The ability to solve geometrical problems emerges from seeing others drawing lines to points and circles etc that never existed initially and then emulating them. The lines facilitate the observation of past experienced connections ie properties of things that were not visible earlier. So the solution emerges from the drawing of lines. Several things get together and then the miracle thought comes. The thought is collective, it belongs to all those things that got together.

Same with collaboration. Same with this thread even. This thread acquires intrinsic properties that are only possible if more than 1 person is posting in 2+2.

Same with the solving powers of this forum. If one wanted to ask a hard problem and they came here the chance to get an answer is significant vs asking a random well educated person. The forum through interactivity and access to many brains acquires a property the individuals never had alone.

The geometric patterns in the formation of snow are emergent symmetries. The collective function of the eye is impossible without all the cells that cooperate to create the sensitivity to input, the resulting signal and the geometry that maximizes the signal. The lenses are impossible without the shapes of their boundaries (ie curvature makes the lens work that way).

The shape of a water droplet is emergent. It emerges out of the collective H-bond properties and the minimization of surface tension energy.


A thought like if i go near this hot surface it will be warm emerges from past experiences. Burning si correlated to heat from past experiences too. So the thought of lets create a hot region/surface by burning something leads to such a multiple level action that has the desired outcome ie the procedure that leads to cooking or warming yourself by burning things. But a baby cant do any of this yet. It hasnt experienced enough to be able to form such thoughts. The connections are missing.


When you have many boxes in a room the putting of all together on top of each other creates a bigger standing position. The fact you have stepped above a box before allows you to imagine the sequence of putting one on top of the other to reach the ceiling.

Of course consciousness is about intelligence and its games past and present. Past games register successful happy to be triggered connections. The connections lead to intelligent behavior. Huge number of if then else settings maybe with a little stochastic character.

Even assuming it's emergent, how do you know consciousness isn't an emergent property of a complex biological system as opposed to the electrical circuity and informational exchange of a computer?

Additionally, I agree that computers will surpass humans for what for all intents is intelligence and computation ability. But as PTB notes, that's a far cry from the awareness humans experience. It's more like the subconscious things that go on with our brain and body that don't entail awareness.

The complex biological system is just an electrical equivalent really. It has complexity. Circuits offer complexity too. Look how smart smart phones are.

You agree that if you know nothing you cant have any thoughts right? Thats how it starts. You gradually learn things ie establish connections.

How fast is a thought? How complicated many parts does a thought have?. If you can process 1 connection per 0.1 sec, in a second you can process 10 connections. That is something. The result triggers a new connection as ok that works now lets try this etc. Within 10 seconds how many thoughts can combine? We have a plan now.


You care about the inner feeling of that voice that connects the dots right? But from my perspective i mostly care about how you behave!

The inner voice is also emergent. We need to study the parts of the brain and what reactions/functions take place in each one and it will be understood eventually.

But the creation of an equivalent seemingly sentient system is possible without it. And in the end the effect is the important thing. I doubt we are anything vastly greater than this effect also.

Convergent extraterrestrial evolution, may suggest that there may exist aliens that see a 3-D world, and shapes as we do, and thus, spherical planets with spaces between them.
However, perhaps they actually evolved to see objective reality (an assumption)
more truly than we did but died out as a result.

What is like to be a bat? Or an alien bat, or an alien bat intelligent enough to have considered but rejected solipsism based on peer pressure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_I...to_Be_a_Bat%3F

Regarding scientism: you can't apply the scientific method to where it can't be applied, and if it can't, the subject matter simply falls outside the realm of science. It's a daring accusation to make against someone without further backup.

Your view on subjective experience appears bogged down in too many unnecessary technicalities, false dichotomies and false equivalences.

And I say subjective experience on purpose. You definitely aren't talking about conciousness - (1) awareness of some thing and; (2) awareness of being aware of some thing.

To clarify, you're always conscious of some thing; and at times, you're also conscious of being conscious of that thing. Conciousness is a kind of aboutness. It is always about some thing/directed at some thing; some object, person, concept. At times, you are also concious of being concious of that thing. In other words, self-concious. This is not what you're talking about.

What you're talking about is subjective experience, and what you seem to be saying above is that your behavioural outcomes are more important than the joys, pains, motivations and emotions that accompany those outcomes. How distorted of a view on subjective experience must you strive to maintain to suggest that everything which makes life worth living is less important than the productivity or complexity that behaviour can produce?

Weigh a human body a fraction of a second before death. Weigh a human body thereafter. Take into account known phenomena which may cause a discrepancy, if any. No difference in mass may mean the soul has no mass or it doesn't exist.

Psst: the soul weighs 21 grams

I think the soul weights 16 ounces* - that's one pint of beer.

* Equals 453.592 grams.

When it is presupposed a soul is something like that which comes and goes separate from the body that might work to tell something about that presupposition. However to use the same method for awareness,....what's the weight of awareness?

You need to do that inside a closed system because some gases or vapor may be released also during death. Lungs alone keep a lot of it even after exhaling. 1000 mil of atmospheric air is easily 1.3 grams right there.

The movie reference aside i dont think "soul" is anything special that survives after death. It can be revived though with more technology. What is lost at death is enormous. Its a magnificent structure and its connections that is lost. The entire universe just lost something precious. But the consequences of that person having lived will never be lost. This is their immortality.

The inner voice, qualia, etc. is in essence subjective. In other words, the experience of it is its reality. What you’re claiming is that someday what is essentially subjective will be explained and understood in a wholly objective manner (like everything else that falls under the guise of emergent). How can that possibly be? I’m not saying we won’t ever do so, but saying we will just seems like a faith-based conclusion of a physicalism doctrine more so than any sort of argument. But again, even if it were the case, it’s incomprehensible to me how we could do so without a vastly different understanding of what physics is or what the notion of matter entails. I don’t see a way around that, because it’s one thing to claim one objective phenomenon emerges from an objective state, but an entirely different thing to say that a wholly subjective phenomenon emerges from a wholly objective state. The only way I can conceive of is to add the subjective experiential to our understanding of matter or deny the reality of the subjective experience.

What exactly is the subjective that insulates it magically from the laws of nature? Whatever it is it emerges inside a being that didnt have it at age 10 days. Interaction with the environment builds it and time, lots of time. It does so following the laws of nature that the body and its environment are subject to. So of course its possible to understand it.

Nothing other than basic chemistry is taking place inside the human body and therefore brain too. And basic chemistry is complicated quantum mechanics without anything exotic about it.

I gave you an example of emergent behavior that is entirely rational and procedural. It is called the cell! You only watch it for a few hours and tell me if it doesnt feel like it has its own mind and character!

Human behavior emotions etc;
Start a series of videos like this next and the ones that follow it and see if it helps see what on earth i am going for...

You can understand the human system by either analysis in its parts where this works to recover the properties or by statistics, chaos theory and complexity when the properties are emergent.






Just watch videos of this guy and you will start seeing how things that looked exotic become reasonably understandable now with not so complicated to follow processes.

All series here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnI...7dHrUbpbSSk2e8

and also

this part within the above series.

One can also watch 10 and 11 after 1 and then go here;

to see what i mean about chaos and complexity and emergence (i havent watched these before either but you will see its very similar to what i have been talking about, so lets watch them together)






Probably a good idea as he also suggests to students is to read

Chaos: Making a New Science
by
JAMES GLEICK

I found this youtube podcast i suppose of it;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_c...&v=94Y7Mzit_tI

http://www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/t...haosGleick.pdf (the beginning of the book) - anyway just buy it lol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos:..._a_New_Science
https://web.archive.org/web/20130805...aos/chaos.html

(the professor above said about this book its the only book since baby Beluga he finished and then started reading again right afterwards)

and about cellular automata and some more fun videos on the game of life that might convince you that simple rules can lead to intricate complicated large scale behavior.

Because there’s nothing about our current understanding of the laws of nature that gives me reason to think that an arrangement of protons, neutrons and electrons will experience anything at all.

Which is why, sooner or later, the brain science crew will label consciousness as an illusion. But an illusion requires something to be experiencing the illusion which they'll label an illusion as well and then we are left with farce.

Something else is going on here, folks, and respectable people are proposing what are now considered outlandish ideas bec of that.

Howard,

If you drink enough beer, everything becomes clear.

You havent tried enough to study the system yet to have such strong position. Mine is because i have and i see clues and because it is my job to deliver miracles of synthesis by not introducing unnecessary exotic concepts like religion does.

You should at least watch all the videos i linked and you may start thinking its possible to obtain the miracle. After all how hard can it be to decode the chemistry of the brain in its entirety. We haven't finished that job yet.

Differences in neurotransmitters activity can probably explain the difference between fear, euphoria etc.

Dopamine for example is associated with satisfaction, reward pleasure, epinephrine aka adrenaline with fight or flight response etc.

So there you go 2 significant emotions/ feelings moods conditions are explained chemically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenaline
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norepinephrine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotransmitter

You have associated in your brain the feeling of fear with the action of adrenaline when you are scared or under attack. Maybe dopamine has a role in situations that you have great ideas or feel happy about your work or success etc.

Just watch all the videos and you will start feeling more excited about the possibility of the breakthrough synthesis.

Emergence is not just a new "in" thing that is trendy for a few years now in physics etc. Emergence is the key game the universe plays also known as complexity. It is precisely because of complexity that protons, neutrons and electrons can indeed give you the miracle. Reductionism cannot explain perfectly all of complexity. Chaos theory can explain a lot of it too. Basically statistical convergence gives chaos some properties that are dependable so not all hope of description is lost because of the nonlinearity.

Complexity is that you start with basic properties of elementary particles and once you create bound systems (atoms and then basic compounds) and higher level molecules you obtain new properties for these systems that are more complicated and when these join in macromolecules even more intriguing properties develop that then when a lot of them get together make possible something originally unthinkable for the protons neutrons and electrons involved. And yet now they are doing it all together. They bring you stones back from the moon for example 4.5 bil years after the original separation! Who could have thought!


Complexity is like a probability ladder. Dynamical probability, something starts as simplistically examined impossible and because of the games complexity plays that are hard to anticipate with only superficial simplistic analysis, it becomes gradually in steps doable as new higher structure breakthroughs materialize.

Basically its hard to produce macromolecules. Its very hard to start abiogenesis using these macromolecules. But once you have the cell structure the rest are becoming possible now with evolution because the degrees of freedom for further exploration open up dramatically with every breakthrough.

I like your effort, masque.

We are interesting machines.

Nowadays I have only NA beer to enlighten me. Just had one, glad my diet allows for that.

Well, just pause at illusion. And recall awareness and sense. There is an observer fallacy to suppose one can observe an illusion beyond their own aware sense of being which another being with awareness does sense. While consciousness/soul is being and can sense with awareness- illusion must be only relevant to the being sensing it with awareness. So an ability sense and dispel an illusion indicates a being/consciousness/soul which does so. The joke is you can only do it your self for "your" illusions because of that observer fallacy. (I use quotes because of no reason to own an illusion while an illusion can be identified and dispelled ) However one can imagine that with empathy like trying to walk in others shoes, one may get a glimpse of illusion of another. I like to do art and collaborate. Imagination is very useful illusion or it's real and just seems like an illusion? Whatever. It doesn't go away when I dispel it.

Illusion, nice and tricky.

David Copperfield makes a good living at that. But, tbh, I have no idea what you're talking about.

"Insulates" is the wrong word. The subjective is fundamentally different. It is intentional. It is motivational. It is narrative-laden. It is emotional. It is value-laden. It is personal. It is the common denominator to the experience of everything. The subjective has a dual existence - seeing the fingers as objects and moving the fingers as will. It has primacy over the objective. It is closer to truth, whatever that may be.

It is also...
more complicated (to motivate the competitor in you).

The subjective is the objective under the unique influence of your own life story/trajectory. There. I can eventually identify your subjective with mine. In doing so we will use the objective we both can share and try to be honest to each other.

Two videos to add to the list;

This i have linked before but she is useful in this discussion again;



And this just to see how the subjective is influenced by all kinds of things gone wrong often at a personal level. (and why those that play sports that risk brain injury or do drugs a lot are victims and some times morons too)

On the same topic here is Tegmark taking a chance on it that BruceZ has reminded me of;

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.1219.pdf