Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

MrFlibble wrote:

Leto Atreides II wrote:

MrFlibble wrote:What's your definition of "consciousness", then?

Awareness. Not merely to see, but to be aware of seeing.

So "awareness" = 'knowledge of oneself'? How do you define "knowledge"?

SandChigger wrote:

Leto Atreides II wrote:The brain may store data and intelligence, it may compute and think, but I do not believe a brain generates awareness or consciousness.

A Thing of Eternity wrote:

SandChigger wrote:

Leto Atreides II wrote:The brain may store data and intelligence, it may compute and think, but I do not believe a brain generates awareness or consciousness.

Yeah, I'm with Chig, having to add come kind of "magic" to the equation (souls) just because we're to egotistical to admit that we are just fleshy computers is BS. There is no soul. I feel completely confident that one we have the brain all mapped out and understood it will explain every inch of what we consider consciousness.

But - if you don't believe that a brain creates consciousness then of course you don't believe machines could ever be conscious. I'm not going to argue with you on that because you obviously have decided as thoroughly as I oppose the idea that consciousness requires the supernatural.

Leto Atreides II wrote:

A Thing of Eternity wrote:

SandChigger wrote:

Leto Atreides II wrote:The brain may store data and intelligence, it may compute and think, but I do not believe a brain generates awareness or consciousness.

Yeah, I'm with Chig, having to add come kind of "magic" to the equation (souls) just because we're to egotistical to admit that we are just fleshy computers is BS. There is no soul. I feel completely confident that one we have the brain all mapped out and understood it will explain every inch of what we consider consciousness.

But - if you don't believe that a brain creates consciousness then of course you don't believe machines could ever be conscious. I'm not going to argue with you on that because you obviously have decided as thoroughly as I oppose the idea that consciousness requires the supernatural.

Supernatural? Magic? I'm talking about energy. This is no more magical or supernatural than electrons, protons, quarks, microwaves or radio waves. Even our fleshly bodies ultimately reduce to charges of energy; why should the consciousness principle be any different?

SandChigger wrote:Exactly. It's religion, not science.

Show me your "soul" or shut up about it, because if you can't prove its existence empirically, it's irrelevant to any practical discussion.

A Thing of Eternity wrote:Sounds like a good ol' pantheist, my favourite kind of theist!

Leto Atreides II wrote:And yet life without awareness would be a mechanical (chemical) process. A carbon-based organism could easily go through a set of motions which preserved its physical integrity, without being aware of anything.

Aquila ka-Hecate wrote:But for now I leave my options open as to the question of how (never mind why) a collection of meat becomes reflexively self aware

Why should it seem so obvious to most people that mind and body are two, not one? One important reason is that our lived experience itself reinforces an apparently inescapable dualistic view of mind versus body. We don't have to work to ignore the working of our bodies. On the contrary, our bodies hide themselves from us in their very acts of making meaning and experience possible.
[...]
For example, our acts of seeing are directed toward and focused on what we see. Our intentionality seems to be directed "out there" into the world. The mechanisms of our vision are not, and cannot be, the focus of our awareness and attention. We are aware of what we see, but not of our seeing. The bodily processes hide, in order to make it possible our fluid, automatic experiencing of the world.
[...]
In addition to focal disappearance of our perceptual organs, there is also a necessary "background disappearance" of other processes and activities that make perception possible, processes of which we are seldom, if ever, aware. This includes such things as the complex of bodily adjustments and movements that make it possible for a certain perception to occur. [...] When I reach out to pick a cup, I am not aware of the multitude of fine motor adjustments or the ongoing cooperation of hand and eye that make it possible for me to locate and touch the handle of the cup.
[...]
Another major type of bodily disappearance is based on the recession of the internal organs and processes throughout nearly all of our experience. [...] [T]hese systems underlie some of our most powerful experiences, even though we are almost never aware of their operations, and some are simply inaccessible to conscious awareness. To cite just one salient example, our emotional experience depends on complex neuronal and endocrine processes, although we typically cannot have a felt awareness of those processes. The result is that we feel a feeling, but we never feel out internal organs generating that feeling.
[...]
In short, the body does its marvelous work for the most part behind the scenes, so that we can focus on the objects of our desire and attention.
[...]
The principal result of these forms of bodily disappearance is our sense that our thoughts, and even our feelings, go on somehow independent of our bodily processes.

A Thing of Eternity wrote:consciousness arises from the computer that is our brain, patterning energy into our minds.

MrFlibble wrote:Apparently, "awareness" and "consciousness" turned out to be the developments that are beneficial to adaptation and survival.

Hunchback Jack wrote:Yeah, I see things the same way. If you believe that self-awareness, or consciousness, or sentience, are purely a by-product of the electro-chemical processes occurring in our brain (which I do), then I think it's inevitable that we will create a machine that will replicate that. Provided we don't destroy ourselves first, of course. (See Sagan)

Of course, whether we can actually tell whether what we've created is *really* self-aware is another matter. (See Turing)

HBJ

SadisticCynic wrote:Personally I quite like some of Penrose's (somewhat extreme I'll admit) speculation that physics may ultimately be non-computational.

MrFlibble wrote:

A Thing of Eternity wrote:consciousness arises from the computer that is our brain, patterning energy into our minds.

Just o make things clear, does this imply that you agree with the "string AI" hypothesis that an artificial mind can be built using the same principles as modern computers? Or was the phrase "the computer that is our brain" purely metaphorical?

SadisticCynic wrote:MrFlibble: I'll get a look at Searle's article later (I need more time than I have right now) but I do recall Penrose mentioning his 'Chinese Room' argument. Unfortunately I think Dennett makes a good point in his (irritatingly named) Consciousness Explained that the man in the machine of Searle's thought experiment does not constitute the entirety of the machine itself and thus does not necessarily demonstrate that the apparently conscious machine is not conscious. A similar example would be saying that the amygdala (first part of the brain that came to mind) is conscious because it processes isome of the information in the brain - I think...

I. The systems reply (Berkeley). "While it is true that the individual person who is locked in the room does not understand the story, the fact is that he is merely part of a whole system, and the system does understand the story. The person has a large ledger in front of him in which are written the rules, he has a lot of scratch paper and pencils for doing calculations, he has 'data banks' of sets of Chinese symbols. Now, understanding is not being ascribed to the mere individual; rather it is being ascribed to this whole system of which he is a part."

My response to the systems theory is quite simple: let the individual internalize all of these elements of the system. He memorizes the rules in the ledger and the data banks of Chinese symbols, and he does all the calculations in his head. The individual then incorporates the entire system. There isn't anything at all to the system that he does not encompass. We can even get rid of the room and suppose he works outdoors. All the same, he understands nothing of the Chinese, and a fortiori neither does the system, because there isn't anything in the system that isn't in him. If he doesn't understand, then there is no way the system could understand because the system is just a part of him.

Actually I feel somewhat embarrassed to give even this answer to the systems theory because the theory seems to me so implausible to start with. The idea is that while a person doesn't understand Chinese, somehow the conjunction of that person and bits of paper might understand Chinese. It is not easy for me to imagine how someone who was not in the grip of an ideology would find the idea at all plausible. Still, I think many people who are committed to the ideology of strong AI will in the end be inclined to say something very much like this; so let us pursue it a bit further. According to one version of this view, while the man in the internalized systems example doesn't understand Chinese in the sense that a native Chinese speaker does (because, for example, he doesn't know that the story refers to restaurants and hamburgers, etc.), still "the man as a formal symbol manipulation system" really does understand Chinese. The subsystem of the man that is the formal symbol manipulation system for Chinese should not be confused with the subsystem for English.

So there are really two subsystems in the man; one understands English, the other Chinese, and "it's just that the two systems have little to do with each other." But, I want to reply, not only do they have little to do with each other, they are not even remotely alike. The subsystem that understands English (assuming we allow ourselves to talk in this jargon of "subsystems" for a moment) knows that the stories are about restaurants and eating hamburgers, he knows that he is being asked questions about restaurants and that he is answering questions as best he can by making various inferences from the content of the story, and so on. But the Chinese system knows none of this. Whereas the English subsystem knows that "hamburgers" refers to hamburgers, the Chinese subsystem knows only that "squiggle squiggle" is followed by "squoggle squoggle." All he knows is that various formal symbols are being introduced at one end and manipulated according to rules written in English, and other symbols are going out at the other end.

The whole point of the original example was to argue that such symbol manipulation by itself couldn't be sufficient for understanding Chinese in any literal sense because the man could write "squoggle squoggle" after "squiggle squiggle" without understanding anything in Chinese. And it doesn't meet that argument to postulate subsystems within the man, because the subsystems are no better off than the man was in the first place; they still don't have anything even remotely like what the English-speaking man (or subsystem) has. Indeed, in the case as described, the Chinese subsystem is simply a part of the English subsystem, a part that engages in meaningless symbol manipulation according to rules in English.

A Thing of Eternity wrote:"the computer that is our brain" was a metaphor, reminding people that our brain computes things, and is not a magical device.