The Scripture Is False And The Biblical God Is Dead.

[Anomalocaris]

I can’t at the moment.   but I can make a computer do so without being aware of its own doing so, which indicate it is in principle possible.   Also, Blind sight suggest humans do have the capacity to excute complex behavior that normally involve consciousness without the participation of consciousness.    So that fact that humans don’t, does not necessarily mean humans, not just computers, can’t under any circumstances.

That participation of consciousness seems nearly ubiquitous in complex human behavior does not prove the participation of consciousness is essential to all these behavior.

It indicates nothing of the sort until you can build a computer that is demonstrably self-aware. To compare human self-awareness with a non self-aware computer is ridiculous, because computers are aware of nothing. It’s like saying that since you can hit any computer with a hammer without causing pain, you can do the same with any human.

Boru

I don’t need to build a computer that is self aware either demonstrably or in secret.    It already does what I want it to do without it.   And that is the whole point.    Consciousness is in principle not needed for what we consider to be behavior sophistication.     

Rather we, who flatter ourselves with our conscious by anthropomorphize and indulge in self importance, both together and separately, attribute larger role and greater mystique to consciousness than warranted.

We imagine our consciousness the king of all it surveys, therefore none of the peasants in the realm would be able to piss or shit or grow crops without the existence of the putative monarch.   That is fallacious.

Consciousness is not a significant enough factor,   IMHO, such that inability to fully explain it as of yet provides much of an opening to indulge to questioning of understanding underlying bahvioral mechanism,

[Brian37]

Lack of evidence. Proposing something has no bearing on whether the something is real or not.

^^^^^^^^ SOOOOOOO MUCH THIS.

[Paleophyte]

Pain is little more than a damage indicator. Don't do this, it hurts. About as complicated as a check engine light. There's some pretty obvious survival advantage to avoiding an unnecessarily punctured hide.

Awareness/subjective experience seem to be unnecessary for proper external behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight

I'd hardly call that proper external behaviour and all it really demonstrates is that they're using a secondary pathway that doesn't correspond to normal visual perception but clearly is perception nonetheless. Congratulations on demonstrating qualia.

[Paleophyte]

Can you explain how we'd do any planning without consciousness? No self-awareness, no awareness of the future, no planning for any self in any future.

If you write code using complicated nestings of conditional statements (if/else statements), you have pretty much built something artificial that can do something akin to planning/decision-making (at least in the rudimentary sense) without the need for any qualia whatsoever.

The trouble being that if you have sufficiently complex code one begins to wonder if those machines aren't getting a little sparky. The simple mimics obviously don't but they bugger up given an even vaguely novel situation. The more advanced genetic algorithms get a bit spooky that way.

So it seems to me, then, that it is possible for an organism like the human being to plan ahead without any "inner movie running in their head".

So computers building an internal digital representation of their external environment and interpreting it doesn't hint at what might be going on in that organic mess in our heads?

Pain is little more than a damage indicator. Don't do this, it hurts. About as complicated as a check engine light. There's some pretty obvious survival advantage to avoiding an unnecessarily punctured hide.

And if pain is DMitry's bar for qualia then he's just thrown humanish p-zombies out the window. Every organism down to and including single-celled organisms exhibit some level of distress when damaged. It's about as fundamental a reaction as you can find.

Yeah, but there is also the feeling of pain as well. That is what Dmitry is referring to, not the outward behavior exhibiting it (or the activities in the nervous system that lead to it), but the inner subjective feeling of it.

Are you likely to get reaction without feeling?

And yeah, hypothetically, you could have p-zombie versions of dogs and other non-human animals that we believe have consciousness. It's not just humans beings that have phenomenal consciousness, of course.

I'm not seeing the hypothetical.

[Dmitry1983]

all it really demonstrates is that they're using a secondary pathway that doesn't correspond to normal visual perception but clearly is perception nonetheless.

What do humans need normal visual perception for if they can function without it?

[Silver]

Take a hot poker to your eyes and find out.

[The Grand Nudger]

all it really demonstrates is that they're using a secondary pathway that doesn't correspond to normal visual perception but clearly is perception nonetheless.

What do humans need normal visual perception for if they can function without it?

Why do we need normal fingers when we can function without them, eh?

[Astreja]

all it really demonstrates is that they're using a secondary pathway that doesn't correspond to normal visual perception but clearly is perception nonetheless.

What do humans need normal visual perception for if they can function without it?

We function better with it.  We can perform complex tasks more easily.  We can identify danger at a distance in environments where it's too noisy to hear someone sneaking up on us.

It may not be an outright need, but it improves our evolutionary fitness considerably.

[Anomalocaris]

all it really demonstrates is that they're using a secondary pathway that doesn't correspond to normal visual perception but clearly is perception nonetheless.

What do humans need normal visual perception for if they can function without it?

The standard evolutionary explanation is the so called “other” visual perception pathway is actually the primary pathway responsible for much of the autonomous functions that depends on visual cue, such as balancing, reflexive navigation, path selection and obstacle avoidance in normal walking, reflexive approaching object avoidance,  etc.  that pathway is also thought to have arisen since very early in the evolution of vertebrate tetrapods.    It may even have predated the very first vertebrates.

The “conscious” pathway is in fact a secondary pathway that evolved much later, probably at the same time of t development of the mechanism of consciousness during mammalian evolution.      

Exactly how a secondary visual pathway evolved is not known for certain because state of techniques to deducing detailed neurological development of fossilized organisms are in their infancy.    However, a plausible reason for this development has been advanced based on duplicate gene scenario.     

The duplicate gene scenario is based on experimental observation that one commonly occurring form of mutation during the replication of embryo cell is certain genes are accidentally duplicated.   Sometimes when this occurs, the result is as the embryo develope, the organ or parts of organ the the duplicate genes encodes also develop duplicates.    If the genes encoding certain pathways in the brain cause the pathway to also be duplicated, and the duplicate does not prove fatal to the embryo and the embryo has a chance to mature, then during the maturation process one set of the duplicates often continues perform the pathway’s original function as expected, while the other set is usually co-opted by the developing brain to perform other functions. 

So the theory is the mechanism for consciousness in the brain is artifact of a mutation early during mammalian history which caused a large group of different pathways to duplicate.   Offsprings of these mutations than co-opted the duplicate pathways to perform a new set of functions that eventually led to consciousness.   But part of the group of duplicate pathways is the pathway for vision.   The existence of a spare vision pathway allowed the evolving mechanism of conspicuous ness to integrate it and thus process visual input separately from and in parallel with the primary visual pathway that has existed since before fishes first crawled onto land.     This new separate parallel visual pathway is what facilitates our conscious vision.

[The Architect Of Fate]

What do humans need normal visual perception for if they can function without it?

Yeah because being able to spot food or danger has no use. You have some very weird ideas that evolution only sticks to what's essential rather than what's useful or creates some advantage or at the very least isn't cripplingly detrimental. Visual situational awareness is very useful.