Why Are We Conscious?

[Unseen]

Simon Paynton wrote:

What makes you think it’s like a passive TV set? Don’t you think it does anything in and of itself? If you experience an emotion, you can name the emotion, and doing so passes experience of it into conscious thought. Then you can reappraise the emotion and maybe change your behaviour from a quick knee-jerk reaction into more considered slow-cognition activity.

No, the consciousness doesn’t seem to DO anything. YOU are doing stuff, but those decisions seem to happen in the sub- or pre-conscious mind before your consciousness becomes aware of them. You have an active nonconscious mind operating at all times below your level of experience. And temporally before.

• This reply was modified 7 years ago by Unseen.

[Unseen]

jakelafort wrote:

No, i don’t know or can’t be certain of the rich internal subjective world of others. But it is a safer wager than the wager you are making about consciousness being an unnecessary add-on.

Safer wager based on what facts or evidence?

You on the other hand are turning a scientific question into a philosophical question. And you are doing it prematurely. The evidence is missing that explains consciousness. If one is to speculate in an intelligent way about consciousness one needs to understand how it arose and how it operates.

Understanding that would still not answer why. Was it the result of a mutation that natural selection never eliminated. We understand why we have eyes, because we need them in order to survive. By contrast, we could survive as automata.

We have examples of organs that were once thought vestigial but in fact have functions and we have examples of genes that were considered throwaway and yet are vital. So just wait before you shoot sparks. You have no way to judge of whether consciousness is a gratuitous phenomenon or whether it is a necessary phenomenon.

That’s why I use terminology like “seems to be unnecessary.” Name one thing you can do that a sufficiently-sophisticated high-functioning Turing-like meat automaton couldn’t do.

As to the quote from Reg’s link relating to AI indicating that a conversation with such might be more enriching and yet there is literally nobody there, i take exception. If and when AI sprouts consciousness it may be qualitatively better than what we have. PURE, It will not undergo the evolution that our forbears underwent and therefore it may not have to function through systems that have served species that came tens of millions of years ago. It may not be functioning on a primarily unconscious level as we are. Furthermore it is more of the bullshit special creation thinking. If it is not organic and it is not human nothing or nobody is there! That is so presumptuous. AI may with greater justification reply that it is you, miss and mister human who is not really there!

Oh, the irony. A machine with no internal experiences accusing humans of being just like them. There’s nothing inconceivable about it!

[PopeBeanie]

(I wrote a long post here on one of my favorite topics but decided it should not be a distraction from Unseen’s great topic here. I moved it to my Development of Consciousness topic in my Consciousness group. I’ve also linked from there to here.)

And yet I thought of something new to write/ask about here:

Is it also germane to ask about how we feel about the personal significance of our own consciousness, or any innate rights we have to survive and flourish? E.g., might we prefer to design AI such that it cannot feel protective of it’s own consciousness, and would never eliminate us in order to prevail over us? At some point, humanity and its philosophy could become extinct and their entire history moot, if some people endow AI with a consciousness that needs to prevail, or simulates the need.

Imagine someone like the current dictator of North Korea defining a consciousness and secretly designing it into AI agents that secretly need to answer only to him. Or maybe a Mullah promoting his personal version of Sharia Law.

[Simon Paynton]

Unseen wrote:

the consciousness doesn’t seem to DO anything

It has thoughts, using language, for one thing.  It reasons using logic, for another.

[PopeBeanie]

Unseen wrote:

A machine can’t have a need, but could certainly simulate a being with a need, given a sufficiently sophisticated program. Anyway, like I said, “experience” is a primitive term, much like “self.” These words will remain primitive because I can’t show you my self of my experiences. You simply analogize to your own.

Consciousness itself analyzes and analogizes, constantly. We even analogize consciousness or at least specific components of it when inventing what we call AI.

There’s that word “need” with various possible meanings. A machine needs energy to operate, which is a “need” that’s different in kind from a humanly-felt emotional need. Now, do we need consciousness? I think the question is nonsensical.

Erm, maybe I’m just playing word games up there. You can ignore it.

But listen, I like your word gratuitous, because I think it’s meaningful in the context of modern human culture, and less meaningful in the context of early human consciousness and other animals, and our basic genetic evolution. Our preternaturally high level of consciousness these days IS gratuitous now even if only because we enjoy it immensely and we keep inventing new ways to expand it in: philosophy, mythology, religion, music, art… cooking, making the most delicious wine… tribalism, politics, drama, comedy acts… competitive sports, nation-state wars… these are all relatively NEW, invented conscious experiences for our species, that exist mostly because we love them or can (however only recently) limitlessly obsess over them and behave radically.

The question isn’t about how deep consciousness is but is about how necessary it is.

But as I’m trying to point out, its cultural depth, is an unquestionable variable, at least in modern consciousness. If you say that’s not important or pertinent, I would suggest narrowing the scope of your question down to, say, lower primates, or even dogs. Dogs in fact might be a useful topic, because they clearly evolved and benefit from being able to consciously connect with us.

Btw, I don’t know if any such AI and other human-invented imaginary agents (e.g. zombies) can actually help us formulate any answers to your question on any rational or reasonably scientific level. Perhaps another oddly related question might be “could we ever invent a version of AI in which consciousness is necessary“?

[PopeBeanie]

Asianne wrote:

I think the development of our pre-frontal cortex has a lot to do with it

Absolutely!

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

I’m experiencing all sorts of things, but consciousness seems to be entirely composed of passively-received experiences. Anything I consciously do, was decided would be done shortly before I became aware.

I agree. I experience the world through my senses. My brain processes these inputs without my direction and “I” view with them in my mind, fitting them into my interpretation of reality. All I am doing is reacting to stimuli and most of what I perceive enters my mind without any effort required on my behalf. Most decisions that I make (if not all of them) are made without me actually deciding anything. Everything is pre-determined.

The only control (if that is the word I mean) I have is when I actively use my senses to discover something, like read a book, watch a movie or listen to music. Even in the middle of a paragraph I can notice that I have read the last few pages with no immediate recollection of what I read or find that I am thinking about tonight’s meal or some mundane chore I need to do (Sam Harris explores this concept in the End of Faith). Walking in a forest or on a beach is “peaceful” because there are few stimuli entering my mind and the ones that are, are passive like the waves in that they don’t require much processing. Time seems to slow down because we are not focused on any one particular thing. When we are, tempus fugit.

I have little or any time for engaging in any intellectual debate with theists. They just cannot think freely and cannot grasp that they cannot. I mean these people think they are in communication with their version of a god that created the Universe and that they are to become immortal, like their god. Almost like the Dunning Kruger effect. I have been accused of intellectual snobbery, but only ever by theists. It is just that I end up frustrated listening to them always arriving at “god-did-it” whatever the argument happens to be. Well, I stand accused because I do hear the words “Oh not another one of them” in my head when they introduce their god as the answer with the naive excitement of a confused child.  God does not have his arms open to welcome me at the limits of my knowledge. I just don’t the answer yet. I want to know more. I make the effort to learn more and to think. All reasonable people do (people who are able to reason). That is what makes us human, especially if like Socrates we can admit that we know so little and don’t have the all the answers.

When we saw enough of our kin dying by predator attacks or burning their fingers in the camp fire we stopped doing these things. Our consciousness had imprinted the “flight” instinct into us and we still “know” this survival information. When we had the long term safety and security of group membership we began to consider what other things meant, like the sun or the stars, thunder, rain, volcanoes and so forth and to view all of these phenomena in terms of our personal and group survival. We began to search for meanings in what our brains perceived and for several millennia we were incorrect in what we deduced. Thus were the early gods born because we were an ignorant and bewildered species with no alternative answers to any of the “big questions”.

But we kept wanting to know what was over the next hill. We developed our mental maps of hunting grounds and memory banks of faces to trust or be wary of. Doing this expanded our knowledge. We got better at processing it and thus survived longer once we discovered fire and how to cook food. This gave us more protein and over time the size of our brains expanded, with much of it taken up to process the stimuli our senses perceived.

Consciousness evolved. It had to in order for us to survive. It still is because we live in bigger groups and have access to much more information that any previous generation ever did.

I agree with what you say about Descartes. He was the person who separated philosophy from theology. He understood that for Reason to advance it was necessary to remove any ecclesiastical chains from our thinking processes. We must learn how to be skeptics, in the true sense of the word, to challenge our doubts and to reason our way to better answers. At some point and using our conscious thought process we come to understand that we can (and should) doubt everything. We can doubt the construction of the reality we have built up, like prisoners freed from Plato’s Cave. Consciousness is the foundation of certainty. All clear ideas are true if they are evidently true and have no reason to be doubted any longer. The only thing I can be certain of is that “I exist”.

Cogito, ergo sum.

[_Robert_]

You can program a computer with adaptive algorithms so that the very nature of the computer evolves with time and stimulus, just like us. You can program a computer to react with simulated emotions to simulates social events and even have it become self-destructive if you give it physical means. You could program a computer to want to pass on it’s algorithms to the next generation. You can program a computer to NEED simulated love to go on. To pretend that biological machines have anything intrinsic that could not be simulated perfectly (with the proper amount of pseudo-randomness) implies the supernatural or spiritual-ness. So sure you also can give a computer an “inner voice” and have it communicate with itself so that it believes it is special. An experiment like that may teach us something. In fact if such a machine became such a great copy of a human and when subjected to gazillions of lifetimes it may well teach us something about where we are headed.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

I did use the word “process” in my earlier post but it was bugging me. Then my mind brought forward a memory that I became conscious of. An old Sunday School post.

[PopeBeanie]

_Robert_ wrote:

Do you think consciousness might amplify the will to survive?

That’s an awesome possibility. I missed that potential when I first skimmed this. Oh, but I’ll disagree with this:

To pretend that biological machines have anything intrinsic that could not be simulated perfectly (with the proper amount of pseudo-randomness) implies the supernatural or spiritual-ness.

I think the vast majority of people talking about simulating this highly evolved biological process greatly underestimate how analog the processes are. To simulate all of it at the molecular level would very likely require the exact same molecular level chemical gradients for each and every different neurotransmitter, duplicate every synapse’s physical structure, and simulate the connective plasticity that varies over short and long periods of time. You might as well grow little brain parts inside of chips, but the chips would have to be huge and dynamically connected to each other with up to million kilometers of insulated wire. From AI Impacts:

The human brain’s approximately 86 billion neurons are probably connected by something like 850,000 km of axons and dendrites. Of this total, roughly 80% is short-range, local connections (averaging 680 microns in length), and approximately 20% is long-range, global connections in the form of myelinated fibers (likely averaging several centimeters in length).

That doesn’t even consider how many decades it takes for a brain to learn how to make all those pathways, and if you think we’ll just be able to download it all someday, consider how to take an instant snapshot of the whole shebang at once, because a high percentage of those neurons (plus ten times that number of “glial” cells that support every neuron) are changing from one millisecond to the next or one year to the next and all times in between.

I’m not saying it’s impossible in the very long run, but in the meantime who knows what kind of monstrosities will be created in the process of trying to make it all work, and if our creations are considered to be conscious to any extent at all, how ethical will that kind of long range experimentation be?

[_Robert_]

In my field we never tried to duplicate every process, that would be impossible.  Instead we employed model-based simulations with millions of runs with slightly varied conditions and then constantly tweak the models based on comparisons with actuals. When you consider the multitudes of factors involved in hurricane path and intensity prediction…wow…. the models are becoming better and better each year and think of all the lives that have saved, thanks to super computers, these incredibly complex models and data collection systems. That problem is much simpler than the human brain I would guess, but that is the idea.

At some point (way off) people could develop hybrid electrical-optical-chemical-mechanical biological entities (with stem cells maybe?) Or perhaps biological computers that look nothing like a human. We would perhaps use them for space exploration, etc.

This is true..when man-made machines approach humanity and our level of consciousness, we have a whole new branch of ethics to deal with. We only need to look at Star Trek, Star Wars, and Blade Runner for guidance, LOL.

 

 

 

[Unseen]

In the last few posts, I don’t detect much discussion of WHY we are conscious.

Anyway PopeBeanie, since you’ve gone off on a tangent, I’ll just pipe in with this: In the future,
computing may return to analog because digital computers are so hackable as it is, and with quantum computing on the horizon, digital computers may become nearly 100% hackable.

• This reply was modified 7 years ago by Unseen.
• This reply was modified 7 years ago by Rebel.

[jakelafort]

Unseen, your why question is nonsensical. It is premature.  Your intransigence is frustrating.

Consciousness is biological. Its depth and degree are dependent on the architecture of the brain. It is not surprising that the how of consciousness is not understood. The complexity of the brain is mind boggling.

Unless and until the how of consciousness (its function) is known the conclusion that consciousness is unnecessary is without foundation. As surely as the unconscious influences the conscious it may be that the conscious influences the unconscious. We need sleep. You might as well ask why when we as easily could have evolved to be awake 100 percent of the time. But it turns out sleep is imperative.

An even more unfounded belief is that once consciousness is understood some mystical cosmic principle is at work or some other iteration of mysticism is in play.

That kind of thinking is at odds with rationalism, with empiricism and is unbecoming an atheist who prides himself on reasoning well.

 

[Unseen]

jakelafort wrote:

Unseen, your why question is nonsensical. It is premature. Your intransigence is frustrating. Consciousness is biological. Its depth and degree are dependent on the architecture of the brain. It is not surprising that the how of consciousness is not understood. The complexity of the brain is mind boggling. Unless and until the how of consciousness (its function) is known the conclusion that consciousness is unnecessary is without foundation. As surely as the unconscious influences the conscious it may be that the conscious influences the unconscious. We need sleep. You might as well ask why when we as easily could have evolved to be awake 100 percent of the time. But it turns out sleep is imperative. An even more unfounded belief is that once consciousness is understood some mystical cosmic principle is at work or some other iteration of mysticism is in play. That kind of thinking is at odds with rationalism, with empiricism and is unbecoming an atheist who prides himself on reasoning well.

Not nonsensical, since you have made enough sense of it to formulate a reply. There is no way to reply to true nonsense like “A roundsquare  is (fart noise).”

Any discussion of consciousness involves using a definition of the term. Science may explain how consciousness happens (though I can’t imagine how) but that will be in reference to a definition they pull out of their ass and designed to be amenable to analysis, theorizing, and testing. By contrast, my definition (consciousness=having experiences) is probably impervious to science, and yet its power is that if we are conscious, it’s something we have and understand as a primitive concept.

• This reply was modified 7 years ago by Unseen.
• This reply was modified 7 years ago by Unseen.

[PopeBeanie]

Thanks for those videos, Unseen. I learned the most from the TEDx one, which had a higher concentration of “interesting concepts per minute”. 🙂 Imo, most people here could skip the first 9 minutes or so of the second video.

Back on your main topic, I feel it’s important to emphasize again how we should better define type, spectrum, or depth of “consciousness”, because different kinds and degrees of consciousness will have different answers to your question. It’s also important (imo) to differentiate “modern day” consciousness vs “legacy” human consciousness, because modern day consciousness is a very different product from our legacy days of near-post genetic level evolution. Not long ago in evolutionary terms, we couldn’t even speak to each other about the abstract concepts we learn and are now deeply conscious of almost daily.

As you point out (if I might paraphrase with my pov), we need to communicate about the nature of consciousness by assuming its “primitive” nature. This (to me) also means it should be useful to relate our ancient, legacy, primitive consciousness even further back to its more primal primate (and even lower animal) origins, in order to get the most accurate and enduring answer(s) to your “why” question.

ymmv, and it’s *your* topic

[Author]

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