[FRIAM] Is consciousness a mystery? (used to be "mystery...deeper".T
steve smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Thu Jul 11 16:04:52 EDT 2024
Nick -
I'm glad you acknowledged (in another branch of this thread?) the
"grumpiness" aspect of your initiation/participation in this thread.
Your analogy around thought/feeling "expression" and that of pimple
popping is in fact very apt if a bit graphic. I do think many of us
want this apparently deeply thorny/paradoxical problem to be easier than
it is? And the plethora of complexly subtle dis/mis-agreements on
language around consciousness, intelligence, cognition, (self)
awareness, qualia complicates that yet more.
I don't know if my own baby-steps are helpful, given that my
background/perspective might align more with DaveW than most others here
(I'm very sympathetic with a pan-consciousness perspective)? maybe it
parses as baby-babble more than baby-steps...
> I missed most of this (and related) threads but am surprised at where
> this seems to be going. I always associated consciousness with
> subjective experience and not necessarily with self awareness. The
> "hard problem of consciousness" is qualia, not self-awareness. No? An
> AI agent cannot understand language on anything other than a
> superficial basis because it has no idea what, for example "wet,"
> means. Nevertheless, it will be quite good at stringing words together
> that say coherent things about wetness. An AI agent has no /idea
> /about anything. At the same time, an AI agent will be quite good at
> creating coherent statements about very many things. Just because an
> AI agent is able to create coherent statements does not mean that
> those statements reflect the agent's ideas--since it has no ideas.
> _
> _
Russ's point here is a good pivot point for me in this conversation if
it is possible to make the pivot. It may not be.
Knowing and Knowing-About:
I use the former to be the quality of qualia... not easily
formalizeable nor quantifiable nor with obvious models which are not
intrinsically subjective. "Knowing-About" is for me reserved for
the formalized models of "facts about the world and relations
between ideas" and when I say "formalized" I don't preclude
storytelling or the highly vilified "just so stories".
Formalized mathematical, statistical, logical models with digital
computer simulations (or analog electronic, mechanical, hydraulic,
pneumatic "circuits" or "systems") are "knowing about"... a steam
train for example embodies "knowing about" converting carbon-fuel
into linear motion across long distances, carrying heavy loads by
way of many repeatable mechanisms... the implementation and
operation of such a device/system is a "proof" in some sense of the
design.
On top of that design/system are other design/systems (say the
logic of Railroad Robber Baronages) upon which yet other systems
(say Industrial-revolution era proto-hyper-capitalism) on top of
which rides trans-global corporatism and nationalism in their own
"gyre and gimbal" with a in intra-stellar and eventually
inter-stellar variation in the sense of Asimov's Foundation and
Empire or perhaps for the youth culture here (under 60?) George
Lucas' Star Wars Empire or Roddenberry's Star Trek Federation vs ???
Consciousness:
A the lowest level consciousness or perhaps proto-consciousness
registers for me as "having a model of the world useful for guiding
behaviour toward surviving/thriving/reproducing/collectivizing".
This permeates all of life from somewhere down at the single-celled
bacteria/archaea/fungi/phyto-thingies/ up to and through
vertebrates/mammals/hominids/sapiens
On the reflection of whether my cat or dog, or the hummingbirds
outside my window or the mice trying to sneak back into my house
have "consciousness", or even more pointedly the mosquito I slapped
into a blood (my blood by the way) spot on my forearm last night,
have "consciousness"... while each of these appear to have a
"consciousness" I know it to be variously more or less familiar to
my own. My elaborate (unfettered?) imagination allows me to make
up (just so?) stories about how cetaceans, cephalapods, jellyfish
all variously have aspects of their "consciousness' that I could
(do?) recognize (empathize with?). So I would want a multivalued
function with at least two simple scalars:
Familiarity-to-Me(Conscioiusness) and Potency-of(Consciousness),
pick your scale... my identical twin or maybe conjoined twin might
max out on the first scale while a nematode or a bacterium might
trail off toward nil on the first AND second scale. And beyond the
scale of organic life into artificial life and beyond, the
"familiarity" of a glider or oscillator in the GameO'Life or the
braided rings of Saturn, even less significant but not zero? The
Potency-scale seems to be something like *agency* which feels
absolute for most of us except Robert Sapolsky while the *agency* of
an electron or neutrino seems registered at *absolute zero*, though
the Quantum Consciousness folks maybe put it at max and our own more
an illusive projection of that?
The idea of "collective individuation" (e.g. mashup of Eleanor
Ostrom's collectives and Jung's individuation) suggests that
perception, cognition, intelligence, even consciousness may well be
a collective phenomena. Our organs, tissues, cells, organelles,
macromolecules, CHON++ molecules, atoms, baryons/fermions, quarks,
strings, branes are on a loose hierarchy of diminishing
Familiarity-Consciousness and Potency-Consciousness. I'm more
interested (these days) in the emergent collective consciousness of
the noosphere and perhaps the symbiotic culture of humanity and
life-at-all-scales (SCHLAAS?) it feels wild and science-fictiony
to assert that earth's biosphere has already (in the last 150 years)
conjured a nervous system, a global-brain (ala Francis Heylighen:
Global Brain Institute)
https://globalbraininstitute.org/ with "our own" Bollen, Joslyn,
Rodriguez still on the Board of Technical Advisors. I scoffed at
this somewhat 25 years ago (mostly because of the hubris of "Global"
and "Brain").
OK Nick, so not "baby steps" more like a hyper-baby's mad dash through
an obstacle course or maybe a pentathalon? I tried shunting all this
to George Tremblay IVo but he referred me to Gussie Tumbleroot who
cheered me on on my careening ideational orbits.
Gurgle,
- Steve
_
_
_
_
> __-- Russ Abbott
> Professor Emeritus, Computer Science
> California State University, Los Angeles
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 11, 2024 at 9:30 AM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Glen,
>
> This is a test to illustrate somethiing about Gmail to Nick.
>
> On Tue, Jul 9, 2024 at 4:37 PM glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347215003085
>
>
>
> On July 9, 2024 2:04:29 PM PDT, Prof David West
> <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>
> Maybe I should not be replying, as I do believe my dogs
> (and your cat if you have one) are conscious.
>
> I have not experienced a Vulcan Mind-Meld with either of
> my dogs, so I cannot say with certainty they are
> conscious—I must infer it from observations:
> 1- interactions with other dogs would seem to indicate
> they "remember" past interactions and do not require the
> same butt-sniffing protocol with dogs they have met at the
> park frequently. Also they seem to remember who plays with
> who and who doesn't. "That ball is not mine, this one is."
> 2-they modify their behavior depending on the tenor,
> sharpness, and volume of barks, ear positions, tail
> wagging differences, by the other dogs; e.g., "that's enough."
> 3-They do not communicate to me in English, but seem to
> accept communication from me in that language—not trained
> responses to commands, but "listening to conversations"
> between myself and Mary and reacting to words (e.g., dog
> park) that are exchanged in those conversations. Mary and
> I are totally sedentary and speaking in conversational
> tone, so pretty sure there we are not sending 'signals'
> akin to training words, training tone of voice.
> 4-they seem to remember trauma, (one of our dogs spent
> three days with dead owner before anyone knew the owner
> was deceased and will bite if anyone tries to forcefully
> remove him from my (current bonded owner) presence.
> 5-seek "psychological comfort" by crawling into my bed and
> sleeping on my shoulder when the thunderstorm comes.
>
> */_All of these are grounded in anthropomorphism—long
> considered a deadly error by ethologists._/* (Some
> contemporary ethologists are exploring accepting and
> leveraging this "error" to extend our understanding of
> animal behavior.)
>
> davew
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 9, 2024, at 2:54 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
>> While I find all the ancillary considerations raised on
>> the original thread extremely interesting, I would like
>> to reopen the discussion of Conscious as a Mystery and
>> ask that those that join it stay close to the question of
>> what consciousness is and how we know it when we see it.
>> Baby Steps.
>>
>> Where were we? I think I was asking Jochen, and perhaps
>> Peitr and anybody else who thought that animals were not
>> conscious (i.e., not aware of their own awareness) what
>> basis they had in experience for thinking that.. One
>> offering for such an experience is the absence of
>> language in animals. Because my cat cannot describe his
>> experience in words, he cannot be conscious. This
>> requires the following syllogism:
>>
>> Nothing that does not employ a language (or two?) is
>> conscious.
>> Animals (with ;the possible exception of signing apes) do
>> not employ languages.
>> Ergo, Animals are not conscious.
>>
>> But I was trying to find out the basis for the first
>> premise. How do we know that there are no non-linguistic
>> beings that are not conscious. I hope we could rule out
>> the answer,"because they are non-linguistic", both in its
>> strictly tautological or merely circular form.
>>
>> There is a closely related syllogism which we also need
>> to explore:
>>
>> All language using beings are conscious.
>> George Peter Tremblay IV is a language-using being.
>> George Peter Tremblay IV is conscious.
>>
>> Both are valid syllogisms. But where do the premises
>> come from.
>>
>> Nick
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> --
> Frank Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> 505 670-9918
>
> Research: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2
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