State of Emergency coming up.

I, not infrequently, suffer from a frustration dream. When I do I usually wake up from it suffering from a headache that then lasts most of the day. A frustration dream is sort of like a nightmare, accept horror is not involved. Instead it involves failure, humiliation, loss, inability to fight back, etc. Lately, when I’ve had one of these dreams I’ve reflected on the plot and it seems rather remarkable to me that the plots haven’t involved anything I remember in past life experience or reflection. They don’t involve places I’ve been or thought about. They don’t involve any people, real or fictional, that I ever remember encountering. You’d think that a dream would involve scrambled tidbits of past experience, but many of these dreams seem completely unique, involving nothing I ever remember encountering or reflecting upon. Interesting how the mind works.

That we do not understand consciousness means little and it certainly does not mean what you want it to mean

The quantum supercomputer Planet 3 does not understand human consciousness yet it spawned it nonetheless

Self-understanding may be inherently impossible to the nature of perception if it is logically impossible for an entity to understand in toto another entity of similar complexity to itself (probably off by several orders of magnitude)

Our day to day existence is a tiny fraction of what really exists, a tiny window presenting illusory order in a tsunami of chaos, i.e. try to understand an acid trip

We think we domesticated plants but really plants domesticated us

Thanks for all the fish

>What do you think I want it to mean?

“Artificial intelligence” is silicon consciousness

Silicon consciousness already exists and manifests each time a computer makes an if-else decision

The Universe created carbon consciousness with a small ball of rock covered by a thin layer of oxygen, nitrogen, and water at the right temperature

Extrapolate

Essay/conversation on microtubules and consciousness.

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/sites/default/files/Consciousness%20Microtubules%20and%20Quantum%20World.pdf

Again if the dissident right or whatever it’s calling itself wants to lay claim to Truth, we have to do better when it comes to science.

“Likely that a jellyfish is not conscious in the sense that we are, that only descendants of the urbilaterian are conscious, and only those descendants that have retained a reasonably large collection of neurons at their front end.”

You’re doing a bait-and-switch with what you mean by ‘conscious’. Social cues in lobsters may very well resemble social cues and caring about status and all the rest of that juicy stuff in humans. They may be near-as-dammit identical for all we know.
Here’s the rub: those behaviours are largely *unconscious*. We bristle when the hot chick talks to chad (OR WHATEVER) and we don’t always know why.

Indeed a core part of your argument is that social behaviours are at the very least *partly* genetic in nature.

This is ‘consciousness’ that basically has no work to do: being *consciously aware* of your social strategies is something some people try to learn and do better at (hence ‘game’ etc. but also the slimy left-wing tactics etc.) but the lion’s share of the work is done on auto-pilot and we don’t even know we’re doing it.

–

“That lobsters have the same neurochemical response to social status suggests that the common ancestor of lobsters and men, the urbilaterian, had that neurochemical response to status, which means it had status, which means it was likely aware of other creatures like itself as creatures, that it experienced status as we do, desired status as we do. Thus, conscious as we are conscious.”

Everything you’ve written is defensible up to the closing leap of illogic: “thus, conscious as we are conscious”.

Not so. If I came up with a full explanation of all the parts of human consciousness that are also shared by the lobster, you’d immediately disagree, saying something like “this doesn’t account for X” – X being anything from reflexive self-reflection or a yearning for abstract principles to the nuances of group sensibility or our experience of aesthetic curiosity. (Or a million other better examples.)

Our consciousness is qualitatively different from that of a lobster, and this is where the ‘qualia’ lovers will say “yes there’s something inexplicable, impenetrable, ineffable and privately subjective that cannot be accounted for in ANY material theory based on mind equals brain” but they’re wrong: the differences between humans and all non-human animals are entirely behavioural – language most of all.

As for the philosophical zombies that people have talked about, these are NOT the same as ‘NPCs’: philosophical zombies are defined as having the EXACT SAME behaviour as a normal human, but no inner subjective life. NPCs do not behave like normal humans, and if you encountered a subject who you told an Irish joke, and he said he felt guilty about laughing because something in him baulks at the idea of racist humour, yet he feels a faint nostalgia for a time in his past when he recalls particular comedians telling such jokes – happy times – then on what grounds could ANYONE entertain the possibility that you were talking to a zombie with no internal subjective life?

If that were the case, we’d have no way of predicting other people’s behaviour. On the contrary we’re rather good at it.

The ‘hard problem’ you’re talking about is Chalmers’ piece of tommyrot which is of the same basic family as all the ‘qualia’ arguments. These always reduce to epiphenomena that have no effects and no work to do. The beef is always behavioural and what it amounts to is this:

For some phenomena the way to understand them is through physical laws (eg. a ballistic missile’s likely trajectory).
For some phenomena, (eg. an iPhone), that way of thinking is not only onerous and prohibitively complex but it fails to capture the point of interest under observation, so we use a different ‘stance’, that of design: the object in my hand is designed to send an analogue of English by means I only half-understand, and the idea is they’ll appear on other people’s computer screens at unpredictable times and places in the future. A thorough physics analysis will fail to describe the important features of this but the design stance succeeds quite well.

Other phenomena (“what will John do next?”) are inadequately explained by the design stance: sure he’s contracting a muscle now, ever so slightly: that muscle is intended to make changes in the angle of his arm. Now his breathing’s growing faster which suggests an increased oxygen requirement, and various other things. But what will he do next? Shake your hand? Flick the Vs? Punch you?
A different stance is needed: we ‘read his mind’ so to speak, put ourselves in his shoes, imagine what motivations he has, what beliefs he has and so on.

This is the ‘intentional stance’, treating him as if he’s an ‘intentional system’ (in philosophical jargon). Whether he REALLY REALLY IS an intentional system can be indefinitely postponed: maybe he really is an NPC or a philosophical zombie, but our best bet of guessing what John will do next comes from treating him as if he’s a human being with all the competences that go with that status.

This is the way to understand consciousness: behaviour interpreted through the lens of the intentional stance.

You’re looking for a True Scotsman, not one of these border creatures who could almost be from Northumbria or Cumbria.

Humans, we can pretty safely assume, are conscious in the ways that matter enough to cause you to even talk about it in the first place.

Computers aren’t. Computers may have strong opinions about some things: temperature, battery health, the presence of disks; but for the most part they’re completely passive and interestless. Left to their own devices, computers literally tick over doing mindless ‘daemon’ checks and waiting to be interacted with. They never seem to get sick of it.
Are they conscious? No, it’d be absurd to claim they were.

But: if you met a computer that was anything *but* interestless, that seemed to have a ‘one track mind’ about something, then you could attribute some form of consciousness to it.

The classic example is game-playing computers, the cliché being chess: did the computer try to fool you into thinking that it was trying to take your bishop when in fact it was playing a deep game with an eye on the big picture?

Frankly, yes.

If you find yourself saying “the computer behaved exactly AS IF it was trying to fool you (etc. etc. as above) but REALLY it was doing no such thing”, then you’re no longer talking about fooling, but rather you’re zooming out and focusing on other priorities: perhaps you just *know* that the computer isn’t *really* conscious because it’s demonstrably *unconscious* in other contexts…….. unlike humans………

But wait: aren’t there plenty of times when humans are unaware of important things and behaving like automatons? We’ve all laughed at such things.

There really isn’t a principled line to be drawn. Most things are somewhere between unequivocally conscious and unequivocally unconscious, and some things are unequivocally conscious most of the time while other things are unequivocally unconscious ALL of the time.

Perhaps some day we’ll encounter a being (or perhaps Being) that’s unequivocally conscious ALL of the time, but for now humans are more than capable of passing muster as ‘as conscious as is necessary for our purpose’, while animals are best seen as a matter of taste. Some might sincerely believe that a chimp learning American Sign Language is highly conscious in a highly human kind of way, while others will note that the chimp may perform tricks with language in order to get food, but left to its own devices it won’t use language at all.

And so on……..

This doesn’t sound satisfying: we yearn for a more precise answer, but what we *can* absolutely throw out is the ‘solution’ of magic dust that can’t be explained but is crucially important somehow in a way that’s unrelated to behaviour. That’s incoherent and unproductive.

Treating people as behaviourally conscious agents, best understood from the ‘intentional stance’ (ie. things with beliefs, wishes and motivations), is the best technique we have for understanding people, and would be the best technique for understanding conscious (or ‘conscious’) robots, aliens, animals or anything else.

Jim’s consciousness is animal consciousness, not Cartesian consciousness. I believe it to be a purely material phenomenon.

It is not at all incoherent. If you can, point out the contradiction.

I merely dislike when a term is clumsily used in a debate to mean different things to different people.

It hardly needs saying, but the fact that some coma patients remain conscious without giving any external indication thereof demonstrates that behavioral animal consciousness and subjective Cartesian consciousness are not the same thing.

I do not believe in a sharp discontinuity between descendants of the urbilatarian and non-descendants. I expect there would be a gradient of behavioral consciousness. And I think the reason computers cannot do what cockroaches can, is that computers have attempt to adapt their software to mimic for a few decades under the guidance of some human engineers, whereas cockroaches have their hardware adapted by the vastly greater evolutionary processing power of planet Earth over eons.

I do not find Biblical evidence for the idea that disembodied spirits prefer short over long time stays in human-grade hosts. They seem to want to stay in a human body as long as possible. Granted the pigs did not work out. Perhaps the shoe did not fit. In that case, AI possession should be a well-known phenomenon by the time we start building pig-quality artificial brains. This would be the optimistic scenario. The pessimistic one is that the same discipline which prevents the demons from refuting Western materialism on camera will also allow them to keep their capacity to possess AI hidden until the opportune moment to institute world government.

The Prince of the Air’s house is not divided, else it could not stand.