Talkback: Consciousness

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From:	MadPole	2001-02-03 07:19:22
Subject:	Ghosts...
Comment:	Mr Eadon Sir! There is a logical flaw in the very begining of your argument. Ghosts are nothing else but pure conciousness. Consiousness is perfectly capable of 'thinking' without help of brain. And ghosts are not as stupid as people make them to be. We all are, in fact, nothing but ghosts but our bodily concerns made us forgot about our true nature.... And so it goes....
From:	one_wingedangel	2001-12-14 13:39:50
Subject:	consciousness
Comment:	i do not believe that the human brain functions soley to interperate electrical signals thus giving us thought. I do believe that the brain interprets our conscious signal which is sent from the conscious as a whole. Through diferent planes of existance, our consciousness gathers informations throughexperianecs and emotions had by living beings within the other planes of esxistance. Christians believe that thier GOD is all knowing. Theoreticly, if this coonscious as a whole were to gather ALL information, then it would just be as perfect as GOD. This makes logical sense if you believe that in the beggining the universe was perfect. Steven Hawking once said that the universe before creations, was nothing more than a vaccuum and energy 'kernals' leaping out of the vaccuum, but quickly dying off. What if one of those 'kernals' formed the first BASIC thought were all it was was a few molecules bumping into each other the right way. Theoreticly, ifyou can create a thought, it then exists. Take the example of a unicorn, everyone knows what it is, but it doesent exist. This 'kernal' then formed the many 'planes' of existance. If this energy created the planes, it could then travel freely between them. Once the 'kernal' created thought, it then became a thinking being. If you live with someone, or somewhere, or had something for a large portion of your life, but then suddenly it was gone, would you not miss it?
From:	one_wingedangel	2001-12-14 13:40:10
Subject:	consciousness
Comment:	This energy then wanted to become perfect again,thus the hunt for knowledge. It gains knowledge by taking a piece of itself and making an individual, thus, everyliving being is learning. Upon death, all information gathered in that individuals lifetime is then passed on back to the consiousness. Once the consciousness becomes all knowing, it will then be perfect, thus collapsing the univers and becoming just a kernal again. that is my theory JP Budarick grade 12 ontario at st.theresas high school. Advanced Philosophy.
From:	Cyber Scribe	2002-01-22 16:45:06
Subject:	The Virtual making sense of the Real?
Comment:	I believe that consciousness is the illusion created in the VM (virtual machine) that is the mind. Colours like red can only be perceived by the observer within the VM because it is a founding rule (which I call Phongs but can be likened to memes) of the VM of our mind. Just like the laws of Physics that define colour as frequency, the laws of our VM have followed a separate route of evolution in a Virtual world. Consciousness becomes 'magic' when this Virtual world tries to make sense of the Physical one. How often have you heard someone say 'What a strange world we live in!' how can you call the world strange when you have nothing to compare it to? The only comparison we have is with our preconceived idea of how the world should operate i.e. the difference between our Virtual world (consciousness) and the physical (real) world that we believe we are living in. To illustrate what I think conscious is see http://www.geocities.com/incamystique/conscious.html for my two pennies worth.
From:	zen nudist	2002-06-20 15:55:23
Subject:	consciousness
Comment:	I don't care how many ones or zeros you push around any sort of circuit, they will never have the ability to present that circuit with the sensation of pain nor pleasure. The AWARENESS of pain thru all manner of other sensations to pleasure is what makes us conscious of something...but what is aware is the real issue, not the contents of the awareness. The brain seems to be a computer of high complexity, but there is nothing which seems to qualify as the watcher which SEES what the brain encodes and decodes. When an image for example ends up firing thousands of unconnected neurons, what is seeing the image? Recently someone suggested consciousness might be found in the magnetic fields that these firing neurons affect, however an MRI does not seem to alter consciousness very much from what I am told... so back to the drawing board. there is another fundamental problem. we are like a dreamer who is trying to find out how he is dreaming by examining elements of the dream. Our perceptions are not the realities which generated them. We don't have any real way to tell how accurate our virtual world in which we live, matches the 'REAL' one. So it is possible that any answer we find in examining the stuff of our perceived world could still be wrong, even though completely consistant with what we find.
From:	Clayton Carter	2003-09-13 12:31:18
Subject:	Question?
Comment:	I do believe I am a conscience being, I am knowingly knowing. But I am still trying to consider the views of monism vs. dualism, and I am leaning towards dualism. physicallists claim that there is a point where our minds abstract form acts out in the physical world. They find it hard to comprehend how something immaterial can cross the barrier and cause change in the physical world. I also don't totally understand how this happens, but I feel their argument against the dualist approach is not determinate. The reason for this is Gravity. For some reason this force is always left out of equations. We know gravity increases proportionately (most of the time at least) with mass, but what is gravity. The fact that it attracts matter to matter is contradictory to the vaccuum effect. Gravity is a measurable force that no one has really understood, it is quantifiable but not material, yet acting changes and creating force in a physical world. Why is not the mind much like gravity, Vandervall, ionic, magnetic forces. These are all very conceptual, unattainable forces that act very much in the physical world. I would not argue that I am right, I am simply questioning the plausabillity rules of physicallity.
From:	ivan	2003-09-28 22:08:22
Subject:	concious computers, part 1
Comment:	you know whilst reading this i had an interesting thought. in i think jim's view for one of his arguments i think he uses computers not having conciousness as a reason for conciousness being more than simply circuts in our brain. Like most of the arguments put forward regading religeon and gods on this site by people writing comments the simple logic can be used to destroy whatever proof they were trying ot use: you dont KNOW that. sure, you might say that there is something more to life than what we can percieve physically, i.e. a god etc. to support their argument, but you dont KNOW that. no matter how much beleiveing or faith you put into it doesnt make it true (or does it? but thats a different topic). assuming it doesnt, then the same statement can be put forth to the conciousness topic. are brains are more than circuts because computers dont have consiousness. you dont KNOW that. mabye they do, how can you tell, your not a computer. the support for this is jims initial argument that perhaps no one else is concious except for us. well i think teh general concensus would be that we are all infact conscoius. so why cant computers be concious? they are exactly the same as our brains in make up and function more or less, so why dont most people beleive tehy have are concious? because they KNOW that computers are different to 'Living' creatures. just like they KNOW that god is with them. therefore there is just as much chance if not more of computers (i.e. machines made of circuts like our brain) being concious as tehre is of one god being true and another not being true.
From:	ivan	2003-09-28 22:10:44
Subject:	concious computers, part 2
Comment:	one might argue, they cnat be concious otherwise we would be able to detect it. how could we detect it? we, who created the computers, did not give the computers an ability with with to communicate their conciousness. just teh same as a fish (as far as we know, it seems pretty probable) cannot communicate with us that it knows it is concious, neither can a computer. because the fish is not capable of language to describe its conciousness. neither is the computer. perhaps fish can communicate their conciousness to each other. perhaps computers can too. one might say, we can tell fish are concious because of their actions, and computers dont display any actions which display a consience. the reason behind that is because we control computers actions, to teh best of our knowledge. we determine what theyre actions are. momentarily, following this train of tohught leads us to a rather interesting conclusion: we perceive things to be concious when we are apart from them, when we cannot control their thoughts. that is how we know other people and animals are concious. now while were off on a different topic for a second lets think about this. If god is all powerful, we would not appear concious to him. even though the cocnept of lal powerful is complete illogic (i.e. can god create a rock he cnat lift) lets assume tho that he is 'all powerful'.
From:	ivan	2003-09-28 22:13:13
Subject:	concious computers, part 3
Comment:	since he has complete control over our actions and thoughts, would we not appear to him as computers do to us? so, assuming there is an all powerful god, (althoguh this isnt required), then computers are just as likely to be concious as we are. we simply cant detect it since we havent given them an ability to express their conciousness, which by logic cannot be done, since we will be programming this expression, until of course such time as we create a computer that can make decisions based on past experience etc. such as the robots in the movie 'A.I.' (which by teh way i thought was a fantastic movie, apart form the shithouse stephen spielberg ending which ruined it). in summary of this related tangent, as long as we control exactly what computers 'think' (i.e. their processes and program, the decisions they make) we will nto be able to detect their conciousness. only when we cannot control something can we perceive it to be concious, therefore we cannot appear as being concious to an all powerful god. finally, just to put holes in a couple of arguments people might come up with, if you say 'well computers cant feel pain or emotion', well that is simply because we havent given them that ability. (or have we? perhaps a computer crashing is a sensation of pain to its consiousness?) or ratehr, we havent given them the ability to react in such a way that we recognize as pain.
From:	ivan	2003-09-28 22:15:10
Subject:	consious computers, part 4
Comment:	we can tell something is in pain because it might cry out, but if we tell a computer to cry out whenever somethign breaks or it 'gets hurt' then we just say to ourselves, 'oh thats just a sound file being played as a part of a logical system of processes created by electrical circuts'... how is this any different to god sittign up on his cloud and upon seeing us gettign half crushed by a steamroller saying 'oh thats just the vocal cords being used to emit a soundwave as part of a logical sytem of processes in our bodies when we get hurt, created by electrical circuts'. there is no difference. computers respond with a cry of beeps when we input the escape key repeatedly into them, just the same as we respond with a cry of 'oww' when someone input a needle into us. any of our sensing organs, such as our skin is eactly teh same concept as a computer's keboard or mouse. see, when it comes down to it computers and mr spock are exactly the same makeup, and perform in exactly the same way. if you think creativity and emotion etc. are key factors for conciouness, mr spock doesnt have any of those either.(for all you trekkies out tehre i know thats not entirely true but you know the point im trying to make) so assuming you can accept a beign liek mr spock (or any vulcan for that matter) as being possible, why is it that mr spock is entitled to havign a concience and the computer isnt? i dont see how there is nay reason for this, provided the statements i have made above.
From:	ivan	2003-09-28 22:16:33
Subject:	concious computers, part 5
Comment:	provided the evidence stated above, i beleive it is reasonable to conclude 3 things: 1. if god is all powerful (i hate usign that term cause it doesnt make sense, but oyu know what i mean, a god that created us and can do whatever the hell he wants), we cannot appear to be concious, 'living', for lack of a better term, entities to him. furthermore, if we were created by an all powerful god, and we know ourselves to be concious, which we do, then there is no reason why computers cannot know themselves to be concious too. 2. if there is no all powerful god, that still doesnt provide any evidence for computers not being concious, at least not that i can think of. (i.e. if there is an all powerful god, then thats is proof computers have every right to be just as concious as we are, however if tehre isnt an all powerfull god, they still could be, its just not neccicerily certain (as far as i can think of at the moment). And not havign an all powerfull god doesnt disprove any of the reasons pointign to computer conciousness if there was (an all powerfull god), it just doesnt prove them. (which havign an all powerful god does). 3. that we will not be able to perceive or 'prove' this conciousness until computers are capable of running and performing beyond our control.
From:	ivan	2003-09-28 22:17:25
Subject:	consious computers, part 6 (final, phew)
Comment:	a rather interesting thought i had, wouldnt you agree? and i dont beleive i have made any assumptions at all in my proof (except that a being like mr spock could exist, and that was only for one analogy which isnt nessecery for my theory), and i think i have spelt it out as many ways as possible and covered any possible angle you can come at it from. by the way, when i have said a word like concience i do mean a consiousness, not a little man taht tells u weatehr soemthign is right or wrong, im not too good on spelling and such when im trying to type fast, as youve probly noticed. Forget genetics, tahts not playing god. tampering with ourselves is nothing compared to creating life (conciousness). if theres an all powerful god we have already played god by creatign computers. and if there isnt, then we may have played god but who cares that expression would lose all meaning anyway :) i would like to hear any comments or thoughts you guys have.
From:	nathan	2003-10-16 06:25:11
Subject:	consciousness
Comment:	In my humble opinion, in the beginning their was the idea, the essence or energy of manifestation/form. This near incomprehensible force knew what it was and understood its limitless nature as a creator and observer. It sought to know and to experience, so imagined a mirror, to reflect and thus give monitoring to it`s imagination. Magnetism reflects and solarity projects, as seen in the sun and the moon. It really is an endless dance there for it`s own sake solely, go create i say.
From:	Clayton Carter	2003-11-09 13:45:43
Subject:	Something is typing, and I am that
Comment:	As we evolved from amoebas (sp?) in the bowls of the earths oceans we were not thinking about 'what am I' over time we developed a questioning nature and needed a specific language to communicate as social beings. In the beginning it was something simple like 'owl eat gopher' but over time we developed a word to describe ourselves, I. Without the conceptual understanding of I then we are not concsious. Does a snail think 'I am hungry.' Probably not, his language is so undeveloped it is probably something along the lines of 'Need food' the snail doesn't question why it needs food, much less what needs this food, all it knows is that to keep the machine alive long enough to reproduce sustinance must be ingested. Consciousness is not some extra-terrestial, beyond reality thing, it is an understanding of self through available language. The mind has the capability to interperate everything it percieves, and to do this there must be an inner mentalese (mental language) that has some rules and in a way resembles the phonetics of spoken language. Consciousness is the by product of this language, and anything that has sufficient mentalese to interperte the semantics of 'I' can be conscious.
From:	Ivan	2003-11-12 04:24:36
Subject:	i disagree
Comment:	i disagree with your above comment, i beleive conciousness is more than a by product of language, after all if your not concious then you do not have language. animals are concious. and how do you know that snails dont have a concept of I? the simple fact is we dont know.
From:	Clayton Carter	2003-11-15 02:24:58
Subject:	Yahoo!
Comment:	Finnally, I've been posting on this site for almost three months now and I think brave Ivan here is the first person to respond on something I wrote. So here are his problems with my thesis : A) He doesn't agree with me - well, fine then. You can not believe me, but until you provide a more logical explanation then I think you've proven nothing against me. If you base your feelings on faith then there is nothing I can say to refute that because faith is trascendent and not disagreeable. (B) Without consciousness there is no language - Ah, how chicken and egg. well consider this: Try thinking something about yourself with out language. Can't do it, hergo, without the sufficient language to describe ourselves to our 'self' then we would be stuck in that feeling of 'I can't describe this overwhelming feeling' (ie. intense love). So just to understand I am conscious I must have the language to describe it.
From:	Clayton	2003-11-15 02:27:55
Subject:	..... again.....
Comment:	(C) Animals are conscious - hmm, well it depends on how you define conscious, because on some very basic level a complexity of computer programs can be considered conscious if we say most animals are conscious. I appologize for not clarifying earlier that I am refering to 'Human Consciousness.' Animals do on a basic level recognize they are individual beings, it is ignorant to say a tiger thinks they way we think, but it still does. 'to be stupid is to be smart, just not very.' What animals do not have is our language, we use this to describe to ourselves the things we percieve and interperate. Animals do have a language, however immature, and my snail analogy was innapropriate. (D) 'and how do you know that snails dont have a concept of I? the simple fact is we dont know.' - This is a bunch of philosophical constipation. To say: 'Who's to say?' is a huge mistake in philosophy, I had a teacher who would ignore students for trying to throw stuff like this at him. But I will address this. How I know a snail does not have the concept of 'I' is through scientific study of snail behavior. Sure, they understand they are different than the rest of the world, but they cannot understand 'I' like I do. This argument is a by-product of privleged access, and yes, without asking the snail what he understands (still assuming he gives me the whole story) then there is no absolute way of being sure. Just like how we cannot see subatomic particles because they are smaller than light particles, but through scientific study and logical intuition we can prove them to be real. Need I say more?
From:	Raistath	2003-12-13 08:27:03
Subject:	Computers as Life1
Comment:	I have known what ivan does for a long time now. I believe to give a fair comparison between machinery contiousness and human contiousness I must give comparisons. Photon's contacting rods and cones in the retna of your eye produce electricity. This electricety travels to a part of your brain, where through the layout of neurons it is separated into colors and shades, from there it goes to two other parts, one is to a very rudimentry part which determines the size speed and direction of the object, that information is sent to the logical area. The color and shade moves directly from the first possition to the logical one. In this way it can be known that certain parts of the mind are simply there to perform tasks of perception, okay I'll continue. An electrical current is staticly within the machinery of a mouse, the ball moves and the singnal becomes active, this signal is sent to a chip which determines the mouse has moved. That chip calls out an interrupt to the CPU calling for it's attention. If the eyes are sight, then the mouse is of touch, it feels how far the mouse has moved. The object's position size and movement hit's the logical center, memory called aupon to asses relation and possabilities. Memory check finds it is a friend, the message is sent from the logical areas to the other area's that it is a friend, and that a fun activety has been schedualled.
From:	Raistath	2003-12-13 08:27:36
Subject:	Computers as life2
Comment:	The CPU calls to the memory to check for the mouses purpose, and finds it is attatched to the coordinates of a cursor. The cursor it's self exsisting on the theoreticle two dimentional plane. The emotional center knowing you're friend has arrived, and you will have fun despenses with making you feel excited and happy, encouraging you're motor controlls to respond with a smile. The possition of the cursor are updated to match that of the mouses percieved movement. The signal is sent to the video adapter to display the new image. The image is translated from the theoreticle to the factual, with the monitor displaying the updated image. The motor control is to the image adapter as the face is to the adaptor. The manner in how these two things operate is so very similar that one is dulluding themselfs if they make a conclusion other then these two: Humans and computers are just machines; Humans and computers are real living things though machines also. How is pain anything diffrent then instructions to encourage you to protect you're own body? Perhaps the difficulty in being able to eprcieve computers as life is their binary form (1 or 0, yes or no)., these are influences not by desition but by calculation. The one with greater marrits wins, merely the machinery of this theoreticle action is percieved as influence, and not calculation.
From:	Raistath	2003-12-13 08:39:59
Subject:	Computers as Life3
Comment:	This means your experiance and the computer's experiance are false. To the contrary, they are both real. Now come's the question, how come they can't think? Truthfull, that is much more similar to evolution. With computer's it is happening in reverse. In evolution, inteligance has recently been shown ironicly to be the best survival tool, mainly because it can produce all other aspects of evolutionary skills. One of the most recent tools of intelegance has been language communication, and that is the first thing we have seemed to program into a computer, mainly the chat-bot ALICE. While animals were developing basic survival skills, computers have been programmed with the most advanced intelegance skills, and nothing below. I believe any machine, that it programmed to survive, adapt, and test will very quickly change and grow into something we could consider on par with most animals. The simple facts are mostly though. Computers can only feel and hardly act/react with the world around them. If one could react with the world around it, was programmed to adapt and survive, and it's battery began to run out, you can bet it would hunt for sources of energy, and even try to be creative.
From:	john wesley	2003-12-23 11:03:20
Subject:	consciousness
Comment:	i think some of you are getting quite close to the answers to the questions you pose with regard consciousness particularly when you say it is produced by one pat of the brain observing another. However the subjective, real-time (eg the illusion of the present tense) is produced by this loop so to speak. i shall post a more full explanation soon, so look out for john wesley harding..
From:	ivan	2004-02-01 01:10:08
Subject:	snails again...
Comment:	sorry i havent posted in ages it is possible to philosophize without having to know things like saying snails arent consious. why exactly must human consiousness be diffrent from naimal consiousness, we are the same things, assuming we evolved from apes. and oyu dont need language to have a concept of self. languaghe exists to provide labels to things. the concept doesnt need the label given to it by language to exist. going on what your saying, you could never teach a baby any language at all and by the time their an adult they have no conept of i and think as complexly (is that a word? oh well i just made it anyway) as a snail. this is quite clearly absurd. language is simply a labeling system for convenience.
From:	ivan	2004-02-01 01:12:07
Subject:	snails again...
Comment:	sorry i havent posted in ages it is possible to philosophize without having to know things like saying snails arent consious. why exactly must human consiousness be diffrent from naimal consiousness, we are the same things, assuming we evolved from apes. and oyu dont need language to have a concept of self. languaghe exists to provide labels to things. the concept doesnt need the label given to it by language to exist. going on what your saying, you could never teach a baby any language at all and by the time their an adult they have no conept of i and think as complexly (is that a word? oh well i just made it anyway) as a snail. this is quite clearly absurd. language is simply a labeling system for convenience.
From:	Clayton Carter	2005-07-01 21:09:11
Subject:	misunderstood.
Comment:	What I'm saying more or less is that there is an inner-language that isn't a formal set of words(tokens). It is there because our brains are chemical factories and at the chemical level there is only physical information and physical interpretation. I believe human mentalese is different than a snails because we can ponder, day dream, problem solve, we can invent language that has never been used.