Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

i've always liked niklas luhmann's assertion that even if we were able to describe consciousness all it would look like is utter chaos. to describe "the sweet and sharp tang of a ripe cherry tomato" is to have already imposed order on it. so i guess my challenge to the hard problem partisans is to be a bit more exact in what they think they are describing.

TLDR: sensations are not prior to cognitive activity but produced simultaneously as the dissipative energy unavailable to it.

yet another way to put this is to state that by the time we are talking about "the sweet and sharp tang of a ripe cherry tomato" we are already talking about a linguistic construct. literally every single form of qualia proposed on this thread is already a linguistic construct. we've already passed the problem by in talking about it.

sorry for thread bombing.

i guess my challenge to the hard problem partisans is to be a bit more exact in what they think they are describing.

But you already seem to have decided that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent! My workmanlike prose is not intended to define, merely to describe enough to produce a glimmer of recognition. Agree with some of yr points about the primacy and pre-linguistic nature of all this but surely the medium in which we are so inescapably immersed can't be so hard to discern.

oh im not for being silent--i simply get frustrated by some versions of "hard problem" talk because i think they actually reify it. they've invented, you might say, a whole army of metaphors for talking about it which strikes me, sometimes, as mystagogic. as you see in my own posts im "talking" about it.

surely the medium in which we are so inescapably immersed can't be so hard to discern

i think my point is that it is, by my definition, impossible to "discern"--it's more like the possibility of discernment in the first place. i do not believe one can grasp or consciously hold in your mind a "qualia" or immediate sensation of consciousness. so whatever we're talking about when we talk about the "hard problem" i dont think it's consciousness.

again, that's why im actually trying to say it's not pre-linguistic because that would assume it's some baseline state from which we extrapolate our cognitive experiences. im saying it's produced conjunctively with those cognitive experience as what is the "other" unavailable side of its distinctions.

it's like those experiments where they give people a 10 dollar bottle of wine and say it costs 600--and then people really rate the wine better! my thinking on this has always been that the wine in fact tastes better. there's no separation possible between our immediate qualitative experience of something and the more abstract informational processing of that thing. but this is not, crucially, to say they are the same thing.

http://open-mind.net/papers

if anyone has lots and lots of time this could be of interest

how could spike trains that were so alike in their physical properties and patterning underlie such “phenomenally” different phenomena as sight, hearing, touch, and smell?

Uh oh, Dennett is on to me.

so whatever we're talking about when we talk about the "hard problem" i dont think it's consciousness.

I like Galen Strawson's point that the thing that makes the hard problem hard is not that we don't understand consciousness, after all that's the only thing that we can be sure we do understand, it's that we don't understand matter. The fact that it's hard for us to imagine how matter can be conscious shouldn't surprise us, because we actually know very little about what matter is.

To me it beggars belief that such similar systems could lead to such diverse experiences.

so what are you saying then?
it beggars belief that a bunch of 1s and 0s can produce every sound and image known to exist when plugged into the proper system, yet here we are...

but ultimately there has to be a conscious observer to encode and decode the sound and vision, to make the correspondence meaningful. Any number of arbitrary patterns produced by natural processes a long time ago in a galaxy far far away could be said resemble or encode human works, with the appropriate decoding algorithm. but they wouldn't represent those works unless there were a human observer there to note the resemblance.

it's that we don't understand matter.

aye that's the thrust of the link i posted upthread.

Yes, thanks for that link, that led me to the Strawson essay that inspired my post.

Do we consider the internet/virtual world to be a part of consciousness?

The internet? I think beetles and carrots, as life forms, are in front of it in line, but the internet may be more conscious than granite slabs or buckets of sand.

i think of comment threads as the collective unconscious

How do I know you all aren't just bots?

youtube comments are basically primal scream therapy

"When I squint just right," Dennett writes in 2013, "it does sort of seem that consciousness must be something in addition to all the things it does for us and to us, some special private glow or here-I-am-ness that would be absent in any robot... But I've learned not to credit the hunch. I think it is a flat-out mistake, a failure of imagination."

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/

The last couple mornings I've been having that "how strange it is to be anything at all" doubt on the walk to work brought on by slightly out of body experiences. I've always felt my "consciousness", or at least my abstract thoughts, as a a sort of activity in the occipital area whereas the rest of my head feels empty. These last couple days that occipital "thought generator" has felt a little unplugged. Probably brought on by my bad sleeping patterns this week.

when i read things like that and think for a second i get these weird full body spasms - i get them in lots of other situations when i'm contemplating non/existence tbf - i think i've developed a reflex response to observing my own objectivity

love2GalenStrawson tho

"that" being fionnland's post btw

great piece, this for me is the crux:

Crucially, though, there’s no reason to give the way the brain appears to physics or neurophysiology priority over the way it appears to the person having the experience. Rather the reverse, as Russell pointed out as early as 1927: he annoyed many, and incurred some ridicule, when he proposed that it was only the having of conscious experience that gives us any insight into the intrinsic nature of the stuff of the brain. 

If I think about this I get into a loop: if we define consciousness as a distinct thing, but it's actually a number of behavioral factors working in concert, then maybe that distinct thing is a gestalt of behavioral factors?

It's not as if we have any way to define the entire list of behaviors/qualia/whatever.

a nice floaty cloud that hardens under pressure iirc

Crucially, though, there’s no reason to give the way the brain appears to physics or neurophysiology priority over the way it appears to the person having the experience.

well sure, no reason to if you're willing to discard scientific method

Bad logic there, granny. There is nothing in that statement that requires or even suggests discarding scientific method or even disregarding it, but only failing to prioritize it when discussing consciousness. The fact that observation itself is a function of consciousness makes observation of consciousness a paradoxically recursive activity.

um no, bad analysis Aimless. if you're giving subjective experience equal footing with scientific method, you are in essence discarding it. which is fine! just don't pretend otherwise.

Is there a school of thought that sees consciousness as a field that our brain/mind is adapted to like our eyes and the visible spectrum, or is that just stoner-think?

Sounds like stoner-think, but maybe I don't quite get what you're saying. Overall there are all sorts of fun hypothetical ways to frame it I suppose.

That it's outside of us and something we tap into (and experience subjectively) rather than something we generate. Admittedly, this may be little more than a head-of-a-pin idea.

if you're giving subjective experience equal footing with scientific method, you are in essence discarding it.

In logic this is called "asserting the conclusion".

i thought giving subjective experience equal footing with scientific method was called bro science?

nbd

Q: How can it be proved that consciousness is what is being measured when you measure consciousness?

A: You can only correlate the subjective experience reported by the subject with whatever you are measuring. This can lead to a hypothesis about consciousness, but not a hypothesis that is falsifiable, because the subjective experience of the subject is unverifiable. All the subject needs to do is to lie and the experimental data becomes worthless. And you cannot decide if the subject is lying.

arah its all relative lads ynow at thn end of the day an egg is still eggshaped isnt it lads

drop the egg and look again

this is your brain on drugs

if u drop an egg u have butterfingers

That it's outside of us and something we tap into (and experience subjectively) rather than something we generate. Admittedly, this may be little more than a head-of-a-pin idea.

― dinnerboat, Wednesday, March 14, 2018 1:36 PM (fifty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What about it makes you consider this possibility? Always curious. Not meant as snark at all.

collection unconscious, right

collective, darn autocorrect

Q: How can it be proved that consciousness is what is being measured when you measure consciousness?

A: You can only correlate the subjective experience reported by the subject with whatever you are measuring. This can lead to a hypothesis about consciousness, but not a hypothesis that is falsifiable, because the subjective experience of the subject is unverifiable. All the subject needs to do is to lie and the experimental data becomes worthless. And you cannot decide if the subject is lying.

― A is for (Aimless), Wednesday, March 14, 2018 1:58 PM (fifty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't think you're 100% wrong here, but we can also, e.g., use fMRI to allow an AI to draw an image it's never seen before straight from someone's brain. That seems to me to run straight past an individual's subjective description of their experience and into their "consciousness." I suppose they could like about what they were thinking of, but that just weights the results more towards the objective observation than the subjective one.

yea but even then, idk if just "thinking about stuff" is necessarily tied into the nature of consciousness. obviously physical changes such as pounding a bottle of gin alter the way our consciousness works. but you're still 'present' in there somehow.

xp or we put human assumptions of perception into the process that creates the image that aren't universals, or the image created by the AI maps to the image we see visually but to non-humans there's no relation

imo those are both ridiculous hedging arguments but that may be my consciousness talking

This can lead to a hypothesis about consciousness, but not a hypothesis that is falsifiable, because the subjective experience of the subject is unverifiable

this to me is the core of the "freaky shit" argument. there is no reason why we can't be "philosophical zombies" - essentially robots with no real consciousness, just a set of programmed responses to stimuli. and yet (if we reject solipsism) we all have the sensation of consciousness. we all have a subjective experience that can't be - or hasn't yet been - explained by materialist views of consciousness.

if we allow that lobsters have consciousness, why not robots?

https://pics.onsizzle.com/why-why-was-programmed-to-feel-pain-4118663.png

if you're giving subjective experience equal footing with scientific method, you are in essence discarding it.

but you can't have the scientific method without subjective experience. every single thing that we know to be 'objectively' true is filtered through subjective experience.

tbh you have to draw a line where you're willing to accept things as objective otherwise you end up with something worse than the simulation hypothesis