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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PixyMisa, if you want to talk about consciousness in terms of how you defined it earlier (the PixyMisa version of consciousness) I am open to that. Your definitions are internally consistent as far as I can tell and I even find the idea of how you define awareness (in a behavioral sense) pretty interesting.

Having a machine that has an internal model of its environment is most likely already a well known idea. I like it though as something to ponder about.
 
tensordyne said:
I want to know how it is that I perceive the color red. The physics behind each step in the chain that leads me to perceiving red. How consciousness works in terms of physics. Consciousness definitely does not work the way the Dennett crowd say it works. Magical complexity to the rescue is not very appealing to me.

But I digress. I leave it to the neurologists to figure it out while bowing out as gracefully as I can.
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I am not a fan of Dennett particularly, however we do know quite a bit about the processes, I believe myself that hard AI is one path of exploration, but neural nets have a lot in common with analog computing as well. There is a huge kludge in the brain, lots of parallel processing, cross reference and complete fabrication.
 
tensordyne said:
How does it make it false?
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Argument from ignorance. You have to SHOW that something is true. Appealing to popularity, like you did in the other post, doesn't cut it.

Why does it have to be 'true'? Why can it not just be an understood concept we can agree to use in a pragmatic way? That is how it is used after all.
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Because we're trying to understand reality.
 
Dancing David said:
As a member of the P-Zombie Party, I ask you seriously,

and how do you know that you are conscious?
Or do you just believe that you meet a definition, like the biomedical one?
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You're asking me how I know my brain is working? Seriously?
 
tensordyne said:
The fact that certain people do not like the concept of qualia is interesting. From Wikipedia (for those less in the know?):



The sum of your qualia at any given moment IS your consciousness. The Hard-AI and Dennett et. al rejection of qualia is most bizarre. It is basically like they wish to get rid of the inconvenient fact that consciousness is hard to study because it IS about qualia and we have not cracked that nut yet in terms of how to study it.

So instead the Hard-AI proponents make it all about mind abstractions that we do know how to agree on. Sorry, but consciousness IS about qualia. Oh yeah, and if you fell for Dennett's arguments in for instance "Consciousness Explained", there is a paper by Ton Dirksen that shows how Dennett engages in the same kind of pseudo-scientific word play that Freud engaged in, plus some.

Oh well, sorry to disappoint Dancing David, it really is all about qualia. The question is, how do we study that while making as few assumptions as possible and keeping with the scientific mindset.
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The question is does the word qualia mean anything at all.
 
tensordyne said:
I know I am conscious and think you are too because you share the same type of physical makeup. A computer has a different physical setup, so I have no way of knowing (or logically inferring) if it is conscious or not. I will tell you if it has a similar kind of consciousness as ours once we figure it out how ours works.
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But you and I don't have exactly the same makeup, so the question remains: how similar is similar enough? You haven't said where between you and computers you would draw the line. Would you allow subjective experience in babies? Or does it "pop in" at a certain age?

As far as a computer saying anything, the phrase garbage in / garbage out comes to mind. You can have something conscious say it is not conscious, say that it is conscious, and the same for plausibly unconscious objects. This means nothing. Consciousness is about an internal state of being.
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So if a computer tells you all about its internal state of being it's lying, but a human doing the same isn't?
 
rocketdodger said:
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.
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This is what it all boils down to. There is no such research that I'm aware of. The only cites the site offers are the author's own papers presenting the scale itself in a third-tier specialty journal. It's a bare-assed assertion, something that sounds truthy, nothing more.

Why are you so hung up on this scale BS, anyway? Is this your site? Am I personally pissing in your cheerios here?
 
tensordyne said:
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.
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So doesn't that suggest to you that your subjective experience is heavily based on your senses?
 
Dancing David said:
Excuseme?

gently, where the heck is the CPU in the animal model?

Multiple parallel and crosslinked processors would be a better, yet still poor analogy. You overe xtended your analogy by far.
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The analogy was that saying emotion precedes attention just because the limbic system evolved first is not a valid conclusion.

Dancing David said:
"Emotions' are comprised of seperate events, and then kludges under one ill defined term.

There are the limbic system events
There are the body responses and homeostatic responses to all sorts of regulatory systems some not limbic (adrenal)
There are responses to perceptions that do not rise to the level of cognition

So you seem to have excluded these as part of the 'emotions' in your model that you pushed too far.

:)
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I would argue that those non-conscious events are not emotional. Emotions are things like fright, love, pain, being too hot, being too cold, being hungry, etc.

When your stomach starts to growl, it isn't an emotion. The feeling of hunger is an emotion. You can feel hungry without your stomach growling, and if your stomach growls and you are in the middle of something important, you won't even notice it.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
This is what it all boils down to. There is no such research that I'm aware of. The only cites the site offers are the author's own papers presenting the scale itself in a third-tier specialty journal. It's a bare-assed assertion, something that sounds truthy, nothing more.

Why are you so hung up on this scale BS, anyway? Is this your site? Am I personally pissing in your cheerios here?
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I'll get you links to the research. It is basically just all the formal peer-reviewed stuff that has been going on in machine consciousness and parts of neuroscience over the years. The author of that site doesn't really have any good papers himself.

Why am I hung up on it? I am not hung up in particular on *this* scale, but what I like is the fact that the descriptions of each level are very plausible and based entirely in science. There is no wishy-washy hand-wavy definitions used. If someone wants to know "what is human consciousness?" they can get a good answer by just stacking all those scale levels on top of each other.
 
tensordyne said:
The sum of your qualia at any given moment IS your consciousness.
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If qualia is consciousness, then tell me what kind of entity observes qualia, and how does it function? Reference post #1 in this thread to get a picture of the problem.
 
Motivating Incantation
Honest attempts at scrubbing up
Synchronicity
Altruistic Behaviour Interesting
Cleaning Up The Mess Taxonomic
Universal Intelligence

:P
 
rocketdodger said:
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.
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rocketdodger said:
I am not hung up in particular on *this* scale, but what I like is the fact that the descriptions of each level are very plausible and based entirely in science.
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These aren't the same argument at all. It's plausible, I'll agree, but so is every baseless scientific hunch. That doesn't make them right. Jumping the gun and going "omg guys, this is it, this is what science tells us" isn't exactly drinking the kool-aid, but it is mixing it and staring longingly at the glass. This guy's even made a magic formula that you can put stuff like Quake bots into and get their "consciousness quantitative score" to know exactly how conscious they are. That's where the silly exponential thing is coming from: he just made it up.
 
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