[FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought

Jochen Fromm jofr at cas-group.net
Mon Jul 8 16:48:43 EDT 2024 

IMHO it is not one language which is necessary, but more than one. Languages can be used to create worlds, to move around it them, and to share these wolds with others. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling have created whole universes. The interesting things happen if worlds collide, if they merge and melt, or if they drift apart.Cervantes in Spain, Goethe in Germany and Dante in Italy helped to create new languages - Spanish, German and Italian, respectively. They also examined in their most famous books what happens if worlds collide. Cervantes describes in "Don Quixote" what happens when imaginary and real worlds collide and are so out of sync that the actors are getting lost.Goethe decribes in his "Faust" what happens when collective and individual worlds collide, i.e. when egoistic individuals exploit the world selfishly for their own benefit (in his first book "The sorrows of young Werther" Goethe focused like Fontane and Freud on the opposite).Dante describes in his "Divine Comedy"what happens when worlds diverge and people are excluded and expelled from the world.Language is necessary for self awareness because it provides the building blocks for a new world which is connected but also independent from the old one. This allows new dimensions of interactions. The connections between worlds matter. A label is a simple connection between a word in one world and an class of objects in another. A metaphor is a more complex connection between an abstract idea and a composition of objects, etc.-J.
-------- Original message --------From: Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> Date: 7/7/24  5:13 PM  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought I think of large language models as the most embodied things on the planet, but let that go for a moment.  Back to baby steps. Can you lay out for me why you believe that language is essential to self-awareness.  Does that believe arise from ideology, authority, or some set of facts I need to take account of.  To be honest here, I should say where I am coming from.  A lot of my so-called career was spent  railing against circular reasoning in evolutionary theory and psychology.  So, if language is essential to self-awareness, and animals do not have language, then it indeed follows that animals do not have self-awareness.  But what if our method for detecting self awareness requires language? Now we are in a loop.  Are we in such a loop, or are there facts of some matter, independent of language, convince you that animals are not self-aware.  Is self awareness extricable from language?It is an old old trope that animals are automata but that humans have soul.  Descartes swore by it.  Is "language" the new soul?Nick On Sun, Jul 7, 2024 at 7:29 AM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:I would say cats, dogs and horses don't have meta-awareness because they lack language. They live in the present moment, in the here and now. Without language they do not have the capability to reflect on their past or to think about their future. They can not formulate stories of themselves which could help to form a sense of identity. Language is the mirror in which we perceive ourselves during "this is me" moments. Animals lack this mirror completely. One dimensional scents trails do not count as language.Large languages models lack consciousness because they do not have a body which is embedded as a actor in an environment. These two things are necessary: the physical world of bodies, and the mental world of language. When both collide in the same spot we can get consciousness.-J.-------- Original message --------From: Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> Date: 7/6/24  5:05 AM  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought Well, that's because Socrates claimed not to know what he thought, and since I genuinely don[t know what I think until I work it out, the conversation has the same quality.  I apologize for that.  my students found it truly distressing. So, if you will indulge me, why don't  you think your cat has meta=awareness?   Authority, ideology, or is there some experience you have had that leads you to think that.   It would be kind of odd if it she didn't because animals have all sorts of ways of distinguishing self from other. They have ways of knowinng that "I did that".  (e.g., scent marking?) On Fri, Jul 5, 2024 at 3:19 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:Well yes, if meta-awareness is defined as acting in response to one's own awareness then I would say animals like a cat don't have it but humans have. As an example I could say this almost feels like I am a participant in a dialogue from Plato...I would be surprised if it can be described in simple terms. If the essence of consciousness is subjective experience then it is indeed hard to describe by a theory although there are many attempts. Persons who perceive things differently are wired differently. And what is more subjective than the perception of oneself? https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/what-is-consciousness/If we can describe it mathematically then probably as a way an information feels if it is processed in complex ways, ad infinitum like the orbits of a strange attractor.https://chaoticatmospheres.com/mathrules-strange-attractors-J.-------- Original message --------From: Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> Date: 7/5/24  6:56 PM  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought ,Great!  Baby steps. "If we aren't moving slowly, we aren't moving."   So, can I define some new terms, tentatively, per explorandum ? Let's call acting-in-respect-to-the-world, "awareness".   Allowing this definition, we certainly seem to agree that the cat is aware.  Lets define meta-awareness as acting i respect to one's own awareness.  Now, am I correct in assuming that you identify meta-awareness with consciousness and that you think that the cat is not meta-aware and that I probably am?  And further that you think that meta-awareness requires consciousness?Nick On Fri, Jul 5, 2024 at 12:17 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:I would say a cat is conscious in the sense that it is aware of its immediate environment. Cats are nocturnal animals who hunt at night and mostly sleep during the day. Consciousness in the sense of being aware of oneself as an actor in an environment requires understanding of language which only humans have ( and LLMs now )https://www.quantamagazine.org/insects-and-other-animals-have-consciousness-experts-declare-20240419/-J.-------- Original message --------From: Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> Date: 7/5/24  5:02 AM  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought Jochen, I think the first step in any conversation is to decide whether your cat is conscious.  If so, why do you think so; if not, likewise.  I had a facinnationg conversation with  GBT about  whether he was conscious and he denied it "hotly", which, of course, met one of his criteria for consciousness.  So.  Is your cat  connscious?Nick On Thu, Jul 4, 2024 at 7:26 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:I don't get Philip Goff: first we send our children 20 years to school, from Kindergarten to college and university, to teach them all kinds of languages, and then we wonder how they can be conscious. It will be the same for AI: first we spend millions and millions to train them all available knowledge, and then we wonder how they can develop understanding of language and consciousness...https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mystery-of-consciousness-is-deeper-than-we-thought/-J.-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
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