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Actually, we've got some pretty good ways to find out if a person is conscious. Doctors plan to apply it to patients in vegetative states to decide if they should be off life support, for example.
We could apply those methods to other animals. That could give us a fix on how much complexity is required for conscious brains, as opposed to unconscious zombie-like brains such as lower worms, etc.
What complexity of brain do you think with be worthwhile to look into whether it's conscious or not? Show me where you'd draw the line:
I erase the line completely. All lifeforms are allowed to live, unless they become an immediate threat, at which point I would make a decision to run, fight, or kill.
And that is reality for me.
When you have applied those methods you write about above, that will,
I think that this is practically the definition of the internet, as it relates to forums.
No better area for the study of consciousness than there, or in this very thread, though.
Some thoughts. Been on my mind for a while, might as well spill them out here.
I've always found words, syntax and the organic creation of language we use to describe all of science rather magical and somehow uber scientific, more in the realm of consciousness contemplating consciousness than objective.
I would say there are two main theories about the world and how it works that have crystallized over time for me over many years of studying consciousness. And both depend on some fundamental axioms and assumptions about what the world is.
One is the scientific theory about the universe. Which claims that the it is a machine, tiny packets of matter that create fields that we can test and measure.
The other is the theory that the world is language. We can state that the world is composed of mass and atoms flying around at the speed of light, that is composed of electromagnetic fields of interlocking subatomic particles in constant flux, but no matter how we try to explain it each time what we end up with is words. Our models of the world are made of words and the world is composed of description.
When scientists and people were more epistemologically naive centuries ago it meant that they did not have a clear understanding of the inside and the outside, between what we imagine and what actually is. The more I think about consciousness reflecting on consciousness the more I come to the conclusion that what we imagine and what actually is are very much closer to the same thing than we typically realize.
I think the mind is somehow a co-creator in the process of reality, through the acts of language that connect, not just us, but every conscious entity in nature. Which in turn each have their own language on a similar yet consciously unique level to ours.
Neither view is necessarily right or wrong.
Although one is far easier to ridicule as baseless nonsense (ironically by using language to ridicule it)
It's just a matter how you look at it, that's all.
I erase the line completely. All lifeforms are allowed to live, unless they become an immediate threat, at which point I would make a decision to run, fight, or kill.
And that is reality for me.
When you have applied those methods you write about above, that will,
...please let us know the outcome and findings of your work.
On your list from one to seven, which would you choose?
I'm not sure how you got to "all lifeforms are allowed to live, unless..." since we're talking about what consciousness is, how it works, and whether or not it's data processing. We're not talking at all about whether or not it's OK to kill a creature because it may or may not be conscious. That topic is for Religion and Philosophy. This thread is to focus on the science of consciousness, and whether or not it needs some magic bean only living brains have that would make it impossible for us to build a conscious machine.
Maybe a cop out but I have started thinking of consciousness simply as a state. When I'm awake that state is on and in dreamless sleep the state is off. A state is produced by something physical yet the state itself is not "made" of anything. The state of a television set being on for example doesn't itself have some substance.
And I think of reality as oneness in the sense that physical reality is an interconnected wholeness. There are no truly isolated systems except perhaps all of reality as a single system.
"In the natural sciences an isolated system is a physical system without any external exchange – neither matter nor energy can enter or exit, but can only move around inside. Truly isolated systems cannot exist in nature, other than possibly the universe itself, and they are thus hypothetical concepts only." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolated_system
So my spiritual idea of oneness is a material one.
The tricky question still remains however: what produces the state of consciousness? Because of oneness, it's the universe as a whole that produces consciousness, and at the same time consciousness is localized in at least human brains. Maybe when the complexity at some localized system is high enough (and can handle high enough abstraction levels) the state of consciousness is produced. That would mean that perhaps computers may become conscious. Or the Internet in some places, or in a distributed way.
Annonymous's actions (our actions) regarding freedom of information and censoring the internet might be a small case in point. The things they have done, and still do, would not have happened without the internet.
When an injustice in the world happens that angers enough people, say a corrupt regime somewhere tries to censor the internet from their people for their own means, the internet seems to follow a recurrent pattern. Restore access to the people that have been cut off, and call out the moral legitimacy of the authority that censored it.
A clear example is here, in the aftermath of Egypt cutting off the internet to their population.
You could say this is not 'the internet' doing anything conscious, it's a specific group of people using it for their own means. Just as you could say when a corporation does something the corporation is not doing anything conscious, it's just the people using its name. Yet the internet, or the corporation, still has measurable effects on the real conscious world we inhabit.
Expanding this idea, corporations are an emergent property of people used by them to make money, and the internet is an emergent property of people to help share information and knowledge, with no money incentive. Just like biology is based on complex chemistry. But biology is far more than complex chemistry. Social systems are based on animal dominance hierarchical organizations, but are far more than just animal life. These are emergent properties, which is the key concept here. Just like biology is an emergent property of chemistry, which is in turn an emergent property of physics.
Likewise, the internet is an evolutionary emergent property of human consciousness. It is made by human consciousness, yet is far more than human consciousness in it's totality.
It has it's own unique effect on peoples perspective, it's developing its own morals, rules, trends and its own behavioral profile. It's helping to remove the ego centric greed driven Machiavellian nature of many people towards a more aware and harmonious view of us all as equals, whilst helping highlight the dis-empowering systems of thought and over arching power structures that have been so destructive to human nature in the past.
Trying to define a brand new emergent phenomenon with no empirical or historical prescient, scientifically, is hard. This is just my opinion.
The internet is just as conscious as you or I, yet it's still in it's infancy. In an abstract way it's the summation of all human consciousness, and its evolving at an unprecedented rate in terms of traditional biological evolution.
The internet is providing a means by which we can start to create the world we dream of. The innovation, technology and change it will cause to how we define ourselves as a species in the coming decades will likely be unprecedented, and highly unpredictable.
The new law is novelty. Novel new innovations. These new inventions, new technologies, are not going to hit a dead end. Novel human developmental processes, due to the emergence of the internet, are increasing exponentially. And for the better.
Good short talk on this here:
The World We Dream of Peter Diamandis
We have evolved to think linearly. Yet the internet is evolving exponentially. The rate of change scares some, it seems out of control. Not to me.
It seems to some that we are destroying the Earth, polluting the atmosphere, wrecking the oceans, dehumanizing ourselves, robbing our children of a decent future, etc.
There’s a lot of talk about cultural death and disenfranchisement, and it’s usually in the context of some happy naked tribes people in the rainforest, or in Africa selling their woodwork to tourists, and isn’t it too bad that their culture is being blown up and traded in for mall culture and shopping by remote; but in fact, all culture is being destroyed. All culture is being sold down the river by the sort of materialist billionaires who want to turn the entire planet into an international airport arrival concourse. That’s not the victory of somebody’s culture over somebody else’s culture; nobody ever had a culture like that. That’s just the victory of greed and crapola over good taste and good sense.
The democratized internet is helping resist this Orwellian possibility.
If I were dependent on the notion that human institutions are necessary to pull us out of the ditch, I would be very despairing. Nobody’s in charge, nor should they be – not the IMF, the Pope, the communist party, the Jews, no, nobody has their finger on what’s going on. So why am I optimistic about the future if it's just a runaway train out of control? Because I think the out-of-controlness is the most hopeful thing about it.
After all, whose control is it out of? No-one ever controlled it in the first place. In my opinion, the conscious internet is helping restore some much needed balance to a very unbalanced world.
Thanks for the link. Any talk by Koch is worth a watch, and this has instantly piqued my interest in relation to his opening remarks about the disparity between the physics of things and the conscious experience of them.
One my favs of his is this one.
3. Christof Koch - Brain, Mind, and Consciousness - Skeptics Society 2005
The inattentional blindness test at 23:00 worked on me first time, and blew my mind.
Annonymous's actions (our actions) regarding freedom of information and censoring the internet might be a small case in point. The things they have done, and still do, would not have happened without the internet.
When an injustice in the world happens that angers enough people, say a corrupt regime somewhere tries to censor the internet from their people for their own means, the internet seems to follow a recurrent pattern. Restore access to the people that have been cut off, and call out the moral legitimacy of the authority that censored it.
A clear example is here, in the aftermath of Egypt cutting off the internet to their population.
You could say this is not 'the internet' doing anything conscious, it's a specific group of people using it for their own means. Just as you could say when a corporation does something the corporation is not doing anything conscious, it's just the people using its name. Yet the internet, or the corporation, still has measurable effects on the real conscious world we inhabit.
Expanding this idea, corporations are an emergent property of people used by them to make money, and the internet is an emergent property of people to help share information and knowledge, with no money incentive. Just like biology is based on complex chemistry. But biology is far more than complex chemistry. Social systems are based on animal dominance hierarchical organizations, but are far more than just animal life. These are emergent properties, which is the key concept here. Just like biology is an emergent property of chemistry, which is in turn an emergent property of physics.
Likewise, the internet is an evolutionary emergent property of human consciousness. It is made by human consciousness, yet is far more than human consciousness in it's totality.
It has it's own unique effect on peoples perspective, it's developing its own morals, rules, trends and its own behavioral profile. It's helping to remove the ego centric greed driven Machiavellian nature of many people towards a more aware and harmonious view of us all as equals, whilst helping highlight the dis-empowering systems of thought and over arching power structures that have been so destructive to human nature in the past.
Trying to define a brand new emergent phenomenon with no empirical or historical prescient, scientifically, is hard. This is just my opinion.
The internet is just as conscious as you or I, yet it's still in it's infancy. In an abstract way it's the summation of all human consciousness, and its evolving at an unprecedented rate in terms of traditional biological evolution.
The internet is providing a means by which we can start to create the world we dream of. The innovation, technology and change it will cause to how we define ourselves as a species in the coming decades will likely be unprecedented, and highly unpredictable.
The new law is novelty. Novel new innovations. These new inventions, new technologies, are not going to hit a dead end. Novel human developmental processes, due to the emergence of the internet, are increasing exponentially. And for the better.
Good short talk on this here:
The World We Dream of Peter Diamandis
We have evolved to think linearly. Yet the internet is evolving exponentially. The rate of change scares some, it seems out of control. Not to me.
It seems to some that we are destroying the Earth, polluting the atmosphere, wrecking the oceans, dehumanizing ourselves, robbing our children of a decent future, etc.
There’s a lot of talk about cultural death and disenfranchisement, and it’s usually in the context of some happy naked tribes people in the rainforest, or in Africa selling their woodwork to tourists, and isn’t it too bad that their culture is being blown up and traded in for mall culture and shopping by remote; but in fact, all culture is being destroyed. All culture is being sold down the river by the sort of materialist billionaires who want to turn the entire planet into an international airport arrival concourse. That’s not the victory of somebody’s culture over somebody else’s culture; nobody ever had a culture like that. That’s just the victory of greed and crapola over good taste and good sense.
The democratized internet is helping resist this Orwellian possibility.
If I were dependent on the notion that human institutions are necessary to pull us out of the ditch, I would be very despairing. Nobody’s in charge, nor should they be – not the IMF, the Pope, the communist party, the Jews, no, nobody has their finger on what’s going on. So why am I optimistic about the future if it's just a runaway train out of control? Because I think the out-of-controlness is the most hopeful thing about it.
After all, whose control is it out of? No-one ever controlled it in the first place. In my opinion, the conscious internet is helping restore some much needed balance to a very unbalanced world.
Some claim that there is only one consciousness in the universe. With consciousness as a state (see earlier post), then there can be many separate consciousnesses!
And it makes sense to have several consciousnesses because when I'm awake another person can be in dreamless sleep and vice versa. So each person can have his or her individual consciousness and separately have it on or off.
It's true that there are no actual isolated system. An isolated system is only an approximation. This means that the universe/multiverse is a oneness on the physical level! But a system can be isolated by having another system isolating it from the rest of the universe. An example is a Faraday's cage that isolates the space inside it from electromagnetic waves on the outside.
Purely out of curiosity, how good was anyone here at counting the number of throws accurately the first time they watched this? Fail or success? It's at 23:00 into the clip, this link will start it at the correct time.
That's a terrific video lecture. I'd seen it before. The consciousness test, the image of a man planking in empty air, is worth analysis.
I'd argue that it's really testing the following:
1) Image recognition of sky and air.
2) Image recognition of person.
3) Understanding of walking, gravity, and flying.
All these require experience, not necessarily consciousness. What computers are lacking when they seem stupid is a lifetime in the real world. If a computer had lived with us in the world, became familiar with the entities in the image, it would see the irrationality without necessarily having to be conscious.
Watson, the Jeopardy champion computer, was a three year old. How many three year olds would be champion Jeopardy players? Watson's mistakes reveal the fact that it hasn't lived in our adult world long enough to know, for example, that Toronto was not an American city. It's not missing the magic bean of consciousness. It just hasn't lived in our world long enough to "seem" conscious.
Some claim that there is only one consciousness in the universe. With consciousness as a state (see earlier post), then there can be many separate consciousnesses!
And it makes sense to have several consciousnesses because when I'm awake another person can be in dreamless sleep and vice versa. So each person can have his or her individual consciousness and separately have it on or off.
It's true that there are no actual isolated system. An isolated system is only an approximation. This means that the universe/multiverse is a oneness on the physical level! But a system can be isolated by having another system isolating it from the rest of the universe. An example is a Faraday's cage that isolates the space inside it from electromagnetic waves on the outside.
No one has shown that consciousness is anywhere but inside living brains. All available evidence indicates it's a result of the data processing power of neurons and neural networks.
If you have any evidence that contradicts this, share it with us. Anything else is impotent daydreaming.
No one has shown that consciousness is anywhere but inside living brains. All available evidence indicates it's a result of the data processing power of neurons and neural networks.
If you have any evidence that contradicts this, share it with us. Anything else is impotent daydreaming.
And some mainstream scientists, such as Amit Goswami (and Peter Russell if I remember correctly), claim that consciousness is what gives rise to physical reality instead of the other way around.
I believe physical reality is what causes the state of consciousness. And it's clear that physical reality is a oneness! (See previous posts about isolated systems.) So while many spiritual people talk about consciousness as oneness, I have started talking about physical reality as oneness, ha ha, and consciousness as merely separate states of being aware.
"Kurzweil: Your brain will connect directly to the cloud within 30 years
Takeaway: By the 2030s or 2040s, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil envisions micro-computers embedded non-invasively in the brain that will act as an interface to a “cloud” of storage and processing power.
Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil remains coolly confident in his prediction that by the 2030s, blood-cell sized computers will integrate with the human brain and dramatically expand its cognitive capacity well beyond the neocortex’s paltry 300 million or so pattern recognizers." -- Full article: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/ge...t-directly-to-the-cloud-within-30-years/10518
And that's just the beginning! Only a decade after that the technology will be 1,000 times more powerful. The difference between biology and technology will blur more and more until in a very short period of time historically speaking (due to exponential progress) they will basically become indistinguishable except that even tiny cells will be super intelligent. So our individual consciousness will come to flow out into the universe sort of.
Consciousness does not exist and scientifically defining it is futile, it's just a universal perspective, a logical kaleidoscope through which species lucky enough to become aware of it's existence and logical strength (through self introspection and reflection on the nature of nature) can use to do science.
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Or the Internet in some places, or in a distributed way.
