SDS wrote:Neurological investigation of consciousness has, however, got far enough to be fairly sure that it does exist, and that it is based on neurochemical activity in the brain. This can be demonstrated by experiments which look at how consciousness is effected by, for example, variable and localised dosing of neural regions by anaesthetics.
That is simply not the case. We only know that the brain reports that consciousness exists and how the brain reports that it is affected by certain experiments, but we have very good reason not to take the brain's word for it and that it must be faking it. If it isn't faking it, then there's something going on in there which involves something real feeling real pain, and that needs to be identified as something other than something magic dressed up as complexity.
Wake up, SDS! This is morality being applied within the thought experiment - totally different from objecting to the thought experiment on the basis that someone is allowed to do something immoral within it!
Point taken! This is what happens when I type, whilst trying to adjust the cuff on a suit, late at night. It doesn't change the fact that you have broken the postulate supporting the thought experiment which is that you create a perfect, i.e.
indistinguishable copy. Once you bring prior knowledge into the question, then anything can happen.
And why shouldn't I change it to make a modified versoin of the thought experiment to illustrate a different point?
Take the thought process in another direction. If the copy was destroyed rather than the original (without bringing forward prior information), would there be anything measurably different.
How's that taking it in a different direction? Killing the copy instead of the original was the original plan. There's a continuity problem here - the original versions of things are buried too deep in the thread to look up to find out what they're being compared with.
Would you like to point to where I become less clear? If you also point to where I became "confrontational", I'll have a look at that to try to work out why I did so.
I personally felt a little irked when you wrote "That lecturer needs to be retrained - he is pushing baseless assertations". Given how little context you were aware of, that is an unecessarily harsh way of stating that you disagree.
You weren't meant to take it seriously. If the lecturer had said what you claimed he'd said, he would have been pushing baseless assertions - I gave you counterexamples to demonstrate that he was wrong. In reality, I bet he framed the whole thing in a whole stack of if's and but's which you left out, so you probably misrepresented him in the same way I've been repeatedly misrepresented in this thread. As his name was never stated, it didn't matter.
Shortly after, you diverged from the discussion to talk about mechanisms of consciousness. I'm not sure why you decided that talking about averaging was pertinent to the existence of consciousness,
The reason's very clear from what led to it just before.
but anyway, I pointed out that you had gone away from talking about sensations to direct responses.
when I was actually focusing directly in on the sensations.
You could have replied that you were talking about the averaging of inputs to consciousness (which I still think is a strange outlook),
in an attempt to find a possible role for consciousness,
but instead you replied:
You're replying without thinking things through carefully
when you clearly weren't thinking things through carefully. I was describing a model of something that might be able both to experience qualia and to perform a useful role, but your response was to inform me that I was describing something that could not be conscious.
At this point, I think things were fine. You then got into a bit of head-bashing with Solar over the meaning of the word same. I think that what Solar wrote was fairly self-evident; you appeared to take objection to almost everything he said, even though in the end you end up with the same (obvious) position. Similarly you failed to take Solar's hint that by talking about the consequences of things in science fiction which you had not read, and therefore hadn't understood, you were very strongly fighting against an opponent who wasn't there.
If you read post #7 on page 6 you will see that in reply to my question:-
Can both the original you and the copy both be you at the same time?
He said:-
so yes, from a certain standpoint they both are "me"
There's more to what he said than that, and his quotes around "me" indicate that he hasn't actually answered the question here at all and it can't be used as a reliable way to guage what he thinks. He further talkes about the two "me"s diverging, which is absolutely fine. In answer to the second thought experiment, however, he says:-
He is me, as a child, with the same set of experiences, memories, character traits etc. etc. that I had, back then.
The whole point of the thought experiment is to point out that the child is someone else. "He is me" - wrong. "that I had back then" - no: you never had them because you were never him. He didn't understand the point. Then we get this:-
One thing that is very important in discussions like these: If you come to the limit of your understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology, don't start inventing metaphysical concepts like "consciousness", or worse, "god", to explain away your lack of understanding. These concepts don't explain anything, and merely obscure your view, keeping you from actually expanding your understanding.
which is the first of many such attacks, to which I do not respond in kind. Soon after (in a post containing many more unpleasant attacks) he said:-
Neither of them is more "me" than the other (provided the copy was perfect).
This demonstrates that he has indeed missed the key point that he is the original and not the copy. This is further backed up by statements in post #4 on page 7 where he says:-
Consciousness is a result of a certain neuro-chemical setup. You create the same setup, you have the same consciousness. It doesn't matter if you create that setup from matter directly, this energy, or that energy. That's the point.
and:-
It doesn't matter. One "me" will die, one "me" will live, either way.
All the evidence points to him thinking that the original and the copy are so alike that the originalness of the original has as good as been lost, and yet if we change the thought experiment again to intensify the outcome by having one of them being tortured to death rather than just being killed in an instant, it becomes all the more clear that the difference really matters. You are informed that a copy will be made of you and that once that's been done, you and the copy won't know which is which. You can decide beforehand whether the original or the copy is tortured to death. Clearly the one who makes the decision knows that if he choses the original he will experience being tortured to death, whereas if he chooses the copy he will not experience it, though the copy obviously will. (The whole process will be carried out by a machine and the program has been studied to verify that it will stick to the rules and do exactly what has been stated at the outset, so the outcomes are certain.)
You tell me that I've been arguing at cross purposes with Solar, but the evidence absolutely doesn't back you up. He says the difference doesn't matter; I say it does.
You also made a very strong and aggressive post, which I quoted extensively a few posts ago, which was really uncalled for.
It was absolutely called for - you edited out all the triggers to make me look bad and ignored all the earlier provocation which led up to it.
Through this debate it became unclear what exactly you were saying. It still batters my brain a bit if I go back and read it. This was tangential to the discussion about whether modern physics supports consciousness.
Well, you still haven't pointed out where I was unclear.
Fundamentally, my position in the macroscopic debate is that although modern science does not understand consciousness well enough to explain it, it does understand it well enough to say that it is not inconsistent with modern science. That neurological activity is able to create thought, even if this is just an 'illusion' to the brain, and that consciousness is constructed on top of that.
The thought is no illusion. The problem is where you bring consciousness in and assert that it is built on top of thought as if that is in any way understood.
From an external perspective it is possible to say consciousness is an illusion - but the structures required to internally support that in every individual are real, and the thoughts definitely pass though our head, even if our awareness of them is illusory and broken up (despite appearances to the contrary). To this extent, consciousness is real.
You have insufficiant mechanisms to be able to say anything about consciousness at all. All we have to go on is that the brain produces data which documents a phenomenon which may or may not be real and that we internally feel that we are indeed conscious. That's more than enough to take the idea seriously, but science has totally failed to identify consciousness in the brain other than when the data generated by the brain asserts that it is conscious, and yet science simply cannot trust that source of this information at any point when trying to investigate whether consciousness is real. It has to find an independent way of verifying it, and the only way to try to do that is to find out how the data is generated and where it's getting its "facts" from.
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