Fear of death.

is ilx conscious

it's pretty self-conscious, i've noticed.

and accept that awareness is the modeling of another state

I do not accept this.

what's an acceptable litmus test for awareness then?

A map is the modelling of a geographic state. Or software modelling a weather system if you want a dynamic example. Are either of those aware? We're talking apples and oranges here. How do I recognise it? God knows! My experience of aware systems is limited to one.

i'd argue those things are as aware as a human is on those subjects, and probably more reliable. the map, though, being static, is as aware as a dead human. but if you put a pushpin on it, it's resurrected.

the problem with defining "consciousness" is that its only real defining characteristic is self-awareness, and self-awareness is something that can only be apprehended subjectively, by the self-aware consciousness. of course, we can perceive secondhand evidence of consciousness in the behavior and communication of others, but our fundamental sense of it - what human consciousness is and does - remains inseparable from self-awareness.

i reject, however, the idea that because we cannot materially define or identify consciousness, it is therefore premature or otherwise unjustified to say that human consciousness is produced and sustained by - and in a sense resides in - the human brain. the human brain seems, among other things, to be a consciousness-generating mechanism. though we do not now exactly how the brain generates the self-aware awareness we call consciousness, we have sufficient evidence, i think, to say that it does in fact do this.

we can also say with some degree of certainty that the state of human consciousness is affected by the state of the human brain. consciousness does not seem to preexist the brain. as the brain develops, so does consciousness. activity within this or that part of the brain typically corresponds in a predictable fashion with this or that conscious state. when we damage the brain, we run a substantial risk of damaging (or at least affecting) consciousness. when we extinguish the brain, we seem to extinguish consciousness.

we do not need to be able to measure or even fully define consciousness to understand the relationship of mind to brain and to understand, too, what this implies about the durability of human consciousness.

paragraph 2: "though we do not know exactly how the brain generates the self-aware awareness..."

"self-awareness is something that can only be apprehended subjectively, by the self-aware consciousness."

i'm not sure, but i think techniques have existed for awhile now to capture how the brain models one's sense of self at least on a very rough level. I bet at some point 'self-awareness' will pass from a philosophical question to commonplace legally admissible evidence of guilt/innocence based on some kind of brain scan w/r/t say like intent to murder. You could show, for example, that you were actually "out of yourself" when chopping up someone.

the qualia of pain, i think, is way tricker to nail down than self-awareness, which seems easy peezy. is a lobster self-aware seems like a way easier question to answer than if it feels pain if you boil it.

not so sure abt that. pain is simply the awareness of a certain type of neural stimulus. nerves of this kind send signals to that part of the brain, and we get the sensation of pain. shouldn't be too hard to measure.

not sure what you mean by "techniques have existed for awhile now to capture how the brain models one's sense of self at least on a very rough level." i don't know of any such techniques or technologies. we can capture sense data (as when the signals sent by an eye are processed to create an image of what the eye sees), but that's a much simpler thing than the sense of self.

there's a bit about capturing activity "grandmother neurons" i.e. specific areas that fire up in recognition of your grandmother. stuff like that. pain really seems much more subjective than awareness though. you can demonstrably mediate people's experience of pain while still showing that the stimulus mechanisms haven't also been mediated. I don't know if you can do that with self-awareness.

what are you talking about?

we can't capture sense data!

MRI, blood flow stuff, sticking electrodes into people's heads and zapping, that kind of thing. also the drugs, weird inhibition with magnet stuff.
maybe there will be a commercial ego-blaster on the market some day where you can have a vacation from self-awareness by zapping a specific area.

there was a cool thing going around where they reconstructed people's dreams from their prior activations according to exposure to youtube clips.

i'd argue those things are as aware as a human is on those subjects, and probably more reliable. the map, though, being static, is as aware as a dead human. but if you put a pushpin on it, it's resurrected.

my first thought was "this is ridiculous!" but then i remembered that i'd said maybe a rock can be conscious, so idk anymore. but no-one knows anything about consciousness outside their own experience, despite what they claim, so saying idk is ok by me, in fact i should say thanks for shaking me out of whatever complacent position i'd settled in to.

maybe this is just a linguistic quirk, but there's a qualia of consciousness that is as problematic as the qualia of pain I don't think the qualia of consciousness has much to do with whether an entity is conscious or not, but pain is pretty much all qualia.

uh

what

?

we can't capture sense data!

sure we can, in a manner of speaking. we can measure the electrical activity in a cat's thalamus and from that data generate video imagery of what the cat is seeing. that's the capture of sense data in the sense i mean.

that's not true

i imagine you're talking about something like this

http://www.pcworld.com/article/240562/scientists_read_minds_sort_of_reconstruct_images_from_brain_scans.html

the key part there is the "sort of"

hey look guys, this is what a supernova looks like

http://gothstore.piratemerch.com/images/joy-division.jpg

i call bullshit, those are the misty mountains

i see mickey mouse ears

http://corecanvas.s3.amazonaws.com/theonering-0188db0e/gallery/original/misty_mountains.gif

the map is not the territory son

http://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf

clicked on that, lived up to my current dn, clicked out

this is getting into that question of "what is blue"

sure you and i can both like look at one 400 nm light source and another 400 nm light source and say "yeah that's the color of the ocean, the sky and charlize theron's eyes" but that doesn't prove we're seeing "the same thing"

Say a robot hired as a security guard has an internal representation of the house getting burgled, but does nothing about it (for some reason this robot has free will). I'm gonna sue that robot, and I'm gonna win, because I can show conclusively it was aware of the house getting burgled, and we don't need to know what it's like to be a robot thinking about things to do it.

but say i get so mad, I dump oatmeal all over the robot. the robot wants to sue me for pain caused by oatmeal. how is it gonna convince people it felt pain?

xp, one of my favourite mindtwisty topics that one

robot must prove a strong enough dislike of/aversion to oatmeal, or demonstrate damage or injury caused by oatmeal dump (possible that development of an aversion to oatmeal/fear of oatmeal as a result of stress of incident could serve for this? consider further- get one of the interns to look into this.)

there's a bit about capturing activity "grandmother neurons" i.e. specific areas that fire up in recognition of your grandmother. stuff like that. pain really seems much more subjective than awareness though. you can demonstrably mediate people's experience of pain while still showing that the stimulus mechanisms haven't also been mediated. I don't know if you can do that with self-awareness.

― Philip Nunez, Thursday, July 12, 2012 12:47 PM (3 hours ago)

the mechanisms by which the brain attaches images and words to complex constructs like personhood (since we were speaking of grandmother neurons) are very poorly understood at this point, and would only provide the most rudimentary accounting of how we construct and experience "selfhood" even if we understood them fully. relative to pain, selfhood seems very poorly understood and defined.

what do you mean by "mediate"?

there are a lot of pain threshold tests (like how long you can leave your hands in cold water) where you can prolong times by distractions, priming, etc...

that's not true

...i imagine you're talking about something like this

http://www.pcworld.com/article/240562/scientists_read_minds_sort_of_reconstruct_images_from_brain_scans.html

the key part there is the "sort of"

― the late great, Thursday, July 12, 2012 4:08 PM (15 minutes ago)

it most certainly is true. i was talking about this, but i accept your substitution. in saying that "we can capture sense data," i'm not saying that we can capture it perfectly. the images we can generate based on the brain's activity are, at this point, rather crude, but given that it's an infant technology, i think they're surprisingly good.

"selfhood seems very poorly understood and defined."
it doesn't need to be understood, really. it does need to be restricted to maybe a less culturally specific definition. for example, if you're driving, your somatic self-representation likely includes the car, too.

yeah, i agree about that part. we don't need to be able to describe, quantify or measure self-aware consciousness to functionally understand it.

going back quite a few posts, i was objecting to your suggestions that we can currently capture the brain's modeling of human selfhood and that pain is less well understood than self awareness, but i don't know that there's anything to be gained by hammering away at those points.

"we don't need to be able to describe, quantify or measure ... to functionally understand it"

just humor me and fill in the blank with something that makes sense that is unrelated to mind / consciousness / metaphysics / etc

mind you i'm just saying consciousness is up there w/ the big bang as one of the great black boxes of science

there's all kinds of experiments where people who were asked to imagine certain actions activated the same parts of the brain as when they were recorded doing the actual activity. so in a very real sense, modeling is synonymous with experience, and if that's the only activity that's going on in the brain, we can make the leap that modeling is also synonymous with awareness, without having to understand the underlying details of how it happens, or how to interpret people's subjective experience of it.

pain, on the other hand, requires such an interpretation.
we can show that a plant or any other black-box is aware of something by its measurable responses, but whether a celery stalk experiences pain in the pete singer ethical boundary sense is an open question.

i think where i get off the boat is when you say "experience"

i mean okay when you flex your arm you have the same electrical impulses in the same region of your brain as when you imagine flexing your arm, but someone could also zap that part of your brain with an electrode while you're unconscious and make your arm flex, does that imply that you experience or imagine your arm flexing?

also i think a lot of people would argue that awareness is synonymous with subjective experience, not with modeling

just humor me and fill in the blank with something that makes sense that is unrelated to mind / consciousness / metaphysics / etc

food, gravity, fire, internal combustion, magnets, machine language, etc. on a practical, day-to-day level, we can understand and deal with most of the shit we encounter in life without much understanding of the science involved. we can even draw useful philosophical and quasi-scientific conclusions from this position of relative ignorance. sure, sometimes you get fooled into thinking that ghosts and bad humors cause disease, but invisible air-monsters sort of make that one a trick question.

um, but we describe and measure and quantify those things all of the time?

"but someone could also zap that part of your brain with an electrode while you're unconscious and make your arm flex"

there's likely a separate mechanism for actuating the arm. (when you're asleep, there's some inhibitory thing that's supposed to keep you immobile, but doesn't always work.) but yah if you zap the right part, you should be made aware of it. at least at the time. there's also this mechanism that makes you forget stuff (why you don't remember dreams often).

is there a neurosurgeon we could invite here? could probably explain things better than me going "this thingybob" and "that doohicky" when referring to how brain worky. i get the feeling though with all the pharmaceuticals going around for mood ailments, half the population should be amateur neuroscientists.

there's all kinds of experiments where people who were asked to imagine certain actions activated the same parts of the brain as when they were recorded doing the actual activity. so in a very real sense, modeling is synonymous with experience, and if that's the only activity that's going on in the brain, we can make the leap that modeling is also synonymous with awareness, without having to understand the underlying details of how it happens, or how to interpret people's subjective experience of it.

yeah, no, we can't really make that leap, i don't think. it's interesting that the same areas of the brain are involved with thinking about a thing and doing that thing, but this does not mean that "modeling is synonymous with experience". it merely means that the brain is efficient. (fwiw, i personally think that modeling IS synonymous with experience, but that's beside the point.) even if we could confidently say that "modeling is also synonymous with awareness", we haven't really come any closer to "capturing" the sense or qualia of self-awareness. instead, we have merely established a chain of mechanical equivalencies.

the subjective experience of pain, after all, is just one tiny aspect of the subjective experience of life-in-toto. why should it be harder to establish the presence of pain, a tiny blip in experience, than it is to establish continuous self-aware awareness of the sort that notices pain? (and pleasure, and hunger, and horniness, and the color red, and that face, etc.)

we can say that the lobster experience neural activity in response to trauma. we can say that the lobster exhibits aversion behavior to the source of the stimuli that trigger the neural activity. we can't of course say what the lobster subjectively feels, but not can we say anything about what anyone or thing subjectively experiences. and the entirety of selfhood is subjectivity.

um, but we describe and measure and quantify those things all of the time?

― the late great, Thursday, July 12, 2012 5:27 PM (9 minutes ago)

we are now able to describe and measure many things that we once could not. and there yet remain things we can't describe or measure. i'll admit that consciousness is rather unique in being completely self-evident, yet largely hidden from science, but consciousness is unique in lots of ways.

We're pouring oatmeal on robots in this thread because each argument someone makes has the next person pointing out one little section that isn't really the point and I've lost track of who here thinks that a spirit will continue and leave their body with some preservation of their brain functions in tact after they die, and why they think this miracle happens to a thinking mind but nothing else in physics.