Phatose on 6/2/2011 at 23:28

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(http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-23-unfortunate-dualist.html)



I don't buy this whole meat puppet thing at all. The moment we start saying "Well, you can have a machine that acts like it's conscious but isn't", I start looking at all the other people on the planet and say "Well, how do I know that's not a description of everyone who isn't me?"

All brains differ, dead people show clearly we can have brains without consciousness, and things can act like they are conscious when they're not. Why on earth allow that other people are conscious too?


And more importantly, if this is the case, why worry about consciousness at all? You can't ever be sure anything is conscious but you, and it doesn't actually DO anything.

Renzatic on 7/2/2011 at 00:15

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Phatose is taking the solipsist viewpoint on things. Or if you prefer, the "I don't know about the rest of yall, but I know I'm conscious. And since I can't ever know what yall are thinking and feeling, I can only safely assume I'm the only one that does, in fact, think and feel. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go get a pizza, and maybe pull one off before I go to bed tonight" argument.

It's a half assed answer to a very hard question. Unfortunately, it's the one answer that's most viable at the moment. You know you're conscious. You don't know other people are. Why even bother. True knowledge of the outside world is impossible.

Assuming that the you within yourself is a conscious entity, of course. If you're not, that even that argument falls apart. But then again, if you weren't, why would you be making the argument in the first place?

Renzatic on 7/2/2011 at 00:50

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I'm gonna quote myself and doublepost (subjeff saved me from doubleposting) because this is at the root of a question I've had bouncing around in my head. Lets see if I can put this into words here...

Okay. From an evolutionary standpoint, how would unthinking meat puppets and their complex behaviors make sense? What environmental stressors could cause a creature to evolve with such a huge amount of various responses, overcomplicated to the point of absurdity, to its own species, other species, and the world around it?

Why does a beaver build a dam? Long story short, a beaver builds a dam because they're a specific learned evolutionary response to its surroundings. They're amphibious creatures, with traits evolved over time to make them good dam builders. They use their environment and manipulate it to their advantage. Would you say they're engineering geniuses? Would you say these dams are examples of their own consciousness? Probably not. They're animals. If you ask the same of them, why not ask it for bees and their honeycombs. Birds and nests? Dams are just of a higher order of size and complexity.

You could say the same things of humans. Do we build skyscrapers and house ourselves in them because we're conscious, engineering geniuses, or because it's a learned response to our environment? The only reason our habitats are more complicated than other animals is because we have more brain to work with.

But then you have to wonder why we build nuclear reactors to give us electricity so we can power or LCD TVs, our computers, our iPads. Why didn't our evolution stop when we discovered the radio and telephone, and could talk to each other over long distances? It's efficient enough, isn't it? TVs? Old black and white tubes should've been good enough. If our actions are nothing more than learned reactions, then why do we keep improving upon it more and more and more? Why hasn't a beaver built something to rival the Hoover Dam? What evolutionary stressor has driven us to the point where we have to build nuclear reactors and iPads in the first place? Don't they seem kind of a waste? Because we don't really need them to survive.

At some point you have to assume consciousness is a given for any of it to make sense. We do it because we want to, not because nature dictates it in a survival of the fittest contest.



Why would evolution even require fake consciousness to come into play? What advantage does it give us?

Renzatic on 7/2/2011 at 03:16

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Right. But even our leisure activities are too complex to attribute to us being simple meat puppets. After all, you don't necessarily need a TV, an iPad, a Nintendo to unwind with. If we're truly without consciousness, why would we need to build something beyond what nature already provides to entertain ourselves? Why would invent these things if we had no conscious drive behind us.

If our brains are just stim-response mechanisms, then at some point, some conscious prime mover type example had to start the chain of events that eventually lead up to TVs, radios, cars, and all our other modern conveniences. Otherwise we wouldn't have built a world that's a rough facsimile of what we've got now. We wouldn't have built anything at all.

At some point, at least one person had to be creative to start the chain of events that led the other stim-response people to our current level. To be creative, as in creative simply for the simple joy of creating, rather than creating to fulfill a basic need. To be creative in that regard, you have to be conscious of yourself and the world around you.

Think of it like this. As a stim-response machine, you'd only have rudimentary knowledge of yourself, as in what's good for you, and what hurts you. If you stub your toe on a rock out in the woods, you'd think "rock hit foot, foot hurt, rock bad, avoid rock". Hit your foot again, well "rock still bad". A conscious being would be able to go beyond that. The first time would be "avoid rock", but the second time? "Maybe I should wear something that protects my feet", or "hey, if this rock hurts me, then it'll probably hurt my enemies. I'll pick this rock up and throw it at people". Extrapolate that idea for a few thousand years, mix it with other ideas along the way by talking to your peers, and bam...nuclear missiles and ergonomically fit shoes with fancy treads for traction, made out of synthetic materials that last forever.

Without introspection, observation, and the intellect to build upon what you see, you can't have progress. You can't be introspective and observational without consciousness. A meat puppet, who's only actions are reactions, could progress only to a point within the limits of its needs and natural surroundings. They cannot improve, because they have no capability for creativity.

For example, beavers have been building dams for tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of years. Yet they still build the same mud and wood dams they've always built. That's all they need. Our dams have gone from mud and wood, to stones, to shape bricks, to complex metals that combine elements not normally seen together in nature. And why? Because we like to experiment and improve upon what we've already made, for no other reason than just because we can. We're capable of this because we're conscious beings.

Wow. I went off on a tangent here.

SubJeff on 7/2/2011 at 11:20

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I think our "understanding" of meat puppet differs. Read dema's link on zombies, though that's only half the story.

When I say meat puppet I'm talking about a purely reductionist view of consciousness. It is a function of the brain set-up and everything is just an illusion created by that set up. In this way we are just one step up from Descartes "automaton" animals and indeed consciousness is just a feature of our more complex automaticity.