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> Am I supposed to believe that this all somehow comes together and forms a meaningful conscious experience? That would be the greatest miracle the world has ev

> Am I supposed to believe that this all somehow comes together and forms a meaningful conscious experience? That would be the greatest miracle the world has ever seen. We already know consciousness can arise from neuronal activity. Do you think no other substrate could give rise to consciousness? > The brain has evolved to produce meaningful conscious experience. That strikes me as quite a leap. Another take on this might be that evolution has selected for intelligence, and that consciousness came along for the ride. It doesn't seem plausible that consciousness, let alone meaning (whatever that means here), could be selected for directly.

adolph 2y ago
> We already know consciousness can arise from neuronal activity. Do you think no other substrate could give rise to consciousness? Conjecture of another is reported by “Light Eaters” [0] which I’ve just started. Of course, materially sufficient is less than a slam dunk given plausible theory that many mental states are learned not innate [1] and consciousness is relatively recent development in humans [2]. 0. https://www.amazon.com/Light-Eaters-Unseen-Intelligence-Understanding/dp/0063073854/ https://www.amazon.com/Light-Eaters-Unseen-Intelligence-Unde... 1. https://www.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Are-Made-Secret/dp/1509837523/ https://www.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Are-Made-Secret/dp/15098... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...
poikroequ 2y ago
Meaningful. Sensible. Coherent. Our conscious experience is NOT random nonsense. An analogy, tune an old analog TV to a station and you get a meaningful picture with meaningful sound. Tune it to a station that doesn't exist, and you get random static and white noise, not meaningful. If computers are producing conscious experience, it's going to be the latter, random and incomprehensible. The underlying computation does NOT matter in this case, because computers are simply incapable of producing meaningful conscious experience. Maybe consciousness is an inevitable consequence of neural activity, but the complex coherent consciousness we experience today is most certainly a product of natural selection. That much is no accident.
- butlike 2y ago
  The picture and sound is a signal meaningful _to you_. The static and white noise may be meaningful signal at a level that's inherently not meaningful to you. The pattern the static signal creates could be analogous to the 'random pattern of neurons firing in the synapse'. You flash enough patterns of that signal and a specific combination could be considered "a thought." Who knows. But if that happens, natural selection boils down to an iterative loop of: If not dead, try ____.

adolph 2y ago

> We already know consciousness can arise from neuronal activity. Do you think no other substrate could give rise to consciousness? Conjecture of another is reported by “Light Eaters” [0] which I’ve just started. Of course, materially sufficient is less than a slam dunk given plausible theory that many mental states are learned not innate [1] and consciousness is relatively recent development in humans [2]. 0. https://www.amazon.com/Light-Eaters-Unseen-Intelligence-Understanding/dp/0063073854/ https://www.amazon.com/Light-Eaters-Unseen-Intelligence-Unde... 1. https://www.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Are-Made-Secret/dp/1509837523/ https://www.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Are-Made-Secret/dp/15098... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...

poikroequ 2y ago

Meaningful. Sensible. Coherent. Our conscious experience is NOT random nonsense. An analogy, tune an old analog TV to a station and you get a meaningful picture with meaningful sound. Tune it to a station that doesn't exist, and you get random static and white noise, not meaningful. If computers are producing conscious experience, it's going to be the latter, random and incomprehensible. The underlying computation does NOT matter in this case, because computers are simply incapable of producing meaningful conscious experience. Maybe consciousness is an inevitable consequence of neural activity, but the complex coherent consciousness we experience today is most certainly a product of natural selection. That much is no accident.

butlike 2y ago
The picture and sound is a signal meaningful _to you_. The static and white noise may be meaningful signal at a level that's inherently not meaningful to you. The pattern the static signal creates could be analogous to the 'random pattern of neurons firing in the synapse'. You flash enough patterns of that signal and a specific combination could be considered "a thought." Who knows. But if that happens, natural selection boils down to an iterative loop of: If not dead, try ____.