Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

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.

I think being a bat would be frickin awesome, btw

we have plenty of evidence of perception/learning/memory/agency happening outside of brains, of which brains only seem to do some of the time and not particularly reliably.
what constitutes consciousness if not those attributes?

Consciousness is having a subjective experience of oneself or one's surrounds. Stuff like feeling pain or feeling sad. Just because my MacBook Air has memory or a camera or can get things off the internet doesn't make it conscious.

xxp ZZ the Occam's razor comes in if we say that the things brains are made of are both ordinary and turned over rapidly (most of the proteins have a lifespan of a few hours to a few weeks) - so if there is something special about "brains", then this ordinary stuff would have to be blessed with specialness on the way into being incorporated into the structure, and decommissioned when broken down / excreted / exhaled. That there is something special about the structure and organisation of brains, in terms of their ability to organise vague protoconsciousness into a mostly-unified single-entity consciousness, I wouldn't disagree. A pretty-crap, don't-push-it-too-far analogy might be gravity, which is a property of every atom and particle with mass, but which only organises into an appreciable gravitational field when you lump enough stuff together. Just the good old emergent-property definition I guess.

and yes the subjective experience is the Chalmers "hard problem" I guess - we can find correlates for many behaviours / responses but not for the experience of being it

your MacBook air has a system of sensors to monitor its own well-being and will shutdown when it overheats or is low on battery (feeling hot or hungry). in what sense does it not have a subjective experience?

When you say “consciousness is emergent” it’s required to draw a little rainbow with your hands in front of your face, fingers extended and wiggling.

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.

― Zelda Zonk, Monday, March 19, 2018 11:24 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Having the “rudiments of consciousness” is not the same as having higher order animal consciousness. Absolutely no one here is arguing that rocks think or get sad. It just means that properties allowing it to exist are found everywhere.

Also Granny’s example of Chocalateyness is interesting because it a subjective category that wouldn’t exist without consciousness! But point taken, defining natural properties by what they can form in some instances is pretty reductive. That said, with all of our eggs now in the brain basket, what is it about brains that makes experience come into being? Their information processing ability? Most explanations for consciousness that aren’t an outright denial of its existence or reducing mostly to amount to “well if it gets sufficiently complex it just emerges I guess. We’ll figure it out someday!”

hi from the emergent hippie camp

face rainbows are good fuiud

Ha I was wondering if anyone would point that out re: chocalateyness. I'm not so sure it is dependent on a consciousness to exist tho: the arrangement of chemicals responsible for chocolateyness would still be there. Similarly, chocolateyness can exist yet be either undetectable or experienced totally differently by other organisms. Or other humans for that matter. I guess it depends on if you view chocolateyness as purely the subjective experience of a human consuming chocolate or is it a quality of the matter itself.

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?

100%

it's often said that the idea that one can do something familiar e.g. drive to work and have no memory of doing so shows that a lot of the time we are acting non-consciously, on autopilot. i think this is rubbish, memory isn't consciousness and not remembering something doesn't mean we weren't aware at the time. so that testify in court question is misleading.

not remembering something means you aren't aware of it now, and if it happens so closely in time after the fact, it is highly suspect that you (in the "conscious construct sense") were ever aware of it.

on a structural level, isn't memory shown to be synonymous with consciousness? the actual mechanisms of memory are the same ones used for awareness?

deferring to an actual neuroscientist here:

we know fuck all about the generation of consciousness from neural activity

Alcohol/drug blackouts & twilight amnesia are 2 (similar) things off top of my head that refute that.

Then there's the guy (probably other cases too) who only has short-term memory. He is fully conscious. Just remembers nothing that happened after 7 seconds or so.

Guys like that have been shown to retain procedural memory (like backwards writing) which amazes them when they can reproduce these "new" skills.

There appears to be a human 'preconscious' that receives constant signals from all senses in every part of the human body, even in sleep. But most of that information is evaluated for importance and stored or discarded without ever rising to the level we tend to identify as an awareness of our self and our surroundings.

The simplest demonstration of this is our hearing during sleep. Familiar noises that are not identified with danger do not awaken us, but noises at the same decibel level that indicate danger, or are unfamiliar, may very well start us awake. If we aren't conscious during sleep, how can this happen?

Right so if episodic memory, procedural memory, and consciousness can all exist with or without one another, how does it follow that consciousness=memory on a structural level?
xp

There's also priming, too. I don't know what reacting to noises while sleeping and priming shows wrt to consciousness other than that there's multiple layers to it. An organism can receive and even process raw stimuli that never makes it to the active focal "window" of conscious attention.