Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Philosophy Club

[Gertie]

GE

I think we getting to repeating ourselves/agree to differ time?

Gertie wrote: ↑
Yesterday, 1:20 pm

True, I'm just making the point that there's nothing intrinsically special about a model which includes the model maker, which might lead to experiential states manifesting. Do you think there is?

I'm not sure what would count as "intrinsically special," or why a system must have some intrinsically special (however understood) property to manifest consciousness.

Right. So the fact that we humans create a model of the world which includes a model of our self within it, has no apparent bearing on how experience arises. Far less complex experiencing animals probably don't create such a model. It doesn't look like a necessary condition for mental experience. And if it's not, copying the creation of that 'model maker within the model' function won't make any difference to whether an AI can experience.

I'm inclined to think of consciousness as a natural phenomenon that occurs predictably in complex dynamic systems of a certain type, analogously to the way a magnetic field appears around a wire carrying an electric current. It appears, or can, at a certain point when evolutionary pressures forge ever more complex organisms having ever more sophisticated tools for assuring their survival and propagation. Consciousness is a survival strategy (though how successful it will be in the long run remains to be seen).

Yeah could be. It leaves you with the problem of not knowing if AI is the right type of wire.

To clarify I don't dismiss behaviour, that is a major observable clue, it would be daft to ignore it. You made the point that we have to assume other people have mental experience too, and I'm saying we have an extra clue re other people - they are made of the same stuff and biological/chemical processes. That could be very significant, we don't know.

Yes, it is a clue, but it may be coincidental and thus superficial.

Maybe. But to assume the observable behaviour resulting from biological stuff and processes is less likely to be coincidental/superficial than the biological stuff and processes itself would be ****-backwards imo.

The only evidence we will ever have for its importance, or lack of it, is behavior.

Pragmatically perhaps, but that doesn't make it reliable.

Look at this way - why do we assume other humans have experiences like us?

- They are physically almost identical, and brain scans show similar responses to similar stimuli, which match similar verbal reports to ours.

- Their observable behaviour is experientally understandable to us, in that we can imagine behaving similarly in similar circs.

It's all about similarity. That's why the hope is that if we create an AI sufficiently similar to a human, it will somehow capture the necessary and sufficient conditions for experience.


But we can already create lots of things which have some behavioural similarities, there are machines which can be programmed to mimic behaviours like avoiding obstacles, play chess, build cars, 'communicate' with each other like we're doing now. We don't assume they have experience. If we could build a machine so good at mimicking some behaviours we couldn't tell the difference, how do we know its crossed some line into experiencing. And why would we believe similarity/mimicry of function and behaviour alone enables it to?

Many of the technologies we've devised were first observed as natural phenomena --- fire, electricity, flight, many others. We've learned to extract the physical principles involved in those phenomena and apply them artificially. E.g., we learned that heavier-than-air objects may fly from birds, but (at least after Icarus) did not assume feathers and muscles are necessary to enable it.

Good point. The unanswered question is - does that apply beyond physical technologies copying aspects of natural physical functions.

Where-as if we had an actual explanation which included the necessary and sufficient conditions, then we could test for those. We could make a consciousness-o-meter and not have to guess.

Well, that's the problem --- there can be no such meter, because phenomenal experience is inherently, impenetrably private. Behavior is the only evidence we will ever have, and if the behavior of an AI system is indistinguishable from that of a human, then it would only be subbornness that deters us from attributing consciousness to it.

Not stubbornness. Just because it's the best we can do doesn't mean it's reliable. We might be forced to act as if it's reliable, but we should realise that's what we're doing.

It's OK to say we don't know.

Are we willing to say that about other people?

We don't know, but we have the additional physical similarity, which would turn the question around. If we're so similar physically, what difference could account for them not being?

I just want a robot servant, is that too much to ask! But we should err on the side of caution, if there's enough evidence to think they have experiential states, they should in principle have commensurate moral consideration, probably including rights. (Just keep the off switch handy).

Should we install such switches on humans too, at birth?

Only some. I have a list...

[GE Morton]

There's a difference between observing something third-person and observing something first-person, where the latter is the observational circumstance where you're identical to the thing in question.

Oh, I'm sure there is. But what is being observed is not the observer, but qualia and other "mental" phenomena. Apparently you're identifying the observer with the observed, or perhaps the brain states of the observer with what is observed. But the latter begs the question. What is observed, or experienced, immediately and directly, are qualia, thoughts, memories, etc., which are not identical to any brain state per any accepted criterion for identity. They may be (and surely are) caused by brain states, produced by brain states, but they are not identical with them. No third person observes my qualia, thoughts, etc. There is no perspective on those but my own.

There's only one thing that exists where we can be in a first-person observational circumstance with respect to it: the subset of our brain functions that amount to mentality. That's the only thing for which we can have the perspective of BEING the thing in question.

You're again begging the question. When I experience a certain quale I am not observing "a subset of my brain function." I may hypothesize the latter in order to explain what I'm experiencing, but it is not WHAT I'm experiencing. Moreover, being something does not entail having a perspective on it.

You can't characterize manifest differences in properties between 2 (nominally) different things as "differences in perspectives." Morning vs. evening perspectives on Venus do not alter the planet's properties. Nor can you claim differences in perspective as accounting for observed differences unless the perspectives are of the same thing. But no third person can have a perspective on my qualia --- unless he begs the question by equating them with something he can observe.

[Terrapin Station]

Oh, I agree. But that is not what you were saying earlier. Earlier you were claiming that the properties of a thing were dependent upon spatio-temporal reference points.

That's still what I'm saying. Properties are a factor of materials, relations and processes. As any of those things change, so do the properties in question. There's no way that any properties are from either no or all relations. Any spatiotemporal reference point is a unique relation to the item in question, and it's not just one relation that changes from any arbitrary spatiotemporal reference point.

Well, first, it makes no sense to speak of perspectives when there is no possibility of more than one. For qualia, there is no possibility of any perspective on it other than that of the person experiencing one.

At any given spatiotemporal point, there will only be one perspective from which qualia appear as qualia, but that doesn't mean that qualia do not appear as something else from another spatial perspective at the same time. They do.

Qualia are not different than the person in question. They're an aspect of that person. A property of their conscious experience, from the perspective of being that conscious experience.

[Faustus5]

If you believe your own experience doesn't exist, you're beyond confused.

Except I don't believe that my own experience doesn't exist. I just happen to think that believers in qualia have invented a purely ideological perspective on experience that I find ridiculous and incompatible with a scientific approach to understanding the mind. If it can't be measured, even in principle, then a property is make believe to my way of thinking.

[Faustus5]

The whole idea that pain is subjective, and the realisation that colours are not "out there" nut only experienced in the head is pure science.

We've known this for a long, long time and didn't need to be told by scientists that this was the case. It was never a scientific discovery.

And it was Charles Sanders Peirce a SCIENTIST who first coined the phrase.
So yes it was in a scientific paper.
Check your ignorance before you make an **** of yourself

Thanks for the education, but I very much doubt that any such paper would be considered "scientific" rather than a work in philosophy. Do you have a link to it so I can read the source?

And this may be a quibble you can justifiably dismiss, but wasn't Peirce really more of a philosopher who was fluent in science rather than someone whose main contributions were scientific? Sort of a 19th century Daniel Dennett?

[Atla]

What sort of material would you say is pertinent? Can you give any sort of reference to it?

Very well..

I'd say Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta are the best to get to the gist of it (the real Advaita, not this neo-Advaitan or pseudo-Advaitan shallow nonsense). But Western interpreters like Alan Watts and Rupert Spira are pretty good, they have many talks online where they are trying to eff the ineffable. If one is somewhat smart, then one doesn't have to waste time by reading a million books or engaging in a 40-year meditation routine or whatever.

If you listen to them, you'll notice that all they seem to be saying is a bunch of rather random gibberish, accompanied by nonsensical hand-waving. With some shallow everyday wisdom here and there that everyone already knows. But what they are actually talking about is a very deep subject, and everything they say actually makes perfect sense and is logically structured.

Again, they are trying to eff the ineffable, all nondual talk is kind of metaphorical. They try to express nondualism in dualistic language, because that's how we communicate. Language is inherently dualistic, all Western philosophy is inherently dualistic, and therefore has an inherent fatal flaw which prevents it from ever succeeding.

----------

Or alternatively, there is the route which I took, QM has proven a century ago that existence is either nondual, or we have to subscribe to some batshit crazy literal magical mind-physical world dualism. Don't try to understand how QM has shown this, it's probably above your conception. I learned about Advaita later, after I found out that this is how the world works.

[Terrapin Station]

What sort of material would you say is pertinent? Can you give any sort of reference to it?

Very well..

I'd say Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta are the best to get to the gist of it (the real Advaita, not this neo-Advaitan or pseudo-Advaitan shallow nonsense). But Western interpreters like Alan Watts and Rupert Spira are pretty good, they have many talks online where they are trying to eff the ineffable. If one is somewhat smart, then one doesn't have to waste time by reading a million books or engaging in a 40-year meditation routine or whatever.

If you listen to them, you'll notice that all they seem to be saying is a bunch of rather random gibberish, accompanied by nonsensical hand-waving. With some shallow everyday wisdom here and there that everyone already knows. But what they are actually talking about is a very deep subject, and everything they say actually makes perfect sense and is logically structured.

Again, they are trying to eff the ineffable, all nondual talk is kind of metaphorical. They try to express nondualism in dualistic language, because that's how we communicate. Language is inherently dualistic, all Western philosophy is inherently dualistic, and therefore has an inherent fatal flaw which prevents it from ever succeeding.

----------

Or alternatively, there is the route which I took, QM has proven a century ago that existence is either nondual, or we have to subscribe to some batshit crazy literal magical mind-physical world dualism. Don't try to understand how QM has shown this, it's probably above your conception. I learned about Advaita later, after I found out that this is how the world works.

I'm actually pretty fond of Zen Buddhism, which I first got into via a martial arts teacher all the way back when I was a teen. Though I don't agree with every aspect of every view, obviously. I'm not very familiar with Advaita Vedanta. I'll have to check that out.

[Atla]

Very well..

I'd say Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta are the best to get to the gist of it (the real Advaita, not this neo-Advaitan or pseudo-Advaitan shallow nonsense). But Western interpreters like Alan Watts and Rupert Spira are pretty good, they have many talks online where they are trying to eff the ineffable. If one is somewhat smart, then one doesn't have to waste time by reading a million books or engaging in a 40-year meditation routine or whatever.

If you listen to them, you'll notice that all they seem to be saying is a bunch of rather random gibberish, accompanied by nonsensical hand-waving. With some shallow everyday wisdom here and there that everyone already knows. But what they are actually talking about is a very deep subject, and everything they say actually makes perfect sense and is logically structured.

Again, they are trying to eff the ineffable, all nondual talk is kind of metaphorical. They try to express nondualism in dualistic language, because that's how we communicate. Language is inherently dualistic, all Western philosophy is inherently dualistic, and therefore has an inherent fatal flaw which prevents it from ever succeeding.

----------

Or alternatively, there is the route which I took, QM has proven a century ago that existence is either nondual, or we have to subscribe to some batshit crazy literal magical mind-physical world dualism. Don't try to understand how QM has shown this, it's probably above your conception. I learned about Advaita later, after I found out that this is how the world works.

I'm actually pretty fond of Zen Buddhism, which I first got into via a martial arts teacher all the way back when I was a teen. Though I don't agree with every aspect of every view, obviously. I'm not very familiar with Advaita Vedanta. I'll have to check that out.

Unfortunately, most Advaita talk online will be the pseudo-Advaita, where they use the words but don't understand what they are pointing to.

Personally I also very much like Peter Russell's 'The primacy of consciousness' talk. He is very scientific minded like I am, and went through a very similar route, when investigating the nature of consciousness.

[Terrapin Station]

I'm actually pretty fond of Zen Buddhism, which I first got into via a martial arts teacher all the way back when I was a teen. Though I don't agree with every aspect of every view, obviously. I'm not very familiar with Advaita Vedanta. I'll have to check that out.

Unfortunately, most Advaita talk online will be the pseudo-Advaita, where they use the words but don't understand what they are pointing to.

Personally I also very much like Peter Russell's 'The primacy of consciousness' talk. He is very scientific minded like I am, and went through a very similar route, when investigating the nature of consciousness.

Okay, thanks--I'll check Russell out.

[Sculptor1]

The whole idea that pain is subjective, and the realisation that colours are not "out there" nut only experienced in the head is pure science.

We've known this for a long, long time and didn't need to be told by scientists that this was the case. It was never a scientific discovery.
{/quote]
Your ignorance is astounding

Thanks for the education, but I very much doubt that any such paper would be considered "scientific" rather than a work in philosophy. Do you have a link to it so I can read the source?

Your doubt is only based on your ignorance.
Are you a flat earther too?
Educate yourself and come back.

And this may be a quibble you can justifiably dismiss, but wasn't Peirce really more of a philosopher who was fluent in science rather than someone whose main contributions were scientific? Sort of a 19th century Daniel Dennett?

Get a life

[evolution]

You still do NOT get it.

I KNOW what a 'philosophical context' is, from my perspective. All I was trying to do was understand better what your perspective of that phrase is. If you can NOT or will NOT back up, explain, or elaborate on what you say and claim on a philosophy forum, then WHY post in one?

So what is your "'what is' presentation" for propositional knowledge in this philosophical context, per how you think about philosophical contexts?

My view is; because absolutely EVERY thing is relative to the observer, then so to is propositional knowledge.

Therefore, whatever is in agreement and accepted as being propositional knowledge, then that is what is propositional knowledge, to those people.

See, unlike you who is looking for what is 'propositional knowledge', subjectively, I much prefer to instead just look at 'what IS', and express 'THAT', objectivity.

[GE Morton]

I think this is a damned difficult topic.

Indeed it is. Perhaps the first step is to develop a rigorous vocabulary and a cogent framework for discussing it.

I’m not sure you are wrong but I have some doubts all the same. I lean towards a particular version of identity theory, (embodied identity theory), so I think I broadly agree with TS, but I’ve not yet completely fallen over. I am not sure whether detailed description of the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness is needed to resolve matters as you suggest.

If "sufficient" is taken to imply a reductive explanation, then no explanation will ever be sufficient, since that type of explanation is impossible, for the reasons given earlier.

Firstly, the effects of some drugs, brain injuries, sleep, dreaming and brain scans etc. suggest that perceptual, cognitive and affective states are linked with brain processes, and experiment suggests a direct link. Change the brain and you can change the experience and vice versa. I think this gives identity theory some plausibility.

I fully agree with your first sentence there. There is abundant evidence demonstrating links between brain states and "mental" phenomena; the first is clearly the cause of the latter. But a cause-and-effect relationship is not an identity relationship, and offers no support at all for the latter relationship, that I can see.

A concern is that objective accounts of an experience may fail to capture the subjective nature of the experience. The subjective appears to be something extra that needs explaining. But as has been pointed out, if consciousness is identical to a brain state then brain processes do not generate or produce consciousness, they are consciousness (and vice versa). If X generates Y it is not identical to Y. In your example GEM, if bees or the things that they do generate honey, then bees or the things they do are not honey. But identity is symmetrical and if consciousness is a brain process, it is not an extra property. There is no new thing to look for. (Gertie, your point about a homunculus is well taken).

It is true, of course, that IF "consciousness is identical to a brain state then brain processes do not generate or produce consciousness, they are consciousness (and vice versa)." But whether they ARE identical is what needs to be resolved. So we need to decide what are the criteria for calling two numerically distinguishable things identical. I've given two common ones, Leibniz's "identity of indiscernibles," and the "is of composition" sense ("lightning is a stream of electrons"). Mental phenomena and brain states are not identical per either of those criteria. So some new criterion would be required to establish that identity (hopefully, one that does not do violence to the common understanding of the term).

The claim, then, is that some objective events are identical to some subjective events. The fact that there are different ways of encountering a thing does not necessarily mean we are encountering different things. A thing may be encountered subjectively as lived experience, or objectively as when observed by another.

That is perfectly true of external things. But there may be some confusion as to what "thing" we are discussing. Yes, the red rose I observe can be the same as the red rose you describe to me. But that rose is not the "thing" we are seeking to identify with a brain state. Instead, the thing in question is the particular, distinctive, phenomenal sensation I experience when perceving that rose, or anything else with that color. There is no "objective," or third-party perspective on that. Similarly, while you can give me a verbal description of the rose, you can't give me a verbal description of the distinctive phenomenal sensation YOU experience when beholding it --- but I will assume, from your behavior and your report, that you have one. We both have subjective, distinctive sensations when perceiving an object with that color. We can't describe those sensations in any informative, non-circular terms; they are ineffable. But because we use the same words to refer to them we can talk about the (external) things that elicit those sensations (Wittgenstein's "beetle in a box" discussion is worth reviewing here).

Note that, in viewing consciousness as a brain process, mentality is not somehow eliminated by the analysis as some have argued. We are not left with just the objective physical description of events. The physical process is also a mental event.

Well, that begs the question. What sense of "is" is that? The physical process surely gives rise to the mental event, but to say it "is" the mental event requires some criterion for identity, as mentioned above.

A difficulty is that some argument will not allow analysis involving anything other than the comparison of objective physical events even though (as I think you recognise) this may be inadequate to the task in hand. In other words I am concerned that, for some, identity is only permitted to be established by observed similar properties from an objective POV, and this will not allow, by definition almost, a different POV (e.g. one allowing that subjective experience could be identical to objective experience), simply on the grounds that the two perspectives are different.

As I argued with TP, above, the difference between two percepts can be explained as different points of view only if we've already established that both percepts are of the same thing. So we need to resolve the identity issue BEFORE we can speak of different POVs. Until then we're entitled to assume the difference is due to perceiving different things.

The brain may be modelling the external world, but identity theory proposes that this modelling just is the processing being done by the brain, not some extra epiphenomenal thing.

It is epiphenomenal in the sense that an induced magnetic field is epiphenomenal, but not in the sense of a physically superfluous "substance" as implied by some philosophical conceptions.

An external observer using a scanner to watch your brain working cannot experience what your brain is experiencing, since they can only experience what their own brain is experiencing. But this just is what it means to have different perspectives.

Caution --- that is not what it means to have different perspectives. It makes sense to speak of different perspectives only when there is no question that the different perceptions are of the same thing. If we assume in advance they are in this case we're question-begging.

The inside of your house does not look like the outside of your house, but it is your house all the same (assuming you have one).

Do you see what you're doing there? Of course the inside of the house looks different from the outside. It will look different from any different reference point. But, by your hypothesis, those viewpoints are all of one thing. That hypothesis is not justified with respect to mental phenomena and brain states; it is precisely what is in question. Until that question is answered we can't speak (sensibly) of different perspectives.

If this works then there seems nothing missing here. Some say you can’t see a thought. But by this view you can, though you can only directly experience your own. This does allow that a clever external observer may be able to decode brain activity, and tell what the thought or subjective experience is likely to be, and researchers are making progress here. I have read that currently, decoding of information gained by brain scans enables researchers to determine what playing card someone is holding with better than 90% accuracy, and it is thought that in the future brain decoding will be capable of extracting information an investigator might want, such as the encryption code to a file or the combination to a safe.

I think you're right on that point. There is every reason to think that we will be able, at some point, to correlate measurable brain states with particular qualia, thoughts, knowledge, etc. I.e., we will be able, by inducing or observing a particular pattern in a particular set of neurons, to predict that the subject is now experiencing a sensation of red, or the smell of cinnamon, or is thinking about his kid, etc. But such correlations don't establish an identity between the brain events and the subjective "feel" or quality of those sensations, though it could confirm a causal relationship between them --- one likely to be individual and idiosyncratic: what neural pattern elicits a "red" experience in Alfie likely would not do so in Bruno. Those correlations don't even address the identity question.

How do we decide on identity? Well, are we justified in saying (in time honoured tradition) that the morning star is the same as the evening star? Even without powerful telescopes, when we examine where and when we encounter these two things it seems we are (something recognised it seems even in ancient Sumeria). And again, we may ask whether these two things, the physical and mental, are the same thing. Again, we answer by looking at how we encounter these things, and the evidence and reasoning outlined above seems to me to justify the view that they probably are.

We are justified in identifying the morning star with the evening star because all of the properties we can observe and measure of those (nominally two) objects are the same. They satisfy Leibniz's criterion for identity. That is not the case with qualia and their correlated brain states; those could not be more different. Suppose we discover (improbably) that a certain neural activity pattern consistently produces a "red" experience for everyone for whom that pattern is active. Suppose Frank Jackson's Mary's vast knoweldge of optics and neurology includes that information. She has never seen colors, and so her brain has never manifested that pattern. She agrees to allow a researcher to induce that pattern electronically in her brain. Will she be able to predict what that experience will "be like" for her? What distinctive sensation will appear to her counsciousness? Or will she say, "Ah! So THAT is what red looks like!" That is what knowledge of brain states can't predict.

To play with your thought experiment, it seems possible that if we are looking at a screen showing our brain activity while looking at the screen, it may be an example whereby both the objective and subjective can be objectively seen to coincide. Flash up a red square, a blue triangle, a green circle or whatever and see the changes in brain activity that result. This would seem to support mind-brain identity.

No, it doesn't. It only establishes mind-brain correlation, and perhaps causality, as pointed out above.

I think this disagreement boils down to what is the relevant criterion for declaring two (nominal) things to be identical. I know of no others than the two I mentioned, and minds and brains are not identical per either of those.

Thanks for a thoughtful post!

[Wossname]

GE Morton » Today, 4:04 am

Suppose Frank Jackson's Mary's vast knoweldge of optics and neurology includes that information. She has never seen colors, and so her brain has never manifested that pattern. She agrees to allow a researcher to induce that pattern electronically in her brain. Will she be able to predict what that experience will "be like" for her? What distinctive sensation will appear to her counsciousness? Or will she say, "Ah! So THAT is what red looks like!" That is what knowledge of brain states can't predict.

We agree subjective experience is a private POV and, in Mary’s case it seems to me that when Mary first learns what red is (to her, as experienced by her), then that learning will also be a change in her brain and would not happen without it. It remains a private experience of Mary’s. She might then map that experience to language in the same way that people would map Wittgenstein’s beetle.

GE Morton » Today, 4:04 am


I think this disagreement boils down to what is the relevant criterion for declaring two (nominal) things to be identical. I know of no others than the two I mentioned, and minds and brains are not identical per either of those.

I think you have the nub of the problem. My concern is that the criteria for identity you prefer just will not do here. They work well, perhaps, where we compare two objective viewpoints. I don’t think it can work for the subjective / objective identity of the kind I’m suggesting. If we hold to those criteria, (and you do and welcome), I think the answer always comes out that mind and brain are separate things. If we declare those criteria inadequate or inappropriate then a resolution of the kind I suggest may be possible. You pays your money as they say. I see no further resolution so I will hold to my viewpoint (but your argument is not lost on me and I repeat, I am not certain of matters in this area). Thank you, also, for your considered reply.

[Terrapin Station]

Therefore, whatever is in agreement and accepted as being propositional knowledge, then that is what is propositional knowledge, to those people.

And do you have any idea what is in agreement and accepted as being propositional knowledge? (By the way, you know that I'm asking you re a characterization of what propositional knowledge is, somewhat a la a definition, I'm not asking you to "list some propositional knowledge," right?)

[Atla]

Okay, thanks--I'll check Russell out.

Well there's also this www.scienceandnonduality.com
They are now holding yearly conferences where scientists and nondual philosophers etc. can meet. I watched a few speeches and found them a bit shallow, but that's rather unavoidable I guess, at least it's a start.