This is totally different from what you said erlier "We count, but only because nature does" — Alkis Piskas

Our concepts of numbers, indeed our existence at all, is dependent on these laws being true, and to that extent derives from them. — Kenosha Kid

It was a short post, you could have read to the end. But yeah if that's too hard, the conversation is doomed.

the conversation is doomed. — Kenosha Kid

So many threads end up like that. Doomed conversations are in the zeitgeist. It seems we cannot do better these days.

"Does a tree exist without an observer?". Which can be recognized as a classic philosophical question — Alkis Piskas

The tree still exists. But not in colors and shape and felt structure. Like the sound of thunder is still there if no one hears it. Our dependence is not dependent on counting though. Counting is a human activity Quantization is purely human, and has absolutely zero existence outside the domain of the human mind. Numbers have no counterpart in nature except in the image of physical laws we have. Physical laws are generally spoken mathematical relations between quantizible physical entities. It's the wrong way round to think these quantities have a physical existence outside the domain of math and measurement. But if investigated this way, nature has no other way to respond mathematically. It are forced answers though.



Very true. It seems the subject matter of science, especially physics, leads to such doom. Science claims to know, and those not knowing are usually frowned upon by the advocates of science, and especially physics. This division between so-called ignorance and so-called knowledge is doomed to lead to doom. The ones with knowledge, so loved by science, making the ignorant feel stupid. One of the reasons I studied physics. Nobody can call me stupid. It's stupid though to feel superior because of posossing some stupid artificial physical knowledge.

. It seems the subject matter of science, especially physics, leads to such doom. — Cartuna

I think it's more general than that. Have seen it happen on a variety of topics, as if it was somehow becoming fashionable to diagnose a communication failure...

Originally I thought maybe it's an an effect of the US blue/red divide, but a similar collapse of societal common ground took place during the Brexit debate, and in France we had the yellow jackets episode, also with a collapse of national discussion into bickering disputes where people talked passed one another...

So what's happening? Am I just inventing a trend? Or are Western societies (or folks) getting sick of their own endless blah? Are we growing tired of always having to share the agora with others?

Maybe it's the dualistic approach while adhering to one reality as a measure for all. Yes, the yellow jackets. Burn la Bastille!

So what's happening? Am I just inventing a trend? Or are Western societies (or folks) getting sick of their own endless blah? Are we growing tired of always having to share the agora with others? — Olivier5

Pointing at failures of others to read what you wrote ("if you would have read what I wrote"...) merely point at the inability in the west to communucate. There is too much knowledge.

There is too much knowledge. — Cartuna

That made me laugh. I take it you are being sarcastic here.

Yes, the yellow jackets. Burn la Bastille! — Cartuna

Or take over the US Senate... People are dreaming of revolution again.

In a sense yes. I like knowledge but you can overrate it. I don't litterally mean to much knowledge but the over evaluation of it make people want to know better than others. Combine this with the fact that a lot of (scientific) knowledge is there (often rather artificial knowledge) and you get misunderstanding and vigorously pointing to it as a natural consequence.

The tree still exists — Cartuna

No doubt about that. Yet, there are philosophers who doubt it. Thtat's why I said "classic philosophical question".
I also agree with the rest of your arguments, except maybe the last two statements: "nature has no other way to respond mathematically. It are forced answers though.", which I don't quite understand.

. I like knowledge but you can overrate it. — Cartuna

There's such a thing as information overload. There is also some truth in the saying that "science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'âme" (Rabelais).

People rarely know the limit of their knowledge, their blind spots are by definition unseen. Hence they tend to overestimate their knowledge, and yes, this may contribute to the phenomenon of abrupt end of conversation that I seem to notice.

And yet there is no true knowledge without such an awareness of the necessarily limited domain whence this knowledge comes and where it applies. No true data is without metadata (data about the source of the data, who collected it, when, where, how, and its limitations...); similarly it could be said that there is no true knowledge without metaknowledge (ie knowledge about the source and limits of the knowledge). No true knowledge without some doubt about knowledge.

There's an English saying about that. Something like the wise doubts while the ignorant is full of certitudes.

For me, the hard problem of consciousness is about feelings. Feelings are physical pains and pleasures, and emotions, though when I say emotions, I only mean the experience of feeling a certain way, not anything wider, such as 'a preparation for action'.

My preferred definition of consciousness is subjective experience. The unemotional content of subjective experience includes awareness of the environment and the self-awareness, all sorts of thoughts, but no emotional content. I am quite happy to follow Dennett as far as the unemotional content of subjective experience is concerned: that is just what being a certain kind of information processing system is like, and there is nothing more to explain. But I do not believe that feelings can emerge from pure information processing. I think that information processing can explain an 'emotional zombie' which behaves identically to a human, is conscious, but has no feelings. There is something which it is to be like to be an emotional zombie, but (as I've heard David Chalmers say) it might be boring.

Here's a couple of funny-peculiar things about how humans think and feel about feelings and consciousness.

1. In science fiction, there are many aliens and robots who are very like us but who have little or no feelings (or are they really so flat inside? read or watch more to find out!). Whether an emotional zombie can really exist or not, we seem to be very keen on imagining that they can. It is much rarer to find an alien or robot which has stronger or richer or more varied feelings than we do. (Maybe Marvin in HHGG counts.) We're quite happy imagining aliens and robots that are smarter or morally superior to us, but bigger hearts? stronger passions? Nah, we don't want to there.

2. A thought experiment that Chalmers (among others) likes is the one where little bits of your brain are replaced by computer chips or whatever, which perform the same information processing as what they replace. As this process continues, will the 'light of consciousness' remain unchanged? slowly dim? continue for a while then suddenly blink out when some critical threshold is crossed? It is the unasked question that interests me: will the light of consciousness get brighter?

For me, the fundamental question is: How does anything ever feel anything at all?

The tree still exists. But not in colors and shape and felt structure. Like the sound of thunder is still there if no one hears it. — Cartuna

Isn't sound equivalent to colour here? Sound involves your eardrums and your brain.

Isn't sound equivalent to colour here? Sound involves your eardrums and your brain. — Daemon

Yes, indeed! I had to write the soundwaves. They are there if you don't hear them. The experienced sound is indeed equivalent to color. So the tree was there, but not in sounds and leaves whispering. :smile:

My preferred definition of consciousness is subjective experience — GrahamJ

That's exactly what I think. Every materialistic approach is doomed, that is, for explaining it. The materialistic approach might say that if you poor with a long needle in your brainy world, some experiences might follow (flashing spaghetti colors maybe, or the unbased drive to move you arm when tickling the motor neurons, making you drop the needle). It can show if consciousness is involved not why (obviously, it has to be involved for making your way in the world; would be hard to cross the road without actually seeing it; you could say that that's the explanation, but that only begs the question(.

For me, the fundamental question is: How does anything ever feel anything at all? — GrahamJ

We only ask that question thanks to centuries of established Western philosophical and scientific dogma which presume a split between mind and matter, subject and object, feeling and thinking. The question should be ‘ How did we get to the point where we became convinced that experience consisted of an opposition between an inside and an outside?’ Chalmers assumes the split with his pan-psychism, while Dennett tries to pretend one side of the binary doesn’t exist , which just makes the problem more striking.

For me, the hard problem of consciousness is about feelings. Feelings are physical pains and pleasures, and emotions, though when I say emotions, I only mean the experience of feeling a certain way, not anything wider, such as 'a preparation for action'.

My preferred definition of consciousness is subjective experience. The unemotional content of subjective experience includes awareness of the environment and the self-awareness, all sorts of thoughts, but no emotional content. I am quite happy to follow Dennett as far as the unemotional content of subjective experience is concerned: that is just what being a certain kind of information processing system is like, and there is nothing more to explain. — GrahamJ

Could you say more about why you distinguish emotions from the other aspects of experience?

Could you give some examples of thoughts with no emotional content?

Could you say more about why you distinguish emotions from the other aspects of experience?

Could you give some examples of thoughts with no emotional content? — Daemon

This is basically an answer to your first question, which maybe makes an answer to the second uninteresting.

I am a mathematician and programmer. I've worked in AI and with biologists. I think that science (mainly computer science, maths, AI) already has the ingredients with which to explain non-emotional subjective experience. We don't yet know how to put the ingredients together, but I don't think that it is mysterious, just a huge amount of work. It seems like we will one day be able to make very intelligent self-aware machines with thoughts and behaviour quite like ours. It seems that self-awareness, thoughts and behaviour are made of complex information processing, and we have a lot if ideas about how we might implement these.

However, we really have no clue about emotions. There is no theory about how to go from information processing to feelings. There seems to be no need for feelings to exist in order to produce thoughts and behaviour. Perhaps emotions will just emerge somehow, but there is no current explanation for how this could happen.

As far as the hard problem is concerned, the area of AI known as reinforcement learning is, in my opinion, the most relevant.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning concerned with how intelligent agents ought to take actions in an environment in order to maximize the notion of cumulative reward. — Wikipedia

The purpose of reinforcement learning is for the agent to learn an optimal, or nearly-optimal, policy that maximizes the "reward function" or other user-provided reinforcement signal that accumulates from the immediate rewards. This is similar to processes that appear to occur in animal psychology. For example, biological brains are hardwired to interpret signals such as pain and hunger as negative reinforcements, and interpret pleasure and food intake as positive reinforcements. — Wikipedia

I am quoting these to show that something (the reward function) is used to perform the function that pain and pleasure appear to perform in brains. It is absolutely fundamental to RL that there is something that acts like feelings, but it is just a series of numbers that comes from the environment, it's just information like everything else in the system.

I am not trying to separate thoughts from feelings in brains (or programs). I am saying that we can, in principle, explain thoughts using science-as-is, but not feelings.

It seems like we will one day be able to make very intelligent self-aware machines with thoughts and behaviour quite like ours. — GrahamJ

That's the typical attitude of many computer scientists. They forget that life and consciousness are not based on a program anywhere to be found in the brain. In the brain there is no division between a program that is stored somewhere, information stored elsewhere, and an external voltage direction the pattern of ones and zeros (input) step by step on the base of a program also stored as a pattern, and producing another kind of pattern (output). A computer can be turn off and on. The brain can't. All you do with a computer is pushing patterns of 1's and 0's into a different pattern of 1's and 0's. It's us who attach a meaning to these patterns.

They only seem intelligent because of the speed of the computer clock. But seeming is different from being. Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of creating a new kind of cute little life, or a big mean one, but it's just not possible to create conscious life in a lab from microchips (or quantum stuff).

We only ask that question thanks to centuries of established Western philosophical and scientific dogma which presume a split between mind and matter, subject and object, feeling and thinking. — Joshs

On the other hand, how does an organism exist without this epistemic cut, Markov blanket or schnitt?

It is not about scientific dogma. Science explains the semiotic process or modelling relation that makes life and mind what they are.

It seems that self-awareness, thoughts and behaviour are made of complex information processing — GrahamJ

Hi GrahamJ.

That does seem to be a widely held belief, but I think it is a misunderstanding, in fact I feel I know it is a mistake, with almost a mathematical certainty. So I find it interesting.

Here's one way of showing what I mean by "almost a mathematical certainty".

Input Voltages for Logic Gates

Logic gate circuits are designed to input and output only two types of signals: “high” (1) and “low” (0), as represented by a variable voltage: full power supply voltage for a “high” state and zero voltage for a “low” state. In a perfect world, all logic circuit signals would exist at these extreme voltage limits, and never deviate from them (i.e., less than full voltage for a “high,” or more than zero voltage for a “low”).

However, in reality, logic signal voltage levels rarely attain these perfect limits due to stray voltage drops in the transistor circuitry, and so we must understand the signal level limitations of gate circuits as they try to interpret signal voltages lying somewhere between full supply voltage and zero.
Voltage Tolerance of TTL Gate Inputs

TTL gates operate on a nominal power supply voltage of 5 volts, +/- 0.25 volts. Ideally, a TTL “high” signal would be 5.00 volts exactly, and a TTL “low” signal 0.00 volts exactly.

However, real TTL gate circuits cannot output such perfect voltage levels, and are designed to accept “high” and “low” signals deviating substantially from these ideal values.

“Acceptable” input signal voltages range from 0 volts to 0.8 volts for a “low” logic state, and 2 volts to 5 volts for a “high” logic state.

“Acceptable” output signal voltages (voltage levels guaranteed by the gate manufacturer over a specified range of load conditions) range from 0 volts to 0.5 volts for a “low” logic state, and 2.7 volts to 5 volts for a “high” logic state: — All About Circuits Textbook

So right at the very start of the design and construction of the machine, we determine arbitrarily what shall count as a I and what stands for 0. There are all sorts of things going on in those physical logic gates, they are emitting heat, magnetic fields, perhaps vibrations, and they are in electrical circuits which pass through for example the computer fan but also the local power station, but we deem an arbitrary range of voltages in arbitrary locations to be the relevant processes.

Another way of looking at this is to say that the "information processing" in a digital computer is "observer-dependent": it's only doing computation because we say it is. Other examples of observer- dependent phenomena include money and marriage. Metals, mice and mountains are examples of observer-independent phenomena.

The mind, thought, feelings and emotions are observer-independent phenomena. You are thinking, you have a mind, you have feelings and emotions, regardless of what any outside observer says about it.

So what is going on in a digital computer is very different to what goes on in the brain/mind. Our computers are astoundingly clever inventions, but they have nothing to do with our conscious experience.

The brain isn't a digital mechanism. As well as the activity at synapses the brain is bathed with slower-acting chemicals whose effects are felt over periods of hours or days. Also there are synchronised waves of activity travelling around the brain.

Finally it makes no real sense to think about the brain in isolation from the whole body and the sensory input it provides, and also the world beyond the body, to which we are connected through our senses, in a way the computer is not.

I am not trying to separate thoughts from feelings in brains (or programs). I am saying that we can, in principle, explain thoughts using science-as-is, but not feelings. — GrahamJ

I like the idea of creating a new kind of cute little life, or a big mean one, but it's just not possible to create conscious life in a lab from microchips (or quantum stuff). — Cartuna

What makes you guys so sure that if quantum properties are fundamental to life, allowing it to achieve the extremely fast rates of biochemical processes, something about quantumlike causality which we don't yet fully comprehend can't be responsible for consciousness?

Read at least the OP of my thread Matter and Qualitative Perception to get a general sense for how quantum physics might contribute to a model of consciousness.

For more detail, look at my recent thread Uniting CEMI and Coherence Field Theories of Consciousness.

Read at least the OP of my thread Matter and Qualitative Perception — Enrique

I read some of it when it first appeared, I looked again at it now, it's incoherent.

For a change, just for fun if nothing else, let's look up instead of down and sideways. We've been diggin' like archaeologists, exploring at eye-level but nobody's bothered to investigate the upper floors of consciousness.

?
$\uparrow$
? Supermind[positively nonphysical]
$\uparrow$
Mind (phsyical/nonphsical? :chin: )
$\uparrow$
Brain (positively physical)

I read some of it when it first appeared, I looked again at it now, it's incoherent. — Daemon

Expressed relationships between electric charge, EM fields, EM radiation and the brain's molecular structure are somewhat nebulous, but that's still to be researched, no one has put it all together in a technical way yet. If you want a more detailed account that better specifies those relationships, the CEMI/Coherence field thread can provide it.

What was the most confounding section, where did I throw you?

Try putting the essence of it in a few sentences.

Philosophers pondering on what is consciousness is like a florist trying to understand mathematical problems, both are not qualified and lack knowledge on the subject.

Only neuroscientist come close to explaining and understanding what is consciousness. And it's not that hard, at all. There are synaptic transmission in the brain passing information by gray matter between brain cells. Sounds and pictures and words acquired by your auditory and visual senses get stores as memory in the brain and get accessed and used. Very, very similar to a computer, just made from organic matter and much more complex in structure.

So, "how can the physical create our experience, our consciousness" is the same question as how can the physical make the earth spin, the grass grow, your heart beat and etc. It's no different than any other problem in explaining the creation of the universe. So far humanity says It's a deterministic result that started by the Big Bang, Allah, Christ, Buddha, "some energy" or whatever. It's a physical function and Alzheimer's plaque buildup in the brain proves it so, as Alzheimer's patients lose consciousness as plaque buildup progressed to clog their brain cells.

Try putting the essence of it in a few sentences. — Daemon

a. the strong EM field of the brain is a global substrate largely responsible for integrating cognition via phase locking mediated in consort with voltage-gated ion channels
b. biochemical pathways blend or "superposition" into the EM radiation of this field to participate in forming percepts
c. CEMI fields are a primary source of full conscious awareness as especially synchronized, densely activated neural networks, and the ultraconcentrated radiative/biochemical blending within this type of field generates the perceptual substance of intentional attentiveness or "will", whether visual, verbal etc.
d. additional, more nonlocal field phenomena resembling quantum coherence in their integrating effects may add a further dimension to qualitative consciousness
e. EM complexes such as CEMI fields with their radiative and standing waves as well as coherence phenomena in general, including all properties of radiative/biochemical blending, can be subsumed with the term "coherence field"

I agree with you that we have to give meaning to machines. But not at the level you suggest (assigning 0 or a 1 to a voltage range), because it wouldn't help. It doesn't seem relevant at all. It's like pointing to the convention assigning a negative charge to an electron and a positive one to a proton and then claiming that this makes brains 'observer-dependent'. (I would be careful using that terminology when people want talk quantum!) AI algorithms work at a higher level.

Instead, AI researchers give meaning to their machines by doing things like:

• Supplying a problem which the machine is supposed to figure out how to solve
• Supplying examples of input and output from which the machine is supposed to learn how to respond to new inputs
• Providing a utility function (in the sense of statistical decision theory) which the machine is supposed to optimise
• Providing positive and negative reinforcements when the machine interacts with the environment in particular ways

This is the sort of way that we give a machine a 'purpose in life'.

Our own purpose in life ultimately comes from the fact that we are products of biological evolution. If and when we make communities of self-replicating machines, we will no longer have to give them meaning, for they will evolve their own.

I agree with you that we have to give meaning to machines. But not at the level you suggest (assigning 0 or a 1 to a voltage range), because it wouldn't help. — GrahamJ

But the observer dependency applies at all levels of computation.

You have the physical machine, the steel, copper, silicon, the electric currents, all those are observer independent, in the sense that they are what they are whatever anybody says or thinks about them.

That the machine is carrying out computation is observer-dependent. We ascribe meanings to the mechanisms, but the machine doesn't thereby take on any meaning.

AI researchers give meaning to their machines... — GrahamJ

Nothing about the physical machine changes when we ascribe meaning to the mechanisms.

We ascribe meaning to the voltage ranges in the logic gates, and at the other end we ascribe meaning to the output, which is what you are doing now as you ascribe meaning to the pixels appearing on your screen.

The voltages and the pixels don't have any meaning for the machine itself.