Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

oh that was me

also I was reading an essay by Anthony Wilden on "analog" vs. "digital" communication yesterday and it occurs to me that part of the issue is that it's impossible to translate one into the other--actual consciousness sort of becomes the analog "environment" or excluded condition of digital communication about it (language, science, logic, etc). therefore "distinct from, and false to" the very phenomenon being discussed.

i think that other thread could be a good thread where scientists talk about how (some of them anyway) hold some non-scientific convictions they have based on higher intuitions but i'm getting kinda fatigued with the *big brains* trying to explain things i already know

this seems like a false dichotomy...

how do we not have a bunch of images with pot leaves on them in this thread by now, is what I'm saying

consciousness is no big deal to me. It's awareness that has always given me fits.

Niklas Luhmann has another one on this that I like a lot:

“If we were to make an effort to really observe our own consciousness in its operations from thought to thought, we would certainly discover a peculiar fascination with language, but also the noncommunicative, purely internal use of linguistic symbols and a peculiar, background depth of the actuality of consciousness, a depth on which words swim like ships chained in a row but without being consciousness itself, somehow illuminated, but not light itself”

voting weird shit

Nbd

The Krisna Consciousness people in my neighborhood would def vote 3, and I have seen them getting down to some epic ragas lately so I'm going wherever they're going.

Consciousness being weird shit isn't precluded by it being a bunch of neurons. It's weird shit caused by a bunch of neurons.

"caused by" doing an awful lot of work there.

but i'm not going over all this again!

my 'fascinating' new theory nicked from a bunch of ppl is that it's a curious causally effective epiphenomenon. so, weird shit.

rad quotes, ryan!
but please double check that you are not cutting off any of the text from now on, i got slightly headachy staring at a quote that began Thus before scrolling down to work it out.

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y55/silverbeam/A%20CSM%20Blog/epee.jpg

l to r: language, consciousness, mind

epee phenomenon

yep

nbd, had to happen somehow if it exists.

Fail to see eeyore connection tbh

More quotes, pls, ryan

No pithy quotes but two of the great papers in the 'freaky shit' school are pretty short and easy to read.

Thomas Nagel, What is it Like to be a Bat: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/nagel.htm
David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness: http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

I haven't found any similarly digestible papers from the 'ndb' school yet but here's a page on master consciousness-denier Dennett:
http://www.consciousentities.com/?page_id=322

i'm a Dennett stan and am quite happy with the "echoes of pre-formed decisions theory", thoroughgoing materialism is happily consistent in a way that metaphysics can't hope to reach

iirc you're a pretty aggro anti-theist ledge? not sure how that sits with wishful magic consciousness? no snark, just saying the logical answer is anti freaky shit

Not freaky at all, I love consciousness. What a gift. Damn.

Putting the talk of magic to one side, I think consciousness is completely natural, it's just of a natural kind that current science is completely incapable of dealing with. My argument for this is from direct personal experience. I know that I'm aware, that I have experiences, they are subjective & phenomenological, and they can't be reduced to an objective, materialist description. That's all covered by the two papers above. Yes I'm an aggressive die-hard atheist but to anticipate one possible objection, there's no analogy between what I've just said and someone saying they have direct personal experience of God. The latter is a particular instance of experience that is peculiar, far from universal, and potentially illusory (in terms of what it represents). My argument is from experience itself which is universal (assuming solipsism is false) and incontrovertible. It doesn't make logical sense to say all experience is illusory - an illusion is still an experience!

fair enough and i wdn't - can't - refute what you say but you realise a believer could equally claim their experience of belief is real and very far from singular yeah?

plus i'm not sure how you can argue that the experience of consciousness can't be accounted for directly by material causes?

dennett is a big fan of nagel and nozick and borges and freaky shit fyi

I don't think the believer's argument works because they're arguing about the reference of their experience. I don't deny their experience, but it doesn't represent what they think it does. Any individual experience can be illusory, but experience itself can't.

Have you been reading Fear of death.? I don't wanna go over all that again, it just seems self evident to me that subjective phenomenological experience cannot be captured by an objective materialist description. cf. Nagel's bats, Frank Jackson's Mary the Neuroscientist, etc etc.

I think therefore ILX

it's because the meaning of "accounted for" is extremely vague

xxxp

me too - i don't think a materialist accounting of consciousness is less freaky than others, in the same way that i don't think a determinist accounting of existence is less freaky than free will. Borges strikes me as pretty deterministic in partic. and Nozick is my favourite libertarian.

i been avoiding fear of death because altho the turn it's taken has been right up my alley i'm terribly affeared of death

also ok i can see that you can argue with the objective conclusions that the believer wants to draw from their experience. in fact that seems like the only objection you can draw, to me. the experience itself is difficult to refute, which is why most theism post enlightenment has retreated into subjectivism and given up the pre-enlightenment ontological bollocks.

i don't know nozick. free will i find an even more intractable problem - the consciousness problem seems 'merely' physical, science might have to change radically but i think the truth is out there. free will seems like a logical problem - either determinism, or randomness. neither a good fit, no room in between.

ps A real life Mary the Neuroscientist!
http://obscureandconfused.blogspot.co.uk/2006/07/something-else-about-mary.html

the consciousness and free will problems are interconnected for me, in both cases i struggle to imagine an agent that's outside of determinism but capable of acting deterministically.

love this thread, this debate and these links btw

I've been posting pictures of pot leaves all week in the Fear of Death thread, but I've been using those tags that can't be seen by stoners.

also, read Anarchy, State and Utopia by Nozick, i think it's my favourite book that i disagree with the major arguments of

good use of time andrew farrell

what i find funny about the fear of death thread is the pejorative use of "leap of faith". soren kierkegaard said we either take that leap of faith or sink into existential despair and a lot of deep thinkers have deeply thought that the leap of faith is heroic. so what, leap of faith is good enough for kierkegaard but not good enough for you?

:D

also thank you for prompting me to get down with Nozick again

what if this is all just a dream...in the mind of a child

what?

that would be stupid

has IlX been connected to the Tommy Westphal universe

consciousness is just the mind noticing it has thought something and seen/hear d something

you wanna unpack that a little bit?

what is the edge of time? do we ride it like a wavecrest? or is it a continuum unfolding? can we know the future? no. can we know the past? yes, in memory. can we know the present? no - it is just an abstraction

http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/jarofthoughts/20254817/3207/original.jpg

i can't avoid coming down somewhere between weird shit and nbd, which is to say that i have a theory. tbh, i wrote nearly 1,500 words on it last night, but then decided that was too long to post to the fear of death thread, so i filed it for later non-use. so here's some other speculative crap, occasioned by ryan's mention of stuart kauffman's theories. i invite anyone who actually knows something about kauffman and/or quantum physics to set me straight:

i sometimes think that wave-function collapse cannot exist in the material sense that some seem to say it does. i think it must instead be a mathematical metaphor describing the point where that which we do not yet know (an infinite sea of possibility) transitions into that which we do know (a finite reality). this is related to the way that the endlessly shifting present might be said to "collapse the wave functions" that constitute the not-yet-present. the former depends on the observer effect, while the latter seems to depend only on time.

how can we say that observation causes wave form collapse - and not, for instance, that wave form collapse allows observation - when these two things (observation and collapse) suddenly coexist in the indivisible present? isn't it possible that we're simply talking about the way what reality somehow congeals from nothingness, continually, in the ever-shifting, nonexistent present that somehow, "magically" contains all of reality? i wonder how we pretend to know what is cart and what is horse in the creation of the now. we can only say that reality is forever becoming on the infinitely narrow edge of the now, with nothing ahead but the void of possibility, and nothing behind but our unreliable memory of what was. perhaps this generative process only exists in our perception of it, and perhaps it would go on just the same if there were no one present to perceive any part of it. it seems impossible to say.

lol, questions asked much more efficiently by latham green.

how can we say that observation causes wave form collapse - and not, for instance, that wave form collapse allows observation
ooh, nice

as a super clumsy dude i totally disown the majority of bodily actions.

This thread has gotten really good. Some very evocative musings on consciousness here.

in all seriousness can you guys recommend some books on this? i find this fascinating.

Probably something by Daniel Dennet

know yr enemy

I should probably read Dennett’s big consciousness book even though he seems to say baffling things in interviews. I suspect materialists and dualists are saying similar things just in a different language. It seems like arguing about that turns into a shouting match and misses the nuanced texture of conscious experience that both sides could agree on.

the oliver sacks books aren't explicitly about consciousness but are pretty good in illustrating the aspects of consciousness that maybe shouldn't qualify as consciousness (which lends support to the idea that almost none of it should qualify). It's really odd he never mentions his own face-blindness in them.

recommended reading

http://i.imgur.com/SaTCn8x.jpg

PASCAL LEMAITRE sounds like suitable name for this kind of thing.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-consciousness/

A quick search of that article shows it contains neither of the phrases, "freaky shit" or "no big deal".

Scientists are beginning to unravel a mystery

uh-huh, go on...

I shouldn't be too dismissive, it's easy to be scornful of scientists doing philosophy but there there is actually some interesting and useful science in that article, and in this particular subject I don't think you can say that philosophers are any better informed or their theories less wildly speculative.

otm

ITT seems intriguing, borderline panpsychist plus this prediction: a sophisticated simulation of a human brain running on a digital computer cannot be conscious - I think they mean at a very high level - even if it can speak in a manner indistinguishable from a human being. And it puts Fela Kuti in my head.

Peter Watts, sci fi author and Biology PhD:

http
://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I

Trying again:

Peter Watts, sci fi author and biology PhD:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I

starts really well, ending is perhaps slightly disappointing

mind-blowing as the "Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect" study sounds, it seems it's been hard to replicate the findings

anyone read his books?

I enjoyed that, especially the ending! He was suitably sceptical about current theories & informative of the current state of the art in actual neural augmentation. Just wish he hadn't repeated the old canard of driving somewhere and arriving with no recollection of how you get there = you were unconscious. Not remembering being conscious doesn't mean you were unconscious.

I have read blindsight, I don't recall anything about it. Does that mean I wasn't conscious when I read it?

Blindsight is really good

Just wish he hadn't repeated the old canard of driving somewhere and arriving with no recollection of how you get there = you were unconscious.

lol yeah I guess I was unconscious during several lunches last week then

hope it wasn't soup or a big plate of spaghetti

Wow- thanks for posting that video. I thought it started well and ended well (the part where Elon Musk made a surprise cameo as the advance guard of the cyber-borg was a real-life lol).

Yo consciousness is wild shit

on the whole it's a great tool, but it's sneaky as hell and tells a lot of lies

O Tru Mind

enjoyed that Peter Watts talk, however terrifying

Good, sceptical, pessimistic piece about understanding the brain in general:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/27/why-your-brain-is-not-a-computer-neuroscience-neural-networks-consciousness

Reverse engineering a computer is often used as a thought experiment to show how, in principle, we might understand the brain. Inevitably, these thought experiments are successful, encouraging us to pursue this way of understanding the squishy organs in our heads. But in 2017, a pair of neuroscientists decided to actually do the experiment on a real computer chip, which had a real logic and real components with clearly designed functions. Things did not go as expected. [...] Eric Jonas and Konrad Paul Kording – employed the very techniques they normally used to analyse the brain and applied them to the MOS 6507 processor found in [the Atari 2600] [...] As Jonas and Kording put it, the techniques fell short of producing "a meaningful understanding"

That’s an awesome paper, they do recordings and try to correlate the activity with what’s happening onscreen in Donkey Kong

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268

The Visual6502 team reverse-engineered the 6507 from physical integrated circuits [11] by chemically removing the epoxy layer and imaging the silicon die with a light microscope. Much like with current connectomics work [12, 13], a combination of algorithmic and human-based approaches were used to label regions, identify circuit structures, and ultimately produce a transistor-accurate netlist (a full connectome) for this processor consisting of 3510 enhancement-mode transistors. Several other support chips, including the Television Interface Adaptor (TIA) were also reverse-engineered and a cycle-accurate simulator was written that can simulate the voltage on every wire and the state of every transistor. The reconstruction has sufficient fidelity to run a variety of classic video games

I find this pretty amazing in itself!

They’ve done that with a few CPUs outside of this context - I think there is an online Intel 4004 simulator showing voltage changes on every line as it runs.

Ledge that Guardian book excerpt is so fucking otm, thank you for linking it