If pulling a bunny out of an empty hat is magic then pulling consciousness out of non conscoius blocks is also magic in exactly the same way. — khaled

Did it ever occur to you that they may be perfectly rational explanations unknown to you in both the cases of the rabbit and consciousness?

Mutes don't talk either, but I'm pretty sure they're conscious. These two properties aren't related then. — khaled

So you think dead people are still conscious but can't say it anymore?

As usual, I am using the reflexivity of thought against thought deniers. The denial of thoughts is itself a thought. It applies to Fury calling thoughts "brain shivers", derogatively. By reflexivity, that very idea of him then becomes a mere "brain shiver", nothing serious. And when he fails to understand something, he's just not shivering his brain hard enough... :-)

The standard view adds two more assumptions on top:

1- At some point things stop being conscious.
2- When enough non conscious things come together consciousness magically pops up. — khaled

"Magic" on this forum tends to be used instead of "mysterious", including here. When anyone on TPF fails to understand something, he declares it "magic" and hence feels allowed to deny phenomena that he can't explain.

Because "magic"... :-)

Yet not knowing how to explain a phenomenon is no ground to deny it. Otherwise we would never learn anything new.

Get rid of your cheap "magic" tricks and accept the real thing instead: puzzlement and wonder as fundamental and beautiful aspects of our intellectual life.

Only then will you have any chance to do philosophy.

Not sure what you mean. — bongo fury

Maybe because you're not brain shivering hard enough.

Right. And this may mean that the emergence of life happened first, as a prerequisite for the emergence of consciousness among certain living species. It would follow that we may be unable to understand consciousness without first understanding life, and its emergence from inanimated matter. The two problems are linked.

Not literally, anyway. It might, of course, be convenient and useful to make the inference in a figurative manner of speaking. — bongo fury

Is there a clear difference between literal brain shivers and figurative ones, and if yes, what could it be?

The basic issue with panpsychism is its ignorance of life as a prerequisite for any psychism. Dead people don't talk much. There must be a reason for that...

On the OP, a serious while funny book is The Curious Enlightenement of Professor Caritat, by Steven Lukes. He concludes that any system of governance that is fixed once and for all and obeying to a single ideology is in practice imperfect, because human beings are always unsatisfied, there's always more than just one or two things they need.

:up:

As with the train speed example, there is no "view from nowhere".
— Andrew M

But there is, because life evolved long after the universe was around, and science can detail the universe in places where there is no life and no perceivers. — Marchesk

Still, a view logically implies a point of view. There are of course things that nobody views, but there is no view from nowhere.

Thanks. A bit of background:

In 1969 the young singer-song writers Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil arrived in London, expelled from military-ruled Brazil. ...

Gil and Caetano met in 1963 at university in Salvador, the capital Bahia, in Brazil’s culturally vibrant Northeast. There they collaborated, initially performing traditional Northeastern songs and bossa nova melodies, sometimes together with Maria Bethânia (Caetano’s sister), Gal Costa and Tom Zé, other future stars.

In 1965 they left Salvador to pursue opportunities in the cultural hubs to the south, with Gil moving to São Paulo and Caetano (with Bethânia) opting for Rio de Janeiro. They soon came to the attention of a wider Brazilian public, in no small part thanks to the growing reach of television. ... [Military coup happens]

Soon after their arrests, Caetano and Gil were transferred to Rio where they were moved between military detention centres. They were often held in solitary confinement, were constantly intimidated and, in a symbolic act of humiliation, both had their famously long hair shorn off.

One of Caetano’s favourite songs, “Terra“ [“Earth”] was born in his prison cell and produced while in exile: he was given a copy of the magazine Manchete which included, for the first time, photos of Earth from outer space.

Finally, on February 19th, they were put on an air force plane and flown north to Salvador. There they remained under semi-house arrest, until they were “invited” to leave the country.

“I guess they just don’t like what we do”, suggested Caetano shortly before his departure, “they just don’t seem to understand anything open-ended, anything they can’t foresee and control.”

As neither Caetano nor Gil had the money for the airfares, let alone resources to meet expenses abroad, a solution had to be found. Despite being banned from making public appearances, the two persuaded the authorities to grant them permission to perform in Salvador, on condition that they pledged not to “incite” the crowd.

The shows (they were allowed two) went ahead on the 20th and 21st July 1969 at the Teatro Castro Alves, the largest artistic venue in the city. Caetano, aged 26, and Gil, who had just turned 27, were then escorted to Rio to await their travel documents. A few days later, together with their wives – sisters Dedé and Sandra Gadelha – they boarded a plane for Europe. ...

source: https://theworldelsewhere.com/2015/10/15/london-london-brazils-caetano-veloso-and-gilberto-gil-in-exile-part-1/

Good suggestions, but those only describe the current intent of the tread. I suppose the idea is that retitling could help relaunch the thread in new directions... In this spirit I propose:

"Qualifying Quania" - exploring the concept of "quining", and whether it boils down to some elementary, ineffable "Quania".

Yes. They say "function shapes the organ". If you want the same cognitive performance as a conscious human being, you will need some form of self awareness and consciousness, yes.

EDIT: Just because in my view consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, it doesn't follow that it would come 'naturally' to a machine past a certain degree of complexity, in the absence of a dedicated mechanism. No machine will one day "wake up conscious" like Skynet in the Terminator franchise, without some guy putting in place some actual hardware mechanism for it.

If you only want to fake it decently well, that's another thing.

LOL the title change. — Marchesk

Saw that too. It's only the second time they change that thread title. What's next? "Not Understanding Quining Qualia"? "How to Use Quining Qualia as a Door Stop"? :-)

please rephrase, I don't get it.

I do. If p-zombies could exist -- I.e. if we could live the exact same lives without consciousness -- then we wouldn't have any consciousness at all. Nature doesn't build things for no reason. Consciousness exists because it brings a Darwinian advantage.

Whatever emergentist theory is proposed, the question "Yes, but why can't all that happen without consciousness?" is often not satisfactorily answered. — bert1

I agree it's important to see consciousness as functional, and contend that consciousness is necessary for the integration of various information 'feeds' into a meaningful, intentional whole. It's a sort of data fusion device.

Well no, emergence doesn't have to be dealt with, it just needs to be rejected as illogical. That's very simple, and it doesn't really require any substitute or anything like that unless the person is inspired to seek reality. But when people reject emergence it's usually because they are inspired to seek reality, then an alternative to emergence is required. — Metaphysician Undercover

Your rejection of emergence and your panpsychism are both illogical, and are thus rejected.

One is left with the impression that you don't actually have anything to say. — Banno

Don't you worry about me.

In other words, it's an easy way out of the problem
— Olivier5

That's good isn't it? — bert1

It works wonders. Should be used more often if you ask me, on scores of other problems. Whence art? Panaesthetism is the answer: atoms love beauty too, you know. Whence morality? Panmoralism of course! Electrons followed rules too, after all. Whence politics? Panpolitism, what else? Quarks know how to spin. Etc.

Emergence is logically incoherent at a fundamental level. Rejection of emergence seems to leave two basic approaches, dualism and panpsychism. Dualism has been seriously beaten down in modern times, so it is rejected out of prejudice, and this leaves panpsychism as the favourable option. — Metaphysician Undercover

In other words, it's an easy way out of the problem, which avoids dealing with emergence.

Anamnesis? — Banno

I don't remember.

This planet will be gone to ashes by then.

Olivier5 I speculate that human recall is based on such non-specific shivers, connected into a narrative; not on a recording, however distorted or fragmented. — bongo fury

Assuming that you trust your speculation shivers and your logic shivers, note that, in order to offer any structure shiver to your memory shivers, a narrative shiver ought to be recorded, even if shiveringly so.

Are we doing memory now? — Banno

Just pointing out that recognizing red apples implies a certain prior knowledge of red and of apples.

the basic idea that episodic memory is reconstructed rather than recalled seems uncontroversial. — Banno

The question is: reconstructed based on what? Surely not some image bank like in a computer; I agree with Fury and you on this, because it's hard to recall a mental image of anything or anyone, or even imagine a face as clear as a picture in one's mind. Dreams (which includes characters and some background) are very vague and impermanent. Memories like dreams and imagined things, are often vague, and impermanent though they last longer than dreams.

So, memories are reconstructed alright, but based on what? There must be some physical trace left somewhere.

What are the options available to a people when its government is hell bent on grinding them into the ground under the guise of striving for an unattainable goal? — Book273

Vote.

Musical interlude. Yellow shines best in the dark.

But is it reasonable to expect that any animals without language ever "recall a scene to mind"? Except whilst asleep and dreaming, of course... — bongo fury

Far more reasonable than what you usually say. If they can dream, they can imagine and recall scenes.

The opposite view is that "recalling a scene to mind" is a uniquely human skill of practicing and maintaining a narrative, ideally a highly flexible but consistent one. (E.g. Bartlett.) — bongo fury

Tell that to the plants around you. Apparently they have some capacity to learn and yet none to maintain narratives.

If crows are capable, and I expect they are, they might learn a voiced instruction to alert other crows to press buttons, and which buttons to press. A noise that means 'press the red buttons' followed by a noise that means 'this is red' as the tutor presses only the red buttons might suffice. If this were the case, newer crows might be said to have a linguistic understanding of redness. — Kenosha Kid

In the experiment where a crow learns to fetch a red object to get food, one could conceive of red objects as symbols for food. In this sense, to use a visual signal to trigger a learnt response is already something vaguely approaching language.

I don't think crows imitate other birds, but some birds are specialists of that, like the mockingbirds. Not sure what the Darwinian advantage is. That's why parrots can mimic entire sentences. I'm pretty sure you can train a parrot to say red when he sees something red.

Because I meant memories in the sense of rememberings. — bongo fury

That's what I meant too. If you can remember events from the past, you must have some way to record them.

As brain shivers — bongo fury

Meaning?

it says no representations in the brain. Storable units corresponding to (representing) external events are excluded by implication. (Was my reasoning.) — bongo fury

So how do you explain your own memories?

If all organisms and even plants can learn, they can link past and present events, in the present. How do you explain that if no trace of the past is left in the organism?

So, now that you think about it, it probably is all to do with storing traces in a memory.

So, you probably reject the premise. Ok. — bongo fury

I beg to differ. Your premise says nothing about storing traces or not storing traces.

Even organisms without neurones display an ability to learn.
— Olivier5
:cool: — bongo fury

The most controversial presentation was “Animal-Like Learning in Mimosa Pudica,” an unpublished paper by Monica Gagliano, a thirty-seven-year-old animal ecologist at the University of Western Australia who was working in Mancuso’s lab in Florence. Gagliano, who is tall, with long brown hair parted in the middle, based her experiment on a set of protocols commonly used to test learning in animals. She focussed on an elementary type of learning called “habituation,” in which an experimental subject is taught to ignore an irrelevant stimulus. “Habituation enables an organism to focus on the important information, while filtering out the rubbish,” Gagliano explained to the audience of plant scientists. How long does it take the animal to recognize that a stimulus is “rubbish,” and then how long will it remember what it has learned? Gagliano’s experimental question was bracing: Could the same thing be done with a plant?

Mimosa pudica, also called the “sensitive plant,” is that rare plant species with a behavior so speedy and visible that animals can observe it; the Venus flytrap is another. When the fernlike leaves of the mimosa are touched, they instantly fold up, presumably to frighten insects. The mimosa also collapses its leaves when the plant is dropped or jostled. Gagliano potted fifty-six mimosa plants and rigged a system to drop them from a height of fifteen centimetres every five seconds. Each “training session” involved sixty drops. She reported that some of the mimosas started to reopen their leaves after just four, five, or six drops, as if they had concluded that the stimulus could be safely ignored. “By the end, they were completely open,” Gagliano said to the audience. “They couldn’t care less anymore.”

Was it just fatigue? Apparently not: when the plants were shaken, they again closed up. “ ‘Oh, this is something new,’ ” Gagliano said, imagining these events from the plants’ point of view. “You see, you want to be attuned to something new coming in. Then we went back to the drops, and they didn’t respond.” Gagliano reported that she retested her plants after a week and found that they continued to disregard the drop stimulus, indicating that they “remembered” what they had learned. Even after twenty-eight days, the lesson had not been forgotten. She reminded her colleagues that, in similar experiments with bees, the insects forgot what they had learned after just forty-eight hours. Gagliano concluded by suggesting that “brains and neurons are a sophisticated solution but not a necessary requirement for learning,” and that there is “some unifying mechanism across living systems that can process information and learn.” — https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant

Is that your view as a biologist? That an organism learns by storing and comparing traces? — bongo fury

That an organism can learn is beyond dispute. Even organisms without neurones display an ability to learn. This ability must logically be supported by some biological mechanisms to somehow store some information and to retrieve or activate it later, usually regrouped under the term 'memory'. How memory works is an important area of cognitive research.

I tend to stick to simple ideas here.