Objects of consciousness
journal.frontiersin.org
journal.frontiersin.org
The math in particular seems inappropriate to present in a Psychology journal, even a frontier one. I question the authors' motivation to cover such advanced mathematical topics, from so many different areas of science. Was the intent that the reader will understand, or just be impressed by the math?
The mention of Deepak Chopra in the Acknowledgment section lends further support to my "perception" that this is not a legitimate paper, but an intellectually-dishonest attempt at disguising improv-style nonsense behind impressive-sounding physics jargon.
If you investigate this you will find that all objects are mind created. There is no essense or Platonic form of an object inherent to the object. The object cannot be said to have inherent existence apart from the mind perceiving it.
This concept is called "Emptiness" in Buddhism and training the mind to recognize the truth of emptiness frees the mind of all sorts of pathology (except maybe sounding weird when trying to explain this to people)
Because it can be easily moved. That is the property all objects share. There are a few exceptions, but they are illustrative. Consider a rusted on bolt. Can it be moved? Not without a lot of effort. However a fresh new loose bolt of the same kind demonstrates movable-objectness. What about a chair bolted to the floor? It was once loose, it's an object. What about a chair welded to the floor? Same thing. What about a chair that's constructed of the floor its self, like a large lump or bend up from steel or molded? I would submit that that's the floor acting like a chair, and not an object chair, but a chair like part of the floor.
An even more technical definition would be along the lines of "Objects are the static locus of continuity within a sharp boundary." And by static I mean to include floppy objects like plants or leather. And by sharp boundary I mean in relative space to the observer and their understanding of their environment. From the ground a cloud looks like it has a relatively sharp boundary, sure, it's complex, but the difference in the color and shading from the sky gives it away. If you're IN the cloud it just looks like fog. Is fog an object? Sure, it's in high contrast to the regular state of the air. Is air an object? Sure, it's in high contrast to the ground, and from a certain perspective interstellar space.
Does liver fit this definition? If it's separated from the organism, sure. If it's still in a living body, it's an organ, not an object.
>all objects are mind created.
I would go even further and say that "All patterns are mind events."
Phurpa drop!
(A phurpa is a triple sided ritual dagger which in Buddhism symbolizes the slaying or destruction of foe or obstructions.)
"Can be removed using a specific level of force" is then not sufficient for determining whether a collection of particles form an object.
Perhaps if one instead uses some amount of force applied on the collection of particles which depends on the mass of the collection?
That seems like it could be tricky, because I don't think I would generally consider fluids to be objects (in the sense we are speaking of), but I would not be too surprised if some fluid could be removed from a glass with a given level of force depending on the mass of a portion of the liquid, applied evenly over the portion, while keeping the portion of the liquid contiguous.
Which would seem to indicate that and portion of the liquid is an object.
However, maybe that is actually a solution, by adding the additional restriction that no part of an object is an object? (In a particular sense of object). Or alternatively, the intersection of any two objects is empty?
So, the section of the liquid is not an object, because a smaller part would then also be an object, and therefore, the individual molecules would be the objects.
That seems plausible to me...
No, because the forces holding the atoms of the cup together are much stronger than the forces holding the cup to the floor. That's the underlying physical reason why it makes sense to consider the cup as an "object".
The individual atoms (or really, electrons and quarks) which make up the chair and the floor and the air around it don’t behave differently based on what object boundaries some person attaches in their mind.
Some of the atoms which the human considers to be “part of” the chair get left behind on the floor, while the bottoms of the chair legs pick some atoms up from the floor. Water molecules are constantly being traded between the chair surface and the air. And so on.
The object boundary is in some sense arbitrary and porous. The way we define it is based on our own practical use and experience, and the aggregated/emergent properties which are relevant to us, since we don’t have the means to simultaneously apprehend every individual particle in our surroundings.
Hmm, but one can scratch a cup fairly easily, can one not? (depending on the type of cup). This is removing some part of the cup. Hmm, I guess that still might take more force than picking it up?
But what if one has like, a really big thing of uh, I want to say talc but I don't know how much of that one could hold up without part of it breaking off...
uh, google tells me gypsum can be scratched with a fingernail, and when I try to look up its tensile strength (which I assume would be the relative measure when considering hanging a thing of it from one end of it), I get the answer of between 1 and 2 MPa at ambient temperature. Also it says gypsum board, which I assume is just a board made of gypsum?
Also, I am assuming that expressing the tensile strength in MPa is force per cross section. No other interpretation comes to my mind, but I could be interpreting this number wrong. I'll call the tensile strength P.
I find for the density of gypsum 803 kg/m^3 .
Then, for a block of gypsum hanging from the top end, with cross section area A, with g=9.8 m/s^2 , the longest height h it could be before breaking would be found by :
hAdensityg=AP
hdensityg=P
h=P/(densityg) h=2 MPa / ((803 kg/m^3)(9.8 m/s^2)) h=2 MPa / (8039.8 N/m^3) h=2 MPa / 8039.8 Pa/m) h=254.1 meters.
So, if one had a column of gypsum 254.1 meters tall, and picked an atom at the top of it to pull up with force more than that of the whole weight of the pillar, certainly the whole pillar would not rise into the air, because its weight would be too much for the tensile strength.
So, certainly it would break somewhere.
If I was standing next to it near the top of it, I could scratch it with my fingernail, and so remove a part of it. But if it had much cross sectional area, the force I would need to do this would certainly be less than the force I would need to lift it. If the cross sectional area was one square meter, its weight, and so the force needed to hold it up, would be 2 million newtons (wolfram alpha tells me this is about 1/6 of the thrust of a space shuttle rocket booster at liftoff).
So, I would be able to remove a small part of it, but would be clearly unable to lift it. If the force that would be needed to lift it were all applied to some atom at the top of it, it would remove some smaller part of it.
I expect if enough force to lift it were to be applied to a single atom at the top, that, while it perhaps would not remove only a single atom, the part which it would remove would be quite small (perhaps only a few molecules?).
Yet it certainly seems like this would be termed an object.
(I guess if it was that thin it would fall over, but it can easily be imagined to be much wider, which I think would allow it to sit on the ground properly.)
So then, it seems like the force needed to pull it apart is significantly less than the force needed to hold it up, yet it still seems to be an object.
Yes. Think of it this way: if the force you used to pick up the cup could remove atoms from the cup, then you wouldn't be able to pick it up; when you tried, you would just come away with some atoms, instead of the whole cup.
> if one had a column of gypsum 254.1 meters tall, and picked an atom at the top of it to pull up with force more than that of the whole weight of the pillar, certainly the whole pillar would not rise into the air, because its weight would be too much for the tensile strength
Yes. With typical materials that cups are made of, you could probably make the column somewhat taller; but in any case, 254.1 meters is way larger than a cup, and weighs a lot more, which is why you don't have trouble picking up a cup, even though you would if you had a tall enough column of the same material.
> Yet it certainly seems like this would be termed an object.
If you choose to, sure. The term "object" is not given by physical law; it's a human convention. Obviously there are going to be edge cases where the term's application becomes somewhat strained.
So, it seems to be that even if, were I to apply the entire force to a single atom of the cup, the atom would be removed, that would not impact my ability to pick up a cup, because I cannot apply the entire force to a single atom of the cup, instead, each atom of the cup which I apply force to has a much smaller force that I put on it.
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What I am talking about is if I were to apply the total force I apply on the cup to a single atom of the cup.
If I took a thin thread strong enough to support the weight of the cup, and threaded it through the handle of the cup, I would be applying the same total force to the cup, and I would be applying it to a much smaller number of atoms, but I think the number of atoms the force would be applied across would still be very large.
Perhaps a needle would be a better example (it would be hard to balance, but that is only a practical matter)
But then it seems to me that if I were to apply the force needed to lift the cup, on an area the same as that at the end of a needle, it seems quite likely that the needle would scratch the cup (and, in doing so, displace some of the atoms of the cup).
Therefore, it seems that the amount of force needed to remove an atom from a cup, may be less than that needed to lift the cup (at least for relatively heavy, and not all too hard, cups).
And, as far as a radius of an atom is a meaningful concept (which is, mostly, I think), it seems the radius is generally at most around 260 pm, so, a square bound around it (which should be in a sense an overestimate) should have an area of .2704 square nanometers. When I look up the surface area of a needle, I find that its about 12.6 mm^2 (on the lower end of the estimates).
So then, the head of a pin would then be around the surface area of 4*10^13 atoms, and then, because of the space between the atoms in the cup which I might have neglected to consider, maybe drop off a few orders of magnitude (lets say, 4 orders of magnitude. I think that seems safe.)
So then, if you took all the force that is being applied to the cup by the needle, and instead applied it to a single atom, the amount of pressure being applied somewhere on the cup would then be around 10^9 times as much.
Generally I don't think it seems all that hard to scratch a cup with a needle, but perhaps applying force to a single atom would not be as effective as applying half the force each to two atoms, at removing them from the cup. So, another few orders of magnitude at most I'd guess.
So then, scratching the cup with a needle is not all that much harder than lifting it,
If the total force from the pin when scratching the cup were all on a single atom, the pressure would probably be at least 10^9 as much (to the degree that pressure makes sense in this context)
removing a single atom probably does not require 10^3 times the force to remove due to the fact that the other atoms nearby do not have a similar force applied to them, I don't think (? but maybe it does?).
So, with the pressure from putting the force on a single atom instead of using a pin being 10^9 times more, I think then the force on that single atom would be 10^9 times more than the average force on a given atom when it is spread over the pinhead surface, and because I think it probably doesn't need 10^3 times as much more force to remove an atom when the surrounding atoms are not experiencing similar forces, or, at least doesn't need 10^9 times as much, I think the force used to scratch a cup with a needle, if applied to a single atom on the surface of the cup, would probably remove that atom from the cup.
And because the force needed to scratch the cup does not seem much more than that needed to lift a heavy cup,
I think using the force that would be needed to life a heavy cup, would, if applied to a single atom on the surface of the cup, be enough to remove the atom from the cup.
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I think a more relevant measure for whether something is an object might be whether it takes more than a given amount of pressure to remove parts of it, instead of taking a given amount of force. (or force per mass, or force per mol. . But it seems like pressure might work well?)
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uh, I've been assuming that you are, like me, just trying to reason this out, as opposed to actually, unlike me, really knowing the physics behind how materials stay together. If that is not the case, oops, I have made an error.
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regarding "object" being a human convention: Sure, but seeing as the gypsum pillar seems to be something that people would classify as an object, it seems like it would make sense to revise whatever definition we choose for "object" to include such a pillar.
Although, when I think about it more, maybe such a pillar might be best not considered an object, so much as something that, each of a certain type of parts of it would be an object if the rest of it were not there?
I guess it is useful to be able to talk about whether something is an object even in microgravity, so I guess maybe it makes sense to choose some amount of pressure\whatever needed to pull something apart, rather than whether it can be picked up without falling apart.
hmmm... ok I'm thinking pressure might not be quite right either?
I'm kind of confused because http://sites.bio.indiana.edu/~hangarterlab/courses/b373/lect... seems to say that water has a higher tensile strength than gypsum, which doesn't seem to make sense to me.
I'm guessing maybe that is only in a particular situation?
hmm...
But that number is still much smaller than the total number of atoms in the cup. So you're depending on a relatively small number of atoms to transmit the force you exert to a much larger number of atoms.
> If I took a thin thread strong enough to support the weight of the cup, and threaded it through the handle of the cup, I would be applying the same total force to the cup, and I would be applying it to a much smaller number of atoms, but I think the number of atoms the force would be applied across would still be very large.
You're right. The number of atoms would still be way too large to introduce any issues with removing atoms from the cup instead of lifting the cup, at least for any material that's reasonably solid. (If you want to test that statement, try lifting an ordinary cup with a very thin thread. You might break a styrofoam or paper cup, but you won't break a ceramic coffee mug.)
To really apply a force to a single atom, you would have to use special equipment (which I'm not even sure exists at our current level of technology). If you could, in fact, apply the same force you apply to lift the cup to a single atom, it might indeed be sufficient to remove that single atom from the cup (I haven't looked up specific numbers) instead of lifting the entire cup. (In fact, it might depend on what the cup was made of: a styrofoam cup would certainly lose an atom, even a ceramic cup might, but a cup made of diamond or carbon nanotubes might not. Material strengths vary over many orders of magnitude.)
> removing a single atom probably does not require 10^3 times the force to remove due to the fact that the other atoms nearby do not have a similar force applied to them, I don't think (? but maybe it does?)
As I just noted, material strengths (which are a measure of the forces between atoms) vary over many orders of magnitude. Certainly more than 3; possibly as many as 9. So, as I said above, it might well depend on the material.
> I've been assuming that you are, like me, just trying to reason this out, as opposed to actually, unlike me, really knowing the physics behind how materials stay together. If that is not the case, oops, I have made an error.
I'm basing my statements on the actual physics involved.
> the gypsum pillar seems to be something that people would classify as an object, it seems like it would make sense to revise whatever definition we choose for "object" to include such a pillar.
That's up to whoever is using the term. Different people use the term "object" for different purposes. In any case, this is really a question about language, not physics.
> seems to say that water has a higher tensile strength than gypsum
Note that this is for a particular case, very thin columns of water in capillary tubes, where the water can actually act somewhat like a solid, at least in resisting tensile forces (i.e., being pulled apart). A liquid in bulk doesn't really have a meaningful tensile strength.
>If you could, in fact, apply the same force you apply to lift the cup to a single atom, it might indeed be sufficient to remove that single atom from the cup (I haven't looked up specific numbers) instead of lifting the entire cup. (In fact, it might depend on what the cup was made of: a styrofoam cup would certainly lose an atom, even a ceramic cup might, but a cup made of diamond or carbon nanotubes might not. Material strengths vary over many orders of magnitude.)
I think a less careful form of this (e.g. not including stuff about different materials) was most of what I was trying to say. I thought "force required to remove a part" was insufficient, because it doesn't include anything about how the force is applied, or how small the part removed can be, etc.
> Certainly more than 3; possibly as many as 9.
Ok, thanks. My physical intuition doesn't tend to be all that great. Thanks for correcting me on this point.
> I'm basing my statements on the actual physics involved.
I am trying to do that, looking up information about different materials, but I don't have any actual experience with like, materials science or whatever (not sure what the right term is), and I suddenly was wondering if you did have experience with that, and that from that perspective I might be obviously wrong.
> Different people use the term "object" for different purposes.
Yeah, I didn't mean to suggest that people ought to use a single meaning for the term. I was just trying to think about what precise definition would be most(?) useful for general use, when some other one hasn't been chosen for whatever reason. So like, what somewhat precise definition fits best with the most people's intuitions/usage of the term.
>Note that this is for a particular case, very thin columns of water in capillary tubes, where the water can actually act somewhat like a solid, at least in resisting tensile forces (i.e., being pulled apart). A liquid in bulk doesn't really have a meaningful tensile strength.
Ok, that makes sense. (I'm a little surprised about that last part, as I was imagining like, a blob of water in microgravity (with air pressure), and pulling it apart (somehow), but I guess applying force to it would cause it to deform before splitting in two, so maybe the cross sectional area wouldn't be well defined (but isn't that kind of like other materials also? oh well.)? Or I guess the force needed could depend on the amount of water or something in a complicated way which doesn't correspond nicely with tensile strength? (I had been considering if the "tensile strength" of free floating water was really small but nonzero, then there might be some value that all "objects" have a tensile strength above, but that probably doesn't make much sense.))
Again, thank you for your response, and for correcting me on some things I was wrong about.
Myself I would consider any physical body without life an object.
There is no such thing as "chariness" outside our brains, it's just a compressed form of representation of many perceptions.
While I understand that Platonism isn't popular, the Platonic form thesis needs a bit more refutation than "this is obviously false" in a serious discussion. But then, maybe you weren't trying to have a serious discussion. :-)
http://www.wisdompubs.org/sites/default/files/preview/Nagarj...
> However, recent studies of perceptual evolution, using evolutionary games and genetic algorithms, reveal that natural selection often drives true perceptions to extinction when they compete with perceptions tuned to fitness rather than truth: Perception guides adaptive behavior; it does not estimate a preexisting physical truth. Moreover, shifting from evolutionary biology to quantum physics, there is reason to disbelieve in preexisting physical truths: Certain interpretations of quantum theory deny that dynamical properties of physical objects have definite values when unobserved.
The properties that "don't have a definite value" are much smaller than the properties that a cow or a human can sense. The properties of big objects can be estimated so correctly with classic mechanics that you can safely ignore the quantum mechanics effects. More precisely, you can hide the quantum mechanics details as average macroscopic properties. For example, the color of an orange is determined by quantum mechanics details of the molecules in the orange skin, but to simulate a cow or a human it's enough to mark all oranges as macroscopically orange and forget about quantum mechanics.
The line "Perception guides adaptive behavior; it does not estimate a preexisting physical truth." is reasonable enough. Evolution may have generated visual recognizers that are task-oriented rather than object oriented ("predator", rather than "fur in bushes"). It's more important to have recognition of likely predators from partial information than correct recognition of a range of animals and other moving objects. That's a useful idea, and suggests that training deep ANNs on predator/non-predator data sets, without trying to distinguish the predators, is a worthwhile line of research. It would be interesting to see what visual model of "predator" emerged.
The "Markovian kernel" concept is not too useful. It's a table of probabilities with one row for each state of the world (which, of course, would be combinatorially huge) and a column for each possible consciousness state. This might be conceptually similar to Searle's "Chinese Room", where understanding is faked by pure lookup. But Searle and these guys go off in different directions.
The paper goes on, but not to anywhere useful.
The mathematics does lose something essential, viz., consciousness itself. Similarly, mathematical models of weather also lose something essential, viz., weather itself. A mathematical model of hurricanes won't create rain, and a mathematical model of consciousness won't create consciousness. The math is not the territory. But, properly constructed, mathematics reveals the structure of the territory."
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/7/2745.full Bayesian learning of visual chunks by human observers
The line is very blury between a model of consciousness and the point where it can not only be described as conscious but truly has that ethereally, hard to define quality that we "feel" as consciousness.
Would the first truly general AIs simply be working models of consciousness, or would they also feel consciousness as we do? When does the viz creep into our model?
Wow. That is an extremely good description of the problem of consciousness. Is this your own formulation? If not, where did you run into it?
What about a detailed simulation of global climate at a granularity of, let's say, individual quarks. Is there a point at which a map is so detailed that it becomes, in some sense at least, itself a territory?
It's not clear to me what you mean when you say consciousness is an abstraction - is this dualism? Consciousness seems pretty thoroughly grounded in real stuff. Intelligent agents might "create information" in some sense, but there is no indication that they do it by breaking the laws of thermodynamics.
Would you agree that, in order for simulated rain to be "really rain", you would require a conscious person inside the simulation who regards it as such?
I'm not sure about your question: are you asking if we should regard the simulated rain to be real if it's real for a simulated person?
This reminds me: "If a tree falls down in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
Let's compare two situations: 1. There are real people on the other side of the world, who experience a real rain (but we, on this side of the world, can't experience that rain directly). 2. There are simulated people who experience a simulated rain, which is real to them.
The simulated people have real consciousness, and are indistinguishable from real people if viewed within their virtual world. They can even control robotic human-like bodies in the real world. Can we say the simulated people are real? What if we regard the virtual world to be an extension of the real world, like the "New World" (the Americas) was considered to be an extension of the Old World? In that case, the rain experienced by virtual people is just as real as the rain experienced by the real people on the other side of the real world.
Thanks for such an interesting question!
It's like using the fact that apples fall from trees as evidence for gravity, but because we plan to use gravity to show that time doesn't exist, we refuse to grant that an apple on the ground was ever previously on the tree, but no matter, we still believe in the concept of "falling." In fact, the principles of falling show us that down is better than up, independent of time.
What I appreciate about the article is it grapples with this deep question (albeit framed oddly): When we model the fabric of reality by inventing quantum mechanics, are we somehow just projecting the building blocks of how we think? This is related to another mysterious question: Is math an invention or a discovery? Were prime numbers and linear algebra there before we came along, or do they emerge from the structure of our brains? There are primitive tribes of humans who have not invented counting, so they are unable to distinguish 10 berries from 11 berries and do not experience integers as part of the natural world; they would probably consider properties of the integers to be properties of the act of counting if they had a mental framework for doing so. So back to the first question, how much of what we find when we peer out into the universe and model it with particles and waves and math is in our heads, and how much is really "out there"? If physics to date is unknowingly identifying the fabric of reality with the fabric of thought, then we should be able to take either reality or thought as primary and use it to explain the other. The author chooses thought (consciousness) as primary.
However, the author's claim that objects aren't really there turns out to be more provocative than substantial. The author takes conscious agents as the building blocks of reality, and the conscious agents are still there when you aren't looking. They are just a different representation. You can replace the term "conscious agent" with anything. The author fully acknowledges both of these facts in his responses to objections 1 and 6.
> …author's claim that objects aren't really there turns out to be more provocative than substantial. The author takes conscious agents as the building blocks of reality, and the conscious agents are still there when you aren't looking. They are just a different representation. You can replace the term "conscious agent" with anything.
My understanding is as follows: conscious agents, as the foundation, exist unperceived. What we see, however, is not a representation of said agents—not a ‘map’. Rather, it’s a hugely simplified interface to the world of interactions between said agents. As symbols of the interface, objects or even space-time can’t be claimed to exist when we’re not looking.
It’s like an API spec that describes various entities and whatever manipulations we can request on them. These Users and Posts don’t actually exist as such, but for our practical purposes they’re always there, helpfully constructed. As API consumer we can fetch a user whenever we need it, but network can be down between our requests for all we know. (A precise map then could probably be raw SQL shell, the complexity of which API hides. I know this analogy is far from ideal, but it somewhat helped me understand some aspects of the idea.)
We all know that there isn't really a desk in front of me, just a pile of atoms, and when I look at it, I'm not seeing the desk but observing photons that bounced off of it. Our interactions with things are always mediated, and the things are never what we think they are. It's also pretty standard for philosophers to debate whether anything is real, or whether we can possibly know that anything is real. Recasting the electrons in my desk as conscious agents doesn't make my desk disappear when I go out to lunch in some new and meaningful way.
> the entire framework of a space-time containing objects, the fundamental organization of our perceptual systems, that must be recognized as a mere species-specific mode of perception rather than an insight into objective reality.
It seems this research can address the Schrödinger’s desk problem in two ways, which I can’t quite tie together:
1) By their conscious agent -> microphysical object theory, your desk doesn’t disappear like that. That is, dynamics of conscious agent interaction do routinely cause particle reconfigurations that reflect as certain patterns of change in relevant microphysical objects’ space-time positions, but—as long as we’re unable to describe the underlying world—“whoops! desk broke” is all we see.
2) By their interface theory of perception, your desk, as icon on your reality interface, pops up in your consciousness whenever it’s brought up for access. In other circumstances it doesn’t exist, like this browser window when I switch to another desktop (the data about my window and your desk is persisted by relevant interface layers). It would be fun if we could tinker with whatever mechanism implements these icons, given that the implementation is within us, but—in apparent absence of such ability within scientific framework—this remains more of a philosophical argument.
AFAICT, though, there’s at least one definite practical implication—we might have a reasonable way to construct meaningful observers and thus advance quantum theory interpretations.
It gets worse in Act 2: The ol' Deepak Chopra trick of equivocating on "observer" in quantum experiments. What Chopra and other people fail to tell you is that the "observer" doesn't need to be human, or even sentient. A video camera or some similar piece of recording equipment - even a photographic film plate - will do fine. That piece of kit would faithfully "observe" the quantum event - and apparently influence it - even if all of humanity had wiped itself out hours earlier.
I'm sure there are sensible arguments to be made about consciousness, but these two seriously doubtful premises do not make for a good start.
http://www.irva.org/conferences/speakers/hoffman.html
and Deepak Chopra
http://www.choprafoundation.org/speakers/donald-hoffman/
So why not go the whole hog, and listen to Rupert Sheldrake explain to you why materialism is bunk?
I started disagreeing with authors at the point where they define conscious experience: I can’t see why it’s contingent on subject’s ability to interact with the outside world, and I don’t follow how subject’s messages to the world can be proved as caused by conscious experience. I suppose I just haven’t yet internalized their definitions (of ‘world’, ‘subject’, etc.), though.
Perception->Visual perception->Ontology of visual perception and consciousness->Quantum physics->No.
edit: Actually, when i think about it, there's something analogous to Goodwin's law in papers/articles about the mind and consciousness. Whenever quantum physics becomes a topic the whole article just unravels into nonsense. This is of course obvious to anyone who've studied the physical properties of the mind (We don't even understand how whole braincells work together to form mental phenomena and conscious thought, so anything on a sub-atomic level is just out on a bike-ride (Norwegian idiom, sorry)).
What you say, however, is dogmatic. You assume the emergentist theory of consciousness: that consciousness somehow emerges from the complex physical interactions in the brain. This theory is itself woo at the moment, because there is not even a proposed mechanism by how this could happen. There is just a magic step: complexity -> magic -> consciousness.
It makes all the sense to take into account the additional information about reality that quantum mechanics provides when trying to understand consciousness, which is so far a mysterious aspect of reality.
So it's either emergentism or woo, by my reckoning. YMMV.
I think consciousness is an intrinsic aspect of the Universe, which seems to be fundamentally made of it and something we can call the flux which is everything else. The flux has pattern/form and is constantly changing apparently in accord with rules, some of which we seem to grasp quite well. Consciousness, on the other hand, has no properties and does not exist in time, it is always now. In fact the only way we know about consciousness (and give talk of it any heed whatsoever) is that we are consciousness. We often forget this due to the distraction of currently occupying a body (a self-referential "whirlpool" of flux that includes an apparatus for interfacing with consciousness in a way that is as yet entirely mysterious to science) but that soon solves itself in the fullness of time. But let that pass.
More interesting from the point of view of this thread is the way that a human mind arises from the mind of the body's cells, if you credit that they are sentient themselves. It also points to the larger multi-human sentient entities which we can and do comprise.
OK, I'll bite: Just what makes you believe that? What evidence convinces you this is true?
I have, myself, had some experiences that seem to me to have something to do with some of the statements I sometimes make about "consciousness".
But there is no way to share that experience with you, no symbols I can transmit. There is no consciousness-o-meter (except for consciousness itself maybe.)
For what it's worth, I consider consciousness to be a capability, like the ability to digest cellulose or to echolocate; and I consider it to exist on a continuum, with us humid beings being the most capable (that we know of) and unicellular microbes arguably the least. And the degree of capability looks to be strongly related to the complexity of a living being's brain (or what passes for it - microbes cogitate, in a very dim but adequate-to-their-needs way by discharging and detecting chemicals in their protoplasm). From all the examples we're aware of, it appears that consciousness is a process, what brains do, kinda like a flame is what a candle does.
We've only ever (reliably) observed the phenomena we associate with consciousness in living brains. If we work hard enough at mimicking brains in silicon, we may one day see consciousness in man-made machines. I, at least, have a lot of trouble imagining that consciousness can arise independently of structures painstakingly evolved in that direction or even more painstakingly constructed. Humans pay a huge price for their capable brains - the difficulty and risk of childbirth, the prodigous consumption of (I think) one-fifth of the body's energy. If consciousness were something lying around elsewhere, evolution would not have needed to take this costly route.
That's me, science and reason talking. Of course there's always a possibility we're surprisingly wrong about this.
I definitely agree with most of what you've said above, with the main exception that I consider consciousness to be somehow intrinsic or primary to the Universe, even more so than matter/energy and space/time, rather than something that emerges over time.
I do agree that what I would call the capability to express consciousness seems to exist on a continuum, and I agree with your characterization of it, but I believe that what we consider "inanimate" objects express consciousness too. At the risk of sounding completely looney, I'll admit that I've had encounters that make me think that whirlwinds ("dust devils") have or express a kind of sentience!
Although I can't really explain it, experimenting with robotics and augmentation has made me realize (or so I believe) that the interface between our bodies and our experience of our bodies is fundamentally mysterious, that there can be no possible way that any constellation of matter and energy could cause or engender the subjective sense of self. Anyone who has blinked their eyes knows that there is some connection between them and the experience of seeing, but how you see is totally mysterious. A sentient machine would be in the same perplexing situation.
I think you're being too quick. Let's think about things that we know to be emergent structures/behaviors: cities, societies, the human body, ecosystems, etc. In all of them, you can recognize that the network of interactions is too complex for human intelligence to fully grasp, but you can pin-point the building blocks. It's not magic. We know how DNA directs the synthesis of proteins, how proteins fold, how they combine to form larger structures, etc. It's not possible to fully grasp the full mechanism that is a human body, or a society, but this is because it's too complicated, not because we don't know the components.
With conscious we don't have that. It's an all-or-nothing proposition. What is your consciousness made of? Can you identify building blocks? If not, then you just have faith in emergentism, but you don't have a serious scientific theory.
If eventually you can identify building blocks, and emergentism is correct, then surely these parts will belong to smaller chunks of the system. Eventually neurons are part-conscious. Otherwise how could the big thing emerge? So, in this case, there is something fundamental about matter that we know nothing about.
Or, consciousness is more fundamental than mater. Serious people have also proposed this throughout the ages -- call it platonism maybe. This is an unfashionable philosophical position theses days, but as valid as materialism. Both are perfectly compatible with current scientific theories.
Some people actually believe that all mater is conscious -- this position is referred to as panpsychism. Some people believe they are the only conscious entity in the universe -- this is solipsism.
These positions may sound absurd, but they are not more or less scientifically credible than the mainstream one. They all fit the observable reality, and none of them can be tested.
We all have our intuitions and personal beliefs, but from a scientific standpoint I think that the only rigorous attitude is to remain agnostic on this. Otherwise we fall into the same intellectual traps as mysticism. The scientific attitude is above all to doubt, not to blindly believe.
Falsifiability doesn't apply to essentially any metaphysics, anyway. Which is where all the woo about panpsychism and morphic resonance and whole series of theories that make consciousness into some weird thing outside our universe.
The question is what metatheories are _compatible with observation_, or at the least, under _what level of gymnastics_ they are.
All this talk about "we don't know what consciousness is; therefore XYZ" is filled with woo.
Even if we don't know what conscious is or can't exactly _test_ for it, most people agree there are at least different levels of sophistication of consciousness, and that some animals appear to be at least partially conscious. That's not odd if we explain this in relation to brain capacity and along normal evolutionary lines. Is it anything other than the evolution of brains really necessary to explain consciousness? Why do you believe so?
So what new dimensions of reality would you like to request in order to explain consciousness? Does anyone have any evidence these other dimensions exist? No, of course they don't.
I agree that emergence-flavoured theories of consciousness are essentially woo woo, or non-explanations. I am therefore not very exited about massive statistical simulations trying to achieve intelligence, because even if Watson were to become self aware after stuffing it with even more megahertz, we would just have another "brain" on our hands and we will have nothing but the turing test to discern its "brain-ness". That is to say - I am exited, because Watson is really cool and useful, but not exited about what neural nets, genetic algorithms or statistical data analysis will tell us about consciousness.