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The Hard Problem of Consciousness
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2019-03-20 at 10:46 AM UTC
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2019-03-20 at 12:32 PM UTC
Originally posted by Obbe No. I think it's a great theory. You should read it, too, sploo.
I did and it doesn't seem to help solve the hard problem of consciousness. It is mostly a useless and pointless assertion of us "beginning to use metaphors and creating an inner mental space" which is retarded because I certainly think there's good reason to believe animals are conscious and some even have an internal capacity to reason to a certain degree. Chimps have complex social structures, make and use tools for food and as social displays for example.
It's just an irrelevant story by an idiot, basically. No wonder she didn't win a Nobel Prize. -
2019-03-20 at 1:40 PM UTC
Originally posted by Common De-mominator I did and it doesn't seem to help solve the hard problem of consciousness. It is mostly a useless and pointless assertion of us "beginning to use metaphors and creating an inner mental space" which is retarded because I certainly think there's good reason to believe animals are conscious and some even have an internal capacity to reason to a certain degree. Chimps have complex social structures, make and use tools for food and as social displays for example.
It's just an irrelevant story by an idiot, basically. No wonder she didn't win a Nobel Prize.
I meant read the actual book not the pieces I posted on here. There is a huge difference between human consciousness and other animals, according to his theory. It will probably never win any prizes but it's still an interesting read, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the origins of consciousness. -
2019-03-20 at 2:53 PM UTC
Originally posted by Obbe I meant read the actual book not the pieces I posted on here. There is a huge difference between human consciousness and other animals, according to his theory. It will probably never win any prizes but it's still an interesting read, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the origins of consciousness.
Like you linked, it's wrong tho. -
2019-03-20 at 3:03 PM UTC
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2019-03-20 at 4:26 PM UTC
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2019-03-20 at 6:10 PM UTC
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2019-03-20 at 7:38 PM UTC
Originally posted by Common De-mominator Like you linked, it's wrong tho.
It's a speculative theory.
That means that you can no sooner prove it wrong than Obbe (or Jaynes) can prove it right.
I don't think it's even really meant to solve the hard problem, it's just a neat theory, and if you look at some of the big academic names giving it praise, you might realize that it might just be worth giving a chance rather than dismissing it out right.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2019-03-20 at 8:47 PM UTCBut did it win the Nobel prize??
Is it even worth considering if it hasn't? -
2019-03-20 at 9:20 PM UTC
Originally posted by gadzooks It's a speculative theory.
That means that you can no sooner prove it wrong than Obbe (or Jaynes) can prove it right.
Consciousness is caused by midichlorians, prove me wrongI don't think it's even really meant to solve the hard problem, it's just a neat theory, and if you look at some of the big academic names giving it praise, you might realize that it might just be worth giving a chance rather than dismissing it out right.
It doesn't answer the interesting question so it's just not interesting and hasn't won even a Nobel Prize so why even bother discussing it?
I could make up any shit that sounds good. -
2019-03-20 at 9:20 PM UTC
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2019-03-20 at 9:22 PM UTC
Originally posted by SHARK My personal dissatisfaction comes from the fact that my mouth can obviously talk about things like the ineffable nature of the colour blue, and how hard it is for me to describe it to a blind man.
It is difficult for me to imagine why my mouth would be talking about something like the "shape" of a ball if my integrated visual experience was not part of the process. And if it is, I don't find a good reason to separate it from its syntactical function for any good reason.
I like to think about it by analogy to a calculator. Certainly I can generate report without consciousness, like I can generate the number 40 on a screen without ever doing any actual calculation of the number. In theory it could just contain a massive list of "if/then" statements that match an input question to fetch a precalculated output. For example "if input 2+2 then print 4" but for all possible combinations of calculations I might reasonably try.
What convinces me calculation is actually happening is that we can understand reductively what's taking place and principally break down WHY the calculator generates the output in the general case. The explanation is completely syntactical at its most basic level, but the calculative idea is an abstraction of that.
In the case of consciousness, there is decent evidence that our conscious perception does play some causal role our behaviour, even if we don't know HOW (and I am not saying this means evidence of conscious libertarian free will or anything, but that conscious perception feeds forward into behaviour).
For example, ever catch a ball? Go out with a friend and have them freely toss the ball to you from far away, do it a couple of times and try to observe the contents of your mind as it happens. Now, as an unstructured informational procedure this shit is difficult as fuck to automate. But as it turns out, the "optimization" that the human brain developed to perform this function is to move the object into the middle of the visual field, then use proprioception to move your hand relative to your head and catch it. I think in that case, you're very consciously aware of what's about to happen as the ball moves in on you, and you adjust to catch it.
You can still argue that an integrated information structure that is analogous to a visual field can exist and be used to process data without consciousness (in theory), but I think empirically that is not the case for the brain.
As an example, you can look into the "phi illusion". One version of this illusion uses only two lights, separated by some distance. At the beginning, one is lit and the other is off. The first goes off, then the second goes on.
However those subjected to this version of the illusion will report seeing the light move between the first to the second, even though there is no intermediate light, it is just an on/off.
Now of course no intermediate light exists. The illusion of movement exists purely in their consciousness, and it is mistakenly reported from the subjects' consciousness.
Now it is possible that the report is still just generated by completely unconscious processes, and consciousness of the experience is just a coincidental epiphenomenon. But I find that hard to believe because… Then why is the machine behaving like it is?
So let's imagine we prick Lanny and Zombie Lanny with a pin in our universe and the proposed zombie universe. Both say "Ouch!" and I say "you baby, that didn't hurt!" Zlanny snaps back "Fuck you, it did!". Remember, these universes are physically identical so Zlanny surely reports for the same physical reasons as you, and surely he must be speaking with the same conviction as you… You're convinced you're having a qualitative experience but Zlanny would be convinced of the same. So… if it's just some syntactical state that produces the seeming of conscious pain, then how do you know YOU'RE not a Zombie now?
And if that's the case, what does the additional element actually do for you that it doesn't do for the Zombie? Not "what function could it serve?" I mean literally, WHAT are we talking about at that point? What is left over in your case?
The problem simply vanishes if you remove the proposed additional element. In reverse, I think the problem is "generated" by entertaining the additional element. So just don't add any new ingredients.
I do have some sympathy towards property dualism though, and I think information as a concept sets up to derive consciousness as something that reducible arises from known physics. But I still think the properties of information structures are firmly physical in nature.
It's subsumed by the physical in the sense that if we can push it around and get reports of it, we can investigate it as a physical phenomenon.
I think what you are talking about is the software/hardware distinction, and it applies to the mind/brain distinction very well. The hardware involved is some variable syntactical machinery and the software is the input information that can configure it a particular way.
The information stored on a CD vs on a vinyl for example is subsumed by the physical because the point is to generate the same syntactical result. The end goal is how to vibrate your auditory sensors in a particular way, and we can find different ways to accomplish that.
The song isn't actually on the disc nor in the player, both are simply precursors that must be combined to generate that particular information structure to be interpreted by you.
The way I view it is, it is very similar to considering the more abstract ideas of a computer.
For example I can syntactically explain how your PC does everything it while running a Java program without ever referencing Java Virtual Machine, and in theory I could produce all the functionality of JVM from pure random chance too. And conversely if I had no idea wtf was going on from the other perspective and I went in to reverse engineer the PC from the hardware and physics, it would seem indecipherable and I'd have no idea wtf was going on above the syntactical level.
DD's black boxes thought experiment is a great way to think about related concepts.
http://cogprints.org/247/1/twoblack.htm
I think there is decent evidence that conscious events are active physical events, and I find it plausible that they are defined by their physical causal properties, which would be what structures the content of our consciousness. If that is indeed the case, then I think it plays a causal role by being "what your body responds to", essentially.
My current view lines up with most simulationists like Marvin Minsky: that consciousness is essentially the process that crunches the raw data and makes it more workable, the "user illusion", the desktop to your brain so it is actually usable, as opposed to using punch cards on a beige box with no monitor. There is a structure in the brain known as the "claustrum", which seems to be responsible for information integration. I think that, alongside the phi illusion, tells us something about how our brains must process data: consciousness is "assembled" unconsciously as a means to process the external world. So I think it's reasonable to assume that it feeds forward for your body to actually respond to it rather than just being an internal lightshow that you sort of "are".
Think about conscious states in similar terms to software: I can generate a given text file using any computing hardware and word processing software, and open it on pretty much any hardware and software. And you can generate the text output without the file.
But of course my text file is in fact a real thing, and it is fundamentally physical in nature. It is even principally possible to determine the ontic fact about whether or not it exists and it is there. But there are just an absurd level of abstraction layers between it and the physics involved so it's ridiculously difficult, but in principle, all information about my text file is reducible to physics. -
2019-03-20 at 9:24 PM UTC
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2019-03-21 at 1:48 AM UTC
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2019-03-21 at 2:42 AM UTC
Originally posted by gadzooks I'm not the one claiming that another person's claim is unilaterally wrong. You said "Jayne's theory is wrong."
I never made any such firm assertions.
Only you did.
I referred specifically to Obbe's link, which directly raised issues with the idea that were not been resolved thereafter. -
2019-03-21 at 2:47 AM UTCMyth: Scholars do not take Jaynes's theory seriously.
Fact: There are many scholars interested in Jaynes's theory, but few if any are able to focus on it full time. An extensive list of scholars who have written favorably on Jaynes's theory can be found on the Academic and Scholarly Interest in Jaynes's Theory page. Furthermore, at last count over 9,000 books and articles listed on Google Books cite or reference Jaynes's theory. A significant percentage of these are by academics and scholars and the vast majority express a favorable opinion of the theory. Several hundred books referencing Jaynes's theory are listed in our Related Books section. Thousands of additional references to Jaynes's theory in books and articles and be found on Google Books and Google Scholar.
Jaynes was in high demand as a lecturer, and was frequently invited to lecture at conferences and symposia and as a guest lecturer at colleges and universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Emory, Johns Hopkins, Rutgers, Tufts, York, Dalhousie, Wellesley, Florida State, Northwestern, SUNY at Genesco, Plattsburgh, Oswego, and Brockport, the Universities of New Hampshire, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts at Amherst and Boston Harbor. He was Scholar-in-Residence at Skidmore, Lake Forest, and the University of Prince Edward Island. In 1983 he gave the keynote address at a conference on "Language: The Crucible of Consciousness." In 1984 he was invited to give the plenary lecture at the Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg, Austria. He gave six major lectures in 1985 and nine in 1986. He was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by Rhode Island College in 1979 and another from Elizabethtown College in 1985. Jaynes's theory was the subject of conferences at McMaster University in 1983 and Harvard University in 1988. A conference dedicated to studying Jaynes's theory was organized at the University of Prince Edward Island in 2006 and 2008. Jaynes's theory was the subject of a speaker session at the 2008 Toward A Science of Consciousness Conference. In 2013, the Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies featured 26 speakers over three full days, including keynote talks by Professor Roy Baumeister, Professor Merlin Donald, and Dr. Dirk Corstens. The conference brought together Jaynes enthusiasts from around the U.S. as well as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, Thailand, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Jaynes's book has been translated into Italian, Spanish, German, French, Korean, and Persian.
While many of Jaynes's ideas remain controversial, for example the necessity of language for consciousness, the origin and neurology of schizophrenia, and the mentality of ancient civilizations and it is likely these issues will be debated for years to come, to date we are not aware of any major flaws in Jaynes's analyses that seriously call into question any of his four main hypotheses. Jaynes himself acknowledged there was much more work to be done, and areas that may require revision as new discoveries are made.
http://www.julianjaynes.org/myths-vs-facts-about-julian-jaynes-theory.php -
2019-03-21 at 3:04 AM UTC
http://www.julianjaynes.org/
Probably the one time you shouldn't have cited the source. -
2019-03-21 at 10:26 AM UTC
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2019-03-21 at 10:35 AM UTC
Originally posted by Common De-mominator I referred specifically to Obbe's link, which directly raised issues with the idea that were not been resolved thereafter.
That's called academic honesty. Literally EVERY theory has opponents. Evolution, vaccinations, the list just goes on and on.
If a theory having dissenters is enough to convince you that it's incontrovertibly false, then you better stop believing in evolution, vaccines, a heliocentric universe, etc.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2019-03-21 at 10:40 AM UTC
Originally posted by gadzooks That's called academic honesty. Literally EVERY theory has opponents. Evolution, vaccinations, the list just goes on and on.
If a theory having dissenters is enough to convince you that it's incontrovertibly false, then you better stop believing in evolution, vaccines, a heliocentric universe, etc.
It's not a matter of a theory having opponents you fuck wit: it is directly contradicted by data, such as the Chinese examples.
