer model of a bridge will predict where the stresses will affect the structure, but not which rivet will rust first if birds are pooping on random spots.

A good computer model of a brain would predict that it would be conscious, but not necessarily exactly what the specific brain it's modeling would say or do from one second to the next.

Remember Chaos TheoryWP?
 
Mr. Scott said:
I'm talking about general prediction, not specific prediction.

A good computer model of a bridge will predict where the stresses will affect the structure, but not which rivet will rust first if birds are pooping on random spots.

A good computer model of a brain would predict that it would be conscious, but not necessarily exactly what the specific brain it's modeling would say or do from one second to the next.

Remember Chaos TheoryWP?
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Thanks for clarifying. I agree.
 
However, even if we manage to build a cellular human brain -which is predicted possible by 2023- equivalent to 1000 rat brains with a total of a hundred billion cells, we still will be talking about artificial awareness, not simulation of human consciousness.

I said it before and I still support the thought that it is a categorical error to equal human consciousness (by whichever definition you prefer) with a synthetic brain.

It simply will lack the right environment, no?

Henry Markam said "It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years," as director of the Blue Brain Project, in 2009. I find that a bit overconfident.
 
deadendmind2013 said:
However, even if we manage to build a cellular human brain -which is predicted possible by 2023- equivalent to 1000 rat brains with a total of a hundred billion cells, we still will be talking about artificial awareness, not simulation of human consciousness.
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By the same token, if we simulate a calculator we should only expect to get artificial numbers out of it, not real numbers.

Do you know something about your own consciousness that isn't itself a piece of information?
 
deadendmind2013 said:
However, even if we manage to build a cellular human brain -which is predicted possible by 2023- equivalent to 1000 rat brains with a total of a hundred billion cells, we still will be talking about artificial awareness, not simulation of human consciousness.

I said it before and I still support the thought that it is a categorical error to equal human consciousness (by whichever definition you prefer) with a synthetic brain.

It simply will lack the right environment, no?
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No.
 
deadendmind2013 said:
However, even if we manage to build a cellular human brain -which is predicted possible by 2023- equivalent to 1000 rat brains with a total of a hundred billion cells, we still will be talking about artificial awareness, not simulation of human consciousness.
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Thank you for at least admitting that no matter how complex, powerful or aware the computer is, you will never accept that it is conscious.
 
Colors are a product of the brain that don't exist in the world

Sorry to hav been gone for so long. Real life is kicking my tail.

But in the meantime, I've found a case that blows a hole in the naive notion that colors exist in the world and are merely "registered" or perceived by the brain rather than created exclusively by the brain.

It's the case of Spike Jahan, as reported by V.S. Ramachandran.

Jahan is a number-color synesthete, who is also red-green colorblind.

His synesthetic color palette, associated with numbers, includes colors which he believes "don't exist" in the outside world.

If it were true that colors exist in the real world and we merely learn to perceive them based on our exposure to them, then Jahan should not be seeing any unique colors in his synesthetic experiences.

What his case demonstrates is that our brains are born with the equipment necessary to perform color -- which is strictly an experience, not a property or quality of any stuff out there in the world.

Because of the problems in his retinas, Jahan's brain never recieves the signals telling it to perform certain colors in the spectrum when he's observing the world. And yet that doesn't prevent his brain from performing a wider range of colors in response to cross-stimulation from ajdoining regions.

Let's face it folks, color exists only in our conscious minds, nowhere else.

I know that's counter-intuitive, and it sure seems like there are colors "out there" but physics and biology tell us otherwise.

The informationalists want to get around this, but they can't. Color -- along with sound, smell, texture, emotion, and our entire phenomenological world -- is purely a product of our minds, not "information" about the world which is somehow (they have no explanation for how anyway) sucked into our heads and "processed".

Qualia are not something "magic" or "dualistic" or anything like that. They are merely observations.

Or more properly, they are the components of all our observations -- they are behaviors of the brain, bodily functions, which determine what our observations will and can be like.

They cannot simply passively arise by taking in "information" from the outside world. They are produced by brain hardware.

This is not a magic bean, it's biology. Just plain old biology.

Granted, there's no theory for it yet, but just was with the northern lights, we can be confident that the theory, when it's developed, will be a physical theory.
 
No one's arguing that the 'qualia' of red, for lack of a better term, exists outside of the mind, Piggy. We're simply objecting to the rejection of the term 'red' to also describe the real-world equivalent. But you're the one arguing that redness is something more than something mundane and reproducible, so I, for one, would like some demonstration that this is true.
 
Piggy said:
....
The informationalists want to get around this, but they can't. Color -- along with sound, smell, texture, emotion, and our entire phenomenological world -- is purely a product of our minds, not "information" about the world which is somehow (they have no explanation for how anyway) sucked into our heads and "processed"....
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Isn't this a false dichotomy? Qualia are produced in our brains in response to stimuli, so they do function as a symbolic representation of whatever produces those stimuli. We know there is not a strict one-to-one relationship between symbol and referent, but that doesn't mean there's no information there, just that it's not precise. Animals don't often (if ever) need to know precisely which wavelength of light is stimulating their retinas, just that more often than not something which appears 'red' falls into one of several categories that may be important to the animal.
 
I haven't had time to go looking yet, but this morning I caught the tail end of an interview that was talking about how, only in the last 3 to 6 months neurobiologists have begun using some new brain imaging tools that promise to become real game-changers as far as our ability to see what's going on inside.
 
PixyMisa said:
Hmm. Not necessarily. Anti-sphexishness has two components - detecting the loop, and acting upon that information. So you could have a working detector (and other subjective experiences) but have something broken at the point where you act to break the sphexish loop.

If I knew more about neuropathology and psychopathology, I might be able to name a specific syndrome that illustrates this. If anyone knows of such, I'd be very interested.
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That sounds very much like OCD. Behaviours repeated unnecessarily despite conscious awareness of the problem.
 
Prometheus said:
... how easy is it to predict what individual humans (or their brains) will do, except in extremely limited circumstances?
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I think we're more predictable than you might think. Most people are creatures of habit and preference and are predictable by those habits & preferences. Also, crowds of people tend to behave predictably in many ways, and many behaviours of large numbers of individuals (not in a crowd) are predictable statistically - as the supermarkets know well.

I think it may be in limited/constrained circumstances that people are least predictable...
 
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Mr. Scott said:
Cool TED Talk: Henry Markram: A brain in a supercomputer

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Tremendous video. The discussion beginning @ around 12:20, "where is the rose?", and the location of 'the rose' as an electrical object, a ghostlike analog whose geometry and topology, if Markram's hypothesis is correct, determine its projection into our "perceptual bubbles" as he calls them, may have profound implication for our understanding of perception & consciousness.
 
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!Kaggen said:
Consciousness affected by ultrasound

http://uanews.org/story/good-vibrations-mediating-mood-through-brain-ultrasound
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Well, it says that ultrasound has a mild and delayed effect on mood. No apparent change in consciousness. Results from double-blind test not reported. This report doesn't pass skeptical analysis.

I've heard that fetal ultrasound subjects had a higher than average rate of dyslexia. Perhaps ultrasound can jumble up synapses and interconnections. Maybe we can think of it as an extremely mild lobotomy or ECT. The experiments in that report should have been performed on animals first.
 
dlorde said:
I think we're more predictable than you might think. Most people are creatures of habit and preference and are predictable by those habits & preferences. Also, crowds of people tend to behave predictably in many ways, and many behaviours of large numbers of individuals (not in a crowd) are predictable statistically - as the supermarkets know well.

I think it may be in limited/constrained circumstances that people are least predictable...
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In aggregate, coarse human behaviour patterns are almost trivially easy to predict. I was concerned with precise individual predictions, but my concern has already been dealt with in post #4843.
 
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