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> I am interested in the notion or aspect of consciousness that relates to why people behave the way they do, think the way they think, and are not only largely

• goatlover 8y ago
  > I like analogies like this and am totally on board with you here. But again, things like 'Mary's Room' are not at all interesting or detailed addresses to this when we know so much about how brains and bodies and artificial neural networks can hold and use so many kinds of knowledge at different levels. Mary's Room demonstrates that's there's more to knowing the world than just third person descriptions. There's also experience. Whether you want to call experience a form of knowledge, or something else like an ability is the crux of whether that particular argument works or not, since it's based on whether knowing all the physical facts leaves some knowledge out (experiential). But I think it works to show that our physical theories of the world can't capture our experience of the world, because one is abstract and mathematical, and the other is how we perceive and feel. So nothing about biology, physics or ANNs bridges that gap, I don't think, since they're expressed in third person terminology. That's the hard problem.
• mistermann 8y ago
  > I completely agree that this is maybe the most interesting general field of inquiry out there, I just think that the consciousness literature/debate has almost nothing of interest to say on it. I think the fields of interest are evolutionary psychology, neurobiology, and at a higher level the interface between sociology and behavioural psychology. Based on what little I know, I would agree, but lots of obviously knowledgeable people in the thread so thought I'd throw a line out there. > Mary's room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument "Roughly thirty years later, Feigl expresses a similar notion. He concerns himself with a Martian, studying human behavior, but lacking human sentiments. Feigl says: "...the Martian would be lacking completely in the sort of imagery and empathy which depends on familiarity (direct acquaintance) with the kinds of qualia to be imaged or empathized" " Yes, this is exactly the "neighborhood" I'm thinking of (whether or not Mary's room is useful to me or not). "Nagel takes a slightly different approach. In an effort to make his argument more adaptable and relatable, he takes the stand of humans attempting to understand the sonar capabilities of bats. Even with the entire physical database at one's fingertips, humans would not be able to fully perceive or understand a bat's sonar system, namely what it is like to perceive something with a bat's sonar." This is another good example, although again not very useful in and of itself. This is the "type" of thing I'm thinking about though, one might comparing it to Human "feelings". Now, it's easy for a "math minded" person to casually discount or handwave away an individual person's "feelings" as some sort of a delusion, mental flaw, lack of education, etc. This is my natural tendency as well. But the older I get, the more I am beginning to think that this thinking will eventually be discovered to be incorrect. Something seems missing to me. > but I think that the evidence that we have from biology and from artificial intelligence suggests that we could probably explain all of our abilities just with physical properties that we already understand Oh sure, that's fine. I see that as the underlying mechanism, which is also important, but I'm not interested in that aspect of it. The resulting consequences, the nature and classification/understanding/deconstruction of consciousness, or more specifically quantifying human behavior, is all I'm interested in gaining a better understanding of. I can't imagine the specific idea I have in mind is novel in any way, but whether anyone has considered it interesting enough to pursue (among all the other competing interesting ideas in this space) is what I'm trying to figure out.