The hard problem of consciousness

[Darat]

Well, that's precisely the problem. Pixy thinks that there's some kind of meaning when he says that a thermostat is aware.



As you do when you say that: "The thermostat possesses mass" there is no difference in your statements yet you are objecting to one because in your opinion it is not "real" physics.

You can't have it both way - you can try to but what it does is render your argument incoherent.



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.



And most people here have followed the assertion that:

"The thermostat possesses awareness"

The problem you keep running into is that your starting assumption that awareness has to have a magical dualistic property, if you do not make that assumption there is no difference in type of those statements.



...snip...

"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.

...snip...

Only if (again) you start with the assumption that awareness has a dualistic property.

Seriously try dropping that assumption for a while (as a thought exercise) and see where it leads you.



...snip...

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.

...snip...

And awareness does - we know things react/respond/experience the environment. To claim they don't would mean that you are giving up on "science" altogether.



...snip...

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.

He has said many, many times exactly what he means (has have others). The problem I think you have is that you always start with your conclusion i.e. your dualistic view of consciousness so when someone explains something without using dualism it's "obviously" wrong to you. As I said above really try to just follow the argument from the premise of the argument i.e. not starting with the nature of consciousness but with the evidence.

[westprog]

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

I'm inclined to the "all mixed up together model" so I don't necessarily disagree entirely here.

However, I continue to assert that the sensation itself is real, even if it has to be associated with categorisation and recording. Which I don't necessarily accept either, but I will think about it.

[MRC_Hans]

Well, that's precisely the problem. Pixy thinks that there's some kind of meaning when he says that a thermostat is aware.

Actually, knowing Pixy, I think he means the opposite. I think he says that there is no special meaning when you say YOU are aware. You are just complex enough to react to your own structure.


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.


However, when we say

"The thermostat posseses awareness"
then that is a statement which is physically meaningless.


No it is exactly not physically meaningless. Physically, it means that the thermostat's internal state reflects the temperature and the relation of it to the built-in limits.

Philosophically, OTOH, it may well be meaningless.

It does not relate to a quantity that exists in TLOP as we presently understand them.

It relates to the structure, and possibly programming, of the thermostat.

Hans

[skiba]

If the "experiencer" does not change, what do you make of dissociative disorders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_disorder)?

Thats the same thing.

A person who has dissociative disorder experiences, "faulty computation". It doesent make it any less of an experience.

If theres a break down or diminishment in awareness(consciousness) then
theres no experience at all, or very little.

[MRC_Hans]

I'm inclined to the "all mixed up together model" so I don't necessarily disagree entirely here.

However, I continue to assert that the sensation itself is real, even if it has to be associated with categorisation and recording. Which I don't necessarily accept either, but I will think about it.I'm not sure what the "all mixed up model" is, but you seem to, if reluctantly, acknowledge that sensation is not knowable unless it is recorded and processed?

Hans

[John Freestone]

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.I'm no expert, but I guess part of the answer to this is that the human being is much more complex than we tend to think it is when we begin to introspect. What I mean is that we are talking about properties (or, as some would have it, qualia) such as redness, roundness, etc., as if we'd not moved on much since Ancient Greece. I wonder if our childhood learning puts properties upon properties, building up larger, more inclusive assumed qualia that are actually just like processing subroutines - and therefore, surely, appleness is one such, with an almost instantaneous output (i.e. mechanical reaction, not answer on screen for homunculus to read, in case anyone goes there). Furthermore, it would seem feasible to propose that our gestalt, the whole of our experience that we assume to flow and be projected image-like in the 'mind', is just such a computational result at the macro level: not integrated except over time - from the formation of a nervous system if not before. Once established, our illusion of a solid personality living a united 'rich tapestry' doesn't ever need to be revisted or refuted (unless some clever sod invents neurobiology and blows our cover gradually).

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.Or perhaps because it is like evolutionary rocket fuel to forget that it's not all happening at once. The delusion that I am looking out of my 'mind' and seeing a whole, and that that whole is impacting upon me simultaneously, is a powerful one - so powerful that if I try to actually focus on what I am aware of in any single moment, I just find it impossible to focus that finely. I just get masses of confusing noise (the same noise meditation is designed to slow down or stop). It's like if I go "NOW!", my brain has already processed the decision of which moment I would pick, and done far too much before I've got to the end of the word - and my reflection about it adds further assumption and noise, more experience. It seems much more persuasive to me to think that almost everything out there escapes me utterly, but the system now and then requires a piece of information and just deals with that piece alone. Now and then, that piece of information is whether it is a single entity with a centre of attention experiencing a gestalt environment all at once, and the computer saying NO is not often of immediate (or, therefore, evolutionary) advantage.

But then a complex scene with an apple, a cat, and a chair would be a confusing mess.Sometimes it is. It depends on whether the relationships between the elements fit with larger computational schemas, I guess, which is why we pay so much attention (execute so many queries to the reality-database) if an apple-shaped chair with whiskers is presented to us in a picture. And that's IN A PICTURE - if an apple-shaped chair with whiskers rubbed round your leg miaoing for its dinner, serious computational error might result (especially if you can't think how someone could have possibly spiked your drink!). The confusing mess could land you permanently in hospital. But cat on chair, apple on desk hardly has to be computed at all unless you want to reach out for the apple or stroke the cat or sit on the chair.

[PixyMisa]

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?
Vibration is not switching.

A switch can oscillate, but an oscillator cannot necessarily switch.

[westprog]

As you do when you say that: "The thermostat possesses mass" there is no difference in your statements yet you are objecting to one because in your opinion it is not "real" physics.


It's not just "my opinion". When he says "the thermostat possesses awareness" then he is making a statement about its properties. He's claiming that a rock, for example, doesn't possess such properties.

If he said "the thermostat is pretty" or "the thermostat is naughty" we'd know what he meant, but we wouldn't think that the statement carried objective scientific significance. But if he's not claiming objective scientific significance, then what is he talking about?


And most people here have followed the assertion that:

"The thermostat possesses awareness"


And I suggest that you wait to see what Piggy, Skiba et al. say for themselves about thermostatic awareness.


The problem you keep running into is that your starting assumption that awareness has to have a magical dualistic property, if you do not make that assumption there is no difference in type of those statements.




Only if (again) you start with the assumption that awareness has a dualistic property.

Seriously try dropping that assumption for a while (as a thought exercise) and see where it leads you.


The starting point is that when he talks about awareness as a property possessed by some objects, and not by others, he assumes that it means something. Dualism has nothing to do with it. He needs to define a physical property in physical terms.

If it's not a physical property, and he can't define it precisely, then he's just waffling.


And awareness does - we know things react/respond/experience the environment. To claim they don't would mean that you are giving up on "science" altogether.


But that is not what Pixy means. If it was, then he'd have to accept that the rock has awareness. He's using the term in some special sense of his own. He's now referring to switching. When we look closely at what switching does, we realise that it means discarding information. How exactly discarding information means awareness is very ill-defined.

He has said many, many times exactly what he means (has have others). The problem I think you have is that you always start with your conclusion i.e. your dualistic view of consciousness so when someone explains something without using dualism it's "obviously" wrong to you. As I said above really try to just follow the argument from the premise of the argument i.e. not starting with the nature of consciousness but with the evidence.

It would be a lot easier if you argued with what I say rather than with what you assume that my underlying agenda is.

[PixyMisa]

Well, that's precisely the problem. Pixy thinks that there's some kind of meaning when he says that a thermostat is aware.
And so there is. And I have explained exactly what that meaning is, ad - at this point - nauseam.

Why do you respond to posts you clearly haven't read?

[PixyMisa]

Actually, knowing Pixy, I think he means the opposite. I think he says that there is no special meaning when you say YOU are aware. You are just complex enough to react to your own structure.
Exactly.

Rocks have no switches.
Thermostats have one switch.
People have two, and sometimes even more!

There's a qualitative difference here between zero, one, and two. There's no inherent qualitative difference between two and a trillion.

No it is exactly not physically meaningless. Physically, it means that the thermostat's internal state reflects the temperature and the relation of it to the built-in limits.

Philosophically, OTOH, it may well be meaningless.
Philosophy's loss, I would say. (And Dennett would disagree with you quite strongly!)

[Darat]

It's not just "my opinion". When he says "the thermostat possesses awareness" then he is making a statement about its properties. He's claiming that a rock, for example, doesn't possess such properties.



We agree that he is making a claim about a property the thermostat or rock has or hasn't got, just like a claim that a rock has a mass of X is a claim about a certain property.


If he said "the thermostat is pretty" or "the thermostat is naughty" we'd know what he meant, but we wouldn't think that the statement carried objective scientific significance. But if he's not claiming objective scientific significance, then what is he talking about?



You might not but anyone who studies human behaviour (which is a science) certainly would say it has "objective scientific significance".



And I suggest that you wait to see what Piggy, Skiba et al. say for themselves about thermostatic awareness.



I said "most" and I am absolutely certain that Piggy follows what pixy is saying; whether he agrees with it or not is of course an entirely different matter, you shouldn't confuse the two.



The starting point is that when he talks about awareness as a property possessed by some objects, and not by others, he assumes that it means something. Dualism has nothing to do with it. He needs to define a physical property in physical terms.



You are right dualism has nothing to do with what Pixy has been posting but has a lot to do with what you are posting. Processes are an everyday feature of biology, chemistry, sociology, behaviorism and a myriad of other science even including physics.

Hint: Remember my "ran" - is my ran not a "physical property"?




If it's not a physical property, and he can't define it precisely, then he's just waffling.



Your definition of a "physical property" would pretty much remove all verbs from physics!





But that is not what Pixy means.

...snip...

It may not be what you think he means....


If it was, then he'd have to accept that the rock has awareness. He's using the term in some special sense of his own.



Which he is careful to describe and explain.

He's now referring to switching. When we look closely at what switching does, we realise that it means discarding information. How exactly discarding information means awareness is very ill-defined.


He is trying to break it down and describe it it in different way so you can understand it. (I don't mean that as any kind of insult but it's you that is struggling to understand the rather clear explanation he has already given so he is trying to provide other ways of explaining it to help you, hardly seems fair to criticize him for trying to help you.)



It would be a lot easier if you argued with what I say rather than with what you assume that my underlying agenda is.

It is not about assuming an "underlying agenda" it is about understanding the arguments being put forward. Your argument requires an assumption of dualism, that you do not recognise that is something I'm trying to help you understand.

[PixyMisa]

But that is not what Pixy means. If it was, then he'd have to accept that the rock has awareness. He's using the term in some special sense of his own. He's now referring to switching. When we look closely at what switching does, we realise that it means discarding information. How exactly discarding information means awareness is very ill-defined.
Think of it not as discarding information, but as filtering it. Information is a physical property, and if all you do is absorb it, all you do is heat up. You have to filter it - and discard some of it - to do anything with it.

[Belz...]

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.

I guess I'm not too clear on what we mean by "sentient", then. Do we mean to use it as a synonym for "self-aware" ?

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 [...] and when they evolved and which critters have them.

The problem is that we don't even know if sentience works the same for various branches of lifeforms who might have evolved it independently.

[skiba]

And I suggest that you wait to see what Piggy, Skiba et al. say for themselves about thermostatic awareness.


I think RD put quite aptly.

Do 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.

apparently you can change the lable when it supports your view.

[Piggy]

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.

No, I don't.

We don't know know if it's done differently somewhere else in the universe, or how it may be done differently (artificially) by us in the future.

But the fact remains that our only certified working model right now is the brain.

And the fact remains that attempting to determine sentience by gross physical behavior of the body is not going to be anywhere nearly as efficient as examining the processor -- whether it's a brain or not -- that's producing the phenomenon.


Which is why we need to be clear and not use ambigous words like "experience".
Using ambiguous words is only a problem if we fail to agree on which meaning we're dealing with.

"Experience" in the sense of "history" is clearly off-topic.

I think I've been clear about what I mean when I talk about sentience, and I use "felt experience" and sometimes "consciousness" in the same way (tho I also use "conscious" to mean "awake and coherent" sometimes, too).

[Belz...]

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?

Bumped.

[Belz...]

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.

Actually, the person -- the "I" -- IS the illusion.

[Piggy]

Suppose there are beings who are as far past us as we are past microcontrollers.

Suppose, instead, we look at the world around us and deal with that.

[Belz...]

No. Repeatability is what lends it scientific credence.

Precisely. And you can't replicate private experiences.

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.

How would you know if the results are similar ?

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.

Oh, I do experience sensations. The difference is that I don't "feel" that they are part of some weird "mind" that is distinct from the rest of the world. "I" is very much part of it. I find it difficult to put that into words, though.

[Belz...]

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.

No, it's not "implicit". "Illusion" means that something is precieving reality differently than it is. Anything can be fooled, including machines (which biological organisms are, by the way.)

[Belz...]

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

I do believe we're been arguing this since the beginning of the thread, Piggy.

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

Sounds circular, to me.

[John Freestone]

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.I might be misunderstanding this. It sounds like you're saying that the words scientists decide between them to attach to phenomena are the baseline of reality, which sounds rather like mentalism or idealism. I'm disappointed, because I thought there ought to be more of an objective qualification. It seems quite arbitrary, especially if simple mechanical reaction is used as the indicator of awareness (which at least Pixy has suggested), and that property is then denied other systems of nature that react to their environment, like rocks, planets or solar systems, all of which are immensely more complex than thermostats.

[PixyMisa]

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?
Very good question (thanks for bumping, Belz). It's only one of many points of data supporting the computational model, of course, but it is certainly one of the most striking.

The answer, I'm afraid, is that I don't know. I'll investigate and report back. Or if anyone else has more up-to-date information - for me it has likewise been a couple of years - feel free to butt in. :)

[Piggy]

Actually, the person -- the "I" -- IS the illusion.

And that's the problem with calling consciousness an illusion.

westprog is right that you have no illusion if no one's there to see it (or hear it, or whatever) -- unless you're using the word in performative terms (e.g., if Randi practices an "illusion" alone... the actions themselves constitute the "illusion" in this sense) but we're not.

If our conscious experience itself is an illusion -- not just is fraught with illusion, but actually isn't real and only appears to be real -- then we are forced to ask, if the illusion occurred, who was fooled by it?

Surely no one is saying that your sentience is an illusion to me, because I don't sense or experience your sentience.

So if my own sentience is an illusion, then who is being fooled by this illusion?

No one, obviously. Because we're agreed that there's no homunculus in the mental theater, no soul in the body, no ghost in the machine.

The problem is, the perceiver of the illusion is built into things when we call consciousness itself an "illusion", so it's a mistake to conceive of it this way. It's not quite right, and it will lead to other mistakes down the road.

Sentience is a real phenomenon in the world, and it generates what we think of as our selves, of course.

When we talk about illusions, we're talking about ways in which sentient beings are misled in their perceptions. But it's not an illusion that the beings are sentient. That's accurate.

One of those illusions -- as noted in an article posted previously on this thread -- is the sensation of a continuous and coherent existence.

[westprog]

Actually, knowing Pixy, I think he means the opposite. I think he says that there is no special meaning when you say YOU are aware. You are just complex enough to react to your own structure.


That is very likely the case - but I have to deal with the arguments I am given.


No it is exactly not physically meaningless. Physically, it means that the thermostat's internal state reflects the temperature and the relation of it to the built-in limits.

Philosophically, OTOH, it may well be meaningless.



If it's meant as a summary of the operation of the thermostat - IOW, just to say that the thermostat does what a thermostat does - then it's of no consequence.

But it was put forward as an observation on reality - and it was specifically claimed that the thermostat had a property that the rock didn't - or alternatively, possessed a higher quantity of the property than the rock. If that assertion is made, then we have to be able to in some way physically identify the property.



It relates to the structure, and possibly programming, of the thermostat.


As an engineering description, it is acceptable - but that is of course inherently limiting.

From subsequent posts from Pixy, I see that it's the switching nature of the thermostat that in his opinion carries awareness - and that the rock doesn't allow for switching.

This is true - but that is because of the special nature of switching. Switching simply means discarding very nearly all the information - except for one yes/no option. A thermostat is useful because it tells you just one thing. It tells you whether the temperature is above or below a certain point. (Subject to error).

This is actually the least amount of information that can be passed. Consider if we lived inside the rock. By checking the internal temperature, we might infer when the sun rose, how long it was in the sky, where it rose and set - we might even guess at the thickness of the rock. If we were connected to the thermostat, we'd know just one thing. If we were unlucky - and the temperature never passed the switch point - we'd never learn anything useful at all.

So the presumption of awareness means, apparently, the capacity to discard information - and just leave one little bit. In fact, precisely one bit.

Is there any reason to suppose that consciousness must involve the digitising of information? It could do, but the evidence is scanty.

[westprog]

Precisely. And you can't replicate private experiences.


You can, however, replicate the claim of experiencing private experiences.


How would you know if the results are similar ?


The language used when describing them. But the fact remains that we still don't know if Dave's red looks like Jim's red. But we do know that Dave and Jim both claim to experience red.

This is, naturally, the purpose of art. When Van Gogh paints a field of sunflowers, he's telling us what yellow feels like to him. When Beethoven composes Ode To Joy, he's trying to communicate the same sensation in our minds that he has in his. That's why we have art and science. We need to communicate things that cannot be explicitly stated.


Oh, I do experience sensations. The difference is that I don't "feel" that they are part of some weird "mind" that is distinct from the rest of the world. "I" is very much part of it. I find it difficult to put that into words, though.

The inability to put the sensation into words is part of the Hard Problem.

However, saying "I have a headache", "I opened the door" and "I imagined myself opening the door" all refer to the same single entity doing different things. It's all "I".

[John Freestone]

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



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.

Sorry westprog, could you confirm for me whether you're a physicalist or material monist, or whatever is the right expression for someone who believes there is only physical matter and nothing else, or consciously intends only to construct philosophies upon that assumption for the purposes of the argument at least? You seem to give me that impression, unless I have imagined it, and then keep saying things like "consciousness has some kind of physical origin", as if its destination were otherwise or its origin could be otherwise. Which is it - are you a materialist or is there an HPC? If you're a materialist, there's no point in continuing to protest that you're having a non-physical experience of life and it can't be explained yet by matter. You just have to boggle for a while longer. An alternative is to openly consider dualism.

[westprog]

When we talk about illusions, we're talking about ways in which sentient beings are misled in their perceptions. But it's not an illusion that the beings are sentient. That's accurate.

One of those illusions -- as noted in an article posted previously on this thread -- is the sensation of a continuous and coherent existence.

The external world as we percieve it is also entirely illusory. There may well be an external world, but it is not the same thing as our model the external world.

Our visual sense, as Jeffrey Gray has pointed out, provides such a strong and convincing model that we can't help thinking that it's the way the world really is - that the green we see on the trees has some kind of objective reality. In fact, the whole thing is internalised.

[Piggy]

But we don't know computers don't. My computer knows it isn't your computer, doesn't it?

We have absolutely no reason to believe that they could be.

As for your computer "knowing" it's not my computer....

People talk about computers in human terms -- and we do this with machines, too -- because it's easy for us. That language makes sense to us, so we talk about what a computer "knows" or what it "remembers" or even what it "forgot", or we say it's being "peevish" today or whatever.

But when you start talking about what's really going on, you can describe everything that's happening in your machine, and you'll never find any kind of processing which is supposed to, or which ought to, produce sentience.

And that's the bottom line, really, regardless of the kinds of metaphors and analogies and language shortcuts we use to talk about machines.

[calebprime]

Exactly.

Rocks have no switches.
Thermostats have one switch.
People have two, and sometimes even more!

There's a qualitative difference here between zero, one, and two. There's no inherent qualitative difference between two and a trillion.


Philosophy's loss, I would say. (And Dennett would disagree with you quite strongly!)

While we're aggravating each other by taking each other literally, I say, imagine a world with two dimensions, or music with only two tones.

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?


ol' Pixy doesn't mince words.

Pixy, do you think a properly programmed $1.95 microcontroller chip could pass a Turing test?

If yes, when will this occur. Or has it already?

[Darat]

Can all humans pass the Turing test?

[westprog]

Sorry westprog, could you confirm for me whether you're a physicalist or material monist, or whatever is the right expression for someone who believes there is only physical matter and nothing else, or consciously intends only to construct philosophies upon that assumption for the purposes of the argument at least? You seem to give me that impression, unless I have imagined it, and then keep saying things like "consciousness has some kind of physical origin", as if its destination were otherwise or its origin could be otherwise. Which is it - are you a materialist or is there an HPC? If you're a materialist, there's no point in continuing to protest that you're having a non-physical experience of life and it can't be explained yet by matter.

I'm claiming to have an experience of life. I don't know what the difference would be between a physical or non-physical experience.

It's readily apparent that there's no physical explanation as yet for subjective experiences. However, that was the case for many phenomena for which explanations were later found.

You just have to boggle for a while longer. An alternative is to openly consider dualism.

I am not in this thread to rule things out - I'm chiefly concerned to avoid narrowing the choices too far.

[MRC_Hans]

From subsequent posts from Pixy, I see that it's the switching nature of the thermostat that in his opinion carries awareness - and that the rock doesn't allow for switching.

I don't think you should latch on to the term 'switch'. Switch is what the thermostat does, but the core of the matter is that it monitors its surroundings and is able to react to certain conditions.

This is true - but that is because of the special nature of switching. Switching simply means discarding very nearly all the information - except for one yes/no option. A thermostat is useful because it tells you just one thing. It tells you whether the temperature is above or below a certain point. (Subject to error).

What the thermostat is useful for is irrelevant. The relevant point is that it can collect information about the outside world and react to it.

This is actually the least amount of information that can be passed.

It is irrelevant how much information it passes. We could fail to connect it and it would pass no information at all, and its level of awareness would be unchanged.


Consider if we lived inside the rock. By checking the internal temperature, we might infer when the sun rose, how long it was in the sky, where it rose and set - we might even guess at the thickness of the rock.


Irrelevant: We are not the rock. If we live inside a rock and perceive the environment there and process the information, then we are very much aware. If by "we" you mean some putative property of a certain rock, then that rock is different from the generic concept of a rock.

If we were connected to the thermostat, we'd know just one thing. If we were unlucky - and the temperature never passed the switch point - we'd never learn anything useful at all.

That would affect our awareness, not that of the thermostat.


So the presumption of awareness means, apparently, the capacity to discard information - and just leave one little bit. In fact, precisely one bit.


No. It means to process information. And processing information ALWAYS implies filtering.


Is there any reason to suppose that consciousness must involve the digitising of information? It could do, but the evidence is scanty.


Digitizing? No, not to my knowledge. It is the models we use to make it easier to understand that involve digitizing. .... Unless you refer to quantum steps, of course.

Hans

[Dancing David]

The external world as we percieve it is also entirely illusory. There may well be an external world, but it is not the same thing as our model the external world.

Our visual sense, as Jeffrey Gray has pointed out, provides such a strong and convincing model that we can't help thinking that it's the way the world really is - that the green we see on the trees has some kind of objective reality. In fact, the whole thing is internalised.

Sensation are correlates of objective reality. The phototrpoin response to the wavelengths labeled 'green' by common idiom is directly related to the photons that are not absorbed by chlorophyll.

So the sensation is not an internalized model of reality, it is a direct interaction with reality.

I also have to review Grey's assertion that there is response prior to perception, I am unclear where that came from.

[westprog]

I don't think you should latch on to the term 'switch'. Switch is what the thermostat does, but the core of the matter is that it monitors its surroundings and is able to react to certain conditions.




What the thermostat is useful for is irrelevant. The relevant point is that it can collect information about the outside world and react to it.



But this is precisely my problem with the aware thermostat/unaware rock hypothesis. The rock is monitoring its surroundings and reacting to certain conditions.


It is irrelevant how much information it passes. We could fail to connect it and it would pass no information at all, and its level of awareness would be unchanged.


That I agree with.

Irrelevant: We are not the rock. If we live inside a rock and perceive the environment there and process the information, then we are very much aware. If by "we" you mean some putative property of a certain rock, then that rock is different from the generic concept of a rock.


If it doesn't matter whether the thermostat is connected to us, then it doesn't matter whether there are people inside the rock. What matters is that information is being passed. And clearly, more information is making its way into the rock than is being passed by the thermocouple.


That would affect our awareness, not that of the thermostat.



No. It means to process information. And processing information ALWAYS implies filtering.



And how do we differentiate between the filtering done by the rock and that done by the thermostat? It was Pixy who introduced switching. All that means is that the thermostat filters more stringently - leaving almost no information. The rock lets quite a bit through.


Digitizing? No, not to my knowledge. It is the models we use to make it easier to understand that involve digitizing. .... Unless you refer to quantum steps, of course.


I'm still unable to see a coherent model that denies the rock awareness and allows it to the thermostat. That's why I'm demanding the physical model. At present, there's nothing to grasp hold of. The thermostat has exactly two states, the rock uncountably many. How does that make the thermostat more aware?

In fact, the thermostat has many states independent of its function as a thermostat. It reacts to its environment just as the rock does. Pixy seems to regard this kind of information processing as invalid, in some way. The reason appears to involve switching. According to Darat, I'm the only person who doesn't know what he's getting at.

[westprog]

Sensation are correlates of objective reality. The phototrpoin response to the wavelengths labeled 'green' by common idiom is directly related to the photons that are not absorbed by chlorophyll.

So the sensation is not an internalized model of reality, it is a direct interaction with reality.


There's a strong correllation between the internal model and the external reality, but they aren't the same thing.

[PixyMisa]

Pixy, do you think a properly programmed $1.95 microcontroller chip could pass a Turing test?

If yes, when will this occur. Or has it already?
No, or at least, not yet, and not for a while (Moore's Law vs. Gresham's Law!)

That specific $1.95 chip has 64KB of flash memory on it. That's plenty for controlling a washing machine, but not a whole lot for conducting a conversation.

Moore's Law is substantially outpacing inflation, and did so even in the 70's, but we've still got a few doublings to go before we get there.

[Darat]

...snip... According to Darat, I'm the only person who doesn't know what he's getting at.

I never said nor implied that.

[Mercutio]

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.

Well... no, we do not have a biological phenomenon called mind. That is a huge part of the problem here. We have a whole slew of sensory, perceptual, memory and thinking behaviors of an active organism. Because, unlike walking, thinking is hidden to us (remember, no sensory neurons in the brain), we have inferred (circularly and falsely) the existence of a mind which does those things. Our introspective accounts have been misleading--they do not tell us what it is that we are processing, nor how, nor which elements we respond to--and any attempt to use biology, or chemistry, or physics, to explain those introspective accounts will fall flat.

Incidentally, our adult introspection (say, of Paul's inspection of an apple) forgets the learning of perception that we did while growing up. We are not merely hard-wired to perceive; we also must learn to perceive. Without an appropriate learning history, we simply will not see all the elements the same way. We think we simply know what it feels like to be hungry; we had to learn that label from others who did not have access to our private behavior.

There is not a simple answer, but the first step is in asking the right question, and the right question dare not presuppose the existence of the very thing we are questioning!

A little light reading on the matter. (http://business.nmsu.edu/~mhyman/M670_Articles/Skinner_AP_1990.pdf)

A little more light reading on the matter. (http://www.behavior.org/journals_bp/2005/3_rachlinfinal.pdf)

[Nick227]

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.

Does sound pretty dualistic to me, though. Experience-Experiencer - that's duality. In the above you're giving "consciousness" the mystical spin, if I read you right. It's becoming what's often referred to as the "ground of being."

As I see it, you can't really dispute dualism and assert that the awareness, or sentience, of the stat is really of a different order to that of the human.

Nick

[westprog]

I never said nor implied that.

I may have filtered the information to provide a more coherent narrative. Sorry if I misrepresented you.

[Nick227]

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.

Well, duality seems to be an emergent property of the brain. Duality defines our conscious experience, yet it does not appear to be innate. Consciousness is a concept. You cannot legitimately have a concept that is all-encompassing and, since you cannot escape human "consciousness," I would say that, by definition, consciousness is really a self-invalidating proposition. Words like "consciousness" are what happen when the concept-creating aspect of the mind tries to look at itself. They are inevitably pretty unsatisfactory.

Nick

[Mercutio]

Yes, the word "illusion" only has meaning when dealing with an experiencer. And no magic is required.
So, a thermostat is an experiencer. OR, you are presupposing some special status of people, which is precisely the item under question. If you are using "experiencer" only for something you have presupposed is sentient, then you are using the language of consciousness prematurely. And as you yourself say...

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.

Can we speak of human experience without the language of consciousness?
Yes, of course we can. We can also speak of it with the language of consciousness. And we can talk about my computer hating me, my car being tired, my refrigerator choosing the worst time to go on strike. Consciousness language, when used as we normally use it, is not restricted to humans (and humans are sometimes not conscious), but rather is restricted to particular types of behaviors--mostly those for which we do not see an immediate, salient, external cause. If we observe such a cause, we say the behavior was reflexive, or determined, or automatic, or some such; if we do not, we infer some sort of internal causality--some form of consciousness. And that is how we learn the word--by observation of behavior in context, not by knowledge of some underlying neurological underpinning. All that stuff is detail. Our language of consciousness long preceded that level of knowledge.

[PixyMisa]

I don't think you should latch on to the term 'switch'. Switch is what the thermostat does, but the core of the matter is that it monitors its surroundings and is able to react to certain conditions.
Yep. A thermometer can be said to monitor its surroundings. But it doesn't react - doesn't switch.

Digitizing? No, not to my knowledge. It is the models we use to make it easier to understand that involve digitizing. .... Unless you refer to quantum steps, of course.Exactly. A switch need not digitise the signal. For example, you could have DPDT switch wired like this:


A--->| X |--->A
B--->| |--->B



A--->| |--->B
B--->| X |--->AThat is, throwing the switch reverses the outputs relative to the inputs, but doesn't actually lose any information.

(As an aside, that sort of switch is necessary for reversible computing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing). But (as far as I am aware) even in reversible computing, to actually get a useful result out you have to latch the results somewhere in an information-lossy type of switch.)

[westprog]

Well... no, we do not have a biological phenomenon called mind. That is a huge part of the problem here. We have a whole slew of sensory, perceptual, memory and thinking behaviors of an active organism. Because, unlike walking, thinking is hidden to us (remember, no sensory neurons in the brain), we have inferred (circularly and falsely) the existence of a mind which does those things.


I'm using "mind" as a catch all for the thing that causes the behaviours. I'm not presupposing the objective existence, here, of its nature - beyond the reasonable assumption that it's biological because we are biological.


Our introspective accounts have been misleading--they do not tell us what it is that we are processing, nor how, nor which elements we respond to--and any attempt to use biology, or chemistry, or physics, to explain those introspective accounts will fall flat.


I'm not too worried about what path researchers follow provided they don't dismiss introspection entirely.

The reason that introspection was used before was that tools for monitoring brain states were limited. However, there's no reason not to use objective tools in conjunction with introspection.

For example, the state of the brain when percieving an object could be compared with the state of the brain when thinking about the same object. That's a reasonable kind of research to be doing, and I don't think it should be precluded because of its introspective element. I suspect Mercutio wouldn't rule out such research either.


Incidentally, our adult introspection (say, of Paul's inspection of an apple) forgets the learning of perception that we did while growing up. We are not merely hard-wired to perceive; we also must learn to perceive. Without an appropriate learning history, we simply will not see all the elements the same way. We think we simply know what it feels like to be hungry; we had to learn that label from others who did not have access to our private behavior.


Perception and imagery is object oriented. Small children percieve pure images, which don't carry information. When we see an apple, we plug in our apple concept. That's why it's easy to mistake a crumpled rag for a dead rat. We have a library of predefined objects that we plug in when they match up.

(This reference to computing concepts is intended to be analagous, not literal).

There is not a simple answer, but the first step is in asking the right question, and the right question dare not presuppose the existence of the very thing we are questioning!

A little light reading on the matter. (http://business.nmsu.edu/~mhyman/M670_Articles/Skinner_AP_1990.pdf)

A little more light reading on the matter. (http://www.behavior.org/journals_bp/2005/3_rachlinfinal.pdf)

Is the assumption that consciousness exists comparable with assuming that phlogiston, or the Aether were real? Or is it simply a matter of naming the problem area?

I'm generally in favour of the fewest preconceptions when doing research in this area - but that must include the possibility that consciousness is real as well as the possibility that it isn't.

[MRC_Hans]

But this is precisely my problem with the aware thermostat/unaware rock hypothesis. The rock is monitoring its surroundings and reacting to certain conditions.

No, the rock is not monitoring anything and it is not processing any information. The "people inside" the rock that you talked about do, but they are not a property of the rock.


If it doesn't matter whether the thermostat is connected to us, then it doesn't matter whether there are people inside the rock.


Right! It doesn't matter to the rock. The awareness of the rock is exactly the same ( =0 ).


What matters is that information is being passed. And clearly, more information is making its way into the rock than is being passed by the thermocouple.


No, no, NO! Transmission of information is irrelevant. The rock just transmits information about the outside world. It does not process it.


And how do we differentiate between the filtering done by the rock and that done by the thermostat? It was Pixy who introduced switching. All that means is that the thermostat filters more stringently - leaving almost no information. The rock lets quite a bit through.


I agree that 'filtering' is perhaps not the best term. A passive filtering, as the rock performs, is just a question of bandwidth. Processing is the matter; the thermostat processes information (compares it to some set limit), the rock does not (it just passes as much as its bandwidth happens to permit).

I'm still unable to see a coherent model that denies the rock awareness and allows it to the thermostat. That's why I'm demanding the physical model. At present, there's nothing to grasp hold of. The thermostat has exactly two states, the rock uncountably many. How does that make the thermostat more aware?

Because the thermostat adds value to the information. The thermostat compares the temperature to a set limit and informs you of the result.


In fact, the thermostat has many states independent of its function as a thermostat. It reacts to its environment just as the rock does.

Certainly. Those states are, however, not part of its awareness. You also have many states that are independent of your function as a sentient being.

Pixy seems to regard this kind of information processing as invalid, in some way. The reason appears to involve switching.

Because the switching involves processing.


According to Darat, I'm the only person who doesn't know what he's getting at.


I don't know if you are the only one, but..... ;).

Hans

[Mercutio]

Well, duality seems to be an emergent property of the brain. Duality defines our conscious experience, yet it does not appear to be innate. Consciousness is a concept. You cannot legitimately have a concept that is all-encompassing and, since you cannot escape human "consciousness," I would say that, by definition, consciousness is really a self-invalidating proposition. Words like "consciousness" are what happen when the concept-creating aspect of the mind tries to look at itself. They are inevitably pretty unsatisfactory.

Nick
I disagree that duality emerges thusly; it comes from our language, certainly, but the same experience is just as easily packaged into public and private experience, with the key difference being the number of potential observers, and no qualitative difference (which is what I think of by "duality") is required. The "duality" is an artifact of our explanation, not of the experience; as such, attempts to explain the duality, if they presuppose that it is real, are doomed.

[PixyMisa]

What Hans said. :)

[Nick227]

Is the assumption that consciousness exists comparable with assuming that phlogiston, or the Aether were real? Or is it simply a matter of naming the problem area?

I'm generally in favour of the fewest preconceptions when doing research in this area - but that must include the possibility that consciousness is real as well as the possibility that it isn't.

Very pragmatic statement! But I think if you're trying to create a concept out of something which, by definition, cannot be experientially escaped from, then at some point either the conceptual mind wins and you become abstracted from reality, or you have to admit that it does not exist. Duality, huh!

Nick

[westprog]

So, a thermostat is an experiencer. OR, you are presupposing some special status of people, which is precisely the item under question. If you are using "experiencer" only for something you have presupposed is sentient, then you are using the language of consciousness prematurely. And as you yourself say...

Can we speak of human experience without the language of consciousness?
Yes, of course we can. We can also speak of it with the language of consciousness. And we can talk about my computer hating me, my car being tired, my refrigerator choosing the worst time to go on strike. Consciousness language, when used as we normally use it, is not restricted to humans (and humans are sometimes not conscious), but rather is restricted to particular types of behaviors--mostly those for which we do not see an immediate, salient, external cause. If we observe such a cause, we say the behavior was reflexive, or determined, or automatic, or some such; if we do not, we infer some sort of internal causality--some form of consciousness. And that is how we learn the word--by observation of behavior in context, not by knowledge of some underlying neurological underpinning. All that stuff is detail. Our language of consciousness long preceded that level of knowledge.

But most people, when they say "my computer hates me" mean something quite different to what they mean when they say "my wife hates me". When they say "my computer hates me", they mean "this inanimate object has exhibited behaviours which, if they were exhibited by a person, would cause me to believe that he hated me". (Computers may be a bad example - some people do believe that computers are animate in a sense that toasters aren't).

That is why it's important to know the context in which we speak. I dare say a lot of physicists claim that their cars are tired. However, they don't do so when talking physics. The portion of the language that is associated with consciousness is deliberately excluded from their work. And that's as it should be.

So when Pixy describes the aware thermostat, if he were using the term in a loose, everyday way then it wouldn't be worthy of comment. If he were using the term as a measure of certain types of digital information, then it wouldn't carry connotations. But if he's asserting scientific fact, then it's relevant to look for the scientific provenance.

That we cannot describe the experience of consciousness without terms which lie outside the realm of TLOP is part of the Hard Problem.

[Nick227]

I disagree that duality emerges thusly; it comes from our language, certainly, but the same experience is just as easily packaged into public and private experience, with the key difference being the number of potential observers, and no qualitative difference (which is what I think of by "duality") is required. The "duality" is an artifact of our explanation, not of the experience; as such, attempts to explain the duality, if they presuppose that it is real, are doomed.

I don't completely follow, but it seems to me that duality arises from the labels "I" and "my," which I would consider the result of brain, or at least mental, processes. Though of course they can be overcome.

Nick

[westprog]

No, the rock is not monitoring anything and it is not processing any information. The "people inside" the rock that you talked about do, but they are not a property of the rock.


I'm quite willing to consider a model where there are no people involved at all. But if we do that, and simply consider the passage of information, the rock and the thermostat are equivalent.


Right! It doesn't matter to the rock. The awareness of the rock is exactly the same ( =0 ).



No, no, NO! Transmission of information is irrelevant. The rock just transmits information about the outside world. It does not process it.



I agree that 'filtering' is perhaps not the best term. A passive filtering, as the rock performs, is just a question of bandwidth. Processing is the matter; the thermostat processes information (compares it to some set limit), the rock does not (it just passes as much as its bandwidth happens to permit).


But the thermostat passes just as much as its bandwidth happens to permit. It's bandwidth is narrow. The rock passes more information.

We could replace the thermostat with a thermocouple, which would transmit information that would give us a temperature measurement, rather than just a switch. Would a thermocouple be more aware than the thermostat? Then imagine dozens of thermocouples in a dome shape. Keep adding them until we have a system that emulates the rock. At what point do we lose awareness instead of gaining it?


Because the thermostat adds value to the information. The thermostat compares the temperature to a set limit and informs you of the result.


Value is another concept that only matters to human beings. Thermostats and rocks don't have concepts of value. We do - which is why we use thermostats to operate our immersion heaters instead of rocks.

The information transmitted by the thermostat and the information transmitted by the rock have exactly the same value according to TLOP: =0, as above.

Certainly. Those states are, however, not part of its awareness. You also have many states that are independent of your function as a sentient being.


When dealing with a non-sentient being such as a thermostat, it seems to be entirely arbitrary which states form part of its function.

Is it entirely coincidental that the supposed engine of awareness in the thermostat happens to be the exact behaviour that makes it useful to human beings? It seems rather odd that the value system of a thermostat is exactly the same as the human beings who created it.


Because the switching involves processing.


So does the passing of information to the centre of the rock. The temperature gradient is smoothed out. All information is processed as it passes between objects.

That a thermostat behaves in a repeatable and predictable way makes it more useful to us as a device. I don't see how that constitutes awareness.


I don't know if you are the only one, but..... ;).

Hans

[rocketdodger]

How do we feel about ants?

.... so.... you now agree that ants have subjective experience?

Wow, that was easy!

[rocketdodger]

I might be misunderstanding this. It sounds like you're saying that the words scientists decide between them to attach to phenomena are the baseline of reality, which sounds rather like mentalism or idealism. I'm disappointed, because I thought there ought to be more of an objective qualification. It seems quite arbitrary, especially if simple mechanical reaction is used as the indicator of awareness (which at least Pixy has suggested), and that property is then denied other systems of nature that react to their environment, like rocks, planets or solar systems, all of which are immensely more complex than thermostats.

What are you talking about?

I am simply stating that if you want to be picky about it yes, every physical interaction in the universe can be viewed as a decision. But it is pointless to view every interaction that way because you will be giving meaning to interactions that have no meaning. That is why such a view is inconsistent with the rest of science.

You can claim that a rock falling is a decision -- if there were no gravity, the rock would not fall, so the input (gravity) is mapped to the output (falling), which could be called a decision. But what meaning? What is that decision for?

A thermostat's decision, on the other hand, has meaning -- to control temperature. It's meaning was designed. A neuron's decision has meaning -- to control some biological process. It's meaning was evolved. Meaning, meaning, meaning.

[rocketdodger]

Suppose, instead, we look at the world around us and deal with that.

Ah, I see. Well, piggy, that is the root of your problem, I think.

[westprog]

.... so.... you now agree that ants have subjective experience?

Wow, that was easy!


I don't know - but I tend to think that what ants experience lies somewhere between what I experience and what a rock experiences. And I would hope that the aliens with consciousness++ would have a similar spectrum, but with them at the top.

[PixyMisa]

But most people, when they say "my computer hates me" mean something quite different to what they mean when they say "my wife hates me". When they say "my computer hates me", they mean "this inanimate object has exhibited behaviours which, if they were exhibited by a person, would cause me to believe that he hated me".
But that is exactly what people mean when they say "my wife hates me".

If your wife hugged you and made you your favourite dinner and wore that special nightie... You wouldn't say "my wife hates me", even though she does.

[PixyMisa]

That we cannot describe the experience of consciousness without terms which lie outside the realm of TLOP is part of the Hard Problem.I'm still trying to work out what this means, or indeed if it means anything at all.

[Darat]

It is again a dualistic construction - i.e. TLOP plus something else = consciousness.

[PixyMisa]

Yeah, but now he's added language into the mix, as though the failings of language are the failings of reality. Which I've seen argued before, admittedly.

[westprog]

You can claim that a rock falling is a decision -- if there were no gravity, the rock would not fall, so the input (gravity) is mapped to the output (falling), which could be called a decision. But what meaning? What is that decision for?

A thermostat's decision, on the other hand, has meaning -- to control temperature. It's meaning was designed. A neuron's decision has meaning -- to control some biological process. It's meaning was evolved. Meaning, meaning, meaning.


I find the word "meaning" slightly loaded - so I'd prefer "reason". There's a reason why the neuron or the thermostat are the way they are. If we then say that the operation of the thermostat reflects its design, that appears quite sensible.

It's the extension of the concept of purpose and design into other aspects which I dispute.

[westprog]

But that is exactly what people mean when they say "my wife hates me".

If your wife hugged you and made you your favourite dinner and wore that special nightie... You wouldn't say "my wife hates me", even though she does.

I'm speaking on behalf of the people who think of their wives as different to computers.

[westprog]

It is again a dualistic construction - i.e. TLOP plus something else = consciousness.

No. I realise that you are wedded to the idea that I favour a dualist approach, but that's not what I'm saying in this case. It is confusing though, so I'll try to explain again.

We have language that we use to describe consciousness. That language is, at present, largely non-scientific, because we don't have a good scientific description of how consciousness works. Since consciousness is an important part of our experience, there's a lot of language that relates to it.

This does not imply that consciousness is not bound by the laws of physics. It simply means that we don't, as yet, understand how it works. It may be that consciousness operates according to laws of physics that we don't yet understand. That's a normal part of scientific progress. Indeed, the observation of unexplained scientific phenomena is how scientific progress is made.

Yeah, but now he's added language into the mix, as though the failings of language are the failings of reality. Which I've seen argued before, admittedly.

But if we use the non-scientific language associated with consciousness to describe other entities with which consciousness is not associated, then we are going in precisely the wrong direction. We should be either trying to define such terms with exactitude, or else producing new ways of talking about consciousness scientifically. When we take imprecise terms from a poorly defined realm, and apply them in areas where it isn't clear if they are applicable at all, we are piling imprecision on imprecision.

[INRM]

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.

A thermostat I suppose could be labeled as such -- however it would be a far leap to lable it the same as a human brain in terms of capability, and in terms of the same degree of awareness. It is not complicated or sophisticated enough to be able to produce the range of characteristics and behaviors that a human brain can, although it works on basically the same principles, it response to input, and produces output in response.


INRM

[Darat]

No. I realise that you are wedded to the idea that I favour a dualist approach, but that's not what I'm saying in this case. It is confusing though, so I'll try to explain again.

We have language that we use to describe consciousness. That language is, at present, largely non-scientific, because we don't have a good scientific description of how consciousness works. Since consciousness is an important part of our experience, there's a lot of language that relates to it.

...snip...

No - we have language that can be used in either a non or scitific manner.



...snip...

. We should be either trying to define such terms with exactitude, or else producing new ways of talking about consciousness scientifically. When we take imprecise terms from a poorly defined realm, and apply them in areas where it isn't clear if they are applicable at all, we are piling imprecision on imprecision.

Yet when people in this very thread have done this (the words "illusion" and "aware" spring to mind) you insist that those words have to be used in their "non-scientific" way.

[westprog]

Yet when people in this very thread have done this (the words "illusion" and "aware" spring to mind) you insist that those words have to be used in their "non-scientific" way.


It's reasonably common for scientists to reuse terms from normal language when speaking scientifically. However, it's necessary to define the terms very precisely, and to avoid confusion with their everyday meaning.

The use of terms such as "illusion" and "awareness" when describing inanimate objects doesn't seem, to me, to go hand in hand with a rigorous definition of what they mean. If such definitions were to be applied, then the correlation between, say, the awareness of a thermocouple and the awareness of a person might not apply.

[Belz...]

You're trying to define awareness in completely mechanical ways

Is there any other way ?

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

In what way must it match, then ?

[Belz...]

The word "aware" is very misleading the way you use it.
The thermostat reacts to the temperature. It's not aware of anything.

Humans react to stimuli. They are not aware of anything.

Now, let's go about to proving those claims, shall we ?

[Belz...]

However, it doesn't have a sensation of being hit. It has the effects of being hit. As does the Grand Canyon.


The sensation IS an effect.

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.

Really ? The hand doesn't "feel" anything at all ?

[Belz...]

Consciousness does not change. Consciousness "The experiencer" (what ever that is) is still there the same, only whats being experienced changes.

That's complete nonsense. If the experience changes, then by definition the experiencer changer unless you believe in a soul. Also, it's quite clear that drugs and other factors can change the experiencer as well.

[rocketdodger]

I don't know - but I tend to think that what ants experience lies somewhere between what I experience and what a rock experiences. And I would hope that the aliens with consciousness++ would have a similar spectrum, but with them at the top.

So then why can't we say that a rock experiences nothing, a thermostat experiences very little, ants experience a bit, and people experience very much? What is wrong with that?

[Piscivore]

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.

Nonsense. The Colorado River is eroding the rocks in the canyon right this second just as it has for millions of years. The Canyon is "having the experience" of being eroded in the present. Unless you have some other explanation for how it got that way?

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.

Like John Wesley Powell's raft trip through the canyon, perhaps? Or a snowstorm. Guess what, The GC has those "momentary experiences" too.

The Grand Canyon doesn't have that kind of experience.
Wrong.

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.
Well, that's a new word, "sensations" If by that you mean is the GC aware that it experienceing snow, or erosion, I'd have to agree probably not. If you mean something else, you'll have to explicate.

It doesn't have any momentary experiences.
Wrong.

Ideally, we'll have a rigid standard to apply. I think we are a long way short of that.

Yet, you seem to be quite comfortable declaring what is and isn't "conscious", based as far as I can tell only on the criteria that if it is like you it is, if not, not.

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".
Isn't it peculiar that whenever one of your terms is defined explicitly enough to be no longer ambiguous, that it fails to support your hypothesis? Why do you assume this is a failure of language, and not of your premises?

The problem is that if we allow computers to be sentient, then why not thermostats?
Good question. Why not?

Why not anything?
Because not everything has the qualities, as Pixy has explained. Rocks don't, for example.

That's the panpsychism theory. Everything is sentient, in its own way.
Who has proposed that? No one in this thread, that I've seen.

[Hokulele]

Thats the same thing.

A person who has dissociative disorder experiences, "faulty computation". It doesent make it any less of an experience.

If theres a break down or diminishment in awareness(consciousness) then
theres no experience at all, or very little.


My question had to do with your phrasing, "the 'experiencer' hasn't changed." By this, do you mean the physical person, the brain, the "I"? In all three cases, it can be shown that there has been a significant change (dissociative disorders all directly involve identity and/or awareness). If by the "experiencer" you mean something else, can you please explain? It sounds to me like you are trying to bring the concept of an immutable soul into the conversation.

ETA: It looks like Belz... beat me to the soul inference.

[Beth]

Can we speak of human experience without the language of consciousness? Yes, of course we can. We can also speak of it with the language of consciousness. And we can talk about my computer hating me, my car being tired, my refrigerator choosing the worst time to go on strike. Consciousness language, when used as we normally use it, is not restricted to humans (and humans are sometimes not conscious), but rather is restricted to particular types of behaviors--mostly those for which we do not see an immediate, salient, external cause. If we observe such a cause, we say the behavior was reflexive, or determined, or automatic, or some such; if we do not, we infer some sort of internal causality--some form of consciousness. And that is how we learn the word--by observation of behavior in context, not by knowledge of some underlying neurological underpinning. All that stuff is detail. Our language of consciousness long preceded that level of knowledge.
Right. We invented a word to describe a sensation. We call it consciousness. Why is that an illusion? I feel sometimes like the people arguing the no HPC side are explaining to folks like me and piggy how it's just an illusion that the sun goes across the sky, circling earth. But I don't get why they believe that it is all an illusion. Not to mention that it sounds an awful lot like what mystics throughout the ages have been saying.

When I was a kid and I was taught WHY the earth actually circled the sun, there was an easy experiment that I could do to test the theory. All I had to do was mark the point that sunlight hit coming in my bedroom window every day for a year. They said that if the earth circled the sun, I'd get a particular pattern of dots. If the Sun circled the earth, I would get another pattern. I did that. Not for a whole year and not every day, but enough to discern the pattern. I could believe them because they made a prediction that I could verify to myself via my own senses.

Now, I actually agree that the thermostat is aware in some weird sense of the word. I'll even grant that it is more aware than a piece of granite. I think dogs and elephants are probably self-aware. Ants? I don't know.

You say that humans aren't special in regard to consciousness. But we ARE special. We are, according to our perceptions, at the very very top of the distribution for consciousness. At least on this planet. As near as we can tell. Is anybody really arguing that's a misperception?

[By the way, the question regarding gods with consciousness++? If such beings existed and we were aware of them, I think we would regard them as gods and they might well regard us as so far down the line as to be not worth bothering trying to communicate with us. ]

If you want me to believe that consciousness is an illusion, that nothing special is actually going on, you're going to have to come up with some predictions and experimental results that indicate that such that I can run the experiment myself. All the experimental results we have relate to microseconds of time. I don't mind if it requires a long period of time to test, but I want to take the data myself. Other peoples experiments are interesting, but don't give me any reason to conclude that what is commonly referred to as consciousness is not there at all, but actually something else altogether.

I disagree that duality emerges thusly; it comes from our language, certainly, but the same experience is just as easily packaged into public and private experience, with the key difference being the number of potential observers, and no qualitative difference (which is what I think of by "duality") is required. The "duality" is an artifact of our explanation, not of the experience; as such, attempts to explain the duality, if they presuppose that it is real, are doomed.

I don't know about Nick, but I don't presuppose duality. I assume that everything that gives rise to what we refer to as consciousness, sentience, or free will can be shown to have a physical explanation for how it occurs.

BTW, thanks for all your erudite posts. It's been a pleasure reading this thread.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

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.
But you just said that a computer could be programmed to respond exactly like a human being. Do we look at the computer or the human to take our benchmark for what is sentient?

~~ Paul

[Piggy]

Ah, I see. Well, piggy, that is the root of your problem, I think.

The root of my problem is that I'm looking at the real world and you're ignoring it?

Ooooh kaaaay....

[Piggy]

But you just said that a computer could be programmed to respond exactly like a human being. Do we look at the computer or the human to take our benchmark for what is sentient?

You're missing part of the point, here.

Attempting to judge sentience by gross physical behavior is a rather poor way of doing it. It's going to come down to the processor, whether that's a brain or computer.

Right now, our benchmark has to be the human brain, because it's the only thing we know of which we're certain produces sentience.

When looking at, say, computers, we need to ask "Do these things seem to be wired up in a way that would allow them to also produce sentience?"

The answer right now is "No".

We have no reason to believe that they are, or even should be, sentient. They have not been programmed to be sentient -- we don't even know how to do that -- and as we've seen from Marvin, systems that sense, process, and respond can hum along just fine without sentience, which seems to be a kind of post-processing product.

[Nick227]

You say that humans aren't special in regard to consciousness. But we ARE special. We are, according to our perceptions, at the very very top of the distribution for consciousness. At least on this planet. As near as we can tell. Is anybody really arguing that's a misperception?

[snip]

If you want me to believe that consciousness is an illusion, that nothing special is actually going on, you're going to have to come up with some predictions and experimental results that indicate that such that I can run the experiment myself. All the experimental results we have relate to microseconds of time. I don't mind if it requires a long period of time to test, but I want to take the data myself. Other peoples experiments are interesting, but don't give me any reason to conclude that what is commonly referred to as consciousness is not there at all, but actually something else altogether.

Beth,

Could I ask you, just to check for possible bias, if you're basically OK with the notion that the human being is simply a thinking and feeling machine?

Nick

[Piggy]

So then why can't we say that a rock experiences nothing, a thermostat experiences very little, ants experience a bit, and people experience very much? What is wrong with that?

What's wrong is that there is no reason to believe that a thermostat experiences anything, and every reason to believe that it doesn't.

You're still trafficking in your "underpants gnome" logic:

1. Build a robust reasoning system.

2. ?

3. Sentience appears.

You have provided absolutely no evidence (because there's none to provide) that the circuitry in a computer or a thermostat produces sentience, or that it can.

As we've seen from real-world examples, even a "computer" as complex as the brain is capable of doing one heckuva lot without sentience.

Sentience does not appear to simply arise -- somehow -- generically out of the system when you program it to do logical things.

Your claim that it does is not supported, and in fact runs contrary to observation.

[Piggy]

Is there any other way ?

Well, there's no other way to describe the processes which generate sentience, but unfortunately we don't know what those are yet.

When we have them, maybe we'll be able to formulate a purely mechanical definition.

The problem with doing that now, especially the way rocketdodger and PixyMisa are doing it, is that if we do we'll end up having to use insufficient processes which end up describing things that are sentient as well as things that are not.

So for the moment, we're forced to define sentience in terms of observation: e.g., it's the difference between being awake and being in undreaming sleep, for example.

It's not optimal, but we're forced into it until we know more.

It's kind of like if there's a sudden, unexpected flash of light in the heavens where there used to be no light. We ask "What is that?" We point telescopes at it to find out.

Until we do find out, we have no good definition for it except "That light over there".

Right now, sentience is just "this thing that we experience".

In what way must it match, then?

It must match, at least, by not setting out conditions which supposedly are sufficient for sentience which -- by observing the brain -- we plainly see are not sufficient for sentience.

If we say "X + Y + Z = sentience", and if we can observe the brain doing X + Y + Z, yet these processes together do not necessarily lead to conscious awareness, then something's missing.

[Piggy]

I guess I'm not too clear on what we mean by "sentient", then. Do we mean to use it as a synonym for "self-aware"?

That gets tricky. I don't think it's sufficient, because of this...

The problem is that we don't even know if sentience works the same for various branches of lifeforms who might have evolved it independently.

I remember a buddy of mine once saying "I don't think a dog has ever had the thought 'I'."

If rodents are sentient -- and I think they probably are -- "self-aware" might be too high a bar for what it is they experience.

It's the ability to feel like things are "happening to you", even if you never once stop and reflect on the nature (or even the fact) of your own existence.

ETA: It may have evolved independently in various critters, but until we have a better understanding of how our brains do the trick, and then start to examine other animals' brains, we're probably going to have to wait before exploring that route.

[cyborg]

the human brain ... [is] the only thing we know of which we're certain produces sentience.

The human soul is the only thing we know of which we're certain produces godliness.

[skiba]

Does sound pretty dualistic to me, though. Experience-Experiencer - that's duality. In the above you're giving "consciousness" the mystical spin, if I read you right. It's becoming what's often referred to as the "ground of being."

As I see it, you can't really dispute dualism and assert that the awareness, or sentience, of the stat is really of a different order to that of the human.
Nick

Theres always a form of dualism intorduced when we use a mechanical model.
A mechanical model is actualy the only one at our disposal, unless we make the assumption that everything is consciousness or consciousness is the "ground of being.". This would go into spirituality, someting that is scientifically unsound. doens't have to be a soul/body either.

If we have a web cam connected to your everyday PC. This would represent the part of the brain that is in charge of creating the image of whats out there. I think we can agree there's no experience happening here.

Lets say we build a machine that is now capable of experiencing this image that the webcam & PC producing. Now we have an experiencer and the experience or object of experience.

IMO, and you're free to correct me here, in a mechanical model we have one specific part appointed to a specific task. You cannot say the webcam is the experiencer, it only collect photons that bounce off something. We cant say it's the PC that experiences, it only constructs the image.
We need something that perceives and experiences the output of the computation.

[rocketdodger]

The root of my problem is that I'm looking at the real world and you're ignoring it?

Ooooh kaaaay....

The root of your problem is that you have this anthropocentric view of conscious experience but you refuse to acknowledge it.

This causes you to summarily dismiss every explanation for conscious experience that doesn't explain how you feel what you feel.

We have given you a completely adequate explanation for sentience. The only reason you refuse to accept it, as far as I can tell, is because we don't include fur in the definition.

I mean, we could build a robotic dog that was as intelligent as a dog and acted exactly like a dog in every way and you would still claim it was not sentient. Why? I don't know. You can't seem to give a reason, other than ... well... that it is not a mammal.

I don't understand how you can not see this.

[rocketdodger]

If rodents are sentient -- and I think they probably are -- "self-aware" might be too high a bar for what it is they experience.

It's the ability to feel like things are "happening to you", even if you never once stop and reflect on the nature (or even the fact) of your own existence.

... and here is a perfect example.

How, on Earth, can you know a rodent can "feel like things are 'happening' to it" ?

Can you ask it? No.

Can you read it's mind? No.

Can you observe it's behavior. Yes. Can you find any behavior in a rodent that we can't program into a computer? No.

So if a rodent is sentient, but a robo-rodent is not, what is the difference? Fur.

Face it -- you simply attribute sentience to things that are cute and cuddly!

[cyborg]

I don't understand how you can not see this.

Carbon-based bigotry.

[rocketdodger]

What's wrong is that there is no reason to believe that a thermostat experiences anything, and every reason to believe that it doesn't.

Yes, because it doesn't have fur. I know.

What I want to know from you is, given all the creatures on the planet, at what point does sentience start emerging?

Rodents are sentient, fine. What about birds? I know they don't have fur, but feathers can be cute, yeah? What about lizards? I have seen some pretty "cute" iguanas. Where do you draw your arbitrary line?

You have provided absolutely no evidence (because there's none to provide) that the circuitry in a computer or a thermostat produces sentience, or that it can.

You're right. All I have is the same evidence that everyone else in the world around me is also sentient -- behavior. I agree with you that this isn't good enough. Before I trust that my fiancee is sentient, I am going to dissect her brain and monitor every neuron, building a complete model of her thoughts, and check it against my own template. Only then will I be convinced!

As we've seen from real-world examples, even a "computer" as complex as the brain is capable of doing one heckuva lot without sentience.

All we have seen is that you define "sentience" according to what you have that others don't. Don't you think it might be a little egocentric to relegate Marvin to "non-sentience" just because he can't experience emotion like a normal human?

Sentience does not appear to simply arise -- somehow -- generically out of the system when you program it to do logical things.

I never claimed it did. Sentience is your word -- remember? I was talking about conscious experience. Clearly, if sentience is "experiencing like I experience" then yes, it does not simply arise out of a generic system -- unless the system is me, in which case it does.

Your claim that it does is not supported, and in fact runs contrary to observation.

Yes, yes. You have said this before. You have also failed to mention a single observation that my claim runs contrary to ... besides, of course, the original assumption of the HPC that ... TADA!! ... conscious experience cannot arise from a physical system.

[skiba]

My question had to do with your phrasing, "the 'experiencer' hasn't changed." By this, do you mean the physical person, the brain, the "I"? In all three cases, it can be shown that there has been a significant change (dissociative disorders all directly involve identity and/or awareness). If by the "experiencer" you mean something else, can you please explain? It sounds to me like you are trying to bring the concept of an immutable soul into the conversation.

ETA: It looks like Belz... beat me to the soul inference.

The brain ofcourse.
I'll admit we have no way of knowing wether "consciousness" is changed or is it only a cognitive feature thats changed.
We usually lump all those together so it might not be clear what I meant. We dont know a "consciousness center" in the brain, but we know the parts of the brain that govern cognition memory etc. I assume(too lazy to check) there is damage to these parts of the brain with people who have the disorder.

I'll just say its an assumption that when cognitive ability is diminished consciousness changes also.

I posted a reply to nick that might also clear this up abit.

[Jeff Corey]

... Can you observe its behavior. Yes. Can you find any behavior in a rodent that we can't program into a computer? No...
I don't know about that. I've played with programs like Sniffy the Virtual rat, and they don't replicate some robust findings in rats, like the intermittant reinforcement effect.
This is probably because there are no comprehensive explanations of why the effect occurs.

[Piggy]

The human soul is the only thing we know of which we're certain produces godliness.

The problem with your logic here is that you're comparing abstractions for which there is no evidence with objects and phenomena which are easily observed.

So it doesn't work.

[Piggy]

The root of your problem is that you have this anthropocentric view of conscious experience but you refuse to acknowledge it.

This causes you to summarily dismiss every explanation for conscious experience that doesn't explain how you feel what you feel.

We have given you a completely adequate explanation for sentience. The only reason you refuse to accept it, as far as I can tell, is because we don't include fur in the definition.

Then you haven't been reading my posts with any care.

The only form of sentience we know about is ours. Sorry, but that's the way it is.

One day we might very well create an ACE out of circuits, but we haven't yet, and we don't yet know how to.

I haven't dismissed any explanations for conscious experience.

And you haven't offered any explanations for it, by the way.

What you have done is to claim that machines qualify as sentient, and to justify that by claiming that a "reasoning system" = sentience, despite the fact that there's no reason to believe such a claim and every reason not to.

You would have us believe that all we have to do is program something that can -- in any way -- sense, record, retrieve, analyze, and respond, and somehow sentience will simply rise up like a genie out of the lamp.

It's an unfounded claim, and one which is directly contradicted by observations of the brain, which show us that sentience does not simply arise somehow whenever those elements are present.

If you had some machine which did, in fact, become sentient merely as a result of performing those processes, then you'd have some reason to make the claims you're making.

But you don't, so you don't.

I mean, we could build a robotic dog that was as intelligent as a dog and acted exactly like a dog in every way and you would still claim it was not sentient. Why? I don't know. You can't seem to give a reason, other than ... well... that it is not a mammal.

I've asked you before not to do this. Please do not tell me what I would or wouldn't do or say. Please ask me instead.

I have said all along that there's no reason to believe we can't create ACEs, whether humanoid or canoid or otheroid.

What I object to is your unfounded claims that simple machines are somehow sentient and that we know how sentience is generated. They're not, and we don't.

[cyborg]

The problem with your logic here is that you're comparing abstractions for which there is no evidence with objects and phenomena which are easily observed.

Reply 1) How can you easily observe sentience in this string of text?

Reply 2) A soul is easily observed - it is that which gives human beings the inner world that a thermostat lacks which makes calling a thermostat aware meaningless but calling a human aware meaningful.

[Piggy]

... and here is a perfect example.

How, on Earth, can you know a rodent can "feel like things are 'happening' to it" ?

Can you ask it? No.

Can you read it's mind? No.

Can you observe it's behavior. Yes. Can you find any behavior in a rodent that we can't program into a computer? No.

So if a rodent is sentient, but a robo-rodent is not, what is the difference? Fur.

Face it -- you simply attribute sentience to things that are cute and cuddly!

You seem to treat things that you don't know as if they didn't exist. This is not safe to assume.

I don't know, in fact, if rodents are sentient. My guess is that they are, because I believe Dennett's A/B brain hypothesis is likely right, and because it seems very likely that something as useful as sentience would have evolved fairly early in the mammalian brain.

But I could be wrong. We just don't know yet.

And as I've said before, observing gross physical behavior is clearly not a good way to go about judging whether a thing -- a person, an animal, a machine -- is sentient. Why? Because sentience is a function of the brain.

So just because you can program a machine to do what a rodent's body does, this does not mean you've made a sentient thing.

It has nothing to do with fur, or DNA, or organic molecules.

Unlike you, I am not willing to accept that things I don't yet know are unimportant, irrelevant, or non-existent.

[cyborg]

And as I've said before, observing gross physical behavior is clearly not a good way to go about judging whether a thing -- a person, an animal, a machine -- is sentient.

Then you shouldn't presume any of us to be sentient.

[Piggy]

Reply 1) How can you easily observe sentience in this string of text?

You can't, because text strings are not sentient.

Reply 2) A soul is easily observed - it is that which gives human beings the inner world that a thermostat lacks which makes calling a thermostat aware meaningless but calling a human aware meaningful.

The problem is, a soul has more properties than that. When you add those in, you discover, oops, it's not observable.

The phenomenon of conscious awareness is, however, observable. We all observe it in ourselves.

How the brain does this trick... we can't really say yet.

But there's no doubt that it does it.

[Piggy]

Then you shouldn't presume any of us to be sentient.

It's not a presumption.

As I've explained before, it's based on solid evidence. I know my brain produces sentience, and my brain isn't special.

Not only does everyone behave as if they're sentient, and say that they are, but also their brains have the same components that mine does, including those which we know are involved in producing the phenomenon of conscious experience.

The notion that I'm conscious and nobody else is... it's simply implausible.

I'd call it silly, in fact.

[cyborg]

You can't, because text strings are not sentient.

How do I observe sentience?

The problem is, a soul has more properties than that.

I said nothing about any other properties.

When you add those in, you discover, oops, it's not observable.

How do I observe sentience?

The phenomenon of conscious awareness is, however, observable. We all observe it in ourselves.

OH[b/], so I observe sentience in myself...

How the brain does this trick... we can't really say yet.

But there's no doubt that it does it.

I observe a soul in myself. Therefore it is a phenomena.

At some point you're going to have to grasp the point that appeals to navel gazing is not a strong argument for [b]ANYTHING.

[cyborg]

It's not a presumption.

Yes, it is. And it must be by your arguments.

As I've explained before, it's based on solid evidence. I know my brain produces sentience,

Where is this produced?

and my brain isn't special.

How do you know your brain is not special again? You sure seem convinced it's special as soon as it comes to deal with the abstracts of its mechanics.

Not only does everyone behave as if they're sentient, and say that they are, but also their brains have the same components that mine does, including those which we know are involved in producing the phenomenon of conscious experience.

Not only does everyone behave as if they have a soul, and say they do, but their whole being has the same components that mine does, including those that we know must be involved in producing the phenomena of the soul.

The notion that I'm conscious and nobody else is... it's simply implausible.

I'd call it silly, in fact.

The notion that I have a soul and nobody else does... it's simply implausible.

I'd call it silly, in fact.

HINT: You may want to actually start talking about the properties of sentience beyond, "you have it, stupid," at some point.

[westprog]

So then why can't we say that a rock experiences nothing, a thermostat experiences very little, ants experience a bit, and people experience very much? What is wrong with that?

Because we have no basis to differentiate between the experience of a thermocouple and a rock.

We know that human beings have something that enables them to have sensations. We know that rocks and thermocouples, as far as we can tell, don't. We see that ants share some characteristics with human beings, but lack others. We can't really quantify the spectrum.

However, there's simply no basis for ranking rocks and thermocouples seperately. We might as well order them in alphabetic order. I've given my analysis of why I think that.

[westprog]

Because not everything has the qualities, as Pixy has explained. Rocks don't, for example.


Pixy has claimed. I find the claim unconvincing.


Who has proposed that? No one in this thread, that I've seen.

I'll provide references, if necessary. I've been doing my reading.

[westprog]

When I was a kid and I was taught WHY the earth actually circled the sun, there was an easy experiment that I could do to test the theory. All I had to do was mark the point that sunlight hit coming in my bedroom window every day for a year. They said that if the earth circled the sun, I'd get a particular pattern of dots. If the Sun circled the earth, I would get another pattern. I did that. Not for a whole year and not every day, but enough to discern the pattern. I could believe them because they made a prediction that I could verify to myself via my own senses.


Mercutio stated, IIRC, that science needs to be capable of third person verification. In fact, science needs to be capable of first person verification, as given above. And all such verification must be mediated via the senses and consciousness.

Thanks for the kind remarks about the thread*.

*That's if you're referring to me. If not, the hell with you**.

**Joking! Honest!

[westprog]

But you just said that a computer could be programmed to respond exactly like a human being. Do we look at the computer or the human to take our benchmark for what is sentient?

~~ Paul

I think our attitude to the sentient computer that responds exactly like a human should be somewhat conditioned by the fact that it doesn't exist. I'm not too bothered about hypothetical computers myself. Piggy might disagree.

[Piscivore]

Pixy has claimed. I find the claim unconvincing.
You think rocks are sentient?

I'll provide references, if necessary. I've been doing my reading.
If you please. Thanks.

[Mercutio]

Mercutio stated, IIRC, that science needs to be capable of third person verification. In fact, science needs to be capable of first person verification, as given above. And all such verification must be mediated via the senses and consciousness.

No, Mercutio did not. Radical Behaviorists' whole notion that private behavior and public behavior differ only in number of observers opens up all of private behavior for empirical observation--albeit only by one observer. As Skinner put it, "the skin is not all that important as a boundary". Why should our observations of what happens outside our skin be trusted more than that which happens inside? (Intersubjective agreement is possible with public agreement, but experimental controls can be and have been introduced with private behavior. Indeed, psychophysics was examining private behavior scientifically decades before behaviorism came to be!)

"Mediated via the senses" is trivially true, and ignores the tremendous amount of experimental control we can exert in order to guard against biases--a poorly controlled examination of public behavior is much less reliable than a well-controlled examination of private behavior!

"...and consciousness" is, as far as I can tell, meaningless. What is the difference between observing X and observing X through consciousness?

[Mercutio]

Because we have no basis to differentiate between the experience of a thermocouple and a rock.

We know that human beings have something that enables them to have sensations. We know that rocks and thermocouples, as far as we can tell, don't. We see that ants share some characteristics with human beings, but lack others. We can't really quantify the spectrum.

However, there's simply no basis for ranking rocks and thermocouples seperately. We might as well order them in alphabetic order. I've given my analysis of why I think that.
There is no evidence whatsoever that human beings have sensations. Human beings sense. The difference is crucial, and gets at the heart of the HPC; our language sets us up to think there are these things, separate from us, that we somehow manipulate without manipulating, and the HPC asks us to explain them. But the truth is that we sense--we transduce, say, electromagnetic energy into chemical energy (via bleaching of retinal pigments, or pressure energy into chemical energy (via hair cells on the basilar membrane), or one form of chemical energy into another (via olfactory or gustatory receptors)--as does the thermostat (transducing electromagnetic energy into mechanical, changing heat into motion).

There is no more need for us to "have a sensation" than for a thermostat to. We do not see images of trees, we see trees. We do not feel a quale of heat, we feel heat. We do what thermostats do, except that instead of one of the simplest switches imaginable, we have the most complex single object known to exist, working away reacting to myriad environmental stimuli, shaped by unthinkable numbers of such stimuli in our personal and unique individual histories.

What we actually do is magical enough for me. I do not need to "have sensations" that are somehow (in an apparently obvious, but never quite definable way) different from thermostats.

[Robin]

Theres always a form of dualism intorduced when we use a mechanical model.
A mechanical model is actualy the only one at our disposal, unless we make the assumption that everything is consciousness or consciousness is the "ground of being.". This would go into spirituality, someting that is scientifically unsound. doens't have to be a soul/body either.
What precise property of "consciousness" will rescue this model from being as mechanical as any other? As far as I can see something can be determined or random and nothing else besides and that would apply to consciousness stuff just as much as material stuff.
We need something that perceives and experiences the output of the computation.
Why? Have we demonstrated the existence of something that perceives and experiences the output of our brain computations?

[Robin]

The only form of sentience we know about is ours. Sorry, but that's the way it is.
Do you mean ours as in "us humans", or as in "us animals"?

[Mercutio]

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.

Um... that's not an "in other words", but a completely different statement. Both of which, actually, are false. The owie you feel is not a "sensation... generated in the brain", but a sensing of a stimulus on the back of your hand. No central nervous system has ever been known to do anything without its peripheral nervous system, besides show off in a museum. And once again, those damned nouns "a sensation" or "that experience" are getting us in trouble. Sensing and experiencing are things that people (and other organisms) do. Not things that parts of people do, and especially not things that imaginary parts of people do.

[Robin]

What we actually do is magical enough for me. I do not need to "have sensations" that are somehow (in an apparently obvious, but never quite definable way) different from thermostats.
We are bloody complex for a start. That may not be the only necessary difference but it is an indispensible one.

[Piggy]

How do I observe sentience?

If you're going to claim that you're not conscious, don't expect me to take you seriously.



I said nothing about any other properties.

I know you didn't. That's what I was pointing out.


OH[b/], so I observe sentience in myself...

Yes, I'm sure you do, even if you decide to play this game here.

I observe a soul in myself. Therefore it is a phenomena.

Do you?

You observe a thing created by God which is not a product of the body but interacts with it and is pre-existing and will survive the body?

You observe that?

Well, damn!

Actually, I don't think you observe anything like a soul. I think you perceive all the evidence of sentience, and you're saying "I observe a soul".

Now, if you want to play Humpty Dumpty and redefine "soul" so that it's stripped down to only the properties of consciousness, well then hey, you done observed yourself a soul!

At some point you're going to have to grasp the point that appeals to navel gazing is not a strong argument for [b]ANYTHING.

It's a strong argument for the existence of navels.

What problem do you have, exactly, with direct observation?

[Piggy]

Yes, it is. And it must be by your arguments.

Please explain to me how, exactly, by my arguments, I'm simply "presuming" that other people are conscious like me.

Please.

<puts on a pot of coffee>

[Robin]

Actually, I don't think you observe anything like a soul. I think you perceive all the evidence of sentience, and you're saying "I observe a soul".
He says tom-ah-to and you say tom-ay-to.

[Piggy]

Where is this produced?

Well, it's like most everything else with the brain at this point. We can point to certain areas of the brain, certain structures, and say "We know this bit is critical for the function" or "We know this part is active when that is going on" or "We know that information moves from here to there".

The Marvin video is a good example of that.

So it's really rough right now, but there's no doubt that the brain produces sentience, and that it's not a generalized function (if there are any such things in the brain).

[Mercutio]

I don't know, in fact, if rodents are sentient. My guess is that they are, because I believe Dennett's A/B brain hypothesis is likely right, and because it seems very likely that something as useful as sentience would have evolved fairly early in the mammalian brain.

But I could be wrong. We just don't know yet.

And as I've said before, observing gross physical behavior is clearly not a good way to go about judging whether a thing -- a person, an animal, a machine -- is sentient. Why? Because sentience is a function of the brain.
You really ought to check out cephalopods. Seriously.

IIRC, cephalopods are legally (in England, anyway) vertebrates. (Yeah, I know--what I mean is, they are written into the law that covers vertebrates when it comes to the humane treatment of animals we are planning on killing and eating.) We can kill them and eat them, but it is illegal (by that law, anyway) to torture them. You can torture a worm, or a jellyfish, or a slug, or a scallop, without fear, because (by the spirit of that law) they do not have the capacity to experience pain; they are not sentient. But they drew the line at vertebrates--you can eat a cow, but you cannot torture it with impunity. Essentially, they buy your argument--"something as useful as sentience would have evolved fairly early in the mammalian brain."

But... the cephalopod brain is much closer to a slug's than to even the most primitive vertebrate's. Why on earth would an octopus, squid, cuttlefish, or nautilus be granted rights due to creatures so utterly unlike them physically?

Because, as it turns out, "observing gross physical behavior is clearly not a good way to go about judging whether a thing -- a person, an animal, a machine -- is sentient." Cuttlefish behave sentiently. They learn. They react to complex stimuli, in stunningly complex responses.

We are only beginning to test cephalopods, and our observations of their neural infrastructures are decades behind our observations of vertebrates. But they ain't us, and they sure look to be sentient. And, damn the luck, delicious. Move over, veal...

[Piggy]

He says tom-ah-to and you say tom-ay-to.

Not quite, because the word "soul" has a lot of history and widespread current useage, so we can't just redefine it to suit our whims.

A "soul" is not, to the overhwelming majority of people who use the term and especially those who believe in a soul, simply a function of the brain that turns on and off and ends altogether at death.

Even if it's not conceived of as immortal, a soul implies a continuity of identity which mere sentience does not, as well as a dualistic relationship with the body.

[Piggy]

Essentially, they buy your argument--"something as useful as sentience would have evolved fairly early in the mammalian brain."

But... the cephalopod brain is much closer to a slug's than to even the most primitive vertebrate's. Why on earth would an octopus, squid, cuttlefish, or nautilus be granted rights due to creatures so utterly unlike them physically?

Because, as it turns out, "observing gross physical behavior is clearly not a good way to go about judging whether a thing -- a person, an animal, a machine -- is sentient." Cuttlefish behave sentiently. They learn. They react to complex stimuli, in stunningly complex responses.

We are only beginning to test cephalopods, and our observations of their neural infrastructures are decades behind our observations of vertebrates.

Thanks for mentioning that, because I'd forgotten about those guys.

This comes back to Belz's comment on the possibility of sentience evolving in more than one way.

I stand by my statement, though. It may be that there are cases in which we get sufficient information from gross physical behavior to infer consciousness, but that doesn't make it generally a good idea.

It's kind of like the discoveries that are being made via DNA which run contrary to many assumptions made by studying form. When we examine the medium of hereditary transmission, we get a lot more information and many surprises. So with consciousness, our best route will be to figure out how our brains produce it, then start observing other kinds of brains that do the same thing, then start looking for ways in which other types of brains might accomplish something similar with different structures.

In the meantime, though, the cephalopods do present us with a very tantalizing case.

Could all of that behavior be accomplished without any accompanying sentience?

Maybe.

Is it likely that it's being accomplished without sentience?

I agree with you, probably not. It's more likely that these are sentient creatures.

Which might knock Dennett's A/B brain theory into a cocked hat, or at least make it only 1 model among many.

[Robin]

Not quite, because the word "soul" has a lot of history and widespread current useage, so we can't just redefine it to suit our whims.

A "soul" is not, to the overhwelming majority of people who use the term and especially those who believe in a soul, simply a function of the brain that turns on and off and ends altogether at death.

Even if it's not conceived of as immortal, a soul implies a continuity of identity which mere sentience does not, as well as a dualistic relationship with the body.

I would imagine that sentience implies a continuity of identity to most people, and dualism has referred to minds rather than souls more frequently in the past few centuries. This we think of mind/body problems, mind/body duality, mind over matter and so on.

When most people think of an afterlife they have in mind sentience. If they mean a soul then they clearly mean a sentient soul.

There are religions where souls survive death minus sentience, but the fast growing ones tend to include sentience in the deal.

[Piggy]

How do you know your brain is not special again? You sure seem convinced it's special as soon as it comes to deal with the abstracts of its mechanics.

I don't understand that second sentence there.

As for the first, let's try to have an adult conversation. If we start launching off on "how do you know", then we'll end up in the land of "How do you know it's not all just a dream?" and "How do you know we're not in a Matrix?" and that kind of stuff.

Been there, no need to go back.

[Piggy]

Not only does everyone behave as if they have a soul, and say they do, but their whole being has the same components that mine does, including those that we know must be involved in producing the phenomena of the soul.

Really?

Everyone says they have a soul? Huh.

And which components do we know must be involved in producing the soul? That sounds interesting.

[Piggy]

Do you mean ours as in "us humans", or as in "us animals"?

Well, when you get down to brass tacks, "us humans" in the strictest sense.

The only conscious experience each of us observes directly is our own.

And only humans are able to answer questions like "Can you feel it when I do that?" or "Did you see the gorilla?", which makes us testable.

But I think that "[some of] us animals" is appropriate, too, because some of our brains are so similar, we have to suspect that some other critters are also sentient.

And as Mercutio pointed out, in some cases an animal's behavior leads us to suspect the same thing.

[Mercutio]

I stand by my statement, though. It may be that there are cases in which we get sufficient information from gross physical behavior to infer consciousness, but that doesn't make it generally a good idea.

Or it could be that the best level of explanation is not brain structures, but behavior, so long as it is consistent with other levels of explanations. Which would make such an explanation a very good idea indeed.

And of course, the language of consciousness came from when the vast, vast majority of the information we had was purely from gross physical behavior. This is prescientific language--we cannot expect the equivalent of asking modern physics to describe how the sun literally climbs in the sky.

[Piggy]

The notion that I have a soul and nobody else does... it's simply implausible.

I'd call it silly, in fact.

So would I.

HINT: You may want to actually start talking about the properties of sentience beyond, "you have it, stupid," at some point.

If you can post a link to my "you have it, stupid" statement, I'd appreciate that.

I don't know that it makes much sense to talk about the "properties" of what is essentially an event. Maybe it does, it's just hard for me to get my mind around it.

At it's most basic, it's simply the sensation of being consciously aware of the world (and/or yourself) and that things are "happening to you".

It's the quality which is present when you are awake and when you are dreaming, but is not present when you are asleep but not dreaming or when you are very heavily sedated.

People who have been in comas or paralyzed have sometimes reported still being sentient and aware of all their senses. People have reported being sedated yet sentient during operations.

In humans, it appears to be generated by specialized structures in the brain which receive highly processed data from other areas of the brain and the nervous system.

When these pathways are interrupted, it is possible for the body to perceive and to react to external stimuli -- in some cases even to make decisions taking the stimuli into account, or to make statements about them -- without any conscious awareness of these same stimuli, which may be internal or external (see split brain studies as well as Marvin's stroke).

That's what I'm talking about when I talk about being sentient.

[Piggy]

Or it could be that the best level of explanation is not brain structures, but behavior, so long as it is consistent with other levels of explanations. Which would make such an explanation a very good idea indeed.

And of course, the language of consciousness came from when the vast, vast majority of the information we had was purely from gross physical behavior. This is prescientific language--we cannot expect the equivalent of asking modern physics to describe how the sun literally climbs in the sky.

I'm not going to get into a scrap with you on this point, Mercutio, because I know you're coming at it thru the lens of behaviorism. That's your thing, I understand that.

But by now, you know I wear a different set of glasses.

How about this for an intersection?

Why not consider the actions of the brain just one kind of behavior the animal engages in?

Then ask, well, which sort of behavior is going to be most likely to tell me what I want to know?

I say it's the behavior of the brain.

Your mileage may vary.

[Mercutio]

I'm not going to get into a scrap with you on this point, Mercutio, because I know you're coming at it thru the lens of behaviorism. That's your thing, I understand that.

But by now, you know I wear a different set of glasses.

How about this for an intersection?

Why not consider the actions of the brain just one kind of behavior the animal engages in?

Then ask, well, which sort of behavior is going to be most likely to tell me what I want to know?

I say it's the behavior of the brain.

Your mileage may vary.

I think it was you who noted that the behavior of molecules would not show a difference between conscious and non-conscious behavior. I agree completely (no surprise there), and furthermore I don't see any reason that brain processes (sensing, perceiving, remembering, thinking) will be any different except when seen in the light of the whole organism acting in its social environment.

Do you really think that some kinds of perceiving are qualitatively different "sentient perceiving"; that some sorts of thinking are "sentient thinking", that something other than social context will be found that differentiates between sentience and non-sentience? Why, then, do you think there would be no difference at the molecular level? Why expect this particular level? Is there a reason at all, or is is just your gut feeling?

[Hokulele]

You really ought to check out cephalopods. Seriously...


I predict Piscivore will be along shortly, kicking himself for not being the one to mention these critters.


Seriously though, this is one of the more educational threads on this topic I have read in a while. Kudos to all.

[Beth]

Beth,

Could I ask you, just to check for possible bias, if you're basically OK with the notion that the human being is simply a thinking and feeling machine?

Nick

Yes.

[Piggy]

I think it was you who noted that the behavior of molecules would not show a difference between conscious and non-conscious behavior. I agree completely (no surprise there), and furthermore I don't see any reason that brain processes (sensing, perceiving, remembering, thinking) will be any different except when seen in the light of the whole organism acting in its social environment.

I agree that we won't be able to understand it except in that light.

To understand the behavior of the brain, we will have to observe it as it's doing what it's built to do, which is interacting with the outside world and with other brains and with itself, and regulating the body.

We're not going to be able to see any difference at the neuronal level between actions directly associated with sentience and actions that aren't, just like in the factory the actions of the molecules and the properties of the building materials don't tell you anything about what the factory does.

We have to look at the macro structures.

When we get a better grip on what the brain is doing -- just the way it's acting, not necessarily how or why -- when we are conscious and when we're not, we'll have a much better shot at understanding how the phenomenon of consciousness is produced, and we'll be in a much better position to affirm sentience in the brains of some other animals.

It's a start.

Do you really think that some kinds of perceiving are qualitatively different "sentient perceiving"; that some sorts of thinking are "sentient thinking",

No, not really.

Because PixyMisa is right that awareness comes after the fact.

It's an add-on.

Of course, you can get really granular, in which case there's not even perceiving, there's just physics and chemistry.

To me, "perceiving" is a much more abstract notion than is "sentience".

The one thing I'm sure of is the mere fact of my experience. When you get right down to it, that's more certain than anything I could ever think I know about the world or my body. The one thing I know is that I'm experiencing something, even if it all turns out to be some kind of sham somehow.

Of course, I wouldn't stop there. I'm sure of a lot more than that. ;)

As for thinking, yes, I believe there's a meaningful -- useful and productive -- difference between thinking which is conscious and thinking which is not, even if the border turns out to be (as I believe it will) very soft, like the border between a dialect and a language.

Interesting explorations along that border include, say, Cialdini's little experiments on how the brain, when making decisions, takes into account many factors which the conscious mind denies having taken into consideration.

These things are clearly off the radar, so to speak, of the brain modules that generate sentience.

Now, if it's correct that sentience in humans is a kind of post-processing, then this is what we'd expect.

And by exploring how the brain processes information that is "on the radar" versus information that is "off the radar" of our consciousness, we can start tickling out the details of how the brain behaves differently when we're consciously aware of what it's doing versus when we're not.

Hopefully, that will tell us at least how, in broad terms, our brain does it.

Then we can start asking, how could this same feat be accomplished by other things -- say, other kinds of brains, or computers?

Then it really gets interesting.

that something other than social context will be found that differentiates between sentience and non-sentience?

I don't have any clue how social context could differentiate between the two. Please don't make me feel like back in the English Department here. I'm begging you.


Why, then, do you think there would be no difference at the molecular level? Why expect this particular level? Is there a reason at all, or is is just your gut feeling?

Why would there be a difference? At the molecular level, they're all acting the same. They're all obeying the same laws. There's no reason for molecules in one factory to be behaving any differently from molecules in the other. Molecules are fungible.

You can examine the molecules of the factory all you want, but if you never move up to a higher level of organization, you'll never be able to determine what the factory produces.

On the other hand, you can be totally ignorant of molecular theory and walk through a hosiery mill and see that it makes socks.

[Mercutio]

I agree that we won't be able to understand it except in that light.

To understand the behavior of the brain, we will have to observe it as it's doing what it's built to do, which is interacting with the outside world and with other brains and with itself, and regulating the body.

We're not going to be able to see any difference at the neuronal level between actions directly associated with sentience and actions that aren't, just like in the factory the actions of the molecules and the properties of the building materials don't tell you anything about what the factory does.

We have to look at the macro structures.

When we get a better grip on what the brain is doing -- just the way it's acting, not necessarily how or why -- when we are conscious and when we're not, we'll have a much better shot at understanding how the phenomenon of consciousness is produced, and we'll be in a much better position to affirm sentience in the brains of some other animals.

It's a start.
I very nearly agree here! You are still needlessly (in my opinion) dissecting out the brain from the whole person. We need to understand the behavior of the person (not of the brain) as it interacts with other people (not other brains) besides itself. Obviously, the neuroscience people have done an excellent job of selling brain science, but... our language is not dependent on neurology, but on the behavior of people.


No, not really.

Because PixyMisa is right that awareness comes after the fact.

It's an add-on.

Of course, you can get really granular, in which case there's not even perceiving, there's just physics and chemistry.

To me, "perceiving" is a much more abstract notion than is "sentience".

The one thing I'm sure of is the mere fact of my experience. When you get right down to it, that's more certain than anything I could ever think I know about the world or my body. The one thing I know is that I'm experiencing something, even if it all turns out to be some kind of sham somehow.

Of course, I wouldn't stop there. I'm sure of a lot more than that. ;)

As for thinking, yes, I believe there's a meaningful -- useful and productive -- difference between thinking which is conscious and thinking which is not, even if the border turns out to be (as I believe it will) very soft, like the border between a dialect and a language.

Interesting explorations along that border include, say, Cialdini's little experiments on how the brain, when making decisions, takes into account many factors which the conscious mind denies having taken into consideration.
I am quite familiar with Cialdini--could you be comfortable saying "...which the person denies having taken into consideration"? Only because I have seen people deny, but have never once seen a "conscious mind" deny anything. I have to suspect that the latter is not an observation of yours, but rather an inference.

These things are clearly off the radar, so to speak, of the brain modules that generate sentience.

Now, if it's correct that sentience in humans is a kind of post-processing, then this is what we'd expect.

And by exploring how the brain processes information that is "on the radar" versus information that is "off the radar" of our consciousness, we can start tickling out the details of how the brain behaves differently when we're consciously aware of what it's doing versus when we're not.

Hopefully, that will tell us at least how, in broad terms, our brain does it.
Again, "how we do it", since none of us have ever seen a solitary brain accomplish such a thing. (damn, the neuro people are great with public relations, aren't they?)

Then we can start asking, how could this same feat be accomplished by other things -- say, other kinds of brains, or computers?

Then it really gets interesting.

Oh, Hell, Yes.


I don't have any clue how social context could differentiate between the two. Please don't make me feel like back in the English Department here. I'm begging you.

All I mean by social context is the interaction between individuals. If you learned how to use the language of consciousness through being taught by others, using public behavioral referents (which I claim is precisely how you learned it, and which is completely consistent with all evidence I am aware of), then you learned to differentiate between sentient and non-sentient behavior as a result of social context. It is not a terribly outrageous claim, actually.



Why would there be a difference? At the molecular level, they're all acting the same. They're all obeying the same laws. There's no reason for molecules in one factory to be behaving any differently from molecules in the other. Molecules are fungible.

You can examine the molecules of the factory all you want, but if you never move up to a higher level of organization, you'll never be able to determine what the factory produces.

On the other hand, you can be totally ignorant of molecular theory and walk through a hosiery mill and see that it makes socks.I agree completely. I suggest that it is [perhaps exactly, perhaps nearly] the same situation with brain processing areas. Processing metaphor A and processing metaphor B may be essentially identical, even though metaphor A equates a word with an object, and metaphor B equates a word with a process tagged as "sentient".

Again, I ask why it is that you claim molecular action as fungible, but not brain pathway action? If, as seems to be the case, there is a claim that some sorts of decisions are qualitatively different from thermostats, why should that qualitative difference come at this level and not another (higher or lower)? I agree with you about the molecular level, but I wonder why you choose to claim a difference at the brain pathway level (without, to my knowledge, evidence for this) and not at the social level (with, again to my knowledge, copious evidence*).

*I do admit that a substantial number of psychologists draw lines at different levels of analysis, as do other scientists. Although I honestly do think I have the right level, I am under no illusion that I could not be wrong. So when I ask you, it is honestly, to find out, rather than to try to trap you into saying something.

[Piggy]

I am quite familiar with Cialdini--could you be comfortable saying "...which the person denies having taken into consideration"? Only because I have seen people deny, but have never once seen a "conscious mind" deny anything. I have to suspect that the latter is not an observation of yours, but rather an inference.

It's a valid inference.

When we're talking about what a person is consciously aware of, if a fellow says he was not aware of X, we have to decide whether to take him at his word or decide that he's lying.

So you have to correct for that.

But it makes little sense to say that a person might be consciously aware of something and not know it at the time.

I say little sense and not no sense because it seems to me that the border is very soft. There's no bright line.

But really, sentience is precisely that feeling of being aware of things, so if we're talking about how that's produced by the brain, then one way into that is to observe how information is chaneled when that feeling is being reported versus how it's chaneled when that feeling is not being reported.

[Piggy]

Again, "how we do it", since none of us have ever seen a solitary brain accomplish such a thing. (damn, the neuro people are great with public relations, aren't they?)

You're just pushing it too far for me here, Mercutio.

I don't have any behaviorist strictures, so I'm not buying this.

You want to deny that you're sentient, and that you know this, go ahead. I don't believe you for one second.

We know sentience is a real phenomenon because, whatever it turns out to be, we experience it.

We know it's the result of brain activity.

Period.

[Piggy]

All I mean by social context is the interaction between individuals. If you learned how to use the language of consciousness through being taught by others, using public behavioral referents (which I claim is precisely how you learned it, and which is completely consistent with all evidence I am aware of), then you learned to differentiate between sentient and non-sentient behavior as a result of social context. It is not a terribly outrageous claim, actually.

No no no. You are not getting me off on that merry-go-round.

I'm a veteran of a large state university English department. I've seen this before.

And we've been through this on other threads, and you should know that I'm going to point out that you're taking an attribute of how we learn and attemting to apply it arbitrarily to the thing we learned about.

That doesn't wash with me.

And we're never going to agree on that, I suppose.

[Piggy]

Again, I ask why it is that you claim molecular action as fungible, but not brain pathway action? If, as seems to be the case, there is a claim that some sorts of decisions are qualitatively different from thermostats, why should that qualitative difference come at this level and not another (higher or lower)? I agree with you about the molecular level, but I wonder why you choose to claim a difference at the brain pathway level (without, to my knowledge, evidence for this) and not at the social level (with, again to my knowledge, copious evidence*).

Depends on what you mean by brain pathway action.

If you mean what the signals are doing, sure, that's fungible.

If you mean the routing, then no, that's certainly not fungible, because different routes lead to different places with different results.

It's like a maze. The walls and floors are fungible. The routes are not.

[Mercutio]

You're just pushing it too far for me here, Mercutio.

I don't have any behaviorist strictures, so I'm not buying this.

You want to deny that you're sentient, and that you know this, go ahead. I don't believe you for one second.

We know sentience is a real phenomenon because, whatever it turns out to be, we experience it.

We know it's the result of brain activity.

Period.

And yet I, who have spent a great deal of time examining this issue from many perspectives, disagree. "We" do not know this, it would seem.

Ok, I will give you that it is the result of brain activity, in the same sense that you would have to agree that it is the result of molecular activity; that is, it is trivially true and completely irrelevant. You are looking in the wrong place; language has framed the problem inadequately and improperly, but you wish to take it at face value.

I have pushed you too far. For now, anyway. When the next incarnation of this thread comes around, we shall see.

[Mercutio]

It's a valid inference.

No.

Your evidence in support of this alleged validity is precisely the stuff that is under question. We know--we can demonstrate, and have demonstrated--that such introspective accounts are not worth a bucket of warm spit. "Lying" is a nice bit of framing, but "honestly mistaken" is more correct.

I know that you are arguing honestly (or rather, I infer it from your behavior), but you are continuing to assume your conclusions. I continue to be surprised and impressed at your willingness to recognize and correct inaccuracies in your view, but you have a blind spot you could drive a homunculus through.

Next thread, then...

[Piggy]

Ok, I will give you that it is the result of brain activity, in the same sense that you would have to agree that it is the result of molecular activity; that is, it is trivially true and completely irrelevant. You are looking in the wrong place; language has framed the problem inadequately and improperly, but you wish to take it at face value.

No, I don't agree with you about language. And language has been my field of study and my bread and butter all my adult life, so I know from language.

I make my living understanding how language infuences belief, and creating language that does just that. I understand how it operates better than most.

Now, I do agree that sentience "is the result of brain activity, in the same sense that you would have to agree that it is the result of molecular activity", except of course that we're at a higher level of organization.

But it is neither trivial nor irrelevant that sentience is a function of the brain.

Would you say that it is trivial and irrelevant that breathing is a function of the lungs?

I hope not.

Then why the reluctance to admit that sentience is a function of the brain -- and not, say, the liver or the skin?

[Mercutio]

Depends on what you mean by brain pathway action.

If you mean what the signals are doing, sure, that's fungible.

If you mean the routing, then no, that's certainly not fungible, because different routes lead to different places with different results.

It's like a maze. The walls and floors are fungible. The routes are not.

Did you read the Rachlin paper I linked? The "routes" business is epitomized by Muller's (sorry, I can't do umlauts, but there is one over the "u") law of specific nerve energies; this paper looks at what this doctrine has to say about the mind.

I understand your objection. It's just wrong.

[Piggy]

We know--we can demonstrate, and have demonstrated--that such introspective accounts are not worth a bucket of warm spit. "Lying" is a nice bit of framing, but "honestly mistaken" is more correct.

For the purposes they're being used for, they're both valid and valuable.

There is no "honestly mistaken" when it comes to reporting if you're consciously aware of something or not. There's only telling the truth and not telling the truth.

If you're telling the truth, and you say you're not aware of X, then you're not consciously aware of it. It's impossible to be consciously aware of something while being oblivious to it.

Of course, there are other parts of the brain that may be very "aware" of what's happening and are furiously processing it and bouncing the results around all over the place.

In fact, the results of all that bouncing may have measurable effects on your decisions, your behavior, even your words. If it does, that's how we know the brain was processing all that stuff.

But when we're talking about the specific brain function of sentience, if you don't think it happened, then it's out of the loop, even if you behave as though you were aware of it. The reason for this is that our behavior is not driven by our sentient selves.

[Mercutio]

Then why the reluctance to admit that sentience is a function of the brain -- and not, say, the liver or the skin?

For the same reason you do not stop at molecules; the liver and skin actually do play a part in consciousness (if you wish to keep it neurological, make it the autonomic nervous system, which has sensors in both liver and skin, among other parts of the body). Consciousness is, in my honest (not merely argumentative) opinion, a function of the person, not of the nervous system. Of the person, interacting in a social environment. And as meaningfully reducible to brain as it is to molecule. (yeah, I know. but nearly so. the point is, the brain is not where to look for sentience, and I mean that absolutely seriously.)

[Piggy]

Did you read the Rachlin paper I linked? The "routes" business is epitomized by Muller's (sorry, I can't do umlauts, but there is one over the "u") law of specific nerve energies; this paper looks at what this doctrine has to say about the mind.

I understand your objection. It's just wrong.

Let's not do this again.

We're never going to persuade each other, and we're just going to bore everyone else to death and eat up Randi's server space.

If I thought you were a crank, I'd ride you, but I know you're not a crank -- we just disagree on the fundamentals, so we're not going to see eye to eye.

That's fine with me. I understand where you're coming from, and I think you understand where I'm coming from.

[Mercutio]

For the purposes they're being used for, they're both valid and valuable.

There is no "honestly mistaken" when it comes to reporting if you're consciously aware of something or not. There's only telling the truth and not telling the truth.

If you're telling the truth, and you say you're not aware of X, then you're not consciously aware of it. It's impossible to be consciously aware of something while being oblivious to it.

Of course, there are other parts of the brain that may be very "aware" of what's happening and are furiously processing it and bouncing the results around all over the place.

In fact, the results of all that bouncing may have measurable effects on your decisions, your behavior, even your words. If it does, that's how we know the brain was processing all that stuff.

But when we're talking about the specific brain function of sentience, if you don't think it happened, then it's out of the loop, even if you behave as though you were aware of it. The reason for this is that our behavior is not driven by our sentient selves.

You are not aware of your blind spot. Do you not have one?

Come on. "Valid and valuable"... I am all in favor of examining private behavior, and not dismissing it because no one else can see it. But that does not suddenly make anecdotal accounts "valid". We cannot, and must not, simply assert that anecdotal reports of experience, not subject to adequate control, are what we must explain. Hell, Targ and Puthoff took Uri Geller at face value and thought they were standing physics on its ear. They were wrong... and were, arguably, honestly mistaken.

[Piggy]

For the same reason you do not stop at molecules; the liver and skin actually do play a part in consciousness (if you wish to keep it neurological, make it the autonomic nervous system, which has sensors in both liver and skin, among other parts of the body). Consciousness is, in my honest (not merely argumentative) opinion, a function of the person, not of the nervous system. Of the person, interacting in a social environment. And as meaningfully reducible to brain as it is to molecule. (yeah, I know. but nearly so. the point is, the brain is not where to look for sentience, and I mean that absolutely seriously.)

Yeah, I know you're serious. I don't think you or I have any stomach for the purely argumentative "what if" games.

I do have my reasons for focusing on macro-level brain activity when it comes to this. The reasons are pretty empirical, having to do with what effectively differentiates various types of brain functions and what does not.

For me, that's a nuts and bolts thing we have to get a handle on before we can get into more nebulous concepts like the "person".

Then what we learn there will feed back to our understanding of the brain.

Every level of organization counts somehow.

[Piggy]

Come on. "Valid and valuable"... I am all in favor of examining private behavior, and not dismissing it because no one else can see it. But that does not suddenly make anecdotal accounts "valid". We cannot, and must not, simply assert that anecdotal reports of experience, not subject to adequate control, are what we must explain. Hell, Targ and Puthoff took Uri Geller at face value and thought they were standing physics on its ear. They were wrong... and were, arguably, honestly mistaken.

Then we agree. They should be subject to adequate control, and we should not rely on anecdotal evidence.

No argument here.

[Mercutio]

Every level of organization counts somehow.
Agreed, and I hear you on previous stuff. I am willing to let this be (tentatively, naturally!) my last post on it, agreeing to disagree. I have seen neurological explanations (for instance, presentations at the Mind, Brain, and Consciousness conference) that are completely and utterly consistent with the fundamental principles of Behavioral accounts, just as neurochemical accounts are consistent with those neurological explanations, and basic chemistry and physics are consistent with neurochem. (I have also seen psychological explanations that are inconsistent with neurology--to my thinking, this effectively falsifies those theories; thus far, the explanations I have suggested in this thread are completely compatible with other levels of analysis.)

At the MBC conference, to my thinking, the level of interacting organisms was by far the most productive and most effective explanatory level, even when other levels of abstraction "worked" for this or that fragment of the question.

You continue to look for something more. I humbly suggest that it is because you are looking at the wrong level. You know better than any, that if the question were asked at the molecular level we would all be looking for something more.

(and, parenthetically, I ask--purely for my own curiosity--what your field of language study is, and which school of thought you swim with. No need to answer here, although I think we both know that some approaches absolutely would influence one's approach to the consciousness problem!)

[Piggy]

At the MBC conference, to my thinking, the level of interacting organisms was by far the most productive and most effective explanatory level, even when other levels of abstraction "worked" for this or that fragment of the question.

You continue to look for something more. I humbly suggest that it is because you are looking at the wrong level. You know better than any, that if the question were asked at the molecular level we would all be looking for something more.

Yeah, I think that's correct.

The brain didn't evolve by itself, didn't evolve to be alone.

It presumes a social context and doesn't perform as intended unless it has one.

Hell, if one is absent, it will invent one.

So you end up with a kind of loose analog to the quantum research dilemma -- the more you isolate the brain, the less you're actually observing what it does; the less you isolate it, the more noise you get and the less clear it becomes what's going on.

[Piggy]

(and, parenthetically, I ask--purely for my own curiosity--what your field of language study is, and which school of thought you swim with. No need to answer here, although I think we both know that some approaches absolutely would influence one's approach to the consciousness problem!)

We'll have to get into that later, but it's an extremely interesting question -- to a language geek like me, anyway -- and I can say that I have a problem with the formalism of transformational grammar and subsequent X-bar theory et al (I've been out of the loop for a few years, so this is probably laughably dated) and I think an organic approach to language is the best prospect for a robust model so far.

[Darat]

For the same reason you do not stop at molecules; the liver and skin actually do play a part in consciousness (if you wish to keep it neurological, make it the autonomic nervous system, which has sensors in both liver and skin, among other parts of the body). Consciousness is, in my honest (not merely argumentative) opinion, a function of the person, not of the nervous system. Of the person, interacting in a social environment. And as meaningfully reducible to brain as it is to molecule. (yeah, I know. but nearly so. the point is, the brain is not where to look for sentience, and I mean that absolutely seriously.)

I remember my high school biology teacher's description of the brain (probably not original to him) as a "parasitic outgrowth of the spinal column" because as he pointed out most creatures manage to do most of what we do very well without such a very greedy organ.

I do struggle with explanations for our behaviour/experiences/sensations/consciousness that seem to want to isolate a single organ when we know our behaviour/experiences/sensations/consciousness is never the result of a single organ. Whatever level you choose to attempt a description of what we are you need to include the fact that it is influenced by the whole organism (and of course by extension the environment the organism is part of). These influences can be very subtle, for example a slight increase in the production of a hormone in the blood stream by a gland a long way away from the brain can result in our behaviour/experiences/sensations/consciousness of hunger. But even more telling is that just the image of food can also result in the behaviour/experiences/sensations/consciousness of hunger (and indeed even result in that gland far, far away from the eye increasing the level of the hormone in the bloodstream!)

That to me is clear evidence that any explanation of "hunger" as somehow a property/process/resultant of the brain alone can never be a complete explanation for our behaviour/experiences/sensations/consciousness.


This is one of the reasons why I do not accept that behaviour/experiences/sensations/consciousness can be duplicated by computation, because the physical substrate of the body is behaviour/experiences/sensations/consciousness.

Descartes got it wrong, I am not I because I think, I am I.

[westprog]

I think it was you who noted that the behavior of molecules would not show a difference between conscious and non-conscious behavior. I agree completely (no surprise there), and furthermore I don't see any reason that brain processes (sensing, perceiving, remembering, thinking) will be any different except when seen in the light of the whole organism acting in its social environment.


That may be the case. It may be that consciousness is a purely macro function undetectable at a micro level.

That's not what Penrose thinks, though, and it has yet to be established. It may be that consciousness does effect molecules. Indeed, if it really exists, it must effect molecules in some way.


Do you really think that some kinds of perceiving are qualitatively different "sentient perceiving"; that some sorts of thinking are "sentient thinking", that something other than social context will be found that differentiates between sentience and non-sentience? Why, then, do you think there would be no difference at the molecular level? Why expect this particular level? Is there a reason at all, or is is just your gut feeling?

[westprog]

Let's not do this again.

We're never going to persuade each other, and we're just going to bore everyone else to death and eat up Randi's server space.


It's still worth stating the irreconcilable positions. Server space is cheap. This thread has to be more valuable than "Baptist Preacher In Omaha Didn't Pay Parking Tickets" or "WTC7 Collapse Impossible Due To Laws Of Physics".

I've found out what I actually think about the subject by discussing it here.

[MRC_Hans]

Again, sorry about the late answer, which may overlap later posts...

I'm quite willing to consider a model where there are no people involved at all. But if we do that, and simply consider the passage of information, the rock and the thermostat are equivalent.

But the thermostat passes just as much as its bandwidth happens to permit. It's bandwidth is narrow. The rock passes more information.

It is not a matter of information amount. Empty space (if such exists, but let's not got there) transmits even more information. It is a matter of processing information. I have now said this so many times that you should begin to take notice.

Let me try another way:

The rock is linear. The output is linearly dependent on the input.

The thermostat is not linear. The output depends on a process that is peculiar to the thermostat.

We could replace the thermostat with a thermocouple, which would transmit information that would give us a temperature measurement, rather than just a switch. Would a thermocouple be more aware than the thermostat?

No, it would be less aware, because like the rock, it is linear. The output is linearly dependent on the input. There is no processing.


Then imagine dozens of thermocouples in a dome shape. Keep adding them until we have a system that emulates the rock. At what point do we lose awareness instead of gaining it?


At no point. We did not have any to start with and we don't get any. 0+0+0+0+0 = 0


Value is another concept that only matters to human beings. Thermostats and rocks don't have concepts of value.


Define value.

We do - which is why we use thermostats to operate our immersion heaters instead of rocks.

No. We don't use rocks to operate our immersion heaters because rocks are unable to operate the things. Thermostats, OTOH, can.


The information transmitted by the thermostat and the information transmitted by the rock have exactly the same value according to TLOP: =0, as above.


No. The information transmitted by the thermostat has an added value: The relation to some preset level.


When dealing with a non-sentient being such as a thermostat, it seems to be entirely arbitrary which states form part of its function.


Not at all. Its function, as a thermostat, is defined by its ability to determine whether a temperature is above or below a predetermined value.

Is it entirely coincidental that the supposed engine of awareness in the thermostat happens to be the exact behavior that makes it useful to human beings? It seems rather odd that the value system of a thermostat is exactly the same as the human beings who created it.

Not odd at all. We created it for exactly that purpose, so if it did not serve it, we would be lousy designers.

So does the passing of information to the center of the rock. The temperature gradient is smoothed out. All information is processed as it passes between objects.

It is modified, not processed. The modification is linear, processing is not.

This is not entirely precise, but it may help you to understand:

The linear modification can only subtract from the signal; the rock does only transmit part of the spectrum that reaches its exterior. And it does only respond slowly to temperature changes.

The nonlinear processing can add information to the signal; the thermostat can inform us of the relationship between the temperature and a predetermined value. This information was not present in the input.

(Please don't nitpick this too much because there are some very fuzzy scenarios out there)

That a thermostat behaves in a repeatable and predictable way makes it more useful to us as a device. I don't see how that constitutes awareness.

Perhaps it is the term "aware" that confuses you. I think this is really the core of this debate: We are really having a debate about irreducible complexity.

Dualists (and others, if you dislike that label) claim that consciousness is irreducible.

Materialists (here represented e.g. by Pixy) claim that it is fully reducible.

The thermostat is an example supporting the latter view. None of us is claiming that it is aware in any way comparable to the awareness of a sentient being, but our claim is that it has an increased awareness when compared to, say, a rock.

Yet, as you have repeatedly noted, the thermostat possesses but one bit (literally) of information output. Therefore it can be said to form the basic building block of awareness.

OUR claim then (or at least MY claim) is that awareness increases exponentially with complexity. A two bit device has four output states. A four bit device has 16 output stages.

A partly analog billion neuron human brain has .... how many output stages?

Hans

[John Freestone]

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.Thanks. I must have missed it. This makes me wonder if the concept of an internal model is superfluous, whether you mean actual identity, or if 'internal model' expresses something different from 'object'. I dare to say that I have read enough of yours to guess that there is a difference, and that perhaps you mean that the model involves the state, which is the sense in which we attach 'internal' to 'model' (actually rather superfluous itself, it seems to me, but a natural linguistic addition - the physical object, I assume, is as internal to a thermostat as its 'model'). 'Model' seems to imply also potentially different states. I also guess that you would consider the states as purely a matter of arrangement of sub-objects, rather than as something ontologically real itself (which would seem like another kind of dualism to propose). Sorry to do so much filling in of blanks. I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but save you having to explain things that I might be able to work out for myself. Please let me know if I've gone wrong.

There seems to be two parts to that question.Yes, I was a bit lazy not sorting those ideas out. I think I'm really getting the idea of emergent consciousness and self-consciousness and am grateful for your help. I was particularly interested in how far 'down' we might be able to push the idea of awareness, after you said that a thermostat was aware. I am still puzzled about your boundary:

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.No. But a rock by itself models its environment in respect to temperature, pressure and I don't know what else. This boundary seems to be as arbitrary to me as that between the awareness of a cat and that of a human, and your response falls into the same mistake as those who insist the higher division is 'real' or 'qualitative' while you might say that it is 'emergent' or 'quantitative' (?). A cat isn't a human, like a rock isn't a thermostat. Do you see what I'm driving at?

I'm surprised, because you describe so clearly how physical states objectively modeling their environment is sufficient for what we call awareness, and I can't get my head round the difference between that happening in a thermostat to that in the physical matter of a rock, or anything else, which one could describe as objectively modeling its environment, in the sense of changing its internal state or arrangement of parts. You say that a thermostat processes information, but a rock doesn't, which seems to suggest that it is the use to which a human being puts the latter that is important (unlikely), or (more likely) the fact that something external is influenced by the change internally - it has an output. It's hard not to see how a rock modeling the environment's temperature by expanding (any rock, AFAIK) doesn't have a kind of 'output' by taking up more volume.

All this makes me think that everything might be thought of as reacting to (modeling) its environment and influencing its environment in turn, and that by that account, all matter is aware. Another way to approach this is to consider whether matter, which has presumably some kind of structure, is ever not information, and whether information is ever not processed or not capable of being processed. I wonder if that is a reasonable definition of information.

Someone else approached the question of thermostat/rock by saying that the difference was a label, and this seemed to lead to something about the uselessness of ontological questions.

It's beginning to all go fuzzy. What the universe is, the question of science, seems inextricably linked, at every level, with what we label forms and patterns as. I'm beginning to think that what 'emergent consciousness' means is that matter is aware, but what 'aware' means changes according to complexity. You would seem to agree above something you called 'gross' (was it) matter, but 'gross matter' would, from my limited knowledge of physics, seem to be an oxymoron. Is there matter that is undifferentiated? Do planets attract each other and move in orbital process around their common c of g because of their gross mass, or with reference to their forms, their 'information', and all the 'processing' the galaxy has been doing for billennia?

A thermostat processes information. It - as Skiba keeps complaining - switches. A rock does not switch.Yes, it does. :p Seriously, in the objective scheme I'm presenting, rocks are capable of switching and, in some forms, do switch. That is enough. A rock formation making up a continent can build up pressure, and result in the switching of an earthquake. If you shrank yourself very small and sat on a thermostat, there would be some similarity.

A neuron is a sort of switch. <snip>With you there.

I was paraphrasing - in my initial post on the microcontroller I said: <snip>Thanks for repeating that. I missed that too. I really tried to read everything sequentially in this thread, but obviously must have got lost somewhere. It was very helpful.

[Belz...]

And that's the problem with calling consciousness an illusion.

westprog is right that you have no illusion if no one's there to see it (or hear it, or whatever) -- unless you're using the word in performative terms (e.g., if Randi practices an "illusion" alone... the actions themselves constitute the "illusion" in this sense) but we're not.

If our conscious experience itself is an illusion -- not just is fraught with illusion, but actually isn't real and only appears to be real -- then we are forced to ask, if the illusion occurred, who was fooled by it?

If a thermostat claimed to be sentient, who'd be fooled ? Same with humans, in my opinion.

[Belz...]

You can, however, replicate the claim of experiencing private experiences.

But you have no way of knowing if they are the same. The language is the same, as you say, because our means of communication is based on labeling these things because we deem that we have similar experiences, but we really don't know. We really can't know.

The inability to put the sensation into words is part of the Hard Problem.

Nice try. It's hard for me to put into words because English isn't my first language, and because I still haven't put too much thought into it.

[PixyMisa]

The inability to put the sensation into words is part of the Hard Problem.
Funny how this inability seems only to apply to those who believe in HPC in the first place.

Those who recognise it as nonsense have no such difficulty.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Attempting to judge sentience by gross physical behavior is a rather poor way of doing it. It's going to come down to the processor, whether that's a brain or computer.

Right now, our benchmark has to be the human brain, because it's the only thing we know of which we're certain produces sentience.

When looking at, say, computers, we need to ask "Do these things seem to be wired up in a way that would allow them to also produce sentience?"
Using humans as a benchmark only allows you to ask "Do these things seem to be sentient in the same way as a human"? That is, do they respond like humans?

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Did you read the Rachlin paper I linked?
An excellent paper; thanks for citing it. I'm going to read it twice.

I wasn't suggesting that there must be a sensorium somewhere in the brain. But given the distributed and nonterminating nature of neural stimuli, we still have to explain why the red apple appears as a coherent whole and not a bunch of disjoint components like a Picasso painting. Is it simply that we get used to the disjoint sensations and they "naturally" tend toward coherency, or are there functions in the brain that add broader meta-sensations to the mix?

Something allows me to separate the apple, cat, and chair that I'm looking at. And something causes me to see the Virgin Mary in the toast, even though there is no Virgin Mary there. Something is "looking for" the big patterns.

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Did you read the Rachlin paper I linked?
An excellent paper; thanks for citing it. I'm going to read it twice.

I wasn't suggesting that there must be a sensorium somewhere in the brain. But given the distributed and nonterminating nature of neural stimuli, we still have to explain why the red apple appears as a coherent whole and not a bunch of disjoint components like a Picasso painting. Is it simply that we get used to the disjoint sensations and they "naturally" tend toward coherency, or are there functions in the brain that add broader meta-sensations to the mix?

Something allows me to separate the apple, cat, and chair that I'm looking at. And something causes me to see the Virgin Mary in the toast, even though there is no Virgin Mary there. Something is "looking for" the big patterns.

~~ Paul

[Dancing David]

There's a strong correllation between the internal model and the external reality, but they aren't the same thing.


Yes but the 'sensation' is defined as the interaction of the 'sensors'/receptor with the environment. The perception is the generation of the 'qualia' or 'perceptions'. So the sensation is directly linked to objective reality.

[Dancing David]

No central nervous system has ever been known to do anything without its peripheral nervous system, besides show off in a museum.

Even that isn't very impressive, they keep falling off the unicycle.

[Dancing David]

For the same reason you do not stop at molecules; the liver and skin actually do play a part in consciousness (if you wish to keep it neurological, make it the autonomic nervous system, which has sensors in both liver and skin, among other parts of the body). Consciousness is, in my honest (not merely argumentative) opinion, a function of the person, not of the nervous system. Of the person, interacting in a social environment. And as meaningfully reducible to brain as it is to molecule. (yeah, I know. but nearly so. the point is, the brain is not where to look for sentience, and I mean that absolutely seriously.)


There goes Merc, sounding like that buddha character again!

;)

[MRC_Hans]

But given the distributed and nonterminating nature of neural stimuli, we still have to explain why the red apple appears as a coherent whole and not a bunch of disjoint components like a Picasso painting. Is it simply that we get used to the disjoint sensations and they "naturally" tend toward coherency, or are there functions in the brain that add broader meta-sensations to the mix?

Something allows me to separate the apple, cat, and chair that I'm looking at. And something causes me to see the Virgin Mary in the toast, even though there is no Virgin Mary there. Something is "looking for" the big patterns.

~~ PaulPattern recognition. Look at this: :eye-poppi .... What do you see? A boogle-eyed human face, right? Yet, all it is, is three partly overlapping circles and three dots.

The vertebrate brain (and, as far as we can see, all biological brains) are very good at this. Digital computers are notoriously bad at pattern recognition, but it is possible, if cumbersome, to program them for it.

This is what enables you put your perceptions into the categories 'apples', 'cats', 'faces', 'chairs' etc. Even if they are not really a perception of any of those objects, but, for instance, a highly simplified pictogram. The ability is partly experience-driven, that is, till you have observed a certain number of apples, you are not able to recognize an apple, but once you have a solid experience-base for apples, you are able to recognize even apple pictograms.

Hans

[MRC_Hans]

*snip*
Yes, it does. :p Seriously, in the objective scheme I'm presenting, rocks are capable of switching and, in some forms, do switch. That is enough. A rock formation making up a continent can build up pressure, and result in the switching of an earthquake. If you shrank yourself very small and sat on a thermostat, there would be some similarity.*snip*

I think we need to stick with the generic nature of objects, here. Otherwise any analogy will break down, and we are getting nowhere. A rock does indeed switch with respect to temperature, because it will melt at some point. It may also crack, change color, and a number of other non-linear things.

The point is that the generic (or symbolic, if you will) rock does none of these things. It just sits there reacting linearly.

Hans

[Mercutio]

An excellent paper; thanks for citing it. I'm going to read it twice.
and respond twice, it seems!

I wasn't suggesting that there must be a sensorium somewhere in the brain. But given the distributed and nonterminating nature of neural stimuli, we still have to explain why the red apple appears as a coherent whole and not a bunch of disjoint components like a Picasso painting. Is it simply that we get used to the disjoint sensations and they "naturally" tend toward coherency, or are there functions in the brain that add broader meta-sensations to the mix?
I admit I fail to follow you on this, and so my answer may not address your question. Part of the problem, of course, is that you are looking at the apple as an adult does, with a long learning history of interaction with items in your environment. That apple is going to look like a coherent whole to you, at least in part, because you have learned (at an experiential level) about perspective, size, color, and other characteristics of objects in your environment. (Some of my favorite exhibits in science museums are those which show optical illusions featuring distorted stimuli that appear to be familiar objects when viewed from one particular perspective. Even when we "know" it is not a red round apple with a green highlight, but a long distorted red blob viewed nearly on edge, with a hole through it through which a green background is viewable, it looks like an apple to us from one perspective.) Perhaps (I do not know) a baby does separate out some or all of the sensory bits, only gradually learning to process the "where it is" data with each of those sensations together, as she finds her hand and learns to move it. As an adult, we take "knowing where our hands are" for granted. But then, a lifetime of experience (and it may only take a few months) has taught us that the sensations are associated with a particular object.

Of course, we can fool ourselves--outlines are so important that when we draw false outlines we can completely miss a large object. Take a look at some of the astounding things done with camouflage!

Something allows me to separate the apple, cat, and chair that I'm looking at. And something causes me to see the Virgin Mary in the toast, even though there is no Virgin Mary there. Something is "looking for" the big patterns. Your learning history (and, by extension, your genetic history) allows you to process these things. Visual scientists have raised cats with no access to, say, horizontal lines; these cats cannot later utilize information about horizontal lines in their environment. There are a few case studies of humans--one, for instance, was a man who was blind from birth (cataracts), but had his sight restored at age 52. He had to learn pretty much all the things you take for granted as automatic. (From my son's psych textbook: "One day [this man] was found crawling out of a hospital window to get a closer look at the traffic on the street. It's easy to understand his curiosity, but he had to be restrained. His room was on the fourth floor!" Essentially, what you are asking about are what visual researchers call "constancies", and although there are some innate aspects, these constancies are largely learned through experience.

[John Freestone]

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.A hypothetical robot (or AFAIK a current real one) could report an internal state labelled 'Happy' by reference to whether its collection of smile solenoid circuits were active, and give the output 'Happy'. The builder could open it up, prod the relevant circuit and cause the same output 'Happy'. Human subjects might be doing precisely the same thing in more complex ways, and your first sentence is a very good example of how that might happen. In these experiments, subjects are not known to have something called a happy emotion as a discrete entity floating round their 'mind', but check for tell-tale signs to their current 'emotional' state. Try it yourself and there's nothing else to do. You can't find the emotion, happy. One of the cues that causes them to tell themselves (output to self, reflexive consciousness) 'happy' and report it to the experimenter, is whether their face hurts the right amount in the right place.

Since science works by isolating behaviours and limiting degrees of freedom, the operation of mind presents enormous difficulties. Everything effects everything else.Profound spelling mistake? Methinks your unconscious is trying to tell you something.

[Beth]

Really interesting thread. Thanks to all participants!

I have a suggestion regarding the question of how to determine sentience. Since consciousness, as piggy says, is what we humans do when awake and dreaming, but not when asleep and not dreaming, sedated or dead, could we use dreaming (or rather the physical correlates of reported dreaming) as a crude way to delineate between consciousness/sentience? This makes dogs, elephants, apes and humans all sentient while rocks and thermostats are not and (I think) creatures likes ants and grasshoppers are not. I'm not sure about the cephalapods. Do they dream?

Another way of putting it would be sentient individuals can distinguish between what they actually experience via their senses and what they imagine they are experiencing via their nervous system alone, but the dream state has physical correlates that make it a publically observable behavior as opposed to a purely private one.

If this isn't a good criteria for distinguishing between sentience and non-sentience, what is the problem with it?

[John Freestone]

Originally Posted by MRC_Hans

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.:eye-poppi :boggled: :rolleyes: :D

If there's no consciousness then you messed with the wrong part of the brain.Or fell asleep maybe.

[Nick227]

You can, however, replicate the claim of experiencing private experiences.



The language used when describing them. But the fact remains that we still don't know if Dave's red looks like Jim's red. But we do know that Dave and Jim both claim to experience red.

This is, naturally, the purpose of art. When Van Gogh paints a field of sunflowers, he's telling us what yellow feels like to him. When Beethoven composes Ode To Joy, he's trying to communicate the same sensation in our minds that he has in his. That's why we have art and science. We need to communicate things that cannot be explicitly stated.



The inability to put the sensation into words is part of the Hard Problem.

However, saying "I have a headache", "I opened the door" and "I imagined myself opening the door" all refer to the same single entity doing different things. It's all "I".

I think you have to take into account that these notions - consciousness, sentience, HPC, experience - all only arise through introspection. The notion that "people have experiences" arises only with introspection and the need to communicate. Thus these notions may have no empiric validity aside of being communication tools. There is imo a considerable human need to communicate experience, yet the nature of our existential situation means this can only be done through this conceptual terminology. It could be that you are confusing human need with what can be empirically demonstrated to be valid.

Possibly, Mercutio has been making this point here for some time, but I'm not sure so I thought I'd stick it in, with my own words, to make sure!

Nick

[Mercutio]

If this isn't a good criteria for distinguishing between sentience and non-sentience, what is the problem with it?

Well, as one of many possible operational definitions, it is pretty decent.

But...

I suppose that one fairly obvious measure would be REM sleep--but some of our dreams occur in non-REM sleep. Would we have to hook up electrodes to the visual cortex of non-verbal animals, to see whether they are dreaming? We cannot simply assume that REM sleep is the indicator.

And of course, the choice of visual cortex presupposes that their dreams are visual, like ours typically are--but that's a bit of an assumption, too. I have no idea whether cephalopods dream, or even whether they sleep, but their waking behavior is what got them special status.

And let us consider insects. I never much thought about the possibility that they might dream, but Lao Tsu did. If we continue to say we do not know what it is about our brain structure that "gives rise to consciousness", then we cannot reasonably say that we know for certain that insects don't possess that quality.

Anyway, those are just some thoughts. Again, as one of many possible definitions, it is better than some!

[Beth]

Well, as one of many possible operational definitions, it is pretty decent.

Thanks. I consider that a major compliment given the contentiousness of this point on this thread.

But...

I suppose that one fairly obvious measure would be REM sleep--but some of our dreams occur in non-REM sleep. Would we have to hook up electrodes to the visual cortex of non-verbal animals, to see whether they are dreaming? We cannot simply assume that REM sleep is the indicator. I think, for the purposes of this general discussion, REM sleep would be a sufficient indicator. It's easy enough that anyone can identify when some other individual is dreaming. I can see that my dogs eyes are moving while asleep and reasonable assume he's dreaming.

And of course, the choice of visual cortex presupposes that their dreams are visual, like ours typically are--but that's a bit of an assumption, too. I have no idea whether cephalopods dream, or even whether they sleep, but their waking behavior is what got them special status. Cephalopods would be a different matter. You can tell when another mammal is dreaming via other motions than REM, but they aren't as consistently indicative of the state. My dog bark or growl for example, but sometimes only his eyes move. On the other hand, I'm only asking if they dream, not for a way to determine always when they dreaming. So might it be possible to ascertain whether an octopus dreams without REM. Perhaps through some other physical signal that only occasionally manifests?

And let us consider insects. I never much thought about the possibility that they might dream, but Lao Tsu did. Lao Tse did? Interesting. What did he have to say about the matter? If we continue to say we do not know what it is about our brain structure that "gives rise to consciousness", then we cannot reasonably say that we know for certain that insects don't possess that quality. True enough. But of course, as we previously discussed, we don't even know for certain that an objective phsyical world exists. However, I think both are reasonable working assumptions for us to use.

Anyway, those are just some thoughts. Again, as one of many possible definitions, it is better than some!

Thanks again. If it seems a reasonable working definition, perhaps we could move beyond the point that thermostats and rocks possess awareness and on to the more interesting aspects of what we term "consciousness". What is it about consciousness that mammals and birds and some cephalopods seem to have it and insects and computers and bacteria presumably don't?

[John Freestone]

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)?

HansYes. It's quite extraordinary how many times the point is put to (self-defined) 'materialists' who seem not to notice their dualism, or even the question. Westprog replies:

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.Here the word 'deterministic' grabbed me, which you seem to contrast with 'consciousness', and that seems to suggest that it is one reason why you doubt emergence of consciousness. Am I right? You presume that your consciousness is not deterministic; you have free will; and anything produced by digital switches ain't gonna initiate behaviour and choose its own goals; it'll all be the human programmer's stuff. Machines don't have intention, humans do? Yeah? I think this is a very big watershed. I'm perfectly happy to consider the idea that humans don't have free will. I was programmed to think that...right....about......now. At least, I think you would need to demonstrate that we have free will in order to use the argument. But again, if we do have free will, and it emerges from the brain, you must conclude that free will either resides in synapses or something, or that it too is a property that somehow emerges from deterministic synaptic switches, it seems to me.

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.No. Sometimes it is considered a delicacy.

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.The fact that it can be extracted and made into dinner does not mean that its sole function is as food, but it is full of nutrients.

In general, emergent properties are common in biology. Evolution relies entirely on emergent properties. In the field of computing emergent properties are usually problematic.Emergent properties are common, full stop, surely? The difference between the elements in the periodic table would be a fairly good place to begin. I could call liquid at room temperature an emergent propery of mercury. Not only that, I can cut glass with one bit of carbon, draw sketches with another. And I have no idea how you can possibly say that emergent properties in computing are problematic. It seems to be so utterly self-evident to me that emergent properties are the basis of computing. This forum, for instance, emerges out of zeros and ones. The objects on the screen have properties. Properties is a word central to computing language.

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.Indeed. It could be that consciousness, if you define it narrowly, is only an emergent property of evolution and meat. If you define it narrowly enough, it is only your personal consciousness. If you define it more openly, it could be the reaction of a thermostat or an ant or a rock. Ah, but I think I'm starting to understand. You're saying your consciousness is non-deterministic, purposeful... so you must ask whether purposefulness is real or false and whether it can emerge from matter, which is (presumably) never purposeful. Actually, if that's what you're saying, it's a good point. Can we humans, who are supposed to have evolved through deterministic processes, choose our evolutionary path? Plenty of scientists seem to think we can and wouldn't go to work otherwise. Are we all arguing because we choose to, or as a direct result of all previous events? If the former, the HPC returns as an emergent problem: is purpose an illusion or an emergent property of matter?

[rocketdodger]

Funny how this inability seems only to apply to those who believe in HPC in the first place.

Those who recognise it as nonsense have no such difficulty.

Pixy, do you know of any theorem in computing concerning how much a system can know about itself?

I mentioned earlier that such a theorem would be a corollary of godelian incompleteness, but I think it could be proved without resorting to godelian concepts at all.

I think such a theorem would really help people understand why this search for the "source" of sentience (whatever that is) is ultimately futile, and that in the end a sentient being will see nothing but information processing when it looks at the mind of other sentient beings (or at the society around it, to satisfy Mercutio!).

So lets just throw it out there: A physical system, of any kind, can never be fully aware of all aspects of itself.

Before we move on, does anyone doubt that I.E. do I have to prove it formally for them?

[Belz...]

I'm using "mind" as a catch all for the thing that causes the behaviours.

Does everything that has behaviour have a mind ? Or is it strictly human behavoiur ? And, if so, do p-zombies count ?

[Belz...]

It must match, at least, by not setting out conditions which supposedly are sufficient for sentience which -- by observing the brain -- we plainly see are not sufficient for sentience.

Plainly ? I'm going to have to ask you for more than that. You have used "clearly" and "plainly" and probably "obviously" when speaking of things that are under debate, here. I think we need to clear that up, first.

[westprog]

But you have no way of knowing if they are the same. The language is the same, as you say, because our means of communication is based on labeling these things because we deem that we have similar experiences, but we really don't know. We really can't know.



The reason we use similar language to describe similar things is because that is how language works. If we think that the word "apple" denotes something, then why should we assume that the word "pain" indicates something entirely different for different people?

It is possible that the experience of pain is entirely different for every different person, but what evolutionary benefit would that confer? Why would we produce such an odd variety of states that have common names?



Nice try. It's hard for me to put into words because English isn't my first language, and because I still haven't put too much thought into it.

I don't know what your first language is, but I bet it has words for pain, joy, nausea, sadness and so on. And those words came from somewhere.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

That apple is going to look like a coherent whole to you, at least in part, because you have learned (at an experiential level) about perspective, size, color, and other characteristics of objects in your environment.
Agreed, but I still think we have some splainin' to do: Why doesn't the apple look red, round, medium-sized, invitingly delicious, and so on, all completely independently and mixed together with the attributes of the other objects of perception? How can I find the apple? Similarly, how can I tease the conversation out from the background noise in a noisy restaurant?

There is some sort of "higher level" function that groups the stimuli based on learned groupings. And not just specific object groupings, but logical groupings as well. If I've never seen a kiwi fruit, I can still distinguish it.

It's pattern recognizers all the way down.

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

That apple is going to look like a coherent whole to you, at least in part, because you have learned (at an experiential level) about perspective, size, color, and other characteristics of objects in your environment.
Agreed, but I still think we have some splainin' to do: Why doesn't the apple look red, round, medium-sized, invitingly delicious, and so on, all completely independently and mixed together with the attributes of the other objects of perception? How can I find the apple? Similarly, how can I tease the conversation out from the background noise in a noisy restaurant?

There is some sort of "higher level" function that groups the stimuli based on learned groupings. And not just specific object groupings, but logical groupings as well. If I've never seen a kiwi fruit, I can still distinguish it.

It's pattern recognizers all the way down. Or up. Or something.

~~ Paul

[Piggy]

Plainly ? I'm going to have to ask you for more than that. You have used "clearly" and "plainly" and probably "obviously" when speaking of things that are under debate, here. I think we need to clear that up, first.

The reason I say "plainly" is because of everything else I've posted before about that.

Let's go back to Marvin, because he's such a wonderful example.

Marvin didn't lose his entire conscious experience -- if he had, the case wouldn't have been interesting, because we couldn't communicate with him -- but he did lose awareness of a subsystem within his brain/nervous system.

If the genie hypothesis were true... that is, it were true that a robust reasoning system, or calculation, by itself gave rise to sentience somehow like a genie coming out of a bottle... then Marvin's stroke would not have removed his emotions from conscious awareness.

All of that robust reasoning, all of that calculation, even the physical responses, remained intact.

The only thing that changed was his awareness.

So from just this one example we can see that a robust reasoning system -- even if it is necessary for sentience -- is not necessarily sufficient for sentience.

In other words, you can have all of that, and not have sentience.

For that reason, the claim that thermostats are sentient because they sense and respond... it just doesn't pass muster.

[Nick227]

I mentioned earlier that such a theorem would be a corollary of godelian incompleteness, but I think it could be proved without resorting to godelian concepts at all.

I think such a theorem would really help people understand why this search for the "source" of sentience (whatever that is) is ultimately futile, and that in the end a sentient being will see nothing but information processing when it looks at the mind of other sentient beings (or at the society around it, to satisfy Mercutio!).

I would personally dispute that it's futile. In fact, I would consider seeking the source of sentience one of the most admirable pursuits one could follow. You can learn all sorts of useful things, mostly about yourself, on the way.

In this seeking I would also consider the basic experience of what must be many millions of meditators worldwide. You become aware of the passage of thoughts to the degree that identification ceases and they can float across your awareness unhindered by the belief that they belong to anyone. I'd say that there is, experientially, a ground of the mind, if not of awareness itself, and knowledge of this can develop.

Nick

[INRM]

Okay here's something that I'm kind of wondering about.

Which creates the sense of identity... I don't mean why I consider myself a certain type of guy, I mean why am I me... like why am I in *this* body?

Does it have to do simply with that I became sentient after Guy X. For example, you have "Conscious Entity 1" born now, Conscious Entitiy 2 born in 2 minutes, and I was born a certan number down the line...

Or does it have to do with the initial information that entered my brain as I was born. Since a brain does not achieve consciousness without some information in it to bounce around in there. Does that make me "me" as in "in this body" or is it the first hypothesis, that I was born after a given number of other people?

I can't really explain this but I think I wrote this before in the Science forum under the what makes me me. Was it the time I was born, brain structure and stuff, or was it the first bits of data that entered my brain? Or some combo of both?


INRM

[Piggy]

If a thermostat claimed to be sentient, who'd be fooled ? Same with humans, in my opinion.

That's not what I'm talking about, though.

I was talking specifically about the claim that consciousness itself is "just an illlusion".

Consciousness is fraught with illusion, certainly. Illusion is part and parcel with it.

But sentience itself is not an illusion.

To say that, we have to believe some very odd things -- specifically, that a thing which doesn't exist is fooling a thing which doesn't exist (itself) into thinking it exists.

That's what you get from the philosophy of "I'm not actually sentient, I just think I am".

It was that particular kind of statement -- "sentience is just an illusion" -- that I was saying is fatally flawed.

It sounds nice at first, but when you drill down, you either end up with that kind of circular nonsense, or you end up reintroducing the little man in the mental theater.

[Piggy]

Using humans as a benchmark only allows you to ask "Do these things seem to be sentient in the same way as a human"? That is, do they respond like humans?

First of all... so where else are you going to go?

What other type of sentience do you know about to use as a benchmark?

If I'm allowed to simply invent novel and undefined types of exotic sentience, I could claim that a toasted bagel is sentient, that my car keys are aware, that the flume ride at Six Flags is conscious -- it's just a kind of sentience which doesn't resemble ours at all!

And we can ask a lot more than if they respond like humans.

In fact, "responding like humans" is not any sort of benchmark for sentience.

The simple fact of the matter is that we have to stay grounded to actual observation of systems that we know produce sentience, and work from there.

Hopefully, it won't be long before we can make some fairly certain statements about sentience in other animals.

But this business of musing about computer models and claiming that they do, or could, produce sentience when we don't know how it's produced by the only thing that we're certain produces it... that's a lot of sound and fury.

[Nick227]

First of all... so where else are you going to go?

What other type of sentience do you know about to use as a benchmark?

If I'm allowed to simply invent novel and undefined types of exotic sentience, I could claim that a toasted bagel is sentient, that my car keys are aware, that the flume ride at Six Flags is conscious -- it's just a kind of sentience which doesn't resemble ours at all!

And we can ask a lot more than if they respond like humans.

In fact, "responding like humans" is not any sort of benchmark for sentience.

The simple fact of the matter is that we have to stay grounded to actual observation of systems that we know produce sentience, and work from there.

Hopefully, it won't be long before we can make some fairly certain statements about sentience in other animals.

But this business of musing about computer models and claiming that they do, or could, produce sentience when we don't know how it's produced by the only thing that we're certain produces it... that's a lot of sound and fury.

From a meditator's point of view, sentience could be considered simply a state of diminished identification with thought or feeling - the time when the "my thought" kick just isn't so much there. If you're used to simply acting upon thought or feeling, automatically generating a sense of selfhood without considering it, then it does feel different if there is this diminishing in identification. There's a sense of there being a space between the thought and you, whereas previously the thought was you. There's a sense of observing the thought. This, to me, is sentience.

Nick

[INRM]

Nick227,

Interesting take... however I don't think that's what causes it. However for all we know you might be right.

[Hokulele]

Lao Tse did? Interesting. What did he have to say about the matter?


Actually, it was Chuang Tzu in "Working Everything Out Equally" from his collected writings.

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt that I was a butterfly, flitting around and enjoying myself. I had no idea I was Chuang Tzu. Then suddenly I woke up and was Chuang Tzu again. But I could not tell, had I been Chuang Tzu dreaming I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I was now Chuang Tzu? However, there must be some sort of difference between Chuang Tzu and a butterfly! We call this the transformation of things.


Please note, this is not my favorite translation, but it is the only one I have on my desk at the moment.

Just for fun (and quite on-topic), here is what he thought of these types of conversations. ;)

Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu were walking beside the weir on the River Hao, when Chuang Tzu said, "Do you see how the fish are coming to the surface and swimming around as they please? That's what fish really enjoy."

"You are not a fish," replied Hui Tzu, "so how can you say you know what fish enjoy?"

Chuang Tzu said, "You are not me, so how can you know I don't know what fish enjoy?"

Hui Tzu said, "I am not you, so I definitely don't know what it is you know. However, you are most definitely not a fish and that proves that you don't know what fish really enjoy."

Chuang Tzu said, "Ah, but let's return to the original question you raised, if you don't mind. You asked me how I could know what it is that fish really enjoy. Therefore, you already knew I knew it when you asked he question. And I know it by being here on the edge of the River Hao."

[rocketdodger]

So from just this one example we can see that a robust reasoning system -- even if it is necessary for sentience -- is not necessarily sufficient for sentience.

Once again, you should really say "sentience like mine."

Or are you suggesting that Marvin was no longer sentient at all?

[cyborg]

I know you didn't. That's what I was pointing out.

You were pointing out some tacit properties that you have conjured up that you presume I also meant when I said "soul," like maybe that it weights 21 grams or something?

Sorry - no sale. What I mean by soul is just what I mean by soul.

Do you?

You observe a thing created by God which is not a product of the body but interacts with it and is pre-existing and will survive the body?

No - see above. No mention of gods nor afterlives.

Actually, I don't think you observe anything like a soul. I think you perceive all the evidence of sentience, and you're saying "I observe a soul".

This would be my point. You object to the word "soul" on a purely ontological basis but have thus far refused to quantify what "sentience" means such that your objection takes on some substance.

Now, if you want to play Humpty Dumpty and redefine "soul" so that it's stripped down to only the properties of consciousness, well then hey, you done observed yourself a soul!

Yes. I have.

And me calling it "soul" and you calling it "sentience" or "consciousness" gets us no closer to any understanding of what it is.

Please explain to me how, exactly, by my arguments, I'm simply "presuming" that other people are conscious like me.

Your words, not mine:

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

So it's really rough right now, but there's no doubt that the brain produces sentience, and that it's not a generalized function (if there are any such things in the brain).

There's no doubt that my body produces a soul.

(Tacit dualism).

I don't understand that second sentence there.

As for the first, let's try to have an adult conversation. If we start launching off on "how do you know", then we'll end up in the land of "How do you know it's not all just a dream?" and "How do you know we're not in a Matrix?" and that kind of stuff.

Been there, no need to go back.

Sorry Piggy - this has nothing at all to do with Matrix-style vat-brains and everything to do with ontology.

But I will endeavour to have an adult conversation as soon as you pony up the goods and start becoming precise about what you mean.

Really?

Everyone says they have a soul? Huh.

Everyone says they're sentient/conscious do they? Huh.

Sorry if you don't like having your gross generalizations thrown back at you.

And which components do we know must be involved in producing the soul? That sounds interesting.

Everything... it's there I assure you and it must be because I know I have one! Serious people are looking for it!

If you can post a link to my "you have it, stupid" statement, I'd appreciate that.

http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=3880340&postcount=915

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

I don't know that it makes much sense to talk about the "properties" of what is essentially an event. Maybe it does, it's just hard for me to get my mind around it.

Can you talk about the properties of a door opening? Can you talk about the properties of a ball falling? Can you talk about the properties of an electron ionizing?

I don't think you're trying very hard at all to think about the ways in which we already describe properties of events: they're called "adverbs".

I don't think I need to go into the rest otherwise I'm just treading the same ground others have trod.

[PixyMisa]

Pixy, do you know of any theorem in computing concerning how much a system can know about itself?
Nothing specifically concerning that. Nyquist and Shannon covered the limits on information encoding and communication, though.

[rocketdodger]

I can't really explain this but I think I wrote this before in the Science forum under the what makes me me. Was it the time I was born, brain structure and stuff, or was it the first bits of data that entered my brain? Or some combo of both?


Neither. You didn't achieve "sentience" (to use piggy's word) until a certain age (probably 3 or 4) and didn't achieve true self-consciousness (the ability to reason about yourself reasoning about yourself) until much later (probably between 8 and 14).

When you are born your brain is merely like a nearly empty RAM bank after a computer boots -- maybe loaded with a rudimentary operating system. That is it.

[rocketdodger]

Nothing specifically concerning that. Nyquist and Shannon covered the limits on information encoding and communication, though.

Eh, that isn't what I am looking for. No matter, I will come up with it myself!

Later today I will post a logically sound mathematical argument that should put this fire out for good.

[cyborg]

Incompleteness says there will always be truths that cannot be known within a system but I'm not sure if that's what you're after - but it seems a good start.

[leon_heller]

Incompleteness says there will always be truths that cannot be known within a system but I'm not sure if that's what you're after - but it seems a good start.

Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem is only relevant to formal mathematical systems like Peano arithmetic. It doesn't apply to systems in general.

Leon

[cyborg]

Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem is only relevant to formal mathematical systems like Peano arithmetic. It doesn't apply to systems in general.

Mathematical systems are generally formal:

Later today I will post a logically sound mathematical argument that should put this fire out for good.

[leon_heller]

Pixy, do you know of any theorem in computing concerning how much a system can know about itself?

I mentioned earlier that such a theorem would be a corollary of godelian incompleteness, but I think it could be proved without resorting to godelian concepts at all.

I think such a theorem would really help people understand why this search for the "source" of sentience (whatever that is) is ultimately futile, and that in the end a sentient being will see nothing but information processing when it looks at the mind of other sentient beings (or at the society around it, to satisfy Mercutio!).

So lets just throw it out there: A physical system, of any kind, can never be fully aware of all aspects of itself.

Before we move on, does anyone doubt that I.E. do I have to prove it formally for them?

This cropped up when I was studying psychology many years ago. It can be countered by having one system studying another one.

Leon

[Nick227]

Neither. You didn't achieve "sentience" (to use piggy's word) until a certain age (probably 3 or 4) and didn't achieve true self-consciousness (the ability to reason about yourself reasoning about yourself) until much later (probably between 8 and 14).

Where did you take these definitions from? I've heard self-consciousness often placed at the age at which a child can recognise his or herself in a mirror, around 18 months. I'm sure there are other ways to define it but I've not heard this one before.

When you are born your brain is merely like a nearly empty RAM bank after a computer boots -- maybe loaded with a rudimentary operating system. That is it.

So where would you say the personality comes from? Are you saying it simply develops from random interractions in early childhood? Is there no pre-conditioning?

Nick

[Nick227]

So lets just throw it out there: A physical system, of any kind, can never be fully aware of all aspects of itself.

Physical systems can have a "ground." Signal and ground. If you take a Buddhist perspective, then awareness is the ground and all experience is signal. Identification with certain signals creates selfhood, but this is not the true self which is awareness, ground. Saying a system can never be fully aware of itself presupposes that "itself" is not simply another aspect of experience. Can you build a computer that needs no ground?

Nick

[rocketdodger]

This cropped up when I was studying psychology many years ago. It can be countered by having one system studying another one.

Leon

Yeah that is the point! You will never be able to fully understand your own objective experience, you can only fully understand the objective experience of another.

[rocketdodger]

Where did you take these definitions from? I've heard self-consciousness often placed at the age at which a child can recognise his or herself in a mirror, around 18 months. I'm sure there are other ways to define it but I've not heard this one before.

I just made it up. You can call it "that which humans have and chimpazees/dolphins don't" if you wish. Higher order reasoning about the self. The point is that humans absolutely do not come ouf of the womb 'ready to go' when it comes to personality.

So where would you say the personality comes from? Are you saying it simply develops from random interractions in early childhood? Is there no pre-conditioning?

Nick

No no, not at all. There is a genetic component, an evolutionary component, etc. Just like a computer, the preexisting hardware is required.

But when a human is born, their brains are quite literally practically empty. Hardly any of the neural connections they will eventually have are in place. Pretty much all they have are instincts.

[westprog]

Does everything that has behaviour have a mind ? Or is it strictly human behavoiur ? And, if so, do p-zombies count ?

We only know about our own inner experience. We only surmise from comparisions what other humans experience. Animals don't report on their own experience. We have no idea if p-zombies even exist.

[rocketdodger]

Physical systems can have a "ground." Signal and ground. If you take a Buddhist perspective, then awareness is the ground and all experience is signal. Identification with certain signals creates selfhood, but this is not the true self which is awareness, ground. Saying a system can never be fully aware of itself presupposes that "itself" is not simply another aspect of experience. Can you build a computer that needs no ground?

Nick

Can you tell my why reading that post would advance my knowledge of anything other than how to string important sounding words together to produce utter nonsense?

[Mercutio]

The reason we use similar language to describe similar things is because that is how language works. If we think that the word "apple" denotes something, then why should we assume that the word "pain" indicates something entirely different for different people?

It is possible that the experience of pain is entirely different for every different person, but what evolutionary benefit would that confer? Why would we produce such an odd variety of states that have common names?

I don't know what your first language is, but I bet it has words for pain, joy, nausea, sadness and so on. And those words came from somewhere.

Somewhere... and here is a big hint: the people from whom you learned those words did not have access to your private experience, nor you to theirs.

Those words--ostensibly describing our inner experiences--can only have been learned by association with publicly available referents.

Again, did you read the Rachlin paper I linked?

[westprog]

A physical system, of any kind, can never be fully aware of all aspects of itself.


I think Heisenberg leads us to Nothing can be fully aware of all aspects of anything.

[Mercutio]

Agreed, but I still think we have some splainin' to do: Why doesn't the apple look red, round, medium-sized, invitingly delicious, and so on, all completely independently and mixed together with the attributes of the other objects of perception? How can I find the apple? Similarly, how can I tease the conversation out from the background noise in a noisy restaurant?

There is some sort of "higher level" function that groups the stimuli based on learned groupings. And not just specific object groupings, but logical groupings as well. If I've never seen a kiwi fruit, I can still distinguish it.

It's pattern recognizers all the way down.

~~ PaulYou are neglecting your history recognizing objects in your environment, whether kiwis or not. "Pattern recognizers" is a wonderfully circular explanation, since you infer them from a demonstrated ability to recognize patterns. Apples (and many other objects) are things we can actually interact with; we learn (long before we are able to remember doing so) that these perceptions go together. It is a functional thing. It works. I cannot imagine why you think the sensations *should* be sensed independently. Perhaps if you explain that, I can come up with a better reply.

[westprog]

Somewhere... and here is a big hint: the people from whom you learned those words did not have access to your private experience, nor you to theirs.

Those words--ostensibly describing our inner experiences--can only have been learned by association with publicly available referents.


Yes, they must be associated with PAR. However, since they describe IE, they must refer to IE. When I refer to fear, for example, I certainly associate it with trembling, running, screaming and fainting. But that is not what I am describing. I am describing the sensation.

Exchanging our inner sensations is what human beings do. We start off observing another human being from a distance and evaluating behaviour. We end up saying "I love you" - which is meant to describe an inner state, whether we mean it or not.


Again, did you read the Rachlin paper I linked?


Gimme a break, you saw my reading list.

[rocketdodger]

Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem is only relevant to formal mathematical systems like Peano arithmetic. It doesn't apply to systems in general.

Leon

Can you give me an example of a system that cannot be reduced to a formal system?

[westprog]

The point is that the generic (or symbolic, if you will) rock does none of these things. It just sits there reacting linearly.

Hans

But there are no generic rocks. There are only real, non-linear rocks.

Look closely at microstructures and you'll find switches. Every atom is a switch.

[leon_heller]

Can you give me an example of a system that cannot be reduced to a formal system?

Let's turn it round. Can you give me some examples of systems that can be reduced to formal systems? Formal systems consist of a formal language together with a deductive system which consists of a set of inference rules and/or axioms, like Peano arithmetic or the Lambda calculus. They are self-contained systems, and aren't derived from any superior system.

Leon

[skiba]

I'm sure some of you have heard of this
http://goodlifezen.com/2008/03/07/are-mystics-just-having-a-brain-wave (http://goodlifezen.com/2008/03/07/are-mystics-just-having-a-brain-wave/)
An interesting story about a woman(Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist) who suffered a stroke.

Might shed some light on the brains "computation". Especially on how the left and right hemispheres operate. Could also explain why some see the HPC and others dont. Depending on which side is your predominant hemisphere.

Her Ted talk is very interesting too
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.htm l"] (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.htm l)

[Mercutio]

Yes, they must be associated with PAR. However, since they describe IE, they must refer to IE. When I refer to fear, for example, I certainly associate it with trembling, running, screaming and fainting. But that is not what I am describing. I am describing the sensation.

Exchanging our inner sensations is what human beings do. We start off observing another human being from a distance and evaluating behaviour. We end up saying "I love you" - which is meant to describe an inner state, whether we mean it or not.

Gimme a break, you saw my reading list.

Break given--I ask only because it directly speaks to this issue, and comes up with a very different answer than you do.

(BTW, there is some nifty research on misattribution of arousal, in which internal states are manipulated--say, with adrenalin--in different social contexts. Turns out that your first paragraph ain't necessarily so; we look to our own behavior and our social context when evaluating an internal arousal state. Heck, our language even shows that we trust our own behavior over our own internal feelings; we take a plateful, can't eat it all, and say "guess I wasn't as hungry as I thought I was." But if sentience simply is what it is, how would it even be possible to not be as hungry as you thought you were--if you thought it, that is hunger, no? On the other hand, if "hungry" describes, behaviorally, that you would eat if the opportunity arose, and if your private state was imperfectly correlated with this real definition of hunger, then not being as hungry as you thought you were makes perfect sense.)

[Piggy]

Once again, you should really say "sentience like mine."

I didn't say that because it's not what I meant.

I mean sentience at all.

Speaking of which...

Or are you suggesting that Marvin was no longer sentient at all?

No, and that's what makes the case interesting.

If he lost all sentience, we could not have talked with him, and that would not have been interesting.

Because the stroke damage cut off communication with the area of his brain responsible for emotional awareness, we were able to see what happens when the emotional subsystem is damaged at that point.

The result was that the system was able to function, but Marvin was not aware of it.

Certainly, this influenced the system, because no doubt there would be some feedback from the activity there which fed information back to "upstream" processing centers.

But still, his body was able to respond emotionally to his environment. All the sensing, data retrieval, matching, analysis, response, and so forth was in full working order.

Before the stroke, Marvin was sentient of his emotional states. After the stroke, he is not.

This indicates that, in the human brain, at least, the robust reasoning system -- in this case, a subsystem -- can continue to function "off the radar" of conscious awareness, if information about it is withheld from certain parts of the brain where it is usually sent.

Now, perhaps sentience can be produced in other ways.

But what we see here clearly is that a robust reasoning system does not, by itself, produce sentience.

Maybe it can, but in the one machine which we are dead certain can produce sentience, it doesn't.

[Piggy]

What I mean by soul is just what I mean by soul.

If you can make up your own definition of words, there's no point continuing a conversation.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

You are neglecting your history recognizing objects in your environment, whether kiwis or not. "Pattern recognizers" is a wonderfully circular explanation, since you infer them from a demonstrated ability to recognize patterns. Apples (and many other objects) are things we can actually interact with; we learn (long before we are able to remember doing so) that these perceptions go together. It is a functional thing. It works. I cannot imagine why you think the sensations *should* be sensed independently. Perhaps if you explain that, I can come up with a better reply.
I'm simply agreeing with you, when you said that we are perceiving individual attributes of the apple, not the whole apple:

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.
Certainly we have a history recognizing objects, and we're stunningly good at it. How does it work? How do the attributes get grouped into coherent objects, and how can we separate 300 attributes into 20 recognizable objects?

I am not proposing the existence of a "pattern recognizer" to recognize patterns. I'm simply pointing out that there is pattern recognition going on at many different levels. Explaining it by "we practice a lot" is not getting to the heart of the matter, I don't think.

~~ Paul

[Piggy]

I am not proposing the existence of a "pattern recognizer" to recognize patterns. I'm simply pointing out that there is pattern recognition going on at many different levels. Explaining it by "we practice a lot" is not getting to the heart of the matter, I don't think.

Agreed. And it would seem odd -- to put it mildly -- that evolution would leave such an important function to the whims of learning, conditioning, or any other post-partum process.

We would expect it, instead, to wire the brain to be able to recognize patterns, and to prefer certain patterns, from the get go.

[Mercutio]

I'm simply agreeing with you, when you said that we are perceiving individual attributes of the apple, not the whole apple:
Then you misunderstood. We (adult humans) perceive the apple. If we look at the brain level, various parts of us (in particular, parts of the brain) perceive different attributes.

Certainly we have a history recognizing objects, and we're stunningly good at it. How does it work? How do the attributes get grouped into coherent objects, and how can we separate 300 attributes into 20 recognizable objects?
Functional interaction with the environment. Dopamine-regulated neurons (specific ones) fire at pairings of stimuli in our environment, changing our behavior to respond to the association in the real world. It is a very functional, adaptive (reinforcing, literally) process.

You can experience it yourself: put on some prism goggles which throw your perception off to one side by 10 degrees or so. As you interact with the world, the separate perceptions of visual location (yes, there are several processes of this) and of bodily-kinesthetic location are not in synch with one another, which throws off where you think your body is, where you think other things are, and all sorts of things. Throw a ball at a target, and you are off by 10 degrees. Simple interaction with the environment resets the different perceptions, and within a few minutes your visual and bodily perceptual systems are once more in agreement. (Take off the goggles and you are off by 10 degrees in the other direction until you re-re-learn.)

And of course, outside the periphery of our vision, we are not separating into separate recognizable objects, but since we are not using that information it doesn't matter. Frankly, a lot of what we commonly believe we are perceiving, we are not. Certainly, there is a lot of perception to explain; but if you look at the Blackmore talk from the MBC conference, you quickly realize that our naive thoughts about our perception are not the standard we need to explain.

I am not proposing the existence of a "pattern recognizer" to recognize patterns. I'm simply pointing out that there is pattern recognition going on at many different levels. Explaining it by "we practice a lot" is not getting to the heart of the matter, I don't think."We practice a lot" is the level of explanation that matters, frankly. As opposed to "it's hardwired", or "it's unexplainable". It really doesn't matter if it is mediated by dopamine as in humans, or by octopamine as it is in honeybees. We learn quickly by experience with associations in the real world.

[Mercutio]

Agreed. And it would seem odd -- to put it mildly -- that evolution would leave such an important function to the whims of learning, conditioning, or any other post-partum process.

We would expect it, instead, to wire the brain to be able to recognize patterns, and to prefer certain patterns, from the get go.

You would be right, if our environment was unchanging. Koalas and Pandas only have to recognize one type of food. If it ain't that, don't eat. Not a terribly adaptive behavior if your environment changes.

Thing is, we are able to learn. You can't hardwire for preferences in a changing environment; you have to, as it were, hardwire for ability to respond to new associations in the environment. You need to be able to learn that some things go together, and learn it quickly. Which we do.

[Piggy]

You would be right, if our environment was unchanging. Koalas and Pandas only have to recognize one type of food. If it ain't that, don't eat. Not a terribly adaptive behavior if your environment changes.

Thing is, we are able to learn. You can't hardwire for preferences in a changing environment; you have to, as it were, hardwire for ability to respond to new associations in the environment. You need to be able to learn that some things go together, and learn it quickly. Which we do.

Ok, I see now.

Y'all have your micro/tele-scopes at different levels of magnification.

Of course we hardwire for the ability to respond to new associations in the environment.

But there's a basic toolbelt that lets us accomplish this.

[Mercutio]

But there's a basic toolbelt that lets us accomplish this.

Wait--you can be as general as "toolbelt", but I get **** for being as general as "practice"?

Not fair!


Hmph!

[rocketdodger]

Let's turn it round. Can you give me some examples of systems that can be reduced to formal systems? Formal systems consist of a formal language together with a deductive system which consists of a set of inference rules and/or axioms, like Peano arithmetic or the Lambda calculus. They are self-contained systems, and aren't derived from any superior system.

Leon

The system of what humans can know.

You can throw in all subsystems of that system as well, for good measure.

Even if I can't reduce a system "properly," as in consolidating redundant statements into axioms and the inferences used to generate them from axioms, I can always take the easy way out and simply declare a new axiom for every statement, right?

So isn't the statement "all systems (a human can know) are reducible to a formal system" always trivially true?

[cyborg]

If you can make up your own definition of words, there's no point continuing a conversation.

Don't get pissy just because I refused to play with the presumption of what "soul" meant to you from your particular cultural context. Of all people I would have expected you to get that feature of language.

[leon_heller]

The system of what humans can know.

You can throw in all subsystems of that system as well, for good measure.

Even if I can't reduce a system "properly," as in consolidating redundant statements into axioms and the inferences used to generate them from axioms, I can always take the easy way out and simply declare a new axiom for every statement, right?

So isn't the statement "all systems (a human can know) are reducible to a formal system" always trivially true?

Do you have an example of such a system? Can you prove that it satisfies the requirements for a formal system, such as internal consistency?

Leon

[westprog]

A hypothetical robot (or AFAIK a current real one) could report an internal state labelled 'Happy' by reference to whether its collection of smile solenoid circuits were active, and give the output 'Happy'. The builder could open it up, prod the relevant circuit and cause the same output 'Happy'. Human subjects might be doing precisely the same thing in more complex ways, and your first sentence is a very good example of how that might happen. In these experiments, subjects are not known to have something called a happy emotion as a discrete entity floating round their 'mind', but check for tell-tale signs to their current 'emotional' state. Try it yourself and there's nothing else to do. You can't find the emotion, happy. One of the cues that causes them to tell themselves (output to self, reflexive consciousness) 'happy' and report it to the experimenter, is whether their face hurts the right amount in the right place.


Do I trust a research paper more than my own sensations? Do I simply examine behavioural clues to determine my state, or do I have the capacity to monitor it directly?

I don't believe that human being's detect their own state of happiness in the same way that they detect the happiness of others. It is quite common to assume the signs of happiness while not being happy. "Smile though your heart is breaking".

We don't need a robot. We could divide the floor into squares marked "happy" and "sad" and drop a coin to see how the room "felt".


Profound spelling mistake? Methinks your unconscious is trying to tell you something.

I hope it is. Maybe it's telling me that I'm not as good at spelling as I think I am.

[westprog]

I think you have to take into account that these notions - consciousness, sentience, HPC, experience - all only arise through introspection. The notion that "people have experiences" arises only with introspection and the need to communicate. Thus these notions may have no empiric validity aside of being communication tools. There is imo a considerable human need to communicate experience, yet the nature of our existential situation means this can only be done through this conceptual terminology. It could be that you are confusing human need with what can be empirically demonstrated to be valid.

Possibly, Mercutio has been making this point here for some time, but I'm not sure so I thought I'd stick it in, with my own words, to make sure!



If I understand him correctly, Mercutio's main point is that introspection has proved an unreliable tool in the past, and that it should not be used.

The problem I have with this view is that all my interactions with the world are done via my sensations. If I read a paper about perception, I have to rely on my own perception to do so. When I read the paper, I find it filled with accounts from researchers who have used their own perceptions to describe what happens when they attach electrodes to someone's brain.

If I am to distrust perception, then I have to distrust all perception.

The problems of introspection are obvious. I don't disagree that they can lead to mistakes. I don't accept, however, that introspection can or should be entirely discarded. (It might be that this is not what Mercutio is claiming, in which case I'm sure he'll correct me).

[Darat]

He isn't.

[westprog]

Well, as one of many possible operational definitions, it is pretty decent.

But...

I suppose that one fairly obvious measure would be REM sleep--but some of our dreams occur in non-REM sleep. Would we have to hook up electrodes to the visual cortex of non-verbal animals, to see whether they are dreaming? We cannot simply assume that REM sleep is the indicator.

And of course, the choice of visual cortex presupposes that their dreams are visual, like ours typically are--but that's a bit of an assumption, too. I have no idea whether cephalopods dream, or even whether they sleep, but their waking behavior is what got them special status.

And let us consider insects. I never much thought about the possibility that they might dream, but Lao Tsu did. If we continue to say we do not know what it is about our brain structure that "gives rise to consciousness", then we cannot reasonably say that we know for certain that insects don't possess that quality.

Anyway, those are just some thoughts. Again, as one of many possible definitions, it is better than some!

And what of people who forget all their dreams? We might test their brain and it might appear that they have brain states that correspond with what are reported as dreams in other people. But when we ask them they say they weren't dreaming. Do they have dreams and forget them? How can we ever know? The experience of a dream can't be demonstrated.

[westprog]

Here the word 'deterministic' grabbed me, which you seem to contrast with 'consciousness', and that seems to suggest that it is one reason why you doubt emergence of consciousness. Am I right? You presume that your consciousness is not deterministic; you have free will; and anything produced by digital switches ain't gonna initiate behaviour and choose its own goals; it'll all be the human programmer's stuff. Machines don't have intention, humans do? Yeah? I think this is a very big watershed. I'm perfectly happy to consider the idea that humans don't have free will. I was programmed to think that...right....about......now. At least, I think you would need to demonstrate that we have free will in order to use the argument. But again, if we do have free will, and it emerges from the brain, you must conclude that free will either resides in synapses or something, or that it too is a property that somehow emerges from deterministic synaptic switches, it seems to me.


I may indeed have some unstated belief that consiousness is non-deterministic, and possesses "free will", and all the consequences that this entails, but that was not the argument I was trying to put forward.

In my experience, complex computer programs, being deterministic, do what they are programmed to do. They don't have "emergent properties". There's a network of beliefs about strong AI, and this is one of them.

Let us assume that it is possible for a deterministic computer program to have the property of consciousness. (Leaving aside issues of definition, and so on). If that is the case, I believe it will only get there if it is programmed in. I also don't think that programming it will be at all easy. Getting a program to store a few pieces of data reliably is difficult. Getting it to exhibit consciousness will be very difficult indeed.

There are also proponents of a view that consciousness exists in any program. The aware thermostat idea. Thus if we have a big program, it has the same amount of consciousness that we do. I see no reason to believe this at all. Different systems have different properties. Human beings have consciousness because it evolved for them. Why would a payroll system, say, need the same thing? Of course, if we redefine consciousness from an observed phenomenon to a measure of complexity, the hard problem disappears. Disappears under the carpet, I would say.

We've discussed the views of Penrose earlier. It's been asserted that his work has been comprehensively debunked by observations of micro-tubules. If that is the case - and I'm not entirely convinced that it is - then his main contention still remains - that human consciousness cannot in principle be duplicated by any deterministic algorithmic process. He's arrived at that conclusion by examining how human beings perform his own particular discipline of mathematics, and by the inability of machine intelligence to perform the same operations.

His own belief is that human consciousness must have a quantum basis of some kind. His selection of a particular mechanism that might provide the location of this behaviour is not the basis for the theory.

I am not an acolyte of Penrosianism, but I give the theory at least as much weight as the most reasonable of the AI contentions - that a computer program can, in principle, be written that might have consciousness written in.

[PixyMisa]

And what of people who forget all their dreams? We might test their brain and it might appear that they have brain states that correspond with what are reported as dreams in other people. But when we ask them they say they weren't dreaming. Do they have dreams and forget them? How can we ever know? The experience of a dream can't be demonstrated.
Find some people who report that they are dreaming. Monitor their neural activity. Learn to distinguish the neural activity associated with dreaming. Then look for that neural activity in people who do not report that they are dreaming.

In other words, it can be demonstrated the same way as anything else: Learn what it looks like, and look for it.

[PixyMisa]

In my experience, complex computer programs, being deterministic, do what they are programmed to do. They don't have "emergent properties".
Okay, problem one: This is completely wrong. Emergent properties abound in computer systems, and most particularly in network systems. Us programmers spend a lot of time trying to avoid them, because they are hard to predict and almost always unwanted, but they are there alright.

There are also proponents of a view that consciousness exists in any program. The aware thermostat idea. Thus if we have a big program, it has the same amount of consciousness that we do.
Hmm. A consciousness of the same order of complexity, I would say.

I see no reason to believe this at all. Different systems have different properties. Human beings have consciousness because it evolved for them. Why would a payroll system, say, need the same thing?
To monitor its own actions. This sort of stuff is programmed into every major application these days.

We've discussed the views of Penrose earlier. It's been asserted that his work has been comprehensively debunked by observations of micro-tubules.
Yup.

If that is the case - and I'm not entirely convinced that it is - then his main contention still remains - that human consciousness cannot in principle be duplicated by any deterministic algorithmic process.
An unsupported assertion.

He's arrived at that conclusion by examining how human beings perform his own particular discipline of mathematics, and by the inability of machine intelligence to perform the same operations.
Yeah, but simply claiming this to be true doesn't make it true.

His own belief is that human consciousness must have a quantum basis of some kind.
It's a triple non-sequitur. His assertions are unsupported, his argument doesn't follow from his assertions, and his conclusion doesn't follow from his argument. You can't do much worse, really.

[westprog]

Again, sorry about the late answer, which may overlap later posts...



As you see, my reply is also late. In general, there's no reason not to delay responses on a subject like this. It's not going away in a hurry, and there's a lot to say about it.

[Nick227]

No no, not at all. There is a genetic component, an evolutionary component, etc. Just like a computer, the preexisting hardware is required.

But when a human is born, their brains are quite literally practically empty. Hardly any of the neural connections they will eventually have are in place. Pretty much all they have are instincts.

Where do you figure basic traits in the personality are stored?

Nick

[Nick227]

Can you tell my why reading that post would advance my knowledge of anything other than how to string important sounding words together to produce utter nonsense?

Can you build a thermostat or a computer without a ground, RD?

If you take the basic electrical system - signal-ground - as a model, then make an analogy with signal-awareness (as many religious and mystical philosophies do) then you have a model for sentience.

Nick

[westprog]

The rock is linear. The output is linearly dependent on the input.

The thermostat is not linear. The output depends on a process that is peculiar to the thermostat.



But the rock is only linear when considered in an abstract, idealised way. In reality, it is highly non-linear. When considered at an atomic level, it is entirely non-linear. Look at how information is passed between molecules.

Yes, there is linearity there. There is also a considerable degree of non-linearity.

And of course, there's linear behaviour in the thermostat also.


Define value.


I didn't introduce the term. As with "awareness", I don't believe that "value" has any meaning within TLOP. However, it's a useful guide to why we consider the rock linear and the thermocouple non-linear.

In physical terms, there's an array of behaviours associated with the thermostat. However, in engineering terms, the only behaviour that interests us is the non-linear switching. In economic terms, the value of the thermostat depends on whether it fullfills its simple function.


No. We don't use rocks to operate our immersion heaters because rocks are unable to operate the things. Thermostats, OTOH, can.



And that's a value distinction. Does it mean that rocks exhibit no non-linear behaviour? No, it means that we can make no use of that behaviour.


No. The information transmitted by the thermostat has an added value: The relation to some preset level.


And that value is an economic measure - based on an engineering interpretation of what is going on in the thermostat.

The information being transmitted by the rock has no economic value. It has no engineering interpretation. However, in physical terms, it's every bit as significant when the rock exhibits non-linear behaviour.

Non-linear behaviour is everywhere to be seen. Throw an ice cube out the window on a cold day and it will give exactly the same non-linear information as the thermostat.


...
The nonlinear processing can add information to the signal; the thermostat can inform us of the relationship between the temperature and a predetermined value. This information was not present in the input.

(Please don't nitpick this too much because there are some very fuzzy scenarios out there)


I hope that I'm not nit-picking in the sense that I'm concerned with non-essentials. And I'm quite happy to accept modifications as we go along. That's how learning advances.

However, the information about the ambient temperature was present in the input. That was the temperature. If the information wasn't there, it couldn't have been abstracted. The processing involved discarding information, not creating it.


Perhaps it is the term "aware" that confuses you. I think this is really the core of this debate: We are really having a debate about irreducible complexity.

Dualists (and others, if you dislike that label) claim that consciousness is irreducible.

Materialists (here represented e.g. by Pixy) claim that it is fully reducible.

The thermostat is an example supporting the latter view. None of us is claiming that it is aware in any way comparable to the awareness of a sentient being, but our claim is that it has an increased awareness when compared to, say, a rock.

Yet, as you have repeatedly noted, the thermostat possesses but one bit (literally) of information output. Therefore it can be said to form the basic building block of awareness.

OUR claim then (or at least MY claim) is that awareness increases exponentially with complexity. A two bit device has four output states. A four bit device has 16 output stages.

A partly analog billion neuron human brain has .... how many output stages?


Even if we accept that awareness is reducible, we are not required to accept that it is a simple matter of non-linear processing. Nor are we required to accept that it is built up by simple addition.

There are quantities which exist in reality which are not universally present. An object can have zero electrical charge, or magnetic field.

[Nick227]

If I understand him correctly, Mercutio's main point is that introspection has proved an unreliable tool in the past, and that it should not be used.

The problem I have with this view is that all my interactions with the world are done via my sensations. If I read a paper about perception, I have to rely on my own perception to do so. When I read the paper, I find it filled with accounts from researchers who have used their own perceptions to describe what happens when they attach electrodes to someone's brain.

If I am to distrust perception, then I have to distrust all perception.

The problems of introspection are obvious. I don't disagree that they can lead to mistakes. I don't accept, however, that introspection can or should be entirely discarded. (It might be that this is not what Mercutio is claiming, in which case I'm sure he'll correct me).

All I'm saying is that these terms and concepts - consciousness, sentience, experience, etc - only arise when the mind introspects and tries to frame what it has "experienced." Thus, to me, they are essentially tools through which the mind can frame its "experience" and communicate it to others, they have no other validity aside of this. It is not that experience actually exists, rather that it is a concept needed to communicate. This is where I am with this anyway!

Nick

[westprog]

Break given--I ask only because it directly speaks to this issue, and comes up with a very different answer than you do.


And I'm not rejecting it. I think this thread might be around for some time, and I expect to cover everything eventually.

Or it might just fade away unnoticed and we start again from the beginning.

(BTW, there is some nifty research on misattribution of arousal, in which internal states are manipulated--say, with adrenalin--in different social contexts. Turns out that your first paragraph ain't necessarily so; we look to our own behavior and our social context when evaluating an internal arousal state. Heck, our language even shows that we trust our own behavior over our own internal feelings; we take a plateful, can't eat it all, and say "guess I wasn't as hungry as I thought I was." But if sentience simply is what it is, how would it even be possible to not be as hungry as you thought you were--if you thought it, that is hunger, no? On the other hand, if "hungry" describes, behaviorally, that you would eat if the opportunity arose, and if your private state was imperfectly correlated with this real definition of hunger, then not being as hungry as you thought you were makes perfect sense.)

I don't claim infallibility in the interpretation of sensations. Just the fact of their existence.

[westprog]

Okay, problem one: This is completely wrong. Emergent properties abound in computer systems, and most particularly in network systems. Us programmers spend a lot of time trying to avoid them, because they are hard to predict and almost always unwanted, but they are there alright.


I think I said this earlier - an emergent property is usually called a bug.


Hmm. A consciousness of the same order of complexity, I would say.


To monitor its own actions. This sort of stuff is programmed into every major application these days.


Yup.


An unsupported assertion.


Yeah, but simply claiming this to be true doesn't make it true.


It's a triple non-sequitur. His assertions are unsupported, his argument doesn't follow from his assertions, and his conclusion doesn't follow from his argument. You can't do much worse, really.

I hardly think that it can be claimed that Penrose's views on consciousness are "unsupported". He's written two very detailed books where he examines the nature of mathematics from first principles and considers whether it is possible to perform mathematics using pure computation. His arguments may not be the final word on the matter, but I certainly don't think that they can be dismissed out of hand.

[westprog]

Find some people who report that they are dreaming. Monitor their neural activity. Learn to distinguish the neural activity associated with dreaming. Then look for that neural activity in people who do not report that they are dreaming.

In other words, it can be demonstrated the same way as anything else: Learn what it looks like, and look for it.

I would say that even if they demonstrate the exact same external behaviour as someone who reports that they are dreaming, we still don't know if they are.

We know what we mean when we say that we have a dream. A dream is perhaps as close as we come to pure sensation. If someone says that he doesn't experience the dream, we should accept the possibility that he didn't.

Or he forgot.

[westprog]

Wait--you can be as general as "toolbelt", but I get **** for being as general as "practice"?

Not fair!


Hmph!


I'd say that the pattern builder is built in, but that the individual patterns have to be learned.

Whether there are "hard-coded" patterns in there I don't know. There's a general aethetic preference for certain types of curve, for example, but that could be a learned response too.

[leon_heller]

I think I said this earlier - an emergent property is usually called a bug.





I hardly think that it can be claimed that Penrose's views on consciousness are "unsupported". He's written two very detailed books where he examines the nature of mathematics from first principles and considers whether it is possible to perform mathematics using pure computation. His arguments may not be the final word on the matter, but I certainly don't think that they can be dismissed out of hand.

What support have you seen for his ideas?

Feferman has comprehensively demolished his Godelian arguments:

http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/penrose.pdf

Leon

[Belz...]

As I've explained before, it's based on solid evidence. I know my brain produces sentience, and my brain isn't special.

[...]

I'd call it silly, in fact.

What I find silly is how you say we have solid evidence for sentience, when you can't even define what sentience is.

[Belz...]

What we actually do is magical enough for me. I do not need to "have sensations" that are somehow (in an apparently obvious, but never quite definable way) different from thermostats.

<Applaud>

[Belz...]

How do I observe sentience?

If you're going to claim that you're not conscious, don't expect me to take you seriously.

I'm sure he was beign quite serious. How do you "observe sentience" ? Because a lot of people "observe" ghosts, space aliens, fairies, and homeopathy at work, we need something more reliable than "observe" for this vaunted sentience thingy.

[calebprime]

What I find silly is how you say we have solid evidence for sentience, when you can't even define what sentience is.

Belz fails the Turing test. Darat was right.

[Belz...]

The reason we use similar language to describe similar things is because that is how language works. If we think that the word "apple" denotes something, then why should we assume that the word "pain" indicates something entirely different for different people?

It is possible that the experience of pain is entirely different for every different person, but what evolutionary benefit would that confer? Why would we produce such an odd variety of states that have common names?

The difference between "apple" and "pain" is that some people will label "pain" something that other people won't. How can you know ?

I don't know what your first language is, but I bet it has words for pain, joy, nausea, sadness and so on. And those words came from somewhere.

French. And it's irrelevant. The point is I have slightly more difficulty expressing some thoughts in another language. You're using that as some kind of evidence of something else.

[Belz...]

The reason I say "plainly" is because of everything else I've posted before about that.

Let's go back to Marvin, because he's such a wonderful example.

I must've missed that. Who's Marvin ?

But sentience itself is not an illusion.

And we know this because we experience it ? Again, how is that different from experiencing ghosts ?

[cyborg]

In my experience, complex computer programs, being deterministic, do what they are programmed to do. They don't have "emergent properties".

This means that you simply don't understand what an "emergent property" is since there is nothing about the concept that relies on non-determinism.

[Belz...]

Does everything that has behaviour have a mind ? Or is it strictly human behavoiur ? And, if so, do p-zombies count ?

We only know about our own inner experience. We only surmise from comparisions what other humans experience. Animals don't report on their own experience. We have no idea if p-zombies even exist.

That doesn't answer my question. Does everything that has behaviour have a mind ? And if not, how do you draw the line, and where ?

[westprog]

What support have you seen for his ideas?

Feferman has comprehensively demolished his Godelian arguments:

http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/penrose.pdf



It's an interesting, but highly technical paper.


...mathematical thought as it is actually produced is not mechanical; I agree with Penrose that in this respect, understanding is essential, and it is just this aspect of actual mathematical thought that machines cannot share with us.


So, while there is a very technical argument over Penrose's deep mathematical thoughts - which I am certaintly not qualified to umpire - Feferman doesn't seem to disagree with Penrose's main conclusions.

Thus Penrose expresses general agreement with Feferman's criticisms, but doesn't consider they seriously derange his main contentions.

http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-23-penrose.html

What is also clear from reading the paper is that this problem leads us into very deep areas, both philosophically and mathematically, and certainty is a lot less convincing than doubt.

The many arguments that computationalists and other people have presented for wriggling around Gödel's original argument have become known to me only comparatively recently: perhaps we act and perceive according to an unknowable algorithm; perhaps our mathematical understanding is intrinsically unsound; perhaps we could know the algorithms according to which we understand mathematics, but are incapable of knowing the actual roles that these algorithms play. All right, these are logical possibilities. But are they really plausible explanations?

4.6 For those who are wedded to computationalism, explanations of this nature may indeed seem plausible. But why should we be wedded to computationalism? I do not know why so many people seem to be. Yet, some apparently hold to such a view with almost religious fervour. (Indeed, they may often resort to unreasonable rudeness when they feel this position to be threatened!) Perhaps computationalism can indeed explain the facts of human mentality - but perhaps it cannot. It is a matter for dispassionate discussion, and certainly not for abuse!

4.7 I find it curious, also, that even those who argue dispassionately may take for granted that computationalism in some form - at least for the workings of the objective physical universe - has to be correct. Accordingly, any argument which seems to show otherwise must have a "flaw" in it. Even Chalmers, in his carefully reasoned commentary, seeks out "the deepest flaw in the Gödelian arguments". There seems to be the presumption that whatever form of the argument is presented, it just has to be flawed. Very few people seem to take seriously the slightest possibility that the argument might perhaps, at root, be correct! This I certainly find puzzling.

[westprog]

I must've missed that. Who's Marvin ?


I assumed we were discussing Marvin from The Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy, but subsequent posts have cast doubt on that hypothesis.

A pity - he seems like a good talking point for the whole "intelligent robot" theory.

[Mercutio]

Where do you figure basic traits in the personality are stored?

Nick

Ouch. Where does Darat's ran go when he sits down?

The storing of personality traits, like the seeing of images, takes an action and turns it into a thing. To ask where that thing is, is to be fooled by the language into thinking there is a thing there to be found.

[leon_heller]

It's an interesting, but highly technical paper.



So, while there is a very technical argument over Penrose's deep mathematical thoughts - which I am certaintly not qualified to umpire - Feferman doesn't seem to disagree with Penrose's main conclusions.

Thus Penrose expresses general agreement with Feferman's criticisms, but doesn't consider they seriously derange his main contentions.

http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-23-penrose.html

What is also clear from reading the paper is that this problem leads us into very deep areas, both philosophically and mathematically, and certainty is a lot less convincing than doubt.

This is quite damning:

"While I have disavowed competence concerning Part II of SM, I can’t help
registering my impression that the effort there is entirely quixotic. What
Penrose aims to do is substitute one “nothing but” theory for another: in
place of “the conscious mind is nothing but the manifestation of sub-atomic
physics”. Can we really ever expect a completely reductive theory of one sort
or another of human cognition? Surely, no one theory will serve to “explain”
the myriad aspects of this phenomenon. As with any other scientific study of
human beings – inside and out – such an enterprise will continue to need to
bring to bear psychology, psycho-physics, physiology (neuro- and otherwise),
biochemistry, molecular biology, physics (macro- and micro-) and lots of stuff
in between (including computational models of all kinds). In my opinion
Penrose’s “missing science of consciousness” is a mirage."

Leon

[Nick227]

The storing of personality traits, like the seeing of images, takes an action and turns it into a thing. To ask where that thing is, is to be fooled by the language into thinking there is a thing there to be found.

People respond to similar situations differently, we say they have different personalities. I'm just asking where this differing is mediated. Why do you say Ouch?

Nick

[Mercutio]

People respond to similar situations differently, we say they have different personalities. I'm just asking where this differing is mediated. Why do you say Ouch?

Nick

Why should there be a where? People with different learning histories have different behavioral repertoires--to speak of such differences in language that assumes a localization of causation is a bit presumptuous.

And "ouch" because of the mentalistic language of your first phrasing of the question; such language treats "personality" as a causal entity, determining behavior, rather than as a summary label inferred from one's behavior. As such, it is circular language--the personality you infer from behavior is inferred to be the cause of that behavior. You may not have meant it that way, but that would make you the exception rather than the rule.

[leon_heller]

Why should there be a where? People with different learning histories have different behavioral repertoires--to speak of such differences in language that assumes a localization of causation is a bit presumptuous.

And "ouch" because of the mentalistic language of your first phrasing of the question; such language treats "personality" as a causal entity, determining behavior, rather than as a summary label inferred from one's behavior. As such, it is circular language--the personality you infer from behavior is inferred to be the cause of that behavior. You may not have meant it that way, but that would make you the exception rather than the rule.

There is one personality variable - extraversion-introversion - that appears to be mediated by a brain structure - the ascending reticular formation in the brain-stem. Extraverts appear to have lower basal arousal levels and therefore seek stimulation, whilst introverts have a higher arousal level and find additional stimulation aversive.

Leon