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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 18, 2017 - 01:04pm PT
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It seems we continue to run into the problem of pointing at the moon and people talking about the finger that’s pointing. I’d say not everything needs to be literal, nor should it be. You might demur.
just the training, I'd guess... when I get the "right" answer but the "wrong" way I don't count it as a success "...a lie does not tell the truth" in science.
And Bohm was trying to be a physicist (and was a good one) who generalized his physics (by using "analogy") but I'd like to think he'd have abandoned those generalizations once the experimental verdict was in... he'd have gone on to something else, no doubt, but we'll never know.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 18, 2017 - 01:45pm PT
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“Big data” projects in brain sciences
Hmmm. I don't see MetaMind in there. Too clandestine I suppose.
I like the Kant clip. But then I learn through examples primarily.
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 22, 2017 - 01:50pm PT
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What happened to this thread?
Did the gross materialists all get vaporized by their own programmed robots that went berzerk?
Oh ... wait ..... no one really cares as long as robots take over humanity.....
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 22, 2017 - 03:46pm PT
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Personally, I would rather see discussions on the amazing things mind can do rather than the non-ending first person vs third person stuff. But that's just me.
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 22, 2017 - 03:50pm PT
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It's amazing that the mind can make a post on forum and jgill appears ......
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Nov 22, 2017 - 04:15pm PT
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Speaking of jgill, I'm waiting for more postings of mathematical art to add to my collection. Surely he hasn't run out of equations yet?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 22, 2017 - 09:20pm PT
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Damasios take on consciousness is a mess, though he has some interesting observations. Have been going over my notes and reviewing his videos and underlined passages in his books. Critiquing Damasio raises some interesting questions, so I'll bust a close review soon as I have time. While we can categorically write off such obvious bloopers as, "awareness is a feeling," it useful to see why. Searle spelled out the obvious problems in the NY Review of Books, and in other places, but in my opinion he didn't understand the basic problem.
Bound to give this thread a good goosing.
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Scott Tracy
Trad climber
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Nov 23, 2017 - 05:11am PT
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Jgill. Isn't the evidence all around us what the amazing things the mind has created?
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Nov 23, 2017 - 07:49am PT
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Largo,
While we can categorically write off such obvious bloopers as, "awareness is a feeling,"
Get it correct you gumby.
Consciousness awareness is the feeling of knowing a feeling.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 23, 2017 - 10:00am PT
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Dingus McGee, you are merely parroting someone you trust has it right. No harm in that - there are true believers in all fields. However this can imperil ones critical capacities - we can easily see why.
"Feeling of knowing a feeling" IS a feeling, as described. Presenting this in compound form (feeling of knowing a feeling) only confuses things.
It also assumes that before a subject, or even the brain itself, is aware, electrochemical processes in the limbic system (which generates emotional content = "feelings") somehow mutate into a phenomenon different from, and over and above, said electrochemical processes, i.e., a "feeling." And that through feedback loops (feeling of knowing a feeling), either awareness emerges (emergence is NOT an explanation, as many have shown) or else feeling a feeling (as posited by Damasio) IS awareness. Of course this unavoidably introduces some strain of Identity Theory, which is logically incoherent in the extreme.
This is a mess - and if you see things differently, rather than shout "gumby," specifically explain how and why you see things differently.
Bottom line is that Damasio's model assumes that awareness is created or emerges from the networking of limbic artifact - sort of like rubbing two sticks together and, viola ... fire! Different versions of the same are posited by complexity theory, information theory, and many more. That is, objective data and/or activity, as variously described,
when collated, shuffled, mixed, juxtaposed, fed back on itself, and so forth, births or gives rise to (for Damasio) a self (a three stage process for Damasio), which "introduces a subjective perspective in the mind," ergo "we are only fully conscious when self comes to mind."
Of course to make any sense of this quagmire you have to go back and unpack self, perspective, subjectivity, "conscious," and so forth, and that's some heavy lifting because Damasio conflates like crazy.
Of course as many have pointed out, Damasio's "Self comes to Mind" thesis derives from systems theory, but I'll hold off on that point till I can do a point by point investigation of the process by which Damasio believes mind, consciousness and awareness emerge/are created.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Nov 23, 2017 - 11:10am PT
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Jgill: Personally, I would rather see discussions on the amazing things mind can do rather than the non-ending first person vs third person stuff.
Oh, my brother. . . it’s right in front of you. It’s all you can see.
The 1st person vs. 3rd person stuff is just a distinction for talking.
Dingus: Consciousness awareness is the feeling of knowing a feeling.
Oy vey. I’ve asked this before: "tell me what a feeling is."
(Pssssttttt! It’s a texture.)
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 23, 2017 - 11:28am PT
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Der Ring des Nibelungen
I don't recall what mathematical formula I used for this one. (edit: a kind of fixed-point continued fraction form in one of my math notes)
What mind can do:
Besides all that is apparent around us there are internal adventures that are just as amazing, such as the Art of Dreaming, Empty Awareness, creation of tulpas, psychedelic phenomena, etc. This is what I had in mind.
Consciousness awareness is the feeling of knowing a feeling
Not sure what this is. Sounds a little strange. Nevertheless . . .
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Nov 24, 2017 - 03:36pm PT
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I would go with feeling as being the closest relevant word to awareness in our normal lexicon. I would say that any of the functions of a conscious, organic being can be mimicked by a machine. The difference between a conscious, organic being and a robot is that the organic being has feelings. Feelings are biochemical algorithms (as expounded upon by Y. Harari in the recent book, Homo Deus). They developed evolutionarily and are unique to a species, although, like everything else, successful algorithms can be and were often incorporated in multiple branches of the down-stream tree (you know, of life) . The mother-child bond is a good example of a successful group of biochemical algorithms or feelings that are exhibited by nearly all mammal species. It's sure not hard for me to imagine that our concept of mind or awareness is a lot like that sense that a mother mammal has for her child.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 24, 2017 - 03:54pm PT
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The standard physicalist take on consciousness is that neurobiological processes in the brain “cause,” birth, or give rise to human and animal consciousness. Related questions are: How exactly is consciousness realized in the brain? That is, where is “it” and how does it exist in the brain?
These and other questions are taken up by John Searle in an abridged book review he did on Koch and information theory. Some might find it interesting (cut and pasted below).
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Whatever else we can say about consciousness, it clearly is not a part of the ordinary biological world of digestion and photosynthesis: it is part of a spiritual world, some say. It is sometimes thought to be a property of the soul and the soul is definitely not a part of the physical world.
The other tradition, almost as misleading, is a certain conception of Science with a capital “S.” Science is said to be “reductionist” and “materialist,” and so construed there is no room for consciousness in Science. If it really exists, consciousness must really be something else. It must be reducible to something else, such as neuron firings, computer programs running in the brain, or dispositions to behavior. This thinking that “it must be something else” is perhaps the most persistent belief in the physicalists mindset.
In The Quest for Consciousness, by Christof Koch, he abandons the biological approach he adapted earlier. According to his current view, consciousness has no special connection with biology. He follows the Italian neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, now at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in thinking that the key to consciousness is information theory, which, he writes, “exhaustively catalogues and characterizes the interactions among all parts of any composite identity.” It does so by quantifying the information about such interactions as “bits” that can be measured, stored, and transmitted.
According to Koch, any system at all that has processes describable by information theory is, at least to some degree, conscious. But since any system that has causal relations can be described in the vocabulary of information theory, it turns out that consciousness is everywhere. Panpsychism follows.
As he tells us: By postulating that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe, rather than emerging out of simpler elements, integrated information theory is an elaborate version of panpsychism.… Once you assume that consciousness is real and ontologically distinct [i.e., exists apart] from its physical substrate, then it is a simple step to conclude that the entire cosmos is suffused with sentience. We are surrounded and immersed in consciousness…. No matter whether the organism or artifact hails from the ancient kingdom of Animalia or from its recent silicon offspring, no matter whether the thing has legs to walk, wings to fly, or wheels to roll with—if it has both differentiated and integrated states of information, Koch believes it has an interior perspective. In other words it is conscious. So: personal computers, embedded processors, and smart phones…might be minimally conscious.
Koch and Tononi begin by investigating biological consciousness in humans and animals. They develop a theory that consciousness is information. But such information is not confined to biological systems. You also find consciousness in, say, smartphones. So, in the end, for these authors, there is nothing especially biological about consciousness. Long story short, the single most important claim is the analysis of consciousness based in information theory, and that information "causes" or hails forth both experiential content and the fact that we are aware of it.
Problem is, no reason has ever been given, at all, why there should be any special connection between information theory and consciousness. In fact there is no existing model, or even an idea about a model, to show how information causally triggers consciousness.
In his earlier views, Koch argued that consciousness is explained by synchronized neuron firings. Now he objects to that previous view. The objection is: Why should there be any connection between certain rates of neuron firings and consciousness? The same question arises with information theory: Why should information theory give us the essence of subjectivity? What is the connection supposed to be? And how is it causally explained?
The contention is that future data or information will furnish a causal explanation might be a misdirection in this regard. A demonstrative link between data and awareness would likely have to first be established before a fruitful direction of inquiry could take place. Conversely, we might say that the link will only be disclosed through direct observation of brain processes. The challenge here, as I will shortly point out, is that subjectivity itself is observer-dependent, and is not directly disclosed through 3rd person analysis.
***
Understand that you are reductionist if you think that consciousness is really something else, and that the first-person ontology—the fact that I am aware, and the sense I have that I exist—can be shown to be third-person ontology—my sense is reducible to something else.
Favorite candidates for reducing consciousness to something else are neuron firings, computer processes, and behavior. Koch is decidedly antireductionist.
Koch’s proposal to explain consciousness by the processing of information marks a major shift in the type of explanation he is seeking. Standard explanations in biology are causal; for example, we want to know how genes cause physical and other traits and how brain processes cause consciousness. But Koch’s explanation abandons this project. He is not saying that information causes consciousness; he is saying that certain information just is consciousness, and because information is everywhere consciousness is everywhere. I think that if you analyze this carefully, you will see that the view is incoherent.
To put the explanation bluntly: consciousness is independent of an observer. I am conscious no matter what anybody thinks. But information is typically relative to observers. These sentences, for example, contain information that make sense only relative to our capacity to interpret them. So you can’t explain consciousness by saying it consists of information, because information only exists relative to consciousness.
Information is one of the most confused notions in contemporary intellectual life. First of all, there is a distinction between information in the ordinary sense in which it always has a content—that is, typically, that such and such is the case or that such and such an action is to be performed. That kind of information is different from information in the sense of the mathematical “theory of information,” originally invented by Claude Shannon of Bell Labs.
The mathematical theory of information is not about content, but how content is encoded and transmitted. Information according to the mathematical theory of information is a matter of bits of data where data are construed as symbols. In more traditional terms, the commonsense conception of information is semantical, but the mathematical theory of information is syntactical. The syntax encodes the semantics. This is in a broad sense of “syntax” which would include, for example, electrical charges.
Information theory has proved immensely powerful in a number of fields and may become more powerful as new ways are found to encode and transmit content, construed as symbols. Tononi and Koch want to use both types of information, they want consciousness to have content, but they want it to be measurable using the mathematics of information theory.
To coherently explore these ideas two distinctions must be made clear. The first is between two senses of the objective and subjective distinction. This famous distinction is ambiguous between an epistemic sense (where “epistemic” means having to do with knowledge) and an ontological sense (where “ontological” means having to do with existence).
In the epistemic sense, there is a difference between those claims that can be settled as a matter of truth or falsity objectively, where truth and falsity do not depend on the attitudes of makers and users of the claim. If I say that Rembrandt was born in 1606, that claim is epistemically objective. If I say that Rembrandt was the best Dutch painter ever, that is, as they say, a matter of “subjective opinion”; it is epistemically subjective. But also there is an ontological sense of the subjective/objective distinction. In that sense, subjective entities only exist when they are experienced by a human or animal subject.
Ontologically objective entities exist independently of any experience. So pains, tickles, itches, suspicions, and impressions are ontologically subjective; while mountains, molecules, and tectonic plates are ontologically objective.
Part of the importance of this distinction, for this discussion, is that mental phenomena can be ontologically subjective but still admit of a science that is epistemically objective. You can have an epistemically objective science of consciousness even though it is an ontologically subjective phenomenon.
This distinction underlies another distinction—between those features of the world that exist independently of any human attitudes and those whose existence requires such attitudes. I describe this as the difference between those features that are observer-independent and those that are observer-relative. So, ontologically objective features like mountains and tectonic plates have an existence that is observer-independent; but marriage, property, money, and articles in The New York Review of Books have an observer-relative existence. Something is an item of money or a text in an intellectual journal only relative to the attitudes people take toward it. Money and articles are not intrinsic to the physics of the phenomena in question.
Why are these distinctions important? In the case of consciousness we have a domain that is ontologically subjective, but whose existence is observer-independent. So we need to find an observer-independent explanation of an observer-independent phenomenon. Why? Because all observer-relative phenomena are created by consciousness. It is only money because we think it is money. But the attitudes we use to create the observer-relative phenomena are not themselves observer-relative.
That means our explanation of consciousness cannot appeal to anything that is observer-relative— otherwise the explanation would be circular. Observer-relative phenomena are created by consciousness, and so cannot be used to explain consciousness.
The question then arises: What about information itself? Is its existence observer - independent or observer- relative?
There are different sorts of information, or if you like, different senses of “information.” In one sense, I have information that George Washington was the first president of the United States. The existence of that information is observer-independent; I have that information regardless of what anybody thinks. It is a mental state of mine, which while it is normally unconscious can readily become conscious. Any standard textbook on American history will contain the same information. What the textbook contains, however, is observer-relative. It is only relative to interpreters that the marks on the page encode that information.
With the exception of our mental thoughts—conscious or potentially conscious—all information is observer-relative. And in fact, except for giving examples of actual conscious states, all of the examples that Tononi and Koch give of information systems—computers, smart phones, digital cameras, and the Web, for example—are observer-relative. We cannot physically explain consciousness by referring to observer-relative information because observer-relative information presupposes consciousness already.
What about the mathematical theory of information? Will that come to the rescue? Once again, it seems to me that all such cases of “information” are observer-relative. The reason for the ubiquitousness of information in the world is not that information is a pervasive force like gravity, but that information is in the eye of the beholder, and beholders can attach information to anything they want, provided that it meets certain causal conditions. Remember, observer relativity does not imply arbitrariness, it does not imply epistemic subjectivity. An example prominently discussed by Tononi will make this clear.
He considers the case of a photodiode that turns on when the light is on and off when the light is off. So the photodiode contains two states and has minimal bits of information. Is the photodiode conscious?
Tononi tells us, and Koch is committed to the same view, that yes, the photodiode is conscious. It has a minimal amount of consciousness, one bit to be exact. But now, what fact about it makes it conscious? Where does its subjectivity come from? Well, it contains the information that the light is either on or off. But the objection to that is: the information only exists relative to a conscious observer. The photodiode knows nothing about light being on or off, it just responds differentially to photon emissions. It is exactly like a mercury thermometer that expands or contracts in a way that we can use to measure the temperature in the room. The mercury in the glass is not aware of and knows nothing about temperature or anything else; it just expands or contracts in a way that we can use to gain information.
Same with the photodiode. The idea that the photodiode is conscious, even a tiny bit conscious, just in virtue of matching a luminance in the environment, does not seem to be worth serious consideration. I have the greatest admiration for Tononi and Koch but the idea that a photodiode becomes conscious because we can use it to get information does not seem up to their usual standards. In short, you cannot explain consciousness by referring to observer-relative information, because the information in question requires consciousness. Information is only information relative to some consciousness that assigns the informational status.
Well, why could not the brute facts that enable us to assign informational interpretations themselves be conscious? Why are they not sufficient for consciousness? The mercury expands and contracts. The photodiode goes on or off. Is that supposed to be enough for consciousness?
As long as we have the notion of “information” in our explanation, it might look as if we are explaining something, because, after all, there does seem to be a connection between consciousness and observer-independent information. There is no doubt some information in every conscious state in the ordinary content sense of information. Even if I just have a pain, I have information, for example that it hurts and that I am injured. But once you recognize that all the cases given by Koch and Tononi are forms of information relative to an observer, then it seems to me that their approach is incoherent.
The matching relations themselves are not information until a conscious agent treats them as such. But that treatment cannot itself explain consciousness because it requires consciousness. It is just an example of consciousness at work.
There are many other interesting parts of Koch’s book that I have not had the space to discuss, and as always Koch’s discussions are engaging and informative. I would not wish my misgivings to detract from the real merits of his book. But the primary intellectual ambitions of the book—namely to offer a model for explaining consciousness and to suggest a solution to the problem of free will and determinism— do not seem to me successful.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Nov 24, 2017 - 04:05pm PT
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The idea that the photodiode is conscious, even a tiny bit conscious, just in virtue of matching a luminance in the environment, does not seem to be worth serious consideration. I must admit that I was being purposively provocative a couple of posts of mine back, where I suggested that plants were borderline conscious. My point, really, is that there ought to be a word that encompasses both the "consciousness" of a human and that of a plant or a snail. The ability of biological organisms to respond to (think make decisions about) outside events emanating from the world ought to have its own word. Our everyday understanding of consciousness is something that means more than that, I understand. But it is something that builds on that more fundamental understanding of biological agency. Again, think hierarchically. It should be the default IMO.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Nov 24, 2017 - 04:31pm PT
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Largo, as exemplified by our last posts, I would contend that the road to understanding the phenomenon of consciousness or mind is so much simpler for the scientist than the philosopher. Look at all of the words it took explain your position vs. mine. All the scientist has to do is acknowledge the continuity of biological life and all of its manifestations on this planet. The rest just falls out as a matter of course.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 24, 2017 - 05:17pm PT
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Eeeyonkeeeeee, I agree,and have struggled with this - not understanding the difference, but trying to come up with the right term, and also, reconciling the fact that the vast majority of human life is unconscious and amounts to stimulus and responses determined by our DNA and conditioning.
My term for auto responding is "machine registration." That is, the stimulus is mechanically registered or input by the machine or person, determined processing (hinging on a billion variables) occurs, and a response happens, none of which involves the machine or person having an experience of same or being aware of that experience.
In the example Searle gave, a light sensor flips on and off. It registers light, and according to its program it renders a response. Though the processes are no doubt different, when I start up a steep hill on my bike, my body adjusts blood pressure and heart rate and so forth automatically, probably in much the same way that the widget registers light. Or better by way of an example, when I'm in dreamless sleep, my body manages my bio functioning automatically and with no awareness on my part.
But this is just stating to get good.
When I was studying Bergson, de Chardin, and he newer evolution folks, the old saw was that mutations and natural selection could not create, only alter and augment, existing forms. This has been challenged along the lines that mutations add new biological information, an idea that has been explained a thousand ways. No need to discuss the fine points here, but the point is, neither natural selection nor yet mutations can be expected to "create" or source MORE than biological information, to say nothing of creating the capacity to be aware of same. And if we say biological information IS awareness, we're left with Identity Theory, which no one has ever been able to explain with logical coherence.
And yet if we are following a physical/causal trajectory, hoping to discover how matter "creates" consciousness, we run into all kinds of problems above and beyond there not being sufficient data to show us how. As Searle has pointed out, data has never been seen to "cause" something that was not itself syntactic, and no one has a clue how it would ever do so.
But that leaves us stuck in a sense because if we appreciate evolution, as any sane person much, we see a drive towards complexification, whereby at some time, ancient man went from a syntactic engine, in which his processing was all machine registration, to a light going on, figuratively speaking, to where he was self aware.
Such "threshold" issues are found in the big bang, when "nothing" became something ("nothing" is now being swapped out for "potentiality"), to where inert matter became living, and to where biology became conscious, to mention just a few. No matter how incrimentally small you posit the transition, there is still a categorical shift that's tricky to explain in strictly physical/causative terms.
Chalmers claims that the causative jump from objective to subject always seems to have a magical step that goes entirely unexplained in strictly physical terms. Given that no one can even imagine what that leap would physically involve, to the extent that no one can envision what a model would even look like, to say nothing of the physical process itself, people close to Information Theory, Damasio, and many other are starting to hedge toward a panpsychism take, believing it is easier to start modeling the topography of consciousness with awareness being a fundamental phenomenon, as opposed to something that is physically created.
To say that this is controversial is an understatement, and underscores the fact that we are really just getting started with this work...
And Eeeeyyyonkeeee, "acknowledging the continuity of biological life" is not an explanation. And while you can dumb down the investigation to pat phrases and objective this and that, others will still be drawn to ask the qestion: What does that actually mean. Does he mean that subjectivity is itself biological and nothing more? That's Identity Theory, where biological states are identical to subjective states. Heads ARE tales. Nobody has been able to make that intelligible in a way that would ever pass muster in a regular scientific investigation. Like saying fire is what he air the the wood are doing.
And none of my work on mind is drawn primarily from philosophy, rather from probing mind directly. Slippery work, but it's not trying to do science without instruments, as is the common misconception.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 24, 2017 - 07:21pm PT
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You are not equal to the task you have set yourself, Largo. Your small town has been bypassed by the highway. Re-think and look beyond your past.
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 24, 2017 - 07:23pm PT
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there ought to be a word that encompasses both the "consciousness" of a human and that of a plant or a snail.
That word is "soul" and it is the real YOU and not your material coverings (your body, mind, and brain).
The individual as the soul is the driver and life force of that material body.
Every material body has the spiritual soul within driving that material body.
Even a blade of grass although the consciousness of that blade grass is much lower than a human.
Without the individual soul within a material body there is no life.
There is ton more but why even bother.
The gross materialists reject all this since they can't measure a spiritual entity with their material instruments.
Thus the gross materialist scoff and remain clueless .....
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Nov 24, 2017 - 08:23pm PT
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Thanks jgill. Other than the fact the ring looks like an Indian woman's bangle I can think of no deeper eastern symbolism. Have we now entered into the realm of the western unconscious?
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