The Hard Problem of Gravity

[Beth]

The only thing that computers simulate that people think will be equivalent to the thing itself is consciousness. Nobody thinks that a computer simulation of the weather is the same thing as weather. Indeed, the idea is ridiculous. We don't think that a computer model of a tornado will give us the same experience as the real thing. Yet because consciousness is inaccessible, we think that somehow the simulation is identical to the real thing. Because we know nothing about the physics of consciousness, the argument is essentially from ignorance.

The only computer simulation that is a perfect equivalent of the thing simulated is of another computer program.

When a computer adds two numbers, is it simulating addition or doing addition? There are many things that computers do that are the perfect equivalent of the thing simulated. I don't think they can simulate consciousness perfectly yet, but I don't see why they can't be considered conscious when they are able to do so.

 

[Mercutio]

Yes I do.

What else can it be?

The brain is a computer. Consciousness is the result of brain activity. That makes consciousness a computer program.

I gotta disagree a bit (which means, of course, that we have found the thing you are wrong about!) I have no doubt that you will be able to re-stuff my explanation back into "brain activity", but it is not the most natural fit. For instance, your earlier words:

Sourness is nothing but a pattern of neural firings. We can take that pattern of firings, map it into another person's brain (someone who has never experienced sourness), and produce in them the experience of sourness via a simple electrical impulse.

That's all any sensation is.

If sourness is learned through public referent (which it is, and must be--no one has access to your private experience), then we learn what is sour through things and through behavior. Vinegar is sour, we say, as are lemons, and battery acid (or maybe that was just me). Sour is the thing that makes your lips pucker up when you suck on a lemon, or makes your face scrunch up when you get a spoonful of vinegar.

Now, there may be a brain mechanism for detecting the acidic nature of the stimulus. I don't doubt that for an instant. But is that all there is to sourness? We also (and again, yes, there are brain areas for this) like or dislike it, have various associations with it, behave in particular ways to it. Each of these contributes to our experience of sourness, but now we are getting further from a single map of an experience that we could transfer to another's brain (even in theory).

My sister used to sit in the kitchen and drink vinegar. Distilled white vinegar. Just load up tablespoon after tablespoon and sip it down. Loved it. So... it is possible that it tasted sweet to her. Or that it tasted sour, but that her reaction to sour was different from mine. Or that it tasted sour, and her reaction to sour was the same, but her behavioral response to that reaction was different. Bottom line is, we have several possible physiological pathways to describe her behavior, and I do not think those would be an exhaustive list. We could have several odd people (and my sister is an odd person) who act as if vinegar is not sour, and who act this way for completely different physiological reasons. But to a child, learning what sour is, we have simply the behavior of the individuals, and not their neural pathways. The consciousness-words ("liking", "sour", "sweet", etc.) that describe a subjective state are all learned from public behavior; my sister would simply say "it doesn't taste sour to me--I like it!"

So... even though consciousness is (and must be) the working of the brain, there is reason to suspect that similar behavior may result from different brain states. Simply (simply!) transplanting one brain state to another person may not result in their experiencing the same sour taste--especially if one defines just a subset of brain activity as "sour" (analogously to feature-detector cells in occipital cortex). I would have to say that the primary factor in consciousness is the behavior in the social environment; the brain activity is the "how", but not the "what" of consciousness.

 

[westprog]

When a computer adds two numbers, is it simulating addition or doing addition? There are many things that computers do that are the perfect equivalent of the thing simulated. I don't think they can simulate consciousness perfectly yet, but I don't see why they can't be considered conscious when they are able to do so.

What does it mean to add two numbers? When one boulder rolls next to another boulder, is it doing addition? For a mathematical operation to take place, there must be some degree of understanding. A computer doesn't understand addition any more than an abacus or a cash register.

 

[PixyMisa]

What does it mean to add two numbers? When one boulder rolls next to another boulder, is it doing addition? For a mathematical operation to take place, there must be some degree of understanding. A computer doesn't understand addition any more than an abacus or a cash register.

Yeah, it does. That's why we make a distinction between computers and non-computers.

 

[PixyMisa]

So... even though consciousness is (and must be) the working of the brain, there is reason to suspect that similar behavior may result from different brain states. Simply (simply!) transplanting one brain state to another person may not result in their experiencing the same sour taste--especially if one defines just a subset of brain activity as "sour" (analogously to feature-detector cells in occipital cortex). I would have to say that the primary factor in consciousness is the behavior in the social environment; the brain activity is the "how", but not the "what" of consciousness.

Brutally snipping your post, because I mostly agree with most of it.

Certainly (for one thing) I was oversimplifying; there is a sense that no two people can experience the same sensation because no two people are the same person. And also, certainly, aspects of the overall experience of sourness are learned, are social constructs.

I think that, to the degree I disagree with you at all, the reason is that I (like rocketdodger) work in a field where internal states are accessible. Though we come to essentially the same conclusions as to the how, we assign different weights to the importance of the various aspects of the what.

 

[Beth]

What does it mean to add two numbers?

When one boulder rolls next to another boulder, is it doing addition? For a mathematical operation to take place, there must be some degree of understanding. A computer doesn't understand addition any more than an abacus or a cash register.

I didn't claim the computer understood addition, I said it did addition. You had claimed that consciousness was the only thing where the simulation was considered to be the same as the thing itself. Addition was a counterexample. Simulated addition is not distinguishable from actual addition.

 

[westprog]

What does it mean to add two numbers?


I didn't claim the computer understood addition, I said it did addition. You had claimed that consciousness was the only thing where the simulation was considered to be the same as the thing itself. Addition was a counterexample. Simulated addition is not distinguishable from actual addition.

I think the same term is referring to two separate things. What happens when a computer performs addition is quite different to what happens when a person performs addition.

I suppose that if one uses a human being as a computer, performing some kind of automated task by a set of rules, then the computer can simulate that - but it has to be an algorithmic task to start with.

 

[AkuManiMani]

First off, lupus_in_fabula I would like to thank you for actually taking the time to thoughtfully consider what I'm saying and give honest criticism and feedback

A lot of the concepts I'm presenting here aren't meant to be definitive statements of fact, tho I do aim to ground them in accepted facts. A lot of the conclusions I'm drawing are, in fact, what I feel to be strong inductive inferences and I'm essentially looking for some collaborative brainstorming.

Well, I went through the these particular articles, and I'm by no way any good in physics or biology but I know discourse somewhat, and it seems to me that we should backtrack quite a bit here. Especially since your assertion includes the modality 'significant'; not only in regards to biological function but to behaviour overall (by which you then at least implicitly have connected it to saying QM is significant in processes which we call "conscious", not only through passive evolutionary progress but in terms of playing an active "steering" role for the function).

I think, you're pretty accurate so far in describing my position. I've no significant disagreement with you here.

At least those articles talk about QM in four general ways: 1) That QM can be used to 'understand' physical processes better; 2) the processes we thus seek to understand is going on at 'very low' scales; 3) almost all of them point out that they do not know 'how much' of a role QM plays, only that there is some at a the very rudimentary level; 4) none of them implies that QM is to be regarded as significant when it comes to brain function or even behaviour when it comes to 'directing' behaviour, more like suitable for 'understanding' underlying processes. And in the case such interpretation can be made, it would have to be reformulated as 'directed through evolutionary processes' through very long time-scales.

Well, I agree that most of the links I provided were to articles of that nature. For the most part, the majority of the articles were concerned with using QM to better understand the physical processes of molecular biology in the sense that you mean in propositions 1-4.

However, atleast two of the sites I posted contained links to more articles discussing the implications of QM on the overall physical processes that take place in organisms. Just this morning I happened to comb over an article titled "Magnetic field effects in chemical systems". For the most part, this particular article is not written for consumption by laypersons. Even so, the abstract does describe how magnetic fields can influence chemical behavior which lends some support to my hypothesis that organizing fields may play a role in biochemistry as well.

I think the clearest formulation is to be found in Ogryzko's article (Biology Direct), although we're still talking about quite low-level scales here [emphasis mine]:

Indeed, if it has taken Humankind only few decades to approach the use of entanglement in quantum information technology, one can wonder why Life, in billions of years of evolution, could not also learn to take advantage, finding in entanglement an alternative resource for stabilizing biological order.

To summarize, entanglement can provide biology with a conceptual ingredient that had been missing from the molecular explanations of life dominating the field for the last 50 years. A philosopher could see in it the physical counterpart of an old dictum – 'the whole is more than a sum of its parts', reflecting the aspect of life that cannot be reduced to molecular structure and interactions. A modern information theorist would see entanglement as an independent resource for information processing in living cells, additional to the molecular 'nuts-and-bolts' mechanisms (including epigenetic templating), which would be tempting to relate with the LOCC operations in this context.

In short, I don't think those articles are a rebuttal to Tegmark.

The Ogryzko article discusses ideas presented by one of the founders of QM, Erwin Schrödinger, in his book 'What is Life?'. The author proposes ways in which QM may play a role in the overall functions and morphology of living systems - what he terms 'epigenetic phenomenon'. Of all the articles I've linked, it appears to me that this one is the one that most directly contradicts Tegmark. Though I don't believe the author wrote the paper with Tegmark in mind, the very fact that he proposes means by which QM processes can be a significant factor in the function and physiology of entire organisms makes it a direct rebuttal.

Even in the case of more conservative proposals, [such as in the studies on photosynthesis] there is strong evidence that coherence can and does persist on scales and temperatures that Tegmark deemed impossible. I cannot say that I know for certain what the exact reasons were for his declaration because I'm a layman in this area; as far as I know from the perspective he was examining the issue he had compelling reasons to do so. Regardless of this, the very fact there are instances in biology where his declaration is falsified proves that [in atleast some conditions that are still under study] coherence and other QM effects can play a role in actual biological functions, including but not limited to, those that take place in the brain. Clearly, there were extenuating factors that he was unaware of that could provide for exceptions.

In a way, this doesn't really surprise me because, as many of my biology teachers have pointed out, exceptions are common when it comes to living things.

[edit: Okay, I'm now checking out Tegmark's home page to read more into his argument ]

 

[yy2bggggs]

By reading up on general biology since I was a pre-adolecent child. Its an established fact that biological system maintain a relatively low internal entropy at the expense of increasing the entropy of the surrounding environment.

When I suggested you had a temperature, that was in a ha-ha-only-serious sense. I'm literally pointing to the increase in entropy within your body. Your body maintains a core temperature of about 98F=37C--which is, quite often, hotter than the environment (and when not, the lack of equilibrium must be maintained by a sort of air conditioning system--sweating in our case).

So what do living organisms do to decrease entropy that inorganic constructs don't? Store energy? Well, they do that, and then slowly release that energy... and so do rocks. Store information? Well, they do that too... and so does freshly fallen snow or a sandy beach (consider footprints in either). Build structures? Well, they do that... by the way, aren't crystals structures? Tornadoes/hurricanes?

When you take into account all of the increasing entropy that happens within all organisms, I find it very hard to believe that the tiny amounts of stored information such organisms maintain net a positive. Living beings are not possessed by Maxwell's demon.

Edit: Think of it this way. The whole "order" thing is only a source of confusion. Think of the raw theoretical base of entropy--the movement of heat from a hotter partition to a cooler one, and the resulting loss of potential to do useful work with that energy once that happens. That is what you're claiming increases in organisms internally. Does it? Are we, really, finding a way to do useful work from dissipated heat energy?

 

[yy2bggggs]

When a computer adds two numbers, is it simulating addition or doing addition?

It depends on how it does it. This is an addition:
OOOOO + OOO = OOOOOOOO
...and this is only an emulation:
101 + 011 = 1000
Usually, when the computer is doing something we describe as adding, it's doing something like the latter; when it's actually "doing addition", we describe what it's doing using a completely different term, such as concatenating.

The reason for this is simple... we've habitually incorporated a very useful radix representation system for accounting--we incorporate it so deeply that we associate the operation of addition more with the abstraction than with the thing it's about.

 

[AkuManiMani]

Yes. The bulk statistical properties of matter can be and are approximated quite well using classical deterministic theories, without employing QM. The thing is, what I'm referring are a class of phenomenon whose behaviors do not lend themselves well to such an approach. I am, ofcourse, referring to the behaviors of living organisms.

Gee... if only one of us were a behaviorist. Oh, wait! I am! Ok, proceed.

You say that as if behaviorism is a particularly insightful approach [emphases added]:

Behaviorism or Behaviourism, also called the learning perspective (where any physical action is a behavior) is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors.[1] The school of psychology maintains that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without recourse either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as the mind.[2] Behaviorism comprises the position that all theories should have observational correlates but that there are no philosophical differences between publicly observable processes (such as actions) and privately observable processes (such as thinking and feeling).[3]

From early psychology in the 19th century, the behaviorist school of thought ran concurrently and shared commonalities with the psychoanalytic and Gestalt movements in psychology into the 20th century; but also differed from the mental philosophy of the Gestalt psychologists in critical ways. Its main influences were Ivan Pavlov, who investigated classical conditioning, Edward Lee Thorndike, John B. Watson who rejected introspective methods and sought to restrict psychology to experimental methods, and B.F. Skinner who conducted research on operant conditioning. [3] In the second half of the twentieth century, behaviorism was largely eclipsed as a result of the cognitive revolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism

Behaviorism is a relic from a time when means of effectively studying the internal realities of the brain [i.e. neuroscience] were unavailable. As a philosophy behaviorism is epistemologically sloppy, IMO. The assumption that internal states are irrelevant and that external behaviors suffices as a sufficient understanding of an organism shallow and completely uninsightful. I don't understand why such an archaic philosophy appeals to you so much when there is so much more that we can to to gain a deeper understanding of things.

I suppose behaviorism's appeal to you reflects a major difference between you and I: You are satsified with pat, superficial knowledge while I prefer to dig for a real understanding of the world. Unfortunately, i think this may prevent us from being able to see eye-to-eye on most things

I very strongly suspect that the reason for this is that those kinds of behaviors are linked inextricably with QM phenomenon.

Do you have an actual reason to suspect that QM adds anything to the equation? Positive evidence?

Yes. I've posted them already. I've linked various articles and scientific papers which support my suspicions and I've gone to great lengths to break down why I'm inclined suspect as I do.

Pixy already alluded to evolution; we can go a step further and demonstrate that the process of selection works in behavior as well; that is a perfectly good reformulation of operant conditioning.

I don't deny natural selection as a driving force in biology. I'm just saying that there is strong reason to conclude that other organizing physical principles are at work in living processes and that, scientifically, it would be a good idea to investigate them.

If you had a more coherent picture of what consciousness is (it is no surprise, I agree with Pixy that you are conflating several different terms), you would find much less here to unravel. And no need to invoke QM.
I look forward to evidence of this non-trivial role.

I've already presented said evidence. Whether or not you choose to accept it as personally convincing is irrelevant to the fact that there is evidence.

Thus far, the only role I have seen for it is to take the place of Descartes' pineal gland, or a magician's smoke and mirrors. In practice, it is not used to explain, but to hand-wave.

I'd say that Pixy's definition of consciousness as merely reflective processing explains nothing in regards to what is actually meant by consciousness, and is hand-waving of the nth degree.

And FYI, the reason why the discussion has digressed down the road of QM is because I was supporting my claim that a distinguishing feature of organisms from inanimate classical machines is the role QM plays in their functioning. The question of consciousness itself is a bit of a different issue.

It is something that will become much clearer once you have settled your definitions. Operationalization is the key to clearly framing your problem; your definitions are all over the place.

I, and other on this thread, have only only presented one definition. Each time I personally provided this definition Pixy simply claims that I've not provided a definition. When I rephrase, to clarify, he claims that I've changed the definition. Its a no-win situation when you're trying to have a meaningful discussion with someone who's so willfully dense.

Not as bad as Iacchus used to be, but on that continuum; just because one sense of a word is synonymous with one sense of another word, does not mean that the two words are functionally identical. Our language is much more complex than that.

So you're saying that the problem isn't so much one of definition but of language? Interesting...

My suspicion is that organisms are expressions of a kind of complex field that organizes the interactions of their constituent atoms. I also suspect that QM will play a major role in understanding this class of field. While I admit that this is speculation, it is based upon reasonable inference from established scientific facts.

And you wonder why we used the term "magic"? You sound like Sheldrake here!

The difference between me and Sheldrake is that he takes a much larger inductive leap than I'm taking here. While I'm arguing my position in terms that can possibly be described with current science [for instance, the fields I'm proposing are information carrying EM fields] Sheldrake proposes mechanisms that much farther away from being described in current scientific terms. While I'm not so certain that I can accept a lot of Sheldrake's more radical claims it seems, IMO, that there is some merit in proposing organizing fields in biology. I just think its extremely premature to start invoking new fundamental processes in nature when current ones my suffice.

I've many specific reasons for proposing organizing fields when it comes to biological functions. A lot of them are presented in some of the articles linked above. I also suspect that evidence for thinking of the mind in terms of an information carrying field can be found in the holonomic brain theory [@Wikipedia and Scholarpedia]. Some of my other reasons are based off of my own reflections on the issue which I've posted here.

What I'm attempting to do here is not invoke 'magic' but to formulate a hypothesis.

 

[westprog]

It depends on how it does it. This is an addition:
OOOOO + OOO = OOOOOOOO
...and this is only an emulation:
101 + 011 = 1000
Usually, when the computer is doing something we describe as adding, it's doing something like the latter; when it's actually "doing addition", we describe what it's doing using a completely different term, such as concatenating.

The reason for this is simple... we've habitually incorporated a very useful radix representation system for accounting--we incorporate it so deeply that we associate the operation of addition more with the abstraction than with the thing it's about.

Where human beings show understanding is in the knowledge that OOOOO + OOO = OOOOOOOO is the same thing as 5 + 3 = 8. Humans can understand symbology. Notwithstanding Brave Little Toaster claims to the contrary, computers don't understand anything at all.

 

[AkuManiMani]

I originally posed this question to westprog, but I think it would be interesting to hear your take on it as well. It might lead us to a kind of conceptual edge.

If we were to take away all the "content" in your experience, would you 'experience nothing', or would there be 'no experience'?

Lupus, you're a mind reader

I was actually thinking about presenting this thought experiment much earlier on in the discussion, but I soon forgot about it in all the hubbub.

Anyways, here's the thought experiment...

Suppose one took a newborn infant and rendered it blind def an paralyzed. Suppose also that you devise a way to prevent the child from receiving smell, taste and tactile information to the brain. Say you kept the unfortunate child in this condition for the rest of its life while maintaining it on life support systems. For all intents and purposes the child is cut off from the sensory 'outside' world.

With that in mind:

[1] Could the child actually be said to be conscious?

[2] Would it go thru the cycles of wakefulness and sleep?

Aside from almost certainly doing irrevocable harm to the child's development, I'd answer yes to both [1] and [2]. My guess is that, absent even external stimuli, the child could still be said to be conscious.

I mentioned earlier that I suspect that consciousness is a field generated by the brain that, when perturbed by various sensory information [being carried by photons, specific signal molecule, etc.] actually produces what we call 'qualia'.

Depending on the nature of the perturbation, the physical characteristics of the signal carriers, or the base state of the conscious field, specific types of qualitative experiences will be produced. In this instance there is really no binding problem because the qualia are properties of the conscious field. In short, I'm proposing that consciousness is a specific class of field that is, almost certainly, is electromagnetic in nature and that the reason why one cannot find a 'seat of consciousness' in the brain is because consciousness is a distributed field generated by and interacting with the brain as a whole. The main challenge of this theory is figuring out what exact physical properties correlate with which qualitative states and why. I think this hypothesis might be one of the first real steps toward grounding qualia in physics.

If one would actually take the time to actually LISTEN to what it is I'm proposing [Mercucio, et al.] you would understand that I'm not invoking anything 'magical'. I'm proposing a real physical basis for consciousness that's more insightful that just saying "its neural firing & computation stuff -- durrrrr...."

 

[Gate2501]

Where human beings show understanding is in the knowledge that OOOOO + OOO = OOOOOOOO is the same thing as 5 + 3 = 8. Humans can understand symbology. Notwithstanding Brave Little Toaster claims to the contrary, computers don't understand anything at all.

A bold claim. Let us get to the root of this issue.

What do you have in your brain, that allows you to "understand anything at all", that a computer brain could not possess?

 

[Mercutio]

Behaviorism is a relic ...[snip]

Quoth the person who cites wikipedia's understanding of behaviorism, yet did not even understand the bits he highlighted.

Sorry, but if you wanted to convince me that you reject my view knowingly, you failed. Your apparent ignorance is still the best explanation; if I thought that your description of behaviorism was what it actually was, I would not be arguing for it.

My posts here should indicate to you that I do not dismiss the neurological aspect; I probably understand it better than you (I base this purely on my coursework, reading, and conferences--you certainly could know more, but you'd have to have put some serious years behind it). Consciousness, however, is a concept we were familiar with long before we had the tools to examine much of brain function (or even localized it to the brain); consciousness is an organismic function, not limited to one organ. A focus on the entire organism is a very proper perspective (though of course not the only one).

The functional contextualist approach of radical behaviorism is shared by the majority of cognitive neuroscientists, fwiw, so be careful of dismissing the philosophical underpinnings of the very view you are suggesting should take its place. Again, one might suspect that you are so ignorant of your own view that you may use multiple definitions without being aware of it.

 

[AkuManiMani]

Quoth the person who cites wikipedia's understanding of behaviorism, yet did not even understand the bits he highlighted.

Sorry, but if you wanted to convince me that you reject my view knowingly, you failed. Your apparent ignorance is still the best explanation; if I thought that your description of behaviorism was what it actually was, I would not be arguing for it.

What exactly, am I misunderstanding about behaviorism? I'm not being facetious; I really wanna know what your definition of behaviorism is. I was first exposed to the idea in middle school and, as it was taught to me and the other students, I found it to be extremely shortsighted and I disliked it ever since as a philosophical approach to seeking the truth.

My posts here should indicate to you that I do not dismiss the neurological aspect; I probably understand it better than you (I base this purely on my coursework, reading, and conferences--you certainly could know more, but you'd have to have put some serious years behind it). Consciousness, however, is a concept we were familiar with long before we had the tools to examine much of brain function (or even localized it to the brain); consciousness is an organismic function, not limited to one organ. A focus on the entire organism is a very proper perspective (though of course not the only one).

Okay, so we do have some common ground. I agree you may have had much more formal training in this subject area, but that does not discount what I'm trying to say here. My argument is that, consciousness and subjective qualia are a specific kind of physical phenomenon that cannot necessarily be reproduced just by using the right algorithms or performing sufficiently complex computations. I think that what Pixy is describing as consciousness is something that's merely incidental too consciousness. Thermostats and toaster-ovens are not instances of consciousness by dint of their mechanical and/or computational properties. I'm asserting that consciousness is a basic physical property and that 'qualia' are a specific class of physical states.

The functional contextualist approach of radical behaviorism is shared by the majority of cognitive neuroscientists, fwiw, so be careful of dismissing the philosophical underpinnings of the very view you are suggesting should take its place. Again, one might suspect that you are so ignorant of your own view that you may use multiple definitions without being aware of it.

I still say that there are flaws and limitations in your current approach to the problem. One of the biggest flaws I can discern is that while you may believe you have a coherent and consistent definition of 'consciousness' you are simply describing a completely different process and labeling it as consciousness.

I've my own underlying philosophy with its own nuances and perspectives that I've spent nearly my entire life developing and refining. I'm operating from a very different ontological framework than you are familiar with and, as a result, I will tend to formulate and phrase things in ways that seem pretty alien to you.

I have a bad habit of taking my own system of thought for granted and it doesn't help that I often have to present pages of qualification to communicate where I'm coming from. I've specifically crafted my underlying philosophical approach to deal with these issues in somewhat novel ways and, as far as I've been able to tell, it does not bring up the inherent flaws and paradoxes of more conventional approaches.

Trust me. I know exactly what I mean when I'm speaking of this, and related issues. Its just that I have an uphill struggle on my hands of trying to translate my mindspeak into yours.

My badnik.

 

[Third Eye Open]

A bold claim. Let us get to the root of this issue.

What do you have in your brain, that allows you to "understand anything at all", that a computer brain could not possess?

Well, that's the "Hard Problem" isn't it? The hard part being accepting that this is yet another area that humans aren't special.

This earth was not made for our benefit.
We are not the center of the solar system.
We are not the center of the galaxy.
We are not the center of the universe.
We are most likely not the only life in the universe.
Life is likely not limited to 'our' kind of life.
We are not the pinnacle of evolution.

We have accepted all of the above, next is accepting that we are not the only beings that are conscious. I'm guessing that within the next decade people will give up this fantasy.


Philosophers, however, may take a bit longer.

 

[lupus_in_fabula]

Lupus, you're a mind reader

Only in the metaphorical sense!

Anyways, here's the thought experiment...

Suppose one took a newborn infant and rendered it blind def an paralyzed. Suppose also that you devise a way to prevent the child from receiving smell, taste and tactile information to the brain. Say you kept the unfortunate child in this condition for the rest of its life while maintaining it on life support systems. For all intents and purposes the child is cut off from the sensory 'outside' world.

I understand your though experiment, but it's not really what I was asking. You seem to have jumped to the empirical plane prematurely. I'm still staying on the philosophical plane and trying to weed out the conceptual boundaries before proceeding. What you have done, is to restrict the though experiment to inhibiting the child from receiving any outside stimuli. That's only half of the equation, and an overstep. What I'm asking is what if 'all' "content" is removed, including hunger, thirst, swallowing, digesting, feeling of heartbeat etc. In other words, total void. Would there then be 'experience of nothing', or 'no experience'. This is a conceptual question.

I haven't ignored your though experiment, and I will get back to it. But I want to sort out this conceptual precursor of it first. You don't even have to think what 'removing all content' means in biological terms, just what it would entail in philosophical terms.

 

[westprog]

Well, that's the "Hard Problem" isn't it? The hard part being accepting that this is yet another area that humans aren't special.

This earth was not made for our benefit.
We are not the center of the solar system.
We are not the center of the galaxy.
We are not the center of the universe.
We are most likely not the only life in the universe.
Life is likely not limited to 'our' kind of life.
We are not the pinnacle of evolution.

We have evidence for all the above. Some of it might not be conclusive in every case, but at least there are indications.

We have accepted all of the above, next is accepting that we are not the only beings that are conscious. I'm guessing that within the next decade people will give up this fantasy.


Philosophers, however, may take a bit longer.

But there is no evidence that inanimate objects are conscious. None whatsoever. A belief that they must be is making the exact same mistake that was made by the people who insisted that the Earth was at the centre of the solar system - overriding science with philosophical preference.

 

[Third Eye Open]

But there is no evidence that inanimate objects are conscious. None whatsoever. .

I guess we haven't been reading the same thread.