WTF is this forum coming to? Awesome discussions on life, the universe & everything!

So people dream(ed) up the notion of a higher power as a way of filling in the voids in our understanding, and then some clever sod came along and turned the idea into something more real and used it to form a way of controlling peoples thoughts & behaviour / attitudes ( = religion ) that has perpetuated through the ages ( who dares challenge such along-held system after all? ). Figures....

 

Impertinent - whether it's one or the other, you must still acknowledge the possibility that God might be the cause.

This is an unresolvable speculation. I'm just getting at the source of what you're saying - if you keep backtracking along the thread that leads you to consciousness from cognition, you will find a point where there is no cognition, no thought at all, just electronic signals in organic matter which somehow evolved autonomously into organised thought. No matter what beliefs you hold or how you rationalise things, there will always be unresolvable conflict somewhere... it doesn't mean that said beliefs shouldn't be discussed!

 

And so could Ymer, Eurynome, Nüwa, Tenchikaibyaku lit, Lord Brahma, Yaweh, Purusha, or one of the hundreds of other gods round the world. They are with your logic all equally likely to be true.

However some of these myths we can simply ignore because they do not conform to the evidence at hand including the biblical creation, does this make the others more likely, well no they are all bordering zero in terms of likelihood and can safely be ignored.

Again possible does not in any shape or form mean likely.

 

Of course not of course not...

 

Very pertinent. An explanation necessitating that God does not exists is making a statement that He does not (i.e. it's impossible according to the explanation). A scientific explanation in which it is not necessary for God to exist leaves the possibility open that He does; it is just not required for the explanation to be true. God could reveal Himself today (film at eleven), and the universe would still function the way that science has explained it to. It would change nothing about that. So since the existence of God not only cannot be scientifically proved, but is not even required for scientific explanations, whether or not He exists is irrelevant from a scientific point of view. He has no impact on the scientific domain. God lies outside its configuration space, so to speak.

So yes, it is possible that God exists, but it is an unprovable philosophical speculation, not a provable scientific hypothesis. In other words: all we can do is have personal opinions on that, based in beliefs.

Emergence, (i.e. new behaviours arising from complex systems that weren't present at a lower level of complexity --a sort of the-whole-is-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts principle) is not speculation but a scientifically well-established phenomenon, and not just in the domain of cognitive functioning. I refer you to Langston's Ant for a nice example of just how screwy an idea it is to get your head around.

Of course we can discuss different, conflicting beliefs, but we should be clear as to our expectations from that. If the debate only serves to reinforce our own beliefs rather than examine why we hold them and how they influence what we actually do, then there is little point. This is what Kayinblack points out when he explores the usefulness of faith: what does it actually do for us, and is that a good thing? You should be bothered less by whether or not I believe in God, than whether or not your faith makes you live happily and act wisely and kindly.

 

I didn't say that emergence was speculation; I said that attributing consciousness to emergence is speculation. Consciousness is still undefinable so we can hardly say what brought consciousness into the world if we do not yet fully understand what it is. Stuart Hameroff says:

(If you really want to fry your brain, check the source )

As with Langston's Ant, "conventional" science can only take us so far and leaves many questions (often the bigger ones) unanswered.

My personal stance is that consciousness is so much more than what we can see and test by science, which of course means that consciousness cannot be defined by science. Perhaps it is emergent, but if that is the case, then I must hold that it was under direction to be so.

I'm not bothered in the least that you don't believe in God - are you? I hear ya, and yes it is extremely important for Christians that their faith profoundly affects and transforms their lives. I consider this debate (and others like it) the icing on the cake - I enjoy picking brains and having mine picked, and I'm not looking to impose anything on anybody but rather to examine why they believe what they do, and whether or not their beliefs can withstand the ilk of scrutiny that they wield - often virulently - against biblical Christianity.

So... as a psychologist, is consciousness purely electrophysiological in your mind (pardon the pun) or is it more than what we currently are able to comprehend and empirically verify?

 

Consciousness is tricky to examine because it is a subjective experience. However what cannot be fully explained (or simulated) at the moment does not need to resort to supernatural explanations. It didn't when e.g. we did not know what the hippocampus and basal ganglia did, and it doesn't now. We also know that brain injury can alter conscious experience in quite fundamental ways, so we know it is a product of physical processes.

Hameroff makes some interesting reasoning errors which I'll get to when I'm not posting from a tiny smartphone. But to argue that we cannot simulate consciousness is dodgy. How could we tell if an AI computer is truly conscious? We only circumvent the solipsistic problem by assuming that other people have a consciousness like ourselves because we observe them behaving like ourselves. Because we're all biologically the same it's a safe assumption, but we don't truly know.

 

I fully agree; all I'm saying is that I choose to believe in a supernatural explanation that is entirely plausible.

Whilst true empirically, this is a reasoning error - the conclusion does not infer but rather assumes that consciousness is wholly a physical phenomenon, which simply is not known. It is equally possible that consciousness would be affected by serious brain injury even if it was partly a product of physical processes.

One thing we can affirm is that consciousness is a correlate of life - you don't get consciousness without life. AI is precisely what it says it is: artificial. In the same way we can tell it isn't "truly" intelligent, we can also tell that a similarly "artificially conscious" computer isn't truly conscious. Simulations are what they are: not the Real McCoy.

 

Again all evidence so far points to there only being a physical existence, if you wish to claim otherwise you have to present proof on the matter.

Addendum: Part two just came up

 

Two issues of confounding here. Consciousness is basically a subjective experience. But definition should not be reification. Life, again is a process with certain qualities that we tend to see in organic entities so we think of life as something organic. We see consciousness in lifeforms so we think of consciousness as a quality of life.

However what constitutes life is tricky --which becomes obvious when you look at viruses or even prions. Again: emergence; life arose from chemical processes. There is no reason why processes associated with life could not occur in complex structures that are not biological (and to an extent they do --complex structures behave remarkably organically). As for consciousness: we can already simulate simple neural functions, so it's just a matter of scaling up. AI would be fundamentally different from ours however as it would not be shaped by, and have evolved in the same biological context as us.

All this hinges on a proper understanding of "consciousness" and "life". Certainly a lot of stuff to learn and explore, but supernatural explanations are the end of such exploring, not a part of it.

 

Consciousness will never be fully 'explained' because there's just nothing else like it in human affairs, and the very fact that we are conscious should hint that we'll never be able to conceptually understand it (the 'hard' problem that is). Only mother nature can understand that.

Unless you think we're a totally blank slate that can learn and understand anything, we obviously have biological limits by virtue of being a human being - we can't fly like a bee, or run like a cheetah, and similarly we can't conceptually understand things we never evolved to understand.

Consciousness is obviously going to be outside of our conceptual apparatus, so no matter how much we know about what happens at lower levels of biology/chemistry/physics, no human will ever be able to conceptually understand why apparently physical entities in the human brain give rise to the experience we all call 'consciousness'.

 

And your evidence for this claim is?

 

Well, in my opinion it should be obvious anyway. We've asked the question since the time of Ancient Greece and yet we're still no closer to understanding it.

The problem is that even if you could explain the total physical processes involved which cause consciousness to occur, there will always be that explanatory gap between those processes and how they become 'consciousness' for human beings (how they become the experience we describe as consciousness).

That's something that will never go away no matter how good of a scientific explanation is given, because we're totally bound by our current conceptual capacity which doesn't allow us to understand things like that (I would argue and many others).

No quantum mechanical explanation will ever make someone go 'oh I get it now, I totally understand how this conscious experience has arisen from chemical interactions in my brain'. It won't happen. That's not to say we won't be able to give a descriptive account of what causes it at some abstract level of science, but that's not the same as understanding it.

If you watch this video and skip to Chomsky's part (2:30), you'll get where I'm coming from:

 

"All evidence" meaning empirical evidence, which will always point to the physical (duh!). I'm not trying to prove anything here.

I disagree - exploring only by empiricism is not much of an exploration. I revere the scientific method and I'm as excited as the next person when it comes to major breakthroughs in various spheres of research, but science falls pitifully short when it comes to addressing the finer points of existence.

 

That is true, but what else but evidence should one base ones life on, with the fallibility and flaws of the human species what else can you rely on to make the correct decisions.

 

Only because you confound your concepts with qualia. You might argue that science cannot explain the colour red. Sure, it can explain that light of 700nm wavelength is perceived by us as red, but it cannot explain how this is experienced by us as red (rather than another colour or perception). Similarly what we call "consciousness" is a set of qualia arising from a whole set of complex cognitive processes.

You are also confounding physical structures with processes and information. Else you would not argue that only biological things can exhibit the quality of life.

 

Not at all - I treat them separately but they are inextricably linked nevertheless. And I'm not confounding physical structures with processes either - it actually seems that you are doing that: as I pointed out earlier, you jumped to the conclusion that consciousness is wholly the product of physical processes, but that cannot be inferred from your premise.

Regarding non-biological things that "exhibit the quality of life," please elaborate!

 

No, I'm saying that the experience of consciousness (but not its cognitive processes) is an epiphenomenon or emergent effect of physical processes. Not the same thing, although it's easy to confuse the two.

As for the second point: let's define "life". Life encompasses the processes of metabolism and maintenance of homeostasis while responding to stimuli, growth, reproduction and adaptation through natural selection. These processes can also be observed to occur in non-organic systems (although usually in a less interactional context). When you look at viruses and prions, you see homeostasis, a very limited response to stimuli, reproduction and even evolution, although you'd hardly talk of "life". When you look at geological processes you can definitely see homeostasis, growth/reproduction and evolution of sorts. Heck, you can see natural selection in almost anything, it is such a universal law. It is no wonder that sooner or later all these processes would combine to form the complex chemical self-sustaining, procreating and evolving system called life.

The cognitive processes that underlie the experience of consciousness similarly do not have to be bound to organic structures. Computers already perform processes normally found in neural networks. In principle these could be scaled up. However the problem is always that computer consciousness would be very different from ours, and would be difficult for us to recognise.

 

I find it strange that you say this - given the very specific conditions required to support any life, it is one hell of a wonder that life exists at all. Atheists will say that it could (and indeed did) happen by chance, however small the chance, whereas theists will maintain that the chance was so slim as to be improbable. I don't necessarily like to go down that route myself because I don't see any merit in it, whether it's true or not - it's not conclusive, only suggestive. Improbable never means impossible, and that's why an open mind is necessary on both sides of the fence.

I suppose in a sense you do agree with me that consciousness may have a metaphysical aspect to it, but even if it were true you would overlook it because it cannot be empirically verified and accordingly you don't see any benefit in pursuing it.

Your definition of life should read that "scientific research tells us..." but that is not a definition of life, only a finding. To define life comprehensively requires you to come out of the scientific paradigm, but I assume you won't do that because then we have to be subjective... and use logic and reason instead of empirical science.

 

Since consciousness is a subjective experience it is indeed metaphysical, and therefore, like God, unprovable (I cannot actually prove to you that I'm conscious any more than I can prove my honey bees at some level are). Moreover I would argue that a metaphysical explanation is not necessary to understand and explain cognitive processes on a scientific level.

How likely life is, is another tricky question. Its rules appear so universal that given the right conditions it seems almost inevitable (but even if it is most unlikely we still need to beware of the trap of the anthropic principle). As we are technologically capable of exploring places on Earth hitherto unreachable, we find it in the most unlikely places in the most unlikely forms. Chances are, if our probes ever stumble across it on Mars, Europa, Titan or Venus we may not even recognise it as such because it is so different.

Hence it is worth really thinking about the definition of life, since you appear (if I understand you correctly) to regard it as a necessary condition for consciousness, and I don't see how that follows so we obviously are thinking about different things. So what is your definition of life?