On Consciousness

[quarky]

quarky comes even cleaner! No waxy build-up!



I have seen the error of my ways.
I have come to accept the general consensus of opinion in this thread.
Consciousness is mechanistic.
Machines can be conscious.

I tried to take it too far, suggesting that there is nothing but consciousness. My angle allowed a hammer to be conscious, but you guys weren't having it, to your good credit.
We needed to draw the line at thermostats, I think.

Accepting the truth, and humiliating myself before you like this, is no cake walk.
I guess it takes some time to adjust.

But now, everything has a dull, anti-sheen, and the wee ones don't think I'm silly anymore. Zippy, the bogus original singularity, has stopped visiting. We used to have coffee. I'm even considering Prozac again, to fill this empty place in my heart, which in the way I use the word, doesn't even exist. The heart is a pumpy thingy with valves.
I've seen them. I used to work in an emergency room. It was part of my punishment for going awol. I saw more poo than hearts, but I saw real hearts too, and when it was young kids in bad wrecks, it broke my heart, even though I know nothing broke. It broke my mind? Nah. Molecules moved within my cranium in a certain way that allowed me to feel grief and empathy? And I made them do it. Whatever I am. If I had more Asperger's flavoring, I might have chosen to move molecules in a different way within my cranium.
The useless sadness might have instead been invested in the up-coming choices I would need to make, in the hospital cafeteria, because, as soon as I got this mess cleaned up and bagged and taken to the morg, it would be dinner break.

And I'd order the usual. I toy with the notion of trying the unusual, but only to seem more fun to myself. Mabel, the cafeteria lady, relies on my reliability. I make her life easier. She seems to not want any surprises in her life. Though I've never asked, which I find suspicious.

If some of you are going glassy eyed, or wondering what the sciency point it is I'm getting to, hang in there.

I think I can nail this in about 25 more posts.

And yes...I'm painfully aware of how un-cool it is to make series of posts without allowing time for interjection.

"Intercourse?, he ejaculated. I have no time for intercourse!"

 

[quarky]

Coming soon!

quarky makes his point, or not, and wraps it up, in a manner of speaking.

I have to go do something. Please remain on the edge of your seats, as I'd like to remember you all.

 

[Dancing David]

Those here that are familiar with my 'style' know that I like to be polite. I abhor cruelty.
Which is why it pains me to tell Dancing David that, this time, he is simply wrong.

.

I doubt I will take it personally, but you are rather vague as to where I am incorrect.

 

[quarky]

I doubt I will take it personally, but you are rather vague as to where I am incorrect.

Quantum indeterminacy.

Its not what I was 'all about'.
Geeperz, I was the dude that pointed out, in a thread about Schrodinger's stupid cat, that the odds were in favor of the cat being dead.

Why?

Because cats die.
Sometimes they just up and die.
Old age; neglect; dog-people; whatever.

I only mention this to point out my uber-scientific-skeptic nature.
Even my old hippy friends hate me for this.

I'm tired of claiming how un-woo i am.
(Though, i like the sound of un-woo, now that I've seen it in cyber-print.)

I'm sure I must come off as idiotic. Truth is, I'm merely mentally retarded, or as we say these days, equally, yet differently challenged.

I'm actually drooling on my keyboard as I type, as if to drive home a point.

(OK, that was a joke, and in poor taste. I'm an advocate for the very special people amongst us. I stop just shy of encouraging them to procreate, with out regard to whether or not they know what causes 'it'.)


Back to the point:

How is it possible that the behavior of the wee-bits is more or less independent of the behavior of the larger bits of the same essential stuff?

And which came first?

(The wee-est bit of all.)

I'm bored waiting for the fields to be unified.

You mentioned that you can't have a single quark.

Why not?

There is no fundamental difference between quarks.
They're all made out of the same essential stuff. Let's call it mayonnaise.
The individual traits are manifested via spin and wobble and such.

But, its mayo, all the way down.
(No endorsements here. But face it, "Hellman's")

anyway, once you're allowed to break all the rules, via the nature of the so-called initial singularity, and its pre-bangy freedoms; before thermodynamics reared its lovely accountant's head, which i totally respect, than all you need is a single unit of the most fundamental 'stuff'.

The wee-quark, or ironic anti-quark, or whatever we manage to further bust it into, is quite capable of manifesting as all the other stuff. It just needs to spin the other way, and then get back over here, and spin the other way, and so forth, at speeds we don't even like to imagine, and, the next thing you know, there's your conglomerate sub-atomic particle...formed from one that is willing and able to change behavior, really quickly, even sequentially, if we need that caveat to cling to, and suddenly, you've got a damn electron.

Its all made out of the same mayonnaise. No laws are violated.
We simply expected violations of "C" to be 'just barely', if that.

I see it as radically violated. Not just a bit faster. Incomprehensibly faster.
This, of course, pre-big-bang. Pre-laws.

For you to tell me that there is no possibility of a single quark; for others to suggest that I read and possibly stole from Depak Chopra; all of that is a bit insulting.

At one time, anyway, they say I was quite intelligent.
Never mattered to me.
The smart kids I was dumped in with bored the crap out of me.
Not because of inferior I.Q.s....hell no.

Because they didn't want to get all covered in mud, rooting through stinky ponds for interesting amphibians that had the ability to reproduce in their immature state.

So,
I'm not stupid, really.

Perhaps I'm not funny, either.

And now, I'm almost depressed.


wtf.

aren't there any cool physicists here?
Why does jref insist on the flavor of the absolute dullest prof. at M.I.T.?

Honestly,

I'm much more compatible with the most outrageous math geeks and astrophysics geeks than I am with the central vibe here.
I hide behind a veil of nasty humor, and even that, i find myself having to self-edit to remain within the pointless boundaries of the bogus decency laws, or whatever they are called.

Its wasteful. You guys are missing out on some funny stuff.


I see now that I've 'gone-off' a bit. Sorry.

What I meant to say is that I'm not smart enough, or educated enough, to rub elbows on a thread about consciousness, of all things.

If it was metallurgy, or tropical vines, or whatever...I'd yield in an instant. I'd be all ears. But this thread is about consciousness.

Other than Zeusss, its like hanging out with a bunch of school marms.

If anyone is curious what I've learned in my extensive, exhaustive study of consciousness, i'll be in my office.

 

[quarky]

My translation of that: "I feel sick when I read opinions I don't agree with."

Tell me if this is the type of half-baked thought that makes you feel ill:

Although the complex machinery of consciousness is not yet understood, there's no evidence it's more than complex machinery.

No offense, but i find your brand of 'no evidence' incredibly more boring and tedious than my brand of no evidence.

Too bad there's never any chicks here.
They would totally go home with my brand of 'no evidence'.

Wtf is your damn opinion anyway?
Besides wondering what wooster I ripped off for my odd ideas?

Is there a whole science of nay-sayer-ness, that has no regard for the universe?
You got some 'splaining to do, Mr. Scott.

much love, incidentally,

quarky

 

[Roboramma]

So let me explain the good news in my "almost nothing" slander of the human ego:

As I imagine the future, which I won't be in, human learning and data exchange is explosive. Is it Moore's law I'm thinking of? It will get squared.
And the humans of that future will have a pie-chart of what was known today, vs/ what is known in that new time...and our slice of that pie; what is presently known...it will be 'almost nothing'.

Hey quarky. My opinion is that from some perspectives you are right about this, but from others you are wrong. The point I was trying to make is that if we want to compare how much we know now with how much there is to know, we need some way to quantify knowledge. For instance, let's look at Mars: we have it mapped now to a resolution of, what, 10 meters? That's just a wild guess, but it work for the sake of the discussion: by one measure if we map it to a resolution of 1 meter we'll then know 10 times more about mars. But is that true? We already know it's general shape (it's round) and better resolution won't improve that knowledge. We know it's general composition, both of the surface and atmosphere, etc. On the other hand, aside from simply mapping the terrain, better resolution may help us to answer some more intricate questions about Mars' past, as wel*as about the complex system that is the planet - it's weather, its interior, the presence or absence of life, etc. etc.

So, my point is simply that quantifying knowledge so that you can compare the total*knowledge at one point to that at another is not easy, and there are likely many valid ways of doing so. Those that I consider to be most reasonable seem to me to suggest that we don't know "almost nothing".

For instance, one way to quantify knowledge about mars might be to determine how many yes/no questions are necessary to represent a¬¬ that we know about it. But I'm not sure that that encapsulates the difference between general knowledge (it's a planet orbiting the sun) and more specific knowledge (there is a pebble at such and such a specific location on the surface) knowing the former seems to me to be knowing more than knowing the latter.

 

[Roboramma]

You mentioned that you can't have a single quark.

Why not?

Because the further one quark gets from it's buddies, the stronger the force pulling it back to them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_freedom

In physics, asymptotic freedom is a property of some gauge theories that causes bonds between particles to become asymptotically weaker as energy increases, and distance decreases.
Asymptotic freedom is a feature of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the quantum field theory of the nuclear interaction between quarks and gluons, the fundamental constituents of nuclear matter. Quarks interact weakly at high energies, allowing perturbative calculations by DGLAP of cross sections in deep inelastic processes of particle physics; and strongly at low energies, preventing the unbinding of baryons (like protons or neutrons with three quarks) or mesons (like pions with two quarks), the composite particles of nuclear matter.

anyway, once you're allowed to break all the rules, via the nature of the so-called initial singularity, and its pre-bangy freedoms; before thermodynamics reared its lovely accountant's head, which i totally respect, than all you need is a single unit of the most fundamental 'stuff'.

Wait, why are you allowed to break all the rules? Why didn't I get the memo? It seems I've been missing out on a lot of fun

The wee-quark, or ironic anti-quark, or whatever we manage to further bust it into, is quite capable of manifesting as all the other stuff. It just needs to spin the other way, and then get back over here, and spin the other way, and so forth, at speeds we don't even like to imagine, and, the next thing you know, there's your conglomerate sub-atomic particle...formed from one that is willing and able to change behavior, really quickly, even sequentially, if we need that caveat to cling to, and suddenly, you've got a damn electron.

I don't quite get it: you're saying that before the big bang (if such a thing even means anything) the laws of physics as we know them didn't apply, therefore after the big bang they also don't apply, so you could have a quark that behaves any way you like, and thus maybe there's only one quark just acting funny?

(that's how I read that, please correct if I'm bungling things)

 

[Dancing David]

Quantum indeterminacy.

Its not what I was 'all about'.
Geeperz, I was the dude that pointed out, in a thread about Schrodinger's stupid cat, that the odds were in favor of the cat being dead.

Why?

Because cats die.
Sometimes they just up and die.
Old age; neglect; dog-people; whatever.

I only mention this to point out my uber-scientific-skeptic nature.
Even my old hippy friends hate me for this.

I'm tired of claiming how un-woo i am.
(Though, i like the sound of un-woo, now that I've seen it in cyber-print.)

I'm sure I must come off as idiotic. Truth is, I'm merely mentally retarded, or as we say these days, equally, yet differently challenged.

I'm actually drooling on my keyboard as I type, as if to drive home a point.

(OK, that was a joke, and in poor taste. I'm an advocate for the very special people amongst us. I stop just shy of encouraging them to procreate, with out regard to whether or not they know what causes 'it'.)


Back to the point:

How is it possible that the behavior of the wee-bits is more or less independent of the behavior of the larger bits of the same essential stuff?

And which came first?

(The wee-est bit of all.)

I'm bored waiting for the fields to be unified.

You mentioned that you can't have a single quark.

Why not?

There is no fundamental difference between quarks.
They're all made out of the same essential stuff. Let's call it mayonnaise.
The individual traits are manifested via spin and wobble and such.

But, its mayo, all the way down.
(No endorsements here. But face it, "Hellman's")

anyway, once you're allowed to break all the rules, via the nature of the so-called initial singularity, and its pre-bangy freedoms; before thermodynamics reared its lovely accountant's head, which i totally respect, than all you need is a single unit of the most fundamental 'stuff'.

The wee-quark, or ironic anti-quark, or whatever we manage to further bust it into, is quite capable of manifesting as all the other stuff. It just needs to spin the other way, and then get back over here, and spin the other way, and so forth, at speeds we don't even like to imagine, and, the next thing you know, there's your conglomerate sub-atomic particle...formed from one that is willing and able to change behavior, really quickly, even sequentially, if we need that caveat to cling to, and suddenly, you've got a damn electron.

Its all made out of the same mayonnaise. No laws are violated.
We simply expected violations of "C" to be 'just barely', if that.

I see it as radically violated. Not just a bit faster. Incomprehensibly faster.
This, of course, pre-big-bang. Pre-laws.

For you to tell me that there is no possibility of a single quark; for others to suggest that I read and possibly stole from Depak Chopra; all of that is a bit insulting.

At one time, anyway, they say I was quite intelligent.
Never mattered to me.
The smart kids I was dumped in with bored the crap out of me.
Not because of inferior I.Q.s....hell no.

Because they didn't want to get all covered in mud, rooting through stinky ponds for interesting amphibians that had the ability to reproduce in their immature state.

So,
I'm not stupid, really.

Perhaps I'm not funny, either.

And now, I'm almost depressed.


wtf.

aren't there any cool physicists here?
Why does jref insist on the flavor of the absolute dullest prof. at M.I.T.?

Honestly,

I'm much more compatible with the most outrageous math geeks and astrophysics geeks than I am with the central vibe here.
I hide behind a veil of nasty humor, and even that, i find myself having to self-edit to remain within the pointless boundaries of the bogus decency laws, or whatever they are called.

Its wasteful. You guys are missing out on some funny stuff.


I see now that I've 'gone-off' a bit. Sorry.

What I meant to say is that I'm not smart enough, or educated enough, to rub elbows on a thread about consciousness, of all things.

If it was metallurgy, or tropical vines, or whatever...I'd yield in an instant. I'd be all ears. But this thread is about consciousness.

Other than Zeusss, its like hanging out with a bunch of school marms.

If anyone is curious what I've learned in my extensive, exhaustive study of consciousness, i'll be in my office.

Solid, righteous dude.

So you are rambling and have yet to show how quantum indeterminacy has an effect of neurotransmission.


The AHc molecule is large enough that it will not participate in quantum weirdness and so ...

Will you explain to me how exactly QM effects the way neurotransmitters interact with the receptors, other than the field effects of the ions?

And while your at could you explain the evidence for a single quark? Seriously, they bind and travel in two and threes. So if you want to explain how a naked quark by itself exits I will be happy to follow along. Have you read Strange Beautyabout Gell-Mann?

I did not insult you.

 

[Mr. Scott]

No offense, but i find your brand of 'no evidence' incredibly more boring and tedious than my brand of no evidence.

My goal here is not to entertain as much as it is to challenge and learn.

Too bad there's never any chicks here.
They would totally go home with my brand of 'no evidence'.

I think !Kaggen is female, BTW. Show us your brand of 'no evidence.'

Wtf is your damn opinion anyway?
Besides wondering what wooster I ripped off for my odd ideas?
Is there a whole science of nay-sayer-ness, that has no regard for the universe?
You got some 'splaining to do, Mr. Scott.

You didn't answer my question, but that's OK. It means you'd rather not. I did answer the public survey.

I hope what follows clarifies my opinion for you.

I've worked for a long time as a computer professional, both with hardware and software and in machine intelligence. I have not seen any evidence the brain is more than just a spectacularly complicated machine.

However, I don't understand the cause of the subjective experience. Here's an example I thought up recently:

Deja vu is a feeling we have of experiencing something now that we experienced in the past. Dennett has pretty good ideas about possible causes of the deja vu sensation. One is timing error, where the deja vu detector compares a memory of what's just experienced with the same event that's still coming in. Another, is when the detector misfires for no interesting reason, as nerve cells are prone to do (background noise).

Though it's easy for me to picture a "seen this before" signal emanating from the detector, the feeling of deja vu is mysterious to me. I know how to program a machine so an incoming item is matched with a remembered item to issue a 'match' signal. I have no idea how to make the machine "feel" that it's encountered the item before. My hope is that engaging in conversations like this might help me inch closer to an answer. The trouble is that the dark matter, QM, EM column, and electron theories of consciousness don't seem to help at all. They can give a weird "feeling" that they are answers, but all fail the delusional woo smell test. No one has answered exactly how, for example, QM could be the cause of feelings.

much love, incidentally

Thanks! Love is appreciated if not offered sarcastically.

 

[quarky]

Well, this is rather special.
My hissy fit garnered response.
My loviness is not sarcastic.

To Mr. Scott, and his lack of evidence refuting his own opinions, all I can say is that there's even less evidence refuting my completely contrary opinion.

D.D., no, I haven't read that book. I will look for it.
Meanwhile, the idea of quarks traveling in 3's does not account for the single one moving fast enough to appear as three separate ones. You did not insult me, btw.
I've always found you to be a reasonable bloke; decent; kind; etc.

I'm not about the quantum 'weirdness'. I'm more up against the Newtonian non-weirdness. I'm attempting to simplify things.

To Roboramma, I'm not breaking any rules, nor is the singularity. There never was a big bang. Just the same little thing, moving about, very fast. It appears to be all over the place, busting out into zillions of new bits. There's no evidence for this, once one entertains this alternate possibility, which, to me, is hugely less wooish. And yes, pre-bang activity is immune to the laws. It may have its own laws; I wouldn't know.
But it is possible that there never was a big bang, and what we perceive are the effects of a single, mini-unit, zipping around and assembling a perceptual field, as well as the percievers.

I realize how bizarre this hypothesis must seem.
And more so, that we know almost nothing about the planet we live on, much less mars. We may actually know more about mars.
The vast majority of the solid surface of our planet remains completely unexplored.
The deeper innards, even less.

And the nature of perception?
And what it is we perceive?

We're still in the dark ages of that stuff.

We simply like to ignore the total logic disconnect. It is disturbing.

Someone tell me what takes place when we try to remember something; like if we were playing trivial pursuit. We ask our brain to dig through some old files?
How does that work?
How do we activate that 'mechanism'?
And what are we, even, that evidently gives the command to begin the search?

We are impossibly far from understanding this. We are impossibly far from going to other galaxies. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we can examine what it is we are, on an individual basis.

My conclusions about this are infantile, yet, at least I've started.
Reducing consciousness to pure mechanistic actions is an awesome disservice to what is.
in my humble opinion.

Anyway, I must thank you fine folks for even humoring me here.
I was expecting something brutal.
I can handle a good beating. I had older brothers.
A closed and arrogant mindset is far more difficult for me to endure.

Keep in mind, please, that I don't believe what I pretend to believe. I believe in the dialog. And for now, I believe that we live in a pretend universe. This doesn't cheapen it for me. It simply makes it responsive to our commands.

Ultimately, it makes us the universe.

 

[quarky]

Have I finally killed this thread?

I was hoping for 60,000 views.
I was hoping for Pixy, at least, to rip me a fresh anal-orifice.

I just read my post above.
Its disturbing to me that I can simply blow that stuff out of my old anal orifice, on one take.
Its an unusual skill, or mental illness. Perhaps we can agree on that.

I'm not allowed to suggest or promote illegal activity, regardless of the oppressive nature of various laws that limit individual freedoms to explore the nature of consciousness...yet, in a hypothetical universe, wherein such restrictions need not apply, I'd totally advise Mr. Scott to trip balls, and ask the field "So, what's up with the deja-vu thang?"

Meanwhile, I should probably suspend myself. It has a nice ring to it, and I'm more or less spent here.

Last time I bailed, I was a bit frustrated by the background imagination of the science geeks at jref.
This time, it feels much better to me. I even have fondness for y'all.

 

[calebprime]

Have I finally killed this thread?

I was hoping for 60,000 views.
I was hoping for Pixy, at least, to rip me a fresh anal-orifice.

I just read my post above.
Its disturbing to me that I can simply blow that stuff out of my old anal orifice, on one take.
Its an unusual skill, or mental illness. Perhaps we can agree on that.

I'm not allowed to suggest or promote illegal activity, regardless of the oppressive nature of various laws that limit individual freedoms to explore the nature of consciousness...yet, in a hypothetical universe, wherein such restrictions need not apply, I'd totally advise Mr. Scott to trip balls, and ask the field "So, what's up with the deja-vu thang?"

Meanwhile, I should probably suspend myself. It has a nice ring to it, and I'm more or less spent here.

Last time I bailed, I was a bit frustrated by the background imagination of the science geeks at jref.
This time, it feels much better to me. I even have fondness for y'all.

One likes Pixy and Quarky. One is not confused.

 

[quarky]

One likes Pixy and Quarky. One is not confused.

Spoken like the singularity.

Be well, my friend.

 

[Dancing David]

Spoken like the singularity.

Or an atevi

 

[calebprime]

On the surface the humans encounter the atevi, a race of dark-skinned humanoids, for whom math is as intrinsic as breathing. Atevi possess no concept of liking or loving another person, but instead place utmost importance on loyalty or man'chi.


Nah, I'm not loyal.

I'm more like Balok -- almost my name backwards, too.

 

[Dancing David]

I meant the use of 'One', man'chi is not loyalty per se, it is deeper than that and supposedly instinctual.

I was referring to the use of the personal pronoun 'one'.

 

[Mr. Scott]

FWIW: "Artificially Intelligent Game Bots Pass the Turing Test On Turing's Centenary"

An artificially intelligent virtual gamer created by computer scientists at The University of Texas at Austin has won the BotPrize by convincing a panel of judges that it was more human-like than half the humans it competed against.

 

[quarky]

sad state of humanity.
the half it beat, anyway.

i'd like to think i could un-plug the bastard, if it came down to a test of human potential.

zippy told me to tell you that my hypothesis was balderdash of the highest order.

 

[annnnoid]

FWIW: "Artificially Intelligent Game Bots Pass the Turing Test On Turing's Centenary"

...oh look, evidence of....something. So who judged the judges...or is everyone considered equal in their ability to definitively adjudicate the veracity of the human condition? Yes...no...don't know? Science by wishful thinking is it? Is the Turing test even science?

Perspective is always useful. Discussion recently on how much we do...or don't know. I've quoted Chomsky before..." Our understanding [of human nature] is thin and likely to remain so..." Argument from authority, naturally... but rote dismissal of same is blatant argument from stupidity.

...I could bring up Geraint Rees on neuroscience and brain scanning, or Christof Koch on what might be described as the limits of analysis (Occams razor is getting a tad dull)...but how about the former head of the National Academy of Science and the current editor in chief of Science mag. A biochemist by trade. Had this to say:

“As a coauthor of a textbook in cell biology that is updated at 5-year intervals, I am painfully aware of the huge gap that remains in our understanding of even the simplest cells.”

I'm guessing it all has something to do with metaphors like forests and trees. It's obviously way easy to see all we know (10 bavillion wiki pages....mucho impressive)...but to see what we don't know requires altitude (anyone for getting high?...is Zeuzzz on to something???). I've always been curious about Socates and his " All I know is that I know nothing. " conclusion. Splitting hairs, you'd have to say...' dude...you know something, obviously...cause if you didn't know something, it would be impossible to conclude that you know nothing. '

....but methinks he had something more in mind. Something to do with the condition called 'knowing' (which, apparently, we know all but nothing about despite the fact that without it neither science nor we would exist ...would that be regarded as a minor or major deficiency in our catalog of understanding d'ya think?). He was Socrates after all. Not exactly a lightweight!


Quarky...you are simply ahead of your time!

 

[quarky]

Funny you mention trees and forests, annnoid.
I was just reading my state's forest magazine, which is always excellent, and they were discussing the demise of our most valuable hardwood trees; this being in Appalachia.

Now we have the ash vine borer; drought; early freeze; heat waves; tornadoes; fungi and endless other opportunistic organisms that make things really complex.

They fell short of saying "We don't know squat, and its kind of embarrassing".
The cool part was that they were curious, and trying to be helpful.
Meanwhile, the climax deciduous forest that surrounds me is in deep doo-doo.

I think its possible that you have to love something before you can actually care about it.
Caring for it, of course, is a huge leap from there.

I've gone off topic, unless I'm attempting to demonstrate consciousness.