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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jun 10, 2015 - 10:04am PT
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Ed: . . . while it is true that the language doesn't currently exist to offer a description, that, in its self, does not constitute a refutation of the basic idea.
Of course. There are no refutations of almost anything. There are theories.
Whether we’re talking about poetry, particle physics, culture, ethics, God, art—how any of it works, what any of it is, why any of it is important—we end up referring to, relying upon, making assumptions about what we are, who we are, how we perceive things, what’s important in terms of our experiences, our consciousness, our awareness, our minds (as well as our brains and body).
Experience, consciousness, awareness tend to be ignored, assumed, or overlooked scientifically because they have not been modeled well. Yet without experience, consciousness, awareness, the rest cannot be said to exist as we conceive them.
Experience, consciousness, and awareness would seem to be at the core of everything.
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 10, 2015 - 10:14am PT
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"Organize matter in just the right way," says Koch, "as in the mammalian brain, and voilà, you can feel."
Stooopid modern scientists have no fuking clue what consciousness is nor its source and then spew out such stooopid bullsh!t.
ASS usual the stooopid ignorant public believes all their clueless bullsh!t masqueraded as knowledge
and then throws their hard earned money at these poseur snake scientists who rubber stamp themselves as Phd's.
Clueless fools .....
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Jim Clipper
climber
from: forests to tree farms
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Jun 10, 2015 - 10:34am PT
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If you can accept that sentience isn't a quality exclusive to humans, then maybe AI has already created it. Other organisms, navigate the world with a less complex, but well adapted "mind". Computers, and AI are already great problem solvers, and in the evolution of AI technology, why is human like consciousness the gold standard.
Maybe the same laws of physics govern the games of a conscious "mind" whether the system is organic or inorganic. Those laws should be the same everywhere too. Wouldn't consciousness exist in other forms on other planets? Why does something we create have to emulate a human in order to have a mind?
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jun 10, 2015 - 10:40am PT
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I would be interested in knowing what aspect of consciousness stands outside of neural processing?
Neuroscience has already established several models that explain neural computation in both the brain and peripheral systems:
Lateral inhibition in the retina: Hartline–Ratliff equations
Cross-correlation in sound localization: Jeffress model
Cross-correlation for motion detection: Hassenstein–Reichardt model
Watson–Ahumada model for motion estimation in humans
Anti-Hebbian adaptation: spike-timing dependent plasticity
etc.
If it can be clearly shown that elements of consciousness demonstrably stands outside of neural processing/computation --then I am all ears.
Until then I'll just have to conflate consciousness with computation.(Sorry,dudes.)
All you have to do is point to a region of consciousness that does not involve neural processing in order to disabuse me of this crazy notion.
Again, I'm all ears.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jun 10, 2015 - 10:56am PT
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computation = consciousness
"Yeah ,I don't like the sound of that either, but then there's a lot I don't like. "( A line from a suspense/murder mystery I'm working on,with the working title of: Dead Men Don't Make Ear Wax )
Its gonna be sort of film noirish.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jun 10, 2015 - 11:08am PT
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And I agree with Ward.
you mean you agree with my main character, Private Investigator Ward Spade
why is human like consciousness the gold standard.
This is related to a point made previously on one of these threads--about AI not being necessarily constrained and limited to the human model. Artificial intelligence is just that: artificial . Why would we want to limit the higher expression of AI to a mere similacrum of a very hot looking human woman?LOL
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 10, 2015 - 11:12am PT
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Ward: You're using reductive reasoning to ground your beliefs in sentience being this or that. But when we keep reducing down, and get to that which has no physical extent, no dimensionality, then what, specifically, are we grounding our findings in. What's more, no one is saying that anything lies outside of anything else. The problem here is that materialists what material to exist outside of consciousness. That's the rub.
And Ed, you said: "Your major criticism of this line of reasoning is that they have not yet been able to describe "experience." You have not offered any other criticism."
You sound as if this "criticism" was a minor affair. I take it as a first principal. Also, I am not hammering this point for no reason, or because I believe the task is impossible, rather because I believe it IS worth going after - but looking at computation to find a workable description of sentience is clearly absurd. That's like a feuding couple going to a marriage counselor and the counselor sending the couple to the hospital to have an MRI to get right down to the root cause of the problem. When in fact, the guy with the lab coat is not even looking at the problem at all, but at objective processing, believing the two are self-same.
What's more, in any investigation, you first must isolate out WHAT it is you are investigating before you can work up meaningful analysis. That is, we are going to investigate the moon. Or a rock. Or a tree. The tricky part with sentience is it is not a "thing" (a material entity) "out there" we can objectify, so we cannot use out normal sense data machinery to describe it. One is obliged to "shut up and stop calculating" and look long and hard at what this sentience is that you hope to describe. This is not at all to say that meditation or any particular modality is the gold standard to looking at sentience, but so far that experience is itself a subjective phenomenon, it stands to reason that we must look at this subjectivity directly to understand what it is we strive to define. My contention is that looking at computation is NOT looking at experience anymore than looking at a topo is the actual experience of rock climbing. In the realm of experience, the map is NEVER the territory.
The thing is, if you actually do shut up and stop calculating, and observe sentience (NOT the content, or that of which we are aware such as memories, feelings, thoughts, etc.), you will invariably be looking at the three cornerstones: awareness, focus and attention. These are not in and of themselves computations. But this is as good a place as any to start looking and working up experiments and a common language for further exploration. Not surprisingly, neither awareness, focus nor yet attention are betrayed through investigating computational models.
JL
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jun 10, 2015 - 11:26am PT
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You're using reductive reasoning to ground your beliefs in sentience being this or that
Even if this were true, at the end of the day ya'll have still got a bunch of neurons that are sitting there computationally processing. Its like the elephant in the room--he's big ,gray,makes loud sounds,and poops bowling balls.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 10, 2015 - 11:30am PT
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all is One
I worship at that altar, too.
As long as we don't get into One what, All can be One.
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Jim Clipper
climber
from: forests to tree farms
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Jun 10, 2015 - 11:31am PT
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All you have to do is point to a region of consciousness that does not involve neural processing in order to disabuse me of this crazy notion.
This seems like a circular argument, and side steps the initial question.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jun 10, 2015 - 11:34am PT
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and side steps the initial question.
Refresh my memory about the "initial question"-- do you mean the thread title?
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Jim Clipper
climber
from: forests to tree farms
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Jun 10, 2015 - 11:48am PT
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Yeah, what is mind. The only one we experience is based in neural anatomy. If you define mind simply as a neural construct, then inorganic minds can't exist.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jun 10, 2015 - 11:58am PT
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If you define mind simply as a neural construct, then inorganic minds can't exist.
In the context of my prior comments when I said "consciousness" (by confining it to a discussion of neural processes) I specifically meant human/organic consciousness, not machine intelligence.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jun 10, 2015 - 12:14pm PT
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The term mind needs a clearer definition.
By some definitions here an abacus could be defined as having mind. A complex abacus can be constructed in which error is reduced by blocking certain movements and these blockings can be thought of as algorithms that insure proper construction of problems to the eventually complex degree that we imagine the abacus is working to solve problems on its own and soon the abacus is the size of half the universe with a construction far more complex than the human brain but how in the heck does the abacus take the step into the realm of self aware thought?
A computer is a remarkably simple machine at its core: it is on and it is off, 1's and 0's. Does anyone really think that those ones and zeros can become aware of themselves.
The imitation of intelligence is no more intelligence than a painting of a landscape is a tree.
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Jim Clipper
climber
from: forests to tree farms
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Jun 10, 2015 - 12:17pm PT
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Moose, the definition may be fuzzy, much like my limited brain.
I was wondering recently if the creation of god was inevitable. A belief in god helped people organize and procreate. People were often more successful, especially when the god in their world was more powerful than the gods in the third world.
Then, god surely exists, even before it was created, and must exist in other parts of the universe?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 10, 2015 - 12:21pm PT
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Dingus said:
The tricky part with sentience is it is not a "thing"
Of course it is.
-
Terrific. Kindly note that all invitations to "shut up and stop calculating," so we might see and isolate out what human consciousness and experience is, in and of itself, have stopped people dead in their tracks. Not ever a single idea or concept that is not just another computation. So now Dingus, sure as he is that sentience is a "thing," can get the ball rolling by describing what "thing" he is talking about, in specific terms, in terms we can start to work up a mutual language to frame what the hell we want to investigate, as opposed to arguing in circles about the assumed neural/material substratum of what we have yet to even define.
So pony up, Dingus. Provide some specifics for this "thing" (by definition, a noun 1. a material object without life or consciousness; an inanimate object) you are calling consciousness.
JL
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Jim Clipper
climber
from: forests to tree farms
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Jun 10, 2015 - 12:41pm PT
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Long One,
One definition of consciousness mentioned above is self awareness. Some animals exhibit the trait some don't. Maybe one day a giant abacus will. Do the animals that lack self awareness lack a mind? Is consciousness a continuum? Evolution seems to suggest that it is varied, and will change.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 10, 2015 - 12:46pm PT
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Self awareness.
That's a starting point.
What is involved, speficically? When you say "awareness," how might you define what that IS. And WHAT is aware? Or is there no agency that is aware, rather there is only awareness itself, existing on a sliding scale? And how does awareness function per dealing with the pluarality of things and one thing.
JL
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 10, 2015 - 12:46pm PT
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I recall that some time ago there was a discussion about awareness and consciousness that concluded the two were not the same. One can be aware of an impending threat and act accordingly while not necessarily being conscious of the threat. It would seem then that awareness operates at a deeper level than consciousness, although neither would appear to exist were it not for neuronal activity. The dead are neither conscious nor aware.
It would seem that a meditator experiencing raw awareness is somehow able to access that realm, but only by neuronal processes. I assume the meditator is conscious while having this experience. So one is conscious of awareness. And it has been stated by meditators here that these are not mental states , but something else which it would appear is indescribable. If these are not mental states dependent upon the brain, then what becomes of them if the brain is incapacitated?
But then again, perhaps El Cap is conscious. A meditative animism perhaps?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 10, 2015 - 12:51pm PT
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John, I would venture to say that awareness is an experiential aspect of consciousness but before we grop into philosophical discussions about it, it might be a more useful first step to simply define or come up with some common language per what it is we are talking about. In other words, what is this phenomenon we call awareness, in and of itself?
JL
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