How could consciousness be an emergent property of the brain?

>How is it that at some point in our evolutionary history some unconscious biological machine developed a "subjective experience"?

Consciousness is a spectrum, not a binary.

It's a mind experiencing itself through biosemiotics. Dink

>How is it that at some point in our evolutionary history some unconscious biological machine developed a "subjective experience"?
Why are you assuming that humans have something unique?

Hard problem deniers are dualists without realizing it

>we are ultimately free from it due to free will
you can't prove that free will exists

you perceive it, but that doesn't mean it's real

Consciousness is a literal fucking meme. It's an utterly meaningless concept. An idea without substance. What we call consciousness is just how a creature with a brain functions and responds to stimuli. Our difference from the minds of bugs is only a difference of degree.

>How could consciousness be an emergent property of the brain?
How can Veeky Forums be an emergent property of your silicon microprocessor?

Also these unscientific "woOooOOooo consciousness is magic" threads are against the rules and this thread is going to be deleted.

I keked reading this.
>Be Maimonidean Jew
>Not retard shekel collector
>believe in evolution
>Believe Adam and Eve actually underwent physical change that produced the human consciousness we know
>mfw when really fucking similar to what you just said.

There be no actual separateness between our minds and that of a bugs baka

define "mind".

there certainly are areas of the brain in humans which bugs do not possess, and those areas are associated with self-awareness (cerebral cortex hurr)

How about you stop trying to sound smart and actually speak english you fuckhead.

how about you stop being stupid and actually educate yourself to the point where you can understand him?

There is no indication that OP knows what he is talking about. Using the term "subjective experience" is a classic error that indicates somebody has a hollywood understanding of the mind.

Different question relating to consciousness. If we were 'philosophical zombies' would we still act exactly the same and follow the same timeline? if an alien were observing conscious and unconscious versions of us?

> Using the term "subjective experience" is a classic error that indicates somebody has a hollywood understanding of the mind.

im sorry, how else would you define consciousness except for a "subjective experience"? You defining a phrase as elementary doesnt take away from its substance.

are you done shitposting?

The interaction problems shows that consciousness can't be immeasurable.

I think we are philosophical zombies.

why? I am feeling right now, how could i be a zombie?

What is there that's feeling something?

*experiencing

You can't define something as subjective experience, because subjective experience is a meaningless term.

Consciousness is the ability to recognize causality. It's why loss of consciousness is characterized by a interruption of continuity, because continuity and causality go hand in hand.

There is no "lights on" birth of consciousness moment. Anything with any sort of a brain is conscious, just to varying degrees of consciousness. The more complicated the structure of the neural network, the more clear it becomes that its conscious. If you have ever had a very intelligent dog this should be obvious to you. I have had some that i swear could almost carry on a conversation, not by speaking of course, but very simply conveying information through gestures or barking. Think like just a step below lassie.

but something is still being felt by something even if we don't know what

>Consciousness is the ability to recognize causality. It's why loss of consciousness is characterized by a interruption of continuity, because continuity and causality go hand in hand.

except that's all subjective to one consciousness. an interruption of continuity is just the consciousness's interpretation, it's not actually true, reality was not interrupted, just one's perception of it was. Just because one's mind cannot interpret a causality doesnt imply there was none, just that it was not perceived or interpreted.

Not the user you replied to but nice strawman. It almost slipped under my radar.

You can't actually know that. You have the vague impression that "something" is there experiencing your life, but you can't prove it.

why not?

strawpoll.me/13285487

>but you can't prove it.
what is the interaction problem

The brain is made up of reactive cells.
They store information, process (sort; relate) information, and send information out.

Input and sorting is just "sensory experience" and "processing"; but they're actually just rudimentary attempts to trying to see what information is useful for survival.

In example: We don't see or process information related to specific light spectrum; nor do we smell or taste to an extent that isn't required for our survival.

Consciousness arose out of this system due to the way the brain eventually evolved to sort information; numerous pathologies can give rise to complicated systems of storage and processing.

> numerous pathologies can give rise to complicated systems of storage and processing.

which we still have no fucking idea the mechanism behind, other than some proteins that are implicated in memory function.

The specifics aren't required for a basic understanding of input, cross reference, tag, conclude and output.

true. Ive always been under the mentality that if ever a system for memory storage is found definitively in the cells, especially in a binary system, that we are fucked. it's too much of a scary thought for me, i dont want to be ghost in the shelled.

Well, we know for a fact that when we remove cells (or damage them) that we remove memories.

I personally like the fact we're just biological machines that just happen to survive and process on a complicated level.

It just indicates all the shit we go through isn't "personal" at all; that we're just brains and stomachs trying to navigate around; shit happens because of happenstance and trial and error.

I'm always fascinated by this notion - how do you define your own internal experience versus that of a flatworm? Do you deny your own self-reflective experience and sense of identity? At worst it seems like a truism - of course consciousness is the sum total of neural firing. That's trivially true - and it avoids the question entirely.

>Well, we know for a fact that when we remove cells (or damage them) that we remove memories.

i am more worried about the opposite. that you can add memories. Also that's really all we know, that removing cells can alter memories, but it doesnt tell us anything about the mechanism. Cells dont equal memories. you dont gain cells with more memories. It's still all so mysterious.

>It just indicates all the shit we go through isn't "personal" at all; that we're just brains and stomachs trying to navigate around; shit happens because of happenstance and trial and error.
it still is personal in a way; each set of experiences is unique to that person. In the same way that no one can have the exact same spacial or temporal position as you did on this earth, no one else can have your exact set of experiences.

>How is it that at some point in our evolutionary history some unconscious biological machine developed a "subjective experience"?
It's not a binary state.

When dealing with an H2O molecule we use molecular physics. When dealing with 2 H2O molecules we use molecular physics. When dealing with 100 H20 molecules we still use molecular physics. But at some point between 100 molecules of H20 and 100 moles of H20 we stop trying to describe it in terms of molecular physics and start using fluid dynamics, because the behavior is an emergent property.

It not like at 3.123477347 mols exactl that that is the discrete point at which it switches over from molecular physics to fluid dynamics. It's a gradual process because one understanding becomes less and less useful while another becomes more and more useful.

Sentience is the same. There isn't a discrete point at which one more atom in one different place and suddenly it's sentient when it wasn't before. It's a gradual change from a prion effectively being entirely driven by physical interactions to the level of a thinking person.

Consciousness isn't a special state that is different than unconsciousness, it's a lazy colloquial description because the details are too complex and don't really matter. Does a normal person have a lot of hair on his head compared to a bald person? Yes. Did I bother to measure the volume of each individual hair on each person's head to give an exact numerical difference? No. I said "a lot" because I'm lazy. That's what consciousness is, people are complex enough in their interactions that other people can't be bothered to describe in exact detail the specific physical processes that ultimately underlay that behavior.

You are not fundamentally different from a spec of dust, you are gradually different from a spec of dust.

Consciousness is shrouded in a fog that gradually disperses with increasing neural complexity.

I remember someone theorizing that Adam and Eve represented not the first humans, but the first sapient ones, having consciousness as we do now. That's why their children were able to find others without being incestuous. Something about all modern man being their offspring in some manner, and mitochondrial eve backing this up.

>at some point between 100 molecules of H20 and 100 moles of H20 we stop trying to describe it in terms of molecular physics and start using fluid dynamics
This is just arbitrary, a subjective decision concerning contextual accuracy, because molecular physics explains fluids by definition. You could simply not use fluid dynamics since it's an approximation of the system unlike consciousness which is a real thing. So if you think you are gradually consciously different from a spec of dust, unlike the case of fluid dynamics which is just an apparent human approximation developed for our 20 watts human brains, you are implying there is small amount of consciousness on a spec of dust.

Could:

explain why they don't believe in panpsychism and conscious protons? And if you do, could you account for the combination problem?

Besides immaterialism, these are your three options.

1) Nobody is conscious.
2) Everything is conscious to some degree.
3) Some things are conscious and some things are not.

1) is clearly not true - I know for a fact that I am conscious; 2) is panpsychism; 3) means there exists some minimal neural density (read: configuration of atoms) that is sufficient to give rise to consciousness. In other words consciousness is binary.

Consciousness does not truly exist and it has no effect on us. It does not factor into decision making at all.

>consciousness is binary.
so 2 creatures with ever so slightly different neural configurations would cause one to be conscious and the other not? I can't imagine that just adding a neuron would cause the lights to suddenly switch on and give rise to experience.

We have no idea what consciousness is, how do you know that it is you experiencing all these things?

>Animals observed up to now are still somewhat of a slave to their natural instincts, and so are humans to a degree, but we are ultimately free from it due to free will.
Did you actually read the literature on this or is this 'common sense' talk. Genuinely asking.
>Animals do have free-will as well, but their free-will is still shaped by their instinct (im not going to go into arguments that this is true for humans as well, but it somewhat is, we just are constrained but so much less parameters.)
The more neuroscience and psychology (usually with a biological perspective) I read the less convinced I am that free will exist - and maybe more importantly in this reply - that instinct still plays a large role in humans.

Even smell can influence how humans behave.

2 and 3 aren't really mutually exclusive - a spectrum can start with a zero. No single atom has consciousness, nor does H20, oleic acid or a lump of metal. But big molecules capable of self-referential computation are conceivable - these would have some.

adam and eve were the first hoomans to supercede the bicameral mind

>self-referential computation

what does this mean precisely, and why is that a satisfactory definition of consciousness?

What is it like to be a big molecule capable of self-referential computation?

Consciousness is an emergent property of a neural network in the same way that a crystalline structure is an emergent property of subatomic stick-em-bricks: it's only impressive if you don't know how it works.

>if this guy doesn't answer my question in the exact way I want him to he must be avoiding the question
Can you consciousnessfags fuck off to /x/ please

It's funny you say consciousness is an evolutionary advantage. What about a philosophical zombie? They would behave exactly like a human would, exhibiting every evolutionary advantage a human has, yet wouldn't be conscious. Which I think points toward what OP was asking.

I'll give you an even more strange phenomenon. There is a big chunk of people who are completely incapable of understanding what it is that you're describing, or why it's a problem, no matter what terms or what language you use to try to explain it to them. Not only do they not agree it's a problem, the problem is completely inconceivable.

This is hardly a matter of not being used to the jargon or what's talked about; Dan Dennett who is a well respected philosopher of mind himself admits that he is incapable of understanding what people mean when they say "phenomenal consciousness".

It really gets you thinking.

It is obvious there is a strong correlation between brain activity and mental events, but neuroscience hasn't gone much further to provide a workable theory with the brain as the physical model.

People say there is no hard problem of consciousness. Ok, then what is the pattern of signals that produce consciousness? Why can we not produce artificial intelligence yet?

Please explain the problem exists.

You can't explain how the brain produces consciousness, only explain what the correlation between brain activity and consciousness.

1/2:

To understand the problem, you have to first understand that consciousness is a broad term that can mean a lot of different things. Let's first separate them into two different things: Access consciousness and Phenomenal consciousness. Access consciousness refers to the function of the brain: How we react to environmental stimuli, control our behavior, categorize information, and use language. There are no doubts here that biology can materialistically account for everything that goes on here. Phenomenal consciousness however is different. Here we are talking about why it feels like something from a first person perspective; why there's "something that it's like" to be you.

The brain is a very complicated collection of physical particles, interacting in a complex ways that causes you to behave in complex ways. But that should be all that those particles are doing: behaving. Yet that doesn't seem to be the case. You can correlate emotions with a certain area in the brain and say, when these neurons fire in this and this way with this intensity, that's emotion X. You can have a very complex functional understanding of how emotion X is caused and how it affects behavior. But with all that, it still doesn't tell us anything about what it is like to experience emotion X; it completely ignores the qualitative aspect. Consciousness is the only thing in the universe where asking how something functions doesn't seem to be able to give us any conceivable answers to the question of why it feels like something phenomenally from the inside. I think that highlights a big gap between explaining how something functions, and explaining experience. From this gap, we can infer that the frameworks of science clearly misses something here in terms of the structure/format of the explanation. Going by what science tells us about the world, this phenomenal experience should not be there, we should all be philosophical zombies without phenomenal experience, but we aren't.

2/2:

Explaining Phenomenal consciousness away as "just an emergent phenomena" misses that there seems to be more than just function emerging. Water has properties not found in a single H2O molecule, but water properties emerging from H2O molecules together with the rest of the environment is something that at least in theory can be fully reducible. This is not the case with phenomenal experience.

Sounds like an emergent property of Access consciousness

Define emergent property, and account for how it can give rise to first person phenomenal experiences, and not simply complex function.

Saying that phenomenal consciousness exists is also a behavior, so it can be measured. If you just looked at what essential properties consciousness has, you'd realize that all this nonsense about subjective experience is founded on a gross misinterpretation of observations. There is nothing about the properties of consciousness that necessitates an arbitrary amount of "private" agents.

I think it's when the animal can identify itself as "me"

Like elephants pass the mirror test or whatever.

There are ants that pass the mirror test.

Lots of people lurk on Veeky Forums apparently

>Saying that phenomenal consciousness exists is also a behavior, so it can be measured.
The behavior can be measured, but not the first person qualitative experience. I do think why we say the things we do about consciousness is very interesting and will eventually lead to progress in the question via scientific investigation of the brain - but I don't see how the phenomenal aspects can be completely discarded just because behavior describing it can be physically tracked. It's not like dualistic models disallow causal relationships between mind and matter.

>If you just looked at what essential properties consciousness has, you'd realize that all this nonsense about subjective experience is founded on a gross misinterpretation of observations. There is nothing about the properties of consciousness that necessitates an arbitrary amount of "private" agents.
Here you are referring to the essential properties of access consciousness, and assuming it also accounts for phenomenal consciousness. I clearly explained before that access consciousness isn't the phenomena I am trying to explain.

>The behavior can be measured, but not the first person qualitative experience.
You're just taking "it can't be explained" as an axiom and arbitrarily saying "that's not good enough" to every attempt.
>I don't see how the phenomenal aspects can be completely discarded just because behavior describing it can be physically tracked.
You could say that about literally anything.
"I don't see how the phenomenal aspects of fire can be completely discarded just because behavior describing it can be physically tracked."

Humans can also change their nature to fit their environment by becoming conscious of their own reactions

>define emergent property
Nigga you serious? It's like an ant colony hivemind to each worker, soldier, and queen. Pic related (inb4 PHONEPOSTER REEEEEEEEE)
>how can it give rise to first person phenomenal experiences and not simply complex function.
It's complex functions interacting together to form something even more complex. At least that's what it would logically be if it is based on physicality like literally everything else that exists.

Forgot pic.

Are Brainlets conscious?

so can you reduce experience down into smaller chunks?

excellent description of the hard problem, thank you!

I agree with a lot of what your saying and it actually highlights why current science and scientists have such a hard time with the concept of qualitative differences. Human experience is not the only place qualitative differences make a huge impact though, they are just as promenent is physics but not recognized. Magnetic fields are one example. There is zero quantitative difference between a magnet before and after magnetization. The difference is all qualitative, merely changing the field coherence to a concentrated band. We fill in the blanks with crazy shit like "virtual particles" to feel better about it though.

Can you reduce an engine down into smaller parts? Yes.
Is it still an engine after being broken down? No.

Emergent properties are derived from all of the parts working together. You can alter how it runs, how much it runs, why it runs, when it runs, or if it runs at all by changing the parameters. You can quantify this running even when you calculate work output, energy input, etc.

There won't be any running if you break it down into parts. This does not mean, however, the running isn't physically explicable. It is an emergent property of the whole of the engine.

The difference between our consciousness and an engine is that we built the engine. The consciousness (running) that is a result of the brain is derived from more moving parts, tinier parts, and moral + ethical implications on trying to physically dissect its engine. You have to rely on cadavers or fairly indirect observation with little direct contact.

He's calling you an autist.

>if you understand an engine down to its smallest part it's not an engine anymore
AHAHAHAHA jesus christ

surely that would merely show us how the brain creates consciousness, it still wouldn't give us any insight why physical processes in the brain create a non-physical experience in the mind or why it feels like anything at all.

No the difference is that all there is to an engine is the parts. They move, there's no subjective experience of running. Not the same as brains.

>You're just taking "it can't be explained" as an axiom and arbitrarily saying "that's not good enough" to every attempt.
I'm not taking "It can't be explained" as an axiom. I'm not saying science can never explain it, I'm saying the frameworks of science right now doesn't seem to be able to account for it because right now science only account for how things function.

>"I don't see how the phenomenal aspects of fire can be completely discarded just because behavior describing it can be physically tracked."
But in the case of the fire, I don't see the problem. It's simply a bunch of elemental particles (or quantum phenomena if you will) acting in a certain way and giving rise to fire. Science clearly has something to say about how the particles acting gives rise to the fire. If you take this example to be analogous to consciousness, then I don't think you have understood what the people arguing for the hard problem are really concerned about.

>It's complex functions interacting together to form something even more complex. At least that's what it would logically be if it is based on physicality like literally everything else that exists.
Again, if the complexity of consciousness was all that perplexed me, I wouldn't have any doubts that today's science could in theory fully account for it. Complexity isn't the problem.

If any of you can properly restate the arguments people make for the hard problem as clearly as possible (doesn't have to be long, simply explain why we think it poses a problem for science), and then explain why it's misguided, it would at least convince me you understand the arguments (and maybe change my mind).

>Conciousness is an enormous evolutionary advantage
Isn't the materialist view that consciousness is a byproduct of what our brains do rather than what the brain is for? Consciousness, or its content, is invisible to evolution.

Conciousness is very good for natural selection. The fact that you realize you exist is why medicine is invented and used.

The materialist view denies that such a consciousness is possible. Mental states are simply functional states.

So how is measurement done? It's measured by the mind.

OP here.

I wrote an article on this just now. Feel free to critique

partnersinthoughtcrime.com/the-sam-harris-argument-for-idealism-and-god/

Couldn't I have p-zombied my way through med school?

There is a type on ants that, when in the need to pass over a bridge, can arrange themselves in a way that they make an "ant bridge" to cross. in the same way the arrangement of the ants makes the bridge emerge, the arrangement of the molecules in your brain can make consciousness, emerge.

It seems that consciousness is substrate dependent. For example, if I simulated a brain on some kind of mechanical computer using gears and pistons, I would be very skeptical of its consciousness. However if I ran it on an electronic computer, I would be a little bit more compelling to believe it is conscious, but not fully convinced.

I could imagine a scale of increasingly more biologically accurate computers, from gears and pistons all the way to a proper quantum simulation of the brain. And this scale would correlate pretty precisely with my confidence that the brain being simulated on it is truly conscious.

So in essence, the further the substrate gets from my ability to comprehend it, the more conscious I think a thing is.

...If we assume 2 way causal interaction between the mental and physical. If the physical simply gives rise to the mental, and the mental has no causal powers over the physical (epiphenomenalism), then consciousness stays immeasurable (at least for now).

There are intuitive reasons to believe that if dualism is true, there is 2 way causal interaction, because the way we can talk about the mysteries of consciousness, but there are theories that attempt to explain that.

You could have. He is talking about access consciousness. You have to keep in mind that in these threads, no one is ever on the same page on what's talked about.

Simply put: I cannot imagine any kind of formula, diagram, cross-section, neurobiological law, some kind of printout of all my brain activity down to the atom, could ever, EVER explain, say, the raw phenomenal feel of water, or a piece of music, or sunlight.

Of course these are all based in physical mechanisms, but the jump from synapses and neurotransmitters -> my actual experiential field and the way it presents Beethoven's 9th to me, is unbridgeable. This is not a difference in degree but of kind.

THIS. That's just what I was thinking about.

And that includes ourselves. Biologically it makes sense that we should be able to look into our firing synapses and find the groups of neurons that respond to every action and thought. But as we don't have that ability (and may never have the ability) we wouldn't see ourselves as just a programmed computer responding to stimuli. We would see ourselves as fully conscious beings.

The most likely reality is that we simply don't know what's fully going on, but can assume it's all naturally explained.

You don't have to understand it.
Removing any part affects how it runs at the least though. You need all of the parts to see it how it normally runs.
Fair enough. I don't even know what to make of that.
I'm just comparing the consciousness itself to the running of an engine as an emergent property. You need all of the parts to do it properly and need to understand how each part of the system interacts with the other to be able to study it and control each variable.