Why do I have a perspective at all?
16 Feb 2012, 3:25 pm
Declension wrote:
Does anyone have any ideas about what properties a system has to have before it gains a point of view? Is it a blurry thing, or black-and-white? For example, I have a point of view. Now look at my father, and his father, and his father..... eventually you are talking about apes. Do my ape ancestors have just as much of a point of view as I do? Do extremely simple objects like computers have points of view?
My cat has a point of view. She has her own thoughts and feelings, though often I struggle to interpret them. I doubt she's contemplating the nature of the universe or asking if there is a god, but she's damned good at getting what she wants.
You don't really need a lot to give a system a point of view. First, it needs to be able to process information - take in input, identify relevant information from it, act accordingly. Second, you give it a need - that is, the input is something it actively looks for (I was going to say "wants", but that is needlessly anthropomorphising). That's about it. End result - something that takes in some aspect of the world around it, and categorises things as "good" or "bad" or however else it is programmed to operate.
It's a big step up from there to human beings, because we process a LOT of information, from various sources, and one of the biggest ones of these is our own selves. We can set up feedback loops, so we're not just thinking about (say) lemons, but thinking about ourselves thinking about lemons. We divide the universe into two, being "us" and "everything else", and we process those parts differently. And we can change our programming - we "learn". In short, we have a perspective that recognises and analyses itself - and adapts accordingly. We are computer programs that can revise and rewrite themselves. Von Neumann would be proud.
There is only one reason why we have been unable to replicate this artificially - the sheer scale of our brains is beyond our ability to replicate or understand, and certainly to build. Our computers have the processing power to replicate insect thoughts. Certainly human senses are difficult for computers to process - we have no problem with sight and sound, but computers struggle to interpret both. (Rather fittingly, computers have no problem with abstract calculation, while many human brains would struggle to even spell "abstract calculation"...)
16 Feb 2012, 3:37 pm
JNathanK wrote:
So , you're saying you're having a problem with objectively modeling subjective experience?
Well, I'm saying that it seems obvious to me that subjective experience cannot be modelled objectively. My "problems" are twofold:
(1.) It is a strange state of affairs that bothers me whenever I think about it.
(2.) Some philosophers (e.g. Dennett) seem to be saying that subjective experience can be modelled objectively. How is it possible that they are so wrong? What am I missing?
16 Feb 2012, 3:45 pm
Thom_Fuleri wrote:
we process a LOT of information, from various sources, and one of the biggest ones of these is our own selves. We can set up feedback loops, so we're not just thinking about (say) lemons, but thinking about ourselves thinking about lemons. We divide the universe into two, being "us" and "everything else", and we process those parts differently. And we can change our programming - we "learn". In short, we have a perspective that recognises and analyses itself - and adapts accordingly. We are computer programs that can revise and rewrite themselves.
Everything that you have said here seems to me to be "third-person talk". If we say that a human can refer to itself, aren't we just saying that there is a structure in its brain that encodes the person, or something like that? If we say that a human can learn, aren't we just saying that the brain can re-wire itself? It seems to me that everything above could be true even if people didn't have points of view.
Thom_Fuleri wrote:
There is only one reason why we have been unable to replicate this artificially - the sheer scale of our brains is beyond our ability to replicate or understand, and certainly to build.
Sure, in principle, maybe we can make a computer that does everything that a human brain does. But I think that this is missing the point. If we have a computer that perfectly models a human brain + body, we still don't understand anything about whether or not the computer has a point of view. Even if I accept that the computer has a point of view (and I probably would, by analogy to myself) it wouldn't solve the problem of why things like me and the computer really do have points of view.
16 Feb 2012, 4:07 pm
Declension wrote:
JNathanK wrote:
So , you're saying you're having a problem with objectively modeling subjective experience?
Well, I'm saying that it seems obvious to me that subjective experience cannot be modelled objectively. My "problems" are twofold:
(1.) It is a strange state of affairs that bothers me whenever I think about it.
(2.) Some philosophers (e.g. Dennett) seem to be saying that subjective experience can be modelled objectively. How is it possible that they are so wrong? What am I missing?
Well, they're not really wrong. They're probably just seeing one side of it. I think our minds are made up of complex electrical impulses, but there's also a spirit side to it, and I mean that in the Hegelian sense of the term.
I think consciousness or mind is a phenomenon that's sort of its own category altogether. You can't explain awareness explicitly in terms of height, width, length, or time. Its a sort of background process that all those attributes exist on, at least where our relation to all of it is concerned.
16 Feb 2012, 4:14 pm
Ah! You've wandered into the dilemma of philosophical zombies. They have all the attributes of regular human beings, even being able to talk and react and think and all that stuff, but they have no "soul". They don't have that "point of view". They are just machines. And there is no way to objectively tell them apart from real people. You know you aren't a zombie, because you're aware of your own perspective, but you can't see anyone else's.
You can go two ways on this. Either you feel that the only subjective viewpoint that exists is yours, also known as solipsism, because everyone else is merely reacting, or you can reason that a perspective such as yours is precisely the result of being able to rewrite itself. A fixed program can never learn anything new, just process things in the same way. A program that can process itself as well as its data can become something very different.
Consider cheese. I rather like cheese, or at least some cheese (stilton is vile). If my perspective was fixed, I would like cheese because I am programmed to like cheese. But my perspective is not fixed. I can ask why I like cheese. I can analyse my cheese obsession and determine I have an addiction to cheese, and stop eating it; my program has been altered. I like cheese on one level, but not on another, and while my fixed program would see me eating cheese frequently, my altered program changes this.
And this isn't the clever part. The clever part is that all this is nonsense - I do like cheese, but I'm not addicted to it. I'm extrapolating from a fictional scenario. I'm imagining I have a cheese addiction, and thinking about how I'd go about it. I've written a subroutine to my program that can be analysed in the same way as the main program, in order to see whether it would work as part of the program.
And the really clever part is that I'm writing all this up because I'm thinking about me thinking about thinking. And cheese. This perspective thing can nest - our program can not only rewrite itself, it can even rewrite the part of itself that reads itself - and the part that rewrites itself. I think that's pretty damned impressive, and if that isn't consciousness, it's probably more interesting.
16 Feb 2012, 4:17 pm
Thom_Fuleri wrote:
a perspective such as yours is precisely the result of being able to rewrite itself.
This is definitely a good candidate, and it's one that I have thought about a lot before. Another possible candidate is that a system has a perspective exactly when it encodes itself somehow.
But whatever the rules are, it is truly bizarre that the universe has such a rule at all.
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16 Feb 2012, 4:20 pm
You might find my answer oversimplistic but here it goes. You don't have a choice in whether you have an 'I' experience (which is what I have to assume you mean by the word 'perspective). If you are nothing more than a river, a wind, a whirlpool, just a more complex variant of natural feed back loops - then so is your 'I' experience. It just means that your perspective exists, just as non-separate and matter-bound as you would imagine it to be, but the gate you put up between the objective and subjective is an arbitrary one. Your right in that the universe would be completely fine without anything having an 'I' experience but, like many things in evolution, stuff just happens and it needs no more reason than the right things to happen in the right places at the right times. To embrace a materialist atheist or strong atheist interpretation is to accept that the subjective is a meaningless artifact, that's not to say that it doesn't mean a heck of a lot to us, but it means nothing to the universe.
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17 Feb 2012, 1:44 am
ruveyn wrote:
peebo wrote:
Thom_Fuleri wrote:
Declension wrote:
Does anyone know what I'm talking about? If so, what are your thoughts on the matter?
Oh yes. It's the main reason this nonsense about free will won't die out.
If it helps, think of it this way - is there any good reason why a materialistic system CANNOT have a point of view?
can you expand on this, before i present a counter argument that may be founded upon a misunderstanding?
He is talking about philosophical perspective (aka a point of view) and we are talking about geometrical/optical perspective.
ruveyn
obviously, yes. i was asking him to expand on the point he was making in relation to philosophical perspective.
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17 Feb 2012, 4:19 am
Declension wrote:
Thom_Fuleri wrote:
If it helps, think of it this way - is there any good reason why a materialistic system CANNOT have a point of view?
I guess not. But why me?
If I'm not going to be egotistical, I guess I have to assume that all materialistic systems with certain properties have points of view. But it seems like such a strange thing. I mean, if you were God, and you built a person from scratch out of atoms, you wouldn't expect him to have a point of view, would you? After all, you know exactly how the person works, and you never put a point of view in him. When he tells you, "I have a point of view!" you would just say, "Yes, I understand why you are saying that." But you wouldn't actually believe him.
If I were capable of programming an advanced A.I., I would expect it to have a point of view that differs from mine. Simply because I would program it with the ability to learn and observe, and eventually arrive at its own conclusions. Otherwise it wouldn't be an A.I., but rather a software designed to parrot whatever I have programmed it with.
Of course this would be different for a hypothetical omniscient god. That's why omniscience and free will are irreconcilable.
Quote:
Does anyone have any ideas about what properties a system has to have before it gains a point of view? Is it a blurry thing, or black-and-white? For example, I have a point of view. Now look at my father, and his father, and his father..... eventually you are talking about apes. Do my ape ancestors have just as much of a point of view as I do? Do extremely simple objects like computers have points of view?
Sorry for nitpicking, but humans are apes. Both humans and other extant great apes have common hominid / ape ancestry. If we go further back in time, our ancestors were pre-hominid primates, prosimians, and eventually shrew-like early mammals.
But you've hinted at the crux of the matter. It's a question of complexity. The human brain is so complex (three times more complex than that of a chimpanzee) that we cannot predict everything it does. It's much easier to predict the behavior of an insect or a nematode, because their nervous systems have a much simpler structure. If we had all the data to make accurate predictions about human thought and behavior, we would ourselves be omniscient in regard to human brain functions.
17 Feb 2012, 7:00 am
Declension wrote:
There's something that has been bothering me for a long time, and it's the sort of thing that also bothers philosophers, although I do not necessarily speak the same language as the philosophers. Philosophers talk about "qualia", or the "explanatory gap", or the "hard problem".
Here is the problem. I believe that my body, including my brain, is a collection of physics-stuff that simply obeys the laws of physics. It is made of physics-stuff, just like my laptop that I am typing on. I believe that is a good materialistic explanation of what I am and why I do the things I do, where my brain is a mechanical control centre for my body. I believe that there is a good materialistic explanation for why I am what I am: the blind forces of evolution have selected for things that have brains.
So, it really could just be that I do not have a "perspective" at all. As far as I can tell, the universe would be just fine if I was just a bunch of atoms. And I am a bunch of atoms. But, I have a "perspective". There is really some subjective viewpoint that I possess, that is looking out into the objective world. You're just going to have to believe me, because I realised a long time ago that I cannot convince anyone of this.
You know what is terrible? I believe that there is a good materialistic explanation for why I typed the last paragraph. In other words, there is a good materialistic explanation for why I claim to have a point of view. But, I really DO have a point of view! Why? It could have just been that I claim to but actually don't!
It seems to me that this problem is a fundamental problem, and cannot be solved. Because as soon as I try to tell anyone about it, I am talking in third-person language, and as soon as the problem is cast in third-person language, it all boils down to materialistic explanations that don't actually capture my first-person perspective at all. Apparently this position (that the problem is unsolvable) makes me something called a "New Mysterian".
Does anyone know what I'm talking about? If so, what are your thoughts on the matter?
Here is the problem. I believe that my body, including my brain, is a collection of physics-stuff that simply obeys the laws of physics. It is made of physics-stuff, just like my laptop that I am typing on. I believe that is a good materialistic explanation of what I am and why I do the things I do, where my brain is a mechanical control centre for my body. I believe that there is a good materialistic explanation for why I am what I am: the blind forces of evolution have selected for things that have brains.
So, it really could just be that I do not have a "perspective" at all. As far as I can tell, the universe would be just fine if I was just a bunch of atoms. And I am a bunch of atoms. But, I have a "perspective". There is really some subjective viewpoint that I possess, that is looking out into the objective world. You're just going to have to believe me, because I realised a long time ago that I cannot convince anyone of this.
You know what is terrible? I believe that there is a good materialistic explanation for why I typed the last paragraph. In other words, there is a good materialistic explanation for why I claim to have a point of view. But, I really DO have a point of view! Why? It could have just been that I claim to but actually don't!
It seems to me that this problem is a fundamental problem, and cannot be solved. Because as soon as I try to tell anyone about it, I am talking in third-person language, and as soon as the problem is cast in third-person language, it all boils down to materialistic explanations that don't actually capture my first-person perspective at all. Apparently this position (that the problem is unsolvable) makes me something called a "New Mysterian".
Does anyone know what I'm talking about? If so, what are your thoughts on the matter?
One book that is still popular is the "User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down To Size" by Tor Nørretranders (1998), and it has inspired a large number of papers on the internet:
http://books.google.com/books?id=TwMwAA ... rch_anchor
or just a google search for ""The User Illusion" Norretranders perspective" or ""The User Illusion" Norretranders" .
Older works by Julian Jaynes ("The Origin of Consciousness" & the breakdown of the bicameral mind) has older versions, while books like "The Ego Tunnel" are more recent.
Since physical/mechanical/chemical brain experiments are difficult and dangerous, beyond theory,so I more like Skinnerian Behaviourism and the recent developments of it into Relational Frame Theory, along with more safe experiments with weak magnetic fields utilized by the "God Helmet", EEGs, and toys easily modified, like "Mind Flex".
Testing for candidacy for brain surgery can greatly change the characterization of the user illusion, especially any test that relies on determining lateralization of functions to which side of the brain by anestheticizing half the brain during otherwise awareness (like a Wada Test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wada_test )
The human brain is crude and sluggish (computers work much faster and more precisely), and the chemistry and electrodynamics of neurological properties and functions are large in numbers, small in size, but still very finite in numbers of cells, and much larger than the very tiny sizes where quantum phenomenon become more ruling (Michael Persinger tends to argue quantum physics a bit much, while the scale seems often greater than a grain of sand to the Rock of Gibraltar between a quantum quanta and a brain cell).
Tadzio
17 Feb 2012, 11:22 am
Thom_Fuleri wrote:
You know you aren't a zombie, because you're aware of your own perspective, but you can't see anyone else's.
That is not true. Even if you are a zombie, you still 'think' you have a perspective and you are aware of it. Indeed If there was really a self test for zombies, we only need need the give the test to a zombie and ask it for the result.
17 Feb 2012, 1:26 pm
01001011 wrote:
Thom_Fuleri wrote:
You know you aren't a zombie, because you're aware of your own perspective, but you can't see anyone else's.
That is not true. Even if you are a zombie, you still 'think' you have a perspective and you are aware of it. Indeed If there was really a self test for zombies, we only need need the give the test to a zombie and ask it for the result.
You're forgetting Descartes. A zombie wouldn't think anything of the sort - if you ask one, it will state is has a perspective and indeed it will give all signs of having one. But if you're asking the question yourself, the answer is "yes", purely because you can ask yourself the question.
17 Feb 2012, 1:35 pm
CrazyCatLord wrote:
If I were capable of programming an advanced A.I., I would expect it to have a point of view that differs from mine.
Why would you expect a program to have a point of view at all? After all, since you programmed it, you know perfectly well that it is simply running through lines of code that you wrote.
CrazyCatLord wrote:
It's a question of complexity. The human brain is so complex (three times more complex than that of a chimpanzee) that we cannot predict everything it does.
I think that this is a red herring. A waterfall is an extremely complex emergent phenomenon, and is impossible to model accurately with modern technology. Does this means that a waterfall has a point of view?
Tazdio wrote:
The human brain is crude and sluggish (computers work much faster and more precisely), and the chemistry and electrodynamics of neurological properties and functions are large in numbers, small in size, but still very finite in numbers of cells, and much larger than the very tiny sizes where quantum phenomenon become more ruling (Michael Persinger tends to argue quantum physics a bit much, while the scale seems often greater than a grain of sand to the Rock of Gibraltar between a quantum quanta and a brain cell).
Even if the human brain works by exploiting the principles of quantum mechanics, that wouldn't help us with the explanatory gap. Quantum mechanics is a mechanical theory (okay, maybe with some true randomness thrown in). It might help to explain why it is difficult to predict what a human brain will do, but it cannot explain why a human has a point of view, because quantum mechanics is entirely a third-person theory.
01001011 wrote:
Even if you are a zombie, you still 'think' you have a perspective and you are aware of it.
You're confusing the matter. What does "think" mean? If it means "process", then yes, a zombie thinks. But a zombie isn't aware of anything.
Last edited by Declension on 17 Feb 2012, 1:39 pm, edited 2 times in total.
17 Feb 2012, 1:36 pm
but descartes wasn't necessarily right.
sartre wrote:
i exist so i exist
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?Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.?
Adam Smith
17 Feb 2012, 4:32 pm
Declension wrote:
CrazyCatLord wrote:
If I were capable of programming an advanced A.I., I would expect it to have a point of view that differs from mine.
Why would you expect a program to have a point of view at all? After all, since you programmed it, you know perfectly well that it is simply running through lines of code that you wrote.
CrazyCatLord wrote:
It's a question of complexity. The human brain is so complex (three times more complex than that of a chimpanzee) that we cannot predict everything it does.
I think that this is a red herring. A waterfall is an extremely complex emergent phenomenon, and is impossible to model accurately with modern technology. Does this means that a waterfall has a point of view?
This is my point. Complexity is not enough - you also need feedback and change. Because our "programs" rewrite themselves, they learn and change. A waterfall doesn't do that.
peebo wrote:
but descartes wasn't necessarily right.
He's often misunderstood. Rather than "I think, therefore I am" it makes more sense to read it as "something is thinking, so something must exist". The fact that something is able to contemplate existence means that something exists to contemplate it, though the nature of this something is entirely open to debate and may not be what it thinks it is.
