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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 18, 2017 - 09:28am PT
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The mind is the brain. The brain is the mind.
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That's usually called type physicalism, aka, reductive materialism, type identity theory, mind–brain identity theory and identity theory of mind. Read up on it if you want.
My sense of it is that you are getting tired of hearing anything BUT type physicalism. Problem is that it makes no account for the fact that we are aware of anything, which for some of us is the very thing that separates syntactic engines from conscious folk. But again, viewed from the outside, this perspective makes perfect sense ... till you probe a little deeper.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 18, 2017 - 09:37am PT
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Paul,
Excellent post on almost every point, IMO. What you’ve written may not be complete or accurate, but it points to significant gaps in so many of the arguments.
For me, in the understanding that I came to some time ago (both personally with my teachers and formally in my educational training), it became increasingly evident that no one and no thing could provide a final, complete, and accurate answer to anything—other than whether or not there is consciousness (viz., mine). Everything else ends up to be unique, unstructured, chaotic, unpredictable, indescribable, unmeasurable, and provisional. At worst (if one thinks that way), “what-this-is” is beyond comprehension on any level.
We can’t get to the bottom of anything. Each and every attempt at a study of anything is incommensurable with every other attempt at a study of anything else. At the bottom of all of this is “ir-resolvability.” We can’t truly resolve anything.
Yet . . . we have almost an unending set of theories about everything (look around); we are faced with a long list of conundrums, paradoxes, and irreconcilabilities; we have more data than we can manage, analyze, or store; contemporarily we look at just about everything almost purely technically; and we elevate and promote (even morally) rationality, reason, consistency, congruence, clarity of thought, etc. *as though* it’s what we are and what we do—ALL in the face of studies and common experience that shows us that we are in practice ostensibly anything and everything but rational, reasoned, consistent, or clear.
Like I wrote above, the scenario looks like an overwhelming shared delusion. Here we are “pretending” as though we know who we are, where we’re at, and what’s going on. It’s either the biggest inside joke possible, or insanity.
Base,
Look up Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. (Then read up on the criticisms.)
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 18, 2017 - 09:51am PT
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study of anything is incommensurable
Therefore your mayavadi philosophy has no standard.
Even the gross materialist are not so ignorant as they have standards.
The mayavadi consciousness is the most dangerous of them all.
And you are there in full view ....
The Māyāvādī philosophers’ position is that at the ultimate issue the individual is lost, everything becomes one, and there is no distinction between the knower, the knowable and knowledge.
But by minute analysis we can see that this is not correct.
Individuality is never lost, even when one thinks that the three different principles, namely the knower, the knowable and knowledge, are amalgamated or merged into one.
The very concept that the three merge into one is another form of knowledge, and since the perceiver of the knowledge still exists, how can one say that the knower, knowledge and knowable have become one?
The individual soul who is perceiving this knowledge still remains an individual. Both in material existence and in spiritual existence the individuality continues; the only difference is in the quality of the identity.
In the material identity, the false ego acts, and because of false identification, one takes things to be different from what they actually are.
That is the basic principle of conditional life. Similarly, when the false ego is purified, one takes everything in the right perspective.
That is the state of liberation.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Apr 18, 2017 - 10:05am PT
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So many interesting lines of thought in the past few hours.
First of all, I agree with Paul. Be careful what you wish for in the realm of consciousness.
Next, I find the statement by Fructose that consciousness needs to be approached from a systems engineering point and not from " ...... a woo, semi-religious, anti-scientific, math or physics perspective" to be remarkable. I'm sure the mathematicians and physicists will have something to say about being lumped together with the religious, anti-scientific woo crowd.
I agree basically with what Mike is saying about us not knowing the ultimate answer to anything though I don't experience reality as being nearly as chaotic as he seems to.
I look forward to Base's conversation with his Chinese neighbor since Sherpa is a language in the Chinese family with a tonal system and similar grammar. I am aware of the critiques of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis and also the fact that almost none of those critical of it, starting with Chomsky, know a non Indo-European language.
And finally, I agree most of all with healyje, that what this thread lacks, is much mention of the unconscious mind. The problem I believe, is that the experts on the unconscious mind, are practitioners of meditative disciplines which are labeled woo. Western psychology and its understanding of the unconscious is only 150 years old by comparison and neurobiology much less. Anyway, it gives us something to look forward to.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Apr 18, 2017 - 11:04am PT
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I agree basically with what Mike is saying about us not knowing the ultimate answer to anything
Is that your final answer? What was the question? How would you recognize the ultimate answer to anything? Might it not be lying around in a dusty old math text?
There is only one ordered domain whose positive elements are well-ordered, and it is Z (the set of all integers)
from Fundamentals of Number Theory
William J. LeVeque
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Apr 18, 2017 - 11:25am PT
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I'm sure the mathematicians and physicists will have something to say about being lumped together with the religious, anti-scientific woo crowd
Grain of salt, Jan. Comes with the territory.
I see that JL is back to attempting to distinguish awareness from consciousness, an approach I have mentioned several times. There are documented instances of non-conscious awareness, whereas we usually think of the two as the same. The problem is that JL then places awareness in a mysterious context as somehow fundamental and a necessary precondition for consciousness. Thus we have returned to questionable "evidence" likely motivated by and gathered from an alternate mental state, Zen meditation.
I have talked before about my experiences while in another alternate state, the Art of Dreaming, in which I could walk through solid walls and doors. And while I cannot document those experiences in everyday reality, neither can the meditators document their beliefs. They witness something in an alternate state and so it must be true.
And that's fine, if it brings them comfort and satisfaction. But I have serious doubts awareness can be examined and peeled away from consciousness in any sense anywhere outside neuroscience laboratories.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Apr 18, 2017 - 11:32am PT
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Suppose the question was:
Is there an ultimate answer to anything?
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 18, 2017 - 12:27pm PT
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Yes .... but it's never material but anti-material.
The rest of the people here think there is no ultimate but make ultimate statements all the time .....
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Byran
climber
Half Dome Village
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Apr 18, 2017 - 12:29pm PT
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The problem here is that in our practical experience awareness/consciousness is exclusive to living entities. If you declare consciousness possible in inanimate nonliving matter then you declare consciousness itself as separate from some kind of particular machine source, consciousness becomes like light or some other physical structure existing as independent product from a variety of sources. And this only opens the door to the monstrous woo that science finds so despicable. Why not say that the universe itself is a conscious/aware entity and what would that entity be if not God? Without getting buried in semantics, if humanity creates a machine that is aware in the same sense a living being is aware the implications will be beyond, take us beyond science’s purview. Careful what you wish for.
In practical EXPERIENCE, awareness/consciousness is exclusive to YOURSELF and nothing else. Any time you're talking about the mind, you're dealing with a sample size of 1. But it's totally fair to assume that other humans who look and act just like you are also conscious, even though you've never peered into their minds to make sure they're not just automata who are "faking it". It's also fair to make the same assumption of other animals who exhibit actions which we associate with various emotions, memory, thoughts, ect..
My speculation that some computers could already be experiencing consciousness applies this same sort of logical inference, albeit with far less certainty because at this point we're sort of comparing apples and oranges. If clusters of carbon atoms exchanging information by electrical impulses results in consciousness, could clusters of silicon atoms exchanging information by electrical impulses also produce consciousness? At this point, it's just an interesting, but unsubstantiated, possibility. I don't even know how one would test or falsify such a hypothesis. Largo had stated quite definitively that computers are not capable of consciousness. I was just challenging this claim, which is equally unsupported by evidence. I just don't think we can say one way or the other.
Edited to add:
If you declare consciousness possible in inanimate nonliving matter There is no such thing as living matter. Life is a process, a continuous series of chemical reactions; it's not a state of matter (like temperature). There is nothing special about the hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon in your body. So it stands to reason that consciousness is a process which is produced by nonliving matter, just like cellular respiration (ie: life) is a process produced by nonliving matter. The process in each case is the important part. So if you were to speculate that maybe a rock is afterall conscious, the question would be: "what process is a rock undergoing which would result in consciousness?".
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Apr 18, 2017 - 12:32pm PT
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Suppose the question was:
Is there an ultimate answer to anything?
In an objective sense, a resounding no.
In a subjective sense, of course.
I do think consciousness is another term for discursive thinking and awareness is another name for the unconscious, though we're generally not aware of it (no pun intended just lacking in specialized vocabulary)
What the meditative arts do is make you aware of it. Whether they make you aware of something else in the universe is the question.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 18, 2017 - 12:47pm PT
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There are documented instances of non-conscious awareness, whereas we usually think of the two as the same. The problem is that JL then places awareness in a mysterious context as somehow fundamental and a necessary precondition for consciousness. Thus we have returned to questionable "evidence" likely motivated by and gathered from an alternate mental state, Zen meditation.
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Not just from Zen, John, but also from looking at the subject for decades, and trying to come up with the least mystifying model I can. As with all fields of study, there are first assumptions.
In physics I'm told that there is the field principal, the quantum principal (discretization), the relitivity principal, and for some, the causality principal - that A causes B, that each frame of time is connected to the next; that moments in time are not independent of each other.
And in math we read this: There are various configurations of axioms that can be chosen as the fundamental foundation of mathematics, with ZFC as the tacit standard. Outside of foundations and set theory and model theory and logic and so on, the axiom list is relatively small (compared to the whole of the theory of any mathematical context with all of the various theorems and formula).
No one knows what holds the laws of physics in place, but whatever the cause or reason, I have never heard it referred to as existing in a "mysterious context," and the same goes for most first assumptions used in science.
In consciousness, we need only have one given, and that's awareness. When you try and fabricate reasons or physical definitions or purported sources that CREATE awareness, they all sound like total magic because they are logically incoherent - which is one of Chalmers' central points.
A perhaps amazing thing about this is that you can probe into most any take on what consciousness is, and you'll probably end up with awareness being a fundamental, a given.
Take identity materialism, which BASE just proposed, whereby brain IS mind and mind is brain. The way this gets phrased by professionals is that brain states are identical with subjective states.
Identical, by definition, means exactly the same. No more. No less. That rules out the brain "producing" awareness because you are then left with an emergent function above and beyond baseline brain functions. That is, subjectivity cannot be an output of firing neurons, it has to be the ontological fact of firing neurons themselves.
There is no logically consistent way to posit this other then awareness is fundamental to brain and consciousness - an ironic fact for identity materialism to admit.
Fact is, for this specie of materialism the fundamental, the basic assumption, the given is that consciousness itself is physical. Field theory (among others) seems to say: Not so fast, cowboy.
Seems there are two options: Either brain produces awareness, in which case we are left with Chalmers Hard Problem (and we can explain it away 1,000 ways, merely dodging it), or else awareness is fundamental, in which case no thing (awareness) is everything, and every thing is impermanent.
Pick your poison, which might be the medicine.
Having fun yet?
I could read Paul's posts all day.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Apr 18, 2017 - 01:33pm PT
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In an objective sense, a resounding no.
In that case there is an ultimate answer to the question, "Is there an ultimate answer to anything?"
So the answer is: yes.
But then the answer was: no.
Which is it?
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Apr 18, 2017 - 01:54pm PT
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In practical EXPERIENCE, awareness/consciousness is exclusive to YOURSELF and nothing else.
The exclusivity of awareness to the individual is mediated by communication. In humans that communication is remarkably subtle and sophisticated and is extended by language. I cannot have your experience but I can know your experience through communication. If this weren't so there would be no consensus. The sharing of consciousness is one of the prime reasons for the arts. Feeling into sensation: the predicate of all expressionism.
The notion that matter doesn't live, is not alive, is semantics and really irrelevant.
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Byran
climber
Half Dome Village
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Apr 18, 2017 - 02:28pm PT
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The exclusivity of awareness to the individual is mediated by communication. So then the Turing test is all you need to confirm consciousness in computers? If an AI can communicate like a person, and claims to be self-aware, then you see no reason to doubt it?
The notion that matter doesn't live, is not alive, is semantics and really irrelevant. Indeed. You were the one trying to draw a distinction between the "living" matter in the human brain, and the "non-living" matter in computer processors.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Apr 18, 2017 - 02:38pm PT
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So then the Turing test is all you need to confirm consciousness in computers? If an AI can communicate like a person, and claims to be self-aware, then you see no reason to doubt it?
I would be suspicious and doubtful of any non living machine claiming to communicate with me, claiming awareness in the human sense. Hopefully a scientist would be so as well. Human communication is much more subtle and remarkable than you give it credit for. Turing was smart, but his test is fallible and unreasonable. Newton was smart too but he had a penchant for astrology.
Indeed. You were the one trying to draw a distinction between the "living" matter in the human brain, and the "non-living" matter in computer processors.
Well, there is a difference between the living and the non living. There are no living pieces of metal, copper wires, glass screens that I can think of. On a practical level there is nothing conscious in the realm of the non living. Is there?
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Apr 18, 2017 - 03:31pm PT
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Well, there is a difference between the living and the non living. There are no living pieces of metal, copper wires, glass screens that I can think of. On a practical level there is nothing conscious in the realm of the non living. Is there?
So far the primary difference between living and non-living things appears to be that living things are carbon-based. In the observable world this means that consciousness is associated with carbon and carbon's interaction with electromagnetic energy.
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 18, 2017 - 04:15pm PT
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No one knows what holds the laws of physics in place
Here's another classic ultimatum which always fails miserably.
NO ONE KNOWS.
If no one knows, .... why should we even take your knowledge?
That would mean someone would have to KNOW in order to make that true .....
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 18, 2017 - 04:55pm PT
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People keen on these twists and turns involving communication and Turing Tests might find something in the following excerpt, which also touches on the "Other Minds" argument.
Even if we possessed a correct account of human mental processes in purely input-output terms (which we do not), such an external description by definition could not describe first-person experience. The Turing Test is not a definition of thinking, but an admission of ignorance — an admission that it is impossible to ever empirically verify the consciousness of any being but yourself. It is only ever possible to gain some level of confidence that another being is thinking or intelligent. So we are stuck measuring correlates of thinking and intelligence, and the Turing Test provides a standard for measuring one type of correlate.
Similarly, although social interaction requires communication in the form of such “input-output” as speech and hearing, it also requires two or more agents who experience that interaction: A teddy bear may provide a child with the same comfort and companionship — and elicit from the child the same responses — that another human being would, but we cannot say that it loves.
AI proponents understand that communication is possibly the most important way of demonstrating intelligence, but by denying the importance of each agent’s internal comprehension, they ironically deny that any real meaning is conveyed through communication, thus ridding it of any connection to intelligence.
While AI partisans continue to argue that the existence of thinking and social interaction in programs is demonstrated by their mimicry of observed human input-output behavior, they have merely shifted the burden of proof from the first-person experience of the programs themselves to the first-person experiences of the people who interact with them. So although behaviorists and functionalists have long sought to render irrelevant the truth of Descartes’ cogito, the canonization of the Turing Test has merely transformed "I think therefore I am," into "I think you are thinking therefore you are."
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Byran
climber
Half Dome Village
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Apr 18, 2017 - 04:57pm PT
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So far the primary difference between living and non-living things appears to be that living things are carbon-based. In the observable world this means that consciousness is associated with carbon and carbon's interaction with electromagnetic energy.
Yeah, but it's good to keep in mind that the human body is predominately oxygen (if you measure by mass) or predominately hydrogen (if you measure by # of atoms). Both hydrogen and oxygen are extremely important to biological life, which is why it's hard for astronomers to imagine life on planets which don't have liquid water. Carbon is obviously super important because of the chemical properties which allow it to form very complex molecules, but it's not the only element that is essential to life as we know it, and it's not even the most common element in the human brain. So it would be just as accurate to say that consciousness is associated with hydrogen's interaction with electromagnetic energy. But really I think this just reveals our ignorance on the matter.
Also, silicon is in the 'carbon group' and shares many of the same chemical properties. As far as I know, it's not impossible that there could be alien lifeforms walking around on some planet a few galaxies over which are "silicon-based" and evolved entirely by natural processes. If that actually were the case, it would be all the less surprising if we were able to artificially engineer silicon-based conscious lifeforms here on earth.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Apr 18, 2017 - 05:01pm PT
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Ward Trotter, while I am normally totally on-board with your posts...this one not so much. Frankly, my position on this subject has changed since reading Homo Deus, by Yuri Harari.
Harari points out that human feelings and by logical consequence, human consciousness is a result of evolved biological algorithms. These biological algorithms, particularly (but not exclusively) in mammals included things like a special "affinity" between a mother and her child, for instance. It is not obvious to me that this could be captured by a non-feeling algorithm, at least not very easily.
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