0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Well, just start by reading Nagel's and Sheldrake's books then , as well as this thread ,while you are at it .
Everyone considers as junk ,relatively speaking , all insights , ideas , currents of thought ...coming from other conceptions of nature than his /hers , per definition , mostly then ...
It is useless to try to bring people to their senses , by trying to make them change their irrational beliefs ....or to make them realise the very obvious and undeniable falsehood of their own beliefs ...
What if you had a person (Bob) who had never seen color, either because of an eye dysfunction, color blindness, may be he had been some how living in a place where one only saw black and white objects, and then you hooked Bob's brain up to another person's brain (Bill) who can see color, and Bill stared at a red apple. Would Bob say "oh, that is what red is like." ?If that happens, what's being transferred through the connection? Or is nothing being transferred? Is it already there in Bob's brain, waiting to be stimulated in some precise way? Now let's say you unwire them, and fixed Bob's eye problem, or he was allowed to leave the black and white place, and see the apple for himself. What would would it mean if Bob's experience of color was exactly the same both times? What would it mean if they were different? Or does it even matter? (I realize that this imaginary experiment isn't really the same thing as to the motor movement one, and perhaps not even possible)
... I also wonder how long you could maintain a sense of self with no sensory input or interaction with the outside world. Could you really maintain a sense of self or consciousness in an otherwise healthy disembodied brain? I know people have sensory hallucinations from sensory deprivation, but how long would the brain keep that up? Would even memories or imaginary concepts and images start to deteriorate as well, or would the brain keep it going, locked in a sleep-like, dreaming state.
Actually, I have had peculiar dreams in which "I" am not in them, sort of like watching a movie. But in the dream there is no sense of being an observer on the sidelines, until I wake up.
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 23/10/2013 21:12:08Well, just start by reading Nagel's and Sheldrake's books then , as well as this thread ,while you are at it .I don't have time to read a deluge of diversions. In an argument, you're supposed to extract one piece at a time that might add something useful and put that across clearly without all the unnecessary bloat.QuoteEveryone considers as junk ,relatively speaking , all insights , ideas , currents of thought ...coming from other conceptions of nature than his /hers , per definition , mostly then ...It's junk when it's either telling people what they already know or repeating things over and over again that have already shown to be wrong.QuoteIt is useless to try to bring people to their senses , by trying to make them change their irrational beliefs ....or to make them realise the very obvious and undeniable falsehood of their own beliefs ...Cut out all the unnecessary bloat and you might get somewhere. I get this from both sides in this kind of discussion. One side wants me to read a ton of quackery while the other wants me to read a ton of stuff about neuroscience which is based squarely on the assumption that consciousness is real and which never stops to question that. The neuroscience is at least science for the most part, but they are determined to shoehorn consciousness into it at every turn with no justification for doing so beyond their own belief that it must be in there. Both sides (not necessarily the people in this thread - I'm refering to many conversations on this subject in many places with people who think they have scientific minds) simply refuse to recognise the point where there is a clear barrier to getting information systems to interact with qualia. They cannot demonstrate any way past this barrier, but assert over and over again that it can be done and that the answer as to how it is done is set out in some book or other on neuroscience, that answer invariably being that these feelings must be there because they are there, emerging out of feedback loops and complexity. I don't care what kind of voodoo they want to use to generate feelings or what they want them to be generated in, because that is unimportant. What really matters is that they cannot even begin to set out a diagram showing in cause and effect terms how these experiences of qualia make themselves known in the form of data in information systems, and yet they repeatedly assert that they have done so. They often assert that qualia can exist as data and that ordinary computers could be conscious if they ran the right software, even once it's been proved to them repeatedly and by multiple methods that this is completely impossible. You cannot get anywhere with such people because they refuse to present their ideas as a mechanistic system and deny that there is any need to do so, but this applies to both sides - those who bring in exotic solutions to consciousness involving gods, fairies or universes in which ideas are primary also need to provide mechanisms by which demonstrably mechanistic information systems can generate information about qualia/consciousness where that data is actually driven by qualia/consciousness rather than just being generated fictions about them which have been constructed mechanistically by a system which merely builds baseless assertions. Anyone who thinks they have an answer to how consciousness works needs to show in precise steps how it can get past the barrier between experience of qualia and the generation of data about qualia in such a way that the generation of that data is steered by the experience of qualia to the point that the data documenting that experience of qualia can be guaranteed to be true.Here's the real challenge. Imagine that everything is conscious. Material is conscious, energy is conscious, data is conscious, the act of processing is conscious, etc. - anything you want to think of as conscious can be conscious. Now build a machine or program a machine to try to hook into that consciousness and describe it without having to resort to making it all up. Show me an information system that can do qualia. Here's a register that can feel. Here's a piece of data in it that can feel. Here's a process that can feel. Here is a piece of neural net which can feel. But how can this system ever generate any data that actually informs us about these experiences other than by resorting to making it all up? The only approach that could work is to remove the limitations of information systems by declearing that they do not function in the way we think they do - they create an illusion of functioning by applying rules which are supposed to constrain their behaviour, but they actually break the rules whenever we aren't looking, and even if we do look, they simply change our recollection of history to make us think the rules were followed. This kind of interference could be going on within every scientific experiment we ever do, making us think that things always work in a certain way when they don't work that way at all. If this is in some way the case, consciousness could be 100% real and 100% impossible for us and intelligent machines ever to get a handle on it. [Note: this paragraph may contradict the previous one, but it's because it contains an idea which occurred to me as I was writing it and I can't be bothered going back to rewrite the earlier part to match.]
human reason (This issue is more impossible than consciousness is )
Quotehuman reason (This issue is more impossible than consciousness is )Not so - human reason is not a problem and can be explained through materialism. The same applies to language - both of these things can be done on conventional computers (and it is this that my work centres upon - there are no barriers to matching human intelligence on today's hardware beyond getting all the hard work done in designing and building AGI systems). The only difficulty is with consciousness, because if it is a real phenomenon, it absolutely cannot be done on any machine which is merely Turing complete. If consciousness is real, there must be another kind of processing waiting to be discovered which can take computers beyond merely being Turing complete.
Living organisms are no machines, obviously ,
human intellect neither : human intellect that tries to apprehend reality , that tries to "capture " the intelligible universe from within and without beyond its external appearances : seen any machine computer doing just that via computational mechanisms , come on .
The reconstruction of images from neuroimagining is pretty interesting stuff. It is striking how well some of the images match up between what the subject was looking at and the comp0uter's data base, as well as the video clips showing movement of objects as well as form. If anyone is interested, this is a fun website. http://gallantlab.org
I supposed that does not address "the feeliness" of qualia, but it certainly encroaches on the private, subjectivity of brain experience, and if everyone was truly unique, and our internal experiences ineffable, it shouldn't work at all.
The other thing I thought about last night when I was interrupted doing something, was the interruptability of the brain. Ramachandran says qualia makes information "stand out." Red berries stand out from green leaves, loud sounds stand out from quiet ones, the pain of appendicitis compared to other sensations, but it always depends on context, and the same stimulus doesn't always have the same outcome. We also adapt to ignore repeated ones over time. And things stand out not just according to contrast, but in a qualitative way. We can't control certain autonomic nerve processes, and it's hard to stop yourself midsneeze, although you can sometimes override reflex arcs. With more conscious activity, one switches gears constantly, depending on the type of stimulus, its strength or whether it violates our expectations. But I don't know enough about computers /artificial intelligence to make any comparisons. I don't know how things are prioritized, or what can be interrupted when, or the extent to which the same input can have different results depending on other inputs.
The more reasons to leave this forum thus indeed .
Would it be impossible to program a computer to be self protective? Would it be impossible to program a computer with the desire to survive regardless of its other instructions? If speed was an advantage, would it be possible to make a computer choose randomly between one option or another, before the advantages of doing one or the other were calculated? If you could do that, you could replicate emotion as much as reasoning.
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 25/10/2013 18:36:43The more reasons to leave this forum thus indeed .That'll be the day... Can't bear to leave, or returning to haunt?
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 25/10/2013 21:13:29Living organisms are no machines, obviously ,A non-conscious plant is just a chemical machine. There's no magic about life itself, any more than there is about chemistry. It's when you add consciousness to the system that the problem begins, but if you strip that away it can all be understood through materialism
Quotehuman intellect neither : human intellect that tries to apprehend reality , that tries to "capture " the intelligible universe from within and without beyond its external appearances : seen any machine computer doing just that via computational mechanisms , come on .Not yet, but it will happen soon.
Cheryl + dlorde :There is a big difference between the materialist misinterpretations of science ,of science results , science experiments , science approaches , and pure science .Major example ? = materialist reductionism in science+ its materialist meta-paradigm in all sciences and elsewhere .Example :There are some scientific experiments concerning the fact that handicaped people might be able , in the near or far future , to move their paralyzed , dysfunctional , amputated or other ...limbs, bodies ....via some implanted chips in the brain , or via some robots those handicaped people might get connected to via their brains' activity .There are also scientific facts that prove the fact to be true that people might be able , in the near or far future , to drive their own cars , move robots or machines ,just via their brain's activity or via their thoughts ...Does that mean that human thought or consciousness are just the products of the brain's neuronal activity ? No way .
I am not a ghost to come back and haunt you :