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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dr. Tononi has even invented a unit, called phi, that is supposed to measure how conscious an entity is
I wonder how it compares to the Birnbaum scale.
I (seem to) remember hearing Kevin Bein, in the Tetons, telling us about Birnbaum, a Harvard colleague(?) who went to Nepal and came back...different. Kevin had visited Birnbaum in hospital, if I recall correctly, and had been inspired by the vistas opened. At a Teton Tea Party he (may have) said that Willi Unsoeld rated 8 millibirnbaums. A measure of craziness, and perhaps respect.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Thanks for the link, Ed (Elizabeth forgot to pay the bill and we haven't got a paper since Saturday (been at the Voo)). You turned us on to a link to M. Graziano months ago that resonated with me. This is the passage in the current link that I think is the most reasonable scenario for self-reflective consciousness. Once you understand the implications of this as well as the way it dovetails with our understanding of "animal consciousness" and our genetic closeness with the apes (who, apparently, don't have what we got), it's got to be the default hypothesis, and requires no woo.
Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes.
The result is an illusion. Instead of neurons and synapses, we sense a ghostly presence — a self — inside the head. But it’s all just data processing.
“The machine mistakenly thinks it has magic inside it,” Dr. Graziano said. And it calls the magic consciousness
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Whatever the magic behind self-reflective consciousness is, it can't be THAT different from, say, chimpanzee or dolphin consciousness. It only had a few million years to evolve from of what was already there in the apes.
I'm a programmer. It seems obvious to me that something as complicated and nuanced as consciousness needed to have been built up from more general things and/or processes. Marry that thought with the fact that it seems pretty settled that humans evolved from a common ancestor with the apes sometime around 8 million years ago, then Graziano's hypothesis is the one that needs to me disproven IMO.
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cintune
climber
Colorado School of Mimes
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Don't know about Birnbaum, but Largo could use some burn balm.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Whatever the magic behind self-reflective consciousness is, it can't be THAT different from, say, chimpanzee or dolphin consciousness. It only had a few million years to evolve from of what was already there in the apes.
Whatever the magic is... to assume it is computer like or the model for consciousness is the computer is simply an assumption and one that may be in great error. Where does that assumption come from if not the prejudices of a materialist perspective.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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an assumption and one that may be in great error
That is the question. If the assumption you refer to can be shown to be in error, that would be good. The question is not about materialists and their prejudices. That is your own prejudice speaking.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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That is the question. If the assumption you refer to can be shown to be in error, that would be good. The question is not about materialists and their prejudices. That is your own prejudice speaking.
Don't believe so. My view is neutral. Show me the evidence that a computer model is appropriate to our understanding of mind or even the mechanical function of the brain that produces mind. You can't because these things remain a mystery and the assumption of a computer model is just that an assumption. I'm not sure it has much more validity than the Christian assumption of an eternal soul. Prejudices are very hard to see.
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allapah
climber
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Eiger North Face has slightly higher phi than its unclimbed, unknown equivalent on Baffin Island
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Look into self-organizing maps:
Maps don't self organize, the dictates of humanly imposed algorithms are the source of all automatic organization. The idea that algorithms are the source of consciousness is just another materialist assumption.
I'd say a computer is more like a book, that is it stores and yields information. However, a book has no mind no matter how complex you might make it.
A Rube Goldberg machine will never think no matter how remarkably complex it's made and how many millions of automatic functions it performs and perhaps that's more analogous to a computer. Even if it convinces you it's a sentient being it is not and you're simply deceived by complexity.
The brain may be a lot of things and a computer it may not be.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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you are anything but neutral, Paul, you are a new mysterian...
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Maps don't self organize, the dictates of humanly imposed algorithms are the source of all automatic organization. The idea that algorithms are the source of consciousness is just another materialist assumption.
Dictates? Humanly imposed? Algorithms? Automatic organization?
You show no comprehension of how unsupervised learning occurs.
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WBraun
climber
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One can expand consciousness into a book ....
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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...The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by Amos Tutuola.
Consciousness is shaped by culture and books can show us that.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Defining consciousness seems a bit like the quest to define God ( as a watchmaker, as a mathematician, as a stern avenging judge, as a cloud of unknowing etc.) Both reflect the culture and technology of the time. Therefore I doubt the current computer based analogy will be the final one. Of course there is talk of biological computers instead of silicon based, so maybe consciousness will be defined by biological computing in the future.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Paul, the mind as a computer is not a big stretch. We already know it works this way to a large extent. What do you think that DNA is? The individual nucleotides (A, G, C, and T) are code, pure and simple. That is, their molecular properties are not used directly -- it's only their relative position to one another that is important in making proteins. Each set of three nucleotides in a gene "codes" for a specific protein. If this does not so like computing to you, then you need to bone up a little on this subject.
Jan, I completely disagree with you about that last post.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Ed: look in the mirror, Mike...
What I see is an image. “Time” is an interpretation, a concept. If you want to get technical about it, the only thing I see in the mirror is a reflection. That real? Is what narcissus saw real?
eeyonkee: Whatever the magic behind self-reflective consciousness is, it can't be THAT different from, say, chimpanzee or dolphin consciousness.
How do you know?
Paul, the mind as a computer is not a big stretch. We already know it works this way to a large extent.
No, it is not, and we don’t. It’s more than a stretch. It has no empirical foundations cognitively. Look back and read more of the information presented on the McGill’s website. You have no grasp of the literature.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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MikeL wrote.
No, it is not, and we don’t. It’s more than a stretch. It has no empirical foundations cognitively. Look back and read more of the information presented on the McGill’s website. You have no grasp of the literature.
Mike, why don't you go read some big-boy books on the subject as I have, and then get back to us.
For one thing, maybe you should think a little harder about the computer analogy. For you to dismiss it completely, makes me think that you have not thought about it hard enough -- not nearly hard enough.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 6, 2016 - 02:52pm PT
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I see two fundamental misconceptions going on in this thread that seem hard-wired into people's minds.
One, that there might be an exception to the law that the map is not the territory. This harks back to the philosophical belief that an observer has no active part in reality formation, basically the exact opposite of what Planck and all the doods from the quiet arts have been saying. From this belief, we are simply passive receptors of a fixed, objective reality "out there."
The second is the wholesale conflation between brain generated content and the fact that we are AWARE and conscious of same.
These thought distortions are in keeping with the philosophical belief in a machine model of consciousness based on looking at consciousness as mind-independent - a fundamentally absurd position to begin with. That is: Let's look at mind (internal, first person experience) as a mind-independent phenomenon. Viola - all we see are the goings on of a machine, because that's all we are looking at. And then the wise guy says: You see - that's all there is.
JL
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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I think that we should establish a baseline of what are generally accepted facts about the world. I would particularly like to see Paul, MikeL, and Largo's responses to each of these questions.
1. Do you believe that all life has evolved from a common, primitive ancestor?
2. Do you believe that humans and apes have a common ancestor who lived around 8 million years ago (give or take a coupla'
mil)?
3. Do you believe that many different hominid species evolved over the past 8 million years but only humans survived as a species to the present.
That set was the set where science pretty much knows the answer (hint: they're all true). Now for some more-speculative questions.
4. Do you believe that animals - say, specifically, apes and/or dolphins have consciousness -- even if in a limited way compared to humans? This would set consciousness as a continuum phenomenon.
5. Do you believe that the hominids that didn't make it to the present likely had what we would call consciousness?
Please, any of you that I mentioned, just give me your answers as yes or no to each of the 5 questions.
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