You are.

Hi Guidosoft.You picked a difficult one there. As NosyNed said in Message 10, nobody has a good definition of consciousness, and different people disagree on what it is.In any case, it is an area of active research. I would expect we will know a lot more in a few years time. Of course, I could be mistaken in that expectation.I agree with you, that consciousness is not easily explained by the motions of elementary particles. I would not try to explain it that way. However, there are a lot of interesting processes going on in a person (including in the brain). These processes seem to be gathering information about the world, and using that information to manage behavior.I can't tell you how these information processes produce consciousness, partly because we don't yet have a clear definition of consciousness. But I do think those information processes are where to look.Some people make the argument that consciousness comes directly from God by means of some special intervention. Personally, I think that's an unwise argument to make. For if scientists do explain consciousness, that would destroy much of your reason for believing in God. I would think it better to say that God created the natural world, and consciousness arose out of the workings of natureMy own view is that consciousness evolved. In my opinion, we can see evidence of some degree of consciousness in other animals such as dogs, monkeys, even kangaroos.I'm sure that I have not answered your questions, or at least not to your satisfaction. But I hope I have made a start. Now I will wait for your comments.

No, I would not expect that imagined brain to be conscious. It is being imagined that information is entering the imagined brain. But that's not the same as having information enter the imagined brain.There is a question here about the meaning of "information." I take "information" as being "that which informs". It is being imagined that information enters that imagined brain. But what is being imagined is that which would inform the imaginer. That's not what would be needed.Let me clarify another point. I do not believe that brains can be conscious. People can be conscious, and their being conscious depends on them having brains. But it is the person, not the brain, that is conscious.Maybe I can explain that another way. I don't believe that consciousness is a matter of some fancy algorithm doing data processing. Rather, I believe that our consciousness is an aspect of our interaction with the world. If there is no interaction, there is no consciousness. Okay, that fits with my views. But I think that still too imprecise to use as a definition of "consciousness". No, I don't think a robot is conscious. There is such a thing as interpreted information. Some people have full time jobs as interpreters. This gets to the old problem of syntax vs. semantics.As I write the reply, I am typing characters on my keyboard. It is those meaningless characters that are transmitted over the internet. Yet, as you read it, you somehow find it meaningful.It is useful to use the term "syntax" to refer to the sequence of characters, including their structure (verb, noun, etc). Likewise, we normally use the term "semantics" to refer to the meaning.Accordingn to one theory of language, we input the
the syntax, and then somehow interpret that to
yield the semantics.But I think that is false. I think we somehow directly input the semantics, and we normally do not have to interpret the syntax. As an example of this, I suspect that you had no difficulty reading the paragraph before this, and you probably did not notice the error in its syntax.Getting back to your statement: I would say that we directly hear the sound, not the sound waves. And we do not normally need to interpret what we hear, because we directly hear what is meaningful to us. By the way, this is roughly what psychologist J.J. Gibson has proposed in his theory of direct perception. Actually, it isn't particles. Even the sound waves are not particles. They are motions of particles. But the information is in the motion. The particles are merely carriers of that motion.You allude to one theory, which says that the information is stored in a specific format in memory and thereby seen by the person. I agree with you that this kind of theory does not adequately account for our experience. That's why I prefer theories based on the interaction between a person and the environment.

This gets a little confusing. In your previous post you said "there is no such thing as interpreted information" and I am still not quite sure what you meant there.I think it is better to use "interpret" when we take some text or other data, and produce from that some other text or data. This is what a language interpreter does, taking English input and producing Spanish output. When we are talking about a person determining the meaning, I think it better to use the word "understand". Thus I am not interpreting your post, I am understanding it (or at least trying to understand it).I'll grant that sometimes people use the word "interpret" where "understand" might be better. I sometimes make that mistake myself. I agree that when we understand written text, we do not seem to be doing a syntactic analysis. In most cases, we seem to be able to directly understand it. That is, we directly perceive the meaning without having to do any thinking about it or any apparent processing. Most AI people would say that our brains are doing some sort of computational processing, but I am not convinced that is right. I agree that I can understand that without difficulty. But I think it is a mistake to say that my brain can understand it. My brain is only part of the system. We have dreams. I think "experience" is the wrong word to use about dreaming.Certainly dreaming is not interaction with the environment. But we recognize that. We use the term "dream" to indicate that it isn't a real experience.In my opinion, dreams do have some relation to experience. What we dream about is, in some ways, connected with our experience. A dream somehow activates memories, but then distorts them.If you are tuning a piano, you might use a tuning fork and see if the strings resonate to the same pitch. The piano tuner will make lots of sounds on the piano, but they won't be the same as ordinary music playing.I tend to think of dreams as something similar. I think it is the system tuning itself, sending test signals to check the effect. And these test signals cause resonances of our memories, and that gives us a dream. You misunderstood me there. I am not saying that a person is some sort of ideal entity created by a brain. I'm just saying that a person is a person, and a brain is merely one part of the person. Experience involves eyes, ears, maybe our sense of touch, etc. A brain alone is not sufficient to have experience or to be conscious.

I sometimes wonder where people get these strange rigidly deterministic ideas. They surely don't come from any evidence that I have seen.Hmm, I guess this is off-topic for the current thread.

Hi iano,Your comments might make for a good opening post on a new "determinism" thread.If you start such a thread, I will comment there. Let's avoid derailing Guidosoft's consciousness thread. Put that in your new thread too, if you like.

No, sorry.I guess I won't get your allusion.

This is not a brain alone, and he is not without senses. He still has proprioception, the internal sensing of the state of the body. Without this he probably wouldn't be able to control his head to bang out the morse code.

Some people talk of a brain in a vat. The idea would be that the brain is in a suitable chemical bath to keep it alive.With that metaphor, my view is that a brain in a vat could not be conscious.If they were able to transplant your brain into my body, I am suggesting that it would not be you with a strange body. If the transplant took, the result would be confused and if one could say that there is a person there, that person would have great problems deciding on its identity, if it could even think straight enough to worry about such questions.I'll grant that my opinion here is somewhat controversial. Some people believe that we will one day be able to transfer a person to be part of an AI system, and thus give that person the possibility of immortality even when the body dies. I think Hans Moravec has that view, and possibly Marvin Minsky has some sympathy for it.The Moravec view is one extreme. A very different position is that of autopoesis. My own ideas are different from either of those, although I am more sympathetic to autopoesis than to the extremes of AI thinking (computationalism). That would be the view that a brain in a vat could be conscious.Many people would probably agree with that. I don't.You can have variations where the brain in the vat is connected up to a computer that simulates all of the input a brain might normally receive. I'm not quite sure where I stand on that particular case.I hope that clears up some of the confusion.

I agree. I don't quite agree there. I think it just reacts to data. The data does not inform the computer, so it is not information to the computer. It is information to us, but to the computer it is just data. I touch something. What is that mysterious "I" that is doing the touching?I guess you might be thinking of the "I" as the atoms that make up my body. I don't agree with that. I don't see the "I" as made of atoms. I see it as a system of processes, which temporarily make use of those atoms to do the processing. But most of the atoms that today constitute my body, will be gone and replaced by this time next year. However, the processes go on.When you say "I can imagine chemicals reacting to it" you are admitting that the processes are affected by the information. Since I am those processes, that has something to do with how I feel that touching.I won't comment individually on your other paragraphs. I think you are repeatedly identifying the person with the atoms, instead of with the processes that use those atoms.

After a few months, the atoms will all have left the body. But the processes will continue. I did read it in full.As I stated in a previous reply, we do not currently have a complete explanation for consciousness. If you want to take that as evidence of an inexplicable mystery, that's your choice. My expectation is that there will eventually be explanations.

You are assuming that you exist as an unconscious entity, and then you find it mysterious that information processes could provide consciousness to that unconscious entity.That's where you create the mystery. There is no unconscious entity that has to be made conscious. Those informational processes create you as an already conscious entity.

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With that metaphor, my view is that a brain in a vat could not be conscious.

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Why do you think the body is neccessary for consciousness? I see you wrote 'could not' instead of 'would not' be conscious. Why do you think it is not possible for:

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variations where the brain in the vat is connected up to a computer that simulates all of the input a brain might normally receive.

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According to commonly held assumptions, the body contains various sensors that pick up information from the environment. They feed this information to the brain as a central processor. That central processor then provides what we consider to be intelligence and consciousness. In effect, the brain is taken to be a passive receiver of information, and the main work of the brain is in processing that information which it has passively received.I believe those assumptions to be seriously mistaken.In my opinion, information about the world is not something cheap that can be picked up by sensory cells. It takes a lot of work to get that information. I see the brain as actively involved in controlling the manipulation of the environment in order to gather information. And consciousness has to do with that gathering of information.I disagree with the "brain in a vat" idea because it is derived from those assumptions where the brain is a passive receiver of information. Remove the body, and the brain is just useless neural tissue. There is then no way for the brain to stimulate the world and prod the world into delivering wanted information.

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We have the brain alone, and the body to sustain it, what else do you need if not the soul?

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The brain is there to sustain the body as much as tbe body is there to sustain the brain

Information is transmitted down the neuron. For that to happen, there is an ionization event. The atoms are used to carry the electrical charge. The information is not made of atoms. The atoms are merely carriers of the information. No, let's not. I have not suggested that a row of balls could be conscious. I have already said that it is not the brain that is conscious. I'm not sure why you are pursuing this argument. The word "system" is useful to us in our description. I have not suggested that there is any magic in our calling something a system.

I'm not expecting any special use of quantum physics in an account of consciousness. However, there are some scientists working on that possibility.

The data is cheap. The information is expensive.I want to find the temperature of the air. I look at the thermometer. The thermometer reading gives me only the temperature of the thermometer. I need knowledge of the placement of the thermometer before I can conclude something about the temperature of the air. That knowledge does not come cheaply. In a way it is still wanted, but we are not actively seeking it. When that happens we are also not nearly as conscious of what happened until we start to actually seek out more information. I haven't actually tried to do either. I expect that the brain is hard because of the sensory deprivation. As for the body, you also have to supply artificial nutrition. It's clear that we have to replace brain functions to keep it biologically alive. Consciousness is consciousness of a world. A brain by itself doesn't have a world. A person has a world.