*new* mind is more than brain (???)

Well, I guess there is no more for us to discuss on the original subject of this thread, is there?

Rich

New Thread direction: Your question "What else could exhibit consciousness?" e.g., an artificial brain based on belief networks or something similar.

How do you verify consciousness? I take it for granted that other people are conscious, even though it seems just as reasonable that this could be false, as is suggested by the zombie thought experiment. I think that both views, dualism and physicalism, boil down to an inability to reliably detect consciousness. So the two views are in actuality isomorphic and serve a similar purpose.

So how does one even verify that an artificial brain is conscious? Does this even matter as long as it can mimic consciousness fairly accurately? As long as the machine can problem solve on any sort of regular basis and interact with humans in a convincing way, can it be considered conscious? This is generally how we verify consciousness in other people, so why not robots?

When you really look at Kripke's Zombie, what is stripped away? Subjective experience. All he is pointing out is that emotion in other beings is unverifiable, since the perception of another person's emotion is really a combination of projection of your own past emotions onto actions that you interpret as signals for said emotions.

So the question really boils down to this: Can we create the semblance of self awareness, of consciousness? I would say that this is probable. Whether it actually is consciousness is beside the point.

Well I certainly would not want beings of faux consciousness all over the planet

But I don't think that's an issue

Behaviorist (or, at least, non-radical behaviorist) appraisals of mental processes are bogus in my view, which is why I don't take stock in the Turing Test. But analogy suggests that anything designed on principles very similar to those in our brain should exhibit consciousness, assuming that evolution probably had at least a little leeway in designing the central nervous system (i.e., our brains come from one of many possible designs, though all of them may be similar to some degree)

And as it stands, we are starting to get pretty invasive with implants:

Brain Develops Motor Memory For Prosthetics

So I think a good test would be to try to carry out Hans Moravec's thought experiment: say you had a kind of nanobot that could find its way to the brain in the bloodstream, find a neuron, figure out its properties, lyse it and then take over. One neuron is not going to make a difference either way, two, three, four are small numbers as well, shouldn't matter. So repeat until the entire brain is replaced.

I think this person would still be conscious.

John Searle argues that if you replaced a person's visual cortex like this, he wouldn't really see, but act like he does. He argues moreover that, if you replaced a person's auditory cortex, he wouldn't really hear, but act like he does again. And so on.

Why would you not rather have beings that feign consciousness to the degree that they can accomplish their given tasks than one that is non-human and conscious?

The question is still lingering, how does one test for consciousness reliably?

Also, this is straying from what the initial question was; I wonder why it would be the case that we would want other man made machines to exhibit consciousness. How would this benefit us?

We'd become them.

Is that really the best approach?

Is it necessary?

Until we have a reliable test for self awareness and consciousness, its no dice beyond enhancement and cybernetics.

emergence = something *magically* arising out of nothing

If consciousness emerged out of my coffee cup suddenly, I would be more than a tad surprised.

A brain is a finite thing.
Consciousness can conceive of the infinite.

Can infinity emerge out of the finite?
Can x emerge out of y if x is greater than y?

anybody on this thread heard of Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by Alva Noe? I had been arguing in another thread that 'mind is not brain' but this guy is a current professor of philosophy at Berkeley and he also seems to support this argument.

No? turns Descartes's famous statement on its head: I am, therefore I think, says No?. The author, a philosopher at UC-Berkeley, challenges the assumptions underlying neuroscientific studies of consciousness, rejecting popular mechanistic theories that our experience of the world stems from the firing of the neurons in our brains. No? (Action in Perception) argues that we are not our brains, that consciousness arises from interactions with our surroundings: Consciousness is not something that happens inside us. It is something we do or make. No? points out that many of our habits, like language, are foundational aspects of our mental experience, but at the same time many, if not most, habits are environmental in nature-we behave a particular way in a particular situation. He goes on to challenge popular theories of perception, in particular the claim that the world is just a grand illusion conjured up by the brain. Readers interested in how science can intersect with and profit from philosophy will find much food for thought in No?'s groundbreaking study.

odenskrigare;78491 wrote:

Well, I guess there is no more for us to discuss on the original subject of this thread, is there?

Rich

Hi Rich, the original question seemed so simple, but oh...didn't it get complicated!!

My interpretation is this. Consciousness is part of a developmental process from birth to adulthood. The brain I believe does not come into this world already conscious but rather primed, ready to develop that aspect of brain function.

Consciousness to me is just an illusion, the dragon in the garage as it were. The almost infinite neural paths one could take during thought, darting at huge speeds from one thought to the next or developing a thought to ridiculous levels of detail gives us the impression that thought is separate from the mechanisms that produced it.

Emotion also contributes hugely to consciousness.

If we believe consciousness is a felt experience than maybe without emotion It would be like cutting yourself and feeling no pain. You are still have consciousness but don't experience it as you should - this otherworldly experience of being disconnected from the mind that produced it.

And here is where we rapidly depart. What caused me to move away from this line of thinking were all my observations to the contrary. Where did children learn to dream? Who taught them how to make sounds (at the moment of birth)? Where did things like emotions, instincts, inherited capabilities come from?

Did you ever notice how you go to sleep? How you awake? Where did that come from? And everything in between? Why is sleep and awake so different and where did that come from?

So, you see, I am very interested in peeling away the layers of the onion and looking deeper into the nature of the mind. Suggesting that it all happens miraculously out of no where, for me is tantamount to saying God did it. It provides no satisfaction. For me, it would be just the lazy way out of tough questions.

And here is where we rapidly depart. What caused me to move away from this line of thinking were all my observations to the contrary. Where did children learn to dream? Who taught them how to make sounds (at the moment of birth)? Where did things like emotions, instincts, inherited capabilities come from

There are tons of things that we do, e.g. eat and digest, that we do spontaneously. All of this, I consider part of the consciousness.

Consciousness is who we are. The totality. The ability to think, to be aware, to survive, to communicate. Everything. There is the individual consciousness which makes us each unique, but there is also, I believe, the universal consciousness, or collective consciousness, of all that we share.

I look at things differently. Everything that I am and what I perceive is real. Why think it otherwise? Why use the concept of illusion to dismiss aspects of our lives?

Genetics

Not all behavior is learned

This is like asking "where does an archer fish learn to spit?"

There are texts that can help shed light on your questions

For me I think this all depends on how you view the developmental process. Sleep is still a grey area in science but we are still far closer to understanding that than consciousness. Most of those observations apart from emotions can be explained away by current science.

I don't really agree with this. The digestive system is no different than the heart in that we cannot stop it digesting by thought or indeed start the process of digesting when we eat.

Unconscious thought takes the form of deep processing. In other words we cannot call walking an unconscious act as we have to learn how to walk from a child.

Conscious behaviour is in the now and is really concerned with reasoning and learing new skills. Unconscious behaviour frees up processing to achieve this.

I have trouble with this. I believe that the unsconciousness is who we are. If you delete the past and all we have learnt, experiences, memories etc then who are we?

Every encounter we have or situation we enter is dealt with by drawing on experiences of the past. Think of a juggler, the balls are unconscious thoughts, experiences etc and the juggler is conscious thought keeping the balls in the air using the information creatively to deal with the situation or problem.

For me, just another word for God.

I have no idea how a gene learns to breathe or how to make a chocolate cake

Well where did it come from?

I have never seen anything in science that explains where emotions come from.

OK. We have a survival instinct. From where? Why?

From where did the impetus to learn to walk come from? Why did humans go upright and what was the impetus? The starting point?

Once you get into the area of consciousness and unconsciousness we enter into psychology where there are many, many interpretations, anywhere from Freud's sexual motivation, to Adler's inferiority complex, to Jung's collective unconscious. I kind of subscribe to Jung myself. Of course there are many other branches of psychology, all with their own interpretations of what is happening in the human psyche.

Except that genetic theory and indeed everything else in biology is testable, well-defined, falsifiable and all that other jazz. God isn't.

Indeed, no form of mysticism is, and that includes the Dao or collective unconscious or whatever. And so I count my lucky stars that I am living to see, and maybe even participate in the greatest demise of magical belief systems since the Enlightenment.

I would strongly recommend doing so, and hitting the biology stacks, before you put together more phrases like "how a gene learns to ..."

I subscribe to radical behaviorism