Trying to simplify my Consciousness hypothesis

[Edwardo Piet]

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.

[bennyboy]

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?

[chimp3]

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@won2blv: 

You are summarizing evolutionary theory and neuroscience. Why is this your hypothesis? You make interesting points but they are echoing current science findings.

I expect you to be skeptical of this statement, but please just hypothetically believe its true. I thought of all of this in just the past 5 or 6 days. I am not college educated, I was one of Jehovah's witnesses up until last year that didn't believe in evolution, and I wash windows for a living. I had never heard of Attention Schema Theory or any of the periphery around it.

I am not claiming that there is a damn thing special about me or my specific brain. Our brains our like software. Humans are still on software version 1, but each human is an even more specific subset. So for whatever reason, because, I am version 1.34958539290b my brain was able to untangle this subject in a short amount of time.

Well , you are doing fine! Keep at it.

[DLJ]

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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?

If by "physical" you include 'chemical', then what else is there? Magic?

This added bonus (pattern recognition, predictive modelling, event detection) gives us empathy (the 'knowing what it's like to") which is useful for discerning intent - whether it's "where will this mammoth run to next?" or "Is he cheating on me?" - empathy enables bonding which assists with tribal identity (in-group / out-group) which enables security and stability which aids survival.

[bennyboy]

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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?

If by "physical" you include 'chemical', then what else is there?  Magic?

You can pick the non-explanation of your choice. So far, there's neither a plausible explanation of how a physical system of any kind can be subjectively aware of what it's like to experience, nor is there any method by which to determine which physical systems do so. In fact, there's no proof that any non-bennyboy physical system actually DOES know what it's like to drink hot chocolate, or to kiss a girl for the first time, or to have a headache.

This added bonus (pattern recognition, predictive modelling, event detection) gives us empathy (the 'knowing what it's like to") which is useful for discerning intent - whether it's "where will this mammoth run to next?" or "Is he cheating on me?" - empathy enables bonding which assists with tribal identity (in-group / out-group) which enables security and stability which aids survival.

Utility is not really a causal explanation. The problem of consciousness isn't to determine whether it's useful-- it clearly is. The problem is the conflation of subjective and objective perspectives, which are normally considered diametrically opposed, into a monist world view. Specifically, why would a system governed by the rules of physics (including chemistry) ever develop something as materially useless as the capacity to experience qualia?


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.

[DLJ]

If by "physical" you include 'chemical', then what else is there?  Magic?

You can pick the non-explanation of your choice.  So far, there's neither a plausible explanation of how a physical system of any kind can be subjectively aware of what it's like to experience, nor is there any method by which to determine which physical systems do so.  In fact, there's no proof that any non-bennyboy physical system actually DOES know what it's like to drink hot chocolate, or to kiss a girl for the first time, or to have a headache.

This added bonus (pattern recognition, predictive modelling, event detection) gives us empathy (the 'knowing what it's like to") which is useful for discerning intent - whether it's "where will this mammoth run to next?" or "Is he cheating on me?" - empathy enables bonding which assists with tribal identity (in-group / out-group) which enables security and stability which aids survival.

Utility is not really a causal explanation.  The problem of consciousness isn't to determine whether it's useful-- it clearly is.  The problem is the conflation of subjective and objective perspectives, which are normally considered diametrically opposed, into a monist world view.  Specifically, why would a system governed by the rules of physics (including chemistry) ever develop something as materially useless as the capacity to experience qualia?


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.

Ah. I think we've got a mix of proximate vs. ultimate "whys" going on here.

Regarding "a plausible explanation of how a physical system of any kind can be subjectively aware of what it's like to experience", I don't have a problem with the idea of self-monitoring software of our self monitoring software mapped onto a model (simulator) of self.

I wonder what it was like to experience a blue sky the first time I experienced it.

I'm not a big fan of this 'qualia' notion. Something that has not been adequately defined is not very useful, philosophically speaking.

[bennyboy]

I'm not a big fan of this 'qualia' notion. Something that has not been adequately defined is not very useful, philosophically speaking.

It's perfectly well-defined. It's just not defined in terms that fit into a material monist view easily. Qualia: "What it's like to experience things."

Since I experience things, and I have a sense of what it's like to do so, it's a meaningful term. Since I care very much about my experiences, and very little about almost anything else, it is not an issue that can be conveniently set aside.

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I wonder what it was like to experience a blue sky the first time I experienced it.  

Probably a lot brighter, I'm guessing, since filtering sensations through a world view really means our limited imaginations are competing with nature for vividness, and that's usually a losing battle.

[DLJ]

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it is not an issue that can be conveniently set aside.
...

Yabut. I just did.

[Won2blv]

     What makes more sense, that we have mental problems, strictly because of something that happened in our short life, that is a blip of a blip of a blip on the grand evolutionary timeframe?

.......Yes?

Let's say that you have a phobia.  You're afraid of the dark.  Now....all of your peers come equipped with the same evolutionary apparatus and history, but they aren't afraid of the dark.  Clearly, the problem has it's origin with the individual.  Now sure, there are some ticks of the mind that seem to be uniform to human beings and we can attribute those to our common biological heritage, and we do.  These things aren't ignored by therapists.

What I was saying is that our consciousness is like an iceberg, and sometimes we focus more on the tip rather than the iceberg as a whole. But clearly it does not have its origin with the individual because it is common to be afraid of the dark. Especially among children. You could postulate a lot of reason why we're afraid of the dark in an evolutionary way

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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?

I think that you're asking the question the wrong way. You should qualify it first with an "as far as we know."

As far as your other question goes about a robot like brain... Do you see the evolutionary advantage of being more consciously aware of useful adaptations? Why do you think it is so scientifically mysterious to us how life started in the first place? Then in turn, how that life evolved from a single celled organism to a larger organism. Single cells floated around for almost 3 billion years before they evolved to a more complex structure.

I think they're big mysteries because they are just simply accidents. When Darwin proposed evolution, he made predictions. He made predictions because he knew that they would have to be true if his theory was true. We can in turn take seemingly "odd" evolutionary products, like the platypus, and also use the evolutionary tree to explain that.

So why wouldn't evolution naturally select organisms that had an ability to be more proactive at living and passing on their life?

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@bennyboy

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

[The Grand Nudger]

I never understand the mystery about consciousness.

In context of this thread or Bennyboys comments? It's called an argument from ignorance. 

We don't know x, therefore y...and certainly not z.

@The "Why's?" of evolution, there is no why. If it's biologically possible, evolution can produce it. If it is selectively advantageous, it may persist. Doubting the advantage of consciousness is absurd on it;s face. Here we are. Top of the food chain. Masters of the Earth. Creatures that operate or react as simple machines stand little chance in the face of us. Even moderately less well developed examples of conscious creatures are at our whim.

I don't -just- smell a female and spread her legs. I experience love. I;m not only aware of my kin (and even plants possess kin selection)..I experience a deep bond of trust and dependancy. We can't help but see how this plays out advantageously for our species. We're surrounded by it, and even this..we subjectively experience...rather than regard it as an io address on a memory bank. It's love and dependence, deeply felt, that sends us into impossible scenarios to rescue the ones we love, rather than running an internal calculus and determining, rightfully, that the odds are slim to nil. Now, one might ask...couldn;t a programmer come up with a more, elegant, solution. Or set the defaults of the machine to do so. Maybe, IDK...but there was no programmer....and there are examples of life that seem to work in such a way that aren't as successful as we are...so, moot point? Conversely, it's anger and hatred that compel us to scorch the earth when we feel threatened. The evolutionary version of mutually assured destruction. We don't, commonly, see these as evolutionary advantages. Often enough, people consider their emotions to be a weakness, particularly when those emotions have been exploited or manipulated...but perhaps that's because we don't view ourselves as plainly for what we are. Just as commonly, we put up a wall between the rational and the emotional, as we put walls between love and dependency..and anger and hatred - forgetting or not acknowledging that they all derive from the same mechanism..and as best we know, by the same means. Similarly, we put up a wall between what we are and how we feel about what we are...between the brain and the experience...again, imo, forgetting or not acknowledging the same thing.