On Consciousness

[Beelzebuddy]

It isn't that simple.

I can ask you whether certain CPU instructions "precede" operating systems, and argue that since the CPU came about first in computing history of course instructions must precede the OS, but in fact the CPU is so intrinsically linked with the OS at this point that many instructions can genuinely be said to require an OS in the first place.

A CPU can operate without an OS, but not vice versa. It's a nice illustration of my point, thank you.

In the case of emotion vs. attention, I challenge you to find an animal that solidly demonstrates emotion without also demonstrating attention. Furthermore I challenge you to specify a human emotion that cannot also be said to require attention. If a mind is not capable of attention, what would an emotion even be?

Every formal description of emotion that I have ever seen reduces to some sort of mechanism to alter attention. That strongly suggests that without attention, emotion doesn't even make sense. It's like saying that love can exist without the ability to recognize other humans. Huh?

In fact, I won't even hold you to existing research. How about you just provide a definition of "emotion," and we will see what would be necessary for a system to satisfy that definition.



Do you have any theories as to what that basis is?

I thought so. So ... what evidence do you have to support your statement here?

No.

You presented a site which lined up a bunch of neurological concepts in a row and asserted they made a scale, complete with unlabeled charts that went up exponentially. It's the responsibility of the site to provide evidence for its claims, not mine.

 

[tensordyne]

No.

You presented a site which lined up a bunch of neurological concepts in a row and asserted they made a scale, complete with unlabeled charts that went up exponentially. It's the responsibility of the site to provide evidence for its claims, not mine.

Yep, the site did not list after any of its statements about each level reference papers on why that level should be what it was either (something I would expect from a scientific point of view).

As a scale of dynamic behavior though (ad hoc as it may be), I do not see why it can not be usefully employed. Lots of scales we use everyday are ad hoc to one degree or another. The usefulness comes in when you use the scale as a tool to help communicate with others as well as set up relationships between the scale and other observations not directly related to the scale.

Oh well, not the worst idea ever.

 

[tensordyne]

Oh yeah, the question was brought up why it matters about probing humans and so on. Answer: because it is something we can study!

 

[PixyMisa]

The fact that certain people do not like the concept of qualia is interesting.

The term qualia is inherently dualistic - i.e. incoherent. Thus, we reject it.

 

[tensordyne]

The term qualia is inherently dualistic - i.e. incoherent. Thus, we reject it.

The royal we, huh. Plus, what form of dualism are you rejecting? Cartesian Dualism, in the form of substance dualism, property dualism or predicate dualism? You never said.

Really, I do not care because if you reject the idea of qualia you are also rejecting the idea of observation and perception because qualia is just a type of perception concept. This makes sense that you would reject perception though, since your philosophy only admits of abstract constructs.

Just because something is inconvenient to figure out does not mean it does not exist. Have fun playing with your thermometer in your cult. I will just follow the methods and results of science as best I can myself.

 

[tensordyne]

The Category Error of "Hard AI"-nistas

The following is my view in a nutshell. It is taken from the Wiki article on Searle.

Ontological subjectivity
Searle has argued that critics like Daniel Dennett, who (he claims) insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error. Perhaps the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective, (i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party), but are not necessarily ontologically objective.

Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is "epistemically subjective", whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is "epistemically objective. In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like 'the summit is so many meters above sea level'. No such criteria exist for prettiness.

Beyond this distinction, Searle thinks there are certain phenomena (including all conscious experiences) that are ontologically subjective, i.e. can only exist as subjective experience. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an ontologically objective claim: it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is "an objective fact of medical science". But the pain itself is ontologically subjective: it is only experienced by the person having it.

Searle goes on to affirm that "where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality". His view that the epistemic and ontological senses of objective/subjective are cleanly separable is crucial to his self-proclaimed biological naturalism.

Artificial intelligence
A consequence of biological naturalism is that if we want to create a conscious being, we will have to duplicate whatever physical processes the brain goes through to cause consciousness. Searle thereby means to contradict to what he calls "Strong AI", defined by the assumption that as soon as a certain kind of software is running on a computer, a conscious being is thereby created.

Take it or leave it or whatever because I am done.
I tire of dealing with fools.

 

[Pulvinar]

You appear to have missed my last post.

The following is my view in a nutshell. It is taken from the Wiki article on Searle.

A computer can be programmed to say exactly what Searle (or you) say about your qualia. Isn't a (suitably programmed) computer's point of view also subjective?

(I've always wondered where the cutoff is on who's allowed to have a subjective point of view. Worms? Humans? White male landowners?)

 

[quarky]

From what you just posted there's no mystery just chemicals.

No.

There is mystery. You missed the fine point of my rant.

 

[tensordyne]

You appear to have missed my last post.

A computer can be programmed to say exactly what Searle (or you) say about your qualia. Isn't a (suitably programmed) computer's point of view also subjective?

Sorry for missing your post. Searle (and me) are saying consciousness is a physical aspect of the universe that currently we are only sure about in ourselves. I do not see how one makes a program that has subjective experience, even in principle.

HardAIMachine machine = new HardAIMachine();
wavelength = machine.getwavelength();
if (wavelength > 630.0 && wavelength < 740.0) machine.experience("red");

It would be possible to do the first line as well as the the part in the if statement conditionals, but I do not see how you program the 'experience' function, or even something like it.

You are a nice person Pulvinar. Hope you have fun with this stuff. It doesn't matter because the world will turn on and the scientific method will figure this out. I even hope the Hard-AI types find their holy grail.

Good Luck and good night.

 

[PixyMisa]

The royal we, huh.

Nope. The usual plural form.

Plus, what form of dualism are you rejecting?

Whaddya got?

Cartesian Dualism, in the form of substance dualism, property dualism or predicate dualism? You never said.

Cartesian dualism specifies a logically inconsistent Universe; it may be true, but it cannot be useful. Rejected.

Property dualism is logically inconsistent. Rejected.

Predicate dualism is a question of the semantics of natural languages. I think that it's necessarily false given that the semantics of natural languages can change arbitrarily.

Really, I do not care because if you reject the idea of qualia you are also rejecting the idea of observation and perception because qualia is just a type of perception concept. This makes sense that you would reject perception though, since your philosophy only admits of abstract constructs.

Everything in that paragraph is untrue.

Just because something is inconvenient to figure out does not mean it does not exist. Have fun playing with your thermometer in your cult. I will just follow the methods and results of science as best I can myself.

Well, it's about time you tried doing that. Good luck!

 

[PixyMisa]

Sorry for missing your post. Searle (and me) are saying consciousness is a physical aspect of the universe that currently we are only sure about in ourselves. I do not see how one makes a program that has subjective experience, even in principle.

Read Dennett and Hofstadter, who cover precisely that question exhaustively.

 

[PixyMisa]

Seeing this repeatedly somewhat 'cheapened' all this warm-hearted expression.
It was just bio-chem. It wears off.
On the other hand, being aware of that phenomena; the cheapness of basic human emotions, like empathy, leads to a new level of empathy.

[snip]

I expect some mockery for expressing this, and I'm good with that.

No mockery. The fact that human intellect and emotion is all just electrochemical impulses doesn't cheapen it. If you've spent time working with computers, the complexity of it, and the fact that we are able to function at all, is amazing.

But only amazing. Not magical.

 

[rocketdodger]

A CPU can operate without an OS, but not vice versa. It's a nice illustration of my point, thank you.

A CPU can "operate" without an OS. It cannot fully function without an OS.

The question you seem to be ignoring is whether or not "emotion" is something like a naive CPU instruction that has nothing to do with the OS, or something like a set of instructions that require the OS to even have meaning. Like instructions pertaining to context switching or security access.

Again -- show me any creature that features "emotion" and does not also feature "attention" and I will concede the point. It shouldn't be that hard for you to do this, since you seem so sure of your position.

No.

You presented a site which lined up a bunch of neurological concepts in a row and asserted they made a scale, complete with unlabeled charts that went up exponentially. It's the responsibility of the site to provide evidence for its claims, not mine.

Well, it isn't merely a scale, it is a sequence of features that all available hard scientific research points to being requisites for each other.

It is clear to me that you either simply did not read the descriptions, or else you did but you failed to understand them. For example, level 4 is called "attentional" but it directly states that:

Additionally, level 4 agents can have primitive emotion mechanisms in the sense that the objects to which attention is paid are elementally evaluated as positive or negative. A positive emotion triggers decrease of distance behaviour or bonding to selected object, while negative emotion triggers increase of distance and reinforcement of boundaries toward selected object. Additionally, a new relation between emotions and memory appears at this level: as demonstrated in biological organisms, emotions are deeply involved in the selection of what needs to be stored in memory.

Are you sure you read this?

And while level 6 is called "emotional" it isn't because level 6 is where emotions first appear, it is because level 6 is where the agents are finally capable of having a theory of mind strong enough to recognize emotions in themselves.

Again -- did you read it? It clearly states all of this in the text right on the page.

 

[rocketdodger]

Sorry for missing your post. Searle (and me) are saying consciousness is a physical aspect of the universe that currently we are only sure about in ourselves. I do not see how one makes a program that has subjective experience, even in principle.

I don't think you fully understand your own subjective experience well enough to be so sure.

Let me ask you something -- would your subjective experience include visual experiences if you were blind from birth?

Would your subjective experience include auditory experiences if you were deaf from birth?

Would your subjective experience include somatosensory experiences from most of your body if you had been a quadriplegic from birth?

What if you were all 3 -- blind, deaf, and couldn't feel anything but your head? What do you think your precious "subjective experience" would be like then?

Can you even imagine what kind of creature you would be, mentally, if you had nothing but the sense of touch from your head to go on? You can't imagine that, because it is impossible for you to -- your notion of the world is fundamentally based on the senses you grew up with. A blind deaf quadriplegic might as well be an alien to you, that is how different their mind would be -- if you can even call it a mind. No hope of shared communication at all. They wouldn't even know what a smile was -- yes, we learn that -- so if you scratched their head who knows what their face would do.

What do you think my point is for bringing this up?

 

[tensordyne]

Read Dennett and Hofstadter, who cover precisely that question exhaustively.

Hofstadter is interesting and Dennett is just plain wrong (about both Consciousness and Scotomas). Your rejection of consciousness as subjective perception is based on a baseless bias for 'objective' reality and mental models. It is useless having a discussion with someone having a bias so, again, good luck.

 

[quarky]

No mockery. The fact that human intellect and emotion is all just electrochemical impulses doesn't cheapen it. If you've spent time working with computers, the complexity of it, and the fact that we are able to function at all, is amazing.

But only amazing. Not magical.

Yes. The amazingness is akin to the meta-empathy I was attempting to illuminate.

Oxytocin, somewhat predictably, allows one to tolerate; even 'love' their baby.
On the one hand, it makes the 'love' kind of cheesy.
On the other hand...

Holy cow.
Pretty amazing that we're privy to such awesome electrochemical impulses.
Its enough to give a guy a warm and fuzzy feeling.

 

[tensordyne]

I don't think you fully understand your own subjective experience well enough to be so sure.

Let me ask you something -- would your subjective experience include visual experiences if you were blind from birth?

Would your subjective experience include auditory experiences if you were deaf from birth?

Would your subjective experience include somatosensory experiences from most of your body if you had been a quadriplegic from birth?

What if you were all 3 -- blind, deaf, and couldn't feel anything but your head? What do you think your precious "subjective experience" would be like then?

You have answered your own question, if I could only feel my own head then my subjective experience would be feeling my own head (taste, smell were not specified). I have no idea what it would be like to be blind and deaf from birth however.

You do bring up an interesting point though that I have kind of addressed already. The further someone else is physically from you, the less you can take it that they perceive things the way you do. This is a problem with the epistemology of consciousness that unfortunately can not be escaped. That does not mean one should give up though.

 

[tensordyne]

Well, it's about time you tried doing that. Good luck!

You missed my point. Your world-view is unscientific. The closest equivalent to your mindset is something like if you applied Scholasticism to current scientific consensus concepts. There is no room for observation in your world-view because observation involves and requires consciousness, which you reject.

So what is the point?

 

[PixyMisa]

Hofstadter is interesting and Dennett is just plain wrong (about both Consciousness and Scotomas).

You need to read Hofstadter again, because he spent two books totalling over a thousand pages answering your question.

Your rejection of consciousness as subjective perception is based on a baseless bias for 'objective' reality and mental models.

What are you talking about?

 

[PixyMisa]

You missed my point.

No, I understood your point. You're just wrong.

The closest equivalent to your mindset is something like if you applied Scholasticism to current scientific consensus concepts. There is no room for observation in your world-view because observation involves and requires consciousness, which you reject.

No.