Forum Borealis has become a goto podcast of mine. It was really cool chatting with Al.

Nobody was suggesting that the actual word did work!

Given that we have no consensus on any definition of the word this distinction is moot. Perhaps the difficulty in defining it is due, at least in part, to it not being a single 'thing'? Maybe we should be more open-minded to this notion?
Can't you see how slippery and vague discussions become - and yes, you are right, this is exactly the way they talk. My reference to anaesthesia was meant to remind you that we aren't talking about something vague or metaphysical, we are talking about something utterly concrete. Imagine you were under the knife, but that the anaesthetic had worn off (but you were still paralysed from the muscle relaxant drug they use), would you say, "consciousness is just a word we've assigned to a collection of biological/neurological processes"!
I guess we see slipperiness and vagueness where it suits us :). I find the phrase "consciousness is fundamental" pretty vague... certainly it's easier said than explained or envisaged.

There is obviously huge amounts of correlative evidence to support the notion that consciousness is just a word we've assigned to a collection of biological/neurological processes (injuries, pharmacology, developing infant brain etc). Probably too much to completely dismiss it outright. Again, I appreciate that many of us tend to concentrate on the evidence we prefer.
 
I do not want to sound know-it-all and offer the following as simple science. I am aware that it is so simple that it is hard to understand. Dennett's arguments are semantic and can be easily recast in the methodology of separating the environments of the physical and the informational.

I have never seen an example of consciousness or mentation (mental activity) do work (science definition)! Work is force times distance. There is no force vector and nothing specifically moves a distance. (I am doubtful about PK)

However, mentation DOES have measurables that are not in physical space!!!!!! There are processes, whereby living things can link information objects into relationships, thereby creating mental work output. These new objects of information are real in infospace and can reduce entropy and increase organization.

A project leader can speak to a group and lay out a plan for achievement. Do we measure her/his work, as the force pushing-out air and how far have the sound waves traveled?????? OR do we measure the work in other ways, such as the % of the instructions that are effectively communicated to each associate? Better coordinated output of synchronized behavior can be measured as productivity increase. The plan expressed can be modeled and its new patterns measured for the correlations of the variables, against a prior standard.

And the the thing about Dennett's view, that really "cheeses me off", is that he tries to tie it to Darwin. The same Charles Darwin who believed and endorsed mental evolution. If something has gained in competency it has not gained an increase in physical prowess - it has gained in knowledge and understanding of relationships, including abstract relationships. These gains in negentropy are measured in information science, and in fact, we have a lot of solid science behind them. What we don't have is a clear message to sort the conflation between physical work W = FD and metal work = better organization derived from structured information.

Someone works out a logic problem and develops an algorithm that will connect the information structures in such a way that personal understanding and specific data can be gained. No W =FD!!!!! But mental work = gain in structured information ( measurable as increased probability for competence is the outcome).

This gain is measured by such models as Cp and CpK used to measure a process's capability. Competence is not free from work. Danny Dennett will tell you how hard he has worked on his ideas. But who thinks his ideas "work".
I think you are rather missing the point.

First, there is always a certain tension between the 'scientific' meaning of a word (science grabbed existing words and gave them fresh meanings - so that is no surprise) so it is pointless to labour points that relate to this unless you are really sure that that confusion is relevant.

I know you are very keen on the ideas of the Third Way of evolution:

http://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/

Your post seems to refer to this idea rather obliquely.

However, it is really hard to see a clear alternative to Darwinian evolution coming from that group - just a mass of (probably genuine) complications - e.g. from epigenetics. It is even hard to be clear to me if they are saying:

1) Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is wrong.

2) The tree of life does (or does not) exist.

3) Life could start up from non-life in a materialistic way.

They are not the first group to try to use 'complexity' to explain things, but no marvellous new theory seems to emerge from that approach! One of the reasons, I think, is that ultimately the same paradoxes remain unresolved. For example, to understand consciousness, you have to understand how even the tiniest bit of conscious awareness can be generated from physical interacting particles. Until someone can solve that problem - or even make a coherent hypothesis - talk of informational spaces, or maths like IIT seem to me completely pointless.

Consciousness is relevant here, because perhaps it is becoming ever clearer that all life (except perhaps viruses) has to be conscious. Even a single cell has to deal with situations that are suboptimal in a whole variety of ways - the blueprint for dealing with every contingency (and the means to detect what the problem is) can't be built into everything - the cell has to think on its pseudopodia!

David
 
I guess we see slipperiness and vagueness where it suits us :). I find the phrase "consciousness is fundamental" pretty vague... certainly it's easier said than explained or envisaged.
True, but quite a number of physicists have said that or something similar. They weren't hippies, and they obviously said what they said after a lot of experience and thought.

We spend a lot of time on this forum trying to envisage what that phrase may really mean - and indeed looking for evidence for fundamental consciousness!

David
 
There is obviously huge amounts of correlative evidence to support the notion that consciousness is just a word we've assigned to a collection of biological/neurological processes (injuries, pharmacology, developing infant brain etc). Probably too much to completely dismiss it outright. Again, I appreciate that many of us tend to concentrate on the evidence we prefer.
Really! So our awareness of anything isn't worth explaining because it is just a name for some physiological process that we can (partially) explain.

Roll it back a bit to when nerves were just being discovered. Suppose someone had said that consciousness of pain (say) was just a name for the process by which nerve impulses were transmitted from a damaged thumb (say) to the brain. Would that have made sense?

The problem is that if we take your approach, we only need to observe a correlation between pain and some physiological event, and state that consciousness of pain just is that event! This piece of rhetoric side-steps the question of why that particular physiological event is experienced that way.

Why not take this approach a whole step further, and assert that being conscious of pain is just a phrase that describes being hit on the thumb with a hammer!

David
 
@Alex

The introduction to this interview reminded me that you have/had some involvement in AI. Clearly you have sampled this field much more recently than I have, and I wonder if you have anything to add (or subtract!) from my view of this field.

1) AI by artificial neural nets (ANN's) probably has something useful to say about the pattern recognition going on at the pre-conscious levels in the brain - preprocessing of vision etc.

2) Classical AI was an embarrassment in the 1980's because it promised so much and delivered very little. Above all, it didn't seem to have much of a method beyond searching of various flavours.

3) By the 1980' AI was not limited by computer speed or memory, but by the lack of any real idea of how it was supposed to work.

4) Little seems to have changed except that computers have become vastly more powerful!

David
It's kinda funny to look back at the whole AI thing. I think the major failing was creating a false dichotomy between AI and IT. I mean, every If-then command is a form of Artificial Intelligence.
 
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It's not widely appreciated, but IDers don't reject natural selection. They rather say that it's only responsible for microevolution, e.g. as in peppered moths. The thing about the moths is that it is claimed that the driver of the colour changes in their wings during the industrial revolution was the blackening of tree trunks. The pictures of how moths with dark wings blended in as opposed to those with light wings were staged: dead moths were actually stuck to tree trunks rather than photographed whilst alive on tree trunks. There is little evidence that moths actually rest on tree trunks in nature.

Likewise, IDers don't reject the possibility that natural selection accounts for the differences in Darwin's finches, or many other small variations in lots of organisms. The thing they question is whether or not many microevolutionary changes accumulate over time to generate new organisms with different body plans. Darwinian macroevolution isn't supported by the fossil record, which shows that new organisms appear abruptly without apparent precursors. Many IDers actually support evolution in the sense of change over time: there's no doubt, for example, that over time, organisms have become more complex. However, the evidence that this has happened gradually is virtually non-existent. Darwinism can't explain this, and Darwin himself said:

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.

When Darwin was alive, the evidence from the fossil record was pretty thin. It was easy to conjecture that over time, many examples would be found of intermediate forms. But the passage of time has shown that, for whatever reason, evolution doesn't work this way. I suppose the Cambrian explosion is the best known exemplar of this, but there have been other "explosions", such as those for mammals, birds and angiosperm plants. Something relatively quickly happens during which many new types of organism are produced, and no one has much of an idea what it is.
thx for clarifying.
 
What makes Infospace real?
I would describe it as - a level of reality where communication, organized relations and logical sequences are activities that can measure the causal effects of information.

Space (or space/time) is the environment of physical transformations. Infospace would be its complimentary cousin. Infospace is the environment of informational transformations.

Luciano Floridi - a leading Oxford philosopher uses the term. Here is an example as how scholars express it. I have not read this whole article as of yet.
Floridi’s infosphere consisting of informational reality is estimated and delineated by introducing the new notion of Typ-Ken, an undifferentiated amalgam of type and token that can be expressed as either type or token dependent on contingent ontological commitment. First, we elaborate Floridi’s system, level of abstraction (LoA), model, and structure scheme, which is proposed to reconcile ontic with epistemic structural reality, and obtain the duality of type and token inherited in the relationship between LoA and model.

What Tononi, et all, are researching as integrated information, could be seen as occurring in infospace. I would draw a straight-line between integrated info and an organism's ability to understand. I am skeptical about its relationship to the collection of different sensory abilities called consciousness.
 
They are not the first group to try to use 'complexity' to explain things, but no marvellous new theory seems to emerge from that approach! One of the reasons, I think, is that ultimately the same paradoxes remain unresolved. For example, to understand consciousness, you have to understand how even the tiniest bit of conscious awareness can be generated from physical interacting particles. Until someone can solve that problem - or even make a coherent hypothesis - talk of informational spaces, or maths like IIT seem to me completely pointless.

Consciousness is relevant here, because perhaps it is becoming ever clearer that all life (except perhaps viruses) has to be conscious. Even a single cell has to deal with situations that are suboptimal in a whole variety of ways - the blueprint for dealing with every contingency (and the means to detect what the problem is) can't be built into everything - the cell has to think on its pseudopodia!

David

I don't think I have used the term complexity as a causal vector. I do like many of the researchers and authors contributing to the Third Way. Most are not programmers and the strength of the Third Way approach is good old empirical physiology!!!! (see Denis Noble)

Your last paragraph is interesting, and if I understand you --- we and C. Darwin agree that mind goes all the way down in evolutionary processes.

Thus, apart from his immediate family, during the last eight years of Darwin’s life (1809- 1882) it is likely that no one had more opportunity to discuss evolution with him than Romanes (1848-1894). Indeed, with permission, his mentor’s unpublished manuscripts on brain evolution were incorporated by Romanes into a major work – Mental Evolution in Animals (Romanes, 1884; Stauffer, 1975: 463-527). In 1886 The Times of London hailed Romanes as ‘the biological investigator upon whom the mantle of Darwin has most conspicuously descended’ (Forsdyke, 2001: 220-222).
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1406/1406.1391.pdf
 
I think that the new Thinking allowed series of six interviews with Stewart Hammeroff kind of tangentially touch on information (they're actually about consciousness, but IMO we're in the right sort of ball park):
I'd try to watch them all if possible, but the sixth should give an overview. Hammeroff is a nuanced thinker who describes himself as a "panexperientialist" rather than a "panpsychist", and certainly doesn't appear to be a reductionist. He gives people like Pat Churchland quite short shrift, as does Roger Penrose. It's interesting that he suspects that rather than consciousness collapsing probability waves, collapse is consciousness. IOW, as far as I can see, as soon as possibilities eventuate, they give rise to experience. It's an interesting idea and I haven't made up my mind whether it's correct, but it's certainly something that will marinate in my mind for a while.

It seems that ideas of the infosphere/Typ-Ken are somewhat dualistic, as Steve Wright's quote indicates, and I have an allergy to dualism in any form. I might be willing to contemplate the notion that the duality isn't inherently in nature, so much as in the mind of the observer: that it's a question of two different angles of view of the one thing. Look from one view, and you see the apparent material world. Look from another, and you can grant the existence of a world of information. It's hard to apprehend both views simultaneously, which may be why one's thoughts on the matter sometimes become dualistic.
 
Oh, well someone should tell Bill Nye then I guess?
great stuff. it's almost like he's genuinely taking a stab at this... then he just gets lost in the ridiculousness of it all: "yeah, we have free will... but it's all about evolution and layers of brain stuff..."



when matter is arranged in some special way they produce the effects of consciousness, meaning consciousness is also a material configuration ~ therefore all of your thoughts, will power, actions, are all PHYSICAL
- nice

is this thing living or dead: virus, cell, whatever? that term is arbitrary because self-replication and danger-avoidance are just physical configurations and given the right configurations you can produce the elements of conscious beings such as replication, influence, competition, collaboration, etc.. Therefore thoughts and matter are both capable of these processes (thoughts can reproduce, spread, preserve themselves, etc.) and neither should be relegated to the back room as they are both describing processes within same system.
- very cool. never thought of it that way. can you elaborate on the "living or dead" part?

The temperature of even our most private thoughts has an absolutely real effect on the mental temperature of the overall consciousness teapot.
- interesting analogy... especially since the our electromagnetic brainwave travel outside of our head and have thermal energy :) I don't always agree with Michael Persinger, but he's done some interesting speculating about this.

invisible unicorns and thoughts are REAL THINGS. If I start a cult proclaiming that invisible unicorns sleep at the threshold of every door and have all the members step over each threshold that is a very real-world effect of thought.
agreed... and it seems to me that we don't have a good handle on where/how this leads. Beverly (ep 350) sees and interacts with Jesus the same way millions of others have. there's a reality there that can't be easily dismissed. When/how did it begin?

Just like Christians, they want to just take the parts of materialism they like (I want to do whatever I want, not have a God looking over my shoulder, I don't want to be held responsible for anyone else, I want to be able to judge and hate freely and abdicate my responsibility for the whole, my thoughts are all private and if I'm mad and bitter that's only affecting me) and not accept what the implications of what they're actually saying about the universe?
agreed... "faith systems" create strange bedfellows :)
 
I have never seen an example of consciousness or mentation (mental activity) do work (science definition)! Work is force times distance. There is no force vector and nothing specifically moves a distance. (I am doubtful about PK)
that for the technical clarification. If I'm gonna be imprecise I oughta do it on purpose.

this "consciousness can do no work" thing is something I heard awhile ago. I thought it was a good shorthand way of summing up the "consciousness is an illusion" position.

A desert mirage is an illusion, but if you can drink the water it's not :) If consciousness is an illusion then it should not be able to "do" anything. e.g. self-directed neuroplasticity (http://skeptiko.com/250-dr-jeffrey-schwartz-sciences-inability-to-explain-personhood/) should not be possible. there's no ghost in the machine.
 
that for the technical clarification. If I'm gonna be imprecise I oughta do it on purpose.

this "consciousness can do no work" thing is something I heard awhile ago. I thought it was a good shorthand way of summing up the "consciousness is an illusion" position.

A desert mirage is an illusion, but if you can drink the water it's not :) If consciousness is an illusion then it should not be able to "do" anything. e.g. self-directed neuroplasticity (http://skeptiko.com/250-dr-jeffrey-schwartz-sciences-inability-to-explain-personhood/) should not be possible. there's no ghost in the machine.
Isn't it crazy that something like Jeffrey's simple observation doesn't open up the subject to science research wholesale?
 
that for the technical clarification. If I'm gonna be imprecise I oughta do it on purpose.

this "consciousness can do no work" thing is something I heard awhile ago. I thought it was a good shorthand way of summing up the "consciousness is an illusion" position.
I think 'work' is a perfectly good English word and in common usage it means more than Force times Distance moved in direction of force - so I think the only place to avoid using it in its broader sense, is when real confusion is likely to ensue.

Put another way, I have given up pandering to science!

David
 
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There is obviously huge amounts of correlative evidence to support the notion that consciousness is just a word we've assigned to a collection of biological/neurological processes (injuries, pharmacology, developing infant brain etc). Probably too much to completely dismiss it outright.

There is?

Nothing you've listed suggests consciousness is "just" biological/neurological processes, AFAICTell.

edit: I mean when even Sam Harris has to admit materialism needs a nonsensical something-from-nothing miracle to even get started...
 
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Just like Christians, they want to just take the parts of materialism they like (I want to do whatever I want, not have a God looking over my shoulder, I don't want to be held responsible for anyone else, I want to be able to judge and hate freely and abdicate my responsibility for the whole, my thoughts are all private and if I'm mad and bitter that's only affecting me) and not accept what the implications of what they're actually saying about the universe?

It really is scary how much of a fanatical religion "skepticism" is. The whole movement is a faith-based social engineering project of dubious merit - telling people there's no objective morality and no free will is going to save the world?

They're even willing to employ questionable tactics to spread their creed, and the New Atheist portion is definitely open to a great deal of criticism even from atheists.
 
I think 'work' is a perfectly good English word.

Put another way, I have given up pandering to science!

David
Work as a "token" word for a math formula has a really firm definition and is a specific instance of a general term. My issue is not to parse the science from our general usage of the term, which as you say - is just fine.

My whole argument is about clear separation and "units of measure" distinction between physical work and mental work. "Work" is an analogy, when used in reference to mental processes. I would see mental work output as scientifically measurable in terms of of creating organization in processes.

As to dualism, well as a fan of C. S. Peirce -- I tend to see things in 3's. Personally, I am in need of "moral work" at a level that has distinction from both objective information and objective empirical measurement. I do not suggest a methodology for approaching morality, but would still see it as a third level of humanity's environment.

I offer as a comparative example expert who can track the chemical bonds of DNA\RNA\Ribosome systems, such as Watson and Crick. The measurements will be physical.

As to measuring abstract informational activity in evolution ---- the measurements will be between structural relations.
Johannes Jaeger
Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG); Barcelona, Spain
Yogi Jaeger is a group leader at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona. He is applying dynamical systems theory to the evolution of biological regulatory networks. The aim is to understand how the structure and dynamics of such systems influence the rate and direction of phenotypic evolution.
 
True, but quite a number of physicists have said that or something similar. They weren't hippies, and they obviously said what they said after a lot of experience and thought.

We spend a lot of time on this forum trying to envisage what that phrase may really mean - and indeed looking for evidence for fundamental consciousness!

A man who wants to beat a dog, will always find a stick ;)
 
True, but quite a number of physicists have said that or something similar. They weren't hippies, and they obviously said what they said after a lot of experience and thought.

Yeah if one looks in the Physics and Consciousness Resources threads there's a lot of stuff connecting immaterialism and physics.

Also the article by physicist and NPR science writer Adam Frank on how shaky materialism is:

The closer you look, the more the materialist position in physics appears to rest on shaky metaphysical ground
 
Really! So our awareness of anything isn't worth explaining because it is just a name for some physiological process that we can (partially) explain.

Roll it back a bit to when nerves were just being discovered. Suppose someone had said that consciousness of pain (say) was just a name for the process by which nerve impulses were transmitted from a damaged thumb (say) to the brain. Would that have made sense?

The problem is that if we take your approach, we only need to observe a correlation between pain and some physiological event, and state that consciousness of pain just is that event! This piece of rhetoric side-steps the question of why that particular physiological event is experienced that way.

Why not take this approach a whole step further, and assert that being conscious of pain is just a phrase that describes being hit on the thumb with a hammer!

David

Yes. I understand that you find the explanation unsatisfactory and incomplete. Is there a model that is complete and satisfactory? And that brings us back full circle: Why would a proponent of fundamental consciousness exclude an explanation on the basis that it stretches their credulity? You would be justifiably indignant if it were the other way round.

We should consider all perspectives, but be aware that none is any more ridiculous than the one we favour.
 
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