Steve wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

Steve wrote:
Experience versus perception - what is the difference?

If you don't want to make the effort to distinguish, just say so. There's no shame in it. But if you want to say something like

if you like it is this so called "knowledge" that tosses us from the garden of eden

... then you are really saying 'ignorance is bliss', but obfuscating. "Ignorance is bliss" is short, and to the point, Steve.

Yes, ignorance is bliss. It is also not a good survival mode. Hence consciousness with all its baggage.

So, what? Just more equivocation about the competition between merely surviving and finding moments of bliss. Anyone may say that life is an admixture of experiences. Not much of an achievement, if you ask me. See? I know it, too. But knowing how to cook is a more reliable technique for achievement of bliss than just being able to wibble about bliss. If you have any good recipes (for food preparation) you still have the chance to shine.

pl0bs wrote:

ColonelZen wrote:Using a cell phone to communicate requires forward planning between physically and temporally distal acts.

Physically and temporally distal acts. Doesnt that include everthing in spacetime that moves?

So you seem to be suggesting that I need to entrain 'everything in space time that moves' to learn how to use my cell phone. It takes a village. A big one. I think picking a proper subset may be faster.

Steve wrote:

pl0bs wrote:

ColonelZen wrote: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".

Yes, of course consciousness is required to do conscious acts (planning, communicating). But why couldnt matter on its own, without consciousness, use a cellphone? Or to put it differently: what does consciousness achieve physically, that physical things cannot achieve without consciousness?

Desire. Physical things cannot have desire without being conscious. A zombie would be quite capable of dialing a cell phone, and would do so if appropriately instructed, but only if it did because it "wanted to" would it be conscious.

And what is this "desire"? The process of perception necessarily creates a fantasy we call the subjective who is separate from what is seen. To the extent we are conscious entities we are this subjective, and to the extent we think about it we identify with the thinking. With this separation there arises this thing called desire where we have likes and dislikes which emphasize our differences and we struggle with it as all we want is what we want but reality does not care as it is not split so it has no subjectivity. Meanwhile we change reality based on our pursuit of our desires and this is how consciousness becomes physical.

The question that got plobs excited again was about what it takes to learn how to use a cell phone. Not to use a cell phone. We seem to have forgot the original direction of the dialog. plobs has that effect on many of us.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

The question that got plobs excited again was about what it takes to learn how to use a cell phone. Not to use a cell phone. We seem to have forgot the original direction of the dialog. plobs has that effect on many of us.

I have never talked much with pl0bs, but we may not be that far apart in thinking. In fact, I don't think most of us are in that much disagreement. We all have our own spin on much the same stuff.

To get back to the thread I think it is bleeding obvious consciousness has evolutionary and physical consequences. Without using them we will starve to death through lacking awareness of our need to eat. Why would we do such a peculiar thing as inhaling yet another lung full of air? While if you are conscious, and you don't inhale, you will get an ever more intense experience of the process of desire until either you inhale or you lose consciousness. Perhaps this could be the test for admittance to the materialist club?

Chrisw wrote:

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.

Sounds like just another cock-up over using the word consciousness to describe subjective experience. We need to use it in it's original useful form.

Nurse: The patient is still conscious doctor.
Dr: How can you know what his private first person experience is nurse?


I don't think so.

GrahamH wrote:
I don't think consciousness is required for eating(digesting) or breathing, we do both well enough when unconscious, and plenty of life forms eat without any evidence of consciousness.
Consciousness is good for getting to the food and keeping our heads above water.
We don't need to "feel hungry" to get us finding food, unless "feeling hungry" is the same thing as our control system knowing we need to eat (information processing, not qualia)

Digestion does not stop when the body dies as a lot of that process is done under subcontract by bacteria. They just eat the body instead of the contents. Breathing and heart beats are run by the most basic bits of brain function. They are part of the conscious process as we can speed them up and slow them down by focusing on them but since they are so life critical they have evolved to have a lot of anti virus software in them. It takes some dedicated hacking to get at them but in the end they are under our conscious control.

GrahamH wrote:There is a limited degree of conscious control (it is doubtful that someone can turn off breathing, heart beat or digestion), but no necessity for consciousness in order for an organism to breath or feed. You suggested that consciousness was necessary for these bodily functions. It isn't.

If one does not regard the panorama from amoeba to Amadeus as a continuum, it ought to be because the offspring of sexual reproduction are never different to the parents by an infinitesimal amount, IOW, inheritance is particulate. If one goes a step farther and imagines that one offspring of non-conscious parents was conscious due to a mutation, or something of that nature, one is perhaps still trying to sneak the Adam & Eve story in under the radar.

zoon wrote:On what basis is it possible to make any moral or social claims, such as that people should be treated with respect?

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.

If consciousness doesn’t do anything then our brains are machinery, and all the characteristics of that machinery are the result of evolution by natural selection.

...Perhaps it makes sense for individuals to leave a margin of extra altruism in their behaviour, to be regarded as valuable members of the group.

It's easy to make this all look much more complicated than it is, to obfuscate. Humans are not capable of solitary existence, like polar bears. They do not have all the tools they need from infancy, and often cannot feed themselves until well past the age of twenty. Even then, they tend to need supermarkets. Reflecting on one's private experience guarantees nothing except, perhaps, putting off foraging for food.

GrahamH wrote:

There is a limited degree of conscious control (it is doubtful that someone can turn off breathing, heart beat or digestion), but no necessity for consciousness in order for an organism to breath or feed. You suggested that consciousness was necessary for these bodily functions. It isn't.

You are intellectualizing this whole thing, which is why you are confused. Suicide is a conscious act, no? It doesn't always work, but when it does there is no more breathing, no more digestion, no more consciousness.

Consciousness is not the same as thinking.

Steve wrote:Desire. Physical things cannot have desire without being conscious. A zombie would be quite capable of dialing a cell phone, and would do so if appropriately instructed, but only if it did because it "wanted to" would it be conscious.

I would say that the difference between a physical thing which has desire and one which does not is in the observer rather than the observed. If I watch a frog fixing its eyes on a wriggling worm and moving towards it, I would be likely to use Theory of Mind, more or less automatically, to see the frog’s behaviour in terms of desire, and work out, quickly and easily, that it’s planning to eat the worm. But if I was able to understand the frog in terms of the machinery of its brain and body, then I would not see it as having desire, but as a collection of atoms following out the laws of physics. This would be much more difficult; a frog’s brain is simpler than a human brain, but we are no closer to predicting it in detail in real time.

Chrisw wrote:I can't experience your thoughts without being you.

Yes, I was arguing earlier that your not being able to experience my thoughts is not what stops you from understanding and predicting them in detail – that is because of the complexity of the brain, and I would stand by that argument. But you do have a point, because Theory of Mind works by seeing people in terms of intention and desire – seeing a person as conscious is re-imagining the world with the other person’s values attached to the objects in the world, and no two people have the same set of priorities. To experience the world exactly as I do, rather than just imagining a shadow version, you would have to accept my priorities, which you have no intention of doing. Theory of Mind allows for our inherent competitiveness, and enables us to cooperate through accurately equitable sharing, that is, by equalizing values. If we saw each other as machinery without values, it’s not obvious how we would continue to cooperate. Each person would simply see the world in terms of their own evolved priorities.

This may have been part of what you were saying here:

Chrisw wrote: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.

zoon wrote: This would be much more difficult; a frog’s brain is simpler than a human brain, but we are no closer to predicting it in detail in real time.

I know. I'm in a bad mood and I'm being a little picky. Sorry.

But! Are you sure we aren't closer to predicting frog brains than we are humans? When was the last time you got in touch with the frog guys?

GrahamH wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

zoon wrote: This would be much more difficult; a frog’s brain is simpler than a human brain, but we are no closer to predicting it in detail in real time.

I know. I'm in a bad mood and I'm being a little picky. Sorry.

But! Are you sure we aren't closer to predicting frog brains than we are humans? When was the last time you got in touch with the frog guys?

My money would be on the rats. They are more communicative and get a lot of attention.

Perhaps one day a rat will learn a maze, get scanned and simulated, and the simulation will know the maze.

I read some stuff recently on frogs. Somewhere. The most complicated thing they do is catch a fly. It sounds like they know a hell of a lot about frog brains.

zoon wrote:

Steve wrote:Desire. Physical things cannot have desire without being conscious. A zombie would be quite capable of dialing a cell phone, and would do so if appropriately instructed, but only if it did because it "wanted to" would it be conscious.

I would say that the difference between a physical thing which has desire and one which does not is in the observer rather than the observed.

This seems to agree with the way I experience things - I do not know what anyone (or any thing) else wants - I only have access to what I want. And what I want is incredibly mercurial. I am hungry - I eat. Then I am not hungry, but sleepy - I nap. Then I am not sleepy but horny. Now I have to figure out who is willing to get it on with me. I have to stop thinking about me and build some sort of relationship. Suddenly the game changes and I start flirting while looking for clues and cues. From the outside it is all very mechanical. From the inside it is a fantasy.

Somehow there has to be a way to marry these two sides - to overcome this split. I can't ignore either one and remain "real". And in exploring this I first recognize the fantasy, then think that fantasy is amazingly real. Stuff like "all men are equals" arises from trying to heal this split. It sounds like a really meaningful statement internally but nonsensical externally. It challenges my ideas of who I am, pretty much to destruction.

I think the big deal is if you can ever simply let go of the definitions of who we are. Folks get scared they will turn out to be monsters but I think that is only true if they push the envelope on their own perceptions. I am rambling here, but I think you are holding the thread that will unravel the tangled web.

GrahamH wrote:I agree zoon, although I think "reading minds" could be improved with technology. Note that mentalists are better at it than most because they have learned to take in more information. If we made more of the brain states externally accessible, and learned to "read them", along with facial expression, body language etc, we would be better at "reading minds". Our own TOMs would be that bit richer in information content. If that info was rich enough would be "experiencing someone else's thoughts"?

How does that compare to experiencing the voice of someone else in your head, expressing thoughts they might have? If you have an imaginary conversation with someone you know well, and they speak in ways typical of their personalities, isn't that you experiencing the TOM you have of that person as thoughts in your own mind? If your TOM was accurate enough and had enough detailed information from their brain, wouldn't you actually be "experiencing their thoughts"? It that pretty much the same process as "experiencing your own thoughts", using the data from your own brain?

Yes, instead of seeing others’ brains entirely as machinery, we could use improved understanding of brain processes to improve the Theory of Mind models – that may be the way to go. A greatly improved version might be very close to the real thing. Especially since, as you say, the models which we have of our own minds may be constructed on the pattern of the models we have of others’ minds.

I think in that post I was concentrating on the way the Theory of Mind models enable humans to cooperate, while a more direct approach to predicting people as machinery would not enable cooperation. It’s guessing on my part, because nobody’s too sure how either ToM or human cooperation work. My wild and extremely schematic guess is that:

a) Humans and other large-brained animals put values on things in the world, as a first step in deciding what to do. The usefulness of brains is in deciding what action to take, and for animals which carry models of the world around with them, setting and updating values on different things is a useful step in decision making.
b) Things in the world can take different values at different times, e.g. an apple has a higher value when one is hungry than when one isn’t.
c) One of the main features of human Theory of Mind is creating a model of the world with a wholesale shift in the values attached to objects, so that the objects now have the values which the other person would attach to them. For example, if an observer is using Theory of Mind to consider a mother, that mother’s child would (probably) have a much higher value for the mother than for the observer: it will be given the higher value in the observer’s ToM model. The observer looks at the situation of the other person and uses their own evolved brain processes to work out what values things in the world have for the other person.

The usefulness of this for cooperation is that people can monitor each other’s costs and benefits accurately, so that cooperation can be fair. Humans exchange on a basis of value in a way that no other animal does, and many researchers think this ability to reciprocate is central to the way humans cooperate more extensively than other animals of the same species which are not closely related. It’s my guess that Theory of Mind enables this reciprocation by value, because ToM enables us to see the world in terms of other people’s values.

So that when using Theory of Mind, another person is seen not just as the centre of an imagined world, but as a centre of a whole set of values.

This enables:
1) predicting what the other person will do – they are likely to aim for whatever has the highest value for them.
2) cooperation with the other person by equalising costs and benefits, both sides being careful not to be cheated.


I was going to say that understanding human brains through neuroscience would not provide this information about values attached to objects in the world, but thinking again, I suppose it could. Not so directly, though, and not as a first step. So Theory of Mind could continue to be a useful approach to interacting with other people even if we had access to what others were thinking via neuroscience.

I suppose I’m trying to address the feeling that understanding people as machines would be dehumanizing – not merely difficult, but actively undesirable. Perhaps it’s because seeing others as machines instead of through the Theory of Mind system would lose the sense that other people are centres of value, to be treated with fairness.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

zoon wrote: This would be much more difficult; a frog’s brain is simpler than a human brain, but we are no closer to predicting it in detail in real time.

I know. I'm in a bad mood and I'm being a little picky. Sorry.

But! Are you sure we aren't closer to predicting frog brains than we are humans? When was the last time you got in touch with the frog guys?

A live frog? In detail (following nerve impulses chasing around large numbers of neurons, not just at the tips of a few electrodes)? Predicting its decisions in real time? I have to admit, I haven’t been in touch with the frog guys, is anyone actually tracking in detail where the nerves are firing in a live brain? I think I was thinking of frogs because I found one on top of a hedge the other day, what was going on in its head would be anybody’s guess.