proto-consciousness field theory

[Myriad]

Which behavior(s) can't be done by non conscious entities?

For example, summarize its own experiences for the previous day in a few sentences.

Oops, wait, have I cheated? I said "experiences," and a non conscious entity (such as a posited p-zombie) by definition has no experiences.

Well, no, I haven't cheated, because whether the p-zombie has subjective experiences or not, being able to recall for instance things it perceived and things that happened to it and things it did and why it did them, and summarize those recollections in narrative form, is something that a conscious person can do, so it's something that a p-zombie should also be able to do as well. That is, the p-zombie must at least be able to fake recounting its (nonexistent) experiences.

My hypothesis is that the processing and remembering and recalling and summarizing it has to do in order to fake narrating its experiences, is indistinguishable from actually having experiences. By indistinguishable I don't mean we can't tell the difference (which is what we started out inherently assuming), I mean there is no difference. Which makes our posited p-zombie conscious, and therefore not a p-zombie.

Note that all that necessary processing etc. is integrating a lot of information, so other hypotheses that approach the question of consciousness more from the point of view of the nature of the processing itself are not necessarily incompatible with this view. I'm not looking at the hardware but at the software design specs: what does consciousness do, and why? The value of being able to summarize interactions with the world into high-level chunks, narratives of things and beings and the self taking actions for reasons, should be self-apparent. Memory, learning, thinking, planning, and the use of language are all either aided or made possible in the first place.

 

[jrhowell]

That's the definition of begging the question.

I disagree. I am defining human consciousness as the thing that causes human conscious behavior. And i propose studying the physical causes of that behavior as a way of understanding the source of consciousness.

Consciousness has real measurable objective influences that can be studied scientifically. You claim that you are conscious and experience qualia. Your making that claim shows that your consciousness has an impact on your behavior. (I cannot see how anyone could believe that consciousness does not influence behavior. It would be an strange coincidence if having consciousness and behaving as if we have consciousness were two unrelated things.)

If technology ever advances to the point where we understand the human brain to the point where we can model it then the model will match human behavior, including claims of experiencing consciousness, or it will not. After a failure there, that would be the time to look for previously unknown factors, such as a consciousness field.

See, I think you could program an AI/robot to perfectly emulate consciousness, but that wouldn't mean it was conscious at all. It would only indicate that robot programming had reached a advanced stage.

Sure it could be faked, but I believe that faking it really well would require something akin to consciousness anyway.

But leaving that aside, I am not talking about programming robots to act like us. I am talking about studying what is actually going on in the human brain that leads to the behaviors that we consider to be actual human consciousness.

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After having caught up in the thread I want to add that I agree with everything Myriad has posted here.

 

[Darat]

See, I think you could program an AI/robot to perfectly emulate consciousness, but that wouldn't mean it was conscious at all. It would only indicate that robot programming had reached a advanced stage.

That's the p-zombie. That you can have all the appearance of being conscious but there are no qualia. In other words if I say to you "close your eyes and imagine a juicy red apple" you will have the qualia of the experience of a red apple. The robot would just say it is imagining the red apple but would have no qualia of the experience of a red apple, it would be lying, just as I've found out I have been doing all my life, I have no such qaulia. I cannot close my eyes and imagine a red apple, juicy or not. If qualia are a neccessary component of consciousness you have to conclude I am not conscious.

 

[Belz...]

I cannot close my eyes and imagine a red apple, juicy or not. If qualia are a neccessary component of consciousness you have to conclude I am not conscious.

Thats explains a lot, actually.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

For example, summarize its own experiences for the previous day in a few sentences.

That sounds pretty lame to me. Since you just asserted that you don't think a non-conscious entity can't do this I'll just assert that one can. I have no idea why you think this is a good example.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

That's the problem of p-zombies, but as discussed at death on this forum in the past, the concept of p-zombies is incoherent.

Don't look now but someone in the thread is claiming to be one.

The arguments that lead to p-zombies being incoherent are about as impressive as the words games theists frequently show up with.

Can we start by talking about what you'll accept as evidence...

 

[jrhowell]

In other words if I say to you "close your eyes and imagine a juicy red apple" you will have the qualia of the experience of a red apple. The robot would just say it is imagining the red apple but would have no qualia of the experience of a red apple, it would be lying...

But would the robot have to be lying? Couldn't it include a copy of some drawing software and use that to draw an apple on an internal virtual screen with no external output of that action? It seems to me that would be the robot equivalent to imagining it.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

But would the robot have to be lying? Couldn't it include a copy of some drawing software and use that to draw an apple on an internal virtual screen with no external output of that action? It seems to me that would be the robot equivalent to imagining it.

So when you put a Gimp session in to the background and make some other window visible, the computer is now imagining whatever you've used it to draw?

 

[Belz...]

Don't look now but someone in the thread is claiming to be one.

...he's not literally claiming to be one. He's saying that he lacks the qualia that philosophical hard-problemers claims is fundamental to consciousness. Is he conscious or not?

The arguments that lead to p-zombies being incoherent are about as impressive as the words games theists frequently show up with.

You think that's unimpressive that they are logically impossible? I think that's rather important.

Can we start by talking about what you'll accept as evidence...

Of what?

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

...he's not literally claiming to be one. He's saying that he lacks the qualia that philosophical hard-problemers claims is fundamental to consciousness. Is he conscious or not?

What definition of p-zombie do you that doesn't meet? He's conscious in the sense that he is awake.

You think that's unimpressive that they are logically impossible? I think that's rather important.

They aren't logically impossible. Certain philosophers, who would otherwise be laughed at on this merely by fact of being philosophers, use dubious premises to claim logical impossibility.

Of what?

Of what we're talking about. I'm mocking philosophical arguments by comparing them to the lame theist arguments we hear all the time. The ones that first require the arguer trick in to agreeing to some weird definition of evidence.

 

[Belz...]

What definition of p-zombie do you that doesn't meet? He's conscious in the sense that he is awake.

Is he conscious in the sense that he's conscious, then? Because if he is, he's not a p-zombie, by definition.

They aren't logically impossible.

Contradictory things are impossible. That's the foundation of logic.

Of what we're talking about.

You asked me a question absent of context. We've discussed quite a few things in this thread. Evidence of what?

 

[baron]

I disagree. I am defining human consciousness as the thing that causes human conscious behavior. And i propose studying the physical causes of that behavior as a way of understanding the source of consciousness.

Consciousness has real measurable objective influences that can be studied scientifically. You claim that you are conscious and experience qualia. Your making that claim shows that your consciousness has an impact on your behavior. (I cannot see how anyone could believe that consciousness does not influence behavior. It would be an strange coincidence if having consciousness and behaving as if we have consciousness were two unrelated things.)

According to the evidence, reported conscious experience does not influence human behaviour. The experiments are necessarily limited, however, and as such it's not appropriate to draw far reaching conclusions from them. Personally I think that consciousness can influence behaviour but most of what we say is conscious behaviour is actually not. I believe a person can go their whole life without consciousness influencing their actions. I'm with Gurdjieff and his crew on that one.

If technology ever advances to the point where we understand the human brain to the point where we can model it then the model will match human behavior, including claims of experiencing consciousness, or it will not. After a failure there, that would be the time to look for previously unknown factors, such as a consciousness field.

You mean after a success. If the replicant didn't report conscious experience (a failure) you could conclude that consciousness was a direct product of the brain and you'd not need to look any further (in theory).

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

Is he conscious in the sense that he's conscious, then? Because if he is, he's not a p-zombie, by definition.

Look up p-zombie for yourself at wikipedia. If you lack qualia you are a p-zombie. Perhaps you might think that only makes you a partial p-zombie. I don't think so, but there might be room to argue that.

Contradictory things are impossible. That's the foundation of logic.

Which is a non-sequitur since nothing has been demonstrated to be contradictory.

You asked me a question absent of context. We've discussed quite a few things in this thread. Evidence of what?

You should have this figured out by now.

 

[jrhowell]

So when you put a Gimp session in to the background and make some other window visible, the computer is now imagining whatever you've used it to draw?

Of course not. The context was a robot that somehow already has experiences. Given that adding imagination seems a small step.

 

[Belz...]

Look up p-zombie for yourself at wikipedia. If you lack qualia you are a p-zombie.

Not only do you refuse to clarify your question, but you refuse to answer mine? I asked you whether Darat is conscious.

Which is a non-sequitur since nothing has been demonstrated to be contradictory.

Then you haven't been paying attention. Every time the concept is brought up it gets shot down again. And in this thread someone's even already made the argument. It's quite simple, really.

You should have this figured out by now.

Come on, Yuppy. You asked me what evidence I would accept. Presumably you want an answer to that, so why don't you clarify so we can move on?

 

[jrhowell]

According to the evidence, reported conscious experience does not influence human behaviour. The experiments are necessarily limited, however, and as such it's not appropriate to draw far reaching conclusions from them. Personally I think that consciousness can influence behaviour but most of what we say is conscious behaviour is actually not. I believe a person can go their whole life without consciousness influencing their actions. I'm with Gurdjieff and his crew on that one.

Do you believe that your own personal consciousness had any effect on the contents of your posts in this thread so far? It seems to me that it would have. If you do not believe so then I would like to understand why.

You mean after a success. If the replicant didn't report conscious experience (a failure) you could conclude that consciousness was a direct product of the brain and you'd not need to look any further (in theory).

If the replicant did not report consciousness then it is missing something essential and we have failed to replicate conscious experience. If it does report success then whatever consciousness is, we will have captured it in our replication and that would imply that there are no unknown fields or other influences involved in producing consciousness.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

so why don't you clarify so we can move

on?

I clarified, just move on.

 

[baron]

That's the p-zombie. That you can have all the appearance of being conscious but there are no qualia. In other words if I say to you "close your eyes and imagine a juicy red apple" you will have the qualia of the experience of a red apple. The robot would just say it is imagining the red apple but would have no qualia of the experience of a red apple, it would be lying, just as I've found out I have been doing all my life, I have no such qaulia. I cannot close my eyes and imagine a red apple, juicy or not. If qualia are a neccessary component of consciousness you have to conclude I am not conscious.

You don't need to imagine anything to experience qualia. Look around the room, what you experience is qualia. The sensation of colour, space and form is qualia. Imagination is useful but it has nothing to do with consciousness (nothing diagnostic at any rate). Qualia is inner experience, forget the imagining.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

Do you believe that your own personal consciousness had any effect on the contents of your posts in this thread so far? It seems to me that it would have. If you do not believe so then I would like to understand why.

There are reports that conscious experience does not control our behavior but only becomes aware of it after it has occurred. I would suspect these reports might be behind an earlier claim that neuroscience has established that consciousness is an illusion.

If the replicant did not report consciousness then it is missing something essential and we have failed to replicate conscious experience. If it does report success then whatever consciousness is, we will have captured it in our replication and that would imply that there are no unknown fields or other influences involved in producing consciousness.

Or it's just programmed to report success or to claim consciousness it doesn't actually have.

 

[Belz...]

I clarified

I asked you "evidence for what?"

Consciousness? I already accept that it exists.
Qualia? They're not even defined properly, so I couldn't tell you.

What, exactly, are you asking me?
It seems to me like you don't know, yourself. You probably misspoke and are now unwilling to admit it, which explains why you're so damned unwilling to clarify your question.

Onto mine, then: is Darat conscious or not?