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/sci/ - Science & Math


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11619044 No.11619044 [Reply] [Original]

What is consciousness?

>> No.11619046

OP is a faggot

>> No.11619049

>>11619044
Not /sci/, fuck off retard.

>> No.11619052

>>11619044
extension of substance through the mental plane

>> No.11619070

>>11619044
Consciousness is an illusion, your brain fools you into thinking you have it to artificially give your life meaning. It is a defense mechanism against suicide, otherwise we’d turn ourselves off with the same consideration we give to flipping off a light switch

>> No.11619076

>>11619044
I've already postulated here that consciousness is the portion of the thermodynamic process that happens at a neural level that isn't wasted heat.

>> No.11619077

>>11619044
I am.

>> No.11619078

Is an emergent property of matter when is arranged in complex biological systems.

>> No.11619079
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11619079

>> No.11619080
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11619080

>>11619070
How can you kill yourself if you're not conscious of yourself?

>> No.11619082

>>11619078
Most complex life lacks intelligence, so we can assume it probably also lacks consciousness or any “internal light”.

>> No.11619083
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11619083

>>11619070
P-zombie detected

>> No.11619089

>>11619044
A process, not a thing unto itself like many of the fags believe it to be, as a replacement/substitute for soul.

>> No.11619091

>>11619044
A gift and a curse

>> No.11619099

>>11619044
Consciousness is the ability to perceive and interpret outside stimuli with senses and association areals of the brain.
Everyone who says anything else is a schizo.

>> No.11619101

>>11619083
Calling people who don't believe in free will p-zombies as though in contrast to yourself is impressively stupid. Either everyone is a p-zombie or no one is. Amusingly, I've noticed it's only ever smarter than average people being called this. Calling people p-zombies just exposes the fact that you're emotionally invested in your view and aren't looking at it rationally.

Bottom line is go back to pol you repulsive shitposter brainlet.

>> No.11619108
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11619108

Long story short, verbal reports. That's really it. If you can't verbally report on it, you're not conscious of it.

>> No.11619110

>>11619083
Free will and consciousness doesn’t exist in reality. It feels real to me too, even though intellectually I know it doesn’t exists. Kind of sad that you let your emotions dictate your beliefs like that

>> No.11619117

>>11619101
>free will
>in a discussion about consciousness
>as if these things are related
>>11619083
Turns out he's not a p-zombie, he's just a retard

>> No.11619121

>>11619110
>consciousness doesn’t exist in reality
A good slap in the face ought to change your mind on that quickly.

>> No.11619122

>>11619101
>>11619110
>t. emotionless bugman

>> No.11619125

>>11619044
take the open individualism + idealism pill, thank me later

>> No.11619138

>>11619125
Saying consciousness is fundamental != an explanation for consciousness.

>> No.11619140

>>11619117
>free will requires consciousness
how could you argue these aren’t related brainlet

>> No.11619141

>>11619044
an emergent property of a self-referential system

>> No.11619146

The real question is how people can have no fucking clue when, on the surface, it seems so simple.

>> No.11619165

>>11619141
I actually like this explanation, because video feedback is fun to play with, and I like the imagining that’s how a brain works. No idea if it’s credible though

>> No.11619176

>>11619140
agree, but the converse isn't true. The guy I was responding to just threw in free will for no reason.
>>11619138
Here is the key thing:
Assuming Open Individualism + idealism i can explain what is perceived as matter and solve the hard problem of consciousness (trivially).

Assuming consciousness is physical means you can't solve the hard problem.

Everyone has to assume something to get their theory off the ground. If you assume qualia exist this can explain everything, if you assume "physical things" exist you can't, simple as.

>> No.11619217

>>11619165
read Godel, Escher, Bach

>> No.11619222
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11619222

>>11619044

>> No.11619303

>>11619080

By walking off a cliff on accident.

>> No.11619316

>>11619070
>>11619089
>>11619099
>>11619108
>>11619141
Why don't we move, process information, speak, make facial expressions, debate, think logically, think emotionally, sleep, eat, communicate to others how good the food we just ate taste, do everything we normally do, but the entire time feel like we are on general anesthetic.

>> No.11619338

>>11619044
/root

>> No.11619354 [DELETED] 

>>11619303
You don't to have to be conscious to do something accidentally, Sir Isaac.

>> No.11619355

>>11619303
Besides accidentally, smartass.

>> No.11619356

consciousness is not some mystical entity that exists without your brain.
There are varying degrees of it and if I hit you in the head enough times you'd experience that.
If I managed to damage your brain it'd diminish permanently.

>> No.11620128

>>11619070
>Everything is actually nothing, but for some reason it's incredibly ordered and consistent
Absolute brainlet

>> No.11620134

>>11619070
how do you explain suicide

>> No.11620137

>>11619356
That implies it does exist as it's effects and changes can be measured consistently.

>> No.11620180

>>11619138
Saying material is fundamental != an explanation for material

>> No.11620218

>>11619121
My favorite take is that consciousness and sense of self is like eyesight an evolutionary trait that helps us better compete in our niche. It's also why we can't explain consciousness, imagine trying to explain to a blind person what color is.
Sure we know what colors are and how the rods and cones in our eyes take in lights and send signals
But actually seeing stuff is way different

>> No.11620382

>>11619044
General awareness of yourself as well as your surroundings

>> No.11620402

>>11619044
Stanislas Dehaene's Consciousness and the Brain is the best book on that subject.

>> No.11620416

>>11619083
People who believe in "p-zombies" have spent too much time reading armchair philosophy and not enough time learning actual science. Just like all dualists... they misunderstand how consciousness works.
It's similar to the Chinese Room fallacy. Just like with the incoherent term "qualia" and the so-called "hard problem of consciousness", the Chinese Room is based on a faulty framing of what the mind is.
There is no person in the room. The program, the instructions and rules for how the AI is supposed to behave in response to the input... THAT is consciousness. And that is the fatal error... there is no homunculus in the brain. There is no special "other" that utilizes the meat or that controls the brain. The rules, the 'instructions' that are so effortlessly glossed over and hand-waved away in Searle's Chinese Room... THAT is consciousness.

>> No.11620425

>>11620416
>The rules, the 'instructions' that are so effortlessly glossed over and hand-waved away in Searle's Chinese Room... THAT is consciousness.

So to take that further, the idea of a "p-zombie" is incoherent, because "acting conscious" is literally the same as "being conscious". People have this intuition that a being can somehow "fake" consciousness... but that's a fallacy. The behaviors of consciousness ARE inexorably tied up with BEING conscious.

>> No.11620436

>>11619176
>Assuming consciousness is physical means you can't solve the hard problem.
what do you think about strawson's panpsychist physicalism?

>> No.11620444

>>11620416
>qualia doesn't exist yet it can be measured and experiment on consistently but somehow it doesn't exist
You are a moron

>> No.11620447

>>11620416
>>11620425
dennett what are you doing here

>> No.11620465

>>11620436
David Pearce has great ideas about suffering... but is woefully out of touch when it comes to the actual science of consciousness. He's one of those "shibboleth-spewers" who loves to complicate relatively simple ideas so that fewer people argue with him.
Literally everything we know about in the universe... every single solitary thing... leads us toward a materialist understanding of the universe. And yet panpsychist physicalism wants us to believe that this one single "other" thing, consciousness... is somehow special, and defies the entire cathedral of science humans have built over the centuries. It's nonsensical, and it's based on the strange bias humans have that our minds are somehow intangible.

>> No.11620469

>>11620465
>Literally everything we know about in the universe... every single solitary thing... leads us toward a materialist understanding of the universe.
The wave equation is objectively real but ontologically immaterial/purely mathematical. It is not physical nor material.

>> No.11620470

>>11619176
the so-called "hard problem" will evaporate once all the so-called "easy problems" are solved.

You shold check out Stanislas Dehaene's Consciousness and the Brain... although I'm sure you'll look it up, find the "criticisms" portion of the wiki pages, and then say something like "oh, I did read it and I think [insert text from criticisms]"

>> No.11620474

>>11620416
Computers have rules and instructions like you describe, but I think we can agree computers are not “conscious” at any point in processing date in the same sense humans experience consciousness. Computers aren’t even 0.0001% conscious. There is zero internal light, zero awareness of their existence, regardless of complexity of anything so far built

>> No.11620484

>>11620469
No, it's an emergent phenomenon of material things.

All of this come from the old human bias toward top-down answers. Evolution, markets, consciousness... they're all bottom-up phenomenon, but people historically have been confused by them because of that. They assume there must be some top-down agent guiding/responsible for them.

When we have a better understanding of complexity science, and when the "easy problems" of consciousness are solved... the "hard problem" will simply vanish.

>> No.11620485

>>11620465
i didn't ask about david pearce anon
are you ok

>> No.11620489

>>11620416
>the incoherent term "qualia"
Lmfao, these people are actually p-zombies.

>> No.11620490

>>11620484
>No, it's an emergent phenomenon of material things.
Except, of course, it is the opposite, and material things are emergent from the wave equation.
Saying "it is human bias to think this way" is not an actual argument, you are again simply asserting this as being true a priori despite the actual evidence that it is the other way around.

>> No.11620498

>>11620436
phsyicalist positions in general suffer from the combination problem. It is analogous to the hard problem. Idealism + Open Individualism is the only way

>> No.11620500

>>11620474
a lump of bacterial mat is not conscious either. And yet humans are. Because we've evolved to be since it was beneficial to our survival. Computers COULD BE conscious however. It's very hard to visualize how that could be, and it's non-intuitive... which is why all these debates exist. Still... look at a flock of birds, murmuration. It appears that there is some intelligent agent at work. But its the result of only a few very simple rules (stay X distance from neighbor bird, but Y far apart; try to get toward the middle, etc). It's emergence. Things appear complex, but they're just the result of a huge number of simple actors (birds, fish, humans in a market, brain cells)

>> No.11620501

>>11620465
ignore this retard

>> No.11620503

>>11620500
>a lump of bacterial mat is not conscious either
How do you know this?

>> No.11620505

>>11619044
an illusion

>> No.11620508

>>11620470
No this is not true. To think the hard problem can be answered from a materialist perspective is to say something like you can produce a picture from a song if the song is complex enough. You are making a category error.

>> No.11620510

>>11620498
Dehaene talks about experiments that shed light on the combination problem and the binding problem in Consciousness and the Brain.

Since that book has been published, philosophers have been strangely quiet about both, and moved their goal posts to another set of "issues".

>> No.11620519

>>11620510
I meant panpsychist btw,
In this case I'll check out this Dehaene guy.

>> No.11620530

>>11620490
to be fair ontology is a priori assumed
it has nothing to do with facts and can't be falsified by facts, it's a matter of how you conceptualize reality
the arguments are based on appealing to certain methodological preferences for choosing which is the best worldview such as logical consistency, fruitfulness, simplicity, elegance, a whole bunch of criteria.

>> No.11620581

>>11619044
I don't think consciousness is just a side product of brain functions. Just because your brain is processing a lot of stimuli I don't think consciousness will just spontaneously arises out of that; it feels a lot more mysterious to me. The brain likely goes out of it's way to create consciousness, and for whatever reason it benefits our survival. I bet a lot of simple animals are almost entirely instinct, and experience very little consciousness.

>> No.11620582

>>11620498
i probably agree idealism has the least problems but can you explain how does open individualism help? i like panpsychist physicalism because it feels like the most wholesome way of avoiding dualism without feeling like i'm being in denial of very significant intuitions.

>> No.11620589

>>11620519
"Binding Without Consciousness

Year after year research on subliminal priming has dispelled many myths about the role of consciousness in our vision. One now-discarded idea was that, although the individual elements of a visual scene could be processed without awareness, consciousness was needed to bind them together.

Without conscious attention, features such as motion and color floated freely around and were not bound together into the appropriate objects. The various sites of the brain had to piece the information together into a single “binder” or “object file” before a global percept could arise. Some researchers postulated that this binding process, made possible by neuronal synchrony or reentry, was the hallmark of conscious processing.

We now know that they were wrong: some visual bindings can occur without consciousness. Consider the binding of letters into a word. The letters must clearly be attached together in a precise left-to-right arrangement, so as not to confuse words like RANGE and ANGER, where the movement of a single letter makes a huge difference. Our experiments demonstrated that such binding is achieved unconsciously. We found that subliminal repetition priming occurred when the word RANGE was preceded by range, but not when RANGE was preceded by anger—indicating that subliminal processing is highly sensitive, not just to the presence of letters but also to how they are arranged. In fact, responses to RANGE preceded by anger were no faster than responses to RANGE preceded by an unrelated word such as tulip. Subliminal perception is not fooled by words that have 80 percent of their letters in common: a single letter can radically alter the pattern of subliminal priming.

>> No.11620601

>>11620589

In the past ten years, such demonstrations of subliminal perception have been replicated hundreds of times—not just for written words but also for faces, pictures, and drawings. They led to the conclusion that what we experience as a conscious visual scene is a highly processed image, quite different from the raw input that we receive from the eyes. We never see the world as our retina sees it. In fact, it would be a pretty horrible sight: a highly distorted set of light and dark pixels, blown up toward the center of the retina, masked by blood vessels, with a massive hole at the location of the “blind spot” where cables leave for the brain; the image would constantly blur and change as our gaze moved around. What we see, instead, is a three-dimensional scene, corrected for retinal defects, mended at the blind spot, stabilized for our eye and head movements, and massively reinterpreted based on our previous experience of similar visual scenes. All these operations unfold unconsciously —although many of them are so complicated that they resist computer modeling. For instance, our visual system detects the presence of shadows in the image and removes them (figure 10). At a glance, our brain unconsciously infers the sources of lights and deduces the shape, opacity, reflectance, and luminance of the objects.

Whenever we open our eyes, a massively parallel operation takes place in our visual cortex—but we are unaware of it. Uninformed of the inner workings of our vision, we believe that the brain works hard only when we feel that we are working hard—for instance, when we’re doing math or playing chess. We have no idea how hard it is also working behind the scenes to create this simple impression of a seamless visual world."

>> No.11620625

its merely a refinement of the brain and a step up in complexity. Animals clearly process emotions and engage in basic thinking.The groundwork is already there.In terms of mechanics there is no difference between us and them.

>> No.11620628

>>11620589
>>11620601
Very interesting, it reminds me of how people can read any word properly so long as the first and last letter are the same, regardless of how jumbled up it is in the middle.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/typoglycemia/

>> No.11620666

>>11620601
this description of the visual system is awesome, but how can they tell what the image looks like at various stages of perception?

>> No.11620674

>>11620416
No consciousness is actual real life feeling. Not a flesh computer programmed to make me say I have feelings or believe I have feelings. Real true emotions and sensations that arrangement of matter cannot create in the same sense that molding blue plado into different shapes cannot create yellow plado.

In order to cling to your materialist belief you are denying the only reality you have ever known.

>> No.11620687

>>11620674
and in order to cling to your materialist belief you are dividing the only reality you have ever known into two sides, inside and outside.

>> No.11620696

>>11620666
Playing Chess Unconsciously For another demonstration of the power of our unconscious vision, consider chess playing. When grand master Garry Kasparov concentrates on a chess game, does he have to consciously attend to the configuration of pieces in order to notice that, say, a black rook is threatening the white queen? Or canhe focus on the master plan, while his visual system automatically processes those relatively trivial relations among pieces? Our intuition is that in chess experts, the parsing of board games becomes a reflex. Indeed, research proves that a single glance is enough for any grand master to evaluate a chessboard and to remember its configuration in full detail, because he automatically parses it into meaningful chunks. 29 Furthermore, a recent experiment indicates that this segmenting process is truly unconscious: a simplified game can be flashed for 20 milliseconds, sandwiched between masks that make it invisible, and still influence a chess master’s decision. 30 The experiment works only on expert chess players, and only if they are solving a meaningful problem, such as determining if the king is under check or not. It implies that the visual system takes into account the identity of the pieces (rook or knight) and their locations, then quickly binds together this information into a meaningful chunk (“black king under check”). These sophisticated operations occur entirely outside conscious awareness.

>> No.11620704

>>11620696
Sorry, I forgot the quotes. That is a quote from Dehaene's Consciousness and the Brain

>> No.11620748

>>11620696
this reminds me of seeing it claimed on some british tv program, that highly trained chess players have repurposed their facial recognition faculties to quickly identify chessboard states, and that this allows them to immediately get the gist of the intrinsic nature of the board state, in the same way they would instantly get a gist of their personal relationship with a human face. the idea was that instead of doing all the calculations, they are able to emotionally guesstimate some "gestalt" quality based on the look of the board, and how it relates to previous games they played. and that this shows as those parts of the brain responsible for facial recognition lighting up when they play chess. but that was over a decade ago, is this still supported by neuroscience or just some bullshit i saw on tv?

>> No.11620776

>>11620748
I'm not aware of any studies that show that chess masters are using the facial recognition area (the FFA, fusiform face area) specifically. But it seems possible. Most people don't realize just how similar human faces are. If humans didn't have this relatively huge area devoted solely to faces, we wouldn't be able to tell people apart. Face blindness (an issue some people have) is, in fact, the "normal" way of seeing faces, in the sense that, it's how we'd all see faces if we saw them the way we see everything else.
There was a study done that showed people a series of shapes and lines that differed by the same small percentages that human faces differ... and regular people couldn't remember them or tell them apart.

>> No.11621453

>>11619044
Consciousness is a (decentralized advanced small structure of specialized neurons) in your head that chooses what to do you will do next by influencing other systems of neurons in the pre-frontal cortex. Kind of like how the brain chooses what the body will do next, the consciousness chooses what the brain will do next.

You can consider consciousness the brain of the brain.

It's like the body trying to understand how the brain works, now of course it knows what to do when a brain tells it orders. Similarly the brain doesn't understand consciousness but knows what to do when the consciousness gives it orders.

It is impossible to feel the essence of what consciousness "is" because we can only use the brain to try and understand it.

btw we never will understand it because consciousness is the final stage of evolution and everything after that is just bigger complexities of the same thing.

>> No.11621463

>>11621453
Thoughts?

>> No.11621572

>>11621463
>by influencing other systems of neurons in the pre-frontal cortex

Based on what we know about the neural signatures of consciousness, the pre-frontal cortex is where consciousness lies, most likely.

>> No.11622450

>>11619355
>>>11619303 (You)
>Besides accidentally, smartass.

By purposefully entering into mortal combat with another creature for mating or territorial disputes and being killed over it.

>> No.11622485

>>11622450
That's not killing yourself, bumface.

>> No.11622649

>>11619044
The ability to understand the question mark in your statement.

>> No.11622965
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11622965

mind =/= brain

>> No.11623051

>>11620582
under idealism you are usually tasked with refuting solipsism or at least explaining it away. Open individualism is the response

>> No.11623061

>>11622965
>completely normal life with ~30% of the normal human brain volume
>civil servant
checks out

>> No.11623062

>>11622965
this is fake

>> No.11623124

>>11619044
i think most peoples idea of consciousness is the combination of all their sensory apparatuses working together to produce a subjective experience.

What is consciousness if your blind
what is consciousness if your deaf.
what is consciousness if your mute
what is consciousness if i you lose sensation to your entire body.

if you keep going you see that when people talk about consciousness they're more talking about what it feels like when you're sensory apparatuses function in conjunction with each other to produce a unified experience.

>> No.11623258

>>11619316
>but the entire time feel like we are on general anesthetic
Anesthetic is about dulling sensory inputs into the brain and the brain's basic unit of cognition is comparing expectation to sensory data. That's why you pass out rather than sit there screaming internally like a brain in a Mi-Go jar.

>> No.11623311

>>11623124
Well if you're blind then visual space ceases to exist since space is only a mental representation, an intution as Kant would say, without hearing there's no sound space, etc, etc. What that means is that the less things you have the more you're like nothing, the more you are like the Atman, one with the universe as an enlightened Brahmin as the ancient vedas teach, which can free us from the samsara, the cycle of birth and rebirth. When one meditates and thinks in nothing aiming at the Brahman, one can realize the truth of the insensibility of the whole to which we all belong - the soul is everywhere.

>> No.11623332

It's a helluva ride, Dude.

>> No.11623372

>>11620137
And?
You're conscious can be measured anywhere between potato and Einstein on LSD

>> No.11623413

>>11623311
actually the senses have some level of crossover, like taste/smell and sound/feel
the second half of your post is utter nonsense

>> No.11623584

>>11620416
Someone who makes a post this stupid knows neither philosophy or science

>> No.11623701

>>11623372
And?

>> No.11625663

>>11619070
What's experiencing the illusion

>> No.11625686
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11625686

They call themselves /sci when they can't even into quantum mechanics

>>>/x/ come and learn a thing or two down the rabbit holes scitards

>> No.11625697
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11625697

>>11619070
>Consciousness is an illusion
>your brain fools you into thinking

>> No.11625705

>>11619079
fuck you i'm already at the peak with my neutral monism i merged everything into one reality

>> No.11625718

>>11623413
>the second half of your post is utter nonsense
completely trapped within samsara

>> No.11625740

>>11623124
>What is consciousness if your blind
>what is consciousness if your deaf.
>what is consciousness if your mute
>what is consciousness if i you lose sensation to your entire body.
It is nothing. But at the same time, what is sight, sound, space, etc. without the experience of it. There is a common misconception that just because one might say that consciousness isn't created by a material substrate, it does not mean that it is not still reliant on the material world to manifest and vice versa. The absolute is not consciousness, nor is it material. Just like how the space around the object defines the object, and objects define the void between them.

>> No.11625747

>>11619082
Even E.Coli has intelligence to get foods.
They don't lack intelligence but just has lower intelligence.

>> No.11625768

>>11623311
>if you're blind then visual space ceases to exist since space is only a mental representation
this is a very nice idea.

>> No.11625769

I found the strict definition of consciousness and programmed an artificial general intelligence.
What should I do next?
Writing a paper?

>> No.11626065

>>11625740
that is right, consciousness is the nothing that hold our thoughts together, ourselves included

>> No.11626388

>>11619044
Prima materia

>> No.11626488

What we think of as "consciousness" is just agency in the context of attention and (metacognitive) memory. In reality, everything we think of as "conscious" is still completely automatic.

>> No.11627185

>>11619110
Holy shit you're retarded.
That "feeling" is conciousness.

>> No.11627195

>>11625769
t. p-zombie brainlet

>> No.11629114

>>11619044
bump

>> No.11629149

>>11619044
The product of billions of years of DNA evolution.
We are concious because it keeps us alive.