The C Word

>Can a larger brain allow us to become more smarter???
Yes it can, now go back to sleep the short bus comes later.

Smart/stupid and levels of consciousness are not the same thing.

People try to equate them by saying "German Shepherds are as 'smart' as a 12yo human!" but the two scales are clearly incompatible.

Dogs to humans is a matter of consciousness, whatever the unit/metric is. Intelligence is a different measure.

It's like mixing up Power and Work and Energy.

You assume too much without realizing it. At this point I believe you to be on par with the pseudo-intellictuals that watch pop-sci meme TV shows and regurgitate the information with no actual research into the subject. Thanks for wasting my time.

Roger Penrose has some interesting ideas on consciousness, as a "new" field of physics that's incalculable, and acts as an intermediary between QM and relativistic physics. Probably quackery, but interesting.

Well there's no need to be mean about it. It depends what you mean by "smarter".

On one hand, you could be talking about the ability to memorise, calculate, and apply. With a bigger brain I could learn calculus and topology faster, and know when and how to apply it. But it says nothing about my conscious state.

On the other hand, you could be talking about expanded experiential, evaluative, and cognitive function. The analogy from dogs to humans, or explaining a highway to the ants living beside it, is relevant here. Does capital-W Worldview also change with greater biological complexity? I think the answer is undoubtedly yes, so I'm interested in what progress beyond our current capabilities would feel like in experiential terms.

>Why can't science answer this question
Because it isn't a real question. "Consciousness" is a vague suitcase word packed with a hundred different debatable meanings. A real question is "What is the reaction time that elapses between a given stimulus and the subject's motor response?" or "If you read 16 words aloud how many can the subject recall regardless of order when prompted to do so after the reading?"
>why haven't scientists rebelled against their dogmatic overlords and developed a new science to answer this question
Some of the more retarded ones have.

>Because it isn't a real question. "Consciousness" is a vague suitcase word packed with a hundred different debatable meanings. A real question is "What is the reaction time that elapses between a given stimulus and the subject's motor response?" or "If you read 16 words aloud how many can the subject recall regardless of order when prompted to do so after the reading?"

Those attributes are purely mechanistic though. As a kid I enjoyed touching mimosa pudica and venus fly traps because they'd react to touch. Does that make them conscious? I wouldn't say so, but as you said, it depends on how you define the term.

aeon.co/essays/how-consciousness-works-and-why-we-believe-in-ghosts

>Those attributes are purely mechanistic though
Everything is mechanistic. Human behavior involves more complicated layers of mechanism, but it's still operating within the realm of physical cause and effect.

Do you think that's an argument for determinism?

If you have a thought to raise your arm, that thought required some electrical impulses to take some stored energy, fire some neurons and raise your arm. Was the initial expenditure of energy a causal response to something else, or was it "out of the blue" and without prompting?

I think we're definitely deterministic even though certain phenomena in the universe might not be. Neuronal firing is a classical physics phenomenon, not something that operates on the quantum scale. Tegmark published a paper about this a while back.

>To us what we are to dogs?

What does that even mean desu? I bet you cant even articulate what you mean apart from an arbitrary scale with us at 100 and dogs at... where would you put dogs?

I don't remember what I did 10 years ago, so was I not conscious then?

What about the case of clive wearing who got hep c in his brain and as a result cant remember experiencing anything before the last 7 seconds. He describes it like waking up for the first time, completely aware and writes phrases like that repeatedly in his diary all day. He says hes never seen a human before. What about him?

Why cant it be after or before birth. All you say is surely.

And what about lower animals without a worldview. Some would argue they are conscious.

You have no reason to believe differences though. All you can observe are outside hings which can just be seen as intellectual skill. The ant knowing what a highway is or having a "W" can be seen as an inference problem a la intellect.

this thread

>What is not measurable or described by motions and velocities is not real! Otherwise it would mean there are things in the universe that humans cannot understand. I do not like that, therefore whatever cannot be described as such doesn't exist!!!!!
You have a religious mind. You have simply chosen to worship physicalism... If you were born in the middle ages you would be one of the most devout christians.
The universe does not owe us meaning. There are things beyond the measurable. The unknowable exists. proabably... Perhaps there is another mode of thought needed to understand. Underrstanding going beyond modelling.

Shit's fake bro

Magpies sometimes make wreaths for their decreased. Is this funeral rite a conscious act? Are they aware that they experience grief?

it's just our "awareness"

>just
reeealy?

>What does that even mean desu?
Work on your English comprehension.

If something is "unknowable" then you can't really think about it in the first place, in which case it's pointless to bring up except to try to say "hey mannnn science doesn't know everything!!!!!" If there's a specific actual thing you're aware of that physics isn't sufficient to account for, then go ahead and describe that thing. Specifically, not with vague mysticism and arguments about how science isn't perfect, but with actual details.

Consciousness is a spiritual phenomenon and requires yogic practice and submissively reading scripture. Modern science cannot answer this and never will be able to because modern science is constricted to materialistic thought. The spiritual cannot be understood by materialistic means, including mental speculation. According to them, the body is a combination of physical elements, and at a certain stage the life symptoms develop by interaction of the physical and chemical elements. They believe the living symptoms develop at a certain stage of material maturity resulting from the interaction of chemicals.

Actually, life does not come from any combination of material elements or chemicals, but due to the spiritual soul residing within the body. The soul is not material, it is of a higher nature called purusha. This very small spiritual spark is the basic principle of the material body, and the influence of such a spiritual spark is spread all over the body as the influence of the active principle of some medicine spreads throughout the body. This current of the spirit soul is felt all over the body as consciousness, and that is the proof of the presence of the soul. Any layman can understand that the material body minus consciousness is a dead body, and this consciousness cannot be revived in the body by any means of material administration. Therefore, consciousness is not due to any amount of material combination, but to the spirit soul.

yogic practice and submissively reading scripture to fully understand*

Consciousness is a phenomena that is experienced by neural systems tasked with complex homeostasis mechanisms. Agency and free will, or their analogues, are mechanisms that enable an organism to pass on more copies of their genetic material.

Oh, that's easy.
It's the most shitposted thread topic on Veeky Forums is what it is.

Seriously why do you fucks keep coming to a Taiwanese Loli-trading forum to discuss something that's not even settled by postdoc professionals. You're going to get the same 3 answers repeated in every thread.

>Just neurology bro
>Just souls bro
>Just a mix of those first two bro

Everything has some degree of consciousness. The smallest things have a binary form of consciousness. We just happen to have more advanced computing power. Of course, you can't just throw a million atoms together and say that's consciousness. But yeah. And I'm not coming up with this either. It's something that is being currently debated by top brass Physicists.
youtube.com/watch?v=0GS2rxROcPo

>why do you fucks keep coming to a Taiwanese Loli-trading forum to discuss something that's not even settled

Because it's not settled.

>If there's a specific actual thing you're aware of that physics isn't sufficient to account for, then go ahead and describe that thing.
If there is a thing that a descriptive system can't account for, describe it.

The whole point is that consciousness belongs to a category of uderstanding seperate than those physical things that can be described. It cannot be explained via the convential modeling methodologies of symbolic representation/manipulation. But that doesn't make it unreal. There is a difference between comprehending and describing, labeling, classifying or modeling.
All I can say is that there is something that it's like to be you and it's different that what it's like to be me. If you can't intuitively get it, maybe you are a p-zombie.

also:
>If something is "unknowable" then you can't really think about it in the first place
Sure you can. The knowability of certain unknowables is knowable. See Godel's incompleteness theorems for a classic example.

For the materialists:

A simple bit of mathematics, like 1+1=2 can easily be worked out with pencil and paper. No problem. But how about complex engineering problems like how far debris from a building will fall upon demolition? Or how groundwater flows in complex stratigraphy? Well, we create models for that sort of thing to simulate them and let the computer crunch the numbers. But even so, a building demolition or groundwater flow CAN be calculated by hand on paper in theory. It's just impractical.

If the brain is purely mechanistic and consciousness materialistic, and this is what Leibniz was talking about with his analogy of the brain as a mill, then even though it can be "approximated" with a model (i.e. A.I.) the natural phenomenon could indeed still be calculated manually with pencil and paper. It's a natural conclusion then, that the pencil scratchings on the paper will start to say "I am conscious"

So is it?

Following that, one interpretation is that the brain and consciousness are indeed materialistic, but the explanation of which is simply beyond our cognitive function.

Horses are aware of stars, but unable to understand cosmological physics. So too would we be aware that *something* is going on, but incapable of expressing it in a meaningful way, or explaining it using our current toolset of language and cognition.

Following on again, here's a wild thought: Consciousness is a field, like everything else, and like the gravitational field is warped into "concentrated" points by mass, the consciousness field responds likewise to "complexity", by which I mean how the human brain is the most "complex" natural system in the universe, and """purely coincidentally""" is the source of the most advanced form of consciousness that we know of.

As brains go downwards in complexity, from humans to apes to dogs to mice to insects, so too does their consciousness (which inconveniently doesn't have any standard units, but I'll call them C here). Complexity forms chemically with energy input, no arguments there from the biologists I would think. It could even be thought of as self-sustaining resistance to entropy.

So there's really no upper bounds to C beyond biological limitations, like the square cube law that stops elephant-sized ants. Nor is there theoretically a lower bound, other than... Heat death? Consciousness upon death would therefore remain, but in a lower "standby" state, and would be distributed widely over space. Trees, even cyclones, would have more consciousness than a rock, but far less than any classically "conscious" being.

Very new age.

This almost emerges naturally for anyone who believes in evolutionary biology. It would seem weird for there to be a binary light-switch moment at which some poor ape-man suddenly snapped into consciousness. Similarly the journey from embryo, zygote, fetus, infant, toddler, child, adolescent, adult, to geriatric, and to death.

Cutely enough, although no hippiness intended, pic related is the best analogy for this journey of consciousness.

I really like the way you put it, like a more elegant chinese room experiment

I like the way you think. Perhaps because I've had similar ideas, but you expressed them in a better way

>All this seems a bit lovecraftian though. Reminds me of SCP-2718:
"I dared not speak of this at first. You'd never have let me out of containment. The truth is, I was aware of all of it. I suppose there was a sweet oblivion, like deep sleep, at first; but in retrospect, I think it was no more than a day. Slowly, but unmistakably, I reoccupied my corpse with dreamlike consciousness: numb for the first merciful hours, blind, deaf, and immobile, but then I seemed to reconnect to every nerve, and became aware of every sensation - moreso than I ever was in life. I perceived myself trapped within an immovable object, and the intensity of the struggle amplified: subtle, then acute, then racking. I cannot describe it completely - but imagine holding your breath, beyond urge, beyond pain, beyond desperation - head throbbing and eyes bulging - a dream of suffocation without end.

"My skin blistered and split in the sunlight; biting insects descended rapidly. I felt eggs hatch, larvae crawl, gases build and burst within me, individual cells rupturing, interstitial fluids souring and blackening. Somehow my capacity to experience and store these sensations grew - even as I was keenly aware of my cerebrum being scattered and devoured, my perception expanded, into the gizzards of birds and the depths of fire ant dens. I was aware of every fingernail and strand of hair that pulled away in the wind - and my sensation clung to them as they settled in the ocean and dissolved in the maws of a trillion diatoms.

"I don't understand it. The more bits of me there were, the larger my capacity for the perception of pain. As I decayed into pieces smaller than living nerves could possibly distinguish, the character of the discomfort changed - from burning and aching and breaking I might relate to you in human terms - to something worse that I cannot fully articulate: a terrible, maddening stretching of every part of myself from every other part. Humans often numb to chronic pains in life, do they not? Yet every year, every month, every second that passed - I swear it only intensified over time.

"In my previous life, I ruminated on Heaven and Hell, and the likelihood of my experiencing one, the other, or something in between. As terrible as I imagined the torpor of Heaven or the torments of Hell to be, this was entirely different from either. In Hell, at least, there would surely be a tormentor, some memory of my deeds, some sense of justice, even if my soul rejected its logic. I can imagine some comfort in Hell, for a mind such as mine.

"I do not think this is a punishment. I do not think it is caused. I deeply suspect it is simply our condition, our nature to go on this way, do you see? In all that time, I was certainly, absolutely, totally alone, and before long all memory of life had shriveled to a cinder, lost beneath my interminable anguish. Alive again, I suspect I cannot quite recall the worst of it - as if my living brain is too small for the experience.

"As Overseers, we witness, inflict, or endure great suffering. Yet what awaits us all is worse, the way an earache is worse than a bee sting, the way frostbite is worse than a burn. I was dead for eighteen years, and my misery eludes description. Dare we try to fathom the collective agony of legions of ancient dead?

>The knowability of certain unknowables is knowable. See Godel's incompleteness theorems
The whole reason Gödel's incompleteness theorems work is because you can prove specific statements are both true and unprovable in a particular axiomatic arithmetic system by showing how they're true and provable in a different axiomatic arithmetic system. "Unknowable in a particular system is different" from "unknowable." Actually unknowable things aren't anything you can think about or comment on in a meaningful way beyond pointing out the general concept of there being unknowable things.
>If you can't intuitively get it, maybe you are a p-zombie.
You don't understand the philosophical zombie argument. The whole point is that philosophical zombies don't behave any differently from non-zombies and trying to characterize someone as a philosophical zombie because they don't agree with your argument completely misses that point. Dualists make this mistake all the time, probably because even they recognize on some level that the real thing going on as far as "consciousness" goes is in fact behavior rather than spooky non-physical qualia ghosts.

That's basically panpsychism

i've been reading up on Penrose and Stuart Hameroff's theories for a while now too, and surprised they're not mentioned much here

Probably doesn't get mentioned much on account of it's pseudoscience garbage.
>Consciousness seems weird to me.
>So does quantum physics.
>Let's force one to try to explain the other!

Hello Elizer Yudkowski