Consciousness

[ryan]

There are no emergent properties in science. Everything is reducible to the physics/Standard model. The actual emergence lies in the consciousness' ability to distinguish samples of what exists out there into whole objects.

Even if we had the ability to reduce and understand each element causing consciousness/mind/subjective feeling, I doubt most people would find this satisfactory. i.e. For consciousness, most people probably won't be satisfied with a complex level of scientific explanation, which would seem satisfactory for most other things.

I agree. The hard problem might still be there after science has a full physical description of the consciousness. I already assume that a full description exists, but the same problem will exist IMO.

 

[George S]

Well the brain is part of the human around it and its merely doing what has been enabled through evolution to contribute. Consciousness is something we humans seem to believe we have. I'm just trying to explain that fact in context of what human senses are known to process. Seems the problem is finding a way to use what the brain does to contribute to a particular human successfully producing more humans. What that appears to be feedback related and it appears to be 'experiencing' some combination of predicting what's probably coming and reporting what has just passed. To give something like that a fitness badge one needs to explain how such a system can help in the successfully producing of babies thingie. My take is sit's a set of calculations patched on to recent history as an experience. That might be all that's necessary to put a plus sign on it's function for fitness.

I do insist,however that it's not a stand alone controller of anything.

It could also be an inevitable side effect of something else that confers a fitness benefit. Perhaps consciousness is an epiphenomenon of having a brain complex enough for language.

So the consciousness is the spokesman who has to explain why did I do that. A good imaginer of reasons why. When your unconscious does it, you, the conscious spokesman, are responsible for explaining why. Hypnotized subjects will invent reasons why they followed the post-hypnotic suggestion. When you react and save a life, you take credit for your unconscious quick thinking.
I like your idea. Makes sense.
It is also the explainer of how. How I do a thing.

 

[fromderinside]

There are all kinds of emergent properties.

Combine red and yellow and orange emerges.

Like orange emerges if you combine red and yellow paint.

Better check things out untermenche.

There is a difference between additive and subtractive color sir: http://maggiesscienceconnection.weebly.com/visible-light--color.html

You would know that if you had studied light and color because there are rules of combination.

 

[untermensche]

There are all kinds of emergent properties.

Combine red and yellow and orange emerges.

Like orange emerges if you combine red and yellow paint.

Better check things out untermenche.

There is a difference between additive and subtractive color sir: http://maggiesscienceconnection.weebly.com/visible-light--color.html

You would know that if you had studied light and color because there are rules of combination.

It doesn't change my point.

Orange is not red and it is not yellow.

But if you take red and yellow paint you will get orange paint.

Something new emerges from the combination of two other things.

And it is in relation to consciousness.

And the combination of brain activity that creates "that which experiences" and the activity that creates the things it experiences.

Which produces this emergent property, "qualia".

 

[untermensche]

There are no emergent properties in science. Everything is reducible to the physics/Standard model. The actual emergence lies in the consciousness' ability to distinguish samples of what exists out there into whole objects.

Even if we had the ability to reduce and understand each element causing consciousness/mind/subjective feeling, I doubt most people would find this satisfactory. i.e. For consciousness, most people probably won't be satisfied with a complex level of scientific explanation, which would seem satisfactory for most other things.

Sure they would.

If it were an actual step by step explanation from the activity in cells to the ability to experience a cool night at the beach.

But it can't be a huge leap from activity to experience with absolutely nothing in between.

 

[fromderinside]

Better check things out untermenche.

There is a difference between additive and subtractive color sir: http://maggiesscienceconnection.weebly.com/visible-light--color.html

You would know that if you had studied light and color because there are rules of combination.

It doesn't change my point.

Sure it does. Instead of emerging we provide an explanation based on the properties of light in combination. Big difference. The qualia you speak of are nothing more than tokens produced in the brain to reflect the fact of this or that light entering the eye. Birds do it ferchrissake.

 

[untermensche]

It doesn't change my point.

Sure it does. Instead of emerging we provide an explanation based on the properties of light in combination. Big difference. The qualia you speak of are nothing more than tokens produced in the brain to reflect the fact of this or that light entering the eye. Birds do it ferchrissake.

Color is not a quality of light.

Light has a wavelength that a brain transforms into a color.

Color is subjective.

It only exists in minds.

 

[Juma]

Even if we had the ability to reduce and understand each element causing consciousness/mind/subjective feeling, I doubt most people would find this satisfactory. i.e. For consciousness, most people probably won't be satisfied with a complex level of scientific explanation, which would seem satisfactory for most other things.

I agree. The hard problem might still be there after science has a full physical description of the consciousness. I already assume that a full description exists, but the same problem will exist IMO.

But that is a nobrainer since you are not capable of realizing that structures of particles are something beyond mere positions in space....

 

[ryan]

I agree. The hard problem might still be there after science has a full physical description of the consciousness. I already assume that a full description exists, but the same problem will exist IMO.

But that is a nobrainer since you are not capable of realizing that structures of particles are something beyond mere positions in space....

Okay, what do you got? How does calling something a structure help us know anymore about a system of particles?

Anything is a structure, the whole universe is a structure, or some of it, or none of it, half of my house including half of the house across the street is a structure. It's a manmade invention to help simplify, identify and discuss something observed.

 

[DBT]

False dichotomy. Mental activity can be a physical process yet have no relationship the concept of panpsychism ( a philosophical position) or your conclusion ''thus panpsychism''

If I understand this third option correctly, you're saying that mental activity is a physical process in essentially the same way that the paint drying on my house is a physical process. The problem with this claim is that mental representations are tangible in a way that the process of generating them is not. In other words, it's probably correct that say that a person's experience of tasting a carrot is generated in some way by a physical process occurring in the brain (and tongue). But it's another thing to say that the taste of a carrot is that process. That just gets us back to Mary's room again. You're right that mental activity can best be described as something brains do. But any process can be rendered as a list of steps, however long and interconnected. Are you saying that somewhere in this gigantic list, the actual taste of a carrot (and not just the process that generates it) can be found?

The subjective experience of taste, colour, sensation, etc, is 'the hard problem of consciousness' - so obviously it is not understood how a brain forms its perception/experience of the world. My point is simply that the available evidence points to this perception/experience being a physical activity of a brain. Chemical and structural connectivity changes (drugs, etc) alter perception, thought and feelings in specific ways and so on.

 

[DBT]

The questions are wrong.

How can consciousness, which is something the brain is forming and generating and constantly updating while consciously active, order the very agency that is forming and generating it?

Your questions imply autonomy of consciousness.

Yes I am claiming there is a clear dichotomy between a brain and the products of brain activity. They are not the same thing.

How do you know? Brain activity is most likely the conscious activity of perception, thoughts, feelings, etc. The brain generates electrical current, modulated impulses/signals, chemical messengers, transmitters, etc.

You can't categorically claim that this is not the brain generating conscious experience, when the evidence supports the proposition that it is conscious activity.

You believe despite every contrary perception in your life your consciousness can do nothing. It is purely passive.

Persistently making that claim is just willful ignorance given that I have given descriptions of the role of consciousness numerous times....which you ignore, only to repeat your strawman in order to support your own baseless notion of autonomy of consciousness. As if consciousness, something the brain is generating, can order the brain to do things.

 

[DBT]

But it is the mind that unifies a sample of what is out there. It is still an emergent "whole" but only in the mind. Out there the sound waves are just parts that the brain unifies into something we perceive as whole, special and emergent.

It is the brain that makes sense of the world through its internal subjective model of the world - which we call 'mind' - this being the essential role of conscious mind.

 

[PyramidHead]

If I understand this third option correctly, you're saying that mental activity is a physical process in essentially the same way that the paint drying on my house is a physical process. The problem with this claim is that mental representations are tangible in a way that the process of generating them is not. In other words, it's probably correct that say that a person's experience of tasting a carrot is generated in some way by a physical process occurring in the brain (and tongue). But it's another thing to say that the taste of a carrot is that process. That just gets us back to Mary's room again. You're right that mental activity can best be described as something brains do. But any process can be rendered as a list of steps, however long and interconnected. Are you saying that somewhere in this gigantic list, the actual taste of a carrot (and not just the process that generates it) can be found?

The subjective experience of taste, colour, sensation, etc, is 'the hard problem of consciousness' - so obviously it is not understood how a brain forms its perception/experience of the world. My point is simply that the available evidence points to this perception/experience being a physical activity of a brain. Chemical and structural connectivity changes (drugs, etc) alter perception, thought and feelings in specific ways and so on.

I'm sorry to be pedantic, but what data exist to support whether the bolded phrasing is true, rather than perception/experience being the result of a physical activity of a brain, and not identical to this activity?

 

[untermensche]

Yes I am claiming there is a clear dichotomy between a brain and the products of brain activity. They are not the same thing.

How do you know? Brain activity is most likely the conscious activity of perception, thoughts, feelings, etc. The brain generates electrical current, modulated impulses/signals, chemical messengers, transmitters, etc.

You can't categorically claim that this is not the brain generating conscious experience, when the evidence supports the proposition that it is conscious activity.

I am saying that there is a logical dichotomy between any "machine" creating an effect and the effect created. The machine and it's activity are one thing and the effect is something entirely different.

This holds true for the brain and brain activity.

The effect of the activity is something completely different from the brain or brain activity.

It logical has to be.

Just like the effect of a picture on a screen is distinct from the activity in the chip that creates it.

Just like the effect of a missile hurling through space is different from the burning of fuel that creates it.

Effects and causes are not the same thing. They are distinct.

Physics 101.

Persistently making that claim is just willful ignorance given that I have given descriptions of the role of consciousness numerous times....which you ignore, only to repeat your strawman in order to support your own baseless notion of autonomy of consciousness. As if consciousness, something the brain is generating, can order the brain to do things.

You simply don't comprehend. It is beyond your capacities presently.

But a consciousness that can command nothing, force nothing, has no use.

The brain does not need such a thing.

The brain has access to all external information. It can do everything reflex like without any considerations.

It has no use for some consciousness that thinks it has control.

Your position is wildly irrational.

Despite your complete inability to see it.

You really have no ability to even comprehend my points. You simply ignore them and do not address them at all. You merely claim the logical conclusions from your position are not the logical conclusions.

When they clearly are.

 

[PyramidHead]

But a consciousness that can command nothing, force nothing, has no use.

The brain does not need such a thing.

So? Isn't it possible that consciousness is an inert by-product of something else that is useful, like exhaust is a by-product of the energy used to drive a car? Not everything in an evolved system is useful. Some parts are just too much work to get rid of, even though they don't really do anything.

In any case, I don't think DBT is saying consciousness has no function. You gave the example yourself of an image on a computer screen. The image provides a model environment to represent the internal workings of the CPU, but it doesn't actually cause anything to happen in the CPU. A program is executed because of what happens inside the processor, not because of what happens on the screen. You can disconnect the screen entirely and still have a working computer, it's just harder to use.

 

[untermensche]

But a consciousness that can command nothing, force nothing, has no use.

The brain does not need such a thing.

So? Isn't it possible that consciousness is an inert by-product of something else that is useful, like exhaust is a by-product of the energy used to drive a car? Not everything in an evolved system is useful. Some parts are just too much work to get rid of, even though they don't really do anything.

In any case, I don't think DBT is saying consciousness has no function. You gave the example yourself of an image on a computer screen. The image provides a model environment to represent the internal workings of the CPU, but it doesn't actually cause anything to happen in the CPU. A program is executed because of what happens inside the processor, not because of what happens on the screen. You can disconnect the screen entirely and still have a working computer, it's just harder to use.

That at least is addressing the point. And the comments do fit in with Gould's ideas about spandrels and are not easily dismissed.

But we certainly believe we, not the brain, have control.

It is embedded in institutions like our criminal justice system.

It is what we teach our children.

And we certainly witness a lot of evidence to support this belief. Not with every movement, but if we want we can plan a movement of the arm and then somehow have that plan carried out by the body through "willing" it.

There is every appearance that consciousness has some control. We firmly believe it.

So at the very least we have to accept that if consciousness does not have any control there is a lot of brain activity going into making the consciousness somehow think it has some control.

This can be described in no other way then the brain is deliberately tricking consciousness.

But why it would do such a thing, since a brain in other areas tries to present an accurate and honest picture to consciousness, defies explanation, even if we accept the idea that the ability to experience is a spandrel.

And even if we can clearly comprehend that a consciousness with an amount of control would have great benefit.

I'm not so sure the brain is aware of thoughts.

Consciousness may be all that is aware of them. Consciousness may be an emergent effect different from the "parts" that make it up. The brain knows the parts, not the effect.

 

[PyramidHead]

So? Isn't it possible that consciousness is an inert by-product of something else that is useful, like exhaust is a by-product of the energy used to drive a car? Not everything in an evolved system is useful. Some parts are just too much work to get rid of, even though they don't really do anything.

In any case, I don't think DBT is saying consciousness has no function. You gave the example yourself of an image on a computer screen. The image provides a model environment to represent the internal workings of the CPU, but it doesn't actually cause anything to happen in the CPU. A program is executed because of what happens inside the processor, not because of what happens on the screen. You can disconnect the screen entirely and still have a working computer, it's just harder to use.

That at least is addressing the point. And the comments do fit in with Gould's ideas about spandrels and are not easily dismissed.

But we certainly believe we, not the brain, have control.

It is embedded in institutions like our criminal justice system.

It is what we teach our children.

And we certainly witness a lot of evidence to support this belief. Not with every movement, but if we want we can plan a movement of the arm and then somehow have that plan carried out by the body through "willing" it.

There is every appearance that consciousness has some control. We firmly believe it.

I don't actually believe it. And I think a criminal justice system that abandoned the idea would be a fairer one. But that's a topic for another thread.

So at the very least we have to accept that if consciousness does not have any control there is a lot of brain activity going into making the consciousness somehow think it has some control.

This can be described in no other way then the brain is deliberately tricking consciousness.

You went off the rails here. It's like saying that optical illusions are deliberate trickery by your eyes. Inaccuracy does not imply lying.

But why it would do such a thing, since a brain in other areas tries to present an accurate and honest picture to consciousness, defies explanation, even if we accept the idea that the ability to experience is a spandrel.

I think you should seriously re-examine the premise in bold. It has been suggested (and, according to one researcher, proven mathematically) that an accurate model of an organism's surroundings will never confer as much genetic fitness as a model that presents a distorted or incomplete picture in order to maximize reproductive success.

Suppose in reality there’s a resource, like water, and you can quantify how much of it there is in an objective order — very little water, medium amount of water, a lot of water. Now suppose your fitness function is linear, so a little water gives you a little fitness, medium water gives you medium fitness, and lots of water gives you lots of fitness — in that case, the organism that sees the truth about the water in the world can win, but only because the fitness function happens to align with the true structure in reality. Generically, in the real world, that will never be the case. Something much more natural is a bell curve — say, too little water you die of thirst, but too much water you drown, and only somewhere in between is good for survival. Now the fitness function doesn’t match the structure in the real world. And that’s enough to send truth to extinction. For example, an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction between small and large — it only sees red — even though such a distinction exists in reality.

You can read his paper here if you are so inclined.

And even if we can clearly comprehend that a consciousness with an amount of control would have great benefit.

Whether it has a benefit or not is inconsequential if it's physically impossible. Evolution can only work with solutions that are permitted by natural laws. It may be that consciousness cannot act upon the brain due to some brute fact of the universe, in which case there would be no possibility of a genetic mutation that would give consciousness the ability to control our actions.

So, the model I'm proposing is one where certain highly organized, self-referential brains provided an enormous survival advantage--say, tool usage or conception of time--a byproduct of which is this ineffable sensation we call consciousness. The conscious model that prevailed in the evolutionary arms race allowed it to highlight the important features of the environment in which our ancestors thrived, at the expense of accuracy. One casualty of this process may have been the sense that we are in conscious control over our brains and bodies all the time. It's not hard to imagine why such an illusion may have been beneficial in guiding goal-oriented behavior.

 

[untermensche]

...I don't actually believe it....

That you don't believe your own experience is odd.

When the alarm rings in the morning do you just observe your body rising out of bed?

Or is it effort?

Even sometimes with a little moaning.

If it is experienced as "effort" then it is experienced as something that is "willed", something that must be done, not just going for a fun ride.

If you really believe that then we are done.

It is totally contradictory to my everyday experience.

It is as if I am talking to an alien creature.

Talking about what I regard as experience is impossible.

 

[untermensche]

I think you should seriously re-examine the premise in bold. It has been suggested (and, according to one researcher, proven mathematically) that an accurate model of an organism's surroundings will never confer as much genetic fitness as a model that presents a distorted or incomplete picture in order to maximize reproductive success.

Are you saying that to navigate the brain creates a false impression of obstacles?

How is this helpful for navigation?

 

[ryan]

But it is the mind that unifies a sample of what is out there. It is still an emergent "whole" but only in the mind. Out there the sound waves are just parts that the brain unifies into something we perceive as whole, special and emergent.

It is the brain that makes sense of the world through its internal subjective model of the world - which we call 'mind' - this being the essential role of conscious mind.

But remember that the mind is unified; the brain is not (unless QM), thus the binding problem.