/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9482238
saged, reported, hidden

>>9482238
CAN? Yes.
WILL? Maybe
How do you know other people are conscious? Because they act like they are. They react in ways similar to what you'd do in their situation. That doesn't prove you're not the only conscious being in the universe, but that way lies solipsism and insanity.

It's easier to assume you're not unique and judge other beings on their behavior. Not their appearance. Their behavior. If you met a Martian and he could hold a reasonable conversation with him, would you deny his (or its) intelligence and awareness?
If a computer could pass the Turing Test how would that be any different? Doesn't mean it would think exactly like us or have the same motivations, but you'd have to assume it was conscious if it said it was.

>>9482238 (OP)
CAN? Yes.
WILL? Maybe
How do you know other people are conscious? Because they act like they are. They react in ways similar to what you'd do in their situation. That doesn't prove you're not the only conscious being in the universe, but that way lies solipsism and insanity.

It's easier to assume you're not unique and judge other beings on their behavior. Not their appearance. Their behavior. If you met a Martian and he could hold a reasonable conversation with you, would you deny his (or its) intelligence and awareness?
If a computer could pass the Turing Test how would that be any different? Doesn't mean it would think exactly like us or have the same motivations, but you'd have to assume it was conscious if it said it was.

>>9482302
What you're describing is the problem of other minds, a separate problem from the hard problem, though in many ways connected.

The hard problem isn't so much a question of how to differentiate non-conscious from conscious, but rather, why anything is possesses phenomenal consciousness at all.

The turing test says nothing about phenomenal consciousness, all you have to do to pass that is appear conscious. A turing test can possibly tell you something about how functionally complex a system is, but nothing about whether or not it feels like something to be that system.

This is all i can say. It is abstract and concrete.

First you would not exist without a universe. Then you would not exist without an evolution. The wheelwork of this turned into you. In this there is a purpose. The universe created a cosmological reaction so it could eventually have life. It stretched immensly far to do so sinse the chances are really slow. It got lucky with time. Now life begun and it's purpose was to copy itself. It were hardwired to do so. Forced to do so. Then eventually the human became the result. The most complex lifeform. And we were able to consciously choose our actions. To take rational decisions. For that you need to use your brain. For that you must do. But you can choose not to. So the main purpose is choise. For that reason can be many. And that comes from force. So concsiousness is force. And the force is beautiful. And that force is senses that is knowlege. Knowlege gives you meaning. And that is to do. And were back to choise because we have meaning. There is meaning in every choise. This comes from force. Force stop when you die. The life you lived is a story. And your part of a bigger story. The universes story. Wich is about forces. And the force is beautiful. That's why life is a gift. And what do you do with a gift. You use it. And it's up to you what to do. Well, you use the complexity to the fullest of what you can reason with. Because you are beautiful.

Concsiousness is force, the universe is force. And it is a story. Wich is beautiful to us. So it's up to you if you want to be zombie in it and do ugly. Be the opposite of the potential. Be a parasite or a saint. Everyone has that choise. Many seems to become a failed missconception of it. And not even time can fix it. And is not gifted. But malware. We don't need that. We should have a land for peasants. Like they did with the jews. But i don't run the world. Im not crazy like Hitler but the problem is huge. We fucking welcome everything. Ruled by blind morons.

>>9482238
The idea of self is an useful abstraction, it makes thinking easier for your brain.

>>9482238

I, while having a schizophrenic episode connected consciousness to number, wave and matter...can remember how I got to it or out of it.

I'll figure it out again when I actually pursue matter manipulation.

I think that the Hard problem is a really bad problem, but it tells us a lot about our own minds, that we think it is significant. The best analogy I can think of is an evolutionary psych theory to explain religion, where It is modeled as hypersensitivity to consciousness. The logic is that primates that failed to recognize consciousness in their peers would lose significantly in social status, and therefore breeding options (think autism), primates that occasionally overreached and thought of inanimate objects as conscious didn't lose too many opportunities, so we evolved to tend towards erring on the side of things being conscious. There is no material distinction between people and our environment, but we didn't evolve to see truth, we evolved to survive, procreate, etc. This is where it relates to the hard problem, we find our own phenomenological experience spooky because we are not fully aware of how our own minds work, and because we evolved to consider ourselves as a single being. When we see something green we are integrating information from our eyes. This tells us something about the wavelengths of light hitting our eye, but we also have emotional reactions to it, and associations. We find it spooky that our perception of green has a character that we can't describe, but that's only because we don't understand everything that goes into our perception of color. If you imagine a so called functional zombie that performed exactly as you do, it would be asking itself the same questions about the hard problem, and be behaving in the same ways. It would get spooked by its own experiences just like you would.

>>9483932
One of the most retarded things I've read ever. You are very very stupid and shouldn't be voicing your thoughts.

>>9484031
Good answer.

>>9482238
>Can science ever solve the hard problem of consciousness, /sci/?

I thought the whole premise of the problem was that it can't be approached from a scientific angle.

So your question is kind of like a category error.

>>9482238
Fucking. Stop. With. These. Threads

>>9484058
I think the interesting question is why we think its a question. Why aren't we satisfied with a material model of consciousness? This is more psyhology than philosophy though.

I've been in my own head thinking about existence a bunch lately and I think I've come full circle to the point where humans existence as it is now is literally impossible and the universe must be made for us

>>9484094
Yeah it happens to me as well. You go from one position to the other and back again. You really can't fully make sense of it.

>>9482383
Yes. But I merely wanted to point out that we can never get "the inside view" of another consciousness even when it belongs to another human. The best we can ever do is the pragmatic assumption "if it acts conscious, it is conscious".

There are unfortunate people with two heads sharing a body. They can't read each other's minds but do you think either head doubts the other's consciousness?

For that matter, if a brain is bisected (usually to stop epileptic seizures) and Left no longer "talks" to Right, when questioned separately, does either hemisphere doubt the consciousness of the other?

>>9482238
>Can science ever solve the hard problem of consciousness, /sci/?
Let me interpret your question for you to show why it's a bad question:
>Can science (as distinct from philosophy) ever solve the hard problem?
>Can the hard problem be solved by neurosci/cogsci?
>Can consciousness be reduced to neurophysiology & information?
The answer is maybe, it depends on whether physicalism or computationalism is correct.
But that's an extremely limited set of theories.
The right question is, can a proper synthesis of science and philosophy solve the hard problem using all the conceptual resources that we can actually develop, not restricting ourselves to the materialist/informationalist resources of the current paradigm?

>>9484090
>Why aren't we satisfied with a material model of consciousness?

Because, following physicalism through, it leaves a giant explanatory gap when trying to imagine how any functional system, no matter how complex, manages to be accompanied by phenomenal experience, and not just the function/behavior. From this gap one can infer that we're dealing with an actual metaphysical problem here, and not just an epistemological.

>>9484031
Yeah, I admit this sort of eliminative materialism is very convincing and consistent in the pure syllogistical sense. For it to work though, you have to deny the existence of phenomenal consciousness entirely (reducing it to just behavior is essentially eliminating in a round-about way, since an identity theory alone can't bridge the explanatory gap).

For me though, it's just something I can't ever do. Call it intuition or blind faith all you want, but the fact that I experience things phenomenally in such a direct, in-your-face undeniable sense, makes it impossible for me to ever deny the existence of phenomenal consciousness - which here means something more than just behavior of a set of particles. If all that existed was the behavior of particles (or quantum interactions if you will), then those should just behave without phenomenal experience being there. In fact, the emergent functions of my brain should cause it to write this exact phrase and be deceived about the nature of consciousness, but without the phenomenal experience, which the existence of is simply undeniable in the purest form of empirical evidence that exists - direct access to your own stream of phenomenal consciousness.

>>9482238
https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2017/1/nix019/4470874

Kolmogorov Theory of consciousness. Doesn’t answer the hard problem, for that look at Integrated Information Theory.

>>9484814
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Integrated_information_theory#Extrapolations:_From_mechanisms_to_phenomenology

>>9484814
Doesn’t answer the hard problem, for that look at Integrated Information Theory.

I haven't read a lot into it, but does ITT really get at the hard problem? It just seems like an identity theory like any other. A reductive materialist would say, "mental states IS functions of the brain", an ITT dude would say, consciousness IS just integrated information. It doesn't answer what phenomenal consciousness really is or why it's there, it just poses an identity theory while shoving the real problem under the rug. I could be wrong, as I said I haven't read much into it, but I know this is one of Chalmer's problems with it.

>>9484814
>Doesn’t answer the hard problem, for that look at Integrated Information Theory.

I haven't read a lot into it, but does ITT really get at the hard problem? It just seems like an identity theory like any other. A reductive materialist would say, "mental states IS functions of the brain", an ITT dude would say, consciousness IS just integrated information. It doesn't answer what phenomenal consciousness really is or why it's there, it just poses an identity theory while shoving the real problem under the rug. I could be wrong, as I said I haven't read much into it, but I know this is one of Chalmer's problems with it.

>>9484814
>Doesn’t answer the hard problem, for that look at Integrated Information Theory.

I haven't read a lot into it, but does IIT really get at the hard problem? It just seems like an identity theory like any other. A reductive materialist would say, "consciousness IS functions of the brain", an IIT dude would say, "consciousness IS just integrated information". It doesn't answer what phenomenal consciousness really is or why it's there, it just poses an identity theory while shoving the real problem under the rug. I could be wrong, as I said I haven't read much into it, but I know this is one of Chalmer's problems with it.

>>9484752
Phenomenal experience means your subjective feeling of "I exist, I think, I feel this way" right?
And the fact that it just feels special and not just chemicals and neurons doing their thing in their brain is your argument? But can you honestly say that the experience of those physical phenomena in your brain isn't what's manifesting as that feeling, if that feeling isn't just a side product or a dangling carrot created by our physical minds?

>>9484896
>Phenomenal experience means your subjective feeling of "I exist, I think, I feel this way" right?

Phenomenal experience is not so much your thoughts in regards to the experiences, but the experiences themselves, but that's not the say reflections of phenomenal experience don't have a phenomenal side to them as well.

So for example, seeing the color green, and experiencing the "greenness" directly, that greenness is the phenomenal experience. Feeling pain, the pain itself is the experience.

>And the fact that it just feels special and not just chemicals and neurons doing their thing in their brain is your argument?
The fact that it feels like anything at all phenomenally, yes that is my argument.

> But can you honestly say that the experience of those physical phenomena in your brain isn't what's manifesting as that feeling, if that feeling isn't just a side product or a dangling carrot created by our physical minds?
Well, this is where we get to the explanatory gap. If phenomenal experiences are reducible to mere physical behavior, then it's not clear at all why or how that can happen, since according to physicalism - according to the scientific world view, physical interactions shouldn't amount to anything but the interactions themselves, and the complexity that emerges from them. Words like "side product", or "manifesting" doesn't provide any explanatory power here as to how this phenomena can actually exist.

But, to clarify, we can still say it's our physical minds creating phenomenal consciousness, you just need to expand our understanding of physics to allow for something more than the mere behavior of matter.

>>9484936
>you just need to expand our understanding of physics to allow for something more than the mere behavior of matter.
At that point, what's the point of calling it "physical," other than to be able to call yourself a "physicalist"?

>>9484948
I was just clarifying the difference between our understanding of physics and physics itself, mostly just to avoid any misconceptions.

Also, saying phenomenal consciousness is an unknown property of physics is not going as far as saying consciousness is non-physical, which would make it another substance, i.e substance dualism. With it instead being an unknown property of physics, it's kind of like postulating the existence of wave functions before QM was part of our understanding of physics.

>>9485005
>Also, saying phenomenal consciousness is an unknown property of physics is not going as far as saying consciousness is non-physical
That's what I'm getting at. I think this really depends on your theory of concepts.
If the "unknown property of physics" that is supposed to constitute consciousness ends up being extremely far from the sources or prototypes from which the concept of the "physical" was derived to begin with, it may end up being its polar opposite (i.e. antithetical to it).
And I think it would have to end up being that way due to how far the prototypical properties of consciousness are from the prototypical properties of matter.
Easy illustration: The prototypical "physical" is solid, concrete, objective, permanent, etc. If we end up saying that matter is ultimately some kind of abstract relative ephemeral metaphysical entity just so we can assimilate consciousness to it, the prototype theory of concepts implies that we've really abandoned the concept of matter, and at that point we should just admit that the world is not physical but abstract or mental. After completely transforming the meaning of "matter" into its own opposite, there's really no point in continuing to call ourselves "materialists."
That's if something like a prototype or radial theory of concepts is correct, and they're the dominant theories in cogsci and philosophy today.

>>9485357
I see what you're saying. I think even modern science has shifted their definition of physical away from meaning solid and concrete things into simply phenomena existing in space time, behaving a certain way, no matter if it's fundamentally concrete or energy-like. This is at least my definition of physical when I use it.

To then contrast this with phenomenal consciousness, something which is not at all about the behavior of a phenomena, but something else entirely. I agree it might prove hard to incorporate that as a property of this definition of physical as well, but I don't think it's inconceivable. Theories like dual aspect theory or dual monism tries to do something like this, where here the physical and the mental are two sides of the same thing, or different components of something even more fundamental. Those theories, along with theories on what is physical and not, can feel very categorical and removed from what's really interesting though, which is the currently unbridgeable gap between the behavior and the phenomenal.

>>9485559
>I think even modern science has shifted their definition of physical away from meaning solid and concrete things into simply phenomena existing in space time, behaving a certain way, no matter if it's fundamentally concrete or energy-like. This is at least my definition of physical when I use it.
I get what you're trying to say here but I actually doubt that even this will work. Modern science wants spacetime itself to be physical, not just things existing within it. And the "behaving a certain way" clause is obviously underspecified and is probably ultimately hiding some bits that would make the physical a lot less, well, physical.
I really think it's worth questioning this desire to be able to apply this word "physical" to the world no matter what, it starts to seem obsessive and pointless. It's one adjective out of tens of thousands in the English language. What's so special about it?

>>9484752
you don't have to deny anything though, you have a bunch of models of the world in your head based on information you have recieved, you don't always know how you know things so you find your own experience spooky. Imagine a 'zombie' copy of you, it would be thinking the exact same things, seeing the same things, saying the same things, imagining the same things. What makes it different from you?

>>9484031
ye

>>9482238
>hard problem of consciousness
doesn't exist

>>9486494
why anybody say this

>>9487294
I think most people don't take enough time to really try to understand it. Different people also construct words and concept differently, and the concept of phenomenal consciousness can be very hard to convey precisely through language, leading to misunderstandings.

A more uncharitable, meme-y interpretation is of course that they're zombies.

>>9482238
Slightly related question: do you believe there exist humans who don't truly possess consciousness? I've heard it called the NPC theory on here before, the idea that people exist who aren't self aware, don't posses any internal dialogue, or ability of introspection. I've heard of people who claimed they went their entire lives without thinking in "words", which made me wonder just how similar or dissimilar our own individual experiences are. I think of times in the past where I took benzos and "blacked out". To any outside observer, I seemed conscious. I reacted to the world around me, I could converse, etc. However I was entirely vacant during these times, and possessed no self awareness or conscious thought. Is it possible that there are people who exist in such a state long term? Or permanently? How would you ever know?

>>9487433
yesterday was the first time i ever seriously entertained the idea that eliminative materialists are p-zombies
as in what if the idea behind the "hard problem" is right and it's just a fluke that some of us have phenomenality in the first place, due to some individual variation in brain design
it sounds like a conspiracy theory level idea but i almost think it's a live option at this point

>>9487504
>the idea that people exist who aren't self aware, don't posses any internal dialogue, or ability of introspection
well in order to be behaviorally indistinguishable from non-zombies they would have to be able to at least behave like they had these abilities, including verbally
so they'd have to be able to describe their (supposed) emotional experiences, perceptual qualities, etc.

>>9487504
Whether someone were truly phenomenally conscious (as in, it feels like something to be them), that we can never know. However, not possessing internal dialogue, or the ability for introspection, self-awareness (depending on how it's defined), seems like the result of different working cognitive functions in their brains; something that can in principle be neurologically traced and modeled. For some of these traits, it seems that they can be tested for by simply asking them questions or see how they interact with the world.

>>9482238
>"Look at me guys! I want to believe I'm special!"

>>9487510
I think it's at least worth considering. I thought of it mostly as a meme-theory when I started being interested in philosophy of mind, but the more I talk to people about the hard problem, and the more I experience people's inability to even remotely grasp what the concept of phenomenal consciousness is referring to kind of makes me wonder sometimes.

>>9482238
I got it Sir. Why look for something when it is at the tip of your nose. I hate to say it but can't you guys think.

You are made out of complex matter. Wich finally becomes your primary functions interplaying in sophisticated operations with a concsious force wich we learn to adapt with use. That my friend is your thought. Concsiousness is tought. Buddha talked about this specially thought, thoughts, think, thinking. How you use it is force. That makes us sophisticated. We can use this simply or advanced. And we can to complex tasks sophisticated. Dynamicly and staticly. Up to a level of supercomplex and supersophisticated. Depends of how you use the power. That's why we say the power of the thought. Can almost do wonders. I think the magic is there hidden in your mind. To gain the state of a buddha. It's like a plate of meatball spagetti, meatballs are good but at the bottom lies the best. You can eat the whole plate first or you can dig it up. They say there is a shortcut to nirvana. And theres 3 levels of it. I think first buddha reached third. Legend say he meditated rigiusly at the end when he discovered how to accomplish. He found a state wich were huge the place were so big and so much in it that this was hard to manage. So he had to do this 6 more times to accomplish and reach nirvana. See i did the research for you.

That's all i can say. I suggest you read Dhammapada. Its free too just google it.

Evolution, revolution, demolution, hevolution. Endolution. Dharma.

>>9482238
There's a pretty good amount of videos on YouTube by Donald Hoffman having to do with concious agents theory. It's definitely worth checking out.

>>9482238
99.99999% of people reading this will have no idea what I'm saying, but let me try to put this as simply as possible:

Classical physics is an Approximation of the true, underlying physics.

Therefore, classical physics contains information which is not in the universe. An example of a piece of this information is an object traveling faster than the speed of light. Such a thing is not real.

You can think of the universe, every quantum field, everything in existence that is real, the set that encompasses all of Reality is {R}. {R} and everything within {R} has a Truth value of "True". Everything that does not exist is Non-reality, {N}, with a Truth value of "False".

An Abstraction is a set of information that is contained within {R} but does not contain all the information of {R}. So an Approximation is a set of information that is contained within {R, N}, has information from both, and of course does not contain all the information of {R,N}.

Consciousness is an Approximation. Approximations are sets of information that are partly based on Non-real information. This means that consciousness has a Truth value of "False", just like classical physics has a Truth value of "False".

>>9488941
(2/2)

You might then say, wait, if the consciousness does not exist, then why am I conscious? You are conscious, you can feel pain, that sure as hell feels real. Something doesn't need to be real to be felt, if the feelings themselves are based off of False information, then anything those feelings feel is automatically False, so there is no contradiction there exactly.

Philosophically, you can say that Non-reality is indeed False, but it can be "real" in a sense. Nothing Non-real can ever interact with anything real, but you can make the argument that they exist in their own realm. This realm is not self-consistent, but you can say it is "real" in a sense, and this is where our minds partly lie.

Non-real cannot interact with Real, but information from both exists, and when you abstract out information from both, only then does the phenomenon of consciousness arise.

So as for The Hard Problem of Consciousness, perceptions like the color "red" and other qualia come from Non-real information, and we cannot describe these things even if we knew the exact configuration (down to every position and every quantum wave/particle) of atoms that created the phenomenon, because consciousness does not arise from atoms, it's atoms along with non-real information. And since the information is Non-real, by definition it cannot exist in the real world.

>>9488941
>>9488945
The highlights:

>An Abstraction is a set of information that is contained within {R}...
>Non-real cannot interact with Real...when you abstract out information from both...consciousness arise.
>...consciousness has a Truth value of "False"...

>...they exist in their own realm.

>Everything that does not exist is Non-reality...
>Non-real cannot interact with Real, but information from both exists...

>...object traveling faster than the speed of light. Such a thing is not real.

>...consciousness does not arise from atoms...

>>9482302
>but you'd have to assume it was conscious if it said it was.
No you wouldn't. I would never assume a machine is experiencing consciousness just because it's advanced enough to hold a conversation.

>>9484031
>If you imagine a so called functional zombie that performed exactly as you do, it would be asking itself the same questions about the hard problem, and be behaving in the same ways. It would get spooked by its own experiences just like you would.
This is untrue and you don't understand what a P-Zombie is if you think this. The P-Zombie has no internal monologue, no thoughts. It doesn't get "spooked" because it's a pure automaton that receives stimulus and acts on it with no intermediary "thinking" step. The whole point of the P-Zombie thought experiment is to show that there is nothing necessary about having an internal sense of self and that theoretically people could exist without it.

So no you're completely off the mark. Qualia is a huge issue and you cannot handwave it away no matter how you'd wish to. We experience qualia, there is no reason we have to, but we do, therefore it must be explained. Same with the sense of self and subjective experience.

>>9482238
>Can science ever solve the hard problem of consciousness, /sci/?
Probably.

Despite how it can look without historical perspective, the mystery of consciousness is not the first phenomenon in science that looked, at the time, to be fundamentally beyond scientific understanding.

Once upon a time, biology was thought to be inexplicable from a scientific standpoint -- that even if you understand all of science perfectly, that still couldn't possibly explain how biological systems did its thing. It could never connect to anything we did understand, and could at best be a completely separate aspect of the world that we had no existing understanding of.

Well, it wasn't. It did fit nicely into existing understanding after all; we had simply failed to imagine how. And this is by no means the only historical case of something apparently fundamentally mysterious, actually having a mundane explanation that could be found, in time. I have every confidence that the same holds for the mystery of consciousness.

>>9489099
This is why some people get confused. There is no hard problem concsiousness. It's just thought. And it can be wrong or right. So mate. You have the key i have the answer. If you picked just the right toughts. Wouldn't you slide straight into nirvana. And isn't it strange to think about that to find a memory or a word neurons travel in lightningspeed to find exactly what we looked for. In some strange cytoplasma that saves them. It's fucking magic to me. What a maze. Were amazing creatures. I think the subconscious is amazing too. Keeps the brain in operative status all the time. Looking after that all operations are working properly. Keeping it at flawless motion. Protecting you. Tells you things to think of. Timing things for you. Making things easy and hard. Doing puzzles.

>Can science ever solve the hard problem of consciousness, /sci/?
Not really, considering subjective idealism is ultimately true and "science" is merely mental content in a mind. "Scientists" are a joke, go talk to a scientist in your dreams and laugh as they try to explain something that essentially is a creation of your mind.

>>9488773
So I just watched like 60 mins of that guy on youtube and..... literally I don't know what he is saying.

What is the physical/metaphysical reality that he is explaining?

He said rocks are conscious in the same way other people are conscious, we are not conscious of their consciousness but they are.

what the fuck is going on

Man. I just came here to play you a little jesus answer i strived as hell to find. It's the holy grail. The final answer up until today. Hard problem concsiousness has it's offsprings from philosophy in the age of enlightment. Descartes and shit bumped into it i know. So it's kind of before psychology, neurology and medicine came stepped into modernism. But they also worked on hard truth at the time. I don't know man this didn't get further than Descartes. Up until today. You can read about this if you google philosophy in the enlightment. Then you click on Stanford University Encyklopedia. I think it's a thesis made by a really dedicated professor. Smooth as a babys butt. Enjoy it. My sincere oblidges.

>>9485971
The difference is that I can cite my own experience as 'experienced'; if actions and reactions are simply those of the physical, things would play out in the same way, but there would be no phenomenal experience, which only I can vouch for in regards to myself

>>9489329
From what I've understood Hoffman is essentially arguing for some form of Idealism. No objective reality exists in any ontological way other than being mental constructions of a series of conscious agents, and those conscious agents are all that exists.

Yes.
Probably not in the near future, but problems always have been circumvented or solved regardless of circumstances. What we perceive as immaterial has always eventually found to be derived from the material. See: light and wind.

Of course, that doesn't guarantee that it'll be solved; I'm just pointing out the track record.

>>9488941
>99.99999% of people reading this will have no idea what I'm saying

Could that maybe be because what you're saying makes no sense? It's seems like you're confusing epistemology, which has to do with knowledge, with metaphysics, which has to do with what exists.

While it's possible to have false information about the world, that information doesn't somehow become false in some ontological, non-existence kind of way. If there is information, of any kind, true or false, that information necessarily exists: it's as real as true information. So to say that consciousness isn't real because it's pertaining to something "false", is as contradictory and misguided to say as to say because there are lies printed in on a piece of paper, that paper isn't real.

If you want to make this theory make any sense, you need to iron out exactly you mean when you claim something to be true or false, and how that effects that something's ontological status (whether they are real or non-real). Because statements like "Something doesn't need to be real to be felt" seems like an oxymoron. If something is felt, that something has to be real. You can be confused as to what it is you really felt, but that you felt anything at all seems unquestionable.

If all you wanted to say was that phenomenal consciousness isn't real, and we're just tricked that it is, then you choose one hell of an autistic and unnecessary route to get there.

>>9494518

>While it's possible to have false information about the world, that information doesn't somehow become false in some ontological, non-existence kind of way.

I guess I am misusing the term "information" here. What I really mean is just the underlying reality, whatever the base reality is made of, whatever is smaller than quantum fields, etc.

"Real information" is code for "stuff that exists in reality".

And "fake/non-real information" is information that is made of nothing.

The information of classical physics, which posits the existence of a faster-than-light object, says that this object exists, but we know that because it it false, it is also made of nothing.

>phenomenal consciousness isn't real

Phenomenal consciousness isn't real, but it exists.

In the Real realm, our bodies are philosophical zombies, the hyper-realm, the realm that encompasses Real and Non-real, we are souls that control the hyper body (the Real and the Non-real Body)

>>9495339
>"Real information" is code for "stuff that exists in reality".And "fake/non-real information" is information that is made of nothing.

So, is it fair then to say then, using your terminology, that "real information" is the objective world as it is, independently of any observer, and "non-real information" is how we in our minds construct models of the world, and since consciousness is part of that construct, therefore it's not real?

And by not real, what you mean is, our brains are feeding us information about what consciousness is, and that information is incorrect, which leads us to the wrong intuitions when stating that we are phenomenally conscious?

>>9482238

Consciousness doesn't feel like anything, you only feel like it does.

>>9495659
I see Dennett himself has found the thread.

>>9488941
>writing the image text as the first line
>not allowing the image to speak for itself

You're automatically a fucking moron. No need to read your post.

Consciousness is still science.

You have to work out how to soul works first on a physical level. What it's doing, how it moves, why it's blue and so on.

>>9483952
It's a false revelation. Not useful

>>9482238
>Can science ever solve the hard problem of consciousness, /sci/?
lol "the hard problem" hahahahah how can you know which problem is hard? have you ever tried solving anything do you?? do you think you look clever because you add the word hard to something you dont understand

>>9484892
It offers a theoretical mechanism for what makes a system conscious, which allows you to predict whether a system is conscious and furthermore describe the quantity and quality of the experience within the framework. I would say it goes beyond "consciousness is just integrated information": While it does arrive at the identity that a conscious experience (if it exists, which the theory predicts) is the "maximally irreducible conceptual structure" (see paper for definitions) of the system, it provides a comprehensive framework for distinguishing an experience from another in terms of its quantity (integrated conceptual information) and quality (conceptual structure). It is a work in progress and openly admits that.

I am not entirely sure what you mean with "what phenomenal consciousness really is" or "why it's there". From a scientific viewpoint, the latter question is one for evolutionary biology and psychology, while I'm not really sure what the former is asking... A deeper intuition about what consciousness is beyond its mechanism?

It's good to know that we could fire every single living philosopher without any knowledge being lost

>>9484814
>https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2017/1/nix019/4470874
Wow, thank you! I had completely missed this publication. The apparent importance of information and compression in both consciousness and artificial intelligence (see Jurgen Schmidhuber's Formal Theory of Fun, Creativity and Intinsic Motivation http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/ieeecreative.pdf)) is deeply intriguing.

>>9498379
>I am not entirely sure what you mean with "what phenomenal consciousness really is" or "why it's there"

What I'm getting at is simply the hard problem, and questions that follow it. A pure mechanistic explanation of consciousness seems impossible, since we're not talking about the behavior of something, like with everything else that scientific explanations describe. We're talking about why it feels like something to be you in a phenomenal sense. "Why it's there" is getting at the idea that a human should be able to function exactly the same without phenomenal consciousness, without a subject that experiences anything, so why don't they? Unless our intuitions are way off (like someone like Dennett would argue) it seems we need an actual metaphysical theory here describing what consciousness is beyond mechanisms and identity theories. While it might prove a hard or impossible thing to actually accomplish, I think it needs to be acknowledged.

If IIT is what you describe, then I certainly agree it's a building block to getting there.

>>9482238
A good question to start is at what point exactly do people start to have a consciousness? For example, my earliest memory I have is from age 4-5. So was I even conscious before that? When exactly did I become conscious? My second birthday? The moment I was born? Or maybe even before that? It's hard to tell. Nobody knows when exactly he became conscious. Nobody can say "this was my first thought. Before that, "I" didn't exist. Maybe my body did, but "I" didnt." And that's pretty interesting by itself.

The second important observation is, that we can clearly manipulate our consciousness by messing with our brain. With anesthesia, we can temporarily become unconcious. With certain kind of drugs, we can heavily alter our consciousness. So this implies that our consciousness is indeed deeply connected to our brain, and that is by the brain delievering sensations that our consciousness can perceive.

So how would a person that has a brain, but no sensors that it can feed his brain with, feel conscious? Or in other words, how would a person that is born blind, deaf, and without a tactile sense, tongue, or any other kind of sense, experience itself? It has no way to ever develop ways the consciousness usually functions, e.g. "talking to yourself", imagining certain colors, pictures, sounds, tastes, smells, etc.. Does the consciousness simply never come into existence?

>>9489998
>everything immaterial is material
Can't follow shit, captain

>>9498474
Are we not talking about the behavior of something? How is the study of consciousness different from the study of matter (physics)? We are satisfied with providing mechanistic explanations of the behavior of matter, so why should we not be for consciousness? If we want something beyond this ("actual metaphysical theory..."), it seems we are talking about a much more sophisticated and mature form of science that one could speculate we might have in the future. It's hard to imagine what would be like, perhaps one might discover deep connections between mechanisms of consciousness and some remote and obscure area of mathematics, which we might indeed find meaningful.

For the "why", a few educated intuition-based guesses are that it might provide evolutionary advantage relating to intelligence, attention, memory or social interaction. A deeper why seems circular or very philosophical, similar to something like "why does reality exist?". At the end of the day, I have never found an answer to questions that deep other than "existence is", although that might be due to limits to my intelligence or understanding.

I can definitely recommend studying the IIT 3.0 paper. It is without a doubt the current best attempt at a theoretical explanation.

>>9498567
>Are we not talking about the behavior of something?
When it comes to being a subject of phenomenal consciousness, I don't think we are talking about behavior, no. This is the only thing in the world where outlining the behavior doesn't seem to get you anywhere. For every other thing, no matter how complicated, it can in principle be reduced to the complex behavior of elementary particles (or quantum interactions); axioms like "things exist in the universe and behave a certain way" usually buys you a fuckload of explanatory power over any phenomena, but when it comes to phenomenal consciousness, this approach runs into a wall. No matter how something behaves, it seems it shouldn't be able to amount to anything but more behavior, yet we also get phenomenal experience. From this gap between function and experience, we can infer that we're dealing with something radically different here; something where the behavior doesn't even begin to account for the core phenomena.

This is pretty much just restating Chalmers arguments; you should read this paper of his if you haven't already.
http://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf

>>9498605
I think I am beginning to understand what you mean, however it seems like a question so far beyond our current knowledge. Understanding the basics of consciousness, both in terms of its relation to the physical world (Hard Problem) and its intrinsic structure and behavior (psychology), seems necessary before we can attempt to go deeper. However, I do feel that the profoundness of the existence of consciousness is indeed similar to the profoundness of existence itself.

Thank you for the paper. I was actually just reading the paper on Kolmogorov Theory of Consciousness, which someone else posted in this thread, where the same paper is referred to, as I read your reply.

>>9482238
>Why there is an "I" present? An "I" does not need to be present, hypothetically, for you to exhibit the exact same behavior.

two views:
1. there is no I, no you. you are just conditioned through your life and are a collection of emergent properties. if we took each other apart bit by bit there would be no I to be found. but you are somewhat your genes, intelligence is only around 50% genetics. so there is no you to be found. but there are certain things you will be predisposed to be more naturally inclined to (such as running, creativity and mathematics) which can be changed, because you are not stationary. (which is true regardless of statement 2)

2. there is a you, potentially in two forms (or both). these are: there is a separate soul which survives death and potentially returns to this level of existence many times.
or
there is just one soul, one intelligence, we aren't actually different people or souls, beyond our conditioning and worldly existence we are all the exact same intelligent awareness at the source of being.

how do we test for either? i think death is our only option.

>>9488941
i think classical physics problem lies in the fact that it deals with objects and boundaries, which are not ultimately real. but they are good for every day living and practical uses, but not in the search for higher truth. maybe quantum can show us, maybe there is beyond quantum too.

>>9489287
what you're putting across is cool, apart from the bit about right and wrong, it doesn't exist. there is a hurtful and a helpful which is like growing a vegetable garden... being pragmatic.
>>9496188
>why it's blue and so on.
i know what ur sayinn

"hard" problem of consciousness - solved by the ancients
"soft" problem of consciousness - a Herculean feat of biochemistry and math, would require human vivisection

>>9487640
>Assumes literally everyone experiences consciousness, just asking if there's some settled mechanism for the matter.
>Trying to make is a snowflake thing
Idk why I even responded to your bait.

>>9500488
>how do we test for either? i think death is our only option.
Is this a subtle attempt to get me to kill myself?

It only... SEEMS to you that... that you are conscious.

I've just thought of something. When a caterpillar gets in it's chrysalis, its body is broken down into a soup and rearranged...that means that the original animal is killed and what emerges is some freakish clone.

It is the amount of possible quantum events possible in a given space that gives rise to consciosuness. A brain for example has an incredible amount of quantum possibilities, and so the space that encompasses the brain becomes enriched by a phenomenal field, that is not so much in the brain as it's acting inbetween molecules, possible having causal effects on the physical system through strong emergence. Different versions of this view can be of the epiphenomenal type, where there exists other fundamental particles/forces in the same space as ours, but they don't interact with ours, except as a read-only property from physical forces/laws to "phenomenal" ones.

>>9504215
So epiphenomalism?

>>9504376
Not necessarily. You can imagine two way causal influence between this field and the "regular" physical brain.

>>9504395
I thought you said
>they don't interact with ours, except as a read-only property from physical forces/laws to "phenomenal" ones
Isn't that a one-way causal influence?

>>9504401
Read the whole thing again. I outline both an interactionist and a epiphenomenal version of it.

>>9504415
My bad.

Is there any evidence for strong emergence, though? Everything, including mental properties, seems to supervene on physical properties.

Recall that supervenience can be defined as follows:

A set of properties A (e.g. mental properties) supervenes on a set of properties B (e.g. neural properties) if and only if any two objects x and y which share all properties in B (are "B-indiscernible") also share all properties in A (are "A-indiscernible").

For example, we may say that if two people are indistinguishable in all of their physical properties, they must also be indistinguishable in all of their mental properties.

>>9489156
But why not? How many neurons do I need to remove from your brain to assume you're no longer conscious?

>>9483932
>Choise

>>9504427
Mind-Body Supervenience could still hold under this view, if you don't give any chaotic/unpredictable properties to the phenomenal field.

If you have your x and your y, both with the same physical properties, they could both give rise to the same phenomenal field, and that field would then give rise to the same interactions back and fourth. The supervenience as it's formulated would still hold, but in a non-direct way.

>>9504430
The key point is
>just because it's advanced enough to hold a conversation.
It's possible that there's something about the brain's substrate that gives rise to conscious/subjective/phenomenal experiences where a pencil-and-paper *simulation* of the brain wouldn't.

I'm gonna link to a rebbit comment that I think does a good job of explaining the difference:
https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/5hmduk/prof_schmidhuber_the_problems_of_ai_consciousness/db23i91/

>>9498605
>No matter how something behaves, it seems it shouldn't be able to amount to anything but more behavior, yet we also get phenomenal experience.
"Phenomenal experience" is reported. And a report is in fact a form of behavior. You only run into trouble when you assume the report must refer to a literal extra-physical phenomenon. If instead the report is the real thing going on and the reference point of the report is a fictional abstraction of convenience then what you have isn't grounds for needing a new science.

>>9504472
I wrote a little meme on this myself a while ago. I think it gets at the same as the reddit post, but in fewer words.

Would a computer fast enough and programmed to simulate a human brain have phenomenal experience? If it is functionally identical, then why not? Well, first of all, it being functionally identical might not matter since the very gap at the heart of the hard problem is between function and experience. The computer could function identically but still lack phenomenal experience. But why would it lack it, given it has the same function? Well, you could argue that the physical substrate where consciousness resides is affected/created differently when a system operates in the incredibly parallell way a brain does, as opposed to the fast repetitive symbol shuffling that happens in fewer place in the CPU. Thus, the nature of the experience is not governed by the functional outcome of a system, but instead on HOW the system came to a functional outcome.

>>9482238
So that just brings me to a conclusion of a question. Is anything really any more/less conscious than anything else? Do all things inhibit this sense of 'self, simply expressed in different ways for all matter. 'Living' and otherwise.

>>9504485
I don't think my subjective experience (which is epistemically prior to literally anything else) is a "fictional abstraction."

" The only thing I can be certain of is the existence of my subjective experience. Now, if I grant that things like brains and neurons and atoms and quarks exist - things which are epistemologically secondary to my subjective experience - then, the challenge is to explain how these conjectured entities could give rise to a thing which I'm much more certain does actually exist - my subjective experience."

>>9504495
I'm leaning toward panpsychism (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/)) myself.

>>9504485
I admit this is one of the best arguments you can mount against the existence of phenomenal consciousness. Rejecting your argument comes down to appealing to the intuition that we simply do have direct undeniable access of the phenomenal. Also, the fact that we do report phenomenal experience really causes some problems for epiphenomenalist theories.

According to epiphenomenalism phenomenal experience doesn't affect the physical, yet the thoughts and verbal reports created by the brain about the mysteries of the phenomenal seems to indicate that they do. If this phenomenal "stuff" is so different from the physical, then how is it that it manifests so profoundly in the behavioral output of you and me? How can a purely functional system directly speak to the existence of the phenomenal, if the very nature of the phenomenal escapes and goes up and beyond the functions of the system making the argument?

>>9504521
>According to epiphenomenalism phenomenal experience doesn't affect the physical, yet the thoughts and verbal reports created by the brain about the mysteries of the phenomenal seems to indicate that they do. If this phenomenal "stuff" is so different from the physical, then how is it that it manifests so profoundly in the behavioral output of you and me?

Isn't the point of epiphenomenalism that physical phenomena is caused by prior physical phenomena, while mental phenomena is caused by physical phenomena, like shown in this diagram? Doesn't that work out in the sense that it explains the correlation between physical and mental phenomena you're referring to?

>>9504521
>>9504532
It's like the causal diagram of a Hidden Markov Model, where the Xs are physical states and the Ys are mental states.

>>9504512
Epistemology is overrated in these discussions. Most any diagnostic tool you can come up with for example will have more reliable information about the things it acts on than it will have information on its own method for acting on them. Just because you can't know about a real world object without having a brain and behavioral routines doesn't mean your knowledge of your own means of knowing the world is more solid or reliable than what you know of the world through those means. It's just the opposite, our knowledge of real world phenomena is so reliable when taken as a product of multiple party cross-validation that you're able to get this post transmitted to your machine through an elaborate global telecommunications network. We have nothing anywhere near as solid or reliable when it comes to knowledge of our own perceptual systems. Just because we go through these perceptual systems doesn't mean we have any reason to be "certain" of what they are or how they work. You really need cross-validation to reach reliability on a topic, and what you can cross-validate about perception is behavior like the reports *of* qualia, not the alleged qualia themselves. Many separate parties (both human and mechanical) can validate that a report has been made. The same can't be done for the alleged non-physical "experience" being reported.

>>9504539
>We have nothing anywhere near as solid or reliable when it comes to knowledge of our own perceptual systems. Just because we go through these perceptual systems doesn't mean we have any reason to be "certain" of what they are or how they work.
You are misinterpreting my comment. I'm not claiming I *understand* how my subjective experience works, I'm only claiming it exists!

>You really need cross-validation to reach reliability on a topic, and what you can cross-validate about perception is behavior like the reports *of* qualia, not the alleged qualia themselves.
I'm not talking about other people's reports of qualia. I'm talking about the qualia I'm experiencing *right now*. Validation by other people is irrelevant here and you know it.

>>9504491
A full simulation accounts for this

1. Being the first known entity to posit the hard problem of consciousness is an observed human behavior
2. Since qualia only exist subjectively, it would be impossible to originally pose the hard problem of consciousness without personally experiencing consciousness
3. For any physical system to perfectly simulate human behavior as it can be observed, it would have to be able to originally pose the hard problem of consciousness to an observer
4. Consciousness is a necessary prerequisite for human behavior
5. Human behavior is the result of natural selection for reproductive fitness
6. Subjective consciousness is the result of natural selection
7. Natural selection is a physical process which can be fully predicted and understood by the physical and chemical interactions of matter
8. Subjective experience is an emergent property of a sufficiently complex physical system

>9504549
>I'm not claiming I *understand* how my subjective experience works, I'm only claiming it exists!
I don't think you can claim certainty something exists without claiming any understanding of what that something is. Otherwise you're basically saying "I am compelled to claim X exists though I have no idea what X is." Which to me seems to reducs very nicely to you having a reporting behavior that is fully explicable through ordinary mechanical physics and a target of that report which is not a real thing at all but instead a behavior driving abstraction of convenience the brain has you speak and act around because it's more efficient than if you were stuck only ever dealing with the way your body and sensory organs function in the literal sense. We certainly do this sort of thing in other contexts e.g. I'm a software developer who knows nothing about how physical machines work and it's not a problem because I get to work in terms of the non-physical / not literally real convenience of abstract objects that are programs as a more efficient alternative to dealing with the literal details of physical computers directly.
>Validation by other people is irrelevant here
No, it's the most relevant thing there is about this topic. It's gets right at the heart of the "problem" to cut the bullshit and stick to what can actually be cross-validated by multiple independent (human, mechanical, and mathematical) parties and methods. And what you get is the report, not what's reported. So long as you don't overrate the validity of what's reported you're left with a 100% mundane and reasonable behavioral / physiological phenomenon.

>>9504571
>4. Consciousness is a necessary prerequisite for human behavior
Why?

>5. Human behavior is the result of natural selection for reproductive fitness
>6. Subjective consciousness is the result of natural selection
It's not sufficient to give teleological explanations. It's like saying "the earth rotates so we can have day and night". That is, it's getting things backwards. The question is --- why is it rotating? Then, we'll give an explanation in terms of more fundamental phenomena. I.e., the earth rotates because of the force of gravity and the preservation of angular momentum. So we need that kind of explanation of consciousness - how do the physical laws which we have give rise to subjective phenomena? Saying "because evolution needs it" is not an answer to the question.

>8. Subjective experience is an emergent property of a sufficiently complex physical system
So you're waving "complexity" like a magic wand. "It's so complex, I can't even imagine it," and poof, there's consciousness. This is just a euphemism for mysterianism, isn't it?

>>9504576
>I don't think you can claim certainty something exists without claiming any understanding of what that something is.
I think I certainly can. This is certainly true of my own sentience.

>you having a reporting behavior that is fully explicable through ordinary mechanical physics
Are you claiming you've already discovered the mechanism by which configurations of matter give rise to consciousness? Please share. There are a lot of people who want to know.

>No, it's the most relevant thing there is about this topic.
No it's not. You're either being obtuse or deliberately misleading. I'm saying I experience something. Period. I might be wrong about some things, which a fortiori entails I experience something. That's it.

>>9504590
>Are you claiming you've already discovered the mechanism by which configurations of matter give rise to consciousness?
Not sure if you're misunderstanding or just misrepresenting on purpose as a rhetorical device, but what I'm saying is if you cut away the bullshit and stick to what can actually be cross-validated by multiple independent parties then what you're left with to this "problem" are behavior (like reports) and physiology. And you can explain how the act of someone saying "I see a blue sky" works if you can explain how physical things like muscles, electricity, chemistry, etc work. That isn't to say it's easy to account for all these details, but it is a list of tasks which fall within the realm of explicable physics, unlike the alleged qualia which would be something beyond physics as it exists today if you cling to the notion qualia are literally real things.

>>9504603
>unlike the alleged qualia which would be something beyond physics
I didn't claim qualia are something "beyond physics" insofar as that means we could *never* discover a physical basis for it. Once upon of time, electromagnetic phenomena were "beyond physics" in the epistemic sense. That's the sense I'm referring to.

>if you cling to the notion qualia are literally real things
I know my qualia are literally real, because I'm literally experiencing something right now. I don't know about you or other people, at least not for sure.

>>9504665
>Once upon a time*

>>9504532
Think about it. P1 refers to all physical things in the brain. M1 refers to all mental, phenomenal things. If P1 causes M1, and M1 can't affect P1 back, how can P1 ever have knowledge of M1, especially the sort of privileged direct phenomenal knowledge that's talked about?

>>9504585
>>4. Consciousness is a necessary prerequisite for human behavior
>Why?
Because discussing consciousness is a human behavior, and subjective experience is necessary to discuss consciousness. A chat bot that did not experience consciousness could repeat sentences about consciousness only if it heard them before

>>5. Human behavior is the result of natural selection for reproductive fitness
>>6. Subjective consciousness is the result of natural selection
>It's not sufficient to give teleological explanations. It's like saying "the earth rotates so we can have day and night". That is, it's getting things backwards.
You're right, but the fact that consciousness can be selected for by evolution gives some insight into its nature. We could be a race of automatons but we are not, so it seems most likely that the type of behavior enabled by subjective experience is reproductively advantageous. It "works backwards" because evolution only "knows" about the behavior itself, and by selecting for the kind of behavior enabled by consciousness it is also evidently able to have produced it.

>>8. Subjective experience is an emergent property of a sufficiently complex physical system
>So you're waving "complexity" like a magic wand. "It's so complex, I can't even imagine it," and poof, there's consciousness. This is just a euphemism for mysterianism, isn't it?
No. Evolution is a physical system which can be modeled by the laws of physics and chemical interactions, and can be understood and predicted perfectly fine. This system has evidently given rise to consciousness in the same way that it produced pigment in a butterfly's wings. I can't explain what it is about the physical structure of the system that makes things conscious any more than I can explain why a butterfly's wings look blue, but it is clear from its origin that it is caused by some specific physical structure

>Ctrl+F
>GEB - 0 results
>Godel, Escher, Bach - 0 Results
>Hofstadter - 0 results

Fuck you /sci/

>>9505130
I guess the implication is that M1 doesn't have "knowledge" of P1, and it doesn't have to. Consciousness is sort of in the passenger seat, so to speak.

>>9505596
>I guess the implication is that M1 doesn't have "knowledge" of P1, and it doesn't have to. Consciousness is sort of in the passenger seat, so to speak.
Sorry, mixed that up. I meant P1 having "knowledge" of P2.

No becasue science cannot prove anything. That doesn't mean ph*losophers can, they just ramble around the point. But if you want a more practical anawer, you can see evidence where people change personality through brain trauma.

>>9505396
>A chat bot that did not experience consciousness could repeat sentences about consciousness only if it heard them before
I'm not sure what you're saying here. It seems to me that a chat bot without consciousness could definitely *talk* about consciousness. However, I'm not sure what you mean by "only if it heard them before".

>I can't explain what it is about the physical structure of the system that makes things conscious any more than I can explain why a butterfly's wings look blue, but it is clear from its origin that it is caused by some specific physical structure
I think we agree on this point. I'm not saying consciousness *isn't* caused by some specific physical structure, I'm saying we don't know what that physical structure is. Here's what Witten had to say about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUW7n_h7MvQ

Perhaps a new paradigm of physics is needed make sense of consciousness, just like a new paradigm (fields) was once needed to make sense of electromagnetic phenomena.

What form that paradigm will take, I have no idea.

>>9505598
I assume you actually meant P1 doesn't have knowledge of M1?

If P1 doesn't have knowledge of any phenomenal properties, then what credibility does any arguments about the existence of phenomenal things really have, since those arguments are expressed through P1? If all we say about M1 isn't actually based on anything about M1, then how can we say there even is M1? This is where epiphenomenalism breaks down.

Given that M1 can't affect P1, we should be acting as if we were zombies in regards to any phenomenal things (which, interestingly enough, a lot of people seem to do).