This seems to be dependent on what is meant by a decision.
So any recognition process is a decision-making process? And you accuse me of tailoring my definitions to suit my needs!
On Consciousness
- Thread starter Mr. Scott
- Start date
- Status
Piggy
Unlicensed street skeptic
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2006
- Messages
- 15,905
Well, in a way, yes, because recognizing means deciding what a thing is from among the choices of what it might be, but we won't draw the definition that closely.
In this case, we're not talking about "recognizing" a face.
We're talking about seeing a face and deciding which emotion that face is expressing.
But according to your definition, a daughter vine is conscious, because you can place the vine between two different potential hosts, and the daughter vine will actively decide which one to go to. And that's ridiculous.
Also, we've documented extensively how our brains perform decision-making well before our conscious minds have any inkling of what's going on.
And we're not free to simply decide that this means those other areas are conscious because (1) there's no phenomenology involved, and (2) the signature indicators of consciousness aren't present.
Fellow Traveler
Illuminator
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2013
- Messages
- 3,566
When i was circumcised, it was widely believed that babies didn't feel pain.
My college biology professor tried to convince me that frogs couldn't feel pain>>>>>>>
Two interesting comments there. Need your professor to come forward and explain the second.
My college biology professor tried to convince me that frogs couldn't feel pain>>>>>>>
Two interesting comments there. Need your professor to come forward and explain the second.
Mr. Scott
Under the Amazing One's Wing
- Joined
- Nov 23, 2005
- Messages
- 2,546
My dad didn't believe dogs (and most all animals) had feelings. He grew up on a farm. There's lots of wishful thinking involved in assessing the level of consciousness of animals and machines. Your biology professor, I surmise, hoped the frogs he asked his students to vivisect didn't have that "feelings" magic bean. Funny how people are so confident in their guesses about other beings' internal subjective experiences.
On this we will have to disagree. I think it is important to consider possibilities for computer sentience without limiting it to being an exact simulation of human consiousness. And even though I do not think that anthills are conscious, I think it is a valid point to consider, even though there may not be synchronous pulses, which you want to tell us is necessary for consciousness.
Of course it is, and I have never given a defintion for "decision", so it is not "according to my definition".
I think context is important here. "Decision" is a loose term that is used for a lot of situations, and the decision that a river makes about which direction it should flow, or the decision that a vine makes about which direction it should grow are not the same as the decision a human makes about where to put a chess piece.
If all decisions were merely the result mechanical, uncosncious processes, chess would not be the art form that it is.
On the other hand, as far as I know, the research into decisions and neurology has been done using simple decisions such choosing one button, or another, and these are so simple that they might actually be more akin to the decisions of vines and rivers. And that weakens my argument for conscious subconscious processes going on in the brain.
And we're not free to simply decide that this means those other areas are conscious because (1) there's no phenomenology involved, and (2) the signature indicators of consciousness aren't present.[/QUOTE]
I have even read that once some people claimed that negroes did not have feelings like white people, and that made them suitable as slaves!
(Please don't ask for sources for that quote!)
I assume by "mechanical", you mean the kind of interactions in physics that are deterministic, within the limits of QM? Could you expand on how a chess player makes decisions that aren't completely determined by the (unconscious?) processes of the atoms in his/her brain, where a rivers decisions are completely determined by such processes. I guess there are external inputs in both processes, but I don't see how one is obviously more/less "mechanical" than the other.
I would like to avoid this wasp's nests by changing "mechanical" to "simple".
Piggy
Unlicensed street skeptic
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2006
- Messages
- 15,905
Never said they were necessary.
Just said we need to understand what they're doing before we determine if that might be done some other way.
I think you simply WANT me to believe that machines can't be conscious, and you're misinterpreting everything I say to make that appear true in your mind.
However, "computer sentience" is something very specific which nobody can even talk about yet.
So let's stick to "machine sentience" please, if you care to indulge in imaginary hypotheticals.
Piggy
Unlicensed street skeptic
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2006
- Messages
- 15,905
What Is Consciousness?
One of the primary problems we run into on threads like these is a misunderstanding of what consciousness is, of what cognitive neurobiologists are studying exactly when they study consciousness.
So here it is in a nutshell….
One of the difficulties with being a critter is that you can only respond to what touches you, to molecules and photons and such bouncing off your exterior.
Of course, critters evolved simple rules of behavior that allowed them to follow trails, so to speak, to move toward greater or lesser concentrations of certain kinds of things touching them, for instance, which allowed them to find food by scent or avoid noisy predators.
(You can look into the world of virtual automata to see just how complex this sort of behavior can become.)
But any critter that evolved something which allowed it to interact more efficiently with the world-at-a-distance would obviously have a tremendous advantage.
That advantage came with the evolution of consciousness, a kind of hologram-like thing produced by the brain.
For our purposes, we will call this thing the Mind. (That term has many usages, but for our purposes here it will mean the phenomenal hologram.)
What is this thing?
For all intents and purposes, it is what you think of as yourself. It's what's missing in a person who is brain-dead. The non-conscious behavior is still operating, but the brain can no longer generate the phenomenal hologram, it no longer performs a Mind. We say there is "no one in there".
But surprisingly, it is also the world you experience -- it is colors, brightness, sounds, smells, flavors, textures, pressures, warmth and coldness, pains, pleasures, emotions… all of that and everything else.
Your mind and your experience are the same thing, and that thing is consciousness.
To understand what's going on, it's critical that we make a difficult shift in our thinking. It's a change that can be as difficult to make as the change required to comprehend for the first time that the earth revolves around the sun, or that space and time aren't absolute, or that the universe can curve upon itself, or that light can be both a particle and a wave. That's because it requires us to shed extremely strong illusions caused by our perspective.
To step outside those illusions, let's step outside ourselves, and imagine what happens in our brains as we wake up from a dreamless sleep….
As your body emerges from sleep, a process is triggered in your brain stem which -- somehow, we're not yet sure -- allows the hologram to be formed. 3 signature deep-brain waves appear, cohere, and begin to gain strength. As this happens, areas in various parts of your brain start producing coordinated bursts of rapid electrical oscillations.
These bursts of synchronized electrical activity come from areas in your brain which are contributing to the phenomenal hologram -- which we'll abbreviate as "phenogram" from here out -- that is taking shape.
As this occurs, the brain starts producing colors, smells, sounds, and all of its other basic components.
These are all happening inside the brain. But they are formed, in large part, by areas of the brain responding to what's bouncing off your body.
The parable of the stone and the shore
Naively, it seems as though we are "looking out" into the big world, that our eyes can (somehow) allow an apparent observer inside our head to "perceive" the colors and sounds and smells and textures and such that are "out there".
Alas, this is impossible. The laws of physics don't allow it.
A better model for what's going on, or a better analogy at least, is that of pebbles being dropped into a pond, and ripples on the pond making patterns on the shore.
A stone is not water. And water is not a shore. And a shore is not a stone.
And yet, each pebble will make its own pattern of watermarks on the shore, depending on its size, weight, shape, and velocity.
Too often, we think in cartoon terms about what our brain is doing, and we imagine this tree out there in the world and light and air bounce off it and onto our eyes and ears and into our noses, and somehow this little picture of a tree travels down our optic nerves, and the sound of the tree streams through the nerves from our ears, and molecules hand little packets of scent to our nose which waft down the olfactory nerves.
But what's really going on is more like the pebble and the water and the shore.
Light waves that bounce off a tree are still just light waves. They don't pick up anything from the tree, of course, although they are affected by the bounce in light-ish sorts of ways.
When they strike our retina, the response is neural activity, while the light that caused it goes zooming away. And neural activity is not light, and doesn't have the properties of light. It's as different from light as water is from a stone.
When the Mind is operating, and if conditions are right, the brain takes some of this electrochemical activity, and performs color and brightness. But these things are not like the raw neural activity, which has no color or brightness. The colors are as different from the neural oscillations as the shore is from the water.
"And then a miracle happens"
Now think about it -- there's no light in your head. It's dark in there.
How could it be possible that you really are "seeing light" as a result of neural activity in your dark skull, at a moment when the light you're supposedly "seeing" is way off across the world by now?
The answer is simple but shocking -- you're not.
Color and brightness, which seem like "properties of light" and things "out there in the world" which we somehow "see", are not that at all. They are bodily functions. They are produced by your brain, from neural activity. And your brain can perform colors and brightness without any light to make it happen, as when you dream or hallucinate.
Different kinds of brains perform different responses to being hit by light, of course. Some perform colors, others perform shades of gray, still others may do something entirely different. Humans with certain brain defects will perform different color palettes from normal brains.
In other words, what the brain does is entirely up to it, according to its design and make-up.
And this is true for everything which you think you are "experiencing" -- sounds, smells, pain, emotions... it's all in your head.
But this thing in your head allows your body to do something truly amazing!
Out of the stuff that bounces off of us, the brain (somehow) forms a kind of hologram inside itself which corresponds well enough to what is out there that the body can actually navigate around the world by partly navigating the phenogram rather than reacting to what's touching it!
Parts of your brain, very large parts of your brain, still operate in the world the old way, by reacting directly to what bounces off of it, and these are non-conscious processes. They include simple responses such as reflexes, as well as much more complex behaviors such as determining that a voice in a crowd has said your name, or waking up the body in response to a threatening sound.
But other parts are navigating the phenomenal landscape. And a strange landscape it is.
In fact, it's an impossible landscape, which can't even be modeled in 3 dimensions. Although we ignore this fact, we live in an impossible space, where every vista converges on a vanishing point… a world made of concentric spheres, each smaller than the one it contains, and the outermost a mere point.
And this insanity doesn't bother us one little bit.
So who's viewing the phenogram?
To answer that, let's go back to our observation of ourselves waking up.
The switch in the brainstem turns on, the deep brain waves appear, cohere, and strengthen, the parts of the brain generating the phenogram begin to pulse rapidly in synch.
Meanwhile, the body starts performing colors, sounds, smells, emotions, textures, pressures, warmth and coldness, pain and pleasure.
When those are being performed, "you" are. When those are not being performed, "you" are not.
The body which cannot perform these things has "nobody in there".
You ARE the phenogram. That is you.
The phenogram creates an implied point of view, and that implied point of view is where it SEEMS as though "you" are, but that's the great illusion -- you are not that implied point of view, you are in fact the performance which -- for most of you, up til right now -- you have mistaken for the world outside.
As your body moves around, the phenogram shifts and moves and changes. That is YOU shifting and moving and changing in a dance with the world around you as things bounce off your body.
You, yourself, your mind, your consciousness, the person… what you could call your spirit or soul… it's a device which your body has evolved to help it navigate around.
We haven't figured out how.
We don't know WHY, for example, certain molecules in your nose cause your mind to consistently perform the smell of cinnamon, rather than the smell of lemons, or for that matter the color green or the sound of static.
The study of consciousness is the attempt to answer that question.
How does the body produce the mind, the phenomenal hologram which we think of as our conscious selves and which we also think of as the experienced world, but which are one and the same?
And why does the human brain produce a human kind of phenogram, while a monkey's brain produces a monkey kind of phenogram?
Do bird brains make phenograms? If so, what are they like? If they do, it's likely that magnetic fields produce some sort of basic form -- these forms and their instances have often been called qualia -- which isn't part of the human phenogram.
That's what it means to study consciousness.
Quite simply, it's the study of how the brain produces that hologram-like thing which appears to us to be the outside world mixed with our own pains and pleasures and emotions, but which is actually entirely ourselves.
One of the primary problems we run into on threads like these is a misunderstanding of what consciousness is, of what cognitive neurobiologists are studying exactly when they study consciousness.
So here it is in a nutshell….
One of the difficulties with being a critter is that you can only respond to what touches you, to molecules and photons and such bouncing off your exterior.
Of course, critters evolved simple rules of behavior that allowed them to follow trails, so to speak, to move toward greater or lesser concentrations of certain kinds of things touching them, for instance, which allowed them to find food by scent or avoid noisy predators.
(You can look into the world of virtual automata to see just how complex this sort of behavior can become.)
But any critter that evolved something which allowed it to interact more efficiently with the world-at-a-distance would obviously have a tremendous advantage.
That advantage came with the evolution of consciousness, a kind of hologram-like thing produced by the brain.
For our purposes, we will call this thing the Mind. (That term has many usages, but for our purposes here it will mean the phenomenal hologram.)
What is this thing?
For all intents and purposes, it is what you think of as yourself. It's what's missing in a person who is brain-dead. The non-conscious behavior is still operating, but the brain can no longer generate the phenomenal hologram, it no longer performs a Mind. We say there is "no one in there".
But surprisingly, it is also the world you experience -- it is colors, brightness, sounds, smells, flavors, textures, pressures, warmth and coldness, pains, pleasures, emotions… all of that and everything else.
Your mind and your experience are the same thing, and that thing is consciousness.
To understand what's going on, it's critical that we make a difficult shift in our thinking. It's a change that can be as difficult to make as the change required to comprehend for the first time that the earth revolves around the sun, or that space and time aren't absolute, or that the universe can curve upon itself, or that light can be both a particle and a wave. That's because it requires us to shed extremely strong illusions caused by our perspective.
To step outside those illusions, let's step outside ourselves, and imagine what happens in our brains as we wake up from a dreamless sleep….
As your body emerges from sleep, a process is triggered in your brain stem which -- somehow, we're not yet sure -- allows the hologram to be formed. 3 signature deep-brain waves appear, cohere, and begin to gain strength. As this happens, areas in various parts of your brain start producing coordinated bursts of rapid electrical oscillations.
These bursts of synchronized electrical activity come from areas in your brain which are contributing to the phenomenal hologram -- which we'll abbreviate as "phenogram" from here out -- that is taking shape.
As this occurs, the brain starts producing colors, smells, sounds, and all of its other basic components.
These are all happening inside the brain. But they are formed, in large part, by areas of the brain responding to what's bouncing off your body.
The parable of the stone and the shore
Naively, it seems as though we are "looking out" into the big world, that our eyes can (somehow) allow an apparent observer inside our head to "perceive" the colors and sounds and smells and textures and such that are "out there".
Alas, this is impossible. The laws of physics don't allow it.
A better model for what's going on, or a better analogy at least, is that of pebbles being dropped into a pond, and ripples on the pond making patterns on the shore.
A stone is not water. And water is not a shore. And a shore is not a stone.
And yet, each pebble will make its own pattern of watermarks on the shore, depending on its size, weight, shape, and velocity.
Too often, we think in cartoon terms about what our brain is doing, and we imagine this tree out there in the world and light and air bounce off it and onto our eyes and ears and into our noses, and somehow this little picture of a tree travels down our optic nerves, and the sound of the tree streams through the nerves from our ears, and molecules hand little packets of scent to our nose which waft down the olfactory nerves.
But what's really going on is more like the pebble and the water and the shore.
Light waves that bounce off a tree are still just light waves. They don't pick up anything from the tree, of course, although they are affected by the bounce in light-ish sorts of ways.
When they strike our retina, the response is neural activity, while the light that caused it goes zooming away. And neural activity is not light, and doesn't have the properties of light. It's as different from light as water is from a stone.
When the Mind is operating, and if conditions are right, the brain takes some of this electrochemical activity, and performs color and brightness. But these things are not like the raw neural activity, which has no color or brightness. The colors are as different from the neural oscillations as the shore is from the water.
"And then a miracle happens"
Now think about it -- there's no light in your head. It's dark in there.
How could it be possible that you really are "seeing light" as a result of neural activity in your dark skull, at a moment when the light you're supposedly "seeing" is way off across the world by now?
The answer is simple but shocking -- you're not.
Color and brightness, which seem like "properties of light" and things "out there in the world" which we somehow "see", are not that at all. They are bodily functions. They are produced by your brain, from neural activity. And your brain can perform colors and brightness without any light to make it happen, as when you dream or hallucinate.
Different kinds of brains perform different responses to being hit by light, of course. Some perform colors, others perform shades of gray, still others may do something entirely different. Humans with certain brain defects will perform different color palettes from normal brains.
In other words, what the brain does is entirely up to it, according to its design and make-up.
And this is true for everything which you think you are "experiencing" -- sounds, smells, pain, emotions... it's all in your head.
But this thing in your head allows your body to do something truly amazing!
Out of the stuff that bounces off of us, the brain (somehow) forms a kind of hologram inside itself which corresponds well enough to what is out there that the body can actually navigate around the world by partly navigating the phenogram rather than reacting to what's touching it!
Parts of your brain, very large parts of your brain, still operate in the world the old way, by reacting directly to what bounces off of it, and these are non-conscious processes. They include simple responses such as reflexes, as well as much more complex behaviors such as determining that a voice in a crowd has said your name, or waking up the body in response to a threatening sound.
But other parts are navigating the phenomenal landscape. And a strange landscape it is.
In fact, it's an impossible landscape, which can't even be modeled in 3 dimensions. Although we ignore this fact, we live in an impossible space, where every vista converges on a vanishing point… a world made of concentric spheres, each smaller than the one it contains, and the outermost a mere point.
And this insanity doesn't bother us one little bit.
So who's viewing the phenogram?
To answer that, let's go back to our observation of ourselves waking up.
The switch in the brainstem turns on, the deep brain waves appear, cohere, and strengthen, the parts of the brain generating the phenogram begin to pulse rapidly in synch.
Meanwhile, the body starts performing colors, sounds, smells, emotions, textures, pressures, warmth and coldness, pain and pleasure.
When those are being performed, "you" are. When those are not being performed, "you" are not.
The body which cannot perform these things has "nobody in there".
You ARE the phenogram. That is you.
The phenogram creates an implied point of view, and that implied point of view is where it SEEMS as though "you" are, but that's the great illusion -- you are not that implied point of view, you are in fact the performance which -- for most of you, up til right now -- you have mistaken for the world outside.
As your body moves around, the phenogram shifts and moves and changes. That is YOU shifting and moving and changing in a dance with the world around you as things bounce off your body.
You, yourself, your mind, your consciousness, the person… what you could call your spirit or soul… it's a device which your body has evolved to help it navigate around.
We haven't figured out how.
We don't know WHY, for example, certain molecules in your nose cause your mind to consistently perform the smell of cinnamon, rather than the smell of lemons, or for that matter the color green or the sound of static.
The study of consciousness is the attempt to answer that question.
How does the body produce the mind, the phenomenal hologram which we think of as our conscious selves and which we also think of as the experienced world, but which are one and the same?
And why does the human brain produce a human kind of phenogram, while a monkey's brain produces a monkey kind of phenogram?
Do bird brains make phenograms? If so, what are they like? If they do, it's likely that magnetic fields produce some sort of basic form -- these forms and their instances have often been called qualia -- which isn't part of the human phenogram.
That's what it means to study consciousness.
Quite simply, it's the study of how the brain produces that hologram-like thing which appears to us to be the outside world mixed with our own pains and pleasures and emotions, but which is actually entirely ourselves.
OK. I've no wish to misrepresent you.
I do not think there is a point in rehashing the debate, so I shall keep quiet for the moment.
Piggy
Unlicensed street skeptic
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2006
- Messages
- 15,905
As an addendum, it might help also to consider dreams first.
You know that your brain is capable of producing a phenomenal hologram, which seems to stretch out to the horizon and is composed of colors and sounds and brightness and smells and textures and flavors and such, but which is entirely in your head.
But the only key differences between waking and sleeping are that when you're sleeping your body is paralyzed so it can't try to navigate against the hologram, and when you're awake the stuff bouncing off you and bouncing around inside you shape and morph the hologram to a much greater extent.
What your brain is doing in each case, though, to produce the hologram itself is essentially the same.
You could think of it this way -- you're always dreaming, but when you're awake the outside world gets a big say in what you're dreaming of.
You know that your brain is capable of producing a phenomenal hologram, which seems to stretch out to the horizon and is composed of colors and sounds and brightness and smells and textures and flavors and such, but which is entirely in your head.
But the only key differences between waking and sleeping are that when you're sleeping your body is paralyzed so it can't try to navigate against the hologram, and when you're awake the stuff bouncing off you and bouncing around inside you shape and morph the hologram to a much greater extent.
What your brain is doing in each case, though, to produce the hologram itself is essentially the same.
You could think of it this way -- you're always dreaming, but when you're awake the outside world gets a big say in what you're dreaming of.
Mr. Scott
Under the Amazing One's Wing
- Joined
- Nov 23, 2005
- Messages
- 2,546
I don't understand your reasoning behind the highlighted item. Dreams should allow more navigation against the hologram, not less, if conscious intent is present. Conscious intent should not be present during dreaming, but can come on accidentally.
What, exactly, do you mean when you refer to it as a hologram?
Regarding dreams, I don't think the imagery in a dream is rendered in level the detail that it appears. It's rendered at a high level with an illusion of detail, much like the way Dennett describes it in the bridge painting example.
Time stamp 29:00
Last edited:
Piggy
Unlicensed street skeptic
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2006
- Messages
- 15,905
Your everyday experience isn't rendered in all that much detail, either. The feeling of a rich, detailed experience comes from your brain's ability to extend the phenogram into the 4th dimension using memory and imagination, but that's a very complicated and murky topic, so I omitted it in that post.
As for allowing navigation against the hologram in dreams (note that I said the body is paralyzed, so I'm talking about bodily navigation in the physical world) there are some tragically unfortunate people who do this. One of them strangled his wife to death while dreaming that the house was being invaded.
What do I mean when I say "hologram"?
That's a short-cut for the longer term I started with… "a hologram-like thing", which I later called the phenogram.
We don't know what it is or how its made.
But it's created inside the head, and it is simultaneously what you think of as yourself and what you think of as the world -- either the outside world, or the world of dreams and hallucinations… whatever sort of world you're in.
Right now, you're awake and your eyes are open. That means the phenogram is being produced inside your head. It seems to extend out to the wall, or the horizon, or a vanishing point.
To you, is seems as though you are an observer sitting inside your head, looking out through the holes in your eyes at a world composed of color and brightness and shadow and sound and scent and texture.
Nothing like that is happening.
All of that stuff, everything you experience and everything you sense of yourself (pain, pleasure, emotions, doubt, etc.) is created by your brain.
Much of it in response to things that happen to your body in the world, yes, but nonetheless, when you get down to brass tacks, all that is done by your brain.
First, it takes time for your brain to generate conscious experience, which means by the time an experience is going on, whatever triggered it is over. You cannot experience the actual present, you're always a fraction of a second behind.
Second, the experience is caused entirely by activity in your brain, which is a dark and confined place. You can't possibly be experiencing anything about, say, light or trees or cinnamon, because none of that stuff is in your brain, and the qualities of these things don't somehow magically "rub off" onto your brain when molecules and photons bounce off your body, and your experience is made entirely from brain activity.
Of course, some patterns and relationships must be preserved between your brain activity and those molecules and photons bouncing off of you and molecules bouncing around inside your body, or else the resulting phenogram would't work as a substitute navigation space for the outside world, but that happens in a kind of transfer between that sort of stuff and brain activity.
It's like the stone changing the water changing the shore -- the light changes the brain activity changes the phenogram.
But the qualities of the stone in no way transfer to the shore. They can't. The patterns in the stone, water, and shore correspond, but they're different kinds of patterns made of different kinds of thing. Same for world, brain activity, phenogram.
So no, you're not looking out into the world and you're not having a direct experience of the properties of the world. We know that, no physics can describe those situations.
Instead, your body invents colors and sounds and smells and pleasure and pain and all the rest of it, and creates this hologram-like thing which seems to extend beyond your head -- right now -- to the wall or horizon or a vanishing point.
That hologram-like thing, whatever it is and however it's done, creates an implied center -- a kind of reverse vanishing point -- which is where it seems like the person inside your head resides, looking out.
But you are not that point.
You are the hologram-like thing itself… whatever it is and however it's done.
ETA: Important sidenote -- from your perspective inside a dream, you're not navigating against the phenogram. Your body is what is designed to do that, and only it can do that. The dream itself is simply the phenogram morphing and shifting. When you're dreaming, there's no separate "you" which is "navigating" the phenogram… when you're dreaming "you" simply are the phenogram as it changes shape.
Last edited:
Not quite-- keep beating it!
- Status