I think if a sense organ did not encounter its intended stimuli often enough and in a significant way enough then evolution wouldn't have selected that sense organ to be passed on to our progeny. Because evolution has selected the the sense organs as they are, that would mean the probability of encountering their particular stimuli will be high enough to offset the energy cost of developing and maintaining the said organ.
To extend your dice example, let us say we have an organ that detects when 6 has landed. If our environment did not contain some rolling dice like phenomenon which landed 6 often enough and it impacted the passing of our genes to our offspring, then evolution would not have led to the development of an organ who only function is to detect when a 6 lands. As a corollary, the presence of 6 detecting sense organ implies that event of landing a 6 is occurring and its is occurring at probably a high enough frequency to justify the development of the organ.

Yes certainly it is possible. We were unaware of microorganisms till the microscope was invented.

If some organism whose temporal perception is much longer than ours, say a single thought or action of it takes centuries or millennia to form, we may be unable to perceive its actions.

Our brains may also be unable to process or even imagine certain phenomena and we wouldn't even know it. Like other animals are unable to think of calculus.

However, if some entity/thing have a material effect on our world, we may be able to deduce their existence. The existence of genes which are responsible to heritability was deduced long before DNA was discovered.

All of us humans have a Broca's area in our brain. Its gross macrostructure is similar across all humans and it bestows each one of us with the capacity of speech (speech is a complicated cognitive function and this is oversimplified, but the basic fact is correct). The microstructural and microenvironmental differences in our Broca's area makes my speech different from yours. Other animals don't have Broca's area so they are incapable of human speech (microstructural differences doesn't even come into play, their brains are macrostructurally different than ours). Is it clear now?

What do you mean by "chaos manifests"? I reiterate again that the neural networks exhibit chaotic dynamics, this has a precise mathematical formulation which is quite different than how you are using the term chaos. Also, chaotic dynamics in neural networks doesnot mean any output is possible. The outputs have a state space over which they vary. What this means is that although our neural networks may exhibit chaotic dynamics we suddenly won't be able hear megahertz frequency sounds or see x-rays.

I think we are talking past each other. What do you mean when you say people should exhibit chaotic behavior?

If chaos theory is applicable to brain-mind... — TheMadFool

It is not a question of if, experiments have shown that neural networks exhibit chaotic dynamics. However, this does not mean it cannot be analyzed or predictions cannot be made.

Do you see people behaving chaotically? — TheMadFool

Chaotic systems are mathematically defined systems, it does not mean people will behave chaotically. You are confusing chaotic systems with the common use of the word chaos.

Gross brain structures are similar across individuals of a species -> that's what makes them a member of the same species. However, there are demonstrable differences between the gross and microscopic structure, physiology and biochemistry between individuals, that is what separates you from me. Gross brain structure allows us both to speak but its the differences that make your speech utterly unique and different from mine.

Even simple neural networks are chaotic systems. This has been shown experimentally since the 1980s and is now a well established fact. See here and here. What this means is that very small differences in the initial state of the network will give rise to significant unpredictable differences in the final state. Apart from that, the anatomical and the biochemical arrangement of the nervous system in craniopagus twins are not identical. At the very basic level, their heart rate and blood pressures are not identical, hence their CNS state will not be identical.

Take your brain and mine for comparison. It's quite obvious that they differ in terms of actual number of neurons, the number and complexity of synapses, the loci of brain cells, etc. Yet, we can both talk, walk, eat, think in, factoring these variations, extremely similar ways. Had these variations any effect on the way our brains operate/function, it would show in the areas of brain function I mentioned. We wouldn't have generic abilities like walking, talking, eating, thinking, etc — TheMadFool

Even if our way of walking is similar, it is as different between individuals as are fingerprints. Individual gait is different and you can identify a person by his/her gait only. Prosapagnosic patients (who are unable to recognize faces) can readily recognize persons by watching how they walk. It is the same for the way we talk. This shows the opposite of what you are trying to say - gross structures in our brains are the same, hence we walk similarly, but there are differences in the little things, thus each of us has individual gait, out own individual way of talking.

It is difficult, but possible. If we are able to fully map and simulate the brain then we can ascribe a certain degree of probability that it will have a qualia similar to us. The difficulty is in the inherent invasive nature of such mapping.

How did a neural learn to do what it does? It doesn't perform the same function as other cells in the body. What allowed it to do what it does and not some other job that some other type of cell does? — Harry Hindu

Cellular differentiation is a result of evolution. There are multiple different cells each performing specialized functions within our body.

Neural networks weren't born knowing Chinese, English or any other language. The neural network had to learn those instructions, which means that the instructions were initially external to the neural network. How does a neural network acquire instructions for learning a language, and where do the instructions go when they are learned, understood, or known? — Harry Hindu

For a sufficiently complex neural network, the basic underlying physiology and anatomy remains the same for learning a language as it is for estimating a trajectory and throwing a ball. Take the example of the C. elegans neural network. It has been shown to learn to balance a pole. No separate instruction set was provided, only the reward was specified - in a the natural environment this reward will ultimately be the survival of the organism.

The instructions within the room and the person along with any other paraphernalia forms the information processing part inside the chinese room, analogous to a neural network within our brain. You are conflating instruction as a separate entity within our brain, something that the neural networks must follow to interpret the chinese symbols. But there is no such separate instruction set that the neurons follow, not atleast for learning chinese. Instead the particular anatomical and physiological state of our neurons allows us to learn chinese in this particular case or to learn to drive in another case.

Well, the neural network and the full connectome of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans have been fully mapped. Simulating this neural network produces an identical response to different experiments when compared to a biological worm. If we are able to do this for our own brains we can expect similar results. But C. legans has only 302 neurons, orders of magnitude less than humans and the network complexity doesnot even come close. However, it is possible and hopefully we will be able to achieve this.

That's because we are replacing the chinese room with the brain and the person inside the room is being replaced by a nerual network.

Even if someone is actually able to construct a Chinese room, I believe it is impossible to ascribe the notion of “understanding” the language in the sense we understand language. Our understanding of language is intimately associated with our particular neural structure developed through evolution. Our sense of “understanding” language comes from neural function in the Wernicke’s area of the brain. People with damage to the Wernicke’s area suffer from Wernicke’s aphasia – they have great difficulty or are completely unable to understand spoke or written language. Two computers might communicate or even understand but it will be always be different from the understanding of language that we perceive because ours is forever tied to our particular neural structure. It is the functioning of the Wernicke’s area that is giving us this “understanding”.

I believe it is all of it. We are not born self-aware, we learn to be self-aware and we can lose it as easily. It begins with the basics, the identification of the self from our environment and gradually increases in further complexity till we have metacognition. We are born with a basic sensory and motor map of our body but most of the rest are learnt through repetition, experience and memory. Without these where would not be a sense of self. Oliver Sacks had described a patient who only lived in the present. He had no idea of causality and could not draw inferences as he could not form any memories. Neither he had metacognition.

Gamma frequency oscillations in paralimbic network and the default mode network in our brain has been identified to cause self-awareness in us.

We don't know. Unless we actually know how consciousness occurs within ourselves, we won't be able to judge the presence of inner life in anything else. Evidently there is some sort of information processing going on within us which is responsible for all this but we only have broad anatomical descriptions, not detailed or functional enough either to replicate or in my opinion to base a theoretical framework.

At this point I'd like you to consider the nature of consciousness, specifically the sense of awareness, particularly self-awareness. The consciousness we're all familiar with comes with the awareness of the self, recognition of one's own being and existence, which unfortunately can't be put into words as far as I'm concerned. It's quite clear that the Chinese Room is, from the way it operates, aware, albeit in a very limited sense, of its external environment in that it's speaking Chinese fluently but is it self-aware? — TheMadFool

Let us consider our sense of awareness as I'm most familiar with that. there are multiple levels of self-awareness in humans, the lowest being not in a coma or vegetative state and the highest being that of metacognition. How would you know if I am self-aware or not? You can only do that by looking to a comparator, yourself. At the crudest level we can do that by comparing behaviors - you compare my behavior with yourself and as it is fairly similar you assume with a certain degree of probability that I must be self-aware too.

With advancing technology, you can examine more closely and reduce the degree of uncertainty in your assumption. Along with behaviour, our EEG patterns are also similar, along with behavior and EEG, our fMRI are similar, along with behavior, EEG and fMRI our MEG patterns are also the same. Hence the uncertainty goes down. Ofcourse you can never be completely sure but with the increase in resolution/dimensions with which we can look into our brain, the uncertainty decreases. There are multiple neurological disorders in which there are varying degrees of loss of awareness, they are diagnosed in a similar way.

What is the underlying mechanism of self-awareness? I concede it is not yet known. Areas within the brain and their interconnections whose lesions lead to loss of self-awareness have been identified but we still lack their functional description as to how they do so. However, this does not mean we will never be able to. Our is brain is much more complex than it was assumed previously and only now the human connectomics project had been able to map the anatomical connections between different areas of the brain. And that is just the anatomical description. A functional description will be more difficult because we don't have a non-invasive way of doing it.
There are multiple large scale networks within our brain, a special one being the default mode network. Anatomically this has been identified with self-awareness. Actually what is going on inside the network is difficult to know but we will get there eventually.

Consider the whole system of the chinese room. There must be a light source in there so that our man can read, there are stacks of shelves or something analogous to whole all the rules through which our man is going to search. There would be a pen which he will use to write down the response. All this will form the part of the system, and no individual object in the system will have an understanding of chinese. Now replace all these objects forming this systems with neurons.

You can also replace the man in the room with a single neuronal network that does the processing instead of a single neuron but the argument against the chinese room will still stand. If the superorganism that is the chinese room does not understand chinese, our brain will also not understand chinese.

Yes, I agree with you but also think its a bit more complicated. The split brain example is interesting but needs to be examined a bit more. Not all patients with corpus callosotomy or corpus callosum agenesis develop disconnection syndrome. I will read up more on this and get back to you. But I do agree that not everything that is processed is reported to our consciousness and even those that are reported initially, cease to report after some time, an example being the sense of smell.

Yes, surely.

Consciousness has a pretty clear definition. You learn it when you do a first aid course — Banno

Nice. I shall use this in future.

I am not trying to find objective truth. In a narrow sense, something struck me odd about the chinese room argument and I'm trying to sound it out. In an broader sense I'm trying to find a model that would fit my observations, which as you say may be subjective.

I think there has been considerable progress made. The rate of progress is not comparable to other sciences or even within subfields of biology because the brain, particularly the human brain does not lend itself very well to experimentation. It is incredibly complex and unforgiving - unforgiving in the sense that neuronal injuries are usually irreversible - so invasive experiments are very difficult even unethical to perform. The only data we have from human subjects are those from patients who have very special circumstances. But certainly we know a lot more than we did 50 years back.

To give an idea of the complexity, there are about 100 trillion connections within our brain and the present technology allows us to put leads with 4-8 channels in a lead and and usually only two leads are put in for long term use. It is like doing nanotechnology with hammers.

Well it can certainly be proven that atleast our consciousness is due to the activity of neurons. Destroy enough of them and we cease to have consciousness.

Putting idealism aside, yes, we have indirect evidence other people are conscious because they have brains like our own, but there's no way to know for sure if they're conscious. How do I know that there's not something unique to my brain, some little unnoticeable difference, that makes me (and me alone) conscious? How would I begin to even test such a theory? — RogueAI

With advances in technology we will have a far more detailed picture for comparing. Hence the gaps in which this uniqueness can hide will become smaller. For example, magnetoencephalography provides a much more detailed spatial map of our brain than EEG. But sure you can always argue that there is "some little unnoticeable difference". Similarly I can say that consciousness is due to a teapot orbiting the sun somewhere with no way to disprove it but that's not a very helpful way to go about it.

Yes, I believe the superorganism that would be the Chinese room will pass the Turing test. If it is possible to construct then it would be a true AI.

This is what is bugging me about the chinese room. It is restricted and doesn't capture the whole thing. Only the whole system of the room can be conscious, if we deny that then our brains are also not conscious.

Most consider general anaesthesia a clear case of unconsciousness. But maybe instead of making us incapable of experiencing pain, it just paralyzes us and prevents the retention of any memory of the experience. Failure to remember or report an experience is certainly not evidence of a lack of experience. How would we know if this is the case? Is there any way to tell? — petrichor

Yes, this has been demonstrated and the effect of paralyzing agents has been isolated from that of anaesthetic agents. Its called the Tunstall isolated forearm test in which before administering any drugs, a tourniquet/pressure cuff is tied to the arm/inflated such that blood flow in the arm seizes but nerve conduction remains intact. Now the patient asked to flex his fingers and the drugs are injected. When only paralyzing agents are instilled the patient is able to move his fingers as the drug does not reach beyond the tourniquet and also his central nervous system remains functional. However when anaesthetic agents are administered, even though it does not reach the forearm, the patient is unable to follow the command to move fingers because his consciousness gets impaired by anaesthetics agents in a dose dependent manner until he finally loses consciousness.
This is a old test, nowadays more sophisticated EEG parameters are used to monitor consciousness during anesthesia.

That's true. We assume other people are conscious because they look like us, and are biological organisms, like ourselves. But we don't know for sure. How can we? — RogueAI

We can look inside our brains and see. Consider my brain and yours. We undergo fMRI and EEG scans when we are awake and find both of us have similar fMRI and EEG patterns. Now for a given brain state as represented by fMRI and EEG patterns, if I consider myself to be conscious, why shouldn't I consider the same for you when you too have a similar fMRI and EEG pattern as me?

What makes a neuronal network conscious but not a silicon network? Sounds like biological bias to me.

Also, this seems to be 3rd person view of understanding. What is the 1st person view of understanding or consciousness or perception. I know I'm conscious, understanding and perceiving by different means than you would know I'm conscious, understanding and perceiving. Why? — Harry Hindu

I'm not saying a silicon network with a similar complexity as that of a neuronal network will not be conscious. Instead I think it will have and I said asmuch upthread with an analogy to the ship of Theseus.

I confess that I have no answer to the second part.

This version has replies to critics.

My response to the systems theory is quite simple: let the individual internalize all of these elements of the system. He memorizes the rules in the ledger and the data banks of Chinese symbols, and he does all the calculations in his head. The individual then incorporates the entire system. There isn't anything at all to the system that he does not encompass. We can even get rid of the room and suppose he works outdoors. All the same, he understands nothing of the Chinese, and a fortiori neither does the system, because there isn't anything in the system that isn't in him. If he doesn't understand, then there is no way the system could understand because the system is just a part of him. — Banno

If he internalizes all the rules in his head(brain) then effectively he is learning and understanding chinese. This is what we do when we learn a new language. Memorizing all the rules does not allow me to answer questions like "How do you feel today?", "What are you grateful for today?". This has been posited as a reply to Searle by D Cole.

So are we just gonna ignore the fact that the person in the room passed the program instruction, and not the understanding of the Chinese language? — Caldwell

No, just that the person passing the instruction is replaced by a neuron or a network of neurons passing the instructions without having any intrinsic understanding of chinese even though the brain as a whole does.

How is this issue different from not having a first-person experience of another person's consciousness? Unless your real issue is that it's a computer rather than a person - but that is the same issue that Chinese Room-type thought experiments try to capitalize on (confusingly, in my opinion). — SophistiCat

I second this. If we consider the statement of a supposedly conscious computer to be unreliable then the same should apply to any other person also and then everyone other than ourselves may be a zombie.

Thanks, this is what I was trying to articulate.

There are other variants of the thought experiment that are an even better fit for this, such as Ned Block's Chinese Nation thought experiment, where a large group of people performs a neural network computation simply by calling a list of phone numbers. The counterintuitive result here is that a functionalist would have to say that the entire system thinks, understands language, feels pain, etc. - whatever it is that it is functionally simulating - even though it is very hard to conceive of e.g. the Chinese nation as a single conscious entity. — SophistiCat

Yes, that's why I used the analogy of the brain and its constituent neurons which we consider to be conscious.

The real contention here is whether something that is not a person - a computer, for example - can have a functional equivalent of consciousness. — SophistiCat

Consider a neuronal network that is responsible for the perception of time as in the case of Parkinson's patients I described earlier. Now consider a biological neuron in this network is replaced by an artificial one. This is already being done, although not at the level of the neurons but more crudely with deep brain stimulation and responsive neuro stimulation. Hopefully, technology will advance sufficiently to let us do this at the neuronal level. Now, these patients don't consider any otherness in their perception except that it normalizes from the diseased state, even when they know that implants are present within their brain. And now we keep replacing biological neurons with electronic ones - sort of like the ship of Theseus. I would argue that as this part biological part electronic construct retains its time perception, if we ultimately replace the whole network, it will retain the same perception. We can extend this to consciousness itself although the network will be much more complicated.

I think that consciousness or understanding or perception at a particular point of time is the function of the structural and physiological state of the neuronal network at that point in time. I confess that I have no idea about the actual architecture of the neural network, but I do think such state functions of neuronal networks or even interconnected neuronal networks give rise to perception or understanding.

Oliver Sacks in his book The River of Consciousness wrote about patients with Parkinsonism with bradykinesia who had altered perception of time. Time flowed more slowly for these patients in their Parkinsonian state. They were able to recognize this change in their temporal perception only when they were relieved of this Parkinsonian state by medication or deep brain stimulation. The region in the brain responsible for this change in temporal perception has been grossly identified to be the basal ganglia and substantia nigra. So a directed electrical stimulation in the brain can change the perception of time.

You don't just jump from "a single neuron" to "full human consciousness" like that. — Outlander

Yes, I agree. I am trying to draw an analogy in which a neuron is the man in the chinese room and our whole brain is the room itself. Both the man and the neuron have no understanding of chinese yet the brain will understand chinese, hence the room should too.

In the human mind, according to my belief anyway, there is a conceptualization what "wheather" is, and what "nice" and "awfu" are. — god must be atheist

This conceptualization of "nice", "awful" etc is due to the activity of one or more neuronal networks in our brain. But any single neuron within the neuronal network is unaware of what it is conceptualizing.

Apparently we can choose not to follow a gradient.

Red blood cells are the only human cells that lack DNA, so not conscious . White blood cells however are a whole different story. They act independently in the body chasing down pathogens via a process of gradient tracking, as per this video: — Pop

RBCs can sense their environment and respond accordingly, DNA does not play much role in it.
WBCs have to follow the gradient, it cannot choose whether or not to follow the gradient.

Again does this make the pack of blood conscious?

exactly - it senses the presence of something and reacts appropriately. How do you sense without consciousness? — Pop

Let's say you go on to donate blood. Your blood is then packed with appropriate preservatives and stored until needed or till the cells degenerate. The RBCs and WBCs present in the pack of the blood sense their immediate environment and reacts to maintain their internal homeostasis as long as they can (about a month for RBCs). Will you consider this pack of blood to be conscious?