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Neuroscience does NOT disagree. What we experience as consciousness is a composite (sum total) of EVERYTHING that is going on in the entire brain. Every aspect of the brain influences the composite that we experience as every conscious moment. The state of the entire brain is the source of our composite consciousness . . . that is why it cannot BE the locus without altering the state of the composite that is produced from it.
One of us linked to page with lots of references to scientific works. The other one of us is just asserting random stuff with no logic or reason. Two guesses on which approach has the better track record of accurately describing reality.
Nope, this is strictly a black and white image, so there's no red to see. Yet after being exposed to this black and white image she now knows what it feels like to experience color.
Strictly speaking, there is never any "red" to see, even when you look at a red wall. The red is not in the wall; it is not in the electromagnetic radiation reflected off the wall; it is not in the retinae; it is not in the optic nerve, it is not in the visual cortex. The qualitative experience of "red" is - according to my theory - a "brain/body/world" process. "Red" is not a "thing seen"; it is a way of being.
More specifically, "red" is an aspect of what it is like to be a particular kind of physical process, namely, the kind of process in which - typically - light waves in a certain part of the spectrum activate molecules, etc. composing an agent (a goal-directed physical being). In some atypical cases, the qualitative experience of seeing red can consist of a process that is missing many of these components. In certain cases, for example, the 660 nm light waves, the retinae, and the optic nerves could all be missing or inactive, and you could still have an agent experiencing a sensation of seeing red. The only component of the process that is strictly necessary in every instance of qualitative red is the agent. Without agents, qualitative red simply does not exist.
According to the enactive theory of consciousness, an agent would never experience qualitative red unless, at some point in its personal history (or, at least, at some point in its genetic lineage), it has participated in the full physical process (light, retinae, etc.). But, thanks to the memory/imagination functions of brains, once an agent has participated in the full process, an abbreviated version of the qualitative experience process can, in principle, be generated (e.g., illusion, delusion, imagery, dream contents). The agent's neural system in some sense "captures the essence," so to speak, of the full process and maintains it ready-at-hand for later retrieval. In other words, the qualitative experience requires the full process at some point in an agent's personal life and/or genetic lineage, but after that, the "brain" portion of the brain/body/world process can be sufficient for qualitative experience. Benham's top somehow "tricks" the agent's brain into "seeing color" where no colored light exists, but this is (according to my theory) only possible because the agent has seen color in the past (or, at least, agents in his/her genetic lineage have seen color in the past).
To the best of my knowledge, colorblind people do not experience the illusion of color when looking at Benham's top. (If you have knowledge to the contrary, I'd be interested in some references.) But even if (contrary to facts, so far as I know) a colorblind person believed they saw color in Benham's top, my guess would be that they still could not identify red objects with accuracy. Why? Because the belief is based on a delusion. They did not actually experience qualitative color, they just had "some sensation" that they mistakenly judged to be a feeling of "seeing color". As I've said before, most judgments about the source or meaning of qualitative experience can be wrong (in most cases they are not wrong but, in principle, they can be wrong).
[BTW: This "need for the full process" is testable, in principle, but it could be difficult in practice, if it turned out that genetic lineage is sufficient for the illusion of color to occur. To rule out the possibility of innate color-vision capacity via genetic lineage, you've have to find agents who have no color-seeing ancestors. Maybe somehow figure out if dogs see the illusion of color when looking at Benham's disk? Not sure how you'd do that, but psychologists can be amazingly clever about stuff.]
If I'm colorblind and I have "this" sensation (indexical instance of "inner ostensive definition" pointing at "this" sensation that I am having now), then I cannot be wrong about the fact that I'm having "this" sensation, whatever it is. But if I identify "this" sensation as a "seeing color" then I could be wrong (and, in this case, I probably am wrong). I am wrong in this case because "this" sensation - whatever it is - is not historically-linked (personally or genetically) to the "essence" of the brain/body/world process that is the qualitative sensation of "seeing red."
If qualitative experience just is, in each case, an aspect of physical brain/body/world processing that is either directly (this full process here and now) or indirectly (partial process via the brain's capacity for memory/imagination) instantiated, then the only way to experience qualia is to be the right kind of physical process (i.e., to be an agent in the right kind of historical context).
Do you keep saying - in your insistence on going around and around in circles - but you have not justified saying it at all. Why does it need to be "alive"? And why would it not be "alive" any way? We are just machines - and we are alive - so why can we not build a non biological machine that is just as "alive" too?
What definition of life are you operating under the precludes it to any non-biological or biological machines that was constructed by our sciences?
So as you can see I find not one but two issues in your failed rhetoric on the matter. Firstly you are not showing why consciousness - whatever it may be - must be predicated on this arbitrary word "life". And secondly - you are not showing why a machine constructed by us (biological or not - or some combination) would not be alive.
So far the only thing - literally - you have offered to argue against either of these things is to tell us you can not abide it.
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
What we experience as consciousness is a composite (sum total) of EVERYTHING that is going on in the entire brain.
That does not even remotely address my concerns. You are simply saying the same things again using a new shuffled deck of words. To repeat - why can the sum composite of EVERYTHING that is going on the machine not produce consciousness (and-or life) every bit as validly as the machine in our head does?
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
that is why it cannot BE the locus without altering the state of the composite that is produced from it.
You are simply restating my question without answering it now. Why can this not be? So the locus alters the state - which alters the locus - which alters the state. I see no issue with that at all. An iterative on going process - with declining iterations. You simply can not "abide" this but aside from that - and assertions - you are not showing what it simply can not be so.
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Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof I think in this case her "memory" of feeling pain is really just a delusion, and this delusion does not count as "understanding what the experience was like".
KCfromNC:
Why not? How is her imperfect memory of what it feels like to experience red empirically any different than the imperfect memory of any other person? If you're going to require something other than a feeling itself to be its own justification then all of the previous stuff you've said about those feelings being the only think we can know for sure goes out the window.
The pain-memories of pain-feeling people are historically linked to the type of physical process that constitutes qualitative pain. A pain-feeling person is the type of process that can be a "pain-experiencing process," whereas a pain-blind person is not. Presumably a careful comparison of pain-experiencing processes and the delusions of pain-blind people would reveal the empirical difference.
You are right, however, to some degree, so I will need to change my phrasing. Instead of saying, simply, that "If I believe I am in pain, then I necessarily am in pain" I will henceforth need to say something more like this: "If I believe I am in pain, then I am experiencing some qualitative condition that I believe refers to the qualia that other people refer to as pain." My immediate experience is composed of the qualitative aspect of being the type of physical process that I am (qualia are what its like to be an agent in a given context), so I can't be wrong about feeling whatever it is that I feel, but as soon as I try to assign a name to my feeling - or as soon as I try to conceptually tie this feeling into the network of feelings that natural-language users have tried to put a label on - then I have introduced some possibility for error in judgment.
Which bring me to another point: As I understand it, you want to insist that the concept of "knowledge" only applies in situations wherein one could be mistaken (and thus you insist that feeling "this" feeling - the indexical inner ostensively-defined qualitative sensation - cannot count as a type knowledge). I still don't see why the concept of knowledge has to be limited in this way. Obviously some people do limit the concept of knowledge in this way, but it seems to me to be a matter of taste or intuition. I'm not aware of any proof showing that other conceptions of knowledge are incoherent. I believe it would not be wrong to say: "I know that I'm experiencing this feeling here and now." Why can't the concept of knowledge be used in this way? It is true that no one else can confirm, with certainty, that I am telling the truth, but why should that mean that I don't know this feeling? I can apply the word 'pain' to this sensation, and thereby introduce a source of conceptual and/or linguistic error, but why do I have to I have to take this step in order to say that I know something? It's not weird or unconventional for people to say "I know what I'm feeling" - so it's not as if I'm trying to stretch the concept of knowledge way beyond practical usage of the term. The only motivation I can see for getting so picky about the use of the term 'knowledge' is just so that you can find an excuse not to accept the seemingly intuitive fact that Mary learns something new when she turns away from her mathematical models of red and experiences her own subjective instance of seeing red.
In my terminology, Mary steps out of her b&w room and becomes the kind of process that partially consists of the qualitative aspect we routinely call "seeing red" - which is to say that she needs to be, herself, a red-seeing process. Merely studying abstract models, or studying other people who see red, won't suffice unless, by some means, these activities trigger her own experience of seeing red. (As I said before, I see no reason to think that any such "triggering" would really occur.) By whatever means she comes to "see red" for the first time, she comes to know that "seeing red" feels like this - where "this" is a instance of Mary using inner ostensive "pointing" to refer to "this" feeling that she now has - which she didn't have before. Even if she can't put the feeling precisely into words and even though she might not be able to prove to anyone else that she see red (she can't prove to anyone else that she's not a "zombie" - nevertheless, I'd still want to say that she now knows something that she didn't know before. She knows "this" feeling that she calls "seeing red." She could be mistaken about calling it "red" - it could turn out that, upon close examination, she can't consistently pick out red objects, so we would conclude that whatever she's feeling, it isn't qualitative "red", but it is still some sort of qualitative experience, and she knows what this experience is like, even if she cannot correctly label it.
To repeat - why can the sum composite of EVERYTHING that is going on the machine not produce consciousness (and-or life) every bit as validly as the machine in our head does?
I don't agree with Mystic here - I do think that machines (human-built systems) can be conscious - but I'd like to take this opportunity to outline what I see as the necessary and sufficient conditions for building a conscious machine.
A few minimal Necessities:
Agency
I think the machine must be an agent, which is to say, it must be a complex goal-seeking system.
Self-organizing dynamics
I suspect that this is one of the necessary conditions of true agency. A pre-programmed, computational system might someday be able to behave as if it is seeking goals (perhaps pass the Turing Test), but such a machine would not be "really" seeking to satisfy goals any more than water really "seeks" lower elevation. Such a machine would not be conscious, even if it seems conscious at first glance. People often point to some "critical level" of complexity but I don't think that complexity, per se, is what really matters. Critical levels of complexity are needed in order to achieve an on-going self-organizing stability achieved by dynamically maintaining internal processes (metabolism) in the context of external environmental demands (that, on the whole, tend to keep de-stabilizing or tearing down the system). These activated principles of self-organization are what really matter; complexity is necessary to activate these principles, but even infinite complexity would (according to my theory) be meaningless in itself. For the complexity to become a conscious system, it needs to give rise to meaning, and meaning depends on self-organizing, self-maintaining, goal-seeking actions.
Qualitative experience
Here I will borrow a page from Mystic's repertoire and ask: "But why is self-organization possible?" And: "Who is the experiencer of conscious experience?" My answers: The principles of self-organization depend on the asymmetrical interconnectivity of elements. For X to be connected to Y basically means that the behaviors of X and Y co-vary in accordance with more or less consistent rules. If you know what X is doing, and if you understand the nature of the causal relationship between X and Y, then you should be able to give a better than random guess at the behavior of Y. The connectivity of the system has to be asymmetric because a system of fully symmetrical connections never "does" anything; it is a static structure. Mathematically speaking, the elementary particles and fields of physics are asymmetrically interconnected (although getting "symmetry-breaking" at the fundamental level has been tricky), so physics has some of the "right stuff" to be a viable model of reality. My suggestion, however, is that physics does not yet quite have all of the right stuff.
I propose that the dynamics of reality ultimately derive from the asymmetrical interconnectivity of qualitative relations. To put it another way: qualitative relations are the essence of all dynamics in the physical world. Most of this dynamics is unconscious (e.g., the dynamics of stellar formation), but it is all, nonetheless, qualitative in the sense that it is all essentially the same kind of "stuff" that conscious systems sometimes come to experience as the qualitative contents of experience. If I am right about this, then the concept of ontologically isolated egos (individual selves/souls) is based, to some extent, on an illusion. The illusion stems from the limited horizons of experience inherent in any given moment of conscious experience. If I'm right, then the reality underlying the illusion of the individual "I" is that every moment of consciousness can best be described as a moment in which the World or "Reality Itself" is conscious. Not every physical event is conscious, but when an event is conscious, the "experiencer" is simply the World. Unlike the "God" concept, I see a qualitative chaos at the primordial level of reality. I won't try to rule out the possibility that the emergent qualitative patterns we could categorize as "conscious" are infinitely old. I'm perfectly happy with the idea that, in the context of a multi-verse, there might not be any "first moment" of conscious experience, in which case it would be correct to say that consciousness is eternal. But I don't see any need to insist on a "prime mover" - no need for a conscious Being who created the qualitative chaos. I see the qualitative chaos itself as the fundamental ground of physical dynamics. No "God's I" view is necessary, although I won't rule it out.
A self-organizing agent (whatever it happens to be made of) will be a conscious being when it achieves a type of complexity wherein it internally models its own qualitative processes (a second-order "qualia about qualia") in the context of modeling its environment for the purposes of self-maintenance. (I'm probably wrong in some way, but I think I'm at least in the ball park.)
Strictly speaking, there is never any "red" to see, even when you look at a red wall. The red is not in the wall; it is not in the electromagnetic radiation reflected off the wall; it is not in the retinae; it is not in the optic nerve, it is not in the visual cortex. The qualitative experience of "red" is - according to my theory - a "brain/body/world" process. "Red" is not a "thing seen"; it is a way of being.
More specifically, "red" is an aspect of what it is like to be a particular kind of physical process, namely, the kind of process in which - typically - light waves in a certain part of the spectrum activate molecules, etc. composing an agent (a goal-directed physical being). In some atypical cases, the qualitative experience of seeing red can consist of a process that is missing many of these components. In certain cases, for example, the 660 nm light waves, the retinae, and the optic nerves could all be missing or inactive, and you could still have an agent experiencing a sensation of seeing red. The only component of the process that is strictly necessary in every instance of qualitative red is the agent. Without agents, qualitative red simply does not exist.
So? None of this has anything to do with the fact that even with our limited understanding of vision and brain function, we can easily answer the question posed by the knowledge argument. Mary does not learn anything new when moving from a black and white room to one with color since she, being omniscient, knows how to generate the feeling of an experience of color using only black and white images. As usual, basic observational science steps in to answer questions which philosophy can't seem to figure out by simply thinking about them.
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If I'm colorblind and I have "this" sensation (indexical instance of "inner ostensive definition" pointing at "this" sensation that I am having now), then I cannot be wrong about the fact that I'm having "this" sensation, whatever it is. But if I identify "this" sensation as a "seeing color" then I could be wrong (and, in this case, I probably am wrong). I am wrong in this case because "this" sensation - whatever it is - is not historically-linked (personally or genetically) to the "essence" of the brain/body/world process that is the qualitative sensation of "seeing red."
As I said before, now you're requiring external justification for something you earlier claimed was intrinsic undeniable "knowledge" about our own experiences. You can't have it both ways.
^ I myself have no idea what is required to build a conscious machine at this time. Much of what you have written above is modelled on our own consciousness - but I would not want to assume that our own one is the only one possible.
However I will not go too deep into a reply equivocating over what is required to achieve it. My only beef is with the claim that it is not possible for us to achieve it. A claim that appears to be made on no basis at all except a desperate need for it to be true - because the person making the claim really wants consciousness to be something special, ethereal, unique, and only to be bestowed upon us by a greater god intelligence which also created the universe.
If you do think "artificial" intelligence can be constructed - then we are already in agreement and little more interaction is required. I am instead waiting to have mystic tell us why it can not be done other than shouting "But it is not alive!" as if this makes the point for him.
The pain-memories of pain-feeling people are historically linked to the type of physical process that constitutes qualitative pain. A pain-feeling person is the type of process that can be a "pain-experiencing process," whereas a pain-blind person is not. Presumably a careful comparison of pain-experiencing processes and the delusions of pain-blind people would reveal the empirical difference.
You are right, however, to some degree, so I will need to change my phrasing. Instead of saying, simply, that "If I believe I am in pain, then I necessarily am in pain" I will henceforth need to say something more like this: "If I believe I am in pain, then I am experiencing some qualitative condition that I believe refers to the qualia that other people refer to as pain." My immediate experience is composed of the qualitative aspect of being the type of physical process that I am (qualia are what its like to be an agent in a given context), so I can't be wrong about feeling whatever it is that I feel, but as soon as I try to assign a name to my feeling - or as soon as I try to conceptually tie this feeling into the network of feelings that natural-language users have tried to put a label on - then I have introduced some possibility for error in judgment.
Yes, exactly. The sum total of what you can say using this "knowledge" is that "I have a feeling". A feeling of what? Can't tell for sure without external justification. Is it like my other feelings? No way to know for sure - there lots of faulty bits of hardware in the process. Is it like other people's feelings? Can't be sure, but even so we're using some additional justification to figure it out. What does this feeling tell me about brain function? Other than "I have feelings", pretty much nothing. Can I use it to tell true from deceptive experiences? Not at all.
Not exactly the most useful thing in the world, especially compared to things we generally use the word for. Not sure if it is equivocation exactly, but it is certainly stretching the meaning quite a bit.
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Which bring me to another point: As I understand it, you want to insist that the concept of "knowledge" only applies in situations wherein one could be mistaken
I'm not sure where you'd get this idea from.
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In my terminology, Mary steps out of her b&w room and becomes the kind of process that partially consists of the qualitative aspect we routinely call "seeing red"
She was seeing red before she left. Remember, she knows better than us an infinite number of ways to generate illusions of color from only black and white images.
Mary does not learn anything new when moving from a black and white room to one with color since she, being omniscient, knows how to generate the feeling of an experience of color using only black and white images.
The premise of the knowledge argument is not that Mary is "omniscient." Mary is a neuroscientist who has complete understanding of the best possible third-person theory of brain functioning. (If she were actually "omniscient" in the sense of God, then of course she would already know what it's like to see red. Also, if her "best possible theory" of brain functioning goes beyond our current scientific concepts of mathematical modeling and somehow incorporates qualitative experience into the guts of the theory (perhaps along the lines that I earlier suggested for a variation of QM that incorporates some notion of a "qualitative map" etc.), then I would leave open the possibility that somehow comprehending this theory triggers her own personal experience of red - at which point she would then understand the qualitative experience of red.
The key to understanding the point of the knowledge argument is to understand that all of Mary's knowledge about qualitative red is achieved via the study of third-person concepts. In other words, she only studies other people's brains and/or she only studies mathematical models of brain activity. To repeat: the core concept at work in the knowledge argument is that Mary only has access to third-person information about brain activity. My contention is that there is no objective short-cut to understanding qualitative red. Mary can only understand qualitative red if she, herself, is the kind of process that has a first-person/subjective experience of qualitative red. IF she can spin a black and white disc and thereby produce within her own mind a veridical experience of qualitative red, then, of course, she can know what it's like to see red.
If Mary is a normal person who (according to Jackson's original version of the knowledge argument) has been confined to a b&w room, then I suspect that the spinning disc will, indeed, generate a veridical experience of red for her. If Mary is color blind, then I would bet that she won't experience red, but these are empirical questions that I don't know the answer to at the moment.
I will leave open the possibility that, even if Mary is colorblind, she might still get some sort of "feeling" when she looks at the b&w disc, and - knowing the history of Behnam's top - she might assume that this feeling is "what it's like to see red." But whether this feeling really is an experience of qualitative red is another empirical question. Given the best possible theory of brain functioning, we should be able to identify the neural correlates of "seeing red." If we can find these patterns in Mary's brain, then we can say "Yes, she's correct. She now knows what it's like to see red" or "No. The feeling she's experience is not seeing red, so she still doesn't know what it is like to see red."
Growing up is a process of learning to correctly match linguistic terms and concepts with "this" feeling or "that" feeling so that we can communicate with other people and learn about the world. I can't know with certainty that I've matched "this" feeling to the correct term, but I can know with certainty that "this" feeling is what I feel, and that these feelings - whatever they are - are essential to my existence. If these feelings all disappear, then "I" cease to exist - even if, by some chance - a "zombie" version of my body were to go on behaving in all of the normal ways that I used to behave. The "I" is grounded in the qualitative aspect of physical existence.
In order to build a conscious machine - and know with reasonable confidence THAT we have, in fact, succeeded in building a conscious machine - we need a theory of consciousness that correlates physical processes with qualitative experiences (we need a "qualitative map"). The only being who can know with certainty whether or not we've created a conscious machine is the machine itself. The machine won't know with absolute certainty that "this feeling" is the experience of "seeing red," but if it has any experience whatsoever at all, then it will know with certainty that it is, at least, conscious to some degree. And this, I still insist, is knowledge of an extremely significant sort. It is the sort of knowledge upon which all other sorts of knowledge are grounded. This knowledge of "this" experience - vague tho it may be - is the most primordial of all knowledge; it is even logically prior to the knowledge that "I exist." You could argue that you can't "do much" with this knowledge, but I would say that everything that is ever done ultimately depends on this "useless" bit of comprehension.
Funny, all of this come down to if you include "feeling" as knowledge or not to me. Yes, or no. I think my philosophy teachers hated me because I bring them down to the axioms. "if/then" type things then followed, but it saved me pages of bumble bee smidgens by saying "if I accept your definition of what "insert idea" is, then the next 20 pages make sense. But even If I use "yes" or "no" the 20 pages is not needed because we have explored yes and no. The whole of this agreement comes due to a simplified definition of knowledge to me. You can even have two, maybe three.
Philosophy is great for writing practice. no god knows I need that.
red is a wavelength of emr. Or a mixture of them. Your body is an input device. You can modify the signal so that most, if not all, inputs would "feel it". That signal then would be transmitted to the brain and processed. because that what the brain does.
we will "create" consciousness. I say in less than 200 years. A worm goes into a cocoon, takes itself apart, and emerges as a completely different looking life form. We will mimic that too. sooner than later imso (s=stupid). It is my opinion that people that don't think we will copy mother nature, possibly using different "legos", do not understand what is going on.
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