On Consciousness

[tsig]

No I said exactly what I said, and you've just interpreted it though your ego and materialistic filter to mean the opposite of what I meant.

Consciousness and subconsciousness precludes the brain and gives rise to it. And you can't prove otherwise.
Neurochemistry and our brain is a great example of consciousness manifesting an extremely complex material system that we're doing a great job researching.

The only person that evoked magic was you, just then.

Your magic is hilited.

 

[AlBell]

If what happens in our brains doesn't reflect reality then how can we do physics?

It's been asked before, and I've seen no answer:

""How can the third-person requirements of the scientific method be reconciled with the first-person nature of consciousness?" Win "

comp.lits seem to think avering there is no first-person consciousness does it.

 

[tsig]

Yes I know your position on this. But your evasive perspective and syntactic smoke and mirrors do not provide you with an ontological foundation to your philosophy. Which I told you right at the outset of our discourse on this forum.

It is all very smooth, slippery and disingenuous and leaves a gapping hole in your logic. Which you try to cover over with appeals to meaninglessness, incoherence and an assertion that logically we should (can) only consider what has been verified scientifically or mathematically.

Now are we going to go around the mulberry bush a fourth time (only this time on the issue of personal philosophies)? Or are you going to accept that humanity cannot make the assumption that physical matter is the sum total of what exists and is involved in reality as we know it. But that we should realise our limitations and state that such assumptions are tentative and provisional on further discoveries and realisations and that we are barely scratching the surface of the subtle reality we find ourselves in.



I know precisely. Do you, does your philosophy have sound foundations?

Nice example of evasive perspective and syntactic smoke and mirrors.

 

[tsig]

It would be awesome, it is what I came to the jref to do, but what did I find?

Yourself.

 

[tsig]

Oh... very well, what is your methodology? As long as it does not include statements about robots being conscious or sensations being the same as abstract models, I am all for discussing whatever you want.

So we can discuss anything we want as long as it's what you want to discuss.

 

[tsig]

For someone so masterful as yourself, you are leaving yourself vulnerable by wrongly describing my motives.

Reality! Look at my avatar, what you see is just a random arrangement of twigs and moss?

We're back to the fairies now?

 

[tsig]

Please keep in mind that when I refer to all conscious experience as "hallucination", I'm using somewhat metaphorical language to demonstrate something which is true, but not intuitive. Kindof like you sometimes have to do when explaining other weird scientific truths such as universal expansion, particle-wave duality, and so forth.

But in truth, indeed, all of your conscious experiences are "false", in that they exist only in your experience, and nowhere outside of it.

Also, it is not true that hallucinations are "not related to sensation"... they can be distortions of sensations.

So it really is accurate to say that everything we experience is a hallucination -- as was demonstrated in the thought experiment out heat, poison, and the drug.

If we were to take a drug that made us feel nauseated by fire, or that made us feel like we were being burned when we approached a toxin, we would consider that a hallucination.

And yet our actual experience is absolutely no different, because our experience of burning when we get to close to heat, or nausea when exposed to the smell of rotting meat, is an arbitrary one determined by evolution.

If evolution had taken a different turn, had solved the problem a different way, we wouldn't think twice about the fact that, of course, getting near a fire makes you violently ill, and rotting food produces a burning sensation.

The feeling you get that you open your eyes and are somehow looking out at a world that's distant from you... that's all illusion. That's not how vision happens at all.

Light bounces against your eyeballs, which causes patterns of neural firing, which (in part) cause your body to produce colors and sensations of brightness and so forth... none of which exists anywhere in the world outside your body.

Your regular experience is 100% hallucination... it's just that it is a functional hallucination, not a dysfunctional one.

What happens in the brain is part of a cause-effect chain which often involves causes outside the brain.

This does not make it a "reflection of reality".

If you drop a rock in a pond, are the ripples a "reflection of the stone"?

If you say no, then you have no grounds to say that what happens in the brain is a "reflection" of what happens outside of it.

How does dropping a rock in a pool have anything to do with reality being an hallucination?

If you think that what happens in the brain does not represent the real world how does anyone survive since they might see a cliff and hallucinate solid ground.

 

[tsig]

Actually, it's not a tautology, because in our everyday lives we have the impression that our conscious experience is not only in our experience... we have the sensation of looking out at the world which is out there, for example... when we look at a tree, it seems to us that we are somehow opening our eyes and experiencing something outside of us... but we're not.

You can't tell the difference between yourself and a tree?

 

[quarky]

If what happens in our brains doesn't reflect reality then how can we do physics?

Damn good retort, I must say.

If I was actually trying to defend my position, I'd answer "We can't".

However, physics is analogous to police work, on steroids.
We hope that it has no agenda.
It will see beyond the false positives and the poor witnesses.
It will dig deeper for the truth. Dna.

Sure, that's biology...but physics would be even more perverse about getting to the crux of the matter.

Which, more likely than not, there isn't one.

 

[Piggy]

"A square is a rectangle."

Piggy: " As you can't help but know, this idea is demonstrably false because there are rectangles that are not squares."

*sigh*

Sorry, that's not analogous.

If PM means to say "SRIP is necessary for consciousness" that's fine. I don't know of anyone who would argue against that, although some might want to preface that with "it seems at the moment that".

But it doesn't seem to me that this is what he has been claiming.

 

[Piggy]

That is about a robot some researchers got to move itself based on "imagining" the state that the resulting movement would lead to, using nothing but neural networks wired up somewhat similar to a known pathway in the mammalian brain. If you want me to explain in more detail I can, but suffice to say the research is 7 years old and yet it pretty much invalidates every single point you have ever tried to make in these discussions. In particular, it is 1) neurons that exist only in code controlling a real robot and 2) doing it in a manner that is similar to how our neurons might control us, at least on a very limited and simple scale.

If you don't mind my saying, this is where your blind spot shows up again.

Our brains imagine unconsciously all the time. That's how we navigate our daily lives, and that's why we're surprised by a looming shape in the hall or a missing elevator.

We can see this now. Brains use the same circuits for imagination as experience, and researchers have been able to observe some activity there as we (nonconsciously) imagine what's going to happen next at every waking moment of the day. (When we're dreaming, on the other hand, we don't seem to care what's going to happen next.)

But we're not in any way consciously aware of this. It's not a brain process which our brain bothers to hallucinate about. And given the inevitable results if it did, it's no wonder that evolution didn't select for such an arrangement.

So that's really cool work, it's just off-topic here.

It's amazing to me that you don't seem to understand that this research, while important for understanding the brain, no argument there, is nonetheless not about consciousness, because consciousness is not necessary here.

 

[Piggy]

I just told you. Neither you or Pixy are giving anything besides quotes and opinions, but both of you speak of actual science. Yet we don't see actual science beign shown.

Dude, on the issue you raised, i.e. Pixy's "central claims", I had no choice but to give you those quotes because it's the best possible evidence to show that one of those claims is false.

The only other option I can think of is to offer as evidence the cognitive neuroscience section of your nearest university library -- reading that should demonstrate my point as well, so that's my other citation.

If you want to discuss the science, you'll have to ask a different question, because there is no science dealing with Pixy's central claims, because they're false.

 

[Belz...]

There is the entire field of computational neuroscience, which Piggy seems to believe can't possibly work.

Great ! Help me, Pixy. Give me some links and references.

 

[Belz...]

Consciousness exists independent of the brain?

Yeah, tell that to the guy who just woke up from a 12 year coma !

 

[Belz...]

Dude, on the issue you raised, i.e. Pixy's "central claims", I had no choice but to give you those quotes because it's the best possible evidence to show that one of those claims is false.

Ok, then. I'll chalk that up as "consciousness is mysterious". I hope Pixy answers my challenge with more substance, but if he does I won't have any opposing evidence to judge both your claims by.

 

[Solitaire]

I've never heard anyone suggest that c. could be replicated easily, or out of old junk.

But, why not a general purpose computer with some very sophisticated programming?

It turns out to have a fatal flaw.

Lolcats don't really rule the internets. Do they?

 

[Piggy]

Oh, I see. "The brain is not like a computer" is not an actual claim, then ?

Let's see. What does a computer do ? What does a brain do ? See the resemblance ? I'm not asking you how brains and computers are different. But considering the definition of "computation" and "computer", I'm asking you how you can claim that this is not what a brain does.

That's right, "the brain is not a computer" is not a claim, because they are obviously different things (which is why we have different words for them) and if someone wants to say one's the other, then we need an explanation.

Brains are bits of organic goo that are great at Frisbre and bad at math, computers (real ones we have now) are quite the opposite.

What if I said your brain was a rocking chair? Would "My brain is not a rocking chair" then become a position that demands evidence? No, you'd want to know why something thinks they're equivalent.

And if you step back and look at what brains and computers-- real ones -- actually do, well, it's not all that similar.

If you want to say that two objects are the same thing, then you've got to show either structural of functional equivalence.

A prosthetic isn't a leg structurally. It's made of plastic and steel and it has springs, but not muscles or bones or nerves. But it's a leg functionally because it can do what a biological leg actually does.

Objects that differ wildly in structure can all be brushes, because they all do the things that brushes do.

Now if we start by comparing real brains to real computers, as they exist today -- and that's the safest place to begin -- we find that they're not similar in structure or in function. (See Frisbee/math above.)

Researchers are developing more and more advanced machines -- and I use that term advisedly -- which can perofrm an expanding range of tasks overlapping with what our bodies can do, but it's slow-going, very early, and more importantly they haven't begun to develop any experiments dealing with consciousness.

So if we say "the brain is a computer" in a broader sense, that they belong to the same category even if the ones we have today are not (yet) functionally or structurally equivalent -- perhaps technology will one day make them functionally equivalent -- then what do we mean?

It means we have to say "What is a computer" and explain why the brain and my PC are both computers, but my desk and the ocean and the stars are not.

Without that, the claim "the brain is a computer" doesn't really mean anything.

And frankly, that's what I've been waiting for: What is this "computer" which a brain and a PC both are, but my heart is not? And what insight about consciousness do we gain from the identification?

You raise the point of computation. If brains perform computations, doesn't that mean they are computers?

Actually, no. If you mean "computation" in the sense that Wolfram means it. In that sense, the laws of physics are viewed as the rule set determining the changes between any state and the next state of the system.

So you can talk about the computational capacity of hurricanes, for instance. And Wolfram does.

If you mean symbolic computation, however, then you have a big problem on your hands, because you necessarily invoke a programmer/user into the system when you do that, and we don't have any such thing in any of the organs of our body, including the brain.

The neurobio approach simply deems symbolic computation unnecessary, and that's been working just fine.

It is interesting, to say the least, that computers have allowed us to make machines that behave in some ways like us precisely because they have computers and not brains. That's damn impressive.

But you'll notice that in the case of the leg we conclude that prosthetics are legs, not that legs are prosthetics.

Similarly, why not say that computers are brains, or can be brains? Hard to argue against that.

But what would it really mean so say that a brain is a computer?

 

[Piggy]

I would say it would have something to do with the definition of the word:

Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.

Of course, by such a simple definition, any computer is conscious, but the "self-aware" part of the definition pretty much screams "introspective", no ?

That's why neurobio uses a functional definition.

I mean, if your body can respond in ways that clearly take something outside of it into account, then you can always argue that you are "aware" of it in some way... I mean, how could you say you're totally "unaware" of it?

But we know for a fact that the body can interact successfully with all sorts of things without involving consciousness. That's been found in a very wide range of experiments.

Computationalists seem to want to then jump to "self-awareness" as the next possible requisite for consciousness, perhaps because they can fit "data about the self" into their model.

But in the brain, it doesn't work that way.

Core consciousness is handled in the brain stem, and is evolutionarily early. Self-awareness, which we seem to share with dolphins and chimpanzees and gorillas at the moment but who knows what we'll find, is higher-order in the brain and later in evolutionary terms, so it's not a requirement for consciousness.

Consciousness is what happens when you wake up or dream, and what isn't happening when you're deeply asleep. It's color and sound and odor and texture and hot and cold and all that.

We're investigating the neural correlates, but we don't know anywhere near enough to even think about designing a machine that we have any reason to believe could generate any of that.

 

[Piggy]

Actually, the question of whether or not we can make conscious machines or whether our idea of consciousness applies to more things than we initially thought is crucial in understanding consciousness in general, and in people in particular.

I know, but we can't work backward.

We must understand what the brain is doing first.

Without that, we can't design conscious machines, or say definitively which other things are conscious and which are not.

Right now, we have no conscious machines to study, no designs, no way to think about designs.

So sure, threads about conscious machines can be interesting.

But if we want to discuss what's actually known about consciousness, I don't see any reason to spend any time hypothesizing about machines we can't even imagine how to design.

 

[Piggy]

How does dropping a rock in a pool have anything to do with reality being an hallucination?

If you think that what happens in the brain does not represent the real world how does anyone survive since they might see a cliff and hallucinate solid ground.

As your highlight notes, I'm using "hallucinate" in a not-entirely-literal sense here.

But in a very real way, I mean what I say.

Someone upthread defined a hallucination as a perception of something that's not real.

And that's fine for everyday use, but when we're trying to be accurate about what happens in the brain during conscious experience, we have to be more careful and more precise.

To illustrate why this definition won't serve, let's imagine you're sitting out on your back porch with a friend who decides, for some reason, to take a very mild dose of LSD. Just enough to change the quality of some of the colors and sounds, things like that, so he could still have a conversation but his experience was in some ways different.

If he experienced a yellow sky, you'd call that a hallucination.

But hold on. How can you do that?

You can't claim he's hallucinating on the grounds that the sky isn't really yellow... because it's not really blue either!

All you can say is that his experience is not normative.

As long as he can interact with his yellow sky as successfully as you can with your blue one, neither your view nor his is "skewed" they are just different.

The whims of evolution could have given us a yellow sky, after all. Why not? In that case we'd consider a blue sky to be a "hallucination".

So what we're really saying in common usage is that a hallucination is a non-normative experience (at the least).

My point here is that our everyday experience is essentially a normative hallucination, because it allows our bodies to get along in the world, but it bears no resemblance to that world whatsoever.

It is an entirely different thing.

And it is indeed like the rock.

You bounce light off a tree and onto an eyeball, the light doesn't at all resemble the tree.

The eyeball reacts with a cascade of electrochemical activity that doesn't resemble the light or the tree.

The brain produces colors and brightness which don't resemble the electrochemical activity or the light or the tree.

We think it does, because we only have access to the last bit, and because it does work for us as we navigate spacetime, so we believe that the stuff out there actually does somehow resemble our conscious experiences.

But of course it doesn't.

That's how it's like the rock and the water.

The rock causes the water to ripple, but the ripples don't resemble the rock, and they are not representations of the rock.

The light and the neural activity have the same relationship.

Ditto the ripples and the patterns on the bank, and the neural activity and stuff like color and odor and pain and sorrow.