The Hard Problem of Consciousness (3'd iteration)

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by Yazata, Jul 11, 2012.

  1. river

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    Conscious is based on memory

    Without memory any stimulis through the senses would be in and out with the speed of light and sound , therefore nothing , no stimulous would be kept , so to speak

    So memory is key to consciousness

    And memory is kept by the molecules that make up the neurons

    So I see the stimulus of the enviroment as then being converted to energy , which moves around the molecule( the shape of the molecule ) of the neurons

    The longer the energy circles the molecule , the greater the memory retention , their could be levels of energy levels within each molecules

    Hence then each level has a memory function

    The lower the level the older the memories , the higher the newer the memories are

    The hard problem of consciousness starts here

    The soft problems are intertwined with the hard

    But without understanding memory and how it works , both are moot ( definition of moot " deprived of practical significance , made abstract or purely academic )

    river
     
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  3. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Mankind does not fully understand how memory is stored, but certainly not as you suggest in molecules. Let’s just discuss your memory of words (because a great deal is known about that) and the structure of how they are stored. There have been many hundreds of detailed studies of this.

    For example, measure the time required to tell if word X is noun and if X is a noun, in what group of words it is stored with. This diagram reflects a very small part of how your "mental lexicon" is hierarchically structured and shows tiny part of the additional information tied to each word.

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    For example, if asked “Is robin an animal?” you can hit the “yes button” with less delay* than if asked: Is robin a bird? (You search down the hierarchical structure to reach the target.) Within the lowest level of the bird hierarchy, the more common birds are found in your search before the less typical bird. I.e. you can hit the “yes button” faster for “Is robin a bird? than for “Is ostrich (or penguin) a bird?”

    I.e. your entire vocabulary, perhaps 30,000 words, is held in one very much larger interconnected hierarchical memory structure; and it is not just the meaning(s) that are stored, in this memory data base, but many other things, like how word is pronounced or what parts of speech these words are (what roles they can play in sentences). For example all verbs are marked as transitive or intransitive. How to form the plural or past tense if it is irregular. Young children often have not yet built all parts of their lexicon so will say things like: “Bob´s three white mouses were sick and sleeped all day.” (They have learned the "add s" to make the plural and "add ed" to make the past tense rule but don´t yet have in their lexicon the exceptions.)

    And it is not just by these response time studies we know this. Very minor strokes can selectively delete small parts of your lexicon. For example, some people have lost the ability to name any food, other have lost only the ability to name vegetables, etc. Interestingly quite often it is only the naming that is lost. If shown a carrot, they still know “It is good for the eyes, horses like them,” they are a crunchy food if eaten raw, etc. but can no longer produce what they are called. (except in a different language if they are bilingual - each language lexicon is a separately stored data set.)

    There is no way this well established, huge, interrelated, hierarchical memory data base, essentially a full functional dictionary, could be stored on a molecule. It is stored in activateable neural circuits just like how to ride a bicycle, play chess, etc. is.

    * Averaged over many trials, which are not sequential as the activation of neurons from sequential trials of the same question must have time to die down. For example, there may be 40 other questions before "Is robin a bird?" is asked again.
     
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  5. river

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    True

    What I should have mentioned and said was the neurons do communicate with other neurons or molecules , my own fault of course

    Nevertheless though memory has layers within each molecule

    The study of how memory works is fundamental to consciousness
     
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  7. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    I spent a year in the cognitive science department of the Johns Hopkins University with one of the world´s leading experts in this lexicon area. AFAIK, there is no evidence for your "stored in molecules” claim, but would be happy to see you provide anything other than your opinion. APL, a branch of JHU, likes to treat its senor staff like JHU facility. - I applied for one of the two sabbaticals granted each year, and was selected, keeping my full salary that very interesting year. It was mainly there that I developed my RTS model of perception although helping on week-ends, for no pay two summers in a Rhesus monkey lab and even once or twice doing brain surgery on them greatly helped the RTS have a solid bases in known neuro-physiology.
     
  8. Rav Valued Senior Member

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    Once again, that is not what I did. All I've done in this discussion is to strongly suggest that matter, or physicality if you like, is more phenomenal than our current models indicate. I tend to think that because consciousness is what it is, something like this must be true. Nick Lane put it this way:

    "Think about all the known properties of matter. Feelings don't seem to be electromagnetic radiation or sound waves, or to correspond to anything in the known physical structure of atoms. They're not quarks, they're not electrons; what on earth are they? Vibrating strings? Quantum gravitons? Dark matter?

    This is the 'hard problem' enunciated by Chalmers; and, like James before him, Chalmers too has argued that it can only be answered through the discovery of new, fundamental, properties of matter. The reason is simple. Feelings are physical, yet the known laws of physics, which can supposedly give us a complete account of the world, have no place for them. For all it's marvelous power, natural selection doesn't conjure up something from nothing: there has to be a germ of something for it to act upon, a germ of a feeling, you might say, that evolution can fashion into the majesty of mind."


    He isn't presenting a theory of consciousness either. If fact he goes on to talk about how much we don't know about such things, and I share the sentiment. I find consciousness to be a bewildering phenomenon. I have absolutely no idea, at all, how such a seemingly miraculous thing is possible. So I certainly don't have a fucking "theory" about it now do I?

    Fields only came into this because you characterized the end-point of a physicalist reduction of consciousness as an atomic unit, or whatever. I was simply attempting to point out that if fields are fundamental, since all properties would ultimately derive from them, whatever properties are necessary for the emergence of consciousness would derive from them as well (rather than particles, for example), obviously. That's not a theory about what consciousness is, or how it actually emerges. Again, I have little to offer in that respect.

    So, as you can see, I am saying exactly the same thing now that I have been saying the whole time. What you call backpeddling is simply me disagreeing with your characterization of my commentary.

    Now, is that enough clarification for you? Can we move on?
     
    Last edited: Apr 24, 2013
  9. Rav Valued Senior Member

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    The thing is, Billy, it's not my speculation. How have I not made that clear? I doubt that the idea that all particles are excitations of more fundamental fields would have ever even occurred to me personally. Such ideas have emerged from Quantum Field Theory.

    So what's really going on here, then, is that you are essentially ridiculing a significant portion of the theoretical physics community when you say things like that. Not just those who are suggesting that fields might be fundamental, but those who are saying anything else about what particles might really be too, such as proponents of string theory.

    Many do, such as the numerous accomplished physicists who take the idea that fields might be fundamental seriously. And remember, I never said it wasn't speculative. On the contrary, I made it clear that it was. But in any case, I seem to be in better company than you are.

    Do it Billy, go solicit opinions from our resident experts. Start a thread in the physics and math forum. Specifically, inquire as to whether the idea that fields might be fundamental pops up a lot amongst those seeking to push the frontiers of physics forward. Anything short of that, and I wont be replying to you anymore. It's all just become too absurd.
     
    Last edited: Apr 24, 2013
  10. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    I suppose there are actually two "puzzles" that hover about: How there is a "showing" of anything at all (experience) and then that how the "outside appearance" is a mismatch to the "inside appearance" (at least as far as brains having the last, in contrast to concrete sidewalks, etc, that supposedly lack any "inside view/feel"). [Second paragraph below clarifies why I'm framing it as "how" rather than "why"].

    Some of the problem caused by naive realism does dissolve when taking into account that both the "public / external appearance" of a brain (components / structure and dynamics) is as much a part of experience as its "private / internal appearance". Mental is a generalization / classification abstracted from the latter and physical is a generalization / classification abstracted from the former (but also taking into account the appearance of things other than brains as they appear [are represented] outside themselves). If adhering to early nominalism, neither concept would be reified with a ten-foot pole; especially hypostatized in the vein of literally being beyond experience -- or a supposed existence as independent of any representation by perception, cognitive and other intellective / describing activities. IOW, we're circularly trying to explain experience with itself or its two divisions of "shown" and interpreted content, which is why the explanation never goes any deeper than correlating the introspective appearances of certain brain patterns / areas with its extrospective appearances / measurements / descriptive understandings.

    Of course, I'm obviously dismissing the sometimes "why" definition of the hard problem for "how". Asking "why" before "how" implies that biological evolution is an omnipotent God that can do anything, not even subservient to the restrictions of physics (reminiscent of the script writers for Irwin Allen's scifi TV shows of the '60s, who were often oblivious to such). Asking "why" evolution introduced phenomenal consciousness is sort of like asking "Why did organisms on Planet-X develop the capacity to travel bodily back in time?" There would definitely be a few screws missing in the curiosity department for that faction of folk that only wondered about that, or that first. Likewise, the very asking of "Why phenomenal consciousness evolved?" is assuming beforehand that experience is not fundamental in the natural world, so there is the matter of explaining how you get from a world where "nothing is shown at all" to one where that world (or anything) is at least is finitely exhibited in regard to the perceptions of brains.

    But again, even when pursuing "how", the answer doesn't get outside the dual appearances of experience, of correlating the "external appearance" (and the additional intellectual and descriptive products derived from that) to the internal appearance. Which arguably are not that totally dissimilar in terms of qualitative properties, apart from the same item (in this loose, figurative analogy) looking like a rose garden privately in itself but looking like a rock garden when the public POV is reflected back from a mirror.
     
  11. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    No. not true. Quantum Field Theory, quantum electrodynamics. quantum chromodyanics etc. are ALL theories of how particles create force fields, like illustrated in in the Feynman diagram I posted, not the othe way round as you seem to think. Even Newton was disturbed by gravity´s "action at a distance" and in his book Optics sort of invents a field theory. (He has "massless particles" constantly streaming from planet to the sun*, if I remember correctly. They pull the planet towards the sun. If rubber bands had existed in Newton´s era, he might have called them "massless virtual rubber bands." )

    These modern physics concepts of virtual particle exchange being the true nature of force fields are answers to that old problem. There are no fields if there are no paticles to exchange virtual particels to make the force fields acting at a distance.

    It is true that one can consider that the particles themselve are excitations in an infinite set of quantized fields (not force fields) but again, without the partices, there is no field. For example production of a "vacuum polarization" electron/ positron pair has briefly an EM force field but it ceases to exists when the particles mutually annihilate. In some sense, the POV that particles are fields is to explain how particles can create virtual particles. This is much like the idea / POV that conscuiosness is produced because it exists in all matter.

    SUMMARY: No particle, no field.

    Yes, I do distinguish between mathematical models, even those with predictive value, from reality - what really exist. In the early days of quantum mechanics there were two very different models (Matrix vs. Hamiltonian based equations). Both made the same correct predictions. It was many years before they were shown to be equivalent. I.e. for some years, those who believe mathematical models are reality, had two different versions of reality to chose from.

    Again: I define as "real" things that have non-zero mass-energy, not math models.

    * Newton, as most well educated of his era, knew about the ancient Greeks and many of their beliefs. Their idea as to how vision was achieved (another "action at a distance" problem) was that massless particles shot out of the eyes, interacted with light while "feeling" the objects that you could see. This may be why Newton´s gravity particles went from the planet to the sun.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 24, 2013
  12. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I don't know who Nick Lane is, but I'll argue with him anyway.

    There's an implicit assumption there that "feelings" must be something that are included in the fundamental inventory of physics.

    That's where I think the error is occurring. "Feelings" probably aren't "physical" at all in the sense of being the kind of things that are studied by physics.

    I'm more inclined to think that they are information. It's like recording text on a computer drive. The drive records the text and presumably its meaning is recorded in there as well. But if somebody were to tear the drive apart and inventory all of its physical constituents, all that the investigator will discover are magnetic domains and stuff. There no mysterious additional physical stuff that we can equate one-to-one with "text" or "meaning". Rather, the text and its meaning is encoded in how the more mundane kind of stuff is arranged.

    It's like life. In the ancient past people believed that life must be a kind of stuff, often equated with the breath (the spirit) or a more abstract animal soul, that temporarily inhabits living physical organisms and animates them. Today biologists don't think of life as a kind of spiritual or even physical stuff at all. They think of life as a complex set of self-reproducing physiological processes that occurs in biochemical structures that are themselves composed of atoms. Nobody thinks that life must be another kind of physical object in addition to all of the atoms.

    My suspicion is that what's made the contemporary philosophy of mind into the last bastion of the successors of yesterday's vitalists, is the desire to believe that, if not life itself, at least mankind's higher functions, are transcendent over the mundane workings of the physical world, simply irreducible by their very nature.

    I guess that the difference between the spiritualists and the pan-psychists in that regard consists of the former imagining that mind/spirit must be something completely separate from and transcendent over physical being, while the latter imagine that physical being itself must ultimately turn out to be something that's far more transcendent and spiritual than what physics currently imagines it to be.

    (Six of one, half a dozen of the other, as far as I'm concerned.)
     
  13. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    I share your bewilderment. The more I look into consciousness the more I feel I'm peering into a deep mystery that will elude us for quite some time. Hell, the physical universe even amazes me. Singularities and virtual particles popping in and out of existence from nothing? That's why I like thinking about it all. It sort of humbles me that what I think is so certain isn't certain at all.
     
  14. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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  15. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    To yazata: I agree almost* entirely with your entire post 149.
    In fact I go even further - not only are all feeligs and qualia just information, not physical items, but even "you" are just that information too - not a physical body.
    (I put words like me, you, self in quotes when I want to be very clear that I refer to the information in the Real Time Simulation, RTS.) Because "we" exist only as information in a simulation, "we" are not goverened by the physical laws of physics and chemistry, which do control the firing of every nerve. "You" don´t exist when in deep dreamless sleep - only your body does.

    Your analogy to information in a hard drive is is a good one. If one program of data stored there were a simulation of a fire burning a wooden log, it might not bother to include the heat a real fire would produce. - Perahps just describes the rate of oxidation of the log into ash. Likewise "we" can have, in the only world "we" live in - the RTS, have free will, etc., however, based on many studies of electrical activity in the brain accruately predicting what you will some seconds later believe you decided, or planed concsiously etc. I am inclined to think conscious choices and free will are just universal illusions.

    For other examples, more details, and evidence supporting the RTS view of how perception, experiences and qualia and "yourself" arise within the RTS, see:
    http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=905778&postcount=66
    But this post is focused on how genuine free will might be possible despite the firing of every nerve being deterministically controlled by the laws of neuro-chemistry and physics.

    * only thing Not fully agreed to is: "The drive records the text and presumably its meaning is recorded in there as well." There is no meaning in binary bits. It would be a strange / unusal case but the same set of bits could mean life expectancies to one humam and daily variations of Apple shair prices to another. Only humans add the "meaning" - it is not in the bits on the disk. I´m glad you said "presumably" as that protects form error.
     
  16. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    As I have pointed out to you before Billy, a simulation cannot occur without being displayed to an already existent consciousness. There is nothing being simulated to anybody when it is being processed inside the computer. It is all just data processing taking place "in the dark" at that stage. The simulation only occurs once it is depicted on a screen or in VR goggles to a person who can experience it as a simulation of a real situation they have prior experience of. So saying consciousness is a simulation assumes a viewing homonculus sitting inside the brain who can visually process the images it sees and "feel" it to be like a reality it is somehow also an experient of. Unless that is what you are suggesting, I'd recommend giving up on this flawed metaphor of a simulation. It creates more problems than it solves.
     
  17. Rav Valued Senior Member

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    And, once again, you have done nothing to invalidate the idea that all particles may be excitations of more fundamental fields. You've done nothing to explain why the physicists who propose the idea are entirely unjustified in doing so.

    Why aren't you engaged in the process of demonstrating why my contention, which is that physicists take the idea that fields might be fundamental seriously (and not that fields definitely are fundamental), is false?
     
  18. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Agreed if your concept is that the "viewer" is separate from the simulation, but there is no need of a separate "viewer" if the viewer is within / part of / the simulation. Then no homunculus is required and anyway the separate viewing homunculus has the same problem, you speak of. It can’t have experiences qualia etc. unless it has a viewing homunculus, etc. etc. - an infinite regress is no solution.

    You don´t seem to have grasped what I am suggesting: "You" are not a physical body. "You" don´t exist in a material world, but in an information one. "You" are a small component within the simulation. If you must think in terms of a physical computer simulation, think of it as a complex set of routines that mutually communicate - for example one routine can write data that the other reads and they thereby interact. I.e. the RTS has representations, usually quite accurate* of the physical external environment, that the components of the RTS creating "you" interact with that information - (the representation of the external world) to have both an understanding in real time of the external environment AND via the interaction experience of it - what it is like to be "you" in that environment. - I.e. "you" have feelings about it (the internal representations** of the external world), qualia, wishes, pains, etc.

    Certainly there is no homunculus - that solves nothing and just starts an infinite regress. "You" only exist as information, part of a larger interacting set of information, and "you" cease to exist when the RTS is not "running" as when in deep dreamless sleep. In other words: There is no "already existent consciousness" viewing some simulation as you falsely assume is required. "Your consciousness" is information created within the RTS when it runs (I.e. when "you" are alert of in dreaming sleep).

    * But illusions do exist and under drugs can be really extreme.

    ** You don´t really have any contact with the real external world - only with the representations of it in the RTS where "You" live and experience what it is like to be "you" living in that internal representation (information only) of the presumed to exist external world.
     
  19. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    I´m not saying it is false, just that it is a succesful mathematical means of calculating (via sum of Feynman diagrams terms or other means I have never done) but not reality - nothing with mass-energy that all real things have. The EM field, created by charged particle´s virtual paricels, etc. for the nuclear fields, are however real. Do have mass energy. I think much the same of "string theory", but know very little about it.
     
  20. Rav Valued Senior Member

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    See here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-field-theory/#Field

    This section discusses various field interpretations of QFT, complete with references. I gave you additional references earlier. I can guarantee you I can find more. I'm just hoping you're not going to push me to do a whole lot of work I'm probably not going to enjoy doing. That's one of the reasons I suggested that you solicit the opinions of our resident experts on this issue.
     
  21. Rav Valued Senior Member

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    Heh. Sorry. Nick Lane is a British biochemist and author, among other things, of popular science books. The quote is from a book entitled "Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution", Page 252.

    I think you're going too far with your characterization of what Nick Lane is suggesting. I mean, just because he is pointing to the idea that matter must be more phenomenal than we give it credit for, doesn't mean he is suggesting that any of that phenomenality manifests in any way that even resembles consciousness outside of complex interactive systems like the human brain. I doubt that he'd want to say that "spirit", even conceptualized as some blank formless physical property, is present in all matter either.

    Why should architecture constructed out of, and interactions between, entities with properties like spin, mass and charge, give birth to consciousness? We're not just talking about emergent behaviour, because that would be there in the brain even if consciousness wasn't. We're talking about the emergence of something that is much, much more difficult to explain, and arguably, much much more significant.

    Sure, that argument hardly makes my case for me. In fact I'm still not sure entirely what my case is, aside from a persistent feeling that there has to be more it.
     
    Last edited: Apr 25, 2013
  22. Rav Valued Senior Member

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    Further to that, but getting away from what Nick Lane might or might not say and onto what I myself might say, I don't really object to the idea that there is some blank formless physical property of matter that might be fashioned into the dimension of experience, so long as we understand formless to mean not even remotely like the dimension of experience itself, but merely a raw material. But not separate from matter, or in addition to it, rather, matter itself. Not just capable of manifesting stars and rocks and radio waves, but consciousness, too.

    But look, here I am again merely saying something really obvious, something every physicalist already believes. But for me, all this is not about what can happen so much as it is about why it can happen (and not much about how, either).
     
  23. Rav Valued Senior Member

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    "The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man."

    - from "Mein Weltbild" (The World As I See It) by Albert Einstein

    Perspectives can vary greatly and clash often even among those who share such sentiments. But perhaps it is the fact that they have this in common that is more significant, especially since it's possible that none of us are barking up exactly the right sort of tree.
     

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