Apo thinks:

A system, typically a brain, is conscious iff it creates a model of it's environment it uses to make predictions. Consciousness is the action or function of doing this.

Apo thinks:

A system, typically a brain, is conscious iff it creates a model of it's environment it uses to make predictions. Consciousness is the action or function of doing this. — bert1

That begs a lot of interesting questions about machine consciousness, yet so far I can't get Apo to byte on any of that. What's the big deal???

I’ve noticed that @apokrisis hasn’t responded to a number of your questions, so I’ll do my best to do so in my honest interpretations of his state of mind. @apokrisis can of course readily correct me wherever he finds me mistaken in anything I say (it is, after all, a best current understanding).

(I wrote this before seeing both yours and @bert1's most recent replies; posting it all the same)

Apo is an eliminativist who deems all speak of first-person awareness and, hence, of consciousness to be a linguistic social construct devoid of real referent(s). Because of this, all your questions regarding the reality of consciousness as first-person awareness are nonsensical to him - with answers that are "not even wrong" as he might say. We are all – take your pick – moist robots or philosophical zombies that hypnotize ourselves via our language into illusions of being consciously aware when, in fact, no such thing can ever and in any way occur.

The socially constructed term (as though there could occur any linguistic terms that aren’t) we specify as “consciousness”, however, can be behavioristically interpreted and defined as “evidenced input into a system conjoined with the output of same said system”.

Hence, if a robot or computer program can report on inputs – with Chat GTP as one example of this - it is then as conscious as anything else. No awareness required - or, for that matter, possible. At least not as anything that is in any way real.

Hence, if a robot or computer program can report on inputs – with Chat GTP as one example of this - it is then as conscious as anything else.

...

Apo is an eliminativist who deems all speak of first-person awareness and, hence, of consciousness to be a linguistic social construct devoid of real referent(s). — javra

You're making Apo sound like an idiot! No offense to either of you, of course.



Are you an eliminativist?

You're making him sound like an idiot! — RogueAI

It was in no way my intention to.

I anticipate and expect that he will correct me in any way that my statements might misrepresent him. Still, from past discussions on this topic in this thread, this is what I've honestly gathered.

ps. I should have written Chat GPT (not GTP)

C - Semiosis is the specification of the general function. What folk call consciousness is this function implemented at four levels of semiosis within a suitable “world”.

F - Go back and read your texts on social construction and Vygotskian psychology if you hope to stay on this course.

Maybe you could entice me to. What's an example of something that is not a social construction according to these texts and Vygotskain psychology.

Besides, you really have nothing to correct in what I interpret your state of mind to be?

What don’t you understand about an F grade? Too many syllables? :grin:

Oh, no. I understand symbols devoid of content. :wink:

Remind me which one you are again?

Remind me which one you are again? — apokrisis

Use more syllables, apo. Meaning transference is important to discussions.

:up:

:blush:

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Why do I feel like I'm in kindergarten ... on a philosophy forum? One of those things one might never know.

Are you an eliminativist? Do you think ChatGpt is conscious?

Ask javra.

Ask RogueAI.

↪javra
Ask RogueAI. — apokrisis

My bad for not clarifying: my last question regarding kindergarten was rhetorical.

As to RogueAI asking me, can you not, you know, express your views in manners that others can understand?

My bad for assuming you might have had the curiosity and knowledge to follow arguments already much simplified.

My bad for assuming you might have had the curiosity and knowledge to follow arguments already much simplified. — apokrisis

Their implications are so far too vague to be clear, apo. Do you uphold that first-person awareness, aka consciousness, is real?

real? — javra

Really what? Really an idea? Really material? Really semiotic – as in the modelling that connects the two?

If you want a conversation, I don't need you to be polite. But you do have to do some work setting out your counter-position. If you just make the plaintiff cry, "you haven't made me understand", then you will stay stuck in the back seat with all the other time-wasters bleating on about "are we there yet".

How can I be an eliminativist given I spend all my time arguing for holism against reductionism? You are just talking out of your arse because you can't be arsed to make a proper effort.

If you feel like you are in kindergarten, it is because that is the level at which you are prepared to engage here. You could keep that up all day. Now impress me by stopping, thinking, coming up with dissent or agreement in terms of the ideas I have presented in some depth.

You might need to brush up on the philosophy and science I've cited. But you could then engage in a way where you learn something, and I might learn something too, which is the outcome that usually comes from talking to people who are up to the task of an informed dialogue.

Really what? Really an idea? Really material? Really semiotic – as in the modelling that connects the two? — apokrisis

I didn't ask "really". I asked "real". As in something that ontically occurs. Not as an idea, but as that which apprehends the idea of consciousness when so thought of.

"Really material" would be contingent on what you here mean by matter; I'll tentatively interpret you meaning that matter is the constitutional makeup of any given (what Aristotle intended by "matter") - and that consciousness thereby supervenes on its own constituents. If this is an accurate interpretation of what you here mean by "material reality", I then easily accept this to be true.

But then its being semiotically real as a "modeling that connects the idea to its constituents" can so far to me only be a misguided inference. And this precisely because I so far cannot make either rational or experiential sense of awareness of itself being an idea - I so far cannot understand how it can be an idea that thereby (due to its semiotics) then holds awareness of other ideas. This would result in turtles all the way down, for all ideas have their constituents - e.g., lesser ideas or connotations, all of which further supervene on the operational parts of a CNS - here apparently entailing that the idea of, say, evolution is in fact itself endowed with first-person awareness.

So I'll again ask a question in the name of optimally impartial philosophical enquiry:

Do you find that consciousness can only be "a) an idea and b) its constituents which are c) connected semiotically by modeling"?

Your previous reply - and I thank you for it - indicates yes. So, if your answer is "yes", then please express what "an idea" signifies in this context - such that consciousness becomes distinctly different from the idea of evolution which consciousness can be aware of (in that while the first is aware the second is not).

As in something that ontically occurs. — javra

Yes. But what are the ontic commitments of this term "real" that you employ. Or what has become now the term "ontic" that I guess is supposed to mean "really real" or "fundamentally real" or "monistically real".

I'll tentatively interpret you meaning that matter is the constitutional makeup of any given (what Aristotle intended by "matter") - and that consciousness thereby supervenes on its own constituents. — javra

I've told you I am a holist and not a reductionist and therefore don't buy the causal cop-out that is supervenience.

So your line of argument goes wrong from there. I am not a reductionist. And you don't seem to have a clue about what else that leaves.

Yes. But what are the ontic commitments of this term "real" that you employ. Or what has become now the term "ontic" that I guess is supposed to mean "really real" or "fundamentally real" or "monistically real". — apokrisis

None of that, or at least not necessarily "fundamentally real". The ontic is that which ontology is the study of. That which is actual rather than illusory, fictional, etc. Hence, is consciousness actual rather than illusory, fictional, etc.? It need not be fundamental for me to make my argument that it cannot be empirically studied by the sciences. But if you deem it illusory, fictional, etc. then that's a disagreement on what is actual and what is not in this world.

I've told you I am a holist and not a reductionist and therefore don't buy the causal cop-out that is supervenience.

So your line of argument goes wrong from there. I am not a reductionist. And you don't seem to have a clue about what else that leaves. — apokrisis

Could you calm down a bit? First off, you could interpret "to supervene" as "to be dependent on something else for truth, existence, or instantiation (definition pulled from Wiktionary)", which is what I intended. Let me know of a more appropriate term to express this and I'll use it: If A's occurrence holds X, Y, and Z as its constituents, then A is dependent on X, Y, and Z in such manner as that just quoted. And obviously this does not negate holistic top-down processes from operating on X, Y, and Z.

Secondly, of main interest was the one question I previously asked, together with what is meant by you to be "an idea".

But I'll cut the crap. If you have no intent to discuss the issue, then so be it.

I've told you I am a holist and not a reductionist and therefore don't buy the causal cop-out that is supervenience. — apokrisis

How do you see that book you refer to, Life’s Ratchet, as fitting into a holistic point of view? From the jacket copy:

Life is an enduring mystery. Yet, science tells us that living beings are merely sophisticated structures of lifeless molecules. If this view is correct, where do the seemingly purposeful motions of cells and organisms originate? In Life's Ratchet , physicist Peter M. Hoffmann locates the answer to this age-old question at the nanoscale.Below the calm, ordered exterior of a living organism lies microscopic chaos, or what Hoffmann calls the molecular storm, specialized molecules immersed in a whirlwind of colliding water molecules. Our cells are filled with molecular machines, which, like tiny ratchets, transform random motion into ordered activity, and create the purpose that is the hallmark of life. Tiny electrical motors turn electrical voltage into motion, nanoscale factories custom-build other molecular machines, and mechanical machines twist, untwist, separate and package strands of DNA. The cell is like a city, an unfathomable, complex collection of molecular workers working together to create something greater than themselves. Life, Hoffman argues, emerges from the random motions of atoms filtered through these sophisticated structures of our evolved machinery. We are agglomerations of interacting nanoscale machines more amazing than anything in science fiction. Rather than relying on some mysterious life force to drive them, as people believed for centuries, life's ratchets harness instead the second law of thermodynamics and the disorder of the molecular storm.

Isn’t that a reductionist (i.e. bottom-up) model?

You (supposedly) have discussions with luminaries yet you can't answer the most basic of questions and hide behind jargon. This is a philosophy forum (nay, THEphilosophyforum). Put your ideas out there!

Isn’t that a reductionist (i.e. bottom-up) model? — Wayfarer

It is semiotic. The model imposes its mechanical constraints in top-down fashion so as to ratchet the biochemistry in the desired direction.

The biochemistry is the bottom-up degrees of freedom in this systems equation. But the point of the nanoscale is that it is a special zone of energy convergence. The ordinary type of physics you might imagine – a world of neat determinacy – is instead turned into a state of radical instability or criticality. It becomes exactly that which the most minimal "informational" nudge can push in any material direction chosen.

So it is the tradic story of the semiotic modelling relation which bridges the "explanatory gap" – the question of how a model of the world could influence the world. A ratchet describes this. It is the switch that imposes the informational asymmetry on the entropic flow. It is the central "how" of how the whole causal story works.

For ordinary bottom-up engineering, building structures amidst raging thermal storms and quaking quantum uncertainty would be what suffers from an explanatory gap. It would seem blatantly the wrong choice of material foundations.

But life and mind are natural systems – organisms implementing modelling relations. And the edge of chaos is what they can colonise precisely because there exists a maximally tipable state of material fury.

Life evolved its handling of chemistry until it could harness the most violent available chemical process – redox reactions. This should blow the mitochondria apart. But respiratory proteins can dance a hot electron down a chain of precisely aligned receptors, dragged along by quantum tunneling effects towards the oxygen atom waiting at the end.

What is then bottom-up, if you like, is that the metabolic system the genes stabilise can then become the platform for building further levels of life and mind. Neurons can play the same trick by stabilising the flux of a sensory world. Language can stabilise the flux of a psychological world. Logic can stabilise the flux of a rationalised world.

It all rests on the ability to use the instability of the nanoscale as the right kind of material fashion. A zone of maximum switchability – that occurs only in a watery solvent on a Sun heated planet – which in itself makes a system of mechanical switches the next most probable evolutionary step.

Information can have maximum meaning where maximum entropy or uncertainty is present.

But first, the material itself has to be a dissipative flow. It is useless trying to milk action from a dead equilibrium. The material realm has to be in a critical state as Hoffman describes. And then the lightest of touches can bend it to your will, from the organismic point of view.

Which philosopher and/or paper most closely matches your view on consciousness?

Hence, is consciousness actual rather than illusory, fictional, etc.? — javra

This is monism. This is reductionism. So how I think of things – how Peirce thought of things, how systems science thinks of things – just doesn't share your ontological commitments. You are trying to jam square pegs into round holes.

Forget it. Until you stop and think about why your questions are wrong, you can't begin to learn how to think in holistic terms and ask questions that are meaningful in light of that ontology.

But I'll cut the crap. — javra

Then stop excusing your lack of effort by claiming I haven't ever said anything in reply.

The model imposes its mechanical constraints in top-down fashion so as to ratchet the biochemistry in the desired direction. — apokrisis

Desired by whom? Actually your description contains other terms implying intentionality - life evolving its complexity, neurons that play tricks, and so on. There seems an implied agency here, which is noticeably at odds with the wording of the book’s description. Not to mention ‘top-down constraints’ - if molecular structures are ‘the bottom’, what is the origin of the ‘top down’ constraints?

Desired by whom? — Wayfarer

The bleeding organism. The system with the metabolism. Don't pretend this is some tricky mystery.

There seems an implied agency here — Wayfarer

Implied? It's a fucking theory of teleology.

if molecular structures are ‘the bottom’, what is the origin of the ‘top down’ constraints. — Wayfarer

Read what I said. Criticality itself "others" the possibility of its own stabilisation. By molecular chaos being the rule, semiotic constraints become that which could then take maximum advantage of this material lack of constraints.

Come on, read what he said! ::snaps fingers:: pay attention! What's wrong with you?