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My general understanding is that "mind" is an objective concept; people have minds that cognize and think and learn and so on. Some minds are apparently more ca

by sctb 2y ago

My general understanding is that "mind" is an objective concept; people have minds that cognize and think and learn and so on. Some minds are apparently more capable of those things than others. When speaking about intelligence, it makes sense to associate that with the mind. Consciousness, on the other hand, is (even) less well-defined and is usually considered to be subjective. Being subjective, it tends to resist all of the usual objective approaches of description and analysis. Hard problem and all that.

Aardwolf 2y ago
The mind concept here then could apply to computers as well since after all those can also be configured to learn things and behave in certain intelligent ways
mirekrusin 2y ago
I don't understand why people have problem with simply stating that it is emergent phenomenon and that's it. Similarly to how computer is computer and half sized computer is half of its bigger friend – you can keep halving it until there is no "computer" left in it. Or pencil – you have pencil that you call pencil; what about pencil half size of it? and so on until you hit single atom. You had pencil, now you don't, where on this line there was pencil and then there wasn't?
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  Pencil is just an idea, minds objectively have qualia (measured internally). Edit: you can’t measure “pencilness,” but you can’t help but know whether or not you’re in pain.
  - heyjamesknight 2y ago
    You can measure "pencilness" a number of ways depending on how you operationalize the term. It could be a measure of how well it achieves the function of a pencil, how well it matches the collective understanding of the form of a pencil, how closely it materially relates to an existing reference pencil. These are all proxy measures, but all of science is done by proxy.
    - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
      Well sure, but you’re putting “pencilness” onto the collection of heterogeneous matter, same with any other level of analysis. Consciousness isn’t debatable by the thing doing it, it’s an irrepressible fact of existence to the conscious thing. Science needs a falsifiable hypothesis for the “why” of the material->consciousness transition, and constructing such a hypothesis is difficult for a lot of reasons. Saying “it emerges from neuron connections” just doesn’t capture the issue. Why should neuron connections produce this observer thing when we seem to see machines do similar things without it? Is a sufficiently large recurrent neural network conscious by the same process? If not or if so, then why? What precisely produces the phenomenon. Emergence is an observation, not a hypothesis for why that observation occurred. It could just be a trick of the light.
      - heyjamesknight 2y ago
        Agreed, I was just commenting that one can measure "penciliness". I see a lot of pedantic arguments against measurement by proxy, as if every single measurement we do wasn't by proxy.
        BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        Actually yeah I see your point. I’ll concede on that.
- heyjamesknight 2y ago
  Because that's the same as giving up and saying "we don't understand." What is mind emerging into? When a video game experience emerges from the combination of processing, display, sound, and controller input, it emerges into a level of organization that a mind can participate in. It emerges into a system of organization emanating downward from the mind experiencing it. It can't just "emerge" into existence on its own. If a game falls in the woods, its not a game. If you call the mind an emergent phenomenon but can't describe the context into which it emerges, you've added nothing to our understanding.
  - layer8 2y ago
    Emergence has no “into”, IMO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
    - heyjamesknight 2y ago
      All of those examples are emergence "into". The snowflake emerges into the mathematical patterns emanating downward. The termite cathedral emerges into the architectural context of the observer. Without emanating structure, there is no "emergence"—just a proliferation of chaos and error.
      - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        Not to butt in, but if the emergent phenomena only exists in the mind of the observer, and the mind is a material phenomenon, the where in the observer-snowflake system is there anything not fully decomposable to atoms, particle motion, so on?
        heyjamesknight 2y ago
        The mind is not a material phenomenon, in the same way that a video game is not a computational one. The emergent experience exists at the level into which it emerges. It's constructed at a lower level of organization, but not decomposable to them in a way that's meaningful without their recomposition—that's what makes the phenomenon emergent. The qualitative experience of a film does not meaningfully break down to the bits in the video stream, the compressed sound waves carrying the dialog, the photons hitting your eyes' rods and cones, or the biochemical signals in your brain. The mind is not in the brain, but on the brain.
- LiquidHelium 2y ago
  It depends on what you mean by consciousness, if we are talking about the intelligence or self awareness or thoughts then I don’t see any problem with it being emergent. But if we are talking about conscious experience/qualia (not something that thinks or interacts, but something that just experiences) then I think it’s incoherent for it to be emergent. That there is a consciousness that is experiencing something is the only thing we can know as 100% true, and the world itself is something we can never know is 100% true: we could be a brain in a vat, we could be dreaming, in the matrix, a demon making us hallucinate everything etc. It seems a bit silly to say the 100% true thing is an illusion or is dependent because something that we don’t know is true tells us it is.
Symmetry 2y ago
There's a whole scientific study of consciousness that actually comes out of behaviorism. The thought is, if I have a conscious experience I can then exhibit the behavior of talking about it. From this developed a whole paradigm of investigation including stuff like the research of subliminal images. Stanislas Dehaene's book Consciousness and the Brain does a great job of describing this, though it's 10 years old now.
- wat10000 2y ago
  Trouble is that you can also exhibit the behavior of talking about it just by being exposed to the idea, even if you don't have the experience. If you were never exposed to the idea and you started talking about it, then I'd be convinced you had the experience, but nobody is actually like that. The fact that the idea exists at all proves to me that at least one human somewhere had conscious experience, and I know there's at least one more (me), but that's it.
  - Symmetry 2y ago
    I was evidently unclear. I mean, if an image of a parakeet is flashed up on a screen for 100ms and you can say "I saw a parakeet" you were conscious of the image. If the image is flashed for 50 ms and you can't you weren't conscious of the image. In this paradigm being conscious is being conscious of particular things.
    - wat10000 2y ago
      That seems like a fairly simple machine could be conscious, which is not usually how the word is used. Typically consciousness means that there is some ill-defined entity that has a subjective experience, what the philosophers call qualia.
baddash 2y ago
mind = container of values consciousness = meta-attention

by sctb 2y ago

Aardwolf 2y ago

The mind concept here then could apply to computers as well since after all those can also be configured to learn things and behave in certain intelligent ways

mirekrusin 2y ago

I don't understand why people have problem with simply stating that it is emergent phenomenon and that's it. Similarly to how computer is computer and half sized computer is half of its bigger friend – you can keep halving it until there is no "computer" left in it. Or pencil – you have pencil that you call pencil; what about pencil half size of it? and so on until you hit single atom. You had pencil, now you don't, where on this line there was pencil and then there wasn't?

BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
Pencil is just an idea, minds objectively have qualia (measured internally). Edit: you can’t measure “pencilness,” but you can’t help but know whether or not you’re in pain.
- heyjamesknight 2y ago
  You can measure "pencilness" a number of ways depending on how you operationalize the term. It could be a measure of how well it achieves the function of a pencil, how well it matches the collective understanding of the form of a pencil, how closely it materially relates to an existing reference pencil. These are all proxy measures, but all of science is done by proxy.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    Well sure, but you’re putting “pencilness” onto the collection of heterogeneous matter, same with any other level of analysis. Consciousness isn’t debatable by the thing doing it, it’s an irrepressible fact of existence to the conscious thing. Science needs a falsifiable hypothesis for the “why” of the material->consciousness transition, and constructing such a hypothesis is difficult for a lot of reasons. Saying “it emerges from neuron connections” just doesn’t capture the issue. Why should neuron connections produce this observer thing when we seem to see machines do similar things without it? Is a sufficiently large recurrent neural network conscious by the same process? If not or if so, then why? What precisely produces the phenomenon. Emergence is an observation, not a hypothesis for why that observation occurred. It could just be a trick of the light.
    - heyjamesknight 2y ago
      Agreed, I was just commenting that one can measure "penciliness". I see a lot of pedantic arguments against measurement by proxy, as if every single measurement we do wasn't by proxy.
      - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        Actually yeah I see your point. I’ll concede on that.
heyjamesknight 2y ago
Because that's the same as giving up and saying "we don't understand." What is mind emerging into? When a video game experience emerges from the combination of processing, display, sound, and controller input, it emerges into a level of organization that a mind can participate in. It emerges into a system of organization emanating downward from the mind experiencing it. It can't just "emerge" into existence on its own. If a game falls in the woods, its not a game. If you call the mind an emergent phenomenon but can't describe the context into which it emerges, you've added nothing to our understanding.
- layer8 2y ago
  Emergence has no “into”, IMO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
  - heyjamesknight 2y ago
    All of those examples are emergence "into". The snowflake emerges into the mathematical patterns emanating downward. The termite cathedral emerges into the architectural context of the observer. Without emanating structure, there is no "emergence"—just a proliferation of chaos and error.
    - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
      Not to butt in, but if the emergent phenomena only exists in the mind of the observer, and the mind is a material phenomenon, the where in the observer-snowflake system is there anything not fully decomposable to atoms, particle motion, so on?
      - heyjamesknight 2y ago
        The mind is not a material phenomenon, in the same way that a video game is not a computational one. The emergent experience exists at the level into which it emerges. It's constructed at a lower level of organization, but not decomposable to them in a way that's meaningful without their recomposition—that's what makes the phenomenon emergent. The qualitative experience of a film does not meaningfully break down to the bits in the video stream, the compressed sound waves carrying the dialog, the photons hitting your eyes' rods and cones, or the biochemical signals in your brain. The mind is not in the brain, but on the brain.
LiquidHelium 2y ago
It depends on what you mean by consciousness, if we are talking about the intelligence or self awareness or thoughts then I don’t see any problem with it being emergent. But if we are talking about conscious experience/qualia (not something that thinks or interacts, but something that just experiences) then I think it’s incoherent for it to be emergent. That there is a consciousness that is experiencing something is the only thing we can know as 100% true, and the world itself is something we can never know is 100% true: we could be a brain in a vat, we could be dreaming, in the matrix, a demon making us hallucinate everything etc. It seems a bit silly to say the 100% true thing is an illusion or is dependent because something that we don’t know is true tells us it is.

Symmetry 2y ago

There's a whole scientific study of consciousness that actually comes out of behaviorism. The thought is, if I have a conscious experience I can then exhibit the behavior of talking about it. From this developed a whole paradigm of investigation including stuff like the research of subliminal images. Stanislas Dehaene's book Consciousness and the Brain does a great job of describing this, though it's 10 years old now.

wat10000 2y ago
Trouble is that you can also exhibit the behavior of talking about it just by being exposed to the idea, even if you don't have the experience. If you were never exposed to the idea and you started talking about it, then I'd be convinced you had the experience, but nobody is actually like that. The fact that the idea exists at all proves to me that at least one human somewhere had conscious experience, and I know there's at least one more (me), but that's it.
- Symmetry 2y ago
  I was evidently unclear. I mean, if an image of a parakeet is flashed up on a screen for 100ms and you can say "I saw a parakeet" you were conscious of the image. If the image is flashed for 50 ms and you can't you weren't conscious of the image. In this paradigm being conscious is being conscious of particular things.
  - wat10000 2y ago
    That seems like a fairly simple machine could be conscious, which is not usually how the word is used. Typically consciousness means that there is some ill-defined entity that has a subjective experience, what the philosophers call qualia.

baddash 2y ago

mind = container of values consciousness = meta-attention