Nature of consciousness

[Eric the Green]

(10-27-2018, 07:50 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(10-26-2018, 01:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(10-26-2018, 02:47 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

pbrower2a Wrote:What is spirit, anyway?

For Olaf Stapledon, spirit was the will for intelligence, kindness and creativity. He believed this is the essence of human personality, or any other intelligent being, distinguishing us from animals. I agree with him here.

When he wrote about the emotional source of Nazism not being simply evil, he probably had in mind the desire for loyalty to something higher than the individual. A Christian directs it towards God, an environmentalist toward nature, a Nazi towards the mystical "soul of the race". Stapledon certainly condemned the racist actions of the Nazis.

I don't know where brower's post is that asks this, but this is a question for a philosophical thread of some sort. As I see it, spirit is synonymous with consciousness, which cannot be accounted for with mechanistic or physicalist theories, and is called the "hard problem" because physicalist scientists try to solve it in their terms, which cannot be done. As I see it too, it is an ethical or moral issue. Although it has been well pointed out to me by Dr. The Rani that physical things are valuable, when we respect living beings as spirits, including humans and all possible higher beings beyond humans as well, then we treat them better than if we consider them as physical objects without sentience. That of course does not extent to "transhumans" who have become machines.

The machine age and the industrial age (same thing, virtually) were built on the model of mechanical cause and effect physicalism. We have transformed the world into our own mechanistic model of reality. That has been useful to us, but it is idolatry to conceive the world in the image of our own machine model. Machines cannot substitute for conscious organic beings, and real progress is to extend our natural human potential through expanded consciousness. The endless progress of machines has its own momentum now, and its impact may not be positive unless subordinated to real life.

The consciousness revolution of the 2T, which reminded us of these facts about consciousness and machines quite clearly, has been put on the back burner in the 4T by younger generations who are overly enamoured with recent high tech progress, and who live in virtual realities. This trend has accelerated just in these 4T years since 2008 with the proliferation of smart phones and other mobile tech. It would be good to take stock of this trend at halftime.

My idea is that consciousness is just the subjective perception of information being processed. This is the view of Max Tegmark, an outstanding gen X mathematician, and before him Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the progressive gen Russian space visionary. Tsiolkovsky claimed also that even atoms have consciousness. I know it's counter-intuitive, but I like the simple logic: consciousness is information. The more complex the information pattern, the more complex the consciousness. Above certain complexity level, thought and emotion appear. Primitive consciousness of a calculator contains only the mathematical operation performed at the moment. It has no sense of self. Self requires certain complexity level, but it may not be unavoidable. Orion's Arm editors imagine a form of artificial intelligence, System of Response, capable of superhuman thought but without even rudimentary sense of self.

You say that machines cannot have consciousness and this applies to transhumans who have become machines. It's absurd. How many electronic implants do I need inside my head to lose consciousness?

I wouldn't say cannot, or never. Like my buddy Justin Bieber says, "Never Say Never." (that's the first song I ever heard by him, only because I was watching my team the Giants play a world series for the first time since 1954).

I would say no, consciousness is not perception of information. Those who are excessively intellectual may think so. Those who are excessively anti-intellectual may not even know what "information" is, since they never seem to absorb any of it. Be that as it may, consciousness is just what it is. Nothing more, nothing less. The only way to define it in words is to think up synonyms, like, "awareness."

Machines are the opposite of consciousness, by their very nature. They are mechanical. They are pushed and used by outside forces and beings. They are not self-reflective, they are not spontaneous, they are not creative, they are not sources of will. Consciousness is self-reflective, spontaneous, creative sources of will. Living, conscious beings move around under their own power. Machines have to be plugged in and batteries are not included.

I don't doubt that AI can go pretty far, and since nothing is devoid of consciousness, I can't say never. But as you say, they have no sense of self, so that AI consciousness can't be very "complex." The only real progress there is, is not progress in machines. It is progress in consciousness. That's what evolution was all about, and it's what human potential is all about. Machines are just tools; living beings USE the tools for THEIR purposes. NOT THE SAME.

There are no objects without consciousness to observe them, and that's consciousness either now or in the future; either human, sub-human or superhuman. Objects require subjects, and subjects require objects. They are interdependent too. To reduce one to the other is a category mistake that materialist, physicalist science tries to avoid or explain away, but it can't be done.

And even if you replace all the neurons in your brain with circuits, you still have not changed your consciousness, because consciousness is not in your brain; your brain is in your consciousness. For much the same reason, no-one can ever construct a living human being by copying and pasting all their atoms.