Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

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

In that case, back to solipsism I go!

the other day I was thinking, how can we be sure we will die if we can't really be sure if we are not dead already?

there is no reason why we can't be "philosophical zombies" 

i think there are reasons why zombies may not be possible but i find zombies confusing. like, dennet thinks they're impossible even though in his view that's basically all we are? idk they just seem like an extra layer of unjustifiable intuitionism so i prefer not to think about them.

In logic this is called "asserting the conclusion".

I think you mean "affirming the consequent"? Anyway the statement was "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." And I'm saying yes there is a reason: if you want to follow the scientific method. If you don't, cool!

Where is the cutoff between life that has consciousness vs life that doesn't? If we grant that it's an actual thing and humans have it, what else has it? Chimps? Dogs? Toads? Fleas? Trees? Bacteria? Amoeba? Does all life have it or just animal life? Does all animal life have it or just some animal life? How would we know? What would be the hypothesis for why some life has it and some life doesn't? Does it even matter?

iirc dennett hypothesizes that all animals do to some extent, based on the idea that no animal, no matter how low, will devour part of itself to feed itself. for example, a hungry lobster won't chew off it's own claw. so he claims all animals have some self-consciousness, i.e. some sense of self and not-self

every single thing that we know to be 'objectively' true is filtered through subjective experience

The subjective experience of many humans. Consensus. Repeatability. Scientific method is just best means we've come up with to reduce subjective bias.

So if a robot was programmed to not devour (destroy? salvage?) itself and to recognize "it" vs "environment", it automatically has consciousness? Idk that seems like stretching the definition of consciousness to point where it's a useless concept.

xp don't you think it sounds a bit odd to say my conscious experience gives me reason to doubt i have conscious experience? for one thing it saws off the branch you're sitting on.

xp in fact in the same paragraph dennett does suggest that such a robot would, in that case, have something like a self-concept and a rudimentary consciousness

this is my favorite book about consciousness

https://alexandria-library.space/files/Ebooks/WorldTracker/Physics/Consciousness%20Books%20Collection/Hofstadter,%20Dennett%20-%20The%20Mind%27s%20I.pdf

?? no idea where you got that from, ledge

the relevant bit on lobsters and robots begins on pg 265 (the reflection)

Does it even matter?

Excellent question.

no animal, no matter how low, will devour part of itself to feed itself

I'm not sure if this is absolutely and universally true, e.g. eating the placenta might present a problem for this assertion. But point taken.

?? no idea where you got that from, ledge

eh? that's the whole crazy hardcore materialist view in a nutshell! we must be talking at cross porpoises.

my cat doesn't even know its tail is part of its body

my cat does

why is your cat concerning itself with my cat's tail

every day i take my cat on "the trip of the 4 mirrors", carrying him around my apartment. he hasn't recognized himself yet but i am determined to freak him out.

I had a cat that grew to hate its tail so much that its vicious attacks on it eventually became life-threatening and it had to have said tail amputated. It was a freaky scene, man.

seems like even a rudimentary pain reflex would prevent an animal from devouring part of itself without it necessarily differentiating a sense of 'self' from 'other'.

hmm that's a rudimentary self-concept too, though!

"if i bite something and feel pain, then it's myself. if i bite something and don't feel pain, then it's not myself"

My inclination is there's a spectrum of consciousness, and it's a large enough spectrum that the far left end of it is so different from the far right end as to appear like it's two separate phenomena. Humans are on the far right side, as far as our current knowledge and experience goes. That gives the illusory impression that it is unique, or "freaky shit". But when you follow the spectrum incrementally to the left, it doesn't seem quite as mysterious.