On Consciousness

[shuttlt]

Mr Scott, so long as it's possible to do a whole bunch of image processing, classification, identification wrt memory etc... without having to produce a qualia, I don't see where this line of reasoning is going. If my brainstem wanders off, eats a madeline, (let's imagine I have some terrible brain injury resulting in blindeating) and I get some kind of qualia representation of my aunt with whom I ate madelines long ago, all the work done by my brain to draw up the qualia of my aunt is still unconscious, surely?

 

[Belz...]

That would mean every instance of self-referential information processing is an instance of consciousness. You're going to run into trouble wrt to anesthetized patients, regulation of involuntary systems, and I think there can be a strong case to be made that even the simplest organisms engage in self-referential information processing.

Indeed. There is possibly something we're missing in function or substance, but nothing like what Piggy seems to be looking for.

 

[Belz...]

I agree, we have to assume it. It kind of feels to me though as if, if we have to go around assuming it, then we clearly don't have a theory. We've got a broad brush strokes hypothesis.

I think no matter how good a theory we have, and how well-supported it is, some people will find ways to seek the next turtle that holds that world on its shell. To me, this is what Piggy's argument boils down to. And no matter how our instruments can detect through imaging someone's brain that they are conscious, in what way, and even what they are thinking, some will continue to claim that there's something else hiding in there. Anything to maintain the mind's special ontological status.

I think we're pretty close to a comprehensive understanding of consciousness, and that we'll be able to replicate it in machines. And by close, I mean it's not 500 years away, but it may be 100.

 

[Piggy]

That one was not aggressive, mean, or defensive, but it shows you don't get what I'm saying, again, as if you hadn't read what I said.

There are unconscious processes between the eyeballs and where the mind appreciates the performance of a color. There are simply more unconscious processes to turn a pattern of colors into a conscious tiger quale.

Why couldn't a shape have a quale? It's certainly performed for the mind, just as a color is, though after more unconscious processing. Check out the Bouba/kiki effect^WP for an example of what I mean.

From wiki:



Notice it does not limit qualia to the five sense. Does a tiger not produce its own unique subjective conscious experience? Or the anger in a face? Or a spiky shape?

Yes, the conscious experience of seeing a tiger or a face is an integration of many different types of qualia, including not just color but shape as well and even the emotional response.

But perhaps I have misunderstood what you were claiming.

You appeared to be claiming that the blindsighted person's ability to guess that they'd seen a tiger indicated that qualia were present which the blindsighted person was not consciously experiencing.

If I misread you, then my apologies.

Let's use the face as an example, if you don't mind, b/c we actually have experimental data on those cases.

In that case, the subject's brain produces no qualia of shape or color. However, it does produce emotional qualia. (There are people with emotional blindness, however, who don't "feel" their emotions even though their bodies produce emotional responses such as blushing, laughter, grimmacing, etc.)

What I objected to was the notion that there might be "unexperienced" qualia.

We could refer to other experiments in which blindsighted persons learn mazes. In that case, only the non-conscious processes in the brain are handling the spatial navigation.

 

[shuttlt]

I think no matter how good a theory we have, and how well-supported it is, some people will find ways to seek the next turtle that holds that world on its shell. To me, this is what Piggy's argument boils down to. And no matter how our instruments can detect through imaging someone's brain that they are conscious, in what way, and even what they are thinking, some will continue to claim that there's something else hiding in there. Anything to maintain the mind's special ontological status.

I think we're pretty close to a comprehensive understanding of consciousness, and that we'll be able to replicate it in machines. And by close, I mean it's not 500 years away, but it may be 100.

So you think we'll get to the point where we don't have to assume that a complicated but different set of information processing on complicated, but different hardware, is non-blindsight conscious? Surely you'd need a testable theory of which self-referential processes resulted in non-blindsight, phenomenological qualia. Let's say I hold some kind of panpsychist position along the lines of all systems are non-blindsight conscious and all systems of systems and so on. It's just that only ones with the necessary feeback loops etc get to talk about themselves. It needs some work, I know Presumably if you could determine that non-blindsight, phenomenological qualia are going on in my brain and your brain and an artifical brain, you could determine that they aren't going on in the "unconscious" parts of our brains. Maybe I'm pushing this too far. I just don't see a way to test this. If you want to claim it'll be possible to create HAL by 2113, sure why not. I don't see how you could test that he wouldn't be just doing it by supercharged blindsight.

 

[shuttlt]

Piggy,

I wonder if this quote from Pixy doesn't relate to your last post:

Well, feedback loops aren't necessarily self-referential, and even if they are, there's no reason you should be conscious of them, any more than you're conscious of what someone else is thinking.

My definition (and the empirical evidence from neuroscience) means that there are multiple conscious processes going on in your brain; it's just that only one of them is you.

Needs to be considered here. This seems to be a claim of "unexperienced" qualia.

 

[Piggy]

This is all wrong! The ball is red because of its reflective properties. Physicists can confirm that by examining the spectrum of incident radiation and comparing it to the reflected radiation, which is within the range of radiation that our neural systems recognize as red, a word we have tacitly agreed to denote that range of radiation.
There are a number of objective ways we can confirm the spherical shape of the ball. A sphere is a precisely described mathematical object. We have tacitly agreed to use that word when objects approximate that shape.
When we say, "red ball," we are describing that objective reality.
It seems the only non-intuitive aspect of all this is your own lack of intuition.

The reflective properties of the ball do not in any way involve redness.

Redness is produced in the brain, at a time after the light reflected from the ball is distant from the retina, and it is produced in areas of the brain also distant from the retina.

Of course, in everyday parlance, it's perfectly fine to talk about redness as being inherent in the object reflecting the light, but it's not fine in this context because it will cause critical mistakes.

Keep in mind that when we examine a spectrum we are necessarily examining our brain's response to light, not the light itself. The inherent properties of light are things like speed, wavelength, and frequency. But we don't experience any of these.

If we knew how to build conscious brains, we could just as well build a brain that responded to light with various scents, or degrees of nausea, or anything else. The fact that our brains respond with color is simply a historical accident of evolution. But it makes no sense to say that our brains' reactions are somehow inherent properties of light. No doubt, other animals have varying color responses from humans, so in that case, which color response are you going to assign to the light?

As for the shape, that's the flip side.

We do not experience the actual shape of anything.

In fact, we live in a world of impossible geometry.

It is literally impossible for us to build a 3-D model of the spatial world which our conscious minds conjure up. That's because everywhere you look, parallel lines converge into a vanishing point. The world we experience is a set of nested spheres, each one smaller than the ones it contains, with the outermost shell being not a sphere at all but a point!

So no, the ball isn't red, and we don't consciously perceive its actual shape.

 

[Piggy]

Piggy,

I wonder if this quote from Pixy doesn't relate to your last post:



Needs to be considered here. This seems to be a claim of "unexperienced" qualia.

Pixy seems to be using the back-door argument that all sorts of brain processes produce consciousness, and that each of our bodies is a kind of commune of conscious entities which have no contact with one another, and only one of them is the person who you feel you are.

It's an interesting idea, I suppose, but utterly untestable and so far unsupported by evidence. It appears to be an argument of convenience to allow SRIP to be a workable definition.

 

[Belz...]

Mr Scott, so long as it's possible to do a whole bunch of image processing, classification, identification wrt memory etc... without having to produce a qualia, I don't see where this line of reasoning is going. If my brainstem wanders off, eats a madeline, (let's imagine I have some terrible brain injury resulting in blindeating) and I get some kind of qualia representation of my aunt with whom I ate madelines long ago, all the work done by my brain to draw up the qualia of my aunt is still unconscious, surely?

I think we need to clear the qualia thing first: do we A) know they exist ? B) know how to define them ?

Because there's a number of things that seem intuitively true or false before we eventually discover that intuition was wrong.

So you think we'll get to the point where we don't have to assume that a complicated but different set of information processing on complicated, but different hardware, is non-blindsight conscious? Surely you'd need a testable theory of which self-referential processes resulted in non-blindsight, phenomenological qualia.

Yes and yes.

Now, we might not need the latter to produce the former. In fact, the latter might turn out to be either a lot simpler than we think, or actually non-existent, or a simple artefact of the processing itself, under certain conditions we're not completely clear on at this time. Remember: you become conscious of your decisions after they are made, so consciousness isn't a decision-maker per se. This alone tells me that consciousness is a mere effect of the brain, although it feeds back data into it.

 

[Belz...]

Pixy seems to be using the back-door argument that all sorts of brain processes produce consciousness, and that each of our bodies is a kind of commune of conscious entities which have no contact with one another, and only one of them is the person who you feel you are.

It's not wrong. In fact if you split a brain in twain, you get two consciousnesses. The whole is a sum of its parts. Also, consciousness as we know it may "simply" be a result of this particular arrangement of sub-processes.

 

[shuttlt]

you become conscious of your decisions after they are made, so consciousness isn't a decision-maker per se.

Yes

it feeds back data into it.

Yes. Though, I kind of wonder if there isn't some kind of equivocation here. Is it feeding the same data back, or is it processing it in some way? If it's processing it, I just wonder whether there isn't in some sense decision making going on?

The rest I can't respond to quite so concisely.

 

[shuttlt]

It's not wrong. In fact if you split a brain in twain, you get two consciousnesses. The whole is a sum of its parts. Also, consciousness as we know it may "simply" be a result of this particular arrangement of sub-processes.

This I'm interested in. I'm aware of the procedure of course. Is there some way to tell that one or other or both or neither of the two half brains are simply some complicated form of blindsight conscious following the procedure? My recollection is that there are a lot of holes in the conscious awareness.

 

[steenkh]

I think perhaps what Piggy means is that the red we experience corrolates with, but is not at all the same as, the red property of the physical ball.

That makes sense, and I would gladly believe this is the case, but when have told Piggy there are two different kinds of red involved, that of the physical, and that of the data structure, he has not taken the opportunity, but rather continued as if there is only one kind of red, and that is only in the brain.

Swap the qualia of the colours around, or with some other qualia, doubtless you'd have some rewiring to do, and the new mappings wouldn't be any more right or wrong than the current ones. The qualia we experience as red is an evolutionary coincidence.

This is wrong because there is not a number of data structures lying around waiting to be assigned to a sensory input. The data structure that is formed by the first sight of red is the one that will be called 'red'. It is not the 'green' one, or the 'loud' one that is arbitrarily used, and you cannot just swap them around.

I suppose that the data structures that I speak of correspond to the 'qualia' that others talk about, but I am not sure.

 

[shuttlt]

This is wrong because there is not a number of data structures lying around waiting to be assigned to a sensory input. The data structure that is formed by the first sight of red is the one that will be called 'red'. It is not the 'green' one, or the 'loud' one that is arbitrarily used, and you cannot just swap them around.

OK, so there is there are the following types of red:

1. Certain frequencies of light.
2. The activation of certain structures in the eye.
3. Particular patterns of activations in the brain.
4. The first person experience that we get when those activations in the brain occur (which may very well just be 3 from a particular point of view).
5. The label that we put on things that are "red".

Clearly it is possible to swap the colours around by meddling with 1. Likewise if you mucked around with the eye, you could presumably swap colours about. It's not as if L-cones activating for red and S-cones activating for blue is "the correct" representation of reality, is it? Same with the patterns of activation in the brain for red. Let's swap blue and red. It would be confusing if it happened, but it wouldn't be any more correct or wrong than the normal mapping. No?

 

[PixyMisa]

Personally I'm not so far off agreeing with this. I don't see where one can go beyond observing the corrolation. I don't know why people insist on saying that they know it's feedback loops or what ever that are the cause of it all.

Because the process can refer to itself. It is intrinsically a feedback loop.

It's untestable.

It's definitive.

 

[PixyMisa]

That would mean every instance of self-referential information processing is an instance of consciousness.

Yes.

You're going to run into trouble wrt to anesthetized patients, regulation of involuntary systems, and I think there can be a strong case to be made that even the simplest organisms engage in self-referential information processing.

Why is any of that a problem? Anaesthetised patients may well have conscious processes still operating in their brains. Their minds are not conscious. Nothing there has changed.

These have all been brought up before, and your answers weren't very satisfying.

They don't need to be satisfying, merely correct.

Do you still believe

As I've noted, I'm amenable to a definition of consciousness that holds SRIP as necessary but not sufficient

http://www.internationalskeptics.co...06666&highlight=unconscious+brain#post8506666
You'll get a lot of agreement on that, I think.

Sure. But since we have no agreement and indeed few coherent suggestions on any expanded definition, for now I'm sticking to the one I have.

 

[Belz...]

Yes

Yes it isn't decision making, or yes it is ?

Yes. Though, I kind of wonder if there isn't some kind of equivocation here. Is it feeding the same data back, or is it processing it in some way?

Well if consciousness is the act of SRIP or the effect of it, it's not, itself, doing any SRIP... I think. It gets confusing at this point.

This I'm interested in. I'm aware of the procedure of course. Is there some way to tell that one or other or both or neither of the two half brains are simply some complicated form of blindsight conscious following the procedure?

Absolutely. In one experiment (I'm telling this from memory) they blinded one eye, and showed a picture of, I think, Hitler to the subject. One side of the brain got the visual cue, and reacted with disgust, but only the other side of the brain has the speech center. So when asked why they reacted this way, the subject has no way to know. So the other brain (left, in this case) takes a wild guess and blurts out an answer that is reasonable but inaccurate.

 

[Belz...]

Because the process can refer to itself. It is intrinsically a feedback loop.


It's definitive.

As much as I appreciate your contributions, Pixy, I wish sometimes you were a bit less pithy, so as to make your facts clear to all. "No" doesn't really inform.

 

[Piggy]

That makes sense, and I would gladly believe this is the case, but when have told Piggy there are two different kinds of red involved, that of the physical, and that of the data structure, he has not taken the opportunity, but rather continued as if there is only one kind of red, and that is only in the brain.

I have not taken the opportunity to make factually incorrect statements.

There are not two kinds of red.

Red only exists inside the skulls of animals, as far as anyone can tell.

Outside, there is light, but color is not a quality of light. There's wavelength, speed, frequency, amplitude… but not color.

Projecting color onto light as an inherent quality is a mistake.

 

[tsig]

I have not taken the opportunity to make factually incorrect statements.

There are not two kinds of red.

Red only exists inside the skulls of animals, as far as anyone can tell.

Outside, there is light, but color is not a quality of light. There's wavelength, speed, frequency, amplitude… but not color.

Projecting color onto light as an inherent quality is a mistake.

What is there about the word color that you find undefinable?