It is a by-product, but it no less directs behavior for that.
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Why was consciousness naturally selected?
- Thread starter Gambit
- Start date
FunctionalAtheist
Hammer of Reason
Correct Answer: Respond to that which it is aware. An organism that is not conscious that you asked a question, cannot attempt an answer to that question. I do not accept your answer. E.g. a person aware of your question verses a person in a coma; one certainly can respond to your question while the other cannot.
Gambit
Well-Known Member
Then you believe in free will. Because the exercising of free will is the only possible causal role that consciousness can play. This would imply some belief in dualism.
Do robots have free will?
Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
Materialism and evolution can explain why there are information processing automatons that can react to environmental changes and act accordingly, but from what I understand, there's so far no real argument made for the benefits of being aware of being a information processor. For instance, robots that build cars, they don't have to be aware of being alive to do their job. They just follow the instruction. All animal and human life could have evolved to just be actors in our environments without necessarily being aware of ourselves. It's the "who am I?" question that we ask ourselves that has no reason to exist.
Also, there's the problem of that it arises or emerges not from the matter itself (materialism) or the energy, but rather the process of matter interacting. It's emerging from a swarm behavior of neurons that do nothing but process tiny bits of information. We can't reduce consciousness to one single particular cell and point at that cell and say, "look, here, this is you." That "you" emerges from the compilation of the things. This "you" must necessarily be part of reality. Consciousness is necessarily something that exists, at least as a potential, in this universe. When big bang happened, even if consciousness wasn't present directly, it's potential must've been there from the start, just as the potentials for stars, galaxies, gravity, and all else did exist as potentials.
I don't think it's supernatural. It's natural. But natural is not necessarily the same as physical. Physical is only one part of the whole.
Take for instance that some scientists today suggests that our world is nothing but a hologram, an illusion. It's not really there, or real in the physical sense we think of it. The physical, hard material view is just illusionary. The problem with that is... who is having the illusion if you are just an emergent property of that same illusion?
Here's a review from the book "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False" by Thomas Nagel. Nagel is an atheist, but is critical (as several other atheistic scientists I've read in the past) of the current reductionist/materialist hard views: Is Scientific Materialism “Almost Certainly False”? | Cross-Check, Scientific American Blog Network
This doesn't mean that an external entity being called God is necessary, but rather that this is how the world, in its totality, works. Consciousness as an integral part of reality itself.
Gambit
Well-Known Member
All stimulus-response systems (i.e.living organisms) respond to environmental stimuli. Are all stimulus-response systems conscious?
Gambit
Well-Known Member
What function can a robot with consciousness perform that a robot without consciousness cannot perform (in theory)?
FunctionalAtheist
Hammer of Reason
Shouldn't the question be "is any stimulus-response system based on its awareness?" Why would all need to be conscious to state that consciousness affects response?
Sapiens
Polymathematician
Frank Herbert made the point in Dune that to be "human" you needed to move beyond stimulus-response.
Gambit
Well-Known Member
I previously asked the question: "What can a "carbon-based information processing system (or stimulus-response system) with consciousness" do that a "carbon-based information processing system without consciousness" cannot do (in theory)?" To which you replied: "Respond to that which it is aware." This implies that all stimulus-response systems require consciousness to respond to their environment. Why? Because if there are any stimulus-response systems that do not require consciousness to respond to their environment, then concsciousness is clearly not needed to elicit an environmental response. So, this begs the question (that I asked in the OP): Why was a stimulus-response system with consciousness naturally selected over a stimulus-response systems without consciousness (because consciousness is clearly not required to elicit an environmental response)?
Not exactly: “Treating consciousness as a real aspect of the physical world brings it back into the realm of scientific inquiry and removes the suggestion that it is an epiphenomenon, lying outside the causal nexus of the universe.” from
Freeman, A. (2005). Consciousness. In C. Mitcham (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics (Vol. 1, pp. 410-412). Macmillan.
The term goes back to the automaton theory of the late 19th century, and is discussed by the great William James:
“But what on this view could be the function of the consciousness itself? Mechanical function it would have none. The sense-organs would awaken the brain-cells; these would awaken each other in rational and orderly sequence, until the time for action came; and then the last brain vibration would discharge downward into the motor tracts. (But this would be a quite autonomous chain of occurrences, and whatever mind went with it would be there only as an epiphenomenon, an inert spectator, a sort of ‘foam, aura, or melody’ as Mr. Hodgson says, whose opposition or whose furtherance would be alike powerless over the occurrences themselves.” (emphases added)
James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology Vol. I (American Science Series- Advanced Course). Henry Holt & Co.
While epiphenomenalism is perhaps safe to call materialist, having sufficiently distanced itself both from a more general term and become an “-ism”, the view that consciousness is an epiphenomenon can be materialist or not: it simply asserts that whatever consciousness is, it is some nebulous, powerless thing that is in stark contrast to mental causation. Can it be physical by-product? Sure. But in some literature it is not treated as such, as in the above (“aura” is not really compatible with materialism).
This assumes it was. By-products occur in evolution as well (and in general in evolutionary psychology the argument over whether what appears to be a universal/innate cognitive “faculty” or “module” was selected for or is a by-product is particularly prevalent). Also:
"One leading line of objection to epiphenomenalism goes as follows: The human mind seems to be the result of a process of evolution by natural selection. But in order for natural selection to get a hold on a trait, that trait must make a causal difference to an organism's fitness. Since epiphenomena cannot be selected for, and since the mind was selected for in the course of evolution, epiphenomenalism must be false."
Walter, S. (2009). Epiphenomenalism. In A. Beckermann, B. P. McLaughlin, & S. Walter (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind. Oxford University Press.
The fact that there are evolutionary by-products is one of the few defenses to this, except that it is an extraordinarily aberrant by-product when compared to any and all would-be analogues of evolutionary by-products.
It asserts nothing much and explains nothing and in general is more of a reaction against dualism, and as a materialist view I think it outdated from the start, as I would generally separate physicalism from materialism (though this is by no means always done) given that materialism, as the name suggest, refers to that which is material or of matter while physicalism, despite the potential for an identical interpretation, is also easily read as that which remains within the purview of physics, and within modern physics we find physical systems that aren’t “physical” (they have no mass), we find nonlocal causality of various sorts (from fields to entanglement), etc. Also, we find within physics even classical systems that are not “constrained” by the laws of physics but are consistent with them.
Free will and mental causation are not equivalent. One can have various models of supervenience, emergence, downward causation, and other non-reductive or non-constructionist mental causation without “free will”. One issue here is that the definitions of terms can be vague on both sides, but this is not so of dualism (where again various forms of all of the above can be compatible with physicalism).
Last edited:
None that now exist. Nor are any conscious.
Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
My computer seems to have its own will though. It crashes at random times, that darn machine. I bet it's doing it to just **** me off.
Watch that. We're not there yet. But jesus ****ing christ that is getting close.
They aren't, at least not in the literature; hence the term "self-aware". Consciousness (or the "mind") are generally taken to be awareness that includes a sense of and awareness of "self".
Conceptual representation and processing.
Consider the models of learning used in fields across the cognitive sciences (which range from the philosophy of mind to computer science to linguistics to augmented cognition & robotics). In particular, considers those we've actually been able to simulate. The earliest "artificial neural networks" go back to Mcculloch and Pitts (1943), Hebbian learning (Hebb's The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory; 1949), Minsky's use of Hebbian theory to create SNARC (1951), & Rosenblatt's perceptron (1957). The basis for computational neuroscience is not all that evolved since the Hudgkin-Huxley model (1952). Perhaps the most influential and important work with biological systems and learning theory was the work in the '60s onwards was that led by Eric Kandel using sea slugs (particularly the three papers all published in the a 1970 issue of Science- Vol. 167 No. 3296). What is so vitally important about this last research was that for the first time the emphasis on Hebbian learning as non-associative was made explicit (the distinction had been drawn, but the incredible work Kandel won a nobel prize for was not the kind of speculative models in Hebb's work nor statistical/computational technique that was posited to be related to the way(s) living systems learn but with little or no basis).
Kandel demonstrated 2 things, although one of these was little appreciated then and remains under-appreciated now. The less appreciated demonstration was the fundamental difference between the way information processors like computers function and living systems do. The more important was that the habituation-type learning Kandel was able to model was non-associative, meaning that the information "learned" about a stimulus corresponded directly to that stimulus and only that stimulus. Associative learning is an older term I dislike (the plurality of terms for memory seems a cancerous growth within the cognitive science, demonstrated dramatically in Tulving's "Are there really 256 different kinds of memory?"). It reflects and understanding of memory when most of what we knew of memory systems came from behavioral studies. However, the key difference between the kind of learning information processing systems that are conscious have over those that are capable of non-associative/stimulus-response learning is to abstract away from specifics. We readily classify novel stimuli, such as a car that looks different from any we've ever seen, as belonging to the concept (category) "car", but not being that concept- only an instantiation of it.
Computers were built to be precise. They are through and through syntactic processors, designed to take input that is reducible to symbols that can be processed by physical instances of operators from Boolean algebra. To maximize their computational capacity and precision, computers are highly compartmentalized. Not only is every bit in RAM, CPU cache, Hard-drive, etc., defined by a precise and permanent address, these storage areas are kept apart from one another and all are distinct from the processor (the logic gates that must actually manipulate input to produce output). Even sea slugs represent information via physiological changes, from connectivity in and among neuronal networks to the ways in which spike train rates and timing change. They are also always active, and the "processor" is the "memory".
When it comes to animals capable of conceptual, rather than purely syntactic, information processing, we cannot begin to simulate this kind of learning. We spent several hundred years formalizing mathematics to remove semantic content and then built calculators/computers designed from the ground up to mindlessly manipulate what can only be (for such systems) meaningless input. It explains the development of "quantum-like consciousness" which attempts to use the formalisms of QM in order to model consciousness as well as the increasing reliance on emergent functional processes and non-reductive models in relational and systems biology (and elsewhere in the complexity/systems sciences). However, it hasn't gotten us much closer to understanding how conceptual processors can do what they do beyond rather speculative hypotheses such as nonlocal nearly zero-lag synchronization (ZLS) among cortical neuronal networks.
The difference from such robots and the work in the 60s like ELIZA is mainly that instead of a chatterbot we have a 3D human looking machine that produces sounds but responds basically the same way to linguistic input the same way. It isn't remotely close. I was at HCII 2013. Many conferences publish a volume of peer-reviewed papers that are presented at the conference. Take a look at the nearly 30 volumes of such papers from that conference and the papers themselves (unless you have access to SpringerLink you won't be able to access the papers, but you can read the abstracts and I can provide you with any of the papers from this or any other set of HCII proceedings volumes. They span the cognitive sciences from augmented cognition, unmanned vehicles, computational linguistics, A.I., etc. You are watching a deliberately deceptive clip. Even the full version (see here) which is more honest is still deceptive in presentation.
This is the one conscious capacity computers have demonstrated they have. Just think of the really conscious version of this innate hatred of humanity: Terminators. It's been proven by science.My computer seems to have its own will though. It crashes at random times, that darn machine. I bet it's doing it to just **** me off.
Last edited:
FunctionalAtheist
Hammer of Reason
Huh? Sorry I didn't realize how far I'd have to reach to connect. No, plants respond to stimulus without any awareness, as do fungi, bacteria, animals, and almost every form of multicellular life. E.g. moisture stimulate germination in seeds, extreme heat stimulates transpiration in plants, and sweating in humans. Humans may also move into the shade. The sweating is not dependent on their awareness, the relocation to the shade is.
Animals would not move into the shade unless they were aware that the conditions in the shade represented an improvement over the condition in the sun.
Gambit
Well-Known Member
Consciousness is inherently subjective, not objective. As such, it is not amenable to the methodology of the physical sciences which require objectivity. This fact alone invalidates materialism.
Technically speaking, epiphenomenalism actually qualifies as a form of dualism - specifically, property dualism. The only truly materialistic position in the philosophy of mind is eliminative materialism which denies qualia (subjective experience.) Of course, this is absurd. But, if we take materialism to its logical conclusion, then we come to the realization that it is absurd.
This is just making my argument. Either epiphenomenalism is false, or consciousness is a brute fact of existence. Either way, atheistic materialism is invalidated.
The is known as the "spandrel" argument. And no one espouses it because it would imply that there may very well be "organic robots without consciousness" walking amongst us.
Quantum entanglement (nonlocality) and quantum indeterminism have simply rendered materialism obsolete. Why? Because if some phenomenon doesn't have a physical cause, then it doesn't have a physical explanation. It's that simple. Also, renaming "materialism" as "physicalism" is simply a case of "moving the goal posts." If it's not really physical, then why call it physicalism? It's intellectually dishonest.
If a phenomenon does not reduce to the physical, then it is not physical. IOW, non-reductive physicalism is an oxymoron.
Ouroboros
Coincidentia oppositorum
We're doomed. Unless we can plug our minds into cyberspace and integrate.