Where does my consciousness come from?

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Anonymous Mon Sep 4 18:28:06 2017 No.9149304 [Reply] [Original]

Where does my consciousness come from?

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 18:30:19 2017 No.9149309 >>9149304 define "consciousness"

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 18:34:27 2017 No.9149313 File: 67 KB, 288x418, ryle.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>9149304 >consciousness Wrong.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 18:45:02 2017 No.9149324 File: 7 KB, 208x250, tfw to intelligent too not be a cuck.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] So /sci/ is consciousness a blessing or a curse?

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 18:47:12 2017 No.9149329 >>9149324 Consciousness, blessings, and curses are all labels for things that don't actually exist.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 18:49:41 2017 No.9149336 >>9149329 oh so you're one of "those guys" hum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0YOH14

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 18:51:24 2017 No.9149341 >>9149304 >Where does my consciousness come from? Same as the rest of you: your mother's vagina. You are a single link in a 4-billion-year-old chain, let's not focus too much on your personal scrap of flesh.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 18:52:41 2017 No.9149344 >>9149341 fuck off sagan, shouldn't you be dead?

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 18:54:03 2017 No.9149347 >>9149329 >labels for things that don't actually exist. cogito ergo sum We are more certain of the existence of consciousness than anything else.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 18:55:59 2017 No.9149352 File: 485 KB, 800x1007, ErnestBorgnine.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>9149344 >fuck off sagan Thanks, that's the nicest thing anybody on the 4chins has ever said to me. :^)

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 19:03:13 2017 No.9149362 >>9149347 Nice one shiva, stop joking around now

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 19:04:59 2017 No.9149364 File: 483 KB, 785x757, punchingfrogs.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>9149347 >Cartesian dualism Way to unironically adopt a position that only gets mentioned in modern times as a way to insultingly refer to an opponent's argument.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 19:16:58 2017 No.9149378 >>9149364 >dude it's 2017 lmao

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 19:19:04 2017 No.9149383 >>9149378 >We can't make more accurate observations and learn about things they have to be this mystical unexplainable /x/ shit Lmaoing at your life.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 19:20:00 2017 No.9149385 >>9149364 Aside from your distaste for my argument, can you show it's actually wrong?

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 19:21:26 2017 No.9149387 >>9149378 Try "it's any time from the mid-1700s forward," Hume killed that idea a very long time ago.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 19:23:27 2017 No.9149394 >>9149383 >If X then Y kys brainlet

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 19:24:44 2017 No.9149395 >>9149394 I will but not now, shitposting brings me too much joy.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 19:25:53 2017 No.9149398 NO. ONE. FUCKING. KNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWS.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 19:29:06 2017 No.9149403 File: 31 KB, 233x255, 1504561641191.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>9149398 >You can't know nuffin Big mac hold the pickles please.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 19:29:06 2017 No.9149404 >>9149387 I've checked on that Hume guy and lmao >argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge is ultimately founded solely in experience David Hume, more like David KEK.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 19:31:53 2017 No.9149409 But seriously, africa will never develop and it's because of black ppl.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 19:33:19 2017 No.9149413 >>9149409 You're not wrong, but that kind of came out of nowhere.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 19:37:50 2017 No.9149418 File: 76 KB, 315x277, leftypol raiders.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>9149413 What can you do when leftypol shills shit up a thread with a libcuck (((((((philosopher)))))).

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 20:44:15 2017 No.9149512 >>9149304 The Boltzmann Brain. You exist as a result of an ocean of sheer probability gaining sentience. You exist because at some point, at some time, you were going to emerge as a flesh construct, the ten zillionth extension of the Brain

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 20:46:58 2017 No.9149519 >>9149418 You sound like a mental patient. I don't think this thread has any indication of being a leftist raid.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 20:55:53 2017 No.9149525 >>9149512 Atheist Logic.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 21:01:34 2017 No.9149529 >>9149525 Hey its the closest science has ever come to acknowledging the existence of a higher power, even if it acknowledged it as a theory thats probably bullshit. I actually just wanted to get some discussion on the theory going

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 22:30:17 2017 No.9149649 >>9149329 So how do you explain self-awareness, which you know you have?

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 22:32:29 2017 No.9149652 File: 26 KB, 367x500, 5103d95ab9892e95000507131d50a4db3883cd12c5717cbf695ae34a9321d3ce.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>9149329

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 22:41:27 2017 No.9149658 >>9149649 Programs can reference themselves as objects too. Do you consider programs "conscious?"

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 22:43:38 2017 No.9149661 Consciousness comes from your brain. Are you mentally handicapped by any chance?

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 23:31:00 2017 No.9149738 >>9149658 A program does the same thing externally as it does internally. We see the entire process fleshed out. Cognition is not this way, yet. Your argument will not be relevant until we improve neurology.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 23:33:52 2017 No.9149745 >>9149324 Its a curse, the curse of vulnerablity.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 4 23:37:43 2017 No.9149753 >>9149738 i know exactly who you are because of your refusal to use the word "neurology" in its proper context.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 12:52:18 2017 No.9150648

>>9149658
Being self-aware isn't "to refer to oneself as object", at least not in the same sense we say a program can refer to itself.

I don't get you people who try to "explain" consciousness but just end coming up with things way more abstract, vague and we could even say metaphysical.
What seems to motivate the opposition to the hard problem is the belief that by admitting it one admits a magic, spooky /x/ thing. But take a look at Spinoza: he admitted a strict determinism on the domain of thought, yet didn't think we could reduce it to extension. Also, to admit there are things in the world beyond the domain of explanation or reasoning isn't the same as being /x/, it's just not being autistic.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:00:43 2017 No.9150667 >>9149385 No, but there are outdated theories where "x is inexplicable therefore its existence is in a different plane than our own" of which all have turned out to be wrong.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:09:49 2017 No.9150686

An anon posted this on the /his/ thread:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/consciousness-color-brain/423522/

Here's my comment:
>The TL;DR is that the hard problem of consciousness is like the 17th century hard problem of white light. No color, particularly white, exists except in our brains.
Colours exist only in our consciousness, in our brains, understood only in a materialist sense, there are only neurons. So the comparison failed.

>Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct. The computer concludes that it has qualia because that serves as a useful, if simplified, self-model.
He missed the point, the problem isn't why we conclude the existence of qualia, the problem is the *experience* of qualia, and a concrete experience is a thing way different from an abstract conclusion.

>Graziano mentions that there is a strong sentiment that consciousness must be a thing, an energy field, or exotic state of matter, something other than information.
What is "information" but a pale abstraction before my immediate experience of consciousness?

>When some philosophers and scientists say that “consciousness is an illusion”, what they usually mean is that this idea of consciousness as separate thing is illusory, not internal experience itself.
That's better, and I think nobody denies internal experience. The problem is: how can internal experience be considered not something separated from physicality in some way or another? Parallelism of events isn't the same as a relation of cause and effect.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:12:46 2017 No.9150691

>>9150686
>You won’t find any evidence of something else, of an additional energy or separate state of matter, of anything like a ghost in the machine. Could something like that exist and just not yet be detected? Sure. But that can be said of any concept we’d like to be true.
That's a non sequitur, and it's a problem that doesn't really matter. You could say you are absolutely sure you have a squirrel on your head and that it's on a different plane, but that would make no sense to me and I would just dismiss it. However, to say that consciousness is by nature different from the things we know only mediately through the senses is a different matter: that makes sense to me and I admit it. And making such a concession has no dangers to science, which only occupies itself with what is measurable and predictable. It would only be a danger if we admitted it's in a different plane and interacts with matter, because then it would affect the system science occupies itself with.

>Am I, or Graziano, missing objective evidence of consciousness being more than information processing?
Maybe, maybe not, "information processing" could mean anything in a wide range of meanings.

Anyway, we can see in the text the old confusion between finding external physical events correlated to internal mental events with finding what those internal mental events "really" are.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:14:39 2017 No.9150698 >>9150691 But I dismiss the hard problem of consciousness because I don't think consciousness, insofar as we consider its "internal subjective nature", could have an explanation or even need one.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:23:15 2017 No.9150721

>>9150686
>my immediate experience of consciousness?
The belief you're having an 'experience' and the details you report it having aren't actually immediate at all. We discussed this a few days back in a thread about optical illusions. The brain actually needs to come up with how to interpret a given stimulus before you get any awareness of it. You can look up blindsight for examples of people with functioning eyes who will respond to visual stimuli e.g. walking around obstacles you put in front of them, but who report not being able to see anything. Is this a disease of 'qualia'? I think the better explanation is there was never any 'qualia' to begin with and that this is instead a matter of behavior. We behave around and believe as though these 'qualia' are there because if we didn't we'd be like blindsighted patients, able to respond to visual stimuli at a low level but not able to reference it as an object to do more sophisticated things with it like talk to someone else about it or come up with a deliberate plan on how to respond to it.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:27:08 2017 No.9150727 >>9150721 >The belief you're having an 'experience' The FACT

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:34:22 2017 No.9150740 >>9150727 It doesn't matter how intensely you insist you're compelled to believe that, your brain is 100% capable of making you believe in things that aren't literally true.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:36:28 2017 No.9150744 >>9150721 i already proved to you that blindsight is a shit example.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:38:04 2017 No.9150746 >>9150740 And consciousness-denialists are living proof of that.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:42:12 2017 No.9150757 >>9150740 In order to be able to believe anything I must be conscious, so saying that my brain makes me believe that I'm conscious implies that I AM conscious.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:43:07 2017 No.9150762

>>9150740
I think you have to define what this illusion is before you make claims of the brain making you believe things that arent literally true. Your brain is making inferences on hidden states. It can be treated as a bayesian engine and in this sense, truth statements don't actually apply to the brain. Just like in science, the brain isn't looking for objective truth, it's looking for predictive efficacy.

Treat the brain as a scientist. Verification is impossible.

So define your illusion.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:44:43 2017 No.9150764

>>9150744
It's a perfect example. They have sight without reporting 'qualia'. And that's exactly what you'd want to look at to identify what's going on with that reporting behavior. Medical conditions where processes break down are usually your best source of information in trying to figure out how those processes work.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:45:47 2017 No.9150769 >>9150757 >In order to be able to believe anything I must be conscious Not true. You can have beliefs you aren't even aware of.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:47:07 2017 No.9150774 >>9150769 So what? I never said you have to be conscious of all your beliefs, I said that having beliefs is something that only conscious things can do.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:48:22 2017 No.9150782

>>9150762
I never used the word "illusion," specifically because you always get the "but you need experience to have an illusion" complaint when you do. A less loaded term is "false belief." A machine can be programmed to operate as though something that isn't true, is. No "experience" required.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:50:09 2017 No.9150788 >>9150782 Well, just replace my word illusion with false belief. What is the false belief? The belief that we have experiences?

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:50:23 2017 No.9150790 >>9150774 The point is if you can have beliefs you aren't even aware exist, then you definitely don't need to have "conscious experience" to have beliefs. A machine can be programmed to behave as though X is true, and that's a belief.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:50:26 2017 No.9150791 >>9150782 >A machine can be programmed to operate as though something that isn't true, is. Again: so what? That doesn't actually mean that the computer believes anything to be true. How can non-conscious things have beliefs?

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:52:05 2017 No.9150797

>>9150721
>The belief you're having an 'experience' and the details you report it having aren't actually immediate at all.
That's right in a sense. But then it would turn to be more a discussion about what "immediate" means than if we do or don't have immediate experience.

>The brain actually needs to come up with how to interpret a given stimulus before you get any awareness of it.
Here we enter in a pretty confusing territory. But it seems that one moment we talk about the brain as if it were only one object, and in another moment we talk about it as if it was the knowing subject. I can only admit it if we say that the brain-as-subject and the brain-as-object are the same thing under two different aspects, one no less valid than the other.
But I think you missed what I meant by immediate: indeed we don't know physical things immediately, but the senses and feelings through which we know things have to be "immediate"; there has to be something immediately experienced through which everything that is mediately experienced is mediated.

>You can look up blindsight for examples of people with functioning eyes who will respond to visual stimuli e.g. walking around obstacles you put in front of them, but who report not being able to see anything.
I think you're talking about this:
http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2008/12/22/blind-man-navigates-obstacle-course-perfectly-with-no-visual/
The problem is: either those visual stimuli are being interpreted somewhere in his brain and probably with correlate phenomenical processes in his consciousness, or we have to admit some kind of magical or supernatural faculty that makes that man deal with those obstacles without dealing with their stimuli, or he can work with such stimuli unconsciously.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:52:35 2017 No.9150798

>>9149304
A chemical reaction, basically. Biological matter occurred as a result of certain reactants coming together due to the characteristics of the universe.
>>9149324
I would argue that its a blessing to be able to perceive information, despite the somewhat difficult aspects, its better than nothing.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:53:12 2017 No.9150800

>>9150721
>>9150797 (cont.)

>Is this a disease of 'qualia'? I think the better explanation is there was never any 'qualia' to begin with and that this is instead a matter of behavior.
I can't see your reasoning. What would be a disease of qualia? Something like synesthesia? We only know his visual cortex is inactive, we know nothing of his inner experience.

>We behave around and believe as though these 'qualia' are there
I don't "believe" I have qualia: beliefs are only propositions, qualia are sensations, feelings. I can ground my beliefs on sensations and feelings, but these can't themselves be "beliefs".

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:54:09 2017 No.9150801 >>9150790 >A machine can be programmed to behave as though X is true, and that's a belief. Define "belief", give an example of a belief held by computers.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:55:41 2017 No.9150808

>>9150788
Yes. Or to clarify a little, the belief the abatrct fictions we behave in reference to are really there as anything more than a reference point for behaving around. In this way, the behavior we exhibit in reference to "seeing blue" would be the real thing (along with the stimuli and phisiology processing) while the idea of our "experience" of blue would be the false but useful thing we're compelled to believe in and behave around, like how the eye of a storm has no substance of its own beyond being the focal point of the things of substance revolving around it.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:57:12 2017 No.9150813 >>9150790 >A machine can be programmed to behave as though X is true, and that's a belief. That's not belief. And we're talking about a machine, it's like saying a book has beliefs.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:58:06 2017 No.9150816 >>9150801 A belief in the sense I'm talking about is a proposition something behaves around as though it were true.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:58:49 2017 No.9150820 >>9150813 Are machines and books the same? No? Then what the fuck are you even talking about?

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 13:59:05 2017 No.9150821 >>9150816 Ok, now give an example.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:00:05 2017 No.9150827

>>9150813
Well feel free to not call that a belief then, but it's what I'm arguing our beliefs are. RE: Books, they don't have beliefs because they don't behave in response to their contents. You need behavior like robots, animals, or people have for beliefs.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:01:24 2017 No.9150831 >>9150797 Maybe his visual ability is habit based?

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:05:27 2017 No.9150850

>>9150820
The same way I can interpret a machine as having purposes and beliefs through its behaviour, I can interpret a book has having the same thing through what it "says".
Anyway, I could ask, like you:
Are machines and people the same thing? No? Then what the fuck are you even talking about?

>>9150827
>You need behavior like robots, animals, or people have for beliefs.
Well, that can be satisfactory only if you want to reduce everything to its external aspect. That's more a matter of how to use the word belief than what constitutes belief (as that word is particularly understood by someone). Your definition of belief can be a scientifically useful way of calling measurable things, but isn't philosophically satisfactory.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:06:43 2017 No.9150856

>>9150791
You are not aware of most of your beliefs.
Most of your beliefs are stored in the non conscious part of you.
Most of your beliefs you have not yet verbalized or thought about, but merely presupposed.
Why do you assume that you have to have to be conscious to have beliefs?

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:08:06 2017 No.9150863 >>9150850 > but isn't philosophically satisfactory. Why not?

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:12:29 2017 No.9150876 >>9150863 Because philosophy, in the sense I pursue it, isn't only an ancilla scientiae.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:16:35 2017 No.9150889 >>9150876 > isn't only an ancilla scientiae. What is it then? Youve merely denied one sense but you havent affirmed any. For all we know you may be denying all senses that we are aware of.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:19:17 2017 No.9150899

>>9150764
But the blindsight information isn't without interpretation at all. It still gets processed if it goes through the midbrain and thalamus. And again, the important thing maybe in how it lacks functional connections to other parts of the brain - this is maybe why the information is non-conscious. Not because it is "unprocessed" (which it is). If we manufactured new connections to the rest of the cortex, the people may be able to see. Its not a perfect example especially as you have other conditions with intact visual cortices which differentially process the information - you need to be able to manipulate the factor of interest without confounds. Blindsight doesn't do this. Furthermore, the "seeing" ability is probably created through older subcortical routes not meant for identifying objects etc and not the cortex. It really is a bad example. His lack of sight is not necessarily directly related to qualia, more the preservation of certain pathways.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:20:23 2017 No.9150903 >>9150856 >Most of your beliefs are stored in the non conscious part of you. They're not real beliefs until there is a consciousness to believe them.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:21:15 2017 No.9150906 >>9150764 I also wonder when they became blind. their ability to evade objects might be a product of developmental learning before the injury rather than an intrinsic ability.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:22:17 2017 No.9150912 >>9150782 We have experiences though don't we? I'm experiencing this right now.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:22:55 2017 No.9150913 >>9150903 Define "real belief".

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:23:42 2017 No.9150914 >>9150797 we are subjects in the brains model of the external world.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:26:34 2017 No.9150920

>>9150808
Im not concerned with whats true or false. Like i said before, the brain isnt either. Our experiences may not be directly representing the outside world (which is impossible considering Berkley's idea of a mind-independent object) but we have experiences nonetheless.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:27:55 2017 No.9150922 >>9150827 No, you just need perception...

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:28:57 2017 No.9150923 >>9150903 why?

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:31:17 2017 No.9150930 >>9150903 No True Scotsman up in this bitch.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:34:18 2017 No.9150935 >>9150816 Well, what are you waiting for? If computers can have beliefs then you should be able to give an example of a belief that computers have, or are you just too stupid to think of one?

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:36:11 2017 No.9150941

>>9150889
I think the better formulation I can give is: the practice of shaping one's own understanding freely, that is, without ethical, technological or scientifical compromises. I know that is still negative, but positively we can say it's some kind of aesthetical or purely contemplative refinement of understanding.
Obviously that's not any usual definition of philosophy, but that's because I find the usual ones unsatisfactory. If that's not philosophy then I'm not a philosopher, whatever; at this point it has only become a word; and if to be a philosopher is to content oneself with ready-made concepts and definitions, then fucking hell I'm not a philosopher.
About the question of defining belief, I don't think I could give a definition that would be any more clear than the common sense and instinctive use of the word. Definitions are pretty useless when given to such things, still more definitions that try to be "pure" or "scientific", that is, without resorting to some other thing with which we're familiar or of which we have some instinctive understanding. Either the definition will give a new sense to the word or it will not clarify anything.
Definitions are only of value when we're introducing a new or unusual concept.

>>9150914
We are subjects in the subject's model of the external world. This isn't going anywhere.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:41:40 2017 No.9150955

>>9150941
it is going somewhere because we clearly aren't our brains. we, as conscious agents don't take up the whole brain. most of it is unconscious. we are just a small part. The brain models the world. We are part of that model. We clearly aren't the aspects of the brain that generate the model and all the unconscious aspects.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:46:50 2017 No.9150967

>>9150816
Since you're still not giving an example I guess I'll just have to give you one.

A robot which has been programed to stop walking when its sensory data returns information which corresponds to it bumping into something "believes" that when it receives that data it means taht it has in fact bumped into something.

There, can we agree that this is an example of a computer believing something according to your own definition of belief and move on to the part of the argument where you get BTFO?

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:48:52 2017 No.9150973

>>9150941
Anyway, that's only one definition of philosophy I have; actually, I think a better definition would be: the practice of shaping one's own understanding of the world without being content with ready-made ideas and ends. The one I've given was a more special one.

>>9150955
I was thinking about the subject in a more Kantian sense instead of the "I". But then we can reformulate it thus: We're I's in the subject's model of the external world.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 14:51:11 2017 No.9150976 >>9150973 But I think I will be leaving for now. Discussing philosophical themes on 4chan always makes me frustrated. Maybe I will be back tonight.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 15:02:01 2017 No.9150997 >>9150973 is there a difference between self-awareness and consciousness?

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 15:22:19 2017 No.9151055

In my humble opinion, there are three possibilities:

1) There is no god. For unknown reasons humans survive and thrive on this planet. The fundamental problem with this, as every literate scientist should know, is: where do ideas come from, and how are we often able to come up with working principles "out of the blue", that is, by default? It seems not like electronics, air planes etc. are an inate part of nature. So either we must aknowledge, and therefore need to look at, some kind of extraterrestrial/extradimensional influence on our brain or our species. So far (SETI etc.) none was found.

2) There is an abrahamic god. This is actually very reasonable considering both historic documentation and the opinion of many accomplished individuals. Which means we should stop looking for wisedom and start looking for righteousness and living according to His will. I am discarding holy cows, buddhas and shrines etc. as these are just silly, at least in my opinion.

3) There is nothing but my brain and everything else is warped around for my survival. Seems plausible to me.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 15:26:21 2017 No.9151070
File: 5 KB, 240x228, psi.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

Yes, self-awareness is the intellectual ability to be aware of your own existence or even reflect upon it. Consciousness is a fundamental property of "having an experience". You can have either without the other.

For anyone genuinely interested in the fundamental mechanics of consciousness (and holding the assumptions that consciousness exists and may be explained), I recommend checking out work by Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi. Koch takes a more neurobiological approach, while Tononi attempts to define consciousness more mathematically. If you are interested in the neurobiological approach, I can really recommend looking into experiments on blindsight and visual cortex TMS - there is definitely a lot to be explored and understood at frontiers.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 15:29:26 2017 No.9151083 wind cry for no one saw his work

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 15:31:22 2017 No.9151090 >>9149329 t. Daniel Dennett

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 15:38:48 2017 No.9151108

What creeps me out the most is the fact that up to this date, no memory storage has been found in our brain. Our brain might very well just be a neuronal net for the decomposition of our sensory input coupled with some control mechanisms for our vegetative system. Which makes you wonder, who are we really and who is in control?

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 15:44:59 2017 No.9151120

>>9151108
Not true, the brain has an intricate memory storage system, although it is not well understood. It is well known that the hippocampus is crucial for the storage and retrieval of memories, although it seems that memories are not stored at a single specific location in the brain - however, damage to a specific location in the brain can cause the loss of specific memories.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 15:46:24 2017 No.9151122 origin of consciousness = 1

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 15:47:07 2017 No.9151124 >>9151108 we are emergent of the whole system. what control mechanisms? and what is vegetative?

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 15:54:31 2017 No.9151139 is shit realize consciousness is to consume it

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 15:57:23 2017 No.9151145

>>9151124
I assume 'vegetative' refers to unconsciousness "base survival" mechanisms, such as those in the brainstem that facilitate breathing. While it is possible that our conscious experience controls aspects of our nervous system, most of aspects are controlled by unconscious processes.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 16:01:48 2017 No.9151151 >>9151145 I believe that consciousness is the "experience" of informational integration when the brain explicitely contextualises sensory input.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 16:06:25 2017 No.9151163

>>9151151
Sensible position, in agreement with empirical evidence and the same position held by (imo) the most respectable scientists studying neural correlates of consciousness. However, large aspects of our minds are unconscious and likely not directly affected by our conscious experience.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 16:14:01 2017 No.9151172

>>9151163
yes, and i believe that, unconscious stuff happens when the brain is able to perform tasks at a certain confidence to the point of it being context-free or bayes-optimal. This entails a form of model-reduction where a situation no longer has to be considered in terms of a high-dimensional space so the parameters of the model are cut down. the task no longer requires the same informational integration or an exploration of potential conflicting solutions. This, i believe underlies the conversion of rich episodic memories into the sparse gists of semantic memory, and also the conversion of goal-directed behaviour into habits. I believe it also applies to perception at least to some extent.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 16:14:02 2017 No.9151173

>>9151120

Your statement is stretching the definition of "memory" or "information". You might aswell say our whole organism is a memory of our closest ancestors as we share their genetic signature, but this is not what memory storage is.

Consider the computer as an analogy, there are models from ASUS, Samsung, Apple etc., and they all share common features. And if you damage the CPU, you might no longer be able to access your photos stored on the hard disk, because your PC is unable to boot. But the memory is there, it is encoded on a magnetic disk, or stored as charge. What is the analogy of charge or GMR for the human brain? We don't know.

>>9151124

Vegetative, that is the system that drives our core funtions needed for survival, ie. heart rate, temperature control, bowel functions etc.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 16:22:20 2017 No.9151184 from depths of the seas where the alligator sleep

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 16:24:27 2017 No.9151187 >>9151173 Im not sure that memory is stored in the brain in that conventional sense

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 16:37:14 2017 No.9151220

>>9151172
Very much agree, especially the notion that consciousness arises from reductive integration of uncertain information. An interesting question assuming the notion holds: Is it possible for all neural information processing to temporarily become "certain" (not requiring consciousness-inducing integration), and what would this experience be like? (perhaps there is something to Buddhist enlightenment?...)

>>9151173
I didn't use the word 'information', but sure memory can refer to anything from old childhood memory to short-term memory of the last second - I meant it in the sense of long-term memories, whether semantic, episodic or procedural. Retrieval and storage seems to be very much context-dependent (where context refers to the current state of the nervous system), so definitely not as simple as voltage-no-voltage on transistors in memory chips. However, traumatic brain injury is well-known to cause loss of very specific memories without affecting other memories or storage/retrieval mechanisms.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 16:42:43 2017 No.9151237

>>9151220
im not sure, but i dont think this would be possible since we continually experience novel contexts with the arrow of time so in a sense, unless we are doing a task in the moment, we are always looking at what is there to do next, what is happening etc, etc.

Maybe it would be more similar to people with massive prefrontal injuries who literally cant do anything but sit in bed all day and perform inappropriate stereotyped actions/habits.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 17:28:12 2017 No.9151316

>>9150790
>A machine can be programmed to behave as though X is true, and that's a belief.
A machine's "x==true" has nothing in common with a conscious being's "x is true".
"x is true" requires an understanding of x and the concept of truth, "x==true" does not, there is no belief involved because believing something necessitates having some concept of what is being believed.

For a machine to be programmed to behave "as if X were true" doesn't imply that it believes X to be true, just as the fact that electrons behave as though it were true that they're attracted by protons and repelled by other electrons doesn't mean that they actually believe either of those propositions.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 18:51:25 2017 No.9151485

>>9151316
So you can elaborate on how much information the machine has to work with then. We're not magic, it's still behavior we're working in terms of either way. Also you're kind of underrating all the information a non-human machine already does go through even when working with relatively simple programs. You don't see it all usually because it would be a lot of irrelevent and tedious details to look at as a human programmer, but much like us, there's a lot more going on under the hood beyond what you see from the console alone.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 18:55:47 2017 No.9151491

>>9151316
>>9151485
Also I don't believe "understanding" actually maps to real world processes in any coherent way because the word is vague and has no standards or scope to it. What we do when someone labels a given situation as involving "understanding" would need to be analyzed into more specific and objective terms which would end up being the outline of the program you would need to write to make a machine do the same things.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 20:16:01 2017 No.9151608

>>9151485
>So you can elaborate on how much information the machine has to work with then.
It's not about quantity of information you doofus.
>magic
Derogatory word used to dismiss the possibility that something might not be explainable purely by mathematical descriptions of physical phenomena. The assertion that "We're not magic" is not based on any amount of facts of reason, only on feeling.
>it's still behavior we're working in terms of either way
Unproven assumption.
>Also I don't believe "understanding" actually maps to real world processes in any coherent way because the word is vague and has no standards or scope to it.
If by "real world" you mean "physical" then you're right, "understanding" is a mental process.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 20:31:32 2017 No.9151631

>>9151608
>The assertion that "We're not magic" is not based on any amount of facts of reason
We have all the facts in the world that point to us not being magic. Why do you think neurologists exist if our minds aren't based in physical reality? Why do you think chemicals alter your mind in consistent ways if our minds are magic and not based in physical reality?
>Derogatory word used to dismiss the possibility that something might not be explainable purely by mathematical descriptions of physical phenomena.
Can you explain to me how something that can't be explained in terms of physical cause and effect could be anything other than magic? If you have something real in mind I'd be interested to hear about it, but it sounds like you're just camping out on the "you can't know nuffin" position so far to me, which isn't very conducive to solving problems.
>It's not about quantity of information
We don't operate in terms of explicit / absolute instructions, but programs don't have to do that either. In fact a lot of the most successful innovations of the past few years have been based on the probabilistic ANN approach to programming where the programmer himself has no idea how to explicitly solve the problems his program solves because it learned through training on known data sets and adjusting weighted nodes based on the gradient of the error function so that the error is minimized below a given threshold and the program can give good answers to unknown data sets.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 21:08:06 2017 No.9151684

>>9151631
>We have all the facts in the world that point to us not being magic. Why do you think neurologists exist if our minds aren't based in physical reality? Why do you think chemicals alter your mind in consistent ways if our minds are magic and not based in physical reality?
I never said our minds are magic
Our minds don't need to be 100% physical or 100% "magical". Consider panpsychism, for instance.
>Can you explain to me how something that can't be explained in terms of physical cause and effect could be anything other than magic? If you have something real in mind I'd be interested to hear about it, but it sounds like you're just camping out on the "you can't know nuffin" position so far to me, which isn't very conducive to solving problems.
Depends on how you define "magic".
I'm not saying that you can't know anything, only that abscence of evidence is not evidence of abscence and that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
>Bunch of text that doesn't actually reply to anything I said
ok

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 21:32:07 2017 No.9151730 >>9149304 aaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAA 90% of problems that exist in philosophy arise from linguistic misunderstandings like this I guarantee you almost every single person in this thread has a different definition of "consciousness"

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 21:53:00 2017 No.9151761

>>9150686
>the problem is the *experience* of qualia
Isn't this literally because there is no mechanism that would allow to brains/nervous systems to communicate with each other?
>B-but WHY
No particular reason, you might as well be asking why the laws of physics are what they are
Answer: Because if they were different we would not be experiencing life in such a way that we would be able to questioning.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 22:03:07 2017 No.9151780

>>9151761
>Isn't this literally because there is no mechanism that would allow to brains/nervous systems to communicate with each other?
no
>No particular reason, you might as well be asking why the laws of physics are what they are
Why do things fall?
>No particular reason, they just do it because that's how things are.
Wow, real great answer. "I can't explain it so it must obviously be happening for no reason at all"

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 22:04:55 2017 No.9151785 >>9151730 m'wittgenstein

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 22:21:20 2017 No.9151803 >>9151780 >Wow, real great answer. "I can't explain it so it must obviously be happening for no reason at all" Assuming there is a anthro-satisfactory "why" for everything is your fault, not realty.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 22:27:04 2017 No.9151809 >>9150798 >its better than nothing. Wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism#David_Benatar

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 22:27:06 2017 No.9151810

>>9151684
>Our minds don't need to be 100% physical or 100% "magical". Consider panpsychism, for instance.
Panpsychism is what I'd call magic. We have an independently verifiable reality and it's described by physics. I don't know why you'd want to throw out the very good idea of checking claims about reality across multiple different parties, instances of observation, and mathematical modeling to entertain things that fail to register on any of those counts.
>abscence of evidence is not evidence of abscence
If you have no evidence and no plan on how to get evidence you have no reason to bring up the claim in the first place.
>whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent
We can speak about how human beliefs and behavior operate. That's not even part of the alleged "hard problem of consciousness." "Hard problem" is for "experience" / "qualia." Beliefs and behavior would actually fall under the Chalmers category of "easy problems."
>doesn't actually reply
Yes it does. You're arguing what we do with beliefs and behavior is something machines can't do and have taken the stance that it isn't just additional quantity of information that accounts for this difference. While I still think basically any difference between what we do and what machines do can be expressed in terms of additional quantity of information, I brought up ANN to show you how machines don't have to be explicitly programmed, and in learning to complete tasks without explicit programming they're doing something more similar to what we do.
You could respond to this by either agreeing with it or disagreeing, and if you choose to disagree, you might explain what specifically we're doing that you believe is still beyond the scope of this non-explicit learning process I've brought up in a way that isn't just a matter of greater complexity e.g. instead of three layers of weighted connections our brains might be using billions or even trillions.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 23:36:22 2017 No.9151890

>>9151810
>Panpsychism is what I'd call magic.
You haven't defined magic yet so I can't even comment on that.
>We have an independently verifiable reality and it's described by physics.I don't know why you'd want to throw out the very good idea of checking claims about reality across multiple different parties
I don't want to throw out jack shit, you only think I do because you subscribe to a retarded pro-science/anti-science dichotomy in which anyone who levels any amount of criticism at scientific knowledge is inherently anti-science.
Not everything which is true can be verified independently by different parties, particularly when dealing with consciousness. If I say "I'm angry", I'm the only person in the world who can know for a fact whether or not I'm actually angry or only claiming to be.
>We can speak about how human beliefs and behavior operate.
This has nothing to do with the particular thread of our argument that it's replying to. I never said that you can't speak about how human beliefs and behavior operate.
>You're arguing what we do with beliefs and behavior is something machines can't do
If you'd actually go back and read the post that I was replying to, you'll find that in the context of the conversation, "machines" implied "non-conscious machines". The discussion was about whether or not consciousness is a necessary prerequisite for the ability to believe things. The other guy (was it you? I'm not sure) used machines as an example of a non-conscious thing which, he claims, can believe things.
So what I'm saying is that what we do with beliefs and behavior is something NON-CONSCIOUS THINGS can't do, and if there were a machine which could do it then it would be conscious to some degree.
>and have taken the stance that it isn't just additional quantity of information that accounts for this difference
And from this you assumed what my stance on the issue was and replied to this assumed idea of mine, not to me.

Anonymous Tue Sep 5 23:50:37 2017 No.9151907

>>9151890
>If I say "I'm angry", I'm the only person in the world who can know for a fact whether or not I'm actually angry or only claiming to be.
https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/eb9.html
>Charles: Surely that view is too extreme. Like anyone else, I can observe my behavior ‘objectively.’ However, I also have an ability—which philosophers call 'privileged access’—with which I can inspect my own mind’ subjectively’ in ways that no other person can.
>We certainly each have some privileged access, but we should not overrate its significance. I suspect that our access to our own thoughts provides more quantity but does not seem to bring much more quality: our self-reflections reveal very little about the nature or causes of what we can see of our own mental activities. Indeed, our self-assessments are sometimes so inept that our friends may have better ideas about how we think. That’s one reason why I suggested that we mainly represent ourselves in the same ways that we use to describe our friends.
>Joan: Still, one thing is sure: none of my friends can feel my pain. I surely have privileged access to that.
>It is true that the nerves from your knee to your brain convey signals that none of your friends can receive. But it’s almost the same when you talk to a friend through a telephone. 'Privileged access' does not imply magic; it’s merely a matter of privacy. No matter how private those lines may be, there still must be some processes that try to assign some significance to the signals that get to your brain from your knee. That’s why Joan might find herself wondering, “Is this the same pain that I felt last winter, when my ski boot did not release quickly enough?”

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 5 23:56:51 2017 No.9151912 >>9151907 >'Privileged access' does not imply magic There's that word again. Everyone else's "knowledge" of me being angry is an educated guess at best. Only I can truly, objectively, without a doubt know whether or not I'm feeling angry.

Anonymous Wed Sep 6 00:04:37 2017 No.9151918

>>9151912
You don't know without a doubt whether you're feeling angry or not though. It's possible to be angry without being aware of it where other people around you notice it and point it out to you. You're overrating the reliability of your access to self-information.

Anonymous Wed Sep 6 00:06:49 2017 No.9151921

>>9151890
>beliefs and behavior is something NON-CONSCIOUS THINGS can't do, and if there were a machine which could do it then it would be conscious to some degree
It depends on your definition of "conscious" I guess. I typically take "consciousness" in the context of these discussions to refer to "qualia" since that's what the "hard problem of consciousness" is about. You seem to be defining "consciousness" here as something different from that, more like "attention." Which is a valid other sense of the word "consciousness" to use, but one I wouldn't normally think of just because attention seems like something you could clearly replicate in terms of behavior alone, whereas with the "qualia" topic it's much harder to get people to understand how that could also reduce to being a behavioral thing.
If you build a machine that can direct its processes to reference both different objects in the real world and different propositions in its own memory using ANN learning (as opposed to explicit instruction based programming), then that'd seem to me to qualify as a machine with the capacity for attention. And if you had it set up like the Watson AI from that one Jeopardy episode where it makes decisions probabilistically based on different degrees of confidence in possible answers to questions, then that's something I'd consider capable of having beliefs.

>>	Anonymous Wed Sep 6 00:24:39 2017 No.9151942 >>9150798 Hypocrite that you are, for you trust the chemicals in your brain to tell you they are chemicals. All knowledge is ultimately based on that which we cannot prove. Will you fight? Or will you perish like a dog?

>>	Anonymous Wed Sep 6 01:58:32 2017 No.9152032 >>9150698 Why would you think it can't have an explanation? Doesn't everything have an explanation even if that explanation is just based on the nature of what that thing is?

>>	Anonymous Wed Sep 6 02:00:39 2017 No.9152037 >>9150764 Our subjective experience is instant and continuous even if the processes that bring about the experiences are not.

>>	Anonymous Wed Sep 6 02:56:40 2017 No.9152097 >>9149304 What reason is there in thinking it came from anywhere?

Anonymous Wed Sep 6 08:45:40 2017 No.9152377

>>9152037
https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/eb4.html
>The Immanence Illusion: For most of the questions you would otherwise ask, some answers will have already arrived before the higher levels of your mind have had enough time to ask for them.
>In other words, if some data you need were already retrieved before you recognized that you needed it, you will get the impression of knowing it instantaneously—as though no other processes intervened.[12]
>For example, before you enter a familiar room, it is likely that you have already retrieved an old description of it, and it may be quite some time before you notice that some things have been changed; the idea that one exists in the present moment may be indispensable in everyday life—but much what we think that we see are the stereotypes of what we expected.
https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/eb8.html
>“The secret is that sight is intertwined with memory. When face to face with someone you newly meet, you seem to react almost instantly—but not as much to what you see as to what that sight “reminds” you of. The moment you sense the presence of a person, a world of assumptions are aroused that are usually true about people in general. At the same time, certain superficial cues remind you of particular people you've already met. Unconsciously, then, you will assume that this stranger must also resemble them, not only in appearance but in other traits as well. No amount of self- discipline can keep those superficial similarities from provoking assumptions that may then affect your judgments and decisions.”— Section §24‑1 of SoM.
>William H. Calvin: “The seemingly stable scene you normally “see'' is really a mental model that you construct—the eyes are actually darting all around, producing a retinal image as jerky as an amateur video, and some of what you thought you saw was instead filled in from memory.” [8]
Your "subjective experience" is really just a narrative, not a literal happenstance.

>>	Anonymous Wed Sep 6 08:46:30 2017 No.9152378 >>9149304 not from frogposting

>>	Anonymous Wed Sep 6 08:49:16 2017 No.9152380 File: 88 KB, 677x995, goyim-i-57c1a2b246419.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>9149304 If I told you, you wouldn't believe me...

>>	Anonymous Wed Sep 6 09:01:17 2017 No.9152387 >>9152380 Try me, my body is prepared <3

>>	Anonymous Wed Sep 6 10:03:23 2017 No.9152438 >>9151918 I said "can", not "can't help but" Go get yourself some reading comprehension and then get back to me.

>>	Anonymous Wed Sep 6 12:06:31 2017 No.9152587 Consciousness is a trait inherited from Neanderthals. Some races have no conscious at all and live entirely in the moment. See: native, pure Africans having zero temporal awareness.

>>	Anonymous Wed Sep 6 12:21:02 2017 No.9152603 >>9149329 >Consciousness exists >blessings exists >curses exists Try again pal. And yes, it's a blessing

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 7 01:33:11 2017 No.9153851 >>9152377 There is a difference between the processes interpreting data input and what it is to feel a subjective sense of self.

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 7 01:41:54 2017 No.9153876 >>9152377 just because experience is inaccurate doesnt mean it isnt real. And experience doesnt have to be linear to sensory input.

>>	Anonymous Thu Sep 7 02:51:07 2017 No.9153963 >>9152377 This is an accurate description of how STEMlords think. Schizophrenic in the literal sense of the word, Aesthetic-based, past-oriented.

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/sci/ - Science & Math