Interesting, because if consciousness confers a functional advantage, then it should be physically detectable, and we can easily settle the question of whether a computer, or a dolphin, or a tapeworm, is conscious.

I'm going to go ahead and agrue the other side of the coin, against myself as it were. It might be that consciousness is the byproduct of the advanced cerebral cortex present in some of the most cognitively niched organisms. A few animals pass the famed dot test. (Everybody who took psychology 101, raise your hands) If it is a byproduct, the positive must outweigh the negative, else it would have been furiously selected against. I suspect it has to do with emotions. On the one hand, emotions attached to sensory input and mental processes act as an amplifier, quickening the learning processes and allowing for a far greater individual environmental adaptation. On the other hand, you never see a gaselle with depression sauntering up to the lions, asking to get offed because they just can't take it anymore, ooh, the gasellity!

It might simply be a byproduct, or it might have started out as one.

But yes, meg machines are very interesting. However, we are studying a structure with more than 100 billion individual neurons, each one which can be connected to thousands of others. And it's plastic to boot. This isn't the human genome, varying very little between individuals, and only changing once per generation.

I'm more in the camp that a conscious mind and an unconscious thinking machine are functionally identical, and only the mind itself is aware of the fact that it is conscious. I think this is a general assumption that many (most?) philosophers make.

Oh, I don't know. say you could build a replica of a human brain. But with silicon pathways instead of neural dito. Say you fired it up.

I'm betting there's nothing inherently magical about the flesh, or the ion channels, or the nucleii... Consciousness is a product of structure and function, it doesn't stem from the material used for assembly.

We like to think that we are special, the crown of creation and the center of the universe. Chances are we're not. Our ego-mania is itself a product and an adaptation of a conscious mind that feels the need to eat, sleep, and fuck.

--

socrates would make all of you look stupid if you talked to him

Most likely, I don't speek greek. 

i was about to write 'i won't read this bullshit', but then i didn't.

Oh, wait. 

"consciousness is adaptation". That doesn't really give much information on what it is like. It's like saying "What is a car? A car made of steel". You could say that everything in a human is the result of adaptation. Etc etc.

I have a hunch that some day we have new mathematics and other sciences to handle the measurements and models and we can approximate when a structure has possibility for significant consciousness (say, related to humans) and when not. It might require simulation though, and probably not on something like current single pipeline computers, but something with lots of connections and feedbacks and balance states.

We can already measure brain waves with cheap EEG and estimate if a person is conscious or unconscious. (Useful during anesthesia when the patients are paralyzed with other drugs!)

The current computers are extremely different from the brain.
The brain has about 100 billion neurons, and many are connected and then again some are connected back etc..
I understand you can't currently, on a computer, simulate well even a simple neural network that has feedback, since the balance states don't form if the processor only checks one neuron at a time.

Science has not made good progress for a while. The branch of cybernetics (Norbert Wiener started this in 1948 or so) is as far as it goes and it is still struggling to find higher level ways of coping with multiple feedback systems. Control theory is the theory which it is built on, and that is well established but it starts from simple components and just adds them, it doesn't provide an overarching picture of complex systems.

When inspecting how the science works, cybernetics is the one dealing with the most "complex" systems, while quantum mechanics then is trying to deal with the simplest possible. In between there are always many levels with new simplifications. We can ditch quantum physics and just look at atoms in classical sense, and it's precise enough for most uses. Or molecules. If there are lots of molecules, we can use statistical physics. But when the number grows even larger, we can ditch that and use just some gas laws. PV=NRT, etc. And so on. There are upper levels of abstraction where new phenomena can be observed, and lower levels of revelation where it can be seen that "hey, it actually isn't exactly like is estimated at higher level".

But the science is stuck with cybernetics, it's supposed to be a higher level simplification of control theory but it is in troubles, it isn't clear.

Usually these levels also alternate in their fundamental mathematical nature: probabilistic, deterministic, probabilistic, deterministic. Quantum theory is probabilistic. But single atoms and molecules can be estimated to be deterministic for many purposes. But then when there are too many of them, again statistical physics is needed, and it uses the probabilistic approach. Etc. This mathematically different approach is what determines the boundaries of different methods of understanding and approximating the world.

I believe we need higher level methods than control theory (where we currently are) to understand consciousness.

Just like nobody who is trying to design a gas turbine does anything with single molecule mechanics, how it behaves in collisions etc... 

"What is a car? A car is made of steel!" 

Since control theory is deterministic, the next level of understanding after that will probably be probabilistic in nature.
I don't actively follow the field, I bet there are lots of proposals out there. How to statistically analyze neural networks with feedback.
I've seen some extremely complicated math related to it. I have a hunch this tells me that it's still in its infancy.
Maybe in 50 years kids learn it in high school. 

Reading this discussion with great interest. I'll add something soonish -- I'm planning on doing research in cognition engineering full-time after I complete my undergraduate studies :) 

I'm going to go ahead and agrue the other side of the coin, against myself as it were. It might be that consciousness is the byproduct of the advanced cerebral cortex present in some of the most cognitively niched organisms...If it is a byproduct, the positive must outweigh the negative, else it would have been furiously selected against.

It seems like you're still arguing the same side of the coin, the side that says that consciousness actually has an effect on the behavior of an organism. Otherwise you wouldn't be speculating about the positive and negative aspects of that effect.

I was trying to contrast your view against the idea that consciousness is a passive experience of the physical self. I looked it up on wikipedia and I guess what I'm describing is a variation of "Epiphenomenalism," where all mental processes (thinking, remembering, etc.) are physical, and it is only the experience of those processes that is beyond the one-way glass of consciousness.

So maybe the essense of our disagreement is how we use the word "consciousness" where I describe it as pure experience of self, and you maybe intend it to mean "thinking" or "awareness" or "mental model of the world which is sophisticated enough to include mental model of self." All of those things of course have to have an effect on behavior, and I agree are genetically selected for.

OMG too much philosophy. 

I didn't even know we were disagreeing actually, I just though we were discussing. Consciousness, to me, is not the same thing as self-consciousness. The latter we can actually measure for, with the aforementioned dot-test, however blunt a test it may be. The concept of consciousness is a trickier line to draw because we, and I mean we as in we the collective humanity, have trouble defining the concept. At least insofar as building a consensus around it.

And it is very much a philosophical question.

Suppose I get together with a bunch of engineers and built a small robotic device. Using a solar panel on the top of it, we instruct it to avoid light, seek out electrical sockets to re-charge itself as needed, and to harvest parts needed to construct another of its kind. We would have to inplement some type of software for this, where we prioritize its flight mechanic to win out unless it is in immediate need for power. The parts harvesting function would peek in priority somewhere before the deadline for assembly time versus own wear and tear. The process of evolution might be simulated by introducing a randomizing element to its software and replicating blueprint, similar in effect to the genetic variation we see in nature through random mutation.

This thing would behave very much like a cockroach. Would we say it's alive? Does it think? Is it conscious? 

Epiphenomenalism is an interesting idea. However, I feel it strays into the territory of the meta-physical. The mind works simple, neural cells firing in patterns. But because these cells are organised in a complex way, an amazing flexibility is possible. The consciousness, or the sense of awareness, must be physically represented somewhere in this organised chaos of neurons. Otherwise, we're embarking on a quest to find the dues ex machina, or the homonculus inside the homonculus.

And, if it's a passive experience of physical processes within the brain, what is it that is doing the experiencing? Somewhere those processes must spend resources and energy communicating their actions to this consciousness, and unless it provided the organism with a positive adaptation, it would be selected against. 

I have no idea why I separated that into two posts. 

well, I don't know if I would classify it as metaphysical in the usual sense, but I guess literally, it is. It's an idea that the conscious self, the thing doing the experiencing, is outside of the material world. This is why i don't think evolution has a bearing on it, becuase there's no energy cost as that is relevant only to material processes, and consciousness is not (or so I argue.)

I guess my other unspoken assumption here is that "Physicalism" is true, that the entire universe is governed by natural laws. Physicalism doesn't require the existence of conscious selves, but our direct experience confirms that at least one conscious self exists.

I see epiphenominalism as a natural result of theory of physicalism and the fact of consciousness. There are plenty of other approaches to the mind/body problem, of course. 

I hear his dog enjoyed ice cubes? 

...and i seem to remember ELEK having a penchant for chives.

The consciousness, or the sense of awareness, must be physically represented somewhere in this organised chaos of neurons.

Indeed, maybe we need to adopt a radical attitude to observe it. Did eliminative materialism come close? Another few questions that keep giving me the raspberry are "What about the body? Aren't the brain and the body a system, maybe consciousness is represented in this larger system?"

Then the slippery slope opens up and I fall to my death. 

.. should be created :) 

guys.

Plus I can (I think) understand your arguments which puts you one up on most philosophers :) 

If it was wrong, how would you know?

distrans: anaesthesia and other drug effects only seem to affect the mind when applied to the brain, which suggests against it. Of course, it's not that simple... 

What the hell kind of masturbational argument is that? 

It goes like this:

You can't just assume universal negatives are true. Physicalism is a universal negative. You can't just assume physicalism is true.

Is that "masturbational"?

/me wipes the seat down 

That's fucking confusing is what the fuck that is.

Thread closed by moderator. 

ohmygod we're all in the matrix, and you can't prove otherwise!

My point is of course that it's a statement that sounds very profound, but isn't really.

What are you after? The existence of god? 

That is MY FUCKING POINT, that physicalism isn't a valid theory because it's untestable.

Was "you can't assume physicalism is true" not clear enough? 

Surely if it's untestable then you HAVE to assume it... 

Only scientific theories have to be testable. Philosophy is almost entirely concerned with questions which are outside the bounds of science. 

move to philosophy thread 

We are discussing some questions here which aren't outside the bounds of science at all - whether there is an energy cost to consciousness, whether it is an adaptation, whether it is computable/can be produced with Turing complete computing devices, etc. Imo answering those with a philosophical style where you can take whatever assumptions you like for the purpose of argument isn't quite kosher.