Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[SteveKlinko]

It is Incoherent to make comparisons and Analogies of Conscious Experience with Magnetics. In any case we would not be satisfies with some Magnetic Spirit explanation. We have a perfectly understandable Explanation for Magnetics. But with Conscious Experience we have no Explanation of any kind. The Conscious Experience just happens when certain Neural Activity happens. That is not an Explanation.

But we know where to look for an explanation, because we know that the brain is the organ, the seat and source of consciousness.

All we know is that the Conscious Mind is Connected to the Non Conscious Mechanistic Brain in some way. Consciousness Connects to the Physical Mind (Brain), it does not Reside in the Brain. Any evidence that seems to show that Consciousness is in the Brain, also works for the Connection Perspective of Connectism.

[Faustus5]

Qualia is experience. Experience is real. It is not the same as neurons firing in the same way as a movie is not LEDs firing.

If you aren't endorsing a view of qualia that is for all intents and purposes nothing but magic, then qualia have to have a basis in neurology, just as yes, the physical basis of a movie is going to be LED's firing (or something similar, obviously).

Most experts agree that the hard problem is valid, with your view being the outlier.

Oh, did someone do a poll? And do most "experts," meaning primarily brain scientists, truly understand what philosophers mean by the "hard problem"? I don't think most of them do.

Perhaps you could direct me to material that supports your claim that the global workspace model has solved the mystery of consciousness?

If the community of cognitive neuroscientists have some sort of consensus amongst each other that the global neuronal workspace model explains consciousness at some level, I think they know better than philosophers do. At least, I'll take the word of most brain scientists over most philosophers every day of every week.

Note that when I say this I don't mean that the model as it exists in late 2021 is at all complete, insofar as any complex issue in biology is ever really "complete". Lots of extremely important details still need to be filled in, particularly the so-called "binding problem", which is an enormous scientific hurdle. But given the preponderance of the evidence accumulated thus far, we can be pretty certain that anything new which comes to light is going to fit within the framework and boundaries of the model as it exists in outline form now.

But basically, it's going to be just more stories about neurons and networks of neurons doing things that ultimately can be causally traced to reports subjects make of having had specific kinds of experiences. That's all you can and should expect of a scientific model of consciousness. Will some philosophers still insist that the "mystery" of conscious is still not being explained in such models? Yes, absolutely. Philosophy of mind, unfortunately, has a lot of ridiculous people making a living off of being silly and obtuse for no good reason.

If consciousness is understood, please provide examples of consciousnesses being created in the lab from scratch (without mating).

If someone were to say to you, "If life is understood, please provide examples of life being created in the lab from scratch", I hope your reaction would be to laugh at them. That's pretty much the only response they'd merit.

[Sy Borg]

If consciousness is understood, please provide examples of consciousnesses being created in the lab from scratch (without mating).

If someone were to say to you, "If life is understood, please provide examples of life being created in the lab from scratch", I hope your reaction would be to laugh at them. That's pretty much the only response they'd merit.

No, my reaction would be to agree, because I don't care about whatever cause are trying to promote, presumably materialism and neurocentrism. By contrast I'm just interested in this, and have no barrow to push.

The fact is that we don't understand the mechanisms of life so well either, although we are further along than with consciousness, so it seems. Researcher still have only a sketchy idea of the mechanism/s that turn/s non-living matter into living matter. Life's extreme complexity remains beyond us. Thus, your doctor probably won't have the answers to all your ailments, and even today new things are being found out about how microbes operate, let alone larger organisms. There are many blanks to fill.

As with consciousness, knowledge is still sketchy, not deep enough to create, to turn non-conscious matter into conscious matter.

[Tegularius]

Perhaps, and this is only a thought, the best way to discover the mysteries of consciousness is to keep creating more intelligent AI systems without any direct intention of wanting to create consciousness. It's clear that consciousness is the upshot of a very long process where complexities become compounded without the organism realizing the languid progression of its deliberate, slow-moving torque . That's what happened to us without knowing what's happening. Why should there be any exclusion for that to happen again...only much quicker, simply because an entity under development isn't considered organic according to our definition?

Consciousness is not something suddenly created by any overt intent, but as something which grows organically assuming the conditions are right. Everything existing, including the universe, required an incipience carried forward by an inherent unfolding evolution. In terms of the universe and everything in it, that would be called entropy and nothing is excluded from it as far as I know, even if it's the indirect creation of that which has already been directly created by it.

[Papus79]

Not sure how I feel about posting this, I suppose I'm not expecting much in doing so, but it's Andres Gomez Emilsson talking a few weeks ago about his own thoughts on what might solve the binding problem in the 'Hard Problem'. I'm at the end of it now and he started by reversing the combination / binding problem by instead examining the demarcation problem (ie. why fields break into differentiated items such as subatomic particles), he also expands a bit on how topological demarcations, as a basis of matter as we experience it, would then favor neurons and nervous systems for their capacity to 'pinch' magnetic fields (think I'm getting that right). In some ways that reminds me - a tad - of Bernardo Kastrup's idea of alters and disassociation but Andres is taking that down to a much more granular level in his discussion and examining the thing that threw panpsychism out for me previously, ie. that if space-time is emergent then the basis for semi-conscious particles is based on something that's not fundamentally real at ground level. Reading it backward and paying more attention to matter (as peaks) differentiating from fields and considering topological boundaries and how they'd break the initial flat/unified state but yet offer much more leveraged re-combining - it's an interesting lens to try on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0YID6XV-PQ

[Sculptor1]

No one has fully explained why a physical explanation is not valid, except some idea that matter does not seem to otherwise exhibit such qualities that would be consinant with consciousness.
Yet we have a perfect example of where a specific organisation of matter and energy in neural matter exhibit a quality that its compenent parts cannot.
We ought to be used to the idea that matter in particular configurations shows secondary qualities.
FOr example. When iron is organised in certain ways it becomes magnetic. Are the detractors of a physicalist theory going to offer a "magnetic spirit" explanation here?
Or maybe the qualities of electornics and computer equipment needs a "magic" theory to explain it?
The fact is that we know that healthy brains are needed to produce consciousness, and that it the place to start where we can atempt of describe what is going on.

It is Incoherent to make comparisons and Analogies of Conscious Experience with Magnetics.

No it is not. I was not saying that consciousness was maganetic
ALL science is comparison. It is a system which advances understanding by describing the unfamiliar with something that is familiar. It is a fact that qualities not apparent or present in some organisations of matter become apparent when matter is organised in speific ways.

In any case we would not be satisfies with some Magnetic Spirit explanation.

We used to be in the past. Just as many people are satified with the "soul" or incorpaoreal "mind" descriptions of consciousness.
But spirits only add another layer of confusion

We have a perfectly understandable Explanation for Magnetics.

No we do not. We have a description.

But with Conscious Experience we have no Explanation of any kind. The Conscious Experience just happens when certain Neural Activity happens. That is not an Explanation.

It is a description like all science.

Your Electronics comparison is also Incoherent relative to Conscious Experience. We would not be happy with a Magic theory to Explain it. The point is that we are able to Explain Electronics. We are not able to Explain Conscious Experience at this point in time.

By the way there are no Magical Explanations of Conscious Experience. Any Magical Explanation is just a Speculation, and is not really an Explanation.

I see a lot of denial, but nothing positive.

We were talking about the Magnetic effects in Iron. Before Science knew anything about Magnetics, Magnets were probably quite Magical. Magnetics at the Deepest level is not understood. But Science can now Explain those properties of Iron using the Phenomenon of Magnetics.

To a degree yes.
THe basic theory is that the atoms are aligned in the same direction and this supposedly multiplies the force. However it is still magical in the sense that there is still no explanation as to why aligning the atoms makes that iron attractive to other bits of iron? Why does this not occur with other elements? What megnetic theory has done is just push the explanation limits to a further place. Such is the case for all science. Science can describe atomic forces but cannot say why they exist.

It is easy to imagine the individual Atomic Magnetic Dipoles creating the Macro Phenomenon of a Magnet. There is no such understanding of Conscious Experience. What Conscious Experience Dipole in the Neurons can Explain Conscious Experience? There is Nothing that Explains Conscious Experience in terms of any Neural Activity or Functioning.

There never will be an ultimate answer to why this happens and never will. I submit that the aim of science is actually to describe since there is no satisfaction to be had.
In the same way science can describe, map, and show how the brain produces consciousness. It can show who specific traumas to the brain can have exact and predictable effects and has thus shown without doubt that consciousness is a phenomenon of physics.
Spiritualists, religiousists, "psychics", wizards and witches, and other such kooks will NEVER be satisified with a physicalist explanation. Yet that is where all the progress is. And the progress is good, and all stems from the assumption that the brain is where consciousness comes from, and that studying the brain shows where mental activities take place.

[Pattern-chaser]

If consciousness is understood, please provide examples of consciousnesses being created in the lab from scratch (without mating).

If someone were to say to you, "If life is understood, please provide examples of life being created in the lab from scratch", I hope your reaction would be to laugh at them. That's pretty much the only response they'd merit.

No, my reaction would be to agree, because I don't care about whatever cause are trying to promote, presumably materialism and neurocentrism. By contrast I'm just interested in this, and have no barrow to push.

The fact is that we don't understand the mechanisms of life so well either, although we are further along than with consciousness, so it seems. Researcher still have only a sketchy idea of the mechanism/s that turn/s non-living matter into living matter. Life's extreme complexity remains beyond us. Thus, your doctor probably won't have the answers to all your ailments, and even today new things are being found out about how microbes operate, let alone larger organisms. There are many blanks to fill.

As with consciousness, knowledge is still sketchy, not deep enough to create, to turn non-conscious matter into conscious matter.

At several points in our recent history, humans have been convinced they had discovered all that is there to be discovered. Soon afterward, of course, we discovered how wrong we were, but it hasn't stopped us making the same mistake, again and again. The simple fact seems to be that, however much we discover, our biggest discovery is how much more there is to be known and understood. Uncertainty is a core characteristic of the world, as we humans experience it. In practice, if not in theory, there is no certainty.

[SteveKlinko]

Not sure how I feel about posting this, I suppose I'm not expecting much in doing so, but it's Andres Gomez Emilsson talking a few weeks ago about his own thoughts on what might solve the binding problem in the 'Hard Problem'. I'm at the end of it now and he started by reversing the combination / binding problem by instead examining the demarcation problem (ie. why fields break into differentiated items such as subatomic particles), he also expands a bit on how topological demarcations, as a basis of matter as we experience it, would then favor neurons and nervous systems for their capacity to 'pinch' magnetic fields (think I'm getting that right). In some ways that reminds me - a tad - of Bernardo Kastrup's idea of alters and disassociation but Andres is taking that down to a much more granular level in his discussion and examining the thing that threw panpsychism out for me previously, ie. that if space-time is emergent then the basis for semi-conscious particles is based on something that's not fundamentally real at ground level. Reading it backward and paying more attention to matter (as peaks) differentiating from fields and considering topological boundaries and how they'd break the initial flat/unified state but yet offer much more leveraged re-combining - it's an interesting lens to try on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0YID6XV-PQ

An entertaining video. But it had a disappointing ending. He rejected 9 Theories of Consciousness for various good reasons, and then put forward a 10th theory that is as bad as any of the others. It has been known for a long time that there are Resonances in the Brain and that this might be related to the Binding problem. But the Binding Problem must be taken all the way out and show us how for example the actual Visual Experience happens. All he has accomplished is Speculating more Neural Correlates of Conscious Experience (the Neurons are at the root of the Resonances) but no Explanation for the Conscious Experience itself. Again, just like with all theories of Consciousness there was no actual Consciousness being Explained.

[Papus79]

An entertaining video. But it had a disappointing ending. He rejected 9 Theories of Consciousness for various good reasons, and then put forward a 10th theory that is as bad as any of the others. It has been known for a long time that there are Resonances in the Brain and that this might be related to the Binding problem. But the Binding Problem must be taken all the way out and show us how for example the actual Visual Experience happens. All he has accomplished is Speculating more Neural Correlates of Conscious Experience (the Neurons are at the root of the Resonances) but no Explanation for the Conscious Experience itself. Again, just like with all theories of Consciousness there was no actual Consciousness being Explained.

I didn't get the same takeaway. Rightly or wrongly he seems to be throwing it back against the fields and seems to be suggesting that intelligence is generally about how tightly a system can articulate / manipulate these. It's quite panpsychist in its flavor but takes care of some of the problems like 'Particles are in space-time and space time is emergent, not fundamental' objections. The question is then one of examining segmentation more closely to see how well we can understand that by itself and see how many problems it solves vs. still leaves us with.

On some level I'm way less optimistic that anyone's going to say anything in the next five or ten years that explains sensory experiences because we're still trying to figure out what frames we're actually going to pursue to even get to where there's any possibility of ingress on that issue. I really think attempts at trying to cross the barrier between objective and subjective boundaries are profound and for as much flack as I took here for reading his work I do think Forrest Landry in his IDM did a good job of framing the problem with how he used the terms immanent, omniscient, and transcendent, where in the last case one system frames another system but isn't as directly participatory in it, and perhaps a poor but relatively understandable analogy might be that the characters in 13th Floor had access to aspects of the simulation itself but not the hardware that was generating it. The idea then is that what seems like the bottom layer of something is quite likely just an orthogonal relationship which what's growing on it isn't experiencing what it's container is made of. In a way as well that idea plays into dissociation to the degree that the orthogonal grounding layer either isn't experienced or at best is indirectly implied.

I'd also suggest that the degree to which consciousness is this much of a PIA to resolve seems to strongly suggest that it's either fundamental or at least much deeper than we've been able to trace previously. What I liked as well about what Andres is trying to do - I've had the sense that you could have an idealist physicalism, particularly when physicalism just tries to claim that things need to have coherent causality and transmission and remains more agnostic to the base layer rather than taking strong metaphysical assumptions as you'd have in materialism.

[SteveKlinko]

An entertaining video. But it had a disappointing ending. He rejected 9 Theories of Consciousness for various good reasons, and then put forward a 10th theory that is as bad as any of the others. It has been known for a long time that there are Resonances in the Brain and that this might be related to the Binding problem. But the Binding Problem must be taken all the way out and show us how for example the actual Visual Experience happens. All he has accomplished is Speculating more Neural Correlates of Conscious Experience (the Neurons are at the root of the Resonances) but no Explanation for the Conscious Experience itself. Again, just like with all theories of Consciousness there was no actual Consciousness being Explained.

I didn't get the same takeaway. Rightly or wrongly he seems to be throwing it back against the fields and seems to be suggesting that intelligence is generally about how tightly a system can articulate / manipulate these. It's quite panpsychist in its flavor but takes care of some of the problems like 'Particles are in space-time and space time is emergent, not fundamental' objections. The question is then one of examining segmentation more closely to see how well we can understand that by itself and see how many problems it solves vs. still leaves us with.

On some level I'm way less optimistic that anyone's going to say anything in the next five or ten years that explains sensory experiences because we're still trying to figure out what frames we're actually going to pursue to even get to where there's any possibility of ingress on that issue. I really think attempts at trying to cross the barrier between objective and subjective boundaries are profound and for as much flack as I took here for reading his work I do think Forrest Landry in his IDM did a good job of framing the problem with how he used the terms immanent, omniscient, and transcendent, where in the last case one system frames another system but isn't as directly participatory in it, and perhaps a poor but relatively understandable analogy might be that the characters in 13th Floor had access to aspects of the simulation itself but not the hardware that was generating it. The idea then is that what seems like the bottom layer of something is quite likely just an orthogonal relationship which what's growing on it isn't experiencing what it's container is made of. In a way as well that idea plays into dissociation to the degree that the orthogonal grounding layer either isn't experienced or at best is indirectly implied.

I'd also suggest that the degree to which consciousness is this much of a PIA to resolve seems to strongly suggest that it's either fundamental or at least much deeper than we've been able to trace previously. What I liked as well about what Andres is trying to do - I've had the sense that you could have an idealist physicalism, particularly when physicalism just tries to claim that things need to have coherent causality and transmission and remains more agnostic to the base layer rather than taking strong metaphysical assumptions as you'd have in materialism.

Yes, Consciousness, but more precisely, Conscious Experience, Qualia if you like, are a big PIA. But understanding Conscious Experience is the real End Goal of any Consciousness research and Theories. It's good to talk about Neural Activity and Brain Wave Synchronizations, but those are only Correlates to actual Conscious Experiences. The Huge Gulf between these Correlates and any Conscious Experience is way under appreciated by a lot of researchers. The Hard Problem is as Hard as it ever was.

[Papus79]

The Huge Gulf between these Correlates and any Conscious Experience is way under appreciated by a lot of researchers. The Hard Problem is as Hard as it ever was.

Well, you do understand that the truth game and the social status game are orthogonal. The social status game is more of a violence game, it tends to be that because significant enough competence is too rare. Thus it's not whether your ideas are right, it's how many thousands of pages you've read on that given thing, or how persuasively you can brow-beat someone or convince them that they're the dumbest person ever born if they disagree with you. Any shot at actually sorting out what's true quite often needs to be kept as far as possible away from both careerism and status or economic concerns, because in most cases deep corruption (ie. violence beats truth) is guaranteed to happen fast.

In that sense any small victories are important and we'll be struggling to not have those individual candles along the way snuffed out by arbitrary power.

[Consul]

Yes, Consciousness, but more precisely, Conscious Experience, Qualia if you like, are a big PIA. But understanding Conscious Experience is the real End Goal of any Consciousness research and Theories. It's good to talk about Neural Activity and Brain Wave Synchronizations, but those are only Correlates to actual Conscious Experiences. The Huge Gulf between these Correlates and any Conscious Experience is way under appreciated by a lot of researchers.

There are two sets of empirical data: introspection-based phenomenological ones and extrospection-based neurophysiological ones. It is known that there are correlations between them, but what is the best explanation of these correlations?

QUOTE>
"It seems to me that science is increasingly giving us a viewpoint whereby organisms are able to be seen as physicochemical mechanisms: it seems that even the behavior of man himself will one day be explicable in mechanistic terms. There does seem to be, so far as science
is concerned, nothing in the world but increasingly complex arrangements of physical constituents. All except for one place: in consciousness. That is, for a full description of what is going on in a man you would have to mention not only the physical processes in his tissue, glands, nervous system, and so forth, but also his states of consciousness: his visual, auditory, and tactual sensations, his aches and pains. That these should be correlated with brain processes does not help, for to say that they are correlated is to say that they are something 'over and above'. You cannot correlate something with itself. You correlate footprints with burglars, but not Bill Sikes the burglar with Bill Sikes the burglar. So sensations, states of consciousness, do seem to be the one sort of thing left outside the physicalist picture, and for various reasons I just cannot believe that this can be so. That everything should be explicable in terms of physics (together of course with descriptions of the ways in which the parts are put together—roughly, biology is to physics as radio-engineering is to electro-magnetism) except the occurrence of sensations seems to me to be frankly unbelievable. Such sensations would be 'nomological danglers', to use Feigl's expression. It is not often realized how odd would be the laws whereby these nomological danglers would dangle. It is sometimes asked, 'Why can't there be psycho-physical laws which are of a novel sort, just as the laws of electricity and magnetism were novelties from the standpoint of Newtonian mechanics?' Certainly we are pretty sure in the future to come across new ultimate laws of a novel type, but I expect them to relate simple constituents: for example, whatever ultimate particles are then in vogue. I cannot believe that ultimate laws of nature could relate simple constituents to configurations consisting of perhaps billions of neurons (and goodness knows how many billion billions of ultimate particles) all put together for all the world as though their main purpose in life was to be a negative feedback mechanism of a complicated sort. Such ultimate laws would be like nothing so far known in science. They have a queer 'smell' to them. I am just unable to believe in the nomological danglers themselves, or in the laws whereby they would dangle. If any philosophical arguments seemed to compel us to believe in such things, I would suspect a catch in the argument."

(Smart, J. J. C. "Sensations and Brain Processes." The Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 141-156. pp. 142-3)
<QUOTE

The Hard Problem is as Hard as it ever was.

It seems you want to make it even harder than it is.

[SteveKlinko]

The Huge Gulf between these Correlates and any Conscious Experience is way under appreciated by a lot of researchers. The Hard Problem is as Hard as it ever was.

Well, you do understand that the truth game and the social status game are orthogonal. The social status game is more of a violence game, it tends to be that because significant enough competence is too rare. Thus it's not whether your ideas are right, it's how many thousands of pages you've read on that given thing, or how persuasively you can brow-beat someone or convince them that they're the dumbest person ever born if they disagree with you. Any shot at actually sorting out what's true quite often needs to be kept as far as possible away from both careerism and status or economic concerns, because in most cases deep corruption (ie. violence beats truth) is guaranteed to happen fast.

In that sense any small victories are important and we'll be struggling to not have those individual candles along the way snuffed out by arbitrary power.

Yes, and ultimately Truth will win.

[SteveKlinko]

Yes, Consciousness, but more precisely, Conscious Experience, Qualia if you like, are a big PIA. But understanding Conscious Experience is the real End Goal of any Consciousness research and Theories. It's good to talk about Neural Activity and Brain Wave Synchronizations, but those are only Correlates to actual Conscious Experiences. The Huge Gulf between these Correlates and any Conscious Experience is way under appreciated by a lot of researchers.

There are two sets of empirical data: introspection-based phenomenological ones and extrospection-based neurophysiological ones. It is known that there are correlations between them, but what is the best explanation of these correlations?

QUOTE>
"It seems to me that science is increasingly giving us a viewpoint whereby organisms are able to be seen as physicochemical mechanisms: it seems that even the behavior of man himself will one day be explicable in mechanistic terms. There does seem to be, so far as science
is concerned, nothing in the world but increasingly complex arrangements of physical constituents. All except for one place: in consciousness. That is, for a full description of what is going on in a man you would have to mention not only the physical processes in his tissue, glands, nervous system, and so forth, but also his states of consciousness: his visual, auditory, and tactual sensations, his aches and pains. That these should be correlated with brain processes does not help, for to say that they are correlated is to say that they are something 'over and above'. You cannot correlate something with itself. You correlate footprints with burglars, but not Bill Sikes the burglar with Bill Sikes the burglar. So sensations, states of consciousness, do seem to be the one sort of thing left outside the physicalist picture, and for various reasons I just cannot believe that this can be so. That everything should be explicable in terms of physics (together of course with descriptions of the ways in which the parts are put together—roughly, biology is to physics as radio-engineering is to electro-magnetism) except the occurrence of sensations seems to me to be frankly unbelievable. Such sensations would be 'nomological danglers', to use Feigl's expression. It is not often realized how odd would be the laws whereby these nomological danglers would dangle. It is sometimes asked, 'Why can't there be psycho-physical laws which are of a novel sort, just as the laws of electricity and magnetism were novelties from the standpoint of Newtonian mechanics?' Certainly we are pretty sure in the future to come across new ultimate laws of a novel type, but I expect them to relate simple constituents: for example, whatever ultimate particles are then in vogue. I cannot believe that ultimate laws of nature could relate simple constituents to configurations consisting of perhaps billions of neurons (and goodness knows how many billion billions of ultimate particles) all put together for all the world as though their main purpose in life was to be a negative feedback mechanism of a complicated sort. Such ultimate laws would be like nothing so far known in science. They have a queer 'smell' to them. I am just unable to believe in the nomological danglers themselves, or in the laws whereby they would dangle. If any philosophical arguments seemed to compel us to believe in such things, I would suspect a catch in the argument."

(Smart, J. J. C. "Sensations and Brain Processes." The Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 141-156. pp. 142-3)
<QUOTE

The Hard Problem is as Hard as it ever was.

It seems you want to make it even harder than it is.

I hate to say it but if you cannot see that the Hard Problem really is as Hard as it ever was then I suspect you do not understand the Hard Problem in the way I do. Let me state something in particular that we can discuss: I claim that there has been Zero progress in understanding what Conscious Experiences are. Take any Conscious Experience like Redness, the Standard A Tone, the Salty Taste, etc. and Explain how we are closer to understanding it. I like studying the Experience of Conscious Light especially the Experience of Redness. What is that Redness that floats in front of our faces at various locations in the Visual Experience?

[Consul]

…What is that Redness that floats in front of our faces at various locations in the Visual Experience?

It's a subjective sensory affection or passion that consists in a particular electrochemical process in a brain.

(By subjective affections or passions I don't just mean emotions but all sorts of experiential impressions, including sensations and imaginations.)