[dlorde]

It isn't that simple. You can have a deluded inteligent computer system which makes incorrect judgements which lead to the generation of data which asserts that feelings are felt in the system without any feelings actually being felt in the system at all. These data making assertions that feelings are felt are then used within the thinking of the system as proof that feelings are felt, but they're all based on untruths. There is no consciousness in such a system, but it continually asserts both to us and to itself that there is.

This sounds a bit like the philosophical zombies. Personally, I'd say that if an intelligent computer system can really be deluded (i.e. be able hold a belief in the face of contradictory evidence), that's pretty good evidence for consciousness But seriously, if such a system displays all the behavioural characteristics of consciousness appropriately, how can we say it is not conscious? after all, that's how we judge consciousness, even subjectively. Yes, we could program a system to superficially appear conscious when it isn't, but I would suggest that there would be differences that would be distinguishable. If it was not possible to tell, I'd say it is conscious. This is what Ayer proposed in the 1930's: "The only ground I can have for asserting that an object which appears to be conscious is not really a conscious being, but only a dummy or a machine, is that it fails to satisfy one of the empirical tests by which the presence or absence of consciousness is determined."

We may be the same as that deluded system. It doesn't feel as if that is the case, of course, because we can stick pins in ourselves and imagine that we feel the pain, but is there really any pain there or are we just being fooled into thinking that there is? And where is the "I" in the machine that is feeling this pain?

There is pain if we feel pain; a headache, or even phantom limb pain is 'real' pain; that feeling of hurting is what we mean by 'pain'. So, I say, for consciousness - that sense of feeling aware, or of self-awareness. That sensation is what consciousness is, and it is accompanied by neurophysiological, and, usually, by physiological and behavioural indicators. The 'I' is an emergent construct, a collaboration of neurological processes. Strictly, its location is in the brain, as it's generated by brain processes, but its subjective location (where it feels it is located) may not be.

In a computer, no matter how intelligent the software becomes, there will never be an "I" in it capable of feeling anything.

That's arguable. Consciousness isn't intelligence. If we built a neural network similar to the brain (architecturally and connectedly) and trained it appropriately, there's no reason why it should not have a subjective sense of self. It won't happen unless it's structured appropriately; we know certain structures are essential to generate various aspects of self & self image. There are various ventures in progress, of which Blue Brain Project looks like the best bet, but their objective is neurological disease research rather than consciousness, so unless diseases of consciousness come under that remit, we may not see it.

Science has failed to find an "I" in us too - all we have to go on are the pronouncements of the information systems within us which assert that there is an "I" inside us somewhere feeling feelings, and yet the information systems which create the data that documents this phenomenon cannot be trusted as it should be impossible for them to access such knowledge.

That's not entirely true; there are many examples of sensory manipulations, or drugs, or damage through disease or injury, that cause faulty construction of self-image, sense of self, and 'I'. The locations, connections, and functions of many of the affected areas that contribute are known to varying degrees, so we're not completely in the dark. Of course, although we know some of the requirements, we're still some way from identifying precisely how that subjective sense of self is generated.

It seems most likely that all that's happening is that assertions are being mapped to inputs such that an input signal which may represent damage being done has the idea of "pain" mapped to it by the information system, and then that fiction of pain is never questioned.

That's pretty much how it seems to work. Pain is generated by and in the brain; it doesn't exist outside it. There are mappings that trigger a bunch of dispositional activity that can include sensations of pain. That's how brain in general seems to work - mappings overlaying dispositions (simple or 'primitive' responses). Pain is triggered usually in response to sensory inputs (which are just pulses of membrane depolarizations like most neural activity), but sometimes just from internal neural 'noise' or spontaneous firings. Damasio's 'Self Comes to Mind' has some interesting information about how these systems work (some of it a bit technical).

There cannot be a transmission of knowledge of actual pain in the input signal itself unless it comes ready packaged as data which speaks of pain, but if it came in that form it would have to be written in the same language as used by the information system collecting that data, which either means that part of the information system is on the other end of the input signal line or another information system that happens to speak the same language is at that other end, but either way the problem is merely transferred - the data system at the far end would still have to know that the pain is real, and yet it can't. All it can do is make an assumption that pain is involved and then assert as much in the data.

Yes; the knowledge or awareness of pain comes last. To start with, it's just a pattern of afferent nerve impulses like any other. The brain processes these signals and various others that provide a context (for example, you may cut yourself but not feel any pain until you see the damage), and [the sensation of] pain may (or may not) be generated (fight-or-flight stress hormones & neurotransmitters, etc., may suppress it).

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Hi, folks :

I will try to respond to the above , later on .

I will just say the following , for the time being at least though :

Thanks for your interesting insights i do appreciate indeed , althought they are just materialistic ones, once again...no wonder  :

The assumption that life is just a biological process ,for example, has more to do with materialism as a world view , than with science proper : take a look back at the past to find out about the roots of such assumption , and regarding the birth of materialism itself .

We are much more than just physical bodies : materialists , per definition, think otherwise of course ,but to say that human consciousness is just an illusion ,for instance ,  how "real " ( dlorde )that illusion might ever be , is the very negation of the validity or truth of all our knowledge , including the scientific one, including that concerning evolution itself, once again ..

Once again, just tell me how can the human consciousness as such , as a means to make any sense of reality , be the product of our evolved brain , that's just a tool to approach reality via our senses , via representations of reality ?  : don't you see the inherent intrinsic paradox or contradiction contained in the materialistic assumption that human consciousness is just a biological process  created by the evolved brain ?

[alancalverd]

Who says reality makes sense? Why should it? To whom? Our entire existence is due tot he fact that it doesn't.

[cheryl j]

I honestly cannot understand how one can attack materialism and reductionism, blithely dismiss things like emergent properties and offer absolutely nothing better in terms of explanation of phenomena.

[dlorde]

I honestly cannot understand how one can attack materialism and reductionism, blithely dismiss things like emergent properties and offer absolutely nothing better in terms of explanation of phenomena.

You don't need such explanations if you have faith. Apparently it's beyond logic, reason, and science...

[David Cooper]

I honestly cannot understand how one can attack materialism and reductionism, blithely dismiss things like emergent properties and offer absolutely nothing better in terms of explanation of phenomena.

Emergent properties are well worth dismissing. Nothing ever emerges that isn't 100% rooted in the components, even if it's hard to recognise them until they emerge. When it comes to consciousness, you can't have something emerge out of a system to be sentient (which is what consciousness is really all about) without any of the components being sentient unless your explanation is based on magic. Sentient geometry with no sentient components is not a scientific explanation of anything.

We're up against the biggest puzzle of them all here, and there is nothing close to a satisfactory explanation on the table. All proposed solutions involve either a large injection of magic or the removal of consciousness altogether, which goes completely against what we directly feel, so none of us can claim to be arguing from a good position. It is important though that we recognise where we are injecting magic into our explanations and don't pretend it isn't there.

[David Cooper]

This sounds a bit like the philosophical zombies. Personally, I'd say that if an intelligent computer system can really be deluded (i.e. be able hold a belief in the face of contradictory evidence), that's pretty good evidence for consciousness

Not when you can examine the workings and see exactly where the fictions are being generated. A fiction of consciousness is simply not consciousness. Writing a program which sends the word "Ouch!" to the screen does not mean there is any actual pain experienced in the system, and the same principle applies to a more complex program which creates other fictions about feelings which it is supposedly feeling. The intelligent machine may be fooled into generating fictional claims about feelings and to mark them as true, but it is plain wrong - there is no consciousness involved.

But seriously, if such a system displays all the behavioural characteristics of consciousness appropriately, how can we say it is not conscious? after all, that's how we judge consciousness, even subjectively.

A simple program printing "Ouch!" to the screen whenever a key is pressed would pass your test, but it would be lying about the existence of pain.

Yes, we could program a system to superficially appear conscious when it isn't, but I would suggest that there would be differences that would be distinguishable. If it was not possible to tell, I'd say it is conscious.

No, it would be wise to treat it as if it is conscious so as not to harm it just in case it is, but you should not label it as conscious unless you can see the whole mechanism and identify where the feelings are being experienced and what it is that is experiencing them.

There is pain if we feel pain; a headache, or even phantom limb pain is 'real' pain; that feeling of hurting is what we mean by 'pain'. So, I say, for consciousness - that sense of feeling aware, or of self-awareness. That sensation is what consciousness is, and it is accompanied by neurophysiological, and, usually, by physiological and behavioural indicators. The 'I' is an emergent construct, a collaboration of neurological processes. Strictly, its location is in the brain, as it's generated by brain processes, but its subjective location (where it feels it is located) may not be.

When you torture someone, what is it that's suffering? Imagine that you can make a brain out of a few thousand atoms. None of those atoms is able to feel pain, but pain is felt somewhere when they are connected together in a particular arrangement and a certain input is fed into them. What feels the pain? The atoms don't feel it, so is it the geometrical arrangement itself that you are torturing and causing to suffer? Or is it something else that doesn't exist which is emerging to suffer? Does that not strike you as being rather magical?

In a computer, no matter how intelligent the software becomes, there will never be an "I" in it capable of feeling anything.

That's arguable. Consciousness isn't intelligence.

Indeed it isn't, but the claims we have about its existence come from intelligent information systems in our brains. If we didn't have the claims about things like pain coming out of such intelligent systems, we would know nothing of it.

If we built a neural network similar to the brain (architecturally and connectedly) and trained it appropriately, there's no reason why it should not have a subjective sense of self. It won't happen unless it's structured appropriately; we know certain structures are essential to generate various aspects of self & self image. There are various ventures in progress, of which Blue Brain Project looks like the best bet, but their objective is neurological disease research rather than consciousness, so unless diseases of consciousness come under that remit, we may not see it.

If we make such a system and it claims to be able to feel qualia, we won't know whether to believe it or not, and it will be programmed in the same way as our minds, hiding all the fine working in complex networks which are practically impossible to untangle. Even a simple neural network can be so complex in the way it functions that no one can work out how it does what it does.

Science has failed to find an "I" in us too - all we have to go on are the pronouncements of the information systems within us which assert that there is an "I" inside us somewhere feeling feelings, and yet the information systems which create the data that documents this phenomenon cannot be trusted as it should be impossible for them to access such knowledge.

That's not entirely true; there are many examples of sensory manipulations, or drugs, or damage through disease or injury, that cause faulty construction of self-image, sense of self, and 'I'. The locations, connections, and functions of many of the affected areas that contribute are known to varying degrees, so we're not completely in the dark. Of course, although we know some of the requirements, we're still some way from identifying precisely how that subjective sense of self is generated.

All we have done so far is find ways to stop and restore the reporting of the experience of sensations - we rely 100% on the individual being studied reporting to us whether they were conscious or not. That may allow us to rule out the possibility of the "I" being in certain places, so we may in time track it down to a small location or set of locations, but even then we'll have a hard time trying to find it within those.

It seems most likely that all that's happening is that assertions are being mapped to inputs such that an input signal which may represent damage being done has the idea of "pain" mapped to it by the information system, and then that fiction of pain is never questioned.

That's pretty much how it seems to work. Pain is generated by and in the brain; it doesn't exist outside it. There are mappings that trigger a bunch of dispositional activity that can include sensations of pain. That's how brain in general seems to work - mappings overlaying dispositions (simple or 'primitive' responses). Pain is triggered usually in response to sensory inputs (which are just pulses of membrane depolarizations like most neural activity), but sometimes just from internal neural 'noise' or spontaneous firings. Damasio's 'Self Comes to Mind' has some interesting information about how these systems work (some of it a bit technical).

I wasn't referring to the inputs from nerves interfacing with the brain, but to the inputs to the information system from the places where the experiences of pain and other qualia supposedly occur. For the information system to be informed that pain has been experienced, there needs to be an input to signal that, but the input signal cannot transmit actual knowledge of pain to the information system, so the information system has to map an assertion that there was pain to the input, an assertion which it cannot back up because it is nothing more than a mapping. The information system has no means to know anything about the pain - all it can know is that there is an input from something which relates to a warning of potential damage being done.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Important note :

I personally think that human consciousness is simply the "I" , or "me"  through which  we interpret or perceive the representation of reality created by our brain   via our senses .

But then again, you would ask me what that "I" or "me" exactly is : i would say : it's the soul : what is the soul ? one would ask ...

That would bring us back to square zero again ...so .

Besides, and regardless of what the soul might be , i think that the soul "resides " in our whole beings , in every cell , atom or organ of ours , not just in the brain : the soul is "located " within and without in fact (Extended sense of reality or the extended consciousness via the "reading" of peoples ' minds,via some sort of telepathy ...)   ,and has no specific "location " ,due to its immaterial nature which escapes space -time= that's no contradiction in fact  .

I also think that human consciousness is a dynamic ever-changing process as well , but the core "I" or "me " in it is unchanging ..., and there are also many levels of consciousness as well ...I dunno .

In other words :

Feelings , emotions ....(There are some scientifc studies such as the one here below which confirms the fact that behavior , emotions, feelings ...are not always required for  consciousness , as some other scientific studies had shown that the brain is not always needed for  consciousness as well sometimes.....

...

 ...) , feelings , emotions ...thus are  in fact no built-in illusions in our systems we get fooled by ,or we confuse with reality : they are as real as we are,but the materialistic interpretation of the biological evolution , via the natural selection ,can only logically conclude otherwise,logically in the materialistic sense at least , to be more precize  : that the evolved brain created consciousness , and therefore the latter is just a sophisticated survival strategy built-in illusion in our systems we perceive as real while it is not as such  :materialists do not even realise or detect the inherent intrinsic paradox or contradiction contained in their latter assumption ,ironically enough .

My own alternative explanation for pain , emotions, feelings ...is as follows :This is just an attempt of mine on the subject : i might be wrong of course : I dunno :

"We" (what we can call our consciousness,relatively speaking then  )  get informed  by our sensory "inputs " about a given representation of reality created by our brain in the process as a result , our consciousness acts up on , by trying to make sense of that given representation of reality by "translating " it into some sort of conscious representation of reality , the latter causes our biological system to act accordingly :

Example : when i hear some bad news on the phone, for example , the sound waves of the voice of speaker via the phone ( the sound waves of the voice of  the speaker at the other end of the phone gets converted to electro-magnetic signals , which get , in their turn , converted to sound waves again hitting my ears ' nerves ...), the sound waves of the speaker's voice hit my ears' nerves which send them to particular areas of my brain : my consciousness or "me " gets informed by those sensory "inputs " and therefore tries to make sense of them , which triggers a conscious feeling of sadness by my consciousness as a result that can even bring tears to my eyes afterwards :

My consciousness gets informed by my sensory "inputs " transmitted to my brain by the sound waves of the speaker's voice  via my ears' nerves , my consciousness then generates the sad feeling as a result , which causes my biological system to trigger tears in my eyes ...= consciousness is not generated by the brain : the latter merely informs it of that given representation of reality corresponding to those sound waves of the voice of the speaker ,my consciousness or "me " acts upon by triggering the feeling of sadness which results in the biological process of tears flowing from my eyes ,I dunno .

In short : the brain does not generate feelings , emotions, pain,consciousness  ....via triggering the alleged biological processes resulting in the feeling of pain, emotions, feelings ....which trigger tears in my eyes = it's exactly the other way around : feelings , emotions , pain ...are triggered by my own consciousness which results in the feedback leading to the biological process resulting in triggering tears in my eyes , after the fact that my sensory inputs inform my consciousness of that particular representation of reality created by my own brain via my own senses .

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Materialism is just that n fact , once again : a world view most of people , including people here , do confuse with science itself ,unfortunately enough :
You have been indoctrinated and brainwashed by materialism for more than 5 centuries now that you cannot but confuse it with science ,thanks to all those scientific great huge advances in the last centuries .
No wonder when we take into consideration that dominating materialistic paradigm in science stating the " fact " that the reality out there is  exclusively material : a materialistic "fact " or paradigm which has been largely refuted by quantum physics at least .
The materialistic assumption that life itself as a result is just a matter , so to speak, of just material biological processes does not hold much water either = no wonder that materialism fails pathetically at the level of human sciences mainly and elsewhere , and even at the level of inorganic  matter itself , and even at the level of quantum physics ...despite the great achievements of materialism at the level of exact -sciences at least , relatively speaking .

In short :

It is only a matter of time before that materialistic  deterministic mechanical reductionistic paradigm becomes ...history , and there are many non-materialistic  alternative approaches of human consciousness,life ... as well out there :

So, materialists just behave as if they do not exist as such, otherwise they would be refuting their own materialism as a world view in the process , as a result= they set a lethal trap for themselves they cannot escape , unless they reject materialism itself  .

P.S.: "The evolved brain created consciousness as a so-called emergent property " is yet another materialistic assumption though = not a scientific fact = not even remotely close . especially when we take into consideration the fact that we still do not know much about the extremely complex human brain, despite all those neurological advances ...

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Who says reality makes sense? Why should it? To whom? Our entire existence is due tot he fact that it doesn't.

That's just your own opinion on the subject , you "extracted " from or you got made to believe in through materialism as a world view = logical, in the materialistic sense at least .

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

I honestly cannot understand how one can attack materialism and reductionism, blithely dismiss things like emergent properties and offer absolutely nothing better in terms of explanation of phenomena.

You don't need such explanations if you have faith. Apparently it's beyond logic, reason, and science...

Come on : if that was the case : how ,on earth , was it possible then that the early muslims "invented " and practiced science ,mainly thanks to that Qur'anic epistemology on the subject .?
You should know better than saying such a stupid thing , sorry .

Science , reason, logic ...have limits , but that does not mean we should "discard " them , who said that ?

Try to detect the context of the statements of people ....

[dlorde]

Emergent properties are well worth dismissing. Nothing ever emerges that isn't 100% rooted in the components, even if it's hard to recognise them until they emerge. When it comes to consciousness, you can't have something emerge out of a system to be sentient (which is what consciousness is really all about) without any of the components being sentient unless your explanation is based on magic.

Of course emergent properties are rooted in the components, that's the point; they are properties of the components interacting together that are not properties of the components individually. So water is wet, but a water molecule isn't; there's nothing about an individual water molecule that is wet. In Conway's Game of Life, there's nothing in the simple rules of a grid square's life & death that predicts a glider gun, that's an emergent phenomenon of multiple iterations of multiple grid squares. Tin and copper are soft metals, but mix them together and the alloy is harder than either; an emergent property of the interaction of copper and tin atoms, not predictable from examining a tin atom and a copper atom.

[alancalverd]

Come on : if that was the case : how ,on earth , was it possible then that the early muslims "invented " and practiced science ,mainly thanks to that Qur'anic epistemology on the subject .?

"Thanks to" or "despite"?

The essence of science is that there is no supernatural or revealed authority: the very opposite of all religions.

[dlorde]

if such a system displays all the behavioural characteristics of consciousness appropriately, how can we say it is not conscious? after all, that's how we judge consciousness

A simple program printing "Ouch!" to the screen whenever a key is pressed would pass your test, but it would be lying about the existence of pain.

Well no, no it wouldn't. All the behavioural characteristics of consciousness is not 'Ouch!' when a key is pressed; I'm thinking along the lines of an extended Turing Test, an in-depth examination. Of course, the criteria for establishing consciousness would need to be defined first. What must any system be able to do for us to judge it conscious?

When you torture someone, what is it that's suffering?

They are; their body and mind.

Their body suffers physical damage, triggering a flood of neural signals to the brainstem, the evolutionarily ancient part, where the nucleus tractus solitarius & the parabrachial nucleus generate activity maps that are the felt body states. These areas have feed-forward and feeback links to many other parts of the brain, but the essence of the experience is generated there.

Imagine that you can make a brain out of a few thousand atoms. ... <fantasy> ... Does that not strike you as being rather magical?

It would have to be magical, because you can't make a brain out of a few thousand atoms. You need around a million neurons to make a cockroach brain, and it's not clear whether they feel pain at all.

If we make such a system and it claims to be able to feel qualia, we won't know whether to believe it or not, and it will be programmed in the same way as our minds, hiding all the fine working in complex networks which are practically impossible to untangle.

That's why we'd have to judge it the same way we judge consciousness in ourselves and others - by how it behaves, what it says and does.

All we have done so far is find ways to stop and restore the reporting of the experience of sensations - we rely 100% on the individual being studied reporting to us whether they were conscious or not. That may allow us to rule out the possibility of the "I" being in certain places, so we may in time track it down to a small location or set of locations, but even then we'll have a hard time trying to find it within those.

Not quite sure what you're saying here; I was referring to the thousands of examples of faulty construction of the self, or sense of self, in various ways; the sort of peculiarities covered by V. S. Ramachandran in his research and books. Here's a link to some of his videos you may find interesting.

I wasn't referring to the inputs from nerves interfacing with the brain, but to the inputs to the information system from the places where the experiences of pain and other qualia supposedly occur. For the information system to be informed that pain has been experienced, there needs to be an input to signal that, but the input signal cannot transmit actual knowledge of pain to the information system, so the information system has to map an assertion that there was pain to the input, an assertion which it cannot back up because it is nothing more than a mapping. The information system has no means to know anything about the pain - all it can know is that there is an input from something which relates to a warning of potential damage being done.

I explained that the brainstem nuclei generate the felt body states, the foundational feelings of pain or pleasure, etc., by mapping the afferent sensory flow from internal and external body senses. From these nuclei, the emotional and hormonal responses are mediated, via signals to the insular cortex and thalamic nuclei. The insular cortex refines and differentiates those basal feelings, relating them to contextual activity elsewhere in the brain. It also feeds forwards to higher cortical areas. This is all described in more detail in Damasio's 'Self Comes To Mind' (chapter 3 onwards).

[David Cooper]

Besides, and regardless of what the soul might be , i think that the soul "resides " in our whole beings , in every cell , atom or organ of ours , not just in the brain : the soul is "located " within and without in fact (Extended sense of reality or the extended consciousness via the "reading" of peoples ' minds,via some sort of telepathy ...)   ,and has no specific "location " ,due to its immaterial nature which escapes space -time= that's no contradiction in fact  .

That's lovely, but it still has to interact with the information system of the brain which does all the thinking mechanically. When you damage the structure of the brain, you can see the thinking go wrong. When you look at a species with inferior wiring, you see a reduction in thinking ability. If the "soul" is to think, it is tied to a mechanical system which does all the work for it and without which the soul can do nothing. This mechanical thinking system, the information system, constructs information about the soul and the feelings that are experienced by it, so it needs to be able to get that knowledge from the soul somehow. All matter and energy may be conscious, as may a fabric of space or something outside of space entirely, but you still have to propose a means by which this consciousness can interface with the information system of the brain which asserts that consciousness is real. How can the mechanical information system ever know? The way to try to find out is to try to follow back the claims generated by the information system to see how they are formed and what they're based on; to see on what basis they are labelled as true.

[David Cooper]

Emergent properties are well worth dismissing. Nothing ever emerges that isn't 100% rooted in the components, even if it's hard to recognise them until they emerge. When it comes to consciousness, you can't have something emerge out of a system to be sentient (which is what consciousness is really all about) without any of the components being sentient unless your explanation is based on magic.

Of course emergent properties are rooted in the components, that's the point; they are properties of the components interacting together that are not properties of the components individually. So water is wet, but a water molecule isn't; there's nothing about an individual water molecule that is wet. In Conway's Game of Life, there's nothing in the simple rules of a grid square's life & death that predicts a glider gun, that's an emergent phenomenon of multiple iterations of multiple grid squares. Tin and copper are soft metals, but mix them together and the alloy is harder than either; an emergent property of the interaction of copper and tin atoms, not predictable from examining a tin atom and a copper atom.

You're missing the point. Nothing emerges that can't be accounted for by the components (which include the fabric and geometry of space in which the components are able to act). Emergent properties such as "wet" are compound ideas which can themselves be broken down. There is nothing extra that pings into existence to be conscious when lots of things are stuck together in a complex arrangement. The point is that nothing can ping into existence out of complexity to do such things as suffer which cannot also be identified in the components. A plurality cannot suffer without at least one of the singularities within it suffering. A complex geometrical arrangement cannot be tortured without at least one of the components suffering. If none of the components suffer, the imagined emerged thing that supposedly suffers cannot exist.

[David Cooper]

A simple program printing "Ouch!" to the screen whenever a key is pressed would pass your test, but it would be lying about the existence of pain.

Well no, no it wouldn't. All the behavioural characteristics of consciousness is not 'Ouch!' when a key is pressed; I'm thinking along the lines of an extended Turing Test, an in-depth examination. Of course, the criteria for establishing consciousness would need to be defined first. What must any system be able to do for us to judge it conscious?

Any more complex case where you add all manner of extra functionality to confuse the situation will still at root work in the same way. A signal comes in, an assertion that pain is experienced is mapped to that input, and then that assertion is made in some way, but it is nothing more than an assertion. There was no pain in the system. You could have a robot that behaves exactly like a human when you interact with it, but every claim it makes about feelings will be achieved by mapping assertions to imputs.

When you torture someone, what is it that's suffering?

They are; their body and mind.

Their body suffers physical damage, triggering a flood of neural signals to the brainstem, the evolutionarily ancient part, where the nucleus tractus solitarius & the parabrachial nucleus generate activity maps that are the felt body states. These areas have feed-forward and feeback links to many other parts of the brain, but the essence of the experience is generated there.

With a robot that behaves like a human, you can break its arm off and it will not suffer. With the right anaesthetics, you can do the same with a human. The body does not suffer. The suffering, if there is any, takes place in the brain (or perhaps outside of this virtual universe entirely). Don't mix up the other meaning of "suffer" as in "the car suffered an accident" where it merely means it is the object of the hidden verb "damaged".

The suffering relevant to a discussion of consciousness is restricted to unpleasant qualia such as pain. If nothing exists that actually experiences such qualia, there can be no suffering. Something complex that experiences qualia without any of the components experiencing qualia will not do - that is a magical solution and not a scientific one.

Imagine that you can make a brain out of a few thousand atoms. ... <fantasy> ... Does that not strike you as being rather magical?

It would have to be magical, because you can't make a brain out of a few thousand atoms. You need around a million neurons to make a cockroach brain, and it's not clear whether they feel pain at all.

You're missing the point. It's just a matter of number. If you make it quintillions instead of a thousand, it makes no difference to the thought experiment other than hiding the problem in greater complexity. The thought experiment can be done with any number down to two atoms. If you can have a system of two atoms in which pain is experienced but no pain is experienced by either atom, what the heck was it that experienced the pain?

If we make such a system and it claims to be able to feel qualia, we won't know whether to believe it or not, and it will be programmed in the same way as our minds, hiding all the fine working in complex networks which are practically impossible to untangle.

That's why we'd have to judge it the same way we judge consciousness in ourselves and others - by how it behaves, what it says and does.

But we don't even know that we have consciousness ourselves. Our brains generate data that claim we have it, and then we believe those claims. But the claims are generated by an information system which is not competent to make such a judgement.

All we have done so far is find ways to stop and restore the reporting of the experience of sensations - we rely 100% on the individual being studied reporting to us whether they were conscious or not. That may allow us to rule out the possibility of the "I" being in certain places, so we may in time track it down to a small location or set of locations, but even then we'll have a hard time trying to find it within those.

Not quite sure what you're saying here; I was referring to the thousands of examples of faulty construction of the self, or sense of self, in various ways; the sort of peculiarities covered by V. S. Ramachandran in his research and books. Here's a link to some of his videos you may find interesting.

My internet connection is too slow to view videos.

I wasn't referring to the inputs from nerves interfacing with the brain, but to the inputs to the information system from the places where the experiences of pain and other qualia supposedly occur. For the information system to be informed that pain has been experienced, there needs to be an input to signal that, but the input signal cannot transmit actual knowledge of pain to the information system, so the information system has to map an assertion that there was pain to the input, an assertion which it cannot back up because it is nothing more than a mapping. The information system has no means to know anything about the pain - all it can know is that there is an input from something which relates to a warning of potential damage being done.

I explained that the brainstem nuclei generate the felt body states, the foundational feelings of pain or pleasure, etc., by mapping the afferent sensory flow from internal and external body senses. From these nuclei, the emotional and hormonal responses are mediated, via signals to the insular cortex and thalamic nuclei. The insular cortex refines and differentiates those basal feelings, relating them to contextual activity elsewhere in the brain. It also feeds forwards to higher cortical areas. This is all described in more detail in Damasio's 'Self Comes To Mind' (chapter 3 onwards).

You can describe all that in as much detail as you like, but it never gets to the point where feelings interface with the information system of the brain. The processor of a computer could be feeling all manner of sensations as it crunches through the code of an AGI system which matches the intelligence of a human (such programs will soon exist - my work is to build one), but there is no way for those feelings to be read by the program running in the machine. There is no "read qualia" machine code instruction, and even if there was one, it would be impossible to test the truth of any information supplied through it because they would be nothing more than assertions that there are feelings being experienced.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Come on : if that was the case : how ,on earth , was it possible then that the early muslims "invented " and practiced science ,mainly thanks to that Qur'anic epistemology on the subject .?

"Thanks to" or "despite"?

The essence of science is that there is no supernatural or revealed authority: the very opposite of all religions.

I thought you could read well .Did you understand what i said here above at least ? That was so simple though .
You are asking me about an issue which was largely debatted in that other thread " What's the real origin of the scientific method ?" you even happened to participate in , ironically enough .
So, be serious and stop this uninformed non-sense of yours ,please , if you wanna be taken seriously at least

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Besides, and regardless of what the soul might be , i think that the soul "resides " in our whole beings , in every cell , atom or organ of ours , not just in the brain : the soul is "located " within and without in fact (Extended sense of reality or the extended consciousness via the "reading" of peoples ' minds,via some sort of telepathy ...)   ,and has no specific "location " ,due to its immaterial nature which escapes space -time= that's no contradiction in fact  .

That's lovely, but it still has to interact with the information system of the brain which does all the thinking mechanically. When you damage the structure of the brain, you can see the thinking go wrong. When you look at a species with inferior wiring, you see a reduction in thinking ability. If the "soul" is to think, it is tied to a mechanical system which does all the work for it and without which the soul can do nothing. This mechanical thinking system, the information system, constructs information about the soul and the feelings that are experienced by it, so it needs to be able to get that knowledge from the soul somehow. All matter and energy may be conscious, as may a fabric of space or something outside of space entirely, but you still have to propose a means by which this consciousness can interface with the information system of the brain which asserts that consciousness is real. How can the mechanical information system ever know? The way to try to find out is to try to follow back the claims generated by the information system to see how they are formed and what they're based on; to see on what basis they are labelled as true.

(I am well aware of some  silly childish games you have been playing here = irrelevent though =Grow up )

A mechanical thinking system ? Come on,be serious  .Is the thought process mechanical ?If it is  mechanical, how would you explain human creativity, innovations, imagination,progress   ...?
You seem to confuse the correlations or interactions between the 2 different "systems " : brain and mind ,with causation : i think that mind (mind is not just semantics, not just a word we invented ) and brain are 2 totally different "things" which do work together as one = a combination of dualism and monism then .
The brain  does not cause the mind  ; they just correlate or interacte with each other : how ? Beat me : i dunno .
The mind is the one which is doing the most important work : thinking , feeling , experiencing , seeing ....= even seeing is not done by the brain, it's in fact done by the mind .
How can a  biological or mechanical system for that matter ever be able to think ,feel , experience or even see  things ....the developers of the so-called artificial intelligence have been having a hard time to make "sentient " machines that can at least "see " ...They will never be able to make those machines think, feel, experience or see things ...the way we do at least = machines can only simulate that .to some degree at least = they can never be conscious, ever .
I think that our biological neurological system is just a tool to report sensory "inputs " ( I do reject this materialistic mechanical reductionistic computer analogy )or  stimuli to our mind which acts upon that by sending ,somehow, feedbacks to the biological system to make it take action ...I dunno .

Don't you realise the fact that  your childish materialistic interpretations of scientific studies are just that = materialistic  childish  interpretations ?

When i was a child , i also used to 'think " that verything was  made of matter (not to mention that quantum physics have proven the fact that "matter is not really made of solid matter , i am way beyond that childish stage you are still stuck in .

[dlorde]

But we don't even know that we have consciousness ourselves. Our brains generate data that claim we have it, and then we believe those claims. But the claims are generated by an information system which is not competent to make such a judgement.

I think here we have the point where we differ, and it looks purely semantic. I'm simply saying that the sensation we have, that feeling, of awareness and self, is what we call consciousness. Whatever it's provenance, whether based on valid or invalid data (and I don't think it is at all what it subjectively feels like, so I agree it doesn't exist as what it feels like), whether you call it an illusion or a fabrication, that feeling or sensation is consciousness. Like many human concepts, it has an emergent quality itself, a kind of uncertainty principle, so that the closer you look at it, the more you try to define it, the vaguer it gets - because it's just a feeling associated with a set of brain states.

I've encountered much the same problem with free will. At a macro scale, events are pretty much causal and deterministic (although often unpredictable), so a dualistic definition or explanation is untenable. To me, free will is the feeling that we have a choice, that we could have done something different. It's a real sensation, but it's not what it seems to be (what you do is causal, you can't 'go back' and do it differently; that unique set of circumstances can only happen once). But we are each unique in our genetics, development, and experiences, so, if unconstrained and uncoerced, our actions, though deterministic, are uniquely the product of our individuality - it seems to me that's as 'free' as it gets, and 'will' is just a subjective sense of personal agency. The common usage is just a social convenience, to cover our ignorance of the detailed causality of our actions and provide a hook for the similarly vague concept of moral responsibility. But I guess that's a whole other story, off topic.