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We do. We know enough to state with absolute certainty that it's an emergent property. Nothing in your head is conscious. Nothing. Not even the whole of the hum

We do. We know enough to state with absolute certainty that it's an emergent property. Nothing in your head is conscious. Nothing. Not even the whole of the human mind. It's in the "software", it's something you learned (and therefore did not have even when you were born, not even until quite a bit after that). It's equally clear that most of what we associate with consciousness, such as thinking, awareness of the body and the moment and time and decision making and ... doesn't exist either. Because time and time again studies prove that when a decision is made (this is well studied in traffic for instance) there are no conscious reasons. Reasons only happen afterwards. Is it therefore such a stretch to say that consciousness simply doesn't exist until long after the fact, and it is only once we ask one of these bags of mostly water to explain themselves (or ... well when we ask them something) that any trace of consciousness, at least the way humans understand it, is actually forthcoming ? Consciousness is a trick. A learned trick. Human minds are not conscious and it is most definitely not a certainty that they, even when born fully formed and healthy that they will become conscious (read the reports on children raised by animals. They are old, sometimes 20 years old and they most definitely aren't conscious, not even on the level that a primate is conscious. The 12 year old boy they found in the wild in France never learned to speak only to articulate 2 words). This is weird, because this is not most humans experience. Everyone around them always had consciousness. But let's compare. Everybody who has kids realizes that memory, firstly, isn't actually memory. We are very much not storing events when they happen in our brain. We learn a trick, because our parents keep referring to our past and "what we've done". We learn to calculate back from our current state of mind to what happened before. That and of course philosophers have a millennium or 3 of history of ... philosophers getting consciousness wrong. Consciousness has been accepted in history to be being religious, to being able to rhyme, to composing music, to being able to talk and explain ourselves, to being able to love, to convince a professor (via chat) that you are conscious, to solve problems (all kinds), to walk around, to play chess, to ... all of these are now of course considered wrong. Why ? Mostly because things that definitely aren't conscious, from little dumb tricks, even mechanical contraptions in some cases, to rule based engines, to deep learning and now reinforcement learning algorithms can do this. So can we please just conclude that whatever this article claims is ... wrong ? Just wrong. Nothing of value, other than perhaps interest a few people for stories with enough alcohol present. The current consensus seems to be that more details will be forthcoming the first time a reinforcement learning algorithm gets far enough to explain it's actions. So you want to know more ? Start there.

basicplus2 7y ago
Just because you don't remember your conscious experiences at birth or before does not mean you were not conscious
- candiodari 7y ago
  No, the fact that people have grown up to very limited or even arguably nonexistent consciousness, but still perfectly functional, capable and alive, means that. Functional enough to survive 7+ years by himself in a French forest. Add that these cases prove that perfectly healthy and normal human minds might never achieve consciousness, or at least nothing exceeding whatever consciousness a cat or dog achieves. There was no medical problem preventing consciousness, we don't even really know what the problem was, or perhaps I should say which of the many, many problems this child faced caused this. Lack of human contact ? Upbringing by wolves (assuming that actually happened) ? Was it surviving by himself ? Was it the water ? Perhaps a forest is just a uniquely bad environment for kids ? Perhaps even that specific forest ? Perhaps there was a human or animal or even something else in that forest that somehow further traumatized this kid ? You'd have to give definitions of consciousness that don't include human contact, don't include language, symbols, any human other than yourself at all, or any thoughts at all not related to short-term survival, don't involve realizing you (as a human) are obviously not a wolf, ... It also means that there is a period where you can be taught consciousness, and clearly if it doesn't happen before 7 years of age, you will never learn it.
  - basicplus2 7y ago
    Do you believe an severely autistic person who has never spoken is concious?
    - candiodari 7y ago
      Given that most definitions of consciousness I've seen essentially express that you are capable of symbolic/abstract thinking, I'd say: 1) (extreme) autistic person that doesn't speak, but can, and arguably thinks too abstract, rather than not enough : yes, conscious. Probably more conscious in some sense than "normal" people, whose consciousness is more a group thing, or at least less independent. (also: not speaking is a pretty extreme form of autism, certainly not something you'd see in your average school) 2) person that grew up without ever having any reason to learn symbolic or abstract thinking ? No, not conscious But it's going to be a sliding scale thing. By some measures a cat and a dog are conscious because, well, because they are certainly capable of making humans think they are suffering (and therefore they both think and feel, which is where consciousness definitions are going on now. Fish, for instance, are not). This seems to me a really bad way to define it but it's certainly widely used.

basicplus2 7y ago

Just because you don't remember your conscious experiences at birth or before does not mean you were not conscious

candiodari 7y ago
No, the fact that people have grown up to very limited or even arguably nonexistent consciousness, but still perfectly functional, capable and alive, means that. Functional enough to survive 7+ years by himself in a French forest. Add that these cases prove that perfectly healthy and normal human minds might never achieve consciousness, or at least nothing exceeding whatever consciousness a cat or dog achieves. There was no medical problem preventing consciousness, we don't even really know what the problem was, or perhaps I should say which of the many, many problems this child faced caused this. Lack of human contact ? Upbringing by wolves (assuming that actually happened) ? Was it surviving by himself ? Was it the water ? Perhaps a forest is just a uniquely bad environment for kids ? Perhaps even that specific forest ? Perhaps there was a human or animal or even something else in that forest that somehow further traumatized this kid ? You'd have to give definitions of consciousness that don't include human contact, don't include language, symbols, any human other than yourself at all, or any thoughts at all not related to short-term survival, don't involve realizing you (as a human) are obviously not a wolf, ... It also means that there is a period where you can be taught consciousness, and clearly if it doesn't happen before 7 years of age, you will never learn it.
- basicplus2 7y ago
  Do you believe an severely autistic person who has never spoken is concious?
  - candiodari 7y ago
    Given that most definitions of consciousness I've seen essentially express that you are capable of symbolic/abstract thinking, I'd say: 1) (extreme) autistic person that doesn't speak, but can, and arguably thinks too abstract, rather than not enough : yes, conscious. Probably more conscious in some sense than "normal" people, whose consciousness is more a group thing, or at least less independent. (also: not speaking is a pretty extreme form of autism, certainly not something you'd see in your average school) 2) person that grew up without ever having any reason to learn symbolic or abstract thinking ? No, not conscious But it's going to be a sliding scale thing. By some measures a cat and a dog are conscious because, well, because they are certainly capable of making humans think they are suffering (and therefore they both think and feel, which is where consciousness definitions are going on now. Fish, for instance, are not). This seems to me a really bad way to define it but it's certainly widely used.