On 5/9/2014 5:09 PM, Dan Asimov wrote:
My point was in the word "how" -- insofar as there is no concept of "consciousness" in physics. (By referring to neurological correlates, I was trying to imply that by "how" I mean above and beyond those.)
And I was pointing by analogy to the fact that in most theories of physics we don't know "how" they work - only that they do. I agree that we don't have a well defined, objective (i.e. third person) concept of consciousness. We have first person experience (or at least I do) and we infer similar experience in others based on behavior. But that doesn't mean that we can't come up with definitions and distinctions that are 3rd person objective. For example, we might say that a being is self-aware if can reason that Godel's incompleteness theorem applies to it (Penrose would like that one). At a more practical, engineering level I think we will learn how to give conceptual reasoning to robots, like Mars rovers, which includes self-representation and complex levels of motivation and subtasks and learning. And to the extent we can tweak these, e.g. give the rover a sense of humor, we will have solved the "hard problem of consciousness". And when someone asks, "But how does that make it conscious?" we'll reply, "Hypothesi non fingo."
In fact "consciousness" can refer to several potentially separate things: the ability to think, or self-awareness, or having experiences. To be clear, the one I mean (by far the most mysterious of these) is the last one.
It also should be borne in mind that the examples of consciousness we would all agree on (humans, and probably at least mammals if not all animals) could be only the teensiest fraction of the kinds of consciousness that actually occur in the universe.
Unless we have some definition of consciousness (like the one based on Godelian reflection) this is a meaningless question since "kinds of consciousness" could include anything. I think it has to be consciousness similar enough to human consciousness that we recognize it through behavior. Otherwise it's hard to say what the concept would mean. Brent
--Dan
On May 9, 2014, at 11:12 AM, meekerdb <meekerdb@verizon.net> wrote:
But that's a misunderstanding of what "having the slightest idea" means. We don't have the slightest idea why matter warps spacetime - but we had a good equation to calculate it. We don't have the slightest idea why charged particles obey fermi statistics - but we can calculate what they do. And when we can make robots that act just as conscious as people and we can design them to be comedians or mathematicians or artists, we still won't have "the slightest idea" how physics gives rises to consciousness at some fundamental level - but nobody will care and the question will seem moot.
On 5/9/2014 6:55 AM, Dan Asimov wrote:
No researcher has the vaguest idea of what consciousness is, and at least at present any scientific progress in this area is inconceivable.
We can analyze the neurological correlates of feelings all we want, and we won't have the slightest idea of how a physical situation gives rise to experiences.
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