Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

(though i refuse to get into a debate about the dialectic...)

That would be rather self-defeating, wouldn't it?

[not responding]

so basically im saying he can't jump outside of the universe and see it from another position.

...(cf Richard Rorty about our inability to jump out of our own heads or even our cultures!)

― ryan, Wednesday, July 18, 2012 10:55 AM (8 minutes ago)

this is probably a tangent, but one of the nice things about consciousness is that we are not strictly limited to our own point of view. i mean we are, of course, but also not. my consciousness is an island, and i am limited to and by it, but it is an island that contains all of reality. my consciousness models reality, and within that modeled reality is a model of my own consciousness which contains all of reality, which contains etc. so at some level, i can see "the whole system". of course, it's just a model, limited by its extrapolative nature, but that doesn't make it useless.

how do you know you consciousness is actually your own and not an illusion?

or a douglas adams fish-type thing you mean? wokka wokka? yeah, sure, that would be hilarious.

i actually agree contend, and i see that paradox as generative. "How can the world be in my head, and my head in the world?" that's kind of the frission of difference that make discussions like this one possible (and so maddeningly difficult). Not for nothing does Peirce model his semiotics on the map paradox. (ie, the map so perfect it includes itself, which then includes a map of the map, etc).

"How can the world be in my head, and my head in the world?"

love this. a couple years ago, i read a short novel by victor pelevin called the helmet of horror. it's about exactly that paradox. funny, too.

sounds right up my alley! gonna check it out.

any recommendation comes with an asterisk. it's basically a field in which long-winded symbolic characters exchange theories (and far too concerned with the novelties of the internet besides), but i had fun with the ideas involved.

is that the minotaur chat book? i looked for the audiobook version because i suspected voice actors speaking chat texts would be hilarious.

yup. the chat conceit generates some cringeworthy moments, but allows the characters to pontificate constantly, which seems to be the point.

did we solve the mystery of the depressed dog yet? i think that will be easier or at least a precursor to solving the mystery of consciousness

i just mean when he's left home alone, he's not like that all day every day

although when i first rescued him off the street he *was* like that for about a week

http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4099/4928943154_6e2aaf1036.jpg

what was his life like before? 1 week sounds like a really fast recovery time.

his life before seems to have been two to four weeks of running loose on the street in east LA, eating garbage and fighting rats

before that, no idea

i *think* he might have escaped or been let go from a puppy farm, he is apparently quite purebred but carries enough breed defects (localized alopecia in his case) to disqualify him as a show dog

at first i was like nbd but i just saw a picture of a 12 hour old kitten and now i'm freaking out

does the dog get happy about anything?

yeah yeah he's not a depressed dog!

i just meant that when he's depressed he's much more single minded about it than a person, ditto hungry or itchy

he can lick himself for an hour if he's feeling like it, i get bored after 20 mins or so

oh, well that just sounds like he's living in the moment.

i think that is exactly right as far as the big difference between humans and animals, not so much language as grammar, i am not sure if animals have as strong a sense of past and future as we do

living in the moment entails a lack of consciousness though, at least a lack of some transphysical governor that has the wherewithal to override base impulses.

There's no such thing as a transphysical governor.

unless you're a substance dualist in 2012

oh i don't know, my senile grandfather lives in the moment, breaking into songs and jokes in french whenever the base impulse seizes him. i know he's confused but he's definitely conscious.

Songs are kind of interesting in that people with severe impairment can seem to come alive for the duration of performing a song.

also, weirdly, surgery. (there's this surgeon with severe tremors who is able to control them during the concentration of surgery, but as soon as it over, the tremors come back with a vengeance)

he's alive all the time, just also in the moment, like a toddler

maybe alive's not the best word for it. continuity maybe?

I have a theory. Actually it's more than a theory, it's a growing conviction. Everything points to this, in my view. It's overwhelmingly likely.

All the phenomena we perceive through our senses are mere illusions. Reality is elsewhere. Through meditation, I have become familiar with this "elsewhere". It's a room containing a moth and a turtle. The turtle just sits in the middle of the room thinking about a difficult chess problem. The moth flutters around laying eggs. These hatch into caterpillars, which then make processions up and down the turtle's back. The caterpillars perform a miniature version of Joseph Haydn's opera The World on the Moon, composed in 1777. The turtle just ignores them, thinking about its intractable chess problem.

By intensifying my meditations, I have learned that in an early version of reality the turtle was thinking about Tetris, while the caterpillars were singing hits by The Brotherhood of Man. So I think we can safely say that reality is getting better. However, the room is not without its dangers. If the turtle ever solves the chess problem, the entire universe will vanish in a puff of smoke.

Luckily it's a very, very difficult problem. White only has a chance if black can be forced into zugzwang. I should probably shut up; the turtle can hear everything we're saying.

bingo

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I havent read this yet but it's entitled "Are We Living in the Matrix?" and looks pretty cool.

http://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/2012/07/living-in-the-matrix.html

Bostrom's simulation argument is a winner.

Counting this as a win for the anti-reductionists. Disappointing lack of actual fascinating new theories posted on thread though.

Hugh Pickens writes "Humans have pondered their mortality for millennia. Now the University of California at Riverside reports that it has received a $5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation that will fund research on aspects of immortality, including near-death experiences and the impact of belief in an afterlife on human behavior. 'People have been thinking about immortality throughout history. We have a deep human need to figure out what happens to us after death,' says John Martin Fischer, the principal investigator of The Immortality Project. 'No one has taken a comprehensive and sustained look at immortality that brings together the science, theology and philosophy.' Fischer says he going to investigate two different kinds of immortality. One is the possibility of living forever without dying. The main questions there are whether it's technologically plausible or feasible for us, either by biological enhancement such as those described by Ray Kurzweil, or by some combination of biological enhancement and uploading our minds onto computers in the future. Second would be to investigate the full range of questions about Judeo, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and other Asian religions' conceptions of the afterlife to see if they're theologically and philosophically consistent. 'We'll look at near death experiences both in western cultures and throughout the world and really look at what they're all about and ask the question — do they indicate something about an afterlife or are they kind of just illusions that we're hardwired into?'"

http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/08/04/230241/university-receives-5-million-grant-to-study-immortality?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29

i'm only halfway thru this, but it's directly relevant to the thread topic. so far it's one of the most brilliant things i've ever read, but be warned it's long and by no means easy. basic argument is that subjective experience constitutes a "transjunctive" or "reflective" operation as opposed to "conjunctive" or "disjunctive."

Gotthard Gunther, "Cybernetic Ontology and Transjunctional Operations"

http://vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/gg_cyb_ontology.pdf

I think maybe you meant to ask about "self-consciousness" as opposed to plain ol' consciousness. Is a baby conscious? Yes, certainly. Is it self-conscious? No, or at least not the way an older child or an adult is. Memory and self-consciousness are inextricably linked. Do you have any memories from before you were self-conscious? You don't, not really. You may have the odd isolated memory of an incident from when you were very small, perhaps even an infant (although more likely you only think you remember such incidents when in reality you were told about them after the fact and subsequently "created" a memory) but such memories are anomalous and in a case where such a memory is legitimate, I'd say the memory exists due to an isolated incident of self-consciousness before its time had really come.

Consciousness is not so terribly strange, but self-consciousness rather is... yeah.

I could be way off here and you really did mean to ask about consciousness, in which case, ignore this post.

Put another way, one can't ponder consciousness without possessing self-consciousness. So the question, "is consciousness strange or not" is really about self-consciousness. If you weren't self-conscious you would lack the ability to ask the question.

Sure only self-consciousness is aware of its own strangeness but it's the consciousness part that is strange, not the self part. Ok maybe the self part is an extra level of strangeness. Subjective awareness just is strange, one assumes other animals have it too even if they don't know it.

I think every living thing must be conscious, on some level, even plants. Self-consciousness, on the other hand, only seems reasonable to attribute to some animals, e.g. cats. Probably dogs too, though maybe not. Apes, definitely. The whole thing about it is that if you don't know it, you don't have it. Self-consciousness is knowing that you know. "Just knowing" isn't much more than moment-by-moment sensory awareness like even dumb animals have - consciousness. Once you know you know, things become interesting. "An extra level of strangeness"... how 'bout the primary level of strangeness.

dogs are so obviously more conscious than cats

Can self-consciousness be observed in third person?

"Just knowing" isn't much more than moment-by-moment sensory awareness

yeah but sensory awareness is just weird. this is my basic hobby-horse, that subjective experience is irreducible, and therefore weird simply by virtue of not fitting in with the objective scientific picture of the world.

Can self-consciousness be observed in third person?

with a robust idea of the neural correlates of consciousness and a decent brain scanner i don't see why not, in principle. would still be weird though.

re: gunther pdf, bits from the schrodinger paper sound v interesting but my eyes glaze over at formal logic and If we assume that subject and object are the inverse unit elements of an enantiomorph system, then it is possible to make empirically conjunctive statements about subjects and objects in a context where all terms are uniformly designated.

i had to look up "enantiomorph" and having done so i think his assumption is kinda groundless

i think it's grounded in the phenomenon we are trying to observe. i'd take the question of consciousness to be at the very least related to, if not identical to, the question of: how does the universe observe itself? in that respect talking about enantiomorphs seems relevant.

<i>with a robust idea of the neural correlates of consciousness and a decent brain scanner i don't see why not, in principle.</i>
seems like saying you can listen to the music by reading the bitstream from the CD player, imo. Depends on what you want from "observed", I guess.

Cats get embarrassed, right? Can you have embarrassment without self-consciousness?

"yeah but sensory awareness is just weird. this is my basic hobby-horse, that subjective experience is irreducible"

What's weird about it? That it's irreducible? It seems totally reducible and subject to deconstruction by any number of experiments that don't even require fancy equipment.

Frank Jackson (1982) formulates the intuition underlying his Knowledge Argument in a much cited passage using his famous example of the neurophysiologist Mary:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’.… What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/