(January 23, 2022 at 1:44 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: The machine theory would say that the internal view is not what you detect or process. It’s not seeing, but attending to the fact that you see.

I've never heard of machine theory... is it related to comp mind or have you moved on from that in your thinking? And what does it mean to 'attend' to the fact that you're seeing... in the case of humans, do you mean mental focus or something?

(January 21, 2022 at 9:40 pm)GrandizerII Wrote:

(January 21, 2022 at 3:19 pm)Ferrocyanide Wrote: There is a small problem there and it has nothing to do with logic. It has more to do with what exists and what doesn’t exist.

I explained it to people in another thread. I will do it here since I love explaining this:
1. Let’s say I have a CD of Win XP. The CD is made of polycarbonate plastic with its aluminium layer, with its pits.
Is the CD Win XP? Or is the CD polycarbonate plastic with its aluminium layer.
What if I melt down the CD. Where did Win XP go?
Does Win XP still exist or did I destroy it? Did it obey the law of conservation of information?

All the atoms are still there. Law of conservation of matter.

In other words, software is not a physical thing.

When you load the contents of that CD into a computer, physical processes occur whereby eventually the OS UI for XP is then displayed on the screen. Now what part exactly is Windows XP does not ultimately matter. However you define Windows XP, whether in an abstract sense or by equating it to the UI on the screen or even the contents of the CD, there is no "hard problem" here.

That’s correct. In order to run Win XP, you need physical processes (atoms). If you melt the PC that is running Win XP, where did Win XP go?
Win XP itself is not something physical. Programs and data are just information and information is not something made of atoms.
In other words, Win XP never existed in the first place. The only thing that existed was a representation of Win XP (the PC running Win XP).

This is related to the discussion about a human and an exact duplicate that doesn’t have a consciousness which you guys are calling a zombie.

I’ll come back to the hard problem later.

Quote:Simplistically speaking, the story exactly as depicted in the book went along with the book. But that's because we are applying the label "story" to the contents of that book (the collection of words and expressions that help us to understand the settings, the plot, and such). And once again, there is no "hard problem" here.

Letters, words, stories and pictures do not exist. They are non-physical things. They are just information.
When you melt the book, it is said the information is destroyed. What is actually meant is that the order of the information has changed and we don’t know how to put it back into its original state.
Some call it “non-conservation of information”.

Again, this is a case of atoms representing a non-physical things. The representation can be scrambled.

Quote:Depends on what the exact relationship between brain and consciousness is. I would say that it most probably fades away with the brain.

But not sure now what the exact point you were trying to make here?

Seems like you were trying to make the case that consciousness is like Windows XP and story in the previous two illustrations? But I don't agree that those two analogies hold, for reasons I already stated earlier.

That’s interesting. You say that conscious most probably fades away with the brain. In other words, there is a strong association between brain and consciousness.

There are some people who think that the brain has nothing to do with the soul. Some people seem to call this consciousness.
They claim that the soul is some other structure, it is non-physical, it is indestructible, and that if you die, your soul keeps on existing.

Since you and polymath257 were talking about a human and an exact copy that is a zombie, I was wondering whether you believed that the consciousness was some object that needs to be added to the human body.
That would be the only difference between the human and the zombie right? That someone plugged in a consciousness into human body 1 and he did not plug in a consciousness in human body 2.

Quote:What do you mean by "experience the flavor" (at level 1)? I just want to be clear we're not conflating first-person perspective kind of experience with experience in the third-person sense. Am I, at level 1, experiencing the flavor in a first-person perspective?

As to your question, I would say gradual, but so long as we're clear that we're not conflating different senses of consciousness.

To make it simple, let’s say I am talking about first person perspective.
(A 3 rd person perspective doesn’t matter. Let’s say he invents a machine and plugs into the brain and the meters show some values. His machine could calculate and give some metric as to what grade of consciousness an ant brain has.)

Quote:Well, it doesn't seem like consciousness is required for addition.

Beautiful.

Quote:I would say that with the exception of 4 (though I'm not too sure and need to think about this better), none of these items require consciousness. But it depends on what you mean by such things as "feeling love" and "appreciating". After all, a chat bot can easily be programmed to feel, or at least act like they're feeling. But it's a very superficial sense of the word that is qualitatively different from the phenomenal sense. Expressing words of love is different from the "I can feel my heart beating really fast" kind of love.

No no. I am talking about true feelings. I am not talking about software that mimics human responses (you type a sentence, the AI analyzes your text and follows language rules and outputs “I love you”).

But it sounds like you didn’t attribute any jobs to the consciousness.
I wanted to know if you thought of consciousness as something that exists without a body, without any atoms.
I wanted to know if you thought of it as some structure that does certain tasks. Kind of like a secondary bain.


THE HARD PROBLEM
As for why does the human brain experience consciousness? Is consciousness just a bunch of neural circuits?

I think lacking the ability to imagine that circuits can have consciousness is part of the limitation of being human.

You are able to understand Win XP because you understand certain 3D structures. You are able to understand that pits and planes on a CD surface represents Win XP.
This is a matter of visualizing objects and there positions. You understand what a pit is. You understand about locations in 3D space.
Combining those 2 concepts, you understand what a CD represents.

As for the Mickey Mouse book, it is ink on paper. Again, it is a case of objects (letters) and their positions in 3D space.
Also, the book is something immobile.

A PC running Win XP is mobile in the sense that there is electrical activity in it. However, for a human, it is easy to imagine that some RAM cells are charged and some are not charged.

I think that humans understand everything via visualization: via objects and their positions.
For example:
Imagine a water droplet in a 0-g environment.

Now, imagine the number 468.
What you are seeing on your computer screen is a graphical representation of 468.

Nothing new, Ferro. We can keep going in circles, or we can stop here. I've already decided to end the discussion on my part.

By the way, I know what classical dualism is, lol.

If you were curious to know what position I [tentatively] lean to, it's property dualism. Feel free to address it if you want, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm done.

(January 24, 2022 at 11:35 pm)GrandizerII Wrote: Nothing new, Ferro. We can keep going in circles, or we can stop here. I've already decided to end the discussion on my part.

By the way, I know what classical dualism is, lol.

If you were curious to know what position I [tentatively] lean to, it's property dualism. Feel free to address it if you want, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm done.

I see.
Is that because you think that the brain is insufficient, that consciousness can’t be coming from the brain since neurons are something very basic and consciousness is at a much higher level?


It was a great conversation. I wasn’t expecting it to go in the direction of “what is consciousness”.

(January 24, 2022 at 8:53 pm)emjay Wrote:

(January 23, 2022 at 1:44 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: The machine theory would say that the internal view is not what you detect or process. It’s not seeing, but attending to the fact that you see.

I've never heard of machine theory... is it related to comp mind or have you moved on from that in your thinking? And what does it mean to 'attend' to the fact that you're seeing... in the case of humans, do you mean mental focus or something?

I used it as an umbrella term for theories that attempt to explain the potential behaviors and reports of machines. They’re not explicitly about human consciousness, though I think they speak to the question of whether or not there’s any conceivable explanation arising from materialistic principles.

If comp mind is the what, a specific machine theory could be the how. Attending to sight, more broadly attending to attention, is one way that researchers have proposed that a machine might be able to make a genuine report about what it’s doing, rather than -just doing it. It’s posited that a machine would have advantages if it possessed the systems and information required to do some sort of internal monitoring or modeling. Benefits to control, being the most well developed and well evidenced.

I saw it mentioned that consciousness doesn’t seem to be required for addition. I think that’s true, but I also struggle to think of anyone who thinks that our brains are an evolutionary response to needing to do addition.

(January 25, 2022 at 12:55 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote:

(January 24, 2022 at 8:53 pm)emjay Wrote: I've never heard of machine theory... is it related to comp mind or have you moved on from that in your thinking? And what does it mean to 'attend' to the fact that you're seeing... in the case of humans, do you mean mental focus or something?

I used it as an umbrella term for theories that attempt to explain the potential behaviors and reports of machines.  They’re not explicitly about human consciousness, though I think they speak to the question of whether or not there’s any conceivable explanation arising from materialistic principles.  

If comp mind is the what, a specific machine theory could be the how.  Attending to sight, more broadly attending to attention, is one way that researchers have proposed that a machine might be able to make a genuine report about what it’s doing, rather than -just doing it.  It’s posited that a machine would have advantages if it possessed the systems and information required to do some sort of internal monitoring or modeling.  Benefits to control, being the most well developed and well evidenced.

I saw it mentioned that consciousness doesn’t seem to be required for addition.  I think that’s true, but I also struggle to think of anyone who thinks that our brains are an evolutionary response to needing to do addition.

Ah, okay, my bad. I see what you're saying.

As for addition, well any arithmetic, I guess I'd think of it more as a byproduct... an ability that is made possible only by combining learned procedural and/or experimental/ad hoc knowledge with the various forms of imaginative/abstract mental processing at our disposal... the latter of which, and the level of development of which, are/can be different in different individuals; such as might be measured by an IQ test; measuring things like visual awareness and spacial awareness, and due to the plasticity of the brain, are probably trainable to improve them.

For instance, I don't know about you, but if I'm asked to do mental arithmetic, I do it ?symbolically (ie by manipulating an abstract concept of numbers), but not by any rigid method... ie it is contextual what method I use, just whatever's best for the job at hand, based on the characteristics of the numbers involved, such as whether they're large or small, odd or even, greater than or less than certain numbers etc. Whereas other people, with better visual awareness, might achieve the same end, but a completely different way; by imagining for instance a blackboard and then imagining themselves writing a longhand mathematical calculation. And then there are those savants that have seemingly superhuman mathematical abilities... what is going on in their brains I can only guess, but maybe it's due to any of those specific imaginative faculties being highly developed, at the expense (or not) of others, and/or perhaps a difference in how those modes are integrated, who knows.

So basically, in other words from this perspective, arithmetic only seems to essentially piggyback upon the different forms/modes of imaginative/abstract processing, contextually using different learned methods depending not only on the characteristics of the numbers involved, but also the different modes/types of imagination used to process them. As such, from this perpective it's not our mathematical capacity per se that I think needs to be explained in evolutionary terms, but the underlying medium so to speak of our ability to imagine itself... that is the ability to mentally manipulate abstract symbols/ideas across a range of different modalities (visual, spacial etc)... but I think that has much more simple and obvious evolutionary interpretations, in the sense that the ability to experiment with and test how different ideas/mental representations fit together in our minds ahead or instead of putting them into physical practice, saves not only time and energy but also prevents potential physical danger.

As great as they are though, our imaginative capacities are nonetheless quite limited in and of themselves... limited by both the capacities of short and long term memory... and indeed any learned method of mental processing (such as mental arithmetic) has to take those limitations into account to be useful/practical. So on their own I'd say they're only really useful for creating rough plans/conceptions, something that would get you out of a jam quickly in nature, which is what I think they evolved for, but extensive and detailed plans/conceptions, such as designing complex machinery or whatever, can't be done in the head alone because of those limitations... it would be great if it could, and maybe for some exceptional minds it is possible (ie on account of highly developed memory or visual capabilities such as a photographic memory etc), but I would think that most people can't. But with the advent of language and writing - a means to represent information outside of ourselves, or in different forms (such as the oral transmission of information pre-writing) - those limitations to our imagination essentially disappeared, creating a basically exponential increase in our capacity to learn and innovate, as an unstoppable feedback loop between information 'in here' and 'out there'. So yeah, that's how I'd see it; mathematics and any mental procedures developed to calculate with it, are the fruits of this process, rather than its evolutionary impetus.

(January 25, 2022 at 12:55 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I saw it mentioned that consciousness doesn’t seem to be required for addition.  I think that’s true, but I also struggle to think of anyone who thinks that our brains are an evolutionary response to needing to do addition.

Yes. We were talking about how to recognize if a circuit has consciousness.

For the human brain, it doesn’t do addition in the same way as an ADDER circuit. The brain has developed the ability to do basic logic and this includes the ability to recognize people, creatures, other objects in its environment. So, along with that comes the ability to count.
So, humans have the ability to count all the members of their family and probably all other vertebrates can do it as well.

I think humans do addition by doing symbolic manipulation, which is very different than the way that an ADDER circuit works.

Fwiw, the human brain is notoriously bad at math. So if that were the advantageous function or ability, we might not be much of a success story.

I use a bunch of little tricks I picked up over the years, none of which help my kids actually learn the math. That was something I had to train myself to stop doing when we started homeschooling.

Yeah me too on the little tricks front... youtube for instance is full of different methods to do mental arithmetic; some more memorable than others.

I'm still not sure what this topic is about. Can anyone give me a Readers Digest explanation? The more I have read the more I don't understand the topic.