Also, I don't think there's any goalpost moving going on. I might grant you that "is x conscious?" might get bogged down in definitions, but "is x in pain?", won't. Everyone knows what that means. — RogueAI

If anyone is unsure, one way to learn is to hit one's thumb hard with a hammer. That's pain, and from that one might further intuit the concept of consciousness.

is stuff good because it is loved by god — Banno

Something is good if it is willed/loved by any agent, from that agent's point of view, god or not. Counterexamples welcome.

The ball valve allows the dishwasher to be disconnected. — Banno

Ah, I know what you mean. Ball-cocks or float-valves are sometimes call ball-valves, but not any more it seems.

Enter the philosopher, who can get down beneath the sink and sort out the bottle trap and ball valves. — Banno

There's something funny going on under your sink if there's a ball valve there. That reminds me, you might want to check out Murun Buchstansangur.

But there are still people who believe mental states are identical to brain states. For them, a mental state isn't emergent, it just is a physical brain state. — RogueAI

Yes I see what you mean. I guess the physical brain state still has properties that its constituent neurons, or even molecules, do not have, for example it is the property of a whole system that it can see red, but the constituent parts don't have that property/capability. So there's still emergence there in that sense.

This is one of those cases where materialism goes down a rabbit hole into absurdity. — RogueAI

I broadly agree with your posts in this thread I think. I prefer to avoid the term 'materialism' as it is vague and has a lot of baggage. It's also unclear to me how it is different from 'monism'. I think a more precise word to use is 'emergentism'.

So continuing the analogy, you cannot have a change in an electric field without a corresponding and completely determined change in a magnetic field: this is evidence that they are "two sides of the same coin".

Same goes for the neurological correlates of consciousness: you cannot (refering back to prior discussions on this thread) have the "I see Halle Berry's face" experience without the Halle-Berry's-face-detector neuron firing and, conversely, you can't have the neuron fire without seeing Halle Berry's face. (There's citations on the older thread, can dig them out with some patience.)

This as far as I'm concerned makes the claim that they are distinct things, not the same thing from two perspectives, in need of justification, in the same way that if you turned an apple 180 degrees and expected me to believe it was a distinct apple, I'd expect a good justification. The model that fits the evidence is the one in which they're the same thing. — Kenosha Kid

OK, thanks. That experiences supervene on the physical is compatible with any theory of mind, including substance dualism (I'm not a substance dualist). To spell it out in terms of substance dualism, just to make the point, there might be a lawlike relationship between physical stuff and mental stuff, such that any change in the mental stuff corresponds to a change in the physical stuff, in a consistent, lawlike way. Substance dualism is wrong for other reasons, but it's consistent with the evidence that physical neural events correspond in a very regular manner with that subject's experiences.

Regarding the view that there is one thing with two perspectives, the problem just pops up again. Lets take a rock. No neurons, no wetware, no behaviour similar to human behaviour that would allow us to infer consciousness, no? So how many perspectives on the rock are there? Just one, presumably. It has no first person perspective, the only perspective that exists is the perspective of the conscious creature looking at it. Now lets take a neural function roughly corresponding with a subject tasting some coffee. You're saying that consciousness just is that thing. The neural function looks like a bunch of readings on a brain scanner of some kind from the scientist's point of view, but from the subject's point of view, those same functions are the experience of tasting coffee.

The question now is, why does a neural function have two perspectives, and a rock only one?

In other words, in claiming an identity in order solve the hard problem (the mental just is a physical function) it becomes necessary to re-introduce a dualism in order to be able to talk about subjective experiences as distinct from neurons firing, namely, the distinction between two perspectives. But now we're back to square one. How can functional interactions of things with only one perspective result in something with two perspectives?

It is nothing more than a way of soothing the fear and desire for immortality. — Fooloso4

Do you actually think that?

How can headway be made? By what means can consciousness after death be measured? — Fooloso4

I don't think it can be measured at all, even in a living person. Other minds can be inferred though. And by examining the arguments for inferring other minds in uncontroversial cases (e.g. other humans) one might (or might not) arrive at the conclusion that similar inferences can be made about anything at all. I haven't rehearsed the arguments here, just indicating how we might end up thinking that corpses (or their component parts) have experiences.

It is nothing more than a way of soothing the fear and desire for immortality. — Fooloso4

I think the question is interesting and possibly headway can be made. Does that mean that I am afraid of death and desire immortality?

Does philosophy have a valuable function do you think?

Regarding figuring out the nature of the world I do think philosophy is all we have to tackle consciousness in a theoretical way.

Yes, you're right regarding Tononi, I was unfair. I was generalising but should not have included Tononi in that.

Yes I did end up with a clearer expectation. I'm a fan of Tononi, I just think he's wrong. It's great that he started with phenomenology and his theory is interesting.

Its not really a theory of consciousness, in my view, since the hard problem is being ignored, and in being ignored only half of consciousness is being calculated. It seems more of a proposal of a way to calculate cognition. So on the basis of this I'm not going to analyze it further. — Pop

Yes that's the conclusion I came to as well. There's no answer to the question "OK, by why can't integrating information happen in the dark?" As if often the case with functionalist views, they come to an interesting point, but when faced with the problem of 'Yes, but why does that result in an experience exactly?" they tend to abandon theory and opt for definition by fiat instead. They say "Oh, but that's just what 'experience' means. There is nothing more other than that." Which is nonsense. I certainly do not mean 'integrated information' when I talk about consciousness.

I do think the IIT is an interesting theory of something. Maybe it is a way to define conscious individuals, and that would solve a problem that besets a lot of panpsychist views, namely Searle's question "What are the units supposed to be?" Maybe the conscious subject is that system that integrates information. And maybe the more information the system integrates in interesting ways, the more varied and rich the associated experiences of that subject are. But as you say, it just doesn't touch the basic question of why we should think that integrated information is consciousness, why it creates a first person perspective at all.

I am interested in other people's thoughts on the question of what becomes of consciousness at death? — Jack Cummins

My view is that nothing happens to consciousness at death. What is lost is identity - temporary functional wholes (e.g. a human body and brain) disintegrate, cease to function in a co-operative organised way as they do in life. Also what is lost are particular complex ideas, feelings, desires, memories, all the make-up of a person's psychological identity, all of which are dependent on that functioning whole. There are still feelings, sensations in the leftovers, but these will be of a complexity and interest level corresponding to the structure and function of the remains. Identities are broken up, shifted and changed.

I might have misread you, sorry. I thought you were asking for the evidence that science proceeds on the basis of evidence, which read like a destruct button. I think the "that claim" is the claim that a neuron firing identically is the "having an experience"? — Kenosha Kid

Yes! Sorry I was unclear. My bad. I'll get to the rest of your reply later, thanks.

I don't think this conversation is going anywhere constructive, which is a shame as it started out interesting. — Kenosha Kid

I'm interested in your views. In particular I'm interested in the relationship between neural events and particular experiences and what we can conclude from that about consciousness, if anything. That's central to this issue, no? The logic of this is interesting - arguments from analogy, tacit assumptions, alternative conclusions etc.

But science doesn't proceed prima facile, it proceeds on the basis of evidence. — Kenosha Kid

Sure, then there must be evidence to support this claim. Please give some examples of the evidence.

You cannot get from "what it is like" to an experiment — Kenosha Kid

In a broad sense of 'experiment' you can, I think. I can ask myself the question, "Is there something it is like to be me?" and I can consult myself and answer in the affirmative.

If you believe there is a difference between a neuron firing and the owner having an experience, yes, there will be a logical difficulty. Personally I think that the logical difficulty lies in justifying that belief. — Kenosha Kid

This seems backwards to me. Prima facie, a neuron firing is a neuron firing, and a conscious experience is a conscious experience. The first step is to give a reason why we would think these two things are, in fact, the same.

I agree with the sentiment (talking about the same thing from different perspectives) — Kenosha Kid

But there is a logical difficulty here in talking about a first person perspective from a third person perspective. Describing subjectivity in objective terms seems like a nonsense to me.

Just as describing objective reality from my point of view is also a nonsense.

As @Wayfarer has correctly said (imho), or quoted someone as saying, science typically proceeds by eliminating the subjective as much as possible in order to arrive at an unbiased, objective, point-of-view invariant view of the world. And that's great until the 'object' of enquiry is subjectivity itself. How are scientists supposed to proceed here? By eliminating subjectivity from the enquiry into subjectivity? Or do we have to do something other than science?

Either way, the scientific definition can't contradict other definitions, or else scientists and laymen would be talking about different things. — Harry Hindu

Indeed. Assuming we actually want to discuss the same thing, of course.

We can talk about water as it appears from consciousness as a clear liquid, or as a combination of hydrogen and oxygen molecules as it appears from a view from nowhere. We're talking about the same thing but from different perspectives, but not contradicting ones.

Can we do the same thing with consciousness? Can you talk about how consciousness appears from consciousness and as it appears from a view from nowhere? Your consciousness appears as a physical brain that drives various actions from my conscious perspective, which is not how my consciousness appears to me so how do I know if you or I are actually conscious or not? What is concsciousness like from a view from nowhere?

These are all excellent questions to begin an enquiry into consciousness. :up:

Are you fibberfab? — Harry Hindu

No, he's RogueAI. I'm bert1 and you are Harry Hindu.

I'm not sure how my comment relates to kk's.

Asking a conscious person if they are conscious is not comparable to asking a scientist if a machine is conscious. — Kenosha Kid

It is if the scientist has the same definition/concept as the non-scientist. This definition:

"Consciousness is subjective experience — ‘what it is like’, for example, to perceive a scene, to endure pain, to entertain a thought or to reflect on the experience itself"

...is given at the very start of the neuroscientist Guilio Tononi's paper on the IIT. Some scientists do start with this concept. And it is those thinkers who I think do come up with a theory of consciousness (even if it is false), and these theories are interesting to me as genuine candidates for a true theory of consciousness. However some thinkers take 'consciousness' to mean a set of observable functions or behaviours etc. That's fine if it's useful, say for a paramedic. But I don't take these as theories of consciousness as I understand it. They are definitions by fiat, and philosophically uninteresting.

EDIT: An example of the latter is H Pattee in his Cell Phenopmenology: The First Phenomenon, in which he says this:

Most branches of philosophy have an explicit or tacit focus on the human level of thought, language, and behavior. Phenomenology has historically focused explicitly on the subjective conscious experience of the human individual. For many years I have found it instructive to explore phenomena from a broader and more elementary evolutionary and physical law-based point of view, defining it as those subjective events that appear to the simplest individual self as functional. At the cell level function cannot be precisely defined because what is functional ultimately depends on the course of evolution. Functional phenomena occur at all levels in evolution and are not limited to conscious awareness. — Pattee

(my bold)

To be clear the article he writes is extremely interesting in many other ways. I just don't think it touches the hard problem.

I think we've hit a conceptual wall. The trouble with the concept of consciousness is that consciousness is only knowable by a kind of introspective reflexive act. You have to notice you have it. For some people this is a simple and obvious thing. Others do not find it simple and obvious, they see problems with it and say such internal observations are illusory or at least misleading. There is a privacy issue here; this problem is not resolvable by consulting a shared world. Normally disagreements about simple matters of fact are resolvable by both parties going to the same place at the same time and saying "Look there, we both see it don't we?"

Thanks for that. Do you think philosophers and scientists have much to say to each other? When scientists investigate well-defined observable functions, and philosophers talk about hard problems and 'what it's likeness,' are they talking past each other? They both use the word 'consciousness'. Has one or other misused the word? Or are there genuinely different meanings?

But the consciousness discussed by neurologists afaik is along the lines of: cognitive awareness of one's environment and one's cognitive awareness of that environment. — Kenosha Kid

And these are presumably measurable in some way? If so, they would need to be functionally defined. You input something into the person, look at the output (how the person behaves, a reading from some kind of direct brain scan), and then the degree of awareness of the environment is observed. Is that the idea?

In more detail, (human, at least) consciousness is a process comprised of multiple components such as awareness, alertness, motivation, perception and memory that together give an integrated picture of one's environment and how one relates to it.

Is this sense of 'consciousness' a collective term for a number of related cognitive faculties? Each of which could be given functional definitions and associated with functional tests to measure their degree of presence? A bit like (Banno's favourite) the Glasgow Coma Scale? Is that the idea of consciousness as studied by scientists?

What do you think of the following rough definition:

"Consciousness is subjective experience — ‘what it is like’, for example, to perceive a scene, to endure pain, to entertain a thought or to reflect on the experience itself"

Would that do as a starting point for a scientific investigation?

That sort of wishy-washy 'well, I know what I mean' way of communicating is no good for answering questions about consciousness in a scientific way. — Kenosha Kid

Do you have a definition in mind when discussing consciousness? When you discuss consciousness, what is it you are discussing?

Another way to bring out the issue is to ask "Why can't all that functional stuff happen without consciousness? What is it about that function that necessitates consciousness?"

Anyway, suppose you built a machine that was functionally equivalent to a working brain. How would you test whether it's conscious or not? — RogueAI

I think the functionalist has to define 'consciousness' in such a way that a function can constitute it. For example, X is conscious if and only if X maps the world and can predict events. Brains can do that, therefore brains are conscious. The trouble is that's not the definition of consciousness that many philosophers are talking about (including me, and I think you). The problem is we can't agree on definitions before we start. This impasse has arisen dozens and dozens of times on this forum and the last. I don't think functionalism is really a theory of consciousness, it's a definition. Most of the time anyway. Sometimes it's a theory, I think, depending on how its forumulated. With the walking and legs analogy, it's definition. Walking just is how that action is defined. And that's not interesting.

EDIT: That wasn't very clear. I'll try and write a better one in a bit.

Lets see how shit we can be

Well there's no way I'm going to scroll up. And what's more I'm going to talk about not scrolling up.

And in any case, "a consciousness field" or whatever would only make "binding" more of a problem since that would suggest a higher level "hive mind" or binding of multiple minds as well. No evidence of the "hive mind" (or "telepathy") as a "mind, or consciousness, field" implies though, so a (e.g. panpsychist) "field theory of consciousness" is merely an implausible, unwarranted, idle speculation (woo-of-the-gaps). — 180 Proof

Oh well that settles it then

How so? — 180 Proof

Because a field is a single partless place extended in space. So it's a candidate for the 'one' part of the many-in-one nature of experience.

But not before throwing a few invectives into it, just in case things don't go quite the way he wants them to, and then taking cover behind his supposedly intimidating selfie. — Apollodorus

If I'm going to be a bully and a twat, I'd rather do it alone.

What is your question you want me to answer? — RogueAI

He won't tell you. Even though it just involves writing one sentence. If he does write a sentence, it will have bold, italic, underline, quotation marks, and some kind of smiley.

Oh, and he'll quote himself.

I love passive aggressive conversations. I'm ripping my dick off I love them so much.

You can drive a house, because houses are like cars. They both have windows.

Really? Explain please. — 180 Proof

You explain why it is

Based on answering questionnaires I am classed as extreme left and woke. — Andrew4Handel

That's interesting. Do you have a link to such a questionnaire? I'd be interested to have a go myself and see what I come out as.