Consciusness IS NOT MATTER

[Strange]

36 minutes ago, Alex_Krycek said:

My point was that if we're able to create a fully sentient, conscious AI, then that still wouldn't explain the origins of our own consciousness. 

Which is one of the counter-arguments I suggested earlier. 

36 minutes ago, Alex_Krycek said:

Animal/ plant life (and life in general) demonstrates levels of complexity, awareness, and purposive behavior that reflects an evolutionary trajectory towards intelligence.

Nope. But if you think that, then it isn't surprising that you think there must be something behind this perceived "purpose".

But it is a natural human reaction to see patterns and purpose where there is none. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

36 minutes ago, Alex_Krycek said:

The alternative perspective is that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of evolution, but the very purpose of evolution itself. 

That is a perspective, but one unsupported by any evidence at all.

36 minutes ago, Alex_Krycek said:

This creative intelligence is what separates us, and arguably all organic life, from something that is purely mechanical.

Until something purely mechanical is able to reproduce it?

Basically, this is a classic example of the fallacy of begging the question: why are we not like machines? Because we have creative intelligence that machines don't have. How do we know that machines don't (can't) have the same intelligence? Because it is uniquely human.

36 minutes ago, Alex_Krycek said:

If one believes that life is merely the haphazard result of random chance, a cosmic accident existing in a dead, mechanistic universe, that person will probably go on to view life with much less value than a person who views life as unique and sacred, the progeny of a "higher power" whose exact nature cannot be comprehended.

I think that is nonsense. Or certainly unsupported guesswork. Some people who believe in some sort of higher power are also in favour of the death penalty, or are mass murderers, or in other ways debase the value of life.

Of course, so do some people who don't believe in a higher power. But that's the point: I don't believe it is a factor in how people view the value of life. But then your belief sounds rather like the smug self-satisfaction who thinks their religion is better than others

36 minutes ago, Alex_Krycek said:

This is why I find David Bohm's work in the area of consciousness so fascinating.  Because of his deep expertise in quantum mechanics, and his extensive dialogues with eastern mystics such as J. Krishnamurti, Bohm gained access to a synergistic perspective that has allowed him to go further than anyone in reconciling the subjective and the objective in a way that is not arbitrary or biased.

I'm not sure that waffle has any place on a science forum.

Edited February 1, 2018 by Strange

[Bender]

1 hour ago, Alex_Krycek said:

I think the machine metaphor is outdated, if not obsolete.  Mechanistic materialism may have been a useful philosophy in the 1600s when reductionism found traction, but there are too many glaring differences between organic life and machines to justify it's use any longer.  The whole really is greater than the sum of its parts.  Any attributes that may be similar between a machine and organic life, such as communication or autonomous behavior, human beings have purposely chosen to create.  Machines are a reflection of our creative intelligence (which is required for their existence).  This creative intelligence is what separates us, and arguably all organic life, from something that is purely mechanical.   

You seem to be the one who is out of date.

Machines paint

Machines compose music

A heap of gears can evolve to a functioning clock

You could argue that the last one was programmed with a purpose, but you would be wrong: it was programmed with an evolutionary pressure.

I invite you to come up with an example of an activity or feature which is in principle impossible for a machine and does not only depend on the higher complexity of our physical brain. 

Edited February 1, 2018 by Bender

[Strange]

1 hour ago, Bender said:

A heap of gears can evolve to a functioning clock

You could argue that the last one was programmed with a purpose, but you would be wrong: it was programmed with an evolutionary pressure.

I don't usually have any time(*) for videos, but that was very good.

(*) Excuse the pun

[DrmDoc]

19 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

It's extremely unlikely.  And we already discussed this point; I agree that a physical apparatus is necessary (at least in humankind) for the expression of human consciousness in this particular dimension.  But this fact does nothing to answer the question of origin, it merely relies on an assumption that the material apparatus is where consciousness originates.  There are clues as to an alternative, as I mentioned before with extremely complex behavior existing in insects without highly developed brains.   

Although you "agree that a physical apparatus is necessary (at least in humankind) for the expression of human consciousness", you do not appear to understand what this agreement confers.  Agreeing that "a physical apparatus is necessary" confers your understanding that brain structure and its related functions are indeed essential to "the expression of human consciousness".  Although I've emphasized necessary and essential, the keyword here is expression.  What you do not seem to understand or have fully considered is the role of brain function in the expression of human consciousness.  The expression of human consciousness originates through the properties of brain structure and function.  Brain structure/function is that elephant in the room of your consciousness perspective that you seen to be ignoring.  Consciousness originates as an expression through brain function and agreeing that the brain is necessary for the expression of consciousness confers your agreement that the brain is indeed, in someway, essential or central to the origin of that expression.  Essentially, you have agreed that consciousness cannot be may manifest without brain structure and function.

 

19 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

There was no evidence for ultraviolet light before Ritter discovered it.  Nor was there evidence for neuroplasticity before scientists like Norman Doidge came along.  The fact that we don't have evidence for a particular theory doesn't make it untrue.  The fact that we have incomplete evidence doesn't make something true.  What is important is asking questions, formulating hypotheses, and working towards a way to test them, even if our current state of limited technology precludes it. 

Yes, it does. Nothing becomes fact or truth without evidence and we do not have evidence supporting your ideas.  Conversely, we do indeed have complete evidence that the expression of human consciousness originates through human brain structure and function by the abundance of tests, studies and incidents of the absence of stated consciousness in the absence of the stated brain structure and function. 

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I'm not asserting, I'm just questioning an unsupported assumption that you're putting forward.  I think there is the possibility that your viewpoint is incomplete, that's all.  All science begins with questions, and questions lead to hypotheses.  There are many hypotheses by "universally accepted science" that are untestable.  Multiverse theory, for example, is one such untestable theory.  So I don't see it as "religious" ,as you say,  to ask questions that challenge someone else's worldview.  If anything it is more religious to posit an unproven theory as scientific gospel and attempt to shut down any inquiry into an alternative.  Science was born from philosophy, from wanting to understand the universe.  Philosophy is where most scientists who want to truly delve into the novel unknown end up - those such as Einstein, Heisenberg, and Bohm, among many others have found themselves squarely in this realm.  In this territory positivism is essentially useless, as you are dealing with phenomena that we either A.) don't comprehend  B.) partially comprehend but can't test  or C.) we can't comprehend or test.

Theories and hypotheses aren't truths or facts without real evidence that can be tested, studied, or replicated. Unlike the idea of consciousness originating from beyond the brain, the facts regarding consciousness originating from the brain can be tested, studied, and replicated because we have the brain as a tangible and testable resource for research.

Edited February 1, 2018 by DrmDoc

[Alex_Krycek]

3 hours ago, Strange said:

Which is one of the counter-arguments I suggested earlier. 

Nope. But if you think that, then it isn't surprising that you think there must be something behind this perceived "purpose".

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But it is a natural human reaction to see patterns and purpose where there is none. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

Similarly, if you think there is no purpose to life, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you will form your conclusions accordingly.

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That is a perspective, but one unsupported by any evidence at all.

Nor is the view that consciousness is merely an unintended byproduct of the brain's evolution.

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Until something purely mechanical is able to reproduce it?

If that is ever possible.  If creative intelligence and mechanistic function are two distinct phenomena, and somehow humans are able to engineer an entity with creative intelligence, that entity would in essence no longer qualify as a machine. 

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Basically, this is a classic example of the fallacy of begging the question: why are we not like machines? Because we have creative intelligence that machines don't have. How do we know that machines don't (can't) have the same intelligence? Because it is uniquely human.

I'd say you're the one engaging in a logical fallacy.  You're saying that human beings and machines might one day share equal footing in terms of intelligence.  Even accepting that this assumption comes to pass, It ignores the reality that human beings created machines.  They did not create themselves, nor did they evolve naturally as we did to possess creative intelligence.  The term is artificial intelligence for a reason.  Everything a machine could ever achieve it was gifted by an organic life form with this intelligence . 

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I'm not sure that waffle has any place on a science forum.

Have you read any of David Bohm's work? 

2 hours ago, Bender said:

You seem to be the one who is out of date.

Machines paint

"This system also uses two sub-networks.The discriminator is given a large set of art associated with style labels, the researchers explained, for example, Renaissance, Baroque, Impressionism, or Expressionism, and the generator does not have access to any art.  As it generates a piece, it receives two signals from the discriminator: one, which classifies the image as ‘art or not art,’ and another which indicates how well the discriminator can classify that art into an existing style."

It's a neat trick, but giving a machine a data-set of previous artwork and then programming it to replicate styles in general alignment with that data-set is only the illusion of creativity. 

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Machines compose music

"As previously noted, the chord structures and instrumentation is purely Amper’s; it just works with manual inputs from the human artist when it comes to style and overall rhythm."

Style and overall rhythm are integral to the end result of a piece of music.  Looks like human beings are still sharing the creative legwork with AI.  Another neat trick. 

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A heap of gears can evolve to a functioning clock

I understand the analogy that cdk007 is positing in this video, but at the end of the day it's just that, an analogy that he concocted in order to advance his philosophy.  This in now way proves anything that mechanistic materialism posits is true.  He simply grafted his previously held mechanistic assumptions onto a more elaborate machine metaphor of evolution.  This is not evidence that machines evolve on their own or that organic life forms are machines. 

It reminds me of a TED Talk that Anil Seth did a while back entitled "How Your Brain Hallucinates Reality".  Most of the examples in Seth's talk were merely reflections of his own assumptions about consciousness, they weren't independently occurring phenomena that objectively advanced his case.  For example, he had subjects wear a virtual reality apparatus (Google's Deep Dream) and then programmed the apparatus to reflect a state of perpetual hyper-awareness, one which produced visual results similar to those reported in hallucinatory states.  He then made the unsupported claim that consciousness itself is a hallucination based on this experiment, which is completely illogical.  Yes, consciousness can become hallucinatory under certain conditions, but that in not way implies that consciousness itself is a hallucination.  

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I invite you to come up with an example of an activity or feature which is in principle impossible for a machine and does not only depend on the higher complexity of our physical brain. 

Any emotion first of all:  True love.  Compassion. Altruism and pity.   Joy when your team scores the winning goal. 

Philosophical wonder:  attempting to understand our place in the universe.  Asking questions about who we are and where we come from, and why.

Etc.

 

Just now, DrmDoc said:

Yes, it does. Nothing becomes fact or truth without evidence and we do not have evidence supporting your ideas.  Conversely, we do indeed have complete evidence that the expression of human consciousness originates through human brain structure and function by the abundance of tests, studies and incidents of the absence of stated consciousness in the absence of the stated brain structure and function.

Yes, we have evidence that human consciousness ceases when the brain is damaged, and that a healthy brain is generally necessary for the active manifestation of human consciousness in this dimension.  However, these two facts still do not address the question of origin.  It's entirely possible that there is a consciousness that exists independently of the human experience. 

Edited February 2, 2018 by Alex_Krycek

[Moontanman]

47 minutes ago, Alex_Krycek said:

Similarly, if you think there is no purpose to life, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you will form your conclusions accordingly.

Who says there is no purpose to life? Why would a material world preclude purpose? 

47 minutes ago, Alex_Krycek said:

Nor is the view that consciousness is merely an unintended byproduct of the brain's evolution.

Actually yes the evidence currently available does indeed point to the brain as the source of consciousness, unless of course you have a source that isn't simply a baseless assertion... 

47 minutes ago, Alex_Krycek said:

If that is ever possible.  If creative intelligence and mechanistic function are two distinct phenomena, and somehow humans are able to engineer an entity with creative intelligence, that entity would in essence no longer qualify as a machine. 

Again with the totally unsupported assertions...

47 minutes ago, Alex_Krycek said:

I'd say you're the one engaging in a logical fallacy.  You're saying that human beings and machines might one day share equal footing in terms of intelligence.  Even accepting that this assumption comes to pass, It ignores the reality that human beings created machines.  They did not create themselves, nor did they evolve naturally as we did to possess creative intelligence.  The term is artificial intelligence for a reason.  Everything a machine could ever achieve it was gifted by an organic life form with this intelligence . 

No, in fact self replicating machines have indeed achieved sentience and intelligence not to mention consciousness with no outside help...  

47 minutes ago, Alex_Krycek said:

Have you read any of David Bohm's work? 

"This system also uses two sub-networks.The discriminator is given a large set of art associated with style labels, the researchers explained, for example, Renaissance, Baroque, Impressionism, or Expressionism, and the generator does not have access to any art.  As it generates a piece, it receives two signals from the discriminator: one, which classifies the image as ‘art or not art,’ and another which indicates how well the discriminator can classify that art into an existing style."

It's a neat trick, but giving a machine a data-set of previous artwork and then programming it to replicate styles in general alignment with that data-set is only the illusion of creativity. 

"As previously noted, the chord structures and instrumentation is purely Amper’s; it just works with manual inputs from the human artist when it comes to style and overall rhythm."

Style and overall rhythm are integral to the end result of a piece of music.  Looks like human beings are still sharing the creative legwork with AI.  Another neat trick. 

I understand the analogy that cdk007 is positing in this video, but at the end of the day it's just that, an analogy that he concocted in order to advance his philosophy.  This in now way proves anything that mechanistic materialism posits is true.  He simply grafted his previously held mechanistic assumptions onto a more elaborate machine metaphor of evolution.  This is not evidence that machines evolve on their own or that organic life forms are machines. 

It reminds me of a TED Talk that Anil Seth did a while back entitled "How Your Brain Hallucinates Reality".  Most of the examples in Seth's talk were merely reflections of his own assumptions about consciousness, they weren't independently occurring phenomena that objectively advanced his case.  For example, he had subjects wear a virtual reality apparatus (Google's Deep Dream) and then programmed the apparatus to reflect a state of perpetual hyper-awareness, one which produced visual results similar to those reported in hallucinatory states.  He then made the unsupported claim that consciousness itself is a hallucination based on this experiment, which is completely illogical.  Yes, consciousness can become hallucinatory under certain conditions, but that in not way implies that consciousness itself is a hallucination.  

Any emotion first of all:  True love.  Compassion. Altruism and pity.   Joy when your team scores the winning goal. 

Philosophical wonder:  attempting to understand our place in the universe.  Asking questions about who we are and where we come from, and why.

Etc.

Would you admit that other animals show all those emotions and create art? 

47 minutes ago, Alex_Krycek said:

 

Yes, we have evidence that human consciousness ceases when the brain is damaged, and that a healthy brain is generally necessary for the active manifestation of consciousness in this dimension.  However, these two facts still do not address the question of origin.  It's entirely possible that there is a consciousness that exists independently of the human experience.   

This last is nothing but technobabble nonsense... It's just as entirely possible that aliens visit me at night and take samples of my aurora to power their spacecraft... 

 

The way i see this is that you either need to show a possible source of consciousness or admit that you are just engaging in magical thinking. 

[DrmDoc]

2 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

Yes, we have evidence that human consciousness ceases when the brain is damaged, and that a healthy brain is generally necessary for the active manifestation of human consciousness in this dimension.  However, these two facts still do not address the question of origin.  It's entirely possible that there is a consciousness that exists independently of the human experience. 

Possibilities are infinite; however, the possibility of a consciousness that exist independent of human experience isn't human consciousness, which I think is what we are discussing here.  Human consciousness is defined by the nature of human experience and is, therefore, inseparable from the physiology that makes human experience possible.  The properties of human brain structure and function give rise to that expression of human consciousness that enables meaningful human experience; therefore, the origin of that expression resides in the properties of human brain structure and function which, again, is confirmed by the absence of consciousness and meaningful life experience without the presence of brain tissue and function.

Edited February 2, 2018 by DrmDoc

[Strange]

6 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

Nor is the view that consciousness is merely an unintended byproduct of the brain's evolution.

But that IS consistent with the evidence. There is ZERO evidence for an external source. That is the difference. You need to invoke something for which their is no evidence(*) to make your idea work.

Occam's Razor.

(*) No scientific evidence. Your "evidence" for this is based purely on your personal beliefs.

6 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

I'd say you're the one engaging in a logical fallacy.  You're saying that human beings and machines might one day share equal footing in terms of intelligence.  Even accepting that this assumption comes to pass, It ignores the reality that human beings created machines.  They did not create themselves, nor did they evolve naturally as we did to possess creative intelligence.  The term is artificial intelligence for a reason.  Everything a machine could ever achieve it was gifted by an organic life form with this intelligence

But that is not a logical fallacy because I am not using it as the basis of my argument. (As highlighted by the words you wisely chose to put in italics.) It is just a hypothetical question. One that, obviously, cannot be answered but can be used to prompt thought.

 

[Bender]

23 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

This system also uses two sub-networks.The discriminator is given a large set of art associated with style labels, the researchers explained, for example, Renaissance, Baroque, Impressionism, or Expressionism, and the generator does not have access to any art.  As it generates a piece, it receives two signals from the discriminator: one, which classifies the image as ‘art or not art,’ and another which indicates how well the discriminator can classify that art into an existing style."

It's a neat trick, but giving a machine a data-set of previous artwork and then programming it to replicate styles in general alignment with that data-set is only the illusion of creativity

How does a human artist learn about art? 

23 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

As previously noted, the chord structures and instrumentation is purely Amper’s; it just works with manual inputs from the human artist when it comes to style and overall rhythm."

Style and overall rhythm are integral to the end result of a piece of music.  Looks like human beings are still sharing the creative legwork with AI.  Another neat trick. 

Most human musicians build on an existing style and rythm. Are humans conscious if they fail to develop a truly original style? 

23 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

Any emotion first of all:  True love.  Compassion. Altruism and pity.   Joy when your team scores the winning goal. 

Philosophical wonder:  attempting to understand our place in the universe.  Asking questions about who we are and where we come from, and why.

Etc.

How do you define "emotion"? Typically, we don't program machines to exhibit emotional, erratic behaviour, but there is no reason why we can't.

True love: a pet robot dog that is programmed to follow you around litterally wants to be with you all the time. Why is that not true love?

Compassion : really easy to program. A few social conventions about how to react to suffering suffices. My car e.g. automatically calls emergency when I crash.

Altruism: I have seen no evidence of true altruism in humans. My car , on the other hand, will sacrifice itself to save passengers and pedestrians.

Joy: when the computer scores in a football game: the AI soccer players are cheering. 

Philosophical wonder: some of the best computers are pondering those questions. But once more, existential anxiety is typically not desired behaviour in a machine. It is also pretty easy for a typical computer to answer such questions, since it can track its serial number.

Etc... 

[Moontanman]

Damn, maybe there is an outside source!

 

https://www.livescience.com/61627-ancient-virus-brain.html

[Alex_Krycek]

8 hours ago, Bender said:

How does a human artist learn about art? 

Are we talking about learning, or are we talking about creativity?  Learning of course does involve memory; understanding different styles, seeing that has come before.   Creativity involves something different.  It's about being able to deviate from established patterns and create something new, but more importantly it's about creating something that resonates emotionally, intellectually, or spiritually with other human beings. 

If a machine can create a work of art, such as those paintings in the article, that sufficiently resonates with an audience, then yes, you could say it is being creative on a certain level.  But there is an important factor in this discussion that we're omitting, and that is the appreciation of art.  If a machine throws together a painting, or composes a piece of music, and has no appreciation for what it is actually doing, then it isn't being creative.  It's just carrying out instructions without the core motivators that define what human creativity actually is: emotion, spiritual inspiration, etc.  So taking into consideration what is driving the machine, it isn't actually being creative at all, the creativity that we're attributing to it is merely a human projection.   

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Most human musicians build on an existing style and rythm. Are humans conscious if they fail to develop a truly original style? 

When the researchers doing this experiment can engineer an AI that doesn't need creative assistance from humans to finish the piece of music, your claims will be more acceptable. 

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How do you define "emotion"? Typically, we don't program machines to exhibit emotional, erratic behaviour, but there is no reason why we can't.

Emotion:  "the affective aspect of consciousness, a subjective state of feeling".

There is every reason why we can't program machines to feel emotion: mainly because we haven't the first inclination how.  Sure, you can program what you believe are the surface manifestations of emotion in response to a given scenario, but that is again work of the illusionist.  The machine in that case would be behaving according to what you told it to do, not because it actually feels anything or is responding to what is right or wrong. 

We're not talking about erratic behavior, we're talking about a unique feature of humanity, one that provides great depth and meaning to our human existence. 

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True love: a pet robot dog that is programmed to follow you around litterally wants to be with you all the time. Why is that not true love?

So you equate love with sycophancy?  Interesting.  With all due respect, this statement sounds like it was written by someone who has never experienced love.

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Compassion : really easy to program. A few social conventions about how to react to suffering suffices. My car e.g. automatically calls emergency when I crash.

Once more, you're just programming superficial behavioral reactions in response to certain conditions which you feel justify compassion, the machine has no actual feeling.  There is no innate natural cause to its behavior.  Any behavior the machine would demonstrate is really coming from the human programmers and from their moral views. 

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Altruism: I have seen no evidence of true altruism in humans. My car , on the other hand, will sacrifice itself to save passengers and pedestrians.

You must not get out much.  With respect, it would be worthwhile for you to perhaps go to your local homeless shelter and see what volunteers do their every day.  Or at the very least, google "charity news" and read about the altruism that ordinary people engage in every day. 

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Joy: when the computer scores in a football game: the AI soccer players are cheering. 

You seem to think that programming a common superficial behavioral reaction to an emotion equates that superficial reaction with the emotion itself.  It in no way does. A human being can cheer at a soccer game and feel absolutely nothing, just as she can stand motionless and be full of joy over something as simple as how the park looks on a cloudy day.  You're not addressing what emotion really is. 

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Philosophical wonder: some of the best computers are pondering those questions. But once more, existential anxiety is typically not desired behaviour in a machine. It is also pretty easy for a typical computer to answer such questions, since it can track its serial number.

Etc... 

More revealing insights here, such as how you equate philosophical wonder with existential anxiety.  You seem to view all the subjective experiences of human beings as inherent flaws in our being, flaws which machines conceivably will be better off without. Do you think your materialist / mechanistic philosophy is informing such a misanthropic viewpoint?

Edited February 3, 2018 by Alex_Krycek

[Moontanman]

1 minute ago, Alex_Krycek said:

Are we talking about learning, or are we talking about creativity?  Learning of course does involve memory; understanding different styles, seeing that has come before.   

When the researchers doing this experiment can engineer an AI that doesn't need creative assistance from humans to finish the piece of music, your claims will be more acceptable. 

Emotion:  "the affective aspect of consciousness, a subjective state of feeling".

There is every reason why we can't program machines to feel emotion: mainly because we haven't the first inclination how.  Sure, you can program what you believe are the surface manifestations of emotion in response to a given scenario, but that is again work of the illusionist.  The machine in that case would be behaving according to what you told it to do, not because it actually feels anything or is responding to what is right or wrong. 

We're not talking about erratic behavior, we're talking about a unique feature of humanity, one that provides great depth and meaning to our human existence. 

So you equate love with sycophancy?  Interesting.  With all due respect, this statement sounds like it was written by someone who has never experienced love.

Once more, you're just programming superficial behavioral reactions in response to certain conditions which you feel justify compassion, the machine has no actual feeling.  There is no innate natural cause to its behavior.  Any behavior the machine would demonstrate is really coming from the human programmers and from their moral views. 

You must not get out much.  With respect, it would be worthwhile for you to perhaps go to your local homeless shelter and see what volunteers do their every day.  Or at the very least, google "charity news" and read about the altruism that ordinary people engage in every day. 

You seem to think that programming a common superficial behavioral reaction to an emotion equates that superficial reaction with the emotion itself.  It in no way does. A human being can cheer at a soccer game and feel absolutely nothing, just as she can stand motionless and be full of joy over something as simple as how the park looks on a cloudy day.  You're not addressing what emotion really is. 

More revealing insights here, such as how you equate philosophical wonder with existential anxiety.  You seem to view all the subjective experiences of human beings as inherent flaws in our being, flaws which machines conceivably will be better off without. Do you think your materialist / mechanistic philosophy is informing such a misanthropic viewpoint?

I have to ask, do you think other animals have consciousness? If so where does thiers come from? I would like to ask you yet again to follow forum rules and give your evidence that consciousness comes from outside the brain. simply asserting that i can't prove it doesn't is not evidence of anything... 

[Alex_Krycek]

8 hours ago, Moontanman said:

I have to ask, do you think other animals have consciousness? If so where does thiers come from?

Why don't you tell me what you think?  Are animals conscious?  If so, what is driving this consciousness?  How is the brain generating consciousness in human beings?  What processes are occurring to make this happen?  

In many ways animals are more conscious than we are. 

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https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13811-birds-can-see-the-earths-magnetic-field/

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0104_050104_tsunami_animals.html

 

From "Birds Can See the Earth's Magnetic Field"

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"It has been debated for nearly four decades but no one has yet been able to prove it is chemically possible. Now good evidence suggests that birds can actually “see” the lines of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Now Peter Hore and colleagues at the University of Oxford have found one.

Cryptochromes are a class of light-sensitive proteins found in plants and animals, and are thought to play a role in the circadian clock, in regulating plant growth, and timing coral sex. A few years ago, Henrik Mouritsen of the University of Oldenburg in Germany showed that they were present in the retinal neurons of migratory garden warblers, and that these cells were active at dusk, when the warblers were performing magnetic orientation."

 

 

This is why I believe the positivist approach is so flawed.  Four decades without conclusive evidence, and the researchers interested in this subject still persisted with their hypothesis.  Imagine if they'd given up or dismissed the idea as "pseudo-science" because they didn't have evidence at the outset.  More discoveries would be made if a more open minded approach is adopted. 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 3, 2018 by Alex_Krycek

[Moontanman]

3 minutes ago, Alex_Krycek said:

Why don't you tell me what you think?  Are animals conscious?  If so, what is driving this consciousness?  How is the brain generating consciousness in human beings?  What processes are occurring to make this happen?  

Yes I think animals have consciousness, some more than others. I see no reason to assume the origin of consciousness is anything but the brain.  Chemical processes in the brain result in the emergent property of consciousness, nothing else is evidently happening but i am willing to consider it if you have some evidence for it..  You keep asserting it comes from outside. Please show why you think this. Not being able to prove it is not coming from outside the brain is not evidence it is.. .

[Bender]

11 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

More revealing insights here, such as how you equate philosophical wonder with existential anxiety.  You seem to view all the subjective experiences of human beings as inherent flaws in our being, flaws which machines conceivably will be better off without. Do you think your materialist / mechanistic philosophy is informing such a misanthropic viewpoint?

Are you aware that you are getting pretty arrogant and ad hominem? Why would I view subjective experiences as flaws?

I'm definitively not misanthropic, quite the contrary. I simply do not share your anthropocentric viewpoint. It is not because I don't consider humans to be superspecial that I hate humans.

I wonder: can you accept that a reductionist like me can value love and life just as much as you do?

 

About your arguments against machine consciousness; they boil down to a difference in complexity or communication protocol. The basic mechanism is the same: a way for the higher level programming to assess internal status and parameters like hormone levels or corrupt files.

Eg: the love of the robot dog is much less complex than my love for my children, but that is pretty obvious , since its programming is much less complex than mine.

Eg2: our body communicates with our consciousness through chemicals, while a machine uses parameters and routines encoded in electronic circuits.

 

Two last points:

- what you consider altruism is people making themselves feel good (or avoid feeling bad); which in no way diminishes the value of the act. Since self preservation isn't a thing for most machines, they are inherently more altruistic.

- are you aware that several of your arguments exclude the average 3 year old from being conscious? 

[hypervalent_iodine]

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Moderator Note

Alex_Krycek, and OP, if you don’t intend to back up your claims with evidence or any sort of backable science, your posts do not belong here and are considered hijacking (since this isn’t your thread). I am removing not his thread to the trash.