Two questions:

1) What functionality is provided by consciousness? (alternatively, how does consciousness confer an advantage over an organism that is not conscious?)

2) Why should this functionality be provided at the quantum level rather than at the level of a network of neurons?

I think that no.1 is one of those questions that seems informative..but..instead, sends us down the path of misconception and inevitable mistakes.  Perhaps it might be more informative to consider consciousness as one way among many to provide something that is advantageous, just as many mechanisms for flight and sight exist.  Experience of first person(a) and experience in first person(b) appear to confer at least some of the same advantages.  

If both phenomena rely, ultimately, on a shared fundamental mechanism..then it shouldn't come as a surprise to find that some examples of self aware organisms are members of subset a, and others subset b, or that members of subset a might at some point become members of subset b. 

If the question is framed more specifically, as in what does subset b confer over subset a, I don't know that a definitive answer can be given..or even that a definitive and uniform advantage exists.  A VOC scream is indicative of experience -of- first person...but...it's doubtful that it comes bundled with pain, and experience -in- first person.  We know how disadvantageous the experience of pain can be - it leads to poor decision making...and often enough the experience of pain comes at the precise moment when good decision making is crucial.  It would probably be nice to know when our bodies are severely damaged without having that input come bundled with something that has a tendency to make the situation that got us damaged even worse.  So points to the plant on that count.

OTOH, the experience of pain, experience -in- the first person, appears to build/support stronger social and sexual bonds.  For all their potential experience of self, voc signallers aren't forming families and throwing their lives down for each other on the small scale - or on a massive scale such as we see in tribal or industrial war. We find some reps capable of rudimentary kin selection, but that's as far as it goes. So points to us, there.  

In a field leveling assessment, both reps of both subsets are wildly successful.  Like all other living organisms, we're both the tip of the spear of our evolutionary development. Badass motherfuckers, descended from a long line of winners, from way back, lol. You'll find us both all over the globe living in largely the same environments..and not only that, in a symbiotic relationship with each other.  Many reps of subset a rely on us for their very existence, and we on them.  We've long leveraged them by exploiting their ability to protect themselves and their production of edible/useful tissue...whereas they leverage our very experience -in- first person..of how tasty x is and how pretty y is and how luxurious z in their cultivation and propagation. Who domesticated whom, in this relationship?

So, points to us both? It seems as though many species have hit on some subset of an ability that confers similar advantage even by disparate means.

(August 25, 2017 at 10:11 am)Khemikal Wrote: I think that no.1 is one of those questions that seems informative..but..instead, sends us down the path of misconception and inevitable mistakes.

Why do you say that?

Implicit in the question is that consciousness and non consciousness cannot provide the same or similar advantages, and also that they are not equally representative of some larger set to which they both belong, is why.

It could be like asking what advantages flying as a dragon fly provides over flying as a sparrow.  We could come up with a pro and con list for both methods of flight, but underlying all of it, at some level, we couldn't avoid that flight -is- the advantage and was accomplished in both cases do to uniform underlying physics and the ability to exploit that is what confers the pros list to both reps.

Similarly, your NNs could be reps of subset a(experience of) whil we are reps of subset b (experience in) - but both are equally capable of doing many of the same things. That is their shared advantage. That's assuming that we aren't actually members of subset a who create narratives about being members of subset b, ofc..which isn't a safe assumption itself. We may be looking for a difference that confers an advantage where there is no difference, only the same advantage conferred by trivially disparate means due to identical underlying mechanisms. If the advantage is flight, no matter how you lift off, if you lift off, you have the advantage. If the advantage is a useful construct of self, no matter the modality of experience, -if- you experience, you have the advantage.

(August 25, 2017 at 10:34 am)Khemikal Wrote: Implicit in the question is that consciousness and non consciousness cannot provide the same or similar advantages, and also that they are not equally representative of some larger set to which they both belong, is why..

Implicit in your objection to it then is the assumption that consciousness is a by-product, emergent phenomenon or an accident. Why assume this for consciousness and not for any other feature of the brain? We can point to the functionality provided by emotions, cognition, memory, action selection, sensory processing etc, why not also consciousness? Or are you arguing that it is a special case? If so, why?

Are you denying that we evolved consciousness? The more highly developed species generally show more signs of consciousness.

Consciousness did not evolve by accident. We have it for the advantage that it provides us, otherwise evolution would not have selected for it. So the question is, what is that advantage? What functionality does it provide?

You have already suggested some, for example creating social and sexual bonds. Although your example does raise the question of whether an organism can experience pain if it is not conscious. Does a non-conscious organism such as a sea slug or plant exposed to aversive stimuli experience pain or is pain only the conscious experience of aversive stimuli?

(August 25, 2017 at 10:34 am)Khemikal Wrote: It could be like asking what advantages flying as a dragon fly provides over flying as a sparrow.  

No it's more like asking what are the advantages of being able to fly and walk rather than just walk.

Specifically, what are the advantage of being able to sense the environment and how you react to it rather than being a stimulus response agent?

(August 25, 2017 at 10:51 am)Mathilda Wrote: Implicit in your objection to it then is the assumption that consciousness is a by-product, emergent phenomenon or an accident.

Only insomuch as all abilities and structures are, in the evolutionary context; byproducts, emergent, or accidental.  The sum total of whats left.  Reproduction with variation, time, and death.  

Quote:Why assume this for consciousness and not for any other feature of the brain? We can point to the functionality provided by emotions, cognition, memory, action selection, sensory processing etc, why not also consciousness? Or are you arguing that it is a special case? If so, why?

See above.

Quote:Are you denying that we evolved consciousness? The more highly developed species generally show more signs of consciousness.

We're already diving into mistakes, see.  You are not more highly developed than a plant.  You;re disparately developed. If you consider how each rep is embodied (a subject I know you enjoy) the differences in how they achieve the same advantage may be illuminated. Plants, for example..cant run...and so, organs are costly. A plant with a brain like ours is making one hell of a biological gamble. Still, they find themselves subject to the same pressures, and so some means of achieving similar abilities is beneficial to them for the same reasons that it's beneficial to us.

Quote:Consciousness did not evolve by accident. We have it for the advantage that it provides us, otherwise evolution would not have selected for it. So the question is, what is that advantage? What functionality does it provide?

-and my answer was that experience in probably evolved for the same reason that experience of did.  They both confer, widely, the same advantages - though by no means all of the same advantages..though even here, I wouldn;t call parity between the two impossible, just not presently existent so far as we can tell. I ca';t tell you that there's -anything- that experience in can do that experience of couldn't, I can only tell you what individual reps appear to be using one or the other for.

Quote:You have already suggested some, for example creating social and sexual bonds. Although your example does raise the question of whether an organism can experience pain if it is not conscious. Does a non-conscious organism such as a sea slug or plant exposed to aversive stimuli experience pain or is pain only the conscious experience of aversive stimuli?

Of/in.  If a sea slug experience pain in the manner that I'm referring to, it would be in, not of.  

Quote:No it's more like asking what are the advantages of being able to fly and walk rather than just walk.

-and there the implicit assumption becomes explicit.  Consiousness ios flight, whereas non-conciousness is walking.  Again, I;m suggesting that they may both be forms of flight.

Quote:Specifically, what are the advantage of being able to sense the environment and how you react to it rather than being a stimulus response agent?

-and my answer to that question was that I don't think that there is a specific or uniform advantage of one over the the other - that they are both ways of securing largely the same advantages, just as different means of flight are all ways of securing largely the same advantages.

(August 25, 2017 at 10:59 am)Khemikal Wrote:

(August 25, 2017 at 10:51 am)Mathilda Wrote: Implicit in your objection to it then is the assumption that consciousness is a by-product, emergent phenomenon or an accident.

Only insomuch as all abilities and structures are, in the evolutionary context; byproducts, emergent, or accidental.  The sum total of whats left.  Reproduction with variation, time, and death.  

But those abilities and structures, whether you call them byproducts, emergent or accidental, are all retained because they confer an evolutionary advantage. So what evolutionary advantage is conferred by consciousness?

(August 25, 2017 at 10:59 am)Khemikal Wrote:

(August 25, 2017 at 10:51 am)Mathilda Wrote: Are you denying that we evolved consciousness? The more highly developed species generally show more signs of consciousness.

We're already diving into mistakes, see.  You are not more highly developed than a plant.  You;re disparately developed.

Do you find yourself insulting people at random by telling them that they are no more highly developed than a plant?

OK, well maybe it's time to define what we both mean by highly developed. I take it it to mean that we are more complex, can do more, are better able to sense and act within an environment. All forms of life on Earth can find a common ancestor. Some evolutionary niches will allow more complexity to evolve over time than others. Crocodiles and alligators have not needed to develop much at all over the last 65 million years. Peacocks are stuck on a local maxima in their evolutionary landscape (evolutionary dead-end). So yes I think it is fair to say that some forms of life are more highly developed than others, as well as being disparately developed.

After all, Neuroscientists commonly refer to parts of the brain in terms of evolutionary age, the reptilian brain, the limbic system, the neocortex etc.

(August 25, 2017 at 10:59 am)Khemikal Wrote:  If you consider how each rep is embodied (a subject I know you enjoy) the differences in how they achieve the same advantage may be illuminated.  Plants, for example..cant run...and so, organs are costly.  A plant with a brain like ours is making one hell of a biological gamble.

That's not how evolution works.

(August 25, 2017 at 10:59 am)Khemikal Wrote:  Still, they find themselves subject to the same pressures, and so some means of achieving similar abilities is beneficial to them for the same reasons that it's beneficial to us.  

Only the same pressures in the most general sense in that organisms need to survive and procreate. I don't know how you can seriously argue that we share the same pressures for achieving similar abilities as all other organisms. I don't know about you, but I eat food and don't need to photosynthesise, or to breathe under water, or fly. The pressure is determined by the environmental niche of the species.

(August 25, 2017 at 10:59 am)Khemikal Wrote:

(August 25, 2017 at 10:51 am)Mathilda Wrote: Consciousness did not evolve by accident. We have it for the advantage that it provides us, otherwise evolution would not have selected for it. So the question is, what is that advantage? What functionality does it provide?

-and my answer was that experience in probably evolved for the same reason that experience of did.

What do you mean by 'experience in' and 'experience of' ?

(August 25, 2017 at 10:59 am)Khemikal Wrote:

(August 25, 2017 at 10:51 am)Mathilda Wrote: No it's more like asking what are the advantages of being able to fly and walk rather than just walk.

-and there the implicit assumption becomes explicit.  Consiousness ios flight, whereas non-conciousness is walking.  Again, I;m suggesting that they may both be forms of flight.

Any reason to suggest this?

(August 25, 2017 at 10:59 am)Khemikal Wrote:

(August 25, 2017 at 10:51 am)Mathilda Wrote: Specifically, what are the advantage of being able to sense the environment and how you react to it rather than being a stimulus response agent?

-and my answer to that question was that I don't think that there is a specific or uniform advantage of one over the the other - that they are both ways of securing largely the same advantages, just as different means of flight are all ways of securing largely the same advantages.

Or is it that there are no or few advantages that you can personally think of? It is a hard question but coming at it from the perspective of building an embodied artificial intelligence, I could start to see reasons why we would want to deliberately build in functionality that could be construed as consciousness.

(August 25, 2017 at 11:43 am)Mathilda Wrote: But those abilities and structures, whether you call them byproducts, emergent or accidental, are all retained because they confer an evolutionary advantage. So what evolutionary advantage is conferred by consciousness?

-and again..they seem to be retained because they are not deleterious, and confer the same advantages that non conscious cognizance provide. 

Quote:Do you find yourself insulting people at random by telling them that they are no more highly developed than a plant?

OK, well maybe it's time to define what we both mean by highly developed. I take it it to mean that we are more complex, can do more, are better able to sense and act within an environment. All forms of life on Earth can find a common ancestor. Some evolutionary niches will allow more complexity to evolve over time than others. Crocodiles and alligators have not needed to develop much at all over the last 65 million years. Peacocks are stuck on a local maxima in their evolutionary landscape (evolutionary dead-end). So yes I think it is fair to say that some forms of life are more highly developed than others, as well as being disparately developed.

After all, Neuroscientists commonly refer to parts of the brain in terms of evolutionary age, the reptilian brain, the limbic system, the neocortex etc.

It's not an insult, Matthilda, it's a statement of fact in the context of evolutionary biology.  You thinking "it's fair to say" is more an acceptance of a term of art and arbitrarity than some global hierarchy of development. Coming from me, specifically, a comparison between yourself and a plant should be taken as a compliment. They're the lords of organic chemistry, the foundation of all human life, wildly divergent and beautiful (and sometimes terrible). I respect them greatly, and even in mundane ways my life and my family's happiness depend on them. I don't see them as many (wrongly) see them as lesser species, utterly interchangeable by silk or plastic effigies on coffe tables. After all, who keeps a stuffed dog around in favor of a live one?

Quote:That's not how evolution works.

It is, actually.  complex organs like brains or livers or kidneys would be deleterious adaptations for a sessile organism.  It can't move out of the way of incoming teeth.  So, for a sessile organism, solutions to the same problems that plague organisms that -can- move out of the way of teeth have to be arrived upon.  The alternative is death. We don;t expect to find a brain like ours in a plant...but plants do require (and possess) structures that achieve many of the things that our brain achieves.

Quote:Only the same pressures in the most general sense in that organisms need to survive and procreate. I don't know how you can seriously argue that we share the same pressures for achieving similar abilities as all other organisms. I don't know about you, but I eat food and don't need to photosynthesise, or to breathe under water, or fly. The pressure is determined by the environmental niche of the species.

Plants also "eat food", they use to energy from photosynthesis to metabolize fertility in the soil.  They also respirate, in that they require carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen through their stomata (they can even be suffocated...heat death is an issue of their stomata swelling to the point of not being able to transpirate and bleed excess thermal energy or maintain the vacuum that initiates flow of nutrients and facilitates turgidity - they literally collapse and have trouble breathing when it gets too hot...sound familiar?).  Many can;t breathe underwater, some can..none fly..but many can drift.  Sure, pressure is determined by environmental niches...and we hare our environmental niches with our crop species.  Where we flourish, they flourish; where they flourish, we flourish.  Yes, we';ve found ways to exceed our latitudinal band of cohabitation...but so have they, for their part. So, we could say that we have advantages that they do not, but they also have advantages that we do not. Some advantages, however, we share - and that expresses itself as the fabric of our frequently co-dependent relationships.

Quote:What do you mean by 'experience in' and 'experience of' ?

It's a concept in mind/cognition called modality.  The purported difference between ourselves and non conscious species is not, meaningfully, that we have an experience of self.  Not that we have some experience -of- pain..damage, for example.  It's that we can be -in- pain.  That we have an experience in first person, not of it.  VOC signalling plants are self aware by any coherent and consistent description of self awareness...they have an experience -of- the first person, but we don;t extend to them the ability of having an experience -in- the first person.

Quote:Any reason to suggest this?

Sure, I've already mentioned a couple, and you won't find a shortage if you kept looking..and you yourself offered examples earlier in thread - when speaking about how your NN could learn.  

Quote:Or is it that there are no or few advantages that you can personally think of? It is a hard question but coming at it from the perspective of building an embodied artificial intelligence, I could start to see reasons why we would want to deliberately build in functionality that could be construed as consciousness.

I can think of plenty of advantages, I just can't think of any that would be impossible to achieve in some other modality of cognizance.  I suggested one, shared experience of suffering, of being -in- pain together builds bonds that facilitate strongly beneficial reproductive outcomes.  OFC, a non conscious this or that with an unchangeable subroutine for reproductive and kinship fidelity would be capable of the same thing, perhaps even moreso..in that we, despite being purportedly conscious and building bonds seemingly based on those shared conscious experiences are still capable of infidelity.

---

On that last one, and as an example of something I touched on earlier...while we're very capable of abandoning our progeny and family...sea rocket is not.  Not only can this plant recognize it;s kin, they band together in colonies to exterminate other, non kin colonies of the same species and any other competing organism - they're self aware, and aware of others, and of the relationships between themselves and others, and capable of coordinating attacks on others without harming their kingroup - despite being non- conscious so far as we can tell.  They use their roots to both chemically poison the earth and also to mechanically strangle, starve, and dehydrate, and uproot kinship out-groups.  

They're more reliable brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers than we are, on that count.

(August 25, 2017 at 11:43 am)Mathilda Wrote: Some evolutionary niches will allow more complexity to evolve over time than others. Crocodiles and alligators have not needed to develop much at all over the last 65 million years. Peacocks are stuck on a local maxima in their evolutionary landscape (evolutionary dead-end). So yes I think it is fair to say that some forms of life are more highly developed than others, as well as being disparately developed.

I'd agree with your general sentiment, because I too think people are generally pretty amazing, but "high" implies that there's some ideal state toward which life is reaching-- maximal complexity for example. But some animals, like cockroaches, have had a truly epic run, and it's very highly unlikely that humans will survive that long. If we don't, we've been relatively less successful in our evolution.

I'd argue that life is the struggle of matter and energy to sustain form in the face of the pressure toward entropy. Therefore those species which bring most organization to the universe, both at one time and in their entire era, might be said to be more highly developed than humans. This very well COULD be humans, if we survive long enough to spread out into the cosmos. But it probably won't be.

(August 25, 2017 at 12:00 pm)Khemikal Wrote:

(August 25, 2017 at 11:43 am)Mathilda Wrote: But those abilities and structures, whether you call them byproducts, emergent or accidental, are all retained because they confer an evolutionary advantage. So what evolutionary advantage is conferred by consciousness?

-and again..they seem to be retained because they are not deleterious, and confer the same advantages that non conscious cognizance provide. 

Not just retained. That just means that there is no cost to them. Only beneficial mutations that increase fitness propagate throughout the population .Retained features do not, but they do widen the search space and allow the possibility of further beneficial mutations to occur. And if they do then the neutral feature and the beneficial mutation both get propagated.

But this is referring to duplication and mutation of the genotype. This is much lower level than a fully developed and complex feature feature such as consciousness. You cannot argue that such a thing happened by accident and was merely  retained because there was no cost to it. It involves too much of the brain. So we can assume that consciousness came about for a reason.

(August 25, 2017 at 12:00 pm)Khemikal Wrote:

(August 25, 2017 at 11:43 am)Mathilda Wrote: That's not how evolution works.

It is, actually.  complex organs like brains or livers or kidneys would be deleterious adaptations for a sessile organism.  It can't move out of the way of incoming teeth.  So, for a sessile organism, solutions to the same problems that plague organisms that -can- move out of the way of teeth have to be arrived upon.  The alternative is death.  We don;t expect to find a brain like ours in a plant...but plants do require (and possess) structures that achieve many of the things that our brain achieves.  

It isn't actually how evolution works. A plant has no ability to grow a brain, liver or kidney even by accident. There is just no physical mechanism in place where those plant genes could be expressed as a such a complex organ. It inhabits the completely wrong part of evolutionary space for that. That's not to say that a plant could not evolve them given sufficient time if the environmental pressures were there.

Unless you have completely redefined what is meant by a brain, liver and kidney that is.

(August 25, 2017 at 12:00 pm)Khemikal Wrote:

(August 25, 2017 at 11:43 am)Mathilda Wrote: What do you mean by 'experience in' and 'experience of' ?

It's a concept in mind/cognition called modality.  The purported difference between ourselves and non conscious species is not, meaningfully, that we have an experience of self.  Not that we have some experience -of- pain..damage, for example.  It's that we can be -in- pain.  That we have an experience in first person, not of it.  VOC signalling plants are self aware by any coherent and consistent description of self awareness...they have an experience -of- the first person, but we don;t extend to them the ability of having an experience -in- the first person.

Is this a useful concept? Is there any evidence that we need to differentiate between 'experience in' and 'experience of' ? Is there an objective way of determining whether an organism is 'in the sensation' rather than having an 'experience of it'? Can a human with brain damage or a neurodegenerative disease have experience of pain when they would normally have experience being in it? If not then it sounds like a pointless philosophical concept to me.

(August 25, 2017 at 12:00 pm)Khemikal Wrote:

(August 25, 2017 at 11:43 am)Mathilda Wrote: Or is it that there are no or few advantages that you can personally think of? It is a hard question but coming at it from the perspective of building an embodied artificial intelligence, I could start to see reasons why we would want to deliberately build in functionality that could be construed as consciousness.

I can think of plenty of advantages, I just can't think of any that would be impossible to achieve in some other modality of cognizance.  I suggested one, shared experience of suffering, of being -in- pain together builds bonds that facilitate strongly beneficial reproductive outcomes.  OFC, a non conscious this or that with an unchangeable subroutine for reproductive and kinship fidelity would be capable of the same thing, perhaps even moreso..in that we, despite being purportedly conscious and building bonds seemingly based on those shared conscious experiences are still capable of infidelity.

---

On that last one, and as an example of something I touched on earlier...while we're very capable of abandoning our progeny and family...sea rocket is not.  Not only can this plant recognize it;s kin, they band together in colonies to exterminate other, non kin colonies of the same species and any other competing organism - they're self aware, and aware of others, and of the relationships between themselves and others, and capable of coordinating attacks on others without harming their kingroup - despite being non- conscious so far as we can tell.  They use their roots to both chemically poison the earth and also to mechanically strangle, starve, and dehydrate, and uproot kinship out-groups.  

I'd argue then that sea rocket is developing the first rudimentary levels of consciousness. Any organism that needs a sense of self and a sense of others, whether it is because it is predator, prey or part of a pack or colony that has to co-ordinate its actions, will benefit from consciousness.

I'd also argue that consciousness helps any intelligent agent that performs action selection. Emotion is known to narrow our range of likely responses to a particular stimuli, whereas cognition widens it. Consciousness aids cognition. For example recognising that you are in a particular emotional state (e.g. dying of thirst) and the danger of the most likely response (e.g. drinking seawater).

So getting back to the original point I was making:

2) Why should this functionality be provided at the quantum level rather than at the level of a network of neurons?