Does everything I do need a reason? I do it because I want to.
When I say everything is alive, I mean everything. the difference between an animal and a chair is that the animal is a cohesive field of energy that has awareness while non organic things have energy and awareness but it is not bound to any one object. Every particle in reality is aware of what every other particle is doing. From the microcosm to the macrocosm. It works as a whole and yet it is scattered.
You are right that words do not ALWAYS only serve to comfort us, but that is what the average man uses them for most of the time. To argue and defend a point is to fight for your ego. Fight for who you think you are. We are scared to see what we might become without the ego.
Indeed you are right matsta. My explanation was rather blunt, I admit.
[QUOTE=SilverBullet;42973580]Does everything I do need a reason? I do it because I want to.[/QUOTE]
Is that not a reason in itself?
[QUOTE]When I say everything is alive, I mean everything. the difference between an animal and a chair is that the animal is a cohesive field of energy that has awareness while non organic things have energy and awareness but it is not bound to any one object. Every particle in reality is aware of what every other particle is doing. From the microcosm to the macrocosm. It works as a whole and yet it is scattered.[/QUOTE]
What do you mean by energy, why should inanimate matter have the same level of awareness as an organism? Is this awareness of each individual particle of inanimate matter something that composes the total awareness of organisms, or are either states of awareness completely different in nature and if so at what point do you distinguish one from the other? Also, if the energy and awareness of inanimate matter is not bound to a single object, what defines an object in this context? Finally, why do you believe this universal energy and awareness exists?
[QUOTE=SilverBullet;42973580]The difference between an animal and a chair is that the animal is a cohesive field of energy that has awareness while non organic things have energy and awareness but it is not bound to any one object. Every particle in reality is aware of what every other particle is doing. From the microcosm to the macrocosm. It works as a whole and yet it is scattered.[/QUOTE]
And what does this mean in practical sense?
Consciousness is what religions call "God" it is inside all sentient life, and it doesn't come from this dimension/plane of existence. It comes from a higher level.
[QUOTE=bIgFaTwOrM12;42982274]Is that not a reason in itself?
What do you mean by energy, why should inanimate matter have the same level of awareness as an organism? Is this awareness of each individual particle of inanimate matter something that composes the total awareness of organisms, or are either states of awareness completely different in nature and if so at what point do you distinguish one from the other? Also, if the energy and awareness of inanimate matter is not bound to a single object, what defines an object in this context? Finally, why do you believe this universal energy and awareness exists?[/QUOTE]
The very essence of energy is mystery. Energy defies rationality, logic, and scrutiny, its what makes, against all odds, the world go round. Everything is made of it. And it is alive in the sense that it exudes awareness.
The only way this is possible is through death. Everything that has died or is dead is now basically a ton of disassemled awareness that expands across infinity. The awareness that makes the living does not vanish in death, it only expands across infinity. It is created from infinity and returns to infinity.
In life we go on a journey to gain awareness and when we die we return home, so the awareness is returned to the universe. In this way, the universe makes an effort to become more aware. When we are alive our awareness is compacted into a form that's almost like a mini universe, so to speak. And just like the universe, we make our own effort to raise our awareness. The universe is like a hologram. Every piece of it contains the whole.
Our perception is limited to this to this reality. When we die our perception is no longer limited to that of our smaller reality and now expands to that of the endless infinite. In doing so we become everything, yet we are nothing. This is similar to the theories that we are all one. We are, but not in life. Only in death.
I once took a phsycadelic, that, for reasons unknown to me, chose to show me death. It all makes perfect sense now. As dramatic and ridiculous as that sounds. It feels like I got so many pieces of the puzzle but I never put it all together until I started this post.
I see the ability/inclination to contemplate these things to be a curse, it wastes so much energy and goes nowhere yet fascinates to no end.
Wouldn't it be nice to just be a tree and not have to worry about any of this bullshit?
[QUOTE=Barbarian887;42984578]I see the ability/inclination to contemplate these things to be a curse, it wastes so much energy and goes nowhere yet fascinates to no end.
Wouldn't it be nice to just be a tree and not have to worry about any of this bullshit?[/QUOTE]
The intellectual aspect is maddening and worrying. So, chuck it out the window and persue the mystery, with only joy in mind.
Here's what I think consciousness could be, as a computer science student with pretty much no advanced knowledge of psychology or neuroscience who has done no reading on the subject:
You could abstract a conscious mind into three main components; a medium for storing information (memory), a non-deterministic sequence generator (Markov chain style generator), and a fitness evaluator.
1. The generator randomly walks around several regions of the memory store simultaneously, pulling up related information.
2. The generator produces many sequences using the information retrieved, and passes them to the fitness evaluator.
3. For each sequence, the evaluator considers their utility to some end goal (the problem to be solved or task to be planned). If they are deemed useful, they are stored back in memory.
4. The evaluator may also choose to commit a sequence as an action; which is vocalised in speech, sent as commands to muscles, etc.
Consciousness simply emerges when generated sequences are stored and recalled. The internal monologue you hear in your mind are just the sequences coressponding to language that are deemed useful, and so stored.
I believe you don't really experience consciousness as it happens, but rather when you recall that it happened. What's the difference between a machine that as emergent behaviour stores in its memory the statement "I am conscious", which is later recalled and evaluated by the machine, and what we consider true consciousness in the manner we possess? Could they just be the same thing?
I don't think consciousness is special or mystical, just useful for planning and solving problems.
From another angle, I believe awareness is just emergent from a system that can store snapshots of its reasoning process and recall them, using them to aid later reasoning activities. A phenomenon that may emerge from such a system is it storing a language sequence representing "I am aware", which it recalls later. Is our consciousness any different from that, apart from our reasoning system not being fully defined?
[QUOTE=SilverBullet;42984509]The very essence of energy is mystery. Energy defies rationality, logic, and scrutiny, its what makes, against all odds, the world go round. Everything is made of it. And it is alive in the sense that it exudes awareness.
The only way this is possible is through death. Everything that has died or is dead is now basically a ton of disassemled awareness that expands across infinity. The awareness that makes the living does not vanish in death, it only expands across infinity. It is created from infinity and returns to infinity.
In life we go on a journey to gain awareness and when we die we return home, so the awareness is returned to the universe. In this way, the universe makes an effort to become more aware. When we are alive our awareness is compacted into a form that's almost like a mini universe, so to speak. And just like the universe, we make our own effort to raise our awareness. The universe is like a hologram. Every piece of it contains the whole.
Our perception is limited to this to this reality. When we die our perception is no longer limited to that of our smaller reality and now expands to that of the endless infinite. In doing so we become everything, yet we are nothing. This is similar to the theories that we are all one. We are, but not in life. Only in death.
I once took a phsycadelic, that, for reasons unknown to me, chose to show me death. It all makes perfect sense now. As dramatic and ridiculous as that sounds. It feels like I got so many pieces of the puzzle but I never put it all together until I started this post.[/QUOTE]
So you've seen death huh? And not the effects of some psychedelic drug? Because I think that is a bunch of crazy talk.
And I'm not sure how any of this tells what consciousness is.. Expanding to endless infinite? Returning home when we die? We being mini-Universes?
Also how is everything that has died a "disassembled awareness" and not a.. long-rotten fucking corpse, in the case of an animal for example?
And what do you mean by it expanding across infinity? It would take a long time for some material fragments from that rotten corpse to end up in the other side of the Universe..
[QUOTE=Bat-shit;42987336]So you've seen death huh? And not the effects of some psychedelic drug? Because I think that is a bunch of crazy talk.
And I'm not sure how any of this tells what consciousness is.. Expanding to endless infinite? Returning home when we die? We being mini-Universes?
Also how is everything that has died a "disassembled awareness" and not a.. long-rotten fucking corpse, in the case of an animal for example?
And what do you mean by it expanding across infinity? It would take a long time for some material fragments from that rotten corpse to end up in the other side of the Universe..[/QUOTE]
You are thinking of everything I say in too much of a linear rational sense. Of course it's going to sound like a bunch of crazy talk if you place a huge amount of importance on everything you think, say, and do. Self importance is our worst enemy on the path of knowledge. It makes us place our views of reality above others. Which makes us fixed, and stagnant.
In a way I think you know exactly what I'm talking about.
[QUOTE=SilverBullet;42991290]You are thinking of everything I say in too much of a linear rational sense. Of course it's going to sound like a bunch of crazy talk if you place a huge amount of importance on everything you think, say, and do. Self importance is our worst enemy on the path of knowledge. It makes us place our views of reality above others. Which makes us fixed, and stagnant.
In a way I think you know exactly what I'm talking about.[/QUOTE]
While I appreciate the nature of the discussion you've had, it's hard to take a look at it in a way that doesn't just make it feel dreamt up
I totally understand your statement here on self importance and agree even to a large degree, there's just a lot of nagging that comes with a view that is just so wildly dream like it's hard to even start talking about it in a "serious" way.
It may seem far fetched from your point of view, but not mine.
This is something that almost nobody understands. They do not fully realize what it means to see the world differently. They'll go as far as calling other people stupid or insane because they do not share the same "reasonable" views as them. My ideas of reality are as " dreamt up" as yours are. There is no right way to see reality.
[QUOTE=SilverBullet;42991782]It may seem far fetched from your point of view, but not mine.
This is something that almost nobody understands. They do not fully realize what it means to see the world differently. They'll go as far as calling other people stupid or insane because they do not share the same "reasonable" views as them. My ideas of reality are as " dreamt up" as yours are. There is no right way to see reality.[/QUOTE]
But why is your opinion of the matter more reasonable than, for example, mine? Can you validate your claims?
[QUOTE=Ziks;42991807]But why is your opinion of the matter more reasonable than, for example, mine? Can you validate your claims?[/QUOTE]
That's the thing. It's not more reasonable. It's simply different.
Different in the way that instead of listening to what I've been told many times by others, I've listened to what reality has told me right in front of my face in it's own way. The knowledge first starts as only feeling, then I do my best with what I have to turn those feelings into words. The problem with us people is that we can understand anything, but only if its assembled in a way that sounds intelligent. Well actually, we can understand almost anything,but if it doesn't sound reasonable and intelligent we will put it beneath us. I could convince you to do anything if I had the energy to make it sound intelligent enough.
We are playing with ideas here. Stupid is the same as smart because they are both only ideas. When you remove importance from the equation, nothing is too crazy to understand anymore.
We are all alone, and scared. We act like we know what we're saying but we don't.
Choosing to see the world in a way that's the best of you requires you to truly act like you could die any moment.
Seeing the world like the average person does is easy, because they get validation and justification in every agreement they get, it makes them feel more comfortable about the bullshit they say.
Me on the otherhand. Its lonely as shit.
My idea of the world is not as comfortable, but it is a lot more roomy. That doesn't make me right though, it just stops me from putting certain ideas beneath me. Gives me more room for change.
But if you have two mutually exclusive ideas, if one is correct the other is not. While it is impossible for us to fully understand the universe, we can use the things we have learned to evaluate which idea is expected to be more truthful; we can be [I]rational[/I].
It appears to me that you prefer to discard prior knowledge in favour of [I]emotional[/I] beliefs, things that sound nice to you. You are not being [I]rational[/I], but simply adopting the beliefs that require least effort on your part. You must be aware that the vast majority of things you "sense" are simply illusions made up by the brain to digest the world into something a lot less complex and confusing. It takes some effort to distinguish between the things your mind makes you feel that are genuine, and the things that are invented. Have you considered that the things you "feel" may just be purely fantastical?
[QUOTE=SilverBullet;42991782]It may seem far fetched from your point of view, but not mine.
This is something that almost nobody understands. They do not fully realize what it means to see the world differently. They'll go as far as calling other people stupid or insane because they do not share the same "reasonable" views as them. My ideas of reality are as " dreamt up" as yours are. There is no right way to see reality.[/QUOTE]
No I don't think so.
I think it's extremely, extremely assumptive of you to project that no one but you or very like minded individuals to yourself can put themselves in another position, or another shoes. This is whole sale wrong. You are not the only with empathy and with the ability to have empathy for ones position in a philosophical debate.
I'm not pretending even for a moment that I know what "right" is in this context. I never pretended to. That doesn't mean any and all ideas that I see are evaluate to me in the same ways. Thus we don't see eye to eye and I have to question where your view point comes from.
There's no need to act above us all here.
[QUOTE=Ziks;42992093]But if you have two mutually exclusive ideas, one must be correct and the other must not. While it is impossible for us to fully understand the universe, we can use the things we have learned to evaluate which idea is expected to be more truthful; we can be [I]rational[/I].
It appears to me that you prefer to discard prior knowledge in favour of [I]emotional[/I] beliefs, things that sound nice to you. You are not being [I]rational[/I], but simply adopting the beliefs that require least effort on your part. You must be aware that the vast majority of things you "sense" are simply illusions made up by the brain to digest the world into something a lot less complex and confusing. It takes some effort to distinguish between the things your mind makes you feel that are genuine, and the things that are invented. Have you considered that the things you "feel" may just be purely fantastical?[/QUOTE]
Yes I have considered that. I realize though that it is pointless to look for what's objectively true, because objective truth either doesn't exist or we will never find it. Even then, it doesn't matter because I'm going to die anyway. So I view the world in a way that would allow me to act with only my best and nothing less.
Fantastical or not, It is all I have. Trust me it's not effortless. It takes lots of effort to cultivate a belief that curtails self importance like this. It's almost exclusively designed to help me realize how temporary and alone I am, and act accordingly. In doing so, I feel more free, but the mountain only gets steeper.
[editline]27th November 2013[/editline]
[QUOTE=HumanAbyss;42992254]No I don't think so.
I think it's extremely, extremely assumptive of you to project that no one but you or very like minded individuals to yourself can put themselves in another position, or another shoes. This is whole sale wrong. You are not the only with empathy and with the ability to have empathy for ones position in a philosophical debate.
I'm not pretending even for a moment that I know what "right" is in this context. I never pretended to. That doesn't mean any and all ideas that I see are evaluate to me in the same ways. Thus we don't see eye to eye and I have to question where your view point comes from.
There's no need to act above us all here.[/QUOTE]
If there is one thing I know, it's that I don't know anything.
But with such a personal belief which you feel only you will understand, what is the point of sharing it here? This isn't really the right environment.
[QUOTE=Ziks;42992446]But with such a personal belief which you feel only you will understand, what is the point of sharing it here? This isn't really the right environment.[/QUOTE]
True, if I was searching for agreements I'd go elsewhere, but this is called mass debate after all. Nothing I do really matters in the slightest, so don't ask why, ask why not.
Honestly I enjoyed this very much. To turn my feelings into words feels great.
We should probably get back on topic.
[QUOTE=Ziks;42985768]Here's what I think consciousness could be, as a computer science student with pretty much no advanced knowledge of psychology or neuroscience who has done no reading on the subject:
You could abstract a conscious mind into three main components; a medium for storing information (memory), a non-deterministic sequence generator (Markov chain style generator), and a fitness evaluator.
1. The generator randomly walks around several regions of the memory store simultaneously, pulling up related information.
2. The generator produces many sequences using the information retrieved, and passes them to the fitness evaluator.
3. For each sequence, the evaluator considers their utility to some end goal (the problem to be solved or task to be planned). If they are deemed useful, they are stored back in memory.
4. The evaluator may also choose to commit a sequence as an action; which is vocalised in speech, sent as commands to muscles, etc.
Consciousness simply emerges when generated sequences are stored and recalled. The internal monologue you hear in your mind are just the sequences coressponding to language that are deemed useful, and so stored.
I believe you don't really experience consciousness as it happens, but rather when you recall that it happened. What's the difference between a machine that as emergent behaviour stores in its memory the statement "I am conscious", which is later recalled and evaluated by the machine, and what we consider true consciousness in the manner we possess? Could they just be the same thing?
I don't think consciousness is special or mystical, just useful for planning and solving problems.[/QUOTE]
You just missed the point completely. You are explaining the functional aspect of our cognitive behavior, but you are missing the [I]'what is it like to'[/I] aspect of consciousness. (a.k.a. experience)
Of course we could build computers that did all of the above, the question is if there is some [I][B]x[/B][/I] such that [I][B]x[/B][/I] [I]is like[/I] being that computer, and what connection [I][B]x[/B][/I] has with the functions performed by the computer. (See my previous post for a more detailed explanation.)
[QUOTE=matsta;42993374]You just missed the point completely. You are explaining the functional aspect of our cognitive behavior, but you are missing the [I]'what is it like to'[/I] aspect of consciousness. (a.k.a. experience)
Of course we could build computers that did all of the above, the question is if there is some [I][B]x[/B][/I] such that [I][B]x[/B][/I] [I]is like[/I] being that computer, and what connection [I][B]x[/B][/I] has with the functions performed by the computer. (See my previous post for a more detailed explanation.)[/QUOTE]
But my proposed model [I]does[/I] explain experience, at least the observable aspects of experience as a phenomenon.
Do you believe you are experiencing the current moment?
Your sensory input has latency, so you are experiencing percepts at a delay to when they originated. Receiving sensory data from different sources would be confusing if you received the sight of something touching your foot before you felt the thing touch your skin. Percepts are cached in memory so they can be synchronised with other percepts expected to occur at the same "time".
For moments that you "experience" that aren't stored in memory (you either forgot them or were distracted at the time), it is as if those experiences ever existed. If you had a device that was able to "experience" but had no memory to store those experiences, is it actually experiencing anything? Wouldn't it just be some fancy data stream processing machine with no perception of "self"?
It appears that memory plays a huge part of experience, and I believe that what we feel is our ability to "see through our eyes" is purely emergent from the ability to recall past experiences. Again, what is the difference between a machine that can recall past experiences and internal deliberative states and naturally produce the phrase "I am aware", and our "special" form of consciousness where there is apparently an amazing phenomenon of being able to live in the moment? Can we [I]actually[/I] live in the moment, or do we just remember living in the moment?
[QUOTE=Ziks;42992446]But with such a personal belief which you feel only you will understand, what is the point of sharing it here? This isn't really the right environment.[/QUOTE]
Though't i'd jump in here.
I have very similar views as SilverBullet here, and while this is a belief backed by science (granted, a field of science we are still learning about, the brain) I find it very hard to get other people to grasp the idea.
I think part of this comes from the fact that (at least in the Western world) this way of thinking is seen as the way of crazies, bordering bizarre.
Most people I know nowadays believe too much into the numbers of science to believe that there's more out there, or the other side of the spectrum that there's a almighty god that gazes upon us and decides who goes to heaven and hell.
There's also a point where you seem to think this is some religion, with the best plausible outcome once we die, and THAT's the reason we think this way.
This is in no way true, as I don't believe in some heaven where we can "physically" see our loved ones.
I DO however believe in an afterlife where our so called "consciousness" (or electrical impulses, for you science peeps out there) gets released from the brain and thus "melts" into the universe.
This means you wouldn't have a feeling of "self", yet your "soul"(for definite lack of a better word) lives on, albeit scattered across the globe and further, melting into the energy of all (for, as we know, EVERYTHING has energy)
This is not necessarily a soothing, or easy thing to grasp.
I say the Western world might find it hard as beliefs such as Taoism get a whole lot closer to this way of thinking.
(Not all aimed at you, Ziks, but I didn't want to quote a bunch of people)
I feel the way of thinking we use (with slight differences or not) is a pretty damn good middle between science and religion.
Now, sorry for this slight deviation,
more on-topic, I found matsta's equation to be a great way to define consciousness, for me showing the gap between electrical impulses to and from the brain, and our "self". Our consciousness.
As for Ziks explanation with a robot, if the robot can get all the "inputs" (view, sound, shape); and combine all of those and know what this would mean, or better, how the input would make the robot "feel", you would technically get a "conscious" robot. Whether you can compare this to the consciousness of a human, is another story.
[QUOTE=MyAlt91;42996884]Though't i'd jump in here.
I have very similar views as SilverBullet here, and while this is a belief backed by science (granted, a field of science we are still learning about, the brain) I find it very hard to get other people to grasp the idea.
I think part of this comes from the fact that (at least in the Western world) this way of thinking is seen as the way of crazies, bordering bizarre.
Most people I know nowadays believe too much into the numbers of science to believe that there's more out there, or the other side of the spectrum that there's a almighty god that gazes upon us and decides who goes to heaven and hell.
There's also a point where you seem to think this is some religion, with the best plausible outcome once we die, and THAT's the reason we think this way.
This is in no way true, as I don't believe in some heaven where we can "physically" see our loved ones.
I DO however believe in an afterlife where our so called "consciousness" (or electrical impulses, for you science peeps out there) gets released from the brain and thus "melts" into the universe.
This means you wouldn't have a feeling of "self", yet your "soul"(for definite lack of a better word) lives on, albeit scattered across the globe and further, melting into the energy of all (for, as we know, EVERYTHING has energy)
This is not necessarily a soothing, or easy thing to grasp.
I say the Western world might find it hard as beliefs such as Taoism get a whole lot closer to this way of thinking.
(Not all aimed at you, Ziks, but I didn't want to quote a bunch of people)
I feel the way of thinking we use (with slight differences or not) is a pretty damn good middle between science and religion.
Now, sorry for this slight deviation,
more on-topic, I found matsta's equation to be a great way to define consciousness, for me showing the gap between electrical impulses to and from the brain, and our "self". Our consciousness.
As for Ziks explanation with a robot, if the robot can get all the "inputs" (view, sound, shape); and combine all of those and know what this would mean, or better, how the input would make the robot "feel", you would technically get a "conscious" robot. Whether you can compare this to the consciousness of a human, is another story.[/QUOTE]
Just a note of detail here:
The [I]electrical impulses[/I] we have in our brain are of an electrochemical nature. There is a flow of potassium and sodium ions as it diffuses through the cell wall thanks to this electrical gradient (different in charge on either side of the membrane), in a sort of wave across the cell. If a person dies the cell bodies disintegrates and the chemicals mixes together.
[QUOTE=MyAlt91;42996884]I DO however believe in an afterlife where our so called "consciousness" (or electrical impulses, for you science peeps out there) gets released from the brain and thus "melts" into the universe.
This means you wouldn't have a feeling of "self", yet your "soul"(for definite lack of a better word) lives on, albeit scattered across the globe and further, melting into the energy of all (for, as we know, EVERYTHING has energy)[/QUOTE]
I'll admit that to an outsider your beliefs appear to be extrapolated from slight misinterpretations of "popular" scientific knowledge.
Electrical impulses aren't our consciousness, rather they are the medium used to transfer and store information. Our consciousness emerges from the information being transferred and processed in a particular way, and consciousness is lost if those transactions aren't maintained. Also, any suitable method of transferring information could be used; for example you could have a huge scale brain with ants carrying seeds along tunnels that could be conscious, but only in the impossibly unlikely event of the information (as represented by seeds) being transferred in a very particular way.
Upon death, these "electrical charges" (really sodium ions within neurons) won't "dissipate across the universe", at least not for millions upon millions of years. They will just hang about within the neuron until the cell membrane collapses and then will perhaps bond with a an anion or whatever (I'm no chemist). Regardless, the very exact set of information transactions required by a consciousness is completely lost. All memories formed, all sense of awareness, all sense of [i]anything[/i] is lost. You may receive some comfort in knowing that components of the medium that once held your consciousness are now being consumed by bacteria et cetera, but you no longer exist. You will never perceive anything ever again. Thinking from your perspective at all at this point is irrelevant. It would be like wondering what you were experiencing 100 years before your birth.
[editline]27th November 2013[/editline]
Please be aware that the reason why you prefer your beliefs to something more rational is that they are more comforting. Please, [I]please[/I] understand this.
Otherwise, when you receive some alternative argument that isn't compatible with your own viewpoint you will invent excuses for why their argument is invalid, such as "Science will never be able to explain this" or "it goes beyond what most people can comprehend". [I]Everyone[/I] holding an irrational belief does this, your beliefs are not special.
[QUOTE=Ziks;42996562]But my proposed model [I]does[/I] explain experience, at least the observable aspects of experience as a phenomenon.[/QUOTE]
Relating experience with data storage is not explaining experience. That is, you haven't explained why there is something like being a device that stores and manipulates data. As I said before, one could build a computer that did all those things you described in your first post, but the question if there is something that is like being those machines is still open. And if they asked me, I would said that no, there isn't. It would be similar to 'being a chair' or 'being a calculator', in the sense that there is nothing which is to be like them.
Your explanation of consciousness is this:
[QUOTE=Ziks;42996562]Consciousness [I]simply emerges[/I] when generated sequences are stored and recalled.[/QUOTE]
That is not even an explanation in my opinion. (Why does it 'simply emerge'?) If it is possible to think that a computer could do all those things without there beign something which is to be like that computer, then you haven't explained anything.
[QUOTE=Ziks;42996562]It appears that memory plays a huge part of experience, and I believe that what we feel is our ability to "see through our eyes" is purely emergent from the ability to recall past experiences. Again, what is the difference between a machine that can recall past experiences and internal deliberative states and naturally produce the phrase "I am aware", and our "special" form of consciousness where there is apparently an amazing phenomenon of being able to live in the moment? Can we [I]actually[/I] live in the moment, or do we just remember living in the moment?[/QUOTE]
Again, those are just the functional aspects of memory, but not the phenomenal aspects of it, which are ones that everyone seeks to explain. you can't explain something by saying that it 'simply emerges', you must explain why it emerges.
Sure, I've left the memory structure, generation method and fitness evaluator for my consciousness model undefined, but I hold that if you find the correct solutions for each consciousness will emerge, because the described system is capable of producing the same phenomena as a "truly" conscious being. I subscribe to the practical AI camp where it doesn't matter how a machine does it deliberation, rather its interactions with the world are how we judge whether it is intelligent or conscious.
I feel you missed a couple of the points I made in the post you quoted, for one the understanding that we don't experience the current moment, rather the only evidence we have of experiencing anything is our memories. When you believe you have the thought "I am aware", can you prove that you didn't just produce the memories of thinking that thought but there is something more special than that? Does there need to be something more special than that if it produces the same phenomena?
I don't see the merit of testing to see if you can imagine being "like" something that isn't human. You could have a conscious form of alien life that have a completely different set of senses compared to ours, which it would be impossible for us to comprehend or interpret without the correct neural structure. It would be the same with a machine that has a completely different visual perception system than ours which we couldn't make sense of. Just because we can't imagine what it would be like to be something, doesn't mean it can't be conscious. It is just a different kind of consciousness to ours.
Anyway, back to my older reply. These questions aren't supposed to be rhetorical, I think it would be useful if you evaluated them and attempted to answer them:
[quote]What is the difference between a machine that can recall past experiences and internal deliberative states and naturally produce and store* the phrase "I am aware", and our "special" form of consciousness where there is apparently an amazing phenomenon of being able to live in the moment? Can we actually live in the moment, or do we just remember living in the moment?[/quote]
* Slight edit
[QUOTE=Ziks;42985768]Here's what I think consciousness could be, as a computer science student with pretty much no advanced knowledge of psychology or neuroscience who has done no reading on the subject:
You could abstract a conscious mind into three main components; a medium for storing information (memory), a non-deterministic sequence generator (Markov chain style generator), and a fitness evaluator.
1. The generator randomly walks around several regions of the memory store simultaneously, pulling up related information.
2. The generator produces many sequences using the information retrieved, and passes them to the fitness evaluator.
3. For each sequence, the evaluator considers their utility to some end goal (the problem to be solved or task to be planned). If they are deemed useful, they are stored back in memory.
4. The evaluator may also choose to commit a sequence as an action; which is vocalised in speech, sent as commands to muscles, etc.
Consciousness simply emerges when generated sequences are stored and recalled. The internal monologue you hear in your mind are just the sequences coressponding to language that are deemed useful, and so stored.
I believe you don't really experience consciousness as it happens, but rather when you recall that it happened. What's the difference between a machine that as emergent behaviour stores in its memory the statement "I am conscious", which is later recalled and evaluated by the machine, and what we consider true consciousness in the manner we possess? Could they just be the same thing?
I don't think consciousness is special or mystical, just useful for planning and solving problems.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Ziks;42996562]But my proposed model [I]does[/I] explain experience, at least the observable aspects of experience as a phenomenon.
Do you believe you are experiencing the current moment?
Your sensory input has latency, so you are experiencing percepts at a delay to when they originated. Receiving sensory data from different sources would be confusing if you received the sight of something touching your foot before you felt the thing touch your skin. Percepts are cached in memory so they can be synchronised with other percepts expected to occur at the same "time".
For moments that you "experience" that aren't stored in memory (you either forgot them or were distracted at the time), it is as if those experiences ever existed. If you had a device that was able to "experience" but had no memory to store those experiences, is it actually experiencing anything? Wouldn't it just be some fancy data stream processing machine with no perception of "self"?
It appears that memory plays a huge part of experience, and I believe that what we feel is our ability to "see through our eyes" is purely emergent from the ability to recall past experiences. Again, what is the difference between a machine that can recall past experiences and internal deliberative states and naturally produce the phrase "I am aware", and our "special" form of consciousness where there is apparently an amazing phenomenon of being able to live in the moment? Can we [I]actually[/I] live in the moment, or do we just remember living in the moment?[/QUOTE]
Ziks, your reasoning is sound, but there are a few flaws which I will highlight. First off, let me introduce the problem with the Chinese Room by John Searle (1980.
Imagine that a man wakes up locked in a room. A note slides in through a slit in the door, but the characters are all in chinese. In his room there is a big bookshelf full with chinese literature. He uses the books in a way to understand the symbols to write an answer, which he slides back through the slit in the door. Some time passes and he receives another similar note. This exchange continues and a process is made, but the man still doesn't understand a single word of chinese. Would this "process" so to speak constitute a form of consciousness? Where inside the computation does a consciousness arise?
You speak that "consciousness simply emerges" and that is a massive assumption, but you haven't presented how - how physical processes becomes the phenomenal experience we enjoy. With this process you presented, it would be completely plausible that every human being around us are empty shells without any subjective experience or reflective thoughts at all. They can still walk around, have a conversation, express how good this cake is etc. But their "minds" so to speak are absolutely blank. Their eyes and visual cortex functions perfectly, and they can recall memories like any other. In short, you couldn't distinguish from this "zombie" and a real human being because they would act the same.
Going back to the topic of memory. Indeed, if we have no sensory memory (our brief perception of what is now) it would be very difficult to function properly, with that I agree. But memories work a lot different in the brain compared a machine. First off, there are a lot of different memories (Sensory; Short-term; Long-term: explicit (episodic, semantic), implicit (skills & habits, priming, classical conditioning, nonassociative learning) and all of these work differently. There is no single place where memory is stored, not even in certain cells. When a new long-term memory is formed new connections between neurons in different cortical regions are created. That makes a memory different from a stimulus. The memory exist in the network, but the network is far from reliable. We forget things, memories changes over time, we create falls memories and sometimes even confabulate pure nonsense. The information we process isn't always right because our brain fills in gaps, and there's a lot of them. For example, the blind spot in our visual field is not consciously perceived unless we test for it. It's not as if we perceive a dark spot where the blind spot sits, but we experience a complete picture.
The consciousness is in the brain, no question about it. But I'm sorry, your proposed model does not explain experience. It only shows how it is capable to filter certain information and value some more important than others, and that is more akin to nonconscious/unconscious functions. Retrieving memories is one thing, but putting them in the spotlight of attention is another. This zombie I mentioned could tell you what year WWI ended, who the 24th president of USA was (given that he read a book about it), and point out Gabe Newell in a crowd. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he is able to reflect upon it or that he can see Gabe with his mind's eye if he close his eyes.
[QUOTE=Kazumi;42997348]Ziks, your reasoning is sound, but there are a few flaws which I will highlight. First off, let me introduce the problem with the Chinese Room by John Searle (1980.
Imagine that a man wakes up locked in a room. A note slides in through a slit in the door, but the characters are all in chinese. In his room there is a big bookshelf full with chinese literature. He uses the books in a way to understand the symbols to write an answer, which he slides back through the slit in the door. Some time passes and he receives another similar note. This exchange continues and a process is made, but the man still doesn't understand a single word of chinese. Would this "process" so to speak constitute a form of consciousness? Where inside the computation does a consciousness arise?[/QUOTE]
Have you presented the thought experiment correctly? In your scenario consciousness arises from the individual in the room. You say that they use the literature to understand the symbols, so they would use their understanding combined with their social capabilities in their native language to decide on the best output. During the experience they are able to learn which input-output pairs were most successful (assuming the input stream isn't independent from previous input-output pairs).
The usual formulation of the Chinese Room states that the individual in the room has no method of deducing the meaning of the symbols, but uses a library of books to follow instructions to produce a convincing output. The books represent an algorithm that passes the Turing Test.
In this scenario the individual in the room takes the form of an information transmission medium, arithmetic logic unit, and whatever basic logical components are required by the algorithm. That they themselves are conscious is irrelevant. For the program to produce convincing outputs, it should be able to recall previous outputs (otherwise it would produce the same output for a given input each time, unless there was a non-deterministic factor). The algorithm would require working memory also, otherwise it would essentially be a lookup table (which wouldn't produce convincing outputs). So now we have a system that can receive stimuli (input slips), has a memory store (the original library of books, but also the record of previous inputs/outputs and working memory), and a combined generator / fitness evaluator in the form of the algorithm (it performs the same tasks as the generator and evaluator; using the memory store it produces a concept sequence considered to be fit). I would therefore be happy to call the overall system self aware and conscious (using my model of consciousness of course). It would evidently be a very limited form of consciousness, and very different to our own, but it has the ability to reflect on previous deliberative states as well as previous inputs (experiences). The individual is irrelevant, his consciousness is entirely distinct from the one emerging from the input / memory / algorithm / output system.
[quote]You speak that "consciousness simply emerges" and that is a massive assumption, but you haven't presented how - how physical processes becomes the phenomenal experience we enjoy. With this process you presented, it would be completely plausible that every human being around us are empty shells without any subjective experience or reflective thoughts at all. They can still walk around, have a conversation, express how good this cake is etc. But their "minds" so to speak are absolutely blank. Their eyes and visual cortex functions perfectly, and they can recall memories like any other. In short, you couldn't distinguish from this "zombie" and a real human being because they would act the same.[/quote]
If they can recall memories, crucially the memories of previous deliberative states, and form new ones using that recalled information, then they would be conscious using my definition of consciousness. You allude to some special extra phenomena, but could you describe it? If they produce the memories of being self aware then surely they are self aware?
When I say "consciousness simply emerges" from a system with memory and a method of producing concepts from previous memories that produce new ones, I meant that as being what my definition of consciousness was. An entity that forms memories of deliberative states and can recall them for use in the production of new states. How complex and human-like this entity would be depends on your memory storage structure, deliberation method and the nature of the percepts it may receive and the responses it may produce. But I feel any system with the aforementioned properties is conscious and self aware, as that was my definition of consciousness.
[quote]Going back to the topic of memory. Indeed, if we have no sensory memory (our brief perception of what is now) it would be very difficult to function properly, with that I agree. But memories work a lot different in the brain compared a machine. First off, there are a lot of different memories (Sensory; Short-term; Long-term: explicit (episodic, semantic), implicit (skills & habits, priming, classical conditioning, nonassociative learning) and all of these work differently. There is no single place where memory is stored, not even in certain cells. When a new long-term memory is formed new connections between neurons in different cortical regions are created. That makes a memory different from a stimulus. The memory exist in the network, but the network is far from reliable. We forget things, memories changes over time, we create falls memories and sometimes even confabulate pure nonsense. The information we process isn't always right because our brain fills in gaps, and there's a lot of them. For example, the blind spot in our visual field is not consciously perceived unless we test for it. It's not as if we perceive a dark spot where the blind spot sits, but we experience a complete picture.[/quote]
Did I claim my model required memory to be of a certain form? It only requires the ability to store concepts and percepts to be deliberated on later. The quality and duration of the storage would obviously affect the performance of the system, and an important aspect of a useful consciousness would be to attempt to store only the "useful" percepts as otherwise out environment would be totally overwhelming.
I'm not sure why you brought up the fact that the information recorded by the brain is often incorrect, but that is comfortably explained using my model of consciousness. The model makes no assumptions about the quality of the concept selection method, and some unfit concept sequences may be committed to memory (and so later recalled as being experienced) if whatever region of the brain evaluating the fitness of that concept sequence is simply over-exerted or under the influence of some psycho-active drug. Basically you experience hallucinations.
To go further with this, I feel my model explains dreams quite nicely. As you fall asleep, different regions of the brain become less active at different rates. What would happen if a fitness evaluation region were to become inactive before a concept sequence generator that feeds into it? Bursts of concept sequences would erroneously pass the fitness test and be stored in memory. As soon as the generator becomes inactive too, these false memories would stop being produced. As these events only occur as the brain is either falling asleep or waking up (where some regions are active but others are inhibited) you would only receive these false memories in the periods we commonly associate with being the source of dreams. Upon waking fully, you would be aware of all these excess nonsensical memories from some time recently. Our minds naturally try to identify order and meaning in our experiences, so these memories would be ordered in some way to try to make some sense of them, usually by imagining some sort of story. This would explain dreams.
[quote]The consciousness is in the brain, no question about it. But I'm sorry, your proposed model does not explain experience. It only shows how it is capable to filter certain information and value some more important than others, and that is more akin to nonconscious/unconscious functions. Retrieving memories is one thing, but putting them in the spotlight of attention is another. This zombie I mentioned could tell you what year WWI ended, who the 24th president of USA was (given that he read a book about it), and point out Gabe Newell in a crowd. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he is able to reflect upon it or that he can see Gabe with his mind's eye if he close his eyes.[/quote]
You not only retrieve memories of past external experiences, but of [i]previous deliberation[/i]. This is the point my model is entirely based upon. Self awareness is the ability to perceive your own thoughts as if they were any other external input.
Imagine you look at a tree.
[b]Sequence Generator[/b]: That is a car!
[b]Sequence Evaluator[/b]: Nope, I'm not storing that concept so you will never experience it.
[b]Sequence Generator[/b]: That is a tree!
[b]Sequence Evaluator[/b]: That could be useful, I'll store that concept in working memory so that you will remember it later. The statement "That is a tree!" is now a thought that you will remember experiencing.
[b]Sequence Generator[/b]: I just thought "That is a tree"!
[b]Sequence Evaluator[/b]: That could be useful, I'll store that concept so you will recall it as being a thought.
[b]Sequence Generator[/b]: I just thought "I just thought "That is a tree"!"!
... etc
I've omitted the huge amounts of unfit concept sequences generated except the first. Also be aware that concepts may be from any sensory domain, so could be images or sounds instead of just natural language sequences as demonstrated here. But as you can see, being able to recall prior thoughts leads to self awareness. You will have the memories of thoughts related to self awareness stored, so you will have the belief that you experienced self awareness.
[editline]27th November 2013[/editline]
Fuck that inflated a bit
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