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Posts by Obbe
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2019-03-11 at 11:14 PM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by gadzooks I'm liking your line of thought here… The whole notion of the subconscious being an indication that we are actually experiencing partial consciousness is something I had never even considered before.
But, why couldn't our brains perform all these same operations that they perform every single day without ANY consciousness?
What is it about this metaphor/language theory that necessitates subjective experience?
Once computers are able to perform these same operations (and they will, most likely even within our lifetime), will they then be just as conscious as human beings are?
The thing I have been referring to as "consciousness" or "inner mind-space" is an illusion generated by a complex language combined with a complex social world. Humans couldn't perform the way we do without consciousness because consciousness is an operation of complex language and we have evolved to communicate with each other using complex languages in complex cultures. To remove consciousness from the picture would be to remove language and culture from the picture and without language and culture nothing about our world would be the same.
Consciousness is not simple awareness, at least as it is defined in the theory. You can teach an ape sign language and ask an ape questions, and the ape is aware you are asking and will answer you. However, apes don't ask questions back. They will ask for things like food, but an ape will never ask "why do we eat food?". Nothing about their brains suggests they would be incapable of asking these types of questions. They just don't.
When you look at Human evolution, you see a similar phenomenon in ancient art. Not only are there no questions as to how things happened, the elder is quick to curtail the possibility of asking such questions by giving a myth or narrative. The world is x way because it is.
The ability to ask these questions isn't genetic. It's cultural. We've had the ability to ask these questions for 200,000 years, yet we only really started asking them recently. Over the last 3 to 4 thousand years. -
2019-03-11 at 10:48 PM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by gadzooks I see what you're saying, but what kinda throws a wrench into that explanation is the issue of explaining a mechanism for that transition.
How did we gradually develop inner subjective experience?
What does it mean to be partially conscious?
I imagine the development was somewhat similar to the gradual development of a metaphorical language to create the illusion of "inner subjective experience".
We are partially conscious right now. You are aware of the subconscious? There are various things you are not conscious of. As you read this, there are various things you could potentially be conscious of, but you're not because this is distracting you. -
2019-03-11 at 10:40 PM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by gadzooks But the problem (or at least, one part of the problem) is the whole issue of when in our evolutionary history did we evolve this inner mind-space?
When "cavemen" were grunting at each other while pointing to indicate "over there", were they experiencing inner mind-space?
As recently as 3-4000 years ago based on the theory, using written texts from before, during and after this period of time as evidence for the change. As a cultural phenomenon (not biological), the exact time depends on the complexity of the culture and language in specific, but if we focus on just western civilization about 3-4000 years ago is the theory. -
2019-03-11 at 10:05 PM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by gadzooks It's the qualitative/subjective experience (qualia) of a physical phenomenon.
Do mice experience sweetness?
What about ants?
I think that is something separate from consciousness as it is defined in Julian Jaynes theory. I imagine ants and mice probably have some level of awareness of their world, but I doubt it is anything like consciousness as we experience it. As far as I am aware mice and ants lack the vocabulary required to create an inner mind-space. -
2019-03-11 at 9:51 PM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
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2019-03-11 at 9:26 PM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by gadzooks Obbe, I absolutely loved your post on metaphor and language as a way of explaining the origins of inner experience. Like, I'm reading some stuff on that very subject right now, and academically speaking, it's RIGHT up my alley.
But, in terms of the actual "Hard Problem" of consciousness, it doesn't quite reach that level of explanation.
And that's precisely why it's called the "hard problem."
Your post kinda comes close to the topic, but it still doesn't explain PRECISELY when, and how, during the course of the evolution of these metaphorical and linguistic experiential phenomena, we went from physical automata to experiencing "I"'s.
But I do I want to reiterate that your post touched on some really good points that at least fall under the rubric of explaining consciousness, which is an endeavor that perplexes even the most prominent philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and other scholars.
The actual "Hard Problem", though, could quite possibly be relabeled the "Impossible Problem."
There's still the issue of explaining why we have inner experience when the world could just as easily exist exactly as is without any such experience.
I agree that this is possibly an impossible problem, but let me clarify something here: the idea is that the "inner space" you speak of is actually an illusion generated by metaphorical language. There isn't really an "inner space" or an "inner experience". Consciousness is a creation of complex language combined with a complex society. In this theory, consciousness is an operation of language, not a secret world that somehow exists outside of objective reality. The idea that subjective experience somehow exists without beyond objective reality with no basis in metaphorical language seems impossible to prove so why should anyone even entertain that idea? -
2019-03-11 at 6:07 PM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness@gadzooks, what do you think about the theory that consciousness is a "mind-space" created through metaphorical language?
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2019-03-11 at 10:20 AM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
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2019-03-11 at 1:51 AM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
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2019-03-11 at 12:50 AM UTC in Aliens Cause Global Warming
Originally posted by gadzooks Admittedly, I have not scrutinized that entire article, it's pretty long so I saved it for later and just kinda skimmed certain parts so far.
I was mainly responding to the part that you quoted here, and that was even bolded in the article itself, about the nature of consensus in science.
And regarding that particular point, I see what he's getting at, but my problem with it isn't the underlying point, but the fact that most of the opponents of climate change will use nearly identical arguments, and that's why I see a need to refute that central thesis.
It's totally true that science is consensus based, but climate change deniers can't use that as an argument against climate change.
When it comes to using mathematical prediction models, the results are only as good as the data fed into them.
i.e. Garbage in, garbage out.
I haven't taken a super close look at the data, but obviously thousands of respected, highly-specialized climatologists have reviewed the data and are satisfied with it.
As to the accuracy of these predictions, it's all a numbers game. The more data points you feed into a model, the more accurate your predictions can become. But then there's also specificity of predictions. If you want to take thousands of years of global temperature data and use that to try and predict global temperature data for a few years from now, it should be pretty damn accurate.
But if you want to predict something way more complex, such as isolated weather phenomena within specific geographic regions… That's going to be a lot trickier.
Similarly, the Drake equation is a similar such estimation, but it's a LOT more difficult to verify since we can't exactly load up a rocket ship full of space exploring astronauts and just launch them into every neighbouring galaxy.
Did you ever finish reading it? -
2019-03-11 at 12:48 AM UTC in So who is up for vapen some shrooms.What about spores in your lungs?
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2019-03-11 at 12:43 AM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
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2019-03-11 at 12:37 AM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by Lanny Don't talk to obbe about illusions, it's a dark dark road to go down.
Illusion or not, consciousness is not something we just “believe in”: it is our immediate experience, and the social world as we know it wouldn’t be possible without this idea of Self endowed with consciousness and free will. The cornerstone of consciousness is metaphor. So what is metaphor, and how can it generate consciousness? The most fascinating property of language is its capacity to make metaphors. For metaphor is not a mere extra trick of language; it is the very constitutive ground of language. I am using metaphor here in its most general sense: the use of a term for one thing to describe another because of some kind of similarity between them or between their relations to other things.
There are thus always two terms in a metaphor, the thing to be described, the target, and the thing or relation used to elucidate it, the source. A metaphor is always a known source operating on a less known target. The human body is a particularly generative source, creating previously unspeakable distinctions in a variety of areas. The head of an army, table, page, bed, ship, household, or nail, or of steam or water; the face of a clock, cliff, card, or crystal; the eyes of needles, winds, storms, targets, flowers, or potatoes; the brow of a hill; the teeth of cogs or combs; the lips of pitchers, craters, augers; the tongues of shoes, board joints, or railway switches; the arm of a chair or the sea; the leg of a table, compass, sailor’s voyage, or cricket field; and so on and so forth.
In early times, language and its referents climbed up from the concrete to the abstract on the steps of metaphors, or actually created the abstract on the bases of metaphors. It is not always obvious that metaphor has played this all-important function. But this is because the concrete sources become hidden in phonemic change, leaving the words to exist on their own. Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb ‘to be’ was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the Sanskrit bhu, “to grow, or make grow,” while the English forms ‘am’ and ‘is’ have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmi, “to breathe.”
Consider any word which has meanings both from the physical-behavioural world and from the inner domain of cognition. For example, grasp: one can grasp a stone or one can grasp an idea. You don’t need to know the etymology of this verb to have a clear intuition about what is the target here and what the source, which meaning is primary and which metaphorical: the direction is always from the “outer” world to “inner”, from “objective” to “subjective”, from physical to cognitive. The mind refers to the outer, objective world to “model” its inner world of ideas: grasping an idea is like grasping a stone, not vice versa.
Have you ever wondered what actually happens in the brain when you understand a word? For example, if you listen to someone saying something as simple as that they jumped, what’s actually happening in your brain to create the understanding of what you’ve heard? There is an increasing body of evidence that such understanding involves partial simulation of the very action of jumping. The pattern of neural codes engaged in understanding the word jump and the pattern of neural codes engaged in actual jumping have a portion in common (but obviously not enough to make you jump whenever you say or hear the word). And if we hear the same word used metaphorically, for example something about someone jumping to conclusions, it would still involve processing of the word jump, and hence the corresponding neural simulation of actual jumping. The sensory properties of the source are brought in to contribute to the target meaning.
Metaphors generate the illusion of special inner mind-space where consciousness “takes place”. Every time the brain processes a sentence about grasping an idea or jumping to conclusion, it simulates a space where these actions might take place, a space where ideas, conclusions, thoughts are modelled as “things” in the outer world — something one can see, approach, jump to, or get hold of.
Consciousness itself emerges as a special kind of “metaphorical” operation in which the world around us is the source and what’s happening inside us, the target. And this internal model of the outside world contains a little “I” who acts there. If I approach a problem both “I” and the “problem” must be located within the same space. This thinking and willing “I” turns out to be a tiny little actor on the stage within my own mind-space.
A mind-space is a part of what it is to be conscious and what it is to assume consciousness in others. Moreover, things that in the physical-behavioral world do not have a spatial quality are made to have such in consciousness. Otherwise we cannot be conscious of them. This is spatialization. Time is an obvious example. If I ask you to think of the last hundred years, you may have a tendency to excerpt the matter in such a way that the succession of years is spread out, probably from left to right. But of course there is no left or right in time. There is only before and after, and these do not have any spatial properties whatever - except by analog. You cannot think of time except by spatializing it. Consciousness is always a spatialization in which the diachronic is turned into the synchronic, in which what has happened in time is excerpted and seen as a spatial projection.
This spatialization of time is what allows our little metaphorical “I”s - the actors within our mind-spaces - to travel in time: to reminiscence about the past and imagine different futures which is particularly important because of its potential role in willing and decision making. But the spatialization of time is also a metaphor: we understand time by modelling it as a kind of space, and this happens in language too. The "time as space" metaphor tends to be embedded not only into the vocabulary, but in the grammar as well - for example, when we use spatial prepositions for time periods (something may happen in America and in winter, within a building or within a month). Just as we learn to understand thoughts and ideas as objects in space when we acquire language in childhood, so do we learn to think of time as a space.
This is how consciousness is generated in each of us now: by modern languages and their metaphors. Languages were not always like this. Their inherent models of our inner worlds weren’t always there, they have evolved over time with language. And before that happened, there could have been no consciousness as we know it. -
2019-03-10 at 5:27 PM UTC in The Hard Problem of ConsciousnessConsciousness is not some weird and wonderful product of some brain process, rather it is an illusion constructed by a clever brain and body living in a complex social world. We can speak, think, refer to ourselves as agents, and so build up the false idea of a persisting self that has consciousness and free will.
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2019-03-07 at 1 AM UTC in What type of women are you most attracted to?"Cluck cluck"
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2019-03-07 at 12:55 AM UTC in What type of women are you most attracted to?
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2019-03-07 at 12:08 AM UTC in Aliens Cause Global Warming
Originally posted by gadzooks I think that article provides an interesting perspective. I'm not trying to dismiss it as being utter garbage or anything.
I mean, Michael Crichton might mostly be known as a world-renowned author of fiction and T.V. shows / movies, but he's also a trained medical doctor on top of that.
What worries me, though, is that it can become so easy to take what he's saying as some kind of proof positive that climate change is completely false.
Or even that he is somehow "anti-science".
That's not the impression this speech left on me. Climate seems to obviously be changing. His speech doesn't seem to be in denial of that, or anti-scince. Rather, his speech seems to be pointing out opportunism. The issue is not about whether human activity is causing global warming, rather that science is used to establish authority, and therefore policy, and therefore power. Certain groups seem to be able to use "science" to push their agenda as if they were a business selling a product, and they seem to be able to do it quite effectively, even if the science is quite poor. I feel like this may not be a good thing.
Originally posted by gadzooks As far as my own personal position on climate change goes, I err on the side of "consensus" simply because of how strong that consensus is. Something like 97% of climate scientists polled agree that climate change is occurring, and that it is a result of human activity.
It seems obvious that the climate is changing and that fossil fuels contribute to that. What do you think about their predictions of the future 30, 50, or 100 years from now? Predictions made using computer models based on equations similar to the Drake Equation mentioned at the beginning of his speech. What are your thoughts on these? -
2019-03-06 at 11:31 PM UTC in Aliens Cause Global Warming
Originally posted by gadzooks This whole notion that we use consensus in some areas of science and not others is just totally incorrect.
This speech is like 10 years old.
I don't know what to make of it. I posted it here so people like you can help inform my opinion. I want to hear what you have to say about climate change. -
2019-03-05 at 9:40 PM UTC in What type of women are you most attracted to?
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2019-03-05 at 4:15 PM UTC in What type of women are you most attracted to?
