Seeing red

[bennyboy]

All definitions of all terms are, essentially, arbitrary.  

Definitions are arbitrary, but reality, for which we make labels, isn't.

You can define a cat however you want, but that meowing furry thing is going to need a name. Similarly, when I wake up and the lights come on in my mind, that's "mind." You can call an AI system a mind if you want, but then we'll need a new word for the thing I'm talking about-- unless we have sufficient reason to believe they are the same, which IMO we don't.

So is mind a real thing, such that a thing either has one or doesn't, or is it just a word of convenience to talk about things which you seem to interact with their environments in certain ways? If the latter's the case, then there's little interesting conversation to be had, I'd guess.

[The Grand Nudger]

All definitions of all terms are, essentially, arbitrary.  

Definitions are arbitrary, but reality, for which we make labels, isn't.

So sayeth the "skeptic" who can't even decide whether or not his experiences are referent, let alone what they're referent to?  You'll need to come a whole lot harder to make this statements of your own stick. Why can't reality be arbitrary, it's just an idea..............

You can define a cat however you want, but that meowing furry thing is going to need a name.  Similarly, when I wake up and the lights come on in my mind, that's "mind."  You can call an AI system a mind if you want, but then we'll need a new word for the thing I'm talking about-- unless we have sufficient reason to believe they are the same, which IMO we don't.

I can, and I can define a cat as such that cat and dragon are equals, therefore there are no cats in the world.  All these meowing things just share similarities /w cats - which don't exist.  Such is the power of definitions in formal logical statements.   Similarly, you can call mind whatever you want, and if photons have mind I must have "supermind", and supermind is all we're -actually- discussing, isn't it?  

So is mind a real thing, such that a thing either has one or doesn't, or is it just a word of convenience to talk about things which you seem to interact with their environments in certain ways?  If the latter's the case, then there's little interesting conversation to be had, I'd guess.

No ones asked you to consider whether or not you and AI are the same. By definition you are not the same. You've only been asked whether or not you might both be capable of exhibiting those behaviors which, in human beings, you interpret as mind.

OFC mind is a "real thing" - otherwise we'd have trouble explaining why we experience it and encounter so much of it on the interwebs. We're not discussing whether or not mind is real...but whats it's made out of, and what can account for it.

[Angrboda]

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mind
noun
1.
the element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought.

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In this instance, the robot drivers would have intentionality, but not mind. For the universe to have mind, it would have to be able to have intentionality about its own existence; this is unlikely. The same for molecules and atoms as they lack a means of representing their environment internally.

[The Grand Nudger]

Indeed.  If photons and atoms had either intention -or- mind we wouldn't have had to take the time to arrange them in computational systems, or to attempt to program AI.  It would be moot point, all comp systems (as all things) would have both intent and mind and neither of those two things would be up for debate or disagreement. They would be brute facts.

Forgive me for assuming that they might work differently, were that the case...that we might notice.

[bennyboy]

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mind
noun
1.
the element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought.

---

In this instance, the robot drivers would have intentionality, but not mind.  For the universe to have mind, it would have to be able to have intentionality about its own existence; this is unlikely.  The same for molecules and atoms as they lack a means of representing their environment internally.

What's the difference in intentionality, in your opinion, between a human brain and a galaxy? As far as I can tell, it's both just a bunch of busy work, with the difference being that we know the human brain experiences qualia, and we assume that a galaxy does not.

[Angrboda]

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mind
noun
1.
the element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought.

---

In this instance, the robot drivers would have intentionality, but not mind.  For the universe to have mind, it would have to be able to have intentionality about its own existence; this is unlikely.  The same for molecules and atoms as they lack a means of representing their environment internally.

Dictionaries mean nothing in philosophical discussion.  You should know that.

I wasn't quoting the dictionary as an authority, so it's perfectly appropriate as a starting point.

What's the difference in intentionality, in your opinion, between a human brain and a galaxy?

A galaxy appears to lack a means of representing things. It's possible that it is forming a representational system that I simply do not comprehend, but then the onus of supporting that notion would be on the person suggesting that it does. You've suggested that mind is endemic to matter. To date you don't appear to have supported that with anything but speculation. Speculation is fine, but it doesn't establish anything. Regardless, that form of representing things would be entirely separate from the type of material representational systems which I suggest are essential to mind.

[Edwardo Piet]

Dualism is false. There is no Cartesian Theatre. The mind may not be "material" but it is physical in the sense it obeys physical laws like the rest of the universe, and it is natural and not supernatural. There is no spirit, there is no soul.

[bennyboy]

I wasn't quoting the dictionary as an authority, so it's perfectly appropriate as a starting point.

Okay.

A galaxy appears to lack a means of representing things.   It's possible that it is forming a representational system that I simply do not comprehend, but then the onus of supporting that notion would be on the person suggesting that it does.  You've suggested that mind is endemic to matter.  To date you don't appear to have supported that with anything but speculation.  Speculation is fine, but it doesn't establish anything.  Regardless, that form of representing things would be entirely separate from the type of material representational systems which I suggest are essential to mind.

I'd argue that ALL states represent something-- they at the very least represent previous states and some function over time. I mean, an atom which absorbs a photon is carrying a record of an interaction from the transmitting body. If a billion photons are absorbed in a small burst into a patch of rock on some planet, is this not, until they are re-emitted, a kind of memory? I think hidden behind the various discussions of intention, representation, etc. is an implied substance dualism: we are looking for those things that we already consider meaningful, because we have minds. However, our brain doesn't follow special physical rules; why then would it achieve a special state?

As for mind and matter-- it is definitely speculation, since I'm trying to view this through the eyes of a materialist. A couple pages ago, I did a kind of process of reduction that kind of makes me feel there's no clear point at which we can say A is not mindful, but B is. If there's no critical mass at which mind sort of pops into existence, then I'd expect a spectrum of mind, from complex all the way down to very elemental.

[Angrboda]

A galaxy appears to lack a means of representing things.   It's possible that it is forming a representational system that I simply do not comprehend, but then the onus of supporting that notion would be on the person suggesting that it does.  You've suggested that mind is endemic to matter.  To date you don't appear to have supported that with anything but speculation.  Speculation is fine, but it doesn't establish anything.  Regardless, that form of representing things would be entirely separate from the type of material representational systems which I suggest are essential to mind.

I'd argue that ALL states represent something-- they at the very least represent previous states and some function over time.  I mean, an atom which absorbs a photon is carrying a record of an interaction from the transmitting body.  If a billion photons are absorbed in a small burst into a patch of rock on some planet, is this not, until they are re-emitted, a kind of memory?

No it isn't a memory. The information is represented in these states, but these states do not form a representational system. Note that in the case of the robot, a representational system consists of information, a system for representing it, and an environment for which that representation is meaningful (and by meaningful here I mean that it contains information which, by its content, guides the behavior of the representational system; in the robot driver example, this element is reflected by the road being represented being amenable to the motion of the vehicle; a robot driver in mid-air or on its back wouldn't be representing objects in a meaningful sense).

[emjay]

So in other words, what would be a state at the particle level? Would concentrated ions count as a state for instance, where one concentration is a different state from another concentration? Or would a molecule count as a state in the sense of being a structural organisation of atoms etc? This is not the way I usually think about these things so I'm having trouble with it.

That's the thing.  Everything in the universe has some relationship to everything else, and these relationships are all dynamic on some level.  So it's ALL information in a sense.  So when we talk about mind, and brains, and neural nets, what is the distinguishing feature that separates any arbitrary collection of components as having "states" or carrying "information," and the rest just being a bunch of stuff floating in space?  I think you can guess that my position is that it is only by mind that these rather arbitrary divisions can be made, and so we're thrown back into our circle again.  Let's say I were to arrange a bunch of black and white stones into a digital pattern on a beach, representing a Beatles' song.  Is it a song, or isn't it?  To me, it is, to anybody who doesn't know my mind, it couldn't possibly be.  So perhaps something ONLY becomes information when a sentient mind aritrarily imbues it with meaning.  Back to the circle a third time.

My particular interest is in photon emission and reception, and for a particular reason.  From the "perspective" of a photon, no time has passed no matter how far it travels, which means (to me) that the point of arrival is predestined.  The photon, then, instead of being seen as a packet of energy traveling for millions of years, could be seen as serving a kind of distant electron function: it binds together two atoms at a point (due to the relativistic flattening of the universe at the speed of light).  What does this have to do with anything? -- It is an extension of information through time and space, much as DNA is an extension of state through time in the form of statistical effects of the environment on that DNA's formation, and much as the human memory serves to bring a remembered state into comparison with a new state.

I don't know what to say but WOW! I think you're going to spawn a whole new interest in me with all this. In that this is a brand new way of looking at the whole problem that deals with what you call the boundary problem. So instead of confining myself to the mind-imposed arbitrary limits of where a system starts and ends, look at in terms of states and relationships of matter in space and time, including your theory of photons which to me sounds like you're saying essentially that they can essentially 'teleport' to anywhere, and I suppose anywhen, in the universe and in so doing transfer information between any two atoms in 4 dimensional spacetime? Physics is not my strong suit so apologies if I've let my imagination run away with me a bit there and that's not what you mean.

Then there's another question that is worth thinking about, both from your position and mine. What about subconscious processes (or indeed non-conscious processes). From my original theory's perspective, there'd have to be a reason why certain neural circuits did not contribute to consciousness despite still being states and relationships. And the same question would apply to your theory... why would certain particles contribute and not others to consciousness, especially given the essentially uniform physical structure of neurons?

This is a problem, and is still so even in psychoneurology.  It turns out that most perceptions, and consciousness itself, is distributed across many brain parts, and not always the same subsystems of each part.  In other words, it seems to be the percepts themselves, rather than the mechanism processing them, which is responsible for the sensation of awareness.

In my theory I would have said that that would be to be expected in that perception was a function of the whole network rather than any particular part and thus could be thought of in a slightly different way such as to say if you were to hypothetically probe any area of the network and artificially turn off a neuron it would - or may... depending on its influence - cause the network to settle into a different state, which is therefore representing different values and relationships. So that's how I would have seen what appears to be perceptions spread across many different brain areas, and not necessarily the same ones... basically as the function of an every changing network that can settle into different states and where any single neuron anywhere in the whole network can have a massive influence on how the whole network will settle.

It's difficult for me now because you're right... the boundary problem is a very real concern, both in terms of what level to think at and in terms of where a system starts and ends, at least in the mind-body question. But there's no doubt about it that neural networks do all this stuff So leaving out mental phenomena the neural network is the right level to understand the system (for me anyway) and I still believe that perception is redundant and unnecessary, however it comes about, and therefore still that we may as well be philosophical zombies. But the question is, do you? Or would you, given that what you're proposing here is provisional on it being a materialistic universe? Do/would you believe that mind, as a property of matter could in any way influence matter, or would it only be a reflection/mirror of it? In other words for me it's a one-way street but is it a two-way street for you?

Selective brain damage is interesting, too.  In various cases, you can lost the ability to do a specific function: say, recognize a face.  That experience is no longer in your toolkit.  And yet, the basic "screen" of consciousness is still fine.  I wonder if when we are sleeping, there's a kind of idea-less "screen" or not, but I'm not sure how it would even be possible to determine.

Well I would say in that situation that you'd lost a 'channel'. Though that's my own word to represent perceptions that co-exist but don't overlap in consciousness. Some channels are obvious in consciousness - like vision, pain, sound etc - but others you might not realise you had until they were gone... like face recognition despite still being able to see faces in the sense of having them 'presented' on the 'screen'.

Quite recently there was an experiment where they found a neuron(s) that could turn off consciousness: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2...p-in-brain. The article says:

Koubeissi thinks that the results do indeed suggest that the claustrum plays a vital role in triggering conscious experience. “I would liken it to a car,” he says. “A car on the road has many parts that facilitate its movement – the gas, the transmission, the engine – but there’s only one spot where you turn the key and it all switches on and works together. So while consciousness is a complicated process created via many structures and networks – we may have found the key.”
...
Counter-intuitively, Koubeissi’s team found that the woman’s loss of consciousness was associated with increased synchrony of electrical activity, or brainwaves, in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain that participate in conscious awareness. Although different areas of the brain are thought to synchronise activity to bind different aspects of an experience together, too much synchronisation seems to be bad. The brain can’t distinguish one aspect from another, stopping a cohesive experience emerging.

Just speculating here but synchronisation could be thought of as reducing the number of distinct states to be represented in my theory or yours (possibly) and thus the differentiation in the output (ie the vividness). The same thing could be said of meditation... which is about quietening the mind... and which can result in weird states of consciousness. And if the claustrum acts as an associative area connecting all these different brain areas like a switchboard then loss or reduction of connectivity there could either separate them essentially into individual networks - as per the same effect as as cutting the corpus callosum - or even if still connected could still influence their overall settled states in the sense that, as I said before, any change in the input of a neural network can cause it to settle into a different state and the difference will be more drastic depending on how influential the inhibited neurons are.

This seems to be the case: that sounds, sights, smells, etc. are coordinated on a kind of common medium.  But it doesn't seem to exist anywhere.  My guess is that it doesn't exist at all, and that wherever there is processing, there is percept-- but its just not "owned" by you, and so it's not part of your subjective experience.  Your neuron may be having a blast with its exciting processing of electrochemical cascades, oblivious to your existence.

By common medium do you mean the body map? As in how you can feel referred pain in all the wrong places etc? Or are you saying that this common medium exists (in whatever non-existing sense you define ) wherever there is matter and that essentially forms blocks bound together by relationships etc so that say the brain... or what is active in the brain could form one such block and the bigger it is, the richer and more subjective it is? Or something else entirely?