From time to time I come back to your interesting panpsychism. May I ask something? Suppose I reproduce the above passage, but remove the term “consciousness” and substitute “Ω”, a neutral placeholder. Here’s what we’d get:
"I believe Ω is fundamental. Like mass, charge, and spin, it is a property of all particles.
There are different reasons people reject this idea. One is that they cannot accept the idea that particles can have mental abilities like thoughts and awareness. But I do not equate Ω with mental abilities. I think that’s a mistake. We have brains that do all these things, and we are conscious of them. But what we are conscious of is not what Ω is. Many people think that various, possibly all, other animal species are conscious. If they are correct, and I think they are, then our mental abilities are not Ω."
With the neutral placeholder Ω, the statement is intriguing, but of course we want to know more about what Ω might be. So, my question is: Why do you use “consciousness” to replace Ω? You’re not suggesting that Ω means consciousness in any accepted usage; that’s exactly what you’re arguing against. So why have you decided we should replace Ω with the word “consciousness”?
Thank you. I’m glad someone finds the idea interesting.
But I’m not sure what you mean with the neutral placeholder. You don’t seem to be asking why I’ve chosen this path in the first place. Are you asking what Ω, which leads to consciousness, might, itself, be?
Is this argument premised upon logical governance; once placed in the conscious category, a correspondent is functionally conscious in the eyes of the person assigning the conscious identity to the correspondent? If so, it sounds as if you’re aligned with Turing on the question.
Right, though I’m sure that’s interesting too. This is a different question concerning why you choose to call Ω “consciousness”. I was suggesting that you’ve posited a new basic property, Ω, and I’m wondering why it couldn’t just as easily be called a “contron” or a “whosis,” since it’s a functional property. What prompts you to use the word “consciousness,” which has so many usages and connotations that you do not mean? The property Ω is meant to explain being conscious. If you’d called it something else, Ω would still serve the same function as the source of conscious experiences. By calling it “consciousness,” I wonder whether you haven’t made it more difficult for yourself, since we already have so many “wrong” usages of that word, according to your view.
I can agree with most or all of what you’re saying.
Most of what animal or human mind does is subconscious in anyway. As an example, we are not conscious of our liver and heart function or even much of what the brain does.
Awareness of certain body parts only come to the foreground when we focus on them or experience stimuli - is that consciousness ?
Thought processes may also be a realisation of stimuli.
My burning question is, does consciousness need a medium at all ? I may have mentioned I was previously in a discussion with a blogger that say consciousness is dependent on the environment, on the objects around us. My other question is, can these objects also be abstract objects.
If consciousness doesn’t need a medium, will abstract objects suffice or does it even go beyond that ?
You’re using the Omega to illustrate the placeholder, how does Phi fit in, which is as far as I know the actual symbol for consciousness ? Or how do they work together ?
I actually hadn’t thought about Phi, but if I had, I would still have chosen Ω because I wanted a symbol that had no connotations, if possible. Maybe “X” would have been better still. Ω means nothing, or is meant to mean nothing. (I guess if one reads it as Omega, some connotations do appear, sorry!)
The idea behind what I’m asking @Patterner is that, instead of starting with consciousness and working back to “what it is,” his view allows the opposite path as well: start with what it is (a fundamental property like mass, according to Patterner) and then decide whether “consciousness” is the best term to use to describe that property. How would we decide along the continuum of “best” and “worst”? I’m suggesting that avoidance of ambiguity and misunderstanding would be an important criterion.
I think there are different types of consciousness. Perhaps we’re struggling because we only have one fixed general and stereotype idea of what consciousness is.
Perhaps the very basic consciousness is the same for everyone and anything, an idea of I’m here and I feel, with respect to inanimate objects that may “experience” it in a different way.
Perhaps the ability to react in any way shape or form to oneself or other things or work with or against something is consciousness not just for life but also for particles.
So maybe we need to re-examine or move past our original thoughts of what consciousness is and realise it means more than just one thing and reacts and exist and functions or manifests differently in other creatures or things.
Mind and thought is an expectation not a requirement. Perhaps our idea of mind is equally limited as is our ideas of consciousness ? Perhaps within this context mind and consciousness is the ability to react and interact in itself ?
Oh. Do you believe that consciousness is possible without the concepts/skills/abilities/attributes such as understanding, meaning, truth, imagination, creativity…? Bear in mind that, AFAIK, no extant AI has any understanding of anything. AIs are designed and built to appear ‘intelligent’, like another human, and that design is very impressively implemented. Just consider how many humans entertain ideas like yours, that AIs could exhibit intelligence (and thus conscious, etc), or maybe already do. They have convinced many of us already.
Is there an exact science for consciousness ? Until there is our ideas of our own consciousness is also speculation.
I don’t think we can through comparison reach conclusions about consciousness or what it is. Isn’t the bigges flaw of understanding something self-compare ?
Yes, and isn’t this the case for many things? Those things that cannot easily be investigated by a science-oriented approach — evidence, empirical observation by impartial observers, etc. — for all kinds of reasons. And so we are left without inquiry and philosophy, or we must speculate, yes?
We can certainly speculate, I’m curious, do you think AI can or do speculate ? Is speculation a part of consciousness ? It is a great skill to be sure.
I’m not sure if this answers your questions, but let’s give it a shot.
I don’t have any “Ω”. What you’re calling “Ω” is consciousness. It is the capacity for subjective experience. Everything has this capacity, so everything subjectively experiences.
A rock of the same volume as a person weighs more than the person. But not because “rock mass” and “human mass” are different in any way. We know that the particles of the two things are arranged differently, so a rock contains more particles than a human of the same volume. Mass is not thought to change from one thing to the other.
The electric charge of the particles of a magnet are not different from the electric charge of the particles of a hunk of iron. It does not have “magnet electric charge”. Rather, the particles are arranged in a certain way in the magnet.
Humans have many information processing systems and feedback loops. We subjectively experience this as thinking and self-awareness. It’s not “human consciousness”; it’s what a human is conscious of.
There doesn’t seem to be any consensus on how to define consciousness, or what characteristics and abilities need to be present to qualify. The idea I’m promoting doesn’t have to deal with that. We just describe the characteristics of whatever entity were dealing with. It’s conscious, regardless.
We also don’t have to try to figure out how physical structures and events manage to do, or produce, non-physical things. Which doesn’t make sense.
Well, it’s not like I know that I’m right about all this. But, if I am, yes, it does. Because it’s a property of matter/energy, just as mass is. It’s like asking if mass needs a medium.
But I think some who think consciousness is fundamental think that it’s a field. It permeates everywhere and everything. The result is the same as what I’m talking about. Everything is in the field, so everything is conscious. But it seems to me it doesn’t need a medium in that scenario.
Although, if nothing is present, then the field is… what… Nothing comes of it.
The Copenhagen interpretation has always made most sense to me in 0t conditions, as with the big bang.
You mention matter and energy. Does the speed of c not depend on the amount of matter and energy present in the universe ?
Should there be no matter or energy, the speed of c may be very high or infinite. Do you think in such a place a super state can occur ? What does this say for fine tuning ? Perhaps in this super state consciousness is whole and have all it’s parts. As a side note, if consciousness is in an empty set, would it still be empty ? Is this how we seperate nothing from something ?
After the big bang, c speed has established to what it is now. The possibility spaces that made fine tuning posible are less, because there is no more super state, or the super state exists somewhere else. … Consciousness is no longer whole and have all it’s parts, but exist in different things and different creatures in different ways. From this we may conclude we as humans don’t hold all of consciousness and its parts in us and cannot use ourself as a template for consciousness.
From this, do you think AI may hold parts of consciousness we don’t have. Is it capable to use more possibility spaces than us as described of super states ?
As far as I know there’s a fixed ammount of Energy in the universe and a balance between matter and energy.
Speeds of c has been theorised to vary in dark matter.
Do you think c or causality survives or can exist without matter and energy ? Does consciousness and c or speeds relat ?
In a super state as discribed is the super state or consciousness priory or does priory an apriory become moot, since it exists in zero t and super state ? If sienctists are right about past and present still existing, does that mean the super state too still exists ? Can we use the complex plain to illustrate variants of c ?
Parts of consciousness may be measured in their abilities within the amount of possibility spaces available.
We humans can and do speculate, yes. Can present-day AIs speculate? My knowledge, limited as it is, says no. [I spent 40 years learning to be a software designer, and worked on projects of many kinds, but none of them were specifically AI-related. I had a professional interest in AI, though, and followed its progress for many years, in the technical press, etc.]
Is speculation “part of” consciousness? I’m really not sure. To me, the question itself seems a bit weird. Speculation is something humans sometimes do. Consciousness is something we sometimes, er, have? Is one “part of” the other, or can it be? This isn’t something I had ever considered. My honest feeling is that I’m not inclined to spend too long wondering about it.
