No, my argument is not "about epiphenomenalism," it's about the apparent fact that the consciousness has nothing to do and going down a sidebar about epiphenomenalism won't help.

There Is No Such Thing as Conscious Thought

and

Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before you Make Them

I think a mouse has an advantage in a maze, actualy. It can probably smell where it's already been!

Consciousness can only do what the brain tells it to do. The conscious mind is an epiphenomenon of the brain. Or are you a dualist, where matter and mind are two different substances like body and spirit?

You wrote: "These are nothing but bland assertions. How do you know that human-like intelligence can go without consciousness? Why is it absurd to suppose that an artificial intelligence can have experiences?"

The proof that we can go without consciousness is that it actually does nothing. Whatever the mind does, it does in the pre-conscious mind with the conscious mind finding out about it after the fact, anywhere from a fraction of a second to a few seconds later.

Actually, the pre-conscious mind drives your car for you while your mind wanders to thoughts about a problem you are having or what's in the fridge for dinner. But even that is going on pre-consciously with you finding out about it a bit later.

You wrote: "That said I want to mention one thing. If life ever is to step beyond depending on random mutations for survival, consciousness is required to self-analyze, to understand pros and cons and improve the odds of survival and isn't that what humans (conscious beings) are doing?"

The problem is that consciousness appears to be passive, so self-analysis, when t happens (I believe it does) goes on in the pre-conscious mind, and when that's done, the pre-conscious mind decides what shall appear to consciousness.

Scientific American article: There Is No Such Thing As Conscious Thought

Since the conscious mind is merely a person watching a movie, what's the benefit?

I think we had conscious minds long before we started using terminology like "mind" or "consciousness." I just don't understand why we have something that appears to be unnecessary to life or evolution (if it were necessary, woudn't plants have conscious minds?). It seems like it appeared at some time in the evolutionary process and the gene simply got passed along with no evolutionary reason for it to be eliminated. It was a fluke.I'm not stating that as a fact. It's my theory.

What do you mean by saying humans didn't always have it? What state of homo (whatever) was not conscious? I'm pretty sure my cat is conscious and even reptiles and amphibians and perhaps fish are conscious, so it's hard to conceive that humans at any stage in their evolution were not having experiences. Remember: having experiences is what I mean by consciousness.

luckswallowsall's statement is nonsense because conscousness is simply a show put on by the brain. Consciousness actually DOES nothing. It's like a person watching a movie.

“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
― Albert Einstein

Still, if intelligence is the goal of "artificial INTELLIGENCE," many scientists believe AI will be smarter than humans in a few decades, if not sooner.

But intelligence doesn't need consciousness. If I were to create a successful Turing machine, it's absurd to suppose that it's anything other than a successful simulation, not a being having experiences.

It would seem that the learning is done in the brain, not the consciousness. The brain selectively passes along stuff to the consciousness. The conscious mind is just like a person in a movie theater.

I don't respond to bedsheet posts. I think I said that early on in this discussion. If you have a real point to make, you can make it with brevity.

I'm at a loss to understand how you arrived at that notion.

I move around based on what the pre-consciousness deems to be worthy noticing and actin on. It also decides what to let me observe and feel.

You don't think AI comes close to human intelligence? Twenty-two years ago IBM's Big Blue defeated chess champ Gary Kasparov.

"A team of researchers from Yale University and Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute recently set off to determine the answer. During May and June of 2016, they polled hundreds of industry leaders and academics to get their predictions for when A.I. will hit certain milestones.

"The findings, which the team published in a study last week: A.I. will be capable of performing any task as well or better than humans--otherwise known as high-level machine intelligence--by 2060 and will overtake all human jobs by 2136." Source: https://www.inc.com/kevin-j-ryan/elon-musk-and-350-experts-revealed-when-ai-will-overtake-humans.html

Here's what I'm saying: First, the consciousness has no direct connection without the world. Some degree of processing goes on before your consciousness is aware of anything. This is what I call the pre-consciousness. It processes the data and decides what to do with it, including what to give you as conscious awareness.

It appears we could get by with what I'm calling the pre-conscious alone.

I move around in the world based on the information that the pre-conscious mind filters to send to the conscious mind. It's well-known that we don't notice everything in our visual field even though the imagery is striking the retina. For example, one danger for bicyclists making their lives more dangerous is that a person driving a car is primarily driving to avoid collisions with other cars and so don't always even notice bicyclists even though they are there in the driver's field of vision. I myself have had close calls with bicyclists while driving.

Science doesn't even know what consciousness is or how it's produced, so science isn't much help. Meanwhile, we can see that AI is developing rapidly with no hint that intelligent devices have experiences of any sort, so it seems that consciousness isn't a function of intelligence.

I'll go further. It IS gratuitous to have experiences. Our preconscious mind could function without the conscious one. In fact, it does so often. You do a long day of driving, mostly thinking of whatever's going on in your life as you do so. By the time you reach your destination, you got there making, really, very few decisions on a conscious level.

Humans behave as evolutionary forces molded us, but being conscious of what we're doing, experiencing it, seems gratuitous.

But consciousness is merely observational. The actual activity that means anything and/or results in anything like actions is pre-conscious and isn't conscious at all.

Consciousness is helpless to do anything. All of our actual thinking (assessing, planning, reacting) goes on in the preconsciousness before we even become aware of it.

I don't see why humans lacking consciousness (having experiences) couldn't function in the world much as an intelligent robot would. (The zombie terminology confuses the situation, I think.) A human whose brain processes information without consciousness seems entirely possible.

The only actions we take which are instant are reflexes, which are REALLY decoupled from consciousness!

Do we need to live? Apart from suicide, we have no choice in the matter.

Anyway, explain how your question relates to answering mine. I'm drawing a blank.

I gather that you disagree with some of the things I said, but did you at any point explain why we need to be experiencing the world to function? Why do we need to be conscious, or do we? Is consciousness just a gratuitous add-on to our functioning?

I don't think anyone of note believes that the conscious mind micromanages sensory input to the degree you imply, making the pre- or sub-conscious mind basically an employee of the conscious mind.

Any citations of researchers who support this view?

Also, with all due respect, please be more brief. Einstein once said, “If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”

[quote="leo;279278"]If you assume that each conscious experience maps to a specific pattern of electrical activity (motion of electrons) in the brain, then you see consciousness as an epiphenomenon that cannot cause anything, and so from that point of view it seems unnecessary, redundant.

But how can you know whether consciousness reduces to that? Our perception is limited.[/quote]

Yes, our perception is limited. Limited to what the pre-conscious mind—which is actively filtering our sensory input and making the actual decisions—gives us.Remember, research shows that decisions we make are made before we become aware of them by anywhere from a fraction of a second to several seconds. Our decisions come into our conscious mind, our experience, as faits accompls.

Unless that research is disproven, your conscious mind is totally passive and does nothing.

My daily activities are not restricted to conversations on a computer, for starters - which is, I believe, the limit of the Turing test at this stage. Correct me if I’m wrong. — Possibility

You're not wrong, but I'm asking you to suppose AI proceded from there to the next level. Japan is already producing some remarkably (creepily) realistic robots.If Turing machines reach a point where all they need is a "social stimulus value" (looking and behaving like people), it doesn't strike me they'd necessarily need to be conscious and having the experience of BEING. They could simply be executing software.

Reflexive actions aside, it seems ALL of our sensory input is processed and filtered in ways we are unaware of, automatically and beyond our control, as it were.

I’m not sure about you, but there are plenty of my normal daily activities that require me to have experiences. — Possibility

So, a sophisticated Turing Human couldn't function simply in terns of executing a program, but we'd have to give such a human the capacity to have experiences?

Explain.

You wrote: Firstly not every decision has been demonstrated as temporally decoupled - those decision experiments are for in-the-moment predictions using available sensory cues, they don’t demonstrate the same for future-oriented goal making or for deliberative reasoning. Secondly, I don’t think a time delay definitively decouples what imparts consciousness from, say, decision making systems or sensory input: the thing which causes the time delay may simply be the time it takes for the signal reach and effect the speech and motor centers involved in providing the response to the behavioral task. But say they really are decoupled, why couldn’t consciousness play important roles in other mental processes - goal setting and goal refining, socializing and interpersonal interaction, meta cognitive reasoning. Maybe it just gets the salient and relevant inputs as prepackaged and refined representations for those roles. If that’s the case then while the consciousness imparting system is distinct, it is involved in some other important processing going on and so has a reason to be there.

My reply: You feel you are doing these things because you are conscious of doing them, but something is presenting these "perceptions" to the consciousness. Have you ever been driving and realized at some point that miles have gone by, with actions and decisions being made, and yet you know that the conscious "you" was operating on auto-pilot? When you argue by giving me questions rather than facts (e.g., " why couldn’t consciousness play important roles in other mental processes") that is just speculation and doesn't really answer why. Remember, I'm not denying that we're conscious. I'm not even denying that we may need to be conscious to function. I just can't figure out why we need to be conscious. Many plant species preceded higher mammals on Earth and, thus, have longer records of evolutionary success, proving that consciousness need not have any survival value at all.

No, you miss my point entirely. I'm asking why we are conscious when all of our thoughts and activities originate on a pre-conscious level. Consciousness, thus, seems gratuitous. We could function as we do without having any experiences whatsoever. So why do we have them. Why aren't we like plants?

Sentience is there prior to conscience. Something in the pre-conscious selects what becomes part of our experience. My definition of consciousness is the state of having experiences.

I'll make this short and sweet, as is my preference (hoping you've read my prior thoughts on responding to lengthy posts), so I won't respond to every one of your points, just the ones I have thoughts on and which I think help us understand what's going on.

First, "sentience" is the condition of having sensory inputs. We have lots of sensory inputs we aren't conscious of, which never turn into experiences. We can see without really attending to everything in our visual field. Something is going on in the pre-conscious mind filtering what we see (by which I mean attend to or notice).

You may be hinting that we are conscious because our creature gave that to us. This may work for those who believe that the universe was created by a cosmic sorcerer through an act of magic, but I don't believe in magic. You;d have to prove that creator's existence to me first, but I apply Occam's Razor to eliminate an idea that raises more questions than it solves.

Thoughts and decisions seem to be made pre-consciously before we become conscious of them. Ditto for actions. That implies that consciousness is inactive, passive, and really unnecessary, so why do we have the experiences of feeling in conscious control.

I don't take or issue reading assignments, but it sounds like you might be interested in aScientific American article titled There Is No Such Thing As conscious Thought by philosopher Peter Carruthers..

For reasons I outlined above, I don't respond to bedsheet posts point-by-point, so let me take this approach: Remember that I'm more or less granting that we are conscious. Rather, I'm asking why? Was there anything in there about why? since we could operate automatically on the pre-conscious mind without having experiences at all.

For me, one of the basic factual issues is that there's a lot of evidence that the active mind is pre-conscious. That, for example, when we decide to do something, that decision was actually made in the brain anywhere from a fraction of a second to a few seconds earlier. Further evidence is that something is filtering our sensory perceptions and deciding which to give us as experiences and which not, Think about it: in no way are you experiencing every single sensory input. Why not?

Think of a Turing Machine simulating a human but with "nobody home" as far as having experiences. Now, put it in a flesh and blood body. In a way, that's what we are except I (and I assume, you) have experiences.

On a more practical level, in the interest of making this an active discussion with a lot of participants chiming in, let's keep posts relatively short and to the point. It takes very little time to dash off a long post, and about the same amount of time to read it, but responding point-by-point can be time-consuming, tiring, and daunting. Long posts can thus stifle discussion and discourage participation.

Also, as a matter of my own philosophy of philosophy, I'm an ordinary language kind of guy. What this means to me is that if you can state a problem so that even a layperson can understand it, only a solution that a layperson can also understand is a satisfactory solution. Thus, "Go read (this or that) book by (Dennett, Dawkins, Kant, Wittgenstein, or whoever)" isn't a discussion. If you feel they have a point, lay it out succinctl8y and clarly, don't give us reading assignments.

I'd love it if well-informed nonphilosophers participated along with the philosophers.

“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”—Albert Einstein