Hal

I was never talking about qualia and I don't know who did, I was just talking about the subject of the thread. I was never talking about self-awareness either.

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Originally Posted by Xei

I think maybe there are tests for consciousness... I talked about it before here. Most neuroscientists would agree that consciousness is the result of physical manifestations, but what's not generally realised is that there are physical manifestations which are the result of consciousness; consciousness is not some kind of added layer with no causal consequences but rather an integral part of physical reality, neuroscience is making that clear.

Think about this thread for example. It is a physical manifestation of consciousness. If consciousness did not exist nobody would have made a thread about consciousness because we would have no concept of it, clearly. One could perhaps argue that something can delude itself that it is consciousness, but I think that that's a contradiction of terms.

Basically what I'm saying is that you can test somebody is conscious or not by asking them 'are you conscious'?

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I am no programmer, but I can create a program that we can finally call concious.

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Input: /any key/
output: Did you mean to ask "Are you concious?" J/N?
Input: /ignore input/
Output: I am concious

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I have done it, glory will be mine once I publish this.

But all fun and games aside, you could create a computer program or robot or whatever that would say it is concious. Under the right (and probably quite silly) circumstances a species that is not or hardly concious could perhaps evolve a cultural phenomenon that is repeatedly saying "I am concious" and referring to ones inner workings, with no real concious knowledge of it, but mearly as a social lubricant, a way to better cooperate, or a peacocks tail perhaps.

Anyhow. "Are you concious?" not exactly a fail-safe way to go. Not that we aren't concious. But also a sleep-walking person could also utter "I am concious". And stuff, like, that.

Yeah, you made that point well.

What I'll say though is that it doesn't change what I was really trying to get across, which is that consciousness does have physical manifestations in 'proper' cases, where the thing responding is being 'honest'.

As a test you're right though, it could fail easily... but if consciousness does have physical manifestiations, which is the point I was trying to get across, then surely there is some hope that there is some kind of 'litmus test' for it... not that actually asking would work in itself, but there ARE physical traces, so there COULD in theory be a test. That's what I was trying to say.

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Originally Posted by Xei

I was never talking about qualia and I don't know who did, I was just talking about the subject of the thread. I was never talking about self-awareness either.

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Then what the fuck is consciousness?

The difference between you and a philosophical zombie. Qualia. Awareness.

I don't think knowledge of self is particularly intrinsic to that.

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Originally Posted by Serkat

What the fuck is consciousness?

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Originally Posted by Xei

Qualia. Awareness.

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Originally Posted by Xei

I was never talking about qualia

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Originally Posted by Xei

Why would the neurons have to be constantly there for consciousness anyway?

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:confused:

What. I was talking about consciousness, not qualia. Just because conscious beings have qualia, doesn't mean that consciousness is qualia... :\

The things you're saying are rather pointless anyway, not much to do with the conversation.

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Originally Posted by Xei

doesn't mean that consciousness is qualia... :\

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Originally Posted by Serkat

What the fuck is consciousness?

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Originally Posted by Xei

The difference between you and a philosophical zombie. Qualia. Awareness.

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WUT

Yeah you're going round in circles now and it was completely pointless to begin with, I just answered that. If you could kindly say something relevant to further the topic. DV already has enough of that kind this pedantry at the mo.

First you say that consciousness is qualia, then you say it's not and you call me pedantic for pointing that out?
You do know that philosophy is about language, right?

I never said consciousness 'is' qualia, I used the term qualia to try and convey what I mean by consciousness. Qualia are probably one of the essential ingredients in my view, I place much less importance in self awareness, and certainly don't make self awareness synonymous with consciousness. I'm calling this whole conversation pedantic, taking random bits of text out of the thread and saying WUT just for the sake of argument is just detrimental to what was a pretty interesting discussion, I thought.

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Originally Posted by Xei

I never said consciousness 'is' qualia, I used the term qualia to try and convey what I mean by consciousness. Qualia are probably one of the essential ingredients in my view, I place much less importance in self awareness, and certainly don't make self awareness synonymous with consciousness.

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How am I supposed to know that from you saying "Qualia period Awareness period". That's not philosophy, that's poetry. Bad poetry though.

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Originally Posted by Serkat

Because behavior is just one aspect of a system. it wouldn't be conscious because there wouldn't be any neurons to be conscious.

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What is consciousness and what natural law requires the presence of nuerons for it to exist?

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Originally Posted by Xaqaria

What is consciousness and what natural law requires the presence of nuerons for it to exist?

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I use consciousness synonymously with qualia.

The natural law I don't know. What I do know is that in the case of myself being conscious, it seems to be very heavily based on neurons as a form of interconnected material systems. As with any other natural law, something must be there for an effect to occur by it. So I'll gladly commit the logical fallacy of deriving a sort of tiny-sized unproven natural law, based on just one piece of evidence, which is my own experience. I'd rather do that than derive the law that something that appears to be conscious by behavior, is indeed conscious, even though it has an entirely different makeup from myself (like a PC).

Nobody would suggest that light or gravity can be simulated on a PC by creating a software that very accurately computes some crazy sub-atomic principles. No matter how much you're computing there, the CPU isn't going to create any extra gravity or light. There's absolutely no evidence for that being possible in any way. That's because the universe doesn't care about "mental" stuff and stuff that appears to be something from the outside. It cares about matter. Similarly, why should it be possible to create consciousness in something that isn't anything at all like those parts of matter we know of that create consciousness?

You see where I'm going with this? There's one piece of evidence for a material system of neurons correlating with consciousness. How much evidence is there for a non-material system of neurons correlating with consciousness? None, as far as I'm concerned. I think it's much more probable that the internet correlates with qualia than a single CPU-based PC ever being even remotely close to that, no matter how sophisticated the software.

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Originally Posted by Serkat

I use consciousness synonymously with qualia.

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My 1/50th dollar is that I also don't really distinguish between them, in the way that what we would call conciousness has qualia, and that which has qualia has conciousness. Or can someone think of an exception?

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The natural law I don't know. What I do know is that in the case of myself being conscious, it seems to be very heavily based on neurons as a form of interconnected material systems. As with any other natural law, something must be there for an effect to occur by it.

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Conciousness and natural laws are completely different things. They both have to do with matter, yes. But things like gravity and light are way more 'one' with matter. Don't know what physics has to say about this, but special/general relativity also included something about mass, gravity, effected space time. Conciousness does no such thing.

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I'd rather do that than derive the law that something that appears to be conscious by behavior, is indeed conscious, even though it has an entirely different makeup from myself (like a PC).

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The whole 'appearing to be concious' (by behaviour) you justly look upon sceptically, as is done in philosophy of mind today. Functionalists still kind of have the whole behaveriousts 'looks like it thus is' thing, but in a 'has certain functions thus is (concious)'. But really, no-one accepts turning-tests (basically chat-bots that can fool people into believing it's human) or anything like that as proof for conciousness these days.

The whole 'brain (simulated) in a PC' is not (as far as I know) used as proof for the possibility of computer based conciousness, but more as a hypothetical, what-if, thought-experiment, to see the discussion of another angle and to look into what exactly could sustain conciousness. (The computer, even in the most optimistic views of human technology, probably will remain hypothetical.)

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Nobody would suggest that light or gravity can be simulated on a PC by creating a software that very accurately computes some crazy sub-atomic principles. No matter how much you're computing there, the CPU isn't going to create any extra gravity or light. There's absolutely no evidence for that being possible in any way. That's because the universe doesn't care about "mental" stuff and stuff that appears to be something from the outside. It cares about matter. Similarly, why should it be possible to create consciousness in something that isn't anything at all like those parts of matter we know of that create consciousness?

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Kind of already gave my view of the 'gravity/light' and 'evidence' parts.

I agree that the universe doesn't care, so to say, about the mental stuff. But gravity and light, even though depended on interaction between matter, are as I claimed of an different order, than conciousness. Conciousness does not in a way come directly from the matter of the braincells. It is their interaction, or actually is it an interaction. From the 'mind's point of view', the neuron isn't really there. What is there, is an stimuli, an impulse. It doesn't matter what gives of a signal, and how. Since you could theoretically exchange one neuron with an electrical device with the exact same functionality as that neuron, you could theoretically exchange all the brains neurons with electrical-switches (awfully hypothetical, but the point stand. A neuron is a simple, material, switching mechanism).

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You see where I'm going with this? There's one piece of evidence for a material system of neurons correlating with consciousness. How much evidence is there for a non-material system of neurons correlating with consciousness? None, as far as I'm concerned. I think it's much more probable that the internet correlates with qualia than a single CPU-based PC ever being even remotely close to that, no matter how sophisticated the software.

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I kind of answered this too. No one is claiming it is certain a computer-like thing could have conciousness. Or saying they have any evidence for it. "But why not?" is a good question. One that (rightfully so) hardly anyone would bet their life on, as people shouldn't have betted their life on the shape of DNA when there was still debate about how it's shape might be.

The evidence for human conciousness is kind of irrelevant, since that isn't at trail at all here, people are just trying to find out what is the essence of conciousness, what is needed for it to be, what could sustain it, besides the human brain. All that to better understand what it really is in the first place.