On Consciousness

[Piggy]

What does this sentence even mean? Colours and stuff are the internal representation external stimuli, connected with representations of concepts and memories. Given that a rope computer has the appropriate external stimuli, why can it not have the same kind of internal representations?

That's all hopelessly vague.

Consciousness is not just any kind of representation. If you fall back on such a generic term, and don't bother to ground your thinking in observations of real conscious systems, you're going to make all sorts of errors.

"Colors and stuff" are produced by the brain.* They are unique. And they are not implicit in anything outside the brain. They don't "just happen" passively.

Slapping a label of "internal representation" on them doesn't solve any problems, or explain any phenomena. It's an empty tag.

Nobody currently knows how the brain performs color.

If you have a theory of how rope might do so, that would be interesting. But until and unless there's some sort of theory explained for such an event, it's not something that deserves to be discussed.


*I often prefer the term "performed" to "produced", just as we often say digestion, physical movement, and other activities are "performed" by the body rather than "produced". To say consciousness is "produced" makes it sound like a thing, an output rather than a process.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

So, you don't see color? You don't have a sense of smell? You don't hear sounds? Because that's how I'm using the term, which, if you'd actually been reading all my long redundant posts -- which you say you've bothered to cut and paste together and measure for length, for some reason -- you should know.

Not the way you're using those terms, no.

When I see color, say "red," it induces what's actually a surprisingly subtle shift in my photoreceptor populations, which percolates through to ganglion cell output. Luckily the brain is an astounding pattern recognition system, and it pulls out the subtle changes in activity as something reliably found in certain objects' appearance, with associative links to object memory like stop signs and such, and to the language centers as "red."

At no point is this ensemble of neural activity and associations dragged before some sorcerous sprout to be given blessing, not merely as activity, but Qualia, made whole and indivisible by the grace of lentil legerdemain. That's the assumption you're making here, and your only evidence for it is your own incredulity that it might be otherwise.

It doesn't matter how thinly you spread your arguments when they're all founded on a false premise.

 

[tsig]

Obviously, brain tissue does produce color and the rest of our phenomenology. We know that phenomenology is a product of the brain.
We don't know how, but we know the brain does it.

Although you're correct, the neurons themselves cannot do this.

But the brain does. That is not in question.

I would love to know. But I would not want for it to be generally known, because I don't have faith in the human species' ability to handle that knowledge well. In fact, I have a dystopian novel sketched out in my head based on a world after that discovery.




I don't particularly care about that last question, to be honest. I don't believe it's at all important to understanding actual consciousness.

I also don't care about those labels.

But I hope that we can agree that if you want to build a real-world instance of anything, you have to build something that does what the target system does in real spacetime.

A flight simulator doesn't get you to Paris, it just fools your mind.

According to your post fooling your mind should be enough since phenomenology is a product of the brain what difference can there be with actually being there and just thinking we're there.

 

[tsig]

Not the way you're using those terms, no.

When I see color, say "red," it induces what's actually a surprisingly subtle shift in my photoreceptor populations, which percolates through to ganglion cell output. Luckily the brain is an astounding pattern recognition system, and it pulls out the subtle changes in activity as something reliably found in certain objects' appearance, with associative links to object memory like stop signs and such, and to the language centers as "red."

At no point is this ensemble of neural activity and associations dragged before some sorcerous sprout to be given blessing, not merely as activity, but Qualia, made whole and indivisible by the grace of lentil legerdemain. That's the assumption you're making here, and your only evidence for it is your own incredulity that it might be otherwise.

It doesn't matter how thinly you spread your arguments when they're all founded on a false premise.

As near as I can figure out Piggy believes the world is an illusion created by the brain out of sensory phenomenon. He also thinks consciousness takes place elsewhere than in the brain.

 

[Belz...]

No I think it's quite clear that he thinks it's in the brain.

 

[Fudbucker]

Nope.

Explain how a math question can't be arbitrary.

 

[Piggy]

Not the way you're using those terms, no.

When I see color, say "red," it induces what's actually a surprisingly subtle shift in my photoreceptor populations, which percolates through to ganglion cell output. Luckily the brain is an astounding pattern recognition system, and it pulls out the subtle changes in activity as something reliably found in certain objects' appearance, with associative links to object memory like stop signs and such, and to the language centers as "red."

At no point is this ensemble of neural activity and associations dragged before some sorcerous sprout to be given blessing, not merely as activity, but Qualia, made whole and indivisible by the grace of lentil legerdemain. That's the assumption you're making here, and your only evidence for it is your own incredulity that it might be otherwise.

It doesn't matter how thinly you spread your arguments when they're all founded on a false premise.

Stop it with the magic bean junk. Really, it's juvenile.

But here you have not described the production of red. And the language centers are irrelevant.

At what point is red produced in this chain reaction?

 

[PixyMisa]

Piggy, you must have something to say about the inverted spectrum^WP thought experiment.

It's a tour-de-force in circular logic and argument from ignorance. "I don't know how qualia are produced, therefore they could be magical, and if they could be magical, they must be magical, therefore they're magical."

It is conceivable for the force gravity to be dependent on the colour of an object.

The force of gravity is not dependent on the colour of an object.

Simple internal consistency does not trump reality.

 

[PixyMisa]

Explain how a math question can't be arbitrary.

Check the definition you provided. The calculator cannot answer arbitrary math questions; you can't even ask it arbitrary math questions, even if we limit ourselves to basic arithmetic.

 

[Piggy]

Not the way you're using those terms, no.

When I see color, say "red," it induces what's actually a surprisingly subtle shift in my photoreceptor populations, which percolates through to ganglion cell output. Luckily the brain is an astounding pattern recognition system, and it pulls out the subtle changes in activity as something reliably found in certain objects' appearance, with associative links to object memory like stop signs and such, and to the language centers as "red."

At no point is this ensemble of neural activity and associations dragged before some sorcerous sprout to be given blessing, not merely as activity, but Qualia, made whole and indivisible by the grace of lentil legerdemain. That's the assumption you're making here, and your only evidence for it is your own incredulity that it might be otherwise.

It doesn't matter how thinly you spread your arguments when they're all founded on a false premise.

Let's do a little thought experiment here, one which avoids the red herrings of language associations.

Suppose there's a baby and a puppy, and they both look at a red rubber ball which reflects light in a way that nothing else does that they've seen in their very brief lives.

The baby has not yet developed language and the puppy never will, and neither one has ever seen anything that looks to you and me like something red.

Let's also imagine that there's a housefly whose eyes are turned toward the rubber ball, and it too has never looked at anything which reflects light in that way.

The baby has an experience of seeing the color red. The dog -- as best we can tell -- has an experience of seeing some shade of gray. And the housefly -- as best we can tell -- has no conscious experience of any color, or anything at all for that matter.

Why does the baby's brain perform red, while the puppy's brain performs gray, and the housefly's neural system performs no phenomenology of any kind?

And in this case, you can't muddy the waters with references to language or to associations with other objects that reflect light in that way, because neither are present in any of these neural systems.

That is the question you've been dodging with your silly and meaningless trashtalk about magic beans.

ETA: I know your answer will begin with the construction of the eye, as it should, but we'll see if we can follow the neural response routes in these cases and come up with red as a result.

ETA2: So we don't waste time... keep this key question in mind as you trace the neurology -- What keeps the baby from seeing green instead?

 

[steenkh]

In theory, there's no reason to object to synthetic machine consciousness, given the fact that biological machines can be conscious.

And yet you spend post after post arguing against just that.

That's all hopelessly vague.

As are your terms. I do not blame you because we are both dealing with unknown territory, but surely you cannot criticise my choice of vague expressions when you are using exxpressions like 'performing red'.

Consciousness is not just any kind of representation.

Nor have anybody here claimed it to be. In fact, I cannot see how consciousness can be a representation at all! I said that it uses representations. 'Red' and so on are most likely representations stored in some way somewhere in the brain. It is not important if it is stored in pulses, neuron states, or whatever. The important point is that it is stored. It is probably also a very complex structure with connections (associations) to many other structures (phenograms, anyone?).

"Colors and stuff" are produced by the brain.*

And you accuse me of being vague! You cannot give a coherent description of whatever is meant by 'performed' or 'produced' without resorting to even more vagueness.

They are unique. And they are not implicit in anything outside the brain. They don't "just happen" passively.

I have no idea what you mean by "just happening passively". It certainly is nothing that I or anybody else have claimed.

Slapping a label of "internal representation" on them doesn't solve any problems, or explain any phenomena. It's an empty tag.

Hardly. It gives you something to look for. Is it really worse than 'phenogram'?

 

[Belz...]

Stop it with the magic bean junk. Really, it's juvenile.

But here you have not described the production of red. And the language centers are irrelevant.

At what point is red produced in this chain reaction?

It's unfortunate you have me on ignore because you might already have the answer.

 

[Belz...]

Why does the baby's brain perform red, while the puppy's brain performs gray, and the housefly's neural system performs no phenomenology of any kind?

It could be that there's simply more parameters to the human visual perception. How else would you expect red to appear to you ?

I mean, we can do the same thing with the laws of physics: why do magnets attract each other through EM ? Even after we get to the basic force of electromagnetism, we can still ask why it behaves this way, but there may just be no answer.

 

[Piggy]

Steenkh, all the stuff you're talking about -- perception, association, response, memory, even learning -- can all be done without involving consciousness in any way.

Consciousness is something "over and above" all that. It is not a necessary process for any of the activities you describe, and that's also true of attention and intelligence which are distinct from consciousness.

So all of that is fine, but it does not address the problem of why a brain produces an experience of color. Every bit of that can go on perfectly well without any color being produced whatsoever.

ETA: I know that I am not providing an answer, but that's because there is none yet to be had. With respect to consciousness, it's as if we were asking about the northern lights in the 1400s before anyone had any idea about solar emissions and the earth's magnetic field. We know that there is something we don't yet know, and we're at a loss to determine what that is.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Piggy, what's your take on the inverted spectrum^WP thought experiment?

 

[Piggy]

Piggy, what's your take on the inverted spectrum^WP thought experiment?

I agree that an inverted spectrum would be behaviorally detectable, and that it is physically implausible given the fact that our brains are so similar.

But here's an interesting phenomenon... our brains seem to know what the phenogram is supposed to be like, and they will adjust accordingly.

For example, when I first got bifocals, there was a distracting and disturbing skewing effect at the edges of my visual field. But my brain adjusted and now I can't even force that skewing to happen. Similar effects have been reported with "inversion" glasses.

People who lose half their visual field deny that anything's missing. To them, it makes just as much sense to say something's missing as it would for us to say that the stuff behind us is "missing".

Where I absolutely disagree with some interpretations of "inverted spectrum" is the contention that such phenomena imply an absence of physical cause, essentially dualism.

The basis for the physicalist position on phenomenology ( = conciousness = qualia ) is simply that an experience of, say, red is simply not necessary, and more importantly not even implied, in the neurological processes of perception, attention, memory ("storage" and "retrieval"... although I dislike those terms and think they can be misleading), learning, and response. We know that all of that can and does go on without the brain bothering to generate any conscious experience ( i.e. qualia or phenomenology). And if you look at texts such as The Cognitive Neurosciences, you'll see that consciousness is treated in its own section separate from the sections dealing with these other processes.

And now that NCCs are being identified, and now that they turn out to be something related to but not identical to the A --> B --> C neural chain, folks are starting to wonder if we've been barking up the wrong tree, and if the physical processes in the brain which generate performances such as color and odor and sound are not to be found in the kind of processes that make up the bounce-back system and current AI applications.

For my part, I think that this has now been sufficiently demonstrated. Conscious experience, phenomenology, has its own specialized hardware. I doubt that this hardware is some single lump of tissue in the brain, however. It is almost certainly distributed, and largely shared with other brain functions. But I'm necessarily speculating there.

 

[Fudbucker]

Not the way you're using those terms, no.

When I see color, say "red," it induces what's actually a surprisingly subtle shift in my photoreceptor populations, which percolates through to ganglion cell output. Luckily the brain is an astounding pattern recognition system, and it pulls out the subtle changes in activity as something reliably found in certain objects' appearance, with associative links to object memory like stop signs and such, and to the language centers as "red."

But that doesn't explain why our brains produce a "redness" in our minds. Your claim is: if you knew enough about two different brains, you would know exactly how each mind perceives red. That doesn't seem true to me. I don't know what red appears like to you. That information seems inaccessible to an outside mind. Perhaps your "red" would appear "blue" to me. A behavioralist would say it doesn't matter how it appears to us, is our behavior consistent? Yes, you stop at "red" lights the same as I do, even if the mental state "red" is completely different for each of us.

To make a long story short, I'm not convinced mental states are the equivalent of (or reducible to) brain states. When I was in college there was a debate over whether mental states could be reduced to physical brain states. I don't know if there still is or if there's a debate in the hard sciences too.

 

[Fudbucker]

Check the definition you provided. The calculator cannot answer arbitrary math questions; you can't even ask it arbitrary math questions, even if we limit ourselves to basic arithmetic.

Have to think about that.

 

[Belz...]

But that doesn't explain why our brains produce a "redness" in our minds.

"Why" or "how" ?

 

[steenkh]

Steenkh, all the stuff you're talking about -- perception, association, response, memory, even learning -- can all be done without involving consciousness in any way.

Yes, we need self-awareness to complete the picture.

Consciousness is something "over and above" all that. It is not a necessary process for any of the activities you describe, and that's also true of attention and intelligence which are distinct from consciousness.

If the 'magic bean' turns out to be something like self-awareness, nobody can accuse us of dualism, and it would be no problem at all for machine intelligence - in theory.

So all of that is fine, but it does not address the problem of why a brain produces an experience of color. Every bit of that can go on perfectly well without any color being produced whatsoever.

I still have no idea why you keep insisting that there is more to colours than a complex data structure. I think that the problem lies in the word 'experience' that seems to be a mystery to you, while for me it just means the process of storing input into the data structures, or it could mean just the structures themselves.