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Yea, but it still doesn't make sense. I mean, imagine Stephen Hawking really became incommunicable. He would still be very much conscious, without exhibiting an

Yea, but it still doesn't make sense. I mean, imagine Stephen Hawking really became incommunicable. He would still be very much conscious, without exhibiting any behavior. Even disposition of behavior doesn't make sense, because behavior is simply impossible. We're back to talking about the internal state of the brain/mind, and not simply behavior disposition. So the idea of behavior disposition being central to consciousness is clearly silly. It is clearly a complicated function of the workings of the entire brain as a system -- even though the sensory and actuator (i.e. behavioral) systems are important to the individual, they are by no means exclusive or central.

mannykannot 9y ago
If, by behavior, you mean movements by the body, then I think is a silly idea - a straw man, in fact, even if it was constructed by people who actually believed it. Pointing out its silliness may be amusing, but it doesn't get us any closer to understanding consciousness.
- darkmighty 9y ago
  But if by behavior we don't mean movements by the body, and instead the whole state of the brain (the entire thinking process), then the theory is again trivial and useless (because it doesn't explain anything). Indeed I don't claim to have read too much about it, but I think the main stream of behaviorism is literally that the functional response (i.e. black box response) is essentially all that matters. I'd be happy to know if there's more nuance than what appears. I have a number of qualms about functional explanation of consciousness (which goes back to the Turing Test, probably earlier). I've seen outright denials that a representation of what is currently on your mind (the "mental theater"), often associated with consciousness, and indeed all similar abstractions we often use referring to our own minds, as "illusions" -- the brain is seen (by I believe at least a few currents) as a single monolithic black box function without a usefully interpretable internal state. Anyone that has in fact experience programming computers will know there usually distinct caches, and clearly distinct subsystems that process information alternatively or in parallel, and algorithms operate recursively or iteratively over the memory until reaching a solution. I don't see why those insights shouldn't hold value for explaining consciousness, and perhaps explaining that even if an algorithm (e.g. a simple machine learning system) is indistinguishable from a [median] human in one or all tasks, then it is still not necessarily conscious, because the details of its inner workings lack certain features of a truly conscious being. For example, its internal representation of emotions may not be equivalent that of a human, such that it does not actually "experience" emotions, but because our own capabilities of verbally communicating emotions are quite limited, it may well beat the median human at this ability after utilizing gargantuan training sets. So you can see themes of data efficiency, internal representation, etc emerge that are completely left out of behaviorism and related theories. I intend to write a little about this (in an article), but there is probably at least a few academics exploring this more complicated, and complete, understanding.
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    > But if by behavior we don't mean movements by the body, and instead the whole state of the brain (the entire thinking process), then the theory is again trivial and useless... Precisely: the straw man that you chose to tilt at in your previous post is beside the point. You have not found a fundamental logical self-contradiction in physicalism here.
    - darkmighty 9y ago
      It is not physicalism I am arguing against, it is behaviorism/functionalism.
      - mannykannot 9y ago
        Regardless, we are not going to arrive at an understanding of consciousness by arguing against weak ideas.
Retric 9y ago
We can directly measure brain state to some resolution. So, as long as the brain can detect and understand outside stimulus we could still communicate.
Koshkin 9y ago
> behavior is simply impossible Thinking is also a form of behavior (in that it is to a large extent under one's control).
- goatlover 9y ago
  But not all behavior internal to the organism is conscious. Most of it is not. So consciousness is not behavior, even though it's correlated with some internal behavior. BTW, behaviorism meant observable behavior, not biological processes, because behaviorists treated the brain (and body) as a blackbox, rather than get involved in a lot of speculation about how internal processes worked.

mannykannot 9y ago

If, by behavior, you mean movements by the body, then I think is a silly idea - a straw man, in fact, even if it was constructed by people who actually believed it. Pointing out its silliness may be amusing, but it doesn't get us any closer to understanding consciousness.

darkmighty 9y ago
But if by behavior we don't mean movements by the body, and instead the whole state of the brain (the entire thinking process), then the theory is again trivial and useless (because it doesn't explain anything). Indeed I don't claim to have read too much about it, but I think the main stream of behaviorism is literally that the functional response (i.e. black box response) is essentially all that matters. I'd be happy to know if there's more nuance than what appears. I have a number of qualms about functional explanation of consciousness (which goes back to the Turing Test, probably earlier). I've seen outright denials that a representation of what is currently on your mind (the "mental theater"), often associated with consciousness, and indeed all similar abstractions we often use referring to our own minds, as "illusions" -- the brain is seen (by I believe at least a few currents) as a single monolithic black box function without a usefully interpretable internal state. Anyone that has in fact experience programming computers will know there usually distinct caches, and clearly distinct subsystems that process information alternatively or in parallel, and algorithms operate recursively or iteratively over the memory until reaching a solution. I don't see why those insights shouldn't hold value for explaining consciousness, and perhaps explaining that even if an algorithm (e.g. a simple machine learning system) is indistinguishable from a [median] human in one or all tasks, then it is still not necessarily conscious, because the details of its inner workings lack certain features of a truly conscious being. For example, its internal representation of emotions may not be equivalent that of a human, such that it does not actually "experience" emotions, but because our own capabilities of verbally communicating emotions are quite limited, it may well beat the median human at this ability after utilizing gargantuan training sets. So you can see themes of data efficiency, internal representation, etc emerge that are completely left out of behaviorism and related theories. I intend to write a little about this (in an article), but there is probably at least a few academics exploring this more complicated, and complete, understanding.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  > But if by behavior we don't mean movements by the body, and instead the whole state of the brain (the entire thinking process), then the theory is again trivial and useless... Precisely: the straw man that you chose to tilt at in your previous post is beside the point. You have not found a fundamental logical self-contradiction in physicalism here.
  - darkmighty 9y ago
    It is not physicalism I am arguing against, it is behaviorism/functionalism.
    - mannykannot 9y ago
      Regardless, we are not going to arrive at an understanding of consciousness by arguing against weak ideas.

Retric 9y ago

We can directly measure brain state to some resolution. So, as long as the brain can detect and understand outside stimulus we could still communicate.

Koshkin 9y ago

> behavior is simply impossible Thinking is also a form of behavior (in that it is to a large extent under one's control).

goatlover 9y ago
But not all behavior internal to the organism is conscious. Most of it is not. So consciousness is not behavior, even though it's correlated with some internal behavior. BTW, behaviorism meant observable behavior, not biological processes, because behaviorists treated the brain (and body) as a blackbox, rather than get involved in a lot of speculation about how internal processes worked.