SENTIENCE

Mmkay, is sentience/consiousness/ect quantum, chemical/electrical, or SPIRITUALLL?

definitely the first three, if by quantum you mean that it obeys qm laws.

Well, what I meant was, is the "mind" an aspect of the quantum realm (schrodinger's cat and the like), instead of solely a set of chemical reactions?

If we could even understand out own sentinence, it would be because we were too simple to understand it.

>>3

what the fuck are you smoking and where can i buy some?

i was sober when i said that, but my usual bagload comes from chris on the corner of clapham common.

Sentience, like everything else, is physically materialistic.  If amino acids can be formed in the right conditions, it is not unreasonable to suppose that sentience can be formed in the right conditions.  Nor does this make us 'not special'; that is a mistake of the theologian. 

I would like to take this time to say that the view above is not properly scientific.  It's just as much a belief/hope as any religion.  But it's a lot more attractive if you're in the right frame of mind.

I read some crank's site a few years back, said the brain was quantum in that it tapped into other quantum realities or something, because it was such a complex system that it existed above this reality or something. 

>>8
do you know what quantum means

the study of elementary quantities, quanta

now, in what way is a brain quantum?
besides being composed of many elementary particles

>>8
lol stoned.

We don't know. Insufficient data. There are many books on the subject, about critical thought, the differences betwee nbrain cells and computers etc... But we don't know.

>>some crank's site

you should have stopped writing there and deleted the internet off ur desktoppe just in case.

Consciousness (and sentience) is an emergent property of the connections between the neurons in our brain.

human's arent made of some special matter.  you can disassemble and reassemble a human as easily as you could any other complex object, and that person would be as alive and sentient as the same person born naturally.  this doesnt mean that people are cold and dead, but rather that everything in the universe is or has the potentual to be alive.

>>14
IF MAN COULD ARTIFICIALLY CREATE A BRAIN ATOM FOR ATOM THERE IS NO PROOF THAT IT WOULD SPONTANEOUSLY BECOME CONSCIOUS

>>15
Proof is impossible outside of formal systems ("maths" for the uninitiated). It's approximations and guesses all the way down baby.

>>15

If someone just created a brain atom by atom and neuron by neuron, it wouldn't become conscious.  Our brains and our consciousnesses don't just spring into existence.  They grow and learn by reacting to stimuli.

>>16
I WAS WAITING FOR "THERE IS NO PROOF THAT IT WOULDN'T"

A MORE DEBATABLE PHRASEOLOGY FOR THE ORIGINAL POST WOULD HAVE BEEN  "THERE IS NO _EVIDENCE_ THAT IT WOULD SPONTANEOUSLY BECOME CONSCIOUS" (BECAUSE THERE ISN'T)

YOU ARE RIGHT SOLID PROOFS EXIST SOLELY IN THE MATH SCIENCES AND WITH REGARDS TO REPRODUCIBLE PHYSICAL DEMONSTRATIONS, THOUGH THE PROCESS OF EMPIRICAL THEORY AND EXPERIMENTATION CAN BE FRACTIONALIZED TO ELUCIDATE CORE PROCESSES AND EXTRAPOLATE THEM UP TO IMPOSSIBLY COMPLEX SYSTEMS, THOUGH MAGNITUDES OF SCALE CAN FUNDAMENTALLY ALTER THE FRACTIONAL DYNAMIC SO, AS YOU SAY, GUESSES ALL THE WAY DOWN (UNTIL WE EVENTUALLY REACH ALL THE WAY DOWN AND KNOW IT DIRECTLY.... SUCKS WE'LL ALL BE LONG DEAD BY THEN)

>>17

Wrong.  If you had created a certain human brain atom by atom, and patterned it after a typical adult human brain, certain thoughts or experiences would be implied in its structure.

Just my opinion though.

>>18

Why that caps lock, why!? T.T

so the broin whould be shocked to not be in its body suddenly after a life that whaould probably not be on earth or make sence as we cant possibly control it wit that detail.
Everything comes back to infinity

There is no essence called consciousness. There is only a definition. You use the ocean of thought to dilineate a subset which you cling to and call consciousness.

When AI reaches a sufficient level of complexity, it will reach "consciousness," which is just a definition.

>>19

Hmm.  I suppose you would be correct.  If you knew beforehand what connections between neurons to make, you could create a fully functioning sentient brain.

Consciousness is an emergent property of the biological functions of the Brain. I'm sure there's more than enough proof of this with aphasia and phantom limbs.

If you could somehow magically reconstruct a brain atom for atom, neuron for neuron and shoot electricity through it, it will have the mental states we consider "conscious". It’s the whole brain-in-the-vat, Matrix, Descartes thing people.

If AI could be considered intelligent, it would never be to the point we consider intelligent like a human being. As Searle has mentioned in his Chinese Room Parable that difference with a computer is that it processes information through syntax, not semantics. If we take that to account, I'm not sure how practical it is. A Turing-compatible machine still seems consciousness, even if we know otherwise.

Now, my whole beef with this Searlian-Physicalism is how the hell is there volition based mental causation?

And for God’s sake, don’t bring in Kant-axiom crap or Nihilism BS. Most sane people ignore that crap now.

If consciousness is just physical interaction, then why am I myself and not you?

>>25

only because of your physical distinctness, and the different physical structure of your body and brain.  Why should it be otherwise?

Person = "body" + "mind" = features + state

Your DNA determines how you operate. Everything you see and do determines your state. Your brain's structure and your current state determine your personality. If I cloned you and managed to export your state to it, or make him/her live through everything you did in the exact same way, the clone would behave exactly as you do. Of course, the later is impossible, exporting is probably impossible, and cloning is still imperfect.

>>25

I am my consciousness.  My consciousness is an emergent property of the neurons that compose my brain.  The states of my neurons are results of my DNA plus my experiences.  Nature plus nuture.

You have different DNA and different experiences.  Thus you are not me.

>>24

in theory, if you had a computer powerful enough, you could estimate all the inter-particle reactions on the quantum level, by doing this in real-time, and feeding into it interactions from the envyronment, you could in theory, make a totally artificial human that would develop, act, etc.  like any other human.

for that matter, it would be possible at some point in the future when we more fully understand why and how the brain works to make a "person" that is more intelegent than our current system allows using this method.

there is already some talk about doing this.  it may happen in our lifetimes, for the young people here.
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm

Well whatever we discover in the future, the theories here are innocent until proven guilty. Most likely we do have free will, we can be predicted, for instance we will scream in agony if soeone shoots us in the gut, but generally we can choose what to think etc and we have properties that a transistor cannot achieve.

So what we know so far is that we apparently have free will, but there are still questions. It's not as if we are suddenly going to go OMG IM NOT SENTIENT IM A ROBOT, then suddenly poof we turn into robots.

>>30

free will is a linguistic trick purported by old philosophy.

>>22
The human brain contains more than 100,000,000,000 nerv cells, all of which are assumed to contain non-binary information (meaning a cell can contain more information than a 1 or 0). Assume that you'll need at least the same amount of transistors to reach that kind of processing power. Also consider that the nerv cells re-wire themselves according to our thinking habits and can communicate using different transmittor substances (such as amino acids). I'm suspecting that we won't see a computer with this capability in the humankind's lifespan. I hate it when people underestimate the human brain. They seem to think it's some simple thing and all our "consciousness of being" is in the soul. gb2/school/ I say.

>>32
It's a thought experiment really, so happening sooner or later is beyond the point. The point is- can it ever happen? (and Searle saids no!)

The Right Casual Powers argument has always bugged me so I think this deserves elaboration. My (limited) knowledge of neurons is that they ARE binary. They are either inhibited or excited, ie 0 or 1. Neurotransmitters really just tell a neuron to fire more or less. Neurons in groups are more than binary.
The plasticity of the brain has been some-what simulated in Neural Networks, where "weights" are redistributed constantly to simulate learning.
The problem is, with current computing power, it is impossible to simulate 100,000,000,000 neurons, but really my question is this then: Current AI is syntax based. It's all just IF cases and look up tables and algorithms. And really good programmers can create algorithms that modify themselves.
Can computers ever reach a point where the information is semantic based? Is sematnic based processing achievable through syntax? Is semantic based processing a necessary condition for sentience?  (though I suppose it is for human-esque sentinince)

Oh, just denying that free will exists suggests free will to me. Epiphenomenalists, go to hell!

neurons is that they ARE binary

Not really. They only exhibit some binary behaviour once they pass the firing threshold. Even when they do, there is a complex interaction across the synaptic gap. Then there are the myriad axons attached to dendrites, each with different influence strengths.

And don't forget that neurons can also fire at different rates. They usually don't fire at the fastest rate they're capable of, and this too also has an effect of recovery periods of the receiving neuron.

The brain isn't binary. Simulating it on a digital machine would be bloody hard. I suspect (but cannot be certain) that a digital representation of a human brain would have exponential or combinatorial time complexity.

>>33
syntax vs. semantics based

you mean programming languages that uses macros as opposed to something else?

>>35

By syntax, I just mean rule based. Computers just follow rules vis a vis humans, who when processing information, have intentionality and meaning. (ie, semantics)

So, for example, take a Turing compatible machine. It has all the behaviors to 'trick' us into thinking it is intelligent. But it is all just formal processing with no "meaning". If I kick the Turing Machine and it gives an output "Ouch!", we can infer that it really isn't "feeling" pain but just spitting an output.
Read up on the Chinese Room Argument for a better explaination!:http://www.macrovu.com/CCTWeb/CCT4/CCTMap4.html

I'm sure there are a lot of follow-up disputes to my example. Behaviorists wouldn't care for the difference. The Right Casual Powers is all murky and confusing. An internalized Chinese Room is equally confusing.

>>34
I secede that Neurons aren't binary! Thanks for the information. But I still think Neurons can be simulated. Here is a more accurate representation on how Neurons are simulated in computers:http://www.macrovu.com/CCTWeb/CCT5A/CCT5APostulates.html

Ignoring plausibility for now ( it’s just a thought experiment), Connectionist would argue if the brain's Neurons are simulated, is the computer now considered a conscious, semantic, intentional, self-referencing being? I mean, it's simulating what I think are responsible for the Right Casual Powers.

And is a simulation in virtual space valid? If we simulate a hurricane on a computer, nobody believes that it's a real hurricane. Just more to chew on.

Consider an extreme thougth experiment. You simulate earth and it's environment and population fully. Everybody's neurons, everything. You then proceed to burn a city and it's inhabitants. Are they conscious, have you been "cruel" for real?

I say yes.

>>36
Thanks for the urls. There's a lot of info here. Good, fun, reading.

>>37
Yes

>>37
>>39

I can only agree to that thought experiment If I believed the mind can be produced by a set of formal systems.
If "The Right Casual Powers" can be simulated by formal processes, then I agree with the conclusion of the thought experiment. (though I'm still hesitant to believe that things that happen in a virtual space really matter, since there's the simple metaphysical distinction. And wouldn't it suck to have to keep the simulation on indefinitely!?)

But seeing as I'm yet to be convinced of that, the thought experiment is moot to me. (it's like asking me to think that if humans could fly by just flapping their arms a lot, could they do a barrel role?)

Bad Analogies Abound!

I think you guys are still thinking at too high of a level.  neurons may or may not be binary, but that's irrelevent.  If you model everything from the subatiomic level, the binaryness or nonbinaryness of the larger cell is concerved, given the model is programmed correctly.  mind you this would take quantum computers so powerful they may or may not be developed in our lifetime, but it COULD be done.

>>41
if i want to fly, i don't model a bird from the subatomic level. likewise here.

>>42

I have a materialistic belief.  It's a 'belief' in the same sense that a political or religious affiliation is a belief.  So I'm not interested in practicality.  what I am interested in is the idea that if you COULD build a brain or a bird, boson for boson, fermion for fermion, it would initially be indistinct from that upon which it was modelled.  If you instantaneously put an adult brain into a certain unexpected context, though, it would probably have trauma.  This gets into blade-runner inquiries about implanted memories, and the psychological result.

>>43
right, right. but here we are atleast trying to look at it from a practical point of view.

You peepul are SMART

HOLY SHIT. CONSTRUCTIVE SCIENTIFIC DEBATE. ON 4CHAN.

My brain has swelled with your insight, thank you.

Long story short. Insufficient information. The least we can do is try to find the properties of the individual brain cell and neuron. The 1-0 transistor mathematics of all computing was developped from the ground up, we don't know where it is heading or even if we will develop systems which can emulate brain cells.

It's going to be some time before we can create a computer which can be called "sentient" or at least a decision maker (rather than a decision simplifier).

Consciousness as a manifestation of quantum effects is an idea that originates with Penrose. Nobody really takes it seriously, I think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose#Physics_and_Consciousness

My own view is that everything is deterministic, including the mind. I am (obviously) not sure what leads to our sense of existence, but it should have something to do with a brain/mind forming a model of the world which includes itself, and being able to predict the behaviour of its environment using that model. Certainly, some day we will come to understand, and create sentient computer programs whose accomplishments will far surpass ours.

Another interesting view is that sentience is itself an evolutionary adaption (rather than a side effect of increasing intelligence), but I've never really heard a solid reasoning for this line of thinking.

You can't prove scientifically that the universe is deterministic though, due to the heisenburg uncertainty principle. All Penrose is saying is that because we cannot predict everything absolutely we cannot say for certain whether the universe is deterministic or not and thus cannot say whether we have free will or not.

Also, can you stop being irrationally hostile to the idea of free will, it certainly seems that way, I exist, perceive, think and can choose to do what I want. If you exist as a sentient being the evidence is right there. This evidence disproves the idea that we are all robots with as much sentience as a rock, or that inanimate objects are our equals.

>>49
Shhhh... it's easier to control them if they think it's their fate.

Science isn't really about proving anything, it's about predicting. And if sometime in the future a "Theory of Everything" is created, which manages to correctly predict all fundamental interactions, is deterministic, and more elegant/simple than the current complex string theories and whatnot, then I'd think it likely that the universe itself is deterministic. I believe that such a theory should exist, but of course with our current knowledge it seems just as likely that the universe has a fundamental randomness to it.

Also, when it comes to the details, Penrose is saying a bit more:
Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have constructed a theory in which human consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in microtubules.

I'm not hostile to the idea of free will at all. Whether free will comes from some sort of randomness, or simply a lack of total knowledge, no one can deny that it seems to exist. Free will would be an illusion in a deterministic universe, but it would still seem just as real to the entities experiencing it. We certainly are robots, in a way; we are information processing machines. In computer science, there are enough examples of programs doing things their designers never expected. Determinism does not imply predictable behaviour, at least not once your system gets complex enough.

I would like to restate some ideas that I have already presented but in the context of 'Free Will':

1. Our knowledge of the universe is completely ruled by formal processes.
2. If everything is decided by formal processes, that must mean the brain is also decided by formal processes. (at the very least, at a micro level)

Conclusion: If our minds are controlled by particles, the same particles that make-up planets and rocks, computers and machines, how do we have sentience? What’s so special about us?

Sentience (in this case) means: A conscious thinking, being with intentionality, self reference and semantics with mental causation.

Searle would argue something along the lines of "Right Causal Powers". Of course, along this line of logic, I no longer understand the complete discredit of Strong AI, though I can reconcile to the fact in no way do computers think now.

>>49
You are hardly being charitable. You seem more worried about the moral implications of determinism rather than the epistemic fact.
>>51
Unpredictable/Random does NOT mean free. Besides, at a macro level, the level which matters, things follow Newtonian physics awfully well. Free is about making choices. The problem with the metaphor of a human being just a robot is that a robot lacks certain aspects of information processing that are (so far) unique to humans. A behaviorist would say no but they are largely wrong because they ignore first-person ontology and the fact that internal mental states MATTER.

Also, you might be interested in the Libet experiments: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet

Searle kind of mentions an argument about consciousness through evolution. He doesn’t take it very far though.

MetaConlusion!: We don’t fucking really know but it’s still worthwhile to question. Most of Science rides the determinism and epiphenomenal train though.

Unpredictable/Random does NOT mean free.
That is a good point actually. I guess I was slightly confused; I assumed that with total knowledge of the system it's in, a sentient entity would already know which choices it would 'have' to make. But now that I think about it, that entire idea is flawed, because it would seem logically impossible for an entity _inside_ a system to have complete knowledge of that system (both state and transition rules) and thereby itself.

Could you elaborate on these "certain aspects of information processing that are (so far) unique to humans"?

I don't know much about Searle, but according to Wikipedia he seems slightly confused. Apparently he believes that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, but for some reason believes that only biological molecules can lead to it? He's also apparently the man behind the Chinese room argument, which I've always considered silly; to me, it seems obvious that the room as a whole is conscious.

Libet's experiments are certainly interesting. It all sounds quite familiar, so I must've heard about it before. They seem to just reaffirm the 'consciousness is an illusion' idea.

Sorry for the late reply, finals and all.

Could you elaborate on these "certain aspects of information processing that are (so far) unique to humans"?

I'm referring to the Right Casual Powers that allow for semantic processing. What are the Right Casual Powers? Searle says something about "neurons", "the brain"...Yeah. I agree it's a bit weak to assume only the brain has RCP. But Silicon hasn't proved to have them so that's why I'm partial to Searle’s Argument there. Admitingly, A Strong AI is not completely discredited then. But the way machines process information now, there is no hope for Strong AI.

I like his Chinese Room Argument much better. "The Whole System Understands Chinese!" response is classic, and his retort would be the "Internalized Chinese Room", which can be found on the debate maps above. Personally, I don't see the room semantically processing anything ever, not even the whole system, only that it has the behavior that it does.

>>19
You are corrrect. That is indeed what would happen. Though, if the brain was just made and kept 'alive' and it were 'conscious' rather than subconsciously active, it would be a very very confused brain since it would lack pretty much all natural stimuli (senses). I would make the assumption that a brain in a such a situation would automicatically be and make itself unconscious as a natural defense mechanism much like the hallucinations of people close to death.


>>21
Shock or confusion. Unless it were rigged up to stimuli... Even then it would still have a high chance of being confused/shock unless it understood what was going on beforehand.


>>51
fundamental randomness?
random eh...
if you're walking down the street and meet a young lady and you chat with her is that a random meeting? You both decided to go down the street for a reason, you both had a compelling reason to talk, etc...
Point being the same goes for nature and everything else, while thing's may seem random it's just a very very complex and intricate set of nonrandom interactions that appear random. Randomness is a guise.

If I held up a deck of cards and said choose one randomly and you selected a card. Then you recreated the entire universe (not just known universe) up the point you made the decision to choose randomly, you would in fact choose the same card every single time you recreated that existance, because everything was in place for that randomness to happen the same way it happened before.

many of the threads on this forum are interelated and you keep on going over the same points over and over redefining them for different people, someone needs to make a unified thread

SEEEENNNNTTTTIIIIEEEENNNNCCCCE

I'm sentient! This calls for a celebration.

can you bitches learn to spell properly? It's SENTENCE for fucks sake.

oh, and people who say that they are spiritual are gay or just trying real hard to sound trendy.

i have only seen evidence to suggest i am sentient, therefore i am the only sentient being in existence and you must treat me like your god

>>54

That's ok. Finals over here as well.

These are actually interesting arguments, but to begin with the Right Causal Powers, I'm not sure I completely understand what you're saying. Is there a definition of the term, something I can work with? If it is 'whatever makes the human brain different/sentient', or something similar, then that would be circular reasoning.

Or are these RCP defined as some kind of unknown property of the materials being used? First of all, every material is, at some basic level, the same kind of goo: quarks, leptons, bosons; any property would have to be emergent. I assume that it would have to be some kind of information-processing-related property (I cannot think what else it could be, other than 'magic'/'a soul'). Since you imply that silicon so far doesn't appear have this property, it would have to be something beyond Turing Completeness, which (AFAIK) is not possible. As you say yourself, this is not really an argument against Strong AI. In fact, to me it just sounds like a good bunch of handwaving.

Now, the Internalized Chinese Room is more interesting. Correct me if I'm wrong here; the change from the previous Chinese Room is that this time, there is only the person, who has perfectly memorized the entire rulebook. For some reason, we are now supposed to think that the system (the person working basically as a computer/robot + his perfect memory) cannot be a separate conscious entity by itself. The obvious question is, why not? Computer programs can be layered (e.g. a scripting language, interpreted by an interpreter, which itself is interpreted by the CPU), why shouldn't it be possible to layer consciousnesses? (Ignoring resource constraints of course, since this is a thought experiment.)

From what I found with Google, the argument seems to be based on the idea that the person doesn't understand what he's communicating. I see two flaws here: (1) 'understanding' is not defined, and (2) as outlined above: whatever understanding is, it could very well exist in the system layered on top of (and completely contained in) the person's own consciousness.

>>55
fundamental randomness?

Yes; Quantum mechanics, and all that jazz. There are no certainties, only probability distributions. According to some interpretations of QM, "recreating the universe" could lead to it taking a different path the second time around. People tried to restore the determinism by saying that it's just Heisenberg - you disturb what you measure - and that underneath that the universe is ruled by hidden variables. Then this Bell guy came along with his tests and experiments, and mostly rules out the hidden variable theories. Not entirely conclusively though; I'm still in denial.

>>61 <- post was truncated because it was too fucking boring to read

I agree with >>31

100 GET POAST MOAR

I'm sentient. I doubt quantum has much to do with it, and I'm sure spiritual doesn't have anything to do with it. So I'm going to go with chemical/electrical.

Consciousness doesn't exist. Apply Hitchens' razor.