Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

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.

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.

― Karl Malone, Wednesday, March 14, 2018 1:57 PM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my cat doesn't have any reaction to mirrors, but i try not to anthropomorphize too much - he's not as visually focused as a human, he recognizes me by smell, sound of voice, and general size and shape rather than facial recognition. and navigates using whiskers, his tail etc. why should he recognize a mirror?

i think you

yes you

are only imagining your consciousness

including all of the imaginary interactions with the imaginary ppl

"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"

I think this is anthropomorphizing. Animals don't have thoughts like that (or at least I don't think they do! Def not in English, I'm pretty confident of that). They don't need a concept of "myself" in order to respond to pain.

"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"

vs.

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

i don't want to speak for dennett or the lobster since i can't do them justice

here's the relevant excerpt

"Could a machine have a self-symbol, or a self-concept? It is hard to say. Could a lower animal? Think of a lobster. Do we suppose it is self-conscious? It shows several important symptoms of having a selfconcept. First of all, when it is hungry, whom does it feed? Itself. Second, and more important, when it is hungry it won't eat just anything edible; it won't, for instance, eat itself-though it could, in principle. It could tear off its own legs with its claws and devour them. But it wouldn't be that stupid, you say, for when it felt the pain in its legs, it would know whose legs were being attacked and would stop. But why would it suppose the pain it felt was its pain? And besides, mightn't the lobster be so stupid as not to care that the pain it was causing was its own pain?

These simple questions reveal that even a very stupid creature must be designed to behave with self-regard-to put it as neutrally as possible. Even the lowly lobster must have a nervous system wired up in such a way that it will reliably distinguish self-destructive from other-destructive behavior-and strongly favor the latter. It seems quite possible that the control structures required for such self-regarding behavior can be put together without a trace of consciousness, let alone self-consciousness. After all, we can make self-protective little robot devices that cope quite well in their simple environments and even produce an overwhelmingly strong illusion of "conscious purpose" ...

But why say this is an illusion, rather than a rudimentary form of genuine self-consciousness-akin perhaps to the self-consciousness of a lobster or worm? Because robots don't have the epts? Well, do lobsters? Lobsters have something like concepts, apparently: what they have are in any event enough to govern them through their self-regarding lives. Call these things what you like, robots can have them too. Perhaps we could call them unconscious or preconscious concepts. Self-concepts of a rudimentary sort. The more varied the circumstances in which a creature can recognize itself, recognize circumstances as having a bearing on itself, acquire information about itself, and devise self-regarding actions, the richer (and more valuable) its self-conception this sense of "concept" that does not presuppose consciousness."

yeah sounds to me like he's down with the "spectrum of consciousness" position. Lobster has a degree of consciousness. But dogs have a greater degree than lobsters, chimps greater than dogs, humans greater than chimps.

Strawson makes a good point in the article that consciousness itself isn’t nearly as mysterious as the intrinsic nature of matter/energy:

One of the strangest things about the spread of the naturalism-based Denial in the second half of the twentieth century is that it involved overlooking a point about physics that was once a commonplace, and which I call “the silence of physics.” Physics is magnificent: many of its claims are either straightforwardly true or very good approximations to truth. But all of its claims about the physical are expressed by statements of number or equations. They’re truths about quantities and relational structures instantiated in concrete reality; and these truths tell us nothing at all about the ultimate nature of the stuff of reality, the stuff that has the structure that physics analyzes. Here is Russell again (in 1948): “the physical world is only known as regards certain abstract features of its space-time structure… we know nothing about the events that make matter, except their space-time structure.” Stephen Hawking agrees in 1988: physics is “just a set of rules and equations,” which leaves open the question “what… breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.” Physics has nothing to say about things that can’t be expressed in general rules and equations.

This is the silence of physics—a simple point that destroys the position of many of those today who, covertly or overtly, endorse the Denial. When we grasp the silence of physics, and ask, with Eddington, “what knowledge have we of the nature of atoms that renders it at all incongruous that they should constitute a thinking [i.e., conscious] object?” The answer is simple: none. The false naturalists appear to ignore this point. They rely instead on an imaginative picture of the physical, a picture that goes radically beyond anything that physics tells or could tell us. They are in Russell’s words “guilty, unconsciously and in spite of explicit disavowals, of a confusion in their imaginative picture” of reality. This picture is provably incorrect if materialism is indeed true because, in that case, experience is wholly physical yet excluded from the picture.

yeah the "true nature" (for lack of better term) of matter/energy is the ultimate "freaky shit" for me

yeah sounds to me like he's down with the "spectrum of consciousness" position. Lobster has a degree of consciousness. But dogs have a greater degree than lobsters, chimps greater than dogs, humans greater than chimps.

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Wednesday, March 14, 2018 9:23 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I’m not sure if a chimp or a dog is necessarily less conscious than a human. Intelligence isn’t the same thing as subjective experience. Is a child’s pain any less real than an adult’s?

Intelligence is not the same as consciousness.

my cat doesn't have any reaction to mirrors, but i try not to anthropomorphize too much - he's not as visually focused as a human, he recognizes me by smell, sound of voice, and general size and shape rather than facial recognition. and navigates using whiskers, his tail etc. why should he recognize a mirror?

i'm not sure. i guess my question is, why shouldn't he? i've thought that maybe he doesn't react to the mirror because his reflection doesn't have a scent or make a sound. but he does recognize other animals when i project films onto the wall - he'll chase them around and paw at them and it's the best thing ever. so like you say, he recognizes general sizes and shapes at least - so why doesn't he recognize a general cat shape in the mirror? instead, when he looks at a mirror it's like he stares right back through himself. it's not that he doesn't recognize himself in the mirror, it's that he doesn't even see what's in it. there's just no desire at all to pay attention at this small, handsome animal a few inches from the mirror.

Sorry for the redundant sentence there.

X-post

I’m not sure if a chimp or a dog is necessarily less conscious than a human

That's not a good way of phrasing it. All animal life is conscious. Chimps and dogs possess fewer of the hallmarks of consciousness than a human does. A housefly possesses less than chimps and dogs. They all feel "real pain", they are all conscious.

Intelligence is not the same as consciousness.

Absolutely. But they are related. An adult does have a greater degree of what we would label consciousness than a child; its internal monologue is much richer. How many children are contemplating the nature of self and the universe?

And they are related because the same brain structures + neurochemistry give rise to both

An adult does have a greater degree of what we would label consciousness than a child; its internal monologue is much richer. How many children are contemplating the nature of self and the universe?

disagree w all of these points lol. for one children are contemplating space/time constantly whereas adults can go on autopilot, distracted with abstractions like work or bills or whatever

i remember as a kid wondering if i could kill myself, will myself to die. i tried not breathing a few times and found myself unable and unwilling to not breathe. i used to "play dead" sometimes to fool my brothers. even if children don't know what death is they are still investigating (and btw no adult definitively knows what death is)

it's when you're not alive anymore iirc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJky8YuTr4

i had lots of thoughts about consciousness when i was a kid. my worldview was a bit unusual because of my circumstances so i can't universalize at all for children as a whole and still i remember some things very clearly. like finding my teacher's explanation of god very unsatisfying and rejecting it in my mind. i didn't know the answer, but i knew what she just told me wasn't it. i was 7. i think a lot of kids have deep thoughts, they just don't let them out all the time.

i also wanted to recommend this book if it hasn't already been discussed -- it's about consciousness as it manifests in an array of interesting circumstances, including out-of-body/autoscopic experiences.
http://www.anilananthaswamy.com/the-man-who-wasnt-there/

yea I think when I was 8 or 9 I saw an old man and thought "when I'm his age, nearly every single person I know will be dead" and that thought continues to haunt me today

when I was in high school I spent a lot of time researching accounts of out of body experiences, usually in hospitals where someone is on the operating table and wakes up seeing something they possibly couldn't have seen

sometimes there were plausible explanations given but there were others that were just freaky - people seeing or hearing things that were physically impossible for them to have experienced, describing things in more detail than I would have been able to while totally conscious. most of the time these stories get handwaved away because they're 'unverified', just anecdotal stuff that you can't really prove scientifically one way or the other, so they just give up. certainly a lot of this is just made up. but you really only need one such story to be true...

When I was in elementary school I used to do this thing where I'd be daydreaming and would start thinking about what it meant to be a human and try to picture seeing myself like other people did and then I would think about how bizarre it was that we exist and would always wind of getting freaked out and have to think about something else. I remember this happening pretty frequently.