On Consciousness

[Belz...]

I don't disagree with you, except for the "data" language which I find counter-productive, not because it's inaccurate but because it's dangerously abstract and incomplete.

How is it inaccurate ? You keep saying that.

Consciousness is behavior, real behavior in spacetime. To get a machine to do the same thing, we're going to have to build a machine that performs that same behavior in spacetime.

How do you perform behaviours NOT in spacetime ? I don't get your point here.

Physics, chemistry, biology.

Those aren't languages.

When we begin to abstract into "information" and "data", it's easy to make mistakes and not notice.

Isn't all science about making abstract models of reality ?

 

[Belz...]

Not only do you seem to have entirely missed the point of why I mention those discoveries -- it was not to compare the phenomena to consciousness -- but now you claim that somehow phenomenology, which we all observe, is "like a soul" despite the fact that it's known to be caused by brain activity.

You want to have your cake and eat it, too. It's brain activity, but there's a damn-near-supernatural quality about it.

 

[PixyMisa]

Those aren't languages.

They share a language, though - mathematics.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Can you produce a hologram, for example, with pure programming, rather than a software/hardware solution?

Are you saying that a hologram could not ever be produced by any kind of software program? Linky?

 

[Piggy]

Are you saying that a hologram could not ever be produced by any kind of software program? Linky?

Are you saying it can? By software alone, no hardware component other than what's necessary to "run the logic"?

How?

 

[Piggy]

He only described the phenomenon in more precise terms. He didn't explain why it occurred.

Your misunderstanding is profound.

Seriously, this surprised me, even given your general confusion.

Einstein's model of gravity explained why the force should diminish with distance in the way Newton described, which is what my example was dealing with.

You don't appear to be able to follow a train of thought for more than one step without veering off into irrelevancies.

Back to animal brains and consciousness, the simple fact is that we have 2 sets of observations here -- the neural activity and the phenomenology. (And no, the phenomenology is not a "soul" or metaphysics or duality or magic or any of that.)

We know they are correlated, we know one causes the other, but we don't know why (or how) the one causes precisely what we observe in the latter.

So for example, birds respond to magnetic fields in ways that humans do not.

Do they do this entirely unconsciously, or is there some phenomenology associated with it? If there is, what is it?

If your view were correct, we could answer that question.

But not only can we not answer it, we have no way of even thinking of how to answer it.

 

[Piggy]

You're going to have to do better than that. I think you're colorblind, and don't see red at all. Prove me wrong. Describe the qualia to me. No objects, no wavelengths, no neuroscience. Qualia only, final destination.

Again, you're failing to address the actual question.

We were not in any way discussing the old saw of "How do I know that what's red to me is red to you?" That's utterly irrelevant here.

Also, there's no way to discuss consciousness without neuroscience. (I won't even ask why you think there should be.)

Furthermore, the ineffability of experience is also irrelevant here -- although it's certainly relevant to our understanding of consciousness generally.

However, if you did want to discuss color without regard to wavelengths of light, you could discuss dreams.

You contend that nobody could dream about red if they'd never seen a "red object" but there's no evidence for that. Perhaps that sort of priming is necessary, but then again perhaps its not. At the moment, there's no way of knowing.

What is known, though, is that if a person is incapable of seeing red, no one could ever describe it to them, because experience and imagination use the same brain real estate.

So the question is not "How do I know you see red?"

The question is why you and I both do see red when we look at a stop sign. Why not green?

We can't blame it on the wavelengths of light, because until our brains get around to performing the conscious experience of color, all we have is different neural activity, from which the experience of color cannot be deduced -- at least not yet, not with our current level of understanding.

That doesn't mean it's impossible to figure out, just that we haven't cracked that problem yet.

 

[Piggy]

Why do you think that would be a problem?

What do you think a hologram is? You are clearly not talking about actual holograms that are recordings of light fields on a (more or less) two-dimensional medium. The storing of multidimensional data in a computer is something that youngsters were taught to do within their first year of computing classes. The more dimensions, the more storage you need.

Building a hologram or 'phenogram' should be no particular problem given sufficient storage and power.

I'm talking about an actual hologram here. A real one. One that exists in spacetime and works.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

Your misunderstanding is profound.

Seriously, this surprised me, even given your general confusion.

Einstein's model of gravity explained why the force should diminish with distance in the way Newton described, which is what my example was dealing with.

You don't appear to be able to follow a train of thought for more than one step without veering off into irrelevancies.

Back to animal brains and consciousness, the simple fact is that we have 2 sets of observations here -- the neural activity and the phenomenology. (And no, the phenomenology is not a "soul" or metaphysics or duality or magic or any of that.)

We know they are correlated, we know one causes the other, but we don't know why (or how) the one causes precisely what we observe in the latter.

So for example, birds respond to magnetic fields in ways that humans do not.

Do they do this entirely unconsciously, or is there some phenomenology associated with it? If there is, what is it?

If your view were correct, we could answer that question.

But not only can we not answer it, we have no way of even thinking of how to answer it.

Again, you're failing to address the actual question.

We were not in any way discussing the old saw of "How do I know that what's red to me is red to you?" That's utterly irrelevant here.

Also, there's no way to discuss consciousness without neuroscience. (I won't even ask why you think there should be.)

Furthermore, the ineffability of experience is also irrelevant here -- although it's certainly relevant to our understanding of consciousness generally.

However, if you did want to discuss color without regard to wavelengths of light, you could discuss dreams.

You contend that nobody could dream about red if they'd never seen a "red object" but there's no evidence for that. Perhaps that sort of priming is necessary, but then again perhaps its not. At the moment, there's no way of knowing.

What is known, though, is that if a person is incapable of seeing red, no one could ever describe it to them, because experience and imagination use the same brain real estate.

So the question is not "How do I know you see red?"

The question is why you and I both do see red when we look at a stop sign. Why not green?

We can't blame it on the wavelengths of light, because until our brains get around to performing the conscious experience of color, all we have is different neural activity, from which the experience of color cannot be deduced -- at least not yet, not with our current level of understanding.

That doesn't mean it's impossible to figure out, just that we haven't cracked that problem yet.

I notice none of that is an objective description of red qualia, but in fact a desperate attempt at changing the subject (ETA: and talk around the problem). You want to continue arguing about something you can't even describe, am I right? Friggin' theists can describe their experiences. Why can't you?

 

[Piggy]

I notice none of that is an objective description of red qualia, but in fact a desperate attempt at changing the subject (ETA: and talk around the problem). You want to continue arguing about something you can't even describe, am I right? Friggin' theists can describe their experiences. Why can't you?

No, it's a calm, reasoned attempt to keep you on the subject.

First, it's already been explained, in terms of neurology, why red cannot be described to someone who doesn't already understand what it is.

Second, since neither you nor I are either blind or color-blind, there's no need for us to describe what it is. We both see it, we both experience it, we both know what it is, we both agree we see red when we look at stop signs or traffic lights, for instance.

And we both agree that brain activity is responsible for this fact -- not magic, not a soul, not divine beings, not any of that.

You're simply failing to address the questions put to you. Then you're coming back with utterly irrelevant questions in order to distract from this fact.

The fact is, you have no theory which explains why the experiences of red and green result from exposure to the particular wavelengths of light which (sometimes) trigger those experiences, and not the other way around.

If you did, you would have offered it by now.

ETA: If it were true that our conscious experience -- our phenomenology, or qualia -- were truly and entirely non-different from the activity of our brain tissue, then we wouldn't have to go to such great lengths to observe said brain activity... we could simply observe it by introspection. But we can't.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Are you saying it can? By software alone, no hardware component other than what's necessary to "run the logic"?

How?

Hmmm...I thought you meant a hologram was somehow special in a way that a computer could not synthesize one.

Perhaps you could tell Pixar that a computer can't make a movie. Or, tell the makers of IBM's Watson that a computer could not answer Jeopardy questions.

What your comments suggest is you belief that consciousness is some kind of output.

There's no evidence for that. You say, yourself, the qualia, apparently the meat and potatoes of consciousness, cannot escape the brain, that we can't experience another person's experience.

However, the brain takes data as input (action potentials of sensory neurons) and produces data as output (action potentials of motor neurons). All scientific evidence indicates that everything the brain does is thoroughly understood as data processing.

How is a conscious brain that outputs nothing, different from your example of a computer running a brain simulation on a planet with no humans to observe it?

Explain in what way you feel consciousness is product... more than information.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Suppose we try and run with the hypothesis that consciousness and qualia are produced like physical output in the brain, and analyze it like an engineer.

1) Light from a red object enters the eye.
2) Cones convert the red light into action potential neuron spike data.
3) Neurons in the eye and brain carry and process the data to someplace in the brain, where...
4) Neuron spike data is turned into a red quale.
5) This red quale exists as some physical thing other than action potential neuron spike data.
6) This red quale is, somewhere in the brain, turned back into action potential neuron spike data.
7) This data is processed and turned into data that will sequence the lungs, voice box, etc., to say "red."
8) The mouth emits the sound of the word "red."

We have computers and IO devices to do all these steps, except for 4,5,6.

#4 is the interface that turns data into qualia (#5) and the qualia is turned back into data by #6.

I believe some hypothesize #5 is physical (it's never, however, been detected scientifically). Keep in mind that we have no scientific evidence for the interfaces between neuron information and qualia, either. These interfaces would have to exist yet also remain undetectable.

Sure, if 4,5,6 are real, they're no doubt distributed rather than modular, but still, if not detectable by any scientific instruments, must necessarily be supernatural.

Why are 4,5,6 needed at all?

Where's my error?

 

[Piggy]

Hmmm...I thought you meant a hologram was somehow special in a way that a computer could not synthesize one.

Perhaps you could tell Pixar that a computer can't make a movie. Or, tell the makers of IBM's Watson that a computer could not answer Jeopardy questions.

What your comments suggest is you belief that consciousness is some kind of output.

There's no evidence for that. You say, yourself, the qualia, apparently the meat and potatoes of consciousness, cannot escape the brain, that we can't experience another person's experience.

However, the brain takes data as input (action potentials of sensory neurons) and produces data as output (action potentials of motor neurons). All scientific evidence indicates that everything the brain does is thoroughly understood as data processing.

How is a conscious brain that outputs nothing, different from your example of a computer running a brain simulation on a planet with no humans to observe it?

Explain in what way you feel consciousness is product... more than information.

A computer can certainly be part of the process of making a movie, but you can't actually get a movie by programming alone. It's a software/hardware solution. That's all I'm saying.

As for Watson, "he" wasn't conscious, and didn't even understand the questions. If you look at the mistakes made by Watson, they're often laughable... utterly simple mistakes no human child would make.

As for thinking consciousness is an "output", I simply have no idea what you mean. Is running an "output"?

As for this: "All scientific evidence indicates that everything the brain does is thoroughly understood as data processing."

This is simply wrong when it comes to consciousness, because there's not even a framework for understanding how it's done, much less any "thorough understanding" of what's going on.

Consciousness is different from everything else the brain does. Profoundly so.

Finally, I don't talk about the brain in terms of information, because information is a measurement, an abstraction. It's useful, but ultimately we have to talk in terms of what's being measured, what's being abstracted. We can't understand what's happening if we fail to take that step.

If you insist on talking about the brain only in terms of "information" and "data", then of course you're going to make mistakes.

 

[Piggy]

Suppose we try and run with the hypothesis that consciousness and qualia are produced like physical output in the brain, and analyze it like an engineer.

1) Light from a red object enters the eye.

<snip>

Where's my error?

You can stop there.

You're assuming your conclusions.

You're trying to put red at the beginning of the process, before it's been produced.

If you do this, and you're thinking in terms of "data" and "information", then you'll make the mistake of assuming that "red" is some sort of "information" about light that's being passed to the brain.

So if you don't mind, let's back up and get more precise.

Also, I don't know what it might mean to say that a "quale exists as some physical thing".

The physicalist point of view is not that conscious experience is a type of matter, but rather that conscious experience is the result of purely physical-energetic processes in the brain.

Can you de-abstract this whole process for me, please, and let's talk in terms of matter and energy, rather than "data"?

 

[Belz...]

They share a language, though - mathematics.

Yes, and it doesn't get more abstract than that.

 

[Belz...]

No, it's a calm, reasoned attempt to keep you on the subject.

First, it's already been explained, in terms of neurology, why red cannot be described to someone who doesn't already understand what it is.

And again this seems to stand against your claim that there's something else to red.

 

[Belz...]

You can stop there.

You're assuming your conclusions.

You're trying to put red at the beginning of the process, before it's been produced.

Really ? You wanted him to say "light with a wavelenght of X" ? Though I suspect you could then argue that "wavelength" is just a word and not a real thing, too. Come on, you understand full well what was meant by "red", here.

 

[steenkh]

I'm talking about an actual hologram here. A real one. One that exists in spacetime and works.

Ah, you mean something with a bit of magic in it?

 

[Mr. Scott]

A computer can certainly be part of the process of making a movie, but you can't actually get a movie by programming alone. It's a software/hardware solution. That's all I'm saying.

As for Watson, "he" wasn't conscious, and didn't even understand the questions. If you look at the mistakes made by Watson, they're often laughable... utterly simple mistakes no human child would make.
As for thinking consciousness is an "output", I simply have no idea what you mean. Is running an "output"?

As for this: "All scientific evidence indicates that everything the brain does is thoroughly understood as data processing."

This is simply wrong when it comes to consciousness, because there's not even a framework for understanding how it's done, much less any "thorough understanding" of what's going on.

Consciousness is different from everything else the brain does. Profoundly so.

Finally, I don't talk about the brain in terms of information, because information is a measurement, an abstraction. It's useful, but ultimately we have to talk in terms of what's being measured, what's being abstracted. We can't understand what's happening if we fail to take that step.

If you insist on talking about the brain only in terms of "information" and "data", then of course you're going to make mistakes.

It's strange to say Watson didn't understand the questions. We're back to the Chinese Room. In fact, one of the errors Watson made during development was a result of Watson not understanding roman numerals, which they subsequently taught Watson. The developers really used the word "understand." I've not asserted Watson is conscious, so that's a straw attack. Remember, even though Watson made errors, he completely demolished his conscious opponents.

 

[Mr. Scott]

You can stop there.
You're assuming your conclusions.

You're trying to put red at the beginning of the process, before it's been produced.

If you do this, and you're thinking in terms of "data" and "information", then you'll make the mistake of assuming that "red" is some sort of "information" about light that's being passed to the brain.

So if you don't mind, let's back up and get more precise.

Also, I don't know what it might mean to say that a "quale exists as some physical thing".

The physicalist point of view is not that conscious experience is a type of matter, but rather that conscious experience is the result of purely physical-energetic processes in the brain.

Can you de-abstract this whole process for me, please, and let's talk in terms of matter and energy, rather than "data"?

Sigh...

Maybe I'll have time tomorrow to deal with the rest of this.