This is still the sort of thing that is trivial to program a robot to do. Even organisms without a brain can probably to this.
Thinking is just one form consciousness can take. It can sense the environment, sense it’s own body, feel emotions, recall the past.
Why experience? Because without it, it wouldn’t work.
A calculator doesn’t feel. If it’s wrong, it doesn’t hurt. If it’s right, it’s not happy. And that’s exactly why it’s not as good as a living being.
When you burn yourself, it hurts. And you remember. Next time you avoid it. That’s not just data – that’s a feeling. And feeling is what makes a decision fast and final.
Experience is not something added on top of the function. It is part of it. Like blood in the body. Without it, it doesn’t work.
I’m not saying I solved the hard problem. But in my view, there’s no need to separate function and experience. One doesn’t work without the other.
Not true. Every combination of events and thresholds has to be thought by the programmer and be hardwired. Unforeseen rare events will be out of the programming.
I should know, I’m a programmer.
That’s pure conjecture. Why develop a brain then?
I already explained the reason: to have a locus of processing power in order to think.
Brains are expensive. There must be an evolutionary reason for animals to keep them.
There is no consciousness without thinking.
If sensing an event in the environment triggers an automatic response, then what’s the point in having a brain, sending the signal to the brain, processing the signal, converting the signal into a conscious form, and then do nothing with it?
The whole point of doing that is to do further processing outside of instinctual automatic responses.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” ― Viktor E. Frankl
In the lexicon of enactive biology, organisms are autopoietic and machines allopoeitic. Organisms are self-maintaining and self-organising, they seek homeostasis, heal from injury, grow, reproduce and evolve. Machines are made be external agents for a purpose, their organising principle is external.
I’m very suspicious of ‘explanations of consciousness’ — as if it is something that needs to be, or can be, ‘explained’ in terms of something else. If anything is a given, then it is the fact of one’s conscious existence. Cogito ergo sum.
A tangent, but I found this interesting. From Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman: Ep85 “What is a Thought?”
I don’t think consciousness evolved. I think that, as things evolve, changing and becoming more complex, different and more complex things are conscious.
Life is certainly where consciousness is easiest to spot. I think it is in everything because there isn’t any idea how it is generated by life processes. The electron transport chain; protein synthesis; ions moving through the membranes of neurons. There’s no suggestion of subjective experience in any of that. So maybe it’s already there, in the particles.
Except there’s many ideas which you are expressly ignoring, including the ones being mentioned in this thread.
I mentioned my idea that it’s an emergent property of thinking brains.
Emergence is a well understood idea.
Maybe consciousness and thought are not the same thing.
The emergence of consciousness is not understood to the least degree. It is not even a known fact. It’s no less a guess than my guess. It’s not like the emergent property of liquidity, which can be explained by the properties of the H2O molecules, which can be explained by the properties of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms, which can be explained by the properties of the protons and electrons. There is no known connection between the properties of primary particles, atoms, or molecules, and consciousness. There is no known connection between the macro characteristics of cells, or anything else, and consciousness. Even Brian Greene, who has a pretty good grasp of the physical, and insists consciousness must come from it, says this, in Until the End of Time:
I hazard the guess that this is the dominant theory. Consciousness is understood as a stuff that somehow arose from a different kind of stuff that was already there.
Since I have come to question that approach, I wouldn’t call it “well understood.” But I can understand why it is appealing.
If you accept the normal idea of a singular fixed past, then you decided that non-conscious entities were here first. Therefore the arrival of conscious entities is also the arrival of consciousness.
My objection is to point at the hard problem of the physical. But my phenomenalism or correlationism, critiqued in After Finitude, requires rethinking how the past (or pasts) exists. So even if it is internally coherent ( from my POV), it’s weird.
In my view, the kind of consciousness we care most about is something like “pure sentience” without the assumption of sapience. Of course only sapient creatures like us are in a position to make such a distinction.
But, like you, I consider the sentience associated with very simple nervous systems. I’m not ready, however, to grant photons sentience. But I respect your verve.
I didn’t say the emergence of consciousness, I said emergence.
You made made a claim about the relationship between a consciousness and subatomic particles as if we didn’t know emergence was a thing. But we know emergence is a thing, so your claim doesn’t stand.
It doesn’t look like you understand emergence at all.
The property of wetness cannot be explained by any of the properties of individual molecules, that’s what makes it emergent. If it could, then it wouldn’t be called emergent.
Just like the emergence of a traffic jam cannot be fully explained by any property of an individual car.
Exactly the same can be said of a mind and neurons.
Once again: I didn’t say the emergence of consciousness was well understood, I said emergence was well understood.
The idea that a higher-level property doesn’t need to be present in the components is well understood.
The fact that it’s “weird” doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
My post must have found you in the argumentative spirit of this thread. I’m not trying to play that game but rather a more a cooperative game. Perhaps in some other thread we will take up this topic again.
So emergence means something that cannot be explained by the properties of its constituents. What, then, about emergence is “well understood”?
Liquidity is explained by the properties of the substance’s constituents. If those properties changed, the substance would not be liquid under the same conditions, if at all. (Although the constituents might not exist, either.)
But still no closer to meaning of consciousness. Is it separate from self?
I don’t know how there could be a self without consciousness. Without consciousness, there would just be the physical events of electric currents traveling through the brain, neurotransmitters being released into synapses and received on the other side, etc.
I would be happier if someone could figure out a way to explain how consciousness could come into existence at some point down the line, so I wouldn’t need to think photons are conscious.
“….. For the manifold representations that are given in a certain intuition would not all together be my representations if they did not all together belong to a self-consciousness; i.e., as my representations (even if I am not conscious of them as such) they must yet necessarily be in accord with the condition under which alone they can stand together in a universal self-consciousness, because otherwise they
would not throughout belong to me. From this original combination much may be inferred.
Namely, this thoroughgoing identity of the apperception of a manifold given in intuition contains a synthesis of the representations, and is
possible only through the consciousness of this synthesis. For the empirical consciousness that accompanies different representations is by itself dispersed and without relation to the identity of the subject. The latter relation therefore does not yet come about by my accompanying each representation with consciousness, but rather by my adding one
representation to the other and being conscious of their synthesis. Therefore it is only because I can combine a manifold of given representations in one consciousness that it is possible for me to represent
the identity of the consciousness (of myself as a subject) in these representations itself…..”
Consciousness never was supposed to mean anything, as opposed to merely standing-in as a fundamental human condition.
I guess one could say consciousness means not having to consider the absurdity of infinite regress with respect to the functional necessities of human intelligence.
This seems similar to my image.
My point is what connects. It’s that “now” that stacks one moment onto another. And when they’re stacked, the line forms – the self. Without this stacking, everything would be scattered, unconnected. The point is what holds my self together.
And it’s interesting that you say consciousness isn’t something that means something, but is a condition. I think that too. Consciousness is not a tool for something else – it’s the foundation, so that I can have tools at all. It’s what makes space for everything else.
I agree. Without consciousness, there is no self. Just electricity and chemistry.
But consciousness is what builds the self. The point experiences a moment. It falls onto the line. Next moment. Falls again. And so it accumulates.
Without consciousness, nothing accumulates. The line stays empty. So yes, without consciousness there is no self. But consciousness is not yet the self. Consciousness is just now. The self is what has already been.
The brain is the machine. Consciousness turns it on. The self is what grows from that.