When did “consciousness” enter the Universe?

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

A little (no a lot) too reductionist for my taste.

Yeah, I know. But really, if you study biochemistry and cell biology, you discover that, fundamentally, that's what it is. Of course, that process has generated some wonderful ways to keep going...

 

[Bradskii]

That is where we diverge: "meaningful way". As you said , there is no clear place to draw that line.

So lets not draw it.

Unless we arbitrarily go with:

• responsiveness to the environment;
• growth and change;
• ability to reproduce;
• have a metabolism and breathe;
• maintain homeostasis;
• being made of cells; and.
• passing traits onto offspring

But then even bacteria does that, right?

Agreed. But I was making the point that a basic unit such as a bacterium can (has) evolved into conscious beings. And then drawing a comparison with computers which could be designed to have most of those characteristics. And extrapolate from there.

 

[Tinker Grey]

Correct.

Edit: But which is like saying that the bottle of Lagavulin* I just treated myself to an hour ago (lockdown isn't all bad) is nothing more than the distillate from some fermented barley which has been left lying around in a wooden barrel for a few years.

*"Revered by connoisseurs and experts, Lagavulin is known as “the king of Islay”. It is an 'essential' Scotch Whisky that any connoisseur or enthusiast must have in their collection; one of the world's favourite Malt Whiskies. Aged in oak casks for at least 16 years, this much sought-after Single Malt has the massive peat-smoke flavour that's typical of southern Islay, while also offering richness and a dryness that turns it into a truly interesting dram. The Lagavulin 16 Year Old has become a benchmark Islay dram from the Lagavulin distillery. A gift for all occasions for lovers of peaty and powerful whiskies." https://www.malts.com/en-au/product...n-16-year-old-single-malt-scotch-whisky-70cl/

Roll on sunset...

Ardbeg is better. I bought a bottle of the Lagavulin 16 a few months back. It's good. But, I felt I've had good or better for 1/2 the price. The Uigeadail and Coryvreken are easily better. Much more complex and interesting. (YMMV)

ETA: Stolen from the Whiskey Vault/Tribe youtube channels who no doubt stole it from traditional Irish toasts: If you fight, may you fight for a friend. If you steal, may you steal a lover's heart. If you drink, may you drink with us!

 

[SelfSim]

Agreed. But I was making the point that a basic unit such as a bacterium can (has) evolved into conscious beings. And then drawing a comparison with computers which could be designed to have most of those characteristics. And extrapolate from there.

Can't help but wonder what will happen when some AI is assigned the task of learning across multiple, diverse and complex areas. I mean at the moment, their chess playing abilities produce solutions and strategies we can barely rationalize. What happens as the task complexity factor increases (alongside their ever growing capacity for more and more computations)? Could we rationalize their solutions for everyday life situations? Looks like the answer is 'no'!?

 

[Bradskii]

I'm sceptical of 'universal consciousness or awareness', but I can conceive of conscious awareness without intelligence.

I can give you a list of forum members if you like.

 

[durangodawood]

Ardbeg is better. I bought a bottle of the Lagavulin 16 a few months back. It's good. But, I felt I've had good or better for 1/2 the price. The Uigeadail and Coryvreken are easily better. Much more complex and interesting. (YMMV)

ETA: Stolen from the Whiskey Vault/Tribe youtube channels who no doubt stole it from traditional Irish toasts: If you fight, may you fight for a friend. If you steal, may you steal a lover's heart. If you drink, may you drink with us!

I do have a soft spot for Lagavulin because the first time I had it was on a stormy eve in a hotel pub in Lochboisedale (Outer Hebrides) Scotland with a E. German girl and a retired English gardener.

 

[Ponderous Curmudgeon]

I do have a soft spot for Lagavulin because the first time I had it was on a stormy eve in a hotel pub in Lochboisedale (Outer Hebrides) Scotland with a E. German girl and a retired English gardener.

Speaking of conciousness?
You went home with the gardener?

 

[Bradskii]

Can't help but wonder what will happen when some AI is assigned the task of learning across multiple, diverse and complex areas. I mean at the moment, their chess playing abilities produce solutions and strategies we can barely rationalize. What happens as the task complexity factor increases (alongside their ever growing capacity for more and more computations)? Could we rationalize their solutions for everyday life situations? Looks like the answer is 'no'!?

Brings to mind the short story 'The Last question' by Asimov: https://www.physics.princeton.edu//ph115/LQ.pdf

If you haven't read it, it's worth it. It suggests where we might end up. Would only take 20 minutes or so - or you could read a short plot summary in wiki: The Last Question - Wikipedia

But I'd go option 1.

 

[durangodawood]

Speaking of conciousness?
You went home with the gardener?

No actually. I met the gal on the bus (actually a jeep) to Lochboisedale. We were going to camp in the empty ferry waiting room to escape the storm, but it was locked. So we got a last minute BnB room, and to my regret we never 'did' anything. Oh well. Might have been for the best. Was great fun anyway. We got dinner at the pub where we met the gardener.

 

[dlamberth]

Check out the New-Age BS Generator. It's as close to Chopra as makes no difference, but it won't try to empty your wallet.

I have a spiritual truth meter of sorts that I run things through. When I run New Age stuff through my meter, it seems to flunk pretty badly.

My spiritual truth meter goes like this:

Truth can't be bought
Truth can't be sold.
Truth isn't money
Truth isn't paraphernalia
Truth isn't grand claims or promises
Truth isn't a teacher
Truth isn't narcissistic.
Truth is naked authenticity

 

[dlamberth]

There is no 'life force' or 'Life Force', unless you mean that as a metaphor, in which case your extensions of it are nonsensical.

I meant exactly what I wrote, straight up.
Life is persistent. It want's to happen. Nothing can stop it. If not here on Earth, than somewhere else in the cosmos.

Life is essentially a complex form of persistent oxidation/reduction (redox) chemistry, similar in principle to fire (combustion), but at much lower temperatures.

Which is what we also have in a corpse. But when I look into my own grand-daughter's eyes and see the light of glee when she laughs, there's a lot more going on there than chemistry.

According to Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi: “Life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.” (American Society for Microbiology)

It sounds like he thinks that electrons have consciousness and intelligence of sorts. And
agrees with the mystics that say the same thing, that electrons, being that the Universe is made of them, are a basic part of the force of Life that runs all through the Cosmos.

 

[durangodawood]

Yeah, I know. But really, if you study biochemistry and cell biology, you discover that, fundamentally, that's what it is. Of course, that process has generated some wonderful ways to keep going...

I realize that those are the parts. But a parts list at this granular level is massively insufficient for appreciating the whole.

 

[SelfSim]

I realize that those are the parts. But a parts list at this granular level is massively insufficient for appreciating the whole.

It goes a certain distance in building up our view of the whole.

 

[Vap841]

It's not just a question of adding complexity. We already know that the brain is not just complex; there is a large number of brain areas that are functionally specific and connected together in specific ways.

I don’t know how this isn’t the same thing as saying added complexity. These different areas of the brain are responsible for different functions in an individual way, and then at a later stage everything is reassembled into a coherent whole. But all of these functional dependent regions could also exist for qualia zombies too, they too would require a ton of different sensory mechanisms in order to avoid running across a busy street 1 second too early or too late, or to chop a carrot without chopping off a fingertip, etc. But we don’t escape the privileged 1st person information problem, we can’t know via brain functions if a person who cut their finger instead of the carrot really feels the pain or if they are just going through the motions and acting like they are in pain. THAT their brain mechanisms matches what my brain mechanisms look like when I feel pain is an objective FACT, but whether or not the pain experience itself is being faked or is genuine in that person is unfortunately reduced to an inference. It’s this reduced quality of knowledge that is the explanatory gap when moving from the physiological data to the assurance that we don’t have a qualia zombie.

We also know that specific damage to these areas or their inter-connections causes specific deficits in consciousness, affect, and sense of self.

Such deficits in motor function ability, speech, etc, would be objective facts. But lost consciousness, and sense of self could come or could still remain without us knowing for sure. It’s like the argument about whether a coma patient can hear & understand you (or even more precisely could THIS coma patient here you, or how about THAT coma patient?). There’s no such argument about the coma patient’s brain scans.

We also have tentative models for how the supporting framework for high-level consciousness functions, from internal and external senses to hind-brain structures to mid-brain structures and on to the cortex. These models are broadly based on the evolutionary sequence that produced the mammalian brain.

I do not disagree that higher states of consciousness are an easy inference to make since we have tons of test subjects to verify that higher level functions in the cortex relates to mental states that don’t exist for lower level entities such as those with just hindbrains. But it’s that “What is it like to be a bat” problem. A friend of mine once made the claim that sharks have to be the most miserable creatures on Earth because of their disturbed & lousy sleep patterns. Now what if I made the argument that sharks live in a state of bliss? We know that levels of distress and contentness in organisms are real properties in reality (and sharks might also feel nothing at all), but to answer this shark debate a hard science can never help us (even though each individual shark would know the answer), we would be reduced to some soft science like Behaviorism to just make an inference. Unanswerable questions about reality (questions that we know for sure HAVE answers) that can’t be answered by the tools of hard physical sciences to me reveals that more exists in reality than the physical. Because we just became forced into a situation where we can only use a tool of mental language to describe a part of reality that we know is real…and that is the claim, that there’s a mental fabric of reality that falls outside of the scope of physical reality (although they are both intimately entangled, and dependent on each other).

Given what we know now, and the advances in exploratory techinques in recent years, it is not unreasonable to suggest that we may eventually be able to identify all the functional requirements (i.e. processes and information inputs) and relations necessary to result in subjective experience. Whether we will be able to say precisely how they do so is a moot point, but we should have a better understanding of it than we do now. Ultimately, it may be that we'll only be able to say that if you connect these processes together in this way and feed it this kind of information, the system will have subjective experience.

Yeah I think so too, kind of like a lie detector test but with way more information. Well that’s if we don’t kill ourselves first and have to start over with sticks & stones. Some of these stories about the record droughts, temperatures, water scarcity, floods, etc are weirding me out.

 

[SelfSim]

Unanswerable questions about reality (questions that we know for sure HAVE answers) that can’t be answered by the tools of hard physical sciences ..

How do we know for sure those questions have answers?
They might well just be irrelevant questions .. so the assumed sought after answers, could be equally as irrelevant.

.. to me reveals that more exists in reality than the physical.

All that means to me is that you already have a fixed idea about what else 'exists in reality'. I say that's all just belief, (where a belief is that which is held as being true out of preference, that does not follow from objective tests and is not beholden to the rules of logic).

Because we just became forced into a situation where we can only use a tool of mental language to describe a part of reality that we know is real…and that is the claim, that there’s a mental fabric of reality that falls outside of the scope of physical reality (although they are both intimately entangled, and dependent on each other).

Try on that all reality is mental. Problem solved!

 

[Vap841]

How do we know for sure those questions have answers?
They might well just be irrelevant questions .. so the assumed sought after answers, could be equally as irrelevant.

Saying that there is no answer to the question of what the internal state of a shark is doesn’t make sense, there has to be an answer. Even if they are like robots and they feel nothing at all that would still be the answer to the question.

All that means to me is that you already have a fixed idea about what else 'exists in reality'.

No I think that that part of reality is knowable only by introspection, however introspection is much more prone to uncertainty than the scientific method, so therefore because of its more iffy interpretations I basically think that it’s impossible to reach an exhaustive knowledge about reality.

I say that's all just belief, (where a belief is that which is held as being true out of preference, that does not follow from objective tests and is not beholden to the rules of logic).

Oh no way, my inner 12 year old and my love of superhero movies most definitely has my preferences out of line with my beliefs, I prefer to be reincarnated as Clarke Kent on a planet without kryptonite lol.

Try on that all reality is mental. Problem solved!

I don’t believe in Idealism, however I do somewhat understand where people like that are coming from. I also wonder if some people move into Idealism as a reaction against Materialism, I’m not sure.

 

[Bradskii]

Saying that there is no answer to the question of what the internal state of a shark is doesn’t make sense, there has to be an answer. Even if they are like robots and they feel nothing at all that would still be the answer to the question.

I guess you could say that there is an answer to everything. If you consider the number of grains of sand in the universe then there is, at this exact moment, an exact number. So that number would be the answer. But does that mean that it makes sense in asking the question? Of course not. It's nonsensical to even contemplate asking it.

So it is with the concept of 'what it is like to be...a bat' or a shark. Or you. It's the equivalent of asking how many angels can dance on the end of a pin. You can keep asking difficult questions but at some point the answers become so detached from what can be observed that they become meaningless in themselves.

 

[Vap841]

I guess you could say that there is an answer to everything. If you consider the number of grains of sand in the universe then there is, at this exact moment, an exact number. So that number would be the answer. But does that mean that it makes sense in asking the question? Of course not. It's nonsensical to even contemplate asking it.

I’m not understanding how it could be consistent to say #1 there is an answer to the question, but #2 it makes no sense to ask the question.

So it is with the concept of 'what it is like to be...a bat' or a shark. Or you. It's the equivalent of asking how many angels can dance on the end of a pin. You can keep asking difficult questions but at some point the answers become so detached from what can be observed that they become meaningless in themselves.

Bad analogy would be an understatement here. It is a fact that it is like something to be a shark, but angels dancing on the end of a pin is where you should be using the word nonsensical. Furthermore I don’t even see the comparison to grains of sand, the difficulty levels involved are night & day, a test subject with a mere 3.5 lb brain can be placed in the center of a room full of researchers and they would have access to everything they need conveniently sitting in a chair.

 

[Bradskii]

I’m not understanding how it could be consistent to say #1 there is an answer to the question, but #2 it makes no sense to ask the question.

Bad analogy would be an understatement here. It is a fact that it is like something to be a shark, but angels dancing on the end of a pin is where you should be using the word nonsensical. Furthermore I don’t even see the comparison to grains of sand, the difficulty levels involved are night & day, a test subject with a mere 3.5 lb brain can be placed in the center of a room full of researchers and they would have access to everything they need conveniently sitting in a chair.

OK, I'll give you the bad analogy re the angels (I knew I shouldn't have included it). But I'm sticking with the question being nonsensical. The answer to the number of grains exists but it is literally impossible to determine. So even if it's a fact that there is an answer it makes no sense to ask the question. It's a nonsensical question.

It's the same with sharks. You can determine every single process involving every chemical change or electrical impulse or physical change in the sharks brain down to the quantum level. But that only, as I said further upstream, gives you the process itself. It will describe the shark's consciousness - which is that process. But You cannot go any further. You still need the observed and the observer (the guy sitting in your chair). They cannot be the same thing.

But the shark knows what it's like to be a shark. So there is a way to know. So there is an answer. But you cannot be the shark. So the question becomes nonsensical.

 

[SelfSim]

The question of whether sharks are miserable, or live in a state of bliss, has a human only context.
The meanings bliss and miserable have, are our meanings. They mean things to us.
A shark is not a human. Those feelings are of no meaning to a shark.
The question only has meaning to humans.
Any answer to the respective questions can only come from a human mind .. most likely by way of a belief. The answer will tell us more about the way the human(s) regard the shark, than it being about the shark.
There isn't much uncertainty about that.