SENTIENCE

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

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.