Consciousnesses is literally just the firing of neurons and chemical reactions right?

Nobody blew out shit, the explanation makes perfect sense. Behavior is real and has the advantage of being compatible with physics and causality. The only argument against the possibility our brains are geared towards behavior premised on useful false beliefs is "but qualia seem very real to me!" And that doesn't amount to much of an argument since the brain is fully capable of creating a false belief that you report as seeming "very real."
Given a choice between everything we know about the entire independently verifiable physical world being mistaken vs. just our own brains promoting useful false belief based behavior, I don't see why anyone would go with the former over the latter.

>Consciousnesses is literally just the firing of neurons and chemical reactions right?
Probably, but shit's so complicated we might as well have some magical soul.
That's why psychology is kinda usefull. Biology is the bottoms-up modell, psych is the top-down.
When the two will meet, we'll take a huge step in understanding ourselves

I never grasped this either. If something exists, it's obviously material/physical, it wouldn't exist if it wasn't. Immaterial/material division is cancer, anything not based in materialism (we shouldn't even have a word for it), should be dismissed and ridiculed.

Yes. They exist in the brain and as information outside of the brain, interpreted by the brain (the work itself). That "information" is not information without us to project (onto it), interpret and comprehend it. Just like everything else in the world, a hatchet is not innately a tool, or a tool for chopping wood. It's just some material.

OP in 1750:
>Like none of you faggots believe that human beings will ever make a device to float them up into the sky right?
OP in 1880:
>Like none of you faggots believe that waves can travel without a physical medium right?
OP in 2017:
>Like none of you faggots believe that consciousness is a non-physical process right?
I believe, and unlike you have abundant evidence to confirm, that we don't know everything about how the universe works yet.

>you can't know nuffin
This is why we need the calculus captcha.

This is the only correct answer. I personally hope for some sort of heavenly ascension but I think it's more likely option 3. Either way it's super exciting to think about.

Uplifting post, my friend

A thought is an example of a non-physical entity because you cannot physically see it.
Sure, you might see the neuron you essentially associate it with being, but the thought itself isn't tangibly physical. I can't hold a thought in my hand like a material object.
So there is a non-physical reality, you material reductionists just over--simplify everything.

You need to disentangle computation from subjectivity. Neurons/their connections are the basis for the brain computing and therefore understanding/reasoning about the world.

However, you probably mean 'subjectivity', i.e. what philosophers term 'qualia'. For instance, the subjective experience of pain or the colour red. Though we know roughly which parts of the brain perform the processing of such subjective experiences (for instance, the full colour spectrum is first processed a few layers deep into the visual cortex), there is no understanding of what the subjective experience 'consists' off.

Multiple speculative theories exist, however. Strict materialists claim that consciousness does not even exist in some sense, and stems from a so called 'folk psychology' misunderstanding over how the brain operates. Adherents of this point of view would say that a perfect physical description of the brain would fully encapsulate any meaningful definition of consciousness.

Substance dualists, in return, claim that consciousness is another aspect of material reality that we haven't fully understood yet. An analogy would be the way a particle has a wave-like behaviour as well. Hence, substance dualists would argue that the essence of consciousness can be comprehended through the scientific method. There is a further subdivision between theorists who believe that the subjective experience of consciousness is integral to the brain's operation, and those for whom consciousness is an accidental 'epiphenomenon'.

Strict dualists believe the universe consists of material and immaterial things. For instance, consciousness could be linked to a 'soul' of some sort or some platonic plane of existence. The difficulty with such a theory is explaining how this 'conscious dimension' interfaces with the brain and its physical information processing. The so-called ghost in the machine dilemma.

Finally, idealists don't believe in matter -- which is a quagmire so lets skip that.

>Like none of you faggots believe
>none of you faggots believe
>you faggots believe
>faggots believe
>believe
>/x/

No you won't.
One critical aspect of being dead is that you're incapable of finding anything out.

We are the software that runs on the hardware of our brain. In this case, the software is more like an FPGA than a plain executable loaded into the memory of a CPU, that being because our "selves" reorganize the hardware of our brain to suit its needs instead of treating it as a generic computing platform

> consciousness is an illusion!

Please, tell me what's experiencing the illusion or false belief?

You've got your ideas completely ass-backwards and you should feel bad about yourself for your lack of rigor. You're completely conflating the contents of consciousness with consciousness itself.

What you don't address is why there's the experience of anything at all to begin with. Yes, neurons firing explains all of the behavior. Period. That's hardly up for debate. But why we have an awareness of that behavior (including thoughts) is still a very open question, and one that's completely unmet by physics as we understand it. There is zero foundation on which we can move from quarks and gluonns interacting with one another through a few particular forces, to the existence of subjective experience.

that is to say, we can imagine philosophical zombies perfectly well - people with no subjective experience. In fact, its absolutely what we'd expect - at no point can you move from 'dead' collections of matter to something 'conscious' because ultimately, any collection of matter is just quarks and gluons all the way down moving with respect to one another in a rather complicated way, so we can imagine a completely mechanistic human in this sense. But that's not the case, and we have no idea why.

>Please, tell me what's experiencing the illusion or false belief?
I can tell you your question is premised on a false belief which is why it doesn't have a real answer, much like asking "please, tell me what's rising in a sunrise if not the sun?" You're assuming there needs to be something there to "experience" something, which is the thing we're disputing in the first place. The way a false belief works is actually very simple: An organism behaves as though something that isn't true, is. You don't need "experience" to be literally real in order for an organism to behave as though untrue things are true. You only need the organism, its physical behavior, and agreement that "true" and "false" mean something.
>You're completely conflating the contents of consciousness with consciousness itself.
No I'm not. I'm arguing "consciousness" / "qualia" aren't really there, not that some physical thing is identical "consciousness" / "qualia."
>What you don't address is why there's the experience of anything at all to begin with.
I addressed why the *belief* there's "experience" isn't a literally true belief. Which is exactly how you address a mistaken claim. I'm not going to assume your wrong conclusion is right to address consequences of it that don't exist because it was never true in the first place.
>at no point can you move from 'dead' collections of matter to something 'conscious'
Which is why "qualia" aren't real things at all. We're compelled to behave as though they're an actual phenomenon that's happening to us because that's useful behavior to have. All you need to do to get past this alleged mystery is just accept that our brains are completely capable of making us believe in something that isn't literally true. No literal "color of red" needs to appear to you to have the behavior of responding to red wavelength light stimuli in similar ways like talking about how you're "seeing red" or interpreting an injured animal as bleeding.

>subjective is hard to explain therefore lets just pretend it exists in a different dimension or something

Sweetie maybe you're a philosophical zombie, if conscious experience isn't inherently the most real thing in existence to my little cupcake. Maybe your little sugar waffle brain isn't sufficiently complex to generate consciousness hmmm :O

>I'm arguing "consciousness" / "qualia" aren't really there, not that some physical thing is identical "consciousness" / "qualia."
Then you're fucking retarded

I'm experiencing consciousness and qualia right now, no pseudointellectual argument will ever convince me otherwise, because "me" IS that experience of qualia to begin with

I'm experiencing qualia right now and I'm conscious and sentient, I am NOT a philosophical zombie. Therefore qualia and consciousness ARE really there you FUCK

In fact this is ALL I actually know to be there, everything else could be the illusion. You're getting this all backwards

>It's really there because IT'S REALLY THERE
Stellar argument, user. It must be physics that's wrong because you have a VERY STRONG belief in Cartesian dualism that conflicts with it.

Don't make fake quotes and attribute them to me you pseud, I never said that

It's really there because I am experiencing it right now. And so are you unless you're a p-zombie

Are you claiming to be a p-zombie? No?
Great, then qualia exists.

>being this triggered because you don't have a scientifically accurate counterargument

>I can't explain what I am experiencing therefore what I am experiencing is something above me.

Once again making up a fake quote and attributing it to me

...Something above me? What does that even mean?

I am experiencing qualia right now and I am sentient. That is all I am saying, since you said qualia does not exist and it clearly does to anyone who isn't a p-zombie, like me for instance.

So stop straw manning me

>I'm experiencing qualia right now and I'm conscious and sentient, I am NOT a philosophical zombie.
That's exactly what a p-zombie would say.

How exactly is:
>I'm experiencing qualia right now and I'm conscious and sentient, I am NOT a philosophical zombie. Therefore qualia and consciousness ARE really there you FUCK
Any different from:
>It's really there because IT'S REALLY THERE
?????????????

>Once again
That's not the same person. Also it's called paraphrasing.

Why are neurons and chemical reactions so special? Why is my consciousness localised to an individual set of cause and effect mechanisms in my nervous system, but not extending beyond that? Why can't consciousness arise from a sufficiently complex system of billiard balls knocking each other, and if it can, why should the experience of consciousness only be experienced by the billiard balls and not, say, the player who knocks the balls and thus participates in the causal chain of the system?
This literally only comes down to a definition of physical as "everything in existence". It's an entirely circular argument

No religion vs science threads

That doesn't matter. Okay, I'm not one. Yet, on your end of the deal it's impossible to know whether I am a p-zombie. I'm aware of this

But I know that I am not a p-zombie because I am sentient and experiencing qualia, therefore I have the epistemic right to make the claim that I know qualia exists for at least one person, myself, and therefore potentially other people

Okay then. "It's there because I'm literally observing it right now and have observed it my entire life and in fact it's the only thing I've ever observed"

What exactly is your counter argument?

No, it's called straw manning

There's really no such thing as "religion vs science" per say but yeah I'll agree that a discussion on what is essentially philosophy on Veeky Forums is just plain odd.

If anyone actually provided theories to discuss like ORCH OR or IIT this who thing might actually be worthwhile but it isn't and you're all just taking cheap b8

> the fact that I have a subjective experience doesn't fit in with my neat little model of physics that's only been in development for a few hundred years, and I'm so cripplingly incapable of accepting the idea that there's more to physics than we already know that I have to deny the only real and immediate thing about my own existence

Experience exists. It's okay that we can't explain it right now.

Nobody said anything about a different dimension. Just an aspect of the universe that isn't captured in physics yet.

> you question is based on a false belief!
> your brain tricks you into believing that subjective experience exists!
You see the problem here, right?

Part of the issue of this discussion is that the language is not fleshed out very well

"Consciousness" is really a vague term. So is "qualia" quite frankly and all of these topics have a sort of voodoo/mysticism based feel to them in the minds of many. They don't view it as a substantial aspect of reality grounded in the dry bland information you can find in the pages of old physics textbooks. But we know it's real, it's all we have ever known to be real, the rest is abstraction based on this

If consciousness is not real then how did we derive physics? How is this discussion taking place? Unless you're all p-zombies and I'm not - but I find that extremely, extremely unlikely. It doesn't pass Occam's Razor.

Maybe those billiard balls are conscious on some level, but they lack the information processing to keep track of previous moments of consciousness (i.e. short-term memory), or reasoning about things, or communicating those thoughts outside the system (what ever that system is).

Qualia can only be denied if you decide that you don't exist. In order to, as you have, reduce a person to an organism which merely behaves as it does, with qualia merely being a theme in the action of the organism, you have to ignore that there is any experience inherent to the actions of the organism. You decide that there is no "colour red" beyond the wavelengths of light being registered by the eye and the brain as electrical signals, and that the organism merely acts as if there is a colour red, but when you look at red, you see red. Sure, it's indistinguishable from a third-person perspective, but to pretend that there is literally no such thing as experience is a vaguely absurd way of clinging to materialism as the principal grounds of your philosophy, literally despite any reason to think otherwise.

>"It's there because I'm literally observing it right now and have observed it my entire life and in fact it's the only thing I've ever observed"
>What exactly is your counter argument?
It's not there, you're just compelled to believe and behave as though it's there.
This scenario only depends on the leap of faith that yes, brains are capable of making organisms believe in (useful) untrue things like the notion there's "something there" that they can reference when light stimuli hits their eyes even though there isn't "something there" in reality other than the stimuli and their behavior in response to the (useful) untrue notion of the "experience" of it.
>Experience exists.
Your *belief* in "experience" exists. It can be an untrue belief and that's OK.
>You see the problem here, right?
It's not a problem. You can set this entire argument aside and the brain still "tricks" you into believing plenty of other untrue things that aren't as controversial / debatable. There is no incentive for everything an organism is compelled to do to be premised in literal truth. This doesn't mean knowledge is impossible, it means we should be aware our brains aren't going to magically give us literally true impressions about reality by default and we therefore need to check our own personal conclusions against independent observations from other parties if we want to approach a better understanding of how reality actually is.

But why only the billiard balls? To give a slightly more confusing, but better analogy, if I talk to you, my neurons are undergoing a cause and effect chain which will ultimately cause your neurons to undergo another cause and effect chain. Why not consider it as part of the same cause and effect chain, with our consciousnesses being linked, such that there is an overarching consciousness experiencing the system of our interaction? In the same way, is the universe conscious? It is sufficiently complex, if that is all that is required

>It's not there, you're just compelled to believe
Who is being compelled to believe?

>This scenario only depends on the leap of faith
By who?

>that they can reference when light stimuli hits their eyes
Whose eyes?

>Your *belief* in "experience" exists
Whose belief exists?

>You can set this entire argument aside and the brain still "tricks" you into believing plenty of other untrue things
Tricks who?

I can keep going on, but by now if you can't see that you are contradicting yourself left and right and that your argument makes no rational sense, then you're a retard or a p-zombie

>Unless you're all p-zombies and I'm not
Since you can suppose p-zombies exist, let me ask you this: Why do you believe you would ever personally know if you were a p-zombie or not? Because you have the impression you're "really experiencing" things? You could be compelled to believe that without it being true.

Already addressed that semantics argument here:
It's not evidence for "qualia" being real any more than the fact the word "sunrise" implies the sun rises is evidence for geocentrism being true. If it's a useful, biologically ingrained false belief then of course it's going to show up as an implied truth in instances of the language used by the people subject to this belief. All you're doing is taking phrasings that assume it's real and then saying "see, this means it's real."

The p-zombie issue is a fundamental issue of reality

It is the same issue as Godel's Incompleteness Theorems - there are truths which can never be proven, but this lack of provability holds no sway over the actual reality of the situation

What you're all discussing is the epistemic ability of thinking agents to determine whether others are p-zombies. Not whether p-zombies actually exist or whether an agent can determine for themselves, whether they themselves are a p-zombie. That is an entirely different issue

>Since you can suppose p-zombies exist, let me ask you this: Why do you believe you would ever personally know if you were a p-zombie or not? Because you have the impression you're "really experiencing" things? You could be compelled to believe that without it being true.
Your argument makes no rational sense, p-zombies do not believe or experience anything, therefore they cannot be compelled to believe anything, because if they were compelled to believe something they could stop being p-zombies

p-zombies cannot be compelled to believe anything because belief is a quality of consciousness which p-zombies do not have, therefore if I believe things, any things no matter how true or untrue, I am not a p-zombie, period. Because it implies consciousness, regardless of whether EVERYTHING I know is actually false - I can still know that I am not a p-zombie.

This is "cogito ergo sum". All we can know, the only thing we can know, is that WE are not p-zombies. I know I am not.

Yeah its a good point. Maybe the brain somehow modulates it so that it encloses itself from the consciousness outside itself, as it would be evolutionary advantageous. Maybe there's a critical density of complexity that is needed. Maybe God enters into structures of sufficient existential richness. Maybe the neurons in our brain interface with consciousness through some quantum effect to gain some advantage.

>p-zombies do not believe
Let me walk you through an example.
A) Someone builds a sophisticated robot that can take in stimuli from light and sound and behave in response to it.
B) The robot is designed to refer to these stimuli capture events in terms of what it "sees" or what it "hears."
C) You now have an example of an entity that behaves outwardly in the same basic way everyone else does and has no "qualia" in reality, which means you don't need the "qualia" to be literally there for any of us in order to explain how we could be the way we are. That we're compelled to report that we have these "experiences" only means that we're compelled to report that we have these "experiences." There's no reason to take an extra step and assume these "experiences" must be actual things instead of just abstract reference points for our behavior.

Not the guy you're responding to, but I think consciousness is a fundamental emergent quality of reality based on the state of a given location

Gravity is clearly similar - the gravitational field depends upon the state of how much matter exists in a given set of locations

Similarly, I think consciousness is a quality that exists relative to the concentration of "states consisting of arrangements of matter capable of keeping track of both internal and external state and making calculations based on previous states and the current state"

By this reasoning, AI would be conscious. Just not in the same way as we are.

I think this is evident, because if we have an AI with the same computational capability as our mental capabilities, we can continuously transform it into us through small changes in the computational hardware and arrangement. So where would the split from unconscious to conscious be? There wouldn't be one

Look I think you're fundamentally not understanding what a p-zombie is here

p-zombies have no consciousness. They do not think, feel, or experience anything. But they have the same inputs and outputs, the same reactions, the same abilities as conscious beings.

p-zombies are exactly like us in every way, except they have no conscious awareness of reality, no sentience, they experience no qualia, there's nobody "there" inside of them to experience anything.

If someone thinks they are a p-zombie, they are mistaken because the act of thinking that they are a p-zombie implies consciousness

If someone thinks they aren't a p-zombie, they are correct because the act of thinking that they are not a p-zombie requires consciousness

A p-zombie cannot form an opinion on whether it is a p-zombie, it cannot form an opinion on anything.

This is an epistemic issue relating to determining whether OTHER seemingly conscious entities are p-zombies. There is no epistemic issue relating to determining whether YOU yourself are a p-zombie.

You're mixing up the map with the territory here

>If someone thinks they are a p-zombie
It depends on how you define "thought." This is why I prefer to stick to discussing "qualia" / "experience," because with "thought" for example I don't believe the "hard problem" ever even comes up provided you use the meaning of "thought" I would use which is taking in information and outputting transformations of it. It's the "what it's like to see red" stuff that raises the question of there being something other than the physical in need of explanation. Information processing doesn't even get into that and is already done by simple inanimate objects.

I haven't read the thread yet, but maybe someone can answer.

Is it possible to make a guess as to how long it would take something to evolve? Say the eye for example. Or maybe something simpler. Can we look at fossil records and see approximately how long it took for something to come about? Could we use that knowledge to make predictions on other features and the time it takes for them to become apparent?

Yes, just collect a large quantity of fossils, calculate their ages, look for that feature, and make a plot of where that feature appears over time. You can see a trend of it becoming more and less common over time.

In general it depends entirely on the evolutionary niche. Hot climates for instance will allow faster reproductive rates due to increased energy existing in the environment to be harvested (since heat is kinetic energy of molecules) resulting in a faster mutation/selection cycle rate and therefore a faster "evolution rate" which can cause novel features to come about sooner

If you want to know more about evolutionary theory as an abstract generalized concept as opposed to the actual evolution of actual organisms on our specific planet, then I suggest you study "evolutionary algorithms" and their relevant parameters, which are primarily

>Reproduction rate (offspring per parent)
>Reproduction group thresholds (can a single organism reproduce? Do you need a pair? Maybe 3? In these simulations you can choose N)
>Reproductive group selection (do they have to be similar organisms to join a reproduction group? Or do they have to maybe be more different? This can all be generalized)
>Mutation rate - how far are offspring from parents?
>Selection criteria - how harshly are organisms killed off and for what qualities let them survive?

Thanks, also what algorithm is that?

It's not "an algorithm" it's an entire class of algorithms called "evolutionary algorithms" which are simulations of the evolution of parameters and their resultant emergent effects on the system which they are parametrizing