On naturalism and consciousness

[bennyboy]

This applies not only to ANNs. Imagine taking a snapshot of 1 second of brain activity-- not fMRI, but every single chemical interaction that happened, and then figuring out where in that mess consciousness was created. Many are confident that mind is "in there" somewhere, but that level of complexity allows for the random supervenience of so many forms that one of those supervened forms may be mind, rather than anything the specific system does.

Imagine taking a snapshot of 1 second of intel i7 980x activity, not just heat loads, but every single transistor interaction that happened, and the figuring out where in that mess is a browser tab, or the video decompression from MPEG4 to screen...
I'm confident these are "in there", somewhere, but that level of complexity blah, blah, blah.... I hope you get the picture.
Just because we can't (yet?) understand it all, it doesn't mean it's not there.
Where else could it be?

The difference is that the software was hard-coded. But what happens with a pure ANN? In that case, EVEN THE CREATORS of the system cannot know what patterns evolve toward cognition. Since we are not the creators of the brain, we do not know exactly what about it, or the information being processed in it, is responsible for consciousness.

I hope some of this discussion will move to my thread on the transcendence of emergent properties. I'm making the case that those supervenient properties, if they can be arrived at by multiple mechanisms, are transcendent-- they are a property of the universe rather than of the (arbitrary) mechanisms which they seem to supervene on.

Let's take a simple example: a wave. Now, a wave can supervene on a body of water. However, it can also supervene on any other liquid or solid. The necessity of having a medium does not make it sensible to claim that a wave is formed BY water, or that it is a property OF water. Wave-ness is better seen as an expression of the relationship between an underlying level of reality: gravity, surface tension, and momentum. The existence of a wave on a water surface is therefore a transcendent property.

If mind IS a transcendent property, then it is not correct to say that it is made by the brain-- only that in the case of humans, the brain is the particular medium on which mind supervenes. So the question "Where is the human mind" is not the right question. The answer is obvious-- it's in the brain. The question is whether the brain is the creator of mind, or only the medium which expresses the underlying reality that makes mind inevitable.