• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

On Consciousness

Is consciousness physical or metaphysical?

  • Consciousness is a kind of data processing and the brain is a machine that can be replicated in othe

    Votes: 81 86.2%

  • Consciousness requires a second substance outside the physical material world, currently undetectabl

    Votes: 3 3.2%

  • On Planet X, unconscious biological beings have perfected conscious machines

    Votes: 10 10.6%
  • Total voters
    94
  • Poll closed .
Status
Not open for further replies.
Mr. Scott said:
I do suspect that the antisphex/seen-it-before/deja-vu (ASD) module might be responsible for what we call consciousness. Qualia I think might come from that roar of associative connections. However, our perception of qualia may result from the combination of those two, plus a dash of cultural woo.
Click to expand...

Does this module work on other sensory levels as well, temperature, kinesthetic, Chemesthesis etc?
 
deadendmind2013 said:
LOL, yes, most philosophers are stuck to the simplistic view of Qualia as "is my red your green? hmm" etc which is pointless.
Click to expand...

Those would be the stoned undergrads 'studying' for their Metaphysics midterm around a bong, not any actual philosophers.
 
deadendmind2013 said:
Does this module work on other sensory levels as well, temperature, kinesthetic, Chemesthesis etc?
Click to expand...

The conversation tends to get stuck on the five senses, especially sight, but the "seen-it-before" module works on any conscious experience, which could also be musical, social, poetic, numeric, territorial, verbal, emotional, sharpness or dullness ... really anything the brain can synthesize into a "quale" can go into the consciousness stream.

I'm trying to think of a really interesting example...

Oh, I had been playing chess really intensively for about a year, and one evening with my friends, a girl said something to the group in reference to some social situations, and I thought, "hey, she just made a knight move" (a "seen-it-before" response). My brain had synthesized chess moves into qualia that had little sensory association.
 
Mr. Scott said:
and I thought, "hey, she just made a knight move" (a "seen-it-before" response). My brain had synthesized chess moves into qualia that had little sensory association.
Click to expand...

This reminds me of synesthesia. I read an article recently in Scientific American Mind (Jan/Feb 2012, p. 11), where the author suggests that we are
all born synesthetes, with senses so joined that stimulating one reliably stimulates another. Maybe this module is formed during infant stages, I don't know.
 
Last edited:
deadendmind2013 said:
This reminds me of synesthesia. I read an article recently in Scientific American Mind (Jan/Feb 2012, p. 11), where the author suggests that we are
all born synesthetes, with senses so joined that stimulating one reliably stimulates another. Maybe this module is formed during infant stages, I don't know.
Click to expand...

Yes, I have read that synesthsesia can be caused by adjacent brain modules failing to separate fully. Let me look for linky...oh, it's in its default wiki page:

Dedicated regions of the brain are specialized for given functions. Increased cross-talk between regions specialized for different functions may account for the many types of synesthesia. For example, the additive experience of seeing color when looking at graphemes might be due to cross-activation of the grapheme-recognition area and the color area called V4 (see figure).[29] One line of thinking is that a failure to prune synapses that are normally formed in great excess during the first few years of life may cause such cross-activation.
Click to expand...

However, synesthsesia is distinct from our natural tendency to form analogies like "dark" humor, a loud visual design, purple prose, or a blue mood, which also tends to be stronger in childhood.
 
Last edited:
Memory Stored Outside the Brain (at least in flatworms)

Could some human memories also be stored outside the brain, and even participate in consciousness?

Levin doesn't know how to explain this. He says epigenetics may play a role—modifications to an organism's DNA that dial certain genes up or down—"but this alone doesn't begin to explain it."

It's a mystery, Levin says, how a chemical tweak somewhere outside of a worm's brain can later be translated into information, such as the knowledge that a bumpy environment means food is nearby. "We don't have an answer to this," he says. "What we do show evidence of is the remarkable fact that memory seems to be stored outside the brain."
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Cool TED Talk: Henry Markram: A brain in a supercomputer

 
Last edited:
I was watching a vintage program of a Cray 2 supercomputer simulating air flow around a Space Shuttle, and realized something applicable to our discussion.

A successful simulation of consciousness in a computer would show that we understand how consciousness works, just as a successful simulation of the solar system would show we understand how it works. Therefore, it's relevant to understanding consciousness.

What computer simulations do is predict what will happen in the real world. A computer simulation of a human brain would predict its behavior and outputs.

Therefore, a successful simulation of the brain would report to the world how mysterious were its sensations of color, love, and pain.

If, as some assert, it couldn't have those experiences but reported them anyway, it would be lying? They predict the simulation would predict reporting subjective experiences it wasn't really experiencing?

Just something to think about.
 
Last edited:
Mr. Scott said:
Therefore, a successful simulation of the brain would report to the world how mysterious were its sensations of color, love, and pain.

If, as some assert, it couldn't have those experiences but reported them anyway, it would be lying? They predict the simulation would predict reporting subjective experiences it wasn't really experiencing?

Just something to think about.
Click to expand...
Well, a human brain is not ready for the world the moment it is born. It needs upbringing and education over many years.

If a successful simulation of a brain is to work, it will need the same, or you will have brain of a newborn baby, or a foetus to deal with.

On other words, our simulation needs parents, and schooling :)
 
steenkh said:
Well, a human brain is not ready for the world the moment it is born. It needs upbringing and education over many years.

If a successful simulation of a brain is to work, it will need the same, or you will have brain of a newborn baby, or a foetus to deal with.

On other words, our simulation needs parents, and schooling :)
Click to expand...

Absolutely. Reminds me of some criticisms of IBM's Watson. Would it have made the same mistakes if it had been interacting with the world for 30 years like most fleshy contestants?

I was 12 years old when I, instigated by a sci-fi comic, first wondered about how, if the brain was a computer, it made such vivid subjective experiences. Perhaps we should give our computer brain about that much time.
 
If we knew how knowledge and experiences were stored in a brain, we could make a shortcut and seed the computer simulation with all those data.

But we don't, so we are stuck with using the methods that nature works with, and let the simulated brain grow just like a normal foetal brain grows, and give it similar experiences to a real kid! My mind boggles when I think of the difficulties in this, and my hopes for a successful simulation seem even more unlikely ever to be fulfilled!
 
steenkh said:
If we knew how knowledge and experiences were stored in a brain, we could make a shortcut and seed the computer simulation with all those data.

But we don't, so we are stuck with using the methods that nature works with, and let the simulated brain grow just like a normal foetal brain grows, and give it similar experiences to a real kid! My mind boggles when I think of the difficulties in this, and my hopes for a successful simulation seem even more unlikely ever to be fulfilled!
Click to expand...

It would be scientifically interesting to simulate the brain, but there are other directions to go that would be more useful. There are wonderfully effective modules in there, but the brain is a mess. We can do better.
 
Mr. Scott said:
It would be scientifically interesting to simulate the brain, but there are other directions to go that would be more useful. There are wonderfully effective modules in there, but the brain is a mess. We can do better.
Click to expand...

Just having a brain simulation which works and replicate brain function would be an incredible step forward, and a falsification of any free will theory. we can think of doing better afterward (in a sense, we are already doing better - just at specialized functions).
 
Mr. Scott said:
...What computer simulations do is predict what will happen in the real world. A computer simulation of a human brain would predict its behavior and outputs....
Click to expand...

I'm not sure it's necessary to go that far, after all, how easy is it to predict what individual humans (or their brains) will do, except in extremely limited circumstances?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom