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John Vervaeke argues that much of our trouble with studying or defining consciousness is due to its fundamentally recursive nature. Start with the definition:
by igammarays 8y ago
John Vervaeke argues that much of our trouble with studying or defining consciousness is due to its fundamentally recursive nature.
Start with the definition: A conscious being is one which is conscious of itself.
Seems circular, but there is really no good non-recursive definition. This definition also seems to "ring" perfectly well with random people on the street.
It has been argued that any attempt at a non-recursive definition of consciousness includes things which most people don't consider to be conscious, see for example the paper titled "If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious".
Which leads to the problem of identification: how do we know that rocks are NOT conscious? Or, more interestingly, how I know the universe itself in its totality is not conscious? The universe certainly must have all the requisite "components" of consciousness, whatever those components are.
Once again, the process of identifying is recursive. A conscious being can only identify, with 100% certainty, its own consciousness. Any "other" thing could theoretically be a p-zombie or a Turing Test.
Corollary: No conscious being can know, with 100% certainty, that a particular entity is NOT conscious.
Could we have a science of a recursive thing? Perhaps, but only if we are willing and able to accept a recursive model with circular arguments.
- modzu 8y agofor what it's worth, vervaeke is best known for his work on relevance, and in particular for demonstrating how the "turing test" (currently the most accepted "test" of consciousness) is insufficient http://www.ipsi.utoronto.ca/sdis/Relevance-Published.pdf http://www.ipsi.utoronto.ca/sdis/Relevance-Published.pdf
- cam_l 8y agoI always thought the Turing test was more performance art than scientific enquiry. Meant as much to illustrate the tenuous nature of consciousness as test computer literacy.
- kuwze 8y agoWhy would you start with a circular definition? You can't use a word in it's own definition! Consciousness: the degree to which something is self-aware. Self-aware: being conscious. There you go. /s
- modzu 8y agohave to agree i dont follow the logic in the parent post. simple refutation: there can be conscious beings which are not self aware (ex. somebody on ketamine).
- conanbatt 8y agoIt is a great weakness of the english language that being implies both the nature of a thing and its current state. In spanish, we have "Ser" (a permanent quality, an identity) and "estar" (right now). You are(ser) a conscious being, but you are(estar) not conscious in that state.
- conanbatt 8y agoConsciousness: the ability to use the word consciousness.
- AstralStorm 8y agoOh no, Google translate is conscious!
- AstralStorm 8y agoNot really. We have a different word, sentience, for self-awareness alone in English. For example, monkeys are sentient. (presuming the self discrimination test is valid) Some birds are not known to be sentient. Are they conscious? Who knows. Consciousness is a misdefined grab bag of things.
- 3pt14159 8y agoEh—I'm as much of a solipsistic skeptic as the next guy, but leaving aside questions about the fundamental knowability of truth (or brain-in-a-vat-isms) a precondition of consciousness is the possession of a mind. There is no evidence or causal factors to suggests that rocks have a mind. Your argument taken to its logical extents allows us to say anything is anything; so we're not really saying anything, because any word is any word and the whole process of communicating is gutted and even this rebuttal is pointless.
- igammarays 8y agoSorry I drifted off into solipsism in the last few sentences. Didn't mean to. Just meant to point out that even rocks can be said to have any number of the "components" required for consciousness. If consciousness is expected to emerge from things that look like neurons and neural networks, then we can consider the molecules of the rock to be its neurons, and the electrons (or sound/heat/energy) travelling between molecules of the rock to be neuronal pathways, and then we should expect it to be possible for consciousness to emerge from that structure, atleast theoretically.
- cam_l 8y agoWhat is a rock though? Is it not just a construct? A piece of dead skin on the surface of a living rock? Is it not like saying a synapse is not conscious because it doesn't have a brain? The issue is not with the op's argument, it is with the nature of (our) reality. We are not saying anything because we are talking semantics. This is about definitions, not reality. The differences between a rock and a human mind are semantic constructs built on sensory constructs. Semantics are all circular.. and we lack the philosophical construct to understand circular argument.
- 3pt14159 8y ago> What is a rock though? What is the purpose of this question if a rock is anything but? I'm not arguing you're wrong I'm arguing that if there is a debate here it's circularly inconsistent because it presupposes that words have meaning by sole virtue of their own ineptitude. I see no proof that truth is knowable by a mind (in our world, anyway) so at some level I agree with you that it's circular on a multitude of levels but this argument goes no where and to argue the other side of it (that a rock is a mind) to me amounts to someone saying something along the lines of "words have no purpose" it's even worse than circular dependancy it's circularly _inconsistent_.
- dwaltrip 8y agoYour first few paragraphs were quite enlightening, thank you for writing that. However... the recursive nature of consciousness doesn't stop us from saying that rocks aren't conscious. You still need a medium that supports recursive operations of the necessary depth and complexity. Rocks don't seem to have such characteristics.
- igammarays 8y agoWell we know very well that rocks have molecules arranged in complex patterns, and that energy transfer occurs between these molecules in the form of electrons, or sound/heat/energy. Nothing too different from a neural network on a fundamental structural level.
- xamuel 8y ago>No conscious being can know, with 100% certainty, that a particular entity is NOT conscious. You might be interested in a very short 2011 paper of mine, "A paradox related to the Turing Test", on page 90 here: https://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/researchcentres/reasoning/TheReasoner/vol5/TheReasoner-5(6).pdf https://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/researchcentres/reasoning/TheRea... I'll paraphrase the paradox here. Suppose you can magically detect conscious entities. I begin speaking to you, and you are obliged to periodically guess whether or not I'm conscious. Here's what I'll do. Whenever you are guessing that I'm conscious, my entire dialog will consist of nothing but "Uhhhh..." over and over, until you change your mind and start thinking I'm non-conscious. Whenever you are guessing that I'm non-conscious, then I'll speak normally. Since I AM conscious, and you have your magic conscious-detecting ability, you should eventually reach a state where you're certain I'm conscious, and you don't need to change your mind any more thereafter. But once we've reached that state, which only takes finitely much time (so for all you know my whole dialogue could've been a tape recording), thereafter I only ever say "Uhhhh..." A non-conscious machine could do that, so do you change your mind? If you do, contradiction, if you don't, contradiction.
- credit_guy 8y agoI would reach the conclusion that you are conscious, but a bit obnoxious or you like playing games.
- xamuel 8y agoYou're implicitly assuming that you yourself have free will and/or are too complicated for a computer to mimic. Because if not, then I could just be a computer which doesn't even hear the words you are saying, and is merely reacting to the words I would hear if I did have ears (which I can do because I have your entire sourcecode built into me). The longer you meditate upon this very silly paradox, the more unsettling it becomes :)
- red75prime 8y agoIt is possibly the reason why some people believe that consciousness requires some kind of Cartesian pineal gland which connect our physical brain to metaphysical consciousness. So we don't need to analyze behavior, we just need to look for the presence of the "gland". The problem still stands though. We can't be sure that the "gland" connects to metaphysical consciousness and not to the metaphysical cloud processor. Nowadays the "gland" is usually mysterious quantum processes.
- resource0x 8y agoThe depth of recursion seems to be limited. And for me personally, the limit is 2 (or is it 1? depends on how you count it). Which is not a true recursion :)
- hossbeast 8y agoLink to the referenced paper, "If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious", which I found fascinating. Thanks for mentioning it! http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.htm http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.htm