The Mysteries of an experience.

[Dean Mullen]

What is an experience? what creates it? although the brain can produce calculations, what causes these calculations to be experience by the conscious being within? I cannot comprehend an experience, for we cannot create experiences in computers even if we recreated the brains network exactly, that means an experience may not be created by a known brain function. Like the brain inherits information from the external world but what causes the experiencer to inherit the informaiton inside the brain? there must be some sort of force or mechanism that creates experience within the brain that we just don't know about?

[swansont]

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Moderator Note

Dean Mullen, please don't post non-physics material in the physics section. Questions about the brain are biology/medicine. Moved.

[SMF]

Dean, I presume you are talking about consciousness. There is no consciousness center in the brain and this function is an emergent property of all of the different brain systems working together. It is not possible to duplicate all brain functions with a computer, but this is a technical problem, and if it were done you would have a working brain. SM

[Marat]

Isn't the OP asking what structures of the brain you would have to be able to duplicate in order to generate consciousness as their epiphenomenon? No doubt it would not be necessary to duplicate all brain structures, since many people with anatomically defective brains are perfectly conscious. This raises the interesting side-question of whether some of the computers now in existence have any form of consciousness? Unless we provide them with a mechanism by which they can manifest that consciousness, we cannot be certain that they don't have one but simply cannot exhibit it, such as sometimes occurs with people in vegetative states.

[SMF]

There are certainly some brain systems that contribute more toward supporting consciousness than others, but the mass of brain tissue is also a very necessary component. There are no current computer systems that are complex enough to duplicate the neural processing done by a house fly, much less consciousness. SM

[Marat]

Panamists would say that a pencil could be conscious! The problem is that if we don't know what physical properties are necessary and sufficient for producing consciousness as an epiphenomenon, then we also can't know what kind of entity can't have consciousness.

 

Perhaps a Wittgensteinian approach would help at least for self-consciousness: Only if I can distinguish my own inner states from surrounding sensations with sufficient stability for me to be able to distinguish an outside world from an inner world of experience can I know myself as an existing consciousness. Thus self-consciousness (as opposed to mere reaction to sensation without reflective processing) would only be a property of entities able to distinguish the persistence of sensations in experience from the stage on which they are experienced, since only that distinction would make awareness of a stage meaningful.

[SMF]

Marat. And, another similar version by G. H. Mead-- http://psychclassics.asu.edu/Mead/socialself.htm

Perhaps recognizing an image in a mirror as one's self might be a primitive test of self awareness. Humans between 6 and 18 months and adult gorillas can do this, but a pencil and my dog Sherman, a very bright specimen of his species, cannot. SM

[Marat]

I saw a documentary recently suggesting that an octopus might have some type of self-awareness. The experimental test of this hypothesis demonstrated that an octopus could decide on a strategy to get through a narrow opening in such a way that he had to have accurately calculated the relation between his own dimensions and flexibility and the opening before even approaching it. The researchers took this as evidence that he was aware of himself -- at least in the sense of being aware of how he related to space from an external perspective, so that he knew himself as a thing amongst the other objects of the world. But of course, this is far from showing that the octopus was aware of himself as a subject of experience able to distinguish its own inner states from external sensations.

[Steve watson]

Recently in the year 2010 the "Robot Scientist" IN some university (I think UCAL), The robot was able to study yeast, draw inferences and even arrived at a conclusion which was considered a discovery. It was the first discovery to be done by a robot. So what do u say, did the machine have an intuition which guided it towards the discovery or the method of discovering itself is replicable and can be fed to a machine by some kind of an algorithm?

 

check this please

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_(robot)

[SMF]

DemonHead. I guess the question is whether a computer, that has been programmed to produce purposeful behavior, is intelligent in any meaningful human sense just because it can make some intelligent decisions. SM

 

 

 

[sxShadoWxs]

What creates an experience is a mind conditioned to believe that a series of events are subject to be broken down into several logical explanations.

 

Such a mind, is not a human mind but - in modern terms, a cold wired machine -> A computer that runs on variables and conditions, very much like C++ or Boolean.

 

Experience is not a mystery, it is an "obvious" turned and twisted into a play of words and logic.

 

We call this science.

 

Consciousness is a belief that the mind of a body or *individual* is, somehow, separate from everything else and can somehow be opened and closed upon a series of external stimuli.

 

Science, although *SOMETIMES* useful seems to like to break things down and has a tendency to dictate that things are not greater than there whole.

 

Science, IMO, should not be able to depict what human potential is. Because, in the end - the whole end result produced by the several human processes outweigh impossibility itself.

 

Experience, in that sense, is everything and is life itself.