evolution

[Angrboda]

Might be in the same territory there as the difference between facts of evolution and the theory of evolution.  It's an observed fact that self awareness is advantageous.  You can see this in life and you can see it in machines.  You can test the conjecture.  We can build identical machines except for the presence, in one, of self monitoring inputs.  We can render a human being unconscious or impaired and drop them in the jungle (or just watch them do it to themselves in the proverbial concrete jungle).

The hypothesis, here, is that this observable fact itself accounts for the existence and persistence of self awareness in living organisms up to and including in human beings.

No. There is plenty of reason to believe that consciousness is fully or partially epiphenomenal. Utility is not observed but inferred from assumptions about the role consciousness plays in our behavior, and those assumptions are far from proven. It's a hypothesis, not a fact, observed or otherwise. That you believe in a specific plausible explanation for consciousness does not make that explanation true. That's your ego talking. And the analogy to machines is false on multiple levels. Machines do not have consciousness. That's merely you believing the stories you've told yourself, not reality.

[The Grand Nudger]

There's being unconvinced by a given explanation of self awareness, and there's being unconvinced that self awareness confers practical advantages to systems.

There's a reason that we have an entire industry devoted to making self aware machines. The advantages of self awareness are not open to any credible debate whatsoever.

[Angrboda]

I will repeat for the dumb and hard of hearing. Machines do not have consciousness. They are not aware. As to consciousness having advantages, you seem to be misinformed about the credibility of debate. I'm sure your mind is closed to debate, but that's a you problem, not a fact about the debate. There are basically two possible things going on with consciousness. A) the things in consciousness have effects that flow downward from consciousness to the rest of the brain. B) the things in the brain that are not conscious have effects that flow up into consciousness. Your errant machine analogies, as flawed as they are, do nothing to resolve this question as machines do not have anything that can credibly be demonstrated to be like consciousness in humans or any other animal. And your other closed-minded notions like model-control theory cannot be demonstrated because you have not isolated comparable systems in the brain and tied them to consciousness. A primary obstacle to doing so is that nobody has been able to isolate those parts of the brain that are responsible for consciousness. What you have is a bundle of conjectures and theories and no actual way to tie them to brains and actual consciousness. You may think that doesn't open the door a crack to allow for debate, but that's because you're mistaken.

[vulcanlogician]

I have serious doubts about evolution explaining consciousness in the ontological sense.

There are many information feedback systems present in our neurology that operate completely below conscious awareness. No good argument has been made for why some of information feedback systems "need" to be conscious. They simply don't. Evolution doesn't explain consciousness. Full stop.

That isn't to say that the process of evolution wasn't involved in the formation of consciousness. It probably was. But it was a Bob Ross "happy accident" during the development of information feedback systems and not a necessity to the formation of those systems.

[Anomalocaris]

I think the likely explanation is consciousness facilitate a different kind of feed back complexity than other types of information processing in the brain.


Regarding the issue of whether there are specific region(s) of the brain that can be tied to consciousness, indications from disabling of specific regions of the brain by stroke suggest there are.       One such indicative stroke symptom is blind sight.     Here a stroke deprives the victim of the ability to see.   The victim reports total loss oh any sense of sight, even the capacity to perceive light and dark.    Yet if a ball is tossed to them without warning, they can capture is in midair.     If they are told to navigate a maze, they can do it without touch.

Test show these stroke victims lost conscious perception of sight so completely they will not even voluntarily hazard a guess of what shape is an object before their eyes.    Yet if asked to select from a range of choices of what shape,  they select 100% accurately over large number of tried.    It is as if disability of specific parts of the cortex deprived them of the ability to consciously know the fact that they know something through their senses.

[Angrboda]

I think the likely explanation is consciousness facilitate a different kind of feed back complexity than other types of information processing in the brain.


Regarding the issue of whether there are specific region(s) of the brain that can be tied to consciousness, indications from disabling of specific regions of the brain by stroke suggest there are.       One such indicative stroke symptom is blind sight.     Here a stroke deprives the victim of the ability to see.   The victim reports total loss oh any sense of sight, even the capacity to perceive light and dark.    Yet if a ball is tossed to them without warning, they can capture is in midair.     If they are told to navigate a maze, they can do it without touch.

Test show these stroke victims lost conscious perception of sight so completely they will not even voluntarily hazard a guess of what shape is an object before their eyes.    Yet if asked to select from a range of choices of what shape,  they select 100% accurately over large number of tried.    It is as if disability of specific parts of the cortex deprived them of the ability to consciously know the fact that they know something through their senses.

Again, the problem is determining whether the fault occurs in areas responsible for consciousness or in areas responsible for informing consciousness. Additionally, multiple areas can and do cause blindsight. If anything, blindsight is a potent argument against simplistic theories of consciousness in that abilities which we normally assume require conscious awareness do not in fact require it. (Oh, and the presentation of blindsight is far more variegated than you describe.) Another relevant syndrome is Anton-Babinski syndrome in which a person is blind, yet steadfastly maintains that they can see. To explain this away as delusion seems entirely too facile. It suggests that conscious awareness at times may be so removed from actual reality as to possess no possible way to link such conscious experience as a cause of extra-conscious processes.

[The Grand Nudger]

I will repeat for the dumb and hard of hearing.  Machines do not have consciousness.  They are not aware.  As to consciousness having advantages, you seem to be misinformed about the credibility of debate.  I'm sure your mind is closed to debate, but that's a you problem, not a fact about the debate.  There are basically two possible things going on with consciousness.  A) the things in consciousness have effects that flow downward from consciousness to the rest of the brain.  B) the things in the brain that are not conscious have effects that flow up into consciousness.  Your errant machine analogies, as flawed as they are, do nothing to resolve this question as machines do not have anything that can credibly be demonstrated to be like consciousness in humans or any other animal.  And your other closed-minded notions like model-control theory cannot be demonstrated because you have not isolated comparable systems in the brain and tied them to consciousness.  A primary obstacle to doing so is lack of any identification of the parts of the brain that are responsible for consciousness.  What you have is a bundle of conjectures and theories and no actual way to tie them to brains and actual consciousness.  You may think that doesn't open the door a crack to allow for debate, but that's because you're full of shit.

That's you being unconvinced by a given explanation for and of self awareness in humans.  I'm totally onboard.  

I agree that the distance between ourselves and any minimally self aware machine is vast.  The distance between that minimally self aware machine and any unaware but otherwise identical machine is comparatively minor.  I suspect it's both A and B.  Minimally self aware machines all have at least one ability A.  I think it's impossible to maintain, with certainty, that every real or purported ability of a specifically human self awareness is in set A.  I think we have at least one ability A, though.  That we can attend to and direct our attention at least as well as a sorting machine on a factory track.  That this confers advantages to us just as it confers advantages to that machine - even if those advantages don't really explain why it's there.

If, for example, as Vulcan put it, a specifically human self awareness is a bob ross thing.

[vulcanlogician]

You have zero proof that a machine is "slightly conscious."

Our brains, which are very complex machines, become regularly non conscious for 6-8 hours out of every day. Do machines experience periods of consciousness and non-consciousness? When you expose our blood system to anestesia, consciousness ceases for a period of time. Why? Anestesia doesn't inhibit brain function as far as we can tell. As far as we can tell, the brain very much knows that the surgeon is cleaving you up. But such things are not sustained in conscious awareness. Why not?

I think Angrboda is asking the right questions.

[Angrboda]

I will repeat for the dumb and hard of hearing.  Machines do not have consciousness.  They are not aware.  As to consciousness having advantages, you seem to be misinformed about the credibility of debate.  I'm sure your mind is closed to debate, but that's a you problem, not a fact about the debate.  There are basically two possible things going on with consciousness.  A) the things in consciousness have effects that flow downward from consciousness to the rest of the brain.  B) the things in the brain that are not conscious have effects that flow up into consciousness.  Your errant machine analogies, as flawed as they are, do nothing to resolve this question as machines do not have anything that can credibly be demonstrated to be like consciousness in humans or any other animal.  And your other closed-minded notions like model-control theory cannot be demonstrated because you have not isolated comparable systems in the brain and tied them to consciousness.  A primary obstacle to doing so is lack of any identification of the parts of the brain that are responsible for consciousness.  What you have is a bundle of conjectures and theories and no actual way to tie them to brains and actual consciousness.  You may think that doesn't open the door a crack to allow for debate, but that's because you're full of shit.

That's you being unconvinced by a given explanation for and of self awareness in humans.  I'm totally onboard.  

I agree that the distance between ourselves and any minimally self aware machine is vast.  The distance between that minimally self aware machine and any unaware but otherwise identical machine is comparatively minor.  I suspect it's both A and B.  Minimally self aware machines all have at least one ability A.  I think it's impossible to maintain, with certainty, that every real or purported ability of a specifically human self awareness is in set A.  I think we have at least one ability A, though.  That we can attend to and direct our attention at least as well as a sorting machine on a factory track.  That this confers advantages to us just as it confers advantages to that machine - even if those advantages don't really explain why it's there.

If, for example, as Vulcan put it, a specifically human self awareness is a bob ross thing.

And yet the machine does it entirely without any awareness. You've refuted your own arguments. Describing machines as aware is an analogy, an analogy which is strained far past the breaking point when you attempt to use it as a basis for conclusions about animal consciousness. Regardless of where one may come down in terms of beliefs about machine consciousness, indisputably the mechanism by which we attend to things is significantly different from the way a machine attends to things that the analogy is rendered impotent. We have attentional processes at some abstract level in the brain. Whether consciousness controls such processes or is controlled by them is not resolved by clumsy and stupid analogies to sorting machines. If machines are in any meaningful sense aware, it is painfully obvious that they are aware in a different way than we are. You cannot draw conclusions based on machine awareness because it and animal consciousness are distinctly different processes. That you think you can naively draw a line from one to the other simply suggests a lack of competence in navigating the subject.

[The Grand Nudger]

That's the idea that what we do is more than what a minimally self aware machine does. As I said, I agree with that. Anesthesia works by interrupting nerve signals in your brain and body.