Didn't say anything about self-worth did I?

Instead of "information", what if I said that everything is causal? — Harry Hindu

None of these "everything is X" explanations are any good Harry. As I said before, an explanation needs to tell us what is different about different aspects of the world. Suppose you want to explain vision. A good explanation will tell us that it uses rods and cones on the retina, and so on. Suppose you want to explain hearing. A good explanation will tell us that it uses hair cells in the cochlea, and so on.

If we take your approach, all we can say is "vision is causal, hearing is causal".

For instance, isn't the universe the most complex thing we know? — Harry Hindu

This is just more of the same. We need to know about differences. Certain parts of the universe are more complex than others, The complexity isn't spread out everywhere like jam.

I do wonder what motivates you to think of things in this way. Are you a fan of Fritov Capra, like Pop? Is it mysticism?

Then I would assume that you would also assert that everything is "physical" doesn't explain anything either. — Harry Hindu

That's correct.

You do realize that different causal relations would be different information? Of course you would if you had been paying attention to anything I have said. — Harry Hindu

I have been paying attention to what you've said, but I'm sorry to say a lot of it doesn't make sense.

I've already asked numerous times, what makes the brain special in that has feelings and consciousness and other things can't. — Harry Hindu

Because everything is information right? And a computer has a lot of information so it should be able to have feelings too?

It just seems like crazy talk Harry. You must know something about the complexity of the brain, it's the most complex thing we know about. And you must know something about the highly specific, highly sensitive mechanisms that make it work, and how they can be affected by injury, disease. I sometimes think you young people nowadays don't take enough drugs.

The fact that we can feel is what makes meaning. — Daemon

I have no idea what this means. — Harry Hindu

Really no idea? Cool!

Well imagine a time before there were any conscious beings. To keep it simple, imagine a time before life. There was no feeling going on, and then there was life and eventually some creature came along that was able to feel, maybe it could feel heat and cold, and heat made it feel good and cold made it feel bad. So before that time, good and bad didn't exist, didn't have meaning, and after that time, they did.

Who said the beach is bothered by someone walking on it? It could be that the beach likes being walked on. — Harry Hindu

So there were beaches before there was life, before there was feeling. Beaches don't have feelings. You know that, right?

Can I ask you to explain straightforwardly what your procedure is?

I tested my Perfect Pitch just now. https://audiomack.com/lune-en-papier/song/perfect-pitch

The problem is that this approach explains nothing. What are footprints in the sand? Information. What is consciousness? Information. What is memory? Information. — Daemon

Sure it does. It explains that everything is information. The problem is that you just don't like the idea because you haven't been able to supply a logical argument against it. — Harry Hindu

I don't like it because it doesn't explain anything. What we need is to find the differences between things. Waves on the sea, footprints on the beach, a piano, a digital computer, a biological brain.

The circuitry in a digital computer is designed to do stuff like making my text appear on your screen. It isn't designed to have consciousness.

Your brain is designed (metaphorically, through evolution) to be conscious. That's what its machinery is for. It's the most complex machinery we know. Consciousness is the dynamic state of this machinery.

It isn't like the machinery in a computer. If we wanted to make a conscious machine, we would need to make something with the same capacities as a brain.

The fact that we can feel is what makes meaning. The waves on the sea can be interpreted as information, but there's no feeling so no meaning. The electrical flows in a computer can be interpreted as information, but again, no feeling so no meaning. No reason to think a computer can feel. Its machinery isn't designed to do that.

If we made a machine that could feel it would raise serious moral questions.

We know that other people feel, that's what life's about. We know that computers, pianos, the sand on the beach and the waves on the sea don't feel, that's why nobody worries about our moral obligations towards them. Saying "it's all just information" loses this all-important distinction.

You must know this Harry. You don't worry about hurting the beach by walking on it. You don't worry whether your computer is living a happy life. You do care about the beings around you that do have feelings.

No, I don't think so. The evidence with the tone languages suggests that it's the use of pitch per se that encourages the development of absolute pitch

I read quite a lot about this topic recently but I have a poor memory and don't remember much of what I read. This is interesting though:

A new study concludes that young musicians who speak Mandarin Chinese can learn to identify isolated musical notes much better than English speakers can. Fewer than one American in 10,000 has absolute pitch, which means they can identify or produce a note without reference to any other note. Also called perfect pitch, this skill requires distinguishing sounds that differ by just 6 percent in frequency.

Five years ago researchers led by Diana Deutsch of the University of California at San Diego found that native speakers of Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese frequently match this level of precision during ordinary speech. In these so-called tonal languages, changing pitch can completely alter the meaning of words. For example, the Mandarin word "ma" means "mother" when the vowel is a constant high pitch, but means "hemp" when pronounced with a rising pitch. Until now, it was not known whether this precision in linguistic pitch transferred to musical tones. — Don Monroe

I play jazz on sax and piano, and Irish traditional music on the fiddle. I play sax completely by ear, I don't know the names of the notes. I use chord charts when I play piano, but melodies I do by ear.

I think I'm gradually developing absolute pitch, only because when I think of a recording and then listen to it I often get the key right. I haven't done any testing and I don't think I will. Absolute pitch is no use to me anyway. Being able to identify and immediately play intervals is what I need. I knew a musician with perfect pitch who said it is a bit of a curse, a lot of music sounds out of tune. He said the piano with its tempered tuning irritates him.

I think if I did want to improve my absolute pitch, I would use recordings of tunes or songs.

Was that a mistake Harry?

I've read it before. Is the summary in Wikipedia incorrect? — Daemon


No, but with respect, I don't think you're conveying an appreciation of it. — Wayfarer

Well explain where I'm going wrong then, please.

Rather than the Wikipedia article, why not read the original. It's not very long. — Wayfarer

I've read it before. Is the summary in Wikipedia incorrect?

This says nothing about what memory is, or how it is associated with biological machinery and not other types of machinery. — Harry Hindu

https://www.the-scientist.com/reading-frames/book-excerpt-from-the-idea-of-the-brain-67502

In the 1970s, British researcher John O’Keefe revealed that as well as encoding memories, the hippocampus contains a map of the animal’s environment. This cognitive map, consisting of what are called place cells, also contains information about how to get from one location to another, enabling the animal to navigate the world and to predict what it will find in different places. In species with different ecologies these hippocampal maps have different forms—for example, while the maps are 2-D in rats, they are 3-D in bats—but they are always cognitive, not simply spatial.

Despite the key role played by the hippocampus and adjacent structures in creating or accessing memories, what we remember is not found in a single place. Memories are often multimodal, involving place, time, smell, light and so on, and they are distributed across the cortex through intricate neural networks.

Modern research can study these networks in exquisite detail, by controlling the activity of single neurons through optogenetics—using light to activate neurons. In Nobel Prize winner Susumu Tonegawa’s lab at MIT, false memories have been created in the rodent hippocampus, leading an animal to freeze in a particular part of the cage as though it had previously been shocked there, although it had never had any such experience.

I think if you think that, then you don't understand the point of the hard question! — Wayfarer

That seems harsh.

The problem of consciousness, Chalmers argues, is really two problems: the easy problems and the hard problem. The easy problems may include how sensory systems work, how such data is processed in the brain, how that data influences behaviour or verbal reports, the neural basis of thought and emotion, and so on. The hard problem is the problem of why and how are those processes accompanied by experience? — Wikipedia

My imaginary white coated specialist above has explained how those processes are accompanied by experience, so he's solved at least one part of the problem. The "why" part is something that's been vaguely troubling me for a while. It seems obvious to me that we can have experiences, like seeing stuff, and it's really useful to be able to see stuff. So that's the "why" question answered. No?

The point is, here, 'consciousness' is not some abstract whatever about which specialists in white coats have privileged and exclusive access. It is also what we are, our fundamental nature. — Wayfarer

I don't think the white coated specialists have exclusive access, but aren't they likely to be the ones who do provide the answer to the so-called "hard question"? If some white coated specialist said tomorrow "I've discovered that when you connect this bit here to this bit here, it goes conscious", would that solve the hard problem? I think so.

Look, everyone, get this: you can't explain consciousness, because consciousness is the source of any and all explanation. Get over it, and find something else to discuss. — Wayfarer

Hi Wayfarer,

I've seen this said before, but I don't see the force of it. We can explain many aspects of consciousness, using our consciousnesses to examine and experiment. We can't yet say what the mechanism is that triggers it all, but I can't see why there's an insurmountable barrier to that.

Maybe we're already looking at the explanation. It seems very plausible that conscious experience is a development of unconscious reflexes, and we can explain the processes involved in those. So maybe the explanation of consciousness is, when you put all those processes together in a certain way, you get consciousness. I realise this is simplistic and I'm not actually explaining consciousness here, I'm just interested in your reasons for thinking that we can't explain consciousness.

Because brains are just lumps of biological matter with electrical and chemical activity. Just looking at it isn't going to tell us what any of it's doing any more than looking at a microprocessor is going to tell us what software is on it. — Isaac

But we do know quite a lot about what it's doing, by looking at the activity and what is causing it.

Isn't your footprint information that Daemon passed this way? Doesn't the sand have a memory of your passing - the persistent existence of your footprint in the sand? Once the footprint is washed away, the sand forgets you ever passed this way. — Harry Hindu

The problem is that this approach explains nothing. What are footprints in the sand? Information. What is consciousness? Information. What is memory? Information.

Memory is something that goes on in conscious minds. It's associated with conscious experience. There's a lot of very specific biological machinery involved, which has evolved over billions of years. It's an aspect of living beings. It's not an aspect of pianos, beach sand, or digital computers.

How do you go about drafting your messages here?

No, the amoeba isn't conscious. I was reading the other day about how a bacterium can swim towards a source of nutrition. It can tell when the concentration of the nutrient is getting higher. That means it has a memory for what the concentration was before. But the whole of this process is known in detail, and it involves only chemical reactions, there isn't anything there that we need to explain with consciousness.

My dog's brain and body all work like mine, that's the machinery that provides my consciousness and his.

Nobody knows when consciousness first appeared on earth, when the first organism could feel something. Maybe it was a worm, or an insect.

All that is true and interesting, but the human capacities you mention are not criteria for consciousness. Other creatures are conscious, like my dog, he hears things, sees things, smells things. A human baby doesn't know how a human eye works, but it is conscious, it can hear, see, smell.

Well, that was my question: how do minds exist "inside" brains? — Harry Hindu

"Inside" isn't really the right word. The mind is constituted by the state of the brain.

Most semantics, though, even where plausibly construed as literal and factual, is far too complex and disputable to reduce to syntax. — bongo fury

It's been said that a machine translation is like a jar of cookies, only 5 percent of which are poisoned.

Some time after his Chinese Room argument Searle wrote that the syntax of the digital computer is as observer dependent as the semantics. That is, the syntax is ascribed (by a conscious human) just as much as the semantics is. Searle said that he should have realised this long before. It's actually very obvious when you take into account how a computer works. The ones we are using have electronic logic gates, and the designer specifies what range of voltages qualify as 0 and 1. That is where the syntax is ascribed, the distinction between 0s and 1s is not intrinsic to the physics of the machine.

So, is Human Consciousness a form of Matter? If so, what is the missing link? Whence the Illusion?
Or, is Human Awareness perhaps a form of immaterial, but knowable, Information?
Questions? Comments? — Gnomon

Neither is correct. These ideas are based on Cartesian Dualism, whereby the world is divided into exactly two realms, the physical and the mental, the material and the immaterial. But that's a mistake. We live in one world.

The definition of consciousness, I'm going to use here is awareness of the external world and also of oneself. It's quite obvious that this is what is meant by consciousness by most folks as when these don't occur e.g. when one is asleep or in a coma, we're said to be unconscious.

Imagine now a camera set up in such a way that it captures images of the external world and also of itself with the help of a mirror placed strategically. It's turned on and images of itself and the world are formed inside it. This camera is, in every sense of the word, aware of both the external world and also itself which take the form of images that form inside it, behind the lens. — TheMadFool

This is absolutely hopeless stuff Fool my friend. The camera is not aware of anything in the way you are. It doesn't see anything. How can you have got yourself into a position where you think a camera can see things? And Harry Hindu is just as bad, he thinks the beach remembers where you walked, until the waves wash the footprints away.

The same as the distinction between an illusion of consciousness that (like the Chinese Room) doesn't have a proper semantics, and one that does. — bongo fury

I don't think this is right Bongo. The discussion here is about er conscious humans that are supposed to have illusions about their own consciousness. In the case of the Chinese Room (some) conscious humans are under the misconception that a computer is conscious.

So my dog's not conscious?

Then that explains nothing. The whole universe is cause and effect, but consciousness happens in individuated pockets. The "start of it" comes when the pockets are individuated, when there's a subject and an object, an inside and an outside, self and non-self. With the cell perhaps. But not with grains of sand washed by the waves or trodden by feet, not with a piano, and not with our PCs and smartphones. Those things are not appropriately individuated.

Was he saying that the sand on the beach (for example) was capable of cognition?

Is the piano not perceiving certain inputs from the keyboard? Does it not perceive the meaning of your keystrokes and make the correct sounds for you to listen to? — Daemon

It appears that you've answered your own question. — Harry Hindu

The paper perceives the meaning of your penstrokes and makes the correct words for you to read?

And when you walk across the beach, the sand perceives the meaning of your footsteps and makes the correct footprints for you to look at?

Ah you mean Dennett's essay. Some time ago, but I'll look again.

No but I will if you point me at it.

I did really want you to explain (again) about what Dennett was doing though Frank.

I think one of the confusions in this thread is that Dennett was directly attacking some commonly accepted understanding of qualia, so that he expected his audience to walk away convinced that there is no such thing.

I found it impossible to get across that this is a misconception. The result of trying to explain what he was doing (which I did ad nauseam) was just hostility. — frank

I feel bad Frank. I've not been here long. I'm still trying to place people on the deranged/perspicacious continuum, and I haven't taken in everything people have been saying ad nauseam.

You go ahead and tell us all again what Dennett was doing, and if there is even the tiniest hint of hostility I will defend you fiercely even if I know you are wrong, like a mother whose son has stolen a car and committed some dreadful felony.

THE END

I don't think you have Huxley's reducing valve quite right. He thinks that a conscious brain includes a reducing valve to prevent us thinking about everything at once. It doesn't mean that the brain isn't the source of consciousness.

Harry I don't have a problem defining consciousness and suchlike. Like many words they are defined ostensively.

Wikipedia:
An ostensive definition conveys the meaning of a term by pointing out examples. This type of definition is often used where the term is difficult to define verbally, either because the words will not be understood (as with children and new speakers of a language) or because of the nature of the term (such as colours or sensations).

Is the piano not perceiving certain inputs from the keyboard? Does it not perceive the meaning of your keystrokes and make the correct sounds for you to listen to?

Hi Antony, I've given it my best shot and got nowhere really. I respect your wish to have a particular kind of discussion, so I'm going to express my views about Wittgenstein in a new thread.

The question remains: do you think there is a phenomenal aspect to my detecting abilities? — frank

Mice were shown a screen with a faint grey line appearing and moving across it, they pressed a lever to receive a reward when they saw the grey line. Certain synapses could be seen firing when they saw the line. The line could be made fainter. Eventually synapses were seen to be firing in synchrony with the appearance of the line when the mice no longer pushed the lever. The line was being detected by the brain, but without any phenomenal aspect.