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.

Apart from them there is vast nothingness. — prothero

Interesting phrase. Can nothingness be vast?

Could be. Unless they have definitively figured out all about consciousness, no longer debating it the way we do, and would know for sure.

↪RogueAI So anyway, the claim now from you is, if physicalism is true then knowing everything about the physical arrangement of the book should allow you to understand the meaning of the book, even if you don't understand the language it was written in.

I just don't think that follows.

I mean, let's take LLMs as an example. They're a good example because they're explicitly physical. They are implemented 100% in the physical world - the computer scientists who invented them didn't learn how to imbue them with souls or anything, they work on the same physical principles as any normal computer.

Now if you give one of these LLMs a bunch of text in a language they're trained on, they can summarise it for you pretty well.

And if you give them a bunch of text on a language they haven't been trained on, they can't.

So we have a fully physical system which can, loosely speaking, "understand" some stuff and not "understand" other stuff, despite having the same access to the visual characters of each text. So... no I don't think it holds that, if physicalism is true, a person should be able to understand text he hasn't been trained to understand.

Obviously LLMs aren't the same as human beings and a summary from the LLM isn't the same as human understanding. BUT the ability to summarise and paraphrase a text is a human test for understanding, so I think the comparison is honestly robust enough. — flannel jesus

Do you think LLMs understand text? I don't think they have the slightest understanding that the marks on paper, or the binary code that the marks on paper are converted to, mean other things. I don't think they understand what meaning is, even when they are programmed to say they are. I think the binary code reacts in different ways to different binary code that is input, entirely determined by how they are programmed. I think it's very complex dominos.

For any unit to be conscious as a unit, it must be a unit processing energy
— Ulthien (should be Patterner)

..but exactly this "lapsus" made me join here, as it stands true for the binding of the info to sentiency: only the EM quantum field can accomplish this thansposition :) — Ulthien

But I meant to say:

For any unit to be conscious as a unit, it must be a unit processing information.

A ping-pong ball is not a unit in regards to consciousness. It's just a physical arrangement of particles.

A Rube Goldberg Machine is not a unit in regards to consciousness. It's just a bunch of physical arrangements of particles knocking into each other. There is no information anywhere in the system. No part of it means anything.

Dominos set up too reveal whether or not a given number is prime is not a unit in regards to consciousness. There is no information being processed. Dominos are falling in a way that demonstrates something mathematical. But because they were specifically arranged to do that, not because they mean that.

When protein is synthesized, information is processed. The structure of DNA is encoded information. The codons mean amino acids, and the order of the codons means proteins. Proteins are literally assembled. They are stuck together, molecule by molecule, in the specified order. This is the beginning of consciousness of more than individual particles.

For any unit to be conscious as a unit, it must be a unit processing energy. Arrangements of particles must mean something other than the arrangements of particles that they are, and they must be processing that information. So DNA, the beginning of life, is also the beginning of groups of particles that are conscious as a unit.
— Patterner

close, but no cigar. — Ulthien

Argh! Reading your quote of me, I see a mistake. I don't know how I made such an obvious mistake, but "energy" should be "information".

no I have yours and a bunch of other posts to read. Welcome aboard!

Philosophers? Among philosophers everything is always a matter of debate. — T Clark

I disagree.








:joke:

↪Patterner are you the guy who listened to the Annika Harris audio thing with me? — flannel jesus

Yep.

↪SophistiCat I think he wants debates within panpsychism. Which is valid. "If we start with the assumption that pansychism is true, where does that lead us?" I think that's fair. I'm not a panpsychist myself but I think that kind of approach is worth having. It's an exploration of an idea. — flannel jesus

Thank you. It seems some would forbid such discussions.

When your physical body is no longer existent, your mind will also evaporate into thin air. — Corvus

Your mind will be gone pretty much the moment you die.

What do you have in mind by "consciouness being fundamental doesn't imply everything being conscious"? What is the alternative?
— Patterner

Fundamental =/= Omnipresent — Dawnstorm

I forgot this part when I replied. Here's what I'm thinking...

1) Consciousness is fundamental, not emergent from the physical.*

2) Therefore, something non-physical is also at work.

3) There's no reason to think matter everywhere in the universe that is arranged like us would not have the same subjective experience that we have.

4) The non-physical aspect of reality that gives us our subjective experience is doing the same everywhere in the universe.

if that's correct, I think it would have an effect everywhere. As opposed to it being everywhere, but being inactive unless certain conditions are present.


*I'll add this quote to these. From Donald Hoffman's 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 as to how consciousness could emerge from the physical. It's like asking how we could build a house out of liquid water. Worse, in fact, because at least houses and water are both physical things.

Also, I think the term "everything" is problematic in the sense that what appears to us as a unit may not be conscious — Dawnstorm

Yes, it may be a unit only in our eyes. A rock, a stop sign, a cruise ship, a cloud, anything. those are not units in the way I mean, because there is no information processing taking place anywhere. Nevertheless, every particle that makes them up is experiencing. A particle is not experiencing thinking, intelligence, or anything mental. its existence, and therefore what it experiences, is purely physical.

But without body, our consciousness evaporates into nothing. Our brain falls asleep every night, and when it does, the whole world of ours disappears into nothing too until bodies waking up in the morning. Bodies keep on living without conscious minds, but no conscious mind can exist without the living body which it could be emerged from. — Corvus

I agree. Information processing - thinking - is a physical thing. I just posted this on response to :

The physical is things like photons* hitting retina, being converted into electrical signals that go to the brain, trigger a storage mechanism containing a similar pattern of photons* hitting the retina at some point in the past during which the body sustained damage, triggering ..., on and on, and the body moves a certain way that avoids taking damage again.

Is that a description of a mental event? — Patterner

I believe that is a description of a mental event. Photons, vibrations in the air, etc., interact with our sensory apparatus. it is converted into another form - my electric signals. These signals represent the original. That's meaning. Information. That information is processed in the brain (for things that have a brain), and action results. That is thinking. Again, 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

But that is not consciousness. Thinking is a physical process. Thinking can be a more complex physical process than most other physical processes (although not necessarily), but that's what it is.

Consciousness is subjective experience. The subjective experience of this particular kind of physical process is what has usually been considered consciousness. I disagree. I think consciousness is the subjective experience of anything, and this just happens to be what we humans subjectively experience.

For any unit to be conscious as a unit, it must be a unit processing energy. Arrangements of particles must mean something other than the arrangements of particles that they are, and they must be processing that information. So DNA, the beginning of life, is also the beginning of groups of particles that are conscious as a unit.
— Patterner

It now seems like you're not actually saying "everything" is conscious. That's perfectly fine, since consciouness being fundamental doesn't imply everything being conscious. It just feels... different from what I read you saying before (partly due to the rock example, no doubt). — Dawnstorm

That's not what I mean. The key is that I don't think consciousness and thinking/mental activity are related. Human consciousness is the experience of thinking/mental activity. Things that don't have thinking/mental activity, obviously, cannot experience it. But they experienced what they are.

What do you have in mind by "consciouness being fundamental doesn't imply everything being conscious"? What is the alternative?

There may be "things" that don't appear to me as a unit that are conscious. They would be units in themselves, but not for me. — Dawnstorm

Yes. My criteria for "unit" is something that process information. I'm sure there is a lot more information processing going on than I recognized.

going to read the rest of your post a couple more times try to get a better handle on your idea.

But our consciousness is about far more than just our physical bodies.
— Patterner

But without body, our consciousness evaporates into nothing. Our brain falls asleep every night, and when it does, the whole world of ours disappears into nothing too until bodies waking up in the morning. Bodies keep on living without conscious minds, but no conscious mind can exist without the living body which it could be emerged from. — Corvus

I agree. The mind turns off at times, like deep sleep or general anesthesia.

For my philosophical purposes, I further define Consciousness as human subjective experience. That's the only type of awareness we forum posters have experienced first hand. I am skeptical that "everything", including atoms, consciously experience their existence. — Gnomon

My position is that the phrase "consciously experience" is like "visually see". But my guess is you don't mean it that way. I would guess you mean something like knowingly, intellectually, or mindfully experience. Which, of course, humans do. But because we have mental abilities to be conscious of, not because those abilities are consciousness.

I've read various accounts of Maxwell's demon. I don't understand why things I see as problems are not. From The Demon in the Machine, by Paul Davies:

Maxwell assumed that the demon and the shutter are perfectly functioning devices with no friction or need for a power source. This is admittedly an idealization, but there is no known principle preventing an arbitrarily close approach to such mechanical perfection. Remember, friction is a macroscopic property where ordered motion, e.g. a ball rolling along the floor, is converted to disordered motion – heat – in which the ball’s energy is dissipated among trillions of tiny particles. But on a molecular scale, all is tiny. Friction doesn’t exist. — Paul Davies

How can you open and close the shutter without using energy?

Aside from that, the molecules are bouncing around the box, being sorted into one side or the other. But they're not going to continue bouncing around at the same speed forever, are they? Demon will be sorting slower and slower molecules?

So, I ask rhetorically for the nth time, why can't the mental be physical? Why can't the physical be mental? — Manuel

The physical is things like photons* hitting retina, being converted into electrical signals that go to the brain, trigger a storage mechanism containing a similar pattern of photons* hitting the retina at some point in the past during which the body sustained damage, triggering ..., on and on, and the body moves a certain way that avoids taking damage again.

Is that a description of a mental event?

Is the universe intelligible to us other than through minds? Not that we know of. — Manuel

What would intelligibility without minds mean?



*My speech to text said futons. Futons hitting retina is contraindicated.

Basically, what would count as a rock's consciousness would be independent from human category-making. For example, a human breaks a rock. What now? Two consciousnesses where previously there was one? One consciousness as broken rock? Both? Is the world flow constantly splintering off and merging consciousnesses? Does really everything have a concsiousness (regardless of whether it's comprehensible as a unit to a human mind)? — Dawnstorm

I'm suggesting that nothing, not humans or anything else "has a consciousness". Said that way, consciousness is a thing. Rather, everything "is conscious". But yes, i'm saying everything is conscious. However, I've been very unclear shirt something. To get more into the unit idea, I don't really suspect a rock is a conscious unit. I know I've been using it as an example, but I guess to try to get the point across that consciousness isn't a mental thing. Rather, consciousness of people means consciousness of mental things. (And I could be wrong. I could be wrong about the entire thing, after all, so certainly about this. Maybe rocks are consciousness as a unity. But I doubt it.) To be a conscious unity, as opposed to just an object with trillions+ of individually conscious particles, Simple physical proximity isn't enough. A rock is only a unit to a human mind. It is not a unit to itself, or any of its particles. it's just a conglomerate of individual, individually conscious, particles.

For any unit to be conscious as a unit, it must be a unit processing energy. Arrangements of particles must mean something other than the arrangements of particles that they are, and they must be processing that information. So DNA, the beginning of life, is also the beginning of groups of particles that are conscious as a unit.

Quite long ago now, I've come up with a thought experience. Imagine you come across a butterfly sitting on a flower. To you there's a butterfly, a flower, stuff around that that's neiter... all that is intuitive and comprehensible. Now imagine an invisible globe, such that part of the butterfly and flower is in the globe, and part of it is outside of it. That is less intuitive, but due to maths we can imagine it. Now imagine the butterfly taking off and flying away. And now find some sort of mathmatics that allows to recalculate the entire universe such that whatever was within the imagined invisible globe stays a unit. I think that's impossible (from a human perspective), but if we imagine it possible, surely the result would be entirely incomprehensible. However, if the contents of the globe were conscious than there would be an experience that would make this cohere, however incomprehensible this would be to us. And yet it would be the very same world flow that contains our consciousnesses, too. — Dawnstorm

Sorry, I just don't understand your idea.