This has been repeated so often that I actually don't need to say it but I'll do it here anyway just in case not mentioning it might sidetrack the reader. What I'm referring to is how evolution is considered as a game of chance - random mutations being the engine that drives adaptation, a necessity if organisms are to survive in an environment that's mercurial. — TheMadFool

Mutation doesn't drive evolution: it permits evolution. Environmental changes drive evolution. Mutation is the noise, not the parameters or the cost function, in a comparable optimisation problem.

And as for strategies, the imperfection of copying a large amount of data using mindless biological machines with no oversight is the opposite of one. Pre-life physical laws account for this noise, no intent required. What we have evolved instead is strategies for the opposite: the surprisingly high fidelity of RNA copying. If we must infer an intent, surely that was to staunch random mutation? But this too is perfectly explicable in terms of environmental selection pressures.

This is not a discussion about narcissism though, it is just an example that might reveal someone's preferences for validity versus product in thought. — Judaka

Is narcissism an example of someone's preference? It's selection seems to be external, e.g. modernity is producing more narcissists.

But arguably that is what Google does in abstracting a vector representation of a word. — Banno

Sorry, this is late and may now be irrelevant, but Google doesn't store vector representations of words in isolation but rather in their semantic context. So the vector for "dog" in:

"My dog likes walks and belly rubs"

is different to the vector for "dog" in:

"Spielberg's Lincoln (aka Amistad 2) is an absolute dog of a film"

Searle used the Chinese room to argue that there was more to meaning than could be captured by mere syntax. A bloke in a room with a book of rules that could translate any piece of Chinese text into English does not understand Chinese.

Does Google Translate understand Chinese? — Banno

I think the claim that Google has no such rule book is over-egging a little bit. An equivalent Chinese argument might be: you feed in Chinese texts and their English translations; the man in the room knows neither English nor Chinese, and constructs rules on how and when to translate Chinese symbols into English ones, then attempts to translate the Chinese text according to his rules; when the man starts outputting English texts sufficiently similar to the ones fed in, you stop feeding him the English translations.

I'd say that since the man does not know English, he doesn't know the meaning of any of the symbols he translates, so does not learn Chinese.

He said that you couldn't have a solar system unless you had an intelligence designer. — Karen Armstrong, interview transcript

Yeah, that sounds familiar. He also came up with the original Bible code. And liked torturing people.

But my question was more about irreligious epiphany. In Hick's view, God obviously isn't too fussed about religious belief itself, rather people are inspired to understand according to their own ways of thinking. I'm wondering what argument he might have for excluding, say, the people who dispensed with God as a Newtonian first cause. If the knower "knows" there is no God, would he not interpret a religious experience from an atheist perspective?

The exception I know of is when a group encounters a warlike group. Until then, it's thought that different groups got along peaceably. — Kenosha Kid

Returning to this point, I was just reading about the Batek of Malaysia, an egalitarian, pacifist collection of nomadic HG tribes, each consisting of around ten families, no violent internal conflicts due to a strict and open conflict resolution socialisation, in Ingold, Riches & Woodburn's Hunters and Gatherers Volume II.

In times of sufficient supply, all tribes can hunt and gather anywhere. However in years of scarcity, the competition for resources causes restricted rights to hunting and gathering land between groups, presumably based around where those particular groups are currently camped (since they are nomadic).

On the one hand, this speaks to an underlying territorialism, a concept of private (group-level) property rights that comes into play when necessary. On the other hand, this is during times of stress, and mimics the lack of empathy and altruism of an individual in a stressful or disadvantaged situation. The equilibrium point here is altruism, not territorialism.

Needless to say, these inter-group restrictions are still installed peacefully.

It's a stretched exercise in Christian/Biblical apologetics (with good benefits (y) — jorndoe

The project appears to be to find new constraints on theology in light of new empirical evidence, rather than to co-opt science into existing theological ideas, making it more critical than apologetic.

Why limit it just to religious epiphanies? Why not posit that a scientific calling arises from witnessing the wonder of God's work as understood by an empiricist? Might Marx be the Moses of his tradition, doing God's work to free people from slavery but in a way he could understand it?

I'm not sure I find this really convincing. After all that mistrust of strangers would seem to work just as well without such rigid thinking. — Echarmion

In a IR group? Why? The exception I know of is when a group encounters a warlike group. Until then, it's thought that different groups got along peaceably. (I think there's citations for this on the older thread if you want me to do some digging.) From what I recall, empathetic and altruistic responses are not conditioned on recognition of the individual -- this would be inefficient for an individual that spends the vast majority of its time with other individuals it knows well. Rather, we learn exceptions to the default rule. (This certainly is cited in the older OP here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/8732/natural-and-existential-morality .)

We exist in a very different, very unequal world in which most people we encounter are strangers and in which strangers are more likely to do us harm. A healthy distrust of strangers makes some sense to us.

It would still also be consistent with an ancestral environment that already had intra-species political struggle with significant stakes. — Echarmion

Well there's no doubt we had that, and that our own species has evolved from that, but that doesn't seem to describe IR societies, or at least the current theoretical model of them.

But perhaps it's also connected to our tendency towards the metaphysical. Humans seem to like grand cosmic narratives, and essentialist strata would seem to fit right in with that. — Echarmion

You're tapping into another favourite subject of mine: the compulsion for humans to construct ordering narratives. These certainly exist in HG groups today, notably the (barely ordering) dreamtime narrative of aboriginal Australians (DR). I'd be interested to research some more into the origins of such narratives: their relationship to authority is obviously pertinent.

What's interesting though is that hierarchical systems were so stable. Of course those at the top wield coercive power, but in pre-historic times and for much of history, that power would have been fairly limited. There is no reason to suppose they could not have been toppled. — Echarmion

That gets to the heart of the matter imo: the role of socialisation in transitioning to and maintaining the DR way of life. My original question was: why wasn't this sufficient? Why were hierarchies needed at all, why not just raise your children to obey rules? This seemed to work for IR groups so would fall well within their cultural capacities, whereas hierarchies would not. If these were the stabilising elements, how is creating, as you say, a limited and easy-to-topple seat of power useful?

If egalitarian DR groups are possible, and their parent IR groups were egalitarian, I would have expected egalitarian DR groups to be the default. And perhaps they were and died out, but, again, why? These groups got through winters because spring was so bountiful, much more so than the equatorial regions we originate from. It doesn't seem necessary for different DR groups to compete at all. In fact, trade was the norm.

Btw I've really enjoyed and appreciate your and @Judaka's contributions to this thread. It's given me a lot to think about.

I might have misread you, sorry. I thought you were asking for the evidence that science proceeds on the basis of evidence, which read like a destruct button. I think the "that claim" is the claim that a neuron firing identically is the "having an experience"? Diectic references...

So continuing the analogy, you cannot have a change in an electric field without a corresponding and completely determined change in a magnetic field: this is evidence that they are "two sides of the same coin".

Same goes for the neurological correlates of consciousness: you cannot (refering back to prior discussions on this thread) have the "I see Halle Berry's face" experience without the Halle-Berry's-face-detector neuron firing and, conversely, you can't have the neuron fire without seeing Halle Berry's face. (There's citations on the older thread, can dig them out with some patience.)

This as far as I'm concerned makes the claim that they are distinct things, not the same thing from two perspectives, in need of justification, in the same way that if you turned an apple 180 degrees and expected me to believe it was a distinct apple, I'd expect a good justification. The model that fits the evidence is the one in which they're the same thing.

Depends on what you mean with 'necessity' and 'impossible', doesn't it? — ChatteringMonkey

We'll, it's what Stiles means by 'impossible' that's in question.

You're talking about cooperatives as a replacement for capitalism? — Judaka

I meant it as an example of an egalitarian DR system. I'm not quite far along enough to build my manifesto :) As you can tell, I'm starting *very* far back.

Then for the abolishment of private property or the maintenance of "equal private property", this sounds dystopian to me but to first establish whether it is possible to function like this, I would like to investigate. What is your model for this? — Judaka

I wasn't planning on one. To an extent, even IR groups have some concept of ownership. You'd get a kicking if you tried to take another person's fair share of food, for instance, which is as good a personal property right as any, actually better than most.

Likewise in a cooperative, your wages are yours. They're just the same as everyone else's in that cooperative, which is, while different from IR, still egalitarian.

But anyway, no, personal property is not my target, and this again exemplifies my issue: I can see how personal property will likely be used to create power differentials, but not how it is impossible to have personal property in an egalitarian society. I get Stiles' hypothesis, but not his conclusion.

I was more thinking of things like black and white in-group / out-group thinking, the halo effect, and the tendency to treat admissions of mistakes as evidence of incompetence rather than transparency. — Echarmion

The first, as I understand it, is an example of a counter-empathetic response, which makes sense in an egalitarian society based on reciprocal altruism. If an individual takes but never gives, it's a disadvantage to carry on giving to them. Intolerance toward antisocial elements is an aspect of social, rather than pre- or sub-social behaviour, since such elements hurt the group as a whole.

I think the extension of this to entire out-groups is believably a result of meeting warlike groups, or having to defend territory and stockpiles from outside tribes, but it doesn't seem to obviously lead to inequality _within_ the group.

It also seems like humans can cope with hierarchies better if the hierarchies are explicitly based on essentialist categories, rather than what we might call individual merit. — Echarmion

True, but then we don't really know our leaders anymore, so what they stand for is easier to evaluate (or manufacturer) than their merits. It's probably different if you know every single member of your society very well.

One other thing I meant to throw out there is that uncertainty tends to make people rally around dominating figures. It could simply be that fear of the winter made early European tribes extremely susceptible to takeover. Politicians fallacy sort of thing.

Sure, then there must be evidence to support this claim. Please give some examples of the evidence. — bert1

I don't think this conversation is going anywhere constructive, which is a shame as it started out interesting.

This seems backwards to me. Prima facie, a neuron firing is a neuron firing, and a conscious experience is a conscious experience. The first step is to give a reason why we would think these two things are, in fact, the same. — bert1

But science doesn't proceed prima facile, it proceeds on the basis of evidence. If the model that has electricity and magnetism as two sides of the same coin is better at predicting results of experiments than the one that holds them as two distinct phenomena, proceed with the former.

Vision isn't your only sense. You have the power to smell and taste. Using all if your senses it is simple to differentiate water from vodka. — Harry Hindu

That would be my way to discern water from vodka. It's a terrible way to discern water from ethylene glycol.

Worth thinking about what smelling and tasting the unknown clear liquid entails. These are extremely sensitive chemical analysers that can usually uniquely identify most naturally occurring things.

But there is a logical difficulty here in talking about a first person perspective from a third person perspective. — bert1

If you believe there is a difference between a neuron firing and the owner having an experience, yes, there will be a logical difficulty. Personally I think that the logical difficulty lies in justifying that belief.

As Wayfarer has correctly said (imho), or quoted someone as saying, science typically proceeds by eliminating the subjective as much as possible in order to arrive at an unbiased, objective, point-of-view invariant view of the world. — bert1

I think that's a very outdated picture of science.

It is if the scientist has the same definition/concept as the non-scientist. This definition:

"Consciousness is subjective experience — ‘what it is like’, for example, to perceive a scene, to endure pain, to entertain a thought or to reflect on the experience itself"

...is given at the very start of the neuroscientist Guilio Tononi's paper on the IIT. Some scientists do start with this concept. — bert1

I don't think a person would work through that when answering the question "Are you conscious?" It is sufficient to know, on a linguistic level, that I am necessarily conscious, in much the same way that I am a homo sapiens.

But there's an implicit point you're making that I should address. The above quote is clearly not a scientific definition of consciousness, i.e. one could not devise a set of experiments from it. As I said earlier, consciousness is multi-faceted, and individual singular definitions may capture qualities of some of those facets, but that's not sufficient to discern anything about having a conscious experience. You cannot get from "what it is like" to an experiment; one could potentially get from a precise definition of consciousness to vaguer qualities like 'what it is like'.

A paper on QM btw wouldn't typically start with the Schroedinger equation, even though that is exactly the starting point for a physicist. Introductions are hooks in science papers, not definitions of terms and it is clear Tononi is being quite informal. My issue with 'what it is like' is not that it doesn't capture any of the facets of consciousness, but that is an impression left by the uncountable processes that enumerate what consciousness does. Tononi's project is to apply his approach to things like clinical assessment. This is scientific: he talks about consciousness in terms of discernable difference.

I did not want to claim that we have a similarly unique tendency towards hierarchy, only that we also have this tendency, which seems to explain a number of biases when it comes to political struggle. Of course these might also merely be side effects of other, more general cognitive biases. — Echarmion

There are characteristic tendencies toward domination, and coping strategies for being dominated, which might be what you mean. However these are far from equilibrium conditions. Those alpha male structures are extremely stressful for all involved, so egalitarianism seems like the stable point.

There seems to be a significant amount of historians that consider warfare, and the ability to project force, as a major factor in the evolution of political systems. Authority and hierarchy are advantageous in a violent conflict, and so more hierarchically societies might have been more able to project organised violence. — Echarmion

Useful when you have a fixed-location stockpile to protect (or you encounter another warlike tribe). It is difficult to imagine an egalitarian army...

Without copypasting too much, the article talks about population control, the need for defending territory and many further required administrative tasks to be taken on within DR groups which create social hierarchies. That is why Stiles concludes that it is impossible for egalitarianism within DR, rather than why hierarchies are simply desirable. — Judaka

I feel bad that I made you copy and paste so much when a little more clarity could have saved you the effort.

None of the advantages of a social hierarchy for DR groups, individually or en toto, appear to mean that egalitarianism is not possible in those groups.

Yes, there will be more roles (processing food, building stores defending stores in addition to hunting, fishing, gathering) but that doesn't necessitate a hierarchy or an authority. Yes, there will be a territory, more surplus and thus the opportunity for, but not a necessity of, unequal private property. Even if people specialised, that doesn't suggest inequality, and an annual surplus can and did drive peaceful trade between groups.

Cooperatives exist even now in our very hierarchical, very unequal societies. Executive roles exist, but are populated by rotation. All profits are shared equally irrespective of effort or skill. That's more the kind of thing I had in mind.

Stiles outlines in great depth the opportunity for hierarchical structures to form, but concludes that egalitarian DR groups are impossible. That doesn't seem shown to me, notwithstanding everything you've quoted... twice.

Outsourcing to other countries, automation, imbalances in capital and our capacity to be egalitarian. The job of those in power within a DR system includes distributing some portion of the productivity of the system to the workers. Perhaps people are just realising that the productivity of the system is not being even remotely evenly distributed and they're not happy about it. My perspective on this issue is that the key issue is how capitalism is very good at producing and very good at distributing unequally. So, we're not backtracking and attempting a deconstruction of the social hierarchy created to make life in urban areas possible. I don't see any attempt to return to egalitarianism, people are just unhappy that capitalism is not distributing the enormous wealth we know exists fairly, with such huge portions going to a small percentage of the population. We have the capacity to be altruistic but instead, this is occurring. I suspect the other answers to this trend are based in philosophy, technology, geopolitics, culture and not relevant to this topic. It's not the same kind of egalitarianism as in IR, it's a demand for a different system of distribution of the productivity and wealth created by our current DR system. That's my view of it. — Judaka

That's fine, I'm not arguing for a return to IR-like societies, rather DR society built outward from egalitarianism and altruism rather than from feudalism. For instance, where inequality has global utility, why not allow it.

Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, the scientific definition can't contradict other definitions, or else scientists and laymen would be talking about different things. — Harry Hindu

Heaven forbid!

We can talk about water as it appears from consciousness as a clear liquid, or as a combination of hydrogen and oxygen molecules as it appears from a view from nowhere. We're talking about the same thing but from different perspectives, but not contradicting ones.

These are all excellent questions to begin an enquiry into consciousness. :up: — bert1

I agree with the sentiment (talking about the same thing from different perspectives), but my point was about the precision necessary to discern a conscious thing from a non-conscious thing. As I said above, "a clear liquid" does not discern water from vodka, and might leave me in the pitiful situation of having accidentally drunk water.

I deleted that expression before you quoted it. Perhaps you might adjust your response accordingly. — Wayfarer

If you like. "On a purely linguistic level, you were able to debunk your own argument." :P

So I said, on a whim, and before I went back and deleted it, that it’s like comparing two wildly different kinds of things - oranges and carpentry tools - and denying that there’s any real difference between them. — Wayfarer

I don't think so. Object is a class. Conscious being is a class. Even if you object to the specific claim that the latter is a subclass of the the former, there'll always be some superclass you can define that includes conscious beings and oranges.

Well, I won't paste everything relevant but the existence of long-term resources, including the creation of new resources like land ownership, decision making power, authority over group practices and so on create opportunities for hierarchies that otherwise wouldn't exist. Once you get the ball rolling, things take care of themselves, because having resources and power makes the acquisition of more resources and power much easier. — Judaka

Yes, this is a much better wording of the issue. It is clear that DR societies make hierarchies easier to emerge, but does it make them necessary or, if not necessary, advantageous for survival?

As for our biological moral hardware, it seems adaptable, there's leeway to define what is "fair". We can't help seeing unfairness but we can be taught that uneven distribution is fair, we just need a convincing framework. Our socialisation teaches us reasons and logic for what is and isn't fair. We can fit hierarchies into our understanding of what's fair. Can you articulate the problems you see? — Judaka

I'm not sure if "fairness" is a good fit with our biological social apparatus. Empathy and altruism, yes. I don't have a citation, but intolerance toward antisocial elements in the group seems extremely likely, since even social primates exhibit this behaviour. If we see one individual with plenty and another with not enough, all three of those come into play. "Fairness" is, I think, an abstraction and rationalisation from that.

The thesis of my previous thread on this topic was that HGs wouldn't need have need for an additional socialisation of fairness (or most other things): their neurobiology and their precise situation would uniquely identify the correct course of action or, to put it another way, what their natural morality would dictate would be exactly in line with what they would want to do. I still feel this is correct, but happy to defend this some more.

But yes that hardware is adaptable, or rather overridable. We have trainable counter-empathetic responses and, of course, free (ish) will, plus the gamut of pre- and sub-social traits (the tendency to dominate if possible, for instance).

Actually, most of your questions seem to be discussed and more or less answered in the article you presented, not sure how much of it I should just copy-paste here but it's better than just paraphrasing. — Judaka

Hence my moan. I spent ages drafting that and discovered the paper later. But the paper still doesn't lead me to conclude that hierarchies are inevitable. To put this in context, I'm interested in why we have (had) the social structures we have (had), and whether there are more optimal ways of organising ourselves that are more in line with what makes us uniquely ultra-social, as well as explaining long-term trends away from e.g. feudalism toward some kind of global social group where egalitarianism and altruism are once again becoming dominant.

DR groups create challenges for which the responses to lead to (more) social hierarchies. It seems impossible to have built an egalitarian DR group. — Judaka

Could you explain this? Might be the fastest ever resolution to a thread with this length OP.

Nope. Not true. 'Oranges are really carpentry tools, they just lack the handles.' — Wayfarer

On a purely linguistic level you ought to be able to debunk your own argument here.

If I can ask "Are you, Kenosha Kid, conscious???" in a meaningful way and get a meaningful answer (which I can), without defining consciousness in a scientific way, why can't I ask a scientist, "Hey, is that machine over there conscious? You say it is. Can it feel pain? Can it be happy? Sad? What is it like to be that machine?" The scientist has to answer those questions. Those aren't questions that are being asked "in a scientific way". Those are ground level questions that a small child can understand. — RogueAI

A child, or adult, can _think_ they understand. Asking a conscious person if they are conscious is not comparable to asking a scientist if a machine is conscious. All the person has to do to achieve the former is know how to use the word 'conscious' in a sentence. To achieve the latter, a scientist has to know what consciousness really is, what parts and processes constitute the minimal agreed criteria for consciousness.

No, the scientist can't prove a computer is conscious because it's impossible to verify the existence of other consciousnesses. — RogueAI

I don't think there's any insurmountable barrier to determining whether another human is conscious or not, because we know a lot about what to look for. The difficulty is more likely in knowing the same about other animals whose brains we understand less well. Non-animal systems might be easier, since we're free to design the hardware, or bypass it in software with the knowledge that the kind of conscience thing you're building might not be naturally or technologically realisable.

Consider an ecological microsystem, small enough to be simulated. Place within this microsystem a sprite and assign that sprite needs: food, water, procreation, survival, with observable meters. Place within the microsystem elements that will satisfy or thwart those needs: fruits and smaller food sprites, a lake, predators, other sprites as the same class as our subject. Define a set of input channels to the sprite and couple those to the state of the environment in a fixed and incomplete way. This defines the surface of the sprite. Give the sprite a set of subroutines that a) build a model of the environment from those inputs, b) perform things like edge detection to discern other objects in that environment, c) some retrainable pattern-recognition models for enriching that view with higher order data. (As an example, you could have three small red things to eat that are nutritious and one that makes the sprite ill. This pattern-recognition package would allow the sprite to learn first that small red things are nutritious, and second that one particular small red thing is harmful.)

An important part of that package would be reflexes. For instance, if a predator sprite is detected, run home or, if not possible, run directly away from the predator. Thus we need some interface between this processor and the surface of the sprite, a sort of will. However we'll also add a second package of routines that also take input from the first. These will be algorithmic, for enriching the environmental model with metadata that can't be yielded by pattern-recognition, and for verifying the metadata from pattern-recognition. This will also feed back to the first processor so that the sprite can act on algorithmic outputs when firing the will.

Implicit in the above is somewhere to store outputs of models, pattern-recognition and algorithms so that the sprite doesn't have to work everything out from scratch every time. These will also be inputs to both processors.

Obviously there's a lot of gaps to fill in there, but you get the gist. Would the sprite be conscious? Done right, if we had the tech to do it, with those gaps sensibly filled in, I'd argue yes.

How could we tell that it's conscious? Compare its behaviour to other sprites that are missing one or more of the key features outlined above. Additionally, make some of those meters inferable from the outside. Perhaps, if we gave the sprite capacity for language such that it could teach its daughter which small red thing not to eat, then removed all of its predators and placed food outside of its den every morning, it might even invent philosophy, science and art! :)

I find the phrase 'what it is like to be' an awkward expression. — Wayfarer

Me too.

And beings are not objects, in that they're conscious agents. This is precisely what is denied by reductionism, as reductionism has no category which corresponds with the notion of 'being'. — Wayfarer

Thanks for a third and fourth example... Love, consciousness, being, agency. Reductionism does not deny that we're conscious agents, but yes it does say we're made of objects, and therefore are objects. There's no contradiction between being an object and being a conscious agent: we're just objects with higher order properties of consciousness and agency.

But you can't provide a purely objective account of a subjective state of being. That's really all there is to it. — Wayfarer

This nicely encapsulates the hard problem. It isn't a problem, rather an insistence.

anything else on your agenda (career, hobby etc). — Benj96

When I saw the question, it made me think that what I want is just a continuation of what I have. That's not quite contentment: I am not satisfied with what I have done; I am ambitious to do more. But there's nothing I wish to acquire* to enable that. That's why a hobby is very different from money, or a career, or possessions.

I like reading, learning, creating, and seeing. For that sort of thing, having and wanting are much the same. If I want to learn about, I don't know, medieval Japan, I have everything I need to do that, but it's still an aspiration. Time, I suppose, is the only thing I want more of**.

*Not quite true. I'd like a boat.
**And a boat.

When scientists investigate well-defined observable functions, and philosophers talk about hard problems and 'what it's likeness,' are they talking past each other? They both use the word 'consciousness'. Has one or other misused the word? Or are there genuinely different meanings? — bert1

Scientists are reductionists, and reductionists will look for the fundamental elements of a thing and how they produce that thing when so arranged. Philosophers can be reductionists or non-reductionists. I expect reductionist philosophers and scientists will probably speak the same language, but non-reductionists tend to take such concepts as irreducible, so speak a different language.

Things like love and consciousness are multifaceted collections of things. Two people could be in agreement with a given statement about love, but one person was thinking about attachment and the other romance, or one romance and the other sex. Consciousness is similar. Treating it as a simple thing is apt to produce ambiguity and confusion.

The Nagel/Chalmers type of approach does this. It treats What it's like as a simple thing, separable to having a bat's body, including it's brain, a bat's needs, a bat's habitat, a bat's social structure, a bat's senses, a bat's memories, all the tiny things that individually and in conjunction produce what it's like to be a bat. And, worse, tells you that because you don't have a bat's body, a bat's brain, a bat's habitat, a bat's social structure, a bat's senses, a bat's memories, you cannot imagine what it's like to be a bat (true), and that this is somehow proof of an irreducible quintessence of batness that will be left over if and when you have as complete a scientific account of the third person view of a bat as is possible. It doesn't deal with the precise elements of what it is talking about at all.

Well, AFAIK, HG societies do have hierarchies, they're just relatively flat and come with little coercive power. Humans seem to have evolved pretty clear political instincts, so there must have been some benefit to it. This seems to imply that a social hierarchy and some amount of authority were already present in our ancestors. — Echarmion

That's in stark contrast to what I've read on the subject, so I'd be interested to hear more. My understanding is that, while we at some point in our lineage evolved social characteristics that drive or give capacity to egalitarianism and altruism that our ape ancestors do not have, there are no similarly unique characteristics for dealing with life in hierarchies. So yes we inherit the pre-social and sub-social apparatus of our parent species, but we are evolved beyond that.

In an IR society, that authority will always be fairly limited, since a band can simply split and, so long as it's of a viable size, will not necessarily be strictly worse off. This changes once you have to store food and prepare shelter and clothing for the winter. Control of these supplies massively enhances the authority and coercive power of those at the top of the hierarchy, and so that might explain how such structures take precedence. — Echarmion

Yes, I was thinking along similar lines. IR groups can resolve their differences simply by spawning new IR groups. Knowing that the profits of your labours are held within a territory now claimed by your group is a disincentive to strike out anew, and a strong incentive to either dominate or concede. And I agree that this will strengthen an authority that controls, or wrests control of, a food store. Perhaps the sort of turmoil that might lead to is enough to make it advantageous to have a more stable, protected authority.

And these are presumably measurable in some way? If so, they would need to be functionally defined. You input something into the person, look at the output (how the person behaves, a reading from some kind of direct brain scan), and then the degree of awareness of the environment is observed. Is that the idea? — bert1

That's an example. Another would be brain imaging. Or both in conjunction. A good example might be experiments that detect pre-cognitive decision-making. The lapse between initiating a response and being cognitively aware of it, if accurate (it's disputed) would fit with the idea that cognition is validating other mental outputs.

Is this sense of 'consciousness' a collective term for a number of related cognitive faculties? — bert1

Or rather an emergent function of interacting parts. For instance, you might want to put your finger in the pretty flame, but last time you did that it really hurt. This is memory working in conjunction with motivation, not just a bundle of memory, motivation and other processes operating in parallel.

"Consciousness is subjective experience — ‘what it is like’, for example, to perceive a scene, to endure pain, to entertain a thought or to reflect on the experience itself"

Would that do as a starting point for a scientific investigation? — bert1

No, because it doesn't say anything. It relies on the reader having their understanding of what it is like to perceive a scene, endure pain, etc. and that does the heavy lifting without examination.

Do you have a definition in mind when discussing consciousness? When you discuss consciousness, what is it you are discussing? — bert1

The part you quoted wasn't about lay or philosophical discussion, but scientific testing. As I am not a neurologist, how I conceive of consciousness isn't pertinent. Also, establishing the need for a scientific definition of consciousness is not the same as defining it. One can recognise that a scientific definition of consciousness must discern between conscious and unconscious things without having such a definition.

But the consciousness discussed by neurologists afaik is along the lines of: cognitive awareness of one's environment and one's cognitive awareness of that environment. In more detail, (human, at least) consciousness is a process comprised of multiple components such as awareness, alertness, motivation, perception and memory that together give an integrated picture of one's environment and how one relates to it.

Are you conscious? Is your significant(s) other conscious? To not draw this out, I'll answer for you: yes, and yes. — RogueAI

This is precisely what I was talking about before. That sort of wishy-washy 'well, I know what I mean' way of communicating is no good for answering questions about consciousness in a scientific way. It's not useful for me to note that I am conscious when trying to determine if a dolphin, an octopus or a guppy are conscious. What is required is not an obvious, possibly extreme example of a conscious being like a human but a minimal set of requirements for something to be said to be conscious.

We all have a basic understanding of consciousness. — RogueAI

Generally I think we're all pretty ignorant about, neuroscientists like Isaac aside.

There are also some outstanding questions you haven't answered:
- Is it possible to get consciousness from rocks, yes/no? — RogueAI

I have answered this here:

We should NOT assume that consciousness can arise from rocks. — Kenosha Kid

- Is it possible to simulate consciousness, yes/no? — RogueAI

In principle, or with present technology? Probably, and definitely not respectively.

- Is consciousness substrate independent, yes/no? — RogueAI

Already answered this too. Yes. Even if the brain turns out to be the only natural or technological means of having consciousness, the answer would still be yes.

Yes. But smoking is bad for your health so stop it!

Teleportation as per that definition isn't FTL, rather the exact equivalent of infinite velocity. In the EPR paradox, for instance, information doesn't traverse the two-body wavefunction in finite time.

Funnily enough, I briefly looked at solving the Dirac equation for two entangled particles, one of which would be "measured" by a magnetic field. Not ashamed to say I gave up solving the Dirac equation which is tough, but my hypothesis was that the information that causes collapse is carried by the phase information of the wavefunction.
(Phase information affects interference.) This has no speed upper limit, even in relativity. In fact, the phase velocity is tachyonic: infinite for a system at rest, slowing down to c as the system is accelerated to c. My professor thought my idea very stupid, but my other ideas he thought stupid turned out right, so....

Looks nice. Most jealous!

The counter argument is that what you describe as "greed" is better described as striving and that those who achieve more for themselves also produce a net gain for everyone else from their hard work. — Hanover

We can bust this capitalist mantra straight away. Egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups that practice immediate return (that is, they immediately get an equal share of whatever the group as a whole has obtained) work far fewer hours and have no lack. Working long hours for future return has typically had no benefit to most people (hence the need for things like workers rights, minimum wage, and the welfare system), but a huge benefit to a few.

This thread has been miraculously resurrected.

You're arguing my point: you don't need to know _much_ about consciousness to be able to distinguish it perfectly well from non-consciousness. We don't need a rigorous definition of consciousness to determine whether that computer that just passed the Turing Test is conscious or not. We don't need to "know much" about consciousness to pose that question. Our basic understanding of consciousness is sufficient to make sense of the question: is that computer conscious or not? Just like we don't need to know much about water to measure how much is in the glass.

Agreed? — RogueAI

Absolutely not. We have no common "basic understanding" of consciousness. On this site alone you'll find a new one for every thread on the subject.

Are you still assuming that consciousness arises from neurons? — RogueAI

Yes. Now I suspect nothing clicked at all :cry:

I think that if you're going to argue that there's a possible world where consciousness arises from rocks, you're going to have to explain why that physical state is conscious rather than non-conscious. — RogueAI

Suspicion confirmed. I'm not claiming there's a possible world where consciousness can arise from rocks. I really need you to pay attention to the distinction between the two following sentences:
1. If a bunch of rocks could reproduce the function of my brain, that bunch of rocks could be conscious.
2. Consciousness can arise from rocks.
They are not the same and I have not claimed the second one.

Verifying consciousness has nothing to do with whether computers (which are non-organic) are conscious??? — RogueAI

That's correct. Are octopuses conscious? Does that question involve whether computers are conscious or not? No. So the question is not about computers (although a perfectly good example).

You don't need a precise definition of consciousness to verify whether something is conscious. You can verify you are conscious, correct?
...
Do you need a precise definition of water to tell whether a glass has any water in it? — RogueAI

My answer regarded scientific descriptions of consciousness, which does require precise definitions. In order for a scientist to discover scientifically what water is, yes, she needs a definition of water. If she doesn't know what water is, she can't tell you what's in the glass. Even if she knows what water looks like, she needs to be able to differentiate it from alcohol, or any other transparent liquid. As it happens, you don't need to know _much_ about water to be able to distinguish it perfectly well from not-water (it's appearance, fluidity, taste, lack of smell). This is the extent to which the definition of consciousness also needs to be precise: to distinguish it from unconscious things.

What do you mean here? — RogueAI

I mean your question was not applicable since it was based on a misunderstanding of my claimm

A reminder:

I recall my first conversation with you in which you criticised the lawlessness (a statist notion) and implicit communism (a boogeyman of the American state) of a group of people protesting their oppression and lives lost in the hands of a violently oppressive state. — Kenosha Kid

But yes I tend to criticize violence, rioting theft, and the destruction of property, and my own statism require rights and properties be defended. — NOS4A2

You complain about the characterisation, but it's quite clear you permit no concept of a justified protest against murder of black Americans. I said "protestors", you read "violence, rioting theft, and the destruction of property". I wasn't talking about looters, why did you substitute them in? Then or now? The position you stated at the time was against BLM as a whole, not the violent members of it, or the concurrent looters on which we've had no disagreement. (Looters are protest parasites. There was a lot of looting during the 2010 UK student protests. Needless to say, they weren't students.)

Just trying to pin down your logic here. It did seem rather incredible that you could describe the oppressive aspect of the state, and see a problem with people protesting state oppression and no problem with the state's violence (either that which triggered the protests or that which met them). It occurs to me that no rational answer to this can possibly be forthcoming.

So no matter which way you model your state, at some point you’ll run out of voluntary participants and move right to force. In the end this scheming and state building will snuff out natural human behavior, not compliment it. — NOS4A2

I agree with part of the first point, but I'm not arguing that anything would reproduce that natural state in an unnaturally large group, merely that a law that is in line with that natural behaviour would have fewer problems it needed force to resolve. (Btw even small groups had to resort to force sometimes. There's no recipe for churning out 100% good citizens under any schema.) The second point is therefore rather moot.

For one thing, it is simply not possible for our natural social behaviour to play out on a large stage: it's untenable to share your food with a town, or to help everyone you meet. Nor is it feasible to recognise fellow members of your group as in-group, since odds are you've never met them before.

But it's straightforward to see that satisfying those impulses indirectly is better than directly thwarting them. An egalitarian society would have lower levels of stress (empirically), wouldn't have to work as hard (because they're not lining the pockets of others), would have less resentment (fewer reasons for those pesky protestors, or bloody revolutions), less class and race hate (no one to demonise), and of course no one dying of starvation or hypothermia.

I'm not saying that there's any version of a state that's free from having to force individuals to behave in a certain way (the kinds of people you admire would probably be in prison, although that's happening anyway), just that, if we have to accept statism, we don't have to accept one based on the concept of protecting the dubious right of the rich to withhold stolen goods from the majority (which is what our states are at root)?

Oh wow, where?

Why should we assume that consciousness can arise from rocks? — RogueAI

I get the impression from later chat that this clicked: We should NOT assume that consciousness can arise from rocks.

This is the Hard Problem — RogueAI

I don't think so. The hard problem allows for a bunch of rocks to be conscious, it just doesn't allow a complete third person description of that consciousness since it will not contain "what it is like to be a conscious bunch of rocks". And when I say "doesn't allow", I mean that Chalmers won't hear of it on grounds of taste.

How could you verify whether such a system is in fact conscious?

I think this is catastrophic to the physicalist project of explaining materialism. Functionalism won't help here. Functionalism is the problem! Suppose we make a metal brain that is functionally equivalent to a working organic brain. If functionalism is right, it should be conscious. Time to test it! So, how do we test whether it's conscious or not? — RogueAI

This has nothing to do with non-organic consciousness as far as I can see. This problem already exists for discerning if an animal or even a person is conscious.

I don't predict this will be the difficult part given a more comprehensive model of consciousness. The issues here (in my experience) relate primarily to language. The concept of "consciousness" is vague and therefore arguable. For instance, some people don't like the idea of observing anything non-human as conscious, and that vagueness gives sufficient wiggle room to be able to say, "but that's not quite consciousness" about anything. I think this is also partly why people like Chalmers retreat to the first person in these arguments. It's possible to claim that something is lost when you transform to the third person view, as long as that something is suitably wishy-washy.

But if you really want to test for consciousness, you have to define in precise terms what consciousness is, not what it isn't.

I'm always interested in other people's ideas of what consciousness is.

What other physical processes besides rock interactions can produce consciousness? — RogueAI

N/A

Now, if you look at the specific details the end result would never be called a Palestinian state due to no control of borders, air space or waters and, I believe, but I can't find a reference right now, no control of their economy. — Benkei

Sorry for late reply, was tearing it up in London. Security Council Resolution 242 was the stated model of Oslo II (for the negotiation of further transfer of power to the interim government of Palestine to establish, within five years, a permanent arrangement), which included mutual respect and autonomous control of borders in the area.

You're probably right that this falls short of an unambiguous acknowledgement of a state of Palestine being the endgame for Israel. Nonetheless, given that the two-state solution was the reigning paradigm, it seems to me that Israel were at least satisfied to give that impression. And it does seem like Netanyahu had a change of heart, from gradual retreat from occupied Palestine to a reoccupation of those territories, and that this was unpopular with his own cabinet.

I was speaking about riots, violence and theft. So why bring up black people and peaceful protest? Logic? — NOS4A2

Because the first time we spoke about this you were quite happy to tar every BLM protestor, however peaceful, with the same brush as it's worst individuals and, indeed, opportunistic looters who had nothing to do with the protests (while maintaining that a minority of murderous, racist cops does not look bad for the police system that arms and trains them). And you seem to be doing that again here: I spoke of protestors; you substituted protestors for rioters and looters, not me.

Equivocating between protean and compulsory egalitarianism makes it all the more confusing. — NOS4A2

You don't seem to understand. I'm not equivocating between humans in their natural state and larger groups with an egalitarian policy: I've said twice now that larger groups can't support that default behaviour. I'm saying that modelling a state on our natural egalitarianism would be better than carving one out protect tyrants, oppressors, exploiters and thieves from the masses, which I gather is your preference.

I’m all for people starting their own communes, so long as people are there by their own free will. — NOS4A2

One of your straw men against BLM was that it had communes. I guess you mean you're all for white people starting their own communes?

Do you believe it's possible to simulate a universe of conscious beings by moving a bunch of rocks around in a certain way? If not, where do you and that comic diverge? — RogueAI

I never said you could build a functioning brain out of anything. Your question was regarding whether something with the same function as a brain would be conscious; my answer is yes. It doesn't follow that you can build a functioning brain out of rocks, liquorice or thin air: that is a purely technological problem. But _if_ you built something with the same functioning as a conscious brain out of rocks, then yes, that system would by definition be conscious.