Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

Is the mind the same as the body? What is consciousness? Can machines have it?

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Dontaskme
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Re: Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

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Immanuel Can wrote: Sun Aug 29, 2021 11:20 pm
Mind is nothing like brain. Brain is a piece of meat. Mind is immaterial. The issue is how something totally unlike brain can be "explained" by doing nothing more than saying, "Well, the brain got very, very complex, and then, hey-presto, out came mind."
Who told you (informed) a brain? Life doesn't have a brain, have you ever noticed how trees are alive, but they do not tell themselves they are alive.

Who told you (informed) a mind?


Searching for yourself by using conceptual thought is like looking for a pet dog in the meat market.

Nice try though, explaining no thing. You'r on a roll.
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Re: Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

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Atla wrote: Sat Aug 28, 2021 6:09 pm
2+2=4 only exists as part of our abstract thinking, but subjective experience itself is CONCRETE, it's objectively happening.
It is truly happening, but that doesn't justfy the word "objective", which is the one thing it isn't.
In fact it's the only thing we can tell for certain to be happening, and everything we know about science and brains is within this direct experience.
Yes, I think there is truth in Descartes' point, though not in his subsequent argument. Nevertheless, there is strong circumstantial evidence that subjective experience is only possible because of something going on in some objective world, even if we can never be certain what it is like.

In short you seem to be denying the existence of consciousness, denying that any of this is happening.
Absolutely not. In my metaphysics, reality distinguishes what is the case from what we can imagine but is not the case; but there are different ways of being the case - objective, subjective, mathematical and others. So I am saying, subjective reality should not be confused with objective reality, and it is a hopeless task to predict "what experience feels like" objectively. None of the theories you mentioned help with that.
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Re: Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

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RogerSH wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 12:25 pm
Atla wrote: Sat Aug 28, 2021 6:09 pm
2+2=4 only exists as part of our abstract thinking, but subjective experience itself is CONCRETE, it's objectively happening.
It is truly happening, but that doesn't justfy the word "objective", which is the one thing it isn't.
In fact it's the only thing we can tell for certain to be happening, and everything we know about science and brains is within this direct experience.
Yes, I think there is truth in Descartes' point, though not in his subsequent argument. Nevertheless, there is strong circumstantial evidence that subjective experience is only possible because of something going on in some objective world, even if we can never be certain what it is like.

In short you seem to be denying the existence of consciousness, denying that any of this is happening.
Absolutely not. In my metaphysics, reality distinguishes what is the case from what we can imagine but is not the case; but there are different ways of being the case - objective, subjective, mathematical and others. So I am saying, subjective reality should not be confused with objective reality, and it is a hopeless task to predict "what experience feels like" objectively. None of the theories you mentioned help with that.
Okay we are talking about different things, I said that subjective experience is objectively happening. And, while remaining within the objective framework, it's possible with sufficiently advanced technology to tell "what experience feels like", but that doesn't help us to actually make the objective -> subjective transition.
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Re: Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

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Atla wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 12:59 pm And, while remaining within the objective framework, it's possible with sufficiently advanced technology to tell "what experience feels like", but that doesn't help us to actually make the objective -> subjective transition.
It is not possible to tell someone blind from birth what the experience of seeing yellow is like, but it is possible to explain that orange lies between yellow and red, which a non-colour-blind person who didn't know the word "orange" might be expected to understand, and even a blind person could understand the logical relationship referred to. So, we possibly agree that it is possible to predict various features of subjective experience without being able to reproduce the experience itself by a verbal or other formula.

An interesting version of the question is whether a blind person could understand what yellow feels like if just those neurons that respond to a yellow stimulus in a seeing person are stimulated. One might think so, but given what is now known about brain plasticity, the nearest equivalent neurons might well have been recruited to enhance other senses, so even that route is not open.
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Re: Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

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Immanuel Can wrote: Sun Aug 29, 2021 11:20 pm
RogerSH wrote: Sat Aug 28, 2021 12:01 pm
"...a property is emergent if it is a novel property of a system or an entity that arises when that system or entity has reached a certain level of complexity and that, even though it exists only insofar as the system or entity exists, it is distinct from the properties of the parts of the system from which it emerges...." (IEP)
Which if you look carefully is exactly what I am saying!
No, no...it's not. Because if it were, you'd know that a soap bubble is not even possibly an analogy for it. I tried to bold the important bits for your special attention.
A soap bubble isn't an analogy, it's an example of the process described. More precisely, a soap bubble is an emergent type of entity, and some of its properties (such as a tendency towards sphericalness) are emergent properties in exactly the sense of your quote. "Level of complexity" is a technical term: a soap bubble is more complex than molecules in the sense that it is an arrangement of molecules.
Same chemical composition, yes. Same properties, no.
Chemical composition is a "property."
Yes, some properties are carried over, I meant not all properties are the same, and gave an example that is novel.

Properly understood, "Emergentism" is not the "coarse-grained/fine-grained" distinction, but rather more like a "grained/not grainable" distinction.
Coarse-graining is an essential part of the distinction between an instance and a type - it's the elimination of all details that distinguish one instance from another. Then you can't reintroduce the details without it ceasing to be a type. If you don't think about the difference between an instance and a type you won't understand how the world is comprised of so many different types.
And that's what makes it open to the objection that it's appealing to "magic." It implies that something totally unlike all the earlier steps involved in an alleged process can suddenly "appear" when that process reaches a certain level of complexity. But it's not just one or two new features of the same substance that can "emerge": rather, a truly "emergent" thing has to be totally unlike the thing that gave rise to it, in all regards...chemical, physical, attributional, and so on.
That is not what scientists mean by it, nor is the requirement of no common properties implied by your red quote. Pressure and temperature are emergent properties of a gas. No scientist thinks that these properties are magic, or that it follows that the mass of a gas must be different from the sum of the masses of the constituent molecules. In fact, I haven't come across anybody who claims that emergence is magical. It's like stage magic: it can appear incredible (like a soap bubble if you had never seen one before) but actually has a rational explanation. I think you are rending a straw man.
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Re: Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

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RogerSH wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 5:32 pm
Atla wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 12:59 pm And, while remaining within the objective framework, it's possible with sufficiently advanced technology to tell "what experience feels like", but that doesn't help us to actually make the objective -> subjective transition.
It is not possible to tell someone blind from birth what the experience of seeing yellow is like, but it is possible to explain that orange lies between yellow and red, which a non-colour-blind person who didn't know the word "orange" might be expected to understand, and even a blind person could understand the logical relationship referred to. So, we possibly agree that it is possible to predict various features of subjective experience without being able to reproduce the experience itself by a verbal or other formula.

An interesting version of the question is whether a blind person could understand what yellow feels like if just those neurons that respond to a yellow stimulus in a seeing person are stimulated. One might think so, but given what is now known about brain plasticity, the nearest equivalent neurons might well have been recruited to enhance other senses, so even that route is not open.
I meant that the experience of yellow is probably identical to some brain event that can be "objectively" described, but this can not be proven. But this should be the default guess, not the magic of strong emergence.
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Re: Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

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RCSaunders wrote: Sat Aug 28, 2021 6:13 pm
RogerSH wrote: Sat Aug 28, 2021 12:00 am How does all this apply to the phenomena of consciousness? The fact that the brain is the most complex and dynamic compact structure known to science shows that there is scope for a hierarchy of structures of logical relationship to form that has far more levels even than that of a single cell, and with each level introducing new types of structure with new kinds of behaviour, it would be sheer stupidity to rule out any kind of behaviour as a priori “inexplicable” on such a basis merely because we haven’t the imagination to guess what the explanation might be.

However, there is a major caveat. Consciousness is unique in being the means by which explanations are understood, which makes certain kinds of explanation inapplicable. The output of an objective theory is necessarily objective, so that to seek a direct explanation of “what consciousness feels like” is a confusion of categories. Nevertheless, consciousness has many objective attributes, such as the capabilities it provides, so continuing the search for emergent structures that explain these attributes is an entirely rational way to proceed.
Without making any baseless assumptions, what exactly about consciousness do you think needs to be explained?
First of all, how come there is such a thing, of course. Then there are many questions about how come it gives us the capabilities we have when we think consciously. I have raised one such question: how is is that focussing conscious attention on a question has the effect of initiating many unconscious processes that yield possible answers to the question? viewtopic.php?f=10&t=33407
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Re: Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

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RogerSH wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 6:09 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: Sun Aug 29, 2021 11:20 pm
RogerSH wrote: Sat Aug 28, 2021 12:01 pm
Which if you look carefully is exactly what I am saying!
No, no...it's not. Because if it were, you'd know that a soap bubble is not even possibly an analogy for it. I tried to bold the important bits for your special attention.
A soap bubble isn't an analogy, it's an example of the process described.
That's even more incorrect, then. :shock:

Soap bubbles come from soap...precisely the same compound of which soap bubbles are composed. So they are not, in the correct Emergentist sense, "emergent" at all.

It seems that you're using "emerge" in the common way...nothing wrong with that, except that it fails to refer to the theory of Emergentism at all, so just isn't relevant. Or perhaps you're using it in the way that ordinary science uses it, as when it says birds "emerge" as flocks or a figure "emerges" from a background pattern. But I assure you, that's not what Emergentism is understood to mean in the mind-brain debate.

Emergentism requires that a thing of one nature can leap into existence, explode onto the scene, suddenly "emerge" -- without process and without sharing any properties or substances with that from which it "emerges" -- that is, it can come spontaneously and in no way that can be explained, from something totally unlike.

That is precisely how, Emergentists insist, "mind" can be a product of "brain" without having any point of substance-contact with "brain." If you think that "emergence" means that brains gradually evolve into minds, or that brains generate minds out of their same substance, then you don't get the theory at all. You're operating on a much more common, low-level and low-resolution definition that does not capture the theory of Mind-Brain Emergentism.

Again, check the definition. It's not a match for "soap bubbles. Read more carefully, and you'll see.
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Re: Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

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Atla wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 6:21 pm
I meant that the experience of yellow is probably identical to some brain event that can be "objectively" described, but this can not be proven. But this should be the default guess, not the magic of strong emergence.
By "identical to" I can only assume you mean "correlated with". And I suspect the brain event is actually slightly different in each individual, and on each occasion, because part of the experience is what is evoked by the sensation, that is what other experiences are linked to it. "Integration" is perhaps a more helpful word than "emergence", but it is still a whole which is not the sum of the parts separately but how they fit together...

I still suspect that "strong emergence" just means "misrepresented emergence".
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Re: Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

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RogerSH wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 7:10 pm
Atla wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 6:21 pm
I meant that the experience of yellow is probably identical to some brain event that can be "objectively" described, but this can not be proven. But this should be the default guess, not the magic of strong emergence.
By "identical to" I can only assume you mean "correlated with". And I suspect the brain event is actually slightly different in each individual, and on each occasion, because part of the experience is what is evoked by the sensation, that is what other experiences are linked to it. "Integration" is perhaps a more helpful word than "emergence", but it is still a whole which is not the sum of the parts separately but how they fit together...

I still suspect that "strong emergence" just means "misrepresented emergence".
Don't know what you're talking about.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

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RogerSH wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 7:10 pm I still suspect that "strong emergence" just means "misrepresented emergence".
Well "strong emergence" is the theory used to pseudo-explain things like consciousness or mind "emerging" from brain. The "weak emergence" alternative has utility in cases of simple change of state or aggregation; but it has no utility in the mind-brain dilemma, because there is not even a candidate substance or dynamic for describing a progressive, natural connnection between brain and mind. The two are just different "things," and manifestly so.

Strong emergence, as implausible as it may be, is needed in order to say we have any explanation of consciousness being an emergence from brain at all.


"We can say that a high-level phenomenon is strongly emergent with respect to a
low-level domain when the high-level phenomenon arises from the low-level domain, but
truths concerning that phenomenon are not deducible even in principle from truths in the
low-level domain
Strong emergence is the notion of emergence that is most common in
philosophical discussions of emergence, and is the notion invoked by the British emergentists
of the 1920s."
(D. Chalmers)

Later, he adds...

"We have seen that strong emergence, if it exists, has radical consequences. The question
that immediately arises, then, is: are there strongly emergent phenomena?
My own view is that the answer to this question is yes. I think there is exactly one clear
case of a strongly emergent phenomenon, and that is the phenomenon of consciousness.
We
can say that a system is conscious when there is something it is like to be that system; that is,
when there is something it feels like from the system’s own perspective. It is a key fact about
nature that it contains conscious systems; I am one such. And there is reason to believe that
the facts about consciousness are not deducible from any number of physical facts.
"


Chalmers is one of the major Emergentists. You can take his word for the fact that mind-brain theorists mean strong emergence when they say "emergence."

In this connection, perhaps Chalmers' whole essay on emergence merits your attention.http://consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf
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Re: Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

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RogerSH wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 6:22 pm
RCSaunders wrote: Sat Aug 28, 2021 6:13 pm Without making any baseless assumptions, what exactly about consciousness do you think needs to be explained?
First of all, how come there is such a thing, of course. Then there are many questions about how come it gives us the capabilities we have when we think consciously. I have raised one such question: how is is that focussing conscious attention on a question has the effect of initiating many unconscious processes that yield possible answers to the question? viewtopic.php?f=10&t=33407
Questions like, "why is there something rather than nothing," or yours, "why is there consciousness," are based on an assumption that things like existence, life, and consciousness, are contingent on something. Without that assumption there is no basis for the question. What is certain is that there is existence, there is life, and there is consciousness else there would be nothing aware of existence. What is, just is. It does not require some explanation. If you assume there must be an expanation for everything you meet an endless regress. Whatever you provide as the explanation becomes the basis for the next question, "what is the explanation for that."

Existence and consciousness are. Existence is what consciousness is aware of, consciousness is awareness of existence.

Your link is to a question about human consciousness, which is unique, because it is volitional, intellectual, rational consciousness in addition to that essential consciousness we share with all the higher animals.
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Re: Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

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Nothing in reality can be explained. Nothing is so inspiring that everything comes out of it.

Absolutisation is dramatisation. To a poet nothing can be useful.


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Re: Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

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RogerSH wrote: Sat Aug 28, 2021 12:00 am Almost all of science - all except for the physics of space-time and fundamental particles - deals with “emergent” entities and properties, but the significance of this concept is, it seems to me, often misrepresented or misunderstood. Here is a brief summary of what I think are the key points, and the relevance for the suggestion of emergence as an “explanation” of consciousness.
Congratualtions - now all you will have to do is EXPLAIN emergence.
When you disappear up your own omphalos, please consider that all you are actuall doing is using emergence to DESCRIBE consciousness.

There are no explanations, except in the case of intentionality. Thus, I can explain my actions. For everything else there is only description; a system of metaphors to describe other metaphors.
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Re: Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

Post by RCSaunders »

Sculptor wrote: Fri Sep 03, 2021 3:22 pm
RogerSH wrote: Sat Aug 28, 2021 12:00 am Almost all of science - all except for the physics of space-time and fundamental particles - deals with “emergent” entities and properties, but the significance of this concept is, it seems to me, often misrepresented or misunderstood. Here is a brief summary of what I think are the key points, and the relevance for the suggestion of emergence as an “explanation” of consciousness.
Congratualtions - now all you will have to do is EXPLAIN emergence.
When you disappear up your own omphalos, please consider that all you are actuall doing is using emergence to DESCRIBE consciousness.

There are no explanations, except in the case of intentionality. Thus, I can explain my actions. For everything else there is only description; a system of metaphors to describe other metaphors.
I agree that all concepts for that which is not directly perceived is largely metaphors and analogies, but it can't all be metaphor, can it? It has to start somewhere.
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