SpeedOfSound wrote:

pl0bs wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:But it can't produce an organism that can learn to dial a cell phone without C.

So is dialing a cell phone something more than just matter behaving according to the laws of physics?

Is your cell phone something more than just matter behaving according to the laws of physics?

In order to be consistent with the matter of the brain, of which we know for a fact that it is conscious, yes it is more.

pl0bs wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

pl0bs wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:But it can't produce an organism that can learn to dial a cell phone without C.

So is dialing a cell phone something more than just matter behaving according to the laws of physics?

Is your cell phone something more than just matter behaving according to the laws of physics?

In order to be consistent with the matter of the brain, of which we know for a fact that it is conscious, yes it is more.

Your cell phone is conscious? I have the old iPhone is that the new iPhone?

SpeedOfSound wrote:Your cell phone is conscious? I have the old iPhone is that the new iPhone?

Brains arent conscious? Or are they not consist of the same elementary particles as the rest of matter?

pl0bs wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:Your cell phone is conscious? I have the old iPhone is that the new iPhone?

Brains arent conscious? Or are they not consist of the same elementary particles as the rest of matter?

What does your brain have to do with your cell phone? Can you read and answer simple questions or not?

SpeedOfSound wrote:What does your brain have to do with your cell phone? Can you read and answer simple questions or not?

This one is still unanswered:

pl0bs wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:But it can't produce an organism that can learn to dial a cell phone without C.

So is dialing a cell phone something more than just matter behaving according to the laws of physics?

You have acknowledged that a physical organism cannot operate a cellphone without consciousness. Youve got yourself in one hell of a mess.

pl0bs wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:What does your brain have to do with your cell phone? Can you read and answer simple questions or not?

This one is still unanswered:

pl0bs wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:But it can't produce an organism that can learn to dial a cell phone without C.

So is dialing a cell phone something more than just matter behaving according to the laws of physics?

You have acknowledged that a physical organism body cannot operate a cellphone without consciousness. Youve got yourself in one hell of a mess.

Actually we do all know that you can't read and answer simple questions.

Its the same mess you got in when you you gave an example of fish moving east, as a reason of why consciousness evolved.

So which part of the physical process of operating a cellphone requires consciousness? Or which part of the physical process of fish moving east requires consciousness? Is it the motion of atoms?

SpeedOfSound wrote:This is you going down the Cartesian rabbit-hole. Yes nature could produce an organism that just moves it's finger without the massive machine of consciousness. It in fact has produced a few zombies. Mold comes to mind.

But it can't produce an organism that can learn to dial a cell phone without C.

Well on the face of it there are two possibilities:

1) In producing something that acted like a human, evolution inevitably produced something that was conscious. This would be because consciousness supervenes on the sort of patterns of behaviour that are characteristic of conscious creatures. If something behaves in every way as if it is conscious then it is.

2) There could be creatures that behaved exactly like humans but lacked consciousness (zombies).

Do you agree with either of these positions (or can you think of a third one?) In neither case does consciousness itself perform any function - in the first case it is just a byproduct of behaviour, in the second it is an entirely optional add-on that has no influence on behaviour.

Chrisw wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:This is you going down the Cartesian rabbit-hole. Yes nature could produce an organism that just moves it's finger without the massive machine of consciousness. It in fact has produced a few zombies. Mold comes to mind.

But it can't produce an organism that can learn to dial a cell phone without C.

Well on the face of it there are two possibilities:

1) In producing something that acted like a human, evolution inevitably produced something that was conscious. This would be because consciousness supervenes on the sort of patterns of behaviour that are characteristic of conscious creatures. If something behaves in every way as if it is conscious then it is.

2) There could be creatures that behaved exactly like humans but lacked consciousness (zombies).

Do you agree with either of these positions (or can you think of a third one?) In neither case does consciousness itself perform any function - in the first case it is just a byproduct of behaviour, in the second it is an entirely optional add-on that has no influence on behaviour.

2 is not possible. 1 has the issue of the meaning of supervenience. If it's meant in a soft sense of C is what the brain carrying organism feels like because that what brains do is feel then we can let it pass. The word was constructed, however, to sound spookier and more intimidating than the thing it is describing.

in the first case it is just a byproduct of behaviour,

Wrong. Unless you are sworn to Cartesian dualism or some ethereal chess move to get around it.

Should we have these last posts, minus pl0bs, moved to my thread on the Definition of C? We are getting off topic and back in the old rut that I started that thread to deal with.

Chrisw wrote:I think your central point that if we are machines then our consciousness is no longer private is just untrue. Materialism implies no such thing. I can't experience your thoughts without being you.

You can’t experience my thoughts without being me, but with the necessary technology (which I agree with you does not yet exist and very probably never will) you could tell me what my thoughts and plans are without being me. If you could read off my thoughts and plans, then those thoughts and plans would no longer be private. The fact that you were not experiencing my thoughts would not change this. The privacy of my thoughts depends only on the physical complexity of the brain, it does not depend on the logical impossibility of you being me.

Chrisw wrote:If you just mean prediction then there is nothing new here. We have been trying to predict each others' actions for thousands of years and we are all quite good at it. I don't see how new technology changes this. I think I might notice if someone stuck lots of wires in my head and connected me up to a machine, I think I might figure that this could give them an unfair advantage over me, say if we were negotiating or playing poker. What's the philosophical significance of this possibility?

I think there is something new. Theory of Mind makes us much better at predicting people than we would be without it, but it is still far from detailed prediction at the physical level. With Theory of Mind, we can make good estimates of the values things or events hold for other people, and we can then use these values to predict that the person will aim for one goal rather than another goal. This is not detailed prediction, but high level guesswork regarding intentions, and so far it is the best we have achieved. If we are machinery, there is a real possibility that one person could predict another at the detailed physical level, and get it right every time. (I agree with you that the technology for this does not yet exist, and may well never exist. Detailed prediction would require a less damaging technique than sticking wires into heads.) I think the philosophical significance is that thoughts are not essentially private. The only thing that’s stopping us from mindreading each other is physical constraints which neuroscience may yet overcome. Effective prediction and mindreading would not require one person to become another, and would mean that thoughts were no longer private.

Technology has a knack of doing surprising stuff. Here is a headset that can read your mind. All you do is think and it responds appropriately. It only costs a couple hundred bucks. I would not doubt we will be able to make sense of brain function some day.



What is being registered here is the mind, which is something other than consciousness. I consider consciousness as the presence of a subjective point of view. I am still entertaining the idea there is only one subjective point of view and it can be placed anywhere to be useful. What we think of as "me" is a thought which is a matter of brain activity, which this headset is able to detect and interpret, and which belongs to a particular physical body. Thoughts without a subjective point of view would be programming which only get changed through external influence. This is where computers and zombies exist. Thoughts combined with a subjective point of view can be judged and changed through internal influence, they change of their own through simple explorations and examination. Indeed this is the only way they change. Others may try to influence them through external influence but it is not until tha subjective point of view changes that the mind changes.

zoon wrote:

Chrisw wrote:I think your central point that if we are machines then our consciousness is no longer private is just untrue. Materialism implies no such thing. I can't experience your thoughts without being you.

You can’t experience my thoughts without being me, but with the necessary technology (which I agree with you does not yet exist and very probably never will) you could tell me what my thoughts and plans are without being me. If you could read off my thoughts and plans, then those thoughts and plans would no longer be private. The fact that you were not experiencing my thoughts would not change this. The privacy of my thoughts depends only on the physical complexity of the brain, it does not depend on the logical impossibility of you being me.

The problem is, most of what goes on in the brain isn't a stream of natural language dialogue so we can't "read it off". Nor are there pictures or sounds or voices in our head that we can observe. Very often we don't know what we ourselves are thinking until we verbalise it or act - we make sense retrospectively of what was going on in our heads. If we come up with reasons for our actions it is often after the fact. Our everyday choices do not usually proceed from detailed processes of verbal argument and on those occasions where they do we usually discuss the issues publically (no need for fancy technology to know what our thoughts are here).

The common view seems to be that we have inner thought episodes (perhaps in some language, perhaps not, this is unclear) which we then sometimes verbalise. Communication is then the task of using language to evoke internal, private thoughts in someone else that match the internal, private thoughts that we are having. Most twentieth century philosophers tell us that this is just wrong (Dennett's Consciousness Explained was one of the most famous recent examples but this critique goes back to Wittgenstein and Dewey at least).

It's actually the other way round. We don't start from some perfectly understood idea in our heads which we then try to squeeze into the straightjacket of language to get our point across to someone else. In fact we can't think to any great degree without language. That's why we silently talk to ourselves when doing complex reasoning and why discussing a difficult problem with others helps even if they don't contribute much. Natural language is the medium in which our thoughts take place. Writing ideas down helps develop them because we can build arguments on paper that are larger and more complex than those we could hold in our heads. We can do almost no mathematics without manipulating exernal physical symbols.

None of this says that we won't be able to predict actions given enough information. We can go from states of molecules to physical actions and words. Just that we won't find "thoughts" inside the brain, hidden from the outside world. If you want to know what I am thinking the best thing to do is ask me (perhaps what I'm arguing here is not that thoughts are private but that they are no more or less private just because materialism is true).

Oh and one more point: you can't even predict someone's actions without either strictly controlling or having immense knolwedge of their surroundings. Given that a Laplace's Demon machine is probably theoretically as well as practically impossible its not clear that there is any machine we can imagine that would really help us out in predicting behaviour in practical situations. Our natural capacity to "read minds" may be about as good as it gets because it uses a high level model of minds that assumes people are fairly autonomous and rational. Working with this model doesn't require much processing power so there is little that technology can do to improve it. All technology can do is operate at lower levels where it's all just molecules and there is simply no way that you could physically get hold of all the necessary data (the precise sate of every atom!) on which to perform your calculations.

GrahamH wrote:Some thoughts on the scale of the problem of understanding the brain, and how Kurzweil got it wrong.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010 ... dersta.php

P Z Myers wrote:There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil... seems to have the tech media convinced that he's a genius, when he's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti.

I really can't stand Kurzweil.

SpeedOfSound wrote:Our strong feeling about our own subjective 'feels like a bat or something' may be hopelessly tied up in and even derived from our feelings about the minds of others.

In fact if you use just a tiny bit of reason you can see that a baby doesn't pop out fully conscious and then later gets a strong feeling about others being just like baby. The two things quite obviously develop in lock-step.

Yes, I think you’re right that the problem of consciousness originates with the way we think about other people. There is plenty of scientific evidence that we do use Theory of Mind in social life, it explains neatly why we think of other people in terms of a shadow model of the world, and the evolutionary advantage for individuals with slightly improved versions of Theory of Mind is also reasonably clear, so it fits the reductionist project.

Theory of Mind doesn’t work primarily by looking at the other person, it works by re-evaluating the world from the other person’s point of view, then using the new values to guess what the other person will do – we guess what another person’s goals are, then guess how they will set about achieving them. Because ToM works this way, it also gives direct information which is relevant to cooperating with other people, and which would not necessarily be available by mindreading a person’s brain. For example, if you see someone standing in the middle of the road, looking at a car bearing down on them, Theory of Mind tells you quickly that the person is probably about to take evasive action. If you could read off what was going on in that person’s brain, you would probably discover the same, as well as exactly what evasive action they were deciding to take. But if you saw someone standing in the road looking away from a car coming at them, reading that person’s brain would tell you nothing about the danger they were in, because they haven’t noticed it. Theory of Mind gives you the information needed to take action on their behalf, because it re-evaluates the world from their point of view, even if their actual point of view doesn’t yet include a car about to run them down. So in some ways Theory of Mind gives us more relevant information about cooperating with other people than mindreading ever can. It looks at the world as well as at the person.

You are saying, I think, that consciousness is understood at a conceptual level because the contents of consciousness match the findings of neuroscience. Would it make sense to say it follows that thoughts are essentially no more private than the external world is? Neurones are part of the external world, and if their activities could be followed and predicted, then people’s thoughts would no longer be private. What is keeping thoughts private to each person is the complexity of the brain, not something inherently inaccessible about subjectivity.

We think of consciousness as being inherently about each person’s point of view because this is how Theory of Mind works. Our best guess at another person’s thoughts is currently by using Theory of Mind, and ToM works by assuming that each person is the centre of another point of view, according to which the world takes on a whole new set of values. (The car about to run someone over has a strongly negative value for that person, not so much for the observer. Using Theory of Mind, the observer re-evaluates the situation from the point of view of the person in the firing line.)

If we used neuroscience to observe and predict people’s brain processes directly, without using Theory of Mind, we would not be imagining their point of view at all, but we would still be accessing their thoughts accurately and in detail. If someone was able to tell me (and everyone else) what my thoughts and plans were, I would, I think, consider that my subjective experiences had ceased to be private.

I think our distinction between the external world and thoughts is a practical one: other people have independent information about the external world, but other people do not have independent information about my thoughts. This is a very useful distinction for a social animal to make. If neuroscience made mindreading feasible, the distinction between thoughts and the external world would evaporate.

Is the rambling getting out of hand?

SpeedOfSound wrote:

Chrisw wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:This is you going down the Cartesian rabbit-hole. Yes nature could produce an organism that just moves it's finger without the massive machine of consciousness. It in fact has produced a few zombies. Mold comes to mind.

But it can't produce an organism that can learn to dial a cell phone without C.

Well on the face of it there are two possibilities:

1) In producing something that acted like a human, evolution inevitably produced something that was conscious. This would be because consciousness supervenes on the sort of patterns of behaviour that are characteristic of conscious creatures. If something behaves in every way as if it is conscious then it is

...in the first case it is just a byproduct of behaviour,

Wrong. Unless you are sworn to Cartesian dualism or some ethereal chess move to get around it.

I don't think its dualist. And how is this not your position? Do you think the brain is the thing that causes consciousness? Well that's all I'm saying here. Hence my response to Jef's point that consciousness must have evolutionary utility: nature did not create something extra called consciousness that requires explanation. Evolution simply produced physical creatures who were adapted physically to the world. Evolution simply doesn't "care" whether creatures have conscious awareness, only how good they are at surviving and passing on their genes to their offspring. It just so happens that advanced creatures do have consciousness (or at least this is what we say, this is assuming we even know what we mean by "consciousness"). It may be that creatures that behave like us will inevitably be conscious. But this does not mean that evolution actually selects for consciousness.

GrahamH wrote:

zoon wrote:I have the impression that while no two people on this forum agree on what exactly consciousness is or isn’t, or whether it constitutes a problem and if so what to do about it, there is general (though not complete) agreement that consciousness doesn’t actually do anything.

I think consciousness does "do something". It permits social interaction. How would a social zombie function if it lacked any intentional model of self and others? The only possibility I can think of is if the zombies had highly detailed functional models of others, but how would they obtain data to build such a thing, and how could it possibly evolve? I think consciousness is an intentional model of self, and a damned useful one.

Yes, I was using “consciousness” there to refer to the sense of a subjective private world which I can’t seem to get rid of. Taking “consciousness” as a mental self-model which is needed for social interaction, I do agree it’s useful.

Chrisw wrote:None of this says that we won't be able to predict actions given enough information. We can go from states of molecules to physical actions and words. Just that we won't find "thoughts" inside the brain, hidden from the outside world. If you want to know what I am thinking the best thing to do is ask me (perhaps what I'm arguing here is not that thoughts are private but that they are no more or less private just because materialism is true).

I agree with almost everything in your post; certainly I did not mean to imply by the phrase “read off” that there is anything simple about translating from brain processes to words or features of thought which we would recognize. I’m not convinced that we would necessarily have to start at the molecular level to get results better than those from Theory of Mind, but I fully agree there’s no prospect of detailed physical level observation or prediction of thoughts for the foreseeable future. I don’t think I’m doing a Kurtzweil.

The sentence I would take issue with is:

perhaps what I'm arguing here is not that thoughts are private but that they are no more or less private just because materialism is true

because it would depend on the alternative(s) to materialism. The standard Christian alternative, as far as I know, is that consciousness occupies a wholly different, spiritual, realm from the material world, one where only God, and perhaps angels and demons, have access to human thoughts, and even they are unable to predict humans because of free will. Many atheists from ex-Christendom have a similar view of consciousness, but without God, angels or demons. This is fundamentally different (in theory, if not in practice) from the view that thoughts are brain processes which are essentially similar to ordinary machinery, and which could be observed and predicted by sufficiently advanced technology. Only brain complexity, and not a different dimension of existence, keeps our thoughts private.

pl0bs wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:What does your brain have to do with your cell phone? Can you read and answer simple questions or not?

This one is still unanswered:

pl0bs wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:But it can't produce an organism that can learn to dial a cell phone without C.

So is dialing a cell phone something more than just matter behaving according to the laws of physics?

You have acknowledged that a physical organism cannot operate a cellphone without consciousness. Youve got yourself in one hell of a mess.

Afraid not. Using a cell phone to communicate requires forward planning between physically and temporally distal acts. There is no obvious connection between the glyphs on the keypad and the person you wish to talk to. While a fairly sophisticated animal - say chimps - could learn to punch a particular number to hear his keeper or similar trivial communication, being able to grasp the connection between the numbers and the person one wishes to talk to, and to look up that number and punch it in requires a level of abstraction requires a plurality of skills, all involving abstraction, and some second order abstraction, that spells "consciousness".

Rocks have none of it. Nor do atoms. Computers can do it but we don't yet know how to "stack" second order abstraction into levels that come close to human level intelligence (computers can be programmed, trivially, to use lookup tables to accomplish an intent (immediately programmed action) to find someones number and, (either electronically or mechanically via actuators) dial their number for whatever purpose of communication it is carrying out - but as yet we don't know how to program them in general to know *why* they are doing those lookups).

-- TWZ