What are the problems of modern science? If modern science is so great then how come we are threatening our very existence with technological devices today? Is there a way we can change our modern beliefs in science in order to change the world today? All these questions and more can be discussed........in this discussion. — Thinking

Technology is older than science. We were using tools long before we were basing them on science or driving science to yield them, including tools specifically to kill. Knowledge can't always be held responsible for what humans do with it.

That said, too much science is funded by technology companies and institutions, including military. It would at least help to not make science so dependent on those willing to pay the most, especially when defense is extremely well-funded.

So - science doesn't know what dark matter is, what its components are, or even really that it exists, except inferentially. But whatever it is, it must be 'matter', because, ultimately, everything is — Wayfarer

This is backward. Dark matter is matter by definition, I.e. it is defined to have physical properties. We do not infer its material nature. The question then of its material nature is nonsensical: the question is, is there good enough reason to believe a particular hypothesis is true?

Science just goes on its merry way, discovering whatever there is to be discovered, and never mind the anomalies! — Wayfarer

This is obviously not an honest representation of science. Dark matter itself IS such an anomaly: it is an error between empirical data and predictions yielded by cosmological models. It is something physicists make a fuss about precisely because it is such a striking anomaly.

How about why you have experiences at all? — Harry Hindu

I'm not sure what specifically you're asking. We have brains that react to external stimuli and convert that reaction into what we consciously experience via various transformations and augmentations. What bit of that are you questioning: How things can react to external stimuli (physics)?; Why we have brains that can do this (evolution)?; How brains do this (neurology)?; Or are you just asking about the first-/third-person distinction, e.g. why a stimulated nucleus accumbens feels like pleasure?

What is the difference between unconscious and conscious phenomena, or systems? — Harry Hindu

My bad, I used the term 'phenomena' in an inconsistent way. What I meant was that there are _processes_ in the brain that we are not conscious of (e.g. outline detection, pattern-matching, etc.) and processes that we are conscious of (e.g. rational decision-making).

How is the brain itself not aware of what it's different systems are doing? — Harry Hindu

A child can just ask 'why?' to every answer; that's not interesting conversation. Do you believe that you are conscious of every thing your brain does, including the cited examples of inverting the retinal image, white-shifting colours, outline detection? Do you claim you make a conscious effort to do these things? Do you consciously regulate your breathing at every moment? Consciously produce dopamine when you spot something surprising that you consciously decide is good?

If not, then you already know that you are unconscious of many (indeed) of the processes occurring in the brain, and your incredulity is less than credible.

Machines infer nothing. They perform calculations, on the basis of which their operators may make inferences. — Wayfarer

You can train a neural network to infer, say, the interests of a shopper looking for t-shirts based on similar shoppers who bought t-shirts. The operator infers nothing: they accept the inference, until evidence suggests the neural net is systematically wrong. The error is in assuming that humans do the same thing in a significantly different way.

How can you say we arrive at beliefs by 'a physical process'? How is the process 'physical' as distinct from cultural, emotional, and so on? — Wayfarer

I'm amazed you assume that I think emotion doesn't have a physical basis. Doesn't seem a rational inference.

Brains don't 'handle data'. — Wayfarer

I'm also amazed you think that stating your beliefs would move me in any way. I already know you believe this. Untrue beliefs do prosper, see? Handling data is precisely what brains do, with or without the capacity for reason. Or do you believe that all mammals rationally invert images, whiteshift colours, detect outlines, etc?

What Haldane's quote illustrates, is that rational necessity, or logical necessity, is of a different order to physical necessity. — Wayfarer

No, what Haldane's quote illustrates is that Haldane believed in something that is almost certainly untrue. Viz your Descartes quote also, argument as hominem is only as good as the authority, and authority has progressed somewhat.

I found a quote by the biologist J B S Haldane which makes the point I was trying to get across — Wayfarer

Good things come to those who wait.

For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true.

...

This is because, as I said, logical necessity can’t be equated to physical necessity. And this has nothing intrinsically to do with whether it’s a ‘human being figuring it out’ or not - although, as it happens, humans are the only beings we know of who can figure it out. But were some other sentient rational beings to exist somewhere else in the universe, they too would be obligated to recognise logical necessity, and for the same reasons - even if their brains were configured completely differently to our own. — Wayfarer

He's right insofar as the processes themselves don't speak to the truth of a belief they culminate in, as evidenced by the prosperity of untrue beliefs. He's wrong insofar as even a dumb machine can infer accurately. If you believe that your beliefs are true because you believe in them, you have a circularity problem. The precise causes of my beliefs are important, not solely because of the physical mechanisms in the brain that yield them, or the physical configuration that stores them, but because the _external_ causes are not equal. "Because my parents taught me" is not the equal of empiricism, for instance.

If it were the case that we only believe true things, he might be presenting something of a mystery. As it happens, he's not stating anything but his own additional belief about his beliefs, which is, to me, obviously bogus.

The physical processes by which we arrive at and recall beliefs are not separable from the beliefs themselves. Knowing more about how these work sheds light on how we can avoid false beliefs, e.g. due to propaganda, which is the art of exploiting the errors and limitations of brains in forging beliefs and making decisions based on them. The fact that a human and a sentient Martian can both figure out the law of the excluded middle demonstrates the efficacy of a highly evolved brain: it would be of no benefit to have a brain that inferred wrongly most of the time, which is why we build good beliefs on evidence and logic. But having the belief is not what makes it true: rather, we need a brain that handles data accurately in order to form good beliefs. Computers handle data accurately, and its trivial to train one to yield good inferences. It's also trivial to train one to yield bad ones.

None of this explains why have a different experience of my raw sensory input with memory, motivation, etc. than you have of my raw sensory input with memory, motivation. — Harry Hindu

Sorry for the late reply. I've seen this argument a few times and never got the sense of it. We don't need any knowledge of the workings of the brain to understand why I don't experience your sensory input. It is not a neurological question. It's not even a sensible question imo.

This assumes that consciousness only exists in one part of the brain. — Harry Hindu

Actually it doesn't, which is why it is broken down into functional systems not specific parts of the brain. Either system could be, and likely is, distributed. But certainly parts of the brain are dominant in certain functions.

You say that "we" are not conscious of our decision, then how can we associate the decision with "we"? — Harry Hindu

The answer to that is precisely why we labour under the illusion that we make those decisions consciously. Recall that we are not conscious of the unconscious causes of conscious phenomena. Decisions from System 1 are presented to System 2 apparently uncaused (i.e. without System 2 being aware of the process). So from System 2's point of view, decisions originate in System 2. There are lots of published tests for this.

This begs the question then, what use is personal phenomenal experience in an evolutionary "survival of the genes" sense? — Harry Hindu

Well, what use is it in day-to-day life? Isaac, Banno et al would argue that there isn't a meaningful separate phenomenal experience, i.e. it isn't useful at all even if it exists. The transformations and augmentations of raw sensory input with memory, motivation, etc., are sufficient to account for consciousness. And I agree to an extent. In my view, when we talk about qualia, we're talking about these transformations and augmentations, at least as available to access consciousness (which is all we can report on). The usefulness might be summed up as: it is quicker and easier to work with 'lion' than it is to work with an unadorned granular image.

What would it look like for someone to change their mind? — Harry Hindu

That's probably not one thing. I've touched on an example from Kahneman's work earlier. There are decisions we make that are not consciously made, that is we are not conscious of making them in the way we do, but rather, once those decisions are made unconsciously, they are presented to consciousness as if for ratification in such a way that we'll swear blind we did make them consciously. (NB: Kahneman doesn't speak in terms of unconscious and conscious decision making but in terms of System 1 (fast, e.g. pattern-matching) and System 2 (slow, algorithmic). But the implication is there.) Consciously we can change our minds, i.e. System 2 will come up with a different answer.

As per Cramer (and his predecessors), there can be no emission without transmission in the absorber theory, whether classical or quantum. "Absorber theory, unlike conventional quantum mechanics, predicts that in a situation where there is a deficiency of future absorption in a particular spatial direction, there will be a corresponding decrease in emission in that direction." (I don't think you disagree, since that is also the premise of your hypothesis - just pointing this out, because what you wrote might suggest otherwise.) — SophistiCat

Yes, I am in the sense that I would insist at least on an ultimate absorber: an electron hole (positron) for an electron, less so on the short-range behaviour Cramer describes. But even in TQM, the retarded wavefunction is emitted whether it transacts or not. It could potentially go on forever, but the emitting system would be considered as in the same state (no emission). By contrast, standard QM has a probabilistic emission: the emitting system is in a superposition of having emitted and not emitted. When the former is 0.9, we can be 90% sure emission has occurred, whether or not we detect a corresponding absorption (in principle), and it's for this reason I was being careful to discuss transaction.

In standard QM, the electron can be emitted without a future absorption event.
In TQM, the electron wavefunction is likewise emitted regardless of any future absorption event, but will only transact if there is a corresponding advanced wave.
In the OP, there is no emitted wavefunction without n absorbed one.

I wonder though whether the absorber theory actually rules out, logically or empirically, uncollapsed/unabsorbed waves? — SophistiCat

The wavefunction spreads out irrespective of future absorbers, just like in standard QM. It's just that the probability of emission does not approach 1 in the absence of absorbers in TQM.

By the way, in the 1980 paper Cramer wrote: "Davies argues that the most general test of absorber theory would include the possibility of type II transactions." This refers to a 1975 paper by Paul Davies: On recent experiments to detect advanced radiation. — SophistiCat

Ah, great minds. And my little one. Yes, it should be experimentally detectable and discernible from other interpretations of QM.

For all these reasons, It is highly dubious that Libet’s apparatus could predict any real-life choice, because in my view it picks up clues from our deliberation that sometimes prepares decision making. When the deliberation time is reduced, when the alternatives have to be invented or imagined prior to deliberation, or when emotions systemically affect deliberations in sudden ways, I predict that no computer can predict my choices in advance. — Olivier5

Variations of the test have been performed for decades now as criticism of this form of yes-buttery is ongoing, all verifying the original result. To put it another way, the number of scenarios in which the effect has been seen is always increasing. No one believes this is true of all decision-making: it is almost certainly not true of chess decisions. However, driving is probably a great example of where it *would* kick in, precisely because the timescales are often short, requiring action to be taken faster than conscious decision-making processes are adept at.

I think I see the issue.

My question was "What do you mean by....?". Which word in that question is hard to describe? — khaled

If you're saying that you meant "Does a computer have consciousness according to *my* understanding of consciousness," then we've been speaking at cross purposes.

But that would be akin to saying "When I press A on my keyboard the letter A is typed on the screen". This would work for explaining how a PC works eventually by testing countless hypothesis and sometimes breaking open the PC (neurology) but it does not answer whether or not the PC is conscious, or why it would or wouldn't be. — khaled

This presumes a definition of consciousness in which a conscious PC would be what-it-is + what-it-does (3rd person) + something else that is undiscoverable from the outside. This something else is what I've been asking you about. it's a property of *your* understanding of consciousness, not mine.

But I think I now get what you maybe really meant. Let's say neuroscience has provided a complete and universally accepted description of human consciousness. Armed with that, is a sophisticated computer conscious? Or a chimp, or a rat, or a crow? Knowing how human consciousness works does not decide for us the essential properties such that we can say something else is also conscious.

A human is a specific system. Is a blind person conscious? I'm sure you'd agree that they are. So one of the most important set of phenomenal consciousnesses that is available for access consciousness is not an essential for a thing to be called conscious.

So at the other extreme, let's consider a speed camera. It could be said to have a phenomenal consciousnesses: it processes raw sensory data according to its training, detects car objects, license plate objects, numbers and letters, and estimates velocities. This is close enough to some things that humans do with visual data. It also makes decisions and reports this derived data (it's nearest equivalent to qualia) to external entities. Given that every qualia it has goes through this decision-making process and is available for reporting, is it conscious?

I would say it is not. It has many of the properties of human consciousness, but it's decisions are reactive, not proactive. It never muses on the prevalence of white over red cars, or gets excited when it sees a licence plate from its home town. These specific things are not what it means to be conscious, rather are indicative of what it means to be human. But the underlying capacity strikes me as being what access consciousness is *for*. So this proactive capacity is what I would include as an essential feature of consciousness.

That is true or false or arbitrary with or without a complete neurological description of human consciousness, which merely limits consciousness to a subset of what brains do, and is reasonably extended to non-brains that do what brains do, or analogues of what brains do, or merely simulate what brains to.

This leads us to the intermediate example of an advanced computer capable of doing everything a human being does, replete with memory, imagination, the ability to form new associations, identify causes (important), etc. The question of whether that machine is conscious is not contained within the neurological description of human consciousness, or animal consciousness should we classify any non-human animals as conscious. Ultimately, you have to make a choice about what your language means: does your definition of consciousness admit non-living things or not? This is a separable question from the completeness of a neurological description of consciousness.

We're talking about human rational inference, right? So we're talking about a human being figuring out that A > C, not some out-there truth that A > C. That's what I presumed anyway. If you meant something like the latter, it doesn't seem to be a question about human reason at all.

Libet’s experiment is easily debunked. We know that our decisions are often taken after some deliberation, that we commit to a choice after contemplating that choice, which can make our decisions somewhat predictable (with a better performance than just by chance), as in Libet’s experiment, but we also know that we can take decisions in less than a second (eg when driving, or playing blitz chess) so there’s no possible way to reliably predict such decisions. — Olivier5

Your argument is circular. You're assuming conscious decision-making in precisely the sorts of behaviours (e.g. split-second decisions when driving) that are suggested to be decided unconsciously.

That sounds like Libet: there's still a lot of controversy about these experiments, their findings, their interpretation. — Daemon

There have been lots, but I was thinking of Fried.

Well, here's the problem: this associates, or reduces, logical causation to a physical state. Whereas physical and logical causation operate on completely separate levels. — Wayfarer

What's the problem? That it conflicts with a belief? That's par for the course. Although I wonder what you mean by "completely separate". As in, there's no neurological activity related to rational thinking at all?

Now, don't get me wrong, I understood what you meant, but I was pointing out that both of us understood it even though it doesn't pass your criteria of a definition. — khaled

I never asked you for a formal and rigorous definition. I asked you to describe the thing's properties such that I could understand what you think it does. In the end, I just asked for anything that could shed light on how you're using the word.

If, as you say, you understood what I meant, then mission accomplished. Except that this isn't about what I think consciousness is... This is a looooong attempt to get you to talk about what you think it is in a way that I can understand. But I'm not sure you know what you think it is.

However you seemed to pretend that they don't so I wanted to see how you would define them without any ambiguity at all which is the standard you set for me and failed to keep yourself. — khaled

A little ambiguity is a large progression from total ambiguity.

I didn't want to write a wall of text like the one you wrote only for you to say something like "'apprehend' is an ambiguous word so I don't get what you mean". — khaled

You're projecting. You did not provide any information. It's not possible to answer your question because it's about something you do not describe at all. I wasn't nitpicking details. There was nothing other than a deferment to another ambiguous word.

For instance: When a white blood cell attacks bacteria is it doing pattern recognition? It clearly doesn't just attack indiscriminantly — khaled

I covered this above (the answer would be no):

Obviously things like the ballness of the ball (recognising a ball as a ball irrespective of its colour, size, proximity, material, etc.) aren't freebies. There is some element of optimised recall (pattern-matching) that requires me to have already been trained to recognise a ball in terms of its other properties, most of which will be quite contingent (such as the nane 'ball') on things that have nothing to do with the phenomenon. This training relied on a general openness to information in my early environment in which I learned to associate contingent and non-contingent properties of balls with certain combinations of phenomena. — Kenosha Kid

So clearly I'm not using the term "pattern-matching" in a way consistent with your counter-example.

You made a claim that neurological progress will lead to some theory of consciousness (not in that particular quote but earlier). I asked you how? In order to answer that question you need to define what you mean by consciousness and what you mean by neurological progress, as you are the one making the claim. You defined the latter but not the former. — khaled

The field of psychology is not up for grabs. I don't have an exotic take on the field that is distinct from the field itself: if I did, I would be misrepresenting it. (Which I may well do as well, accidentally.) Your idea of consciousness, by contrast, entertains panpsychism, i.e. is not constrained even to that which is amenable to scientific study, let alone that which is studied in a particular field. This is why your notion of consciousness required illumination: you were asking questions about a thing that is not identical to modern, scientific descriptions of it, nor with any certainty similar to any other particular notion.

Consciousness-as-brainstates actually supports the statement that neurological progress will lead to a theory of consciousness, but I think it makes no sense and your continued reluctance to mention it again makes me think you think so too. — khaled

I'm happy to reaffirm it here and now.

You would need to explain how consciousness as "consciousness of something which (somehow) results from pattern recognition (whatever that means)" is related to neurological progress. — khaled

For sure, and that's what we have neuroscience for. I'm not going to reproduce every paper, which is what I suspect you're suggesting my burden entails, or even send you links you probably won't read, but check out Isaac's Halle Berry detector description on the Quining Qualia thread for a great example.

For consciousness as "consciousness of a subset of consciousnesses" I don't see how neurology has anything to do with that. It vaguely reminds me of the neural binding problem but that's it. — khaled

So for instance in no-report problems, you can track what the brain is paying attention to and compare to what the consciousness is paying attention to. Your eyes might physically move to focus on a secondary stimulus but, when asked, you will report no awareness of it. In terms of accounting for the difference, neurology seems to be the *perfect* framework in which to explain it, as it deals with the transmission of information between different parts of the brain responsible for different tasks.

If the accuracy of our knowledge is not affected by how direct or indirect the knowledge is, then what is the point of using those terms? — Harry Hindu

The accuracy likely is affected, but for one thing it avoids going down wrong paths when looking for or describing something. The way people often talk about human reason and it's role, for instance, seems very wrong to me. There was a famous experiment a while ago that showed that neurological behaviour associated with motor responses fired before correlated decision-making processes in the prefrontal cortex. The subjects remember, from their limited but direct phenomenal experience, deciding to act, then acting, when in fact the action appeared to be unconsciously chosen and only consciously ratified -- or rationalised -- after the act. The narrative based on the first person viewpoint is wrong, and this is exceedingly common it seems.

This reminds me very much of Daniel Kahneman's System 1 / System 2 model of the brain and his tests of it. Problems that appear amenable to pattern-matching (the thing that makes it easier to add 5 or 9 to things than 7 or 8) but that pattern-matching would lead to the wrong answer for follow a similar pattern. Human subjects swear blind they worked out the answer, when in fact they seem to be *receiving* an answer and ratifying it. Badly. That is, System 2 (the so-called rational, algorithmic part of the brain associated with conscious decision-making) receives a putative answer from System 1 (the dumb but hard-working pattern-matching part of the brain that acts without conscious input).

There are all sorts of psychological effects that follow from these sorts of behaviours, some good, some terrible, and those effects can be exploited. It's beneficial to know how your mind operates, what mistakes it makes. For instance, the above suggests to me that the conscious mind is not adept at discerning "We should do this, right?" from "We did this FYI." Besides that, it's just interesting.

Don’t you dare tell me you can get all that from a display on a machine strapped to my head. — Mww

Uh oh. Too late! :rofl:

You cannot use the word in its definition. — khaled

I was giving you a quote, not a definition.

So what exactly do you expect of me. Because so far none of your definitions pass your own criteria:

say anything about consciousness at all that would shed any light on your question, without just deferring the ambiguity to other ambiguous terms
— Kenosha Kid — khaled

I think a vaguely interested, vaguely intelligent human being can, if not fully understand what I meant, correctly establish bounds of possible interpretations of consciousness. My description was not consistent with Pfhorrest's, for instance, nor your more standard panpsychists'. Nor is it very consistent with a rationalist's description, who would likely deny that the brain is doing anything that we're not second-order conscious of (i.e. the second order is the only consciousness).

You can't get any of that from 'consciousness is the ability to have experiences', which is consistent with EVERY idea of consciousness. My feeling is that you're not actually very interested in the subject. You refuse to think about or communicate what you mean, and you're obviously not very interested in what I mean. I can only guess that you're practising your typing?

Btw, I never promised you a definition of consciousness because I'm not asking you questions about it. The above was me giving up on you ever explaining what your asking about and having a go myself. It's a pretty poor show that others have to do this for you.

Sorry for jumping in, but by definition - and the reason I don't agree with panpsychism - anything capable of experiencing a subject of experience, and therefore not 'a thing'. Conversely, things are not subjects of experience. What makes something a subject of experience? The fact that it's a living thing. So any living thing is in principle a subject of experience, but non-living things are not. Hence the requirement for a dualist ontology. — Wayfarer

No beef from me. As I just said to Khaled, I'm open to the idea that technological consciousnesses are possible. You might consider these simulations, whereas I'm of the view that what something is is determined by what it does. But yes I think most people consider life, even a central nervous system, to be sane prerequisites for consciousness.

That's a form of 'brain-mind identity', is it not? — Wayfarer

Yep. The mind is what the brain does.

Is drawing a rational inference - 'because this is the case, that must be the case' - also 'a brain state?' — Wayfarer

Yes, I think so. To be clear, it is part of a time-dependent state, not an instantaneous state, i.e. it is a process. But this kind of inference is something that AI can do quite well, such as on classification problems. You could train a model with historical data concerning sunrises in Adelaide, and it will not only yield a high probability that the Sun will rise tomorrow, but also a high certainty about the precise time it will rise. Is this a 'state' of the computer? Yes, over time, since any computer process is a part of the history of its state.

Define, simplify, potato, potato. I cannot define it without referring to equally vague concepts becaue it doesn't get simpler than that. — khaled

Why do you insist on using 'simple' as a synonym for 'unambiguous'? They are not even close to the same.

Can you say anything about consciousness at all that would shed any light on your question, without just deferring the ambiguity to other ambiguous terms?

When I use the word, I use it in two ways. One is Sartrean consciousness: consciousness is consciousness of something. When we apprehend multiple things, we have a consciousness of each of them. If I see a red ball before me while I chew spearmint gum while church bells peal behind me, I have a conscious each of: the ballness of the ball, the redness of the ball, the proximity of the ball, the taste of spearmint, the texture of chewed gum, the sound of church bells. This you might call animal consciousness: how the central nervous system receives, processes, and transforms information about itself, the body, and its environment.

Obviously things like the ballness of the ball (recognising a ball as a ball irrespective of its colour, size, proximity, material, etc.) aren't freebies. There is some element of optimised recall (pattern-matching) that requires me to have already been trained to recognise a ball in terms of its other properties, most of which will be quite contingent (such as the nane 'ball') on things that have nothing to do with the phenomenon. This training relied on a general openness to information in my early environment in which I learned to associate contingent and non-contingent properties of balls with certain combinations of phenomena.

This already distinguishes animals with this sort of consciousness from computers, which have no general ability to assemble arbitrary information about their environment into patterns, although many AIs do have the ability to train neural networks based on specific contents of limited inputs for the purposes of pattern detection. What these AIs lack, in addition to this generic and open exploitation of environmental data, is the motivation to do so.

Nonetheless, I don't think it's completely unreasonable to predict that something hair-splittingly similar might exist in the not-so-distant future. So if this is what you mean by consciousness, I'd say: not yet, but maybe one day.

The other use of the word is more in the Kierkegaardian sense: a reflexive, totalising consciousness of a subset of the consciousnesses described above, a sort of metaconsciousness that is, I think, what people mean when they ask if a dolphin has consciousness. This is a less reactive, more proactive capability that goes beyond dumb unitary, binary and pattern-matching behaviours toward a more contemplative, algorithmic consciousness.

Unlike a consciousness of the first kind, which might be 'ball', or 'lion!' or 'pain', because consciousness of the second kind is a partial consciousness of consciousnesses of the first kind, there is an implicit but unavoidable relation of phenomena to the self. 'lion!' is a statement about the person's environment, good for running procedures like:

if lion(): {
body.rotate(PI);
body.legs.alternate(FUCKING_FAST);
}

But a second order equivalent is 'There is a lion a short distance from me'. This might be useful if 'me' has 'my gun'.

Do computers have this kind of consciousness? Absolutely not. Will they? I honestly can't see why not. I think the blocker is that non-biological technologies just won't do it as well. But yeah maybe a simple version, one day.

How do you know? Isn't what you said prior to your present experience of what you said? Can't you only infer what you previously said since it happened prior to your present statement of what you previously said? — Harry Hindu

That's true. Which is one reason why people can be mistaken. But if your argument against the idea that we are not conscious of the causes of our consciousness is going to rely on a general doubt about the veracity of anything we experience, you really do have a contradiction on your hands. After all, I'm only rendering knowledge of the causes of our experience indirect. You're questioning the reliability of experience itself, which is going much further (too far imo) down the road. The reliability of experience has nothing to do with my earlier comment; it is the total absence of experience of certain events that underlies my comment.

Ok, fine. The Rock....with or without hair? — Mww

Spoken like a scientist overly concerned with hair! :rofl:

Categorical error: seeing a mechanical representation, an altogether empirical enterprise, is very far removed from the a priori originating cause it. — Mww

That is not the issue. A thing cannot be at once hidden from the world and and have an open representation in the world. The latter is an observation that the thing has *some* footprint in the world, which makes it amenable to physical enquiry.

Good methods for precisely this taken to mean methods for the scientific study of consciousness. — Mww

Yes. The mechanical representation must end up being a good one, ideally not a representation at all but the thing itself. One needs to know what phenomena one is looking to phenomenalise, which isn't hard. In an example elsewhere, I suggested pleasure. Not pleasure *of something* necessarily, just pleasure. You need to know what phenomena phenomenalise pleasure. This has thankfully been done. There is a very particular area of the brain that, when stimulated, will cause the subject to react with signs of pleasure, will have them self-report pleasure, will lead them to, when given the button, press it repeatedly, even fight you for it, in a statistically compelling (i.e. independent of the individual) way. So when we observe brain activity in that region, using specific technology that causes lights to light up in a region of the screen corresponding to that region, we have a phenomenon: I see lights in that preselected region, or not. Boom! Phenomena phenomenalised! I see your pleasure.

Now obviously I predict the response: I see but a correlate of your pleasure, an electromechanical feature that corresponds to your phenomena. But then any phenomenon I experience is incomplete, whether it is of my pleasure or of yours. When I see the Moon, I know the Moon itself is not in my eye, or brain, or phenomena, but rather my lunar phenomena are just correlated to the real thing. Same goes with my phenomena of your phenomena. It can only be a correlate. The task is to identify what of your pleasure is unaccounted for in my indirect experience of it.

I don’t know what to do with that. Sorry. — Mww

Oh go on, answer it! Pleeeeeeease?

If your "indirect" description of events that cause experiences is no different than a "direct" description then what is the point of even using the terms "direct" and "indirect" — Harry Hindu

But they are different. Again, I said quite the opposite.

What is an indirect experience of phenomena? If there is no such thing, then why use the term, "direct" in the first place? — Harry Hindu

Precisely because you seem confused by it.

You imply that you have "direct" awareness by describing these facts. — Harry Hindu

No, you might infer it. I do not imply it. By explicitly stating that we don't, there is no implication that we do. "My name begins with J and is not John" does not imply "My name is John and is not John."

All direct experience is of phenomena. If we have some raw data and a black box that produces all of my phenomena, there is no contradiction between "I do not have direct experience of the raw data or the black box" and "the black box transforms raw data into my phenomena." You might question the existence of the raw data and the black box, but that doesn't constitute a contradiction.

Very important distinction here: are they brain states or are they caused by brain states. Because for me it is the latter (note: I am not saying they are only caused by brain states). I cannot understand how it can be the former. So the experience of the color red is a 600nm wavelength entering your eye? — khaled

No, because we do not experience a 600nm wave, nor is one entering the eye the brain state. Irrespective, what I think of as consciousness is not relevant. When YOU ask whether a computer has it, you need to state what YOU mean.

The ability to have an experience. I know this doesn't explain any more than the previous "definition". But that's because this can't be simplified. — khaled

No one is asking you to simplify anything. I'm asking you what you mean by a word. Merely refering to another equally ambiguous word isn't helpful. If you cannot explain what you mean by consciousness, how can I or anyone else answer a question about it and know we're talking about the same thing?

I would just like to point out that that doesn't make it meaningless. If I asked you to describe what "shape" is for instance you would also struggle. Because the concept is so basic any attempt at defining is going to require more complicated concepts which only make sense assuming you already know what "shape" means. — khaled

Not remotely. The shape of an object is its outline. If you ask me what shape I'm in, potentially I'll get confused, can ask you what you mean, and you can clarify that you're asking about my physical health. There's no fundamental problem with shape. There's no fundamental problem with Pfhorrest's definition of consciousness either (in that respect), or Dennett's. Mine will probably curl up at the edges. But yours is absent entirely.

What does it mean for a thing to "have experiences"?

I don't see how that follows. Maybe if you were to define it I'd see why it's incompatable with panpsychism. — khaled

Because in my view, states of consciousness are just brain states, and atoms don't have brains. You seem to be reacting with faux surprise at the idea that a panpsychist-compatible idea of consciousness isn't to be taken as a given. This is nonsense. Even panpsychists know that their idea of consciousness is not in any way mainstream.

Again, it would help if you defined what you mean by it. — khaled

That's been my question to you. You asked me if a computer has it or not. State what it is. (Of course, I'm not really expecting an answer. Conversations like these exist precisely because people cannot or will not say what it is they are talking about, viz. Chalmers' chain of synonyms.)

This is putting the cart before the horse. You already assumed that computers and atoms don't have consciousness before even coming up with a theory that explains what consciousness is. — khaled

That is a false representation of the facts. You asked me whether a computer has it. I have not answered that because you cannot say what 'it' is. You are putting the cart before the horse by asking whether something has a property but refusing to say what that property is. I did the same when I asked:

I place a cup, a ball and a towel in front of you. One of these has property X. Which one? — Kenosha Kid

Yes, I can answer your question according to my own definition, but it's you asking, not me, so it's your definition that matters. Since you do not have one, its a meaningless question.

How can someone claim that we can't be aware of the causes while at the same time explaining the causes as if they had "direct" knowledge of the causes? :chin: — Harry Hindu

By all means, point out where I suggested that I have direct awareness of, say, stabilising my field of view or whiteshifting the colours I see. My statement was that abstraction from subjective experience is a necessary part of understanding subjective experience because the causes of subjective experience are not part of subjective experience. For instance, I am not aware of turning the retinal image upside down; I am only aware of the transformed image (which is why I am happy to talk about qualia at all). The fact that I can be extremely confident that this transformation occurs does not rely on subjective experience, or divine revelation for that matter, but on scientific progress and study. It might yet transpire that science and books and research journals are a conspiracy to mislead us or some such, but I'm happy that that's a vanishingly small likelihood.

On a more mundane level, the description of a thing is not that thing. Knowing about the physiology of pain or fear, does not amount to 'knowing pain' or 'knowing fear'. — Wayfarer

Good point. And this is interesting precisely because this sort of argument pits personal testimony -- the narratives we construct around experience -- with physical activity. Why is experiencing pleasure more than having one's nucleus accumbens stimulated? Because some people insist they experience more, although they can't quite pin it down. But their description of the thing is not the thing itself. We've considerable amounts of evidence to show that people are not great judges as to what happened, why they did what they did, etc.

The same also must be true for any description of experience, which might explain why it can't be pinned down better. Be it a metaphysical description, a neurological description, or personal testimony, we are always making some transform between description of experience and experience itself or vice versa.

You can describe the physiology of a bee sting or a shark bite but the description doesn't amount to the experience. — Wayfarer

Yes, seeing someone have an experience is not the same as having the experience. The experiencer is different.

And besides, as I've pointed out to you previously, neuroscience has had to acknowledge the 'neural binding problem' - which is that it can find no neural mechanism which accounts for the subjective unity of experience. — Wayfarer

This is an -of-the-gaps argument.

In very general terms, the appearance of life anywhere in the cosmos represents the manfestation of subjective awareness. — Wayfarer

Which, @khaled, is a different definition of consciousness to the one I had in mind re:

conscious of, say, a red ball
— Kenosha Kid

This. This is basically exactly as I defined it but although you were apparently confused by my definition you still reused it. Which shows that maybe it's not confusing or vague, at least for the purposes of this discussion. — khaled

Above you're saying that any use of 'conscious' is how you mean it. But you're entertaining panpsychism, which is not compatible with consciousness as I define it. Seeing that I use the word is not evidence that you and I use it in the same way. Pfhorrest uses it synonymously with reactivity, any change in a system due to changes in its environment counts. That is not my definition, or most people's. Panpsychists generally hold consciousness or mind to be something that an atom has. That's not compatible with most people's views either.

The question is: what properties does consciousness have such that one could say a computer has or doesn't have it, or an atom has or doesn't have it. In Pfhorrest's schema, these properties are well-defined. Mine are less well-defined, but are nonetheless incompatible. Chalmers' are at once under- and over-defined and fail to show, merely insist upon the existence of, distinction.

To put it another way, I place a cup, a ball and a towel in front of you. One of these has property X. Which one?

No, we do not; what is seen, is a mechanical representation of my thinking. — Mww

Therefore:

I will admit that pure reason is an individuated closed system and by association, is inaccessible to general external inquiry. — Mww

must be false, since observing that mechanical representation is a form of external enquiry.

Difficult indeed. And with a neural connectivity average of 12.9 x 10^8/mm3**, the physical process of burrowing down to specific network paths in order to correlate them to specific cognitive manifestations, may very well destroy that path.
**Alonso-Nanclares, et. al., Department of Anatomy/Compared Pathological Anatomy, Madrid, 2008) — Mww

Hurry up, quantum computing!

In order for science to study consciousness, it must reify it, or, which is the same thing, turn it into a phenomenon — Mww

Okay, so I wasn't that far off. It's still not shown why this is problematic. There are good methods precisely for this.

Oh...forgot: in what sense do you say metaphysics is doomed? — Mww

Well... who would win in a fight between Superman and The Rock?

But the categorical difference between our own and chimp/dolphin consciousness, is that human self-awareness has created a whole new form of Evolution : Culture. — Gnomon

But this just defers the categorisation problem. Now we have explain why a human matriarchal tribe somewhere is a culture but a non-human matriarchal primate tribe is not. This isn't obviously easier than explaining why humans are conscious but primates are not. In fact, it's harder, since we also have to show that consciousness is the cause of culture. What we call cultural transmission -- memetics -- is observed in many animal species. These animals and no others being found to be conscious would be a great indicator that consciousness is indeed the driver of culture. Unfortunately we're trying to show that only humans are conscious. This is generally the mucking fuddle we get into when we try to show that humans a qualitatively different from, rather than just more complex and successful than, related animal species.

I try to avoid the misleading term Panpsychism, due to its implication that bees and atoms are conscious in a manner similar to human awareness. This may sound anthro-centric to some, but human-self-consciousness is in a whole separate category from bee-awareness. There is indeed a continuum of Information complexity from atoms to humans, but it's still a hierarchy, with silly self-important humans on top. — Gnomon

It may not be anthropocentric to say that human consciousness is categorically different to bee consciousness. A more telling comparison would be a chimp or a dolphin.

You have to explain *why* science cannot explain, which means describing its properties such that they aren't amenable to scientific modelling.
— Kenosha Kid

David Chalmers does that in 'facing up to the hard problem', to wit:

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
— David Chalmers — Wayfarer

You know, the bulk of this paragraph can be summarised as: "Chalmers can use the terms 'subjective aspect of information-processing', 'experience', 'felt quality' and 'state of experience' as synonyms". Other than that, he enumerates a few experiences. "dark and light"... pretty much the first neurons that fire when the retina is excited detect dark and light. What we want is not a stating of the obvious that we experience dark and light, but the distinction between "experiencing dark and light" and "detecting dark and light". What can we point as a property in our experiences that goes beyond "this is light" or "this is dark".

Analogously, what is the distinction between "I experience pleasure" and "my nucleus accumbens is stimulated"?

The eliminativist claims that it is possible in principle to provide an account of the nature of experience in third-person terms, continuous with the other sciences; in other words, the first-person sense of experience can be eliminated without loosing anything essential to it. — Wayfarer

I'm not an eliminativist. I think maybe Isaac is closer to that than myself. I do not deny that you or I have subjective experiences. My question to khaled was: what properties do they have that are not accounted for neurologically? If you look at a red ball on the table in front of you, what subjective experience of a property of that red ball do you have that is additional to the third-person view, beyond the fact that it is happening to you not someone else.

That said, I also suspect we're drifting from panpsychism a lot. The point of course is to identify a property of an electron or an atom or a living cell that can be said to be this additional property that consciousness has that a future neurological description of a conscious thing will not account for.

Yes but maybe it can’t be ascertainable for most cases. — khaled

That suffices. The redness of the ball is not ascertained in pitch darkness.

Incorrect. Ascribing it says something. — khaled

About the ascriber, maybe. If I say the red ball has a soul (a rubber soul, natch) but you can't do anything that proves or disproves it even in principle, or some new property that interacts with nothing in the universe, even other things having that property, it would be foolish to believe me.

You’re starting as if there is this word “consciousness” that means nothing that we then ascribe meaning to by specifying some capacity or other. But I would say that consciousness already has a well defined meaning. It is whether or not something can have experiences. — khaled

Yes, on a thread in which people cannot agree as to whether an atom has consciousness or even whether a person has it. A strange place to insist it's all very well defined.

As for your definition, it simply defers it's vagueness. What do you mean by 'have experiences'? Do you mean it as Pfhorrest's conception of consciousness would have it, wherein an experience would simply be a response to a change in the environment, such as a charged particle in a changing electric field? Or do you mean it in it's normal sense of animals that are not only conscious of, say, a red ball, but aware that they are conscious of it? Or something in between?

The internal behavior in the human object of study, such behavior apodeitically known only to himself, is his thinking. Any characterization of the means for such behavior, by which the ends of such behavior are sufficiently, but henceforth also necessarily, given, can have no possible external explanation whatsoever, for that which is known only to the self can be explained only by the self, and then only with respect to the self. — Mww

Which assumes that thinking is ethereal, i.e. the mind is a closed system and anything that goes on inside it is completely transparent to outside interrogation. But what neuroscience sees is the opposite: we can see you think. What remains is a difficult classification problem: how we identify a particular neurological activity with a particular mental activity.

is catastrophically false, under the predication that scientific study is itself in terms of natural law, in conjunction with the absolutely necessary condition that consciousness is a product of human internal behavior alone, which is not. — Mww

It's not, to the same extent that psychology is not. Psychology of perception, for instance, is as concerned with the external world as perception itself is.

The intrinsic circularity, as ground for asserting the falliciousness, is obvious, insofar as no science is at all possible that has no relevant thought antecedent to it, of which consciousness itself is an integral member. — Mww

What is the claim here, that since thinking involves consciousness, we cannot start to think about consciousness? It simply doesn't follow. Philosophy has the exact same features you describe btw, so:

It is current physics which must throw up its hands in defeat, and grant extant metaphysics its true purpose — Mww

by your own logic, metaphysics is doomed. Which it is, but not for that reason.

But that would be akin to saying "When I press A on my keyboard the letter A is typed on the screen". This would work for explaining how a PC works eventually by testing countless hypothesis and sometimes breaking open the PC (neurology) but it does not answer whether or not the PC is conscious, or why it would or wouldn't be. — khaled

By your own words, a PC may or may not have a property you call <consciousness>. If something has or doesn't have a property, such as <configured to print A>, then there must be a circumstance in which the presence or absence of that property can be ascertained, otherwise it is meaningless to say that it has such a property, since ascribing it says nothing at all.

So the pragmatic way of proceeding is to define what we mean by consciousness in terms of what the property actually does, how it interacts with the world, what it's correlates are, then look for it. This is what some neuroscientists do. But often what we find is a recourse to mysticism. "It's the thing left over when all those other things are discovered by science." "It can't be explained in mere words!" "It's what it's like to be a conscious thing."

If you're of the former persuasion, i.e. you actually want to know what consciousness is, you have to do this iteratively. You start with a putative idea of how a conscious thing behaves such that a non-conscious thing would not behave that way, and then you refine.

Either way, saying "Science cannot explain" is not useful. You have to explain *why* science cannot explain, which means describing its properties such that they aren't amenable to scientific modelling. This is not what you are doing. Just pointing at the fact that it currently does not fully explain is an -of-the-gaps argument.

Are you saying that we can only talk about our experiences and not about what caused them? — Harry Hindu

No, I'm saying that no one is conscious of the causes of our phenomena: we have no knowledge of objects that cause phenomena except indirectly through phenomena; we have no awareness of light lensing through the eyeball and being projected onto the retina; we have no consciousness of outline detection occurring, of images being turned upside down, of colour being whiteshifted, or any of the other processes of the brain that create qualia: the objects of experience and their properties. What we get is, if not an *end* result, a late iteration of a metaview of the data. That is immediacy of qualia.

It's not a god-of-the-gaps argument if the difficulty is conceptual. — Marchesk

But you are not promoting that by saying that "where is the scientific explanation for...?" You are pointing to gaps in knowledge and claiming them for the inexplicable. What I guess you'd like is an ab initio conclusion that consciousness is not amenable to scientific modelling, for which pointing to gaps in knowledge is irrelevant.

but our scientific understanding is a necessary abstraction from the particulars of our human experience — Marchesk

Because the causes of our human experience are not part of that experience.

consciousness is different, because our sensations are not the properties of structure and function. It's like saying that color just emerges from neuronal activity. Okay, but how and what does that mean? Is it spooky emergence? — Marchesk

This is nothing more than the usual -of-the-gaps argument: If science were capable of explaining consciousness, it would have already (impossibility of future scientific discovery); Science has not already explained consciousness; Therefore science cannot explain consciousness (and therefore consciousness is magic).

Janus' previous post already deals with your response to it:

What do you think the assumptions are that lead to the hard problem? Is not the primary idea that experience could not emerge from "brute matter"? Why would that be any more of a problem than the idea that self-organizing life could not emerge from brute matter? In either case, why not? Perhaps it is our conceptions of what experience, life and brute matter are that is the problem. The fact that we cannot exhaustively explain how it happens should not be surprising; we cannot really exhaustively explain much of anything. — Janus

:100:

But when we seek to ‘explain consciousness’, we have no such division - we are that which we are seeking to explain. So there simply cannot be an objective explanation of the nature of consciousness analogous to objective explanations of phenomena, as a matter of principle (which is another way of stating the hard problem.) — Wayfarer

On the contrary, a requirement of a proper definition of consciousness such that explaining consciousness is actually explaining something is that we can identify it in something that has it that is not ourselves, otherwise our explanation is nothing more than personal testimony. To put it another way, if consciousness *is*, then consciousness *does*, and we ought to be able to identify it in an object of study by what how it behaves.

Things like the hard problem exist specifically to add by hand a component that does nothing at all, and therefore is not amenable to scientific study. If it does nothing, how are we aware of it in a first person way, in the same way we are aware of the redness of a red ball which *is* amenable to scientific study? The answer is merely that enough of us believe in it, even though many do not. Is popular belief worth a damn to a good explanation of consciousness? No. Does this fact temper the role of belief when defining consciousness robustly? Alas also no.

How is that related to consciousness if at all? — khaled

The scientific study of all aspects of consciousness, such as perception and identity, fall within psychology and therefore, where possible, neurology.