Fear of death.

xp Not a belief, it's concentrated in stuff like determinism.

sorry, not a lot of belief, there.

I just came across this article by Strawson quite by chance, in which he argues, honestly and somewhat wittily, for *real* physicalism, whereby the physical phenomena are sufficient to explain experiential phenomena. Of course any regular physicalist will claim they can do that, but the usual strategy is either to dispense with the experiential entirely (e.g. Dennett) or to lean heavily on the notion of emergence. He dispenses with both of those (of course the first is barely worth considering), and concludes that in order to be a *real* physicalist one has to realise that the basic stuff of physics must have experiential properties. This is, he admits, panpsychism by another name. It's the clearest statement I've read yet of the position I've been groping towards myself.

http://faculty.unlv.edu/beiseckd/Courses/PHIL-352/Dave%20-%20Consciousness%20PDFs/Strawson%20-%20Realistic%20Monism%20and%20Replies/Strawson%20-%20Realistic%20Monism%20Why%20Physicalism%20Entails%20Panpsychism.pdf

There is belief in science too, a whole LOT of belief.

well, there's belief in everything. science, afaic, is a method, a process, a tool. i believe (ahem) that the scientific method, carefully applied, is a self-validating tool - i believe that it proves its own utility.

at a sufficient level of remove, this belief is, of course, like all beliefs, "just a belief". but that godlike level of remove encourages parallel fatuities like "anything is possible" and "nothing really means anything," so it's best to spend as little time there as possible. in the pragmatic here and now, there are obvious differences between the slow search for information via the scientific method and the willy-nilly manufacturing of capital-T Truth by other means.

The only point on consciousness I find particularly interesting in this context is that spiritual believers seem to resist that it is a product of the mind, and isn't produced when the mind is inactive. Any uncertainty of how consciousness works is at least framed within that basic concept.

Like if you thought of a store as a brain, and it was constantly adjusting prices, moving around inventory, restocking areas, cleaning, bustling employees that make store related actions, and then assumed once that store was out of business that all of that specific store's inner functions kept happening for eternity afterwards or just without purpose, why would you think that?

You may have no understanding of the inner functions, but you frame it all with the idea that they stop when the store stops.

The scientific method is a self-validating tool because it never arrives at an exact answer, things can always been changed, new paradigm shifts can occur, old beliefs can be tossed out in favor of new and more accurate results. Science deals with approximations that change over time, so there is no risk ever in being proven wrong. Because proving things wrong is part of the process! There is often no capital-T truth for all time declared.

People don't give religion this leeway. They say it is wrong because it should be the capital-T truth and the flaws in doctrine are all examples why the whole thing is irrelevant. But how else are you supposed to explore the indescribable but through approximation and metaphor?

No when the store stops they all get new jobs at different stores.

i would like to see some conversation between the "great headway" amateurist describes contemporary neuroscience as having made and ledge's "recent science hasn't made one iota of progress in explaining subjective awareness

I think we're just talking about different things. Amateurist is (correct me if I'm wrong) talking about the neural correlates of consciousness, what goes on in the brain when we are aware and experiencing. And sure great strides have been made there, although there's still a long way to go. But exactly how awareness, private personal subjective experiential awareness, arises out of all that, well that's still as great a mystery as it ever was.

i'm probably being thick here, but i don't understand why people consider consciousness to be such a terrible "problem". we are aware as certain other forms of life seem to be aware. while we don't understand the origin point of this kind of awareness in the evolution of cognitive capacity (the means by which a biological input-output mechanism might acquire consciousness), it does seem likely that our awareness is the product of cognitive complexity. the limitations of our knowledge here parallel our inability to fully understand and/or replicate the point at which the components of an electrochemical soup might acquire the quality of self-sustaining life. despite this, i think we can say with some confidence that life exists in the material world and that it did emerge from non-life. similarly, despite the fact that we can't fully define or describe consciousness, it seems to me that we have every reason to think that it is a material process residing in the material world, like life and like everything else.

Adam: The employees in the store are only relevant in the analogy in regard to their inner store functions. Plus, all of those functions in the store attribute to the consciousness, so it can only be maintained when the parts are together.

[to my own xp]

^ not that any of this is certain, mind. it's simply the most reasonable default position, given what we seem to know.

No when the store stops they all get new jobs at different stores.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Friday, July 13, 2012 12:33 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And the only real way you could link this to the analogy is if you say the energy within a living brain is separately redistributed back into the universe.

The scientific method is a self-validating tool because it never arrives at an exact answer, things can always been changed, new paradigm shifts can occur, old beliefs can be tossed out in favor of new and more accurate results. Science deals with approximations that change over time, so there is no risk ever in being proven wrong. Because proving things wrong is part of the process! There is often no capital-T truth for all time declared.

People don't give religion this leeway. They say it is wrong because it should be the capital-T truth and the flaws in doctrine are all examples why the whole thing is irrelevant. But how else are you supposed to explore the indescribable but through approximation and metaphor?

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Friday, July 13, 2012 9:32 AM (14 minutes ago)

sure, i accept that. i wasn't faulting religion, simply making the case that science is a method of investigation more than a body of doctrine, though it's grounded in certain precepts. i meant to oppose a nihilism that equates all forms of belief with one another.

contenderizer you've been brilliantly eloquent this whole time.

i think we can say with some confidence that life exists in the material world and that it did emerge from non-life. similarly, despite the fact that we can't fully define or describe consciousness, it seems to me that we have every reason to think that it is a material process residing in the material world, like life and like everything else

but conscious experience is utterly unlike anything else in the natural world! It is a completely different kind. One can see how life can emerge from or be reducible to purely physical properties, assuming the usual definitions of growth, reproduction, adaptation, stimuli response, etc. I'm genuinely flabbergasted that anyone can blithely say the same of consciousness. How does experience reduce to physical properties?

what are you talking about when you say conscious experience? You can obliterate parts of experience that people used to think were indivisible by slicing the brain in half.

People don't give religion this leeway. They say it is wrong because it should be the capital-T truth and the flaws in doctrine are all examples why the whole thing is irrelevant.

I . . . think many religions claim for themselves to be the capital-T Truth?

xp I'm talking about subjective, phenomenal, personal, private, aware experience. Need I say any more? We all know what conscious experience *is like*, even if we can't necessarily describe it or deconstruct it into more amenable components. I wouldn't know what a split-brain patient feels without becoming one myself - and there's the problem! Of what purely physical object or process would you ever say "I couldn't possibly know what that is without becoming it myself"?

i know what a linguistically modulated experience is like. other than that it's just a stream of incoherence that i can't say is privileged over whatever I'd imagine an ant experiences. (or even a rock)

(in fact this is what is disturbing about the reports from split-brain patients -- that so much of what we would like to think of as an integral, coherent consciousness is mostly autonomic muck)

but conscious experience is utterly unlike anything else in the natural world! It is a completely different kind.

i'm not sure that this is true. to the conscious mind, consciousness seems special, but this seeming is not necessarily proof of anything but how things seem. or rather that things seem. i think it's likely that awareness of the sort we experience is not something that simply IS or IS-NOT, but rather is something that accretes gradually as certain types of intelligence develop or evolve. i wonder how large a role self-awareness plays in the development of consciousness - not merely to know things, but to know what one knows and how one came to know it, to know not only the world, but oneself in it. it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that something like conscious self-awareness might develop in bits and pieces out of such knowings, out of recursive layers of self-knowledge.

i guess we have to ask at this point whether "awareness" is anything but a kind of information processing. it might be, but i don't see any compelling reason to suppose so. its quality of "seeming" seems unique and possibly non-physical to us, but i expect that this kind of awareness is really just information processing. in fact, the insistence that consciousness must be a thing of a super-special sort strikes me as odd.

i guess i mean that a mechanism (biological or otherwise) that experiences the first faint, super-primitive glimmerings of conscious awareness does not necessarily contain any special kind of energy or matter that a similar but non-conscious machine would lack.

the presence of awareness does not require the introduction of a new "stuff of awareness" or "energy of awareness" into the system. rather, "awareness" is simply a way of describing a particular arrangement of what's already there.

xp

Adult human consciousness is super-special only in terms of its extreme complexity. The obvious difference between adult human consciousness and infant consciousness suggests the degree to which what we experience within our conscious mind is extremely contingent on post-natal experience and cannot in any way be separated from it. This grounds consciousness decisively in the material world, imo. It can seem to emerge somehow out of the nebulous mists of selfhood because of all we forget and all we ignore.

I have no problem with a gradual accretion of awareness, but there has to be stuff to accrete and I just don't see how matter (as we normally consider it) can be that stuff, for me the conceptual gap between the physical and the mental is just too great. They are just different logical kinds. That you don't share that view, well I guess nothing remains but to gaze uncomprehendingly through the glass at each other. xp.

we get into trouble, i think, when we treat our own, fantastically complex and multilayered adult awareness as the default example of what "awareness" is. this is like treating a jet fighter as the default example of "mode of transportation". how could such a thing just come to exist? what precedent for it is there elsewhere in the natural world? neither thing just came to exist. both are the product of millennia of development and refinement. both echo ancestors so primitive we could hardly recognize the one in the other.

and aimless otm. even in humans, conscious awareness seems to develop more than simply exist. though, of course, it's impossible to say for certain...

I don't think that is the problem! No serious student of philosophy of mind would assume human consciousness just winked into existence.

I have no problem with a gradual accretion of awareness, but there has to be stuff to accrete and I just don't see how matter (as we normally consider it) can be that stuff, for me the conceptual gap between the physical and the mental is just too great.

i view the stuff in question as information, or rather as information-processing systems/patterns/whatever. information isn't really "matter" per se, but it is encoded materially, and it's in the action and interaction of the material involved that the processing takes place.

And I agree that consciousness is "grounded" in the brain, I don't subscribe to free-floating mental phenomena. But mental events are not identical with or reducible to physical ones, and calling them emergent doesn't get you any further. But I'm just repeating myself now.

xp, that seems to be begging the question, or putting the cart before the horse, or something. To call something 'information' assumes a thinking, aware subject, not vice versa.

I don't think that is the problem! No serious student of philosophy of mind would assume human consciousness just winked into existence.

i wonder. when reduced to its minimal essence, what is awareness? what is the least thing that might qualify? could awareness lack a sense of self, a sense even of will? probably. could it lack language, emotion and memory? perhaps. since we can't really know any awareness but our own, we can only speculate about other sorts. it's possible that plants and even computers are aware in ways we can't perceive. and it doesn't require that we bring any new stuff to our existing conceptions of these things. at least not so far as i can see. to process is to be at least theoretically capable of awareness.

To call something 'information' assumes a thinking, aware subject, not vice versa.

A sunflower can respond to sunlight by turning toward the sun. The sunlight provides the plant with the information about which direction to turn. I presume you accept this as proof that sunflowers are both thinking and aware. It makes reasonable sense to me to extend these definitions to cover this case, but I am not sure this is how you meant it.

To call something 'information' assumes a thinking, aware subject, not vice versa.

i am not sure that this is true. imagine a simple organism that can sense light and move towards it through a fluid medium. it's constructed to remain in the warmer, oxygen and life-rich top layers of the ocean. though it is not "aware" in any conscious sense (i invented it, so i get to decide), it is able to gather information about its environment and respond accordingly. the information it gathers is pretty much limited to "where's the light at", but that's sufficient for its purposes.

in that creature is a switchboard that coordinates light-sensing and the actions by which it moves in the direction of the light it's sensed. this switchboard isn't really a "brain" yet, and doesn't need to think or feel. it just does a certain thing under a certain condition, on or off. over time, as the creature evolves and becomes more complex, it acquires new senses and new behavior routines that are triggered under this or that condition. it takes in and processes a lot more information about its surroundings, but still doesn't need or have awareness ... up to a point.

at some point maybe it does begin to become aware, but this is long after it has begun to process information (evolutionarily speaking).

I disagree, I think that to call it information - light = 'good', dark = 'bad', say - and not just mechanical stimulus response, requires a kind of awareness, a capacity to ascribe meaning, albeit at the simplest possible level imaginable. And yes I would be happy to ascribe that kind of awareness to that creature.

Ultimately information requires a conscious observer to ascribe meaning, otherwise it's all just mechanical patterns of dancing particles. Saying that your proto creature is not aware just pushes the problem higher up the chain - the problem of where this magical meaning-ascribing entity comes from.

if this amoeba can negotiate a maze to get to food, i'd say it was aware in a minimal but meaningful sense. it had to have constructed an internal mental model of the maze. (i.e. not just stimulus response)

well, we could say that the creature is or isn't "aware" in a conscious sense. you seem to be sticking the smallest unit of awareness to a primitive emotion or desire ("light = 'good', dark = 'bad', say"), which seems reasonable, if not the only reasonable way we might break it down.

my point was that viewed from outside, the creature is gathering "information" about its environment whether or not it is aware. i do not think that information gathering of this sort requires awareness. it only requires an environment, a mechanism by which some aspect of that environment can be measured, a biological "goal", and a responsive action that is environment-dependent and seeks to satisfy the goal. whether or not the creature is aware, its relationship to its environment and its biological goal remains the same, so i think it's appropriate to use the phrase "information gathering" in either case.

i guess i'm using a three-tiered system to talk about cognition: non-congnition, non-conscious information processing, and conscious information processing. rocks seem to be non-cognitive, simple organisms and computers seem to be non-conscious information processing systems (though we can't say for sure what is or isn't conscious in some way), and complex organisms process information in a conscious fashion. you're using a two-tiered system in which there's no cognition and conscious cognition, and information only belongs to the latter.

The intermediate step toward more complex consciousness is the development of a memory mechanism. That's where computers reside.

i'd argue that's the final step.

if this amoeba can negotiate a maze to get to food, i'd say it was aware in a minimal but meaningful sense. it had to have constructed an internal mental model of the maze. (i.e. not just stimulus response)

yeah, but we can make computers that are capable or learning mazes, computers that operate on strictly stimulus response terms. hell, human beings might well be stimulus response machines. the ability to construct mental models is not necessarily the same as awareness. awareness is the experience of being, the experience of things "seeming" a certain way. it's not what you know, but how it feels to know it, how it seems to know it. the having of a self, whatever that means.

if some things seem a certain way, it's because that's how it is encoded in your memory. you can't build a computer program to solve and remember a maze without a memory mechanism.
how does a maze seem to a computer? probably boringly literal.

I have watched a bumblebee return to its nest when some details of the detritus near the entrance have been altered. It flies around the spot for a while gathering clues, comparing them to its old mental map of the area and learning the new configuration. Change things too much and it can't find its nest any more.

As an amateur AI computer programmer I can tell you that the most critical missing element in most AI computer programs is an equivalent for emotions. If a computer had feelings about mazes, it would not find them boringly literal.

both echo ancestors so primitive we could hardly recognize the one in the other

see that's what i'm talking about when i'm talking about the consciousness of a stone

But mental events are not identical with or reducible to physical ones,

this is where you and i disagree. "mental events" emerge from a plenitude of neurons interacting with one another, in a variety of processes that overlap and parallel one another. not to mention all the information and direction that goes back and forth from other parts of the body. the tiny electrical charges and other physical events are the stuff of consciousness (insofar as consciousness emerges from a certain density of such activity).

just because we could never (?) possibly map out the complex of neural activity in the brain and correlate with any exactitude to mental events doesn't mean that mental events don't have a physical basis.

can i prove this? not exactly. although experimental neuroscience can demonstrate stuff like which neural networks correlate to certain aspects of cognition (and hence experience).

but i'm not sure it needs to be "proved" in the impossible sense you seem to call for to be convinced.

there's an argument for consciousness, intelligence, emotions etc... being an emergent property of sufficient complexity but i dunno. I think it only appears that way because we describe these things in such mushy terms, so of course you need a fair amount of mush and slop to cover all the bases. maybe to meet a properly bounded, minimal definition of consciousness you would only need 3 dice and some twine.

well sure it's a hypothesis. but even if consciousness were a product of a less complex series of neural interactions it doesn't change the likely fact that every "thought" is an effect (not a "consequence," which would seem to presume some _other_ thing "processing" the interactions) of such activity.

Saying that your proto creature is not aware just pushes the problem higher up the chain - the problem of where this magical meaning-ascribing entity comes from.

― ledge, Friday, July 13, 2012 11:36 AM (18 minutes ago)

i think the problem is that we want to treat the self-possessing, seeming-perceiving consciousness as a magical kind of thing. given how little we know about it, it's hard not to do this, but i'm more inclined to treat it as nonmagical. i suspect that the conscious is an evolved product of the need to manage many overlapping layers and patterns of non-conscious information processing. for instance: a simple creature has a damage sensor and an aversion mechanism. a more complex creature has a subroutine dedicated to "sensing" different sorts of pain and selecting an appropriate response. an even more complex creature needs networks of networks that can coordinate an impossibly vast array of information types, the complexities within complexities branching out towards infinity. at this level of complexity, it makes sense to dumb things back down by subordinating all that infernal cognitive complexity to a decider whose only job is to simply feel the general tenor of the whole and just say "ow" when necessary.

a theory: i suspect this is why evolution has placed a final, conscious arbiter at the top of the cognitive decision tree. the arbiter's job is to make moment-to-moment simple sense of deep processes about which it knows very little. rather than deal with the fantastically complex "machine language" of the body, the arbiter instead can simply coordinate the informed decisions made by countless neurological and cognitive subsystems. it has access to libraries of stored memory and highly flexible symbolic coding systems which it can use to measure the present set of environmental circumstances and internal urgings against others experienced in the past. its job is to know things about the self and to make sense of information provided by the brain and body. its job is, in a sense, to be aware. is it any surprise, then, that it actually is aware? that it does "know things" and "feel things"?

this is us. it's what we are. there's nothing magical or non-material about it. we're the workings of the top-level computer whose job it is to know things and make decisions about the rest of the system.

that is beautifully explained, contenderizer. much clearer than a host of books i've read recently.