The hard problem of consciousness

[Piggy]

Except that every single observation is in agreement with it, because it came from observation, and that it has predicted every observation since it's conception. Like the one just mentioned, about awareness of decisions occuring after the decision is made.

I think I've lost track.

What exactly is "it" you're talking about here, because I might be in agreement with you on this one.

[rocketdodger]

Ok, that's enough. I've had it with your self-serving definitions.

So now, somehow, I'm "indirectly aware" of every neuron in my brain.

Ok, Humpty Dumpty, if you want that kind of discussion, you can have it with someone else.

We disagree on the fundamentals. No sense dragging it out over the details.

That isn't what I am saying. I am saying that the portion of your brain responsible for what you consider consciousness needn't be aware of other processes for them to still be part of your consciousness. Could you recognize a face without all the pre-processing done in your visual cortex that you have literally no idea is going on? Could you walk from point A to point B without the automatic leg control that takes place in your spinal column? Could you even think at all if your automatic temperature control system didn't keep you alive to begin with?

That is why I said you might not be aware of these processes now, but you would certainly be aware of them if they were suddenly removed. Do you disagree with this?

[RandFan]

Why is consciousness needed to explain observed behaviour?Do you behave the same when you are unconscious as when you are conscious?

She makes a fairly compelling case for consciousness being an illusion.I posted a different link. I'll come back to this.

[rocketdodger]

If you want consciousness, you have to wire for consciousness.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that any old system you wire up will be sentient.


I already told you it isn't that simple. You have to give the system goals, you have to give it facts, you have to give it a method of learning new facts, etc.

[Nick227]

Here's why it doesn't make sense to say that consciousness is an illusion we experience....

If "consciousness" is an "illusion" that "I" am "experiencing", then if we explain what's behind the illusion of consciousness, we're still left with this "I" who "experiences" it to explain.

"I" is part of the illusion. The brain creates a sense of "I" as an artifact to thinking. It's just a machine. It has no "I."

Remember that the notion of "consciousness" only comes up during introspective examination of the human condition.

See what I mean?

It actually introduces an unnecessary problem.

To say that our consciousnesses are illusions is to say that our sense of self and our consious awareness are 2 different things, that the phenomenon of experience and the identity of the experiencer are 2 different things, and they're not.

Consciousness = experience = awareness = I.

I can't follow your reasoning here.

Nick

[rocketdodger]

The fact that we don't have a good grasp on what sentience actually is... that doesn't leave your definition somehow standing alone on the beach.

Yours fails because it does not appear to be able to actually distinguish sentient beings from non-sentient ones.

First of all, it isn't "my" theory. I simply take a very formal computer science view of the prevailing theory.

Second, it does not fail precisely because nobody can distinguish sentient beings from non-sentient ones other than with a gigantic enumeration.

Nobody has come up with a simple theory that you plug in the behavior on one end and on the other end "yes" or "no" comes out. All anyone has done is to say "animal Y is sentient because it acts more like humans than animal X, and we have already decided animal X is sentient."

The whole point of the prevailing theory is that it explains why there is no simple metric we can use for sentience and why we are forced to use comparisons to ourselves.

[Mercutio]

Do you behave the same when you are unconscious as when you are conscious?
If by unconscious you mean "knocked unconscious", then this is easy. No. But if by conscious, you mean the simpler "awareness", then think of the times you are driving for an hour or more, then realize that you have no recollection of that timespan. You were driving, perfectly well, without it being a conscious behavior. Or look at the research into blindsight, where a subject can claim no awareness of a stimulus at all, but when asked to "guess", is perfectly able to tell you which direction it is moving. (The earlier example of ducking when something is thrown at you is something that cortically blind individuals can do; with no awareness at all of any visual stimuli, they will duck when an object is coming at them.)

Quite obviously, the answer to your question depends greatly on a definition of consciousness in the first place!

[Hokulele]

Isn't the "consciousness is an illusion" statement merely a comment on the type of "thing" that *consciousness is*, or, rather, in this instance, what it *is not*?

It seems to me that when we say 'consciousness is an illusion', the real intent of the statement is to deny that there is such a "thing" as consciousness, which most in this thread would really agree, I think. Rather, it is a statement that consciousness is a process, or, more likely, a collection of different processes that are not truly integrated into a single whole (substitute the word 'behavior' for 'process' and we end up in the same place, since we don't have very good words for describing this -- I'm simply more used to words like 'process' than 'behavior' in this situation). It is really a statement that former views of consciousness are wrong and that we need a new way of looking at it, not that there are no 'internal experiences that formerly went under the name of consciousness'. Maybe we need a new symbol, much like the artist formerly known as Prince.


Hm, this leads to the question of whether consciousness is seen as a property of an object or system, or as an object of its own. I think the HPC is treating it as a discrete object, which may be what is causing all of the philosophical strife.

I always thought of it as a property of a system, much like red is a property of an apple, rather than an entity or projection of its own, like a rainbow or mirage.

Hm, again.

*Wanders off to make a fresh cup of tea and indulge in some pondering behavior*

[Ichneumonwasp]

It strikes me that the capacity for body sentience would be as evolutionarily favoured as, say, physical strength. Initially, in simpler organisms, there would have been just unconscious responses, I guess, which seem to be the main means that evolution transfers what it has learned. Conscious monitoring maybe came after that, offering again evolutionary advantages. Thus conscious awareness would have been evolutionarily favoured, I figure.

Generally, I'm not so much convinced that "consciousness" itself is such a valid concept. I think feelings and self-awareness make up a big chunk of it.

Nick


I think that is a good way of looking at it. I think part of the argument over 'consciousness as illusion' fits directly into this. We might benefit from jettisoning the word 'consciousness' because it refers to so many different 'things' that confusion abounds in all such discussions. Like the thread that asks, 'what is irony?', there are serious problems discussing consciousness as a single 'thing'/'process'/whatever because we are really talking about several different processes/behaviors that fit under one name -- and they do so because of old ways of looking at this that assumed a single integrated entity different from the material world.

Awareness and feeling cover much of it, but there are other parts that also fit under the definition making it even more difficult. As long as we treat all these different processes as the same thing, we are going to continue spinning philosophical wheels.

[rocketdodger]

Do you really not believe that there is a qualitatively different phenomenon going on when you decide what movie to go to and when a thermostat kicks in?

You believe that either the thermostat has some sort of awareness, or that you don't?

Seriously?

Sounds to me like you're just choosing to ignore the phenomenon that needs explaining, in order to make it seem as though you have an explanation.

You misunderstand. I think we just have a communication problem.

A thermostat has awareness because it responds to the world around it. It is not the same level of awareness that you and I have.

As to whether it is the same kind of awareness -- that is the question. And it seems like you are taking the view that because our awarenss includes a formal awareness of "self" that it is qualitatively different. Because I am a computer scientist, I take the view that "self" is just another collection of facts like any other and hence the awareness is just quantitatively different (albeit taken to an extreme).

You are free to think that the collection of facts representing "self" is special -- and rightly so, because it is what makes us (and possibly elephants, dolphins, and higher primates) special. But it is still a collection of facts, so I hope you see where I am coming from.

[Mercutio]

"I" is part of the illusion. The brain creates a sense of "I" as an artifact to thinking. It's just a machine. It has no "I." Just my opinion!
In one of these threads, years ago, Darat responded to someone (perhaps Interesting Ian) who had claimed that he could not deny that there was an I that was experiencing red, or cold, or pain; Darat's response was written much better than my paraphrasing would be, but basically made the point that it could just as easily be said that from the experiences of red, cold, pain, etc., we infer the existence of the I. These responses to environmental stimuli come first, and "consciousness" is built on that foundation.

[rocketdodger]

If all we know about squares and rectangles is that they have four right angles, then we can't jump to the conclusion that if you build a rectangle, you will have built a square.


If that is all we know, then they are the same thing!

[Ichneumonwasp]

Hm, this leads to the question of whether consciousness is seen as a property of an object or system, or as an object of its own. I think the HPC is treating it as a discrete object, which may be what is causing all of the philosophical strife.

I always thought of it as a property of a system, much like red is a property of an apple, rather than an entity or projection of its own, like a rainbow or mirage.

Hm, again.

*Wanders off to make a fresh cup of tea and indulge in some pondering behavior*


Yeah, it's more or less what Joe Ellison was trying to get across on the first page. I think that is one of big problems with HPC -- it does assume dualism, and so creates the problem as hard. It's still a hard problem, but not nearly so hard as David Chalmers seems to think. Hobbes dealt with the broad outlines a long time ago.

[Nick227]

You misunderstand. I think we just have a communication problem.

A thermostat has awareness because it responds to the world around it.

It seems to me that one defining feature of conscious awareness is the possibility to not act upon stimuli. Does the thermostat have this option?

Nick

[John Freestone]

A newborn baby is not actually miraculous when the sense of the word is used to mean, "an unprecedented event of good," since newborn babies are plentiful.This is really interesting. On the one hand, it is true, newborn babies are plentiful; on the other, each newborn baby (including identical twins) is unique. Part of what makes a mother or father feel awe and miracle is that uniqueness. Part of what makes the HPC question perplexing is that it involves this uniqueness of self. This even transcends genetic identity, since identical twins are clearly separate people (others might confuse them, but they don't!).

Two things can be called 'the same' because they are made of the same kind of basic units assembled in the same relationship exactly, yet the basic units are not the same - since they make up two separate sets of things.

This is one of the interesting things about the idea of us loading our personalities into silicon or some other medium, or proposals that we could plug one consciousness into another and experience the other. If someone doesn't have my exact unique arm, they can't feel my arm being pinched, can they?

But I wonder if it is again only the complexity of the system that makes the significant difference. We are used to mass producing computers and assume that they are in all respects funcitonally identical (even though containing different molecules and having occasional faults that differentiate them). But almost the moment two identical twins are born - sorry, long before they are born - their environment has caused them to be functionally different (often the other being a significant part of that shaping, leading to dominance relationships, cooperation, etc.).

I wonder then what impact these facts have on the assertion that the HPC and similar ideas are unreasonable attempts to cling to specialness. We are more comfortable with our species being special, when we talk about levels of consciousness or complexity, but equally complex humans are, from a human perspective, utterly special and unique.

[Nick227]

In one of these threads, years ago, Darat responded to someone (perhaps Interesting Ian) who had claimed that he could not deny that there was an I that was experiencing red, or cold, or pain; Darat's response was written much better than my paraphrasing would be, but basically made the point that it could just as easily be said that from the experiences of red, cold, pain, etc., we infer the existence of the I. These responses to environmental stimuli come first, and "consciousness" is built on that foundation.

Yes, I agree. The machine infers the existence of "I" (and usually prefers to not examine this inference too closely in case it finds out it's just a machine!)

Nick

[Hokulele]

Yeah, it's more or less what Joe Ellison was trying to get across on the first page. I think that is one of big problems with HPC -- it does assume dualism, and so creates the problem as hard. It's still a hard problem, but not nearly so hard as David Chalmers seems to think. Hobbes dealt with the broad outlines a long time ago.


Meh, it's not so much the Hard Problem of Consciousness as the Poorly Defined Problem of Consciousness.

[leon_heller]

Well, fear is an emotion and, to me, emotions are a feature of conscious awareness. It's quite possible that you can't separate consciousness from evolution.

Nick

Many years ago it was found that emotions like fear and anger could be switched on and off with simple brain stimulation in the amygdala - that had nothing to do with consciousness.

Leon

[rocketdodger]

I think I've lost track.

What exactly is "it" you're talking about here, because I might be in agreement with you on this one.

The theory that our consciousness is just the result of computation and that subjective experience is simply what it is like to be computation.

I call it "reasoning about facts" instead of just "computation" because it is more useful if you are trying to understand the underlying data flow. Others, like Pixy, simply use "computation." We are all talking about the same thing, just framed differently.

[John Freestone]

It seems to me that one defining feature of conscious awareness is the possibility to not act upon stimuli. Does the thermostat have this option?

NickThat's a good point and very persuasive. I'd say that you're right. I would also imagine that a more complex machine does have 'choice' (depending on how we think of that). Indeed, AFAIK, reasoning systems can be no more than connected switches. We might imagine a set of thermostats monitoring all the rooms in a house, and giving an output depending on some mechanical relationship between the inputs. If we are not aware of some of the rooms' temperatures, the machine might appear to 'choose' not to respond to the ones we are monitoring separately ourselves.

What I'm driving at from this is that perhaps our human choice is such a process, but there are many rooms (pardon the accidental philosophical reference!), some in awareness, some out. The idea of consciousness may be illusory. So may free will.

[Darat]

It seems to me that one defining feature of conscious awareness is the possibility to not act upon stimuli. Does the thermostat have this option?

Nick

May be a semantic misunderstanding but as you state it that would only apply if you assume the supernatural type of freewill exists.

[leon_heller]

Do you behave the same when you are unconscious as when you are conscious?

We seem to be discussing something different; you appear to be referring to consciousness vis-a-vis unconsciousness whilst I am referring to consciousness per se, not in relation to unconsciousness.

Leon

[rocketdodger]

It seems to me that one defining feature of conscious awareness is the possibility to not act upon stimuli. Does the thermostat have this option?

Nick

Inaction is still a decision. It is impossible to not decide upon stimuli, since by definition a stimulus must be an input to a system.

And of course a thermostat can "not act". If it is programmed to only turn on the heat at night, it will not act upon stimuli it receives during the day.

[Nick227]

May be a semantic misunderstanding but as you state it that would only apply if you assume the supernatural type of freewill exists.

As I see it, if you're consciously aware of a stimuli, you have options as to how to respond to it. Now, you might say that this experience of choice is finally illusory, but there is still the possibility to respond to the stimuli, rather than react to it. To me this is a feature of awareness. The thermostat merely reacts to stimuli, thus I would personally dispute that it is aware.

Nick

[INRM]

I didn't respond because it had to do with consciousness but instead I responded only because I was quite familiar with phantom limbs. That said I think it has a lot to do with consciousness but I'm at a loss as to how easily explain that it does in light of the discussion.

Have you read Ramachandran's book that deals with the subject?

I have not read Dr. Ramachandran's book.

Regarding how the phantom limbs has to do with consciousness, does it have something to with the effects of feedback and such?


INRM

[Nick227]

Many years ago it was found that emotions like fear and anger could be switched on and off with simple brain stimulation in the amygdala - that had nothing to do with consciousness.

Leon

Well, you could switch off the richness of colours by closing your eyes. I don't see that this really proves so much. We've known for decades that many emotional reactions are mediated by the limbic system but this does not make them any more of less defining features of this "consciousness."

Nick

[leon_heller]

I have not read Dr. Ramachandran's book.

Regarding how the phantom limbs has to do with consciousness, does it have something to with the effects of feedback and such?


INRM

Feedback in what sense?

Leon

[leon_heller]

Well, you could switch off the richness of colours by closing your eyes. I don't see that this really proves so much. We've known for decades that many emotional reactions are mediated by the limbic system but this does not make them any more of less defining features of this "consciousness."

Nick

The paradigms are completely different. Brain stimulation doesn't involve any sensory input, unlike colour perception.

Leon

[Ichneumonwasp]

Meh, it's not so much the Hard Problem of Consciousness as the Poorly Defined Problem of Consciousness.


Problem solved. Let's get a beer.:)

[Nick227]

The paradigms are completely different. Brain stimulation doesn't involve any sensory input, unlike colour perception.

Leon

You're saying that emotional reactions being mediated by the amygdala aren't occuring in response to sensory information?

Nick

[Nick227]

Meh, it's not so much the Hard Problem of Consciousness as the Poorly Defined Problem of Consciousness.
Problem solved. Let's get a beer.:)

...the Poorly Defined Problem of an Undefined Concept - strictly for people who just love to debate.

Nick

[leon_heller]

You're saying that emotional reactions being mediated by the amygdala aren't occuring in response to sensory information?

Nick

No, but they appear to be different. The colour sensation is, presumably, generated by higher-level structures and is subject to self-examination. The fear or anger response resulting from limbic system stimulation is generated directly by lower-level structures and isn't subject to self-examination. There might be an associated sensation, of course, but it will come later, after the response.

Leon

[Mercutio]

Problem solved. Let's get a beer.:)

Way ahead of you.

And pretzels, in honor of the logic of the problem...

M

[Nick227]

No, but they appear to be different. The colour sensation is, presumably, generated by higher-level structures and is subject to self-examination. The fear or anger response resulting from limbic system stimulation is generated directly by lower-level structures and isn't subject to self-examination. There might be an associated sensation, of course, but it will come later, after the response.

Leon

Does this affect the original point that emotions are a big feature in what is considered "consciousness?" Without evolution you may not be able to have consciousness. Unless someone manages to make a machine that can experience feelings.

Nick

[RandFan]

If by unconscious you mean "knocked unconscious", then this is easy. No. But if by conscious, you mean the simpler "awareness", then think of the times you are driving for an hour or more, then realize that you have no recollection of that timespan. You were driving, perfectly well, without it being a conscious behavior. Or look at the research into blindsight, where a subject can claim no awareness of a stimulus at all, but when asked to "guess", is perfectly able to tell you which direction it is moving. (The earlier example of ducking when something is thrown at you is something that cortically blind individuals can do; with no awareness at all of any visual stimuli, they will duck when an object is coming at them.)

Quite obviously, the answer to your question depends greatly on a definition of consciousness in the first place!Yes. I agree to a great deal with what you are saying.

As far as the driving example which we have discussed before, aware of what? That one can't remember the events of driving doesn't mean that the person was not conscious or aware. It is very possible that a person is aware at every moment but not storing the memories of his or her awareness. Further, to what degree is the person aware and of what? Aware of his or her thoughts or aware of the road? Clearly it's possible for us to conduct a number of acts on a subconscious level. Susan Blackmore has some great stuff on this see link above.

[leon_heller]

Does this affect the original point that emotions are a big feature in what is considered "consciousness?"

Nick

I think it does. In the case of brain stimulation the "consciousness" comes later. Otherwise the emotion appears to result from an experience.

Leon

[RandFan]

We seem to be discussing something different; you appear to be referring to consciousness vis-a-vis unconsciousness whilst I am referring to consciousness per se, not in relation to unconsciousness.

Leon How many types of consciousness are there? I say this half in jest but it is a valid question. I understand your point and it is not as if you don't have a point but I think it's a mistake to suppose that there are discrete levels of consciousness.

The driving example is a good point for discussion. Can we falsify the notion that there is a level of consciousness or awareness that is unnecessary for behavior. I don't think the driving example is a good experiment because there are other explanations for why we don't remember being aware, mainly that the memories of that awareness were not stored.

And BTW, let me agree that Blackmore clearly makes an excellent case that what we think of as a stream of consciousness or even consciousness is an illusion. Further she doesn't simply state that it is an illusion but gives good reasons why she thinks it is an illusion. FTR, she also thinks that HPC is a valid concept.

I've read that article before and had forgotten about it. I'm still mulling it over.

Thanks.

[Nick227]

I think it does. In the case of brain stimulation the "consciousness" comes later. Otherwise the emotion appears to result from an experience.

Leon

The conscious emotional response is mediated unconsciously (or on the border of awareness) by the limbic brain, likely by referencing prior learned or inherited experience, yes. Thus emotions usually arise as a result of the body's unconscious reactions to external stimuli. This makes sense to me.

I still don't see how it affects the proposition that emotions are a vital aspect of what is called "consciousness," though.

Nick

[Ichneumonwasp]

How many types of consciousness are there?

At minimum, probably three. I'm sure there are many more.

[Piggy]

If that is all we know, then they are the same thing!

No.

If those are the only qualities they have, then they are the same thing.

[Mercutio]

And BTW, let me agree that Blackmore clearly makes an excellent case that what we think of as a stream of consciousness or even consciousness is an illusion. Further she doesn't simply state that it is an illusion but gives good reasons why she thinks it is an illusion. FTR, she also thinks that HPC is a valid concept.

The "Brain, Mind, and Consciousness" videos that Pixy linked several pages ago should (but do not) include the second session, which featured (among others) Sue Blackmore. Her "grand illusion of consciousness" stuff is even better with the examples she gave. And yeah, it is quite appropriate for this thread.

I do have the video on my computer, but have to assume that it was taken down from general consumption for a reason. Again, though, I ask, if anyone knows why session 2 is not up, and can do something about it, please do!

[Piggy]

The theory that our consciousness is just the result of computation and that subjective experience is simply what it is like to be computation.

You and I don't disagree about that.

All I'm saying is that we cannot, from there, claim that all computational systems are sentient, or that we know how sentience is produced by the brain.

That's all.

[skiba]

But is experience anything more than a sufficiently complex computational machine responding to, interpreting, analysing and predicting internal state variables and external sensory input?

Certainly, no one would accuse a simple ALU of experiencing anything; but it doesn't follow from this that emotions aren't computational processes.


This is a very poor analogy.

My web cam feeds sensory input to my PC. It goes through a series of "complex" computations, and end up on the screen, but theres no experience of that image. The image just is there, nothing more.
I keep hearing the same explanation in the case of humans. The brain creates an image of what is out there and....then we see.
Basically computation experiencing computation, thats it, thats the answer and all there is to it.


If you believe that transistors experiences their own "states of being" then I really cannot begin to debait this, then it's a matter of faith, which is ok by me.

[Piggy]

I think I'm conscious as well, but I don't have any evidence that anyone or anything else is.

Yes, you do. You have tons of it. In fact, all the evidence shows that our brains are extremely similar, and that they produce the sensation of sentience.

Studies of animal brains and our current hypotheses about sentience, sketchy as they may be, give us every reason to think that apes, elephants, and other critters may be as sentient as we are, and even voles and chipmunks could have a kind of conscious awareness.

It would be nothing short of astonishing if others weren't sentient, and there would be a lot of explaining to do.

[skiba]

A thermostat is aware - it responds to external condictions according to an internal model of those conditions - but it is not self-aware, a critical distinction. There is no internal feedback mechanism that could allow it to examine its own behaviour - to consider, rather than just to react.



Dont you see that by adding a feedback your just adding more on/off switches to the equation. The first one reacts to the temperature the rest reacts to the signal coming from the thermostat.

more of the same.
Theres really no difference.

[Piggy]

Btw, if you don't mind, I'd prefer if you'd start by asking me if I can do something before telling me that I can't. Maybe I can't, but at least give me a shot. ;)

You have already said that you think dogs and monkeys are conscious. What about a ferret? A rabit? A frog? You can't come up with any sort of objective delineation other than by using a specific instance you want to compare to.

I don't think I said monkeys. I think I said apes. But yeah, monkeys, too.

Ferrets and rabbits... yeah. I'd be surprised if they weren't sentient.

A frog? Wow. I dunno.

As I said before, I think Dennett's A/B brain hypothesis is likely to be right.

But to draw a conclusion about a frog, I'd want to know more about which areas of our brains have been identified as directly involved in sentience -- like the area of Marvin's brain which had input cut off to it -- and when they evolved and which critters have them.


That is why I keep harping that the only definition of consciousness that has meaning is "awareness like the awareness a normal human has." And as far as we can tell, the difference between that kind of awareness and the kind a gorilla has is simply quantitative.

Sure, I'd agree with that last statement about the gorilla.

[Piggy]

That isn't what I am saying. I am saying that the portion of your brain responsible for what you consider consciousness needn't be aware of other processes for them to still be part of your consciousness.

I'm going to disagree with you on that -- in a way... there are some parts of your phrasing that are problematic for me, so I don't want to seem to agree to their counterstatements, but anyway....

I want to use different terms to discuss the phenomenon of sentience, on the one hand, and the totality of brain activity that is involved in that, on the other.

I'm fine with "sentience" and "computation" respectively. I'm not really comfortable with "reasoning" for the latter because I come from a field where that means something rather high-order.

I don't see the need to qualify consciousness with the phrase "what you consider".

Certainly there's a lot of non-conscious processing going on to create sentience, which we are totally unaware of.

Could you recognize a face without all the pre-processing done in your visual cortex that you have literally no idea is going on? Could you walk from point A to point B without the automatic leg control that takes place in your spinal column? Could you even think at all if your automatic temperature control system didn't keep you alive to begin with?

That's right. It's also trivial.

That is why I said you might not be aware of these processes now, but you would certainly be aware of them if they were suddenly removed. Do you disagree with this?

Well, some of them, if they were removed, I wouldn't be aware of anything, of course.

I just want to be clear that, although sentience is a result of computation, it appears to take some doing to get it to happen, therefore it is not synonymous with computation.

Computation, just by itself, is required, but not sufficient.

[Piggy]

I didn't put anything in your mouth. You clearly said that any rudimentary consciousness a person could create (which current technology and funding seems to place at about the level of a rat, since researchers are working on a rat neocortex model as has been mentioned) would be phenomenally different from the one we have.

Oh, no, I didn't say that at all. In fact, I've said a few times on this thread that there's no reason to expect we won't be able to create artificial conscious entities (ACEs).

Maybe we'll figure out how to grow a brain, or maybe we'll wire it up with some other sort of circuit.

What I did say is that is no reason to believe we've done it (in other words, that any existing machine is sentient) and it's premature to say that we know how to do it. We haven't and we don't.

So all we can say is that "we can't now".

Therefore, it seems safe to say that there's a phenomenon (sentience) which is a feature of the working human brain which is not a feature of any kind of machine we've ever created.

Just making the computations run won't get us there. We're going to have to use principles like PixyMisa's reflection, and more info about what our brains are doing, before we do get there.

[Piggy]

I already told you it isn't that simple. You have to give the system goals, you have to give it facts, you have to give it a method of learning new facts, etc.

Yes, I know. But the problem is, it's pretty easy to imagine a system that does all that, but still isn't sentient.

Take a look at Marvin. His brain kept computing just fine. But a lost connection took away his emotional awareness, so he had the physical sensations associated with emotions -- and even some reactions like laughing -- but he wasn't consciously aware of them.

Obviously, there's some extra bit of processing above and beyond the goals, facts, learning, etc. -- which Marvin's system was still doing -- which translates some of the output of this process into the phenomenon of sentience.

[Piggy]

First of all, it isn't "my" theory. I simply take a very formal computer science view of the prevailing theory.

Second, it does not fail precisely because nobody can distinguish sentient beings from non-sentient ones other than with a gigantic enumeration.

Nobody has come up with a simple theory that you plug in the behavior on one end and on the other end "yes" or "no" comes out. All anyone has done is to say "animal Y is sentient because it acts more like humans than animal X, and we have already decided animal X is sentient."

The whole point of the prevailing theory is that it explains why there is no simple metric we can use for sentience and why we are forced to use comparisons to ourselves.

Well, all right, but remember, I've been posting about what Darat dubbed the "difficult problem of consciousness".

If we get a better grasp on what's happening in the brain, we very well may be able to distinguish sentient and non-sentient beings based on how their brains are structured and what they're doing.

I wouldn't put much hope in diagnosis from gross behavior, because sentience is the product of brain activity, so looking at how the brain is behaving is much more productive.

[Piggy]

A thermostat has awareness because it responds to the world around it.

In what field is it acceptable to say that?

I'm not saying that it's not, mind you, I'd just like to know.

It's a damn poor use of the word "awareness" if you ask me because it makes everything "aware".

So now we have to invent a new word for what "aware" used to mean until we decided it means this instead.

So, I'll pick Wasp's "sentience".

Thermostats are not sentient.

[Piggy]

And it seems like you are taking the view that because our awarenss includes a formal awareness of "self" that it is qualitatively different.

No, the qualitative difference between us and the thermostat, with regard to this, is that we are sentient and it is not.

It simply does not have any circuitry which we have any reason to believe is capable of producing sentience.

Because I am a computer scientist, I take the view that "self" is just another collection of facts like any other and hence the awareness is just quantitatively different (albeit taken to an extreme).

Most -- but not all -- of the courses I've taken that deal with how the brain works, and the reading I've done on my own, were focused on how the brain learns, produces, and processes language.

As part of that, you get involved in all sorts of necessary side trips into brain function which you wouldn't immediately think were relevant, but they are.

(I also did a psych minor, but that was 20 years ago.)

So I'm coming at this from a brain-centered point of view.

Which is necessary, as it turns out, because brains are the only thing we know of which we are certain can produce sentience.

So for me, everything has got to be grounded back to the brain, tested against what we know about the brain.

So even if we identify certain features of a sentient system which appear to be necessary, we can't say they're sufficient, unless we know the mechanism responsible for the experience of sentience.

To my mind, your view "that 'self' is just another collection of facts like any other and hence the awareness is just quantitatively different" doesn't hold water.

A collection of facts doesn't get us to sentience. I come back to Marvin's case, which illustrates that the computation and the response can exist without awareness, and that conscious experience is indeed qualitatively different from the computation which is purely necessary to produce behavior.

There's something going on in our brains which is qualitatively different from what's going on in a computer or a thermostat.

You are free to think that the collection of facts representing "self" is special -- and rightly so, because it is what makes us (and possibly elephants, dolphins, and higher primates) special. But it is still a collection of facts, so I hope you see where I am coming from.

No, I don't.

"Collection of facts", to my way of thinking, can't equal "sentience" which is a process.

[Mercutio]

My web cam feeds sensory input to my PC. It goes through a series of "complex" computations, and end up on the screen, but theres no experience of that image. The image just is there, nothing more.
I keep hearing the same explanation in the case of humans. The brain creates an image of what is out there and....then we see.

Actually, this description, taken at face value, is extremely misleading. The brain at no time creates an image of what is out there. There are multiple parallel throughputs, ostensibly responsible for different aspects of the visual experience (some we can be aware of, others not). There are several separate channels that process (if I may use that word) information about color, for instance--color perception is distinct from color awareness, or memory for color. Shape, orientation, texture, good/bad, friend/enemy, faceness, each are at least partially independent from the others.

There simply is no place in the brain where the "image" comes together. The only place where it is all together would be the actual stimulus.

The notion that an "image" exists at all is illusory. As I said before, we do not have sensory nerves in the brain to give us access to the process of seeing (or hearing, or thinking, or remembering...); we only have partial access to the products of these processes. Systematic examination allows us to artificially separate out [some of] these processes; our intuitive grasp of how it feels to us is pretty much useless.

So... if you "keep hearing" this, the next time you hear it, you have my permission to slap the speaker with a fish. Blame me.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

There simply is no place in the brain where the "image" comes together. The only place where it is all together would be the actual stimulus.
What do you think is the mechanism that makes the image appear as a coherent whole? Is it simply the fact that one brain is performing all the functions, or is there some kind of integration function?

~~ Paul

[Piggy]

There simply is no place in the brain where the "image" comes together. The only place where it is all together would be the actual stimulus.

But it's not all together there, either.

I mean, if I look at some wallpaper, I have the sensation of seeing a whole wall of pattern, but I know my brain is taking bits and pieces of input and coupling it with automatic processing and memory and schema and such to produce this experience of seeing an entire wall of pattern, most of which I never actually look at.

I think the trouble comes from asking about the "image" as if it were a nouny kind of thing. We're asking about a process, an event.

[RandFan]

There simply is no place in the brain where the "image" comes together. The only place where it is all together would be the actual stimulus.If true that would seem to dispatch the binding problem.

[rocketdodger]

Forgive me piggy but I am only going to respond to this post because I am spending too much time here!

No, the qualitative difference between us and the thermostat, with regard to this, is that we are sentient and it is not.

It simply does not have any circuitry which we have any reason to believe is capable of producing sentience.

First, I think the term "sentience" suffers from the same problems that "consciousness" suffers from. But I don't really feel like arguing that because I know what you mean when you speak of it, and since you are a fellow materialist there is no point in debating it.

Second, yes, we have no reason to believe that. Certain nobody intelligent would claim that a thermostat is sentient like we are.

So even if we identify certain features of a sentient system which appear to be necessary, we can't say they're sufficient, unless we know the mechanism responsible for the experience of sentience.

Since we are now speaking of "sentience," which I presume has a more "like us humans" flavor, I agree. So my argument would be that being a robust reasoning system is a requirement of sentience.

To my mind, your view "that 'self' is just another collection of facts like any other and hence the awareness is just quantitatively different" doesn't hold water.

I am convinced that this is only because you are looking at the problem from a different perspective than me. After all, from a certain perspective a man is only quantitatively different from a pineapple.

A collection of facts doesn't get us to sentience. I come back to Marvin's case, which illustrates that the computation and the response can exist without awareness, and that conscious experience is indeed qualitatively different from the computation which is purely necessary to produce behavior.

Yeah but wasn't Marvin still conscious?

There's something going on in our brains which is qualitatively different from what's going on in a computer or a thermostat.

I think we just disagree on the definition of "qualitative" here. I do not disagree that the phenomenon of our sentience is emergent and thus different in that respect. But I don't consider an emergent phenomenon to necessarily be qualitatively different. Perhaps y ou do?

No, I don't.

"Collection of facts", to my way of thinking, can't equal "sentience" which is a process.

Sentience is a process that cannot exist without certain facts in the system's knowledge base. But, fundamentally, the greater process is reducible to the same basic computational processes that worm minds use. It has to be -- neurons only work in certain ways.

So I agree with you that the process behind sentience is different in many ways that the process behind simple perception, for example. I am just saying that the building blocks are the same.

When I say we know how it emerges, I mean that we understand the building blocks. A man versed in structural engineering can look at a skyscraper and "know" how it was built -- it does not require an explicit understanding of every floorplan.

[Ichneumonwasp]

But it's not all together there, either.

I mean, if I look at some wallpaper, I have the sensation of seeing a whole wall of pattern, but I know my brain is taking bits and pieces of input and coupling it with automatic processing and memory and schema and such to produce this experience of seeing an entire wall of pattern, most of which I never actually look at.

I think the trouble comes from asking about the "image" as if it were a nouny kind of thing. We're asking about a process, an event.


And notice how we keep using nouns (process, event -- we all do it). If all these words were verbs in our language, I don't think we'd have this problem.

[Mercutio]

What do you think is the mechanism that makes the image appear as a coherent whole? Is it simply the fact that one brain is performing all the functions, or is there some kind of integration function?

~~ Paul
I am not certain how to address this. Right after I say there is no "image", you ask what makes "the image" appear as a whole! The tree appears as a whole tree, I suppose, because it is one (yeah, I know, if we take the primacy of perception, I cannot prove that the tree exists, yadda yadda...). It is the tree that is a whole, not the "image of the tree" that is. We perceive things, not images of things, or qualia of things, or representations of things. Yes, perceiving is an active process, and the parts of us that can see the green of a tree can also see green in the absence of that tree (we call this imagining, but it could just as easily be called seeing, even without a thing seen).

Perhaps there is an integration function; I am not certain there needs to be one. We don't perceive redness, roundness, shininess, and infer "apple", we see the redness of an apple, the roundness of an apple, and the shininess of an apple. The integration may well be in the apple, not in our brain.

[Mercutio]

But it's not all together there, either.

I mean, if I look at some wallpaper, I have the sensation of seeing a whole wall of pattern, but I know my brain is taking bits and pieces of input and coupling it with automatic processing and memory and schema and such to produce this experience of seeing an entire wall of pattern, most of which I never actually look at.I think you misunderstand me. Your example here speaks of various elements, but my argument is that that the wallpaper is the place that has all the pattern, not your perception of it. (ok, I like the tree and apple examples in my previous post better, but the bottom line is, I think my point was precisely what you are saying here.) My "there" is not inside us, but (for your example) on the wall.

[Mercutio]

If true that would seem to dispatch the binding problem.

I actually had to google "binding problem". But I think I agree. There are similar problems solved by a behavioral approach--like "where are associations?"

[PixyMisa]

But "contextual analysis of its senses and memories" etc. isn't awareness.
Then what's missing?

But it's qualitatively different from the kind of considering I do when I decide what movie to see.
Qualitatively different how?

I keep asking this, and I keep getting non-answers.

It may very well be true that my conscious mind is not doing the deciding, that it just appears that way, and I'm really just "along for the ride", so to speak.
Yes.

But that does not change the fact that this experience of feeling like I'm deciding is an amazing phenomenon that we don't have an adequate explanation for and which we have absolutely no reason to believe is present in a thermostat.
It's an illusion. Which we can reproduce in fairly simply computer programs.

What's amazing about it?

You can't simply say, well the brain is doing X, Y, and Z -- among God knows how many other things -- when it's conscious, and this little device also does X, Y, and Z, therefore it must be aware.
Until you can show me that there is some other thing, and that it is (or even might be) relevant, yes, I can.

[PixyMisa]

I agree with you but it's not a fight I care to pick. Like you, when the subject comes up I point out the same criticisms you do but beyond that I'm happy to concede the premise for sake of argument. Pixy is free to call it an illusion. Having done so Pixy has not really said anything. One might as well have said that flight is not a ton of bricks or that flight is not invisible pink unicorns. I'll go one step further. I'm willing to concede that reality is also an illusion. So what? So what if consciousness or reality or both are illusions. Accepting either premise gets us no where. Those like Pixy who think it somehow explains consciousness or obviates HPC are in effect saying that it is turtles all the way down.
Consciousness is clearly an illusion.

I don't claim - have never claimed, if you or Piggy would bother to read what I have written - that this is an explanation. It just points out that the notions of consciousness arrived at through introspection are, for the most part, dead wrong.

[PixyMisa]

Dont you see that by adding a feedback your just adding more on/off switches to the equation.
Yes.

The first one reacts to the temperature the rest reacts to the signal coming from the thermostat.
No.

more of the same.
Yes.

Theres really no difference.
Complexity is the difference.


If you think that a sufficiently complex array of switches cannot produce human consciousness, then please tell me exactly what aspect of human consciousness it fails to reproduce. I listed earlier a series of functions we know for certain (because it's done every day) that can be reproduced.

So go on. Give me one example.

[PixyMisa]

No, the qualitative difference between us and the thermostat, with regard to this, is that we are sentient and it is not.

It simply does not have any circuitry which we have any reason to believe is capable of producing sentience.
A thermostat, as I've mentioned before, is aware but not self-aware. But, as I've also mentioned before, it's easy to add additional circuitry to make it self-aware.

What then is the difference between thermostat++ and something that is sentient, whatever that might be?

Seriously.

Which is necessary, as it turns out, because brains are the only thing we know of which we are certain can produce sentience.Define sentience, as you are using it here.

There's something going on in our brains which is qualitatively different from what's going on in a computer or a thermostat.What? In terms of process, in terms of behaviour, I don't care, as long as you're specific. Tell me what this difference is.

[President Bush]

A thermostat has awareness because it responds to the world around it.


Can your thermostat explain this (http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2008/jul/18/boulder-police-triple-taser-man-found-naked-roadwa/)?

[RandFan]

Consciousness is clearly an illusion.Yes, assertions are by their very nature facts.

Thank you.

[PixyMisa]

Yes, assertions are by their very nature facts.

Thank you.
An example that demonstrates this has been referred to at least a dozen times in this thread. And once more: Conscious decision making in actuality follows the action that introspection would say is caused by the decision.

That is, introspection leads us to reversed causation, but computational models explain this easily. The introspective view of consciousness does not represent what is really going on: It is an illusion.

[PixyMisa]

Can your thermostat explain this (http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2008/jul/18/boulder-police-triple-taser-man-found-naked-roadwa/)?
Hmm. Let's whack it a few times with a hammer and see how that works out.

[skiba]

Complexity is the difference.


Yes, but it does not change the result. There nothing but reaction, thats what you start with and thats what you end up with.
the hardware, program and the thermostat are all on/off switches
Yet you claim theres some fundamental difference that enables self awareness.


If you think that a sufficiently complex array of switches cannot produce human consciousness, then please tell me exactly what aspect of human consciousness it fails to reproduce. I listed earlier a series of functions we know for certain (because it's done every day) that can be reproduced.

So go on. Give me one example.

You cannot produce conciousness or subjective experience.
That is, awareness of its computational outcome.

But yeah, I know, You explain it away by adding another series of switches to the end of the computation, which is more of the same, a mere reaction, like the thermostat that we begin with.


A thermostat, as I've mentioned before, is aware but not self-aware.


If a thermostat is aware, then every action in the universe is awareness.
Everything is action & reaction. The word "aware" looses its meaning.

Is there such a thing as un-aware action? Can you give me an example?

[PixyMisa]

In what field is it acceptable to say that?

I'm not saying that it's not, mind you, I'd just like to know.

It's a damn poor use of the word "awareness" if you ask me because it makes everything "aware".
It doesn't make rocks aware. Rocks don't respond.

It does make some varieties of plants aware, though.

So now we have to invent a new word for what "aware" used to mean until we decided it means this instead.

So, I'll pick Wasp's "sentience".

Thermostats are not sentient.
Thermostats are aware (they react to the world), but not self-aware (they have no memory of doing so).

The same applies to plants, and much the same applies to insects. Insect brains are sufficiently complex to produce some form of self-awareness; they just don't seem to be wired up that way. Which is one of the other points of the computational model: You can build a great big computer that is not self-aware. But you can also build a very small computer that is. ENIAC could have been programmed so as to be self-aware.

[PixyMisa]

Yes, but it does not change the result.
Of course it changes the result!

There nothing but reaction, thats what you start with and thats what you end up with.
There's nothing but reaction, yes.

the hardware, program and the thermostat are all on/off switches
Yet you claim theres some fundamental difference that enables self awareness.
Yes. The fundamental difference is the complexity. That's all that's needed - more state, more switches.

You cannot produce conciousness or subjective experience.
That is, awareness of its computational outcome.
That is not an example. That's just saying "You can't do it because I say so!"

Be specific. Take a look at what makes up what we regard as human consciousness. Show me a behaviour or a process that cannot be reproduced by a machine or a computer program.

Computer programs are most definitely aware of their "computational outcome", as you put it. They would be utterly useless otherwise.

But yeah, I know, You explain it away by adding another series of switches to the end of the computation, which is more of the same, a mere reaction, like the thermostat that we begin with.
Why do you think that consciousness is anything other than "a mere reaction"? Once again, you have to give me specifics.

If a thermostat is aware, then every action in the universe is awareness.
Nope.

Everything is action & reaction.
Of course. But irrelevant.

The word "aware" looses its meaning.
Wrong. Thermostats are aware. Rocks aren't. Remember that distinction? Remember why we make that distinction?

Is there such a thing as un-aware action? Can you give me an example?
Wind. Rain. Fire. The Moon orbiting the Earth. Anything that depends solely on the bulk properties of matter, really.

[RandFan]

Conscious decision making in actuality follows the action that introspection would say is caused by the decision. I'll confess it's been a couple of years since I followed the arguments for and against your proposition. At that time it was by no means a foregone conclusion. Has this now been sufficiently peer reviewed and replicated and vetted as to become the consensus among experts in the field?

[69dodge]

I have a question for those who believe that consciousness is what information processing feels like to the information processor.

Suppose I have two different information processing devices---two different computer programs running on the same computer, for example, or perhaps two programs running on two computers of very different hardware construction. How can I tell whether the information processing tasks that they're performing are equivalent, as far as consciousness is concerned? That is, what determines whether they have the same experiences as each other, or different ones?

There is no unique definition of "equivalent information processing". If I compile and run a C program on a little-endian machine, and also on a big-endian machine, are the two resulting processes equivalent? Yes and no.

If we decide upon well-defined notions of what is input and what is output, we can then say that two programs are equivalent if they turn the same input into the same output. But if consciousness is supposed to be associated with the running of the program, and not just with the mapping that it defines between input and output, this sort of definition of "equivalence" won't do. Or else, some parts of the internal state of the process, considered at a certain level of abstraction (but not other parts or other levels of abstraction) need to be defined as output for the purpose of consciousness; and the question is, "which parts, and what level of abstraction?".

[Darat]

I have a question for those who believe that consciousness is what information processing feels like to the information processor.

Suppose I have two different information processing devices---two different computer programs running on the same computer, for example, or perhaps two programs running on two computers of very different hardware construction. How can I tell whether the information processing tasks that they're performing are equivalent, as far as consciousness is concerned? That is, what determines whether they have the same experiences as each other, or different ones?

There is no unique definition of "equivalent information processing". If I compile and run a C program on a little-endian machine, and also on a big-endian machine, are the two resulting processes equivalent? Yes and no.

If we decide upon well-defined notions of what is input and what is output, we can then say that two programs are equivalent if they turn the same input into the same output. But if consciousness is supposed to be associated with the running of the program, and not just with the mapping that it defines between input and output, this sort of definition of "equivalence" won't do. Or else, some parts of the internal state of the process, considered at a certain level of abstraction (but not other parts or other levels of abstraction) need to be defined as output for the purpose of consciousness; and the question is, "which parts, and what level of abstraction?".

For me this doesn't work as an analogy because you are looking at it as if the "mind" is a piece of software that runs on hardware. First of all it is using the idea we have currently for computers and we've seen historically these types of models don't work e.g. considering us as clockwork automata was popular a century or two ago because that was the most complex hardware that seemed to share some observed behaviour in common with humans. So I am wary of describing us in terms of current technology.

Secondly, and this is my major objection, is that what we observe does not provide any evidence that the hardware and software can be considered separate in any meaningful sense at all. Every scrap of actual evidence demonstrates that "consciousness" is a result of the entire bag of chemicals.

I've argued this with Pixy in the past and that I do not think it necessarily follows that a computer model of a human would be conscious because a model is not the thing it models. For instance I could have a computer model of a steam engine down to the atomic (or even beyond) level however that would not be capable of turning a grinding stone in the real world but the real steam engine could. So if I am right and (human) consciousness is a result of pretty much the whole system, including the physical, then modeling that system would probably not give rise to (human) consciousness. This isn't an attempt to keep human consciousness as something special, it would still be no more unique or different in type to other processes that are the result of physical systems interacting.

[PixyMisa]

A model of a rock isn't a rock, but a model of an information processing system is an information processing system.

A map of a map of the territory is a map of the territory. ;)

[John Freestone]

As I see it, if you're consciously aware of a stimuli, you have options as to how to respond to it. Now, you might say that this experience of choice is finally illusory, but there is still the possibility to respond to the stimuli, rather than react to it. To me this is a feature of awareness. The thermostat merely reacts to stimuli, thus I would personally dispute that it is aware.

NickI'm beginning to think these are semantic differences, as Darat suggests. I can't help again saying that I agree with you Nick that 'consciousness' is not represented by something as simple as a solitary switch, even one that translates an analogue (:confused:) input (if there is such a thing - perhaps another important consideration in all this!) into its binary output on/off, but I then wonder if this is just about us deciding where we put the line between conscious and unconscious, just as we might ponder the boundaries between many phenomena. When looked at really carefully, I do conclude that these are likely to be semantic. I am pretty sure that there are oceans on the planet's surface, and that my tea isn't an ocean, nor a molecule of water. Somewhere between a large salt lake and the Pacific, it really gets quite difficult to say.

I didn't put it very well before, but the illusion of freewill could arise simply from me not recognising perfectly material, causal inputs to my system. There is at least to my knowledge as a lazy student of psychology a fair amount of evidence that we think we make decisions that can be shown to be no such thing - being unconscious reactions.

Unless there is another semantic misunderstanding, your distinction between reacting and responding seems confused in the quote above. I follow your logic and find it perhaps circular. A thermostat is not conscious, you say, because it can't properly respond (for instance by not switching at a certain temperature, I suppose you mean - it is built to and that's that). The difference between us, you seem to suggest is that we 'respond' rather than just 'react' (which to me implies only some delay and computation on input before output happens). You concede that choice may be ultimately illusory, but you seem to put this difference between reaction and response in opposition - we can respond & therefore are conscious; thermostats can only react & therefore are unconscious.

I suppose that 'response', as you mean it, would be satisfied by the input being routed round circuits, computation, delay (typically comparison with 'memory' or other current states) before output occurs. Thus, if 'response' is considered a feature of conscious entities, it may be possible to define thermostats as unconscious and humans (or computers) as conscious (or one may also believe that consciousness requires other attributes). However, what seems relevant to me is that if we take each bit of the computational system, the delay, the reference to memory, etc., all of those parts of the whole process appear to be, by the earlier distinction, reactions. Thus an entity apparently capable of 'response' is only so as a system, yet analysis reveals no response in its logic at finer detail.

I'm not sure whether I'm disputing anything of yours or backing it up! I just feel there's something interesting going on here, almost as though you have conceded the illusion of free will, but can't quite let go of human spirit (perhaps for want of a better word - agency? - it is a supernatural extra thing beyond the machine, in other words) and now express it as 'response'. I could have saved time, and just asked what's the difference between reaction-response and conscious-unconscious and free-causal?

Of course, the human does have something extra beyond reaction; the question is about whether that something extra is complexity-of-simpler-elements or of-a-different-nature-altogether: monism or dualism.

Some people seem to argue that a thermostat is a kind of rudimentary conscious entity but a rock is not. I fail to see the boundary between those, as well. If a rock encodes information (in a sense, which has been said I think), and reacts to temperature by melting, I'm not quite sure what the systematic difference is, other than one is a human-built tool and therefore thought of as operational, and a melting rock is not being monitored for its 'output'. Nevertheless, in the monist systemic view of the universe, there is actually no boundary*.

*Incidentally, the name of one of Ken Wilber's works. No Boundary is a brilliant book, speaking to this issue very closely, despite his less believable flights of fancy. Strangely, he emerged from writing it, apparently a dualist, or maybe he's just a Mentalist, or maybe I just don't understand what he thinks.

[skiba]

That is not an example. That's just saying "You can't do it because I say so!"

Be specific. Take a look at what makes up what we regard as human consciousness. Show me a behaviour or a process that cannot be reproduced by a machine or a computer program.



And you say "it can because I say so"

I've already asked once to post some schematics for an machine that experiences emotion similary as we do.
you can always assume that some feedback loops create experience of emotions. Assumptions dont give anything to the HPC.


Computer programs are most definitely aware of their "computational outcome", as you put it. They would be utterly useless otherwise.


What I mean by computation outcome is forexample, what's on my screen right now. That is the end result of my PC's computation at this moment.
The end result is a bunch of pixels lighting up on the screen, which are again antother form of on/off switch.

This is what your describtion of the experience of computation basically consists.
Of course you will add many other series of computations that analyse, and process the picture which you claim gives it the experience, but the end result of all these other computation is AGAIN "a flip of a switch"

The machine does what it's been told to do, and you stamp a lable of experience on that. :confused:


Why do you think that consciousness is anything other than "a mere reaction"? Once again, you have to give me specifics.

I experience my reactions. I dont, "just react".
explaining the experience of a reaction, with a reaction makes no sense at all.




Wrong. Thermostats are aware. Rocks aren't. Remember that distinction? Remember why we make that distinction?

A rock contracts and expands accoring to the temperature, so does the wire inside the thermostat. What makes them different? The other one is man made and the other's not. Other one contracts and expands more than the other.


Wind. Rain. Fire. The Moon orbiting the Earth. Anything that depends solely on the bulk properties of matter, really.

All part of an enourmesly complex system of action & reaction

[skiba]

*Double post*

[69dodge]

Example: I get a watch as a gift and I wonder how long the battery will last. I love the watch and wear it all day every day. After several years, it's still going strong. One day I'm in a jewelry shop and figure, why not go ahead and buy a battery, so I ask for one. The jeweler looks at the watch and says, "That watch has quartz movement, it doesn't use a battery".

I realize this is totally not the point, of course, but anyway, most quartz movements do use a battery. Maybe he said "autoquartz"? That kind of movement uses a self-winding mechanism like the one in an automatic mechanical watch, except that instead of winding a mainspring, it spins a little electrical generator.

(Watches are easier to understand than consciousness.)

[westprog]

You're arguing a different point. The original post by cyborg said this:




I do think that "illusion" is an apt description of consciousness, and that it is hard to understand what it really is because, first, it isn't what it would appear to be, and second, because it is what people have traditionally used to understand it.

Once you break away from that and start doing rigorous research, you find that, to take the example I used earlier, conscious decisions are not effectual at all, but merely reflect a reaction that is already taking place.

When you decide to raise your hand, you are already triggering the motor nerves to do so before you are aware that you have made any decision at all.

Obviously, the decision comes first, and then the motion. Obvious, but entirely wrong.


And this experience is what goes on in the microcontroller? It makes a decision and then experiences it milliseconds later?

Naturally, we have no reason to believe that the microcontroller has any experience of making a decision seperately from the decision. Thus we are already dealing with something entirely different.


It's that sort of thing that blows the likes Skiba, Westprog, and Nick out of the water. The simple fact that you exhibit conscious behaviour, even to yourself, does not qualify you to make pronouncments thereon.


The experience of consciousness is exactly what qualifies anyone, including people who haven't given the concept a moment's thought, the right to make pronouncements thereon. It seems that the average man in the street is more likely to have something sensible to say on the subject that the "experts".

[westprog]

I wanted to point out that this finding was in complete agreement with the computational model of the brain as a reasoning system.

Such a model predicts that subjective awareness of the result of a decision ("experiencing a decision") will not occur until after the decision has already been made by the reasoning system.

That's true, up to a point - but the computing model doesn't allow, at present, for subjective experience. That's why concepts such as "emergent properties" have to be devised.

[PixyMisa]

And you say "it can because I say so"

I've already asked once to post some schematics for an machine that experiences emotion similary as we do.
Sorry, I missed that. Why is it relevant, though?

you can always assume that some feedback loops create experience of emotions. Assumptions dont give anything to the HPC.
That's backwards. HPC is one huge hidden assumption that consciousness is magical.

What I mean by computation outcome is forexample, what's on my screen right now. That is the end result of my PC's computation at this moment.
Okay. Yes, the program is aware of that.

The end result is a bunch of pixels lighting up on the screen, which are again antother form of on/off switch.
Yes. So?

This is what your describtion of the experience of computation basically consists.
Yes, that's exactly what it is.

Of course you will add many other series of computations that analyse, and process the picture which you claim gives it the experience, but the end result of all these other computation is AGAIN "a flip of a switch"
Yes. Absolutely.

The machine does what it's been told to do, and you stamp a lable of experience on that. :confused:
Sure. If there's something wrong with that, tell me what. Don't just say "It can't experience because it can't experience because it can't experience!", which is what HPC is all about.

Show me that a certain aspect of human (or other) consciousness can't or even doesn't show up from a mechanical device.

I experience my reactions. I dont, "just react".
What's the difference?

explaining the experience of a reaction, with a reaction makes no sense at all.
Why not?

A rock contracts and expands accoring to the temperature, so does the wire inside the thermostat. What makes them different?
One processes information. The other does not.

The other one is man made and the other's not.
Wrong. It's already been pointed out that the vast majority of thermostats are not man-made.

Other one contracts and expands more than the other.
Perhaps, but not necessarily. Most thermostats don't rely on simply expansion.

All part of an enourmesly complex system of action & reaction
Yeah. But not aware.

[westprog]

Let me make sure I understand this. You are saying that the only evidence I have for consciousness is behavior (true) and therefore, I claim that behavior is caused by consciousness. (false).

I'm not claiming that all behavior is caused by conscious thought. Only some behavior. Do you disagree? Are you saying that conscious thought does not impact our behavior at all?


Even if conciousness doesn't affect behaviour, that doesn't mean that it isn't real. Maybe consciousness is just sitting there watching what's going on. It's still there.

The fact that experiments measure the correlation between consciousness and decisions is in itself an indication that the people doing the hard science are taking it seriously.

[PixyMisa]

And this experience is what goes on in the microcontroller? It makes a decision and then experiences it milliseconds later?
Sure.

Naturally, we have no reason to believe that the microcontroller has any experience of making a decision seperately from the decision.
Wrong-o. You can actually get a dump of its memory and see the experience taking place.

Thus we are already dealing with something entirely different.
Nope. You keep saying "It's different, it's different!", but you have to say how it's different.

The experience of consciousness is exactly what qualifies anyone, including people who haven't given the concept a moment's thought, the right to make pronouncements thereon.
Except, as has been shown, this is absolutely not the case.

It seems that the average man in the street is more likely to have something sensible to say on the subject that the "experts".
Well, if by "experts" you're talking the likes of John Searle and David Chalmers, you have a point. It takes years of education to come up with something that silly.

[Ivor the Engineer]

<snip>

Perhaps there is an integration function; I am not certain there needs to be one. We don't perceive redness, roundness, shininess, and infer "apple", we see the redness of an apple, the roundness of an apple, and the shininess of an apple. The integration may well be in the apple, not in our brain.

Are there not people who can identify all the characteristics of, say, an apple, yet cannot "see" the apple? Wasn't this the problem the man who mistook his wife for a hat had?

I think there is strong evidence for an integration function, and (IMO) it will be the most difficult problem to solve in AI.

[skiba]

It seems that the average man in the street is more likely to have something sensible to say on the subject that the "experts".

My thoughts exactly.

It seems the academic types have more trouble grasping the HPC.
Maybe it's because of the have adopted a certain type of mind set and reasoning early on. Academics may bee too smart to see the simplest things.
Everything is made complex, and this is what they assert in the HPC as the solution "consciousness is sufficiently complex computation"

The academics of course claim the opposite. The lay man is just too dumb to realize that s/he is being fooled.

Sorry, dont mean to generalize.

[PixyMisa]

And you say "it can because I say so"

I've already asked once to post some schematics for an machine that experiences emotion similary as we do.
Okay, back to this.

Let's take a two-setting thermostat:




|--------|
| Max |-------------->[cooling]
[sensor]------------>| |
| Min |-------------->[heating]
|--------|

When the temperature is above the max setting, it turns on the cooling circuit. When the temperature is below the min setting, it turns on the heating circuit.

Fine so far?

Now, we add a feature: When the temperature is below the max setting, but above the min setting, it lights up a little sign that says: :)

How's that?

[PixyMisa]

My thoughts exactly.

It seems the academic types have more trouble grasping the HPC.
Nope. It's the "academic types" who came up with HPC.

Maybe it's because of the have adopted a certain type of mind set and reasoning early on. Academics may bee too smart to see the simplest things.
I'm not an academic. I'm a college drop-out. I work for a living.

Darat? Mercutio?

Everything is made complex, and this is what they assert in the HPC as the solution "consciousness is sufficiently complex computation"
Nobody has ever produced a coherent definition of HPC.

But that's academics for you.

The academics of course claim the opposite. The lay man is just too dumb to realize that s/he is being fooled.
I is a lay man.

Sorry, dont mean to generalize.
Then don't.

[PixyMisa]

Are there not people who can identify all the characteristics of, say, an apple, yet cannot "see" the apple? Wasn't this the problem the man who mistook his wife for a hat had?
I haven't read the book, but it sounds likely.

I think there is strong evidence for an integration function, and (IMO) it will be the most difficult problem to solve in AI.
Building a human-level intelligence is hard in many ways, and this is likely one of them. Building something that is really dumb and bad at integration, not so hard. Not useful, but not hard. ;)

[Darat]

Nope. It's the "academic types" who came up with HPC.


I'm not an academic. I'm a college drop-out. I work for a living.

Darat? Mercutio?


Nobody has ever produced a coherent definition of HPC.

But that's academics for you.


I is a lay man.

...snip...

Merc is one of these clever-clogs professory academic types but I don't have any university education.

[Belz...]

If there are no thoughts, there are no thoughts. What do you want me to do? Make something up for a bunch of researchers? It happens. Plenty of people experience passivity of mind.

Plenty of people experience ghosts, too.

[Belz...]

It's entirely valid for me. If I'm alone in the lab, late one night, and I dip litmus paper into a liquid and it changes colour, the fact that this is a private experience does not make it invalid as totally sound scientific evidence for me.

Just as private experiences are good evidence for those who see ghosts, or whatever woo you care to discuss. Experiencing something is not evidence that this something exists.

If someone then demands that I prove that the liquid really is, or is not, an acid, I can then say "go do the experiment for yourself" and they have access to exactly the same objective evidence that I have.

But that's not the same thing. Everybody can see the result of YOUR test.

So pinch the backs of your hands. And if they don't give you any sensation, pinch a little harder. Maybe give yourselves a little slap.

When I pinch myself, my nerves send data to my brain. What's your point ?

[Dancing David]

We are in exactly that position. We don't know if dolphins, or ants, or bacteria are conscious in any sense. The way we know that humans are conscious is because humans experience consciousness, and assert that they are conscious. We assume that e.g. apes are conscious in the same sense for behavioural reasons because they share much of the brain functions that humans have. It remains unproven, however.

If reacting to the environment is sufficient to claim consciousness, then everything in conscious. But clearly that's too big a brush.


So how do you know that you are conscious?

I ask this most seriously, is it because you have perceptions, is it because you have memories of perceptions?

I ask this because it is crucial.

As you have pointed out, you can not know if another being is conscious. You can only chose public behaviors that we define as 'conscious'. So that begs the question, do you say you are conscious because you display the behaviors that are conscious?

What are those behaviors? Perception without verbal cognition is still perception.

[Nick227]

I have a question for those who believe that consciousness is what information processing feels like to the information processor.

I don't think "feels like" is the best choice of phrase here, given that computers don't have feelings.

Nick

[Belz...]

When you start talking about "what was experienced -- the external event or the bodily reaction?" then you're diving into some heavy assumptions and things get muddy really quick.

Well... it's like a billard ball hitting a second one hitting a third. Did the third ever come in contact with the first ? Nope. It's true that it gets muddled quickly, but obviously, for example, when you touch a chair, your hand never actually touches it, etc. We experience everything indirectly, though of course, since I just said "everything", it's not really worth mentioning! :p

[Belz...]

To the analytical mind, yes, because it works in a dualistic manner.

I see words, but no meaning.

[Nick227]

I'm beginning to think these are semantic differences, as Darat suggests. I can't help again saying that I agree with you Nick that 'consciousness' is not represented by something as simple as a solitary switch, even one that translates an analogue (:confused:) input (if there is such a thing - perhaps another important consideration in all this!) into its binary output on/off, but I then wonder if this is just about us deciding where we put the line between conscious and unconscious, just as we might ponder the boundaries between many phenomena. When looked at really carefully, I do conclude that these are likely to be semantic. I am pretty sure that there are oceans on the planet's surface, and that my tea isn't an ocean, nor a molecule of water. Somewhere between a large salt lake and the Pacific, it really gets quite difficult to say.

I think that one difference between the thermostat and me, qualitatively, is that it takes me longer to make decisions and I have the experience of being aware of choices. I wouldn't consider the thermostat aware but, I figure, on reflection that this is more for quantitative reasons. Not completely sure.

Nick

[Dancing David]

Bottom line, PixyMisa, you want to call consciousness an "illusion", you go right ahead.

Hopefully some of the others on this thread can explain better than I can why this way of looking at it leads to intractable problems and introduces unnecessary (non)entities.

(Anybody care to chime in?)

But I reject that definition for reasons I've already explained.

I will try.

There is a notion that the AHB taught, that there is a body and it's attendant processes, thoughts, emotions, perceptions and habits. These do exist. They are however transitory in nature, they are ephemeral and changing all the time. For subtle reasons the you that starts to read this post is not the 'you' that will finish reading this post. The me that goes to sleep is not the 'me' that wakes up.

It is like the ship which is replaced piece by piece over time. One thousand years later , the 'ship' still exists but is it the same ship that is was one thousand years agao.

This led the AHB to the notion that there is a body but there is no 'self' beyond the body. And that while there is the body, the 'self' is not transcendant, it is impermanent, ephemeral and transitory. Thus while there is a body, the notion of the self is an illusion , in that it is a semantic convention that labels as permanent or static something that is neither.

So when it comes to consciousness, I put a different spin on it. Is a car fast?

That is a label that is applied to the behavior of a car. But when a car is not is motion, is it still fast? Does the label fast apply to a possibility that may never be expressed, meaning capable of great speed?

Is a car that has never been driven above one MPH, still fast? Do we say so because it is similar to other cars?

[Piggy]

Certain nobody intelligent would claim that a thermostat is sentient like we are.

I'm going a little farther and saying it's not sentient at all.

Nothing about it even remotely resembles sentience.

So my argument would be that being a robust reasoning system is a requirement of sentience.

I suspect you're right about that.



I am convinced that this is only because you are looking at the problem from a different perspective than me. After all, from a certain perspective a man is only quantitatively different from a pineapple.

From a limited perspective, I reckon. In other words, from a perspective that manages to ignore the qualitative differences, sure.


Yeah but wasn't Marvin still conscious?

Marvin's conscious awareness was restricted. He lost awareness of his emotions.

(Full disclosure: I have something similar going on, but it's a dampened feedback, not a "black hole" -- which is one of the reasons I can't make relationships work and will probably be single all my life -- so I can tell you, it's both bizarre and real.)

Meanwhile, all the computations continue as before. It's the after-the-fact conscious awareness that's been cut off.

What this tells us is that some specialized processing is necessary to take already highly processed information and generate the sensation of awareness of (whatever it may be -- an external event or an internal state) from that.

So it appears to be a specialized function, not a generic byproduct of the entire system.



I think we just disagree on the definition of "qualitative" here. I do not disagree that the phenomenon of our sentience is emergent and thus different in that respect. But I don't consider an emergent phenomenon to necessarily be qualitatively different. Perhaps y ou do?

It's hard to see how the presence of an emergent property in thing X and the absence of that property in thing Y wouldn't constitute a qualitative difference between the two. In this case, at least, I certainly consider it a qualitative difference.



Sentience is a process that cannot exist without certain facts in the system's knowledge base. But, fundamentally, the greater process is reducible to the same basic computational processes that worm minds use. It has to be -- neurons only work in certain ways.

Ok, so you've acknowledged the need for "certain facts in the system's knowledge base" and "basic computational processes", but you're ignoring something in between -- specific systems to organize the information in such a way as to produce the phenomenon of sentience.

We don't really know how this happens yet.

Systems that do this, when they're operating, are doing something qualitatively different from systems that don't do this, even if all the basic nuts-and-bolts level mechanics is identical.

It's like those factories -- the canning plant is doing something qualitatively different from what the hosiery plant is doing, even if all the physics and chemistry, and even the materials used in the buildings and machinery, is exactly the same.

So I agree with you that the process behind sentience is different in many ways that the process behind simple perception, for example. I am just saying that the building blocks are the same.

Agreed, but see above.

When I say we know how it emerges, I mean that we understand the building blocks.

Then I wouldn't go that far. I'd say we know that it emerges, and we understand the building blocks of the machine it emerges from.

A man versed in structural engineering can look at a skyscraper and "know" how it was built -- it does not require an explicit understanding of every floorplan.

The problem is, the brain is a building we didn't build, and can't build, and can't build anything like it yet, so we're still staring at it, going "huh".

[MRC_Hans]

Okay, back to this.

Let's take a two-setting thermostat:




|--------|
| Max |-------------->[cooling]
[sensor]------------>| |
| Min |-------------->[heating]
|--------|

When the temperature is above the max setting, it turns on the cooling circuit. When the temperature is below the min setting, it turns on the heating circuit.

Fine so far?

Now, we add a feature: When the temperature is below the max setting, but above the min setting, it lights up a little sign that says: :)

How's that?Only, now we make a slight sophistication of that contraption. Due to delays in heat transfer to the sensor, we may find that the actual max and min temperatures exceed the set limits.

So we add a small programmable controller: When the min temperature is reached, and the heater is turned on, it measures and stores the time it takes to hit the upper limit. Then is switches to cooling and times and stores the time it takes to reach the lower limit. Now it calculates the optimum heating and cooling intervals to keep the temperature in mid-range. If one of the limits is exceeded at a later point, it re-times and recalculates its intervals.

Now we have a machine that collects experiences and makes decisions based on them.

Hans

[skiba]

What's the difference?


I was under the impression from you previous posts that you made the distinction between mere reactions and self-awareness (The understanding that one exists). But im not sure you have.

You believe that complex reactions = self-awareness, consciousness, experience. I can understand why you think this.

Science tells us atleast the basics of how the brain is wired an functions.
This is what you know yourself to be through science.
You allso know what it is to experience.
So it is an logical assumption that mimicing the wiring of the brain on a circuit board creates a conscious, experiencing machine.

To me it seems illogical that any mechanical device could experience anything similary as we do, atleast not by the machanisms being proposed here.
It is only reactions going on "in the dark"

To you, its different, you "know" you are a conscious machine and that means IT MUST work the same on the circuit board.

[westprog]

Actually, I do consider any system which uses it to be conscious, by definition, and that it is therefore the whole ball of wax. The rest is just garnish.

(Why you'd want to garnish a ball of wax is left for another thread.)

It comes back to my question - what is there about human consciousness that is missing from (this time) a reflective computer program?

The ability to sponataneously assert its own consciousness.

Not only has such behaviour never been seen from a computational device, there are reasonable grounds for supposing that it cannot be programmed in.

Either it will be the mythical "emergent property" - something which more down to earth programmers refer to as a bug - or it will involve some new programming technique.

If, and when, (especially if) such a program is constructed, we'll be able to step through every line of code, and find out just exactly where the assertion of consciousness comes from. We'll then be able to decide if it is comparable to the human's assertion of consciousness, and reflects a similar kind of inner state.

But we have no such programs. They are just over the horizen, as they were when I was first studying computer science thirty years ago. Programs that pass the Turing test are still at the Eliza stage. Unlike nuclear fusion, we've no reason to suppose that genuine AI is getting any closer.

That's not to say the field isn't enormously useful and important - just not in the field of consciousness.

[westprog]

Bottom line, PixyMisa, you want to call consciousness an "illusion", you go right ahead.

Hopefully some of the others on this thread can explain better than I can why this way of looking at it leads to intractable problems and introduces unnecessary (non)entities.

(Anybody care to chime in?)

But I reject that definition for reasons I've already explained.

I think that if you want to believe that an illusion is possible without a person to be fooled, then you have to ascribe some kind of analogue of consciousness to non-conscious entities. You have to say that a thermocouple is "fooled" when you heat it with a match.

Of course it isn't. No non-conscious entity can be fooled. It is simply experiencing its local environment. The thermocouple isn't "wrong" in the world of a thermocouple to detect a high temperature. It doesn't care. In fact, it cannot care.

That is why there is no illusion of the sun going around Mars. There's nothing to be fooled.

[westprog]

But "contextual analysis of its senses and memories" etc. isn't awareness.

You call it "considering", well fine, that's ok, I guess.

But it's qualitatively different from the kind of considering I do when I decide what movie to see.

It may very well be true that my conscious mind is not doing the deciding, that it just appears that way, and I'm really just "along for the ride", so to speak.

But that does not change the fact that this experience of feeling like I'm deciding is an amazing phenomenon that we don't have an adequate explanation for and which we have absolutely no reason to believe is present in a thermostat.

Get serious.

You can't simply say, well the brain is doing X, Y, and Z -- among God knows how many other things -- when it's conscious, and this little device also does X, Y, and Z, therefore it must be aware.

I'm sorry, but that doesn't wash.

There is no need for a dualistic approach to consciousness. If you have a dualistic approach - i.e. consciousness is a little man driving the body, sitting behind the eyes - then you are going to find problems with the issue of what makes the decisions - consciousness or reasoning.

But if you accept that the mind is part of being a human being, and that consciousness is part of the mind, that issue disappears. The mind makes decisions. The mind exhibits consciousness. The hard problem is to determine how the mind produces consciousness. There's no need to consider consciousness as a seperate thing from mind.

[Darat]

I think that if you want to believe that an illusion is possible without a person to be fooled, then you have to ascribe some kind of analogue of consciousness to non-conscious entities. You have to say that a thermocouple is "fooled" when you heat it with a match.

Of course it isn't. No non-conscious entity can be fooled. It is simply experiencing its local environment. The thermocouple isn't "wrong" in the world of a thermocouple to detect a high temperature. It doesn't care. In fact, it cannot care.

That is why there is no illusion of the sun going around Mars. There's nothing to be fooled.


You are again assuming your conclusion. All an illusion is (in this sense) is a flawed evaluatio of data. For instance if the thermometer has a display that says "The room temperature is: x" that can easily be "fooled" by a localised heat or cooling source.

[westprog]

What evidence do you have that they are "conscious"?

Leon

The primary evidence for consciousness is the sensation of consciousness. The secondary evidence is the assertion of the sensation of consciousness. The tertiary evidence is the analogy of structures and behaviours that indicate that something - such as an ape - would appear to act as if it had consciousnes.

The primary evidence is entirely convincing, to me and to some others posting here. The secondary evidence at least shows that there is a reported phenomenon. The tertiary evidence isn't definitive.

[Nick227]

I was under the impression from you previous posts that you made the distinction between mere reactions and self-awareness (The understanding that one exists). But im not sure you have.

You believe that complex reactions = self-awareness, consciousness, experience. I can understand why you think this.

In human social or psychological terms I'd say there's a considerable difference between responding to a situation and reacting to it. The former demonstrates greater self-awareness. However, I'm not clear that this represents a qualitative difference between the stat and the human.

If we say that experiential reality is what "information processing looks like" (and sounds like, etc) then I think there's only a quantitative difference, but I'm not clear here.

Nick

[Nick227]

Nope. It's the "academic types" who came up with HPC.


I'm not an academic. I'm a college drop-out. I work for a living.

Darat? Mercutio?

Nobody has ever produced a coherent definition of HPC.

But that's academics for you.


I is a lay man.

Sounds like you're the Bruce Springsteen of consciousness research.

Nick

[westprog]

We do know a lot. What we know is amazing. But we don't yet know exactly how it's done.

And we don't know that any and every robust reasoning system must be sentient.



Well, the first part of that is correct, but the second part is not.

It's not just the behavior that leads me to conclude that other people are sentient and that worms and computers are not.

It's the wiring.

The kind of complex processing and routing that was going on in Marvin's brain... that's not going on in a worm, and I don't think it's going on in a computer, either.

If you want consciousness, you have to wire for consciousness.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that any old system you wire up will be sentient.

We don't yet know how those brain systems -- like the ones that process emotional awareness from the video -- do what they do and generate this sense of being in the world that we all have.

That's the difficult problem: figuring out exactly how it happens.

Saying "it's the wiring" is perfectly valid - but it doesn't imply that consciousness is computable, or that it can exist in a Turing machine.

[Nick227]

It comes back to my question - what is there about human consciousness that is missing from (this time) a reflective computer program?


The ability to sponataneously assert its own consciousness.

Can you demonstrate that "spontaneity" is not simply determinism with reduced self-awareness?

Nick

eta: to answer the question....feelings. A computer program can mimic the action of feelings but it does not experience them.

[westprog]

Hm, this leads to the question of whether consciousness is seen as a property of an object or system, or as an object of its own. I think the HPC is treating it as a discrete object, which may be what is causing all of the philosophical strife.

I always thought of it as a property of a system, much like red is a property of an apple, rather than an entity or projection of its own, like a rainbow or mirage.

Hm, again.

*Wanders off to make a fresh cup of tea and indulge in some pondering behavior*


Treating consciousness as a property of mind doesn't make the hard problem go away. It has to be explained whether it's a property or a seperate "thing".

[MRC_Hans]

I was under the impression from you previous posts that you made the distinction between mere reactions and self-awareness (The understanding that one exists). But im not sure you have.

You believe that complex reactions = self-awareness, consciousness, experience. I can understand why you think this.

Science tells us at least the basics of how the brain is wired an functions.
This is what you know yourself to be through science.
You also know what it is to experience.
So it is an logical assumption that mimicking the wiring of the brain on a circuit board creates a conscious, experiencing machine.

To me it seems illogical that any mechanical device could experience anything similarly as we do, at least not by the mechanisms being proposed here.
It is only reactions going on "in the dark"

To you, its different, you "know" you are a conscious machine and that means IT MUST work the same on the circuit board.No, you are projecting your own, belief-based, outlook onto Pixy (and others). The assumption that consciousness is an emergent property of a very complex thinking machine is based on the known facts. To be sure, it is an assumption based on the materialistic doctrine that as long as we have no evidence that something exists, we assume it doesn't.

The assumption that it is NOT an emergent property is a belief.

Hans

PS: I recommend the spell-checker.

[westprog]

Because I am a computer scientist, I take the view


I find that a revealing half-sentence. There's a strong attachment to the computing model of consciousness.

[MRC_Hans]

The primary evidence for consciousness is the sensation of consciousness. The secondary evidence is the assertion of the sensation of consciousness. The tertiary evidence is the analogy of structures and behaviours that indicate that something - such as an ape - would appear to act as if it had consciousnes.

The primary evidence is entirely convincing, to me and to some others posting here. The secondary evidence at least shows that there is a reported phenomenon. The tertiary evidence isn't definitive.The sensation of consciousness? Do you mean the perception of consciousness? What is that other than the brain being able to monitor its own fuction?

Hans

[westprog]

The assumption that it is NOT an emergent property is a belief.



What would the skeptic believe? It is an emergent property, it isn't an emergent property, or we don't know if it's an emergent property or not?

[westprog]

As I see it, if you're consciously aware of a stimuli, you have options as to how to respond to it. Now, you might say that this experience of choice is finally illusory, but there is still the possibility to respond to the stimuli, rather than react to it. To me this is a feature of awareness. The thermostat merely reacts to stimuli, thus I would personally dispute that it is aware.


Whether or not free will, in any sense, exists, conscious beings think that they are choosing. Thermostats don't.

[westprog]

The paradigms are completely different. Brain stimulation doesn't involve any sensory input, unlike colour perception.

Leon

Sensory input is brain stimulation.

I don't understand why it's such a big deal that doing things to the brain affects consciousness. It's as if the dualist assumptions were so strong that it's taken for granted that refuting dualism is to refute consciousness.

Yes, messing with the brain affects consciousness. However, such experiments assume that consciousness is there to be affected in the first place.

[Nick227]

Whether or not free will, in any sense, exists, conscious beings think that they are choosing. Thermostats don't.

Yes, I agree. But does this constitute a qualitative difference?

Nick

[leon_heller]

Sensory input is brain stimulation.

I don't understand why it's such a big deal that doing things to the brain affects consciousness. It's as if the dualist assumptions were so strong that it's taken for granted that refuting dualism is to refute consciousness.

Yes, messing with the brain affects consciousness. However, such experiments assume that consciousness is there to be affected in the first place.

I was referring to brain stimulation via electrodes, nothing to do with sensory input. "Consciousness" isn't involved.

Leon

[westprog]

In what field is it acceptable to say that?

I'm not saying that it's not, mind you, I'd just like to know.

It's a damn poor use of the word "awareness" if you ask me because it makes everything "aware".


A physicist would not say that something was "aware" because it responded to the world around it because everything responds to the world around it.

There is a theory that everything is conscious in the same way. That at least makes a lick of sense. But consciousness as being a matter of engineering - no.

[westprog]

So go on. Give me one example.

The spontaneous assertion of consciousness.

[westprog]

A model of a rock isn't a rock, but a model of an information processing system is an information processing system.

A map of a map of the territory is a map of the territory. ;)

And an illusion of an illusion?

[Nick227]

The spontaneous assertion of consciousness.

How do you demonstrate that an assertion is actually spontaneous, and not simply the result of a partially-conscious system acting on unconscious directives in the belief that it is spontaneous?

If you have a computer with a portion of its programming kept hidden from the rest, you could get it to believe it had free will and spontaneity.

Nick

[westprog]

Just as private experiences are good evidence for those who see ghosts, or whatever woo you care to discuss. Experiencing something is not evidence that this something exists.


No. Repeatability is what lends it scientific credence.


But that's not the same thing. Everybody can see the result of YOUR test.


That's helpful, but not necessary. If everyone who disputes my test duplicates it with similar results, that's good science, and it's all that's necessary.


When I pinch myself, my nerves send data to my brain. What's your point ?

My point is that a sensation is experienced, and that can be observed. It can be duplicated.

I do except people disputing the nature of consciousness. They don't seem to experience sensations in the same way. That might even be the second hard problem. However, out in the rest of the world, people do experience sensations. They report them in similar terms. That's sufficient, scientifically speaking, to identify a phenomenon.

[skiba]

The assumption that it is NOT an emergent property is a belief.


I didn't say its not an emergent property of the brain/complex computer.
I could go either way, but that not the point here.

We dont know, how consciousness could arise from these AI computers or the brain. Theres an assumption that the mechanical model is enough to explain consciousness and experience. Maybe it's not that much of an assumption, but its the only model we got, so people cling on to it.


PS: I recommend the spell-checker.

Yeah :rolleyes: I'll look into that.

[westprog]

So how do you know that you are conscious?

I ask this most seriously, is it because you have perceptions, is it because you have memories of perceptions?

I ask this because it is crucial.

As you have pointed out, you can not know if another being is conscious. You can only chose public behaviors that we define as 'conscious'. So that begs the question, do you say you are conscious because you display the behaviors that are conscious?

What are those behaviors? Perception without verbal cognition is still perception.

Simple. I do the pinch test and I experience sensation. That's sufficient as a test. I have no other requirements to assert consciousness in myself.

Note that I do not require any behavioural elements to this test. I don't need to flinch, or scream, or say "ow".

[Darat]

How do you demonstrate that an assertion is actually spontaneous, and not simply the result of a partially-conscious system acting on unconscious directives in the belief that it is spontaneous?

If you have a computer with a portion of its programming kept hidden from the rest, you could get it to believe it had free will and spontaneity.

Nick

And whilst I do say we should be wary of assuming the brain is like one of current computers, as an analogy that is exactly what the public and private evidence points to.

When I experience the "sensation of hunger" I am not conscious ;) of a process that has various parts of me reacting to a lowering of nutrients in my body, the "causal" agent of "I" being hungry (the biochemistry) is hidden to the section that proclaims "I'm hungry" if I am asked of the state of my nutritional needs. So we do experience our consciousness as if large parts of it are hidden from the very processes we label "I".

[Nick227]

I didn't say its not an emergent property of the brain/complex computer.
I could go either way, but that not the point here.

We dont know, how consciousness could arise from these AI computers or the brain. Theres an assumption that the mechanical model is enough to explain consciousness and experience. Maybe it's not that much of an assumption, but its the only model we got, so people cling on to it.


I think that people cling more to the belief that they are not machines. To reinforce this belief they assert that there are properties of the human that transcend an entirely mechanistic explanation.

Personally, I figure there are aspects of human conscious experience, for example feelings, that will not be replicated in our machines. However, to say they aren't originated in the human organism...I haven't seen a good case made for that one yet.

Nick

[John Freestone]

A thermostat is aware - it responds to external condictions according to an internal model of those conditions - but it is not self-aware, a critical distinction. There is no internal feedback mechanism that could allow it to examine its own behaviour - to consider, rather than just to react.

The $1.95 microcontroller does have that, though. As I said, it it quite capable of contextual analysis of its senses and memories, and changing its behaviour based on that. If that's not considering, I don't know what is.Can you help me understand what you mean by the internal model of a thermostat, Pixy?

I'm also wondering whether you consider there to be any distinction between the 'awareness' of a thermostat and the reaction of a rock to temperature - i.e. to change state and chemical composition - and between what people often assume, the non-reflexive consciousness of lower animals and self-aware human consciousness.

Does a thermostat have an internal model, but not a piece of granite?

Presumably a cat is also "capable of contextual analysis of its senses and memories, and changing its behaviour based on that". Is there a difference in consciousness, and if so, is it merely one of complexity, medium and temporal causation (i.e. evolved complex flesh rather than relatively simple, manufactured mineral)?

I'm afraid I missed your earlier post, if there was one (you said 'As I said' here), so I'm sorry if this is asking you to repeat.

[Belz...]

But the consciousness is real.

Really ? Sounds like a claim, to me.

[westprog]

You are again assuming your conclusion. All an illusion is (in this sense) is a flawed evaluatio of data. For instance if the thermometer has a display that says "The room temperature is: x" that can easily be "fooled" by a localised heat or cooling source.

In such a case, the only illusion would be experienced by someone reading the display. The operation of the machine when recieving "illusory" data would be no different, in principle, to the operation of the machine recieving "good" data. Described in terms associated with physics, there are no illusions.

When a thermocouple measures a tempertature, and that temperature doesn't correspond with room temperature, that's an engineering matter. It solely has to do with the conscious person using the device.

A simple test for this is to try to describe an illusion for an inanimate object in terms of the laws of physics. I think it would be a difficult thing to do.

[westprog]

Can you demonstrate that "spontaneity" is not simply determinism with reduced self-awareness?


I can't, but since no such program has been written, I'll worry about that when it does.



eta: to answer the question....feelings. A computer program can mimic the action of feelings but it does not experience them.


I agree. The ability to experience feelings is apparently, unique to biology. At least I don't think it's been demonstrated to exist in either inanimate objects or abstract processes.

[westprog]

The sensation of consciousness? Do you mean the perception of consciousness?


No.

[John Freestone]

Hm, this leads to the question of whether consciousness is seen as a property of an object or system, or as an object of its own. I think the HPC is treating it as a discrete object, which may be what is causing all of the philosophical strife.

I always thought of it as a property of a system, much like red is a property of an apple, rather than an entity or projection of its own, like a rainbow or mirage.

Hm, again.

*Wanders off to make a fresh cup of tea and indulge in some pondering behavior*How was the tea? I'm now wondering what an object is. Does science not attempt to discover what objects are by describing and classifying their properties, ending at subatomic levels where 'objects' and 'properties' are (more forcefully) rather unclear distinctions? If you say that 'red' is a property, rather than an object, it seems not to be part of material reality anymore, but a subjective expression of a physical reality. If you express 'red' in physical terms, as a wavelength of light, it may be more clearly objective. It almost seems as though the object/property question were a rephrasing of the object/subject one.

I could go monist in either direction - properties don't exist, they are words we use when certain objects are present, or objects don't exist, they are merely illusory projections of ideal properties. :confused:

[westprog]

Yes, I agree. But does this constitute a qualitative difference?


I think so. There's an objective difference between human beings and thermostats. Whether it's an important difference is a matter of opinion. Most people act as if it is.

[westprog]

I was referring to brain stimulation via electrodes, nothing to do with sensory input.


I repeat - sensory input is brain stimulation. Poking around with electrodes is bound to change the operation of the brain. In the case of sensory input, it's supposed to change the operation of the brain.

[Belz...]

I wanted to point out that this finding was in complete agreement with the computational model of the brain as a reasoning system.

Such a model predicts that subjective awareness of the result of a decision ("experiencing a decision") will not occur until after the decision has already been made by the reasoning system.

Disconcerting, isn't it ?

[Darat]

In such a case, the only illusion would be experienced by someone reading the display.

...snip...


Again and again you keep assuming your conclusion and then feeding it back into your argument. Your argument in this post is nothing more than your assumption that there has to be a magical "experiencer" (and the reason it is magical is that otherwise 'it's turtles all the way down'), in other words you are again describing a dualistic approach to consciousness.

The illusion (in this sense) is that the thermometer is not actually showing what is the "underlying reality" i.e. what the room's temperature is. That requires no observer it's just a property of the thermometer.

[Nick227]

I agree. The ability to experience feelings is apparently, unique to biology. At least I don't think it's been demonstrated to exist in either inanimate objects or abstract processes.

Yeah, seems to be a flesh-and-blood thing.

Nick

[leon_heller]

I repeat - sensory input is brain stimulation. Poking around with electrodes is bound to change the operation of the brain. In the case of sensory input, it's supposed to change the operation of the brain.

The difference is that sensory input results in sensations and then emotions, but brain stimulation seems to result in a direct emotional response without any sensations.

Leon

[Dancing David]

The primary evidence for consciousness is the sensation of consciousness.

Which we still seem to lack a defintion of.

The secondary evidence is the assertion of the sensation of consciousness.

A machine could do that.


The tertiary evidence is the analogy of structures and behaviours that indicate that something - such as an ape - would appear to act as if it had consciousnes.

that is the only standard.

You say you have a sensation of consciousness, yet you can not define it or say what it is. You could be a machine saying the same thing. How can you tell the difference?


The primary evidence is entirely convincing, to me and to some others posting here.

However you could be a machine, I can't take it on faith that you arent.

The secondary evidence at least shows that there is a reported phenomenon.

So are fairies and bigfoot.

The tertiary evidence isn't definitive.

It is because it is the only one that states a definition. You only appear to be consciouss, you just assume that you are.

Define the sense of consciousness, what is it, even as a metaphor.

[John Freestone]

The fact that experiments measure the correlation between consciousness and decisions is in itself an indication that the people doing the hard science are taking it seriously.But if these are the 'experts' you refered to earlier, didn't you say that their pronouncements were less reliable than the average man in the street? You seem only to be arguing from what Darat has called the Difficult Problem of Consciousness (I think - at least, from what I called the Mindboggling Problem of Consciousness) to suggest that the Hard Problem of Consciousness is to be taken seriously. Few would be stupid enough to dispute that most human beings between the ages of 2 and 99 have a consistent experience of having a subjective centre, an eye or I 'watching' as you put it. The experts have been inspired to experiment to discover the secrets of that Mindboggling fact of life, and seem to be rejecting the intuitive experience of selfhood. I nearly responded to your 'man in the street' argument, but let it pass. Now you seem to want to have it both ways, unless I've misunderstood: the subjective observer of experience must exist because people are studying experience; I'm going to ignore the results.

[rocketdodger]

IBut if consciousness is supposed to be associated with the running of the program, and not just with the mapping that it defines between input and output, this sort of definition of "equivalence" won't do. Or else, some parts of the internal state of the process, considered at a certain level of abstraction (but not other parts or other levels of abstraction) need to be defined as output for the purpose of consciousness; and the question is, "which parts, and what level of abstraction?".

It is fundamentally impossible according to the computational model, because consciousness is what it is to be information processing. So the only way to be sure a conscious experience is the same as ours is to become the information in question -- which is clearly impossible, since we are already the information that is us and any change to that would make us something else.

That is why the best we can do is look objectively at a bunch of information (or behavior) and try to find analogs with what we think is taking place at some level in us. Hence, we think other humans feel love and pain because they react just like we do to certain stimuli. The same can be said for various elements of consciousness when it comes to dogs, for mice, for worms, and even thermostats.

[cyborg]

Consciousness is best thought of as another type of data processing like visual, aural, olfactory, thermal, pressure etc... that presents some sort of result, in this case the result is some sort of digest of the results of the other data processing units in that it makes some explanation of them.

In this way it is as machine like as anything else.

[rocketdodger]

I've already asked once to post some schematics for an machine that experiences emotion similary as we do.

Neither children nor the mentally handicapped experience emotion like I do. Are they no longer sentient? What about great apes? Dolphins? Dogs? What does "similarly" mean here?

The machine does what it's been told to do, and you stamp a lable of experience on that. :confused:

You don't do what you have been told to do? What do you do, then?

I experience my reactions. I dont, "just react".
explaining the experience of a reaction, with a reaction makes no sense at all.

How is an experience different from a reaction?

A rock contracts and expands accoring to the temperature, so does the wire inside the thermostat. What makes them different? The other one is man made and the other's not. Other one contracts and expands more than the other.


The thermostat makes a decision. There is a computation made.

[Hokulele]

How was the tea? I'm now wondering what an object is. Does science not attempt to discover what objects are by describing and classifying their properties, ending at subatomic levels where 'objects' and 'properties' are (more forcefully) rather unclear distinctions? If you say that 'red' is a property, rather than an object, it seems not to be part of material reality anymore, but a subjective expression of a physical reality. If you express 'red' in physical terms, as a wavelength of light, it may be more clearly objective. It almost seems as though the object/property question were a rephrasing of the object/subject one.


It does sound similar doesn't it? The way I always understood it, properties arise from a collection of objects. So in that sense, "red" isn't a thing much as "fast" isn't a thing. Both are emergent properties of a system. For example, you can define "red" by its wavelength, but where is the red? When you break a red object down to its component molecules, is it still red? Some properties, such as "fast", apply to behavior rather than the physical object itself. The car itself isn't "fast", but it can exhibit "fast" performance.

I could go monist in either direction - properties don't exist, they are words we use when certain objects are present, or objects don't exist, they are merely illusory projections of ideal properties. :confused:


The Wiki is actually a pretty decent introduction to emergence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence). I haven't read this one in depth (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/), but after a quick skim, it seems to hold some promise.

ETA: The tea was lovely, thanks for asking. :)

[rocketdodger]

I don't think "feels like" is the best choice of phrase here, given that computers don't have feelings.

Nick

Do you have evidence that computers don't have feelings?

While you answer, perhaps you could tell me if mice have feelings, if dogs have feelings, if chimpanzees have feelings, if dolphins have feelings, etc.

[cyborg]

The thermostat makes a decision. There is a computation made.

We could get into dangerous territory of Free-Will here where people start asserting that a decision can be something that isn't computational and isn't arbitrary because neither option in the dichotomy is palatable...

[westprog]

Again and again you keep assuming your conclusion and then feeding it back into your argument. Your argument in this post is nothing more than your assumption that there has to be a magical "experiencer"

Yes, that's implicit in the word "illusion". If there's nothing there to have an experience, or a belief, or a wish, then there is no illusion.


(and the reason it is magical is that otherwise 'it's turtles all the way down'), in other words you are again describing a dualistic approach to consciousness.


No, I'm not. I'm saying that for there to be an illusion, there has to be something capable of being fooled. That doesn't apply to a thermostat.

It might be possible to devise something without consciousness which can still experience illusion, but I don't know of anything.


The illusion (in this sense) is that the thermometer is not actually showing what is the "underlying reality" i.e. what the room's temperature is. That requires no observer it's just a property of the thermometer.


In other words it's simply an arbitrary statement about the operation of the thermostat. If the average temperature in the room is x, and the thermostat records y, we have an illusion. Trouble is, we can create or delete illusions simply by our choice of design parameters, without changing the experience of the thermostat in any way.

I repeat the challenge - describe an illusion with reference to the laws of physics only. I think it's meaningless.

[cyborg]

MEH.

[rocketdodger]

It's hard to see how the presence of an emergent property in thing X and the absence of that property in thing Y wouldn't constitute a qualitative difference between the two. In this case, at least, I certainly consider it a qualitative difference.


Ok, so you've acknowledged the need for "certain facts in the system's knowledge base" and "basic computational processes", but you're ignoring something in between -- specific systems to organize the information in such a way as to produce the phenomenon of sentience.

I think this is the only point we disagree on.

Is it possibly because you see neural architecture as hardware?

I see neural architecture as software. I can fully understand how looking at it as hardware would point to a qualitative difference.

These "systems" of which you speak, in my view, are just more data structures and information flow in the software. Hence their addition is merely quantitative to me. Do you see it differently?

[John Freestone]

I will try.

There is a notion that the AHB taught, that there is a body and it's attendant processes, thoughts, emotions, perceptions and habits. These do exist. They are however transitory in nature, they are ephemeral and changing all the time. For subtle reasons the you that starts to read this post is not the 'you' that will finish reading this post. The me that goes to sleep is not the 'me' that wakes up.

It is like the ship which is replaced piece by piece over time. One thousand years later , the 'ship' still exists but is it the same ship that is was one thousand years agao.

This led the AHB to the notion that there is a body but there is no 'self' beyond the body. And that while there is the body, the 'self' is not transcendant, it is impermanent, ephemeral and transitory. Thus while there is a body, the notion of the self is an illusion , in that it is a semantic convention that labels as permanent or static something that is neither.

So when it comes to consciousness, I put a different spin on it. Is a car fast?

That is a label that is applied to the behavior of a car. But when a car is not is motion, is it still fast? Does the label fast apply to a possibility that may never be expressed, meaning capable of great speed?

Is a car that has never been driven above one MPH, still fast? Do we say so because it is similar to other cars?Thanks for jumping in and putting that so well, DD. It made me think also of how selfhood is connected with the idea of a whole 'image' or constructed gestalt of a person's consciousness. I've forgotten the neurobiological or computational term for that just now. Both may be complete illusion. The body may process a certain stimulus, quite unconnected with others, for its momentary or evolutionary advantage, and, as someone has reminded us, no-one has as yet found any mediation that constitutes the building of a whole personal reality. We can construct this with the time-bridge of memory and repeated reactions to small stimuli. We could imagine the body even accessing reality rather as a program puts queries to a database. We dip into the pool of data that is reality to test certain questions: am I standing or sitting? is the horizon moving relative to me (nice to switch this query off at sea by chemical means!), etc. - endless tiny pieces of information that don't need to be seen holistically for effective living. Behind this, some subroutine is, when accessed, popping its own result into the system of linguistic construction, the evolutionarily advantageous lies: I am experiencing a seamless image of reality, and I am the person who did that a moment ago.

It almost gives me seasickness to think this, but it seems that all that needs to happen for me to believe those assertions is to have moments when I construct the assertions conceptually...which is very rarely indeed, yet their consequences influence almost everything I do the rest of the time.

The meditative process is useful in some ways, as it was for AHB, not least that we can learn to watch the body as if it were (or rather as it is - ) just another piece of the world doing its stuff. Meditating on the fact (reported earlier) that our motion is caused by some decision prior to our awareness of that decision is a powerful way to conceptualize the non-solution (of material monism) to the non-question of the HPC, and may cut a lot of argumentative corners. There is, however, another bizarre effect, which is that one can increase the sense of being a witness, separate from all matter, unchanging, which also seems to be a traditional assertion and purpose of meditation, even in Buddhism! And that's where I get very stuck indeed. One of my objections to the exercises set me by a Buddhist teacher was to divide all my momentary experiences into two categories, subjective impressions and real matter out there (nama and rupa), and I can't for the life of me do that other than by quite obvious assumption. Do I see a cup, or do I experience a cup-experience? Maybe they're the same. Maybe, in fact, the exercise itself is a good way to convince yourself of dualist nature, which was the conclusion of the particular form - that all is made of mind and matter. I don't know, maybe it was designed to exhaust that delusion and find that all is mind-matter. I gave up, partly because there was so much self-evident nonsense being told me.

The AHB seemed to accept some of his background of Hinduism, and commonly, Buddhists believe in reincarnation, though exactly what is being reincarnated from body to body I have never got to grips with. Materialism would allow for a material reincarnation, of course - since we are all recycled material - but there is a confusion here. There's the doctrine of no-self, and yet the belief that that same AHB now inhabits a current human form, having passed through several since then! :confused:

[skiba]

I think that people cling more to the belief that they are not machines. To reinforce this belief they assert that there are properties of the human that transcend an entirely mechanistic explanation.

Nick

Maybe so, but it's not really a daily thing for many people to ponder wheter s/he is a machine or more than a machine. Some never ponder about it. Depends who you ask, really.
"thinkers", scientists and skeptics alike, usually dont like to say "I don't know", so they HAVE TO come up with an explanation.
Leaving open the question of "What am I" or "HPC" just wouldn't be acceptible for people who tend to need an explanation to most thing, especially when it comes the consciousness. I don't mean to say it's not a thing to look into, but we all are biased to some extent about any subject. A totally honest approach is a rare thing.

Well atleast thats the impression I get when I watched Dan Dennets lecture on consciousness. Hes a smart man, and needs to explain it some how. Most of the lecture he gives examples of "tricks of the mind" and leaves it at that.

[rocketdodger]

If, and when, (especially if) such a program is constructed, we'll be able to step through every line of code, and find out just exactly where the assertion of consciousness comes from. We'll then be able to decide if it is comparable to the human's assertion of consciousness, and reflects a similar kind of inner state.

Do you think it would be possible, assuming the technology existed to keep track of individual neural impulses and analyze the amount of data generated, to do this for a human brain?

That is, do you think we can find out (from a simple measurement of neural impulses) just exactly where our assertion of consciousness comes from?

[Nick227]

Do you have evidence that computers don't have feelings?

While you answer, perhaps you could tell me if mice have feelings, if dogs have feelings, if chimpanzees have feelings, if dolphins have feelings, etc.

I don't have evidence that computers don't have feelings, as in experiencing feelings. Though I feel it reasonable to assume that they don't, given that they don't have any of the biological and neurobiological apparatus associated with feeling states.

Animals are more complex and don't quite see what the relevance is here.

Nick

[rocketdodger]

Can you demonstrate that "spontaneity" is not simply determinism with reduced self-awareness?

Nick

eta: to answer the question....feelings. A computer program can mimic the action of feelings but it does not experience them.

Yay, everyone jump aboard the pseudo-dualism merry-go-round!

*sigh* Prove that your girlfriend is actually experiencing feelings rather than mimicing the action of them.

[Nick227]

Yay, everyone jump aboard the pseudo-dualism merry-go-round!

*sigh* Prove that your girlfriend is actually experiencing feelings rather than mimicing the action of them.

If your reasoning is reduced to pointing out that, existentially, I cannot get inside someone else's head and confirm what they are experiencing...then I would say your argument is likely flagging some!

Do you experience feelings, RD? If so, how would you propose to create an artificial conscious unit that can also?

Nick

[rocketdodger]

I find that a revealing half-sentence. There's a strong attachment to the computing model of consciousness.

You could also find it revealing in the sense that I have a strong enough grasp on the fundamentals of computation to actually understand the computing model of consciousness.

[rocketdodger]

Can you help me understand what you mean by the internal model of a thermostat, Pixy?

The little piece of wire that expands or contracts according to external temperature. It is a "model" because it models the temperature. That it, it maps temperature values to a level of expansion or contraction. A given level of expansion or contraction represents a given external temperature.

[rocketdodger]

I agree. The ability to experience feelings is apparently, unique to biology. At least I don't think it's been demonstrated to exist in either inanimate objects or abstract processes.

Wrong. Laypeople have only ever attributed feelings to biological organisms. And that is only when they are adults. Children attribute feelings to all kinds of inorganic entities.

[rocketdodger]

Disconcerting, isn't it ?

Not at all! Because I understand the computational model, I know that I can re-program my subconscious decisions just like I can change my (apparently) conscious morality -- in fact, the model asserts that they are one and the same!

[westprog]

Do you think it would be possible, assuming the technology existed to keep track of individual neural impulses and analyze the amount of data generated, to do this for a human brain?

That is, do you think we can find out (from a simple measurement of neural impulses) just exactly where our assertion of consciousness comes from?

There's a big assumption there. The brain is a biological object. It can be abstracted, in some sense, as a computer. Certainly the brain can be a computer. However, we don't know if when we abstract away all of what seems, in the computational model, to be superfluous, we are disposing of inessentials.

So even if we could map the "computer program" of the mind, it might only be a starting point. The neuron might be a complex organ in its own right, rather than a one-bit processor.

[Beth]

Wow, really good thread. I'm sorry I have such trouble keeping up with it, I can't contribute much.

[
Let me make sure I understand this. You are saying that the only evidence I have for consciousness is behavior (true) and therefore, I claim that behavior is caused by consciousness. (false).
Are the words in parentheses your summation of my thought, or your own evaluation? My evaluation. I'm not denying that behaviors can (and do) occur without conscious awareness. Heartbeats are a good example.
I'm not claiming that all behavior is caused by conscious thought. Only some behavior. Do you disagree? It does not matter if it is all or some--what matters is that for those behaviors, the only evidence you have for the alleged cause is the observed effect. And nothing more. Well, there are also observations of my own private experiences, which are congruent with the reported private experiences of other individuals. These observations indicate that humans consistently report being conscious, making conscious decisions about goals followed by reasoning about that goal and deciding what actions they need to take to accomplish that goal, followed by taking those actions and (sometimes) accomplishing that goal. An example of this is a person who decides they are overweight, changes their eating habits, and successfully loses weight. Isn't that an example of conscious thought affecting behavior? If not, could you explain why you don’t consider it evidence in support of that hypotheses?

Three thousand years ago, the same behavior, for the same reasons, was attributed to the actions of the gods, every bit as logically.
I’m not following this at all. Three thousand years ago, all human behavior was attributed to the actions of gods? Human beings weren’t considered to be autonomous agents? I don’t think this is what you mean, but that's how it reads to me. So I'm not sure what you are trying to say. Are you saying that conscious thought does not impact our behavior at all? All of our behavior changes our environment, and impacts our behavior. That is trivially true. There is nothing special about private behaviors that somehow makes them the causal, and the public the caused, behaviors. Again, I’m not following you at all. I’m not denying the existence of feedback loops. I’m more than happy to acknowledge that public behavior can effect private behaviors as well. It's pretty well documented that changing behaviors can change your mental state. What I’m saying is that a human being can make a decision that then can cause a change in public behaviors, even habitual behaviors which are often done without conscious thought. Are we in disagreement here?

Correlation is not causation, true. But it is a very useful pointer to causal relationships. If you hypothesize a causal relationship (such as consciousness can cause changes in behavior), correlations can be interpreted as supporting evidence (not proof) that the causal relationship exists. This is how much scientific research works. But I think you knew that already. Of course it is a pointer. But sciences differ in how much stock they put in correlations, without the actual manipulation of an independent variable. Yes, well there are ethical limitations on the experiments we can do on humans. I think this is a case where it’s reasonable to hypothesize that a causal relationship exists and that we can, to some extent, control our behavior through the use of our conscious mind. I’ve yet to see convincing evidence that this is not the case.

Actually, no it doesn't. According to Penrose, who was referenced earlier in this thread, consciousness is dependent on quantum interactions in the nervous system. If this theory is true, then the timing of the motions and the conscious thoughts is not an issue since it is well established that quatum interactions are not limited to linear progression through time in the forward direction.
Near as I can tell, Penrose assumes a causal consciousness, notes that the timing as observed by Libet is backwards given that assumption, and concludes that it must be a quantum thing, since backward causation is not taboo there. I have read quite a bit of Penrose, and there is a reason he is not a major figure in the peer-reviewed journals of neuropsych research. I’ve only recently actually gotten around to reading some of Penrose on this topic, but the stuff I’ve got was published in the early nineties. I thought the timing result was a more recent observation but I might be wrong about that. Do you know the approximate date that Libet’s findings were published? If the timing observation came first, you have a valid point.

Just a theory, of course. It's entirely unproven. My point is only that the evidence you cite does not blow the alternative theory out of the water as you claim.Not just unproven, but unsupported.
There is a former associate of Penrose’s who’s specialty is anesthesiology. His research indicates that general anesthetics affect the nervous system at the site they hypothesized a quantum reaction would occur. [Sorry, I can’t give a cite for this, I happened to catch him on a PBS talking heads show where he was discussing his findings. He was also a presenter at Beyond Belief.] While this doesn't prove the hypothesis, I think it does qualify as providing support for it.

[Piggy]

Really ? Sounds like a claim, to me.

You want to argue that people really aren't conscious, sentient beings... go right ahead.

I don't think the existence of sentience needs to be argued among sentient beings, myself.

[cyborg]

I don't think the existence of sentience needs to be argued among sentient beings, myself.

Well I don't think the existence of souls needs to be argued amongst God's children but that's just me.

[Piggy]

Prove that your girlfriend is actually experiencing feelings rather than mimicing the action of them.

Why would this need to be done?

We all have similar brains.

[rocketdodger]

If your reasoning is reduced to pointing out that, existentially, I cannot get inside someone else's head and confirm what they are experiencing...then I would say your argument is likely flagging some!

Um... that is the argument. Experience requires you to be what is experiencing, thus it is impossible to confirm any type of experience in any other entity.

Do you experience feelings, RD? If so, how would you propose to create an artificial conscious unit that can also?

Nick

Yes.

I have already explained this. Take a robust reasoning system, give it an initial set of facts and goals, give it a means to learn new facts about the world, and you are good to go.

The feelings will not be anything like what I experience. How could they? There would be analogs, though -- "pain" when the system reasoned it was in trouble or damaged, "happy" when it reasoned it has reached a goal or subgoal.

[skiba]

How is an experience different from a reaction?


I've gone through this many times with pixy.



The thermostat makes a decision. There is a computation made.

Rocks also make decision to obey gravity? When things react according TLOP its a decision? Or is it only a decision when we label it as one, as it is in the thermostat or PC

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Perhaps there is an integration function; I am not certain there needs to be one. We don't perceive redness, roundness, shininess, and infer "apple", we see the redness of an apple, the roundness of an apple, and the shininess of an apple. The integration may well be in the apple, not in our brain.
And yet if we take a quick look, without stopping to introspect, we just see the apple. Without some study of neurophysiology, the average person would not know that he was seeing the redness, roundness, and shininess separately. He would think he is just seeing an apple. It's fairly well integrated in our "minds," if not in our brains.

Why isn't it a grab-bag of disjoint sensations instead of a reasonably coherent whole? Perhaps just because all the sensations are happening at once. But then a complex scene with an apple, a cat, and a chair would be a confusing mess.

~~ Paul

[Piggy]

Then what's missing?

What's missing is an understanding of how sentience -- not just sensing, processing, and reaction -- is generated in the brain. Without that, you can't begin to claim that it can be replicated. As Marvin shows, all that can go on without awareness, which appears to be some kind of post-processing of already highly processed information.


Qualitatively different how?

I keep asking this, and I keep getting non-answers.

Y'know the difference between when you're awake, on the one hand, and when you're in deep sleep but not dreaming, or totally knocked out on anesthesia, on the other?

That's how.


It's an illusion. Which we can reproduce in fairly simply computer programs.
No. You can't. No one ever has.

If you've got a sentient computer in your basement, bring it out and claim your prizes.

What's amazing about it?
If you're not amazed, I'd suggest you're not paying close enough attention.


You can't simply say, well the brain is doing X, Y, and Z -- among God knows how many other things -- when it's conscious, and this little device also does X, Y, and Z, therefore it must be aware.
Until you can show me that there is some other thing, and that it is (or even might be) relevant, yes, I can.

Well, yeah, you can, but it doesn't make it logical.

It's not logical.

And I think Marvin puts the lie to it.

Sentience is not simply a byproduct of the processing.

[rocketdodger]

There's a big assumption there. The brain is a biological object. It can be abstracted, in some sense, as a computer. Certainly the brain can be a computer. However, we don't know if when we abstract away all of what seems, in the computational model, to be superfluous, we are disposing of inessentials.

So even if we could map the "computer program" of the mind, it might only be a starting point. The neuron might be a complex organ in its own right, rather than a one-bit processor.

Nice dodge.

How about this: replace "individual neural impulses" with "any physical property" and re-answer my question.

[Piggy]

I think this is the only point we disagree on.

Is it possibly because you see neural architecture as hardware?

I see neural architecture as software. I can fully understand how looking at it as hardware would point to a qualitative difference.

These "systems" of which you speak, in my view, are just more data structures and information flow in the software. Hence their addition is merely quantitative to me. Do you see it differently?

Yes, I do.

I'm not focused exclusively on hardware and software.

I'm also looking at the phenomena which are generated by the hardware and software.

Brains which produce sentience -- consciousness, felt experience -- are producing a phenomenon when they operate which does not occur when, say, thermostats or computers operate.

That's the qualitative difference in the systems.

And sure enough, you'll never find it if you only look at the hardware and software, without paying attention to what the systems are doing.

The qualitative difference is in what they're doing, not in the low-level nuts and bolts stuff.

[skiba]

Yes.

I have already explained this. Take a robust reasoning system, give it an initial set of facts and goals, give it a means to learn new facts about the world, and you are good to go.

The feelings will not be anything like what I experience. How could they? There would be analogs, though -- "pain" when the system reasoned it was in trouble or damaged, "happy" when it reasoned it has reached a goal or subgoal.

Interesting.

Would this machine also have a mode for "non-analytical / non-reasoning sensory input" Like nick described his thoughtless awareness of the chair?
From a mechanical aspect how would accomplish this?

[Piggy]

I have already explained this. Take a robust reasoning system, give it an initial set of facts and goals, give it a means to learn new facts about the world, and you are good to go.

The feelings will not be anything like what I experience. How could they? There would be analogs, though -- "pain" when the system reasoned it was in trouble or damaged, "happy" when it reasoned it has reached a goal or subgoal.

What makes you think that analogs are good enough?

The fact is, you have no reason at all to believe that you could produce a sentient system, one that is aware of itself and its surroundings in anything like the way we are, and in which other mammals probably are.

What you describe -- '"pain" when the system reasoned it was in trouble or damaged, "happy" when it reasoned it has reached a goal or subgoal' -- is not sentience.

Why are you pretending that it is?

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

What you describe -- '"pain" when the system reasoned it was in trouble or damaged, "happy" when it reasoned it has reached a goal or subgoal' -- is not sentience.

Why are you pretending that it is?
What if it responded to pain in all ways similarly to a human? Would it be sentient then?

~~ Paul

[rocketdodger]

Rocks also make decision to obey gravity? When things react according TLOP its a decision? Or is it only a decision when we label it as one, as it is in the thermostat or PC

When we label it as one. In this case, labeling what a thermostat does as a decision is consistent with the rest of science. Labeling a rock falling as a decision is not.

[rocketdodger]

Interesting.

Would this machine also have a mode for "non-analytical / non-reasoning sensory input" Like nick described his thoughtless awareness of the chair?
From a mechanical aspect how would accomplish this?

Nick doesn't know what he is talking about. This was demonstrated when he claimed he is "aware" of a chair in a stadium, among thousands of others, in his peripheral vision, that he doesn't even notice.

From a mechanical aspect the idea of "thoughtless awareness" is nonsense. That is why the question is so illuminating. What is different between a leaf on a tree you become aware of and all the other leaves? If you truly remain thoughtless, why do you only become aware of certain leaves?

[westprog]

Which we still seem to lack a defintion of.

A machine could do that.

that is the only standard.

You say you have a sensation of consciousness, yet you can not define it or say what it is. You could be a machine saying the same thing. How can you tell the difference?


You can't, for sure. A machine can assert it's consciousness trivially, in an essentially meaningless way. That's why, when or if a computer program does produce the emergent property, we'll need to trace the code to see just what's going on.


However you could be a machine, I can't take it on faith that you arent.


It's an inference, from similarities in our stated experience, and our apparent configuration. It's not certain.



It is because it is the only one that states a definition. You only appear to be consciouss, you just assume that you are.

Define the sense of consciousness, what is it, even as a metaphor.

It's a strange requirement - as if everyone posting to this thread didn't have access to the sensation.

[rocketdodger]

What makes you think that analogs are good enough?

... snip ...

Why are you pretending that it is?

WTF? You told me you think dogs are sentient and that mice may be. Are you going to claim that dogs and mice experience the same feelings we do?

The fact is, you have no reason at all to believe that you could produce a sentient system, one that is aware of itself and its surroundings in anything like the way we are,

Is that how you define sentience, now? "like the way we are?" I already admitted that to be well beyond our understanding at this moment.

and in which other mammals probably are.

Like rats? hmmmm

[rocketdodger]

You can't, for sure. A machine can assert it's consciousness trivially, in an essentially meaningless way. That's why, when or if a computer program does produce the emergent property, we'll need to trace the code to see just what's going on.

Why does this not apply to your brain as well?

[westprog]

Nice dodge.


If by "nice dodge" you mean "nice pointing out the inherent problems in the Strong AI viewpoint", thanks.


How about this: replace "individual neural impulses" with "any physical property" and re-answer my question.


Since I believe consciousness has some kind of physical origin, it's likely that duplication of the physical conditions that create it will reproduce it. But I don't know that to be the case.

[skiba]

From a mechanical aspect the idea of "thoughtless awareness" is nonsense.

That it is, but its part of the human experience.


What is different between a leaf on a tree you become aware of and all the other leaves? If you truly remain thoughtless, why do you only become aware of certain leaves?

I dont see where your getting at this. Why couldn't You be aware of hundreads of leafs at the same time as a "whole" when no-thought is happening?

Or you focuse on some leaf on the tree and THEN no-thought happens.

[Nick227]

Um... that is the argument. Experience requires you to be what is experiencing, thus it is impossible to confirm any type of experience in any other entity.

Well, empirical research has shown that certain biological and neurobiological pathways are involved in the experience of feeling - nerves, cortices, etc. I think it's pretty justified to state that things which don't have any of these pathways, such as computers, do not feel.

Of course, I cannot demonstrate unequivocally that the computer does not feel but it seems to me as reasonable an assumption as that which any empiricist makes prior to experimentation.


Yes.

I have already explained this. Take a robust reasoning system, give it an initial set of facts and goals, give it a means to learn new facts about the world, and you are good to go.

The feelings will not be anything like what I experience. How could they? There would be analogs, though -- "pain" when the system reasoned it was in trouble or damaged, "happy" when it reasoned it has reached a goal or subgoal.

You can make the computer behave as though it has feelings but you cannot give it the experience of feelings. It's not made of flesh-and-bone. It didn't evolve for billenia in an environment where the capacity to consciously monitor itself, ie feel, was an evolutionary advantage.

Nick

[Nick227]

What's missing is an understanding of how sentience -- not just sensing, processing, and reaction -- is generated in the brain. Without that, you can't begin to claim that it can be replicated. As Marvin shows, all that can go on without awareness, which appears to be some kind of post-processing of already highly processed information.



Sentience is not simply a byproduct of the processing.

Well, in considering how one might go about making a computer sentient, a few thoughts...

...for a start you'd have to give it a value system that replicated that of evolution. This isn't too hard, I imagine.

...then it would need to experience this value system kinesthetically. I have no idea how you could do this from silicon.

...then you would have to get it to identify with its processing functions, such that instead of regarding them as "this computer's processing" it would consider them "my processing." Then it could create human-style selfhood as an internal model, and regard its processing as intrinsic to its existence.

I think the hard bit is the still the actual feeling bit, but I'm not clear. I'm also not clear that the above would create real sentience but it would be a good start. For sure it would be exciting to have a computer actually identify with its processing, and defend its computations as though threatened with non-existence.

Nick

[Nick227]

I know that I can re-program my subconscious decisions just like I can change my (apparently) conscious morality -- in fact, the model asserts that they are one and the same!

Well, your experience of "I" itself is only arising as a result of a subconscious process, so actually little conscious reprogramming is likely happening here. In a sense you are merely subjugating selfhood to unconsciousness. No wonder you don't experience thoughtless awareness!

Nick

[Nick227]

I have already explained this. Take a robust reasoning system, give it an initial set of facts and goals, give it a means to learn new facts about the world, and you are good to go.

The feelings will not be anything like what I experience. How could they? There would be analogs, though -- "pain" when the system reasoned it was in trouble or damaged, "happy" when it reasoned it has reached a goal or subgoal.

For sure you can create a p-zed. But, firstly, why do you assume that feelings in others are not like yours? And, secondly, how do you get it to feel in the first place? It seems to me that you are creating from an existential reality (that of not knowing for sure what others feel) the assumption that each individual's feelings are utterly different, and then using this to put forward a well-acknowledged inadequate model. Given the phenomenal degree of coherence between individual humans' neurological apparatus, does this not strike you as a rather tentative way to construct an argument?

Nick

[Nick227]

Would this machine also have a mode for "non-analytical / non-reasoning sensory input" Like nick described his thoughtless awareness of the chair?
From a mechanical aspect how would accomplish this?

It would have to be aware of the space between the thoughts. It would have to be aware of ground, not just signal. It would have to be attracted to that which is intransitory.

Nick

[PixyMisa]

What's missing is an understanding of how sentience -- not just sensing, processing, and reaction -- is generated in the brain. Without that, you can't begin to claim that it can be replicated.
Another non-answer.

What's the difference between sentience and "just sensing, processing, and reaction"? Why do you even think there is a difference?

Y'know the difference between when you're awake, on the one hand, and when you're in deep sleep but not dreaming, or totally knocked out on anesthesia, on the other?
Except that my little computer chip does many things that an unconscious person doesn't do. So wrong. Also, because you have failed to mention any specific behaviour or process, a non-answer.

No. You can't. No one ever has.
I have. There are millions of them around.

If you've got a sentient computer in your basement, bring it out and claim your prizes.
What's the point? You'll just say "It's not sentient because it's not sentient because it's not sentient!"

[Piggy]

What if it responded to pain in all ways similarly to a human? Would it be sentient then?

Not necessarily, because sentience is not a gross physical response, it's an activity of the brain.

(We could imagine, for example, a non-sentient robot programmed to respond aptly.)

If you want to judge whether an apparently sentient being who reports being in pain actually is in pain, it would probably be best to determine if its brain -- or whatever substitutes for a brain -- is doing the kinds of things that a brain is doing which we know to be sentient when it is aware of pain.

[Piggy]

You told me you think dogs are sentient and that mice may be. Are you going to claim that dogs and mice experience the same feelings we do?

No, but that's not the issue.

Sentience is not a matter of having a human experience. It's a matter of having any experience at all.

[Piscivore]

If you want to judge whether an apparently sentient being who reports being in pain actually is in pain, it would probably be best to determine if its brain -- or whatever substitutes for a brain -- is doing the kinds of things that a brain is doing which we know to be sentient when it is aware of pain.

That seems a bit unnecessarily anthropocentric.

Sentience is not a matter of having a human experience. It's a matter of having any experience at all.

What's experience, then? Seems to be that the Grand Canyon is a record of experience of the rocks, yeah?

[Piggy]

Is that how you define sentience, now? "like the way we are?" I already admitted that to be well beyond our understanding at this

No no no. Anything at all like the way we are. That is, anything even remotely resembling it.

You're trying to define awareness in completely mechanical ways -- because it suits your purposes -- while simply ignoring the phenomenon of sentience.

You're defining "aware" in purely mechanical ways so that thermostats get to be "aware".

This allows you to file conciousness and mechanical reactions in the "aware" drawer, and declare there's nothing significantly different here.

In doing so, you simply elide the very real difference between the sentience of a transistor (it doesn't have any) with the sentience of, say, higher mammals (they do).

You're trying to tell me, "Oh, well, this thing reacts to stimulus, so it's 'aware', and we're also 'aware'" while ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that the thermostat isn't conscious and we are.

Those 2 definitions of "aware" are qualitatively different.

Because of this, if you want to use "aware" in that way, we're going to have to find another term to designate the difference -- and I'm using the term IchneumonWasp rightly suggested: sentience.

That's a real difference. And you can't tell me that you know how the brain creates sentience, because you don't.

And you're not going to tell me that anyone has created an ACE, because they haven't.

The system features and components you've laid out, while probably necessary to any conscious system, do not appear to explain sentience by themselves.

If you could explain how they did, you'd be rich and famous.

[Piggy]

That seems a bit unnecessarily anthropocentric.

Actually, it's not. We simply find ourselves in the situation that the only machine we know of which we're certain creates sentience is the brain.

Since it's a product of the brain, looking to gross physical behavior to determine if it's happening doesn't make any sense.

(Does the name Terry Schiavo ring a bell? Look what happened when people tried to judge if the brain was conscious by looking at the body. The brain scans told a much clearer story.)

If we want to know if something is sentient, we first need to figure out how our brains generate the phenomenon of sentience, then from that try to determine which other creatures can be reasonably assumed to have brains that do that as well.

What's experience, then? Seems to be that the Grand Canyon is a record of experience of the rocks, yeah?

But that's just a semantic similarity.

When we're talking about conscious experience, felt experience, we're probably going to have to wait for a precise definition til we know more about how it's produced, and hence what it is.

Sentience -- the feeling of being someone, of having individuality, that kind of thing -- is something we're all aware of. And we know desks don't have that experience, because they have no brains which would allow them to.

And we ourselves move in and out of it.

As the article RandFan posted indicated, it seems perfectly reasonable to say that when we wake up every morning, our consciousness reboots itself, in a sense, pulls up a lot of data and starts the programs and actually re-creates "us" on the spot.

We don't have to ask "where did we go" while we were alseep and not dreaming.

That was a problem for the soul, but it's not a problem for sentience.

Sentience didn't "go" anywhere. It just stopped. Then it started again.

Right now I think a kind of quasi-functional definition is the best we can hope for. Sentience is a function of the brain which creates the sensation of a self. That's pretty darn sloppy. So we can only point to the phenomenon and say, "See that... that's what I'm talking about -- I don't know how or why it's happening, or exactly what's making it happen, but that."

When my car breaks down, and the gauges don't work anymore, I'm bummed out, but I don't worry about how the car feels about it.

When I took care of my stepdad while he died of brain cancer, when he lost the ability to speak, it was unbearably difficult for us, too, because we knew he was experiencing things, and not able to tell us what he wanted. We knew he could be in pain, and not be able to tell us he needed to be moved.

And that's not some philosophical speculation. That's real-world.

This is significant. It's important. It's a meaningful question. It makes a difference whether a thing has sentience or not.

Which is why I hope we find out more about it than we know now before I die.

[Piggy]

Another non-answer.

What's the difference between sentience and "just sensing, processing, and reaction"? Why do you even think there is a difference?

It was an accurate answer, if not very precise.

I think there's a difference because it seems pretty clear that sentience is a rather high-order function of the brain.

And from examples like Marvin, we see that sentience of a basic process appears clearly to be unnecessary to the functioning of that process.

So there's no reason to expect that systems which can sense, process, and react should be sentient.

It seems clear from what we know of the brain that consciousness is a higher-order (and, in a sense, after-the-fact) function, which is specialized.

Therefore, I do not believe that thermostats and computers are sentient.

If Dennett's A/B brain hypothesis is correct, then grasshoppers and worms aren't sentient either.

I think that's likely correct.

In other words, I'm not just looking at computer models.

[Piggy]

Except that my little computer chip does many things that an unconscious person doesn't do. So wrong. Also, because you have failed to mention any specific behaviour or process, a non-answer.

It's only a non-answer if you refuse to unpeel your eyeballs from your computer simulations and actually look at the world.

You asked me the difference, and I told you.

I wasn't comparing unconscious humans and a computer chip.

There's a phenomenon we all experience, which is created by our brains, called "consciousness", "felt experience", "sentience", etc.

This phenomenon seems to be generated by sectors of the brain which handle processed information. We don't know how that happens yet.

Sentience is not a "behavior" so we can't define it in terms of gross bodily behavior.

We don't know how it's produced, so we can't yet talk about which "processes" are involved.

However, we do know the phenomenon exists, because we all experience it.

And we can safely conclude that our desks don't, because they don't have anything like a brain that would allow them to.

As for computers and thermostats, they also do not appear to have anything built into them which would give rise to conscious experience.

It's really that simple.

[Piggy]

I have. There are millions of them around.

That's so damn silly, there's really no way to respond.

You're pretending that mechanical sensing, processing, and reacting = sentience, and it doesn't.

That view simply does not match what we know about the one machine that certainly does generate sentience -- the brain.

There is no reason to think that there is even one sentient machine on the planet.

[Piggy]

What's the point? You'll just say "It's not sentient because it's not sentient because it's not sentient!"

No, I'll say it's not sentient because we have no reason to believe it might be.

Yeah, it's doing a lot of the basic stuff a brain does.

Ok.

Is it doing the specific stuff that a brain does to produce sentience?

Nope.

If it is, it would be a horrible accident. But since you can examine how a computer works and find no indication anywhere that there's a component that would produce sentience, it's rather silly to claim that the thing is conscious.

[Dancing David]

I've gone through this many times with pixy.



Rocks also make decision to obey gravity? When things react according TLOP its a decision? Or is it only a decision when we label it as one, as it is in the thermostat or PC

That is the problem with the search for ontology, it doesn't matter.

If particles have choice or not, it doesn't matter. They still obey the approximate models of reality that we create and call TLOP.

we can only define 'behaviors' that we define as choices and then retro fit them.

[John Freestone]

There is no need for a dualistic approach to consciousness. If you have a dualistic approach - i.e. consciousness is a little man driving the body, sitting behind the eyes - then you are going to find problems with the issue of what makes the decisions - consciousness or reasoning.

But if you accept that the mind is part of being a human being, and that consciousness is part of the mind, that issue disappears. The mind makes decisions. The mind exhibits consciousness. The hard problem is to determine how the mind produces consciousness. There's no need to consider consciousness as a seperate thing from mind.More semantic confusions appear! I'm sure I got the picture earlier from at least one monist that what that meant was that there was matter, but no mind. Mind does not exist, someone said as flatly as that. I'm sorry, this thread is frying the few brain cells I have left and remembering who said what is harder than the HPC. Now, westprog, you apparently consider yourself a monist for not believing in a little man behind the eyes making decisions. Yet you consider consciousness a property of mind, which you say is part of a human being, but do not specify at that point if you mean the physical stuff of a human body exclusively, and whether, in that sense, consciousness is a function of the physical human body. Do you see what I mean? - you seem to put the mind in between the 'human being' and consciousness, and do not seem to accept the proposition that there is no difference of what I'll dare to call a substantive nature (to inject yet another meaningless gathering of letters!).

It's all looking semantic to me, from conscious rocks (or at least thermostats) to fully formed human bodies who have only the lie of consciousness. I follow the logic and most of it makes sense if the meaning of the words are flexible enough. Furthermore, I suspect that it isn't actually a problem of language (i.e. that developing a specific language to describe life and cosmos and consciousness would solve the problem). I suspect that the Kosmos might be words all the way down. Now that would turn the tables again! In the beginning.... :D

[Dancing David]

Interesting.

Would this machine also have a mode for "non-analytical / non-reasoning sensory input" Like nick described his thoughtless awareness of the chair?
From a mechanical aspect how would accomplish this?


If it creates perception from sensations then yes.

[Piscivore]

Actually, it's not. We simply find ourselves in the situation that the only machine we know of which we're certain creates sentience is the brain.

Since it's a product of the brain, looking to gross physical behavior to determine if it's happening doesn't make any sense.

(Does the name Terry Schiavo ring a bell? Look what happened when people tried to judge if the brain was conscious by looking at the body. The brain scans told a much clearer story.)

If we want to know if something is sentient, we first need to figure out how our brains generate the phenomenon of sentience, then from that try to determine which other creatures can be reasonably assumed to have brains that do that as well.
That's my point. You've got an unspoken assumption there that the way we do it is the only way it can be done. If the only standard we have to judge sentience is our own model, we're more likely than not going to miss it when we find it elsewhere.

But that's just a semantic similarity.
Which is why we need to be clear and not use ambigous words like "experience".

When we're talking about conscious experience, felt experience, we're probably going to have to wait for a precise definition til we know more about how it's produced, and hence what it is.
Agreed.

Sentience -- the feeling of being someone, of having individuality, that kind of thing -- is something we're all aware of. And we know desks don't have that experience, because they have no brains which would allow them to.
But we don't know computers don't. My computer knows it isn't your computer, doesn't it?

Right now I think a kind of quasi-functional definition is the best we can hope for. Sentience is a function of the brain which creates the sensation of a self. That's pretty darn sloppy.
Agreed.

So we can only point to the phenomenon and say, "See that... that's what I'm talking about -- I don't know how or why it's happening, or exactly what's making it happen, but that."
That's precisely why you don't want to limit yourself to looking only for human-ish sentience.

When my car breaks down, and the gauges don't work anymore, I'm bummed out, but I don't worry about how the car feels about it.
You obviously don't drive a Volkswagen. :)

When I took care of my stepdad while he died of brain cancer, when he lost the ability to speak, it was unbearably difficult for us, too, because we knew he was experiencing things, and not able to tell us what he wanted. We knew he could be in pain, and not be able to tell us he needed to be moved.

And that's not some philosophical speculation. That's real-world.

This is significant. It's important. It's a meaningful question. It makes a difference whether a thing has sentience or not.

Which is why I hope we find out more about it than we know now before I die.
Agreed.

[John Freestone]

Can you demonstrate that "spontaneity" is not simply determinism with reduced self-awareness?

NickThat was a succinct expression of what I waffled in several paragraphs, thanks.

eta: to answer the question....feelings. A computer program can mimic the action of feelings but it does not experience them.I imagine that feelings are quite easy to model (though you're right here in the sense that the question related only to a reflective computer program, which suggests something fairly self-contained). Include a complex and powerful sensory system and motor system, finely monitoring its own workings, and combine that with being a machine built by several billion years of evolution, and I don't think emotions appear spooky enough to back off from dismissing the HPC. We have a tradition of thinking of emotions as very cerebral, but they are rather animalistic, so the impressions they give us are not very different from sensory impressions, and the motor feedback is rather automatic too. We feel fear at least partly because we find ourselves shaking. Anger is indicated by a redness or pressure in the face and upper body. (These are just crude descriptions of what we recognise by complex and subtle physical cues.)

I think our habitual failure to conceive of emotions as physical states is due to the cultural development of theories of mental and soul states, which seem likely to be romantic notions and possibly quite wrong. When we consider anger, say, we're likely to talk about what's happening in the brain, but it is a whole-body condition, perhaps even a social process. Often two pairs of eyes and nostrils are widening almost simultaneously, cortisone and adrenaline keeping pace in both sub-systems...rarified higher impressions have little to do with it, and there doesn't have to be any verbal thinking at all. So if a robot had systems to process how ready it was for fight or flight, or gather data about how suitable conditions were to prepare to power down, they might be considered rudimentary emotions, I think.

[PixyMisa]

It was an accurate answer, if not very precise.
That's the problem.

You say that my circuit is not sentient. I say it is.

So I ask you to point to what exactly it is that shows you that the circuit isn't sentient. And you say - well, it's not sentient.

That doesn't help at all.

I think there's a difference because it seems pretty clear that sentience is a rather high-order function of the brain.
What is it that it does that's different? What is it in the way that it does it that's different?

Yes, it's more complex. Yes, it involves vastly more variables. But that's just quantitative.

If your point is that a sufficiently large quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference, then we're actually on the same track, and just arguing over terminology.

If that's not your point, then you need to show me.

So there's no reason to expect that systems which can sense, process, and react should be sentient.
What is sentience? I've defined awareness and self-awareness in terms of mechanism and behaviour, but this sentience is fuzzy stuff.

It seems clear from what we know of the brain that consciousness is a higher-order (and, in a sense, after-the-fact) function, which is specialized.
Sure. Yes. Absolutely. But my little microcontroller chip can do that. A thermostat can't - but that's the entire point of the thermostat example.

Therefore, I do not believe that thermostats and computers are sentient.
That is still a non-sequitur.

If Dennett's A/B brain hypothesis is correct, then grasshoppers and worms aren't sentient either.
Quite possible. But if grasshoppers aren't sentient, that's just a trick of the way evolution has wired them up. There is, after all, even less difference between the grasshopper's brain and ours than there is between us and my microcontroller.

Unless, again, you're saying that the essential difference is quantitative, in which case I agree.

[Mercutio]

Sentience is not a "behavior" so we can't define it in terms of gross bodily behavior.
Please explain how you learned to label your own experience of sentience.

We don't know how it's produced, so we can't yet talk about which "processes" are involved.
The "it's produced" is frighteningly close to the dualistic language that creates the HPC.

However, we do know the phenomenon exists, because we all experience it.
... we do know better than to trust our introspective accounts to tell us what sort of explanation is required.

And we can safely conclude that our desks don't, because they don't have anything like a brain that would allow them to.
Recall, the vocabulary of sentience, consciousness, etc., preceded an understanding of the nervous system that would allow you to make that claim.

As for computers and thermostats, they also do not appear to have anything built into them which would give rise to conscious experience.
Or that one.

It's really that simple.
Um... no.

[PixyMisa]

Can you help me understand what you mean by the internal model of a thermostat, Pixy?
This has been answered, but just to repeat: The bimetallic strip, or whatever other mechanism is used - even, potentially, a rock with suitable properties - is the model.

I'm also wondering whether you consider there to be any distinction between the 'awareness' of a thermostat and the reaction of a rock to temperature - i.e. to change state and chemical composition - and between what people often assume, the non-reflexive consciousness of lower animals and self-aware human consciousness.
There seems to be two parts to that question.

I consider there to be a difference between a thermostat and a rock, because a thermostat processes information and a rock doesn't. You can use a rock as part of a thermostat (if you can find the right sort of rock), but a rock by itself is not a thermostat.

A thermostat processes information. It - as Skiba keeps complaining - switches. A rock does not switch.

A neuron is a sort of switch. A complicated sort of switch, but in essence the same thing as a thermostat. Certain stimuli elicit certain responses.

Now, we get to the separation I keep mentioning. A thermostat is aware: It responds non-linearly to the conditions it models. But it is not self-aware: It has no model of itself, no way of examining its own behaviour.

The difference is whether the switch network has internal feedback or not.

Insect brains are plenty complex enough to have internal feedback loops that would allow for self-awareness. They just don't seem to act that way. Likewise, it's easy enough to program a computer to be self-aware, but it's even easier to program a computer such that it is not self-aware. (However, these days, the tasks we ask computers to do are so complicated that the easiest way to get them done is often to program in some degree of self-awareness.)

Does a thermostat have an internal model, but not a piece of granite?Yup.

Presumably a cat is also "capable of contextual analysis of its senses and memories, and changing its behaviour based on that".Certainly. Cats are notoriously bad at changing their behaviour, but they can in times of dire need. ;)

Is there a difference in consciousness, and if so, is it merely one of complexity, medium and temporal causation (i.e. evolved complex flesh rather than relatively simple, manufactured mineral)?My view is that once you have the feedback loop, the difference is just one of complexity. More and more layers.

I'm afraid I missed your earlier post, if there was one (you said 'As I said' here), so I'm sorry if this is asking you to repeat.I was paraphrasing - in my initial post on the microcontroller I said:

Okay, here:

I can build something that is conscious.

I can do it the hard way, with a couple of hundred discrete transistors.

Or I can do it the easy way, with, say, a 68HC08 8-bit microcontroller.

Let's examine the microcontroller for a moment.

It has both analog and digital inputs for senses.
It has digital outputs for taking action.
It has on-chip flash for long-term memory.
It has ram and registers for short-term memory.
It even has timers to give it an internal sense of time.

Now, without power it's an inert lump of contaminated silicon, but without food we humans don't do so well either.

So let's power it up and do a little programming.

Now it can take inputs and respond to them, singly or in combination with other inputs or with the data in its memory.

And it can take that input and analyse it and store information about it in its memory.

And it can take a record of its actions and store that in its memory

And it can examine its memory, and take actions based on that, or write the results of its analysis back to its memory again.

And it can adjust its own programming based on any of this.

So what exactly is it that people do that a $1.95 microcontroller chip doesn't?
I'm still waiting for an answer to that question.

[rocketdodger]

And we can safely conclude that our desks don't, because they don't have anything like a brain that would allow them to.

As for computers and thermostats, they also do not appear to have anything built into them which would give rise to conscious experience.

It's really that simple.

Suppose there are beings who are as far past us as we are past microcontrollers.

Suppose they, as information processing, experience themselves on a level beyond our comprehension. As you would say, on a "qualitatively different" level. Call it sentient+.

Would they be correct, or incorrect, in asserting that we are merely mechanical objects incapable of experience because we don't have anything resembling their brains that would allow us to?

[PixyMisa]

It's only a non-answer if you refuse to unpeel your eyeballs from your computer simulations and actually look at the world.

You asked me the difference, and I told you.
No, you just said "Because it's not". You didn't actually tell me a difference.

I wasn't comparing unconscious humans and a computer chip.Yes, you were.

There's a phenomenon we all experience, which is created by our brains, called "consciousness", "felt experience", "sentience", etc.Sure. What is it?

This phenomenon seems to be generated by sectors of the brain which handle processed information. We don't know how that happens yet.

Sentience is not a "behavior" so we can't define it in terms of gross bodily behavior.
It is certainly a behaviour, because all you get is behaviours. Everything's a behaviour.

If you can't tell me what it is, that's okay, but at least tell me what it does.

We don't know how it's produced, so we can't yet talk about which "processes" are involved.We know it's produced by brain processes.

However, we do know the phenomenon exists, because we all experience it.Which tells us only that there is some process happening.

And we can safely conclude that our desks don't, because they don't have anything like a brain that would allow them to.Sure.

As for computers and thermostats, they also do not appear to have anything built into them which would give rise to conscious experience.True for thermostats, as I've said time and time again. Once more: That's the point of the thermostat example. It's aware but not self-aware.

But it's a mere assertion when it comes computers - unless you can show me something that human consciousness does that computers can't do, or some process that happens in the brain that can't happen in computers. And it's an awfully weak assertion, given all the parallels that we can tie between human consciousness and computer programs.

It's really that simple.

[skiba]

That's the point of the thermostat example. It's aware but not self-aware.



The word "aware" is very misleading the way you use it.
The thermostat reacts to the temperature. It's not aware of anything.



It was freezing in my bed room last night, maybe the thermostat wasnt aware of this.

[westprog]

When we label it as one. In this case, labeling what a thermostat does as a decision is consistent with the rest of science. Labeling a rock falling as a decision is not.

Where do "decisions" interact with "science"? I just took down Fundamentals Of Physics and looked up "decisions". Nothing there.

Decision-making is a biological term, if anything.

[Darat]

Yes, that's implicit in the word "illusion". If there's nothing there to have an experience, or a belief, or a wish, then there is no illusion.

...snip..

No it is not implicit in how the word illusion is being used by everyone else in this thread bar you. It is you that keeps asserting that there has to be magical experiencer. (As you do for consciousness.)



No, I'm not. I'm saying that for there to be an illusion, there has to be something capable of being fooled. That doesn't apply to a thermostat.



Yes it does - the thermometer thinks/reacts/is fooled that the room temperature is "X" degrees because its system is incorrectly reacting to the temperature of the room, which is in fact Y.


It might be possible to devise something without consciousness which can still experience illusion, but I don't know of anything.


Any process that uses information from the environment is capable of experiencing an illusion.



In other words it's simply an arbitrary statement about the operation of the thermostat. If the average temperature in the room is x, and the thermostat records y, we have an illusion. Trouble is, we can create or delete illusions simply by our choice of design parameters, without changing the experience of the thermostat in any way.



That is exactly what an illusion is to a human i.e. not correctly (as in providing an accurate representation of what reality is) processing the data from the environment. Indeed all the evidence points to the fact that it is quite accurate to describe much of what we say is how we experience reality as an illusion.

Again the evidence does not require your magical experiencer.




I repeat the challenge - describe an illusion with reference to the laws of physics only. I think it's meaningless.

I have done - see the thermometer example.

[westprog]

You'll just say "It's not sentient because it's not sentient because it's not sentient!"


And you'll say "It is sentient because it is sentient because it is sentient".

If consciousness and sentience are ill-defined - and they probably are - then to assert that they are properties possessed by entirely dissimilar entities would seem to be the proposition requiring evidence.

Saying that because they are ill-defined they can be assigned to whatever we please doesn't really work, except as a debasement of language.

[westprog]

What's experience, then? Seems to be that the Grand Canyon is a record of experience of the rocks, yeah?


There are two slightly overlapping definitions here. There's "experience" as something that happens in the present. It's a sensation that we feel as it happens.

Then there is the change it makes in us. Memory, scars, changes in behaviour. The Grand Canyon has the second kind of experience, but it doesn't have the first.

The point about the pinch test is that it generates an experience which is momentary - which need not lead to any behavioural changes - and which can be quickly entirely forgotten. Gone without a trace.

The Grand Canyon doesn't have that kind of experience. That's why it's possibly an unfortunate choice of word. Sensation is better. I don't think anyone is claiming* that the Grand Canyon has sensations when it is being eroded. It doesn't have any momentary experiences.

*Except possibly one person on this thread.

[westprog]

More semantic confusions appear! I'm sure I got the picture earlier from at least one monist that what that meant was that there was matter, but no mind. Mind does not exist, someone said as flatly as that. I'm sorry, this thread is frying the few brain cells I have left and remembering who said what is harder than the HPC. Now, westprog, you apparently consider yourself a monist for not believing in a little man behind the eyes making decisions. Yet you consider consciousness a property of mind, which you say is part of a human being, but do not specify at that point if you mean the physical stuff of a human body exclusively, and whether, in that sense, consciousness is a function of the physical human body. Do you see what I mean? - you seem to put the mind in between the 'human being' and consciousness, and do not seem to accept the proposition that there is no difference of what I'll dare to call a substantive nature (to inject yet another meaningless gathering of letters!).

It's all looking semantic to me, from conscious rocks (or at least thermostats) to fully formed human bodies who have only the lie of consciousness. I follow the logic and most of it makes sense if the meaning of the words are flexible enough. Furthermore, I suspect that it isn't actually a problem of language (i.e. that developing a specific language to describe life and cosmos and consciousness would solve the problem). I suspect that the Kosmos might be words all the way down. Now that would turn the tables again! In the beginning.... :D

The problem we have is that in terms of Physics, none of this means a thing. We have no physical theory of mind. What we have is a concept which isn't quantified.

That is where my chief disagreement with Rocketdodger and PixyMisa lies. They are using terms such as awareness and sentience when we don't have any proper theories to quantify them. There is no way, as yet, to analyse mental attributes in terms of Physics. What we have is a subset of Biology.

Computer Science doesn't help either. At its highest, it's a branch of mathematics - at its lowest, it's engineering. Neither will tell us anything fundamental.

There are areas of Physics which may, at some stage, allow us insight into the property of mind. Information theory, and entropy point to it. But we are a long way short. This is why it's a hard problem. All science reduces to physics. If it isn't physics, it's just collecting facts.

We have a biological phenomenon called mind. It exhibits consciousness, and it seems to be associated with life. When we can quantify it in terms of physics, we'll be getting somewhere.

[westprog]

That's my point. You've got an unspoken assumption there that the way we do it is the only way it can be done. If the only standard we have to judge sentience is our own model, we're more likely than not going to miss it when we find it elsewhere.


Ideally, we'll have a rigid standard to apply. I think we are a long way short of that.

Which is why we need to be clear and not use ambigous words like "experience".


Language is slippery, but unfortunately there are few entirely unambiguous terms. I can't think of any expressions relating to the brain that PixyMisa won't assign to a thermostat, except maybe "soft" and "wet".


That's precisely why you don't want to limit yourself to looking only for human-ish sentience.


The problem is that if we allow computers to be sentient, then why not thermostats? Why not anything? That's the panpsychism theory. Everything is sentient, in its own way.

[westprog]

That was a succinct expression of what I waffled in several paragraphs, thanks.

I imagine that feelings are quite easy to model (though you're right here in the sense that the question related only to a reflective computer program, which suggests something fairly self-contained). Include a complex and powerful sensory system and motor system, finely monitoring its own workings, and combine that with being a machine built by several billion years of evolution, and I don't think emotions appear spooky enough to back off from dismissing the HPC. We have a tradition of thinking of emotions as very cerebral, but they are rather animalistic, so the impressions they give us are not very different from sensory impressions, and the motor feedback is rather automatic too. We feel fear at least partly because we find ourselves shaking. Anger is indicated by a redness or pressure in the face and upper body. (These are just crude descriptions of what we recognise by complex and subtle physical cues.)


I think it's been shown that it is possible to induce feelings of happiness simply by smiling. The same emotion that can be triggered by electrodes in the brain can be triggered by a conscious decision to exercise certain muscles.

Since science works by isolating behaviours and limiting degrees of freedom, the operation of mind presents enormous difficulties. Everything effects everything else.

[westprog]

I'm still waiting for an answer to that question.

I'm still waiting for a response to my answer to that question.

[MRC_Hans]

Sensory input is brain stimulation.

I don't understand why it's such a big deal that doing things to the brain affects consciousness. It's as if the dualist assumptions were so strong that it's taken for granted that refuting dualism is to refute consciousness.

Yes, messing with the brain affects consciousness. However, such experiments assume that consciousness is there to be affected in the first place.I know the above post is a few pages back, but threads like this move awfully fast for those of us who have a life and only visit about once a day ;).

I think this is an important, if tangential point:

* Messing with the brain affects consciousness. That is a fact (it has been verified empirically).

* Things that don't have a brain, or only a very primitive brain, don't have consciousness. That is not really a fact, but I think we can consider it an axiom for this discussion.

So it seems that Materialists and Dualists can agree that consciousness depends on a sufficiently complex brain.

I now assume that:

1) The Materialist POV is that consciousness is an emergent property of a complex brain.

2) The Dualist POV is that consciousness is a separate entity that can only interact with the material world through a complex brain.

OK?

Hans

[westprog]

This has been answered, but just to repeat: The bimetallic strip, or whatever other mechanism is used - even, potentially, a rock with suitable properties - is the model.


A thermostat is not, naturally, a model for a thermostat. The reason is simple - it has too much information. It is too specific.

If we want an engineer to make us a thermostat, then we don't give him a thermostat and tell him to copy it. We give him a functional description. We want an electrical device that will connect or disconnect an electrical circuit when a given temperature is exceeded.

That sentence is a model for a thermostat. If we want to be more specific, we can draw a schematic, or describe the size and thread depth that will allow the thermostat to be fitted into another device.

The thermostat itself is not a model. And that's why it's not aware. It is not a model of itself - it contains enormous amounts of information, most of which has nothing to do with its function of being a thermostat.

In order for the thermostat to be self-aware, it would need to have the concept of what a thermostat does incorporated into itself.

[westprog]

Suppose there are beings who are as far past us as we are past microcontrollers.

Suppose they, as information processing, experience themselves on a level beyond our comprehension. As you would say, on a "qualitatively different" level. Call it sentient+.

Would they be correct, or incorrect, in asserting that we are merely mechanical objects incapable of experience because we don't have anything resembling their brains that would allow us to?

How do we feel about ants?

[MRC_Hans]

There are two slightly overlapping definitions here. There's "experience" as something that happens in the present. It's a sensation that we feel as it happens.

Then there is the change it makes in us. Memory, scars, changes in behaviour. The Grand Canyon has the second kind of experience, but it doesn't have the first.

Sorry, that doesn't compute. Whether the GC feels anything or not will, of course depend on what IS the Grand Canyon. If it is the void in the ground, then it does not feel the experience, it IS the experience, but if it is the river and its occupants, then I'm not so sure.

Anyway, it does not make sense to take apart the experience and the traces it may leave. We discuss what we mean by 'feel' but a nail certainly 'feels' the hammer hit, in that it is affected by it when it happens.


The point about the pinch test is that it generates an experience which is momentary - which need not lead to any behavioural changes - and which can be quickly entirely forgotten. Gone without a trace.


Excuse me, but that's silly. How long is a moment? If I pinch myself, the sensation is there for a while, and there may be a red spot on my skin for minutes. Certainly the pinch experience has a time extent.

The Grand Canyon doesn't have that kind of experience. That's why it's possibly an unfortunate choice of word. Sensation is better. I don't think anyone is claiming* that the Grand Canyon has sensations when it is being eroded. It doesn't have any momentary experiences.

*Except possibly one person on this thread.

Isn't there a moment for each rock particle to break loose from the bedrock? Isn't each moment unique (different particles break loose)?

There is certainly a series of closely definable moments.

Hans

[westprog]

No it is not implicit in how the word illusion is being used by everyone else in this thread bar you. It is you that keeps asserting that there has to be magical experiencer. (As you do for consciousness.)


Yes, the word "illusion" only has meaning when dealing with an experiencer. And no magic is required.

Yes it does - the thermometer thinks/reacts/is fooled that the room temperature is "X" degrees because its system is incorrectly reacting to the temperature of the room, which is in fact Y.



Any process that uses information from the environment is capable of experiencing an illusion.



That is exactly what an illusion is to a human i.e. not correctly (as in providing an accurate representation of what reality is) processing the data from the environment. Indeed all the evidence points to the fact that it is quite accurate to describe much of what we say is how we experience reality as an illusion.

Again the evidence does not require your magical experiencer.



I have done - see the thermometer example.

Yes, you use terms like "think" and "fooled" with respect to the thermometer.

How is that in any way a description that relates to the laws of physics? I have science books designed for small children in the house, and even they don't say that thermometers are "fooled".

If you use the language of consciousness, then you imply consciousness. Otherwise, you use the language of physics to describe physical processes. In physics, nothing is "fooled", or "thinks" or experiences "illusions". And if you doubt that, read a textbook.

This is not a trivial point. What appears to be a possibly profound statement about the nature of awareness and consciousness dissolves into The Brave Little Toaster when we attempt to express it in terms of physics.

I asked Pixy Misa to give a reference to a physical definition of the supposed quantity of "awareness". He referred me to the Wikipaedia page on information theory which didn't mention "awareness" once. To describe a thermostat as exhibiting "awareness" is scientifically speaking meaningless.

[MRC_Hans]

A thermostat is not, naturally, a model for a thermostat. The reason is simple - it has too much information. It is too specific.

If we want an engineer to make us a thermostat, then we don't give him a thermostat and tell him to copy it. We give him a functional description. We want an electrical device that will connect or disconnect an electrical circuit when a given temperature is exceeded.

That sentence is a model for a thermostat. If we want to be more specific, we can draw a schematic, or describe the size and thread depth that will allow the thermostat to be fitted into another device.

The thermostat itself is not a model. And that's why it's not aware. It is not a model of itself - it contains enormous amounts of information, most of which has nothing to do with its function of being a thermostat.

In order for the thermostat to be self-aware, it would need to have the concept of what a thermostat does incorporated into itself.Just a minute, here: What is the model for a human being? Obviously, according to your argument above, not a human being. Do you have a concept of what constitutes a human being incorporated into yourself?

You may have made yourself an idea of what is a human being, but that is another thing. Likewise, the thermostat has an idea of what is a thermostat (namely the type of thermostat it happens to be).

But to claim that a thermostat must incorporate the abstract concept of a thermostat to be self-aware implies that you can also not argue that a human is self-aware.

Hans

[westprog]

I know the above post is a few pages back, but threads like this move awfully fast for those of us who have a life and only visit about once a day ;).

I think this is an important, if tangential point:

* Messing with the brain affects consciousness. That is a fact (it has been verified empirically).

* Things that don't have a brain, or only a very primitive brain, don't have consciousness. That is not really a fact, but I think we can consider it an axiom for this discussion.


I wish we could.

So it seems that Materialists and Dualists can agree that consciousness depends on a sufficiently complex brain.

I now assume that:

1) The Materialist POV is that consciousness is an emergent property of a complex brain.

2) The Dualist POV is that consciousness is a separate entity that can only interact with the material world through a complex brain.

OK?

Hans

I'm not sure if we have any admitted dualists here. Though I think there's an implication of dualism in the Strong AI viewpoint, whereby consciousness could be plucked out of the brain and run on a computer.

[MRC_Hans]

Yes, you use terms like "think" and "fooled" with respect to the thermometer.

How is that in any way a description that relates to the laws of physics? I have science books designed for small children in the house, and even they don't say that thermometers are "fooled".

If you use the language of consciousness, then you imply consciousness. Otherwise, you use the language of physics to describe physical processes. In physics, nothing is "fooled", or "thinks" or experiences "illusions". And if you doubt that, read a textbook.
Mmmm, the 'appeal to textbook' fallacy? ;)

If you are energy conscious where I live, you have a system that can lower the temperature in your house during the night, and when you are not home. As all the heaters run on individual thermostats, this is done by mounting a small heater on each thermostat and wire them together. Now, using a clocked switch, you turn on those heaters at appropriate time, and the heater makes the thermostat sense a temperature that is a few degrees higher than the actual room temperature. It then turns down the heat accordingly.

Can you find any good reason why the term "fooling the thermostat" is not appropriate for this?

Hans

[MRC_Hans]

I wish we could.



I'm not sure if we have any admitted dualists here. Though I think there's an implication of dualism in the Strong AI viewpoint, whereby consciousness could be plucked out of the brain and run on a computer.Now you have me confused (even more): I distinctly see people here arguing that consciousness is more than or different from an emergent property of a complex brain. How can someone claim that and not be a dualist (belive that brain and soul are different entities)?

Hans

[Darat]

Yes, the word "illusion" only has meaning when dealing with an experiencer. And no magic is required.



No it doesn't - see how it has been defiend in this thread.


Yes, you use terms like "think" and "fooled" with respect to the thermometer.




I was trying to encompass all the different terms Members like you and Pixy and everyone else has used to describe what a thermometer does without giving an emphasis to any particular word used. What word we use make not the slightest difference as long as we all agree on what it does mean.


How is that in any way a description that relates to the laws of physics?



You wish to resort to just using mathmatical equations - which is the language physics uses? I woudl suggest thsi wold render any menaingful communication all but impossible.


I have science books designed for small children in the house, and even they don't say that thermometers are "fooled".


And?


If you use the language of consciousness, then you imply consciousness.

...snip...

Yes and no.


Otherwise, you use the language of physics to describe physical processes. In physics, nothing is "fooled", or "thinks" or experiences "illusions". And if you doubt that, read a textbook.

....snip...

What a load of nonsense. "Science" uses whatever means of communication helps you to communicate with someone - that can be words, pictures, experiments and even videos. Without humans communicating "science" does not exist. Science is just a human behaviour, like a ran is.

(And I do have to say that this new and to be blunt nothign but a smokescreen of a criticism you are bringing up is one that you fail to apply to your posts in this thread....)



This is not a trivial point.



We agree on this - it is in fact a trite point.

What appears to be a possibly profound statement about the nature of awareness and consciousness dissolves into The Brave Little Toaster when we attempt to express it in terms of physics.



I'll await your support of this, of course that will only be acceptable (under your criteria) if it is in the language of physics i.e. mathematics. (Members we do have LaTeX installed here to help you format your equations.)

I asked Pixy Misa to give a reference to a physical definition of the supposed quantity of "awareness". He referred me to the Wikipaedia page on information theory which didn't mention "awareness" once. To describe a thermostat as exhibiting "awareness" is scientifically speaking meaningless.

I'll await your support of this, of course that will only be acceptable (under your criteria) if it is in the language of physics i.e. mathematics!

westprog - can we please not now start to go down the path of this trite semantic silliness and keep to the meat of the discussion?

[Darat]

...snip...

I'm not sure if we have any admitted dualists here. Though I think there's an implication of dualism in the Strong AI viewpoint, whereby consciousness could be plucked out of the brain and run on a computer.


You've got that totally back to front. If consciousness was dualistic than this could not in principle happen, only in a monist system could such a thing in principle happen.

[westprog]

Sorry, that doesn't compute. Whether the GC feels anything or not will, of course depend on what IS the Grand Canyon. If it is the void in the ground, then it does not feel the experience, it IS the experience, but if it is the river and its occupants, then I'm not so sure.

Anyway, it does not make sense to take apart the experience and the traces it may leave. We discuss what we mean by 'feel' but a nail certainly 'feels' the hammer hit, in that it is affected by it when it happens.



However, it doesn't have a sensation of being hit. It has the effects of being hit. As does the Grand Canyon.

Excuse me, but that's silly. How long is a moment? If I pinch myself, the sensation is there for a while, and there may be a red spot on my skin for minutes. Certainly the pinch experience has a time extent.



The important point is not the time extent. It is that the pinch experience is seperate from the behavioural change, seperate from the memory of the incident, and seperate from the lasting effect. I can pinch my skin lightly, feel a sensation - yes, for the duration of the pinch - and leave no mark. A few minutes later I've forgotten it.

Whether the sensation of the pinch is a series of seperate sensations following each other or one single sensation lasting for a few moments doesn't really matter.

Isn't there a moment for each rock particle to break loose from the bedrock? Isn't each moment unique (different particles break loose)?

There is certainly a series of closely definable moments.


But there are no associated sensations. What happens when a rock particle doesn't break off? What does that mean to the Grand Canyon? As far as we can tell, nothing.

The point about the pinch test is that it has no effects apart from sensation.

[westprog]

Just a minute, here: What is the model for a human being? Obviously, according to your argument above, not a human being. Do you have a concept of what constitutes a human being incorporated into yourself?

You may have made yourself an idea of what is a human being, but that is another thing. Likewise, the thermostat has an idea of what is a thermostat (namely the type of thermostat it happens to be).

But to claim that a thermostat must incorporate the abstract concept of a thermostat to be self-aware implies that you can also not argue that a human is self-aware.


A model of a human being is exactly what a human being contains.

Try the pinch test. Where do you feel it? On the back of your hand. Where is that experience actually taking place? In your mind.

IOW, you have a model of a human being which has the experiences. You feel as if the back of your hand is being pinched. The actual sensation is generated in the brain.

At the science museum in London they've a model of the homunculus - the internal representation of the body which responds to sensation.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Sensory_and_motor_homunculi.jpg

And as with all models, it's an abstraction, and unimportant elements are disregarded. We are happy enough with a vague idea of buttock, but we are precise about our tongues.

I think it's fairly clear that the thermostat lacks such a self-representation. Why should it need it? It's a thermostat, not a model of a thermostat. Only conscious creatures need to carry their own model around with them.

[John Freestone]

Yes, that's implicit in the word "illusion". If there's nothing there to have an experience, or a belief, or a wish, then there is no illusion.Semantics again, westprog. I think if you are to consider the view that Darat holds (whether you take it on as your own or not) you would first need to practise thinking of words more relatively - maybe even try to follow the possible meanings the other is putting to you for a while rather than take only one meaning (your own) as obvious. The word 'illusion' for Darat and others with similar views is, like all words, problematic, not because it gives the game away that there simply MUST BE an observer to experience an illusion, but because it is nearly impossible to describe consciousness and other bio-physical processes and at the same time speak helpfully to those who believe there is an HPC (or indeed to describe them to themselves perhaps) in English. Darat tried to build a bridge over the gap between what we as human machines might be asserting is our illusion and the mechanics of purely physical error in a simple reactive system. In order to connect the dots for us deluded humans (all of us), he called it an illusion (or used the word because someone else had already). Pardon me Darat if that has misinterpreted your posts. Yet rather than try to stand on that bridge and see how it feels to make sense of it without the soul-human meaning of "illusion", you use the term to refute his position, which is actually the one that has no need for it.

No, I'm not. I'm saying that for there to be an illusion, there has to be something capable of being fooled. That doesn't apply to a thermostat.Forget thermostats. For an illusion, there has to be something that is capable of being fooled: yes. We are trying to explain that that 'something' is (or could be) a bundle of cells following the laws of physics (including, of course, their genetic programming). What does your 'something' imply that isn't some kind of super-material entity like soul, pure subject? If, as I perceive, you're calling yourself a monist materialist, what the hell else is there that could possibly explain your experience other than your bio-physical reality?

It might be possible to devise something without consciousness which can still experience illusion, but I don't know of anything.Again, if we try to transcend semantics, it is sitting on the bridge pondering its own existence. Conscious, unconscious? What's the difference? That may sound stupd to you, but it's meant as a kind of koan. You keep saying something like this: of course my human consciousness is real: it is my primary fact. Furthermore, we repeat the experiment publicly comparing our private experience of being conscious, so that reinforces our scientific result - consciousness undeniable exists. Unfortunately, we can do the same with elephants, bump into them, measure them, get together and agree that they're real things. It's just that we then do the equivalent of concluding that Elephant exists, as if it must be a separate truth from the earth it is standing upon and have landed from another dimension. To someone who understands evolution and is trying to explain how an elephant comes into being, it is equally valid to say that there is no elephant (even in the singular, I mean), because that phenomenon is a process that changes over time, so there is no elephant that persists in any way, and that there are elephants, but they weren't created by God on the 5th day or whatever.

If that evolutionary scientist states the first, people will force elephants in his path and say he's an idiot. If he says the latter, they will say "Well, you can't have an elephant without Elephantness, and you've used the word, so...". In fact, forcing elephant-like-processes in their path and calling them elephants is just an intermediate step to repeating the assertion of Elephantness.

In other words it's simply an arbitrary statement about the operation of the thermostat. If the average temperature in the room is x, and the thermostat records y, we have an illusion. Trouble is, we can create or delete illusions simply by our choice of design parameters, without changing the experience of the thermostat in any way.If the proposition were first accepted that a thermostat's experience was due to its mechanics, I don't see how changing its design parameters could fail to change its experience.

I repeat the challenge - describe an illusion with reference to the laws of physics only. I think it's meaningless.They have. And once again, what would be the alternative, an explanation for illusion that breaks the laws of physics? Methinks you would actually only be happy with that.

[westprog]

Mmmm, the 'appeal to textbook' fallacy? ;)


More the "appeal to the entire body of scientific thought fallacy".


If you are energy conscious where I live, you have a system that can lower the temperature in your house during the night, and when you are not home. As all the heaters run on individual thermostats, this is done by mounting a small heater on each thermostat and wire them together. Now, using a clocked switch, you turn on those heaters at appropriate time, and the heater makes the thermostat sense a temperature that is a few degrees higher than the actual room temperature. It then turns down the heat accordingly.

Can you find any good reason why the term "fooling the thermostat" is not appropriate for this?



It's perfectly accurate when describing the operation of a system which incorporates a conscious human being with wishes which the thermostat is reflecting. Take the human being out of the picture, and it becomes meaningless to talk about fooling the thermostat.

Do we talk about comets being fooled by Jupiter into swinging closer to the Sun? Is there any possible way that could be applicable?

The reason we can talk about fooling devices is because we have intentions which we associate with the devices. The intentions always originate with us. We can't claim that the devices want anything. We want them to do something.

This only becomes an issue if someone claims that it is meaningful to ascribe qualities, such as awareness, which we reserve to conscious beings to inanimate objects. If they do that, it's reasonable to demand that they express their claim in the terms of the laws of physics. That's how we test reality.

There's an obvious counterclaim. If you can't demonstrate awareness using TLOP for a thermostat, then you have to admit that you can't observe it in a human being either. My answer is that I believe that consciousness is a phenomenon which can be observed, and that the observations are capable of independent confirmation. I therefore deem it something that needs to be incorporated into TLOP, though at present we don't know how.

[skiba]

Messing with the brain affects consciousness. That is a fact (it has been verified empirically)


This shows the common misunderstanding.

Consciousness does not change. Consciousness "The experiencer" (what ever that is) is still there the same, only whats being experienced changes.
Consciousness is so primary it gets easily mixed up with
brain stimulus (sense perception, congnitive functions, etc.)

The same "experiencer" was there when you were 3years old, only your thoughts and emotions have changed.

Note. I'm not giving a dualistic POV here.

If there's no consciousness then you messed with the wrong part of the brain.

[Nick227]

That was a succinct expression of what I waffled in several paragraphs, thanks.

I noticed you do like to write!

I imagine that feelings are quite easy to model (though you're right here in the sense that the question related only to a reflective computer program, which suggests something fairly self-contained). Include a complex and powerful sensory system and motor system, finely monitoring its own workings, and combine that with being a machine built by several billion years of evolution, and I don't think emotions appear spooky enough to back off from dismissing the HPC.

I think it depends if you are looking at creating human "consciousness" in a computer or tracking it to the physical apparatus of the human brain.

Nick

[westprog]

Now you have me confused (even more): I distinctly see people here arguing that consciousness is more than or different from an emergent property of a complex brain. How can someone claim that and not be a dualist (belive that brain and soul are different entities)?

Hans

I think that there's confusion because there's a viewpoint that consciousness can emerge from a deterministic computing system. In other words, a computer program can become conscious. I think that that is the kind of emergent property that I, for one, regard with doubt.

That consciousness can be an emergent property of a brain is, however, quite a different idea. A brain is a physical object, and need not be considered as a computer. The fact that it can be abstracted as a computer doesn't mean that it's sole function is computing, or that consciousness is a side effect of it's operation as a computing device.

In general, emergent properties are common in biology. Evolution relies entirely on emergent properties. In the field of computing emergent properties are usually problematic.

This might be a matter of solving the problem. It might be that I am wrong, and that consciousness is an emergent property specifically associated with computing. However, that remains to be shown.

[MRC_Hans]

However, it doesn't have a sensation of being hit. It has the effects of being hit. As does the Grand Canyon.

Back to the original dilemma: What is sensation?

Correct, the nail does not have a nervous system that transmits the sensation of being hit, but the effect of the hit is being transmitted to all of the nail, through its structure. Is 'sensation' restricted to being transmitted through neurons?

The important point is not the time extent. It is that the pinch experience is seperate from the behavioural change, seperate from the memory of the incident, and seperate from the lasting effect. I can pinch my skin lightly, feel a sensation - yes, for the duration of the pinch - and leave no mark. A few minutes later I've forgotten it.

Oh? I still remember when I did it a couple of hours ago. OK; time is not important, but the process is the reason I forget the pinch but not touching a hot object is that the latter sensation is useful to me. My brain processes the information and discards the pinch as unimportant but stores the hotness as useful information.

But there are no associated sensations. What happens when a rock particle doesn't break off? What does that mean to the Grand Canyon? As far as we can tell, nothing.

Is it important whether we can observe it or not? Of course not.

... Now, I don't suggest that the Grand Canyon, or a nail for that matter, has feelings. What I do suggest, however, is that the qualitative difference lies solely in the ability of the complex brain to store and categorize the experience.

Hans

[John Freestone]

Yay, everyone jump aboard the pseudo-dualism merry-go-round!

*sigh* Prove that your girlfriend is actually experiencing feelings rather than mimicing the action of them.Gadzooks! Pistols at dawn, scallywag! ;)

[Hokulele]

This shows the common misunderstanding.

Consciousness does not change. Consciousness "The experiencer" (what ever that is) is still there the same, only whats being experienced changes.
Consciousness is so primary it gets easily mixed up with
brain stimulus (sense perception, congnitive functions, etc.)

The same "experiencer" was there when you were 3years old, only your thoughts and emotions have changed.

Note. I'm not giving a dualistic POV here.

If there's no consciousness then you messed with the wrong part of the brain.


If the "experiencer" does not change, what do you make of dissociative disorders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_disorder)?

[westprog]

They have. And once again, what would be the alternative, an explanation for illusion that breaks the laws of physics? Methinks you would actually only be happy with that.


We can't break the laws of physics. We can, however, extend them. When - and if - we solve the Hard Problem, we'll have an explanation in terms of physics for consciousness, and terms like "illusion", "think" and "fooled" will have precise objective meanings. At present, they are meaningful only in association with conscious beings.

[westprog]

... Now, I don't suggest that the Grand Canyon, or a nail for that matter, has feelings. What I do suggest, however, is that the qualitative difference lies solely in the ability of the complex brain to store and categorize the experience.


There I disagree. Even if the experience is not recorded, or categorised, or gives rise to behaviour, the sensation is still real.

[westprog]

No it doesn't - see how it has been defiend in this thread.



I was trying to encompass all the different terms Members like you and Pixy and everyone else has used to describe what a thermometer does without giving an emphasis to any particular word used. What word we use make not the slightest difference as long as we all agree on what it does mean.



Well, that's precisely the problem. Pixy thinks that there's some kind of meaning when he says that a thermostat is aware.

When we use such terms loosely, there's no confusion. If I say "the car let me down today" everyone knows that I'm not assigning moral responsibility. However, Pixy is asserting that there is a real quantity involved.

You wish to resort to just using mathmatical equations - which is the language physics uses? I woudl suggest thsi wold render any menaingful communication all but impossible.

http://glennhager.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/straw-man.jpg
I suppose it would. But I suggested no such thing.

Here's an example of a meaningful physical statement about the thermostat.

"The thermostat posseses mass"

See? Easy. No mathematics. I think most people reading this will be able to follow that assertion.

There are many statements which can be made about the thermostat which are physically meaningful. We can describe the elements of which it is composed, it's shape, when it melts - and how it operates.

However, when we say

"The thermostat posseses awareness" then that is a statement which is physically meaningless. It does not relate to a quantity that exists in TLOP as we presently understand them.

I am not requiring an abtruse level of formalism here. I'm not even asking that the qualities possessed by the thermocouple be quantified. I'm just saying that they have to have some kind of basis.

This is not a minor point, because Pixy's claim that thermostats possess awareness is fundamental to his view of consciousness. It's important that we question what he actually means when he says this. And in terms of a physical description of the thermostat, he's saying nothing at all.

[John Freestone]

The little piece of wire that expands or contracts according to external temperature. It is a "model" because it models the temperature. That it, it maps temperature values to a level of expansion or contraction. A given level of expansion or contraction represents a given external temperature.Thanks. It was a genuine question and I have no problem with the answer. It's a pity Pixy didn't answer it. I am interested in whether there is any significant division between that and a rock, since Pixy seems to make a strong distinction, mentioning something about gross matter or bulk or something. I think someone else was trying to follow this line of reasoning further, too. Any thoughts (I've still to catch up and may already have a reply re this.)

[PixyMisa]

How is that in any way a description that relates to the laws of physics? I have science books designed for small children in the house, and even they don't say that thermometers are "fooled".
I should hope not!

A thermostat, of course, is another matter entirely.

[westprog]

Thanks. It was a genuine question and I have no problem with the answer. It's a pity Pixy didn't answer it. I am interested in whether there is any significant division between that and a rock, since Pixy seems to make a strong distinction, mentioning something about gross matter or bulk or something. I think someone else was trying to follow this line of reasoning further, too. Any thoughts (I've still to catch up and may already have a reply re this.)

MRC_Hans posted earlier about the Grand Canyon processing information and storing it. In fact, everything in the universe does just that. Every particle is interacting with everything else in the universe. If the thermostat is aware, then so is every single particle.

[PixyMisa]

Thanks. It was a genuine question and I have no problem with the answer. It's a pity Pixy didn't answer it.
Sorry, I have since answered that point here (http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=3881282&postcount=956).

This thread moves pretty fast and I only have a limited amount of time to devote to it.

I am interested in whether there is any significant division between that and a rock, since Pixy seems to make a strong distinction, mentioning something about gross matter or bulk or something. I think someone else was trying to follow this line of reasoning further, too. Any thoughts (I've still to catch up and may already have a reply re this.)
Yep, I addressed that too. Hope you find that answer helpful.

[PixyMisa]

If the "experiencer" does not change, what do you make of dissociative disorders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_disorder)?
I think Skiba is busy defining consciousness out of existence. If he can only tell us what it isn't, and never what it is...

[PixyMisa]

MRC_Hans posted earlier about the Grand Canyon processing information and storing it. In fact, everything in the universe does just that. Every particle is interacting with everything else in the universe. If the thermostat is aware, then so is every single particle.
There's a difference between encoding information and processing it. That's the difference between a thermometer and a thermostat, between a lump of rock and a human brain. Switching. Computers are made of switches, and so are our brains. Thermostats switch. Rocks do not. However many fascinating fossils and instructional engravings a rock may bear, it does nothing with them.

[westprog]

I should hope not!

A thermostat, of course, is another matter entirely.

We can go through the physics texts and there are no accounts of thermometers, thermostats, thermocouples or thermal underwear being "fooled". There's a good reason for that.

[MRC_Hans]

There I disagree. Even if the experience is not recorded, or categorised, or gives rise to behaviour, the sensation is still real.Ehr, how can you know that? How do you have a sensation that is not recorded (at least temporarily), or categorized? Even if you have, how do you know you had it if you don't recall it??

In fact, the tendency to categorize is very prominent in human behavior. I sincerely doubt that you are able to sense something without categorizing it.

Hans

[westprog]

There's a difference between encoding information and processing it. That's the difference between a thermometer and a thermostat, between a lump of rock and a human brain. Switching. Computers are made of switches, and so are our brains. Thermostats switch. Rocks do not. However many fascinating fossils and instructional engravings a rock may bear, it does nothing with them.

Look at a rock in the sun at a micro level, and there's all the switching anyone could require going on. How does the inside of the rock get hot otherwise?