Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

xxp not to me, it doesn't

xp no doubt you can

lol and I'm the one using circular definitions

yes

i only suggest we judge purposefulness as a binary, things that happen can either be purposeful or non-purposeful, only a purposeful event can be counted as a reaction to the environment

that's all

why do you discount the evidence of alterations to brain structure/chemistry leading to alterations in consciousness? wouldn't this lead one to believe the 2 are related?

ok now define purposeful

i'm not sure i can construct a great definition of a purposeful event on a first try but i figure if i tried it would have something to do w/ entropy or potential energy

for example a fish swimming upstream would be purposeful, a fish floating downstream would be non-purposeful

if i pour caffeinated drinks on a plant it will alter how its cells responds to its environment, so there

so your definition has changed, no? "consciousness is purposeful reaction to an environment"? and so the reaction is what consciousness is? rather than the chemical reactions and whatnot that spurred the reaction?

what if the fish is chasing food downstream?
can we talk about The Ether next, this is fun

jesus christ you're condescending

FYI i probably know a fuckload more about the ether than you do, so let's if you like

check out the big brain on Mr Soul

jesus christ you're dense

i don't understand why you're acting like such a prick but congrats, i'm peacing

because you're spouting jibberish and thinking you're some deep thinker

if you post with all sincerity stuff like a carrot's consciousness is housed in its soul and a fish going upstream is purposeful movement, going downstream is without purpose, good god man you deserve to be mocked

he's got you there, you can't deny it

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

consciousness is reaction to environment

just as flinching upon seeing something come towards you is evidence of sight, rather than sight itself, reaction to environment is evidence of consciousness rather than consciousness itself.

I’ve got a box with a real cool beetle in it.

rought draft but here goes...consciousness: the subjective experience engendered by an organism's brain or brain-like-structure activity
If you believe it's not an emergent property of brain activity, then I can see how that would be circular.

brain or brain-like-structure

So consciousness, in your view is strictly the property of chordates?

Brains and brain-like structures are not confined to chordates. So no.

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

Your definition seems like the result of the following argument:

1. Humans have consciousness
2. Humans have brains
3. Humans report alterations in their subjective consciousness when you do stuff to their brains
4. Therefore consciousness is, at least, a subjective experience dependent on whatever it is brains do

And extends to the following ideas:

5. Since other things have brains, it's fair to suppose they have a consciousness like ours, because consciousness depends on the brain
6. Since other other things have less complex brain-like-tissues, it's fair to suppose they have something reminiscent of a consciousness like ours
7. Anything without anything like brain-like-tissues (including rocks and hurricanes) is certainly not going to have anything reminiscent of consciousness like ours, and anything they do have ought not be called consciousness

Is any of this unfair

Yeah pretty much agree with all that.
Back to "reacting to environment", I don't think that's a good definition not only because something can react to its environment without having consciousness (adding a qualifier like "purposeful" is very problematic) but also cause I think it's likely that some thing can have consciousness but lack ability to respond to environment, eg "locked in" patients.

are you an epiphenomenalist?

ARE YOU OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN

i think it's important to recognise at this point that none of us are going to solve this and none of us are going to change our minds.

anyway, epiphenomenalist much?

Doesn't that include maintaining that mental activities don't have any effect on the material world? I don't agree with that. Mental activities are part of the physical world.

7. Anything without anything like brain-like-tissues (including rocks and hurricanes) is certainly not going to have anything reminiscent of consciousness like ours, and anything they do have ought not be called consciousness

Sure but acknowledging that they have qualities that are on a continuum with what we call consciousness isn’t crazy.

Even emergent properties have to be explicable in terms of their constituent parts. And studying the neural correlates of conscious experience doesn’t get you experience itself. We only know it’s there because we are ourselves conscious.

So there has to be some naturally pre-existing property or properties that, when combined in certain arrangements of matter, produce what we know as consciousness. Whether you call it proto-consciousness, spaghetti power or phi (which is a term some theorists have gone up with) it doesn’t matter, because nature sure as hell doesn’t give a fuck about terminology.

Old question and previously covered here and elsewhere, but what happens when a computer simulation is indistinguishable from a human? In regards to opinions, decision making, observations etc.

What happens to what?

Does the computer have consciousness? Sorry was unclear.

I think a sufficiently advanced neural net could have consciousness. Far more willing to entertain that having it than a carrot.

(and it wouldn't need a "body" to have it, hence no "reaction to its environment" would be necessary)

"Even emergent properties have to be explicable in terms of their constituent parts."

To believe this kind of reductionism would be tossing out decades of research into nonlinear systems, dynamic systems, chaos research, complexity etc.

I don't know if things other than brains (or neural networks) can be conscious, but it's the obvious place to start, since the evidence that brains produce or are intimately associated with consciousness is pretty strong. If we can work out how that happens, we can then think about other scenarios.

I don't know how'd you'd ever know if it truly did have consciousness or was merely an expert at faking it.

I mean what is it like to be a bat etc.

Sure why not? In principle it doesn’t matter. Just as cameras do the same basic thing as eyes why wouldn’t a sufficiently brainlike computer be conscious?

X-post

Having 100% of your thoughts be non-lingual is just so hard to fathom

Of course "all stuff has a rudiment of consciousness and we have brains structured to locally concentrate that quality for a few decades" is the Occam's razor perspective, and not coincidentally the fundamental of the Buddhist view.
I'm a neuroscientist with a long interest in consciousness and I can tell you that, to the best of my knowledge, (a) we know fuck all about the generation of consciousness from neural activity, (b) I'm totally comfortable with the idea that the brain is the seat of consciousness and that neural systems in general carry an overtone of awareness, (c) that the brain / neurons are not made from anything in any way different from the rest of the material world, and so (d) the above view is the least dogmatic position from my perspective.

what percentage of the day do y'all feel like you're actually attentively "I could testify to perceiving X,Y,Z in court" conscious?

That's a really good question, I personally cycle from nonresponsive to dimly aware to aware most of the time. "I'm on it" is probably 20 minutes a day.

i am an automaton built for shitposting

my infinity ai went bonkers on the weekend so i had to disable it

back to normal human posting til i fix this fuzzy logic

crosspost to the actual artificial intelligence thread

I'm not convinced the Occam's razor perspective is that all stuff has a rudiment of consciousness. We know brains are associated with consciousness, and we have zilch evidence of consciousness not associated with brains. That's the bottom line. Even if we have no clue how brains generate consciousness, it seems the best starting point to presuppose that they do, and to remain totally agnostic as to whether consciousness can be generated in other ways.

In so far as, like Matthew said, brains are made up of the same fundamental stuff as everything else. But then you could say all stuff has a rudiment of chocolateyness too.

Yep. Brains are just atoms, and so all atoms can be assembled in such as way as to produce consciousness. That's a trivial truth.