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Byran
climber
Half Dome Village
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Apr 18, 2017 - 05:13pm PT
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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. But what if we write an algorithm which is actually intended to "feel". Like, what if an AI is answering phones on a customer service hotline and is programmed to empathize with angry customers and have a desire to make the customer happy, what then? Would the AI actually experience empathy, or feel fulfillment when it resolves the customers problem, or disappointment if the customer threatens to file a complaint? How would we know one way or the other?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Apr 18, 2017 - 06:00pm 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. -Jan
Rest assured Jan, if (a) physics and math and (b) the religious anti-science woo are "lumped together" it's only as far as one sentence construction goes and one context goes and one post goes - as there's a world of difference between (a) and (b).
This should be obvious by now after 15k posts.
A more careful, more nuanced (and maybe more experienced?) reading of the post could/should indicate that physics, math and systems engineering simply have different "ways of talking" about subjects, different nomenclatures, etc..
The point being: the mechanistic systems engineering approach or "way of talking" whether concerning biological systems, mechanical systems, electrical systems or industrial systems, etc.. tends to express itself in such terms (of art and science) as causation, input and output, circuitry, system characteristics, system design, functions or functionality, system flows, signal processing, control, amplification, clocking, memory, filtering, performance, agency, competence, etc etc etc etc... and because it expresses itself thusly and conceptualizes thusly is more likely in the end to derive the best model / description for the so-called Hard Problem, namely sentience or consciousness.
But nice try?
;)
PS, for more elaboration on this subject, namely the different "ways of talking" (in turn, reflecting different levels of understanding or explanation) as one moves from one branch of science to another, I'd highly recommend Sean Carroll's The Big Picture. (He's a physicist, btw.) IMO, he does a good job describing this interesting phenomenon.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Apr 18, 2017 - 06:14pm 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. -Jan
Further, Jan, for sake of completeness, nowhere did I "lump" mathematicians and physicists (actual persons or personal titles or identities) in with the woo crowd as your sentence suggests.
I posted in terms of approaches (edit: "perspectives" actually) via subjects (eg, systems engineering, woo), not in terms of people or types of people.
Accuracy matters.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 18, 2017 - 06:21pm PT
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because it expresses itself thusly and conceptualizes thusly is more likely in the end to derive the best model / description for the so-called Hard Problem, namely sentience or consciousness.
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It has been point out many times that attempts to posit engineering models and algorithms with sentience is logically incoherent. Why, the question asks, should there be any affinity between the content of consciousness or the data in an algorithms and the fact the we are aware of it?
Attempting to do so is the magical thinking and high octane woo element in wannabe Dr. Frankensteins who want to create sentience machines. This, as mentioned, is called the machine trance, which is basically being fixated on data.
An example of making some magical leap from content to consciousness is clearly seen in Sean Carols take on how consciousness "emerged" once evolutionary pressure was exerted on species for initially crawled from the ocean. the brain simply repurposed extant physical brain processing functions and using the same brain regions, simply started using said areas and function is a new way - a conscious way. Of course there is no mention of how or why the mechanical brain would make such a radical flip, nor yet how it accomplished this miracle - which in my mind sounds like magic all the way. The notion of content assigning itself consciousness, or the brain dong the same, is at the core of information theory as well.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 18, 2017 - 07:18pm PT
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Just as Uncle Dennett (your nemesis) has said many times now - what evokes consciousness (perception, qualia, sentience) is perhaps more or less the equivalent of a number of stage tricks - that are simply beyond our (current?) comprehension - which evolution via natural selection has had the time to shape and hone over a gazillion generations.
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You're missing the point here Fruity, because you are locked into the mechanical trance, your attention being fused to content.
And conflating sentience, qualia, and perception into one giant jumbo only buggers up the whole process. Yes, these all occur in a unified whole, but are not the same thing any more than an injector, tail pipe and windshield are the same things in an auto.
Dennett's Folly is that he has conflated content, and the brain's stage trick of conjuring content (thoughts, feelings, sensations, and memories) with awareness. I'm with Uncle Dennett in that consciousness can conjure up many misrepresentations per content. This gets phrased like this: Consciousness is an illusion. And if you've ever seen Uncle Dennett do his stage act, it's pretty fun.
But the question is NOT what we are aware of (content), illusion or otherwise, but rather that we are aware of anything at all: Unicorns, Godzilla, or Cocoa Joe. You can be deluded about much of what you see or think you see and experience, but there is no way to be wrong about being aware in the first instance. "You only think you are aware" is logically incoherent.
Lastly, you flatter me in insisting that only I have noted these glaring philosophical boners, some of the biggest made in the 20th century. Searle, for one, and many others, have chided Dennett since his "Consciousness Explained," which as you know got dubbed, "Consciousness Explained Away."
Remembet, Uncle Dennett came out of the old behaviorist camp, which looked only at inputs and outputs. And that's all you really get from the old guy.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 18, 2017 - 08:55pm PT
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Well, there is a difference between the living and the non living.
what is it?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Apr 18, 2017 - 09:15pm PT
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This, as mentioned, is called the machine trance, which is basically being fixated on data
And who is it that calls it that? Why, the same person (and only that person) who refers to "Dennett's Folly" ! A majority of one. A legend in the making.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Apr 18, 2017 - 09:18pm PT
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what is it?
Good question.
Answer: I'm relatively sure I'm alive and I have the ability to ponder the morality set forth by Kant. Rocks on the other hand are not alive and haven't the ability to ponder anything. Even the lowliest of bacteria might ponder where their next meal is coming from. Rocks don't eat and that's another indication that they're not alive.
Or: Life: the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.
By the way it's easy to find these kinds of answers on wiki... just sayin.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Apr 18, 2017 - 09:21pm PT
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An excerpt from A Science of the Soul by Joshua Rothman - an article about Dennett - in a recent New Yorker Magazine:
"Then, late last year, my mother had a catastrophic stroke. It devastated the left side of her brain, wrecking her parietal and temporal lobes and Broca’s area—parts of the brain that are involved in the emotions, the senses, memory, and speech. My mother now appears to be living in an eternal present. She can say only two words, “water” and “time.” She is present in the room—she looks me in the eye—but is capable of only fleeting recognition; she knows only that I am someone she should recognize. She grasps the world, but lightly.
As I spent time with my mother, I found that my intuitions were shifting to Dennett’s side of the field. It seems natural to say that she “sort of” thinks, knows, cares, remembers, and understands, and that she is “sort of” conscious. It seems obvious that there is no “light switch” for consciousness: she is present and absent in different ways, depending on which of her subsystems are functioning. I still can’t quite picture how neurons create consciousness. But, perhaps because I can take a stance toward my mother that I can’t take toward myself, my belief in the “hard problem” has dissolved. On an almost visceral level, I find it easier to accept the reality of the material mind. I have moved from agnosticism to calm conviction."
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Byran
climber
Half Dome Village
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Apr 18, 2017 - 11:42pm PT
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I wonder if we started a thread called "What is Life?" if we could get it to 15k posts? That could be the most difficult question to answer in the field of biology (maybe "what is a species?" takes a close second). No matter how you go about it, you can't help but feel like you're just arguing semantics.
So the first thing one must know about defining "life" is that we've already decided beforehand that certain things are alive, and other things are not alive. Don't question how we know this, that's not important, and it might reveal the circular nature of the task ahead. What's important is that we must come up with a set of criteria that includes all the stuff we know is alive, and excludes all the stuff we know isn't. A line in the sand MUST be drawn.
A commonly used set of criteria looks something like the definition Paul copied and pasted:
"capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death"
Not always in those exact words, but that covers the basic idea. But then some clever people realized, much to the embarrassment of everyone, that a fire meets all these criteria as well. A fire, alive? Nonsense! There must be something wrong with the definition! The solution, it was discovered, is to pile a few more criteria on top of the former, namely those required for evolution by natural selection. They are: replication (that one was already in our original set), variation, and heredity.
That is, as far as I'm aware, as uncontroversial a definition of life as you're going to find anywhere. It does have it's problems - it seems to exclude sterile organisms, it's questionable whether artifacts should be included or excluded, it includes super-organisms like Gaia (which some people object to), ect... There are many practical reasons for wanting an agreed-upon definition for a concept like "life". But it does make one wonder... if the subset of structures and chemical reactions known as "life" are so very different than all other structures and reactions, then why are such contrivances needed to differentiate the two?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 19, 2017 - 12:52am PT
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By the way it's easy to find these kinds of answers on wiki... just sayin.
not interested in what wiki says life is, more interested in what you say it is... but the problem with your definition is, as Bryan points out, other types of systems meet the criteria of your definition.
My question was really to see if you had something more, long before there was wiki, there was 7th grade "Earth Studies" and I'm pretty sure I recall that the same attributes were forwarded as a definition.
The hallmark of life is that it is a process that is essentially in non-equilibrium. It can do this because of the existence of energy sources external to the biome, be it a volcanic vent in the ocean, a extreme pH concentrations in liquids, or the Sun shining down. While Gaia is controversial, the fact that the Earth's atmosphere and oceans are out of equilibrium provides a signature of life. If there were no life the Earth would go back into equilibrium, the atmosphere and the ocean reverting back to an "abiotic" state. So the whole planet could be viewed as "living," almost every part of it is involved in this process.
Looking at life as a 4.1 billion year old non-equilibrium chemical "reaction" is probably the key to a more profound definition of life, and this will provide the signature for us to search planets for life in the coming decade. Seen in this way, one might also propose different forms of life, and perhaps even search for those, presumably possessing all the attributes of your definition.
This is nothing new, but just what the details are of such a description are still some time off.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Apr 19, 2017 - 06:57am PT
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there is no way to be wrong about being aware in the first instance
Okay.
Suppose you are a judge in one of the Turing Test contests. You communicate via text with either an algorithm or a human, not knowing initially which, and after enough back-and-forth you make a guess as to whether your correspondent is machine or human.
Suppose that during the exchange you receive the reply, "I am aware that you are trying to determine if I am human."
Does that assure you that you are not being fooled by an algorithm?
Now suppose that your subconscious mind has capabilities at least as powerful as those of the algorithms that compete in the Turing Test contests. If that is the case, your sense of being aware could be generated by "mechanical" processes in neuronal networks which your conscious mind is not aware of.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 19, 2017 - 07:28am PT
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Werner:
I’ll object to your categorization. I don’t hold any positions other than one. I’m just reporting what my experience is. My experience has so far shown that I can find no answer to any question other than whether or not there is consciousness. The rest is speculation, and an infinite number of implications—all of which are also speculations.
I’m no longer sure that there are any questions worth concerning myself with. I don’t seem to need or have them. I seem to be fine without them. The *state* of my experience (content) appears to range widely (maybe even infinitely), and yet it is all the same. Everything (content) has the same taste to it. One can argue with the masters about what liberation is or is not all day long, I suppose. Even that’s irrelevant from what I can make out. There is just living, and it seems to be effortless. It’s taking care of itself.
The choice of words is always unfortunate. When I say “chaos,” Jan, I mean that since narratives / interpretations aren’t producing any final, complete, and accurate truth, it’s the only word I can come to. Perhaps you have another one for me? How would “unpatterned” work for you?
It’s becoming increasingly interesting to me how much folks need to say what things are, ontologically. What’s the need, anyway? There is no real need, is there?
I’m not sure that anyone could be so sure that any matter isn’t an indication of living. I think it would be hard to come up with a turing test for rocks. One would have to wait a long time for an answer, and then one would have to be sure that one understood “rock language.” In my view of the dreamstate, everything is impermanent. That would imply that everything changes. Is change not a sign of living? All these suppositions / interpretations / speculations are impossible to prove or disprove. Again, the tetralema.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 19, 2017 - 08:27am PT
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DMT,
Thx. :-)
Jgill,
I came back here this morning to say that I neglected to say that I'm sorry for your mother's state for you. I can imagine that it's sometimes difficult for you. You probably have many thoughts and feelings that you go through (or that go through you). As I was drawing for a painting this morning, I found my own thoughts imagining if that was happening to me. About 6 years ago, my mother went into hospice (and came back out!), and while I sat with her over the days, I saw compassion showing up but also a sense of inevitability.
May all our mothers have happiness and its causes.
Being a good son surely is part of that.
Be well.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Apr 19, 2017 - 09:40am PT
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Sheesh.
...
jgill, thanks for the reminder about...
A Science of the Soul by Joshua Rothman
I had bookmarked it but never got back to finishing it.
Dennett had lurked off to the side, stolid and silent, but he now launched into an argument about perspective. He told Chalmers that there didn’t have to be a hard boundary between third-person explanations and first-person experience—between, as it were, the description of the sugar molecule and the taste of sweetness. Why couldn’t one see oneself as taking two different stances toward a single phenomenon? It was possible, he said, to be “neutral about the metaphysical status of the data.” From the outside, it looks like neurons; from the inside, it feels like consciousness. Problem solved.
...
re: Darwin's dangerous idea
Bach’s music, Christianity, human culture, the human mind, and Homo sapiens all exist as fruits of a single tree, the Tree of Life, which created itself, not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly.
“Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not.” But, he says, it is “greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. . . . I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.”
-Dennett
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 19, 2017 - 09:42am PT
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there is no way to be wrong about being aware in the first instance
Okay.
Suppose you are a judge in one of the Turing Test contests. You communicate via text with either an algorithm or a human, not knowing initially which, and after enough back-and-forth you make a guess as to whether your correspondent is machine or human.
Suppose that during the exchange you receive the reply, "I am aware that you are trying to determine if I am human."
Does that assure you that you are not being fooled by an algorithm?
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Did your read the post about the Turning Test I submitted earlier. What you are arguing for is the "argument of other minds." My quote above, about the impossibility of being wrong about awareness, concerns YOU being aware. Not some external object. Only a host has direct access to awareness - namely, their own.
The screwy thing, MH2, is that I have repeatedly said that 1st person consciousness is private, as every schoolboy knows. This is hardly a new idea but one you have taken issue with many times, claiming, in so many words, that consciousness and neurological function are identical, that by watching a PET scan, say, you ARE watching consciousness itself. Saying, if I remember correctly, that they are "the same" (so-called Identity Materialsim).
If that is so, then YOU tell me how you can "avoid being fooled by an algorithm?" I'm not the one making that case.
And Ed, the "criteria of my definition" of conscious life is that it is aware and that 1st person, subjective experience is it's operate mode. Not to say that objective functioning is NOT going on within the unified system of a human being. It clearly is. We can tweak the underlying mechanics and it effects the content of our experience - I do it all the time with biofeedback work I still follow as a hobby and stress reliever. But the problem with "other systems" meeting the criteria of defining a conscious subject is that most simply give us 3rd person sketches of objective functioning. Unlike us unified folks, they are usually "observer independent," leaving out the very quotient that we are seeking to understand. That's the rub. You tell us all about the bath water, but little to nothing about the baby. Now if you are saying that the bathwater and the baby are selfsame - then we have another discussing altogether.
And John, per the example of the grandmother who had the stroke. As mentioned, the model I follow is that brain generates content, and awareness "sees" it and the medley of the two gives rise to consciousness as we experience it, by way of all kinds of real time processing loops etc. So it stands to reason that when grandmas capacity to generate content is greatly compromised, her consciousness is likewise affected. It might be worth while to at least realize that what Dennett is trying to do is present a behavioralist model based on physical inputs and outputs.
What is fascinating to me is how hard a bunch of intelligent and conscious humans beings are trying to conjure up ways to explain away who they are - conscious subjects. In every case it seems that they are working off the first assumption that the fundamental here is material, considered from a kind of classical Newtonian vantage - the very thing field theory seems to have junked.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Apr 19, 2017 - 10:21am PT
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The hallmark of life is that it is a process that is essentially in non-equilibrium. It can do this because of the existence of energy sources external to the biome, be it a volcanic vent in the ocean, a extreme pH concentrations in liquids, or the Sun shining down. While Gaia is controversial, the fact that the Earth's atmosphere and oceans are out of equilibrium provides a signature of life. If there were no life the Earth would go back into equilibrium, the atmosphere and the ocean reverting back to an "abiotic" state. So the whole planet could be viewed as "living," almost every part of it is involved in this process.
As someone who never made it to seventh grade earth science class, the logic of the above paragraph nevertheless reads as problematic: if the earth and its various processes, all of which are necessary to life, can, in fact, be viewed as "living" then the same thing can be said of the universe itself, the processes of which are necessary for any manifestation of life at all. And if the universe can be declared a living thing then the moment before the first cause (big bang) can be declared the same as well because all structure and energy necessary to life were contained in that moment... and ultimately we have a kind of nonsense when it comes to our definition of life because if life is everything then it is at least indistinct if not "nothing."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 19, 2017 - 10:45am PT
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I think it so ironic that someone who obviously has spent so much time considering the "mental life" gets the basic sciences that relate to it so... wrong.
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Fine, Fruity. Then clearly and simply state my fatal errors. And posit the "right" scientific take on sentience (the very life we live).
Common stances to consider:
A: Material, specifically arranged (engineered) simply IS consciousness.
B: Material processes give rise to consciousness (emergence).
C: All matter and all consciousness is information, and can be posited in those terms.
D: Reality is entirely composed of physical processes. We only "think" we are conscious. Or, "consciousness only seems to be X, when it is actually Y."
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