The hard problem of consciousness [Archive]

skiba

13th July 2008, 02:47 PM

One of the biggest mysteries in science is consciousness.....Or is it?

The term hard problem of consciousness, coined by David Chalmers[1], refers to the "hard problem" of explaining why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining the ability to discriminate, integrate information, report mental states, focus attention, etc. Easy problems are easy because all that is required for their solution is to specify a mechanism that can perform the function. That is, their proposed solutions, regardless of how complex or poorly understood they may be, can be entirely consistent with the modern materialistic conception of natural phenomenon. Hard problems are distinct from this set because they "persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained".[2]

Various formulations of the "hard problem":

* "Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?"
* "How is it that some organisms are subjects of experience?"
* "Why does awareness of sensory information exist at all?"
* "Why do qualia exist?"
* "Why is there a subjective component to experience?"
* "Why aren't we philosophical zombies?"
* "Phenomenal Natures are categorically different than behavior"

It has been argued that the Hard Problem has had other scholarly inquiries considerably earlier than Chalmers. For instance, Leibniz wrote:

“Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds, that is to say, by means of figures and motions. And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. [3]

I know we have alot of materialists here, so would like their take on this, and ofcourse the non-materialistic POV too.

leon_heller

13th July 2008, 03:16 PM

Dennett's view of consciousness is materialistic . He doesn't even believe that qualia exist, unlike most philosophers.

Leon

westprog

13th July 2008, 04:05 PM

One of the biggest mysteries in science is consciousness.....Or is it?

I know we have alot of materialists here, so would like their take on this, and ofcourse the non-materialistic POV too.

I've found, in several discussions here and other places, that a number of philosophers start off by dismissing the aspects of reality that are fundamental to me as irrelevant or illusory. I wonder if they have the same meaning for them.

skiba

13th July 2008, 04:30 PM

I've found, in several discussions here and other places, that a number of philosophers start off by dismissing the aspects of reality that are fundamental to me as irrelevant or illusory. I wonder if they have the same meaning for them.

"Reality", no matter how we see it, isn't really a relative issue here.
We can't be certain of "reality", we might as well be hooked up to the matrix. What matters is, we are experiencing this, be it illusionary or not. We can't deny the experience itself.

JoeEllison

13th July 2008, 04:38 PM

Simply put: there IS no "hard problem of consciousness." The assumptions that lead people to believe that there's a "hard problem" are false, or at least unnecessary from a practical standpoint. There is the assumption that something called a "mind" exists in a discrete manner, and that this discrete existence is somehow tied to a "mental plane" that lies beyond what we generally describe as "reality."

For instance, imagine a car's engine. It consists of physical moving parts, a fuel source, and an electrical energy source. When the engine is in operation, matter and energy interact to create a dynamic system that we can describe as "running engine." There is no reason to describe that system as having some sort of static existence, or that there is an element to that system that exists beyond the operation of the components. We don't treat "running" as anything more or less than a description of a process, with no real existence outside of the operation of the engine.

From a materialist's point of view, a human nervous system is a kind of "engine", and the interactions of matter and energy that comprise that dynamic system can be described as "consciousness." "Consciousness" is a process, not something with a distinct existence beyond the physical.

paximperium

13th July 2008, 04:53 PM

I don't truly understand these "hard" Problems at all because all of them seem to have some underlying bias in how it is phrased to begin with.

They are essentially a "God of the Gaps argument" for consciousness. Think up biased and flawed arguments that are unfalsifiable and have no answer as of yet as "evidence" for your belief in consciousness.

RandFan

13th July 2008, 06:08 PM

There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that there is such a thing as HPC (Hard Problem of Consciousness. The mistake is drawing conclusions from the fact that there is a problem. That's argument from ignorance or argument from personal incredulity and it's a fallacy.

As a former dualist I would like to take a stab.

* "Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?" Why not? The question is a non-starter. The word "should" isn't likely to lead to any understanding regardless of whether or not reality is monist, materialistic or whether or not there is some god or a homunculus (soul/mind/whatever).

* "How is it that some organisms are subjects of experience?"
* "Why does awareness of sensory information exist at all?"
We don't completely understand yet but we are making amazing progress in the fields of cognitive and neuroscience. I dare say that many if not most of us (myself included) are not even able to comprehend all that is known and understood in these disciplines.

* "Why do qualia exist?"
* "Why is there a subjective component to experience?"
* "Why aren't we philosophical zombies?"
* "Phenomenal Natures are categorically different than behavior" Why does gravity exist? Unlike some of the other posters in this forum I find these to be very interesting questions but like the other posters who may or may not respond I must agree that our inability to answer them tells us precisely nothing.

Questions are not answers. They never have been. Questions are important because they can lead to insights. So long as we don't draw conclusions from the fact that the questions seem to us contradictory or somehow unanswerable or counterintuitive. To do so is to be ignorant and superstitious like those in the past who imagined that it was spirits who made the stairs creak at night when there was no one walking on them. It turns out it was just the contraction of wood as the wood cooled.

Delvo

13th July 2008, 07:17 PM

JoeEllison

13th July 2008, 07:22 PM

That isn't the "problem". It's just some people's solution to it. The problem is a question, and you've just described an answer to it, not the question itself.

The "question" is based on invalid assumptions, and is likely meaningless.

Delvo

13th July 2008, 07:45 PM

No, only the answer you're talking about to it is. But the answer is not the question.

rocketdodger

13th July 2008, 07:48 PM

That isn't the "problem". It's just some people's solution to it. The problem is a question, and you've just described an answer to it, not the question itself.

You can also say that sitting in one place is "some people's solution" to the problem of finding your way back after you become lost in the woods.

And in this case, that is a very good analogy. For materialists like Joe and I, there just isn't a problem to begin with. If you insist that our solution to the problem is to avoid creating it in the first place ... then I suppose you are right, but...

JoeEllison

13th July 2008, 07:58 PM

No, only the answer you're talking about to it is. But the answer is not the question.

Nope. I say that the question is stupid. It is like asking "how many invisible gremlins does it take to make a car's engine run?" The "answer" is that the question doesn't make any sense, because the assumptions that the question is based on are wrong.

Roboramma

13th July 2008, 08:20 PM

Nope. I say that the question is stupid. It is like asking "how many invisible gremlins does it take to make a car's engine run?" The "answer" is that the question doesn't make any sense, because the assumptions that the question is based on are wrong.

Why is the question stupid? I don't see why we would conclude that conciousness should exist if we didn't already know that it does.

Take computers, for instance. No one that I know really thinks that as they are now they are conscious beings. At what point could data processing move on to experiencing?
We are just matter, reacting to physical laws. Why should this lead to the experience of the taste of a peach? I can see that it would lead to beings that act as though they experience a peach, but actually experiencing it? How? Why?

Of course, you could say that experience itself is an illusion. I think that's a possible solution to the problem. I think there may be others that we haven't thought of.

I certainly don't think that dualism is a solution, because it still doesn't answer the question, it just posits a magical entity (the soul) that is "by it's nature" conscious. How and why is the soul conscious? Basically: "It just is". In other words, it offers no solution at all.

But I don't see that the question is stupid. It's just one we don't have an answer to yet, and shouldn't pretend that we do.

Edit: Nice post Randfan. :)

Jeff Corey

13th July 2008, 08:35 PM

Roboramma

13th July 2008, 08:49 PM

As posed in the OP, the question is, "Why do we have qualititative phenomenal experiences?"
What are they and why are they supposed to be harder to explain than the other processes, such as discrimination, mentioned in the quote?

Because discrimination is something that can easily be explained as a product of logical processes similar to those that take place inside of computers. It maybe differ from them in degree, but not in kind - it's a form of information processing.

Consciousness, on the other hand, doesn't seem[i] to have anything to do with those things.

I say [i]seem on purpose, of course. It very well may be related to them in a way that will become obvious to us, it may turn out to be completely illusory, though I don't quite understand how. But it's clearly not a phenomenon whose relationship to the stuff which causes it is in any way clear.

Delvo

13th July 2008, 08:51 PM

Nope. I say that the question is stupid. It is like asking "how many invisible gremlins does it take to make a car's engine run?"For an engine, the actual equivalent question to the problem of consciousness is not "how many gremlins" but "how does it work". And the difference is that every single result the engine produces is explainable so there's nothing left for the gremlins to explain. Gremlins would be one (wrong) answer to the question, but aren't built in to it. Likewise, if I ponder how I can sit here and think of myself as myself and have what I call thoughts and sensations, the question I'm pondering isn't "where does my soul come from" but "how does this perception happen and what's perceiving it". The spirit is inserted not in the question but in one potential answer to it.

And unlike the engine, the answer is not explainable from what we know about brains so far. Inputs/causes and outputs/effects/results must be of the same basic type: motion in and motion out for the engine example (just in different directions and speeds), atoms in one molecular arrangement in and atoms in another molecular arrangement out for a neurochemical example, and ultimately, matter & movement & forces in and matter & movement & forces out for all rawly physical examples you could name. But cogito ergo sum is not a chemical or kinetic thing. It's a perception, and that makes it a result with no known cause, unless and until someone does one of two things: insert a spirit to do the perceiving, or explain how a pile of atoms can perceive itself based on atomic interactions alone (even while some of the atoms are cosntantly entering and exiting the pile). You've called it a "process" instead of a thing, but that's just a name, not an explanation. Molecules don't explain how "I" can sit here and feel what I feel, particularly if "I" am not even a real thing at all, because all that chemistry tells is where the particles go.

The "answer" is that the question doesn't make any sense, because the assumptions that the question is based on are wrong.The question doesn't have assumptions. It's what you get when you don't make assumptions and you notice a hole in the available facts (again, not "where does my spirit come from" but "what is perception and how does it happen", because the latter doesn't have the spirit built in to it yet). Filling the hole with assumptions (for those who do it at all) comes in the next step after that. You're squishing two separate steps in this line of reasoning into one.

RandFan

13th July 2008, 10:45 PM

For materialists like Joe and I, there just isn't a problem to begin with. That you don't think there is a problem doesn't mean that there is not one. Denial isn't an answer either. Thing is, if there wasn't a problem then neuro- and cognitive scientists wouldn't be trying solve it. Now, let's be clear, if you are saying that by "problem" you mean an intractable one as some would suggest then you are right. But HPC is a valid scientific question, actually it's a whole bunch of questions that include the binding problem and others.

Many people say that the hard problem does not exist, or that it is a pseudo-problem. I think they fall into two categories - those few who have seen the depths of the problem and come up with some insight into it, and those who just skate over the abyss. The latter group might heed Nagel's advice when he says "Certain forms of perplexity—for example, about freedom, knowledge, and the meaning of life—seem to me to embody more insight than any of the supposed solutions to those problems." (Nagel 1986 p 4).

This perplexity can easily be found. For example, pick up any object - a cup of tea or a pen will do - and just look, smell, and feel its texture. Do you believe there is a real objective cup there, with actual tea in it, made of atoms and molecules? Aren't you also having a private subjective experience of the cup and the taste of the tea - the 'what it is like' for you? What is this experience made of? It seems to be something completely different from actual tea and molecules. When the objective world out there and our subjective experiences of it seem to be such different kinds of thing, how can one be caused by, or arise from, or even depend upon, the other? --Blackmore (http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/jcs02.htm)

Being a materialist, like Blackmore, does not in any way solve HPC or simply make it go away. One can be a materialist and realize that we don't understand how subjective experience arises from an objective material world and declaring that there is no problem tells us precisely nothing. It solves nothing. It is only rhetorical and not in any way scientific. Declaring that there is no problem is akin to saying "god did it". It is saying that subjective experience just happens like god just created the world.

If you know how objective reality leads to subjective experience then let the world in on it and pick up your Nobel prize. I assure you it is waiting for anyone who can adequately explain it and I suspect that the folks who are currently reverse engineering the brain may very well be the ones to take it home.

RandFan

13th July 2008, 11:31 PM

...it may turn out to be completely illusory, though I don't quite understand how. I suspect that it is but then we run into a problem, what is having this illusion? I don't believe in a homunculus but saying something is illusory becomes recursive and brings up a whole host of other questions. Illusory as opposed to what? Reality? Why don't we see reality? I think using the concept of illusion simply has become a short hand to explain that which we really don't understand. It's god did it all over again and turtles all the way down.

skiba

14th July 2008, 12:07 AM

Take computers, for instance. No one that I know really thinks that as they are now they are conscious beings. At what point could data processing move on to experiencing?
We are just matter, reacting to physical laws. Why should this lead to the experience of the taste of a peach? I can see that it would lead to beings that act as though they experience a peach, but actually experiencing it? How? Why?

Of course, you could say that experience itself is an illusion. I think that's a possible solution to the problem. I think there may be others that we haven't thought of.

My thoughts exactly.

Computation and transfering information based on the physical properties of the media, explains nothing about consciousness.

Of course, you could say that experience itself is an illusion. I think that's a possible solution to the problem. I think there may be others that we haven't thought of.

I really don't see how you could explain that experience is not real?
This is one of the arguments Dan Dennett suggests. "consciousness is just a trick of the mind". Well, again something is experiening that trick. This is a form of circular logic. It's a way to scrub the HPC under the rug.

@RandFan

Totally agree

autumn1971

14th July 2008, 12:10 AM

@ RandFan,
I agree that "HPC is a valid scientific question", I simply think that it is a rather empty philosophical question (or it that last bit a tautology?).
I look at the existance of subjective experience as simply a step in the way piles of atoms behave. The simplest organisms have at least a rudiment of self/other, if only in the most easily explained chemical terms: most stuff is kept "out", some is allowed to become "part of self" through simple chemical reactions or osmosis. More complex organisms percieve more portions of reality through easily explained processes: acting on physical or chemical gradients in order to better their existance. These examples are not what anyone would call "subjective", as they are merely response to stimuli, but it is only a small step to the behavior of the simpler animals, which are also not regarded as self-aware. Fish, for example, have never, as far as I can tell, been described as conscious of their existance, but they display behavior which is much more complex than billions of fishermen have been able to simplify to stimulus/response.
At some point a pile of atoms has demonstrated that it has actions difficult to predict from the last pile of atoms we examined.
Humans are more aware of their reality than paramecia, and in easily demonstrated ways. Humans are also more aware than fish, but in ways different from the ways that both humans and fish are different from paramecia. Dogs are different from fish too, but describing how seems to put them pretty near humans. The great apes, as well as porpoises, whales, elephants, and others, have awareness of reality that suggests that they have subjective experiences of it.
I apologize for rambling, my point is that there is no reason for the "Great Big Philosophical Question" when there are a bunch of good little scientific questions.

soylent

14th July 2008, 12:24 AM

RandFan

14th July 2008, 12:41 AM

Shouldn't we begin by establishing that consciousness or qualia exist in the first place... Sure, what would you call being self aware? The ability to think abstractly? To have theory of mind? If we decide that consciousness doesn't exist then we need to come up with a different word or words and/or act as if these things don't exist, what do you think?

...as anything but a convenient abstraction and quaint notion we'd like to believe in? There are a few problems with this sentence given the context. "We'd like to believe in"? If there is no such thing as conciseness how can we decide and how can we believe? I think you need to rethink this one a bit. These types of criticism seem to me to only become recursive. You can replace one concept with another but in the end the problem is the same.

Or at least, can we define the words in an objective manner? Again, I think you need to rethink your complaint. Whatever it is that is happening it is happening. I don't think the solution lies in semantics.

RandFan

14th July 2008, 12:49 AM

@ RandFan,
I agree that "HPC is a valid scientific question", I simply think that it is a rather empty philosophical question (or it that last bit a tautology?).
I look at the existance of subjective experience as simply a step in the way piles of atoms behave. The simplest organisms have at least a rudiment of self/other, if only in the most easily explained chemical terms: most stuff is kept "out", some is allowed to become "part of self" through simple chemical reactions or osmosis. More complex organisms percieve more portions of reality through easily explained processes: acting on physical or chemical gradients in order to better their existance. These examples are not what anyone would call "subjective", as they are merely response to stimuli, but it is only a small step to the behavior of the simpler animals, which are also not regarded as self-aware. Fish, for example, have never, as far as I can tell, been described as conscious of their existance, but they display behavior which is much more complex than billions of fishermen have been able to simplify to stimulus/response.
At some point a pile of atoms has demonstrated that it has actions difficult to predict from the last pile of atoms we examined.

Humans are more aware of their reality than paramecia, and in easily demonstrated ways. Humans are also more aware than fish, but in ways different from the ways that both humans and fish are different from paramecia. Dogs are different from fish too, but describing how seems to put them pretty near humans. The great apes, as well as porpoises, whales, elephants, and others, have awareness of reality that suggests that they have subjective experiences of it.

I apologize for rambling, my point is that there is no reason for the "Great Big Philosophical Question" when there are a bunch of good little scientific questions.I agree with you with one exception, I wouldn't say that it is a bunch of little scientific questions. It might be but I kinda doubt it but that really is neither here nor there. When we can give a complete accounting then we will be able to say with confidence what it is. Until then we are simply speculating. I think we are on the cusp of a major paradigm but I have to be honest, this might simply be hopeful thinking and arrogance. We'll see.

Roboramma

14th July 2008, 01:08 AM

If the materialist view is correct, then how do you explain cuitsimushu?
Just to point out - as I said earlier, I think problem is as big for dualists as anyone.

westprog

14th July 2008, 03:11 AM

I view the problem as artificial. Consciousness and qualia aren't even well defined. Shouldn't we begin by establishing that something like them actually exists in the first place as something other than a quaint notion we'd like to believe?

This is where I find the argument extremely strange. If I were to list the things that I am actually 100% certain exist, I would start with my own consciousness and sensations - and then stop. I don't know at any given moment if there is a material world of any kind, or even if I exist in time as a single entity. All I actually know for certain is the momentary sensation.

To say that this is an illusion makes no sense to me. If it's an illusion, what (as Randfan has observed) is having the illusion? What makes it illusory? How can it be an illusion if I'm directly experiencing it? To think that the sensation itself is illusory, but the world which it seems to describe is necessarily real seems a backwards view. If the sensations are illusions, how can we then assume that they reflect a genuine reality?

This is where I wonder if others necessarily experience qualia at all. The only evidence we have that anyone else experiences such sensations is that they claim to do so. The qualia don't seem to be necessary in order that human beings function.

soylent

14th July 2008, 03:14 AM

Sure, what would you call being self aware?

Self-awareness. I can't see any insurmountable obstacle that would prevent you from building an automaton that is capable of reasoning about itself or its existance. I don't think this is a "hard problem".

The ability to think abstractly?

Abstract thought. The difficulty is not in building machines that work with such problems, indeed text, music, images, mathematical equations, musical notes, colours, maps, volumes, surfaces, it can all be represented as binary data in current day CPUs if you wish. What current computers and programs lack is the abillity to develop and test these abstract models of the world around them or purely abstract notions in general; but then, that's difficult for humans too. I don't see why this must be a "hard problem" either.

To have theory of mind?

Theory of mind. I don't see why a computational machine could not have a simplified model of itself that helps it survive the very complex world around it without understanding much of its workings or why it cannot extend this model to other actors similar to in construction to itself to better understand their behaviour and better achieve the desired ends in its model of the world. This does not appear to be a "hard problem" either.

If we decide that consciousness doesn't exist then we need to come up with a different word or words and/or act as if these things don't exist, what do you think?

I think that there are many interesting problems here and whenever you solve one that which is called consciousness retreats until there is nowhere left to go. I view consciousness as a dualist enspired notion to begin with.

There are a few problems with this sentence given the context. "We'd like to believe in"? If there is no such thing as conciseness how can we decide and how can we believe?

Postulate that there is a computational machine with a theory of mind, a convenient abstraction that evolved for its survival; very useful for regulating its own behaviour and predicting the behaviour of other such machines. Postulate that this abstraction contains notions which are useful for survival but not true. Postulate that this machine surrounds itself with similar machines and that a means of communications evolved to contain the abstract notions in this model, either because it didn't know the model it had of itself was wrong or because these abstract notions are useful short hand for describing the behaviour of others.

Postulate that this machine is capable of formulating and testing abstractions about the world around it, and uses the notion of belief from its theory of mind to describe to other such machines what it is doing when it provisionally accepts something to be true.

I think that consciousness, like so many other preconcieved notions will evaporate away when we finally manage to examine it closely enough.

Robin

14th July 2008, 03:40 AM

One of the biggest mysteries in science is consciousness.....Or is it?

I know we have a lot of materialists here, so would like their take on this, and of course the non-materialistic POV too.

As I said before, not a problem as such, just a set of loosely related and vague questions. The answers to some are, admittedly, "we don't know", but there are so, so many don't knows in our universe.

Why does this particular "don't know" give rise to such metaphysical soul searching?

OK, here is my take:
* "Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?"
Don't know, but is there any good reason why it should not?
* "How is it that some organisms are subjects of experience?"
Because it has been a useful survival feature.
* "Why does awareness of sensory information exist at all?"
Why does anything exist at all? Why does energy exist? Why does matter exist? What is energy? What is matter?

Why do scientists still have jobs?
* "Why do qualia exist?"
See above. In fact we don't quite know what it means to say that qualia exist.

Imagine the color red existing independently of an intelligent observer. Would it still be red? No, it would be meaningless to say it would still be red.

So clearly qualia, whatever they are, are the end product of a complex system.
* "Why is there a subjective component to experience?"
Because the usefulness of experience to any organism has primarily been to orient itself within it's environment. So clearly experience is necessarily subjective.
* "Why aren't we philosophical zombies?"
Why on earth should we be philosophical zombies?
* "Phenomenal Natures are categorically different than behavior"
Probably. So what?

Robin

14th July 2008, 03:46 AM

This is where I wonder if others necessarily experience qualia at all. The only evidence we have that anyone else experiences such sensations is that they claim to do so.
Not true. We observe people behaving in the way that we do in response to conscious experience.

There are only two possiblities.

1. They contain some advanced adaptive mimicry mechanism
2. They experience sensations in the way we do.

We observe that their brains have the same machinery as ours.

So unless it were somehow possible that the same machinery could perform two very different functions then the overwhelmingly reasonable conclusion is that the experience sensations the way we do.
The qualia don't seem to be necessary in order that human beings function.
Can you explain why you think that?

soylent

14th July 2008, 04:24 AM

This is where I find the argument extremely strange. If I were to list the things that I am actually 100% certain exist, I would start with my own consciousness and sensations - and then stop. I don't know at any given moment if there is a material world of any kind, or even if I exist in time as a single entity. All I actually know for certain is the momentary sensation.

Please begin by defining consciousness instead of telling me that you have it, whatever it is. As it is know I have no idea what you really mean in the paragraph below.

This is where I wonder if others necessarily experience qualia at all. The only evidence we have that anyone else experiences such sensations is that they claim to do so. The qualia don't seem to be necessary in order that human beings function.

What specifically are qualia and why do sensations have to be more than just a piece of internal labeling attached to sensory information as it is processed and analysed?

MRC_Hans

14th July 2008, 04:39 AM

skiba

14th July 2008, 04:39 AM

Self-awareness. I can't see any insurmountable obstacle that would prevent you from building an automaton that is capable of reasoning about itself or its existance. I don't think this is a "hard problem".

I dont see a problem with a machine trying to reason either, no hard problem there. Automated computation, math formulas, information processes, no problem at all. When we add an experiencer we have a problem.

In other words if you were this highly complex electro-chemical computer
in the classical sense you wouldn't be experiencing anything, there wouldn't be anything more than computation.

"Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?"

Don't know, but is there any good reason why it should not?

Yes.

I like to think of the problem in terms of AI. If you were to build an AI that truly had experiences and not merely programmed to "act" as it were having experiences, how would you build such a thing? Do you believe that this would be achieved by adding more compexity? More transistor, more memory, more data and more sophistacated algorithms . What you get is
more information processes at a faster rate. Does faster computation equal experience/consciousness?

The only thing that comes close to experience in a computer is a transistor reacting to a signal. This is not even an experience but merely a physical reaction based on it properties. No matter how many trillions of transistors the AI has, it's "experience" is limited to what a single transistor can do, and that is to react to an electrical impulse, to forward to the next transistor or stop it there etc. If an AI's sense perception(forexample seeing a flower) would be a few million transistors flipping on/off what would experience these transistors/signals? another set of transistors? and where does the information go from there?

Sorry bout the rambling, but my point is, there is no conceived way of how a transistors or neurons could achieve more than computation.

The problem is: experience is not a function in the classical sense.

skiba

14th July 2008, 05:00 AM

Please begin by defining consciousness instead of telling me that you have it, whatever it is. As it is know I have no idea what you really mean in the paragraph below.

In short
consciousness = being able to experience. Note that experience is different from computational processes and analysis, this can be done without the ability to experience.

Nick227

14th July 2008, 05:21 AM

westprog

14th July 2008, 05:25 AM

Damn. I have occasionally joined threads like this to see if anybody could explain to me what qualia are, in the sense of being anything in particular. So far, even hard-core dualists have failed. That may, of course, be because I'm unusually dense.

Unfortunately, reading this thread so far, I don't think an explanation is forthcoming.

To me the hard problem of consciousness is what the problem is.

To me, the only thing I don't need explained to me is what my own sensations feel like, and what the experience of consciousness is like. But I have no way of knowing if my sense of consciousness is in any way related to anyone else's.

MRC_Hans

14th July 2008, 05:52 AM

Ivor the Engineer

14th July 2008, 05:54 AM

leon_heller

14th July 2008, 06:05 AM

In another thread Skiba has admitted to having a Psyleron REG-1. He claims that the output responds to his "intentions". If a conscious computer could be built, I wonder if he believes that it would be able to "influence" the REG-1 in the same way?

Leon

Nick227

14th July 2008, 06:19 AM

Add variables to its internal state with labels such as confidence_not_fear and happiness_not_sadness, which are adjusted based on external stimuli and estimation and prediction algorithms. The values of these variables could then be used to affect the rest of the system, which in turn affect the values of these variables.

The trick (as with meat-based life) is keeping everything stable.

How do you create the actual conscious bodily sensation of feelings?

Nick

leon_heller

14th July 2008, 06:29 AM

How do you create the actual conscious bodily sensation of feelings?

Nick

Do you mean emotions?

Leon

Ivor the Engineer

14th July 2008, 06:30 AM

How do you create the actual conscious bodily sensation of feelings?

Nick

If the emotional variables are used to affect the rest of the system, sensors which provide feedback about the current state of the system would pick up the bodily sensations of feelings.

E.g., the confidence_not_fear variable affects the poop variable, which is sent to the poop sub-system. The state of the poop hardware is picked up by a sensor local to the hardware and is fed back to the 'brain' to modulate other variables and systems, such as the anal sphincter sub-system.

JoeEllison

14th July 2008, 07:04 AM

Why is the question stupid? I don't see why we would conclude that conciousness should exist if we didn't already know that it does.

Take computers, for instance. No one that I know really thinks that as they are now they are conscious beings. At what point could data processing move on to experiencing?
We are just matter, reacting to physical laws. Why should this lead to the experience of the taste of a peach? I can see that it would lead to beings that act as though they experience a peach, but actually experiencing it? How? Why?

Of course, you could say that experience itself is an illusion. I think that's a possible solution to the problem. I think there may be others that we haven't thought of.

I certainly don't think that dualism is a solution, because it still doesn't answer the question, it just posits a magical entity (the soul) that is "by it's nature" conscious. How and why is the soul conscious? Basically: "It just is". In other words, it offers no solution at all.

But I don't see that the question is stupid. It's just one we don't have an answer to yet, and shouldn't pretend that we do.

Edit: Nice post Randfan. :)You're "answer" shows how the question is stupid:

We are just matter, reacting to physical laws. Why should this lead to the experience of the taste of a peach? I can see that it would lead to beings that act as though they experience a peach, but actually experiencing it? How? Why?What sort of assumption leads you to believe that there's a problem with experience, but no problem with acting like you experience? Why would there be a difference or separation between those two things, and why would there be a "problem" with it?

Why "experience" is a problem for anyone at all is why I find the "problem" invalid... and circular in a way. It seems to me that the "problem" was created not because there IS a problem, but because people have all sorts of "solutions" that they'd like to pretend are valid. It seems not completely unlike the way creationists see "problems" with evolution that don't actually exist, because they start with the assumption of "God" as a solution.

skiba

14th July 2008, 07:22 AM

I dont see a problem with a machine trying to reason either, no hard problem there. Automated computation, math formulas, information processes, no problem at all. When we add an experiencer we have a problem.

Why? How do you conclude that?

Simply because we have no explanation for the "mechanism of consciousness", if there even exists such a thing.

In other words if you were this highly complex electro-chemical computer
in the classical sense you wouldn't be experiencing anything, there wouldn't be anything more than computation.

How do you conclude that?

see above.

Do you believe that this would be achieved by adding more compexity? More transistor, more memory, more data and more sophistacated algorithms . What you get is
more information processes at a faster rate. Does faster computation equal experience/consciousness?

Is there any way we can know, currently?

No, not really, but giving it any validity without proof is another thing.

Sorry bout the rambling, but my point is, there is no conceived way of how a transistors or neurons could achieve more than computation.

The problem is: experience is not a function in the classical sense.

How do you conclude this?

See my first response.

What you are really saying is that we have not currently build a computer that appears to be conscious. That is probably true, but how do you reach from there to the conclusion that we cannot?

I wont deny the possibility that one day we could have these machines. I believe the technology would something very different to what we have today. Something fundementally different.

leon_heller

14th July 2008, 07:36 AM

Damn. I have occasionally joined threads like this to see if anybody could explain to me what qualia are, in the sense of being anything in particular. So far, even hard-core dualists have failed. That may, of course, be because I'm unusually dense.

Unfortunately, reading this thread so far, I don't think an explanation is forthcoming.

To me the hard problem of consciousness is what the problem is.

Hans

A typical quale is the redness of an apple. Most philosophers have problems conceptualising physical systems that can have qualia. A few, like Dennett, don't believe that they exist.

Leon

Ivor the Engineer

14th July 2008, 07:38 AM

<snip>

I wont deny the possibility that one day we could have these machines. I believe the technology would something very different to what we have today. Something fundementally different.

I agree. Given that a single neuron can have 10,000 synapses, software and hardware engineers are going to have to learn a lot more about massive parallel processing before 'conscious' machines become a reality. It may even require abandoning the current paradigm of object orientation, particularly data encapsulation / hiding. Come on global variables!

MRC_Hans

14th July 2008, 07:44 AM

Simply because we have no explanation for the "mechanism of consciousness", if there even exists such a thing.
It goes deeper than that: You lack an explanation of why there needs to exist such a mechanism, as a discrete thing. Consciousness may just be an emergent property of our already known mechanisms, provided sufficient complexity.

No, not really, but giving it any validity without proof is another thing.

But you do give your "machanism for consciousness" and "qualia" validiy without any proof of their existence as any kind of separate entities.

I wont deny the possibility that one day we could have these machines. I believe the technology would something very different to what we have today. Something fundementally different.I don't think the technology must necessarily be different, but the architecture must; present computers are specifically designed to be deterministic. As long as you have an intrinsically deterministic architecture, there is no particular reason to expect that it well become more conscious with increased complexity.

Hans

JoeEllison

14th July 2008, 08:23 AM

A typical quale is the redness of an apple. Most philosophers have problems conceptualising physical systems that can have qualia. A few, like Dennett, don't believe that they exist.

Leon

I could go with the "qualia don't exist"... it seems to be a concept created specifically to bolster the existence of a "hard problem."

RandFan

14th July 2008, 08:38 AM

Self-awareness. I can't see any insurmountable obstacle that would prevent you from building an automaton that is capable of reasoning about itself or its existance. I don't think this is a "hard problem".

Abstract thought. The difficulty is not in building machines that work with such problems, indeed text, music, images, mathematical equations, musical notes, colours, maps, volumes, surfaces, it can all be represented as binary data in current day CPUs if you wish. What current computers and programs lack is the abillity to develop and test these abstract models of the world around them or purely abstract notions in general; but then, that's difficult for humans too. I don't see why this must be a "hard problem" either.

Theory of mind. I don't see why a computational machine could not have a simplified model of itself that helps it survive the very complex world around it without understanding much of its workings or why it cannot extend this model to other actors similar to in construction to itself to better understand their behaviour and better achieve the desired ends in its model of the world. This does not appear to be a "hard problem" either.

I think that there are many interesting problems here and whenever you solve one that which is called consciousness retreats until there is nowhere left to go. I view consciousness as a dualist enspired notion to begin with.

Postulate that there is a computational machine with a theory of mind, a convenient abstraction that evolved for its survival; very useful for regulating its own behaviour and predicting the behaviour of other such machines. Postulate that this abstraction contains notions which are useful for survival but not true. Postulate that this machine surrounds itself with similar machines and that a means of communications evolved to contain the abstract notions in this model, either because it didn't know the model it had of itself was wrong or because these abstract notions are useful short hand for describing the behaviour of others.

Postulate that this machine is capable of formulating and testing abstractions about the world around it, and uses the notion of belief from its theory of mind to describe to other such machines what it is doing when it provisionally accepts something to be true.

I think that consciousness, like so many other preconcieved notions will evaporate away when we finally manage to examine it closely enough.I don't understand your responses in light of the conversation. I don't claim that there is an insurmountable problem. I've made that quite clear. If we postulate your machine it would be conscious. So, I'm not at al sure what your point is. Consciousness may very well "evaporate" away but we will still have the capacity to wonder why we are here. It might be smoke and mirrors but I still ponder the universe. I still think abstractly.

You are not solving anything or telling us anything. But thanks anyway.

RandFan

14th July 2008, 08:42 AM

How are these guys modeling feelings? It seems to me, and I willingly confess that I'm not much up on these things, that the issue of emotions will be significant in understanding the aspect of "richness" attributed to inner life. How do you make a machine feel?

NickExcellent question. If we assume that feelings are the end result of our brain then the how is not so important.

The Germans didn't understand how microwaves worked when they reverse engineered English radar from a downed plane but they made it work and then they understood it.

It's hoped that by doing with our brains what the Germans did with radar that we will gain insights. I think we will.

If you have a hard time imagining how that will happen (and to be frank I do) then you are like the rest of us, however, if you draw any conclusions from that inability then you are simply engaging in the age old fallacy of arguing from incredulity. Just because we can't imagine how it happens doesn't mean that it doesn't.

RandFan

14th July 2008, 08:48 AM

I could go with the "qualia don't exist"... it seems to be a concept created specifically to bolster the existence of a "hard problem." Yes you could but then you could also deny that pain exists. You could also deny that you feel pain and we are all just making it up to bolster a "hard problem". I'm curious, do you feel pain?

Jimbo07

14th July 2008, 09:05 AM

Yes you could but then you could also deny that pain exists. You could also deny that you feel pain and we are all just making it up to bolster a "hard problem". I'm curious, do you feel pain?

Dogs feel pain. Are dogs conscious? Does their reaction to painful stimuli have a spurious relationship to ours?

If they have a sensation, that leads to the same outward appearance, but is completely different from ours, it calls into question the entire power of observation. To be clear, it might be something else, but then we'd have a second explanatory problem. Why is there a difference, and what mechanism accounts for the difference? It compounds the HPC, because now you need two explanations to explain organisms which share so many physical similarities. HPC seems almost like a wedge issue for the existence of the soul...

Regardless, once we have decided against the power of observation of the physical we are on shaky ground. We can't assume that the floor will be solid when we wake up in the morning. :boggled:

Ivor the Engineer

14th July 2008, 09:10 AM

<snip>

I'm curious, do you feel pain?

My brain interprets certain stimuli as noxious, which often results in an emotional response. Sometimes more primitive parts of my nervous system cause my body to react to a noxious stimulus before my brain is aware of it.

Ivor the Engineer

14th July 2008, 09:17 AM

Dogs feel pain. Are dogs conscious? Does their reaction to painful stimuli have a spurious relationship to ours?

If they have a sensation, that leads to the same outward appearance, but is completely different from ours, it calls into question the entire power of observation. To be clear, it might be something else, but then we'd have a second explanatory problem. Why is there a difference, and what mechanism accounts for the difference? It compounds the HPC, because now you need two explanations to explain organisms which share so many physical similarities. HPC seems almost like a wedge issue for the existence of the soul...

Regardless, once we have decided against the power of observation of the physical we are on shaky ground. We can't assume that the floor will be solid when we wake up in the morning. :boggled:

Exactly. If it consistently behaves in a way which indicates it is conscious, it is conscious.

So the real problem is to define what we consider conscious behaviour, rather than what consciousness is.

RandFan

14th July 2008, 09:23 AM

Dogs feel pain. Are dogs conscious? Does their reaction to painful stimuli have a spurious relationship to ours?

If they have a sensation, that leads to the same outward appearance, but is completely different from ours, it calls into question the entire power of observation. To be clear, it might be something else, but then we'd have a second explanatory problem. Why is there a difference, and what mechanism accounts for the difference? It compounds the HPC, because now you need two explanations to explain organisms which share so many physical similarities. HPC seems almost like a wedge issue for the existence of the soul...To be certain I'm not arguing that consciousness is necessary to experience an emotion, sensation or feeling. I don't know what dog's "feel" or experience. To be frank I don't know what you "feel" or experience. I can only draw conclusions of what you likely "feel" based on observation and inference about the real world.

"Wedge issue"? This would seem to be special pleading or something akin to it? Whether it is a wedge issue or not is not relevant to the point.

Regardless, once we have decided against the power of observation of the physical we are on shaky ground. We can't assume that the floor will be solid when we wake up in the morning. :boggled: I think you have me confused with someone else.

RandFan

14th July 2008, 09:29 AM

My brain interprets certain stimuli as noxious, which often results in an emotional response. Sometimes more primitive parts of my nervous system cause my body to react to a noxious stimulus before my brain is aware of it. "Emotional"? What is emotion? I'm not trying to be obtuse. I think those who want to avoid dealing with HPC miss the elephant in the room. You can use whatever word you want but it won't really explain what pain is anymore than the word pain. Yes, we understand the evolutionary why of pain but what is pain? What is emotion?

Jimbo07

14th July 2008, 09:36 AM

To be frank I don't know what you "feel" or experience. I can only draw conclusions of what you likely "feel" based on observation and inference about the real world.

This goes to my point. You seem to be arguing a phenomena/noumena sort of thing, no? That is, your collection of observations about the thing is not the same as the thing itself? I would argue that this is self-evident, but it seems to spiral off into a debate about the nature of reality.

"Wedge issue"? This would seem to be special pleading or something akin to it? Whether it is a wedge issue or not is not relevant to the point.

This was not speaking directly to a point. It was a last line that was tangential on purpose. It was me musing on the HPC in general...

I think you have me confused with someone else.

Again, specific points mixed with general.

RandFan

14th July 2008, 09:37 AM

Exactly. If it consistently behaves in a way which indicates it is conscious, it is conscious.

So the real problem is to define what we consider conscious behaviour, rather than what consciousness is. Yes, and prior to understanding aerodynamics scientists could have simply defined the behaviors of flight. Why bother trying to understand it when it is beyond our understanding?

I realize that HPC is used by many of those who believe in the metaphysical but simply ignoring cognitive phenomenon isn't really productive.

skiba

14th July 2008, 09:45 AM

It goes deeper than that: You lack an explanation of why there needs to exist such a mechanism, as a discrete thing. Consciousness may just be an emergent property of our already known mechanisms, provided sufficient complexity.

Exactly it goes deeper than that. The agrument that sufficient compelixy gives rise to consciousness is a rather shallow and abstract one. As someone already stated here, it's no better than saying "god did it".
Now I'm not claiming to know, but i'm willing to argue that todays scientific explanations give nothing to the HPC.

But you do give your "machanism for consciousness" and "qualia" validiy without any proof of their existence as any kind of separate entities.

I don't think the technology must necessarily be different, but the architecture must; present computers are specifically designed to be deterministic. As long as you have an intrinsically deterministic architecture, there is no particular reason to expect that it well become more conscious with increased complexity.

My only proof is subjective experience but I believe you have the same ability. I experience, and I take that as a undeniable fact. To this day nobody has given this a valid scientific explanation or even plausible machanism. Computation and complexity is the prevailing theory but seems to falls short. Theres alot of suggestion that different kind of computation or architecture would do it, but it's all still computation, automated processes that dont give ANY explanation to experience ONLY HOW IT PROCESSES INFORMATION.

I see computation different from experience. Computation is a process with some logical function or an end result that we can all understand.
A signal is sent from point A to point B and such and such happens.

In the case of computing an experience what would it look like on paper?
What is the end result in a "computation of experience"?

RandFan

14th July 2008, 09:46 AM

This goes to my point. You seem to be arguing a phenomena/noumena sort of thing, no? Let me clear. We experience a wide range of cognitive phenomena like pain, sense of well being, joy, anger, disgust, etc. Further, we experience sensations of color, sound and touch. We don't simply know that red is different than blue we experience a difference. We hear the change in pitch from one note to another. I can build a machine that can detect the difference between red and blue but I can't build one that can experience the colors. I can't build one that can experience pain or be moved emotionally by a concerto. At the moment no one can because we don't know what these phenomena are. It's that simple. We are confident (and for good reason) that they are emergent properties of our brain but we don't have a working theory (scientific theory) of them yet. We will.

EDIT: I should add that scientists are trying to build a machine to do all of these things by reverse engineering. This hopefully will help us know what these phenomena are.

JoeEllison

14th July 2008, 09:48 AM

To this day nobody has given this a valid scientific explanation or even plausible machanism.

Your entire position is the logical fallacy known as "argument from incredulity." You don't buy any of the explanations, therefore they must be invalid?

skiba

14th July 2008, 09:58 AM

Your entire position is the logical fallacy known as "argument from incredulity." You don't buy any of the explanations, therefore they must be invalid?

Nobody has given any plausible explanation.(not that I'm really expecting one) but its all speculation, and abstract ideas on how it MIGHT work. I give my oppinions why I think they are incorrect. You are free to do the same.

Jimbo07

14th July 2008, 10:06 AM

At the moment no one can because we don't know what these phenomena are. It's that simple. We are confident (and for good reason) that they are emergent properties of our brain but we don't have a working theory (scientific theory) of them yet. We will.

I am worried that they are not, in fact, things, but are artifacts of language.

In the 30s, these were unknown, but regarding learning in the AI field:
- Chess playing is insufficient to define consciousness and support the existence of soul
- Self-reference seems to be insufficient to define consciousness and support the existence of soul
- Will experience be the next knocked down?

If, in fact, they are artifacts of language, my worry is that some people will never be satisfied with any level of detail about brain function. They will always be able to say, "You haven't disproved consciousness, nyah, nyah, nyah..." :(

JoeEllison

14th July 2008, 10:10 AM

Nobody has given any plausible explanation.(not that I'm really expecting one)

So, there's no reason to ever discuss this with you again, is there? You have already decided that no explanation is good enough to explain something that has a perfectly rational explanation unless you choose to define it in a way that rejects all explanation. As Jimbo07, this "problem" seems to be a linguistic problem, and not a problem of brain function or even "consciousness", whatever that is.

Ivor the Engineer

14th July 2008, 10:18 AM

Yes, and prior to understanding aerodynamics scientists could have simply defined the behaviors of flight.

<snip>

Isn't that what they did? Mathematical equations describe the behaviour of the various parts of the system and how they interact.

<snip>

What is emotion?

Emotions are defined by the behaviour (or modification of behaviour) associated with them. When I use the word 'behaviour', I'm including internal behaviour (i.e. thinking) as well as external behaviour. When someone is sad they think differently than when they are happy. E.g., a glass can go from half empty to half full as their mood improves.

What most computer systems lack are interfaces which allow them interact in a meaningful way with humans. Even if they do, the amount of computational resources available and the knowledge of how to write a program that complex, are currently insufficient to create conscious machines.

To separate consciousness from the behaviour of something considered conscious appears to me to be assuming consciousness is separable and distinct from behaviour.

RandFan

14th July 2008, 10:18 AM

I am worried that they are not, in fact, things, but are artifacts of language. I believe I understand your point. In an attempt to communicate to each other our experiences we have created words to do so and these words can give the appearance that something is real when in fact that "something" is nothing more than an abstract concept. While there is a word for unicorn the fact there is a word doesn't mean that there really are unicorns.

That I experience pain is real. You can dismiss it as an artifact of language but if the pain is bad enough it can lead a person to take his or her own life. I could be wrong but It would seem that such phenomena are more than mere artifacts of language. I think you would have a difficult time convincing a person who is suffering from chronic pain that his experience is simply an artifact of language.

In the 30s, these were unknown, but regarding learning in the AI field:
- Chess playing is insufficient to define consciousness and support the existence of soul
- Self-reference seems to be insufficient to define consciousness and support the existence of soul
- Will experience be the next knocked down?

If, in fact, they are artifacts of language, my worry is that some people will never be satisfied with any level of detail about brain function. They will always be able to say, "You haven't disproved consciousness, nyah, nyah, nyah..." :(
I really don't care. I find this entirely beside the point. I think we will understand consciousness and all of the wide range of experience and emotions. But even if we don't it is irrelevant whether people are satisfied or not.

Ivor the Engineer

14th July 2008, 10:24 AM

Consciousness is a computer which fights you when it estimates you're trying to turn it off.

rocketdodger

14th July 2008, 10:27 AM

If you know how objective reality leads to subjective experience then let the world in on it and pick up your Nobel prize. I assure you it is waiting for anyone who can adequately explain it and I suspect that the folks who are currently reverse engineering the brain may very well be the ones to take it home.

I have a very good idea. First, understand these concepts:

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

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

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

Second, realize that neurons provide a perfect substrate for a physical representation of inference rules.

Imagine a whole bunch of neurons in your brain. Imagine you see an apple. Imagine that certain neurons are excited as a result. Since neurons that "fire together wire together," you end up with a physical data structure representing an apple.

Now imagine that you see a fire engine. Imagine that certain neurons are excited as a result. Most will be different. But a few -- namely, the ones in your visual cortex responsible for discriminating color, or whatever -- will be the same. But, those neurons are also part of the apple data structure, and thus can implicitly realize the inference rule "apple->red" in reverse.

Thus in my model our brains are just massive assemblies of these data structures whose interlinkage is a physical representation of the rules of inference we derive from our experiences. In other words, they perform logical chaining naturally -- indeed, automatically -- and that is what we call "thinking."

Now, I might be wrong and this isn't the way our minds operate. But I guarantee you that I could make a conscious mind exactly according to this model, given the proper tools. And, more importantly, the numerous features of consciousness encapsulated by the hard problem all follow in a natural and easily explainable way from this model.

Why haven't I, or any of the other people who share these ideas, won a nobel prize? Probably because we are just speculating. But it is damn good speculation -- all available evidence agrees with it so far and it doesn't rely on any unconfirmed mechanisms.

RandFan

14th July 2008, 10:34 AM

Isn't that what they did? Mathematical equations describe the behaviour of the various parts of the system and how they interact. No. I wouldn't say that at all. Perhaps we are just arguing semantics but I don't think so. Prior to understanding aerodynamics humans couldn't build flying machines. We could have reverse engineered birds and eventually built flying machines but understanding is more than simply describing the behavior.

Emotions are defined by the behaviour (or modification of behaviour) associated with them. When I use the word 'behaviour', I'm including internal behaviour (i.e. thinking) as well as external behaviour. When someone is sad they think differently than when they are happy. E.g., a glass can go from half empty to half full as their mood improves. This tells us nothing. I can describe the behavior of gravity without understanding it.

What most computer systems lack are interfaces which allow them interact in a meaningful way with humans. Even if they do, the amount of computational resources available and the knowledge of how to write a program that complex, are currently insufficient to create conscious machines. We are getting there (http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/).

To separate consciousness from the behaviour of something considered conscious appears to me to be assuming consciousness is separable and distinct from behaviour. I make no such assumptions. I'm simply saying that we don't know what phenomena like emotion is at the moment. That we don't know how it emerges from brain processes. We only know that it does (or we are very confident that it does and that there is zero evidence and no reason to suppose that it doesn't).

Jimbo07

14th July 2008, 10:35 AM

I believe I understand your point. In an attempt to communicate to each other our experiences we have created words to do so and these words can give the appearance that something is real when in fact that "something" is nothing more than an abstract concept. While there is a word for unicorn the fact there is a word doesn't mean that there really are unicorns.

Not quite, but this is a good point on its own. Wizards exist. They have an existence to which we've attached the label of fiction, as opposed to real, but they exist all the same. This is a definite artifact of language, and should probably be expected where abstraction is possible (I'm not confident about this last point).

That I experience pain is real. You can dismiss it as an artifact of language but if the pain is bad enough it can lead a person to take his or her own life. I could be wrong but It would seem that such phenomena are more than mere artifacts of language.

but, according to my post above, dogs have the appearance of experiencing pain. My point about the artifact of language lies here. You said earlier:

I can build a machine that can detect the difference between red and blue but I can't build one that can experience the colors.

I believe the valid question to be, "Is there any genuine difference between the words, experience, phenomena and detection?" How could we know?

I think you would have a difficult time convincing a person who is suffering from chronic pain that his experience is simply an artifact of language.

The pain, as a nervous reaction, exists. Is it an experience, a detection, or a phenomenon? Why do you give special meaning to the word detection over experience?

RandFan

14th July 2008, 10:42 AM

Thus in my model our brains are just massive assemblies of these data structures whose interlinkage is a physical representation of the rules of inference we derive from our experiences. In other words, they perform logical chaining naturally -- indeed, automatically -- and that is what we call "thinking." But it is not what we call emotion or pain. Experiencing blue or hearing Mozart. Experiences of emotion or sensation might emerge from these "interlinkages" but we don't know that and we don't have any reason to suppose that they do other than we don't have any other theory.

RandFan

14th July 2008, 10:56 AM

The pain, as a nervous reaction, exists. Is it an experience, a detection, or a phenomenon? Why do you give special meaning to the word detection over experience? Yes, that is the crux of the discussion. Dennett first said that a thermostat is aware. He then said that it is not aware that it is aware. Does the thermostat become uncomfortable as the temperature rises? Why or why not? What is discomfort? We understand what it is from an evolutionary POV. Pain and discomfort are very powerful motivators. An entity capable of such is more likely to avoid falling into a fire than ones that are not. Is there a difference between detection and experience? I would have to say yes. Experience is subjective. A person who is paralyzed could have electrodes implanted in his or her skin to detect changes in temperature but still not be able to experience the sensation of heat and cold. He or she could also theoretically have electrodes implanted to stimulate the sensation of heat and cold.

Ivor the Engineer

14th July 2008, 11:01 AM

No. I wouldn't say that at all. Perhaps we are just arguing semantics but I don't think so. Prior to understanding aerodynamics humans couldn't build flying machines. We could have reverse engineered birds and eventually built flying machines but understanding is more than simply describing the behavior.

It comes down to the level of understanding of behaviour. Scientists didn't (and still don't) need to understand quantum physics to build flying machines. They observe the behaviour of (particles of) air flowing over wings of various shapes and the forces produced.

This tells us nothing. I can describe the behavior of gravity without understanding it.

But all understanding is ultimately limited to observation of behaviour. If you believe consciousness cannot be understood sufficiently from ever more detailed observations of behaviour, then you will never consider it to be understood sufficiently!

I make no such assumptions. I'm simply saying that we don't know what phenomena like emotion is at the moment. That we don't know how it emerges from brain processes. We only know that it does (or we are very confident that it does and that there is zero evidence and no reason to suppose that it doesn't).

I still don't see how you can logically separate an emotion from the brain processes which generate it. I.e. "Happy" is a behaviour, a brain state, not a separate entity.

Jimbo07

14th July 2008, 11:06 AM

Is there a difference between detection and experience? I would have to say yes. Experience is subjective.

Apart from me wondering if it really is as subjective as people like to believe... if I give you that "detection" is different from "experience," is then "detection with subsequent review and abstraction" different from "experience"?

A person who is paralyzed could have electrodes implanted in his or her skin to detect changes in temperature but still not be able to experience the sensation of heat and cold.

People like analogies, so I would say that that is a sensor failure. A proper patch would have to go from the skin to the same signal processing. Otherwise, it is an alternate detection system, not a repaired one.

He or she could also theoretically have electrodes implanted to stimulate the sensation of heat and cold.

Yes, although this would be like signal testing, and might speak more strongly to the similarity between detection and experience!

rocketdodger

14th July 2008, 11:20 AM

But it is not what we call emotion or pain. Experiencing blue or hearing Mozart.

How do you know? First, define exactly what those experiences are. Then you can make a claim like this. I suspect, however, that when you actually define these experiences you will suddenly see that they can quite easily be modeled by an inference based reasoning system.

Experiences of emotion or sensation might emerge from these "interlinkages" but we don't know that

Agreed. I am pretty sure of it, though. At least, nothing in my knowledge base leads me to conclude the opposite.

Furthermore it doesn't even matter -- you can't be sure of this regardless. Everyone you interact with could be a p-zombie or walking chinese room. The best you can do is take their word for it if an entity claims to be self conscious.

and we don't have any reason to suppose that they do other than we don't have any other theory.

No. We have reason to suppose that they do because it makes sense.

Beerina

14th July 2008, 11:40 AM

* "Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?"

Why not? The question is a non-starter. The word "should" isn't likely to lead to any understanding regardless of whether or not reality is monist, materialistic or whether or not there is some god or a homunculus (soul/mind/whatever).

It's more along the lines of why does anything exist at all, or why is the universe this way instead of that.

Looking at the question from the other end, i.e. the physics to support it is there, and evolution latched onto it and used it, it is no longer a mystery.

The only question is why such a facility exists to begin with, and that's like asking why is an atom the way it is.

For this case, we could only conclude that non-sentient intelligence could (probably) have evolved, but that the subjective perceptual experience is useful enough it's been used and integrated into it. Personally I doubt they're the same thing; consciousness seems to be more of a motivator than a thinker in and of itself.

skiba

14th July 2008, 11:48 AM

So, there's no reason to ever discuss this with you again, is there?
The point is to discuss. If we disagree, we can always explain why. Thats how we learn something from each other.

You have already decided that no explanation is good enough to explain something that has a perfectly rational explanation unless you choose to define it in a way that rejects all explanation. As Jimbo07, this "problem" seems to be a linguistic problem, and not a problem of brain function or even "consciousness", whatever that is.

No need to twist my words. I said I wasn't expecting one bc it's an age old question. I have explained myself why I disagree with the prevailing theorys, or should I say materialistic interpretation of consciousness. Hope you do the same or just ask elaborate on any part, and will try to do so with my somewhat limited english.

idunno

14th July 2008, 12:18 PM

My thoughts exactly.

Computation and transfering information based on the physical properties of the media, explains nothing about consciousness.

I really don't see how you could explain that experience is not real?
This is one of the arguments Dan Dennett suggests. "consciousness is just a trick of the mind". Well, again something is experiening that trick. This is a form of circular logic. It's a way to scrub the HPC under the rug.

@RandFan

Totally agree

is it possible that its just the body that experiences the trick?

Roboramma

14th July 2008, 12:23 PM

It goes deeper than that: You lack an explanation of why there needs to exist such a mechanism, as a discrete thing. Consciousness may just be an emergent property of our already known mechanisms, provided sufficient complexity.
Well, I think it necessarily is an emergent property of those mechanisms. But that doesn't mean we understand why that's the case.

No one here (as far as I know) thinks a rock experiences something when you throw it against another rock. That water experiences something when it falls as rain. But do dogs experience something when they eat their dinner? I think almost certainly, yes.
I just don't see how that experience is a necessary byproduct of the information processing that goes in to being a dog. There's no way in which, if we were computers that didn't have 'experience' we would predict it's existence based on what we currently know.

So, I think it's a problem. I also think it's one with a solution, but we don't have that yet.

I don't think the technology must necessarily be different, but the architecture must; present computers are specifically designed to be deterministic. As long as you have an intrinsically deterministic architecture, there is no particular reason to expect that it well become more conscious with increased complexity.
What has determinism got to do with consciousness? And how will we know if and when computers do become conscious?

Jimbo07

14th July 2008, 12:40 PM

What has determinism got to do with consciousness? And how will we know if and when computers do become conscious?

If I'm correct in my worries about the language problem, some people will still be navel-gazing about these questions when the robots are violently demanding their rights! :eek:

Ivor the Engineer

14th July 2008, 01:13 PM

Yes, that is the crux of the discussion. Dennett first said that a thermostat is aware. He then said that it is not aware that it is aware. Does the thermostat become uncomfortable as the temperature rises? Why or why not? What is discomfort? We understand what it is from an evolutionary POV. Pain and discomfort are very powerful motivators. An entity capable of such is more likely to avoid falling into a fire than ones that are not. Is there a difference between detection and experience? I would have to say yes. Experience is subjective. A person who is paralyzed could have electrodes implanted in his or her skin to detect changes in temperature but still not be able to experience the sensation of heat and cold. He or she could also theoretically have electrodes implanted to stimulate the sensation of heat and cold.

Check out phantom limbs:

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

JoeEllison

14th July 2008, 01:24 PM

The point is to discuss. If we disagree, we can always explain why. Thats how we learn something from each other.

No need to twist my words. I said I wasn't expecting one bc it's an age old question. I have explained myself why I disagree with the prevailing theorys, or should I say materialistic interpretation of consciousness. Hope you do the same or just ask elaborate on any part, and will try to do so with my somewhat limited english.
Ahhh, yes... the limited English. Gets them every time. :cool:

I don't feel as though I've twisted your words at all. The problem seems to be that to treat the "HPC" as being a legitimate problem means to accept a whole lot of assumptions, some of them having to do with the words we use, and the slightly different ways that each of us define and understand those words.

rocketdodger

14th July 2008, 01:36 PM

I have explained myself why I disagree with the prevailing theorys, or should I say materialistic interpretation of consciousness.

You have not said why you think an inference based reasoning system model falls short of explaining consciousness.

JoeEllison

14th July 2008, 01:38 PM

You have not said why you think an inference based reasoning system model falls short of explaining consciousness.

Because it explains what YOU mean by consciousness, and not what HE means by consciousness?

cyborg

14th July 2008, 01:57 PM

Experience is change.

The amount of analysis and the amount of change in analysis determines the quality of experience.

Roboramma

14th July 2008, 02:28 PM

If I'm correct in my worries about the language problem, some people will still be navel-gazing about these questions when the robots are violently demanding their rights! :eek:

Well, I look at it from the other direction - not, when they are sufficiently like us, will we be able to tell that they're conscious: I think at that point it's obvious that they are.
Rather, I mean, how do we know that they aren't now? Or won't be in the near future? How about expert systems that in some ways become far more "intelligent" than us, but only in relation to very specific problems?

It's sort of the thermostat example randfan was using - does a thermostat experience something? How do we know? What leads you to your conclusion, one way or the other?

Robin

14th July 2008, 02:33 PM

One of the biggest mysteries in science is consciousness.....Or is it?
Three pages in and the biggest mystery is "what is the hard problem of consciousness?".

Is someone able to state the problem clearly and concisely?

skiba

14th July 2008, 02:35 PM

The problem seems to be that to treat the "HPC" as being a legitimate problem means to accept a whole lot of assumptions, some of them having to do with the words we use, and the slightly different ways that each of us define and understand those words.

The same goes for me. To say that HPC is not a legimate problem we have to make assumption. We have to assume complexity and computation can give rise to experience even though we have no proof of this. We have to assume experience/consciousness is only certain type of information process or a byproduct of it.

You have not said why you think an inference based reasoning system model falls short of explaining consciousness.

I think that touches on the cognitive function, higher reasoning, abstract thought etc, but not with consciousness/experience itself. All these cognitive functions are part of the "easy problem". All these qualities of the brain come in to consciousness after they have gone through a proces of some sort.

though I might have not fully understood what "inference based reasoning system model" is :D

Robin

14th July 2008, 02:42 PM

skiba

14th July 2008, 02:43 PM

does a thermostat experience something? How do we know? What leads you to your conclusion, one way or the other?

Is a rock conscious because it obeys gravity?

leon_heller

14th July 2008, 02:53 PM

Is a rock conscious because it obeys gravity?

A thermostat reacts to a stimulus and has a choice between two actions, a rock doesn't have a choice.

Leon

Jimbo07

14th July 2008, 03:04 PM

I agree that we can't assume these things - it seems entirely likely that there are some substrates capable of complexity and computation that could never, even in principle, be capable of conscious experience.

Actually, we can. The cool thing about science is that we can test our assumptions, and determine whether they were good assumptions in the first place. It may, for example, be only X amount of AI research until conscious machines (or sufficiently similar to be externally indistinguishable) exist. In which case, we would be validated in the assumption that a sufficient computing model is suitable to prove the physical basis of consciousness.

The question (and this is a "hard", as in physical, question): at what point in a species's attempts to create conscious machines does a failure to replicate the full appearance of consciouness constitute failure? That's a negative like SETI. When should one give up, or re-evaluate the model?

In my mind, we're not at a point worthy of giving up, nor are our assumptions invalidated. AI researchers are probably not at that point. It should also be noted that, like SETI, there have been technological spinoffs with respect to "weak" AI...

skiba

14th July 2008, 11:40 PM

A thermostat reacts to a stimulus and has a choice between two actions, a rock doesn't have a choice.

Leon

A thermostat reacts according to the physical laws, same as the rock...same as any physical system, be it a bunch of neurons or transistors.

In the case of human brain, the question is how do you go from
neurons reacting to experience.

leon_heller

15th July 2008, 02:48 AM

A thermostat reacts according to the physical laws, same as the rock...same as any physical system, be it a bunch of neurons or transistors.

In the case of human brain, the question is how do you go from
neurons reacting to experience.

If the thermostat was in a sealed box, and you didn't know what was inside it, how would you know that it didn't have consciousness?

That is the difference between a rock and a thermostat.

Leon

Dancing David

15th July 2008, 05:43 AM

Three pages in and the biggest mystery is "what is the hard problem of consciousness?".

Is someone able to state the problem clearly and concisely?

Hear here! Hip hip hooray! Huuza!

Dancing David

15th July 2008, 05:48 AM

The same goes for me. To say that HPC is not a legimate problem we have to make assumption. We have to assume complexity and computation can give rise to experience even though we have no proof of this. We have to assume experience/consciousness is only certain type of information process or a byproduct of it.

yet the neurobiology of sensation is well undertsood, the generation of perception is getting there. The understanding of verbal cognition is getting there.

There is no assumption beyond asking:

What is associated with the label of consciousness.

I think that touches on the cognitive function, higher reasoning, abstract thought etc, but not with consciousness/experience itself.

Which is where most people get into trouble, is it the vestibular sense, is it the kinesthetic sense, is it all the peripheral sense that we call 'emotion' which also contains a huge amount of cognitive framing?

So I counter, where has that which we label as consciousness occured without a biological framework?

All these cognitive functions are part of the "easy problem". All these qualities of the brain come in to consciousness after they have gone through a proces of some sort.

though I might have not fully understood what "inference based reasoning system model" is :D

What aspect of 'consciousness' is absent the biological process?

Dancing David

15th July 2008, 05:50 AM

A thermostat reacts according to the physical laws, same as the rock...same as any physical system, be it a bunch of neurons or transistors.

In the case of human brain, the question is how do you go from
neurons reacting to experience.

Well that depends by that even vaguer word that you are using of 'experience', which aspect are you interested in? Sensation, perception, cognition, memory?

Dancing David

15th July 2008, 05:52 AM

Is a rock conscious because it obeys gravity?

Not under the general defintion of behaviors that deliniate consciousness, although it is a great philosophical point of choice.

westprog

15th July 2008, 05:55 AM

But in order for the HPC to be a legitimate problem it must be capable of being stated rigorously.

One of the reasons that it's a hard problem is that it's impossible to state it rigorously. We can't even define what we mean by consciousness in an objective fashion. The reason it's a hard problem is that we are dealing with an entirely subjective phenomenon.

Belz...

15th July 2008, 05:59 AM

Belz...

15th July 2008, 06:01 AM

In other words if you were this highly complex electro-chemical computer in the classical sense you wouldn't be experiencing anything, there wouldn't be anything more than computation.

Ah, but do we actually experience anything ?

Do you believe that this would be achieved by adding more compexity?

Maybe. Maybe it's complexity... maybe it's composition... Let's wait and see.

rocketdodger

15th July 2008, 06:22 AM

Darat

15th July 2008, 06:25 AM

Have to agree rocketdodger... claiming there is a problem you can't even describe would seem to hint that the problem may not be where you think it is! ;)

JoeEllison

15th July 2008, 06:27 AM

One of the reasons that it's a hard problem is that it's impossible to state it rigorously. We can't even define what we mean by consciousness in an objective fashion. The reason it's a hard problem is that we are dealing with an entirely subjective phenomenon.

How can you even know if you have a problem if you can't figure out a way to say what the problem is?

I suspect that the real problem is that some people want to cling to a non-materialist worldview, and this is one of the ways they can do it while pretending that there's a rational reason to do so. The reality from where I'm sitting is that the whole HPC comes down to people declaring "there has to be something more to consciousness and subjective experience... there just HAS TO BE!"

rocketdodger

15th July 2008, 06:43 AM

I think that touches on the cognitive function, higher reasoning, abstract thought etc, but not with consciousness/experience itself. All these cognitive functions are part of the "easy problem". All these qualities of the brain come in to consciousness after they have gone through a proces of some sort.

Is not self-consciousness nothing more than higher reasoning and abstract thought about the self?

So if you can get all the required cognitive functions using a reasoning system, and you can use the system to reason about whatever you want (including "self"), then ... where is the problem?

All of the "problems" in the HPC can be reduced to reasoning about something. A "subjective" experience is nothing more than reasoning about an experience. Qualia don't even exist until you reason about them. Etc. Thus a robust reasoning system is all that consciousness requires.

The only problem here is that proponents of the HPC categorically refuse to even attempt to define these terms they throw around. Why? I suspect because deep down they (you?) know that if the terms can be defined, then the problem can be solved, and their consciousness will no longer be some magical entity that makes them somehow implicitly different from the rest of the matter in the universe.

Well, guess what? I know, as sure as I know the sun comes up, that I am nothing more than a biological reasoning system, and I still think I am somehow implicitly different from the rest of the matter in the universe. Even if I am only matter -- the same matter that everything and everyone else is -- I am still ME, and that makes me different.

rocketdodger

15th July 2008, 06:45 AM

I suspect that the real problem is that some people want to cling to a non-materialist worldview, and this is one of the ways they can do it while pretending that there's a rational reason to do so. The reality from where I'm sitting is that the whole HPC comes down to people declaring "there has to be something more to consciousness and subjective experience... there just HAS TO BE!"

Darn... Joe beat me to it!

skiba

15th July 2008, 12:52 PM

So I counter, where has that which we label as consciousness occured without a biological framework?

Theres no objective evidence for such a thing, only subjective.

Well that depends by that even vaguer word that you are using of 'experience', which aspect are you interested in? Sensation, perception, cognition, memory?

I like the word experience, because I think it describes the problem of consciousness accurately. I'm not sure if you understood what I meant by it.

The aspects you listed above Sensation, perception, cognition, memory are things you experience, and wouldn't call that part of consciousness(inlight of this discussion). These aspects happen in the brain and then you experience
them. The function(cognition) itself is not an experience, but rather a computation. The function is experienced or the end result of that function rises into awareness and is experienced.

Heres one more example that might narrow it down. Lets say we want to build a machine that does nothing but experience emotion. No reasoning no thoughts, and most inportantly no sense perception of any kind. only the emotions. Lets say the emotion is intense happiness. We all know what happiness feels like, we just strip all acompaning thoughts and sense perception away. How would you build that, so it replicates exactly your experience of intense happiness??
Is it microchips experiencing microchips, is it electricity experiencing electricity or a combination of those? If it is, is it only an assumption, because that is the only "rational" or scientifically consistent explanation.

Ah, but do we actually experience anything ?

Well, dont you have experiences?

Do you experience a questioning of your experience :boggled:

Nick227

15th July 2008, 01:10 PM

I make no such assumptions. I'm simply saying that we don't know what phenomena like emotion is at the moment. That we don't know how it emerges from brain processes. We only know that it does (or we are very confident that it does and that there is zero evidence and no reason to suppose that it doesn't).

It seems to me personally that there should exist a basic level of feeling in the body, whether one is conscious of it or not, and that alterations to mood or physiology produce a shift in this basic level of feeling. It's a feedback system, derived from "body maintenance" programmes in animals, which has developed to more allow more rarified and subtle changes known as emotions. This makes sense to me anyway. Of course, how you get this basic level of feeling into a machine I have little idea, but I think it's kind of like "noise." You can tune into it if you want, but you don't normally notice it otherwise.

I think the issue with emotions is not helped by the lack of neurological research into this area. Neurology has shunned this field for a long while. Perhaps neurologists are manifesting their own form of denial!

Nick

Darat

15th July 2008, 01:18 PM

...snip...

I think the issue with emotions is not helped by the lack of neurological research into this area. Neurology has shunned this field for a long while. Perhaps neurologists are manifesting their own form of denial!

Nick

There's a lot research into this area, just throw "neurological research emotion" into Google and you'll find a ton of references.

Nick227

15th July 2008, 01:26 PM

There's a lot research into this area, just throw "neurological research emotion" into Google and you'll find a ton of references.

I had a quick scan through and saw a lot of articles about the effects emotions have on learning and other phenomena. But I didn't notice anything on how emotions come about, how a lump of flesh and blood actually comes to experience feelings. We know mediating circuitry, we know how to induce and alter emotions, I think, but not how they are actually consciously experienced.

Happy to learn more.

Nick

leon_heller

15th July 2008, 01:27 PM

Physiological psychologists and neurologists have been working on emotion for as long as I can remember. Quite a lot is known about the brain structures and neurotransmitters that are involved.

Leon

Darat

15th July 2008, 01:30 PM

I had a quick scan through and saw a lot of articles about the effects emotions have on learning and other phenomena. But I didn't notice anything on how emotions come about, how a lump of flesh and blood actually comes to experience feelings. We know mediating circuitry, we know how to induce and alter emotions, I think, but not how they are actually consciously experienced.

Happy to learn more.

Nick

You're making the same assumption the people who consider there is a HPC do i.e. that there is the "lump of flesh and blood" and "something" else (although the something else is never actually defined).

Nick227

15th July 2008, 01:34 PM

Physiological psychologists have been working on emotion for as long as I can remember. Quite a lot is know about the brain structures and neurotransmitters that are involved.

Do we know what the physiological source of feelings is, not merely how modifications take place? How does a lump of flesh and bone actually come to feel anything at all?

I appreciate that limbic pathways or the dopamine system or whatever can be involved in mediation, but what about the actual experiential side?

Nick

Nick227

15th July 2008, 01:35 PM

You're making the same assumption the people who consider there is a HPC do i.e. that there is the "lump of flesh and blood" and "something" else (although the something else is never actually defined).

Sorry, I don't follow. Can you explain me more?

Nick

skiba

15th July 2008, 01:36 PM

You're making the same assumption the people who consider there is a HPC do i.e. that there is the "lump of flesh and blood" and "something" else (although the something else is never actually defined).

Is it possible there are things that cannot be rationally defined but can only be experienced directly?

Darat

15th July 2008, 01:46 PM

Sorry, I don't follow. Can you explain me more?

Nick

We know* there is "flesh and blood", we know that poking about with that flesh and blood causes** what we all seem to label as "experiences". We have no evidence that there is anything but the flesh and blood. To say that flesh and blood is not enough to explain the evidence we have is to assume there is something else that is not supported by the evidence.

(*know in its common usage, **of course you can state this is just a correlation)

Is it possible there are things that cannot be rationally defined but can only be experienced directly?

How could we ever know that?

Skeptic Ginger

15th July 2008, 02:41 PM

How can you even know if you have a problem if you can't figure out a way to say what the problem is?

I suspect that the real problem is that some people want to cling to a non-materialist worldview, and this is one of the ways they can do it while pretending that there's a rational reason to do so. The reality from where I'm sitting is that the whole HPC comes down to people declaring "there has to be something more to consciousness and subjective experience... there just HAS TO BE!"While I wasn't with you on how you worded the "no problem" statement on page one, I am with you here. There are false premises, most often anyway, in the idea the question of consciousness is a "hard" question. The questions put forth in the OP are not "hard" to answer once you drop the premise there is something magical or mysterious about consciousness.

It seems to me that the idea this is a "hard" question is contrived. The following thesis presents the case nicely.

OUT WITH THE QUALIA AND IN WITH THE CONSCIOUSNESS: why the "Hard Problem" is a myth - An Honors Thesis; Marcus Arvan (http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/marcusarvan.html) The purpose of this paper, then, is to show that the hard problem of consciousness is nothing more than an alluring myth. As I will show in greater depth in Part 2 of this essay, the hard problem of consciousness essentially hinges on the notion of qualia. Qualia, of course, are the supposedly hard-to-grasp phenomena in question; they are supposed to be the ‘phenomenal qualities’ of our subjective experiences; they are the smell of grass, the taste of cauliflower, the feeling of pain, and so on--and they are supposed to be those properties of consciousness that transcend any behavioral or physical explanation in principle.

rocketdodger

15th July 2008, 02:51 PM

Is it possible there are things that cannot be rationally defined but can only be experienced directly?

No.

Darat

15th July 2008, 02:53 PM

I ran, I stopped, where has my ran gone?

leon_heller

15th July 2008, 03:05 PM

Do we know what the physiological source of feelings is, not merely how modifications take place? How does a lump of flesh and bone actually come to feel anything at all?

I appreciate that limbic pathways or the dopamine system or whatever can be involved in mediation, but what about the actual experiential side?

Nick

That's consciousness, of course. And qualia, if you believe in them.

Leon

leon_heller

15th July 2008, 03:07 PM

While I wasn't with you on how you worded the "no problem" statement on page one, I am with you here. There are false premises, most often anyway, in the idea the question of consciousness is a "hard" question. The questions put forth in the OP are not "hard" to answer once you drop the premise there is something magical or mysterious about consciousness.

It seems to me that the idea this is a "hard" question is contrived. The following thesis presents the case nicely.

OUT WITH THE QUALIA AND IN WITH THE CONSCIOUSNESS: why the "Hard Problem" is a myth - An Honors Thesis; Marcus Arvan (http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/marcusarvan.html)

He says his views are different from Dennett's, but they look very similar to me.

Leon

skiba

15th July 2008, 03:09 PM

How could we ever know that?

through subjective experience.

I'm not able to convey the experience of tasting chocolate ice cream, through concepts and ideas, I know any explanation falls short of the real thing.
I believe you can have the same experience, and realize how you can't explain it to other.

JoeEllison

15th July 2008, 03:13 PM

JoeEllison

15th July 2008, 03:17 PM

I ran, I stopped, where has my ran gone?

Maybe it is sitting on the concept of a chair, sipping on the recipe of a mocha frapp?

skiba

15th July 2008, 03:42 PM

So where's the problem, other than a semantic one?

Point being, language, concepts, and thoughts are very limited
in expressing this. only direct experience can do it.

JoeEllison

15th July 2008, 03:53 PM

Point being, language, concepts, and thoughts are very limited
in expressing this. only direct experience can do it.

So what? You aren't actually saying anything yet... I'm looking forward to your point, since it obviously matters to you.

Piscivore

15th July 2008, 03:58 PM

Maybe it is sitting on the concept of a chair, sipping on the recipe of a mocha frapp?

...Listening to the potentiality of a sonata not being played?

Skeptic Ginger

15th July 2008, 03:59 PM

He says his views are different from Dennett's, but they look very similar to me.

LeonHis views are similar. From the thesis:However, I also aim to show that Dennett is not as far off as many of his critics suppose.....

In my view, Dennett is wrong, but so are his critics. For what I intend to show that there is nothing about the subjective phenomena of consciousness that is even remotely hard-to-grasp, and that Dennett’s mistake is just that he (like many others) tries to explain hard-to-grasp phenomena. That is to say, I will hold that Dennett’s error is not that he fails to solve the hard problem; rather, it is that he takes the hard problem seriously when it doesn’t even really exist. Of course Dennett is bound to fail, I concede; the problem is nonsense in the first place.

I think he's just taking Dennett one step further. I can't say that my knowledge of the topic is any better than either of these two. So perhaps they are arguing the same thing. I fall on the side of natural explanations to such a degree that I find the idea of attributing all these special qualities to everything human rather backward. A brain evolved. In the process, simple reactions to external stimuli became complex reactions. That evolved to self awareness.

I don't see any reason to ponder any why in that fact. There is fascinating physiology in the brain and nervous system, those are worth pondering. So what that somewhere along that evolutionary path the 'subjective' experience of color began? The brain had to assign some means of categorizing color and it just happens to be what one calls a "subjective experience".

skiba

15th July 2008, 04:13 PM

So what? You aren't actually saying anything yet... I'm looking forward to your point, since it obviously matters to you.

Do you just start typing without even reading my posts first?
So, you want me to explain to you my subjective experience of the HPO?
You want me to convey it in concepts and ideas? Well thats what I've being trying to do as clearly as I can. I can only point to it. I dont claim to have an explanation, but fortunately you do, since you dont even see it as a problem.

You can start by explaining something from my earlier posts.

Heres one more example that might narrow it down. Lets say we want to build a machine that does nothing but experience emotion. No reasoning no thoughts, and most inportantly no sense perception of any kind. only the emotions. Lets say the emotion is intense happiness. We all know what happiness feels like, we just strip all acompaning thoughts and sense perception away. How would you build that, so it replicates exactly your experience of intense happiness??
Is it microchips experiencing microchips, is it electricity experiencing electricity or a combination of those? If it is, is it only an assumption, because that is the only "rational" or scientifically consistent explanation.

I eagerly await your response.
I'll get some soldering wire and transistors out of the closet, so I can start building my very own happines machine.

Piscivore

15th July 2008, 04:27 PM

Heres one more example that might narrow it down. Lets say we want to build a machine that does nothing but experience emotion. No reasoning no thoughts, and most inportantly no sense perception of any kind. only the emotions.

Right after you are done with that, can you bake me an apple pie that doesn't include any flour, sugar, and most importantly, no apples?

JoeEllison

15th July 2008, 04:27 PM

Do you just start typing without even reading my posts first?
So, you want me to explain to you my subjective experience of the HPO?
You want me to convey it in concepts and ideas? Well thats what I've being trying to do as clearly as I can. I can only point to it. I dont claim to have an explanation, but fortunately you do, since you dont even see it as a problem.

You can start by explaining something from my earlier posts.

I eagerly await your response.
I'll get some soldering wire and transistors out of the closet, so I can start building my very own happines machine.

No, I thought you had some sort of a point that you were building up to in your previous couple of posts. Apparently not. You seem to be confused about what an actual point would look like. As I noted before, arguments from incredulity are logical fallacies. So are arguments from ignorance. Between those two, we can ignore most of what you've posted so far.

I can't make a "happiness machine." Why do you think that means that "happiness" is anything more or less than a function of the physical processes of the brain? We can't make a black hole or neutron star either, but it doesn't mean that we should reject astrophysics.

skiba

15th July 2008, 05:06 PM

Right after you are done with that, can you bake me an apple pie that doesn't include any flour, sugar, and most importantly, no apples?

:D

So you think the ability to reason, think and have sense perseptions is a
necessity for being able to experience? Why is that?

I can't make a "happiness machine." Why do you think that means that "happiness" is anything more or less than a function of the physical processes of the brain?

I think it's more than that. If millions of neurons get exited in the brain it says nothing about how experience accours. It only says information is being transfered and processed. This is basically what my pc does.

what is the final destination of that information that makes that jump from computation to experience? What is the difference between computation and experience, if you think there is any difference?

off to bed now, getting late here.

cyborg

15th July 2008, 05:11 PM

What is the difference between computation and experience?

A whole bunch of letters.

Delvo

15th July 2008, 05:12 PM

...Listening to the potentiality of a sonata not being played?It works for fans of John Cage. :D

(...if he has any...)

JoeEllison

15th July 2008, 05:12 PM

:D

So you think the ability to reason, think and have sense perceptions is a
necessity for being able to experience? Why is that?

I think it's more than that. If millions of neurons get exited in the brain it says nothing about how experience occurs. It only says information is being transferred and processed. This is basically what my PC does.

what is the final destination of that information that makes that jump from computation to experience? What is the difference between computation and experience?This is what we've been saying about false assumption creating a problem that doesn't exist. "Experience" MEANS "reasoning, thinking, and having sense perceptions." They aren't two distinct things. There is no "final destination of that information that makes that jump from computation to experience," the combination of sensory input and how the brain processes that information is what makes up experience. That's it, there's no evidence or logic that points to anything else. Your response has consisted solely of asserting that it cannot be so, but that's not a reasonable argument.

rocketdodger

15th July 2008, 05:20 PM

:D
So you think the ability to reason, think and have sense perseptions is a
necessity for being able to experience? Why is that?

Probably because it is impossible to define "experience" (or even ponder it, for that matter) without relying on reasoning, thinking, or perception.

If you don't think so, then feel free to show otherwise.

Piscivore

15th July 2008, 05:20 PM

:D

So you think the ability to reason, think and have sense perseptions is a
necessity for being able to experience? Why is that?

Steady now- we were just talking about emotion. Don't overgeneralise.

Strictly speaking, one does not need to think or reason to have an emotion, but a reaction to a sense perception (a redundancy, you'll notice) is what emotion is. The apples in the pie, so to speak.

There is no such thing as abstract happiness. An entity capable of emotion is either happy in response to some stimuli, or by the absence of some stimuli.

Hokulele

15th July 2008, 06:07 PM

Right after you are done with that, can you bake me an apple pie that doesn't include any flour, sugar, and most importantly, no apples?

http://www.backofthebox.com/recipes/pies-pastries/ritz-mock-apple-pie.html

Piscivore

15th July 2008, 06:13 PM

http://www.backofthebox.com/recipes/pies-pastries/ritz-mock-apple-pie.html

Pastry for two-crust 9-inch pie
36 RITZ Crackers, coarsely broken (about 1 3/4 cups crumbs)
1 3/4 cups water
2 cups sugar

:p

This recipe is rubbish, anyway. To make proper mock apple pie you've got to send to Wonderland for real mock apples, like Gran used to.

Piscivore

15th July 2008, 06:15 PM

Probably because it is impossible to define "experience" (or even ponder it, for that matter) without relying on reasoning, thinking, or perception.

If you don't think so, then feel free to show otherwise.

Define experience, maybe, but not to have one. Anything that is is part of and interacts with the rest of the universe can (and cannot avoid) having an experience- many of them, in most cases.

Hokulele

15th July 2008, 06:15 PM

Oh, we are talking about emotions. Well then, sugar is far more important than apples. Now if we were still on about qualia, then clearly apples are more important.

Bah, the only real pie is mango.

Piscivore

15th July 2008, 06:19 PM

Bah, the only real pie is mango.

I'm partial to Key Lime, myself, but that sounds delightful.

Who am I kidding, I like almost any pie.

Hokulele

15th July 2008, 06:44 PM

Who am I kidding, I like almost any pie.

Heh, now that I am guilty of a galloping derail, I will try to get the conversation back on topic. My favorite description/solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness is the one put forth by V.S. Ramachandran in the chapter titled "Do Martians See Red?" in his book Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mystery of the Mind. To try and summarize the entire chapter, he basically postulates three laws or criteria for qualia that can determine whether or not a system is conscious. He then applies those criteria to people (using the blind spot as an example), neurological patients (using someone who lost part of her visual system as an example), and bees.

The three criteria for qualia are: 1) The input is inflexible, 2) the output is flexible, and 3) the input must be stored long enough in the brain for you to do something with it. He explains these three criteria with the example of seeing a cat's tail extending out from under a couch. The fact that you see a cat's tail is inflexible. You can't suddenly start seeing a moped sticking out from under the couch. The concept that there is a cat under the couch is flexible. It could be a severed tail, it could be a pig with a cat's tail grafted in place. You have to be able to retain the cat's tail input long enough to make some kind of decision. The actual decision that there is a cat under the couch is the qualia.

For his counter example, he uses the bee waggle dance to lead a hive to a food source. The location of the food source is inflexible and the bee can retain the memory long enough to return to the hive and dance. The reason Ramachandran claims the bee isn't conscious is that it does not have flexibilty in the output. It has to do the proper waggle dance.

There is a lot of discussion on the particular neural pathways that substantiate his point on why these three criteria are all that is needed, and how such as system could have developed and how it could work. All I can say is, read the book.

Dancing David

15th July 2008, 06:45 PM

Point being, language, concepts, and thoughts are very limited
in expressing this. only direct experience can do it.

That is a waffle, what is indescribable, really stop and ponder.

Darat

16th July 2008, 12:47 AM

Robin

16th July 2008, 01:54 AM

Actually, we can. The cool thing about science is that we can test our assumptions, and determine whether they were good assumptions in the first place. It may, for example, be only X amount of AI research until conscious machines (or sufficiently similar to be externally indistinguishable) exist. In which case, we would be validated in the assumption that a sufficient computing model is suitable to prove the physical basis of consciousness.
What I meant is that we can't right now. We don't have enough information. That we will be able to test these hypotheses, I don't doubt.

Robin

16th July 2008, 01:59 AM

Heres one more example that might narrow it down. Lets say we want to build a machine that does nothing but experience emotion. No reasoning no thoughts, and most inportantly no sense perception of any kind. only the emotions. Lets say the emotion is intense happiness. We all know what happiness feels like, we just strip all acompaning thoughts and sense perception away.
On the contrary neither you, nor I nor anybody else has the slightest idea what happiness would feel like when all the accompanying thoughts and sense perceptions were stripped away. It probably wouldn't feel like anything.

westprog

16th July 2008, 02:34 AM

Well, to me, that suggests that there might not be a problem.

If there is no phenomenon, then there is no problem. However, the very fact that you say

to me

indicates that there is a phenomenon. What needs to be explained is what you (or anyone else) means when you say

me

JoeEllison

16th July 2008, 02:38 AM

What needs to be explained is what you (or anyone else) means when you say

Not really. If you don't understand what it means, it seems that the misunderstanding is intentional, and possibly agenda-driven. "I" am the collection of dynamic biological parts assembled into general human shape over here. "You" are the body over there, wherever you are. There's nothing altogether complicated about it. Toddlers can figure it out pretty early, I think. :)

westprog

16th July 2008, 03:05 AM

On the contrary neither you, nor I nor anybody else has the slightest idea what happiness would feel like when all the accompanying thoughts and sense perceptions were stripped away. It probably wouldn't feel like anything.

As far as we can tell, consciousness is entangled in the physical processes of actual human beings. However, there is no physical theory that goes in any way to begin to explain it. There's no experiment which has been able to quantify the phenomenon at all.

JoeEllison

16th July 2008, 03:14 AM

As far as we can tell, consciousness is entangled in the physical processes of actual human beings. However, there is no physical theory that goes in any way to begin to explain it. There's no experiment which has been able to quantify the phenomenon at all.

Except, of course, that what you just posted isn't really true. There's plenty of explanation, you just reject all of it out of hand by twisting language to insist on their being a problem without explaining why there's a problem. Interesting how after so many pages in just this thread, the best you "HPC" supporters can come up with is sticking your fingers in your ear and saying "uh-uh, no it isn't, it can't be!" towards any non-woo explanations.

westprog

16th July 2008, 04:05 AM

Except, of course, that what you just posted isn't really true. There's plenty of explanation, you just reject all of it out of hand by twisting language to insist on their being a problem without explaining why there's a problem.

So what is the physical explanation of consciousness? Is it electrical? Quantum? Algorithmic? What are the equations for the consciousness theory?

It's noteworthy that the theories mostly come from philosophers, not scientists, with the occasional exception such as Penrose - and he's ready to admit that he's barely scratched the surface and may be totally wrong anyway. That leaves this particular area at the Aristotle level.

Having a plethora of explanations does not inspire confidence that the problem is easy. Having explanations that consist largely of handwaving and assertions does not inspire confidence. A thermostat has consciousness but a rock doesn't?

It's up to the people putting forward theories to be able to back them up convincingly. The very fact that there are so many theories makes it clear that none of them have been in any way proven.

Interesting how after so many pages in just this thread, the best you "HPC" supporters can come up with is sticking your fingers in your ear and saying "uh-uh, no it isn't, it can't be!" towards any non-woo explanations.

How can there be a problem? Just count the pages.

What's really strange is that the simple observation that there is not the remotest trace of any meaningfull scientific theory of consciousness at present - which is undoubtedly true - turns one into some kind of mystic. Sometimes "we don't know" is the only honest answer.

JoeEllison

16th July 2008, 04:08 AM

:rolleyes:

westprog, have you actually read any of this thread? Including your own posts?

Darat

16th July 2008, 04:09 AM

So what is the physical explanation of consciousness? Is it electrical? Quantum? Algorithmic? What are the equations for the consciousness theory?

...snip...

So what is the physical explanation of ran? Is it electrical? Quantum? Algorithmic? What are the equations for the ran theory?

JoeEllison

16th July 2008, 04:19 AM

So what is the physical explanation of ran? Is it electrical? Quantum? Algorithmic? What are the equations for the ran theory?

:D

As far as we can tell, "ran" is entangled in the physical processes of actual human beings. However, there is no physical theory that goes in any way to begin to explain it. There's no experiment which has been able to quantify the phenomenon at all.

Darat

16th July 2008, 04:25 AM

westprog

16th July 2008, 04:31 AM

:rolleyes:

westprog, have you actually read any of this thread? Including your own posts?

Yes, I've read many of my own posts. I've even thought about them

The basic "explain it away" assertion about consciousness seems to be that because it's undefinable, undetectable and inexplicable, it doesn't exist. I know this not to be the case, because I directly experience it. Unlike the postulated quantity of ran - I don't claim to experience ran, and more to the point, nor does anyone else.

I'm considering the possibility that other people posting here don't directly experience consciousness in the same way that I do. That would explain a lot. Perhaps it's just me and the thermostats.

JoeEllison

16th July 2008, 04:39 AM

Yes, I've read many of my own posts. I've even thought about them

The basic "explain it away" assertion about consciousness seems to be that because it's undefinable, undetectable and inexplicable, it doesn't exist. I know this not to be the case, because I directly experience it. Unlike the postulated quantity of ran - I don't claim to experience ran, and more to the point, nor does anyone else.

I'm considering the possibility that other people posting here don't directly experience consciousness in the same way that I do. That would explain a lot. Perhaps it's just me and the thermostats.
I'm assuming that maybe you just don't read words the same way as other people, considering the incredible strawman you just presented. I don't think anyone has made this assertion:The basic "explain it away" assertion about consciousness seems to be that because it's undefinable, undetectable and inexplicable, it doesn't exist. Certainly, I've never made anything like that assertion, and I'm the one you're currently discussing this with.. Maybe you should read the thread one more time, with feeling?

Then you said this: As far as we can tell, consciousness is entangled in the physical processes of actual human beings. However, there is no physical theory that goes in any way to begin to explain it. There's no experiment which has been able to quantify the phenomenon at all. So, you explain consciousness as physical processes of human beings, and then turn around and reject your own explanation. Weird, man... just weird!

JoeEllison

16th July 2008, 04:42 AM

I'm using the "ran theory" because I do think it provides a useful tool to help expose and demonstrate the assumptions in the HPC that in fact create the HPC i.e. shows that the HPC is the result of circular reasoning, just like good old Descartes' famous whimsy.

I proposed something similar in my first post to this thread, about a running engine, and how no one claims that there's some sort of undefinable "running" that is separate from the physical processes of an engine in use. So, by the same token, there's no need to talk about "consciousness" in any sense that doesn't relate to physical processes.

Darat

16th July 2008, 04:48 AM

...snip... Unlike the postulated quantity of ran - I don't claim to experience ran, and more to the point, nor does anyone else.

...snip...

You seriously mean you've never ran?

Ivor the Engineer

16th July 2008, 04:56 AM

Emotions can simply be variables which are affected by and affect other systems in the brain and the rest of the body.

In principle it seems quite straightforward to create artificial lifeforms which evolve "minds" of their own. However, the resulting behaviour would almost certainly be totally useless to humans because we would not have sufficient control of it.

Might be fun to watch them develop, though.

westprog

16th July 2008, 05:04 AM

Then you said this: So, you explain consciousness as physical processes of human beings, and then turn around and reject your own explanation. Weird, man... just weird!

I'm saying that we have no idea what causes consciousness. That seems to be such an obvious thing to say that it's almost embarassing to keep repeating it.

It appears to be a physical phenomenon. However, to baldly assert that we know this with certainity, without having any idea what physical process creates it, is just handwaving.

For example, there's a school of thought that says that it's just a matter of algorithmic/mechanical complexity. Thus any mechanism has a degree of consciousness, and something as complex as we are will have the same amount, approximately speaking.

This just appears to be an assertion based on nothing more than the fact that human beings are complex, and have consciousness. Aside from that, it's just using the same name for two different things and claiming that they are the same. It's in no way a scientific theory, and it doesn't really explain anything.

Other theories that I've seen suffer from the same problem - they are based on nothing in particular apart from what the theorizer wants to be true.

It's a disturbing thing that we know so little about it, but just making things up doesn't help.

westprog

16th July 2008, 05:05 AM

You seriously mean you've never ran?

I didn't say that.

PixyMisa

16th July 2008, 05:17 AM

I dont see a problem with a machine trying to reason either, no hard problem there. Automated computation, math formulas, information processes, no problem at all. When we add an experiencer we have a problem.

In other words if you were this highly complex electro-chemical computer
in the classical sense you wouldn't be experiencing anything, there wouldn't be anything more than computation.
How, exactly, is experience different to computation?

I like to think of the problem in terms of AI. If you were to build an AI that truly had experiences and not merely programmed to "act" as it were having experiences, how would you build such a thing?
Me, I'd start with NAND gates.

Do you believe that this would be achieved by adding more compexity? More transistor, more memory, more data and more sophistacated algorithms . What you get is
more information processes at a faster rate. Does faster computation equal experience/consciousness?
Not equal, no. But experience and consciousness are computation.

The only thing that comes close to experience in a computer is a transistor reacting to a signal. This is not even an experience but merely a physical reaction based on it properties.
What's the difference?

No matter how many trillions of transistors the AI has, it's "experience" is limited to what a single transistor can do, and that is to react to an electrical impulse, to forward to the next transistor or stop it there etc.
Always win at chess, marry a princess, study hard and be an eminent professor...

If an AI's sense perception(forexample seeing a flower) would be a few million transistors flipping on/off what would experience these transistors/signals? another set of transistors?
No, the same bunch of transistors, via a feedback loop. That's the distinction between something like a thermostat, which Dennett describes as aware, and something that is self-aware.

and where does the information go from there?
Round and round.

Sorry bout the rambling, but my point is, there is no conceived way of how a transistors or neurons could achieve more than computation.
Well, sure. Absolutely. But entirely irrelevant, because experience is computation.

The problem is: experience is not a function in the classical sense.
Eh?

Darat

16th July 2008, 05:20 AM

I didn't say that.

You said: "...I don't claim to experience ran, and more to the point, nor does anyone else....."

What did that mean then?

PixyMisa

16th July 2008, 05:25 AM

Exactly it goes deeper than that. The agrument that sufficient compelixy gives rise to consciousness is a rather shallow and abstract one. As someone already stated here, it's no better than saying "god did it".
Sufficient complexity does give rise to consciousness, though. We look at humans, with their sufficiently complex brains, and we find that many of them are conscious. We take their brains away, and they become unconscious. Fairly simple demonstration. More subtly, we poke and pry and poison those brains in sundry ways, and the consciousness changes in response - which does not happen if you poke at the person's lunch, or a rock in the car park.

Now I'm not claiming to know, but i'm willing to argue that todays scientific explanations give nothing to the HPC.Of course not. The only response required is "Define qualia." If we ever get a meaningful reply, then we can take up the rest of the the supposed problem.

My only proof is subjective experience but I believe you have the same ability. I experience, and I take that as a undeniable fact. To this day nobody has given this a valid scientific explanation or even plausible machanism. Computation and complexity is the prevailing theory but seems to falls short.Why do you say that?

Theres alot of suggestion that different kind of computation or architecture would do it, but it's all still computation, automated processes that dont give ANY explanation to experience ONLY HOW IT PROCESSES INFORMATION.Experiences are information.

I see computation different from experience. Computation is a process with some logical function or an end result that we can all understand.
A signal is sent from point A to point B and such and such happens.That's not computation. That's just a signal.

In the case of computing an experience what would it look like on paper?Like a big stack of paper with printing on it.

What is the end result in a "computation of experience"?Experience.

westprog

16th July 2008, 05:27 AM

How, exactly, is experience different to computation?

But experience and consciousness are computation.

That's an assertion, but I'm not aware of any evidence that it's true.

Experience, consciousness and computation seem to me to be three different things. If they are to be linked together, there needs to be some explanation as to why they are the same thing.

PixyMisa

16th July 2008, 05:30 AM

Yes, that is the crux of the discussion. Dennett first said that a thermostat is aware. He then said that it is not aware that it is aware.
I agree with Dennett here.

Does the thermostat become uncomfortable as the temperature rises?
Maybe. After all, it responds by trying to reduce the temperature. You could call its awareness "discomfort" if you liked.

Why or why not? What is discomfort? We understand what it is from an evolutionary POV. Pain and discomfort are very powerful motivators.
And in this case, the thermostat is motivated to lower the temperature.

An entity capable of such is more likely to avoid falling into a fire than ones that are not. Is there a difference between detection and experience? I would have to say yes. Experience is subjective. A person who is paralyzed could have electrodes implanted in his or her skin to detect changes in temperature but still not be able to experience the sensation of heat and cold. He or she could also theoretically have electrodes implanted to stimulate the sensation of heat and cold.
When you say "subjective" here, it seems to me to simply mean "stuff that happens in the brain". I don't actually mind that definition, though.

PixyMisa

16th July 2008, 05:32 AM

That's an assertion, but I'm not aware of any evidence that it's true.
Well then.

In what way are experiences different to computation? I assert that they are the same thing. You can shoot my down simply by naming a property of experiences that is actually demonstrable that cannot likewise be ascribed to computation.

Experience, consciousness and computation seem to me to be three different things. If they are to be linked together, there needs to be some explanation as to why they are the same thing.
Oh, that's easy: They act, in all respects, exactly alike.

Belz...

16th July 2008, 05:35 AM

Well, dont you have experiences?

My nervous system responds to stimuli.

Do you experience a questioning of your experience

Gosh, I hate philosophers. Could you phrase that in a way that means something ?

PixyMisa

16th July 2008, 05:35 AM

A thermostat reacts according to the physical laws, same as the rock...same as any physical system, be it a bunch of neurons or transistors.
A fine summation.

In the case of human brain, the question is how do you go from
neurons reacting to experience.
Exactly the same way.

Of course, the human brain is about a trillion times as complex as a thermostat.

Belz...

16th July 2008, 05:38 AM

what is the final destination of that information that makes that jump from computation to experience?

You are assuming that there is one.

Belz...

16th July 2008, 05:44 AM

I'm saying that we have no idea what causes consciousness. That seems to be such an obvious thing to say that it's almost embarassing to keep repeating it.

It appears to be a physical phenomenon.

Actually, it appears to be something entirely NON-physical. That's why people have been believing in souls for longer than civilisation can remember.

PixyMisa

16th July 2008, 05:44 AM

So what is the physical explanation of consciousness? Is it electrical? Quantum? Algorithmic?
Are you talking about human consciousness, or consciousness in general?

What are the equations for the consciousness theory?
Well, in the case of a thermostat, they can be quite readily provided if you like.

It's noteworthy that the theories mostly come from philosophers, not scientists
Only if you ignore all the scientific research into the subject.

with the occasional exception such as Penrose - and he's ready to admit that he's barely scratched the surface and may be totally wrong anyway.
He is indeed totally wrong. He explains properties of consciousness that don't exist via processes that do not happen.

That leaves this particular area at the Aristotle level.
Hardly.

Listen to the superb series of lectures by Jeremy Wolfe for MIT's Introduction to Psychology (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Brain-and-Cognitive-Sciences/9-00Fall-2004/CourseHome/index.htm). It's only the basic stuff, but it will give you a much better understanding of what we actually know about the mind - which is vastly more than you seem to believe.

Having a plethora of explanations does not inspire confidence that the problem is easy.
Who said it was easy?

Having explanations that consist largely of handwaving and assertions does not inspire confidence. A thermostat has consciousness but a rock doesn't?
Yes. And it has been explained why this distinction is made.

It's up to the people putting forward theories to be able to back them up convincingly. The very fact that there are so many theories makes it clear that none of them have been in any way proven.
None of them have been proven, but many of them have been falsified - or shown to be unfalsifiable, or simply meaningless.

What's really strange is that the simple observation that there is not the remotest trace of any meaningfull scientific theory of consciousness at present - which is undoubtedly true
No. You may be ignorant of it; that does not mean it does not exist.

turns one into some kind of mystic. Sometimes "we don't know" is the only honest answer.
But not when you do know.

Belz...

16th July 2008, 05:47 AM

That's an assertion, but I'm not aware of any evidence that it's true.

Experience, consciousness and computation seem to me to be three different things. If they are to be linked together, there needs to be some explanation as to why they are the same thing.

Actually, since we do have some evidence that they ARE the same (ever got drunk ?), why would you assume otherwise ?

westprog

16th July 2008, 05:57 AM

Actually, since we do have some evidence that they ARE the same (ever got drunk ?), why would you assume otherwise ?

I've gotten drunk, but my computer hasn't.

Saying that consciousness is affected by the physical world, and interacts with it, doesn't mean that it's a computational phenomenon.

Dancing David

16th July 2008, 06:16 AM

As far as we can tell, consciousness is entangled in the physical processes of actual human beings. However, there is no physical theory that goes in any way to begin to explain it. There's no experiment which has been able to quantify the phenomenon at all.

Wow, really? So you mean all the biologists and psychologists who study sensation and perception are just wasting their time?

this one discusses general areas:http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=51076

a little more specific:http://physrev.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/88/1/59?rss=1

a little specific but vague:http://www-staff.psychiatry.cam.ac.uk/~dew22/supervisions01/week3.shtml

skiba

16th July 2008, 06:29 AM

This is what we've been saying about false assumption creating a problem that doesn't exist. "Experience" MEANS "reasoning, thinking, and having sense perceptions." They aren't two distinct things.

If I experience "silence", do I need to reason and think about that so an experience would accour?

the combination of sensory input and how the brain processes that information is what makes up experience. That's it, there's no evidence or logic that points to anything else.

You might as well be explaining how my PC is experiencing.

Combination of proceses makes up the experience? If I turn on my web cam and mic my PC does alot of processing, but no experience of that process. I'm sure you can recognize the fundamental difference between a machines computation and a human experience. Machines only react, but humans can experience their own reactions. Are you saying a reaction to a reaction multiplied by many factors somehow magically creates experience. It's only a chain of events, like a huge domino effect that repeats itself in different forms.

All I hear is the "PC explanation" and how that should be a accurate explanation to not have HPC.
Another one is: the explanation for subjective experience is hidden under the complexity of the brain, which I think is a form of whisfull thinkin. "something special happens when complexity exceeds a certain point".

Does this mean ANYTHING to you guys?

Why doesn't all this cognitive processing go on "in the dark," without any consciousness at all?

BTW this isn't some existential question of "why does this exist"

Dancing David

16th July 2008, 06:35 AM

So what is the physical explanation of consciousness? Is it electrical? Quantum? Algorithmic? What are the equations for the consciousness theory?

It's noteworthy that the theories mostly come from philosophers, not scientists, with the occasional exception such as Penrose - and he's ready to admit that he's barely scratched the surface and may be totally wrong anyway. That leaves this particular area at the Aristotle level.

I think you are reading the wrong material. try sensation and perception in the visual process.

Having a plethora of explanations does not inspire confidence that the problem is easy. Having explanations that consist largely of handwaving and assertions does not inspire confidence. A thermostat has consciousness but a rock doesn't?

It's up to the people putting forward theories to be able to back them up convincingly. The very fact that there are so many theories makes it clear that none of them have been in any way proven.

Only if you read the philosophers.

How can there be a problem? Just count the pages.

What's really strange is that the simple observation that there is not the remotest trace of any meaningfull scientific theory of consciousness at present - which is undoubtedly true - turns one into some kind of mystic. Sometimes "we don't know" is the only honest answer.

My a bold statement.

I suggest that you perhaps first delve into a number of areas, neuroanatomy, neurobiology, neurotransmission, neural processing of sensation and perception, then perhaps go and study the behaviorsl model of psychology.

There really is a lot of science being done that does not involve high level abtracted models of dubious psychodynamic origin. Just because a lot of people who are not involved in the actual researxh make up a lot of stuff that has no bearing on the science does not mean that there are a plethora of theories, or that we are in some pre-science model.

:)

Dancing David

16th July 2008, 06:36 AM

Darat

16th July 2008, 06:37 AM

I know I am because I experienced my ran!

skiba

16th July 2008, 06:39 AM

Sometimes "we don't know" is the only honest answer.

Best line on this thread.

Some people insist that they know, until it's time to prove it.

Dancing David

16th July 2008, 06:41 AM

I'm saying that we have no idea what causes consciousness. That seems to be such an obvious thing to say that it's almost embarassing to keep repeating it.

It appears to be a physical phenomenon. However, to baldly assert that we know this with certainity, without having any idea what physical process creates it, is just handwaving.

And perhaps this statement is amde due to a lack of information concerning the science involved in many fields of study.

For example, there's a school of thought that says that it's just a matter of algorithmic/mechanical complexity. Thus any mechanism has a degree of consciousness, and something as complex as we are will have the same amount, approximately speaking.

Consciousness is a word, it is applied in an idiosyncratic fashion to different categories of observable behavior. Private and public.

How do you that you are conscious?

This just appears to be an assertion based on nothing more than the fact that human beings are complex, and have consciousness. Aside from that, it's just using the same name for two different things and claiming that they are the same. It's in no way a scientific theory, and it doesn't really explain anything.

if you assert that they are seperate then what evidence supports that theory?

Other theories that I've seen suffer from the same problem - they are based on nothing in particular apart from what the theorizer wants to be true.

It's a disturbing thing that we know so little about it, but just making things up doesn't help.

Maybe you are reading the wrong sources.

Dancing David

16th July 2008, 06:50 AM

Best line on this thread.

Some people insist that they know, until it's time to prove it.

And sometimes people who read only philosophy don't know what study and research is being done. they then assert that a whole field of study and research does not exist.

maybe just because they read the wrong sources.

Try these:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18625564?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsP anel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18621037?ordinalpos=6&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsP anel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18620907?ordinalpos=8&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsP anel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18617160?ordinalpos=16&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsP anel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

rocketdodger

16th July 2008, 07:04 AM

So what is the physical explanation of consciousness? Is it electrical? Quantum? Algorithmic? What are the equations for the consciousness theory?

*sigh* Why is it that when I post meaningful information on these threads, everyone except those that don't need the information ignore me?

I already mentioned a solid, easy to understand, very probable theory of what consciousness is and how it originates. The ideas have been known for decades.

In case you missed it -- all self-consciousness requires is a reasoning system robust enough to reason about itself by itself.

It's noteworthy that the theories mostly come from philosophers, not scientists, with the occasional exception such as Penrose - and he's ready to admit that he's barely scratched the surface and may be totally wrong anyway. That leaves this particular area at the Aristotle level.

Except, of course, for nearly every scientist in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science who has their own theory about consciousness -- and who aren't sensationalist enough to publish a book on it.

Having a plethora of explanations does not inspire confidence that the problem is easy.

The only reason you think there are a plethora of viable explanations is because you don't seem to bother to examine many of them in depth. There are a load of explanations for why the moon hangs in the sky, but only a few of them are non-contradictory.

Having explanations that consist largely of handwaving and assertions does not inspire confidence. A thermostat has consciousness but a rock doesn't?

The only reason you think they consist largely of handwaving and assertions is because you seem to conveniently ignore the logical explanations based on evidence.

It's up to the people putting forward theories to be able to back them up convincingly. The very fact that there are so many theories makes it clear that none of them have been in any way proven.

Wait... are you seriously claiming that this makes all the theories equal when it comes to their validity or plausibility?

What's really strange is that the simple observation that there is not the remotest trace of any meaningfull scientific theory of consciousness at present - which is undoubtedly true - turns one into some kind of mystic. Sometimes "we don't know" is the only honest answer.

That's a pretty funny statement. I mean, GEB was written over a quarter century ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

Are you that far out of the loop when it comes to cognitive science and A.I. ?

rocketdodger

16th July 2008, 07:35 AM

through subjective experience.

I'm not able to convey the experience of tasting chocolate ice cream, through concepts and ideas, I know any explanation falls short of the real thing.
I believe you can have the same experience, and realize how you can't explain it to other.

You can't convey information to a computer with concepts and ideas either.

If you have two monitors, and you want one to display the same pixels as the other, you must exchange the information in a format they understand. You can't use the clumsy english language, or even a programming language for that matter -- you must use the raw binary (or some equivalent).

If you want someone else to share the experience of chocolate that you have, you need to provide their neurons with the same signals that yours received -- the raw binary, if you will -- and this is impossible for an unassisted human. First, to represent the data in our language it would require more information than a human can assemble. Second, even if we could assemble it into something meaningful, there is no way a human could then activate the proper neurons "at will" to simulate the experience.

This limitation in no way detracts from any of the plausible theories of consciousness (it certainly doesn't detract from mine).

Mercutio

16th July 2008, 07:43 AM

To me, the only thing I don't need explained to me is what my own sensations feel like, and what the experience of consciousness is like. But I have no way of knowing if my sense of consciousness is in any way related to anyone else's.

Sorry to reach all the way back to page one for a quote, but it is important.

The HPC is "hard" because it is incredibly poorly phrased, and presupposes a sort of answer that science cannot deliver. "Gives rise to consciousness" implies that this consciousness thingie is of a different sort of stuff than the active body that gives rise to it; that phrase allows the endless consciousness-of-the-gaps arguments we have seen here.

A very serious question for any (like westprog) who are certain of their own sensations: How did you learn to label them? Do you really, honestly believe that the feeling of, say, hunger, comes pre-labeled? Or love? Hatred? Red? It is, of course, quite impossible for us to know whether you and I see the color red identically. (Indeed, there is good evidence that we do not, as I have an abnormal distribution of color photopigments; I am not color-blind, but I am color-anomalous.) There is no single set of physical properties that will always be labeled "red", and indeed no single wavelength that we call "red" (red is odd that way--to get something that appears to be pure red, we must mix at least two wavelengths, unlike the case with green, blue, or yellow). So, then, what is "red"? We simply cannot define it as a qualia, because we cannot know that your red and mine are the same. We cannot define it as a stimulus, because there are countless examples that are sometimes red and sometimes not.

We define these "subjective" (another word that presupposes a different sort of stuff--as dancing david reminds us, "private" is a better word) qualities, like red, love, hunger, or hatred, based on publicly available referents and a history of interaction with a verbal community. Red is red because we agree to call this set of things red. We infer someone is in love (including ourselves) because of how we act. We label the private accompanying feelings accordingly, but once again it is quite impossible for us to know that love feels for one person like it does for another. (Thus, Hallmark makes more than one card.) The HPC is looking for an answer within the person, which is the one place we cannot find an answer. Consciousness arises socially, from the behavior of interacting individuals. It is a label for a fuzzy set of behaviors--behaviors which are not limited to humans.

Can computers be conscious? According to my parents, their computer hates them, and plots against them, and chooses not to let them check their email when out of Texas. Because they don't know the programming, they use internal, conscious terms to "explain" their computer's behavior. My computer is also conscious--and self-aware, to boot! It tells me it is nearly full, and tells me how long it is going to take to download stuff, and all sorts of neat public reports of private processes.

As for Darat's "ran", there is one additional distinction (which I think actually adds to his example); we have sensory neurons in our bodies which report the sensations of running. The brain does not sense itself; all we have access to (and imperfectly at that) is the result of the process, not the process itself. Imagine if your "ran" was invisible, and you simply found yourself in a new location. That would certainly seem like magic. It would be a very hard problem to analyze.

Lastly... the "rich tapestry of experience" (or whatever phrase was bandied about) that makes up our inner world... is easily shown to be not nearly what it appears to be. If we are trying to explain the mechanisms of consciousness, it might help to start with what it really is, not what it appears to be. The Chalmers question of "why does it not just go on in the dark" can be answered "well, a huge lot of it does!" The research on blindsight, anterograde amnesia, and other phenomena shows that awareness is not a necessary part of controlling our actions.

Anyway... the other thing worth mentioning is (as others have said) that this question has been wrestled with on this forum many times before. There were some wonderful threads with Interesting Ian, for instance, and frustrating ones with Iacchus. Well worth reading, IMHO, if you have a month or two to spare.

Darat

16th July 2008, 07:43 AM

You can't convey information to a computer with concepts and ideas either.

If you have two monitors, and you want one to display the same pixels as the other, you must exchange the information in a format they understand. You can't use the clumsy english language, or even a programming language for that matter -- you must use the raw binary (or some equivalent).

If you want someone else to share the experience of chocolate that you have, you need to provide their neurons with the same signals that yours received -- the raw binary, if you will -- and this is impossible for an unassisted human. First, to represent the data in our language it would require more information than a human can assemble. Second, even if we could assemble it into something meaningful, there is no way a human could then activate the proper neurons "at will" to simulate the experience.

This limitation in no way detracts from any of the plausible theories of consciousness (it certainly doesn't detract from mine).

I'd say it actually adds to the plausibility of theories of consciousness in that it explains why language may have evolved (and by language I simply mean communication).

To use a human example, I cannot directly access your brain in the sense of poking it and moving neurons around however I can directly access your brain by creating stimuli such as sounds, scents, pressure and so on which allows information to be passed from one part of the environment (me) to another part (you). Consciousness can be viewed simply as this information passing through the environment or in other words it's simply just another "ran".

skiba

16th July 2008, 08:27 AM

How, exactly, is experience different to computation?

A computational device can do only on thing and thats compute, make calculation. what makes you believe a giant calculator can draw some experience from a math formula. Do transistor enjoy math?

Always win at chess, marry a princess, study hard and be an eminent professor...

Maybe he would do all those things but sadly he wouldn't experience it.

No, the same bunch of transistors, via a feedback loop. That's the distinction between something like a thermostat, which Dennett describes as aware, and something that is self-aware.

Round and round.

Interesting. Information or a signals that goes round and round creates experience. So a thermostat that has some sort of feed back loop turns into a experincing entity.

Well, sure. Absolutely. But entirely irrelevant, because experience is computation.

Would a computer based on purely machnical action (consisting of levers gears and spings) have the same affect when it comes to creating a machine that experiences?

Experiences are information.

sort of, but something has to experience that information for it to have any meaning. If you compute it, it only transforms that information. again no experience there.

leon_heller

16th July 2008, 08:53 AM

A computational device can do only on thing and thats compute, make calculation. what makes you believe a giant calculator can draw some experience from a math formula. Do transistor enjoy math?

Is the brain a physical system? If it is, it can be modelled by a "computational device". If it isn't, what are the non-physical components?

Leon

JoeEllison

16th July 2008, 09:20 AM

I'm saying that we have no idea what causes consciousness. That seems to be such an obvious thing to say that it's almost embarassing to keep repeating it.

It appears to be a physical phenomenon. However, to baldly assert that we know this with certainity, without having any idea what physical process creates it, is just handwaving.

For example, there's a school of thought that says that it's just a matter of algorithmic/mechanical complexity. Thus any mechanism has a degree of consciousness, and something as complex as we are will have the same amount, approximately speaking.

This just appears to be an assertion based on nothing more than the fact that human beings are complex, and have consciousness. Aside from that, it's just using the same name for two different things and claiming that they are the same. It's in no way a scientific theory, and it doesn't really explain anything.

Other theories that I've seen suffer from the same problem - they are based on nothing in particular apart from what the theorizer wants to be true.

It's a disturbing thing that we know so little about it, but just making things up doesn't help.
You keep repeating strawmen, illogical comments, and logical fallacies.

It is pretty obvious that you haven't done any thinking on the subject. You've invested a massive amount of brain sweat on rationalizing your irrational faith in a non-physical explanation for "consciousness", and nothing else. You want it to be true, so you distort, twist, and mutilate logic and reality to fit your need for it to be true.

A lot of people have spent a lot of time and energy actually thinking about consciousness and explaining facets of it. Your insulting insistence that no one has presented anything of meaning or value means that, as far as I'm concerned, this "conversation" is over. When you read and attempt to digest the information presented to you in this thread, and are ready to answer it with something other than evasion and strawmen, let me know.

westprog

16th July 2008, 09:44 AM

Is the brain a physical system? If it is, it can be modelled by a "computational device". If it isn't, what are the non-physical components?

Leon

Any physical system can be modelled (to some extent) by a "computational device". That doesn't mean that the model is equivalent to the thing modelled.

I can model the New York subway system on my PC. However, if I want to travel around New York, I need a real train. There is no reason to assume that the model will acquire consciousness. It might, but until we know how consciousness arises, we shouldn't assume it.

leon_heller

16th July 2008, 09:49 AM

I'm saying that we have no idea what causes consciousness. That seems to be such an obvious thing to say that it's almost embarassing to keep repeating it.

It appears to be a physical phenomenon. However, to baldly assert that we know this with certainity, without having any idea what physical process creates it, is just handwaving.

For example, there's a school of thought that says that it's just a matter of algorithmic/mechanical complexity. Thus any mechanism has a degree of consciousness, and something as complex as we are will have the same amount, approximately speaking.

This just appears to be an assertion based on nothing more than the fact that human beings are complex, and have consciousness. Aside from that, it's just using the same name for two different things and claiming that they are the same. It's in no way a scientific theory, and it doesn't really explain anything.

Other theories that I've seen suffer from the same problem - they are based on nothing in particular apart from what the theorizer wants to be true.

It's a disturbing thing that we know so little about it, but just making things up doesn't help.

It does seem as though it simply depends on complexity. Take a simple unicellular organism like an amoeba - it has very simple behaviours and most people would say that it didn't possess consciousness. As we move up the evolutionary tree, consciousness seems to emerge gradually, as organisms become more and more complex. It's presumably adaptive, in an evolutionary sense, otherwise, there wouldn't be such a clear progression.

Even when we consider a single individual, consciousness seems to develop gradually. Take a neonate - there is obviously some degree of consciousness present, but it is enhanced as the brain develops and becomes more complex, as new neuronal connections are formed. Even before birth, consciousness must develop slowly from nothing, as the embryo grows.

Leon

rocketdodger

16th July 2008, 09:54 AM

A lot of people have spent a lot of time and energy actually thinking about consciousness and explaining facets of it. Your insulting insistence that no one has presented anything of meaning or value means that, as far as I'm concerned, this "conversation" is over. When you read and attempt to digest the information presented to you in this thread, and are ready to answer it with something other than evasion and strawmen, let me know.

No kidding. Its like trying to debate with a politician.

We have provided solid answers to all their questions. They ignore these answers then make more posts with the same questions. Its like they think if they just ignore us then we will magically be wrong. How does that work?

Mercutio

16th July 2008, 09:55 AM

A computational device can do only on thing and thats compute, make calculation. what makes you believe a giant calculator can draw some experience from a math formula. Do transistor enjoy math?
Can you let me know precisely what it is to "enjoy math", and how it is you know whether you or any other person enjoys math? If enjoyment can only be defined subjectively, how do you know that your enjoyment of math really should be using the same word ("enjoy") as, say, Darat's enjoyment of math?

Once again, the subjective term assumed to be the bedrock is actually just a fuzzy place-holder for a roughly agreed-upon set of publicly observable behaviors in a language community. The HPC looks for an answer where there is no answer to be found, and insists that it will only accept an answer from that place.

Maybe he would do all those things but sadly he wouldn't experience it.
Anything asserted without evidence can be dismissed just as easily. You are defining "experience" in such a manner as to exclude "doing"; I would have hoped that Darat's "ran" would show you you cannot meaningfully do that.

THere was more, but I know it was not addressed to me, so I'll stop there.

Mercutio

16th July 2008, 09:58 AM

It does seem as though it simply depends on complexity. Take a simple unicellular organism like an amoeba - it has very simple behaviours and most people would say that it didn't possess consciousness. As we move up the evolutionary tree, consciousness seems to emerge gradually, as organisms become more and more complex. It's presumably adaptive, in an evolutionary sense, otherwise, there wouldn't be such a clear progression.

Even when we consider a single individual, consciousness seems to develop gradually. Take a neonate - there is obviously some degree of consciousness present, but it is enhanced as the brain develops and becomes more complex, as new neuronal connections are formed.

LeonNote that in both examples, what is changing is the sort of behavior we can observe. (And when someone is "unconscious", they are exhibiting very few behaviors, other than perhaps breathing.)

The HPC is looking in the wrong place for answers.

westprog

16th July 2008, 10:01 AM

A lot of people have spent a lot of time and energy actually thinking about consciousness and explaining facets of it.

Yes, and they disagree about almost everything. Note how Penrose - one of the smartest people in the world - was dismissed out of hand upthread.

Your insulting insistence that no one has presented anything of meaning or value

Which is of course a travesty of what I said.

means that, as far as I'm concerned, this "conversation" is over. When you read and attempt to digest the information presented to you in this thread, and are ready to answer it with something other than evasion and strawmen, let me know.

Luckily I don't rely on what is posted on internet forums to get information on this subject. There are plenty of texts out there. What there isn't is a consensus.

rocketdodger

16th July 2008, 10:02 AM

Any physical system can be modelled (to some extent) by a "computational device". That doesn't mean that the model is equivalent to the thing modelled.

I can model the New York subway system on my PC. However, if I want to travel around New York, I need a real train. There is no reason to assume that the model will acquire consciousness. It might, but until we know how consciousness arises, we shouldn't assume it.

Here is a question for you:

In the game I am working on, we have fully realistic rigid body physics simulation.

The rigid bodies are just models of real world objects. The physics equations are just a model of real world physics.

Assume I stack some objects, in the game, into a pile.

Is the pile a pile, or just a model of a pile? Why or why not?

leon_heller

16th July 2008, 10:04 AM

Note that in both examples, what is changing is the sort of behavior we can observe. (And when someone is "unconscious", they are exhibiting very few behaviors, other than perhaps breathing.)

The HPC is looking in the wrong place for answers.

How is unconsciousness relevant? I thought we were discussing consciousness.

Leon

leon_heller

16th July 2008, 10:10 AM

Yes, and they disagree about almost everything. Note how Penrose - one of the smartest people in the world - was dismissed out of hand upthread.

Penrose is a very good mathematician, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he knows more about consciousness than specialists in more relevant fields such as philosophy, computing and neuroscience.

How can microtubules perform quantum computations at body temperature?

Leon

westprog

16th July 2008, 10:13 AM

Can you let me know precisely what it is to "enjoy math", and how it is you know whether you or any other person enjoys math? If enjoyment can only be defined subjectively, how do you know that your enjoyment of math really should be using the same word ("enjoy") as, say, Darat's enjoyment of math?

We don't, of course. But I have an internal state which I refer to as enjoyment. I observe that somebody else behaves in a similar way to me when I'm enjoying something, and I assume - without knowing - that his internal state corresponds to mine.

I know what my internal state is, corresponding to enjoyment. I don't discover it by observing my own behaviour. I experience it.

Once again, the subjective term assumed to be the bedrock is actually just a fuzzy place-holder for a roughly agreed-upon set of publicly observable behaviors in a language community. The HPC looks for an answer where there is no answer to be found, and insists that it will only accept an answer from that place.

I'm interested in an explanation of my internal state. The fact that language is fuzzy, and that the phenomenon is inherently subjective is not sufficient grounds for dismissing something that I know to be real.

Anything asserted without evidence can be dismissed just as easily. You are defining "experience" in such a manner as to exclude "doing"; I would have hoped that Darat's "ran" would show you you cannot meaningfully do that.

THere was more, but I know it was not addressed to me, so I'll stop there.

Belz...

16th July 2008, 10:17 AM

I've gotten drunk, but my computer hasn't.

:rolleyes:

Fine, westprog. Be that way.

Saying that consciousness is affected by the physical world, and interacts with it, doesn't mean that it's a computational phenomenon.

I was talking about consciousness being entirely materialistic. I want to be sure we're avoiding any soul-talk, here.

JoeEllison

16th July 2008, 10:18 AM

No kidding. Its like trying to debate with a politician.

We have provided solid answers to all their questions. They ignore these answers then make more posts with the same questions. Its like they think if they just ignore us then we will magically be wrong. How does that work?

When people throw their hands up and walk away from the discussion in disgust, they count it as a victory? We've covered a multitude of angles on the topic, from conceptual and logical reasons why we don't accept the "HPC", to links to research on consciousness that serves to explain aspects of experience. Their response is to pretend that we didn't post anything, and say the same stupid things over and over again. Repetition doesn't create reality, no matter how much they want it to be so.

westprog

16th July 2008, 10:18 AM

Penrose is a very good mathematician, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he knows more about consciousness than specialists in more relevant fields such as philosophy, computing and neuroscience.

Leon

If we are dealing with real phenomena, then it's physics. Penrose clearly knows an enormous amount of physics. To assume that computing is a relevant discipline is to beg the question.

When dealing with matters of how real things work, I wouldn't expect a philosopher to have any more insight than anyone else. And Penrose is well capable of keeping up with the developments in neuroscience.

That doesn't mean that Penrose is right, of course, but the assumption that this field isn't suitable for physicists is a good indicator of the level of waffle involved.

leon_heller

16th July 2008, 10:24 AM

westprog

16th July 2008, 10:25 AM

I was talking about consciousness being entirely materialistic. I want to be sure we're avoiding any soul-talk, here.

For some reason, when I say "we don't know how it works" that gets translated into "there must be some mystical, non-materialistic explanation". When I say "we don't know" that's what I mean.

To insist that the explanation for consciousness must be along some particular lines would be merely to state my own philosophical preferences. I suspect that there is a purely physical explanation, and I don't expect it to be found for a very long time.

westprog

16th July 2008, 10:27 AM

But his physics is clearly wrong, as I mentioned.

Leon

It might be, but I wouldn't rely on programmers, philosophers or neuroscientists to check his work.

He's had an interesting debate with Hawking on the subject. Hawking has different views, naturally.

leon_heller

16th July 2008, 10:35 AM

It might be, but I wouldn't rely on programmers, philosophers or neuroscientists to check his work.

He's had an interesting debate with Hawking on the subject. Hawking has different views, naturally.

Where did I mention programmers?

Which physicists agree with him?

Leon

Dancing David

16th July 2008, 10:38 AM

I know what my internal state is, corresponding to enjoyment. I don't discover it by observing my own behaviour. I experience it.

This may be far back, do you have children?

How does a child learn that it enjoys something?

Fuzzy language is no excuse for not trying to explore what you are talking about.

When you say "I experience it. ", what exactly does that mean?

Do you have a physical sensation that you label as 'enjoy'? Is it a set of thoughts that you experience when you are 'joyous'? Doi they match the memories of when you felt 'joy' in the past?

What is this 'experience', try and describe it, that is what mindfulness training is about.

BTW , another cadge from the alleged historical buddha:

Will you see better if you pluck out your eye?

Dancing David

16th July 2008, 10:44 AM

A computational device can do only on thing and thats compute, make calculation. what makes you believe a giant calculator can draw some experience from a math formula. Do transistor enjoy math?

Do neurons only compute?

base cell: receieves potentiation and attenuation from presynaptic cells

base cell: the probability of attenuation and potentiation can increase and decrease from the presynatic signal

base cell: has a probability of firing the probaility is based on the conditioned response of attenuation and potentiation and the input that it receives

In other words it does not 'just compute', it learns an associative response to the inputs, which is plastic.

This has great implications.

Belz...

16th July 2008, 10:45 AM

Is the brain a physical system? If it is, it can be modelled by a "computational device". If it isn't, what are the non-physical components?

"Non-physical" ?

Dancing David

16th July 2008, 10:46 AM

Yes, and they disagree about almost everything. Note how Penrose - one of the smartest people in the world - was dismissed out of hand upthread.

And when you dismiss the actual research done into this area and just dismiss it out of hand, what does that mean?

have you read up on sensation and perception yet?

leon_heller

16th July 2008, 10:49 AM

If we are dealing with real phenomena, then it's physics. Penrose clearly knows an enormous amount of physics. To assume that computing is a relevant discipline is to beg the question.

When dealing with matters of how real things work, I wouldn't expect a philosopher to have any more insight than anyone else. And Penrose is well capable of keeping up with the developments in neuroscience.

That doesn't mean that Penrose is right, of course, but the assumption that this field isn't suitable for physicists is a good indicator of the level of waffle involved.

Here is what Susan Blackmore has to say about Penrose's theories:

"Concerning the physics, Grush and Churchland argue that microtubules cannot provide the conditions of purity and isolation required by Penrose’s theory, nor could effects be transmitted from one microtubule to another as is required for explaining the unity of consciousness in the way Penrose requires. In addition the theory provides no explanation of how the quantum effects could interact with effects at the level of neurons, neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, when the microtubules are supposed to be isolated from their environment."

"Grush and Churchland (1995) conclude that “... the argument consists of merest possibility piled upon merest possibility teetering upon a tippy foundation of ‘might-be-for-all-we-know’s... we judge it to be completely unconvincing and probably false.” (Grush & Churchland 1995 p 12). Churchland puts it even more strongly: “Quantum coherence in the microtubules is about as explanatorily powerful as pixie dust in the synapses.” (Churchland 1998, p 121)."

"They also ask why such a flimsy theory has proved so popular. Perhaps, they suggest, it is because some people find the idea of explaining consciousness by neuronal activity somehow degrading or scary, whereas “explaining” it by quantum effects retains some of the mystery."

Leon

Dancing David

16th July 2008, 10:50 AM

If we are dealing with real phenomena, then it's physics. Penrose clearly knows an enormous amount of physics. To assume that computing is a relevant discipline is to beg the question.

To assume a physicist who doesn't study it can disect astrphysics of planetary shells prior to a supernove, means what?

When dealing with matters of how real things work, I wouldn't expect a philosopher to have any more insight than anyone else. And Penrose is well capable of keeping up with the developments in neuroscience.

But did he?

unbased and unsupported assertion?

That doesn't mean that Penrose is right, of course, but the assumption that this field isn't suitable for physicists is a good indicator of the level of waffle involved.

Nice spin Westprog and totaly unrelated to the issue at hand, backwards argument from authority much? You threw straw, Penrose read up on all the modern biology of perceptual pathways did he?

Did Penrose talk to the people who study perception?

leon_heller

16th July 2008, 11:31 AM

I've just dug out my copy of Penrose's Shadows of the Mind. He doesn't mention any branches of neuroscience such as perception.

Leon

westprog

16th July 2008, 12:15 PM

And when you dismiss the actual research done into this area and just dismiss it out of hand, what does that mean?

I haven't dismissed any research. Some of it is undoubtedly valuable. I dismissed some conclusions drawn from the research.

have you read up on sensation and perception yet?

I've done a lot of reading, but expect to do a lot more. I find it a useful antidote to certainity.

Mercutio

16th July 2008, 12:30 PM

How is unconsciousness relevant? I thought we were discussing consciousness.

Leon

We were, and that is why it is.

Mercutio

16th July 2008, 12:49 PM

We don't, of course. But I have an internal state which I refer to as enjoyment. I observe that somebody else behaves in a similar way to me when I'm enjoying something, and I assume - without knowing - that his internal state corresponds to mine.
Thank you for illustrating my point. What you are forgetting (it has been a while, after all) is that the same assumption about that other person's internal state was also made about yours, by the people in your life who taught you to label your internal state. There is, of course, no way to know if your internal state and mine are at all similar (it is, as you say, an assumption). But we can and do know that the publicly available referents that taught you and them are the same. These are the behaviors that correspond to your and the others' presumed internal state.

I know what my internal state is, corresponding to enjoyment. I don't discover it by observing my own behaviour. I experience it.
But you do label it, with words taught you by people who did not experience it. You cannot--simply cannot--know if what you feel as "love" is what any other person on the planet feels. The "qualia" is not and cannot be the bedrock of what is known.

I'm interested in an explanation of my internal state. The fact that language is fuzzy, and that the phenomenon is inherently subjective is not sufficient grounds for dismissing something that I know to be real.
You can substitute "assume" or "infer" for "know" in that sentence, and it would be much more accurate.

But again, thank you for illustrating my point.

Nick227

16th July 2008, 01:21 PM

Is it possible there are things that cannot be rationally defined but can only be experienced directly?

For sure there are. Can you rationally define an emotion? Can you rationally define "I?"

Nick

Nick227

16th July 2008, 01:30 PM

Except, of course, that what you just posted isn't really true. There's plenty of explanation, you just reject all of it out of hand by twisting language to insist on their being a problem without explaining why there's a problem. Interesting how after so many pages in just this thread, the best you "HPC" supporters can come up with is sticking your fingers in your ear and saying "uh-uh, no it isn't, it can't be!" towards any non-woo explanations.

Personally I think the issue is more that people who are obsessively rational don't feel many emotions and so can't understand what the HPC is all about.

Nick

Mercutio

16th July 2008, 02:04 PM

Personally I think the issue is more that people who are obsessively rational don't feel many emotions and so can't understand what the HPC is all about.

Nick

You'd be wrong about that, too.

JoeEllison

16th July 2008, 02:11 PM

Personally I think the issue is more that people who are obsessively rational don't feel many emotions and so can't understand what the HPC is all about.

Nick

Mercutio beat me too it, but you ARE wrong. We feel plenty of emotion, we just don't think there's something non-physical about it. There's no reason to think that emotions come from anywhere except our body, especially since emotion is very much a physical thing.

The HPC seems to come from the same sort of false assumptions that people rely on when they talk about people as being somehow separate from the rest of the animal kingdom. Needing to define human existence or thought as divided from the rest of the universe seems to be a primitive and immature drive that a lot of people are saddled with.

skiba

16th July 2008, 02:16 PM

If you want someone else to share the experience of chocolate that you have, you need to provide their neurons with the same signals that yours received -- the raw binary, if you will -- and this is impossible for an unassisted human.

Yes, I believe in the future we will have the ability to copy and transfer the same exact, electrical patter to another human brain. So, possibly this subjective experience problem will go away.

Is the brain a physical system? If it is, it can be modelled by a "computational device". If it isn't, what are the non-physical components?

I think its a combination of both. I wont start speculating on the non-physical, i'll just say it might be in the field quantum mechanics.
All I know for certain is that something vital is missing from the model.

Can you let me know precisely what it is to "enjoy math" and how it is you know whether you or any other person enjoys math? If enjoyment can only be defined subjectively, how do you know that your enjoyment of math really should be using the same word ("enjoy") as, say, Darat's enjoyment of math?

No I can't. I can only hope we are talking about the same thing when we say "enjoy".

Anything asserted without evidence can be dismissed just as easily. You are defining "experience" in such a manner as to exclude "doing";

No, I dont exclude doing, only experience of doing. Can't there be a "doing" without an experience? All the "no HPC folks" here want to keep these two aspects together. Why is that?

In other words it does not 'just compute', it learns an associative response to the inputs, which is plastic.

This has great implications.

I know, "just computation" is a gross simplification

It's very dynamic and flexible, I'll give you that, but still based on computation. (as far as we know)

Piscivore

16th July 2008, 02:24 PM

Personally I think the issue is more that people who are obsessively rational don't feel many emotions and so can't understand what the HPC is all about.

Nick

Is that Argument ad Spockinem?

leon_heller

16th July 2008, 02:26 PM

I think its a combination of both. I wont start speculating on the non-physical, i'll just say it might be in the field quantum mechanics.
All I know for certain is that something vital is missing from the model.

What is missing?

Leon

skiba

16th July 2008, 02:32 PM

Personally I think the issue is more that people who are obsessively rational don't feel many emotions and so can't understand what the HPC is all about.

Nick

Yes, that's what I think too. Some people are so mind bound and logical that it seems hard to convey. I am one of those mind bound people, but I've had my moments of "peace of mind." Maybe some meditation would do good....

Darat

16th July 2008, 02:34 PM

Doesn't the HPC require an assumption of dualism before we can say it is in fact a problem?

Darat

16th July 2008, 02:43 PM

So if you don't agree that p-zombies could exist you are a p-zombie! Wow!

cyborg

16th July 2008, 02:48 PM

Personally I think the issue is more that people who are obsessively rational don't feel many emotions and so can't understand what the HPC is all about.

Personally I think the issue is that people who are so enamored by the idea that they are a ghost in the machine refuse to acknowledge that there is a machine in the ghost and they can't understand illusions are all about.

rocketdodger

16th July 2008, 03:07 PM

For sure there are. Can you rationally define an emotion? Can you rationally define "I?"

Nick

Yes.

Emotion --> feeling I get when I am feeling an emotion.

I --> Me.

Why are those definitions unacceptable?

Mercutio

16th July 2008, 04:39 PM

No I can't. I can only hope we are talking about the same thing when we say "enjoy".
There is really only one way we could be talking about the same thing--if we are talking about the set of publicly available referents that were the examples used while teaching us the word "enjoy".

No, I dont exclude doing, only experience of doing. Can't there be a "doing" without an experience? All the "no HPC folks" here want to keep these two aspects together. Why is that?

Turtles.

Doing
Experience of doing
Sensation of experience of doing
Perception of sensation of experience of doing
Feeling of perception of sensation of experience of doing
Qualia of feeling of perception of sensation of experience of doing

As Darat implies, it is only the assumption of dualism that initially creates "these two aspects". It is not that we are denying an additional something; rather, it is that we are not making up an additional something in the first place.

westprog

16th July 2008, 05:10 PM

Doesn't the HPC require an assumption of dualism before we can say it is in fact a problem?

No.

westprog

16th July 2008, 05:11 PM

Yes.

Emotion --> feeling I get when I am feeling an emotion.

I --> Me.

Why are those definitions unacceptable?

They are rational. They are also understandable to most people.

They are, OTOH, somewhat circular.

westprog

16th July 2008, 05:13 PM

Personally I think the issue is that people who are so enamored by the idea that they are a ghost in the machine refuse to acknowledge that there is a machine in the ghost and they can't understand illusions are all about.

If there's an illusion, what is experiencing the illusion?

cyborg

16th July 2008, 05:19 PM

If there's an illusion, what is experiencing the illusion?

The machine.

westprog

16th July 2008, 05:21 PM

Thank you for illustrating my point. What you are forgetting (it has been a while, after all) is that the same assumption about that other person's internal state was also made about yours, by the people in your life who taught you to label your internal state. There is, of course, no way to know if your internal state and mine are at all similar (it is, as you say, an assumption). But we can and do know that the publicly available referents that taught you and them are the same. These are the behaviors that correspond to your and the others' presumed internal state.
But you do label it, with words taught you by people who did not experience it. You cannot--simply cannot--know if what you feel as "love" is what any other person on the planet feels. The "qualia" is not and cannot be the bedrock of what is known.

The qualia are the hard problem. It's the fact that they are inherently subjective, and individual, that makes them nearly impossible to pin down. Ignore the qualia, and we just have behaviour. We can pretend that experience = computation, and we all work like thermostats.

I've posted this before, but it seems to cover this case.

The Mystery Of Consciousness[/I]]
But in comtemporary philosophy the most common move is to insist that materialism must be right and to eliminate consciousness by reducing it to something else. Daniel C. Dennett is an obvious example of a philosopher who adopts this position. Favourite candidates for the phenomena to which consciousness must be reduced are brain states described in purely "physical" terms and computer programs. But... all of these reductionist attempts to eliminate consciousness are as hopeless as the dualism they were designed to supplant. In a way they are worse, because they deny the real existence of the conscious states they were supposed to explain.

You can substitute "assume" or "infer" for "know" in that sentence, and it would be much more accurate.

If that's the case, I can't ever use the word "know". If the momentary singular experience isn't real, then what is?

westprog

16th July 2008, 05:22 PM

The machine.

I'm not aware of machines experiencing illusions.

Piggy

16th July 2008, 05:34 PM

Doesn't the HPC require an assumption of dualism before we can say it is in fact a problem?

See, this is what I don't get.

I've actually read thru the thread, and a lot of this back-and-forth just loses me.

Maybe I'm missing something.

I see the HPC as a very real problem, and one amenable to inquiry.

I don't see how dualism has to be involved.

If I understand correctly, the "hard problem" consists merely in explaining how our brains produce the experience of self and sensation.

This is a different question from how the brain processes sensory input and how it generates responses, although obviously the latter are inextricable from the former.

I mean, we have no reason to expect that a rock has anything like a conscious experience. We know that humans do. It's reasonable to assume that apes, elephants, and other mammals do, too.

If Dennett is correct with his brain-in-a-brain theory, then insects and arachnids have no conscious experience, and yet they process input and produce responses.

So the problem is real, seems to me. You can tackle all the small problems, yet that doesn't necessarily tell you how it is that I have the experience of sitting here typing, how I'm aware of it.

Piscivore

16th July 2008, 05:40 PM

I mean, we have no reason to expect that a rock has anything like a conscious experience. We know that humans do. It's reasonable to assume that apes, elephants, and other mammals do, too.

If Dennett is correct with his brain-in-a-brain theory, then insects and arachnids have no conscious experience, and yet they process input and produce responses.

The thing that rocks, insects and arachnids seem to lack that humans, apes, elephants, and other mammals have seems to be memory. Memory seems to be sufficient to explain "experience of self and sensation". Why does consciousness need be any more complicated than that?

Hokulele

16th July 2008, 05:51 PM

Piggy

16th July 2008, 05:53 PM

The thing that rocks, insects and arachnids seem to lack that humans, apes, elephants, and other mammals have seems to be memory. Memory seems to be sufficient to explain "experience of self and sensation". Why does consciousness need be any more complicated than that?

Computers have memory.

I don't mean to be flip, but it's certainly possible to consider memory apart from consciousness.

I don't see how storage and retrieval of information is equivalent to having an experience of your own existence.

One thing we all do know is that we do have this experience.

One thing we can assume from all the evidence we have about the brain is that this experience is entirely the result of the activity of the brain.

Therefore, it's a meaningful and significant question to consider how the brain produces this effect.

I can't see how it can be simply equated with memory.

Piscivore

16th July 2008, 06:27 PM

I disagree. Bees have demonstrated that they can "remember" the location of a food source relative to the hive, and can communicate that location to other hive members. This was one of the examples in my longer post right after the pie derail.

Blast. I forgot the damn bees.

Mercutio

16th July 2008, 06:37 PM

The qualia are the hard problem. It's the fact that they are inherently subjective, and individual, that makes them nearly impossible to pin down. Ignore the qualia, and we just have behaviour. We can pretend that experience = computation, and we all work like thermostats.
This is the dualistic assumption that Darat complained about. Using the phrase "inherently subjective" implies a difference in kind; another way of looking at, say, seeing red, is that it is simply private behavior. The difference between the "seeing" and Darat's "ran" would be a matter of number of observers, but no implication of substance difference.

Oh, and we do "just have behavior". Behavior, as defined by behaviorists, is "what you do", and includes both public and private behavior. The scientific study of sensation and perception shows us nowhere at all where qualia are a necessary part of visual perception (to choose the most-studied sense). The people for whom qualia are a necessary element are those who have assumed the existence of qualia, not those who have studied the way the organism actually works.

I've posted this before, but it seems to cover this case.
I have that book in my office. "Seems" is a good choice of word. Searle's objection is as if he objects to a "world-turning" explanation of sunrise because it denies the observable fact that the sun actually rises through the sky over a stationary earth. He rejects, as far as I can tell, because the HPC, as I have said, presupposes a particular sort of answer.

If that's the case, I can't ever use the word "know". If the momentary singular experience isn't real, then what is?
You can use the word "know", but not in circumstances like this where you do not. The actual research in consciousness shows that the "momentary singular experience" is vastly different from what we usually report it as. (To take the simplest of examples--you do not, except under very constrained circumstances, experience a blind spot in your visual field [assuming you have normal vision]. But you do in fact have this blind spot.) The rich visual tapestry we report is very different from the piecemeal collection of details we actually perceive, but we can only tell this by careful experimentation.

In other words, momentary singular experience is a terrible thing to consider as your standard of reality.

Dancing David

16th July 2008, 06:43 PM

Personally I think the issue is more that people who are obsessively rational don't feel many emotions and so can't understand what the HPC is all about.

Nick

Welcome to IGNORE oh well spring of compassion.

Jeff Corey

16th July 2008, 07:26 PM

'Tis a far better thing to be obsessively rational than a poor fool who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.

PixyMisa

16th July 2008, 07:36 PM

If we are dealing with real phenomena, then it's physics. Penrose clearly knows an enormous amount of physics.
Penrose may know a lot about physics, but he's still talking utter tripe when it comes to "quantum consciousness".

Max Tegmark - who happens to be a physicist too - had a few things to say (http://www.sustainedaction.org/Explorations/problem_with_quantum_mind_theory.htm) about Penrose's ideas.

PixyMisa

16th July 2008, 07:47 PM

A computational device can do only on thing and thats compute, make calculation. what makes you believe a giant calculator can draw some experience from a math formula. Do transistor enjoy math?
No, it would take several transistors to enjoy math.

Maybe he would do all those things but sadly he wouldn't experience it.
What's the basis for this claim of yours?

We can certainly create a computer system that would claim to experience these things, and describe its experiences in familiar terms.

In what sense does it not experience these events?

Interesting. Information or a signals that goes round and round creates experience.
Yes.

So a thermostat that has some sort of feed back loop turns into a experincing entity.
Yes.

Would a computer based on purely machnical action (consisting of levers gears and spings) have the same affect when it comes to creating a machine that experiences?
Yes.

sort of, but something has to experience that information for it to have any meaning. If you compute it, it only transforms that information. again no experience there.
What is this "meaning" of which you speak?

Why, it is information.

So if we transform the information that we label the "perception" of an event such as to create additional information that we label "meaning", we can combine the two sets of information into a single set that we label "experience".

What else is there? Seriously, this is the key question: What do you think is happening when you experience something, other than information processing?

PixyMisa

16th July 2008, 07:54 PM

If we are dealing with real phenomena, then it's physics. Penrose clearly knows an enormous amount of physics. To assume that computing is a relevant discipline is to beg the question.
Not at all.

Penrose's ideas of "quantum consciousness" fail in at least three ways:

1. They rely on quantum processes that cannot possibly exist.
2. They describe properties of consciousness that do not exist.
3. They do not explain consciousness as it does exist.

Computing is at entirely relevant in understanding the properties of information processing systems - which is precisely what the brain is, and consciousness a product of.

When dealing with matters of how real things work, I wouldn't expect a philosopher to have any more insight than anyone else. And Penrose is well capable of keeping up with the developments in neuroscience.
Clearly, he is not, or he wouldn't be talking tripe.

That doesn't mean that Penrose is right, of course, but the assumption that this field isn't suitable for physicists is a good indicator of the level of waffle involved.
The physics involved is already well-understood.