Consciousness

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Nonsense.

Boru

What's nonsense?

Sorry, that’s just my go-to response to anything you post.

Boru

[Disagreeable]

Define "concrete". Does consciousness exist? Is consciousness "concrete"?

Administrator Notice
Ginormous wall of text placed in hide tags.

---

Concrete would be as opposed to abstract. I'm talking about stuff.

Yes, consciousness is concrete. There couldn't be anything more concrete than the stuff we feel.

I included a bit that wasn't directed at me because I think it speaks to our interaction - omitted the rest, just to keep it neater - the same impulse that guided me in recognizing that this one premise contains all that's necessary to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly.  If there's a problem with this premise, the entailments cannot salvage the conclusion, and that problem would, itself...ripple down through those entailments.  

Well the problem with the premises was repetition. The structure of the argument is still valid.

You've expanded on your idea of what is or is not radical emergence and decided that the emergence of life does not qualify.  Life coming from non life is not it.  What, then, makes consciousness coming from non consciousness radical?

Because life can be wholly explained in terms of the parts of non-life. But qualia cannot be explained in terms of the parts of non-qualia. It doesn't matter how much non-qualia, non-experience, we put together ... it doesn't suddenly leap into qualia, or experience. That's a radical emergence. Life from non-life isn't radical but experience from non-experience is.

  Further, your statement at the outset that no matter how we arrange nonconscious stuff it doesn't become conscious seems false on it's face, doesn't it?  Isn't there at least one way to arrange nonconscious stuff that does, then, become conscious?  Are we not exactly such a thing ourselves?  

That would be to beg the question against me though. Why are we assuming that we come from non-experiential stuff? Especially when there is zero evidence of non-experiential stuff in the universe. All evidence is empirical and empirical means experience-based. You can't get evidence of the non-experiential. Experience is all we have.

For the latter bit - what if there is no leap?  If consciousness is fundamental then you're dead wrong just in the framing without any regard for the facts.

Wait what? The fundamentality of consciousness is where my argument concludes.

  Information processing can lead to information processing with consciousness..and so can literally anything else.

But how can information processing without consciousness possibly lead to information processing with consciousness?

 If consciousness is fundamental there's no way your statements about information processing and what it can or cannot do could be true.

What statements did I make about information processing?

 If your observations about the scarcity of consciousness however arrived upon are true, then there's no way that consciousness could be fundamental as described.

I'm not saying that consciousness is scarce. I'm saying it's fundamental.

 The hard problem is not -then- why we seem to possess subjective experiences - but why drops of water do not.

Because just because stuff is made of consciousness doesn't mean that every single perceptual construct of things are conscious. That's no more plausible than saying that because football players are consciousness that then therefore the football team is conscious.

 Knowing everything about a world of consciousness and the mechanics thereof could not explain -that-.

Well there is primordial consciousness and then there is more complex evolved consciousness. We can get the latter from the former. But it doesn't seem that we can possibly get the latter from non-consciousness.

I discussed the hard problem in some detail with other posters above.

But nowhere did you explain how consciousness can emerge from non-consciousness. You just asserted that it happens and claimed that it happens when we wake up from deep sleep ...

We don't always remember what we were experiencing when we were asleep. That doesn't mean we were not experiencing. And just because complex consciousness may be switched off doesn't mean that all consciousness is switched off. The more complex consciousness can emerge from simpler consciousness. There is no way that complex consciousness can emerge from non-consciousness. There is no evidence of the non-experiential. All evidence is experience-based.

I also mentioned that this is a problem for reductionist materialists.  It is not such a problem for emergent materialists.  I am an emergent materialist.

Emergence is very much a problem for emergentists. You claim that consciousness emerges from non-conscious beings. But how can that possibly be the case? It would be like getting concrete things out of abstract things. It would be a very radical or brute emergence.

Emergence.  And it happens all the time in our day-to-day experiences, when we wake from deep sleep.  That is evidence.

No, no, no, no, no, NO. We have zero evidence of non-experience because all evidence is experience-based. Not remembering what we experienced doesn't mean we didn't experience something. Science being unable to detect consciousness doesn't mean consciousness wasn't there. The hard problem can't be dealt with by science ... this is why it's the hard problem.

I disagree.  If you understood the concept of emergence, you wouldn't so easily jump to such conclusions.

I do understand emergence. What's more, I understand the difference between legitimate emergence and radical or brute emergence. You don't seem to understand how emergence can be a problem for emergentists.

On the contrary, you are the one maintaining that consciousness always existed.  You are the one without evidence.

There is evidence of experience. There is not evidence of non-experience. We can't get experience from non-experience. But experience exists. Therefore it's always existed.

 The theoretically economical assumption is that consciousness evolved with life,

No, that would require radical emergence which is completely against how evolution works. Evolution doesn't use radical leaps like getting concrete things out of abstract things or getting consciousness from total non-consciousness.

and also that it is on-again-off-again, just as it appears to be.

We never experience non-experience. Not remembering something doesn't mean we didn't experience it. You are confused if you think we can have experienced-based empirical evidence of an absence of experience.

 If you are denying appearances, you have the burden of proof.

You are denying appearances. You are saying non-appearances appear when they haven't appeared to you. You have the burden of proof.

Sure there is.  According to the book Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene, certain "patterns of neural activity are exclusively associated with conscious processing."  Others are unconscious stimuli processing.  The signatures of consciousness include:
1) "a sudden ignition of parietal and prefrontal circuits" which is similar to a phase transition between unconscious and conscious processing,
2) a P3 wave, a late slow wave, 1/3 to 1/2 second after a stimulus,
3) "a late sudden burst of high-frequency [gamma band] oscillations,"
4) "a synchronization of information exchanges across distant brain regions."

This information was gathered by multiple experiments, with consistent results, comparing subjective reports from experimental subjects with their brain scans, during tests playing with threshold conditions, i.e. those which in various ways were right on the edge of awareness for various reasons.

Consciousness studies have become a real science which is beyond mere philosophical speculations at this point.

---

None of this touches the hard problem.

That's my final word on the matter at least for now. Unless I forget to shut up or something. I don't want to keep repeating myself.

[Alan V]

Consciousness can emerge from non-consciousness through evolution, in gradual steps.  The emergence of consciousness from deep sleep is more complex.

Yes, we can dream for a couple hours every night without remembering our dreams, because our working memories don't work because we are robbed of our waking neuromodulation.  However, once people wake up and try to remember their dreams, they can recover a lot of information, since their working memories and neuromodulation are on-line again.  Dream researchers have woken people from all stages of sleep to understand their subjective experiences.  There is a poverty of subjective reports from deep sleep, suggesting that such a reduced consciousness is on-again-off-again at best.  

However, that is not really my argument.  I quoted the signatures of consciousness from my reading.  Those were derived from waking studies in which people reported whether they saw something or not in certain carefully staged threshold conditions, i.e. things on the edge of awareness.  If people weren't experiencing something, they did not evidence the signatures.  When they were, they did.  So scientists can, in fact, know objectively when people are conscious by reading the signatures in brainscans, and not just via subjective reports in every case.

We know that once there was no consciousness on earth and now there is, because we know that consciousness depends on lifeforms with brains.  Your whole argument depends on redefining consciousness in ways in which we do not experience it.  We literally lack consciousness of your redefined consciousness.  That is why you still have the burden of proof.  You are asserting it is there, so prove it and collect your Nobel Prize.  Don't try to shift the burden of proof on others.  That's an old trick from the theistic playbook.

Emergence is very much a problem for emergentists. You claim that consciousness emerges from non-conscious beings. But how can that possibly be the case? It would be like getting concrete things out of abstract things. It would be a very radical or brute emergence.

Consciousness is not concrete.  It is abstract, being a variety of information processing accomplished in physical brains.  A lot of information processing is non-conscious.  We know that for a fact.  So we can indeed derive an abstract (conscious information processing) from an abstract (non-conscious information processing).  Is isn't such a big step as you claim.  The hard problem may boil down to understanding the details of a certain kind of brain-wide information processing, where information is shared across systems.

As I said before, you really need to read about brain science.  Scientists understand a lot more than you think.

[Ahriman]

Nah, consciousness is concrete.

[Angrboda]

[Paleophyte]

Yes, consciousness is concrete. There couldn't be anything more concrete than the stuff we feel.

Err, no. Consciousness is an abstract. The stuff that we feel is an abstract, like justice or beauty. Concretes are tangible, made of atoms and energy and crap. Consciousness isn't.

Because life can be wholly explained in terms of the parts of non-life. But qualia cannot be explained in terms of the parts of non-qualia. It doesn't matter how much non-qualia, non-experience, we put together ... it doesn't suddenly leap into qualia, or experience. That's a radical emergence. Life from non-life isn't radical but experience from non-experience is.

Qualia is shitty perception. Nothing special about it. Even if I allow you your quales this argument breaks down to 'I can see how life can emerge from non-life but not how qualia emerge from non-qualia'. It's an argument from ignorance. Your claim of radical emergence is unsubstantiated.

[Ahriman]

Qualia, plural of "quail", like the bird

[Thumpalumpacus]

The GOP aren't dogmatists. If they were, they would never have nominated Trump three times. They nominated him precisely because they had no principles. Dogma is only words which are spewed when needed, useful for garnering votes, to be abandoned forthwith.

[Ahriman]

The GOP aren't dogmatists. If they were, they would never have nominated Trump three times. They nominated him precisely because they had no principles. Dogma is only words which are spewed when needed, useful for garnering votes, to be abandoned forthwith.

Why do you think people with the same mindset as Trump would have no principles?

[The Grand Nudger]

Because life can be wholly explained in terms of the parts of non-life. But qualia cannot be explained in terms of the parts of non-qualia. It doesn't matter how much non-qualia, non-experience, we put together ... it doesn't suddenly leap into qualia, or experience. That's a radical emergence. Life from non-life isn't radical but experience from non-experience is.

That's not actually true, or..if you prefer, no more true (or less false) of life than of qualia.  We don't even have all the steps of some of life's most basic and enabling processes down.  We're missing a step in photosynthesis.  Think about that, let it sink in.  Hearing that doesn't make you think that organic chemistry can't do photosynthesis, does it.

Why not?  Why are you not equally convinced that life cannot come from non life?  We can add up all the non living stuff we want and we still won't have life, right?  Why are you not equally convinced that photosynthesis cannot come from non photosynthesis?  Add up all the non photosynthetics and you still won't have a photosynthetic.  

That would be to beg the question against me though. Why are we assuming that we come from non-experiential stuff? Especially when there is zero evidence of non-experiential stuff in the universe. All evidence is empirical and empirical means experience-based. You can't get evidence of the non-experiential. Experience is all we have.

Against you....?  

Even if we can't explain how our consciousness (or life, or photosynthesis) arose - we do know that it did so at least once.  There was a time where there was no you, no me.  Then organic chemistry happened..and here we are talking.   Right now, right?  Is your experience different than mine in this regard?  

Wait what? The fundamentality of consciousness is where my argument concludes.

But how can information processing without consciousness possibly lead to information processing with consciousness?

What statements did I make about information processing?

You asserted that information processing cannot lead to information processing with consciousness, and are still questioning it's simple possibility.   Obviously..I think you're wrong, but that's not what I think is interesting.   Imagine a world of consciousness.  Fundamental consciousness.  Yes, and ofc information processing could lead to information processing with consciousness.  It's not just possible it's always happening.  Not just information processing either, eh?  Everything...literally everything...is whatever-with consciousness.  

I'm not saying that consciousness is scarce. I'm saying it's fundamental.

Because just because stuff is made of consciousness doesn't mean that every single perceptual construct of things are conscious. That's no more plausible than saying that because football players are consciousness that then therefore the football team is

More interesting ideas.  So it's not scarce, but not everything that's made of consciousness is conscious.  Have you ever wondered whether we might be just like that?  Made of consciousness, but not ourselves conscious?  Give me some examples of conscious things.

Well there is primordial consciousness and then there is more complex evolved consciousness. We can get the latter from the former. But it doesn't seem that we can possibly get the latter from non-consciousness.

-and that's what I find interesting, especially from a person who believes that consciousness is fundamental.   It seems to me when considering these things, that if I believed that, I would be far more surprised that things failed to instantiate consciousness.