This is an incredibly complex question put into brainlet words but bear with me a bit:

Are you telling me, with the complexity of our modern digital technology, that you can't imagine all of those capabilities being recreated?

It seems like you still aren't asking the real question. About what we can't replicate yet.

Processing information from reality. We started as mindless single cells then eventually developed a centralized information processing organ our brain giving an individual existence to us. As time passed our brains became more advanced as our environments changed meaning we get smarter if our brain needs to process new information in an environment.

To say that something is conscious is to say that there is something that it is like to be that thing. There is presumably nothing that it is like to be a rock, but there presumably is something it's like to be a dog. Do you think we have been able to create something like this, with an inner, subjective life?

Self aware is a matter of language u use. Concept of I wasn't there until "I" was initiated into a public language most likely by perceiving another human silent while maintaining an action. One may have assumed that human was talking "innerly" and further formulated a concept of himself, or of inner thought, which then u could apply to your own self. Thought exists outside of awareness though, so what we consider "I" or private consciousness is really just a mental function with aid of evolving public language.

Even if this were true, it still tells us nothing about how or why it's possible. Why should a large enough collection of atoms, arranged in the right way, suddenly start subjectively perceiving itself?

So what you mean when u say "I have an experience" is on par with the accuracy of "he probably feels x". You have no direct awareness to your own thought. That knowledge exists superficially through language and is no more accurate that you inferring what someone else feel.

But here's another question: when you program something on a computer, you can see it. When you look through a database you can see all of the information within it.

But nobody else but you can see what you're thinking, right now. There's no space in reality where what you're thinking really exists, if you consider reality to be what we can perceive and what we can assume or deduct from physics.

So going back to the original point, is it even possible for an artificial intelligence to gain true consciousness? I personally think it's impossible for the complexities of this to be programmed.

But once again, I have no science to back any of this up. It's all just bullshit I'm pulling out of my asshole. Which is why I'm posing this question here.

I fail to fully perceive(and thus remember) "my own self" from one fleeting macro-moment infinitesimally separated from the next fleeting macro-moment. At what exact moment could I have finished the thought that I am completely self-aware?

After many moments of internal study of myself, I think that I'm not nearly as 'conscious' as I thought I was. Instead, I live under a comfortable illusion as a particular part of my brain (the speech parts) gives me an 'internal-monologue' most of the time.

One part of me talks to the other part, which talks back to the first part in a hidden, non-verbal way. Just internal brain-to-brain communication. Is my brain a single unit as a whole, or is it separate units who work together? The answer must be that it is both and neither- the brain is just the brain, just as I am just a thing. I am neither conscious nor not-conscious because these are just made-up things, I just talk to myself and think I hear more than I say while I actually say more than I hear.

The question shouldn't be "what about our brains makes us conscious" and should be "what about our brains makes us different from other observable living organisms" and I think very strongly that the answer is our brain's capacity for language as a tool.

>True consciousness
Lol, The mysticism! Is science so dreadful that one must escape to a land of blissful dreams to feel authentic? Worthwhile? Meaningful?
Consciousness will be explained and recreated, it is only a matter of time. Bye by folk psychology!

Similar

>But nobody else but you can see what you're thinking, right now.
But we do in fact have equipment to see something. It doesn't matter whether or not we can interpret it because the manifestation of that information has been measured in some form.

Some people think that brains are like computers, in that they consist of hardware and software. Thus they think that no matter what the material a particular software is instantiated in (the hardware), it could be conscious. For example, if a robot brain made from silicon had the same structure as a human brain it could be conscious. Or even a brain simulated on a computer could be conscious.

if human brains follows the rules of physics, how come no one still understands it? I mean, there's got to be some sort of explanation right?

The question is what can the brain do that our current model of physics doesn't account for.

You can see brain activity that anyone in principle could see. You can't see the thoughts or perceptions correlated with this brain activity.

Semantics. But that doesn't necessarily invoke "conscious" debate.

You are confusing self-consciousness with phenomenal consciousness. OP is asking about phenomenal consciousness.

You don't have direct access to phenomenal experience though...? all his points still apply to phenomenal experience. Just shift language primacy over towards awareness and there is still an issue accounting for knowledge of phenomenal experience. P

Something about our brains simulating the world including us simulating ourselves within that world and so on...?

These people always make me wonder if they lack consciousness themselves, do not get what we are refering to, are aware but not aware enough to notice their own awareness or perhaps they do not want to admit that we might live in a universe that doesn't owe us meaning and the unknowable exists.

You do have direct access to phenomenal experience. Right now I can see my computer screen. That perception is (part of) my phenomenal consciousness. I am directly aware of it.

To suggest that you need language for it is to imply that there can only be something that it is like to be human, and that dogs and birds are the mental equivalent of rocks.

>You can't see the thoughts or perceptions correlated with this brain activity.
Because you have already defined that as being impossible. Without any justification, you dismiss the possibility of an experiment proving you wrong.

The justification is that it is a fact that there is such a thing as subjective experience. By definition, subjective experience cannot be observed objectively. That's an epistemic limitation of science.

Which is why consciousness is a philosophical problem and not a scientific one.

>it is a fact that there is such a thing as subjective experience
And what would it take to disprove subjective experience? There are other models that account for human behavior.

Consciousness is an illusion created by the brain's ability to perceive and analyze its senses. We use our senses to create a representation of reality and we base ideas off that representation. Our self awareness comes from us sensing ourselves. If you were to somehow get rid of these senses and the memory of these senses, not only will you lose self awareness but you'll also lose the ability to have any thoughts of any kind because you have no way to perceive reality.

>Loss of consciousness only occurs with death.
Never been drunk before?

It is literally the only thing that can't be disproved, because it's not possible that it's not there. Can you see your computer screen right now? That seeing is subjective experience. Even if you're hallucinating, or are in the matrix, or are dreaming, there is still experience. Just because it cannot be proven objectively doesn't mean it's not there.

Consciousness can't be an illusion, because consciousness is the "something-it-is-likeness" of experience. An illusion is where something is other than what it seems to be. Consciousness IS the seeming. If anything can seem like anything at all, then you are conscious.

Something has to be there, but it doesn't have to be subjective experience.

nice

Perhaps consciousness arises from a complex series of systems? The human brain is processing information thousands of times a second simultaneously. A computer however, only processes information linearly(albeit much faster than the human brain).

Have you ever asked yourself "why am I me and not someone else?" Have you ever sat in meditation trying to grasp what "me" truly is?

Yeap. Maybe "me" is just a particular manifestation of the concept of me-iness. Maybe that thing about you living all lives including the tortured ones makes some sense. Rather thatn each thing generating each one consciousness, maybe it's one consiouss-field expressing itself in the appropriate machinery..
It's hard to put it into words, but you probably get what I mean...

>Rather thatn each thing generating each one consciousness, maybe it's one consiouss-field expressing itself in the appropriate machinery..
Yeah, but have you thought about what that means? What does the brain use it FOR?

maybe nothing. maybe it just fits. maybe the laws of of reality are that way. There is no why, only how.

So you're the retard that assumes all is possible in the realm of technology in time

Only valid answers in this thread

There is no scientific explanation for how the brain gives rise to consciousness, in the way that we perceive it or even the most insignificant bacteria may. All the dumbasses in this thread relating language to consciousness are chasing the fucking wind, language is just a result of how your brain perceives the patterns of the world around it and manipulates it through the same and similar patterns. Fuckin Helen Keller never knew a spoken language but she still thought before she learned braille. I agree that without external stimuli or memory of it to influence thought there would be no thought and by that definition the brain in question would be unconscious, but it still has the potential to think so that begs the question of whether consciousness is thinking itself or being. The real mystery lies with how the brain processes the information it receives, which is something we can only minimally understand. We can map brain activity through magnetic resonance while the subject is doing certain things to use different parts of their brain (for lack of a better explanation) such as math, reading, listening to music, but how the brain directs that information to that area and how it expresses that to your conscious self, to then be brought back through the brain and expressed into the world you're in is completely incomprehensible. Even if we were able to map every individual neuron and each synapse it fires at any given moment, I don't believe we will ever have an answer to this.

Go back to fucking reddit, no one wants to waste their finite time in this life reading your vague questions begging for validation. No one wants to see your oh so smart substitutions for although or your asides in parenthesis. This question has nothing at all to do with computers or how they relate to brains. Go back, stay there.

There's nothing in the brain that makes us conscious,
Consciousness is fundamental to reality.
Materialism is a false god.

I see a correlation on this chart of the number of neurons in a cerebral corte. The more neurons you have, the more "conscious" you are. Only mammals have a cerebral cortex, the outer portion of your different lobes and where many of the compartmentslized areas, like the Broca's area, that communicate with one another are. At the anatomical bottom of our brain is the brain stem, a primitive area that is responsible for basic functions like breathing and heart rate. Every animal with a brain has that, or at least some form of it. They do not possess a cerebral cortex, so they cannot have complex thoughts. There is a middle area where basic instincts like our emotions are. The cerebral cortex, with a vast intricate network of connections going in every which way, is what seems to lead to a higher conscious on the spectrum.

One question I have:
How does this explain for the intelligence and higher cognitive functions that cephalopods exhibit

>No one wants to see your oh so smart substitutions for although
lel
Qualia :^)
I see the "what it is like to be X" phrase a lot, even in serious philosophical texts, but it still seems like just another semantic trick while bypassing the real definition.

I can accept that a certain encoding of information, or maybe in particular a computation thereon, will have an associated quale (basically panpsychism). But why "greenness" and "blueness" manifest in the specific way that they do, and not the other way around, or whatever, I really can't fathom how that could ever be answered.
Maybe it's all relative, for example in the inverted qualia thought experiment, it clearly makes no functional difference when the subjective experiences of light and dark are switched, as long as it's internally consistent. The only thing that your brain *really* encodes is the difference between lightness and darkness (the first derivative of light intensity so to say).
But it seems that if you adopt this view, you run the exact same problem at the higher level: why is "lightness darkness" experienced a certain way, and "loudness quietness" another?

>I see a correlation on this chart of the number of neurons in a cerebral corte. The more neurons you have, the more "conscious" you are.
Nigga please, you don't know that. You don't actually know that a human is more conscious than a motherfucking harbor porpoise, or that a gorilla is more conscious than a chimpanzee.

I agree with what you say about individual experience of color being indeterminable, but there is a difference between that and lightness/ darkness or loud/quiet in that those are both comparative, quantitative measures of energy and stimuli, whereas the color is a qualitative measure of the composition of the light. I have thought before how it would be possible (theoretically possible) for someone to see colors in negative and therefore see light as black and the absence of light as white, this however is different from seeing light as dark and dark as light (dark is inherently the absence of light)

To expand on this you can graph the difference between light/dark or loud/soft on a line, 1 dimensional, however to graph the full spectrum of colors would require a 2 dimensional plane.

Yea that's true, but there's still a huge qualitative difference between colors and e.g. taste, which is also multidimensional.

Might be unrelated but are you basically saying language can be a tool allowing consciousness to carry out, maybe, more complicated tasks

nothing. it's not your brain that makes you conscious.

What is it that allows us to perceive that we are perceiving our senses?

You talk a lot like a friend I met on a chat site a long time ago

Prefrontal cortex (RAM)
Cerebellum (Long Term Memory Storage)
Tightness and location of neurons (CPU)
Senses (Sensors)

REEEEEEEEEE

Drugs can change parts of consciousness but none of them stop it, unless you get put in a coma i guess, but that's still debatable in some cases i would guess.

Tell your friend he's a smart feller :^)

It's a combination of memory and advanced neurological circuits. When you talk to yourself, the only reason you are aware that you're talking to yourself is because you recall it happening. What exactly, you may ask, are you recalling? You're recalling the images and events associated with each word that you used in your mind. It's a complicated mnemonics system using phonetics, and even the recollection of words is just a connection between the syllables and the real (or constructed aka abstract) objects.

oh that's more of my personal theory. obviously there is no evidence of we would have the answer.
>Even if this were true, it still tells us nothing about how or why it's possible.
agreed, but it's probably not impossible to figure that out
> Why should a large enough collection of atoms, arranged in the right way, suddenly start subjectively perceiving itself?
personally i think it has less to do with the large enough collection and more to do with a certain amount of continuous signaling, which can be based on more than just neuron amount, like frequency or density.

obviously we don't have proof or hard evidence of anything related to consciousness, asking for such and then complaining when someone can't provide it is really redundant. That's like asking what the purpose of life is and then getting upset at people's guesses

...

we're programmed to be feel concious, this feeling/perception can be altered and downright nullified by certain substances and experiences.

also the ability to introspect, like user said

To talk about illusions without a conscience having them makes no sense.

What does it mean to say that consciousness "emerges"? I see it employed a lot as if it explained something when it actually doesn't.

Any definition will employ words, if you don't agree with the words employed you will ask for their definition until the person being interrogated reaches a point where he can't formulate anything, and then you will cry victory.

Falsificationism isn't a good philosophy of science and isn't how science actually works. Read Thomas Kuhn.

Please stop thinking things only in terms of computers, programming, formulae and shit.

>Consciousness is fundamental to reality.
How? You mean in a transcendental idealist sense or a spiritualist one?

But it's undeniable that what goes on in the brain is intimately linked to our conscious experience. Why is our consciousness linked to the brain? How is it linked? How much does it depend on it?

Oh, I forgot: why do we have those threads in Veeky Forums? Isn't Veeky Forums the place for them?

>Please stop thinking things only in terms of computers, programming, formulae and shit.
Why? The brain is literally just an information processing device.

WATER
Water is alive

The question was so stupid it fleetingly disappeared from my mind.

Learn about neurohashes (my invention, similar to binarized neural networks) and not neural networks in general.

If it's your invention, why don't you tell us about it?

The problem is that the whole cybernetic worldview has no pure theoretical value. It's only a tool to predict things and control the workings of matter; we're not really "knowing" the nature of things through it, just getting a technologically useful concept of their behaviour.

>we're programmed to be feel concious
oh_no_its_retarded.jpg
only conscious things can feel anything, you moron. if we're programmed to "feel" conscious, then we ARE conscious. "cogito ergo sum"

I think consciousness can only really be explained in terms of a functionalist view of the brain. Whether that is based on something computer-like or not is not particularly relevant, since it all boils down to the same thing anyway.

The problem is that with "explained" you probably mean "made something exploitable to technology". I was going to make a comment based on a vague idea I have of functionalism, but I'm not familiar with contemporary philosophical jargon, as it's completely shallow to me, so I think it's better not to. I prefer to talk about the ideas themselves instead of words.
When I see you people talking about those -isms the impression I have is that philosophy to you is like a game of picking ready-made views and combining them in a big philosophical toy.

...

>idealist
This sense, though I'm not sure whether I should be a transcendentalist yet.

>I fail to fully perceive(and thus remember) "my own self" from one fleeting macro-moment infinitesimally separated from the next fleeting macro-moment. At what exact moment could I have finished the thought that I am completely self-aware?
Sounds to me like the achilles-tortoise "paradox" but with time instead of distance and mental moments instead of a man and a tortoise.
>No matter how close Achilles gets to the tortoise, there will always be an infinite amount of infinitesimal distance-units between him and the tortoise, therefore motion is impossible
>No matter how close two mental moments are in time there will always be an infinite amount of infinitesimal time-units separating them, therefore continuity of consciousness is impossible

Anesthetics I would say do. When I got my wisdom teeth removed it was like closing my eyes and then immediately opening them when the procedure was done, with no gap in between, the anesthetics didn't even make me lose the memory of the exact moments before and after waking. I'd say that's a gap in consciousness. Even people in comas can be aware.

Hi Hofstadter

This doesn't even answer the question, you're just going on about how you theorize the brain works with such conviction to make it seem like you know what you're saying. You don't explain how the brain gives way to memory through neurological networks, how it talks, how it recalls memories, you're just saying that it does to add filler to this already pulpish thread.

>he uses google definitions
Might as well post a screenshot of urban dictionary.

One of three actual thinkers in this thread. However the whole of science progresses through the falsification of previously deemed true theories. You're right to think going around knocking down the pillars of modern thought without erecting new ones isn't the scientific process, but the goal of science is to explain the unexplained, and anything that can be proved wrong doesn't fully explain.

You're a douche and a charlatan, leave your computer out in the rain.

I assume he's trying to say utilitarian.

If you think you aren't a transcendentalist yet you're neither one nor an idealist; you're a hipster.

The "achilles-tortoise 'paradox'" is the application of Zeno's arrow you dingus, try reading GEB through one more time
All the faggots in this thread have seriously failed to make the grade, I would be ashamed if I were nearly any of you.

Define "define"

>hipster
Oh. I was working through the SEP to try to understand all the different objections and idealisms before I committed to transcendentalism but now I'm going to get a macbook instead.

Neurohashes are binarized neural networks. Working on them I learned so much about consciousness and what neural networks do much better than the inefficient floating-point neural networks we have now.

I think an artificial intelligence lifeform using neurohashes could be useful if it could think in ways we can't and thus go further and solve little bits of problems we can't or haven't thought of. This has been the main reason I don't really care about making AI, until I thought of this, but it still seems like too much effort today because of the problems I have in finding a mapping of the hash bits to advance from the previous state of the hash bits to the closest next one to satisfy all the previous associations, fast enough. What excites me though is that a possibly slower method like raising a child for years could be used to train a neurohash that doesn't try keep all the associations, only mapping the latest one, and advancing the state of the hash bits to the next closest one so that eventually a semi-stable state will be achieved where the associations will be more and more preserved.

github.com/dmdware/lm16
github.com/dmdware/lm15

My first idea for an ALife was having the neurohash get reinforcement whenever it gets new novel exciting stimulus eg accelerometers changing rapidly or seeing many pixels change from a camera eg using a smartphone body. It's all about mappings and what inputs you map to outputs. The other technique I thought of was "dreaming" or having the neurohash take a desired output.... it could be something random like seeing circles in the camera, but so far my methods require it to be an exact pixel-for-pixel goal without room for fuzziness or room for possibility,... and based on that target output, to backtrace through the neurohash to any of the possible input states that would create that, then... I forget. Rather it's a back and forth, making a prediction what the next input frame will be...

...text was too long.

So making a prediction what the next input frame will be (based on the reaction of the world and actions of the output of the neurohash), based on the current input, and doing a back and forth somehow. You'll go far with something like that.

What is is about our consciousness that creates our brains? Why does consciousness give rise to matter? (or rather the feeling of matter)

Also gamedev.net/blogs/entry/2262981-neuro-hash-edit4/

A bunch of brain circuits that we don't yet understand but are within our reach of understanding with computers and artificial intelligence, if we invest the time in neurohashes.

Magic. Any other answer is either deluded or wilfully ignorant

Consciousness is an epiphenomenon. There just is a feeling of being certain processes, natural or artificial.

Understanding of consciousness is possible only through enlightenment. To even know why it's fundemental you must remove all other aspects of self (ego, body, etc.)

This is complete hand waving.

Its like if I said gravity works by things falling down.

Maybe it's the part of your mind that you communicate with other people, like a common basis for understanding each others internal processes, if speaking in the analogy of neurohashes and complex artificial intelligences. Or maybe it has something to do with the two intelligences of the two hemispheres of the brain in a similar way. We just have retarded non-interesting machines and so never see it created artificially. You think insects have consciousness? At what point does it appear? Apes and orangutans were made for us to laugh at. But I look into the eyes of some primates sometimes and see that they are actually depressed because they're not like us. And then I look at a chimpanzee being happy that an ipad can make peanuts out of nothing that I feel said that we are like that too.

youtube.com/watch?v=P8NRh9UI1aQ

> In philosophy of mind, epiphenomenalism is the view that mental phenomena are epiphenomena in that they can be caused by physical phenomena, but cannot cause physical phenomena.
This makes no sense. Mental phenomena cannot be caused by physical phenomena because they concurrent with them. If both "cause" and "effect" happen at the same time then they are not actually cause and effect. If there can be no mental events without corresponding physical events, and if those physical events cannot occur without generating mental events, then they are no more than two sides of the same coin. Neither type of event is caused by the other, rather they are the same event manifesting itself on different levels, both as real as each other.

This.

I don't understand your objection. They're both the same event manifesting themselves on different levels. Property dualism.

I fail to see where this steps into the realm of consciousness. You'll need to explain what makes your "neurohashes" separate from any other binarized neural network (unless you're implying you invented binarized neural networks, which you didn't), not everyone can program, much less understand your run on sentences, it seems English isn't your first language. Simply posting your git is not an explanation, not everyone is a compsci wizard. The output images of your program on gamedev.net/blogs/entry/2262981-neuro-hash-edit4/ seem very procedural to me, and lacking of conscious manipulation, so if you could please, since you're so passionate about it, explain more.

top kek

I appreciate the sentiment, but keep your shit facebook-tier replies to yourself

They don't happen concurrently, The information from a physical phenomena reaches your eye at the speed of light, and the neurons that interpret that information move much slower (different neurons go at different speeds, especially non-cerebral myelinated neurons) in reality when you look at anything you're looking relatively far into the past. My understanding of epiphenomenalism is that every thought is contained within the neurons of the brain, and therefore is a quantifiable physical phenomena. I wouldn't say I agree with it only because it implies reading thoughts will be theoretically possible, which I do not believe, however I do agree that every thought you have is caused by your nervous system's reaction to physical phenomena. but now this is getting into determinism, which I'll save for another thread.

Would reality/universe still exist without the human brain?
>yes
Is there anybody that is aware of it?
>no

Does a tree fall in the woods
Did I dunk on your mom last night
How many licks does it take to get to the center of a lolipop
your wojack is pretty qt

you are literally saying that the universe does not exist out side human consciousness you dumb flip

How could he possibly be saying such a thing