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-   -   Consciousness, Death, Existentialism etc. (http://www.nubblies.net/forums/general-chat/18823-consciousness-death-existentialism-etc.html)

Mr. Blonde 06-30-2016 02:26 PM

lol

Orgazmo 06-30-2016 10:51 PM

Rofl

Mr. Blonde 07-01-2016 12:46 PM

rolf

Orgazmo 07-01-2016 01:10 PM

RIP

Mr. Blonde 07-02-2016 12:28 PM

http://www.nubblies.net/forums/Photo...-dogs-1024.jpg

Mr. Blonde 07-05-2016 01:38 PM

http://www.nubblies.net/forums/Photo...5_11_36_41.png

Dent 08-20-2016 05:39 PM

Adam Perrotta What is the difference between simulation of consciousness and actual consciousness?


David Pearce a deep question. My answer: you can't simulate first-person facts, or rather if you do, then appearance and reality are one-and-the-same. By contrast, you can simulate the economy or the weather or the financial markets (etc) with greater or lesser fidelity. This leads to another question. What makes any state of the world "about" another state? How, if at all, can semantic meaning be naturalised?

---------

#aboutness #intentionality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentionality

Dent 08-22-2016 12:41 PM

Blondie do you think suffering and bliss are commensurable or not? Do suffering and bliss share a common standard of measurement?

A)
Commensurability - suffering and bliss share similar enough standards of measurement such they can be compared

B) Commensurability - suffering and bliss share a common standard of measurement

C) Suffering & Bliss are value-less

D)
Incommensurability - suffering and bliss DO NOT share a common standard of measurement

Mr. Blonde 08-23-2016 12:01 PM

Nigga did you just give me a multiple choice? I really don't know. It's an interesting thing to think about, I have come from it from another angle, namely why we tolerate (and consciously engage in) various forms of human cruelty. I spend less time thinking about the measurement of bliss than I do suffering.

One of the main problems as far as talking about ideal or at the very least "other" states of consciousness (like perpetual bliss) is the fact that we generally have almost no tools or imaginative ability to compare these states (or they are currently federally illegal). I think this is the reason most people ignore these types of discussions, because we don't have a base-framework for measuring, comparing, and therefore being able to scientifically show that these states are (obviously) more or less pleasurable.

These two problems in the way we operate as primates-turning-spacemen;

1. Perception of states like suffering and bliss are subjective and thus prone to error and misinterpretation

2. Human beings often lie or exaggerate in order to achieve an unspoken goal


As far as suffering, here is an example I use: The most suffering a person has ever experienced is still the maximum amount of suffering a person has as a reference point. Another person, who has experienced different circumstances and different suffering, will only be able to relate their suffering they have experienced personally to the suffering another person is describing.

This has a common problem in mental illness; people who have not experienced months-long lasting clinical depression may not understand what it's like, having only to compare their experience when their grandma, grandpa, mom, dad, dog died. This difference in personal experience creates a huge rift of empathy between two people, where one person feels the other is belittling their actual suffering, and the other is doubting the others suffering (might they be lying for attention), and privately think of them in a negative light because they cannot feel the depth and intensity of the suffering that person is experiencing.

Dent 10-11-2016 08:19 AM

200 years ago our brains were automata, now our brains are computers.

https://www.facebook.com/BigThinkdot...c_ref=NEWSFEED

Mr. Blonde 10-11-2016 11:31 AM

changing models

Dent 10-12-2016 03:36 AM

People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners
"YOU ARE JUST AN ALGORITHM IMPLEMENTED ON BIOLOGICAL HARDWARE."
"Consciousness is what a cognitive algorithm feels like on the inside"
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_an_algorithm_feels

If this is true then consciousness can "emerge" when you run an algorithm irrespective and the substance you run it in, most of the people I speak with believe in this and I think it's just the flavour of the century. They think there's something it's like to be the stock exchange. And the pulley logic gate thing I linked a few years back, and your computer.

I don't think this is the case.

------------

DP
Many (most?) AI researchers also seem to assume that the brain has a clean digital abstraction layer: phenomenally bound minds will "emerge" (why? how?) if and when organic minds are “implemented” in a classical digital computer.

However, such unexplained “emergence” of subjects of experience reflects an assumption, not a scientific discovery. It’s not a testable conjecture that leads to any novel, experimentally falsifiable predictions. Reality doesn’t really have "levels", or rather, reality only has one level, and we’re part of it.

Dent 10-12-2016 03:58 AM

I should probably post the full thing, this is a conversation between someone that things a whole brain emulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading is more likely to be conscious than a chicken is.
Getting this wrong would be an ethical disaster.


A

I mean whole brain emulation where it is clear that you are getting the functionality fully right, such that your digital brain could do any task that an organic brain can do. The universe would just be too weird if consciousness was somehow part of carbon atoms...

B

Carbon chauvinism? Perhaps consider primordial life. The conjecture that primordial life elsewhere in the universe will be carbon-based is, on the face of it, arbitrary. Why not e.g. silicon-based life? But many if not most astrobiologists now believe that the unique valence properties of the carbon atom and liquid water are a precondition for the evolution of information-bearing self-replicators. So instead of talking about “carbon chauvinism”, we should refer to carbon micro-functionalism.
.
What about consciousness? Does the analogy hold? We’ve no grounds for believing that one, and only one, element of the periodic table, i.e. carbon, mediates primordial consciousness. Yet when weighing which information processing systems do - and which don't - have moral status, we aren't concerned with the nature of the ultimate stuff of the world. [This ultimate “stuff” may - or may not - support primordial consciousness, i.e. conventional “materialistic” physicalism versus property-dualist panpsychism or non-materialist physicalism.] ather, when weighing moral status, we are considering which information processing systems are unitary subjects of experience - phenomenally bound states of consciousness - whether subjects of experience as "simple" as the cephalic ganglion of a bee, or as complex as the human or dolphin CNS. In other words, what's critical, ethically, is getting our theory of phenomenal binding right. Thus the stock market, for example, is a fabulously complex information processing system; but it’s not a mind. The stock market doesn't inherently matter.

Currently, no one knows how to explain phenomenal binding as undergone by a “pack of neurons” in the skull. Powerful arguments dating back to William James have been made that phenomenal binding is classically impossible.
(cf. http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf) Quantum-theoretic accounts are implausible because thermally-induced decoherence in the CNS is exceedingly rapid. (For a contrary view, see: Non-materialist physicalism: an experimentally testable conjecture.) Despite such mystification, most investigators assume that any explanation of phenomenal binding will turn out to be “high level”: the valence properties of carbon and liquid water as a quantum fluid (cf. http://nautil.us/.../five-things-we-...ont-know-about...) are too “low level” to be relevant to our phenomenally-bound minds. Many (most?) AI researchers also seem to assume that the brain has a clean digital abstraction layer: phenomenally bound minds will "emerge" (why? how?) if and when organic minds are “implemented” in a classical digital computer.

However, such unexplained “emergence” of subjects of experience reflects an assumption, not a scientific discovery. It’s not a testable conjecture that leads to any novel, experimentally falsifiable predictions. Reality doesn’t really have "levels", or rather, reality only has one level, and we’re part of it. In short, IMO we should be open to the possibility that “carbon micro-functionalism” is true for conscious mind, just as it is true for primordial life.

Dent 10-12-2016 04:00 AM


Mr. Blonde 10-12-2016 11:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dent (Post 440005)
People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners
"YOU ARE JUST AN ALGORITHM IMPLEMENTED ON BIOLOGICAL HARDWARE."
"Consciousness is what a cognitive algorithm feels like on the inside"
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_an_algorithm_feels

If this is true then consciousness can "emerge" when you run an algorithm irrespective and the substance you run it in, most of the people I speak with believe in this and I think it's just the flavour of the century. They think there's something it's like to be the stock exchange. And the pulley logic gate thing I linked a few years back, and your computer.

I don't think this is the case.

------------

DP
Many (most?) AI researchers also seem to assume that the brain has a clean digital abstraction layer: phenomenally bound minds will "emerge" (why? how?) if and when organic minds are “implemented” in a classical digital computer.

However, such unexplained “emergence” of subjects of experience reflects an assumption, not a scientific discovery. It’s not a testable conjecture that leads to any novel, experimentally falsifiable predictions. Reality doesn’t really have "levels", or rather, reality only has one level, and we’re part of it.


As long as we are speaking about flavors of centuries, I think the majority of the individuals engaged in the Consciousness debate are still looking at it from a purely material point of view. I think to understand consciousness in any personally satisfying way, it requires a deeper internal, subjective experience. We can write papers about water all day long but the ones who jump in the pool are the only ones who really know what it's like. It's not, "What is Consciousness", it is "Consciousness, IS!"

The Universe blooms consciousness in matter, using the machine of Nature. Why would this happen? Consciousness is not a fluke, indeed, it seems to be the end-all-be-all of the universe. What else is left for conscious entities to do in the universe but decrease suffering and enjoy Reality? Do you think we will escape our universe? Into what?

Denying that Reality has levels is a shaky statement, because existence is clearly absurd. Most people go their entire lives seeking without knowing what. Notice how difficult it even is to get people to talk about consciousness? Because they aren't even aware they are swimming in it. But what if you suddenly got the answers to consciousness you are looking for? Here are the options after that based on what I have read:

1. Kill yourself, because the Universe is devoid of meaning beyond what you make of it
2. Begin any of the various spiritual disciplines that exist to keep yourself from killing yourself
3. Go deeper into unconsciousness (poison your body and mind with what our cultures offer by Default until one's death)
4. Chill out and just try to enjoy the sensory and intellectual features you are lucky to have in this Universe for the time being

Science doesn't have the answers to consciousness, philosophy does. And the answers have already been known for thousands of years.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Albert Camus
The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feelings in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal. The cat's universe is not the universe of the ant-hill.

Any being that has a form of consciousness/awareness, even at a low level, is clearly experiencing a wildly different reality than ourselves. Scientific fact tells us this; the olfactory organs of dogs are much more developed than ours. The eyes of birds of prey. Echolocation.

Nature does not develop a conscious entity's reality based on the human standard, our species-wide subjective "level" of perception of reality, it creates an entirely new one based on the materials it has at it's disposal + mutation.

So I guess I'm just not sure why you're so confident consciousness could not eventually arise in non-organic matter, especially when consciously designed.


Blind Nature created human beings capable of consciousness, so that event (consciousness in matter) is something that is possible within our universe. So what makes you think (relatively) intelligent Man can't do the same?

Mr. Blonde 10-12-2016 11:47 AM

Read this. It's by your boy Chalmers.

https://books.google.com.au/books?id...page&q&f=false

Dent 10-13-2016 03:32 AM

This my boy Chalmers

Dent 10-24-2016 04:53 AM


Quote:

Shelter tells the story of Rin, a 17-year-old girl who lives her life inside of a futuristic simulation completely by herself in infinite, beautiful loneliness. Each day, Rin awakens in virtual reality and uses a tablet which controls the simulation to create a new, different, beautiful world for herself. Until one day, everything changes, and Rin comes to learn the true origins behind her life inside a simulation.
Cool video, but absolute bollocks values, there's nothing valuable about disvaluable states.
Stick me in the pleasure machine ASAP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_machine

Dent 10-24-2016 02:33 PM


consciousness is fundamental to the cosmos!

Repugnant Abomination 10-24-2016 02:40 PM

We can never eliminate suffering. Nor should we. Everything gives rise to its opposite. Without suffering there could not be happiness. Because we experience both thesis and antithesis, what we're left with is the synthesis. But that is derivative. A step back and we find existence and non-existence. The synthesis of these are are what we call life.

Dent 10-24-2016 02:44 PM

Quote:

4.0 "Happy experiences, and the very concept of happiness itself, are possible only because they can be contrasted with melancholy. The very notion of everlasting happiness is incoherent."

Some people endure lifelong emotional depression or physical pain. Quite literally, they are never happy. Understandably, they may blame their misery on the very nature of the world, not just their personal clinical condition. Yet it would be a cruel doctrine which pretended that such people don't really suffer because they can't contrast their sense of desolation with joyful memories. In the grips of despair, they may find the very notion of happiness cognitively meaningless. Conversely, the euphoria of unmixed (hypo)mania is not dependent for its sparkle on recollections of misery. Given the state-dependence of memory, negative emotions may simply be inaccessible to consciousness in such an exalted state. Likewise, it is possible that our perpetually euphoric descendants will find our contrastive notion of unhappiness quite literally inconceivable. For when one is extraordinarily super-well, then it's hard to imagine what it might be like to be chronically mentally ill.

Here's a contemporary parallel. It's possible to undergo, from a variety of causes, a complete bilateral loss of primary, secondary and "associative" visual cortex. People with Anton's Syndrome not only become blind; they are unaware of their sensory deficit. Furthermore, they lose all notion of the meaning of sight. They no longer possess the neurological substrates of the visual concepts by which their past and present condition could be compared and contrasted. Our genetically joyful descendants may, or may not, undergo an analogous loss of cognitive access to the nature and variant textures of suffering. Quite plausibly, they will have gradients of sublimity to animate their lives and infuse their thoughts. So at least they'll be able to make analogies and draw parallels. But fortunately for their sanity and well-being, they won't be able to grasp the true frightfulness lying behind any linguistic remnants of the past that survive into the post-Darwinian era. Such lack of contrast, or even the inconceivability of unpleasant experiences, won't leave tomorrow's native-born ecstatics any less happy; if anything quite the reverse.

It's true that a world whose agents are animated by pleasure gradients will still have the functional equivalent of aversive experience. Yet the "raw feel" of such states may still be more wonderful than anything physiologically possible today.
.

Dent 10-24-2016 03:43 PM

victims of chronic pain and/or depression couldn't really be suffering since they lack a contrast effect.

People in hell aren't really suffering because they've never been to heaven.
Factory farmed animals are fine too.
Heroin works better if you drill a hole in your foot beforehand.

Repugnant Abomination 10-24-2016 05:25 PM

I'm talking about abstract concepts that exist in relation to their opposite by definition and are made manifest in the world through conscious experience. Of course some people suffer and have very little happiness in their life. But that does not negate happiness and suffering's dependency on the other for defining what they are. Suffering is a lack of happiness. Happiness is a lack of suffering. You can try to define them by what they are synonymous with, i.e. happiness is joy, pleasure, contentedness, etc -- but those synonyms have their own antonyms on which their definitions are dependent on.

Dent 10-25-2016 10:20 AM

I think tables chairs rocks and computers lack both suffering and happiness.
I also think positive, negative and neutral valence exist, and they're not abstractions.
I'll look more into your stuff so we don't end up talking past each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_tone

I don't think abstract concepts exist at all.
Pretty sure I'm a valence realist.

Mr. Blonde 10-25-2016 11:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dent (Post 440044)
A Conscious Cosmos - YouTube

consciousness is fundamental to the cosmos!

same page


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