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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Nov 21, 2016 - 04:02pm PT
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Maze problem!
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jstan
climber
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Nov 21, 2016 - 05:03pm PT
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A little like a professor whose PhD student needs a thesis topic or problem to solve and must formulate one for that student that is of some degree of importance yet solvable within a certain time frame. Unfortunately, academia is littered with the mistakes of this nature, to the misfortune of students.
This pretty much bypasses the training a person needs in order to take a job.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 21, 2016 - 06:41pm PT
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Robert Wright and Keith Frankish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBgtM1EuaQc
Fruity posted the link above and it's a pretty comprehensive look at some popular physicalist takes per mind studies - chiefly, functionalism, the complexity argument, and information theory.
Robert Wright is well versed in most of these areas but he wasn't jiggy enough with the contradictions and double-speak involved in Frankish's position to show as much. By its very nature, staunch functionalism backs itself into a corner in which it cannot argue its way out, but that involves asking specific questions that Wright did not ask.
Frankish was basically trying to narrow the gap - or more precisely - to eliminate the distinction between so-called machine registration of stimuali, and being consciously AWARE of said stimulai.
Chalmers and others have labored to show that the difference between a robot that can mechanically register, process and respond to vast arrays of stimulai, and a sentient being who has a first-person experiential perspective (is aware) of what it is like to have said experience.
Frankish says that we don't really have first person experience, rather we only have machine registration, and that once that registration reaches a critical level of complexity, we have an ILLUSION of having an internal life. But in fact there is nothing more going on than machine registration.
Some people on this thread might have a fun time unpacking this can of baloney. A few starting points are:
Is the illusion of consciousness above and beyond the machine registration? If not, then machine registration and the illusion of consciousness are selfsame. What does that actually mean?
Is the illusion of consciousness experienced as an illusion? If not, in what way does the illusion of consciousness actually exist?
What criteria would have to be met for consciousness to be real? And if consciousness was real, what physical difference would an objective analysis of the brain turn up, above and beyond the way our brains are currently composed?
Or if you want to simply tackle one question to get started, perhaps try this one:
Frankish says we only seem to have this "inner light show" we call first person experience, but what is REALLY going on is nothing more than mechanical registration and mechanical responses.
What then is the difference between "seeming to have" experience, and actually HAVING experience?
Fun stuff.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 21, 2016 - 07:24pm PT
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What then is the difference between "seeming to have" experience, and actually HAVING experience?
You tell us, so we can have a better idea of what you are getting at.
It looks like you prefer to define a machine as a thing that cannot have self-awareness. In that case, no amount of argument can convince you otherwise.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 21, 2016 - 08:31pm PT
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What then is the difference between "seeming to have" experience, and actually HAVING experience?
In fact the onus is not on me but rather on the person or school who makes the assertion that all 1st person experience is in fact 3rd person objective functioning, and that "your sense of internal experience is in fact an illusion."
Making that statement requires a defense of the basic premises, which, perforce is not my responsibility. Answering this question is not contingent upon me stating my position per machine sentience. That's not the question.
So to your comment I would say: Why not take a crack at trying to honestly answer the question per Dennett's (and others) position, as opposed to deflecting the question back to me.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 21, 2016 - 09:04pm PT
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Frankish was basically trying to narrow the gap - or more precisely - to eliminate the distinction between so-called machine registration of stimuali, and being consciously AWARE of said stimulai
Machine registration plus machine reaction perhaps. This takes us back to a distinction between awareness and consciousness. One that has experimental backing: we may be aware of a threat, but not conscious of the threat. The body, the machine, reacts, recoils to protect itself.
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Nov 21, 2016 - 09:13pm PT
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“Do not be tense, just be ready, not thinking but not dreaming, not being set but being flexible. It is being “wholly” and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for whatever may come.”
– Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 22, 2016 - 08:19am PT
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In fact the onus is not on me but rather on the person or school who makes the assertion that all 1st person experience is in fact 3rd person objective functioning, and that "your sense of internal experience is in fact an illusion."
That is not the assertion I make.
I believe that it is possible that what you call first person experience is produced by what you call machine registration.
You make it clear that you do not think that is possible, but you don't make it clear why you think so.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Nov 22, 2016 - 10:11am PT
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The problem remains: what is experiencing the illusion? What realizes there is an illusion?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Nov 22, 2016 - 10:36am PT
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The problem remains:
For you, Paul?
I think Frankish was pretty clear. The conundrum of the "registration" resolves itself for anyone who takes into account the many magnitudes (each magnitude is x10) more complexity of an organic robot than a 20th century manmade robot.
It might start with.. What is a flip-flop? (that is, of the electronic, informational sort)
...
In regards to the human organism as a mechanistic bio-robot, the facts are in. At this point, for many of us at least, the real $64 question is whether the human organism esp at the cultural, national and species level can adapt to this modern understanding... and succeed with it. Or fail. Either by rejecting it... or perhaps ironically by accepting it and then succumbing to it (eg, by losing its mojo, its will, in some way).
Sam Harris: How do we create meaningful lives for ourselves knowing they come to an end?
...
When Largo is serious, really and finally, he'll give us his best response, or best responses, to the finger in the eye question posed several years ago right here and multiple times (re: retinal stimulation and first person subjective experience, perception of light yet in the absence of photons); how so? It is really one of the easiest experiments and questions anyone interested in these issues can pose, start with. And it only takes seconds in any darkness to carry out.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 22, 2016 - 12:13pm PT
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The problem remains: what is experiencing the illusion?
If the characteristic of "I" is reduced to lowest levels, do we still have consciousness in the sense of self-contemplation? Is there consciousness without the sense of "I"? Or does consciousness fade into (machine) awareness? Is there a way of systematically reducing "I" to the point of extinction, but remaining conscious? Does this happen as we climb and enter a state of "flow"?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 22, 2016 - 12:25pm PT
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Machine registration resolves for you, Fruity, because you haven't "ran the numbers," so to speak, and played the thing out to its logical conclusions, which inevitably leads into corner and exposes Dennett and all the others as purporting a theory that is totally unintelligible. Nobody can answer the question, "What is the difference between "thinking I have an inner experience," and actually having an experience because the original statement, "You only think you have an experience" is itself a nonsense statement.
But to really get jiggy about any of this you need to bone up on the "complexity argument." It's broached in the following excerpt.
• Format: Abstract
Networks of conscious experience: computational neuroscience in understanding life, death, and consciousness.
Leisman G, Koch P.
Author information
Abstract
We demonstrate brain locations appearing to correlate with consciousness, but not being directly responsible for it. Technology reveals that brain activity is associated with consciousness but is not equivalent to it. We examine how consciousness occurs at critical levels of complexity. Conventional explanations portray consciousness as an emergent property of classical computer-like activities in the brain's neural networks. Prevailing views in this camp are that patterns of neural network activities correlate with mental states, that synchronous network oscillations in the thalamus and cerebral cortex temporally bind information, and that consciousness emerges as a novel property of computational complexity among neurons. A hard-wired theory is enigmatic for explaining consciousness because the nature of subjective experience, or 'qualia'- 'inner life' - is a "hard problem" to understand; binding spatially distributed brain activity into unitary objects, and a coherent sense of self, or 'oneness' is difficult to explain as is the transition from pre- to conscious states. Consciousness is non-computable and involves factors that are neither random nor algorithmic - consciousness cannot be simulated; explanations are also needed for free will and for subjective time flow. Convention argues that neurons and their chemical synapses are the fundamental units of information in the brain, and that conscious experience emerges when a critical level of complexity is reached in the brain's neural networks. The basic idea is that the mind is a computer functioning in the brain. In fitting the brain to a computational view, such explanations omit incompatible neurophysiological details, including widespread apparent randomness at all levels of neural processes (is it really noise, or underlying levels of complexity?); glial cells (which account for some 80% of the brain); dendritic-dendritic processing; electrotonic gap junctions; cytoplasmic/cytoskeletal activities; living state (the brain is alive!); and absence of testable hypotheses in emergence theory. There is no threshold or rationale specified; rather, consciousness 'just happens'. Consciousness then involves an awareness of what we are sensing or experiencing and some ability to control or coordinate voluntary actions. These issues of life, death, and consciousness are discussed in the context of Mike, the headless chicken, who survived for 18 months, and in the context of consciousness with high degrees of intellectual and cognitive function in a congenitally anencephalic brain; additionally, in the reanimation work of Soviet scientists in the 1920-30s, and in auditory sentence processing in patients in comatose, vegetative, and minimally conscious states.
Further reading can be had by doing a search on the Complexity Argument, keeping an eye pealed for anything by Tononi.
More later.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 22, 2016 - 01:55pm PT
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The Problem with Phi: A Critique of Integrated Information Theory
Michael A. Cerullo
"Summary:
In the last decade, Guilio Tononi has developed the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness. IIT postulates that consciousness is equal to integrated information (Φ). The goal of this paper is to show that IIT fails in its stated goal of quantifying consciousness. The paper will challenge the theoretical and empirical arguments in support of IIT. The main theoretical argument for the relevance of integrated information to consciousness is the principle of information exclusion. Yet, no justification is given to support this principle. Tononi claims there is significant empirical support for IIT, but this is called into question by the creation of a trivial theory of consciousness with equal explanatory power. After examining the theoretical and empirical evidence for IIT, arguments from philosophy of mind and epistemology will be examined. Since IIT is not a form of computational functionalism, it is vulnerable to fading/dancing qualia arguments. Finally, the limitations of the phenomenological approach to studying consciousness are examined, and it will be shown that IIT is a theory of protoconsciousness rather than a theory of consciousness."
From Wiki: concerning Tononi's Phi function
"Heuristics and approximations can sometimes be used to provide ballpark estimates of a complex system's integrated information, but precise calculations are often impossible."
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 22, 2016 - 03:14pm PT
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These issues of life, death, and consciousness are discussed in the context of Mike, the headless chicken
That has to be a win for the complexity argument.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Nov 22, 2016 - 03:35pm PT
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If anyone has listened to the last third of the Frankish video... the best part in my opinion ... we should discuss it... Otherwise we would just be talking past each other per usual.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 22, 2016 - 05:30pm PT
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What then is the difference between "seeming to have" experience, and actually HAVING experience?
Why not take a crack at trying to honestly answer the question
It is the difference between a magician making it look like they are pulling a rabbit out of an empty top hat, versus CREATING a rabbit in the hat and then pulling it out.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Nov 22, 2016 - 07:37pm PT
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Ed: The major difficulty with using the word "metaphor" is that there is an intention when creating a literary metaphor, and that intention is different then the one employing a simile. It is a device used in writing, a tool of conveyance for ideas.
I think that’s how regular folks initially thought about it. But that notion changed with Ortony’s seminal 1975 article.
Why Metaphors Are Necessary and Not Just Nice
A Ortony - Educational theory, 1975 - Wiley Online Library
if you’re up to it, you can look at his compilation of how other thought about metaphor emerged from that point of insight in 1975.
(Lakoff and Johnson's work was only a tributary in that flow.)
[BOOK] Metaphor and thought
A Ortony - 1993 - books.google.com
(And many after and before that last one.)
Talk about what you’ve studied. Punters, please choose another venue.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 22, 2016 - 07:43pm PT
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Is there a continuum of consciousness, from unconscious to fully conscious, say from 0 to 1? Or is consciousness as described by a function discontinuous - a step in the function - at a critical point? And if there is such a function, does it vary over time, depending upon our age? Is it possible to assign a single function to many people, or would such a function depend upon the person?
Would this hypothetical function describe the spectrum of mental activity from the purely mechanical to the self-referential sense of "I"? Are "mind" and "consciousness" the same? I don't think so, for the mind works at below-conscious levels.
(I thought we had exhausted the subject of metaphors and moved on to zeugmae. Apparently not.)
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Nov 22, 2016 - 09:14pm PT
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In the Wright Frankish video, if one subs "perception" for "illusion" and "perceptual" for "illusory" it'll make even more sense.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Nov 22, 2016 - 09:24pm PT
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Interesting question jgill. Personally I think it is a continuum if allowed to happen naturally.
There's the unconsciousness of deep sleep, dreaming consciousness of REM, half consciousness of directed lucid dreaming, confused state consciousness when waking up in a strange place and trying to remember where you are, and there's the consciousness of waking up and OMG it's Monday again.
Of course there are abrupt transitions (dare I say quantum leaps?) that no one voluntarily chooses - being awakened by an alarm or someone screaming, having a really interesting dream interrupted and wondering what the outcome would have been. Worse yet, dreaming that you were solving an important research problem and then were awakened before the end. Trying to remember and unsuccessfully get to the same place with waking consciousness etc.
I do agree that mind lies below consciousness working away unnoticed for the most part.
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