[FRIAM] Is consciousness a mystery? (used to be "mystery...deeper".T

Thu Jul 11 20:01:21 EDT 2024

Lol.  That’s fine, except for the suspicious promotion Ecological Dual Fields!

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2024 4:36 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Is consciousness a mystery? (used to be "mystery...deeper".T

Nick 

you wrote:
>  In reply, I only would say that if somebody were willing to ask me short, to-the-point questions about my thinking on any matter and explore carefully my answers, I would eternally grateful.   I might even cuddle with them in a thunderstorm.

Based on your request above, Dan created 5 questions for you. Please answer by moving the sliders and hit the button to copy the results and email it to the list. I promise to carefully consider your answers. I asked Dan to do his best to partition the consciousness space to understand where you are coming from and give the closest philosophers to your thinking. Any issue with the questions, partitioning or philosopher vectors we can follow up with Dan.

Consciousness Questions: https://guerin.acequia.io/consciousnessTensor.html <https://guerin.acequia.io/consciousnessTensor.html>  
(from the AI maker that brought you Elf Selector)

others are welcome to post their results. Dan may create a group report with enough samples...

https://guerin.acequia.io/consciousnessTensor.html

_________________________________________________________________
Stephen Guerin
CEO, Founder 
https://simtable.com
stephen.guerin at simtable.com <mailto:stephen.guerin at simtable.com>  

stephenguerin at fas.harvard.edu <mailto:stephenguerin at fas.harvard.edu> 
Harvard Visualization Research and Teaching Lab <https://hwpi.harvard.edu/eps-visualization-research-laboratory/home> 

mobile: (505)577-5828

On Thu, Jul 11, 2024 at 2:55 PM Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > wrote:

Steve, 

The scale of your response alone suggests that it cannot be baby steps.   

I guess I am proposing a method here, one inn we work outward from an evocative experience to explore our understandings of contraversial concepts, and that we do it in relatively short bursts.  

Dusty comes to cuddle with David when she hears thunder.

Does Dusty love David?

If yes, what else would you expect Dusty to do with  respect to David. given you have made that attribution.

If no, what more would have Dusty have to do, before you would make such an attribution.

I would like to respond to an inference that there is something patronizing about my insisting on a method, as if  I think you need thought-therapy and I am the guy to give it.  In reply, I only would say that if somebody were willing to ask me short, to-the-point questions about my thinking on any matter and explore carefully my answers, I would eternally grateful.   I might even cuddle with them in a thunderstorm.

NIck 

Nick 

On Thu, Jul 11, 2024 at 4:05 PM steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com <mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com> > wrote:

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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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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-- 

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140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918 

Research:  https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

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