(February 14, 2017 at 2:37 pm)Alasdair Ham Wrote: I never understand the mystery about consciousness.

As far as I'm concerned it's just an evolutionary by-product, a side effect. We don't need to be conscious but we just are. I guess consciousness is the side effect that naturally happens when brains get complex enough.

And the whole "How can consciousness emerge from the physical?" thing is just a complete equivocation. Mental can be physical. It's not a contradiction.

You are engaging in the pathetic fallacy - attributing subjective internal thoughts, feelings and intentions to objective external phenomena. Mental properties are intrinsically teleological; whereas, all physical processes, including brain processes, are not. It takes a mind to give meaning to any and all the phenomena presented to it. Mind is logically prior to any assigned meaning given to physical objects and events, of which the brain is a part. Emergence theories are basically a kind of sympathetic magic, like manipulating a voodoo doll to make your enemy sick.

If you say so, it must be so.  What's the problem with magic anyway, in your opinion?

(February 15, 2017 at 12:53 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote:

(February 14, 2017 at 2:37 pm)Alasdair Ham Wrote: I never understand the mystery about consciousness.

As far as I'm concerned it's just an evolutionary by-product, a side effect. We don't need to be conscious but we just are. I guess consciousness is the side effect that naturally happens when brains get complex enough.

And the whole "How can consciousness emerge from the physical?" thing is just a complete equivocation. Mental can be physical. It's not a contradiction.

You are engaging in the pathetic fallacy - attributing subjective internal thoughts, feelings and intentions to objective external phenomena. Mental properties are intrinsically teleological; whereas, all physical processes, including brain processes, are not. It takes a mind to give meaning to any and all the phenomena presented to it. Mind is logically prior to any assigned meaning given to physical objects and events, of which the brain is a part. Emergence theories are basically a kind of sympathetic magic, like manipulating a voodoo doll to make your enemy sick.

No I'm not committing that fallacy at all because I am not attiributing anything of the sort. I am saying that the mental can be physical and to say it's a contradiction is to commit the equivocation fallacy. I'm not saying objects without brains have thoughts and feelings

Your (mis)understanding of logic is often as simplistic and cartoonish as your god belief. It's no surprise you believe in such nonsense.

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(February 14, 2017 at 5:46 pm)bennyboy Wrote:

(February 14, 2017 at 2:37 pm)Alasdair Ham Wrote: I never understand the mystery about consciousness.

As far as I'm concerned it's just an evolutionary by-product, a side effect. We don't need to be conscious but we just are. I guess consciousness is the side effect that naturally happens when brains get complex enough.

And the whole "How can consciousness emerge from the physical?" thing is just a complete equivocation. Mental can be physical. It's not a contradiction.

Why would evolution arrive at a by-product which cannot be seen, cannot be measured, and is known only to exist through subjective agency?  Saying "consciousness is useful" is pretty meaningless when consciousness is only a collection of material interactions.  Why wouldn't a brain just take in data, process it, and output behavior, without the organism ever knowing what it's like  to experience hot chocolate in early fall or whatever?

This is the real problem-- if physical interactions are sufficient to explain behavior, then why would the universe give us this added "bonus" of being aware of those physical interactions?

What do you mean "Why would it?" Why wouldn't it? Evolution has useless side effects and by products left over all the time. There's no purpose to it it's purposeless.

(February 15, 2017 at 3:02 pm)Alasdair Ham Wrote:

(February 15, 2017 at 12:53 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: You are engaging in the pathetic fallacy - ...

No I'm not committing that fallacy at all because I am not attiributing anything of the sort. I am saying that the mental can be physical and  to say it's a contradiction is to commit the equivocation fallacy. I'm not saying objects without brains have thoughts and feelings

But you are attributing intentions to (supposedly) deterministic processes.

(February 15, 2017 at 7:32 am)bennyboy Wrote: Take a computer for example.  No matter how complex we can make a computer, we can revise its software, make hardware improvements, and so on.  We can probably make computers that will do almost every task better than humans 100% of the time, including making driving decisions in off-road terrain and so on.  But at no point of that process would we expect to have to imbue the computer with the ability to know what its like to experience dust or blue skies-- it just has to grind through its data and output a driving behavior.

You might not expect it, don't talk for the rest of us.

What about if the computer was a 100% perfect simulation of all the neurons, dendrites, synapses and neurotransmitters in a real brain, and you then plugged it into a real body with senses?

Why wouldn't it have an equal experience of dust or blue skies?

And if you can't find any reason to argue that there is a difference, then why does it have to be a computer simulation of a neural network? Why not some other adaptive controller that performs exactly the same functionality but in a different way?

What about instead of using a computer, you created an agent controller using cells and put that in a body? Would that then be able to experience? If so, why? Or why not?

The key requirement here is that the agent controller needs to be embodied in an environment and be able to sense and act within it.

Assumptions that you have to have reached a certain level of mental development in order to experience things can lead to really immoral acts. The medical profession used to only give anaesthesia to adults for this very reason. My dad for example remembers having his tonsils cut out of him without anaesthetic when he was a young boy. It's the same mentality that leads to animal or cruelty or abuse of children.

(February 15, 2017 at 1:11 pm)Khemikal Wrote: If you say so, it must be so.  

Yes. Because there is no good reason to suppose otherwise.

(February 15, 2017 at 5:58 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: Yes. Because there is no good reason to suppose otherwise.

Another instance where, if you say so, it must be so... applies.

"Trying to simplify my Consciousness hypothesis "

SHIFT+Delete


Sorry, can't resist.

In a weird mood...

(February 15, 2017 at 3:02 pm)Alasdair Ham Wrote:

(February 14, 2017 at 5:46 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Why would evolution arrive at a by-product which cannot be seen, cannot be measured, and is known only to exist through subjective agency?  Saying "consciousness is useful" is pretty meaningless when consciousness is only a collection of material interactions.  Why wouldn't a brain just take in data, process it, and output behavior, without the organism ever knowing what it's like  to experience hot chocolate in early fall or whatever?

This is the real problem-- if physical interactions are sufficient to explain behavior, then why would the universe give us this added "bonus" of being aware of those physical interactions?

What do you mean "Why would it?" Why wouldn't it? Evolution has useless side effects and by products left over all the time. There's no purpose to it it's purposeless.

An extra appendage, a malformed foot or a vestigial organ is not in the same category as the capacity to subjectively experience. All those other things, all the ones you could possibly discuss, are philosophically neutral. The ability to experience what things are like is a really different issue-- it's not derived from anything else, it doesn't contribute to anything else, it is not even physically detectable, and yet it is clearly the most important aspect of human existence.

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(February 15, 2017 at 5:41 pm)Mathilda Wrote: What about if the computer was a 100% perfect simulation of all the neurons, dendrites, synapses and neurotransmitters in a real brain, and you then plugged it into a real body with senses?

Why wouldn't it have an equal experience of dust or blue skies?

Why would it?

Quote:What about instead of using a computer, you created an agent controller using cells and put that in a body? Would that then be able to experience? If so, why? Or why not?

The key requirement here is that the agent controller needs to be embodied in an environment and be able to sense and act within it.

Is that the key requirement? If you had a non-organic system, and it could do the things you say are key, would you know that it was really experiencing, rather than just seeming to?

Let's view this as a hypothesis: "Systems with requirements X and Y have the capacity to subjectively experience what things are like (i.e. qualia)." How would you go about proving this hypothesis? Ask it, "Siri. . . are you conscious?" "Yes, Dave, I am. Super-duper, fully aware."

Quote:Assumptions that you have to have reached a certain level of mental development in order to experience things can lead to really immoral acts. The medical profession used to only give anaesthesia to adults for this very reason. My dad for example remembers having his tonsils cut out of him without anaesthetic when he was a young boy. It's the same mentality that leads to animal or cruelty or abuse of children.

Eh? Are you saying all of this for a reason? I don't see the connection to anything I said. It seems to be an attempt to support a philosophical position with an emotional appeal: "Yes, but what about the CHILDREN?" and eventually maybe, "Well. . . YOU say the bennotron 3000 isn't really alive. . . but what if you're WRONG?"

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(February 15, 2017 at 11:50 am)Won2blv Wrote: How come seemingly immaterial emotions can have a physical emotion? Take stress for example, how come an abundant amount of stress can take a toll on us physically? Or nervous causing our heart rate to rise? Maybe those feelings are just our other body parts reporting back to the brain in simplistic terms

There's no doubt about the interaction between the body and qualia. Simply, if I didn't have eyes, I couldn't see things. If I didn't have a brain, there probably would be no "me" to experience anything at all. But that doesn't change the essential problem: why is it that there is any such thing as qualia, anywhere in the universe? Why would any system, under any configuration, actually know what it's like to experience things, rather than just mindlessly grinding through its physical interactions? Why isn't humanity a collection of 7 billion philosophical zombies?


If the universe is nothing but materials, their processes, and their physical transformations, then where does subjective agency fit into all this? It is irrelevant to the mechanism. Imagine this-- let's say there were a universe identical to this one, with one exception-- no qualia experienced by anything. Then look at this universe, identical but with qualia. What's the difference in physical function? Zero. So to insist that the universe is nothing but physical function is to introduce a ghost into the equation.

(February 15, 2017 at 9:32 pm)bennyboy Wrote: If the universe is nothing but materials, their processes, and their physical transformations, then where does subjective agency fit into all this? 

Apparently, it fits into brains.  ...........?

Quote:It is irrelevant to the mechanism.  Imagine this-- let's say there were a universe identical to this one, with one exception-- no qualia experienced by anything.  

Most of the universe very much appears to be this way already.

Quote:Then look at this universe, identical but with qualia.  What's the difference in physical function?  Zero.

The difference in physical function would be qualia.....

Quote:So to insist that the universe is nothing but physical function is to introduce a ghost into the equation.

I'm not sure why you would think so, it doesn't follow from anything above.