[ExI] What is Consciousness?

Tue Mar 21 06:20:50 UTC 2023

On Tue, Mar 21, 2023, 1:52 AM Gordon Swobe <gordon.swobe at gmail.com> wrote:

> In my view, consciousness is to be understood in the normal common sense
> meaning of the word. It is what we lose when we take a blow to the head and
> are knocked unconscious. We have it when we are awake or asleep and
> dreaming. It is first person, subjective experience which can include not
> only sense perceptions but abstract thoughts held consciously in mind.
>
> The word consciousness is almost synonymous with intentionality in the
> philosophy of mind. From wiki:  "Intentionality is the power of minds to be
> about something: to represent or to stand for things, properties and states
> of affairs. Intentionality is primarily ascribed to mental states, like
> perceptions, beliefs or desires, which is why it has been regarded as the
> characteristic mark of the mental by many philosophers."
>

Intentionality was popular for a time, but I think it's fallen out of favor
recently. I think beliefs and perceptions are closer to the mark, desires
less so, as desires might be subconscious.

"In philosophical literature, many phrases have been used to try to evoke
the right flavors for what being sentient really is (“being sentient” is
one of them).
Two old terms are “soul” and “anima.” These days, an “in” word is
“intentionality.” There is the old standby, “consciousness.” Then there is
“being a subject,” “having an inner life,” “having experience,” “having a
point of view,” having “perceptual aboutness” or “personhood” or a “self”
or “free will.”
In some people’s eyes, “having a mind,” “being
intelligent,” and just plain old “thinking” have the right flavors."
— Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett in “The Mind’s I”
(1981)

I tend to agree with Dennett here:

"Wherever there is a conscious mind, there is a point of view. This is one
of the most fundamental ideas we have about minds–or about consciousness."
— Daniel Dennett in “Consciousness Explained” (1991)

> On a related subject, I often see proponents of "conscious AI" write
> things like "AIs might never be conscious in the way we humans understand
> it, but they will have their own type of consciousness." To me, that is
> nonsensical wishful thinking. We know consciousness only as we understand
> it as humans (or perhaps more generously as mammals) and anything else must
> simply be labeled as not conscious.
>

We don't even understand it "in humans", as one can only ever be aware of
their own conscious state (and even then only at one instant in time).
Different humans may have radically different ways of perceiving the world.

But just because two people experience the world differently doesn't mean
one of those two isn't consciousness.

Likewise we shouldn't deny the very different types of consciousness as
might exist between different species, alien life forms or machines, just
because they experience things differently.

Jason

>
> On Sun, Mar 19, 2023 at 12:37 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> I posted this to the everything-list, but thought it would be relevant to
>> some current discussions. I am looking for other's input regarding their
>> own theories for "what consciousness is", and what is required to realize
>> it. Below is what I think consciousness is:
>>
>>
>> First we might attempt to dissect the word "consciousness" itself:
>>
>> The word *"con•scious•ness"* has three parts:
>>
>>    - con- <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/com-> meaning *"with"*
>>    - scious <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scious> meaning *"knowledge"*
>>    - -ness <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ness> turns an adjective
>>    *'X'* into a noun meaning *"the state of being X"*
>>
>> So the meaning of *"con•scious"* is simply *"with knowledge." * And just
>> as *'happiness'* means *"the state of being happy,"* adding *-ness* to
>> *conscious* implies *"con•scious•ness"* is *"the state of being with
>> knowledge."*
>>
>> So consciousness is anything which has a state of being with knowledge.
>> Next, what is knowledge? The oldest definition is that knowledge is a "true
>> belief". But here we run into a problem. Truth is not definable, not even
>> in mathematics. This was proven in Tarski's *undefinability theorem*
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theorem>. So if
>> consciousness is being with knowledge, and knowledge is true belief, then
>> the undefinability of truth, means we will never have a complete definition
>> of knowledge of consciousness. The best we can do is understand the
>> relation between them.
>>
>> The next question that poses itself to us, is what is belief? What is
>> required to have a belief? Is it a particular structure or state of matter,
>> or is it a mathematical or functional relationship or property, might it,
>> in either case, be related to information or information processing
>> (computation)?
>>
>> I don't have a firm answer on this, and will instead leave you with some
>> speculations by others on this question of what consciousness is:
>>
>> Douglas Hofstadter in "Godel Escher Bach" (1979):
>> "My belief is that the explanations of “emergent” phenomena in our
>> brains–for instance, ideas hopes, images, analogies, and finally
>> consciousness and free will–are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an
>> interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards
>> the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself
>> determined by the bottom level. In other words, a self-reinforcing
>> “resonance” between different levels–quite like the Henkin sentence, which
>> by merely asserting its own provability, actually becomes provable. The
>> self comes into being at the moment it has the power to reflect itself."
>>
>> Daniel Dennett in “Consciousness Explained” (1991):
>> "Anyone or anything that has such a virtual machine as its control system
>> is conscious in the fullest sense, and is conscious because it has such a
>> virtual machine."
>>
>> David Chalmers in "The Conscious Mind" (1996):
>> "Given the laws of coherence, we have a partial answer: consciousness
>> arises in virtue of the functional organization associated with awareness.
>> We can even arrive at a fairly specific understanding of parts of the
>> supervenience relation by virtue of the principle of structural coherence:
>> not only does consciousness arise from awareness, but the structure of
>> consciousness is determined by the structure of awareness."
>>
>> David Darling in "Zen Physics - The Science of Death, The Logic of
>> Reincarnation" (1996):
>> "But there is also an interior view, to which you alone are privy. In
>> mechanistic terms, as well as the appearance of the brain-body machine,
>> there is the feeling of what it is like to be that machine — the subjective
>> experience of being a certain someone. Consciousness, we might say, is the
>> symmetry-breaking factor between the objective and the subjective."
>>
>> Gerald Maurice Edelman and Giulio Tononi in "A Universe of Consciousness"
>> (2000):
>> "For the first time in evolution, information acquires a new
>> potential–the possibility of subjectivity. It is information “for
>> somebody”; in short, it becomes consciousness itself."
>>
>> Bruno Marchal in discussion list (2020):
>> "Consciousness is just anything simultaneously true, non provable,
>> knowable, even indubitable (knowingly for “rich" entities) and non
>> definable, and indeed the logic of machine self-reference shows that all
>> machine looking inward, in the way allowed by mathematical logic
>> (theoretical computer science) will bring a term to describe this, and is a
>> good candidate to be called consciousness."
>>
>> Stephen Wolfram in “What is Consciousness” (2021):
>> "In a sense what’s important is that it seems we may have a realistic way
>> to formalize issues about consciousness, and to turn questions about
>> consciousness into what amount to concrete questions about mathematics,
>> computation, logic or whatever that can be formally and rigorously
>> explored."
>>
>>
>> We see recurring themes of information, recursion, computation, and
>> machines and logic. I think these are likely key to any formal definition
>> of consciousness. I also think part of the difficulty rests in the fact
>> that there are infinite possibilities of different realizable conscious
>> states, and creating a single definition to cover all these cases is as
>> hard as making a single definition to  cover all possible mathematical
>> objects, or all possible universes in an ensemble type multiverse theory.
>>
>> Jason
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>>
>
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