Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[The Grand Nudger]

We tend to think that identical circumstances lead to identical outcomes.

Another way of forming the question might be to wonder if two machines can be alike except in one attribute, structure, or function. The answer seems to be yes. A machine can possess a useful body model and no attention model, or vv.

We’re contended to have both, the pz is contended to have one. On its own, this is what I’d call an unremarkable observation, which leads to nothing in particular.

[polymath257]

Functionalism is the correct view, but it may also be true that one can't create human-like consciousness without hardware that mimics some of the functionality of a real neural network.  That isn't because I'm waffling on functionalism - it is because the function may be highly dependent on neural structure.

I am a fan of the work of Gerald Edelman, who believed that biological intelligence self-evolves from the structures of neuronal groups.  If this is true, the nature of our intelligent conscious experience may be difficult to replicate without building a similar self-evolving AI.

Functionalism is quite popular among philosophers. Maybe not THE most popular theory, but close. The problem with functionalism is it tests our intuitions in a way that's unsettling. If information feedback causes consciousness, then it would seem that ANY information feedback system would lead to a conscious entity. Like, are the back of our toilets "slightly conscious"? That's a rudimentary information feedback system.

One of the reasons Chalmers suggested thermostats could be conscious.

I do think there is a hierarchy of different states going from simple reactivity to full self-consciousness.

Some important stages are when there is an internal model of the external state, an internal model of the internal state, and when there is an internal model of the internal states of others.

Also trees. I remember a guy in my metaphysics class who was a die-hard functionalist. He would argue that trees are conscious in a sense because of the adaption to environmental factors... he even took it down to cellular biology with trees. I mean, he made a good case. He was incredibly intelligent and knew his biology better than I did. But I still think his conclusions and his willingness to reduce consciousness so easily were hasty... even if correct.

One issue is time scale. There is certainly a sense in which plants are reactive to their environment, but there does not appear to be a representation of even external states. So it would be a fairly low level on the consciousness hierarchy.

The toilet question and the tree question really make me take a second look at biological naturalism. It isn't haunted by these pesky absurd scenarios. But it, of course, has its own problems. I'm not saying I AM a biological naturalist. Just that I think it's a plausible theory. Functionalism is plausible too. Don't get me wrong. But unanswered questions remain.

And I think a LOT depends on the definitions used. We seem to think there is a single 'consciousness' that doesn't vary from specific example to specific example. I really doubt that is the case. We need definitions to clarify what we are talking about.

---

But, who knows, maybe people with pools shouldn't watch Nicholas Cage movies.

They shouldn't swim in pools during years where Cage has been prolific. They can watch all the Nick Cage they want, really.

-- nice analysis of the graph, btw.

Thanks!

[The Grand Nudger]

What aspect of physicalism or materialism do you think any explanation of consciousness would have to give up?

[GrandizerII]

I would say that with the exception of 4 (though I'm not too sure and need to think about this better), none of these items require consciousness. But it depends on what you mean by such things as "feeling love" and "appreciating". After all, a chat bot can easily be programmed to feel, or at least act like they're feeling. But it's a very superficial sense of the word that is qualitatively different from the phenomenal sense. Expressing words of love is different from the "I can feel my heart beating really fast" kind of love.  

And if the circuitry is detecting and processing the 'feeling of love', then it *is* the feeling of love in the first person.

In the first person ... how does that switch to first person work? And one in which love is felt? How does the "non-feely" electrochemical process translate to the first-person "feely" experience which appears to be as if it did not arise from the firings of neurons? Why does the experience seem qualitatively different from physical stuff including the underlying neurons or their processes?

You seem to be taking the switch to first-person for granted, but the hard problem is partly asking about that

---

I was pointing out that it is *logically possible* for air not to be a mixture. You seem to be focused on logical possibility as the standard.

Unless I'm misunderstanding this quote here, I'm not focusing on the logical possibility. It doesn't matter if air is hawayawaya and temperature is tabbalaabilou, and it doesn't matter if we didn't know in the past that air is hawayawaya and temperature is tabbalaabilou. Whatever you're equating air to now, the point is that in this air is just a label you're applying to hawayawaya. It is not something more than that.

The better analogy is that of temperature. There is no logical requirement that what we measure as temperature is the result of molecular motion. But, in fact, it is the *product* of molecular motion. Talking about temperature and talking about molecular motion are the *same thing* in our universe, just from different perspectives.

Ok, but you also said temperature IS the average kinetic energy of the molecules (per your statement in a prior post). You observe the motion of the molecules, measure the average kinetic energy, and that there is temperature.

Analogously, the activity of neurons and consciousness is simply the same thing in this universe, but from different perspectives (that from the outside and that internally).

It's not the same. In the temperature analogy, there is no internal perspective. Otherwise, you're including your/my internal perspective which is what we're trying to explain in the first place.

[polymath257]

And if the circuitry is detecting and processing the 'feeling of love', then it *is* the feeling of love in the first person.

In the first person ... how does that switch to first person work? And one in which love is felt? How does the "non-feely" electrochemical process translate to the first-person "feely" experience which appears to be as if it did not arise from the firings of neurons? Why does the experience seem qualitatively different from physical stuff including the underlying neurons or their processes?

There is no 'switch to the first person'. The first person perspective is the one to whom it happens. So, if a creature with a brain detects the color red, that is what it *means* for that creature to 'see red' and that is the first person perspective for that creature.

You seem to be taking the switch to first-person for granted, but the hard problem is partly asking about that

And once again, I don't see a hard problem at all. It is simply who something happens to. if I am the one whose brain is processing the information, then I am the one with the first person experience of it.

---

I was pointing out that it is *logically possible* for air not to be a mixture. You seem to be focused on logical possibility as the standard.

Unless I'm misunderstanding this quote here, I'm not focusing on the logical possibility. It doesn't matter if air is hawayawaya and temperature is tabbalaabilou, and it doesn't matter if we didn't know in the past that air is hawayawaya and temperature is tabbalaabilou. Whatever you're equating air to now, the point is that in this air is just a label you're applying to hawayawaya. It is not something more than that.

The better analogy is that of temperature. There is no logical requirement that what we measure as temperature is the result of molecular motion. But, in fact, it is the *product* of molecular motion. Talking about temperature and talking about molecular motion are the *same thing* in our universe, just from different perspectives.

Ok, but you also said temperature IS the average kinetic energy of the molecules (per your statement in a prior post). You observe the motion of the molecules, measure the average kinetic energy, and that there is temperature.

Analogously, the activity of neurons and consciousness is simply the same thing in this universe, but from different perspectives (that from the outside and that internally).

It's not the same. In the temperature analogy, there is no internal perspective. Otherwise, you're including your/my internal perspective which is what we're trying to explain in the first place.

I don't see what needs to be explained: I have a first person experience because it is my rain that processes the information. it seems trivial to me.

[GrandizerII]

There is no 'switch to the first person'. The first person perspective is the one to whom it happens. So, if a creature with a brain detects the color red, that is what it *means* for that creature to 'see red' and that is the first person perspective for that creature.

There is no switch from your perspective, correct. We each observe everything in first-person perspective. But, if you were to imagine you could go beyond your first-person perspective, to get from third-person neurons firing to first-person perspectives requires a switch of some sort.

Ok, maybe that word "switch" is just causing confusion. But then I don't know what else to say. Can you at least see why Chalmers and co. see a hard problem, even though you don't agree there is one?

I don't see what needs to be explained: I have a first person experience because it is my rain that processes the information. it seems trivial to me.

In your view, first-person perspective is fundamental then?

[polymath257]

And there's this unexplained capacity to vividly experience things. Try to imagine how you can get to that from neural activity. There's clearly a gap there that is being left unexplained.

Let's look at this because it seems to be the crux of the matter.

What does it mean to 'vividly experience things'? 

Is there a difference with 'dimly experiencing things'? What does the word 'vividly' actually modify?

Let's take two examples of information that the brain processes. One is the color red when we are looking at it in good light. The other is carbon dioxide level in your blood.

Both of these are processed by the brain, but only one of them is 'conscious': the perception of the color red. The perception of the carbon dioxide levels happens, but is not conscious. The brain reacts to both. For example, it will trigger deeper breathing in response to high CO2 levels.

The question is why? What is the difference in how the brain processes those two pieces of information?

This is a 'soft' problem, but it seems to me to be the key to the question of consciousness. Knowing the differences between how those two pieces of information are processed would point to what, precisely, is happening in 'conscious perception'.

I guess the first question is : do you agree with this assessment? Does it seem to you to be a key question? If not, why not?

So, now, what actually *are* the differences? One big one is that the autonomic nervous system only links to fairly low levels of the brain stem and NOT to the higher regions in the brain (limbic system, cortex).

This suggests to me that the limbic system (which deals with emotions) is the key to what we usually call 'consciousness'. And, in fact, the role of anesthesia is to suppress parts of the activity just above the brain stem to achieve *unconsciousness*.

So why is it 'vivid'? Because the limbic system is strongly connected to the other areas of the brain, making the results of its processing *important* for the processing of other areas.

Now, admittedly there are a LOT of details, but does not this seem like a plausible route towards explaining consciousness? Why we 'feel' strongly: the connections are *important* across the brain. That *is* vividness, only from a different perspective.

---

There is no 'switch to the first person'. The first person perspective is the one to whom it happens. So, if a creature with a brain detects the color red, that is what it *means* for that creature to 'see red' and that is the first person perspective for that creature.

There is no switch from your perspective, correct. We each observe everything in first-person perspective. But, if you were to imagine you could go beyond your first-person perspective, to get from third-person neurons firing to first-person perspectives requires a switch of some sort.

Ok, maybe that word "switch" is just causing confusion. But then I don't know what else to say. Can you at least see why Chalmers and co. see a hard problem, even though you don't agree there is one?

No, I actually don't see the difficulty. if a rock was processing information at a certain complexity, then it would have a first person perspective. I really don't see what the problem is supposed to be.

I don't see what needs to be explained: I have a first person experience because it is my rain that processes the information. it seems trivial to me.

In your view, first-person perspective is fundamental then?

I'm not sure what that means in context. It seems to me to be simply the concept of identity. So, when a comet hit Jupiter, it did not hit the Earth. From the perspective of the Earth it was third person, from that of Jupiter, it was first person. Now, Jupiter doesn't have a complex enough processing of information for it to be 'conscious', but the comet strike hit there and not here.

So, I see first person vs third person to simply be a description of where something happens. Consciousness, on the other hand, seems to be related to complexity of processing of information, probably in real time. The two seem to be very different questions.

[GrandizerII]

And there's this unexplained capacity to vividly experience things. Try to imagine how you can get to that from neural activity. There's clearly a gap there that is being left unexplained.

Let's look at this because it seems to be the crux of the matter.

What does it mean to 'vividly experience things'? 

Is there a difference with 'dimly experiencing things'? What does the word 'vividly' actually modify?

I guess I only add the word "vividly" to distinguish two different senses of the word "experience" that a person may use. The "dull" sense is when we talk of something that happens to some entity but without being taken in by that entity in a first-person perspective form. The example I mentioned in a prior post was a rock in a river experiencing the splash of water against itself. Now it may be the rock, after all, does have some rudimentary first-person perspective, but intuitively we don't see it as having such. So it only experiences in the "dull" sense.

Or, if you want, we can ditch the words "vivid" and "dull" and "dim", and instead contrast "experience" with "no experience" (as long as we understand and agree that we mean experience to be something that is taken in as a first-person form that feels what is happening through the various senses).

Let's take two examples of information that the brain processes. One is the color red when we are looking at it in good light. The other is carbon dioxide level in your blood.

Both of these are processed by the brain, but only one of them is 'conscious': the perception of the color red. The perception of the carbon dioxide levels happens, but is not conscious. The brain reacts to both. For example, it will trigger deeper breathing in response to high CO2 levels.

The question is why? What is the difference in how the brain processes those two pieces of information?

This is a 'soft' problem, but it seems to me to be the key to the question of consciousness. Knowing the differences between how those two pieces of information are processed would point to what, precisely, is happening in 'conscious perception'.

I guess the first question is : do you agree with this assessment? Does it seem to you to be a key question? If not, why not?

If I'm understanding this correctly, I wouldn't cleanly classify this as a 'soft' problem actually. If you're trying to explain the differences by partly explaining how the sensation of "red" is processed, then in my view, that's crossing over into the "hard problem" realm.

But if you're not trying to explain how "red" is processed in explaining the differences, then yes, it's a "soft" problem.

So, now, what actually *are* the differences? One big one is that the autonomic nervous system only links to fairly low levels of the brain stem and NOT to the higher regions in the brain (limbic system, cortex).

This suggests to me that the limbic system (which deals with emotions) is the key to what we usually call 'consciousness'. And, in fact, the role of anesthesia is to suppress parts of the activity just above the brain stem to achieve *unconsciousness*.

So why is it 'vivid'? Because the limbic system is strongly connected to the other areas of the brain, making the results of its processing *important* for the processing of other areas.

Now, admittedly there are a LOT of details, but does not this seem like a plausible route towards explaining consciousness? Why we 'feel' strongly: the connections are *important* across the brain. That *is* vividness, only from a different perspective.

The issue I see with this is that it still seems to be providing only a correlation. Contrary to what you're suggesting, it doesn't address why we feel vividly. And just as importantly, it doesn't address how either. I'll grant you that this might be in the right direction, but that's the best this approach you describe would be doing.

I'm not sure what that means in context. It seems to me to be simply the concept of identity. So, when a comet hit Jupiter, it did not hit the Earth. From the perspective of the Earth it was third person, from that of Jupiter, it was first person. Now, Jupiter doesn't have a complex enough processing of information for it to be 'conscious', but the comet strike hit there and not here.

Assuming panpsychism is false, then no, I don't agree that planets have perspectives in the same sense we have perspectives. They are two qualitatively different senses. Of course the perspective you speak of is trivial, but first-person perspective (in the typical context of discussions on consciousness) is not trivial in the eyes of many philosophers of the mind.

So, I see first person vs third person to simply be a description of where something happens. Consciousness, on the other hand, seems to be related to complexity of processing of information, probably in real time. The two seem to be very different questions.

If you say so, but first person vs third person is an important consideration when pondering the hard problem.

See this article in which third-person views of consciousness are contrasted with first-person.

[Belacqua]

See this article in which third-person views of consciousness are contrasted with first-person.

Chalmers' article is really useful.

I've been through the "hard problem" discussion two or three times on the Internet, back when I was more patient and less grumpy. So every position and every argument that Chalmers cites in the article is something I recognize. It's lovely to see things laid out so plainly, after I struggled to get through it with much less clarity.

I'm also impressed by how well you and @emjay have done on this thread. It reminds me what it's like to be patient and non-grumpy.

It makes sense to keep the zombie problem simple, since it's necessary to address those who deny first-person experience, or its difference from the third person. I'd say what interests me more, however (at the risk of taking things off topic) is the richness of the first person experience, which goes beyond what the zombie issue addresses. 

So for example when we talk about first person experience, we say "the experience of seeing red." But whenever we actually have that experience, we are not simply seeing red. The term "red" covers a wide range of visual experiences. Whenever we have an experience of color in real life it is an experience of that red in that context, under that light. Years ago when I was in art school it was a kind of motto to say "seeing is forgetting the name of the thing you see." So if you say "I see red," it was thought to be too generalizing. The goal was to recreate the particular red you were looking at -- or to create some kind of objective correlative for the experienced object in a different substance -- oil paint or watercolor. 

The point is that when a person gets all the way to the point of being aware "I am seeing red," he has always already interpreted the input. It isn't simply a question of a wavelength of light starting a chain of dominoes that give rise to a particular type of qualia. The experience of the color also includes associations and methods of interpretation, like language, memories of other colors, etc. 

There's a wonderful book on all this by Umberto Eco. You probably know, when he wasn't writing novels he was a specialist in semiotics, so this is a non-fiction book in which he discusses how the mind interprets, and the degree of influence from not-purely-sensory interpretive influences. 

https://www.amazon.com/Kant-Platypus-Ess...501&sr=1-1

He understands that the hard problem is currently unsolvable, so he metaphorically refers throughout the book to what he calls the "black box," which is his half-serious name for the function that turns brain function into first person experience. 

I guess what really interests me is the possibility of difference -- that people may look at the same world and perceive it very differently, at a very basic level. Someone who has spent decades painting pictures from nature is just going to have different experiences of color from someone who hasn't. The possibility of enriching our interpretations is appealing to me. 

There's a wonderful scene in the Tale of Genji where all the courtiers blend up new and original types of incense, and then they have a contest with their most sensitive incense-maker acting as judge. Since smell is the human sense least susceptible to conceptualization, it always impressed me that this group of extreme aesthetes could be so aware. Translations of the book generally have to include long long footnotes explaining the different adjectives used in the original, which just aren't available in English, or even to most modern Japanese people. 

Qualia, it seems to me, don't just appear automatically, but are contingent on experience and thus can be trained, enriched, etc. Connoisseurship or the aestheticism of someone like Dorian Gray or des Esseintes (though they are not admirable in other ways) always seemed enviable to me. 

OK, sorry for the tangent. Again, I admire your input on this thread.

[GrandizerII]

See this article in which third-person views of consciousness are contrasted with first-person.

Chalmers' article is really useful.

Yeah, it's a fascinating read.

This bit, I think, we can all relate here:

As I have said, the first-person is hard to talk about. One important reason is that every first-person concept has a corresponding third-person concept. The word "consciousness" has often been taken as a compact reference to all that is mysterious about the first-person; but obviously, there are some third-person aspects which are very relevant to the word. If consciousness means something like "awareness of self," then a third-person commentator can point to the properties of physical systems (like the brain) which are monitoring their own processing, and using this feedback to adjust their behaviour. "So," the reductionist will claim, "wasn't this just what you meant by the term?". The first-personite will of course reply "No, the problem is, how could a mere physical system experience this awareness." The reductionist will reply in character, and the two will go on, feeling that they are talking past each other. The two are talking about corresponding phenomena, but not necessarily about identical phenomena.

This direct correspondence between first-person and third-person phenomena is the cause of much of the confusion. It has led to a slippery terminological slope, where nobody is sure what words in the "mental" vocabulary are referring to at a given time. Increasingly, terms which were once reserved for first-person issues are now used to cover third-person issues also.

The word "mind" once stood for everything that was quintessentially first-person. Witness the phrase "mind-body problem," for instance. But over the years the emphasis of the term has changed, until now is now much more frequently used to refer to third-person phenomena. Terms in common parlance such as "the subconscious mind" bear witness to this fact. Cognitive science, which is essentially the third-person investigation of mechanisms of thought, is often described as the "study of mind." These days the word "mind" is a general coverall for abstractions from the brain, first-person or third-person.

The word "consciousness," even. People who talk of "the evolution of consciousness", and of its survival value, are obviously addressing third-person aspects of the problem. I don't mean to say that these aspects are uninteresting, but nevertheless these aspects are not what makes consciousness such a mysterious problem. It is a pity; for a while the word "consciousness" was a general indication that one was talking about the mysteries of the first-person. These days, this seems to be less often the case.

The cause of this confusion is of course the intimate relation that the first person has to the third person. We should never forget that the mind is caused by a brain, and that the brain is at the bottom line a physical system understandable from the third-person view. Although we do not know how, a first-person is emergent from a third-person-understandable substrate. A consequence of this is that much of interest from the first-person viewpoint corresponds directly to phenomena viewable from the third person. Even the thought which I am having now: "Wow, how could it be that a mere brain could experience this thought", is being supported by a pattern of neural activity in my brain.

Take "consciousness," for instance. Despite the fact that this word usually represents all that is mysterious about the first-person, it would be naive to expect that the phenomenon be completely separable from the third-person viewpoint. And indeed, there is much in the third-person viewpoint which gives us insight into consciousness. The third-person notion of a brain which is scanning itself, or observing (directly or indirectly) its own processing, for example, obviously has a lot to do with consciousness - it is an important part of the third-person substrate from which consciousness emerges.

But it would be a mistake to regard this view of consciousness as dissolving the first-person mysteries altogether (as is sometimes claimed). To make this distinction clear, I will always denote this view of consciousness as "third-person-consciousness", or in the interests of brevity, "3P-consciousness." (One should not confuse this third- -person view of consciousness with "consciousness of the third person," which is a different matter entirely.) When I use the word "consciousness" alone I will always mean "first-person-consciousness", which I will sometimes abbreviate "1P-consciousness."

This direct correspondence (some might even say isomorphism) between first-person phenomena and (a certain subset of) third-person phenomena seems to be what often leads to confusion when discussing first-person issues. Many commentators, particularly those in the third-person camp, give the illusion of reducing first-person mysteries by appropriating the usual first-person words to refer to the third-person phenomena to which they correspond. It would be a final irony if this was to happen to the word "first-person" itself. I hereby issue a plea that this word be off-limits to the third-personites. If they wish, they may argue that the first-person does not exist; but they may not pretend to 'explain' the first-person by describing only third-person phenomena.

It would be nice if every article on 'mind' and 'consciousness' came with a caveat at the beginning, alerting the reader whether it is to be the first-person or the third-person phenomena that will be discussed. It is not unusual to find a paper which seems to be addressing the great first-person mysteries, only for the reader to find halfway through that it is doing no such thing. Sometimes even authors themselves seem confused as to which questions they are addressing.

It seems that there are only about three expressions which these days are still reserved only for first-person phenomena. These are "qualia," "phenomenology," and "subjective experience." But even these words (particularly the last) may begin to be appropriated by reductionists; and besides, each of these words has a fairly limited domain of application. I will always use the term "first-person" as a general term covering the whole area of this metaphysical mystery.

Of course there is also the old standby "Mind-Body Problem." This phrase has probably outgrown its usefulness, with the change in usage of the word "Mind" and the change in emphasis from "body" to "brain." But I will still use it from time-to-time; no other phrase has such universal first-person connotations.

Note the amusing part in bold.