What Would the Framework of a Materialistic Explanation of Consciousness Even Look Like?
We're pretty sure Dark Matter is a particle of some sort. Dark Energy may be the energy of space itself. How does materialism even begin to explain how moving electrons across synaptic gaps in certain ways gives rise to conscious experience? The only things I've been seeing lately are vague handwavings about integrating information or lame attempts to define conscious experience out of existence. There's been no actual progress on how non-conscious stuff can produce consciousness since Descartes.
Since we've known that brains produce consciousness for a long time now, shouldn't we be closer to an actual explanation? At what point do we begin to question the premise "brains produce consciousness"? Do we reject it if there's no explanation in 100 years? 1,000 years? 10,000 years*?
*by then the question will no doubt be "Does X produce consciousness?" where X is whatever machine we've invented to replace brains.
Since we've known that brains produce consciousness for a long time now, shouldn't we be closer to an actual explanation? At what point do we begin to question the premise "brains produce consciousness"? Do we reject it if there's no explanation in 100 years? 1,000 years? 10,000 years*?
*by then the question will no doubt be "Does X produce consciousness?" where X is whatever machine we've invented to replace brains.
Comments (142)
i agree. This is one of the reasons i've embraced pan-psychism. There are over 11 forms of pan-psychism.
Well I presume we'll be abandoning it right now. The fact that some random poster on an Internet forum finds the arguments to be "lame" is, after all, the main standard of modern science. Newton's notions of gravity were famously abandoned after Ilovetherovers57 called them "a bit off".
And now I see someone else here "agrees", well... It's a wonder the professional cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, philosophers and psychologists who've been diligently investigating conciousness for the past few decades, don't just hang up their coats right now after such a damning counter-argument.
Materialism is historically rooted in the aversion of consciousness. This was the domain of the soul, and the turf of the clergy, so off limits to anybody with a sense of self preservation.
Materialists tend to focus on finding a physical source of consciousness – seemingly hoping that they can deal with consciousness outside of personal conscious experience – Ha ha ha – good luck with that one!!
That is impossible! The only way to deal with consciousness is through personal introspection, as each consciousness is absolutely unique! Each consciousness is personally constructed absolutely – even if two people share the same DNA, and share the same experience, they must occupy a different space – and so posses a different consciousness, in the absolute sense. When two people share the same DNA, experience and space – they are the same person! The only way that consciousness exists is in the particular, and we all have a particular consciousness – our own particular consciousness. This is the only one we have access to, and the only one we are really interested in, as this is the one that creates our personal reality!
However this is where dealing with consciousness gets prickly. As we all know life can be traumatic. The simplest and most immediate way to deal with trauma is to suppress and deny it. To deal with consciousness however, you have to deal with all the nitty gritty that forms it, including the things that you would rather not deal with. And some people cannot, or choose not to, and this has to be respected, but it can result in the suppression and denial of consciousness outright.
There are still other problems besides.....I could go on for some time.
The result is a cultural aversion and blindness around the area of consciousness.
But for a philosopher this is an unacceptable situation. I like to think we partake in life through the prism of our consciousness – I don’t see how anybody can argue with this, or get around it. Ultimately this has to be dealt with, as consciousness is there prime centre in absolutely every philosophical consideration.
This question is red herring because it conflates materialism-as-epistemology (i.e. scientific paradigm) with materialism-as-ontology (i.e. metaphysical category) wherein the so-called "explanatory gap" only arises for the latter (thus, 'panpsychism' is often a proposed metaphysical Woo-of-the-Explanatory Gap) and does not arise for the former (due ro conceptual shifts like 'eliminativism' which dissolve the so-called "Hard Problem"). Disambiguated or not, materialism is (mostly) irrelevant vis-à-vis "conscious experience". Rather
i. What does "conscious experience" do for an entity? (re: functionality)
ii. What does an entity do with "conscious experience"? (re: utility-adaptivity)
iii. If the answers are negative (e.g. epiphenomenalism), then what explains the illusion of "conscious experience" and its persistence? (re: facticity)
b. Substitute "conscious INexperience" (e.g. trance, 'autopilot') for "conscious experience" in questions i-iii above.
c. Substitute "UNconscious experience" (e.g. blindsight, dreaming) for "conscious experience" in questions i-iii above.
(This old thread rambles on further with relevant recommendations.)
Enables it to write the above.
Quoting 180 Proof
Write the above, or any other entry that it sees fit to write, for whatever reason.
Quoting 180 Proof
I presume you wrote the above consciously, unless you're a trance medium?
Relevant trivia: MS Word spits out paragraphs of random text on entry of rand=(). But it never varies.
@Wayfarer :roll:
I would agree that any attempt to define consciousness out of existence, or to say that it is an illusion, would be lame. However, I don't see the "integrating information" concept as vague handwaving. I don't know about you, but I get the distinct feeling of being informed while being conscious and that thoughts are a type of information that can be processed as the act of thinking.
Quoting 180 Proof
It informs an entity.
Quoting 180 Proof
It uses the information to find food and mates, and avoid predators.
Quoting 180 Proof
Conscious experience seems to be a requirement when learning something. Once we have learned it, we can perform it as if on "autopilot". Think about learning to walk, ride a bike and driving.
Quoting 180 Proof
Our brains seem to be in the habit of filling in gaps in information that our senses aren't providing, but were meant to provide but aren't as a result of faulty sensory organs or having those connections between the senses and the conscious part of the mind minimized when asleep. We still wake up when touched or hearing a loud noise, so our senses aren't completely turned off when asleep, for survival reasons.
This is obviously incorrect. There are entire fields of study dedicated to this that are pretty mature now.
single electrons do not move across synaptic gaps, it is neurotransmitters which pass a signal from neuron to neuron.
Some of them agree with RogueAI. His view does not stand in opposition of to the views of the overwhelming majority of academics studying consciousness. There is no settled position on this such that opposition to it is by default unreasonable.
I didn't make any claims to the contrary. My snipe was at the pointlessness of a thread OP which contained nothing more than "none of materialist positions seem right to me, when are they going to give up?". The point was why on earth would anyone consider giving up just because the positions don't seem right to @RogueAI?
Oh, I see. I think you both have a point. I'd like materialists to keep working on it, even though I suspect they will not find the solution they are after. They may discover other interesting things in the process. For example, Tononi might have stumbled on a good theory of identity (rather than consciousness), in my view. That is to say, the entities that have a unitary consciousness are those entities that integrate information.
I suspect it's more a case of them not finding the solution you are after (not you personally, the general 'you'). Much of the debate around conciousness centres on people getting totally hung up on their own feeling about conciousness and expecting everyone else's theories to explain their personal intuitions. The point about the whole 'conciousness is an illusion' analogy though is to question those very intuitions. We either discard the possibility out of hand or we have to accept that the content of our intuitions may be wrong.
Usually in philosophy, one is not hemmed in by an either-or. People are frustratingly good at finding alternatives. There are many approaches to consciousness, so it's decidedly not a binary proposition. We don't have to accept or discard anything because it's not a settled matter.
@Baden I’m pretty sure tilda here is christian2017 evading his ban, as this “11 forms” thing is a stock phrase he used to repeat over and over.
Thanks for the link. I’m familiar with Tononi, but I’ll check out the other two.
I like Roger Penrose and co cellular microtubule proposition. If this pans out to be true then it will be the case that entangled and integrated quantum states give rise to consciousness.
One entangled and integrated quantum state gives rise to a future entangled and integrated quantum state. But we would be back at the same point - dose an entangled and integrated quantum state have free will? But at least we are not introspecting!
Thumbs up - my emoticons don't work.
I don't think that is known. Alva Noe says 'Consciousness is the fact that we think and feel and that a world, the world shows up for us.' Thinking of 'consciousness' as 'something that is produced by the brain' is a remnant of the materialist canard, 'the brain secretes thought like the liver secretes bile'.
The process by which that conclusion was reached was more a matter of history than science, per se.
In 2003, there was a landmark book published, Hacker and Bennett, The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Hacker is an Oxford philosopher and considered a leading scholar on Wittgenstein, Bennett the author of many papers and books in neuroscience. (Worth reading the review here.) In their view, most neuroscience falls into the 'mereological error', i.e. attributing to a part -namely the brain - what is really only attributable to an agent or person. So, brains don't think, reflect, plan, etc - persons do, and obviously whilst a functioning brain is central to that, it is only ever a part of the story.
Indeed; that someone can make such a statement in light of e.g. modern cognitive neuroscience is... pretty bizarre. Pretty incredible how far these fields have come just in the past few decades alone.
Cognitive science is not philosophy of mind. But this paper on the neural binding problem and the subjective unity of perception does explicitly mention David Chalmer's 'hard problem of consciousness', acknowledging that 'this version of the neural binding problem really is a scientific mystery at this time. '
Modern cognitive science is an interdisciplinary paradigm that includes philosophy (of mind) as a crucial contributor. And in any case, both the scientific study of the brain (and its relation to mental states/processes) and philosophical accounts of mind are obviously far advanced from Descartes time, such that RogueAI's assertion was... not particularly credible, shall we say.
I think there are very wide-spread and deep-seated assumptions that progress has been made on these fronts, but they don't necessarily address the hard problem of consciousness, which is why David Chalmer's paper on that is still relevant.
And, have a glance at the neural Buddhists.
I agree that its a judgment call, but the idea that we've been running in circles (i.e. in philosophy) for 400 years since Descartes and that literally everything written since then has no value or has contributed nothing to the philosophical discussion strikes me as completely ludicrous... not least because of the fact that some of that work includes credible critiques of Descartes himself- Descartes own account of the mind is far from perfect or unassailable, that would be quite depressing if we have made no progress from that. I mean really, Descartes of all people is where you identify our philosophical accounts of the mind as having plateaued? And this is all granting the highly implausible notion that none of the results of the scientific study of the brain (and especially its relation to the mind) have any philosophical significance at all. If that's what you sincerely believe, okay, but good luck actually defending or supporting any of that.
You see how this question, and your post, is framed against the (I suggest unconscious) assumption of historical progress?
I'm looking at the issue through the perspectives of philosophy of mind, and also history of ideas. Descartes himself introduced some highly problematic perspectives which have had huge influence on subsequent thought - that book I mentioned by Hacker and Bennett discusses this at length. Daniel Dennett, and all of the current philosophers of mind, discuss Descartes and cartesian dualism at length, because these are like the architectonics of modern thinking.
Do look at some of the references I've provided above, they are all directly relevant to this subject.
I'm not assuming historical progress- I've read and studied a non-negligible amount of the philosophy we're talking about (i.e. philosophy of mind post-Descartes), and regard some of it as quite important and valuable (and certainly as having contributed positively to the discussion- i.e. progress). And again this is even granting the wildly implausible notion that no scientific results since then have any philosophical relevance either. Just not a serious or credible assertion, looks closer to trolling (or just a statement of ignorance) to me.
I didn't say they don't have philosophical relevance. What I said was that cognitive science is not the same subject of philosophy of mind. But as you can only respond with ad homs, then obviously I'm wasting my time.
And I pointed out that modern cognitive science is an interdisciplinary approach that includes the philosophy of mind and so this distinction doesn't do what you apparently think it does.
And in any case if any scientific results since Descartes have any philosophical relevance (they do), and anyone's bothered to write about it in that connection (they have, at great length), then we've made progress in that discussion in virtue of that alone. So, again, not a serious assertion, and I honestly feel a little silly having engaged with it even this much.
Oh brother. Obviously at no point have I even given the appearance of arguing against the proposition that "cognitive science is deficient or invalid or broken"- a proposition which had not appeared til you typed it just now. I understand quite well what you're saying and feel like my own remarks have been pretty clear.. and so I've said all I mean to say on the idea that 400 years of philosophy of mind + an incredibly productive last few decades in neuroscience has amounted to "no actual progress on how non-conscious stuff can produce consciousness since Descartes" (a statement of dogma if ever there was one).
I don't understand what you're saying here. My proposition was that we either discard the idea that consciousness might not be what we think it is, or we accept that it might not be what we think it is. I'm not seeing any 'third way' in that, either accepting or rejecting a possibility seems pretty exhaustive of all options to me.
As per my quote, my issue was with that statement that "no actual progress on how non-conscious stuff can produce consciousness". I do not argue that those active fields are all wrapped up.
Anyone perplexed by this phrase should know that it is @Wayfarer's bizarre mis-reading of this,
Quoting Wayfarer
Which is, as per my added emphasis, harsh on historical theories of brain function that ended up fueling dualism or eleven kinds of pan-psychism, but not on materialism.
I.e., not a "materialist canard" at all, but an apt caricature of how an abstract noun (like consciousness) can conjure up goo as well as woo. Hence the incredulity,
Quoting RogueAI
Somewhere inside of which there may lurk a valid question, but it won't need to luxuriate in the usual fantastic premises (e.g. pictures in the head, or a world in the head) that phenomenalists claim are undeniable.
Mine was a reference to the original quote, by Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, a French materialist philosopher of the Enlighenment. It was his expression 'Le cerveau sécrète la pensée comme le foie sécrète la bile.'
That quote of Weiner's is commenting on the same point.
I would enlarge on Weiner's point by commenting that the fundamentals of reason, such as the law of the excluded middle, can never be conceived of as being 'produced' by the brain. What happens is, h. sapiens reaches the point of being able to grasp the truths of reason, at which point the mind transcends any strictly biological explanation for its capacities.
However as evolution now amounts to a secular creation mythology it is now naturally assumed that the mind can be explained in naturalistic terms. The effects of this belief extend well beyond the sphere of philosophy.
Because there are a lot of people who unconsciously accept materialism - like, they wouldn't think of themselves as materialist, and they're not materialist in an obvious or gauche kind of way. They don't know what philosophical materialism means, but they nevertheless believe it. Modern culture holds to what I call a kind of 'handrail materialism' - when it comes to tricky philosophical questions such as this one, then they grab for the materialist response, because an alternative seems religious (and, boo religion!)
There was a shrewd comment by a contemporary philosopher, on this point, to wit:
Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.
Good link, especially the bit that says:
Fine, so Wiener used as caricature a phrase from one of the theories whose assumptions he was targeting.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, remarking how early attempts to understand brain function without reference to an immaterial soul ended up implying one through carelessness of metaphor.
Quoting Wayfarer
... on your obstinate (deliberate, even?) misreading of it.
Although, I never found a pdf of the Wiener book, and you had only the wiki-quote; but I would be astonished if my emphasis (above) is incorrect.
Haha, ok forget about Weiner, and this ill-conceived thread.
From that you have retained the Cabanis quote and hope to use it to mock (now that you see that Wiener sought only to bolster) materialism.
No worries.
We've made tremendous progress in identifying brain state/mental state correlations. I see no progress on the causation front. When it comes to how non-conscious matter gives rise to conscious experience, we're still completely flummoxed.
Well, that's a pseudo-question so ... and "idealism" is (mostly) just woo-of-gaps. :roll: The more interesting (less speculative) question is: how does non-consciousness arise from consciousness (e.g. sleep, auto-pilot habit) and yield consciousness again (e.g. waking-up, novelty)?
Yes, that's interesting as well. As there's no agreed explanation for how consciousness arises, you can't get much more speculative than "how do brains produce consciousness?".
I don't see anything "wooish" about idealism. It never strays from first-principles. There are things we know that exist (mind(s), thoughts, ideas, sensations), and reality is made of this mental stuff. Since materialism posits the (unproveable) existence of non-mental stuff, it's far less parsimonious.
I suggest that it's our precritical linguistic habits that make it 'obvious' that ideas and sensations exist. I don't dispute that in some sense they do. 'Ideas' and 'sensations' are words that we know how to use, and they help us get along in the world.
To me the philosophical task is not simply deciding that 'mind' alone (or 'matter' alone) is 'real', but rather figuring out what all of our babble about such things is supposed to mean in the first place.
I'm pretty sure I recall having sensations before 'sensations' entered my vocabulary. Don't you?
In principle, it doesn't seem that surprising to me that when you put together some "unconscious" stuffs you may get a stuff that is "conscious", as we know from experience that by combining stuffs we may get a different, new stuff. For example, if you mix blue and yellow paints you will get, perhaps surprisingly, a green paint.
Whether the stuffs of a brain are sufficient to constitute the stuff we call "consciousness", we don't know for sure. But we know that our brains play at least some role in it because changes in the brain correlate with changes in consciousness.
It also seems that objects that are conscious are very complex in the sense that they have many different dynamic parts that are richly dynamically interconnected (dynamic organized complexity). General anesthesia usually disrupts connections between parts of the brain and loss of consciousness follows (too much differentiation, too little connection). Epileptic seizures, on the other hand, are characterized by increased synchronization of brain processes and loss of consciousness follows (too much connection, too little differentiation). The cerebellum has four times more neurons than the cortex, but damage to the cerebellum, unlike damage to the cortex, has practically no impact on consciousness; it turns out that while there is rich differentiation and interaction in the cortex, the cerebellum has many small modules that process information locally, without much interaction with other modules.
I find the fact that you asked me that illuminating.
A speech act on my part is something we can reason about. It is there, it is public.
The problem is that sensations tend to be understood as private and therefore 'epistemologically invisible.'
A theist can assure me that we all experience God 'directly' through some kind of spiritual intuition.
I find Mach fascinating. He studied the relationship of sensations and 'external stimuli.' Or did he? Could he? (As a critically minded philosopher/scientist.)
We can't make objective (impersonal, transpersonal) statements about sensations, more or less by definition.
We can see whether certain wavelengths are called 'red.'
For me the unifying theme here is that facts (uncontroversial propositions) are primary.
The world is not sensations or noemata.
Or at least thinking in those ways leads to serious problems while ignoring how we actually reason.
This rather treats indirect evidence the same as no evidence, which is just a pathway to solipsism. If we're going down that route, I deny that you and your argument exist! :rofl:
My sensation awareness and memory are not invisible to me. Evidence of yours is indirect. You can tell me God speaks to you, and I can ask others if God speaks to them and note that God never speaks to me, and from this I can deduce that you're probably mistaken. That this reassuring consensus requires words, it does not follow that I needed the words to 'not be spoken to by God'. I do not contest that I need language about sensation to understand your sensations. I contest that I do not need it to have my own.
For context, I'm a science-loving atheist. I am coming from a quasi-Wittgensteinian place, and I am also impressed by Sellars, quoted below.
****
Antecedent to epistemology, Sellars’s treatment of semantics essentially constitutes a denial of what can be called a semantic given—the idea that some of our terms or concepts, independently of their occurrence in formal and material inferences, derive their meaning directly from confrontation with a particular (kind of) object or experience.
****
Quoting Kenosha Kid
In the everyday sense of those words, of course. The point is to challenge an inherited way of talking and thinking about 'consciousness.'
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I think you are taking too much for granted here. You could only be spoken to by God if you have been trained into knowing a language --the same language that would allow you to interpret yourself (your 'experience') as a human being (as a self) talked to by some kind of god.
I'm not denying some kind of extra-linguistic reality. There's just maybe not much we can say about it. We reason from facts (already language).
A p-zombie could write a great work of science or philosophy.
Objectivity does not depend on contact with mysterious objects, be they sense-data or intellectual intuitions.
It happens in public, in language.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
In the usual sense, sure, but you can't prove you aren't a p-zombie. I don't think you are, but the concept of the p-zombie is useful for thinking about epistemology.
Your private sensations (if they exist, whatever they are) can play no role in themselves. On the other hand, public speech acts including words like 'sensation' are epistemologically significant.
What do you make of the following famous passage?
https://web.stanford.edu/~paulsko/Wittgenstein293.html
It's debatable whether there's an outer physical world. It's not debatable there's an "inner" mental world that is composed of sensations and noemata. Now, are you going to say this inner/mental world isn't part of "the world"? That's absurd. So it would seem that at least part of the world IS sensations and noemata.
Other than that, I enjoyed your post.
While I do understand where you are coming from --and while I do understand that in ordinary language terms that 'consciousness exists' -- I also think that a certain inherited interpretation of consciousness obscures important aspects of it.
When you say that 'it's not debatable,' I actually agree. But that is precisely the problem!
If consciousness is radically private, we are wasting our time talking about it. We [s]don't[/s] can't even know if we mean the same thing by the word 'consciousness.'
We can throw way words like 'meaning' too as grunts that can't be checked for whatever 'meaning' is supposed to mean in our new isolation.
Quoting RogueAI
On the contrary, I am saying that the inner/mental world is actually 'in' the world, between us as language users. 'The world makes the self possible.'
As you reason with yourself and compose a response to this post, entertain the thought that you are using a borrowed, alien language to do so, because I claim that you are.
But we humans are the aliens, and the world is significant for us as social animals who have developed a complex system of interaction that involves sentences, handshakes, salutes, flags, etc.
Maybe there are toothaches, but the meaning of the word 'toothache' is 'out there' between us.
And you have the grounds for questioning (doubting) "there's an outer physical world" or grounds for taking-as-given (certitude) that "there's an 'inner' mental world"? Please elaborate.
I have a direct experience, that's an ultimate proof. Anything trying to prove it more or deny it it's simply a waste of time.
All of them with some success for the easy problem and 0 success on the hard problem. Again, the hard problem has been avoided and even denied, but ultimately it has remained untouched by materialism.
Well I have direct (personal) experience of the 17 gods who created our world. Is that an 'ultimate proof' of my 17-god theology?
Quoting Eugen
The hard problem is understood by some precisely so that progress can't be made (so that nothing could count as progress.)
'I demand an objective explanation for stuff that only I have access to or am.'
I'd argue toward a philosophical explanation of consciousness. The word 'materialistic' tends to mislead people into equally useless assumptions (of ineffable stuff we can't be objective about).
Materialism (and materialists) make very bold claims about reality. They should have a causal explanation for consciousness by now.
I would agree with this, there is a cultural aversion,and a tradition of non engagement. to engage at all is in some ways antisocial.
Quoting Yellow Horse
I believe it is possible to create a rough sketch of a philosophical consciousness. But ultimately consciousness is something created from DNA, experience, and perspective, so personal.Only you can understand your own personal consciousness as only you have full access to it.
Quoting Yellow Horse
There are many problems.
Another word for consciousness, though not entirely accurate, is sanity.
What if we made progress in our understanding of consciousness such that it caused a shift in our sanity? What if this shift caused a misalignment with the sanity of our family, friends, and culture?
Would you still go there?
On the other hand, is the sanity of our culture functional or dysfunctional?
It's the ultimate proof for your consciousness. You know, I asked a question on this forum on why so many deny consciousness and many people argued that this is not the case and that nobody actually argues about that. Well, reading some comments here shows they were wrong.
Quoting Yellow Horse
That sounds like a poor excuse for the incapacity of materialism.
Floats your lil rowboat but not mine. I'm interested in the grounds for doubt or belief, not "proof" (ultimate or otherwise). :roll:
If we cant trust experience, then what can we trust?
Grounds are an illusion, they don't exist. It's a word invented by you and you don't exist, therefore ''grounds'' doesn't exist.
180 Proof - ''I am not interested in ''proof'' '' :rofl:
I just love when people simply want to debate the undebatable simply because they don't like the outcome. Materialists are like if Brazil, after losing 1-7 to Germany, went out and celebrated telling everyone they won the game. ''Reporter: You lost 7 to 1! Neymar: We are interested in the ''grounds'' of such an affirmation!'' :rofl:
Dear materialists, keep up with your wonderful adventure of finding arguments that consciousness does not exist, you are really good at it. Meanwhile we, the rest of the world, will focus on other things.
Logic (i.e. sound inferential reasoning) to start. We also can - must - trust experience, but within limits.
We have to start with experience - the emotional aspect of consciousness - as that is what creates our consciousness - what distinguishes us from zombies. Of course it should be balanced and fortified with reason.
Sorry to be a pedant, but its a reasonably important distinction.
The confusion may be fleeting, or persist into our thinking and talking about the inter-relation of the three.
By "confusion" I mean a semantic association subject to severe or recurring doubt and revision: hence, a cognitive process attending to its own attitude of choosing among symbols, and hence quite possibly conscious, in the sense here proposed.
Confusion of this general sort may be so tangled as to be rarely if ever resolved. Indeed, a symptom of its intractability could be the fact that we fail to recognise it as a confusion, but develop instead various culturally specific narratives that purport to explain (and do at least reinforce) certain sub-types of the confusion. For example, "ideas", "mind's eye", "inner voice", "qualia" etc. (Which may of course serve useful cognitive functions.)
In turn, these vectors of public (but partial) recognition of common varieties of confusion, in human processing of symbols, may facilitate the coherent, if problematic, usage of the word "conscious" found in modern society. In particular, I suggest that the overall notion of symbolic confusion serves to identify those features of an artificial intelligence that would convince most people (most competent users of "conscious") of that machine's consciousness; including most people sympathetic (like me) to Searle's "Chinese Room" critique of the Turing Test, and even perhaps some people susceptible to the notion of "philosophical zombies".
Searle showed that common usage of "conscious" implies that a conscious person has a "proper semantics": an ability to connect words not only with semantically related words, but with things out in the world. Since AI robotic machines are even now only beginning to learn to predict the trajectories of balls or sticks cast into a relatively small world, it's hardly surprising that most people will not yet be willing to grant them a "proper semantics", if that means an ability to predict the (imaginary) trajectories of words cast (as it were) into a relatively vast world.
On the other hand, there seems no special obstacle in the way of increasingly powerful neural network machines being set towards that task, and making the same kind of smooth (and internally somewhat mysterious) progress displayed by similar machines allowed to train in all sorts of skills, from playing games of strategy to painting pictures or composing music. Now, we don't feel inclined to attribute consciousness to those machines, and it seems to me that we might be similarly unimpressed by one that did somehow impress us as having Searle's "proper semantics" or "intentionality": at least under my interpretation of that notion as just sketched, i.e. an ability to learn the social game of pointing symbols (words and pictures) at things. On the contrary (to being impressed), we should, I imagine, be ready to dismiss such a machine as a "zombie", in the straight forward sense of it being, like a smart phone, an unconscious or "mere" machine, not tempting us to infer the presence of a "ghost" inside.
This scenario, in which we easily intuit a lack of consciousness in hypothetical machines that otherwise impress as capable of thought, leads many to the view that consciousness is inherently immune to an explanation merely in terms of patterns of thought. (And is fundamentally "harder".) I think that Searle's requirement of a proper semantics provides the needed specification of thought pattern, as long as it is couched in (the possibly un-Searlean) terms of the pointing of external rather than internal symbols, and is subject to the plausible expectation of those symbols getting habitually confused with thoughts and with the symbolised objects.
Imagine a machine capable of equivocating between e.g. its thought whilst momentarily looking at (or imagining or dreaming of) a tree, a picture of the tree, and the tree itself. The nature of such equivocation in the fleeting moment will require separate analysis; suffice here to suppose that, on subsequent introspection, the machine reports that its thought had consisted of a picture, or even of a tree. Perhaps by way of surprise or apology, either kind of entity is qualified as "mental" or "phenomenal", in which manner the machine has learnt that it may join with us in curious but apparently meaningful talk about such thoughts.
The machine's thought processes here strike me as conscious. Not, obviously, if it merely fakes the required kind of confusion: which for example it would need to if it lacked even a "proper" semantic connection of symbols to objects, confused or not; but which it might otherwise fake by learning to deceive us about the confusion. Not, either, if it really did have words or pictures in its head, like a camera or a pre-connectionist symbolic computer.
If I'm wrong, and the appropriately confused machine might still be unconscious, I need alerting towards features of my own conscious thoughts that I am leaving out of consideration. However, I don't think the usual claim of unreflective and immediate certainty will be one of those features. Indeed, the confusion hypothesis suggests a reason for that kind of claim: certainty arose in our assessment of the status of the tree itself, but we mistakenly ascribed it to our confused (e.g. pictorial) characterisation of our thoughts.
Whence the confusion? Maybe because skill in playing the social game of pointing symbols at things came so late after all the pragmatic and syntactic (e.g. musical) skills. Hazy on this.
The fact that the gap between what is believed by materialists, and what is believed by idealists, continues to widen, is clear evidence that progress has not been made. The fact that the materialists ignore this evidence to claim that progress has been made, is simple denial. So the materialists float off in their self-induced bubble, further and further from the idealist perspective, while all the time claiming progress is being made in closing the gap between them.
Exactly! I am an outsider when it comes to philosophy and ideologies and I can say that I am shocked by the difference between my expectations and reality. I thought people who claim that they are lead by science are objective, open-minded, and ready to admit their failures. I was so naive.
Objectivity (insofar as it applies to investigation) is about dealing with shared phenomena, open-mindedness is only about accepting possibilities (not about choosing which to persue), and not yet having all the answers is not a failure in science, but rather the standard mode.
So what you're looking for to accommodate your need for your personal feelings on the matter to be investigated thoroughly and failure admitted when they are not resolved, is a therapist,not a scientist.
If I find a therapist like you who denies consciousness, he'll need a surgeon to fix him )))
You should have a look at Electrical Brain Stimulation (EBS)
[quote=Wikipedia]A comprehensive review of EBS research compiled a list of many different acute impacts of stimulation depending on the brain region targeted. Following are some examples of the effects documented:[6]
Sensory: Feelings of body tingling, swaying, movement, suffocation, burning, shock, warmth, paresthesia, feeling of falling, oscillopsia, dysesthesia, levitation, sounds, phosphenes, hallucinations, micropsia, diplopia, etc.
Motor: Eye movements, locomotion, speech arrest, automatisms, laughter, palilalia, chewing, urge to move, crying without feeling sad, etc.
Autonomic: Blushing, mydriasis, change in blood pressure and breathing, apnea, nausea, tachycardia, sweating, etc.
Emotional: Anxiety, mirth, feeling of unreality, fear, happiness, anger, sadness, transient acute depression, hypomania, etc.
Cognitive: Acalculia, paraphasia, anomic aphasia, recalling memories, "going into a trance", "out of this world", conduction aphasia, hemispatial neglect, alexia, déjà vu, reliving past experiences, agraphia, apraxia, etc.
EBS in face-sensitive regions of the fusiform gyrus caused a patient to report that the faces of the people in the room with him had "metamorphosed" and became distorted: "Your nose got saggy, went to the left. [...] Only your face changed, everything else was the same."[/quote]
if EBS shows anything it's that many aspects of what we call consciousness can be elicited physically. What do you think this means for the nature of consciousness?
It shows that we will be able to find out how consciousness arises, dissapears, and correlates with phisicsl states, it tells nothing about the 1st person experiences and it cannot explain how some electric signals or whatever they find can have a 1st person experiences.
Presumably all conscious aspects that were evoked by EBS were 1st person experiences related to the experimenters by the subject.
[s]My earlier post notwithstanding, I have a vague idea as to how a materialistic account of consciousness fails. If I'm correct, the current scientific consensus is that the fundamental structural and functional unit of the nervous system is the neuron and that their primary mechanism is the action potential - an electrical wave that travels along the branches of the neuron. The problem I see is that there's no difference between the action potential in a skin neuron that senses pressure and an eye neuron that senses light - in fact, they're both essentially identical. Yes, an action potential from a pressure sensor on the skin and an action potential on a retinal neuron end up in different places - one in the somatosensory cortex and the other in the visual cortex - but these different brain centers themselves are essentially made up of neurons and thus will consist of the very same action potentials. In other words, a materialistic account of consciousness has to explain how what is a generic action potential becomes in one instant sound, light, pressure, etc. and that seems to be difficult considering all neurons, whatever their loci, are capable of are action potentials.
An action potential then constitutes a language with just one word, the signal travelling through a neuron, and to know what this signal means - a sound, a light, a taste, etc. - is another level of processing which I think brain function, because it itself consists of only action potentials traveling back and forth between neurons, is incapable of. Something else is processing the signals into the different perceptions of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.
Imagine a language, call it L, that has only ONE word, "signal". Imagine then that there are two people who speak this language, me, a translator, and you to whom anything translated is passed on to for comprehension. Suppose also that you know no other language except the language L. Now, if I were to translate the Bible into the language L, it would consist of strings of one word exactly, the word "signal", If I were then to let you read this L language translation of the Bible, you'd be confused as hell, no? It's impossible for you to understand the Bible or any other book for that matter if the only language you speak is the one-word language L.[/s]
PS: It appears that the brain distinguishes between the various senses based on which sets of neurons are activated. There is no need for just one part of the brain, as I had assumed, to distinguish between the various signals as one type or another. For instance, the eye is stimulated only by light and so even though action potentials in the eye are no different from those from the ear, that the eye is only stimulated by light and the ear only by sound is enough to make the distinction between these various sensory perceptions.
That makes absolutely no difference in terms of the hard problem. See, this is the problem with materialism. They postulate all kind of information that's never really related to the core issue, but they claim it is. It isn't. Other times they simply say there is no hard problem.
Again... if materialism is true, absolutely every question can be theoretically answered by physics. The problem is that your EBS and any other futuristic ultra-sophisticated technology will be able to answer only "how" things happen at the level of atoms and fields. But when asked about the intrinsic nature of consciousness, or why supposedly non-consciouss matter produces 1st person experience, or how is to feel something, etc., materialists have 2 answers:
1. These questions have no meaning, I have already shown you everything.
2. There is nothing intrinsic, it's all an illusion.
This is why I think materialism cannot go too far.
What is this "intrinsic nature of consciousness"? Also, once the "how" has been answered, the explanation of consciousness in terms of the physical is complete, no?
That's the point. No.
X#7366$€÷77_÷3663%#%#_77#_6#6# like equations or description of atom movemnts will never explain the "redness" of red. Just get over it and accept this reality.
What's so special about "redness"? If materialism is true then it's nothing more than the neurons connected to a certain subcategory of retinal cones being activated.
It is special because materialism cannot explain it. It is fundamentally different from the rest of things. Stating it isn't doesn't mean it isn't. It's just the confirmation of a fundamental limit of materialism.
Imagine an alien race having a feeling called zappiness, zappiness being a feeling only those aliens can experience. You could come up with tons of equations and neuron movements, you won't be able to really know what zappiness is.
This hurts materialists so much because their nice sand castle will be destroyed.
I totally understand your frustration, but you only confirm my affirmation: Quoting Eugen
In just a matter of few replys, you went from 1 to 2 and you will be stuck there forever.
This reminds me of what I've been considering regarding the refutation of materialism with arguments like Mary's room. An explanation of something is in no way that something. I can explain the process of digestion with the physical theory of enzymes, etc. but the explanation is clearly not the actual process of digestion, right? Likewise, the visual perception of redness can be explained in physical terms but that explanation is obviously not going to be anything like actually seeing red. To think an explanation is the same thing as that which is being explained is preposterous. One is providing causal basis for a certain phenomena, evidently distinct from the phenomena themselves.
Exactly!!!
So, you agree that there's nothing wrong with materialism then? After all, the way you argued your position, everything depended on explanations having to evoke the experiences the explanation was about.
No explanation is that which is being explained but that's a given.
Not so fast my friend!
First of all, observing how things work and not what they are is called science, not materialism, and that I have nothing against it.
But I do have something against materialism:
Quoting TheMadFool
That's not consistent with Quoting TheMadFool
So finding correlations is not the same thing with consciousness itself. So science', and not materialism, is the one that finds correlations between certain first person experiences and physical manifestation.
Materialism says that either:
1. Things with no purpose, no will, no first person experience cannot create something with first person experience, therefore consciousness doesn't exist - STUPID
2. Things with no purpose, no will, no first person experience can create something with first person experience - good luck explaining that!
I think your issue is that you don't make the fundamental difference between science and materialism.
I disagree with 1. As for 2, all I'm going to say is that there's no need to posit something non-physical
Ok, I respect that, but then there's the issue of what is physical. Is consciousness fundamental, is it part of matter, is it part of the laws of nature? Or it simply emerges from purposeless, non-conscious, blind matter?
Kenosha Kid wouldn't agree with that. He says that the universe does not necessarily follow logic or common-sense.
This is an obvious non-sequitur, even if the premise is true (which it very likely isn't). So, another extremely sloppy argument/comment. Par for the course on this thread/topic I'm afraid.
I'm not sure their claim about the lack of consensus is even accurate in the first place. I suppose it depends on who they're referring to. At least among philosophers, physicalism appears to be the majority view. That's what the last PhilPapers survey showed at any rate. And I'd be pretty surprised if the situation was much different in the cognitive sciences (if anything, its probably an even stronger majority). Not that that settles the substantive question (i.e. if something like physicalism is true) or anything, but worth noting nonetheless (since people have made claims about the lack of such a majority).
I wasn't making an argument, just pointing out what is obvious to many philosophers. If you close your eyes to the obvious, and deny it when someone points it out to you, what type of philosophy are you engaged in? A philosophy of exclusion?
It is exactly my problem with a part of philosophy. It is like an athlete who stops in the middle of the raceand say ''I won! That was the finish line!'' and the rest of the world is saying otherwise.
Have you stopped beating your wife? C'mon, I'm not answering such an obviously loaded question (which, so far as the philosophic topic is concerned, is plainly question-begging and so not a productive argument either- and of course the continued refusal to engage in the topic without simply assuming your conclusion strongly undermines the anti-physicalists here.. is that really the best you can do?)
Consciousness is NOT the mental processes, but how these mental states feel like.
So it is not a matter of complexity, as many materialists claim, it is a matter of principle.
"How the mental states feel like" - IS a mental process, yes/no?
I tried googling "first person experience" and did not find anything useful in the standard philosophy sources.
Can you expand on this a bit - what do you mean by "first person experience" and "mental process" - and in what way(s) is a first person experience NOT a mental process?
Ok, let me make it simple. Saying mental processes (moving of atoms inside your brain) is the same with pain for example is like saying a punch in the face is the same thing as pain. A punch in the face creates some atoms moving in certain ways and that movement creates pain. Pain is an experience, which is produced by a movement of atoms, which in turn is not the same, but produced by a punch. I think I've made it clear now. They are not the same thing.
Try more
You haven't made this clear to me.
Quoting Eugen
So a "mental process" is the moving of atoms inside your brain.
Quoting Eugen
I assume here that the atoms referred to in this sentence are the same atoms you were talking about in the previous sentence. I.e., we're not talking about the atoms in your nose, or in the nerve paths leading to your brain.
Quoting Eugen
So is this the same movement of atoms that you were referring to in the previous 2 sentences or is it a different set of moving atoms? Either way, what do you mean by the word "experience"?
I did about a 5 minute search on the phrase "first person experience". Nothing in wikipedia, Britannica, Stanford, etc.
So you need to search that on wikipedia and Britannica. Do you have personal experiences? If no, keep searching.
As for the rest, I have been polite so far and I have tried tooffer you very simple arguments for obvious things. But I simply don't find productive to waste my time explaining the obvious more than I already did: pain is not the same with a punch in the face or toany other movement of atoms starting from your nose to your brain. If you don't like that, it's your problem.
And if you think that asking me tons of questions hoping you'll somehow find a crack in my argumentation that you could explore, you're wasting your time.
I know that no matter what logical commonsense arguments I'd bring, even in obvious areas, you wouldn't admit the reality.
Notice I used "admit" and not "convinced".
I'm a reasonably intelligent person and I've been polite to you. I may or may not agree with your position - likely not, but you never know- I keep an open mind. But if you cannot explain yourself clearly to a reasonably intelligent person, then you're never going to convince anyone that your position is correct.
My "google-fu" is pretty good. I did a good faith effort to research the phrase "first person experience" and came up empty handed. That phrase does not appear as a topic on either Wikipedia or Britannica. At this point in time the burden of proof is on you. If you can provide me with some links, perhaps I can at least understand what you're getting at.
Quoting EricH
That you were.
Quoting EricH
I think there is no one to convince in cases where things are so obvious. It's just chatter, a poor tactic to stretch the conversation with explanations hoping you'll find a soft spot to take advantage of.
Quoting EricH
To proove what? That a feeling is not the same thing as an atom?
I would like to ask you something, but please be 100% sincere. Do you really believe that your feelings are exactly the same thing and nothing more than a certain movement of atoms yes/no?
The expression is used. The concept is not obscure at all, at least to me. I'm not a great fan of this particular formulation, as it appears to be an amalgam of 'first person point of view' and 'experience'. The former being a grammatical point of view of the narrator in fiction. Experience is necessarily 'first person' in a sense as one always only ever has one's own experiences by definition, so adding 'first person' is redundant.
I personally prefer to separate the word 'experience' from these other synonyms, as an experience implies content (that which is experienced) which these others, strictly speaking, do not. It's clearer to abstract consciousness from its content so that we can distinguish different senses of 'consciousness'. Sometimes people mean the capacity to feel abstracted from what is felt. Other times people mean the totality of what is felt, as in 'The realisation entered his consciousness' (crappy example).
Ah - you're not a native speaker. That's OK. It is likely that we are not going to agree, but I would first like to have some understanding of your position.
Quoting Eugen
Perhaps I was not clear. Here is what I said:
Quoting EricH
Given that you are not a native speaker - and that these concepts are very difficult to express even for someone who is fluent - I am asking you to provide me with some references that I can read that will help me understand what it is you are saying. As I responded to @bert1 - this is a philosophy forum so it would help me if you could proved some references that would position your ideas within some philosophical framework. E.g., some type of Idealism?
Quoting Eugen
I would like to give you an sincere response - but I need to understand what you mean by "feelings" - it is a very vague word which has many different definitions.
If I'm following correctly, you seem to be saying that feelings are not mental processes - so I'm trying to figure out the word "feelings" (or experiences) means to you.
So to repeat myself - I hope you can provide me with some references - and I'm not looking for a dictionary definition of feelings.
I hope I'm being clear - and reasonable - in my requests.
Quoting bert1
I'm not a professional philosopher. :smile: In fact I'm not even an amateur philosopher - I'm just stumbling around in the dark trying to figure out what's going on.
I think I have sort of a vague sense of what @Eugen is saying, but I'm trying to get some clarity.
I am sorry but I cannot take that seriously. I truly believe you perfectly know what I and @bert1 are talking about. I truly believe that no explanation will do - if I say ''everything you feel'' you will ask me ''What is to feel? I searched that on google and I couldn't find anything.''. I am not a philosopher either, but I am versed enough to realize that when you don't accept something obvious, the only thing you can do is to find ways to escape that reality. So by asking me so many questions you are basically trying to obtain more information, because where's a lot of information maybe there are some flaws as well that you could take advantage of and turn the argument in your favor. Another possibility is to make ''feelings'' or ''personal experiences'' look like empty concepts.
Anyway, this is more about debating tactics, not about the truth.
It is no problem if you don't want to answer my question.
I believe EricH. I think the misunderstandings, differing assumptions, differing definitions and perceptions are so deep and difficult to sort out in the philosophy of mind, that people are frequently completely baffled as to what others mean. I used to be like you, what could be more obvious than consciousness? Surely everyone who has reflected on the issue for even a moment will share the same concept as me! It's just not true.
This may not count as an actual explanation, but I have a hypothesis based on physics, but also including a role for metaphysics (non-physical Information). Without an understanding of the Enformationism thesis though --- that Mind & Matter are both emergent forms of Generic Information --- this brief synopsis may sound like speculative non-sense. Yet, it's a combination of sensable Realism & knowable Idealism, of Physics & Metaphysics.
I begin with the assumption that Matter, Energy, & Mind are emergent forms of a universal fundamental creative "power to enform". If you find that hard to believe, I have lots of supporting evidence & arguments. In the original Singularity, that cosmic Potential was generic, not specific (no instances), and not physical (no real stuff). But after the Big Bang, infinite Potential was transformed into finite Actuality (the stuff of reality). Over time, that proto-energy gradually caused new forms to emerge in what scientists call "phase transitions". Energy, in the amorphous state of Plasma, evolved (condensed) into a field or fog of free particles (ions), then into the various forms of matter that we know today. Those phase changes are merely new forms of the same underlying Potential for creation of novelty.
So, I propose that the metaphysical phenomenon we call "Life" was also a phase transition from complex interactions of energy & matter. Once that cosmic novelty was established in one insignificant corner of the universe, it eventually transformed again into what we call "Mind" or "Consciousness". Hence, Mind is merely an emergent form of Energy. It's what eventually came to be known as "Information" (mind stuff), in the form of metaphysical concepts (ideas) generated by physical brains. In this process of successive phase changes, no new "stuff" was added, such as a Soul, because the Potential for Mind was already included in the Program we call The Singularity. If any of that makes sense, I can get much deeper into the hypothesis. :nerd:
Five (or 8) phases of Matter : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_matter
The EnFormAction Hypothesis : http://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
Note : click note 2. Emergent Phases
Emergence of Mind : http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page70.html
EnFormAction : http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page29.html
I'll try again. I get that you folks feel that materialism does not - and will never - offer an explanation of consciousness. But beyond that I'm not getting what your positions actually are - and please don't say it's obvious - or toss out words like "feeling" and "experience".
I am not rejecting your ideas out of hand. I am not criticizing you personally or attacking you for not being able to express your ideas clearly. These are difficult topics. What I am asking for is some reference. Is there some philosopher and/or some philosophical school of thought out there who you agree with?
Just for example, here is someone who talks about how Idealism explains consciousness. In this discussion he makes it clear that he does not agree with the Idealists but he gives a clear explanation of their thinking.
https://thepsychedelicscientist.com/2017/02/13/solving-the-hard-problem-with-idealism/
Please read this - it's a quick read - and get back. Does the author give a good explanation of your thoughts? if not, can you supply a link that gives a reasonably accurate summary of your position?
I won't do that! The thing Eugen and I are talking about as so obvious (albeit apparently only to us and some other people) is not a theory but the thing that the theories are about. The easy bit should be identifying and agreeing on the phenomenon to be explained (e.g. What actually is a Star?) and the hard bit should be explaining it (Maybe it's a hole in the firmament? Maybe it's the soul of a dead person? Maybe it's a lamp? Maybe it's a ball of burning gas?). Unfortunately with consciousness, isolating exactly what it is we are talking about is also the difficult part, as there is nothing external and public to point at.
I'm a panpsyschist, but I'm an unusual kind of panpsychist. I think most modern panpsychists are micropsychists, that is to say, they don't think, say, that half a sausage with a stick through it has a single consciousness. They think that sub-atomic particles, or perhaps atoms, are conscious. Then maybe some organic chemistry. Then maybe a cell, or something. They have a difficulty in specifying exactly what the conscious units are supposed to be.
I'm a much more radical panpsychist. I think that any arbitrarily defined object whatever is a unified centre of consciousness. So take half a German sausage, three paving stones from Aberdeen and 25% of the Andromeda galaxy, that is a single conscious entity. Exactly what it is conscious of as that entity is almost nothing. I'm not completely wedded to this very odd view, in fact I'd rather like to come up with something less weird, but at the moment I think it is the most likely thing to be true. I need to think more about ways to define conscious objects, and an adaptation of the Integrated Information Theory might be a good way to do that.
Regarding references, a recent panpsychist philosopher who is worth having a look at is Philip Goff. I think my views might be quite close to his. I can't remember if he is a micropsychist or not.
I used to be a subjective idealist following Berkeley. I may still be an idealist, but for somewhat different reasons. I certainly think that mind is fundamental. But I also think that spatiality may also be fundamental as well, along with will (the ability to self-move). Not sure exactly. I think substance might have more than one fundamental property which are mutually irreducible to one another, and jointly sufficient for all the phenomena that occur.
I'm not sure he actually gives his own view. Maybe I missed it. I might be an idealist, but it's more informative to say I'm a panpsychist.
My worldview is also related to ancient Idealism and Panpsychism, but I try to express those valid concepts in more modern terminology. That's because they retain a lot of historical baggage, which doesn't hold-up in light of modern science. Here's a note from my blog.
Panpsychism :
In popular usage, this term is taken to mean that even stones and atoms are conscious in the same sense that humans are. But that’s nonsense. In my theory it only means that the potential for emergent consciousness is included in the energy & information that constitutes those elementary Objects. The elementary mind-stuff eventually adds-up to self-consciousness in holistic Selves.
https://qz.com/1184574/the-idea-that-everything-from-spoons-to-stones-are-conscious-is-gaining-academic-credibility/
I part company with you there Gnomon. I think everything is conscious in exactly the same way, according one sense of the word.
Thank you for the thoughtful & polite response. I looked up Philip Goff & I think I have a bit of a handle now on what you're saying. So first I will respond to your comments - and then I will attempt to give my own somewhat incoherent thoughts on the topic.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Panpsychism in all of it's variants seems like a religion to me. Compared to most religions it seems relatively harmless - I can't see anyone going to war over it and/or threatening to kill people if they do not convert. And I can see how it might be an appealing option. But unless there is a way to test/verify these hypotheses it remains a religion of sorts. But if there were any way to verify these hypotheses - then at that point it would cease being a religion and would become - for want of a better term - scientific.
I can anticipate that your objection to this is that science is locked into a materialistic paradigm and thus is incapable of performing any such inquiries. If this is the case, then it is up to you and your fellow panpsychists to lead them in a new direction. How should we proceed to investigate these hypotheses? How should one attempt to verify that a rock has some form of consciousness?
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
So what do I think about all this?
To the best of our current knowledge, the universe is composed of atoms, sub-atomic particles, forces, etc, etc. And yet somehow, atoms can organize in such a way as to become self aware.
Hey! Look at me! I'm made of atoms!
This is truly an extraordinary thing and the more you think about it the more mind boggling it gets. How can one account for this?
My short answer? Beats the heck outta me. . . :smile:
My longer answer . . .
Humankind has been around in it's current form for, say, 40 thousand years or so. It is only in the last 400 years that we have started to understand how the universe behaves. Our knowledge base is expanding every year - we are finding new facts about reality and our abilities to explore/measure are also increasing. We likely know as much about existence as an ant crossing a football field understands about the rules of the game. Maybe a bit more. If history is any guide, it is likely that much of what we know about the universe will prove to be only partly correct under certain conditions.
If we (mankind that is) can succeed in not destroying civilization, then perhaps 100s or 1000s or millions of years from now we will get to the bottom of things (that's a metaphor of course).
As such, we must be humble and acknowledge our limitations. We are all frail fallible human beings out here.
One possibility is that the existence of conscious beings is a manifestation of some underlying principal in nature - I believe the most common way of expressing this is "emergent property". Perhaps consciousness is somehow related to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem? It strikes me a fascinating that no computer program can detect an infinite loop in another computer program yet human beings can spot them.
Alternatively, Noam Chomsky has stated that - while there is a materialistic explanation for consciousness - we human beings will never uncover it because we cannot introspect ourselves.
Perhaps in the future science will come up with a machine that can truly transfer thoughts/feelings from one person to another. I can't rule it out.
Vulcan mind meld anyone? :chin:
That is what I call the "New Age" notion of Consciousness, which it seems to equate with Spiritualism and with magical powers (e.g healing). It's essentially a religious belief system with myths about the spiritual powers of stones, that would formerly be attributed to conscious agents (shaman) in ancient religions. They sometimes adopt technical sounding terminology, like "energy", to make their myths sound scientific. I have a pretty crystal on a shelf, but I don't try to communicate with it.
My own unconventional worldview is intended to stay closer to a pragmatic scientific understanding. Which is why I prefer to use the more technical term "Information" (power to enform, to give meaning) instead of emotion-laden "consciousness" (power to know, awareness). I sometimes concede that stones --- metaphorically, not literally --- "know" their environment by exchanging energy, but that's a far cry from the kind of knowledge that humans gain by exchanging Information. So, I have to spend a lot of time trying to differentiate my own notion of Panpyschism --- which I call Enformationism --- from the New Age notion of Universal Consciousness. It's a philosophical, not religious, attitude toward the world we know & love. :nerd:
Alternative Theory of Reality : http://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page9.html
Universal Mind : http://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page12.html
Panspiritualism : http://bothandblog5.enformationism.info/page32.html
I call it the 'dictionary' notion of consciousness.
That is exactly the point of my Enformationism thesis and the BothAnd philosophy. Panpsychism probably evolved from the ancient "superstition" of Animism. The shamen & sages, who tried to explain mysterious signs of Causation in the material world, used their own personal experience of Intentional Action (agency) as a metaphor for whatever was causing inanimate things to move and change (spirits, gods).
Eventually, in the 19th century, scientists coined the impersonal term "Energy" (work; capacity for activity) to explain such abstract physical causation. Now though, in the 21st century, we have become familiar with a new usage of traditional "Information" (mind contents) to describe the even more abstract concept of Shannon Data in terms of pure mathematics. Yet, few us us are aware that Quantum Theory has applied the same word to describe natural forms of Energy, as in E = MC^2 (see below).
So, I have merely taken the term for "Mind Stuff" and "Causal Force" literally, to say that Matter, Energy & MInd are all forms of basic Information. It's that fundamental stuff (ultimately : Mathematics, Numbers or Logic) that I propose as a modern version of Panpsychism (all mind) : Enformationism means All Information. The original Singularity is envisioned as pure mathematics (algorithm, program), which evolved into generic Energy, then into Matter, and finally into Life & Mind. In which case, atoms & rocks exchange energy (numerical values; ratios), but not ideas (personal values; reasons). Consciousness is a late emergence on the cosmic scene in the form of animals with agency, and humans with moral agency. This proposed paradigm combines ancient mental models of Physics (Materialism) and Metaphysics (Spiritualism) into a comprehensive 21st century worldview. :smile:
Animism :
[i]1. the attribution of a soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena.
2. the belief in a supernatural power that organizes and animates the material universe.[/i]
Energy - Information Equivalence : https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.5123794
Information = Energy : https://physicsworld.com/a/information-converted-to-energy/
What Are Numbers? : https://science.howstuffworks.com/math-concepts/math1.htm
Information :
Knowledge and the ability to know. Technically, it's the ratio of order to disorder, of positive to negative, of knowledge to ignorance. It's measured in degrees of uncertainty. Those ratios are also called "differences". So Gregory Bateson* defined Information as "the difference that makes a difference". The latter distinction refers to "value" or "meaning". Babbage called his prototype computer a "difference engine". Difference is the cause or agent of Change. In Physics it’s called "Thermodynamics" or "Energy". In Sociology it’s called "Conflict".
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
Consciousness :
Literally : to know with. To be aware of the world subjectively (self-knowledge) and objectively (other knowing). Humans know Quanta via physical senses & analysis, and Qualia via meta-physical reasoning & synthesis. In the Enformationism thesis, Consciousness is viewed as an emergent form of basic mathematical Information.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page12.html
Conscious Crystals : It's the dictionary definition of human consciousness that is metaphorically attributed to non-human and inanimate objects. We seem to enjoy our metaphors, without regard for facts, such as cartoons with talking animals. Sponge Bob is obviously conscious and sentient.
I think the ancient metaphors of Animism were good guesses in pre-scientific times, but we now have a better understanding of how the world works, and how unique Consciousness is to living things, and Self-consciousness to reasoning things. :cool:
I believe I have a very plausible theory posted awhile back on this site as a brief essay. You can read it at this thread: Qualia and Quantum Mechanics, the Reality Possibly. Tell me what you think!
I've seen this way of thinking in many materialists like Sean Caroll, but what they don't want to admit it's that this is not a matter of gathering more information, it is a matter of principle, and in this regards, materialism has already set its final statements:
1. either consciousness do not exist
2. or physical manifestations = pain, happiness, love, etc. and absolutely nothing else.
The problem with this is that while materialists see this as a final victory, the rest of the world perceives it as a limitation of the materialistic view.
Materialism has another huge issue: it cannot explain their super-argument of emergence - they want consciousness to be made of things that have no conscious properties, but somehow, like magic, they add up and form consciousness. They try to build first person experience with things experienced within our first person experience.
Quoting EricH
Well, this is exactly the problem of materialism - anything that leaves a small open door for spirituality is automatically invalidated. Materialism is not science, it is an idelogy meant to refute absolutely anything that could somehow give a chance to spirituality.
Panpsychism has nothing to do with religion, it is more like a view of reality that makes more sense than purposeless unconscious atoms forming a purpose-driven conscious being. As Chalmers put it, ''emergence'' is like a magic word for things that we really don't understand. Indeed, panpsychism has to move fast and come up with more well-defined theories, theorems, experiments, and some proofs. I personally see panpsychism being in its infancy and very different from what it will be in 30 years from now.
Cool! I'm clearly out of date. What are the latest findings on which things are conscious?
I think it highly unlikely, but if the panpsychists can come up with some experiments & proof? That would be very cool.
But once you have theorems, experiments, and reproducible proof - then you are following the scientific method.
Yes, for now panpsychism is, in my opinion, just a proposal to people to analyze things from another perspective, it is more like an alternative appeared in a time when for an increasing number of people materialism seems to have reached its limits.
Descartes expressed his opinion that only humans are conscious, while animals only appeared to be sentient. But modern science has discovered signs of consciousness in almost all animate (self-moving) organisms. Unfortunately, we still have no way to detect consciousness directly, so we rely on inference from behavior. Even primitive bacteria seem to interact with their environment as-if they are sentient beings. But, since inanimate objects have no observable self-propelled behavior, they are presumed to be non-conscious. Therefore, it appears that Life is a necessary precursor to Mind.
I don't know why some Panpsychists believe that crystals are conscious. I suspect their beliefs are based on the common ancient notion of universal "Psychic Energy", such as Western Spirit, Chinese Chi (Qi), and Hindu Prana. Those are pre-scientific hypotheses to explain the mysteries of Life & Mind & Animation & Causation. Ironically, some modern proponents of "Vital Energy" claim that Chi is a form of electromagnetic energy, but sadly it is not detectable with EM instruments --- even though ghost hunters claim to find spurious signals on their EM devices.
Consequently, my Enformationism thesis assumes that Sentience is not a fixed property of the universe, but instead an emergent evolutionary process. My guess is that It began as something like a mathematical algorithm (information) in the pre-big-bang Singularity, and has gradually complexified over the eons into Energy, Matter, Life & MInd. If so, then we can assume that Self-Consciousness, as found in humans, is the current pinnacle of Evolution. Who knows what comes next --- artificial consciousness? Of course, this is a philosophical hypothesis, not a proven scientific theory. :nerd:
Animal Consciousness : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness
Bacteria Consciousness : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29254105/
Psychic (Vital) Energy : Qi is a pseudoscientific, unverified concept, which has never been directly observed, and is unrelated to the concept of energy used in science (vital energy itself being an abandoned scientific notion).
Chi : https://universalenergyarts.com/chi/
I'm intrigued. What are the "signs" that "modern science" has discovered with regard to consciousness in non-human organisms?
I should make it clear that I don't doubt that non-human organisms are capable of consciousness, I just wasn't aware that there were any scientific criteria by which consciousness could be detected in any organism.
As I said before, in physical Science, the "signs" of consciousness are limited to overt behavior, which must be interpreted by analogy to the activities of conscious humans. For example, in mice, intentional behavior must be discriminated from automatic or reflexive actions. But some minimal level of consciousness has been assumed in vegetative or comatose humans, even when they are unable to make voluntary movements.
So, in recent years, neurologists have been using a variety of brain scans looking for indications of consciousness in the electrical activity of the brain. That still requires a lot of guessing and interpretation. So they are using artificial intelligence to spot consistent patterns that signify subliminal awareness. That is a big step toward detecting Consciously directly. But in my thesis, Mind is a highly-evolved intentional form of physical Energy (EnFormAction), which we still can only detect by its effects on physical objects. EnFormAction is the power to Inform, to Transform, to cause Change in both Matter and Minds. :nerd:
Signs of Consciousness : https://www.scientificamerican.com/gallery/searching-for-signs-of-consciousness/
Coma Consciousness : https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/new-test-can-detect-hidden-consciousness-in-coma-patients
Energy :
Scientists define “energy” as the ability to do work, but don't know what energy is. They assume it's an eternal causative force that existed prior to the Big Bang, along with mathematical laws. Energy is a positive or negative relationship between things, and physical Laws are limitations on the push & pull of those forces. So, all they know is what Energy does, which is to transform material objects in various ways. Energy itself is amorphous & immaterial. So if you reduce energy to its essence of information, it seems more akin to mind than matter.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
If I understand correctly, the 'consciousness' you're talking about (assumptions based on neural activity) is not the same as the philosophical sense of consciousness (as in the 'hard problem' and p-zombies).
Thanks, that's good. Inference from behaviour is an interesting way to resist panpsychism and has some force. This line of thought leads to possible issues of overdetermination. A narrow examination of this argument by analogy with humans would be worth a thread of its own I think.
Quoting Gnomon
Indeed, that appears to be the case.
Quoting Gnomon
I'd need more information to understand this properly. Do you think consciousness is identical with a certain kind of information processing?
Yes. The links I referred to are talking about scientifically observable signs of consciousness. Philosophical Consciousness is not observable via the senses, but hypothetical via reasoning. The basic concept of Consciousness is simply awareness of the environment : Sentience. But theologians & philosophers have posited a variety of shades of mental activity --- sensation, thought, feelings, inner-source-of-truth, conscience, etc --- with Self-consciousness at the top of the hierarchy. But, at this moment, no one is certain of what makes the difference between Conscious and Non-conscious beings. My own theory is that Consciousness is an emergent property of energized matter (living organisms), and that abstract Information is common to all phases of sensing & knowing. :smile:
Consciousness : The problem of consciousness is arguably the central issue in current theorizing about the mind. Despite the lack of any agreed upon theory of consciousness, there is a widespread, if less than universal, consensus that an adequate account of mind requires a clear understanding of it and its place in nature. We need to understand both what consciousness is and how it relates to other, nonconscious, aspects of reality.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/
Sentience : the capacity to feel, perceive or experience subjectively. Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel.
https://speakingofresearch.com/2019/08/26/what-is-sentience/
Yes & no. It's not that simple. In order to understand my theory of Consciousness, you'd need to start with a fundamental "fact" discovered by Quantum theorists : that matter, energy, & mind are all emergent forms of mathematical Information. That's my summation of the concept, but few scientists have made that connection. Paul Davies, physicist & cosmologist, is one of those few, who conceive a new paradigm of Science based on expanded Information theory. As for my personal worldview, it is expressed as a non-academic thesis in my website : Enformationism. As a new paradigm, though, it will puzzle or offend both Materialists and Spiritualists. :joke:
Paul Davies : What is Information? "the primary stuff, out of which the physical world is built".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7EjwUp5krY
What is physical Information? : "photons & Information are the same thing"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or8Rktj_HA4
Enformationism : http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/page2%20Welcome.html