RE: Quantum consciousness...
August 15, 2017 at 8:08 pm
(This post was last modified: August 15, 2017 at 8:12 pm by bennyboy.)
(August 15, 2017 at 6:05 pm)Khemikal Wrote: I can't ride an electrical current, a heat wave, or time either.Don't see the difference, huh?
Consciousness isn't inferred as a physical explanation of other properties or observations. There was never a moment when a non-conscious agent thought, "Hmmmmm. . . why are these bundles of organic materials acting like that?"
There's no philosophical quandary surrounding electrical current: we know what it is and how to look for it. We have simple tests for determining its presence. We are not required to make a philosophical assumption in order to believe in it.
Consciousness, by which I mean the capacity to experience qualia, cannot be demonstrated. You SAY you can demonstrate it, but then you will trot out a bunch of physical correlates that wouldn't mean anything at all if we didn't already know what qualia were by our direct experience of it. This borders on religious evidence: we already "know" what it is, and then we start looking around for things that we will consider evidence of it.
This should be obvious in another sense-- nobody can really dispute that it's a hot day. That's because we all share access to the same observations. We can DEFINITELY dispute whether a particular physical system might experience qualia-- from "only me" to "everything is a giant mind" and everything in between, and nobody can be proven right or wrong through observation-- there is assumption, and nothing else.
(August 15, 2017 at 6:05 pm)Khemikal Wrote: I'm unaware of any proposal that attempts to bypass the subjectivity of a human being?No, I don't think you are unaware of that. We say a robot is conscious if it can process light and sound and interact meaningfully with its environment. We do not seriously attempt to establish whether it experiences qualia subjectively. But you have to seriously strain the meanings of several words in order to fit any concept of mind into your world view: awareness, conscious, mind, etc.