Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

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

truth cannot be known at all in a jar. why do you ask such questions? do you WANT freaky shit?

Id want a higher level of abstraction and merely call observation the drawing of a distinction. otherwise you're constructing an overly materialist "ground up" account that assumes the very thing it's purporting to describe: ie, how is observation possible?

moreover, I'd follow Niklas Luhmann and say it's a self-referential distinction (ie, that what is distinguished is both the same and different). as someone like Spencer-Brown (quoted above) would insist, it's that vacillation that in fact creates the rudimentary experiences of space and time. Luhmann has a great essay on this called "The Paradox of Form."

contenderizer if wave function collapse didn't exist you wouldn't have diffraction slit experiments

what is the edge of time? do we ride it like a wavecrest?

Pretty much. Given the speed of light, everything we look at is light traveling from the past, and the farther away, the farther in the past that light is from.

i think the issue that's obscure is what constitutes an observation and whether it involves consciousness

some german speaking physicists did and rejected physicalism entirely!

i think most people agree now not necessarily and that it's an artifact of the concept of intention that is not particular to quantum mechanics

time to break out the CTMU!!!

http://www.ctmu.org/

adam b i dispute your interpretation

if you are two light seconds away from me, events i observe happening in your zone are simultaneous with my observation, much as events in san Diego and London are simultaneous, but you're in the two light seconds off time zone, so your clock is two seconds slow, just like east Greenwich or whatever

time is relative motion - even Quasars fuck up sometimes

http://www.ctmu.org/

I smell time cube.

tesseractilingus

Holopantheism is the logical, metatheological umbrella beneath which the great religions of mankind are unknowingly situated. Why, if there exists a spiritual metalanguage in which to establish the brotherhood of man through the unity of sentience, are men perpetually at each others' throats? Unfortunately, most human brains, which comprise a particular highly-evolved subset of the set of all reality-subsystems, do not fire in strict S-isomorphism much above the object level. Where we define one aspect of "intelligence" as the amount of global structure functionally represented by a given sÎS, brains of low intelligence are generally out of accord with the global syntax D(S). This limits their capacity to form true representations of S (global reality) by syntactic autology [d(S) Éd d(S)]

Can't spell metatheological without lol

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