4 ms·

Odd though, the author just recently reviewed another mechanistic consciousness book and recommended this old essay [1] in the review. There seems to be a real

by themgt 10y ago

Odd though, the author just recently reviewed another mechanistic consciousness book and recommended this old essay [1] in the review. There seems to be a real resistance towards accepting what's hard about the hard problem. http://www.massline.org/ScienceGrp/ConsciousnessAndBrain.pdf http://www.massline.org/ScienceGrp/ConsciousnessAndBrain.pdf

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>There seems to be a real resistance towards accepting what's hard about the hard problem. Well, there also seems to be a real resistance to even phrasing the "Hard Problem" in terms that both admit a nontrivial role for functional cognition (for "mere brains") and also don't presuppose dualism.
- titzer 10y ago
  I'm in the camp (following somewhat Daniel Dennett) that the hard problem just simply doesn't exist. It's invented. Some have objected to Dennett in that he just wishes the "hard problem" away. I submit that dualistic philosophers, crystallized by David Chalmers, just "wished" the hard problem into existence. It's a made-up question, the same as "why are fairies so hard to get on camera?" It's made-up by philosophers who just want dualism to be true. There is zero evidence that dualism is true. Consciousness and the brain boils down to this: if we reject dualism, then we implicitly accept some form of materialism. Materialism means that the brain and whatever physical processes that it carries out must give rise to consciousness, must give rise to subjective experience, even if that involves nonlocal quantum mechanics or whatever cutting edge physics you care to imagine. If it's physics, it's materialism. From the other angle, we keep asking ourselves "what is it like to be a bat?" or what is it like to be this or that. Well therein lies the answer. There probably is something it's like to be a bat, or a fish. But this is what it feels like to be a human consciousness, with all those processes going on in the brain, feeding that consciousness information. Is that really so hard to believe? Consciousness is just one of many programs running in the human brain. This is what it feels like to be that program running inside your brain.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >From the other angle, we keep asking ourselves "what is it like to be a bat?" or what is it like to be this or that. Well therein lies the answer. Well, the thing is, I'd imagine that being a bat is probably like the flow of air through your wings when you flap, the sound of mosquitoes you can eat, the taste of fruit you settled for, the relaxed feeling of finding a branch or something to hang on and sleep, et cetera and et cetera. That is, I expect that "what it's like to be a bat" is exactly what happens to a bat in life, as experienced through the bat's model of the world as constructed from the (exteroceptive and interoceptive) information brought in by its own sensorium and the dynamics of its body.
    - titzer 10y ago
      I don't know for sure, but I kind of suspect that bats don't have any sort of analogous "consciousness program" in their brains like humans. They probably go through life very automatically, without a conception of self, without a reflection on their existence, very much like a person who sleepwalks is unconscious, but in a far dimmer way. The same probably goes for most animals, and certainly for insects and worms. Only advanced primates, dolphins, whales, elephants, and maybe some birds are likely to have "consciousness" programs that are in any way analogous to what you and I experience. After all, think of it: you don't experience the regulation of your heartbeat or other autonomic functions, or the rods and cones detecting light in your eyes, or the individual variations in sound intensity that make up audio. Instead, you experience a very highly processed and organized show of sorts that is presented to your consciousness by many various brain subsystems. Studies have started to show that even the decisions we make are determined by the brain far before we are consciously aware. In some sense, consciousness is the story our brain tells itself while all the systems are off busy doing their things. Maybe bats just don't have that, so there is nothing that our consciousness can conceptualize that is similar to their very automatic behaviors.
      - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
        > I don't know for sure, but I kind of suspect that bats don't have any sort of analogous "consciousness program" in their brains like humans. They probably go through life very automatically, without a conception of self, without a reflection on their existence, very much like a person who sleepwalks is unconscious, but in a far dimmer way. The same probably goes for most animals, and certainly for insects and worms. Only advanced primates, dolphins, whales, elephants, and maybe some birds are likely to have "consciousness" programs that are in any way analogous to what you and I experience. Nah, I suspect that most mammals are conscious, emotive, and at least somewhat intelligent. But of course, I'd have to understand consciousness a lot better to really say! >Instead, you experience a very highly processed and organized show of sorts that is presented to your consciousness by many various brain subsystems. Studies have started to show that even the decisions we make are determined by the brain far before we are consciously aware. In some sense, consciousness is the story our brain tells itself while all the systems are off busy doing their things. Welll.... not really. Consciousness, AFAWK so far, is what happens when parallel sensorimotor systems sample a maximum-a-posteriori perceptual, interoceptive, and affordance model of the world into a global workspace where certain precise, mostly deterministic sampling computations can be done as a part of active inference to determine which actions to emit. Decisions aren't made ahead of time; (low-precision) affordances are computed ahead of time. It's not a show; it's the best model.

by themgt 10y ago

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

>There seems to be a real resistance towards accepting what's hard about the hard problem. Well, there also seems to be a real resistance to even phrasing the "Hard Problem" in terms that both admit a nontrivial role for functional cognition (for "mere brains") and also don't presuppose dualism.

titzer 10y ago
I'm in the camp (following somewhat Daniel Dennett) that the hard problem just simply doesn't exist. It's invented. Some have objected to Dennett in that he just wishes the "hard problem" away. I submit that dualistic philosophers, crystallized by David Chalmers, just "wished" the hard problem into existence. It's a made-up question, the same as "why are fairies so hard to get on camera?" It's made-up by philosophers who just want dualism to be true. There is zero evidence that dualism is true. Consciousness and the brain boils down to this: if we reject dualism, then we implicitly accept some form of materialism. Materialism means that the brain and whatever physical processes that it carries out must give rise to consciousness, must give rise to subjective experience, even if that involves nonlocal quantum mechanics or whatever cutting edge physics you care to imagine. If it's physics, it's materialism. From the other angle, we keep asking ourselves "what is it like to be a bat?" or what is it like to be this or that. Well therein lies the answer. There probably is something it's like to be a bat, or a fish. But this is what it feels like to be a human consciousness, with all those processes going on in the brain, feeding that consciousness information. Is that really so hard to believe? Consciousness is just one of many programs running in the human brain. This is what it feels like to be that program running inside your brain.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >From the other angle, we keep asking ourselves "what is it like to be a bat?" or what is it like to be this or that. Well therein lies the answer. Well, the thing is, I'd imagine that being a bat is probably like the flow of air through your wings when you flap, the sound of mosquitoes you can eat, the taste of fruit you settled for, the relaxed feeling of finding a branch or something to hang on and sleep, et cetera and et cetera. That is, I expect that "what it's like to be a bat" is exactly what happens to a bat in life, as experienced through the bat's model of the world as constructed from the (exteroceptive and interoceptive) information brought in by its own sensorium and the dynamics of its body.
  - titzer 10y ago
    I don't know for sure, but I kind of suspect that bats don't have any sort of analogous "consciousness program" in their brains like humans. They probably go through life very automatically, without a conception of self, without a reflection on their existence, very much like a person who sleepwalks is unconscious, but in a far dimmer way. The same probably goes for most animals, and certainly for insects and worms. Only advanced primates, dolphins, whales, elephants, and maybe some birds are likely to have "consciousness" programs that are in any way analogous to what you and I experience. After all, think of it: you don't experience the regulation of your heartbeat or other autonomic functions, or the rods and cones detecting light in your eyes, or the individual variations in sound intensity that make up audio. Instead, you experience a very highly processed and organized show of sorts that is presented to your consciousness by many various brain subsystems. Studies have started to show that even the decisions we make are determined by the brain far before we are consciously aware. In some sense, consciousness is the story our brain tells itself while all the systems are off busy doing their things. Maybe bats just don't have that, so there is nothing that our consciousness can conceptualize that is similar to their very automatic behaviors.
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      > I don't know for sure, but I kind of suspect that bats don't have any sort of analogous "consciousness program" in their brains like humans. They probably go through life very automatically, without a conception of self, without a reflection on their existence, very much like a person who sleepwalks is unconscious, but in a far dimmer way. The same probably goes for most animals, and certainly for insects and worms. Only advanced primates, dolphins, whales, elephants, and maybe some birds are likely to have "consciousness" programs that are in any way analogous to what you and I experience. Nah, I suspect that most mammals are conscious, emotive, and at least somewhat intelligent. But of course, I'd have to understand consciousness a lot better to really say! >Instead, you experience a very highly processed and organized show of sorts that is presented to your consciousness by many various brain subsystems. Studies have started to show that even the decisions we make are determined by the brain far before we are consciously aware. In some sense, consciousness is the story our brain tells itself while all the systems are off busy doing their things. Welll.... not really. Consciousness, AFAWK so far, is what happens when parallel sensorimotor systems sample a maximum-a-posteriori perceptual, interoceptive, and affordance model of the world into a global workspace where certain precise, mostly deterministic sampling computations can be done as a part of active inference to determine which actions to emit. Decisions aren't made ahead of time; (low-precision) affordances are computed ahead of time. It's not a show; it's the best model.