Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

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/

The main thing to take away here is that philosophers love subjecting imaginary people to terrible circumstances.

"Depends on what you want from "observed", I guess."

^^this

it's probably not in the spirit of the argument but you can simulate color using a black and white set using some clever optical illusion-y effects.
Actually, I take it back -- that kind of optical illusion, or any kind of illusion shows how you can manipulate and deconstruct conscious sensory perception.
Those magic eye mall posters basically give you the power of Cartesian devils.

First of all not sure i agree with 'but she had all the physical information'.

I just read a passage in Carl Sagan's book "Boca's Brain", about the history of hypotheses about the magnetosphere of Jupiter. Over a number of decades all they had was spectral analysis of the light, and yet they were able to calculate within some amount of accuracy the displacement of the magnetosphere from the equator, the tilt of the axis, and so on. When Pioneer 10 spacecraft physically visited the Jovian atmosphere and took readings, they realized that the hypotheses were correct to a remarkable degree of accuracy. It validated their methods.

Why did it validate something that was already 'proven' by the hard science of mathematics? Maybe there is something inherently 'right' about multiple points of view agreeing with each other. It can be an agreement between two people in person. Or an agreement between two scientists using different methods to study the same thing over different periods of time. Or maybe even an agreement with yourself, your present self confirming an experience that your past self as observed.

It seems totally reducible

I agree that consciousness is somehow produced by - or supervenient on at least - neuronal activity. But I would love an explanation of how such activity can produce felt experience, subjective awareness. How similar looking activity can produce such varied sensations as the sweet sharp burst of a cherry tomato on the tongue; the fingernails down the blackboard feeling; sadness; the sudden feeling that someone is watching you. The best we could ever do (it currently seems) is just correlation - brain area A produces B. Causation - how that area, that neuronal activity, gives rise to subjective experience - is still a complete and utter mystery. And yeah Mary the colour scientist as a classic example, even if you had a complete map of the correlation of neuronal activity to experience, how would you know what something felt like unless you had experienced it yourself?

1. a lot of what people think they are experiencing aren't what they are actually experiencing (given the malleability of memory) so this notion of a privileged, impenetrable subjective world is already on shaky ground.
2. the experiences of synesthetics points to personal experience being completely arbitrary, so in fact we don't know what anything feels like, regardless of experience.

If the best that subjective experience can offer is arbitrary shaky models of things, then why isn't that, at least in the abstract, a reasonable explanation for how subjective experience arises? I.e. through shaky modeling?

1) they are still experiencing. a hallucination of redness is still red.
2) seems like a point to me, if anything. i know what my experience is like and i know there must be a "what is it like" for other creatures, yet it is inaccessible to me.

i don't know how this magical bootstrapping from a model of reality to subjective experience is meant to happen. really the idea of a model is meaningless without already supposing an agent who can identify the correspondences. it begs the question.

Is it not equally tricky to say you can have the model without the agent? The idea of the agent is meaningless without supposing the model.

The bootstrapping of both the agent and the model maps pretty well to infancy, istm. Both increase in complexity in complementary and symbiotic ways.

I think of the chess-playing machine as my go-to in these cases, and the only neat difference is that the observer of the game (the viewer who gives the mechanical operations their meaning) is running on the same hardware.

yes i guess that's equally tricky. ie very tricky! and complexity doesn't really add anything significant to the equation.

i feel like i (and y'know some actual real philosophers, i'm not a lone nut) am shouting about the elephant in the room and y'all are saying "what fucking elephant" and i don't think i'm the crazy one. but i can't be certain.

No! I mean, you're basically asking The Hard Problem, if I read you correctly, right? And that's still the big dog of consciousness questions afaik

Aye The Hard Problem. But Philip seems to be denying that it's a problem at all (and y'know that's basically Dennett's line so he's not a lone nut).