Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

[R. Steve Walz]

You have not yet demonstrated any argument that self awareness has
anything to do with consciousness.

----------
They are the same.


Self awareness sounds a bit like a

high fallutin concept that perhaps even some humans don't have.
Consciousness is very simple and requires no philosophical
sophistication. --------------
Nonsense.


Do you FEEL or not? I can feel even when I am half
asleep. The test for self awareness is recognising a reflection as
yourself in the mirror, right? Can babies do this? Are babies
conscious?

-----------------
No. Not before they can do that, they aren't!

By the way, I am arguing for agnosticism. I don't think we have
enough data to decide.

-----------------------
Last resort of a coward. We eat animals. We've decided.

To me your argument sounds like this: Only humans are conscious
because only humans can do trigonometry. If humans are unique in one
respect they must be unique in all respects.
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.

---------------------------
Not all humans know trig. But they can all talk about themselves
without needing to be "interpreted". Animals can't speak the
language, but they don't have anything to say, either! How do
we know? Because, even the ones that DO talk can't do that!

-Steve

 

[R. Steve Walz]

Are you aware of experiments demonstrating that many animals can
count?

-----------
My computer can count, AND talk. These are actually much lower
capabilities than awareness, they are just not usually recognized
as such.

(And I am not referring to Hans the horse.) That is an
abstraction.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

A human who takes some heavy drug may be unable to speak or reason,

 

[dan michaels]

That not my definition of consciousness. I am suggesting that
consciousness is what spontaneously appears when those conditions are
met, (not those conditions themselves) much the way a magnetic field
spontaneously appears in the presence of an electric current.

I think the way it's stated, this would allow in almost any complex
inanimate system, such as a gas in a bottle, atomic particles, etc, as
being conscious. no?

 

[dan michaels]

We developed our talents gradually. Most of man's special abilities
are completely lost in a feral child.

If we think about comparing man's consciousness with animals, we
should pick a more typical man -- a cave dweller (not the recent
aberration) unless you want to argue that man very recently developed
his special talent for consciousness.

This is a good point. Is a feral child, raised by wolves with no
knowledge of humans, human history, human languages, etc, *not*
conscious? I think not. It's just as conscious as you or me, even if
it doesn't share the same level of communications skills. It just
cannot do all the same tricks.

And certainly it can 'think' about what happened yesterday, and
'reflect' upon the situation going on around it, even if it doesn't do
this with words. So, how does it do this, absent of language? Probably
using mental imagery.

BTW, Kosslyn discovered that about 2% of humans do not have the
ability to do mental imagery - as it seems, this small subset included
some of the most vocal psychologists from the past.

 

[Lester Zick]

This is a good point. Is a feral child, raised by wolves with no
knowledge of humans, human history, human languages, etc, *not*
conscious? I think not. It's just as conscious as you or me, even if
it doesn't share the same level of communications skills. It just
cannot do all the same tricks.

And certainly it can 'think' about what happened yesterday, and
'reflect' upon the situation going on around it, even if it doesn't do
this with words. So, how does it do this, absent of language? Probably
using mental imagery.

BTW, Kosslyn discovered that about 2% of humans do not have the
ability to do mental imagery - as it seems, this small subset included
some of the most vocal psychologists from the past.

It's interesting that a decade or so ago when the original analysis
for a seminal Eve was conducted via mitochondrial DNA estimates of
twenty thousand to two hundred thousand years were conjectured for
modern humans. And if this transition coincides with the emergence of
consciousness in humans we might be looking at as few as 1,000 to
10,000 generations.


Regards - Lester

 

[Roedy Green]

Last resort of a coward. We eat animals. We've decided.

To me your argument is that of a religious fanatic. You pretend to
know what you do not. I find your certainty baffling. But then then
so is the certainty of all religious belief.

You argue by repeated assertion. It is not in the least convincing.
Perhaps you took this argument from somewhere else. Perhaps that
originator makes the case more carefully.

 

[Roedy Green]

I think the way it's stated, this would allow in almost any complex
inanimate system, such as a gas in a bottle, atomic particles, etc, as
being conscious. no?

Potentially, but they don't undergo state changes similar to what
happens in brains.

Brains are made of atomic particles. What's so magic about them?

Gas molecules in bottle don't change state. They just move around.

 

[Eugeny Kornienko]

on 10 jan 2004 Roedy Green wrote

the intention to move your arm can be
measured my monitoring neural activity. It precedes the conscious
intention by something like .3 seconds.

The 'deciding' you do consciously is not really a decision. You have
already done the calculation.

Not me. My organism, my brain have done a work, then, after 0.2-0.3 sec I
(what is named "self") watch it.

It probably proves that consciousnes is the eyewitness. It watches or
measures what is going in my organism.

EK

 

[Eugeny Kornienko]

on 11 jan 2004 Roedy Green wrote

On 10 Jan 2004 09:47:10 -0800, (e-mail address removed) (dan michaels) wrote

they don't undergo state changes similar to what happens in brains.

Gas molecules in bottle don't change state. They just move around.

The differentiation of states is subjective. You consider a bottle with bear
and an empty bottle as the same bottle. I think the bottles are in different
states. Quantum states of atoms don't have any advantages as
"states" in comparison with biochemical states of neurons or other
structural elements of the brain.

Consciousness, as feeling, is ideal phenomenon. The brain is a material
structure. My brain (together with the whole my body, environment and my
experience) plays its role in creating my consciousness. Material (physical)
details of the brain don't matter to consciousness. Rather information
details do matter.

EK

 

[Roedy Green]

The differentiation of states is subjective.

I meant change of state in the quantum sense, a electron absorbs or
emits a photon and changes "orbital".

 

[Eugeny Kornienko]

Roedy Green wrote

I meant change of state in the quantum sense, a electron absorbs or
emits a photon and changes "orbital".

I meant that quantum or other (physical) details doesn't matter to creation
of (ideal) consciousness. Consciousness arises as experience of a
self-learning system when the system finds dependency of its action on its
condition and starts to repeat "useful" actions to achieve "good" condition.

EK

 

[dan michaels]

Potentially, but they don't undergo state changes similar to what
happens in brains.

Brains are made of atomic particles. What's so magic about them?

Gas molecules in bottle don't change state. They just move around.

You've just taken your 'definitional' model of consciousness one level
deeper ... into definition ... because now you have to define how the
word 'state' is applied here. Some like systems engineers would say
the values of position/velocity/etc of all the gas particles is the
state of the system. Others like thermodynamicists would take a more
global perspective, and might say gas/liquid/solid is the state. On
and on.

This is the root problem with trying to talk about things like
consciousness, as I mentioned in my first response above. You get what
you define. Edelamn, at least, doesn't get too cosmic in the looseness
of his definition.

 

[dan michaels]

It's interesting that a decade or so ago when the original analysis
for a seminal Eve was conducted via mitochondrial DNA estimates of
twenty thousand to two hundred thousand years were conjectured for
modern humans. And if this transition coincides with the emergence of
consciousness in humans we might be looking at as few as 1,000 to
10,000 generations.


Regards - Lester

And what about the animals ... are the wolves which are bringing up
the feral child conscious?

And for that matter, is the feral child in the wild really conscious?
Or does he become so only because he later gets discovered by a
regular human and reintroduced back into society?

Of course, the answers are yes, yes, and no. This is because
consciousness is not the same thing as being intelligent, able to use
language, etc.

 

[Programmer Dude]

Dennett said something like "philosphers who have dogs believe that
dogs have consciousness, while philosophers who don't have dogs
don't believe that dogs have consciousness". This simply shows how
definition-dependent this entire issue is.

And it brilliantly describes my view of philosophy! (-:

 

[Programmer Dude]

I think the way it's stated, this would allow in almost any complex
inanimate system, such as a gas in a bottle, atomic particles, etc,
as being conscious. no?

Explains certain STAR TREK episodes, anyway! :-|

 

[Lester Zick]

And what about the animals ... are the wolves which are bringing up
the feral child conscious?

And for that matter, is the feral child in the wild really conscious?
Or does he become so only because he later gets discovered by a
regular human and reintroduced back into society?

Of course, the answers are yes, yes, and no. This is because
consciousness is not the same thing as being intelligent, able to use
language, etc.

Except that I would add that of course the answers are no, yes, no. I
agree that consciousness and intelligence are distinct characteristics
but that language is indicative of the former but not the latter. The
general idea of language I'm referring to here is the something
predicated of something type of language and not merely vocalizing and
signalling.

Regards - Lester

 

[Roedy Green]

Of course, the answers are yes, yes, and no. This is because
consciousness is not the same thing as being intelligent, able to use
language, etc.

Another way to think about it is to consider various types of degraded
humans, e.g. progressive alzheimers, als, mental retardation, cerebral
palsy. I think we tend to ascribe consciousness to humans even when
they have abilities far below animals.

This notion that only humans are conscious smacks to me of tribal
think -- our side is the good/noble/conscious/intelligent side, no
matter what the evidence to the contrary, and the other side are not
even conscious. Hitler convinced himself of these notions about Poles
and Jews. It is based on an exaggerated sense of self importance in
the cosmos.

Uniqueness is rare in nature. (The eye evolved something like 6
independent times.) We should not stretch our arguments to find more
than absolutely necessary. We should be very careful if what we
propose flatters our species ego. We know what suckers we are for
flattery, even when it is blatantly insincere.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

To me your argument is that of a religious fanatic. You pretend to
know what you do not. I find your certainty baffling. But then then
so is the certainty of all religious belief.

---------------
And I maintain that you're merely ignoring the obvious. Humans have
the capacity for REFLECTION!! When you consider it carefully, you
realize that the WHOLE of the Individual's Life-World and Everything You
Think Is Real is made strictly of this Reflection, the Truth both
REVEALS and INSISTS that *IT* is the One and Only Source of Our Being
as Being Knows Itself!!

All "previous" forms of alleged "life" are merely as hypothetical in
their realness as the form of "time" in which they theoretically
existed within without being aware they did, which is none at all
that is REAL Time, namely, one we have experienced or can speak of
as experienced BY a Human that Reflects!

There are several kinds of Time, and a future language will someday
acknowledge this with separate words and even concepts for them. We
experience Time(1) since we last paid attention, Time(2) since we
woke up today, Time(3) since we've been Aware, and then there are
lesser forms of alleged "time"(alleged) such as "time"(1) another
claims to have experienced elsewhere/when, and "time"(2) that only
supposedly existed or in fiction, and then "time"(3) scientific
before humankind, and so on. The latter three are merely intellectual
fictions.

You argue by repeated assertion. It is not in the least convincing.
Perhaps you took this argument from somewhere else. Perhaps that
originator makes the case more carefully.

-------------
Nope, you simply resist it. That's cheap disingenuity.
Your dishonesty confabulates in your vested motivation.

Pretending not to understand and that the other person
is a "fanatic" is merely an easy out.

-Steve

 

[Roedy Green]

Humans have
the capacity for REFLECTION!!

Let us say I am reflecting on a conversation I had. Now I am not
reflecting. I am eating an apple. Am I suddenly unconscious?