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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
(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 .
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 05/09/2013 19:09:28(I am well aware of some silly childish games you have been playing here = irrelevent though =Grow up )What games? Where is any of it irrelevant? What has growing up got to do with the price of fish?QuoteA 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 ...?Have you heard of the invention of the computer? Have you seen what a calculator can do for arithmetic and mathematics? The damn thing can outthink us in many calculations. What do you suppose happens when you take the same idea of mechanical computation and extend it into linguistics and general thought? We will have machines some day that can outthink us in any discussion on any subject, and all the thinking they do will be cause-and-effect mechanical. The alternative to a mechanical thinking machine would be a magical one. You clearly believe that the brain is a magical computer which therefore doesn't depend on mechanisms, but whenever the brain makes mistakes it displays the mechanical nature of the functionality within.Creativity and innovations - problem solving. A machine needs to identify a problem and then calculate potential solutions. It took half a billion years for our brains to evolve to the point where they could do innovative and creative things, but we will program machines to match our abilities within a mere hundred years of the building of the first computers. Some creativity is guided by feelings, so when it comes to the arts it will be hard for machines to create things that satisfy us until we can find out what the algorithms of human aesthetics are. Some of these are known - we know that the golden ratio makes things better looking, so machines can already create arrangements of things that look more pleasing than random arrangements on that basis.QuoteYou 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 .Here you are trying to tell me about the workings of a system which you don't understand. I at least come to this with an understanding of the mechanisms of computation, but all you have to offer is "dont know"/magic. Who is the one playing a childish game here? QuoteThe 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 .Is that a fact! Wow - you're good!QuoteHow 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 am one of the developers of artificial intelligence and my aim is not to make machines sentient. It appears to be impossible to make machines sentient, and it also appears to be impossible for us to be sentient because we are machines. It will be possible to make machines think though, and they already do. Thinking is just mechanical calculation. Machines can see too, and cameras are able to take photographs automatically whenever the subject smiles. That is machine vision.QuoteI 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 .You can reject it all you like, but you're not qualified to make such a judgement (and when I say qualified, I'm not talking about certificates, but knowledge of the subject). You aren't interested in doing the work to learn about how computation works because you already have an answer that satisfies you, and that is belief in magic.QuoteDon't you realise the fact that your childish materialistic interpretations of scientific studies are just that = materialistic childish interpretations ?Belief in magic is childish. Science is about the elimination of magic in order to understand how things really work.QuoteWhen 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 .That is hilarious. I'm going to print that out and put it up on the wall.
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.
Well, no. If it's an illusion and the feelings aren't real, then there is no consciousness. A novel asserts the existence of characters who live out adventures and experience feelings, but all of it is fiction - there were no feelings. A machine (whether silicon or biological) which generated fictions of feelings is not creating feeling - there is no consciousness, but merely a machine generating accounts of consciousness that aren't true.
Quote from: dlorde on 05/09/2013 21:51:41I 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.If there really are feelings, that would indeed be consciousness. Mechanical awareness (as in a security light with a sensor which detects when it's dark and switches it on) is different from conscious awareness where there is a feeling of existing; a feeling of being aware. Consciousness is all about feelings.QuoteWhatever 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.Well, no. If it's an illusion and the feelings aren't real, then there is no consciousness. A novel asserts the existence of characters who live out adventures and experience feelings, but all of it is fiction - there were no feelings. A machine (whether silicon or biological) which generated fictions of feelings is not creating feeling - there is no consciousness, but merely a machine generating accounts of consciousness that aren't true.QuoteLike 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.If the feelings are to be real, they have to be experienced by something, and that isn't something that can emerge out of complexity. If we can't point to something of substance (which isn't to restrict it to matter or energy, both of which may just be twists of a fabric of space) and say that it experiences the feelings, we're left with nothing experiencing the feelings, and if nothing experiences them, they can't be felt and can't be feelings.On the free will point, there isn't such a thing, but there could indeed be a feeling of there being such a thing. That can be stuck in the pot with all the other qualia, but the big question is how to get an information system to access qualia and know anything of them. If it can't, any information it has about them is made up, unless there is some kind of intelligent sentience system which is capable of doing all the work of an information system and can directly manipulate the data in the information system to ensure that the claims about sentience contained in it are true, but an intelligent sentience system would then need to be an information system itself and would need to speak the same language as the other information system in order to know how to manipulate its data, so it doesn't take us any further on: the interface problem is merely transferred into the intelligent sentience system where the sentience side of things has to be converted into data by the information system side of things. There will always be a division between these two things because sentience and data belong to different systems - data requires representation and calculation apparatus, while sentience requires direct feeling without any representation. To translate direct experience of feelings into data about feelings appears to be impossible because the translation has to be done by the information system and the information system can't access the sensations.That is the sticking point with consciousness. If there is a solution to this that makes consciousness as possible as it feels to us, it's going to take a radical change in approach to the way we look at computation, but so far the only alternative approach that has been suggested by anyone is the childish one of magic, though of course it may be that science is indeed just a pile of pants and that magic really is king.
Just try to refute the above refutation of materialism in science , especially concerning that magical dogmatic materialistic approach of consciousness, here above , written by a physicist :I would love to see you trying to refute that refutation : impress me .Make my day .
But consciousness can operate beyond the brain, body, and the present, as hundreds of experiments and millions of testimonials affirm. Consciousness cannot, therefore, be identical with the brain.
To reiterate a single example – the evidence supporting foreknowledge – psi researchers Charles Honorton and Diane Ferrari examined 309 precognition experiments carried out by sixty-two investigators involving 50,000 participants in more than two million trials. Thirty percent of these studies were significant in showing that people can describe future events, when only five percent would be expected to demonstrate such results by chance. The odds that these results were not due to chance was greater than 10 to the twentieth power to one.
As Rutgers University philosopher Jerry A. Fodo flatly states, “Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. So much for our philosophy of consciousness.”
This “identity theory” – mind equals brain – has led legions of scientists and philosophers to regard consciousness as an unnecessary, superfluous concept. Some go out of their way to deny the existence of consciousness altogether, almost as if they bear a grudge against it. Tufts University cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett says, “We’re all zombies. Nobody is conscious.” Dennett includes himself in this extraordinary claim, and he seems proud of it.
Some of the oddest experiences I recall are attending conferences where one speaker after another employs his consciousness to denounce the existence of consciousness, ignoring the fact that he consciously chose to register for the meeting, make travel plans, prepare his talks, and so on.
Many scientists concede that there are huge gaps in their knowledge of how the brain makes consciousness, but they are certain they will be filled in as science progresses. Eccles and philosopher of science Karl Popper branded this attitude “promissory materialism.” “[P]romissary materialism [is] a superstition without a rational foundation,” Eccles says. “[It] is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists . . .who confuse their religion with their science. It has all the features of a messianic prophecy.”
Thoughts can be displaced in time, operating into both past and future. In precognitive remoteviewing experiments – for example, the hundreds of such experiments by the PEAR Lab at Princeton University – the receiver gets a future thought before it is ever sent.
Furthermore, consciousness can operate into the past, as in the experiments involving retroactive intentions.
The way ahead, I believe, has to place mind first as the key aspect of the universe...We have to start exploring how we can talk about mind in terms of a quantum picture...Only then will we be able to make a genuine bridge between physics and physiology.”
When scientists muster the courage to face this evidence unflinchingly, the greatest superstition of our age – the notion that the brain generates consciousness or is identical with it – will topple. In its place will arise a nonlocal picture of the mind.
Quote from: David Cooper on 06/09/2013 19:34:21Well, no. If it's an illusion and the feelings aren't real, then there is no consciousness. A novel asserts the existence of characters who live out adventures and experience feelings, but all of it is fiction - there were no feelings. A machine (whether silicon or biological) which generated fictions of feelings is not creating feeling - there is no consciousness, but merely a machine generating accounts of consciousness that aren't true.So what is your position on feelings and consciousness?
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 06/09/2013 19:18:46Just try to refute the above refutation of materialism in science , especially concerning that magical dogmatic materialistic approach of consciousness, here above , written by a physicist :I would love to see you trying to refute that refutation : impress me .Make my day .I have nothing to offer that can impress you as I don't have a solution to the problem of consciousness. I agree with his main objection, but he offers no solution other than to move the problem elsewhere and pretend that that fixes it.QuoteBut consciousness can operate beyond the brain, body, and the present, as hundreds of experiments and millions of testimonials affirm. Consciousness cannot, therefore, be identical with the brain.I don't see the evidence of it operating beyond the brain, but at the same time I see no reason why it shouldn't. This universe could be virtual and our consciousness could lie outside it, but this doesn't address the fundamental problem - it merely moves it elsewhere (the calculations will still need to be done somewhere, and for the claims about feelings to be true they will need to be generated by a calculating information system which has some way of accessing the experiencing of sensations - how it does that is something that still needs to be explained). Cutting up brains and looking for mechanisms in them may never reveal anything because the real mechanisms could be hidden and the apparent mechanisms of the brain may not be used when the brain is actually "running".QuoteTo reiterate a single example – the evidence supporting foreknowledge – psi researchers Charles Honorton and Diane Ferrari examined 309 precognition experiments carried out by sixty-two investigators involving 50,000 participants in more than two million trials. Thirty percent of these studies were significant in showing that people can describe future events, when only five percent would be expected to demonstrate such results by chance. The odds that these results were not due to chance was greater than 10 to the twentieth power to one.I very much doubt that that is serious research, though I'm basing my initial judgement on the fact that I haven't heard of it before. It ought to be big news if it's true, so is it being suppressed or is it just being ignored because it's a pile of pants? Where can I read more about it? Has it been published in a serious science journal?QuoteAs Rutgers University philosopher Jerry A. Fodo flatly states, “Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. So much for our philosophy of consciousness.”That doesn't really matter. It could easily be the case that everything is conscious and experiences qualia all the time. The real problem is how anything can then express the thought that it is conscious and not merely get stuck at the point of feeling conscious.QuoteThis “identity theory” – mind equals brain – has led legions of scientists and philosophers to regard consciousness as an unnecessary, superfluous concept. Some go out of their way to deny the existence of consciousness altogether, almost as if they bear a grudge against it. Tufts University cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett says, “We’re all zombies. Nobody is conscious.” Dennett includes himself in this extraordinary claim, and he seems proud of it.It is a superfluous concept in some ways, but we are set up in such a way as to believe the claims our brains generate about feelings and we can even imagine that we feel them directly. If the feelings aren't real, then we are deluded zombies, but we're pretty determined not to believe that's the case, as any well-deluded zombie should be. This nihilism would be a good solution to the whole problem if it wasn't for the fact that the illusion feels too damned good. How can the "I" in the machine be fooled into thinking it exists and into feeling sensations if there is no "I" in the machine to fool? If it was easy to dismiss the whole idea of the "I", we would just junk it and accept that we don't exist; that there are merely machines in existence which generate superfluous fictions about "I"s and the imaginary feelings they supposedly experience.I certainly don't wake up every day to think, "Oh yes - I don't exist and all these feelings are fake." They feel too real. But if they are to be real, there has to be an explanation as to how they work, and maybe the only possible explanation for them is magic. Most of the things that used to be regarded as magic have been shown not to be magic at all, but as mechanistic. We're assuming that this will go on being the case with everything that has yet to be understood, though that may be a mistake. Then again, it also seems reasonable to suppose that even magic ought to run on some kind of mechanism, so it feels like a very poor explanation of anything just to stop at the point where you declare it to be magic and give up on looking for a mechanism.QuoteSome of the oddest experiences I recall are attending conferences where one speaker after another employs his consciousness to denounce the existence of consciousness, ignoring the fact that he consciously chose to register for the meeting, make travel plans, prepare his talks, and so on.That just shows poor judgement on the part of this physicist, because they wouldn't be employing their consciousness to denounce anything - they'd simply be mechanically denouncing it using machinery which generates fictions about feelings as it grinds through all the necessary computations.QuoteMany scientists concede that there are huge gaps in their knowledge of how the brain makes consciousness, but they are certain they will be filled in as science progresses. Eccles and philosopher of science Karl Popper branded this attitude “promissory materialism.” “[P]romissary materialism [is] a superstition without a rational foundation,” Eccles says. “[It] is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists . . .who confuse their religion with their science. It has all the features of a messianic prophecy.”I can see no way in which it can be filled in, but I still leave the door open to a way being found - it may be that there's another possible way of looking at computation waiting to be discovered which will open the door to some kind of sentience-based processing taking place in some weird quantum soup outside of the universe, though having looked into things quantum I can't find anything there that goes against normal reason (most of the odd things are really just badly described), and reason continues to appear to bar the way to dealing with the key difficulty of turning direct experience of feelings into data about feelings.QuoteThoughts can be displaced in time, operating into both past and future. In precognitive remoteviewing experiments – for example, the hundreds of such experiments by the PEAR Lab at Princeton University – the receiver gets a future thought before it is ever sent.Sounds like more fake science.QuoteFurthermore, consciousness can operate into the past, as in the experiments involving retroactive intentions.And some more. Where can I read more about these experiments?QuoteThe way ahead, I believe, has to place mind first as the key aspect of the universe...We have to start exploring how we can talk about mind in terms of a quantum picture...Only then will we be able to make a genuine bridge between physics and physiology.”You can make it as quantum as you like, but you still need to account for the translation of experience of sensation to data about sensation. I keep coming back to that because it is THE problem with consciousness. "That hurt" is data. When we think about whether something hurt, we are processing data. When something actually hurts (if such a thing is even possible), it isn't happening in data - something is directly experiencing pain. To communicate the idea that pain was felt, even just to think about the idea that pain was felt, we have to move from experience of sensation to processing of information, and that's where we hit the crucial disconnect.QuoteWhen scientists muster the courage to face this evidence unflinchingly, the greatest superstition of our age – the notion that the brain generates consciousness or is identical with it – will topple. In its place will arise a nonlocal picture of the mind.It will be a nonlocal picture in which the fundamental problem is not addressed either. The physicist is not proposing a solution to the problem, but a way of fiddling around moving it somewhere else rather than addressing the central problem.
If you happen to be right about the "fact " that we are just machines which seem to need those sophisticated evolutionary so-called built-in in our systems illusions such as consciousness, feelings , emotions ....in order to survive, then you or others for that matter can be able some day to create conscious artificial intelligent machines exactly like us ,and maybe even some conscious intelligent machines that would even surpass us = the next level of evolution as some scientists like to call it .
Thank you for your reply i will read carefully later on , later alligator ...kidding You are an honest consistent guy with yourself ,a guy with integrity ,without self-deceit ,without self-delusions , without magical thinking , or self-illusions : i do respect and salute that in you, as a person , i mean it .Take care
We could make machines which copy us right down to the generation of fake claims of consciousness and the ability of the machines to get so stuck in their thinking that they believe non-existent feelings exist and that an "I" is in there feeling them, but they would not actually be conscious.
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 06/09/2013 19:18:46Thoughts can be displaced in time, operating into both past and future. In precognitive remoteviewing experiments – for example, the hundreds of such experiments by the PEAR Lab at Princeton University – the receiver gets a future thought before it is ever sent.Sounds like more fake science.
QuoteFurthermore, consciousness can operate into the past, as in the experiments involving retroactive intentions.And some more. Where can I read more about these experiments?
Quote from: dlorde on 06/09/2013 21:28:08So what is your position on feelings and consciousness?I'm in two positions. In one of them I see consciousness as impossible. In the other, I refuse to see it as impossible and hope someone will come up with a completely new way of looking at the problem with some approach in which data and sentience can be mixed together in the same system and can speak the same language. I can't see any way of doing it, but that isn't the same thing as saying it's impossible. I keep hoping that a clue will jump out of some conversation which will lead to a breakthrough, and that clue is maybe as likely to come from a fruitcake as a scientist. If there's a solution, it will be found by someone who's looking in from an angle that normal people don't explore.
So what is your position on feelings and consciousness?
So your definition of "conscious" is...?
PEAR was, initially at least, a serious attempt to investigate a wide range of claimed paranormal phenomena, from remote viewing to mentally biasing mechanical and electronic randomisers, precognition, etc. They did thousands of experiments over many years, with annual reports & reviews, and, in general, reported a slight (but significant) excess of anomalous results. Their methodologies and analyses were often criticised, and attempts at replication were less successful. Mainstream consensus is that nothing of interest was demonstrated....This may be a reference to Daryl Bem's experiments on 'Retroactive Facilitation of Recall'. His methodology and analyses were criticised, particularly when he modified and added new analyses after the data was obtained. Several attempted replications were unsuccessful.
I suspect that we'll need a combined approach to get close to understanding it - a synthesis of investigating the progressive increase in consciousness & awareness in animal and infant developmental studies, large scale emulation projects (Blue Brain, etc.), and scanner studies of different conscious states and their transitions.
I don't see a problem with ambiguity. If you use a word to mean two different things, just tell us both meanings!
What I do see as a problem is that you have defined conscious in terms of consciousness and not being unconscious.
So you would define a cow as exhibiting or experiencing bovine phenomena, and not being an uncow. Not a particularly useful contribution to a discussion on the evolution or ecological function of a cow.