Careful with this 'we'. I've looked at philosophy of mind from many perspectives. — Wayfarer

Sorry. I didn't mean you. I meant people in general, as a result of "Galileo's Error".

For those actually interested the Causal issue here is a snippet from Davidson expressing something akin to what I am getting at: — I like sushi

I like the snippet. Wish his books didn't cost so much.

Property Dualism in a nutshell? It does get confusing when people use differing terms to describe the same idea.

Another example would be physicalism and materialism. People tend to use this as synonyms while others do not. What is important is to clarify your position and use of terminology. — I like sushi

Ain't it the truth. Materialism. Physicalism. Naturalism. Nagel even says 'I will use the terms “materialism” or “materialist naturalism” to refer to one side of this conflict...' I can't imagine there will ever be a consensus on the exact meaning of these words, and anything less than exact can only lead to discussions of definitions. Which takes away from the more important discussion. I think the best solution is probably to not use any of them, and just spell out what you mean every time.

This is the crux of the so-called "hard problem": how consciousness could possibly emerge from wholly non-conscious components. But note the implicit assumption — that a configuration of matter and forces gives rise to inner experience. What if this assumption is itself misguided? — Wayfarer

It certainty is.

In other words, instead of questioning the conceptual framework that makes consciousness seem alien to materialism, Strawson redefines matter to include it — which looks suspiciously like moving the goalposts. That's the sleight-of-hand that panpychism tries to get away with. — Wayfarer

Another way of looking at it is that I don't think we have any justification for saying reality contains only the things we have discovered, or can discovered, with our senses and the devices we've built. Consciousness is proof of this, and there's no reason to rule out a building block, as it were, for the consciousness we're familiar with. Everything else we're familiar with is built up from some kind of building block, after all.

Hence the various contortions in contemporary philosophy of mind — from eliminativism and behaviourism to panpsychism — all share a desire to naturalise consciousness, but without challenging the presuppositions of naturalism itself. — Wayfarer

How can it be that thinking consciousness is a fundamental property of reality is not challenging the presuppositions of naturalism?

rather than grafting mental properties onto matter
...........

Consciousness isn’t simply another puzzle to be inserted into a pre-existing picture of the world
...........

not of matter with consciousness as a puzzling add-on — Wayfarer

I don't see it as "grafted", "inserted", or "added on", any more than properties like mass or electric charge are. Everything is just a part of what is. As such, consciousness is not "puzzling." The problem is that we are so used to thinking of things in only one way that it's difficult to consider there might be other ways.

Philosophim does not believe there is a Hard Problem.
— I like sushi

Incorrect. We cannot know what its like to have the subjective experience of another individual, and while this is the case, the hard problem will be unsolvable. — Philosophim

But what is the Hard Problem?

I agree. But I don't think all properties are physical.
— Patterner
That's another tack, suggesting properties of trivial parts (atoms say) that have never been measured by anything studying atoms. — noAxioms

If consciousness is fundamental, then we can't measure it in the ways we measure everything else. It's not physical, and all of our methods of detecting and measuring are physical.

We can clearly see brain states influencing behaviors and responses from individuals that demonstrate altered brain states alter the person's subjective experience. — Philosophim

The HPoC is explaining why the altered brain states alter the person's subjective experience. Why do brain states have subjective experience at all? There is no physicalist theory, or even a guess. As Hoffman and Greene said about the physical properties off the universe:
"is utterly different in nature than conscious experience".
"there is nothing that even hints at the inner experiences those particles somehow generate."
"seem completely disconnected from anything remotely like subjective experience."

That it happens in the physical brain is the answer to where it happens. The Hard Problem is how. If I rubbed two sticks together and a geyser of water shot out of it, you would ask how that happened. You would not be satisfied if I answered that it came from the wood. That's not an explanation. Neither is brain activity an answer to how subjective experience comes about.

Why does hydrogen and two oxygen in combination at a certain temperature become a water? This question applies to the entirety of existence. Why is a rock hard? Why from carbon can we construct graphite and all living things? — Philosophim

We can answer these questions. We can explain these things, at least in terms of properties of particles. Negatively charged electrons, electron shells, positively charged protons, etc. Because of all that, atoms are formed, molecules are formed, graphite is formed... We can't explain how/why electrons have negative charge, protons have positive charge, electron shells have the specific numbers of atoms they have... But we can explain down to that level.

Here I just posted an incredible description of party of what's going on in our cells, on the molecular level, the explains how we are powered. Beyond fascination, and detailed description of what happens.

We cannot do any of that with consciousness. Nobody has any idea how it can come about from the properties of particles. There's nothing. What does it have to do with mass, charge, the nuclear forces, gravity, or any other physical thing that can be named? There aren't even guesses. Nobody can make any connection.

I view the objects and phenomena of pretty much all the special sciences (e.g. biology, ecology, psychology, economics, etc.) to be strongly emergent in relation with the the objects and phenomena of the material sciences such as physics or chemistry. Some, like our apokrisis argue (and I would agree) that even within physics, especially when the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium processes is involved, many phenomena are strongly emergent in the sense that they aren't intelligible merely in light of, or deducible from, the laws that govern their smaller components. — Pierre-Normand

We cannot account for every molecule of air in a room, but we do fine measuring things like temperature and air pressure. And the temperature and pressure are, and are specifically what they are, because of individual molecules.

Other things might be the result of, or dependent on, the properties or behavior of some kind of structures, rather than individual molecules or atoms. But those structures have the properties they have to the atoms and molecules that they are comprised of.

Does anything you have in mind not fall into the category of either directly dependent on/caused by the particles, or due to structures that have their properties because of the particles? Here is what, for me, is a great description of some of the awesome stuff that's happening in our cells. I think it's truly mind-blowing. One aspect of metabolism, from Brian Greene's Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe:

Evidence for the unity of life grows even more convincing as we follow the subsequent journey of the energy released by electrons hopping from one redox reaction to another. That energy is used to charge up biological batteries that are built into each and every cell. In turn, the biological batteries power the synthesis of molecules particularly adept at transporting and delivering energy wherever and whenever it is needed throughout a cell. It is an elaborate process. But across life, it is the same process.

In broad outline here is how it goes. As an electron jumps into the outstretched molecular arms of a given redox receptor, the receiving molecule twitches, causing it to shift its orientation relative to other molecules closely packed around it, much like a gear ratcheting one step forward. When the fickle electron subsequently jumps to the next redox receptor, the first molecule clicks back to its original orientation, while the new molecular recipient experiences the twitch. As the electron executes further jumps, the pattern continues. Molecules receiving an electron twitch, ratcheting their orientations forward; molecules losing an electron twitch too, ratcheting their orientations back.

In a living cell we encounter an analogous situation, with pent-up protons replacing pent-up electrons. But it’s a distinction that hardly makes a difference. Protons, like electrons, all carry the same electric charge, and so they also repel one another. When cellular redox reactions pack protons closely together, they too stand at the ready waiting for the chance to rush away from their enforced companions. Cellular redox reactions thus charge up biological proton-based batteries. In fact, because the protons are all clustered on one side of an extremely thin membrane (just a few dozen atoms wide), the electric field (the membrane voltage divided by the membrane thickness) can be enormous, upwards of tens of millions of volts per meter. A cellular bio battery is no slouch.

What, then, do cells do with these mini power stations? Here’s where things get yet more astounding. Attached to the membrane are a great many nanoscale-sized turbines. When the packed protons are allowed to flow back across specific sections of the membrane, they cause the tiny turbines to rotate, much as flowing gusts of air cause windmills to rotate. In centuries past, such wind-powered turning motion was used to crush wheat or other grains into flour. The cellular windmills undertake an analogous grinding project but instead of pulverizing structure the process builds it. As they turn, the molecular turbines repeatedly cram together two particular input molecules (ADP, adenosine diphosphate plus a phosphate group), synthesizing one particular output molecule (ATP, adenosine triphosphate). Forced together by the turbine, the constituents of each resulting ATP molecule are in a tense arrangement: mutually repelling charged constituents are clasped together by chemical bonds, and so, much like a compressed spring, they strain to be released. That’s extraordinarily useful. Molecules of ATP can travel throughout a cell, releasing that stored energy when needed by snapping the chemical bonds and allowing the constituent particles to relax into a lower energy, more comfortable state. It is that very energy, released by the dissociation of ATP molecules, that powers cellular functions.

The tireless activity of these cellular power stations becomes clear when you consider a few numbers. The functions that keep a typical cell alive for just a single second require the energy stored in about ten million ATP molecules. Your body contains tens of trillions of cells, which means that every second you consume on the order of one hundred million trillion (10^20) ATP molecules. Each time an ATP is used, it splits up into the raw materials (ADP and a phosphate), which the proton battery-powered turbines then cram back together into freshly minted, fully rejuvenated ATP molecules. These ATP molecules then hit the road again, delivering energy throughout the cell. To meet your body’s energy demands, your cellular turbines are thus astoundingly productive. Even if you’re an extremely fast reader, as you scan through this very sentence your body is synthesizing some five hundred million trillion molecules of ATP. And just now, another three hundred million trillion more. — Brian Greene

It's all about the molecules, atoms, and proteins and electrons.

The reason we can't know what its like to experience it, is we have no way of knowing what a 'thing' experiences without being 'that thing'. — Philosophim

The answer is simple. We are not the particles. We don't know how to have the experience of those particles without being those particles. — Philosophim

It's not a matter of not being able to experience what someone/thing else experiences. The puzzle is why anything has any subjective experience at all. That's the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Why does the physical activity of moving ions, signals moving through neurons, neurotransmitters jumping the gap between neurons, and any and all other physical activity, have a subjective experience?

But Brian Greene's point is, the physical properties of an electron can be measured with precision. — Wayfarer

His point is that, although the properties can be measured with Precision, but we do not know what that are. We could not know what proto-consciousness is, either, even if we know what it does. Of course we won't be able to measure it with our physical ways of measuring things. What are the measurements of consciousness according to your idealism?

I don't think we're all that separate from one another. I just view subjective experience as the experience of being physical being over time. In other words, its simply an aspect of the physical, not something separate.

I am curious in terms of motivation, what is the push to make consciousness something non-physical? — Philosophim

I am not trying to "make consciousness something non-physical." Consciousness is non-physical. I'm interested in this particular hypothesis.

I present these three steps regarding it not being physical.

1)
Chalmers presents the problem in his famous Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, Chalmers says:

There is no analogous further question in the explanation of genes, or of life, or of learning. If someone says “I can see that you have explained how DNA stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next, but you have not explained how it is a gene”, then they are making a conceptual mistake. All it means to be a gene is to be an entitythat performs the relevant storage and transmission function. But if someone says “I can see that you have explained how information is discriminated, integrated, and reported, but you have not explained how it is experienced”, they are not making a conceptual mistake.

This is a nontrivial further question. This further question is the key question in the problem of consciousness. Why doesn’t all this information-processing go on “in the dark”, free of any inner feel? Why is it that when
electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. — David Chalmers

2
A couple quotes that I think make the problem a little more clear. From people who I think know what they're talking about.

At 7:00 of this video, while talking about the neural correlates of consciousness and ions flowing through holes in membranes, Donald Hoffman asks:

Why should it be that consciousness seems to be so tightly correlated with activity that is utterly different in nature than conscious experience? — Donald Hoffman

In Until the End of Time, Brian Greene wrote:

And within that mathematical description, affirmed by decades of data from particle colliders and powerful telescopes, there is nothing that even hints at the inner experiences those particles somehow generate. How can a collection of mindless, thoughtless, emotionless particles come together and yield inner sensations of color or sound, of elation or wonder, of confusion or surprise? Particles can have mass, electric charge, and a handful of other similar features (nuclear charges, which are more exotic versions of electric charge), but all these qualities seem completely disconnected from anything remotely like subjective experience. How then does a whirl of particles inside a head—which is all that a brain is—create impressions, sensations, and feelings? — Greene

3
What exactly is the, or a, physicalist theory of consciousness?

David Eagleman in this video,

Your other question is, why does it feel like something? That we don't know. and the weird situation we're in in modern neuroscience, of course, is that, not only do we not have a theory of that, but we don't know what such a theory would even look like. Because nothing in our modern mathematics days, "Ok, well, do a triple interval and carry the 2, and then *click* here's the taste of feta cheese. — David Eagleman

Donald Hoffman in this video,

It's not just that we don't have scientific theories. We don't have remotely plausible ideas about how to do it. — Donald Hoffman

Donald Hoffman in The Case Against Reality Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, when he was talking to Francis Crick:

“Can you explain,” I asked, “how neural activity causes conscious experiences, such as my experience of the color red?” “No,” he said. “If you could make up any biological fact you want,” I persisted, “can you think of one that would let you solve this problem?” “No,” he replied, but added that we must pursue research in neuroscience until some discovery reveals the solution. — Donald Hoffman

We don't have a clue. Even those who assume it must be physical, because physical is all we can perceive and measure with our senses and devices, don't have any guesses. Even if he could make something up to explain how it could work, Crick couldn't think of anything.

Lets say for example that consciousness was something non-physical, but it could never be separated from the body and would cease to be forever when your brain dies. Would you accept that! Or would there be no an insistence that consciousness had some other aspect that made it last beyond bodily death? — Philosophim

I think proto-consciousness is a property of matter, just like mass and electric charge are. When the body dies, mass and electric charge are still in the particles. So is proto-consciousness. But there is no longer a thinking brain experiencing itself.

I'm asking if anyone has an example of strong emergence. For those who think consciousness is, I'm wondering if there are others.

The only avalaible properties are the properties of parts though. — MoK

I agree. But I don't think all properties are physical.

For those who think consciousness is an example of strong emergence, are there any other examples?

Mental causes are really physical causes so I see no real difference in them than any other cause.
— Philosophim
Is there any need for the word "mental"?
— Patterner

Absolutely. We can't go around calling everything 'physical' all the time in normal conversation. It is a great way to compartmentalize a certain set of physical existence and processes that are different from other physical sets and processes. We need some type of categorization, and we're not going to change the use of the word anytime soon. The issue is that mental processes are still physical processes. As long as you realize that, talking about mental processes is fine. Its when you start to think they exist apart from physical processes as some independent entities that you run into trouble. — Philosophim

I gotcha. And I agree, although I don't suspect you would agree with the reason I agree. I think consciousness and thinking/mental are entirely different things. I think consciousness is simply subjective experience, and thinking/mental is something humans are conscious of. So we can talk about mental being a physical process without touching on consciousness.

Don't forget about property dualism. :grin: Matter has a non-physical property.
— Patterner

Which nobody can specify. — Wayfarer

I don't know how you mean by this. In what way can anyone specify what they think is the answer to the HPoC? Surely proto-consciousness is not far less specified that it shouldn't be mentioned with the other guesses.

Also, as Brian Greene writes in Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe, Brian Greene writes:

If you’re wondering what proto-consciousness really is or how it’s infused into a particle, your curiosity is laudable, but your questions are beyond what Chalmers or anyone else can answer. Despite that, it is helpful to see these questions in context. If you asked me similar questions about mass or electric charge, you would likely go away just as unsatisfied. I don’t know what mass is. I don’t know what electric charge is. What I do know is that mass produces and responds to a gravitational force, and electric charge produces and responds to an electromagnetic force. So while I can’t tell you what these features of particles are, I can tell you what these features do. In the same vein, perhaps researchers will be unable to delineate what proto-consciousness is and yet be successful in developing a theory of what it does—how it produces and responds to consciousness. For gravitational and electromagnetic influences, any concern that substituting action and response for an intrinsic definition amounts to an intellectual sleight of hand is, for most researchers, alleviated by the spectacularly accurate predictions we can extract from our mathematical theories of these two forces. Perhaps we will one day have a mathematical theory of proto-consciousness that can make similarly successful predictions. For now, we don’t.

I italicized the two instances of "I don't know" because Greene emphasizes them in his reading of the book. So if a fairly competent physicist doesn't know what a couple of important physical properties are - properties that we know certainly exist because of the effects they have on things, effects that we have measured with incredible precision - then I'm not going to worry that we can't do more for a non-physical property.

Non-reductive physicalism
...........
The alternative seems to be dualism - that mind is one kind of substance and matter another.
............
Or idealism - that mind is somehow fundamental, which is hardly accepted by academic philosophy at all. — Wayfarer

Don't forget about property dualism. :grin: Matter has a non-physical property.

Mental causes are really physical causes so I see no real difference in them than any other cause. — Philosophim

Is there any need for the word "mental"?

I'm interested in how you see this issue. Are you more inclined to grant an agent-like status to the AG program and others of similar sophistication? — J

No, I am not. I think there must be quite a bit more to an entity than just the one kind of mental ability for it to have an agent-like status, regardless of how advanced that ability is. How do we even describe all that is going on in the human brain and body? How much information is being processed within us every second? How many different kinds of information? I don't suspect we could come up with an actual number. And most of it is routed through the brain, which, as it's coordinating all that, trying everything together, is processing an immense amount of its own information.

To get to that point, we, as soon as we're born, learn to manipulate the world around us, giving meaning to everything.

What does the most advanced program do in comparison?

It’s not a digital computer, but it’s a device used for calculations. But the rhetorical point, was simply that computers no more intend than does the abacus. — Wayfarer

My point was that an abacus does not process information, and is therefore not a unit in regards to consciousness (according to the idea I'm discussing the last couple weeks). It is only a physical unit to our eyes, and a tool that we use to help us process information.

By the way - I might draw your attention to an AEON article from a few years ago - now a book - The Blind Spot. It is a relevant criticism of the form of panpsychism (of the Harris/Goff variety) that you’re pursuing. — Wayfarer

Well, I am the unlearned one, so I often don't get what most of you are saying. I don't see how that article criticizes what I'm pursuing. I think the physical and experiential are inseparable. The article seems to be saying the same.

not sure what I'm doing wrong with that. The link is:
https://meridian.allenpress.com/aplm/article/141/5/619/194217/AlphaGo-Deep-Learning-and-the-Future-of-the-Human

The authors are:
Scott R. Granter, MD; Andrew H. Beck, MD, PhD; David J. Papke, Jr, MD, PhD

↪Patterner Yes, would need all of that - but the point being, computers are still physical systems. — Wayfarer

Yes, computers are physical systems. But an abacus is not a computer. It can't process information unless you give it a power system and add the rules so it manipulates the beads correctly. IOW, unless you turn it into a computer.

(Notice my careful avoidance of the term "learn"! :wink: There is no entity here that can learn anything.) — J

Do you think they use "learn" and "teach" inappropriately in this article?

In March of last year, Google's (Menlo Park, California) artificial intelligence (AI) computer program AlphaGo beat the best Go player in the world, 18-time champion Lee Se-dol, in a tournament, winning 4 of 5 games. At first glance this news would seem of little interest to a pathologist, or to anyone else for that matter. After all, many will remember that IBM's (Armonk, New York) computer program Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov—at the time the greatest chess player in the world—and that was 19 years ago. So, what's so significant about a computer winning another board game?

The rules of the several-thousand-year-old game of Go are extremely simple. The board consists of 19 horizontal and 19 vertical black lines. Players take turns placing either black or white stones on vacant intersections of the grid with the goal of surrounding the largest area and capturing their opponent's stones. Once placed, stones cannot be moved again. Despite the simplicity of its rules, Go is a mind-bogglingly complex game—far more complex than chess. A game of 150 moves (approximately average for a game of Go) can involve 10360 possible configurations, “more than there are atoms in the Universe.”  As complex as it is, chess is vastly less complex than Go, and chess is amenable to “brute force” algorithmic computer approaches for beating expert chess players like Kasparov. To beat Kasparov, Deep Blue analyzed possible moves and evaluated outcomes to decide the best move.

Go's much higher complexity and intuitive nature prevents computer scientists from using brute force algorithmic approaches for competing against humans. For this reason, Go is often referred to as the “holy grail of AI research.”  To beat Se-dol, Google's AlphaGo program used artificial neural networks that simulate mammalian neural architecture to study millions of game positions from expert human–played Go games. But this exercise would, at least theoretically, only teach the computer to be on par with the best human players. To become better than the best humans, AlphaGo then played against itself millions of times, over and over again, learning and improving with each game—an exercise referred to as reinforcement learning. By playing itself and determining which moves lead to better outcomes, AlphaGo literally learns by teaching itself. And the unsettling thing is that we don't understand what AlphaGo is thinking. In an interview with FiveThirtyEight, one computer scientist commented, “It is a mystery to me why the program plays as well as it does.” 5 In the same article, an expert Go player said, “It makes moves that no human, including the team who made it, understands,” and “AlphaGo is the creation of humans, but the way it plays is not.”  It is easy to see how some viewed AlphaGo's victory over Se-dol as a turning point in the history of humanity—we have created machines that truly think and, at least in some areas like Go, they are smarter, much smarter, than we are. — Scott R. Granter, MD

An abacus can be used to process information - it's a primitive computer. There's no real difference in principle between the abacus and a computer. The difference is one of scale. The NVidia chips that drive AI have billions of transistors embedded in a patch of silicon. You could in principle reproduce that technology with the abacus, although it would probably be the size of a city, and it would take long periods of time to derive a result. But in principle, it's the same process. — Wayfarer

Could you do that without giving it a power system and adding the rules so the abacus would manipulate the beads correctly?

A Paul Davies quote seems appropriate, although I don't know if it helps any. From The Demon in the Machine:

Like information, energy can be passed from one physical system to another and, under the right conditions, it is conserved. So would one say that energy has an autonomous existence? Think of a simple problem in Newtonian mechanics: the collision of two billiard balls. Suppose a white ball is skilfully propelled towards a stationary red ball. There is a collision and the red ball flies off towards a pocket. Would it be accurate to say that ‘energy’ caused the red ball to move? It is true that the kinetic energy of the white ball was needed to propel the red ball, and some of this energy was passed on in the collision. So, in that sense, yes, energy (strictly, energy transfer) was a causative factor. However, physicists would not normally discuss the problem in these terms. They would simply say that the white ball hit the red ball, causing it to move. But because kinetic energy is instantiated in the balls, where the balls go, the energy goes. So to attribute causal power to energy isn’t wrong, but it is somewhat quixotic. One could give a completely detailed and accurate account of the collision without any reference to energy whatsoever. — Paul Davies

What might an abacus be conscious of? — Wayfarer

I don't suspect an abacus is a conscious unit. While I suspect consciousness is everywhere, in all things, I don't think everything that humans view as physical units necessarily are conscious units. I think the unit must be processing information in order to be a conscious unit. That is, I think experiencing information processing is what unifies all the parts of a physical unit as a conscious unit.

An abacus does not process information. It is just a tool we use to process information, and reveals the information processing we are doing.

A possible reply to this is that "ineffable" may be one of Chalmers' "temporary" obstacles, as opposed to a permanent one like biological composition. Even your chatty friend only goes so far as to say "ineffable at least in part." We should acknowledge the possibility that, in the future, this will become effable :smile: . I know that right now "irreducibly first-personal" seems like the end of the road, but let's wait and see.

Another reply is that consciousness will "just kinda happen," along the lines of a sketchy emergent property, if we put together the right ingredients. Therefore we don't need to know what it is or how to synthesize it -- it'll happen on its own. — J

Yet another reply is that consciousness is fundamental, already there in the LLM. But the LLM does not have enough information processing systems and feedback loops to experience itself with the awareness and self awareness worry which we experience ourselves. It can only experience its own abilities, not ours. And it does not have our abilities to experience, it can't very well demonstrate that it does.

A collection of electronic switches being conscious is no different than a collection of neurons being conscious. — RogueAI

Indeed. It is a matter of what the electronic switches are conscious of.

Or Beethoven composing music after going deaf.

Louis CK says he hates when people say "The N-word." Not the actual word, but "the N-word." Because you're intentionally putting the word into someone's mind. And if you're going to do that, you should have to actually say the word. (He explains it with harsher language.)

17-12=

A young woman and young man, early 20s, run into each other at a party. They don't know each other, but start talking. They are stunned when they realize they lived a couple houses apart about 15 years ago, before the girl's family moved away. The young man says he cried those years ago when he heard she had moved away. He says he remembers that she said she liked brand new, shiny pennies, because they reminded her of the sun.

If you now have a certain word, and/or number, and/or scene of a romantic nature, in your head, was it put there physically? I think the medium of my communication, squiggles on the screen, is physical. But the meaning of the squiggles is not physical. And, since I stopped before the word, number, or scene, I certainly didn't physically put them into your head.

You can identify neural correlates of mental events, but correlation is not identity. — RogueAI

Indeed. The neural correlates are locations.

↪frank I think at that point mathematics wasn’t divorced from the real world yet. Numbers were representations of things. 5 was a representation of 5 things. But what does it mean to talk of 0 things? That’s literally talking about nothing. Negative numbers came even later (if I remember correctly) for the same reason. It is pointless to talk of 0 things and nonsense to talk of negative things. How could you have -3 tables? — khaled

Stand and Deliver is a really good movie. Here's the scene where he talks about 0 and negative numbers.

"Did you ever dig a hole? The sand that comes out of the hole, that's a positive. The hole is a negative."

"Minus 2 plus 2, fill the hole." — Stand and Deliver

But yeah, I doubt anybody ever thought of that before they tried to explain negative numbers.

Already the RNA that transcribes is the "observer — Ulthien

I assumed RogueAI meant an observer with some mental abilities, perhaps even humans. But if considering things your way, then perhaps the answer to the question "To whom do the codons and strings of codons mean amino acids and proteins?" is RNA, or maybe the laws of physics.

With due respect, this discussion misses some 75 years of prior research :P — Ulthien

Darn, I was hoping nobody would notice. :rofl: I am not well read in much of this stuff.

I really like this post btw. — Philosophim

Thank you.

I wouldn't fight you on your alternative proposal. I see the value in knowing that when someone uses the word "consciousness", they mean something specific. It won't be easy to get everyone to go along with this, because "consciousness" is often defined as "subjective experience". But I expect those who only define it as the mental properties humans have would be all in.

Take a bit of DNA outside of it's special little environment and watch it do nothing. — flannel jesus

DNA is never naturally found outside of its special little environment. Taking it out is doing something to prevent its natural function - synthesizing proteins for whatever species it is a part of, not just special humans - from taking place.

2) What "therefore"? If consciousness is fundamental and not emergent then something non-physical is at work, sure. And that something... surely is consciousness? This seems circular? — Dawnstorm

I don't know that everyone who thinks consciousness is not emergent thinks something non-physical is at work. Some may think consciousness is physical. Or maybe another explanation. I'm just saying this is what I think. Something non-physical - something that our sciences cannot deal with - is at work.

3) That seems to be upside down to me. Again, it's true, but only because to have the experience we do is fundamental, and it involves being arranged like we are. Again circular? — Dawnstorm

I'm just restating the old idea that we are not made of matter that is special or different in any way. Same stuff everywhere, same principles apply everywhere.

4) I reality gives us our experience, then reality (whatever that is) is fundamental. I suppose I might have been implying from the beginning that - if consciounsess is fundamental - then reality isn't. It's consciousness that arranges reality. — Dawnstorm

Possibly. It's also possible that consciousness is only one fundamental thing. The reason I think that is that I don't know why consciousness would, if it was the only thing going, develop a reality with properties that are so different from itself that it can't be found in, or explained by, them, and its very existence can be doubted.

That is, unless, you've rowed back on your definition — Dawnstorm

I don't think I have. However, I'm just exploring this whole idea, and I don't have reason to believe I'll come out the other end with exactly the same thoughts I went in with.

My intent with that post was to say, in at least this case, Fundamental is Omnipresent.

↪Patterner it seems fairly obvious to me it's processing information. No?

You accept that DNA is processing information - DNA is chemical dominos as much as anything computers do, including LLMs. If DNA is information processing dominos, LLMs can be too — flannel jesus

I know what you mean, and I'm not sure I have an argument against it. But I still see a difference that feels important. DNA, I suspect all natural information, has an objective goal. Unless something prevents it, something specific will come of it. I wonder if natural information always produces or accomplished something.

Information we make never has a purpose in and of itself. It's always for our use. Possibly for the sake of understanding things, or sharing what we know. Well give it to me to me that give me that give it to me give it to me give me that give me that a camera dirty dog dirty dog George is a dirty dog give me give me joy joy you've had not come get it you bring it to me


That response applies to you, too.

↪Patterner Is information processing possible without an observer to interpret the results? — RogueAI

Yes. DNA is encoded information. The codons and strings of codons mean amino acids and proteins. Using that information, things like the RNAs, aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase, and ribosomes assemble the amino acids and proteins. That's been happening since long before anything observed it.

But not everyone sees it that way. T Clark recently said it's "exactly the same" as the chemical reaction when you mix vinegar and baking soda, though much more complex.

A person using an abacus is processing information with it. Let's say the abacus beads are moving in pattern xyz. What if that same abacus is now falling out of plane and the beads are moving back and forth from air currents also in pattern xyz? Is it processing information? — RogueAI

I'm not comfortable answering this. :rofl: :rofl: I have too many half-baked ideas about information. (I use that phrase because I found a cookie shop in Buffalo today called Half-Baked. OMG.) I'm just throwing ideas around. Trying to make sense for myself. I'd appreciate any thoughts on it.

DNA is natural information. So are all biological information systems. Vision and the other senses. So many others in our bodies we aren't aware of, like our immune system, everything that helps with homeostasis, on and on. Natural information, in it's natural medium, does something. The information means something else, and something comes of it.

Natural information can be encoded in another medium. The information in DNA can be written on paper. But protein will not be synthesized. We can read that information. Most of us will never try to synthesize protein as a result of acquiring that information. Some people do. But nobody has to. Unlike when the information is in its natural form.

Some say the fundamental basis of reality is not matter, or energy, or space, or time. All of those things, and I suppose consciousness, are emergent properties. The true basis of everything is information. Probably mathematical information. In it's natural form, mathematics is certainly doing something. It's doing everything.

Let's just go with that, for the sake of argument. If all that is true, the beads on the abacus might be a human representation of (a veeeeeery^1,000,000,000 tiny bit of) the true basis of all reality. But the "processing of information" that I think is so important is, surely, taking place in the mind of the human manipulating the beads. The abacus isn't doing anything. Not the way DNA and all the biological information processing systems are. It's not the information in it's natural form, any more than DNA's information on paper is.

And I don't think beads that just happened to be blown around into particular patterns are processing information any more than an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters are. Things are going to happen from time to time that look like something significant, but it's not because information was processed. A Boltzmann Brain just happens to come together.

↪Patterner interesting question for you:

Physicalism aside, if consciousness is fundamental, is there something it's like to be an LLM? — flannel jesus

I really don't know enough about them to know if they are what I'm calling "units in regards to consciousness." They could be like dominoes, which are not processing information, regardless of the pattern they are in. Like squiggles in books, regardless of how they are arranged, dominoes, before during or after they fall, don't have any meaning other than what we perceive, which is because we arranged them so we could perceive that meaning. Is ChatGPT more than that? Is a calculator? Chat is obviously much more complex that a calculator, but do the moving patterns of electrons mean things? If not, then it's just a unit to our eyes. All its particles are having subjective experience. But what's the experience of a particle?

If it is processing information, if the moving patterns of electrons mean other things, the way DNA's codons and strings of codons mean amino acids and proteins, the way certain impulses moving through our brains mean photons hitting our retina, then it is experiencing as a unit. Obviously, it's not experiencing all the mental processes we experience. But it's a start.

You did cite unicorns in your earlier post. It is true that my disbelief in them is defeasible. (Most claims about non-existence are.) But your argument is wildly speculative and does not even begin to convince me. Until there is better evidence, I shall continue to classify them as mythical and claim they don't exist, except in the way that mythical creatures (Pegasus, the Gorgons, etc.) exist and not in the way that horses exist. — Ludwig V

Is it not surprising and disappointing that we still don't have words or phrases for such common things, and can only say things like "mythical creatures (Pegasus, the Gorgons, etc.) exist and not in the way that horses exist"?

"X event happend in the past", "Y event will happen in the future", and "Z event is happening now" are all true and all those events are real, hence exist. — Ludwig V

What if Y doesn't happen in the future? An uncountable number of things had been "sure bets" never happened. How can Y be real in the sense that either X or Z are real?

Your link has some great stuff. It's all way beyond me, so it's very possible things are far more than what I just posted in response to RogueAI. I'm generally talking about life forms that came about on Earth through natural processes. In Lights On, Eagleman says:

I think conscious experience only arises from things that are useful to you. You obtain a conscious experience once signals make sense. And making sense means it has correlations with other things. And, by the way, the most important correlation, I assert, is with our motor actions. Is what I do in the world. And that is what causes anything to have meaning. — David Eagleman

That goes along nicely with the quote I've posted so many times, including this thread, from Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam:

A mind is a physical system that converts sensations into action. A mind takes in a set of inputs from its environment and transforms them into a set of environment-impacting outputs that, crucially, influence the welfare of its body. This process of changing inputs into outputs—of changing sensation into useful behavior—is thinking, the defining activity of a mind. — Ogas & Gaddam

The more a living thing moves, the more it comes to refine it's movements, and the more it learns to control it's environment. That goes for moving up the evolutionary tree, and for something like an infant human growing and learning.

But I guess that doesn't mean humans can't make something with real intelligence and understanding in a different way.

But since we're as ignorant as we are, could we be wrong that ChatGPT doesn't understand and isn't conscious? — RogueAI

Could be. Nobody can claim definite knowledge of the subject. There's no way to test any of the theories.

I don't suspect ChatGPT is conscious as a unit. The idea I've been discussing in this thread is that there must be information processing for something to be a unit in regards to consciousness. I don't think ChatGPT processes information. It does from our point of view, because we told it what to do. But is it processing information from its own point of view? I don't see how. When 110101101010001011010010100100 is input, it does what it is required to do with other 0s and 1s, based on it's programming. It doesn't know 001010001...001111101 means a flower. It doesn't know it is providing information for us. It doesn't know it is in communication with us. It doesn't even know it is manipulating 0s and 1s, any more than dominoes know that they are falling in particular patterns because of the way they were arranged, or that they are falling at all.

So I believe all the particles that make up all the parts of ChatGPT - all the wires, other physical parts, and electrons flowing, etc. - are having subjective experiences, because consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous. But chatGPT is no more a unit in regards to consciousness than a rock is, even if there is much more complicated activity within it than there is in a rock.

A thermostat reacts. It doesn’t decide. It compares a set input (say, 22°C) to the ambient temperature and triggers a mechanism based on that difference. It operates entirely within a pre-defined causal structure: stimulus → comparison → output.

When we perform an experiment, we ask a question about the world and design a process to answer it. There's intentionality, inference, and anticipation involved — ChatGPT

Indeed, there is no decision. There is only one possible course of action, and the thermostat cannot not take it.

What if a tiny critter has a sensor for food, a sensor for poison, and flagella to take it toward food and away from poison. The sensors weigh which sensory input is stronger, and the stronger gets control of the flagellum.

So a decision is made.