Consciousness: Is It Possible?

[Hygro]

I am of the view that consciousness is the experience that any system of energy has as a collected system of energy.

 

[Borachio]

From time to time, individuals appear who present notably 'different' ways of thinking. Try reading any of the early victorian era stuff, and then Franz Kafka. They both are literature and prose, but there are some glaring differences between them. I do like a number of victorian era literature, such as short stories by Dickens or RLS's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but the difference between the ways those narratives are formed, along with their scope in relation to the external world and society, is simply vastly different than those elements in the work of Kafka, who was already born by the time most of those stories were being written.

I don't think I agree. I have read all three writers and I think they structure their stories in very similar ways. That's not to say writers cannot be experimental but no writer exists in a vacuum and they must write in ways that either conform with previous ones or in ways deliberately dissimilar. In both cases there's no original thought involved.

There are only a very limited number of narrative plots. ~30 or something, iirc, and depending how you define one.

All literary is essentially derivative, I think. Every Shakespeare play is either a rehash of someone else's, or is based on history (as it was related by Holinshed and Petrarch, principally, I believe).

And, moreover, there's also a "theory" that there's only one book in the entire world. And it was written by Homer.

 

[Kyriakos]

^Maybe this has to do with the degree of analysis one is willing/bothering to show on this issue? Since if one is looking at a forest from miles away, most if not all of the trees will appear to be a repetition of the same form.
If he stands inside the forest, each tree looks quite different.

Same goes in more pronounced effects when one is actively observing the particular texture of each distinct segment of those studied phenomena. Literature is developed in countless different plot formations, often mingling with countless other variables as well. To argue that there are only a few different types of plot, or other main literary elements, is in my view somewhat like arguing that since each line can be said to consist of united dots, it is the same as a circle, or a cone, a cube, or any complicated system created by many such shapes linked together with their own secret dynamics That patterns exist (eg symmetries) does not mean the system of shapes (or language, paragraphs, chapters, plots and subplots and undercurrent plots) is a repetition of everything else.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I am of the view that consciousness is the experience that any system of energy has as a collected system of energy.

Is that a well done new-age-parody?
Or should I stop using batteries?

 

[Borachio]

^Maybe this has to do with the degree of analysis one is willing/bothering to show on this issue? Since if one is looking at a forest from miles away, most if not all of the trees will appear to be a repetition of the same form.
If he stands inside the forest, each tree looks quite different.

Why, then, one could just as well say that Dickens and RLS differ extremely. And they do. As much different from each other as Kafka differs from them both, imo.

In point of fact, I heavily favour Conrad. Even Somerset Maugham, at times.

But if you want something out on a limb, I'd go with Gogol. Who wrote simply for the sake of writing, I think.

 

[Kyriakos]

Why, then, one could just as well say that Dickens and RLS differ extremely. And they do. As much different from each other as Kafka differs from them both, imo.

In point of fact, I heavily favour Conrad. Even Somerset Maugham, at times.

But if you want something out on a limb, I'd go with Gogol. Who wrote simply for the sake of writing, I think.

They do differ, of course, any two authors do. However neither Dickens nor RLS seem to have written prolonged allegorical stories (while intending to do so, anyway), whereas Kafka is quite obviously not using the external reality in a direct way in his works. Dickens appears to pretty much use the idea of his industrial Britain as the background of his plots, while in Kafka the Castle is not Prague or any other place that is non-allegorical.

Kafka even started his first novel, Amerika, with a paragraph in which the ocean-liner reaches New York from the old world, and the people see the godess Liberty holding her ominous sword. So metaphor is always there.

Of course form is not the only main characteristic of a piece of literature. Speaking of Kafka's first novel, he himself noted that he tried to use the plot outline of one of the novels by Dickens (don't recall which one now).

As for Gogol, in my view he was one of the greatest writers of all time, and the best of the 19th century Russian authors. The ending to "Diary of a madman" would alone be enough to make him immortal in the realm of letters, in my opinion.

 

[timtofly]

I am of the view that consciousness is the experience that any system of energy has as a collected system of energy.

There are both negative and positive factors to that notion, so you are probably on to something.

 

[Borachio]

Yeah, Mr Kos, there's much in what you say. I too like Gogol tremendously.

But RLS deserves a lot more credit than he gets, imo.

Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, but with the rise of modern literature after World War I, he was seen for much of the 20th century as a writer of the second class, relegated to children's literature and horror genres.[80] Condemned by literary figures such as Virginia Woolf (daughter of his early mentor Leslie Stephen) and her husband Leonard, he was gradually excluded from the canon of literature taught in schools.[80] His exclusion reached a height when in the 1973 2,000-page Oxford Anthology of English Literature Stevenson was entirely unmentioned; and The Norton Anthology of English Literature excluded him from 1968 to 2000 (1st–7th editions), including him only in the 8th edition (2006).[80] The late 20th century saw the start of a re-evaluation of Stevenson as an artist of great range and insight, a literary theorist, an essayist and social critic, a witness to the colonial history of the Pacific Islands, and a humanist.[80] Even as early as 1965 the pendulum had begun to swing: he was praised by Roger Lancelyn Green, one of the Oxford Inklings, as a writer of a consistently high level of "literary skill or sheer imaginative power" and a co-originator with H. Rider Haggard of the Age of the Story Tellers.[81] He is now being re-evaluated as a peer of authors such as Joseph Conrad (whom Stevenson influenced with his South Seas fiction), and Henry James, with new scholarly studies and organisations devoted to Stevenson.[80] No matter what the scholarly reception, Stevenson remains popular worldwide. According to the Index Translationum, Stevenson is ranked the 26th most translated author in the world, ahead of fellow nineteenth-century writers Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Louis_Stevenson

 

[Orka]

On one hand you make it look like simple brain function, and then you say that AI though simple does not scratch the surface. Why does there seem such a huge abyss, but not one.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that human-level consciousness was a simple function. It's not, and remains one of the greatest mysteries to science. Although we understand certain aspects of it (e.g. areas in the brain associated with consciousness) and can measure certain aspects (e.g. mirror self-awareness tests) we know very little. We don't even have a solid definition of what it is! And because we know so little, we are very unlikely to fully reproduce it in AI anytime soon. I'd say we first need a better understanding of the subfunctions and mechanisms involved.

 

[peter grimes]

Would we recognize a silicon consciousness if one were to emerge?

One way we might is if the behavior of the system as a whole appeared to be more than could be accounted for by the constituent modules.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I think it is safe to assume that electric charges would be at play.

 

[timtofly]

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that human-level consciousness was a simple function. It's not, and remains one of the greatest mysteries to science. Although we understand certain aspects of it (e.g. areas in the brain associated with consciousness) and can measure certain aspects (e.g. mirror self-awareness tests) we know very little. We don't even have a solid definition of what it is! And because we know so little, we are very unlikely to fully reproduce it in AI anytime soon. I'd say we first need a better understanding of the subfunctions and mechanisms involved.

I was thinking about this earlier, and most of the brain function is used to control and keep track of every tissue and cell in the human body. We really only use a small part to think and make a few motor function decisions with. An AI body really does not need all of the extra attention a human body does.

Like Peter said, there seems to be something more than the sum of the given parts.

 

[Perfection]

It would be a mistake to think that sensory and control functions are divorced from thought processes and are mere input and outputs to some central consciousness. They are a very important part of thinking. Consider the act of talking to oneself, this method of self-reflection traverses not only through sensory and control parts of the brain but through sensors and motors themselves and even the world outside the body.

 

[Kyriakos]

Regarding RLS (to close the parenthesis )

I like some of his works, but i only read them in the Greek translation so i cannot comment on the original language. The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a very interesting novella, although it suffers from RLS's own characteristic weakness to describe many characters in a way which suffices to make them interesting and not have the reader tend to confuse the secondary characters with each other.
On that note RLS himself left a memorable quote about one of his failed attempts at writing a character, according to which that character had around the same degree of a personality as a kitchen pipe.

 

[Perfection]

I've always found the idea of consciousness requiring " true randomness" to be far-fetched magical thinking. What's so special about such a process that makes them vital?

Thanks for the link! I do think that TRNG has to happen faster for it to be practical as a means of consciousness generation. Right now, it is too slow.

What's to prevent us from just precalculating a massive amount of random numbers and storing them in a giant look up table whenever needed?

 

[Terxpahseyton]

@Perfection
I tend to view the whole of our experience as a series of superimposed sensation.
For instance: I can not determine what to think. Try it.
As you will notice, you can only decide what to think after you are already thinking about exactly that. I can only decide to think the word "house" after I am already thinking the word house and am thinking to decide to think the word "house".
While we experience some sensation as external (the view of a red car) and others internal (thoughts), both are out of our hands it appears.
So there in deed would be no "central consciousness" but just a flow of sensation we have the pleasure to be riding.
Hm, I actually very much like that, never quit explained it that way. Goes to show why I see free will as an illusion.

 

[timtofly]

Thinking about something is the hardest route. One has to think along side of the rest of the conscious as Perfection seems to imply. So it is not free will directly, but free will to be able to also think along side of the conscious.

 

[Hygro]

Is there any utility in proclaiming free will an illusion?

Also, I have to caution you. As someone who studies equilibrium theories in the marketplace (economics), it's very easy to justify consequentialist if-then logic as the truth, when reality has no interest in your limiting analysis and will continue to function in a grander way.

Is that a well done new-age-parody?
Or should I stop using batteries?

The mistake people make is assuming its experience is like ours. A battery's consciousness is certainly less interesting than that of a battery, a switch, a light bulb, and some wires. But even that consciousness is basically "electricity is lighting me up, electricity isn't lighting me up!" as far as I can surmise. Oh, and it wouldn't understand the abstract concept of the self as it, well, lacks a brain. Not a particularly interesting consciousness to me.

The narcissistic leap certain folks think is in thinking that an inorganic consciousness has feelings like humans do. It's even a mistake to think that a conscious ascribes value judgments that inform it of its survival vs its death a market-consciousness might not actually care if its booming or busting, but then again, as its informed by human actors who do care, it might actually be hyper emotional and care a lot. But even if it did, it might not care the way we could ever empathize with without completely invalidating its existence.

In the end, the only interesting takeaway I have is that if energy systems spawn consciousness, and consciousness is experienced, and anything experience something is observing within its limits of observation, then it has by definition some kind of agency or some kind of self-awareness feed-backing effect.

It's also a question of how meta a system of energy can be and still live. My thoughts are real existing things. A collection of thoughts interacting is a collection of interacting (energy with cause-effect) things. And a collection of a collection, influenced by biological systems affected by physical constraints of the nearby star etc? If it can layer up, which I think by definition it does, it ends up layering into the entire universe and some. And it is a consciousness made up of intelligent parts, and has awareness and therefore some kind of agency.

The other thing is that I find interesting is that if its an aggregated energy system, and I show you

    .
  .   .
.   .   .

and ask you to make triangles from the dots, how many unique triangles are there? And are redundant triangles (the same dots but rotated) unique? The lines that connect the dots into the triangles are the energy that is aggregating the nodes (brain cells, visual stimuli, organs etc) can form many aggregations, many triangles. Could it be that you are just one consciousness in your body having a full experience? And that most of these consciousnesses are pretty redundant and they're all kind of on the same journey, does it matter? But if each one has agency, might they be working sometimes in unison, sometimes diversifying, and sometimes in conflict? How could you communicate with them?

Perhaps, if when they become redundant (rotations of the same triangle) they are in sync and can communicate. How to maximize redundancy? Meditation, when practice optimally, is optimally firing off your neurons to the point that you are creating white noise in your head. And maybe the thought of "I'm sharing this body with nearly identical me's, and maybe some radically different ones" is a physical enough manifestation that it can get it all more integrated and working together.

But then, and here's where I step outside consciousness and back into economics is a separate question: what's more resourceful to your life, harnessing crowd wisdom and independence of separate consciousnesses sharing a body working toward mutual goals of survival and thrival, or all of them thinking the same united thoughts so that there's no contradiction in action and there's the strength of a cohesive unit. Which is basically the same Triforce question that my dots hint at in the first place. Boom.

There are both negative and positive factors to that notion, so you are probably on to something.

Say more!

 

[Gatsby]

The below exchange sounds interesting, so I thought it deserves it's own thread, instead of being intertwined into the other thread.

What allows consciousness? Is it the amount of brain capacity? Is it the result of evolution? Is it random or pre-programmed? Do thoughts arise out of nothing, or are they put there by some invisible force?

It is my theory that there is more to it than just raw brain power, thus eliminating the material aspect altogether. It seems though that some hold that it is just a product of evolution. I apologize if there is already a thread on the topic, and this is not about God or a God existence. It is more to hash out what we know/have opinions about consciousness itself.

The more I think about this issue, the more I am inclined to think that consciousness is no more real than the illusion of moving pictures created by a roll of film being run through a film projector.

Consciousness clearly has a reflective quality to it, and I have read of it being compared to a mirror. I think that consciousness is more like two mirrors facing each other, creating an impression of an infinite series of mirrors which aren't actually there. Likewise the reception of new data by the senses is continually compared to / "reflected" onto previous sensory data (i.e. via short- and long-term memory), and this process happens rapidly and continuously thus creating the illusion of an independently existing consciousness. Humans have brains of sufficient processing power and complexity that they can use sensory data to create elaborate abstract notions like "self" and "subjectivity", and these notions help reinforce the apparent substantiality of what we call consciousness. In other words, "consciousness" is a sensationalised interpretation of what happens when sensory data meets memory.

 

[warpus]

I am of the view that consciousness is the experience that any system of energy has as a collected system of energy.

What about something like the sun though? That is a lot of energy! Does it have consciousness?

I've always found the idea of consciousness requiring " true randomness" to be far-fetched magical thinking. What's so special about such a process that makes them vital?

Nothing, I just think true free will is impossible in a fully deterministic system. I have no idea how you'd design one in a system that isn't deterministic, so I claim no answers there, but mind you I am not fully convinced that we do have it in the first place.

Is there any utility in proclaiming free will an illusion?

As much as proclaiming that God exists, in my mind. But if that statement is a conclusion built upon a rational examination of some data and axioms, and is fully logical, then surely it must carry some weight, even if it is wrong.