In this book Sean Carrol declares consciousness to be an emergent phenomenon and leaves it at that which I find entirely unsatisfactory:



In this interview Brian Greene says

if you could pick three mysteries in physics that you'd want to see solved in your lifetime, what would those be?

One of them would certainly be: How did the universe really begin? The next would be: What is time at a fundamental level? And for the third, I think I would leave physics. I would like to know: What is consciousness?

Bear that quote in mind when someone tells you that they know what consciousness is.

In other words the fast observation of yourself making connections with past experiences triggering new connections is not satisfactory. It is totally emergent. You are observing the brain playing the game, a game that makes more and more sense every day that passes. You didnt have it as a baby and it developed over time as your brain improved in meaningful connections.

The baby is partially conscious in the sense of trying to get there starting with a primitive hardware configuration. It gets batter after the first 2-3 years, a lot better. But it gets way better after 20-30-40 years etc. It is always getting better. Oh you better believe it i am today more aware than ever before and tomorrow i will still look naive to that future self, ever so little or a lot depending on the growth experienced.

Now lets just try to see these through chemistry and the apotheosis game will be over.

While one is conscious they autonomically know what it is by virtue of being what consciousness is.

So is everyone else.

I haven't been confused in years. Took some work I suppose, but hey beats being unaware and vulnerable to suggestions of confusion.

To clarify confusion it usually helps to ask questions.

As for Masque and Carroll - the study of the objective can no more yield insight into the subjective, than can the study of reproduction into the experience of sex.

Subjective lol. Any bet the way it feels from me inside is the same it does for you in all the important things?

Any difference and is not massive is precisely the result of different trajectory and different initial chemical setup and environment.


Talking about subjective to a theoretical physicist is so funny as i make my life about imagining the point of view from outside me all the time in everything. Its about moving from one frame to another all the time. What is the chance i walked on the moon or visited a black hole vicinity in my lifetime? Well i have already done both because it is all about placing yourself there in objective terms. You think i havent felt anxiety or lust or anger or fear or peace or extreme happiness in a way similar to yours?

There is nothing eternally subjective and insulated about what you are feeling. All we need is the transformation matrix or something more advanced than that but you get the idea. Eventually you can see the world of the others too. It is is very similar with a bit of different input and understanding.

We may be in some danger when scientists start telling us how experiences ought to feel and ought not to feel.

Brave New World comes to mind.

Ought? No ought. We can test it. It will have your blessing in the end. Its a promise.

Universality.

Actually plenty of clarity can happen without questions. I'd guess half of clarity is accepting answers. The rest is accepting clarity.

No matter the tests you run, the experience of my first kiss was likely very different to your own. Whatever average you can derive tells me no more of my experience than does watching two people kissing tells me of theirs.

Yeah but if you describe it i will instantly recognize it or others will.

Ps: Age 5, tongues were involved and an elevator. Her name was Maria. I do not remember anything more, not even her face anymore. Plus it wouldnt matter by now. Correlations lost under the arduous work of time. But i hope she is happy. Then several years had to pass for part 2. She had a different name and no tongues were involved initially. Maybe a little heart beat accelerating?

Universality is impossible to evade. How could we, we are 99.9% similar. Even when we differ it is predictably so.

That's an observation, not an explanation. It's like saying the earth revolves around the sun and that's that. An explanation requires a "how" to be an explanation at all. Maybe a synthetic brain would attain conscious or maybe it wouldn't. We don't know because there's nothing in our current understanding of physics that explains how a subjective experience could potentially emerge when a physical system reaches a certain level of complexity. Which is just another way of saying that despite our intimate knowledge of its existence, we have absolutely no idea what consciousness actually is.

Clean observations of the essentials leads to theories, superficial ones will not. You will know it when it will start looking very complex, original, unpredictable and tricky at deeper levels of it vs them thinking.

I don't think consciousness is anything special. It's just popular to think it is.

Boosted "ego"

"I am", "I am", "I am"

A psychopath can mimick human emotion to near perfection. Sometimes they're more convincing than the standard population. A psychopath promted to cry when they see a dead child laying on the street in the middle of traffic cries because it's expected by the people around them. Not because there's an emotional experience present.

Similarly, there's a difference between a simulated intelligence being promted to run script - love - and the experience of love.

If we don't actually know what that difference comprises, we cannot just assume it away. To assume it away for no other reason but ignorance would be like if Aliens came and looked at cats and dogs and then proceeded to assume away any fundamental differences in their personalities based on knowledge of the attributes that they share, such as having 4 legs, eating meat and being roughly of the same size.

You say being a psychopath as it's a bad thing . . .

Humans consider themselves unique so they've rooted there whole theory of existence on their uniqueness. One is their unit of measure, but it's not. All social systems we've put into place are a mere sketch. One plus one equals two. That's all we've learned, but one plus one has never equaled two. There are, in fact, no numbers and no letters. We've codified our existence to bring it down to human size to make it comprehensible. We've created a scale so that we can forget its unfathomable scale.

1+1 Has Never Equal 2
Time is the only true measure, without Time we done exitst, and we done't even know what Time is . . .

There are no claims about psychopathy being bad, nor are there claims about humans being unique.

Apologies if thats how it reads.

Humans have fairly observable uniqueness.

I agree it will require a new theory, but I doubt our current physics theories are capable of providing a genuine explanation for consciousness. So the new theory will be a new physics paradigm from which consciousness will be explained or required to explain why the physical world exists.

Could be many different things. Or many different things at once.

Perhaps a simulation of a simulation of a simulation of a simulation.... Sims all the way down?

Alternatively or even compatibly, God's cure for eternal boredom and loneliness?

Alternatively or even compatibly, the infinitude of everything and nothing?

Leaning toward all three options simultaneously. In other words: standing.

I almost perpendicularly (that strongly) disagree that it takes new physics. The brain is a very basic chemical system that is operating with very elementary processes that are nothing like anything exotic. It is almost macroscopic actually. The entire thing is purely basic in terms of its physics and emergent. Emergent means that it has intriguing properties that do not become expected if you look at the basics but become possible as the law of large numbers of systems comes into play with collective behavior that now has a character of its own that looks extraordinary. What is missing is the recipe to make it happen in computers but it will happen soon.

I anticipate what is missing is to develop a computer that has "arms and legs" on top of sensors and is allowed to experiment with the world and learn by playing the game, any game with objectives that lead to pleasure and goals. It will start operating like a very smart animal and it will continue to get better if it has substantial scale of brain connections and we establish a fast way to make decisions based on these connections and what usually works.

The amount of training that has gone into me typing this sentence since age 1 is astonishing. We have trained for hundreds of millions of seconds on these things, on every single word.

What we see as consciousness ie the ability to have clear thoughts and plan things is the collective convergence of what has worked in literally hundreds of millions of experiments, now all put together to attain larger goals, all while we observe it happen. Do you think when you use a bike? It is like that nearly automatic now, an instant skill with endless of things we do that come natural.

Take a cell. Observe in a microscope and tell me it doesnt look intelligent to you. Of course it is not consciously designing its day but you better believe it it has already started to convince you it is after something on purpose depending on what is going on around it and inside it.

Big numbers of connections and the game is on. I anticipate a magpie is also very intelligent in that manner and the fact our hands and brains are so interesting makes tremendous difference in the essential outcome of a super smart entity. But the bird is also very intelligent and understands its own self as individual. We are vastly better at this game because of a few critical things that went well with our properties from fingers to eyes. We have significant dexterity. Give that to computers and see how fast they start doing remarkable things. Give a system very many goals and allow it to operate into a very dynamic intelligent fluid environment and it will start designing complicated behavior to meet objectives and learn from all its failures to do them better!!! It will start designing sequence of steps to improve the outcome of an effort. It will start solving mini problems to attack bigger ones. All well solved mini problems become part of its arsenal to use later to solve even more complex ones. Because the analysis of each complex procedure triggers subroutines that do the sub parts well leading to the feeling of a thought forming. Study how you solve a complex geometry problem to see what i mean.


Observe also something very intriguing. The same very same animal H. Sapiens appears to be way different because of training. Imagine the kind of thoughts that occupy the brain of you today and your counterpart 100000 years ago. Almost same DNA though. Complete lack of mathematical reasoning and language for example on that older version. Tell me arent you thinking in terms of some language often and in terms of numbers and their connections? Well how about that other animal? The difference is in the training environment. An astonishingly massively important role in all this is played by our highly intelligent environment ie our civilization. It trains us relentlessly daily. It facilitates the building of complicated connections.

The primitive man is instantly shocked when in contact with a modern human and their technology. What on earth can this being even make of your thought to use a spaceship and accelerate optimally to reach a mars orbit? None of these concepts mean anything to him. They didn't mean anything to you at age 3 either. Naturally that being is highly skilled in hunting and survival though but is nowhere near imagining microbes or what it means to eat clean food, what nutrients are and how they impact health or what can go wrong etc at anything other than superficial ritualistic level. Your effective modern education gives you a deeper level of consciousness and sense of elaborate planning. He knows 50 tools, you know 10000 ones. You can play with the 10000 a lot more interesting games in your mind than with the 50. Degrees of freedom and branching opportunities is the difference. Our modern environment is a highly complicated system or endless tricks that work well.

I think "the ability to have clear thoughts and plan things" refers to "intelligence". "Observing it happen" points toward "consciousness" but not exactly. The mystery is in why we consciously experience all this. How does consciousness arise out of all this mechanistic computation? If "emergence" explains it then give examples where "emergence" similarly explains other things where we better understand the process by which it does so.



PairTheBoard

Properties of traffic are emergent. Traffic appears idiotic and unreasonable but it makes sense if you understand that shock waves are created. The emergent thing is the shock wave but the basic thing is how cars brake to avoid hitting each other when the density gets big or some moron changes lanes at will in the last minute forcing all to brake in a domino effect that has delay reaction time per driver or when someone that just entered the highway wants right here and now to change from lane 1 to 3 and the hell with the others, instead of staying at 1 for a while and changing lanes when speed is big again avoiding all the previous moronic delays.

So yes the properties of traffic emerge in part from the selfishness and idiocy of humans.