Nature of consciousness

[Eric the Green]

(10-28-2018, 12:46 PM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(10-27-2018, 02:29 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: 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.

A Papuan hunter-gatherer doesn't know what neurons and receptors are, but still feels pleasure and pain because he has them without realizing it.

Information is not only intellectual knowledge. Bodily sensations and emotional experiences are also information processed in the brain. If an alien uploaded appropriate data packets to my brain, I would feel pain in my feet, sexual delight, or hope. It wouldn't be possible for me to distinguish between artificial and real sensations.

I agree of course about the Papuan hunter, though I don't know why you mentioned him. I guess you can call all our experiences "information," although I myself would not use that word for sensations, feelings and intuitions. It's a more rational, intellectual term. I suppose an alien could upload sensations into you. We feel and sense things in our senses and bodies as well as our brains. When we feel something, it is in the place where we feel it, even though the feeling is also connected to the nervous system, and as far as I can tell, we need the nervous system to have most physical sensations. But all sensations are fundamentally experienced by the soul, your consciousness. There is nothing more fundamental than that.

Quote:

Quote: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.

Yes, noone really knows how to give an AI consciousness and autonomy, and this might be the main obstacle for AI. Mere speed and number of microchips aren't enough. You cannot construct a human by juxtaposing a quintillion microbes. Special structure is needed to have intelligence and personality. We don't know which structures result in a sense of self. So we cannot rule out that the source of selfhood is something supernatural (or some natural thing we still don't understand, like dark energy). But it doesn't seem likely, because of Ockham's razor. Simplest explanations are the best.

The simplest explanation, is that your consciousness is your consciousness; period. The soul is the soul. We complicate the issue by adding our desire to explain it mechanically somehow.

You could call it supernatural, but that really only means it lies beyond OUR OWN idea of "physical," which is an incorrect idea. Consciousness is perfectly natural; it just can't be explained as a physical, mechanical being.

There is only energy, and that energy is either spirit energy, or derived from same.

Quote:

Quote: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.

It is practically not feasible, but in theory the new entity would be a human like any other. A 3D-printed human, like the girl in the movie Repli-Kate.

If consciousness is not in the brain, why do we need one? If its only job is doing things already done by the immaterial soul, why did Nature bother?

The brain is a principle link between the soul and its bodily functions and activities. We also have neurons in 5 other centers (called chakras) as well as 2 of those in the brain itself. These are the primary links between soul and body, although there are many more throughout and beyond our bodies. The 7 main chakras are each nerve ganglia, and are also spirit centers of feeling and intelligence that we experience directly. The heart is the principle nerve ganglia center outside the brain, and is the center of the embodied soul. Only heart-centered actions are authentic. The solar plexus is also a powerful chakra and nerve ganglia. You punch someone there, and you shut down his or her power, as though shutting it off.

Consciousness is everywhere in the body and beyond the body. The brain is just part of the body, so we need a body to interact with bodies. Bodies are not material or physical (there is no such thing), but are dense forms of energy. Beyond our physical bodies, we have (or are) spirit bodies, less dense expressions of spirit energy than our physical bodies are. Some spirits get trapped here on earth, and we see their spirit bodies as ghosts. Others can see souls expressed in spirit bodies directly.

The brain does not do anything of itself. It is the switchboard of our nervous system. The soul is who we are, and it is what does all actions, here on Earth or anywhere. The body/brain is the soul expressing itself; there's no need to think that it's "job" is somehow different or separate from that of the soul. There are no separate material and spiritual worlds, except relatively speaking. It's just a question of how much we can perceive beyond our limiting conceptions.

It's a great thing to have (and be) a body/brain, because of all the delights of the senses and the glories and learning challenges we face in this dense dimension. Basically, the so-called physical dimension is just the energy that we experience through our senses and brains. We experience energy as both outside us and within us, but this outside world (which we call physical objects or objective) is interdependent at all times with our inner or subjective world. So there really ultimately is only one world, and each of us is IT, here and now and forever.

That's my understanding, anyway. I assert that no understanding of the universe is complete without this and other spiritual understandings, although I also think we need physical science to understand behavior of those things we call mostly dead (or not self-moving), as these can be explained more-or-less by empirical evidence and generalized generalities that we discover. The more alive an object of our knowledge is, the more that spiritual knowledge is also needed to know it. And philosophy and the arts are also needed to understand reality fully.