Consciousness is hard to be treated scientifically, not because it is hard to explain but because it is hard, if not impossible to detect. There is no objective test or measurement that can be applied to consciousness; it is exclusively subjective.

You might believe that you have evidence that you are conscious, but I have absolutely none.

The problem is based upon a gross misunderstanding(misconception) of human thought and belief as a result of being based upon the objective/subjective dichotomy. As is qualia...

Empty statement with no explaination, again. I conclude it is you who has gross misunderstanding of what the problem is.

Scientists typically try to limit experience to Empirical or A Posteriori Knowledge gained from sensory impressions. But Philosophers and Theologians often include Theoretical or A Priori (tautological) knowledge in their discussions of Consciousness — Gnomon

Good point, although I would add that a priori knowledge is not necessarily tautological. That is, synthetic judgements afford knowledge a priori, but are not tautologies, re: mathematics.
——————-

The confounding problem here is that human beings are capable of acting as-if concepts that exist only in the mind (e.g. fictional characters) are real. — Gnomon

Hmmmm.....I’d suggest the confounding problem is humans treat acts of the mind that are real as actually existing. Thoughts, ideas, intuitions, concepts are real, but only to the mind, and not to sensibility. And real to the mind only as hypotheticals in a speculative theoretical epistemology. Sensibility is impossible without objects that impress it, and thought is impossible without objects that impress it, but the impressions are different, so the reality of the objects absolutely must be different.

One man’s semantic quibble is another man’s logical consistency, n’est ce pas?

The abstract mathematical playground was in use long before its application to the natural empirical one. — Mww

I'm not so sure of this, but prefer not to argue the point. When I taught college algebra courses some of the word problems went back very far in time. For instance, the problem of determining how long it would take for two workers to plow a certain field working together if it is known how long it would take for each individually. Cuneiform tablets 5K years ago.

I like Chalmer's definitions of strong and weak emergence, particularly the weak variety which he explains in terms of computer programs. Speculation, of course, is that consciousness or mind may be the only example of strong emergence. We discussed much of this on SuperTopo, a climbers forum, in the thread "What is Mind" - over 25K posts I recall.

No conclusions.

The issue I have is that there is no information 'per se'. The word itself has many meanings, depending on the context; it's not as is there is an identifiable fundamental type called information. It also seems to me the only naturally-occuring process with reference it makes sense to speak in terms of 'information' is living organisms, as DNA encodes biological information. But there is no such information encoded in the vast majority of matter and energy found throughout the cosmos.

All information we know of is embedded in spatial arrangement of matter, so information is just 'geometrical relations of matter' in essence. Context is given when one arrangement interacts with another, say a program running on a computer prints stuff on the screen. It's hard or impossible to tell how meaningful any interaction is without knowing or understanding the "purpose", i.e. future consequences the product of that interaction may have on other arrangements of matter.

Therefore, there is information in every atom. Context for H and O is given by their specific interaction which produces water. How water is meaningful is hard to tell until you land on planet Earth, for example.

God did it! What a satisfying answer, let us pretend that explains everything about us and our world, so we are only left to explain it all over again for the gods and their worlds. Why make the problem worse for no reason at all?

It's not independent, that's the concern/problem. It is perceived as independent yet not independent. Further, it's dependent on each other to function properly in the broader context of cognition viz the human condition.

God did it! What a satisfying answer, let us pretend that explains everything about us and our world, so we are only left to explain it all over again for the gods and their worlds. Why make the problem worse for no reason at all? — Zelebg

Do you prefer the Magic Bang answer? Is that satisfying to you? Apparently, it's not for many astronomers, who postulate a hypothetical Multiverse as a "turtles all the way down" alternative to the mathematical creation event. How is that better than a One Big Turtle solution? Does an infinity of invisible universes satisfy your curiosity about an origin theory that most scientists at first rejected as a religious explanation?. My thesis does not try to explain G*D, but merely takes the First Cause hypothesis as a reasonable axiom. After that assumption, it's all a process of Enformation (applied mathematics). My reason for pursuing that hypothesis is because all materialistic explanations ignore Qualia, which is of more significance to living humans than dead Matter and aimless Energy.

At least my hypothetical "G*D" creates via gradual evolution and physics, not by instantly inflating space faster than the speed of light. And the attribution of Enformation and Entention to the First Cause explains the existence of Mind & Consciousness much better than mindless Materialism. Besides, which is a faith-based explanation : "Imaginary God did it!", or "Imaginary Multiverse did it!" Which is "lunatic fringe" : a Mother-verse, or Eternal Mind? *1


*1 " a dynamic evolving space that once had some sort of childhood --- and perhaps some sort of birth about 14 billion years ago."
"Inflation is like a great magic show --- my gut reaction is : this can't possibly obey the laws of physics!"
"Q. What caused our Big Bang?
A. There's no explanation --- the equations simply assume it happened.
Q. How could an infinite space get created in a finite time?
A. There's no explanation --- the equations simply assume that as soon as there was any space at all, it was infinite in size."
"where multiverses have gone from having lunatic fringe status to being discussed openly at physics conferences. . ."
Max Tegmark, physicist, cosmologist
Our Mathematical Universe : My Quest For the Ultimate Nature of Reality

Note: Tegmark's Mathematical Universe is equivalent to my Enformationism, except that I use G*D as a First Cause metaphor instead of a "Level 4 Multiverse".

It's in the Introduction to Systems Philosophy. That was the only one of the systems books I didn't buy - it was over $200! When I first read it I was amazed at how neatly it resolves the issue. Once you understand how emergence works, and that it is a ubiquitous feature of reality and quantifiable, the whole mind-body issue just doesn't seem like a real problem anymore. Which is I think the hallmark of a paradigm shift...

The problem with this notion of rigid designation is that 'Bruce Wayne' can be a name for more than one individual, and only one of those individuals is also Batman; so it is not necessarily or "analytically" true that Bruce Wayne is Batman.

The problem with this notion of rigid designation is that 'Bruce Wayne' can be a name for more than one individual, and only one of those individuals is also Batman; so it is not necessarily or "analytically" true that Bruce Wayne is Batman. — Janus

I was just saying that that kind of thing, not what OmniscientNihilist was calling "omniscience", is what analytic a posteriori knowledge is about.

But to defend Kripke, what you are saying is that it is not necessary that names "Bruce Wayne" and "Batman" refer to the same individual; those words can be used to refer to other people besides that one individual we're talking about. That is true, but Kripke's point is that that individual (the one we're talking about) is necessarily identical to himself, like all individuals are, and so if that is the person being referred to by both the names "Bruce Wayne" and "Batman", then it is necessarily true that Bruce Wayne (the "Bruce Wayne" we're referring to) is Batman (the "Batman" we're referring to); but we cannot know a priori that those names are used to refer to the same individual, we learn who those names are used to refer to (and that they're used to refer to the same person) a posteriori. This is a kind of analytic knowledge, because it's about the meaning of words; but not all analytic knowledge is a priori.

For another example: the classic example of a necessary, a priori, analytic truth is that "all bachelors are unmarried". But that hinges on the meanings of "bachelor" and "married". And we acquire the knowledge of what those words mean a posteriori. That "bachelor" means "unmarried man of marriageable age" is an analytic a posteriori (and contingent) fact; that bachelors (meaning unmarried men of marriageable age) are unmarried is an analytic a priori (and necessary) fact.

The problem is based upon a gross misunderstanding(misconception) of human thought and belief as a result of being based upon the objective/subjective dichotomy. As is qualia...

The problem is the historical notion of "necessary". When the criterion for what counts as "necessary" is being true in all possible worlds, then all we've done is cloud our own understanding.

Something can be existentially dependent upon something else(in this world), and if we adhere to that archaic notion of "necessary" we're forced to to either deny the existential dependency in this world or say that it matters less than what we can imagine another world to be.

Flies and bottles.

I think there are only physical things, and that physical things consist only of their empirical properties, which are actually just functional dispositions to interact with observers (who are just other physical things) in particular ways. A subject's phenomenal experience of an object is the same event as that object's behavior upon the subject, and the web of such events is what reality is made out of, with the nodes in that web being the objects of reality, each defined by its function in that web of interactions, how it observably behaves in response to what it experiences, in other words what it does in response to what is done to it. — Pfhorrest

There's a deep definitional problem regarding the nature of physical things. This is of course the fundamental subject of physics, but physics has been unable to arrive at such a definition, despite having constructed the most complex, largest and expensive apparatus in history (namely, the large hadron collider).

There's a current article in Aeon magazine about whether what the Universe is 'made of' is atoms or fields. The conclusion is moot, but let's just note in passing that 'fields' are of a far more ethereal nature than the so-called 'indivisible particle' (which atoms were thought to have been, but which so far have never been observed.)

So we can't really even say what a physical thing is, other than in a common-sense way. But as we're dealing here with foundational definition of what constitutes the nature of being, then does declaring that there are 'only physical things' say anything beyond your adherence to physicalism?

. A subject's phenomenal experience of an object is the same event as that object's behavior upon the subject

However, surely you can't be saying that stones experience the hitting of a human subject. The fundamental point about beings, as distinct from inanimate objects, is that they are demonstrably subjects of experience, whereas there is no grounds for asserting that with respect to stones and other objects.

The contemporary panpsychist answer is that there isn't anything special that gives us subjective first-person experience, there just is a subjective first-person experience to everything.

But what is the difference between that and saying subjective first-person experience emerges from computation? And in either case someone can come along and say: "panpsychism? higher thought? that's the spirit of god I've been telling you about for the last 2000 years".

None of it is testable and none of it makes any practical difference, not just to solve the problem, but not even to show us direction or a hint as to how should real mystery be resolved. Or do they?

The point is not to solve the problem but to dissolve it. Saying phenomenal consciousness, not just access consciousness, arises from computation still leaves the question of how and why.

Consider all this preparation to encode qualia in a certain format for consumption by the "self". If we now suppose all the information actually must take this specific qualia format to be experienced, then that tells us something about this "self". We could then look into what is special about this format and maybe find out what does it take to be decoded or 'consumed', which then might tell us a little bit more, and so on. It's not much, but it's something "practical", in a way at least, something worth pursuing to see where it leads. Isn't it?

How does ghost in the machine solve the problem? How do you explain subjective experience of the ghost? And whose ghost is it? Mine? Or is it some shape shifting lizard alien playing some game through my avatar?

No, that just won't do it. Crystals don't convey or contain any information unless it is encoded in them intentionally. And information is not 'every atom'. Nor is water, nor anything else. intrinsically information-bearing, unless it is intepreted.

Your reply is not addressing what I said, you're misinterpreting.

Crystals don't convey or contain any information unless it is encoded in them intentionally.

You are confusing static information with its computation and the result. Information itself does not "convey a meaning", but first it needs the context, i.e. interaction. The meaning is a function of the result and its impact on the future interactions, thus mostly unpredictable in principle.

H and O atoms contain very specific information so they will always compute the same result that is H2O, and not H3O4 or H4O2. Furthermore, this H2O result contains specific information itself, which determines snowflake designs that are always beautiful patterns and never a random mess. Furthermore, snowflakes contain information themselves, by not being random, and that information when observed by some brains may result in emotion or appreciation of beauty. Furthermore, this emotion contains information itself, and so on...

This also means information contained in emotions are spatial arrangement of matter too, but that's not the problem for immaterial appearance of the mind, it's the other part of that interaction, something emotions interact with to be put into context and result in qualia.

And information is not 'every atom'

Information is simply geometrical relation between chunks of matter. Meaning is not the same thing as information.

Do you think the atman is supposed to represent what we would call consciousness, even if it is called the Self? — Mww

There are noted convergences between Vedanta and German idealism particularly Kant, Schopenhauer and Fichte (It was said Schopenhauer used to read from the Upanisads every evening in the later part of his life.) The reason I mentioned that passage is because there is an arguable similarity between the Kantian transcendental ego and the Vedantic 'atman'. Not the ego, which is 'man's conception of himself', but something deeper than that.

I’m down with real but incorporeal, but I’m not sure one could justify denying materialism entirely from the immaterial quality of pure a priori conceptions. — Mww

'In his seminal 1973 paper, “Mathematical Truth,” Paul Benacerraf presented a problem facing all accounts of mathematical truth and knowledge. Standard readings of mathematical claims entail the existence of mathematical objects. But, our best epistemic theories seem to debar any knowledge of mathematical objects.'

Why is this? Because, it turns out, 'our best epistemic theories' are materialiist - well, naturalistic, and based on the assumption of physicalism. We read: 'Some philosophers, called rationalists, claim that we have a special, non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths, a rational insight arising from pure thought. But, the rationalist’s claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies.'

https://www.iep.utm.edu/indimath/

(I love 'some philosophers, called "rationalists"..' - I can almost here a TV host intoning those words as he introduces the audience to those rare and elusive creatures....)

From the SEP entry on mathematical Platonism:

Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects which aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences. Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge. For there is little doubt that we possess mathematical knowledge. The truth of mathematical platonism would therefore establish that we have knowledge of abstract (and thus causally inefficacious) objects. This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to accommodate.

Think of it as though the entire universe is a computer program... — Pfhorrest

Italics added - so, this is a metaphor. And, no computers are spontaneously occurring, they are built by human agents to perform a function. So the notion of the universe being a program irresistibly suggests a programmer - which I'm sure you don't want to do.

There's instinctive sympathy for analogies of the universe being a simulation, or a computer program, or like a computer, which is understandable, given the technological nature of the culture. But it is still an analogy.

You seem to think that any view that doesn't maintain a separation of mental, intelligible, otherwise non-physical stuff from physical stuff is trying to do away with the non-physical and reduce everything to non-mental, unintelligible, dumb little billiard balls clicking around. — Pfhorrest

Like this, you mean?

Daniel Dennett, in one of his characteristic remarks, assures us that “through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to ‘do things.’ ... There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level — all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home.” Then, after describing a marvelous bit of highly organized and seemingly meaningful biological activity, he concludes:

Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe. — Steve Talbott

...signals being communicated between those functional objects are thus the fundamental ontological stuff of reality... — Pfhorrest

Not really. 'Ontology' is about 'types or modes of being'. And this doesn't say anything about ontology, or how 'those signals' come to be, other than today's universal assumption that it relies on an ability that 'must have evolved'. But that is back to neo-darwinian materialism, which is very much what is at issue in all of this. You're not 'dissolving' the problem at all, you're simply singing from the neo-darwinist songbook.

go ahead and name some more of those supposed multiple meanings (of 'information', and if it does not (simply) encapsulate "spatial arrangement of matter" — Zelebg

Think of a simple item of information: 'The cat sits on the mat'. I can write that in any one of a number of languages, all of which consist of arrangements of different symbols in a different order. I can write it in pencil on a piece of paper, or I could send it by morse code, or even flags or smoke signals. In all cases, the information remains the same, but the physical form is completely different.

Therefore, the information is different to the physical form.

Now, what arranged that matter to convey that meaning? Clearly, humans did that. And when we speak of 'information', I'm pretty sure we're generally talking of something that humans have generated or understood. It makes no sense to speak of 'information' in respect of inanimate matter; matter contains no information, as such. Scientists have spent decades scanning interstellar space for signs of life. Any sign of 'information transmission' would be the biggest headline in history. No luck, so far.

There's only one naturally-occuring range of phenomena with respect to which I think it's meaningful to speak of 'information' being encoded and transmitted - and that is DNA.

I would just caution against splitting semantic hairs. — 3017amen

Yeah, that is a common problem. But what about this, and pardon me, everybody, for stealing from another thread:

“When someone shuffles a deck of cards and deals you the first twenty cards, the probability of getting those specific cards is extremely unlikely.”

Is it extremely unlikely?

There’s no profit in thinking experience is something that exists. Existence is a condition only of sensible objects, and experience is very far from a sensible object. — Mww

Unfortunately, defining "experience" and "existence" has been a subject of debate in philosophy for millennia. Scientists typically try to limit experience to Empirical or A Posteriori Knowledge gained from sensory impressions. But Philosophers and Theologians often include Theoretical or A Priori (tautological) knowledge in their discussions of Consciousness. So, whether there is profit in talking about the ontological "existence" of Experience may depend on your worldview : Materialism or Idealism. Is unproven, but reasonable, Theoretical knowledge a form of non-sensory Experience? Some call Reason the sixth sense.

The confounding problem here is that human beings are capable of acting as-if concepts that exist only in the mind (e.g. fictional characters) are real. Apparently, posters in chat rooms for Game of Thrones or Lord of the Ring seem to gain some profit from imaginary beings. That's not to mention all the various gods of world religions that are treated as-if real in some sense. So, apparently there is Material "profit" and Ideal "profit". If we were discussing a material object here, your assertion would be accurate. But Consciousness is not that kind of thing. :wink:

Again, you can't compare quarks to hunger, but both are equally real.

I am not comparing anything. I sad the question is whether qualia is physical phenomena like magnetism or liquidity, or is virtual phenomena like algorithm or Pacman.

I also explained what is physical and what is virtual phenomena. What exactly do you have a problem with? What statement of mine are you even responding to?

Isn't this just a lot of rationalization to account for distracted driving? I'm having a hard time seeing this as exemplifying a cognitively significant phenomenon. — Pantagruel

There is a distinction between distraction and daydreaming, yes?

Consider yourself driving to work while your subconsciousness is putting you in an island by the beach. Then, all of a sudden you crash as a result. At that moment of daydreaming about the island, were you at the beach while driving at the same time? Was it your consciousness driving, while your subconsciousness was dreaming? Or, was your subconsciousness driving and your consciousness dreaming?

Hence; I'm driving and not driving.

The idea is that if consciousness does not admit of degree, then it becomes very hard to find a point at which it can plausibly emerge. We'd have to find a change in a physical system that did not admit of any degree, some kind of quantum jump or something, with which to correlate the emergence of consciousness. This cannot plausibly be done it seems to me.

Stanford has caught up with this, no doubt due to my heroic efforts on these forums and the last:

More recently, Goff (2013) has argued that consciousness is not vague, and that this leads to a sorites-style argument for panpsychism. Very roughly if consciousness does not admit of borderline cases, then we will have to suppose that some utterly precise micro-level change—down to an exact arrangement of particles—marked the first appearance of consciousness (or the change from non-conscious to conscious embryo/foetus), and it is going to seem arbitrary that it was that utterly precise change that was responsible for this significant change in nature. — Goff, Philip, Seager, William and Allen-Hermanson, Sean, 'Panpsychism', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

EDIT: ...and just to finish the thought, we then have to pick an alternative to emergentism. And as pfhorrest has already mentioned, the two obvious alternatives are eliminativism (nothing is conscious) or panpsychism (everything is). Eliminativism is false because I am conscious. That leaves panpsychism. It's the worst theory of consciousness apart from all the others.

Yep. It is not uncommon for physicists today to think of all of reality as an informational structure. People like Max Tegmark argue (and I agree) that there isn't a hard ontological difference between abstract mathematical objects and the concrete physical world: the concrete physical world is just whichever mathematical object of which we are a part, and other abstract mathematical objects are just as real in the broadest abstract sense, they're just not concretely real, not part of the same structure as we are. "Concrete" is indexical, the way modal realists take "actual" to be.

Information : Knowledge and the ability to know. Technically, it's the ratio of order to disorder, of positive to negative, of knowledge to ignorance. It's measured in degrees of uncertainty. . . . — Gnomon
I'm highly dubious about this. You can't make up definitions of fundamental words, like 'information'. — Wayfarer

You are probably most familiar with Claude Shannon's definition of Information. But, my general definition of Information above is a distillation of many technical definitions. For example, Shannon defined Information in absolute digital terms suitable for computers : either 1 or 0; either True or False. Hence, no uncertainty. But humans are analog computers, and parse information in terms of relative certainty : a ratio between 1 or 0; a probability range from True to False. Shannon's Entropy is defined in terms of a degree of order relative to disorder. The complete concept of Information is so broad that you will find almost diametrically opposite definitions depending on the application. For example, Shannon equated computer Information with physical Entropy, expressed as a Ratio between Randomness and Order : "Information entropy is the average rate at which information is produced by a stochastic source of data." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)

My thesis goes step-by-step through the evolution of the modern meaning of Information, and has several pages of references. But in the final analysis, it's all mathematical and metaphysical : a Rate or Ratio is not a specific thing, but a general range of probabilities from certain information (100%) to uncertain Information (0%). The human analog brain uses fuzzy logic (intuition) to extract meaning from incoming information. That may be why precise mathematics does not come easy for most of us; it requires hard conscious thinking. :nerd:

Enformationism : http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/

Not only then is the ratio a : b the fundamental notion for all activities of perception, but it signals one of the most basic processes of intelligence in that it symbolizes a comparison between two things, and is thus the elementary basis for conceptual judgement . . . A proportion, however, is more complex, for it is a relationship of equivalency between two ratios . . . An analogy.
—-Robert Lawler, Geometry

Ontology (from the Greek word "ontos", meaning "being") is the study of being, as in existence, or reality. — Pfhorrest

The definition of ontology -
'The compound word ontology ("study of being") combines onto- (Gr. ὄν, on, gen. ὄντος, ontos, "being; that which is") and -logia (Gr. -λογία, "logical discourse"), where 'on' is the present tense participle of the verb εἰμί, eimí, i.e. "to be, I am".

So 'ontology' is the 'study of the nature of being' - which has a different meaning to 'the study of what exists', although it's a hard distinction to draw.

Pretty much the entirety of the human sciences, History, Sociology, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Economics, Ethics, Aesthetics are the products of the nebulous thing called consciousness. And yes, these sciences are amenable to "scientific" analysis. Stochastically, and most recently, through the use of non-linear dynamics which it turns out can be used to model a lot of previously stubborn problems in complex open systems. Dilthey dedicated a huge portion of his philosophical career to the formalization of the development of the objective spirit in the human sciences. I guess you could call it the "material mind".

In any case, consciousness has been studied scientifically and is amenable to scientific study.

The top level system is whichever system contains the entity being evaluated from an internal/operational perspective. Every entity is simultaneously itself a complex system, having an internal systemic nature, and a functioning element of a complex 'container' system.

Importantly, complex systems are not 'created' in the sense of A makes B. Complex Adaptive systems are that precisely because they arise spontaneously through the ongoing interaction of an initial set of elements.

It is all quite fascinating, and the role of chaotic/fractal mathematics (attractors) and non-linear equations is central to getting the big picture. Basically, these self-organizing emergent systems exhibit causal regularities which are not of a linear (B follows A) nature but are real and measurable nonetheless using complex (non-linear) modelling. Essentially it is like a self-caused a-causally connected mechanism. And a lot of traditionally stubborn problems in virtually every field you'd care to look at it turns out can be successfully modelled following this paradigm.