OSDev.org

You folks are going off-topic.

No Neurology lessons here, please.

Chandra wrote:You folks are going off-topic.

No Neurology lessons here, please.

If a mod decides the thread should be split, the following information may make the job easier: the 8th post on the second page (one by Bonch which ends by asking "Do you think computers could ever be conscious?") should be the first post of the new thread, but the last post on that page (one of mine) and the 2nd, 4th and 6th posts on the third page (one of mine and two of gerryg400's) would then need to be extracted and put back into the original thread. [That all assumes that 15 posts appear on each page.] After splitting the thread, the four posts to extract and move back to the original thread will have become posts 8, 10, 12 and 14 of the new thread.

If I may...

DavidCooper wrote:(1): Imagine a machine that can make a perfect copy of anything you stick inside it. You stand in one side of it and a working copy of you is created in the other. The copy thinks he's you (assuming you're a he). Can both the original you and the copy both be you at the same time?

You remember Star Trek? The transporter "beaming" people around? That's actually just what you describe, with one difference: The original body is disintegrated in the process, turned into a series of energy pulses to transmit the information of the material configuration to the destination. Interesting point, don't you think? Is the "beamed" person actually the person? Technical details like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle or the lack of a reintegrating machinery at the remote location aside, Roddenberry (and most of the screen writers) got it right, and several episodes and novels touch on the finer parts of the process. Check out the TNG episodes "Second Chances" (where the original of a "beamed" Riker is left behind alone on an evacuated planet, to be rediscovered years later), "Relics" (where Scott "stores" himself in a transporter buffer to be rediscovered many years later), or the novel "Spock must die" (where Spock is "duplicated" during a transport, and there's quite some dilemma on which one is "real", and what to do with the copy).

To return to your original question, both "me"'s will have the same set of experiences, character traits etc., so yes, from a certain standpoint they both are "me". Make the setup a bit fuzzy on who's the original and who's the (perfect) copy (like, by having them both emerge from a door on the far side after having been turned around a couple of times), and no-one (not even the two "me"'s) would be able to tell the difference.

As SDS pointed out, from the moment of the copy, the two "me"'s would diverge, becoming two different (if very much similar) personalities.

If someone sticks a pin in him, do you feel it too?

Nope, won't happen. No neural connection between his pain receptors and my nervous system.

(2): Imagine that all the atoms that were in your head many years ago have been collected and built back together into the same arrangement as they were once in when you were a child. We're now dealing with a copy of you as a child which is actually built up from the same material as the original (hard to do this for the whole body as some of the material is retained and reused, such as with calcium in the bones, but this is just a thought experiment so we can ignore all the technical difficulties). You can stand looking at the child that you once were, and yet he isn't you.

He is me, as a child, with the same set of experiences, memories, character traits etc. etc. that I had, back then. (And a pretty confused child, too, with all those years "suddenly" gone by from his POV.)

Stick a pin in him and you feel nothing (until someone hits you over the head with a baseball bat in return).

Correct, see answer above.

One thing that is very important in discussions like these: If you come to the limit of your understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology, don't start inventing metaphysical concepts like "consciousness", or worse, "god", to explain away your lack of understanding. These concepts don't explain anything, and merely obscure your view, keeping you from actually expanding your understanding.

(Don't get me wrong, I'm not an atheist, I'm actually actively religious. I don't tell people that they shouldn't believe in something, if it makes them feel better. That is what religion is about, and what it is good for. But please don't use the gods you believe in to explain anything. I know this sounds somewhat schizophrenic, but it's the only way to go without drifting into fundamentalism.)

DavidCooper wrote:It doesn't involve movement - it's just a shift of attention when the absorbing task is finished with.

Not at all. As an example, I fell asleep on the plane on Saturday. On waking up I felt fine, but as soon as I moved around my legs began to complain. Unless you are considering a totally different physiological effect, then that is entirely flow of blood related.

DavidCooper wrote:How can you be sure of that? When I try to work out if I can experience more than one sensation at a time, just trying to monitor this can itself block both of them, but it feels to me as if there is a rapid switching going on with only one sensation actually being experienced at any one moment. It's impossible to be sure though. I'm sitting in a cold room with a heater to one side, trying to feel the cold on one side and the warmth on the other, but I don't think I can be aware of both at once. It's like the picture that switches between being a candlestick or two faces, but it seems impossible to see it as both these things at the same time.

Try a quick experiment. Take 3 containers of water, one (very) cold, one lukewarm, one hot. Put both your hands in the warm one for a minute - they will both feel warm. Then put one in the cold, one in the hot - one will feel cold and the other hot. Indeed, you will be able to explicitly notice the contrast. Putting them back in the warm, the sensations will cross over. They won't feel the same at all, but you will be able to feel the contrast between the two - implying that you are experiencing both sensations at the same time.

DavidCooper wrote: Consciousness appears to me to have an extremely small focus of attention, but it can flit between different things at very high speed rather like multitasking on a single processor.

If this were the case, then you wouldn't be able to tell from introspection. Indeed, the biggest indicator would be the lag induced by the 'task switching' rather than parallel processing.

One of the interesting things about the brain is that the neural systems it contain are inherently parallel - and yet our perception of reality is quite serialised. It seems to me that this perception is more illusive than real - it doesn't speak about the absolute processing capacity of the brain.

I am a rower. Teaching people to row is difficult because of the large amount of fine muscular control associated with very subtle feedback. You spend a lot of time doing very limited exercises intended to illustrate a very small element of muscular control, or perception of things in the boat (timing, roll, slippage of the blade in the water, transfer of load into different element of the muscular and skeletal system etc.). Each of these elements requires focus. You build the stroke up and break it down at various levels. When I am rowing, say in a race, I am aware of information at varying levels. I can focus on various things in isolation while doing complicated actions under conscious control and getting the feedback required. Certainly my focus is directed at certain things, but the whole activity would break down if I could consider only one thing at a time.

DavidCooper wrote:If there was only one input, filtering wouldn't be involved, but there are many and I'm very sure that you can't experience many at exactly the same point in time - I don't even think two at a time is possible, though trying to monitor that may be blocking it, so it's hard to tell.

By 'looking' too hard chances are you are directing your attention on one thing and losing it on another. I would be careful, though, that you haven't defined what 'one' thing was. Is that one nerves signal (certainly no). Consider sight, you can look with a certain amount of attention at 'one' thing - but things vary in size etc. There is a variable direction of focus on the 'inputs' as you have it.

DavidCooper wrote:With your clothes example, the inputs must be being generated all the time, but they are filtered out and don't make it through to conscious awareness until more significant inputs remove themselves.

The point here being that I am consciously aware that I should be able to feel them, and the effect of this conscious thought changes what is allowed through. The control and filtering process is VERY complicated (for instance, noticing that someone has chopped my leg off would not be under conscious control - although the subconscious may cut out the pain sensation at a certain level).

DavidCooper wrote:I never said filtering was part of consciousness, but I did suggest that whatever it is that's conscious may be capable of averaging out many inputs and experiencing the resulting average sensation. Alternatively, all that may be done non-consciously and then a specific feeling be generated in whatever it is that's conscious, though there doesn't seem to be any point in doing that if there's no function in it other than to receive an input, feel it and then send out an output to say that it was felt.

I just see no reason to consider 'averaging'. I don't see an 'average' colour with my eyes when reading this text, despite the fact that my attention is focussed on the word(s) in the centre of my vision to the loss of focus in the periphery of my vision. The brain can clearly take action based on a range of sensory input. In your example, standing between hot and cold areas, you would know which way to move to got towards the hot or cold area - you don't just experience the average.

There is a lovely experiment (which you will need a friend to help with). Your 'assistant' should lightly poke you with either one pin, or two pins at varying separations, without telling you what they are doing. You should say whether you feel one or two. The idea being that you can determine at what point the body can distinguish two inputs - with this being related to nerve density. The corollary is that you can only tell if you are feeling two closely spaced pricks in your back if you can be aware of the position of one while feeling the other...

If you program a robot to be able to solve any problem it encounters (though let's limit ourselves to just those problems which a human can solve), then all such problems are automatically within the scope considered when it was designed, regardless of whether they were specifically considered or not. Such a machine would be able to solve problems which are new to it without needing consciousness. It isn't clear as to how consciousness would make the process any more efficient as it has no obvious role, but we won't be able to tell until we can see the actual mechanism of it.

You have kindof answered your question already, by saying 'within the scope considered when it was designed'. Unless you resort to an external intelligence for design, the only driving force for the scope of design would be evolution. My suggestion is that consciousness provides greater adaptability to widen the scope - and that being able to adapt to unexpected circumstances which have no specific evolutionary timescale pressure is in itself beneficial. That is, obviously, conjecture.

DavidCooper wrote:The point is about what you are. You think you were a child in the past, but now that child is standing there in front of you: he isn't merely an identical copy, but is actually built out of the exact same atoms as the original and in the exact same arrangement. You are clearly not him. Were you ever him?

Well, yes and no. He is a replica - he does not have temporal continuity of thought or existence. He does, however, behave in the same manner as I did/would have and would have consciousness of his own which would be independent of mine, even if it has the same history of development up to that point.

DavidCooper wrote:So let's go back to the pain issue. If pain is felt, something feels it. What is that thing? If I stick some atoms together and create a structure which can feel pain, but none of the atoms and no part of the atoms feels any pain, then what are you left with to feel the pain? Is it the geometrical arrangement of the atoms that feels pain? Is it energy passing through that feels the pain?

Is it the atoms, the geometric arrangement or the moving electrons in a computer which are aware of what a window containing a program is, or the significance of a mouse click? If you take a dead body, that was alive a minute ago, what is different? The geometric arrangements in the brain are the same, and yet it is not thinking, or experiencing anything. Thought is closer to a combination of data and what is being 'run' by the brain, than it is to the physical arrangement. The structure may be required to support consciousness, but the structure is not consciousness itself.

Solar wrote:One thing that is very important in discussions like these: If you come to the limit of your understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology, don't start inventing metaphysical concepts like "consciousness", or worse, "god", to explain away your lack of understanding. These concepts don't explain anything, and merely obscure your view, keeping you from actually expanding your understanding.

I don't think that trying to explain the existence of consciousness, or perhaps the illusion of it, from our perspective is the same as using the concept of "consciousness" to explain something else.

Solar wrote:(Don't get me wrong, I'm not an atheist, I'm actually actively religious. I don't tell people that they shouldn't believe in something, if it makes them feel better. That is what religion is about, and what it is good for. But please don't use the gods you believe in to explain anything. I know this sounds somewhat schizophrenic, but it's the only way to go without drifting into fundamentalism.)

Somewhat unusually amongst the other physical scientists I work with, I'm not an atheist either . I do, however, flit with depressing frequency between active religion and formal agnosticism - probably erring towards the latter. It irks me immensely when people use religion to explain reality from a position of incomplete knowledge - rather than demonstrating that said religious views are consistent with reality.

Edit: I am a retard with quote tags. And these posts are getting a little unweildy...

Solar wrote:You remember Star Trek? The transporter "beaming" people around? That's actually just what you describe, with one difference: The original body is disintegrated in the process, turned into a series of energy pulses to transmit the information of the material configuration to the destination. Interesting point, don't you think?

I don't generally watch science fiction, but I'd always assumed that in teleporting the idea was to turn the matter into energy, send that at the speed of light, then turn it back into matter and recreate the original person exactly as was. If you only send the information rather than the actual stuff, you are killing the original person and creating a new one which stupidly thinks he/she is the original one (and of course he/she would be that stupid to have got into that kind of teleport in the first place). Having said that, if the thing that's conscious in us is only ever there for a moment before being replaced with a new one, it isn't going to matter, but we don't know if that's the case. It surprises me to learn that in Star Trek they use the wrong kind of teleport, and it surprises me more to learn that they don't just create a remote copy of everyone they want to teleport and kill them once they've carried out their task rather than "bringing them back" (which involved killing them and creating yet another copy to replace them).

To return to your original question, both "me"'s will have the same set of experiences, character traits etc., so yes, from a certain standpoint they both are "me". Make the setup a bit fuzzy on who's the original and who's the (perfect) copy (like, by having them both emerge from a door on the far side after having been turned around a couple of times), and no-one (not even the two "me"'s) would be able to tell the difference.

But if there is genuinely something conscious in you, and if that thing remains there and conscious for long lengths of time rather than being replaced moment by moment, that thing will continue to exist in only one of the two people that think they're you. The other one will contain a different thing that is conscious. If you object to that on the basis that there isn't a "thing" in there that's conscious, then you have to explain what you imagine it is that does such things as experience pain. Can you hurt a pattern?

As SDS pointed out, from the moment of the copy, the two "me"'s would diverge, becoming two different (if very much similar) personalities.

Are you saying you then become two radically different people at the same time, or are you going to change your mind and just be one of them?

If someone sticks a pin in him, do you feel it too?

Nope, won't happen. No neural connection between his pain receptors and my nervous system.

Yes - one feels it and the other doesn't because they are not the same person.

(2): Imagine that all the atoms that were in your head many years ago have been collected and built back together into the same arrangement as they were once in when you were a child. We're now dealing with a copy of you as a child which is actually built up from the same material as the original (hard to do this for the whole body as some of the material is retained and reused, such as with calcium in the bones, but this is just a thought experiment so we can ignore all the technical difficulties). You can stand looking at the child that you once were, and yet he isn't you.

He is me, as a child, with the same set of experiences, memories, character traits etc. etc. that I had, back then. (And a pretty confused child, too, with all those years "suddenly" gone by from his POV.)

I'd say that he is the child that you wrongly believe you once were.

One thing that is very important in discussions like these: If you come to the limit of your understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology, don't start inventing metaphysical concepts like "consciousness", or worse, "god", to explain away your lack of understanding. These concepts don't explain anything, and merely obscure your view, keeping you from actually expanding your understanding.

I don't think I invented either concept. If you have a machine that genuinely feels pain, it has something conscious in it - we are then required to discuss consciousness. If you don't believe in consciousness, you shouldn't believe in pain - you should regard us as machines.

(Don't get me wrong, I'm not an atheist, I'm actually actively religious. I don't tell people that they shouldn't believe in something, if it makes them feel better. That is what religion is about, and what it is good for. But please don't use the gods you believe in to explain anything. I know this sounds somewhat schizophrenic, but it's the only way to go without drifting into fundamentalism.)

I haven't used any gods here and don't intend to bring any into the discussion either.

SDS wrote:As an example, I fell asleep on the plane on Saturday. On waking up I felt fine, but as soon as I moved around my legs began to complain. Unless you are considering a totally different physiological effect, then that is entirely flow of blood related.

Actually, it's not about blood flow at all, but that misconception is pretty common. (The effect is actually caused by compression of the nerves. That is why a ruptured intervertebral disc causes quite similar symptoms - pressure on the nerve.)

But that's really getting OT.

DavidCooper wrote: Consciousness appears to me to have an extremely small focus of attention, but it can flit between different things at very high speed rather like multitasking on a single processor.

Small?

SDS told you about rowing, let's stick with sports. I'm a martial artist, Judo and Ju-Jiutsu to be exact. In a kumite, I am aware of an extremely wide range of sensory input at once. Grip and countergrip, own balance and that of my opponent, how strong my opponent is, where he is trying to push me and what kind of options that leaves me.

If I try to think, the amount of input overwhelms me, and I lose because I cannot react fast enough. Most training is about not thinking, just being aware (or "being conscious", if you will.) It's the ability to go beyond focus to actually become more focussed.

SDS wrote:It irks me immensely when people use religion to explain reality from a position of incomplete knowledge - rather than demonstrating that said religious views are consistent with reality.

They don't even have to. Religion is about feeling, emotion. That can readily be disjunct from reality, as long as it doesn't interfere with it.

DavidCooper wrote:I don't generally watch science fiction, but [...] It surprises me to learn that in Star Trek they use the wrong kind of teleport...

So you didn't watch any of the episodes or read any of the novels I mentioned, but you jump to a conclusion? Nice.

...and it surprises me more to learn that they don't just create a remote copy of everyone they want to teleport and kill them once they've carried out their task rather than "bringing them back" (which involved killing them and creating yet another copy to replace them).

Whether it's "killing" or not is the point of the discussion, isn't it? Nice twisting you're doing there.

And have you thought about the implications of "your way"? Having temporary copies running around, then killing them once you're done as they are "only copies"? (The problem with that is the very subject of "Second Chances" and "Spock must die".) Killing the copies who actually gained experience on an away team, while keeping the "bench-sitting" originals around? Takes a special kind of mind to come up with that one.

Oh, and another thing: If you turn matter into energy, that energy has no "memory" of what it once was. Whether you use that energy or a different energy to re-built the matter doesn't matter! (No pun intended.)

But if there is genuinely something conscious in you, and if that thing remains there and conscious for long lengths of time rather than being replaced moment by moment, that thing will continue to exist in only one of the two people that think they're you. The other one will contain a different thing that is conscious. If you object to that on the basis that there isn't a "thing" in there that's conscious, then you have to explain what you imagine it is that does such things as experience pain. Can you hurt a pattern?

Yes. Plain and simple. I can hurt a couple of neurons in a petri dish and measure the response. I can hurt a brain-dead creature on life support and measure the reactions of the organism.

You interpret too much into that "conscience" of yours.

As SDS pointed out, from the moment of the copy, the two "me"'s would diverge, becoming two different (if very much similar) personalities.

Are you saying you then become two radically different people at the same time, or are you going to change your mind and just be one of them?

What?

At the moment of the copy, the persons are identical. But from that moment onward, their lives will be different. They will see things from different angles, eat different food - slightly different or very different doesn't matter - have different conversations, etc. etc. - and their personalities will take a different development from there on. Perhaps slightly different, perhaps dramatically so. Perhaps one returns home to wife and kids, while the other is hit by a bus and ends up as a quadriplegic.

If someone sticks a pin in him, do you feel it too?

Nope, won't happen. No neural connection between his pain receptors and my nervous system.

Yes - one feels it and the other doesn't because they are not the same person.

Gosh, you're really trying to screw this up, are you? Of course there are two seperate bodies stepping out of the machine. But as I said, having the same "starting point", they will be very similar. More so than two identical twins at the same age - since twins seperate during gestation, while the two "me"'s stepping out of the machine have been identical for over 38 years of life (in my case). So, when they come out of that machine, you are facing two seperate "me"'s that seperated only seconds ago, and thus will be very, very similar personalities, to the point that no-one would be able to tell the difference. Not even the two "me"'s themselves, unless the machine itself gives a hint (for example by one stepping out of the chamber labelled "original", hence my remark about both copies coming out of the other side). Neither of them is more "me" than the other (provided the copy was perfect).

(2): Imagine that all the atoms that were in your head many years ago have been collected and built back together into the same arrangement as they were once in when you were a child.

He is me, as a child, with the same set of experiences, memories, character traits etc. etc. that I had, back then. (And a pretty confused child, too, with all those years "suddenly" gone by from his POV.)

I'd say that he is the child that you wrongly believe you once were.

Does it matter what I believe? That child will be certain it is "me", and rightfully so. Not the 38-year-old me, but the child-me. Only environmental evidence will prove the poor child wrong. Let's say I time-tunneled into the 1980'ies and faced that very same configuration of the very same atoms, just in a different timeline. I would still be "me", that child would still be "child-me", and neither of us would be any less "me" than in the original example.

Again, you're trying to construct something into this "consciousness" of yours, but there's nothing to be found there. There's nothing "conscious" in us that wouldn't show up in a sufficiently precise microscope. (Again, ignoring Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which puts a physical limit to these what-if games.)

I don't think I invented either concept. If you have a machine that genuinely feels pain, it has something conscious in it - we are then required to discuss consciousness. If you don't believe in consciousness, you shouldn't believe in pain - you should regard us as machines.

You don't feel "pain". You feel heat, cold, pressure, the piercing of your skin. The rest of it is the reaction of a massively parallel, highly complex neural network that had millions of years to evolve into the "ouch, bad, avoid, fear" cycle. Which is physics and chemistry. Yes, in that regard, we are as much machines as a sufficiently sophisticated (and evolved!) machine would be "conscious".

I haven't used any gods here and don't intend to bring any into the discussion either.

Yet still you're trying to point out consciousness as something beyond physics and (bio-) chemistry, aren't you?

DavidCooper wrote:But if there is genuinely something conscious in you, and if that thing remains there and conscious for long lengths of time rather than being replaced moment by moment, that thing will continue to exist in only one of the two people that think they're you. The other one will contain a different thing that is conscious. If you object to that on the basis that there isn't a "thing" in there that's conscious, then you have to explain what you imagine it is that does such things as experience pain. Can you hurt a pattern?

Are you saying you then become two radically different people at the same time, or are you going to change your mind and just be one of them?

You appear to have a notion that consciousness is something external which is somehow in you. This is most similar to some interpretations of the religious notion of a soul - i.e. that you as a person are somehow 'inhabiting' your body.

Understanding consciousness as an emergent phenomenon removes this problem. If you somehow made a perfect copy of a person - including all of the momentary fluctuations (including electrical ones) within the brain which make up the 'thoughts' which are in your head, then that copy will be able to function independently of the original.

The physical structure/geometry of the brain is something which changes slowly. At maximum, it is limited by chemical transportation processes within cells, and even then most of the structure in the brain is stable for the long term - and yet thoughts occur rapidly. The physical structure is not the same as the thoughts.

Solar wrote:Actually, it's not about blood flow at all, but that misconception is pretty common. (The effect is actually caused by compression of the nerves. That is why a ruptured intervertebral disc causes quite similar symptoms - pressure on the nerve.)

I appreciate standing corrected!

Solar wrote:You don't feel "pain". You feel heat, cold, pressure, the piercing of your skin. The rest of it is the reaction of a massively parallel, highly complex neural network that had millions of years to evolve into the "ouch, bad, avoid, fear" cycle. Which is physics and chemistry. Yes, in that regard, we are as much machines as a sufficiently sophisticated (and evolved!) machine would be "conscious".

Indeed up to a point. Although this description would also match an autonomic system quite well. There does appear to be an additional level of indirection and/or abstraction of 'thoughts', which are over and above the input-output observed irrespective of how sophisticated a neural network is. That is not to say that the neural network doesn't provide the 'system' that those thoughts occur in.

SDS wrote:

DavidCooper wrote:It doesn't involve movement - it's just a shift of attention when the absorbing task is finished with.

Not at all. As an example, I fell asleep on the plane on Saturday. On waking up I felt fine, but as soon as I moved around my legs began to complain. Unless you are considering a totally different physiological effect, then that is entirely flow of blood related.

Then we're talking about different things. What I'm talking about is more like your clothes example.

Try a quick experiment. Take 3 containers of water, one (very) cold, one lukewarm, one hot. Put both your hands in the warm one for a minute - they will both feel warm. Then put one in the cold, one in the hot - one will feel cold and the other hot. Indeed, you will be able to explicitly notice the contrast. Putting them back in the warm, the sensations will cross over. They won't feel the same at all, but you will be able to feel the contrast between the two - implying that you are experiencing both sensations at the same time.

That's no different in practical terms from the situation I've described already. I can't be sure whether I can be aware of both things at the same time. I seem to alternate between one and the other. I don't get any sense with temperature experiments that they're being averaged at any time, but if any averaging that is being done at any time is done outside of consciousness, but that only serves to reduce the possible role of consciousness and make it seem even more accidental and unnecessary.

DavidCooper wrote: Consciousness appears to me to have an extremely small focus of attention, but it can flit between different things at very high speed rather like multitasking on a single processor.

If this were the case, then you wouldn't be able to tell from introspection. Indeed, the biggest indicator would be the lag induced by the 'task switching' rather than parallel processing.

Well, there's a huge lag: those smilies kept interrupting my thoughts for a moment and corrupting the contents of some of my registers.

One of the interesting things about the brain is that the neural systems it contain are inherently parallel - and yet our perception of reality is quite serialised. It seems to me that this perception is more illusive than real - it doesn't speak about the absolute processing capacity of the brain.

There's clearly only one processor (in a multiprocessor environment in our heads) which has consciousness associated with it, or at least only one that generated data about its state of consciousness (whether real or fictitious). When we're doing something new that we aren't used to, we tie together our existing skills and generate new ones using our conscious processor, but as we gain mastery over these new tasks we automate them, generating programs to carry them out which can be run through non-conscious processors so that the conscious one is freed up to monitor interesting events that crop up, and those events can be used to trigger modifications of the automatic programs to make them more efficient. If there are no interesting events, the conscious processor can get bored - something that the other processors cannot do (or at least cannot inform us that they can do), though their performace can certainly decline as they tire.

Certainly my focus is directed at certain things, but the whole activity would break down if I could consider only one thing at a time.

No it wouldn't, because most of what you're doing has been automated and can run without involving your conscious processor which is free to focus on one thing at a time, and it may be impossible for it to focus on more than one thing at a time.

DavidCooper wrote:If there was only one input, filtering wouldn't be involved, but there are many and I'm very sure that you can't experience many at exactly the same point in time - I don't even think two at a time is possible, though trying to monitor that may be blocking it, so it's hard to tell.

By 'looking' too hard chances are you are directing your attention on one thing and losing it on another. I would be careful, though, that you haven't defined what 'one' thing was. Is that one nerves signal (certainly no). Consider sight, you can look with a certain amount of attention at 'one' thing - but things vary in size etc. There is a variable direction of focus on the 'inputs' as you have it.

Well, you don't have to look at anything to do the experiments. Just think about a bicycle. Can you really think about the whole bicycle in one go or does your mind have to jump around the set of ideas that it is built up from? I find myself doing the latter, and I've only just got to valves now. Now I've found the post that holds the chainstays apart a short distance behind the bottom bracket. It all happens in sequence - the big stuff first, then working down through all the details. At one moment it's just a general shape, then a feeling associated with balancing, then the colour of handlebar tape, the ragged end of a gear cable which I forgot to dip in superglue, and on it goes - I can't be conscious of more than a few of these things at once at best, and I'm not even sure I can do two at once. Consciousness seems to have a remarkably narrow focus, although it can focus on large things at the expence of losing track of the details. This doesn't give consciousness much room to have a useful role.

I just see no reason to consider 'averaging'. I don't see an 'average' colour with my eyes when reading this text, despite the fact that my attention is focussed on the word(s) in the centre of my vision to the loss of focus in the periphery of my vision. The brain can clearly take action based on a range of sensory input. In your example, standing between hot and cold areas, you would know which way to move to got towards the hot or cold area - you don't just experience the average.

I don't see room for averaging with colours either. An example where there may be averaging would be whether someone feels happy, sad or neither when there are things to be happy and sad about at the same time - e.g. a lottery winner whose wife/husband died from the shock of winning millions of dollars. Alternating between the two extremes is more likely than averaging them out though, so again this seems to be leaving consciousness with nothing useful to do.

There is a lovely experiment (which you will need a friend to help with). Your 'assistant' should lightly poke you with either one pin, or two pins at varying separations, without telling you what they are doing. You should say whether you feel one or two. The idea being that you can determine at what point the body can distinguish two inputs - with this being related to nerve density. The corollary is that you can only tell if you are feeling two closely spaced pricks in your back if you can be aware of the position of one while feeling the other...

Or you can be feeling something which relates to the idea of there being more than one position without at that moment being consciously aware of either pin, and then you fool yourself into thinking that you were aware of both pins at the same time.

You have kind of answered your question already, by saying 'within the scope considered when it was designed'. Unless you resort to an external intelligence for design, the only driving force for the scope of design would be evolution.

I can't remember what the question was or who asked it. My point was that if you design a general purpose problem solving system, it shouldn't surprise you if it is able to solve problems that you wrongly think it wasn't designed to solve because it was designed to solve them - you're actually just discovering that a problem that you thought it wasn't designed to solve is actually one of the problems it was designed to solve. You only find out which problems it was designed to solve when it solves them. I don't know what point you're trying to make about evolution. Initially evolution was the only way things could be "designed", but when it reached the point where it was creating things of sufficient intelligence to design things deliberately, they were able to design things intelligently. Evolution designs things through lucky accidents where the accidental inventions are passed on because they work, whereas we design things deliberately to solve problems that we want to solve.

My suggestion is that consciousness provides greater adaptability to widen the scope - and that being able to adapt to unexpected circumstances which have no specific evolutionary timescale pressure is in itself beneficial. That is, obviously, conjecture.

Fine, but now you need to test the idea. What might consciousness do to help identify a problem and create a solution?

DavidCooper wrote:The point is about what you are. You think you were a child in the past, but now that child is standing there in front of you: he isn't merely an identical copy, but is actually built out of the exact same atoms as the original and in the exact same arrangement. You are clearly not him. Were you ever him?

Well, yes and no. He is a replica - he does not have temporal continuity of thought or existence. He does, however, behave in the same manner as I did/would have and would have consciousness of his own which would be independent of mine, even if it has the same history of development up to that point.

I don't think it's fair to call him a replica - he's far closer to being the original than you are. you say he would have consciousness of his own, and that's my point - he isn't you, but he is the person that you wrongly believe you once were.

Is it the atoms, the geometric arrangement or the moving electrons in a computer which are aware of what a window containing a program is, or the significance of a mouse click?

When you say "aware", do you mean consciously aware?

If you take a dead body, that was alive a minute ago, what is different? The geometric arrangements in the brain are the same, and yet it is not thinking, or experiencing anything.

It's broken. Whatever it might be inside it that was conscious before may still be conscious, but the machine which loads it with inputs and which records its outputs is no longer functioning and we've lost the ability to communicate with the conscious thing.

Thought is closer to a combination of data and what is being 'run' by the brain, than it is to the physical arrangement. The structure may be required to support consciousness, but the structure is not consciousness itself.

So, you have non-conscious material in a non-conscious structure, and this processes non-conscious data while the supported consciousness which has no form is able to feel such things as pain? Does this not rely on magic?

Solar wrote:SDS told you about rowing, let's stick with sports. I'm a martial artist, Judo and Ju-Jiutsu to be exact. In a kumite, I am aware of an extremely wide range of sensory input at once. Grip and countergrip, own balance and that of my opponent, how strong my opponent is, where he is trying to push me and what kind of options that leaves me.

If I try to think, the amount of input overwhelms me, and I lose because I cannot react fast enough. Most training is about not thinking, just being aware (or "being conscious", if you will.) It's the ability to go beyond focus to actually become more focussed.

What you're trying to do is avoid thinking about anything consciously so that the automatic systems you've programmed into yourself are able to leap into action as soon as the need arises, and your conscious thought process jumps around between the things most likely to be important moment by moment. You become aware of all manner of things in sequence, but not at the same time. To fight best, you want to do it all subconsciously using pre-programmed systems while you keep your conscious mind as uncluttered as possible.

Solar wrote:So you didn't watch any of the episodes or read any of the novels I mentioned, but you jump to a conclusion? Nice.

So, you expect me to watch episodes of this, that and the next thing, and read novels too between posts before I reply to the simple points you appear to be making? Nice.

...and it surprises me more to learn that they don't just create a remote copy of everyone they want to teleport and kill them once they've carried out their task rather than "bringing them back" (which involved killing them and creating yet another copy to replace them).

Whether it's "killing" or not is the point of the discussion, isn't it? Nice twisting you're doing there.

If they're so happy about destroying the original person every time, why would they care about the copy? Yes, if there's new information in the copy which is important, then it would make sense to bring that one back, but in situations where they're just trying to escape and avoid death, they aren't avoiding death at all - my point is that they should always keep the original. If they then bring a copy back which contains vital knowledge, they can then decide whether to kill the original or not (and given that they're all so expendable, they might as well kill one or other of them, or even both). If they're creating shitty dilemmas like the ones you described where it's all based on a teleport that kills the original person almost every time they use it and they don't realise that they're killing them, why do you imagine I'd want to waste time watching them?

And have you thought about the implications of "your way"? Having temporary copies running around, then killing them once you're done as they are "only copies"? (The problem with that is the very subject of "Second Chances" and "Spock must die".) Killing the copies who actually gained experience on an away team, while keeping the "bench-sitting" originals around? Takes a special kind of mind to come up with that one.

It isn't my way - it's a natural progression from their idiotic way. My way is not to use a teleport that kills people in the first place.

Oh, and another thing: If you turn matter into energy, that energy has no "memory" of what it once was. Whether you use that energy or a different energy to re-built the matter doesn't matter! (No pun intended.)

You'll have heard of e=mc^2, but there's a conversion factor in that, so the better version of it if we change the units on one side is e=m. Matter is energy tied up in knots in some way. You turn the stuff from matter into energy, then send it at the speed of light, then turn it back into matter. If consciousness in in matter, it will still be the same matter that is conscious after going through a non-matter energy state.

But if there is genuinely something conscious in you, and if that thing remains there and conscious for long lengths of time rather than being replaced moment by moment, that thing will continue to exist in only one of the two people that think they're you. The other one will contain a different thing that is conscious. If you object to that on the basis that there isn't a "thing" in there that's conscious, then you have to explain what you imagine it is that does such things as experience pain. Can you hurt a pattern?

Yes. Plain and simple. I can hurt a couple of neurons in a petri dish and measure the response. I can hurt a brain-dead creature on life support and measure the reactions of the organism.

You interpret too much into that "conscience" of yours.

Are you writing in your sleep? Torturing dead people now! Conscience is a different thing entirely and is not under discussion here, but I assume you mean consciousness when looked on as a noun, similar to the concept of the soul, but without magical attachment of memories and other external functionalities.

As SDS pointed out, from the moment of the copy, the two "me"'s would diverge, becoming two different (if very much similar) personalities.

Are you saying you then become two radically different people at the same time, or are you going to change your mind and just be one of them?

What?

At the moment of the copy, the persons are identical. But from that moment onward, their lives will be different. They will see things from different angles, eat different food - slightly different or very different doesn't matter - have different conversations, etc. etc. - and their personalities will take a different development from there on. Perhaps slightly different, perhaps dramatically so. Perhaps one returns home to wife and kids, while the other is hit by a bus and ends up as a quadriplegic.

Absolutely, but you can't be both of them at the same time without opening up all sorts of other possibilities which would ultimately allow you to be everyone in the universe at the same time.

Code: Select all

If someone sticks a pin in him, do you feel it too?

Nope, won't happen. No neural connection between his pain receptors and my nervous system.

Yes - one feels it and the other doesn't because they are not the same person.

Gosh, you're really trying to screw this up, are you? Of course there are two seperate bodies stepping out of the machine. But as I said, having the same "starting point", they will be very similar. More so than two identical twins at the same age - since twins seperate during gestation, while the two "me"'s stepping out of the machine have been identical for over 38 years of life (in my case). So, when they come out of that machine, you are facing two seperate "me"'s that seperated only seconds ago, and thus will be very, very similar personalities, to the point that no-one would be able to tell the difference. Not even the two "me"'s themselves, unless the machine itself gives a hint (for example by one stepping out of the chamber labelled "original", hence my remark about both copies coming out of the other side). Neither of them is more "me" than the other (provided the copy was perfect).

So, you step into the machine and a friend on the outside presses the copy button, then you step out again and look round to the other door to see the copy emerge. The copy is very surprised at first to have stepped out through the other door, but then he realises he's the copy. No, that's wrong - you introduce a spin to things so that both come out not knowing which is the original and which is the copy. Then you stick a pin in one of them and it hurts, but the other one doesn't feel it precisely because he is someone else. There are two people now who look the same, but they're different people. One of them is the original and the other is not, and it doesn't matter which is which.

Here's a question to help you focus your mind. I'm going to put you into one of these machines, then you'll come out of it not knowing whether you're the original or the copy, though I will know. I will then kill one of you, and you can choose which one I will kill in advance of the copy being made. Would you prefer me to kill the original or the copy?

Code: Select all

(2): Imagine that all the atoms that were in your head many years ago have been collected and built back together into the same arrangement as they were once in when you were a child.

He is me, as a child, with the same set of experiences, memories, character traits etc. etc. that I had, back then. (And a pretty confused child, too, with all those years "suddenly" gone by from his POV.)

I'd say that he is the child that you wrongly believe you once were.

Does it matter what I believe? That child will be certain it is "me", and rightfully so. Not the 38-year-old me, but the child-me. Only environmental evidence will prove the poor child wrong.

No, it's the child that's got it right (though you did get it right in the first sentence).

Let's say I time-tunneled into the 1980'ies and faced that very same configuration of the very same atoms, just in a different timeline. I would still be "me", that child would still be "child-me", and neither of us would be any less "me" than in the original example.

That's a different thing altogether because the same conscious thing could in this faulty scenario be in both of them at the same time, but in practice it would be impossible to do because of the circular causality inherent in backwards time travel.

Again, you're trying to construct something into this "consciousness" of yours, but there's nothing to be found there. There's nothing "conscious" in us that wouldn't show up in a sufficiently precise microscope. (Again, ignoring Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which puts a physical limit to these what-if games.)

You seem to be describing a machine with no room for consciousness in it.

I don't think I invented either concept. If you have a machine that genuinely feels pain, it has something conscious in it - we are then required to discuss consciousness. If you don't believe in consciousness, you shouldn't believe in pain - you should regard us as machines.

You don't feel "pain". You feel heat, cold, pressure, the piercing of your skin. The rest of it is the reaction of a massively parallel, highly complex neural network that had millions of years to evolve into the "ouch, bad, avoid, fear" cycle. Which is physics and chemistry. Yes, in that regard, we are as much machines as a sufficiently sophisticated (and evolved!) machine would be "conscious".

If you don't feel pain (or any other kind of quale), there can be no such thing as pain - just inputs which signal potential damage. If a damage detector of some kind is wired into a computer, the computer can process the input and report damage by sending messages to the screen, but it feels no pain. We feel (or imagine that we do) pain, and that is fundamentally different.

I haven't used any gods here and don't intend to bring any into the discussion either.

Yet still you're trying to point out consciousness as something beyond physics and (bio-) chemistry, aren't you?

Beyond known physics, certainly - if we're limited to known science, there is no such thing as consciousness and no possibility of people feeling real pain, and that means there is no need for any kind of morality as it doesn't matter how much you abuse other people - they cannot be hurt by anything in any real way, but merely generate data which wrongly reports pain that isn't actually real.

SDS wrote:You appear to have a notion that consciousness is something external which is somehow in you. This is most similar to some interpretations of the religious notion of a soul - i.e. that you as a person are somehow 'inhabiting' your body.

Indeed, but something minimal which has no memory or calculation capability of its own - it could for example be that feeling is something that matter/energy simply does, meaning that it feels different qualia depending on the state it's in at the time. This doesn't get round the communication of the knowledge of qualia problem which should prevent us from expressing our knowledge of consciousness.

Understanding consciousness as an emergent phenomenon removes this problem.

It doesn't: it just hides it in magic, a bit like bringing God into it. Something that doesn't exist suddenly emerges out of complexity by magic to feel pain, and then when we try to find the thing that got hurt, we find nothing.

If you somehow made a perfect copy of a person - including all of the momentary fluctuations (including electrical ones) within the brain which make up the 'thoughts' which are in your head, then that copy will be able to function independently of the original.

Correct.

The physical structure/geometry of the brain is something which changes slowly. At maximum, it is limited by chemical transportation processes within cells, and even then most of the structure in the brain is stable for the long term - and yet thoughts occur rapidly. The physical structure is not the same as the thoughts.

Indeed - the thoughts are like the data going through a CPU, but with a CPU which claims it feels qualia triggered by the data being processed.

[Edit: thread splitting instructions for mod relocated]

I don't have time to reply to everything I want to in this, but I just want to pick up on two bits that leap out:

DavidCooper wrote:Beyond known physics, certainly - if we're limited to known science, there is no such thing as consciousness and no possibility of people feeling real pain, and that means there is no need for any kind of morality as it doesn't matter how much you abuse other people - they cannot be hurt by anything in any real way, but merely generate data which wrongly reports pain that isn't actually real.

This is a truly absurd statement, and a very poor representation of both the scientific process and the state of scientific knowledge. A great deal is known about the manner in which the brain supports thinking (I can dig out specific review papers if you are interested, although it isn't my field...), but our understanding of how you get from there to the larger remit of consciousness is more incomplete.

Even without that, the lack of a complete explanation built from the lowest levels of physics does not imply that science would indicate that 'there is no such thing as...', and it certainly would never support statements which draw a moral position in that way.

DavidCooper wrote:Indeed - the thoughts are like the data going through a CPU, but with a CPU which claims it feels qualia triggered by the data being processed.

The thoughts could be thought of as being linked to data. Consciousness would be closest to the evolving state of a self-aware program being run by the CPU. Although not a perfect analogy, the whole point is to say that the atoms or geometry of the brain is not what feels pain or other sensations, in the same way that a CPU doesn't claim to feel any sensations.

DavidCooper wrote:If they're creating shitty dilemmas like the ones you described where it's all based on a teleport that kills the original person almost every time they use it and they don't realise that they're killing them, why do you imagine I'd want to waste time watching them?

Because they go into detail of the process involved, and the decisions that have been made by the designers of the transporter, which I am unwilling to look up and translate for you. Also, because you should get away from your keyboard sometimes and might be looking for thought-inducing entertainment.

It isn't my way - it's a natural progression from their idiotic way.

Again, you judge something you only know from hearsay.

Oh, and another thing: If you turn matter into energy, that energy has no "memory" of what it once was. Whether you use that energy or a different energy to re-built the matter doesn't matter! (No pun intended.)

You'll have heard of e=mc^2, but there's a conversion factor in that, so the better version of it if we change the units on one side is e=m. Matter is energy tied up in knots in some way. You turn the stuff from matter into energy, then send it at the speed of light, then turn it back into matter. If consciousness in in matter, it will still be the same matter that is conscious after going through a non-matter energy state.

Consciousness is a result of a certain neuro-chemical setup. You create the same setup, you have the same consciousness. It doesn't matter if you create that setup from matter directly, this energy, or that energy. That's the point.

I can hurt a couple of neurons in a petri dish and measure the response. I can hurt a brain-dead creature on life support and measure the reactions of the organism.

You interpret too much into that "conscience" of yours.

Are you writing in your sleep? Torturing dead people now!

Merely hinting at standard issue biology studies. Not "dead people", but dead frogs, for example. How can you argue the finer points of a field in which you are unaware of basic research?

Conscience is a different thing entirely and is not under discussion here, but I assume you mean consciousness when looked on as a noun, similar to the concept of the soul, but without magical attachment of memories and other external functionalities.

No, not similar to the concept of the soul, that's the very point of my argument: That, from a scientific standpoint, there is no such thing as a "soul" or other "magic thing that is 'me'", beyond what persons perceive as such.

Here's a question to help you focus your mind. I'm going to put you into one of these machines, then you'll come out of it not knowing whether you're the original or the copy, though I will know. I will then kill one of you, and you can choose which one I will kill in advance of the copy being made. Would you prefer me to kill the original or the copy?

It doesn't matter. One "me" will die, one "me" will live, either way.

Edit: Actually, there is already an error in the way the question is asked: "I" can chose? Which of the two identical "I" you are facing is getting asked the question?

The beginning of this thought experiment was that the copy would be perfect. If it's perfect, both the original and the copy are a perfect "me". If the copy process is a loud flash and a bang, both "me's" will remember stepping inside the machine, experiencing the flash-and-bang, and stepping out of the other side.

Edit: Both would be certain they were the one "me" who entered the machine. Neither would "feel" a copy, and as the experiment is about a perfect copy, there would be no justification to call one "original" and the other "copy", because both are (up until very recently identical) humans.

The fact that you don't seem to have any objections killing the copy simply "because it's a copy" raises some not so nice questions about your morality. What makes the copy any less human than the original, the killing any less murder? The fact that you "made" it? That implies you would also feel justified to kill your own child if the mother agrees, because the two of you "made it". Would you?

Again, you're trying to construct something into this "consciousness" of yours, but there's nothing to be found there. There's nothing "conscious" in us that wouldn't show up in a sufficiently precise microscope. (Again, ignoring Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which puts a physical limit to these what-if games.)

You seem to be describing a machine with no room for consciousness in it.

Right, and wrong. When you are talking about "consciousness", you seem to have some "magical spark" in mind that is non-copyable by a mere physical copy. When I am talking about "consciousness", I understand it to be a result of neuro-chemical complexities, nothing more - but that makes "you" and "me" no less valuable (though, for the sake of our thought experiment, copyable).

Yet still you're trying to point out consciousness as something beyond physics and (bio-) chemistry, aren't you?

Beyond known physics, certainly.

Known physics is completely sufficient to explain consciousness, with just a touch of imagination applied where we lack the detail in observing and the complexity of understanding, and thusly I refuse to accept anything "metaphysical" in the equation. Occams razor.

That "pain" is a neuro-chemical reaction to stimulus, in a very deterministic way (which is merely a bit too complex for us to understand fully at this point), does not make it less "painful" or less real, and the application of pain to a being no less amoral, even if there is no "magical spark" in there.