On Consciousness

[punshhh]

And that is why it, the scientific model is so effective at doing things, it is about behaviors, not about meaning.

Yes, not about philosophy.

 

[punshhh]

If you tell me what those questions mean, I will answer them.

Do you think something exists?

I think you've identified your problem.

Your problem, I have no problem as I know where science ends and philosophy begins.

 

[dlorde]

You know what is so weird about tryptamines is that it is a cyclohexane and cyclopentane ring of carbon atoms with various other substituents on each ring in a few key places. Why does that particular chemical structure seem to have such an astounding affect on consciousness?

Sounds like you'd enjoy (if you're not already familiar with them) Alexander and Anne Shulgin's books, 'PiHKAL' and 'TiHKAL' (Phenethylamines/Tryptamines i Have Known And Loved). They each come in two parts, part one being lively descriptions of numerous experimental ingestions of various psychedelics; part two being a description of the chemistry and synthesis of these compounds. Part two of each is freely available online. You might find the part one's online, but they're available to purchase from Amazon, etc.

 

[PixyMisa]

Do you think something exists?

Things happen.

Your problem

Nope.

I have no problem as I know where science ends and philosophy begins.

Perhaps, but in that case you don't know where science begins and philosophy ends.

 

[Piggy]

Well, I don't know about hallucinating but I can make a computer perceive something that's not real and react as though it is. It would be trivially easy, in fact.

That would indeed be trivially easy.

It would also have nothing to do with consciousness.

 

[Belz...]

That would indeed be trivially easy.

It would also have nothing to do with consciousness.

Indeed. Awareness, but not consciousness.

 

[Belz...]

Your problem, I have no problem as I know where science ends and philosophy begins.

I think you mean where philosophy ends and science begins. It's a subtle but important difference.

 

[Belz...]

Are you asking me to peer inside their minds ? If you think they are wrong, then please post some relevant evidence. You might be frustrated by repeated posting of said evidence, but not everyone may have seen the other threads.

Come on, Piggy. I'm really interested in this.

 

[Piggy]

Come on, Piggy. I'm really interested in this.

No, I'm not asking you to mind-read, just wondering if you have any cogent explanation for the unwillingness of the comp.lits to actually discuss contemporary brain science, which is the only area of inquiry directly addressing consciousness, in favor of irrelevant discussions of AI, fictional conscious machines, p-zombies, rope-brain consciousness, false claims about Church-Turing, and so forth, if they are not simply uninformed and mistaken?

The fact is, they cannot discuss the current research because it contradicts their claims, so instead they descend on every thread about consciousness that pops up and they clog it up with false or irrelevant arguments.

I started a thread with the narrowly-defined topic of the contribution of biological studies on the brain to our understanding of consciousness (which I have sadly neglected for quite some time in favor of other studies I'm interested in, but hope to return to before too long) and they were incensed that I insisted that they stay on topic and not launch into discussions of hypothetical machine consciousness, or mere assertions that "the brain is a computer" without evidence derived from actual brain studies.

When they were forced to discuss brain science or move on, they chose to move on.

Funny, that.

 

[Mr. Scott]

all consciousness, waking or dreaming, is hallucination

I've been away a while, and need a while to catch up, but I wanted to make some comments before they slipped by.

Computers hallucinate. The ones at Pixar do it daily, but I call Humpty Dumpty fallacy:

Definition of HALLUCINATION
1 perception of objects with no reality usually arising from disorder of the nervous system or in response to drugs (as LSD)

www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hallucination

Thanks very much for the detailed exposition of your position in a later posting. I'll be studying it carefully and respond later.

Carry on.

Be nice! We're all in this together.

 

[Mr. Scott]

I like what this poll suggests about consciousness. Answer without hesitation:

According to The Bible, which of the below is closest to the number of animals Moses brought onto the ark:

A) 20
B) 200
C) 2,000
D) 20,000

Answer with A, B, C, or D. I will explain after a few answers are posted.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Somebody explain to me what an "EM Column" does to help explain qualia, as suggested in this video (sounds like EM woo to me):

 

[blobru]

C (part marks?) ;]

 

[PixyMisa]

No, I'm not asking you to mind-read, just wondering if you have any cogent explanation for the unwillingness of the comp.lits to actually discuss contemporary brain science, which is the only area of inquiry directly addressing consciousness, in favor of irrelevant discussions of AI, fictional conscious machines, p-zombies, rope-brain consciousness, false claims about Church-Turing, and so forth, if they are not simply uninformed and mistaken?

We can't answer that, because all of your premises are false.

 

[PixyMisa]

Somebody explain to me what an "EM Column" does to help explain qualia, as suggested in this video (sounds like EM woo to me):

Answer: Absolutely nothing!

As I noted earlier, this guy also believes that evolution is directed towards a specific end, via quantum time travel.

 

[Zeuzzz]

Sounds like woo to me too. Of the worst sort.

 

[Belz...]

No, I'm not asking you to mind-read, just wondering if you have any cogent explanation for the unwillingness of the comp.lits to actually discuss contemporary brain science, which is the only area of inquiry directly addressing consciousness, in favor of irrelevant discussions of AI, fictional conscious machines, p-zombies, rope-brain consciousness, false claims about Church-Turing, and so forth, if they are not simply uninformed and mistaken?

The fact is, they cannot discuss the current research because it contradicts their claims, so instead they descend on every thread about consciousness that pops up and they clog it up with false or irrelevant arguments.

I started a thread with the narrowly-defined topic of the contribution of biological studies on the brain to our understanding of consciousness (which I have sadly neglected for quite some time in favor of other studies I'm interested in, but hope to return to before too long) and they were incensed that I insisted that they stay on topic and not launch into discussions of hypothetical machine consciousness, or mere assertions that "the brain is a computer" without evidence derived from actual brain studies.

When they were forced to discuss brain science or move on, they chose to move on.

Funny, that.

Piggy, why should I believe you if you are unwilling to accede to this simple request ? We require the same thing of any other poster who makes a claim. It was my understanding that Pixy's general claim, while a bit flamboyant and pithy for my taste, was pretty much on the money. Now, if that's not the case, I'd like to see some evidence.

 

[Piggy]

I've been away a while, and need a while to catch up, but I wanted to make some comments before they slipped by.

Computers hallucinate. The ones at Pixar do it daily, but I call Humpty Dumpty fallacy:


www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hallucination

Thanks very much for the detailed exposition of your position in a later posting. I'll be studying it carefully and respond later.

Carry on.

Be nice! We're all in this together.

I wouldn't put much stock in that particular definition for our purposes here.

First of all because we know that perception and consciousness are not the same thing, a fact which MW does not take into account.

Also, the major point in my post about hallucination is that you are hallucinating all the time.

A doctor performing surgery is hallucinating. A gymnast delivering a perfect-10 performance is hallucinating. An orchestra performing Mozart is hallucinating.

These hallucinations are a mixture of perception and dreams.

You actually perceive a small fraction of what you experience. The brain patches up the rest in a process that's pretty much the same as dreaming, but without the bodily side-effects such as paralysis.

On the other side of the coin, you do quite a bit of perceiving which simply never gets involved at all in the brain functions that produce conscious experience.

The hallucination model has several advantages, not the least of which is that it conforms with current observation and experiment (unlike the alleged computational model of consciousness, which, truth be told, doesn't even exist). It also finally gets rid of the Cartesian theater for good, which is no small feat.

The computationalists will often speak of "representations" in the brain, and physicalists do as well... it's a very useful way of talking about what's going on in the brain. But the computationalists make the mistake of entifying the representations, treating them as real things rather than convenient ways of talking about incredibly complex phenomena.

I'll give you an example of what I mean....

Suppose you drop a stone in a lake. It causes ripples. These ripples are not "represenations" of the stone... they are merely consequences of the stone hitting the water. They don't resemble the stone at all. (And even if they did, their similarity could not actually be a "representation" of the stone without an observing mind to note the similarity and decide that they were representations.)

So even though different stones will produce different patterns, and even though these patterns may be entirely predictable, there's still no objective "representation" going on.

Now suppose that this particular lake has some sort of film on it, maybe pollution, maybe pond scum, whatever. And the ripples in the pond cause patterns of this film to be left behind on the lake bank when the ripples cease.

Those patterns on the bank are not representations of the ripples, much less of the stone!

And yet the computationalists want to say that they are... or they would say so, if they were consistent in their logic.

The patterns of neural firing that go on in your brain when light bounces off a tree and onto your eyeballs are not representations of the tree. They are in no way similar to the tree. They don't resemble it at all.

And here's the kicker... the hallucination resulting from the patterns of neural firings also does not resemble either the neural firings or the tree!

Your gut instinct is probably to think, "Wait, no, of course my vision of the tree resembles the tree... if it didn't, I couldn't do things like climb the tree".

But as we saw in the earlier thought experiment about the drug, the fire, and the poison, this is actually not true at all.

All that matters is that the hallucination enables your body to interact effectively with the tree. Representation is not necessary.

And absolutely nothing that's in your conscious experience of the tree is present in the tree itself -- nothing at all. Not the color, the smell, the sound of wind in the leaves or the branches rubbing together, the feeling of the texture of the bark or its coolness to your hand, the pain you get if a twig sticks into your side... absolutely none of that exists anywhere except your conscious experience.

The light bouncing off the tree is like the stone dropped into the pond. The neural firings are like the ripples in the pond. The hallucination your body performs is like the patterns of algae on the bank.

They are part of a causal chain, but no part resembles any other part, no part is a representation of any other part.

Once you kick this notion of representation to the curb, your understanding of what's really and objectively occuring gets much clearer... and the computationalist model unravels even further.

 

[PixyMisa]

No.

 

[Piggy]

Piggy, why should I believe you if you are unwilling to accede to this simple request ? We require the same thing of any other poster who makes a claim. It was my understanding that Pixy's general claim, while a bit flamboyant and pithy for my taste, was pretty much on the money. Now, if that's not the case, I'd like to see some evidence.

If by his general claim you mean his assertion that the mechanism of consciousness is known, and it is self-referential information processing, and this is widely accepted, that's easy to debunk.

"Sometime in the twenty-first century, science will confront one of its last great mysteries: the nature of the self. That lump of flesh in your cranial vault not only generates an 'objective' account of the outside world, but also directly experiences an internal world -- a rich mental life of sensations, meanings, and feelings.... Qualia are vexing to philosophers and scientists alike because even though they are palpably real and seem to lie at the very core of mental experience, physical and computational theories about brain function are utterly silent on the question of how they might arise or why they might exist." V. S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain (2011)

"What about consciousness? What makes us actually suffer the pain of a toothache or see the blue of the sky as blue? The computational theory of mind, even with complete neural underpinnings, offers no clear answer." Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (1997)

"One of the mysteries of consciousness is how a perception or information enters into consciousness from the nonconscious depths.... The question of consciousness has been rather like the holy grail of neuroscience.... No one knows exactly what is going on." Michael Gazzaniga, Human (2008)

"Consciousness appears as mysterious to 21st century scholars as it was to the ancient Greeks." Christof Koch, The Cognitive Neurosciences (2009)

"We have no idea why the neural basis of an experience is the neural basis of that experience rather than another experience or no experience at all.... Nothing that we now know, indeed nothing that we have been able to hypothesize or even fantasize, gives us an understanding of [this]." Ned Block, Comparing the Major Theories of Consciousness (2009)

"As neuroscience advances, we are getting closer to understanding what consciousness is and how it comes about." Rita Carter, The Human Brain Book (2009)

"Practically all the historical debates [about consciousness] are still alive today [although] the practical applications of cognitive neuroscience continue to grow." Bernard Baars, Cognition, Brain, and Consciousness (2010)

"When we have finally identified the elusive NCC [neural correlates of consciousness]... we will need to understand why this particular NCC does give rise to consciousness, and why not that one." Christof Koch, Cognition, Brain, and Consciousness (2010)

I could go on, but that should suffice to demonstrate that Pixy's claim is false. If he wants to identify someone (anyone) actively working in the field who thinks the mechanism is known, and that it is what he says it is, then that's up to him.

If, on the other hand, you are referring to his claim that it is widely accepted that "the brain is a computer", then there's nothing I can do for you because I can't cite what doesn't exist -- it's like asking me to provide citations to prove that it is not widely accepted that horses eat rabbits, because nobody writing about horses bothers to point out that they don't eat rabbits.

I could give you citations of folks discussing what horses do eat, but that would not disprove the claim that horses might also eat rabbits (even if they couldn't digest them, but perhaps just out of spite) but my sources simply fail to mention it, either because they're not discussing that part of a horse's diet, or because it's so widely known they don't bother mentioning it, or because (to borrow Pixy's argument) "they're wrong".

So if that's the claim you are referring to, then it is entirely Pixy's burden to show that his claim has any merit whatsoever. And he has, to my knowledge, never done anything of the sort.

But I will cite Ned Block again, from the same article as above (note that several of the planks of the computational literalists on this forum, such as the notion that a brain could be conscious even if the neurons were rearranged spatially and that consciousness is irrespective of temporal considerations, are contradicted even by Dennett) -- the NB is original with Block:

"As should be apparent, the competitors to the biological account are profoundly nonbiological, having more of their inspiration in the computer model of the mind of the 1960s and 1970s than in the age of the neuroscience of consciousness of the 21st century. As Dennett confesses, 'The recent history of neuroscience can bee seen as a series of triumphs for the lovers of detail. Yes, the specific geometry of the connectivity matters; yes, the location of specific neuromodulators and their effects matter; yes, the architecture matters; yes, the fine temporal rhythms of the spiking patterns matter, and so on. Many of the fond hopes of opportunistic minimalists [a version of computationalism: NB] have been dashed: they had hoped they could leave out various things, and they have learned that no, if you leave out x, or y, or z, you can't explain how the mind works.' Although Dennett resists the obvious conclusion, it is hard to avoid the impression that the biology of the brain is what matters to consciousness."

In short, Pixy's claims that his ideas are widely accepted are simply false.