Here's to second chances...you are not exactly dead yet

I feel that people of the overly scientific leaning, look at people like myself as romantics. As the same people who once insisted in the existence of spirits; of souls; of supernaturals.

Fascinating how little philosophy some have managed to indulge.

Ha maybe I am the most romantic physicist you ever met

Here is another researcher. Illusion? It is all an illusion a little bit because we are approximating the observation of the world and because there may not be such thing as objective reality. But you better believe it we can agree on a lot of it and I doubt we are all getting it wrong at macroscopic level.



Nothing exotic going on, just that the brain, a mere 1kgr object, is a system on incredible beauty and extraordinary complexity.

This is a denial of the fundamental differences between them. This is like looking at cats and dogs and assuming they're the same. Why?

What, if anything, about someone else's neurons, and their connections, tells me about my experience?

Even a shoddy poet will tell me more.

Well I wish illusion was always an easy and simply topic, but that would be an illusion. I agree with the sentiment of your post if it helps.

While we can share experiences in one sense, we can’t share the subjective experience itself. If I smash my thumb with a hammer, it’s impossible for me to share the subjective experience with you. You simply can’t “feel my pain” because it’s my pain, the phenomenal experience of which is exclusively mine. Since that felt experience of pain exists only for me, its objectifiableness by you or anyone or anything else is rendered impossible.

On topic of consciousness framed as a problem. It's a results oriented way of looking at it because problems have results like answers and more problems.

However considering consciousness to be performance rather than a result doesn't have that problem.
Oh one can perform results- so resulting approach to consciousness can be included.

Yeah. Once tried tackling consciousness using productivity management terms. That was about the result.

What if one clones the entire brain decoding every single neuron and its connections with some very advanced scanning method possible next century? Then maybe it is possible.

We also go back to my red is not your red etc. Yes it is i say for most cases that we do not have a specific color differentiation deficiency situation lol.

I know what your pain with the hammer is damn it. It feels a little nasty shock unhappiness upon realization you missed initially but no big deal yet for a fraction of a second or two and then it starts feeling bad and you grab it with the other fingers and continue to probe it endlessly as it gets more and more painful and you try to help it but poor little finger will have to face it now and be brave. Damn! Hopefully no nail broken because then that would be God damn it bad! But unless the smash was massively aggressive hit you can survive the pain without too much cursing. Its tolerable and the pain is a not a surface one more like a deeper one. There!

From a pamphlet by R.G. Ingersoll ;who is this, here ?

"Thought is a form of force. We walk and we think by means of the same force. Man's organization transforms certain forces in thought-force, which is sustained by the intake of what we call "food" and turned into what we call "thoughts". What wonderful chemistry in that we can produce the divine tragedy of Hamlet by means of digestion !"

In this world there are 2 kinds of people. Those that get frustrated easily and give up and those that don't. Those that recognize the task is difficult but still go after it and those that decide it's impossible.

Which one are you? At the end of the day you know who is the most romantic and it's not the one that gives up. If the universe found a way to do it, it will also find a way to understand it.


Somewhere between a cell and an ant the first miracle happens. Somewhere between an ant and a bird the second one does. Somewhere between a bird and a baby something more intriguing happens. And somewhere between a baby and a 4 year old the big adventure has finally started. And it is no longer a miracle, it is inevitable. It means there is a range it gradually happens when certain conditions are met. Not a crystal clear point but a gradual process. It is also something you lose every time you sleep and an alarm can help you regain. So there is your first clue. Study what is the difference when you sleep.

A fertilized egg gradually becomes an embryo and a newborn. It only consumed chemical compounds and participated in chemical reactions to go from one to the other state. No magic was involved between the first cell and the next billion. So it is emergent.

Keep in mind a baby doesn't have even 10% of the connections it will have a few years later. The brain is eventually getting more interesting than that of a mouse. Some animals can recognize themselves in the mirror and form more elaborate planning. And some can produce theorems, write poems and visit the stars. Never forget that within 1kgr of interesting matter inside your skull there are more neurons than the stars of milky way galaxy and each one has thousands of connections. It took over 1 bil years for life to produce the brain. You better believe it it is the gift of time and probability. It is after all the rise of complexity that is the main theme in this universe.

How much attention have you been paying while the tragedy that is your life was taking its shape? The answers are inside you. The tools of modern science will assist your current state of your brain to understand itself and find peace at last.

Close your eyes, remove all sounds, smelling or tasting opportunities and feelings of touch or heat. Refrain from using your hands and legs and your tongue. You are alone now! You and your breathing and heart. Aha so not exactly completely alone. What is it this that you are almost alone into? It is the product of all these things you closed one by one. Can it exist without your senses? Can it get started? How aware and complex your thoughts would be if you were raised in a room from day one without ever meeting a single person and having food given to you by that room and being cleaned while asleep or sedated by others. Would the complexity of your room influence the intricacy of your thoughts? Math, Physics? What is that? Would the ability to play around with objects in your room affect your range of thoughts? Well can you see now how important your senses, your dexterity and mobility and of course our civilization and the others, the complexity of your environment prove in the capacity ultimately to form intricate thoughts? Interactions build the miracle. A rich environment that sustains your existence has many of them. Your nervous system evolved to match the opportunities this planet's environment offers.

We can study the brain until the end of time, but without a new understanding of physics we won’t be any closer to understanding what consciousness is than we are now. For naturalists, I don’t see the Hard Problem of Consciousness as really having anything at all to do with consciousness. I think they have a Hard Problem with Matter.

Despite all the progress science has made in describing how energy behaves, we know absolutely nothing about its intrinsic nature. For example, per the naturalist somehow, someway energy takes the form of subjective experience. But what is taking that form? We have no idea – which is why we have no idea about the intrinsic nature of consciousness.

This is all just terrible. You are not even trying and you go to new Physics. Why dont you go to God directly while at it.

It wont require any new physics, it's a promise. It wont even require elaborate quantum mechanics we dont already know. The thought you are having is not any more quantum mechanical than the chemical bonds and electromagnetic interactions that make it possible. An ant has the minimal version of a nervous system. It has only a few basic rules and it can survive well. As the animal gets more complicated it needs more assistance by its brain. What exactly so exotic you think happen between an embryo and your brain now? The brain and any cell is a low energy system. You do not likely need any new physics to describe the state of matter that is that of a tissue and its interactions. Its all organic molecules damn it.

Study how you see with your eyes for starters. Exactly what exotic is going on in your eyes? A ton of your thoughts originate because of visual information you have picked all your life. Vision alone is dominating right now your brain and keeping it super active decoding so much every second. What if all that is happening is constantly connections firing to help you recognize everything you see and bring you back to prior experiences. That right there is 50%of the game or more already. The brain trains itself to connect things to external info. A lot of what it does is not under "your" control either, it only feels that way. Go ahead and tell me you are planning every move you make when you are riding a bike or driving and not mostly reacting to adjusted information.

I am actually substantially tilted that you guys are not even trying to see what is happening here. Haven't you studied your own progress, your own lifeline as living being? Can you remember anything before age 4? Why the hell not? Maybe because things do not exactly make sense at the first week yet or first month or year to be possible to connect well? Why are babies so helpless and stupidly simplistic like ants operating on trivial logic without ability to differentiate between slightly different environments some of which are so adorably affectionate to them a few seconds later but they will cry anyway, idiots (lol in a cute way)? Maybe because they are completely fuzzy and clueless and they are forming connections now. They are stupid not very intelligent at all. Their awareness is that of a little helpless animal. At age 6 weeks from conception they have not even a slightest concept of feelings as most systems haven't formed even yet. The whole thing is emergent from day 1.

What the hell really i had no bloody idea what math, geometry (other than toys), physics etc was about at age 3. I could walk but what on earth walking meant to me? Was i even aware if i was stepping on ants at age 2 or if my father was happy to see me walking or was i only focused on a narrow set of objectives in front of me and the rest of the universe was not even remotely in my thoughts? How about now? Endless noise and lots of meaningful information from all corners now.

Have you tried to teach a little child the alphabet and see how it repeats things without a clue what is going on and only gradually gets better at it? Have you heard your own recorded voice at age 2 to see what funny things you were talking about that are ridiculous and broken and trembling like some drunk person trying to balance himself? hahahaha. It is all so easy to get started to understand. Neuroscience is not finished with all the details yet. This is why it feels so distant. It hasnt been studied properly for more than 1 century. And philosophers are morons without modern math, physics, chemistry, biology or scientific methodology in their thinking.

Next time you see a very young child near you, try to feel a little something about the birth of the miracle, study the moment and consider the possibilities of greatness you can help that child experience with only a little bit of design of the interactions it will face in the next few minutes. Do not lose that moment, do not prove indifferent to them if they have nothing to do, do not betray the possibility. Your every choice at that moment matters like very few in your life. Be good, kind, creative and imaginative. They are learning the world at this point. Oh but dont worry, remain a little vigilant even 30 years later because they are still learning or questioning what they know. This is now your second chance.

If we drew up an electrical schematic copying the neurophysiology of the brain and didn’t tell anyone what it was, I doubt anyone on earth would think such a device would experience anything at all.

There is nothing in today's physics which predicts consciousness. There is nothing in today's physics that even points toward a concept of consciousness. You can say consciousness happens in the human brain and thereby theorize that it should happen in things similar to the human brain. But that explains nothing about why it happens in the human brain nor what it is. You can say it must happen because what goes on in the human brain must make it happen and we know this because it does happen. But that's not physics.


Higher level concepts of chemistry emerge from the physics of what goes on at more reduced levels. But that emergent chemistry can be predicted by the lower level physics. Similarly for traffic patterns. Physics points toward no such prediction for consciousness nor does it seem theoretically reasonable that physics advanced along its current paradigm ever will.


PairTheBoard

You all need to define for me what is the consciousness that you want to be predicted with current physics? List its properties and then why they cant be reproduced with a semi macroscopic system of many degrees of freedom.

Indeed what would satisfy you as prediction of consciousness? It makes absolutely perfect sense to me that if you design a system that reacts based on input and stores the important details of success or failure it will converge to a system that behaves exactly like a human does if you put tremendously more effort into it than current computers and give it significant degrees of freedom, memory and time to experiment, goals, desires and values based on desires etc and then allow even this to be flexible later. How do you wish to see it? From the inside? How could you ever see it from the inside if you are not it? You can only see a prediction of what it is from the inside. Why would current physics fail to make that prediction? What prediction you want to see of what? What property of the inside you want predicted? The voice talking to you now or the endless billions of photons that get to your eyes forming smooth images, the sound in your ears and the trillions of trillions of atoms of objects in that room you are touching?

Being conscious for a primitive animal is elementary easy. A big enough number of electro-chemical conditionals will have it acting properly for most cases and always running away from you even if you mean good.

What you are after is that little voice inside telling you the world makes sense this way doesn't it and the endless stream of thoughts that follow if you ignore certain tasks and focus on on others with a will that we have discussed its probably not even a real "free" thing but an observed thing. Well it was built after a tremendously long time interval of training and now it is so good and rapid that it feels continuously successful and the endless neurotransmitters activated keep you so glad to be alive to witness it. It's all statistically mathematically sound to me and i would expect it starts very erratically exactly like babies. Its a stochastic dynamical system that updates its decision core live based on chemical reactions and electrical signals. The updating is chemically based and connections based. Connections also affect chemistry.

I bet when the first sentient system is created it will describe to you how it is thinking also. It may be similar to our experience of smooth semirandom flow.

Tegmark calls it a new state of matter and i say no it's not a new state of matter, it's a new type of organization of biologically macromolecularly based matter. It is the architecture and interactivity of all its parts that give it its properties. All emergent exactly as you expect when a system of atoms and molecules is organized to give you a house that has a roof in which you can now eg put a ball and it rolls down! lol. Of course the incline created and its properties are emergent! A house has other emergent properties too like it traps heat inside and has no wind or rain inside! Imagine that, all emergent, quarks and electrons cooperating to have no weather inside and funny temperature gradients!


Look at it this way. What if we have a system that based on information flow, information access ie past memory (database) and current objectives that are reinforced by neutronsmitter action of pleasure or displeasure and all this mix re-valuated at every second you decide what comes next in actions or thoughts because that decision connection was maximized as choice of most severe direction. The system is inherently stochastic and unpredictable and yet it does have points of attraction that you converge and works indeed based on wisdom from past experiments. Why doesn't this look like what is going on actually or how it all started even in a clumsy clueless manner? You have a super fast interpretation of the senses input to establish current environment conditions, then based on ongoing objectives you act to maximize satisfaction of the objectives, but because there is randomness and the environment also is highly dynamical and even more so if you interact with it, you end up having such an amazingly chaotic and yet statistically meaningful system. You live and update the system and connections grow etc as you play this endless game. Why is this beyond current physics?

Consciousness is Masque. Beyond physics, maybe. I'm on a phone. It was hard enough posting that video. I don't actually think you understand the problem. Or know that there's one, rather.

What if they cant understand the solution to the problem because exactly like all the modern big names are super lazy or unable to accept defeat of ideas when it comes to true substance and in the end irrelevant to progress. Why should i trust someone that moreover his amazing mathematical skills is behind a never ending string theory all his life that truly doesnt revolutionize anything and didnt give a slightest hint of ever trying to think about the problem?

You know more about the problem from me than from Witten.

The only thing i agree with him or shall as i say Penrose really, is that yes QM will be reframed and all of physics too (something i am working on every day) but not in a way that makes the functions of the biological systems different suddenly or more creative in how they operate at the basic level.

If only you guys could see how you appear to me with what you say and how even Witten appears at that moment in the video. Oh consciousness how mystical! Exactly like a Newton that moreover his successes is still trying to do alchemy and introduces God in the conversation when he is not heavily watched in public.

I dont understand the problem? haha. Ask yourself who has here given you more insight and ways to study it than all the other "experts" you know that only superficially casually are thinking about it without even telling you anything. He is not even trying to discuss about it with some details. Ha!

If i run into problems it will be because i tried. Did they?

Consciousness is a statistical game of what comes next after all interactions of your system and the world are momentarily done perturbing the state of your brain system until the cycle starts again negotiating a new state. If you are working on something the perturbation needs to be a little bit more significant to get out out of course or the collective state of your brain ready to pull an i dare you moment!


Oh the glorious moment you will see a machine talk to you like a human and better even make jokes and play games of tilt with you and then apologize when it detects your frustration and then to lift you up tell you , you know when i am driving i do what you always wanted to do, i also run an algorithm by deep scanning the area that tells me how likely it is for police to be observing me and accordingly i violate the speed limit or perturb the other cars to do it for me if nobody is at risk from it nearby, lets keep it between us.

Oh but then you will proceed to claim i bet it has no inner voice or soul, it doesnt really know what it is doing oh yes but we do...no our soul much as its own is simply the game of interactions of one complex system with another and the wisdom accumulated. It is the real thing because like us it is about change and self reflection finally free from our restrictions.

"The number of neurons in the brain varies dramatically from species to species.[38] The adult human brain contains about 85-86 billion neurons,[38][39] of which 16.3 billion are in the cerebral cortex and 69 billion in the cerebellum.[39] By contrast, the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans has just 302 neurons, making it an ideal experimental subject as scientists have been able to map all of the organism's neurons. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, a common subject in biological experiments, has around 100,000 neurons and exhibits many complex behaviors. Many properties of neurons, from the type of neurotransmitters used to ion channel composition, are maintained across species, allowing scientists to study processes occurring in more complex organisms in much simpler experimental system."

This is how you try to understand it. By starting with the 302 and 100000 system.

So the fruit fly 100k and look how many interesting things it can do and detect, are you kidding me? What can you do with 10^11?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron

"Neurons communicate with one another via synapses, where the axon terminal or en passant bouton (a type of terminal located along the length of the axon) of one cell contacts another neuron's dendrite, soma or, less commonly, axon. Neurons such as Purkinje cells in the cerebellum can have over 1000 dendritic branches, making connections with tens of thousands of other cells; other neurons, such as the magnocellular neurons of the supraoptic nucleus, have only one or two dendrites, each of which receives thousands of synapses. Synapses can be excitatory or inhibitory and either increase or decrease activity in the target neuron, respectively. Some neurons also communicate via electrical synapses, which are direct, electrically conductive junctions between cells."

All of these are macroscopic systems. Millions of different molecules per cell. What kind of QM exotic behavior are we even talking about here? Decoherence is already in place in them. No mystery. Just a very complicated system doing over 1 bil things per second giving you the statistical feeling of total smoothness.

I would say I don't know whether the system is conscious and might infer it due to the explanatory gap you haven't but seem to think you've explained away.

As an example, take the time-lapse video of the nueral activity you posted which is a third person, objective, quanitative perspective on a part of a brain. Increase its complexity to whatever you like. All you can do is make correlations to subjective experiences. You can't take a brain state and state why the person is having a experience as opposed to no experience, when you take measurements of the things you're mentioning such neurons firing, neurotransmitters, action potentials etc.
Only correlations.

Suppose some aliens beam us instructions to build a perpetual motion machine. We build it and it works. If they didn’t include the new physics behind it, we won’t understand things any better than before. Same goes if we build a synthetic copy of the brain. Suppose we do and it shows all the outward signs of being conscious. Neither we nor it will have a better understanding of what consciousness is, if it's actually conscious and not just a p-zombie or how it became conscious than before for the very same reason: we’d need the new physics to explain why, if and how it became conscious to genuinely understand consciousness.

You can theorize all you want about how consciousness happens when physical properties xyz are present. But that totally ignores the mystery. The mystery is WHY consciousness happens when physical properties xyz are present.


PairTheBoard

I see, taste, hear, touch, smell, and also sense of balance , sense of ego of another, sense of word, sense of thought,sense of movement , sense of life , sense of warmth .

Through these "senses" we are conscious within the earth, but that's not all, for the question becomes "who or what is conscious" of these earthly happenings?"

Two things but first is first; the "soul" is conscious into the earthly through these senses; not your brain ala Dennett, or your toes but your "soul", like it or not.

Because we have an "ego" we are within the realm of "self consciousness" which is not , as comparative examples, a power of the animal, plant or mineral kingdoms.

The "soul" is the middle power of threads to the higher worlds or spiritual world which is junctured through thinking, and it also connects the earthly to higher realms. the "soul' lives within two(2) worlds.

The "senses" are comprehensible, via Goethe, who wrote that "only like can know like" . And so, human "warmth" in some manner , interfaces to the soul the "warmth perception" .

There are , of course, physical manifestations of the senses, undeniable, but Goethe again, "the eye was made for light by the light". In this case I can only say the "creative light" approaches the soul which responds with an inner light thus forming the eye.

Mankind in no small measure has the questions of creation which sit in their hearts, ever hopeful. The science which only wishes to weigh and measure denies thinking and thoughts which is a supersensible activity. In effect the present science denies "creation" leading to the human dross of the entropy of fire and the unworthwhileness of the moral being, the being of soul.

You can't create a morality of tone in a petri dish nor an astronomy of distances and times; the human being, soulful with a warmth of thought , a heartfull thinking, a warmth imbued thinking , leads to fulfillment.

It's ironic how simple over-complication can end up.

I think the assertion that consciousness is an "illusion" amounts to a kind of sensational misdirection of a valid idea. What they're really talking about is our perception of reality rather than consciousness. We perceive sights, sounds, smells, etc. and think of that perception as the reality of what's "out there". But it's an illusion of what's out there. Our experience of perception is only the reality of our perception. This remains true even as our perception is extended through technical instruments and theories of science. But consciousness itself is another subject altogether. Consciousness is real unto itself.


PairTheBoard