HI Vahid Rakhshan

This is partly legitimately definitional.

Sensation is data input.

Perception is analysis of that.

Cognition is further data processing.

Robots can do all of those; I Have worked on multiple. With all of these any "simulation" is in principle fully equivalent to an original.

The essence of consciousness is feeling. Simulated feeling is not feeling; no pure information and its manipulation is or can be feeling. Feeling is a natural act that fundamentally requires energy, no "software" makes it. Of the four terms you mentioned, this is the one in the Hard Problem.

Thanks Karl Sipfle , yes I agree, it is definitional. And I agree with the 3 levels you defined. But when we look at them microscopically, we note that there is a great overlap between each two of them; it is not known where sensation ends and perception begins. Cognition merges with perception (and sensation) too. Moreover, the word perception itself is polysemic with quite different meanings. So I asked this question after talking with Larry about the (lack of) exact lines between sensation, perception, and cognition (and possible similarities between perception and phenomenal consciousness). I would try to quote Larry's comments here too (with his permission).

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• Karl: "The essence of consciousness is feeling."

Interesting, thanks for the nice suggestion. Can you elaborate on the definition of feeling here? You mean, for example, emotions? Or are you referring to qualia?

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• Karl: "Simulated feeling is not feeling; no pure information and its manipulation is or can be feeling."

How can we be so sure? How can we even know this?

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• Karl: "Feeling is a natural act that fundamentally requires energy, no "software" makes it."

I am sure you are very well aware that computer software is actually electrical currents moving among millions of transistors, right? So how doesn't software use energy? Software is by definition pure energy; at least the way I know it. So as far as energy is of concern, software is ahead of humans. I am saying perhaps we should look for other (or more) ingredients.

Moreover, is there any act or thing that does not require energy? A little bit confused.

Karl Sipfle reading your interesting papers, I now understand you mean "qualia" by "feelings".

Vahid Rakhshan

Point 1: Short answer is qualia.

Point 2: This is self-evident. It can only be broken down so far and then one sees it or does not. Feeling is wholly, ontologically different from information. You can arrange ball bearings all day long into any informational pattern you want and you will not get a pig. Unlike with information, it matters what the stuff is, what physics actions are occurring.

Article The Nature of Fundamental Consciousness - - - PsyArXiv downl...

Article The Primary Pitfalls on the Road to Understanding Consciousn...

Point 3:

No, computer software is a program to process information. The program can be run on many forms of technology. Now if you know enough about the computer and it is the right kind, you can even make it play songs over a nearby radio or heat up your coffee sitting on top. But if you use a different technology, it will not work anymore, even though logically equivalent. That is because the SPECIFIC movements of energy used to transduce the information are what they are. A program does not itself take energy except that we must record it somewhere. Mathematically speaking "the solution exists." For data computations, what computers are generally used for, it makes no difference what the physical process is.

In the brain, for the data flow and computation all you need care about is that information is being carried and calculated. The exact fabric doesn't matter, as long as logically equivalent.

Feeling is a fundamental act of physics. It is not calculations against information that do not care what physical acts are used to do the calculating. It IS the physical act, requiring energy.

Vahid Rakhshan Yes, feeling, singular, as a phenomenon. Feelings plural usually refers to animal feelings.

Vahid Rakhshan I avoid term "qualia" because most of the popular one are NOT basal feeling as claimed. They exist in Layer 2 of the stack, made out of the lower ones.

Larry Carlson (from https://www.researchgate.net/post/What-could-be-proof-of-consciousness/140 ) -->

My point is that one reason why we might not include percepts (such as our subjective mental image of the moon) in an explanation of consciousness is that we not only cannot see what happens in the leap between "neural correlates" of conscious perception, but we cannot see the end product. Hence, researchers may content themselves with describing the processes which seem to converge, culminate, and manifest themselves in subjective experiences (such as the sight of the moon).

In short, the traditional claim posed by dualists is that (moon) images are internally subjective, and thus supposedly cannot be observed or studied by scientists objectively; from this they draw the conclusion that sensory images/percepts in particular (and consciousness, in general) cannot be studied by scientists, and are therefore, they presume, outside of the realm of of physics... and thus are non-physical.

However, much as we could never provide a visual of an atom, we seem now to be headed in the direction of more directly observing mental images in other individuals, as if these images were external 'things'.... specifically those images in our own dreams, as Musk et al. relate in this Youtube clip:

This Device Can Record Your Dreams

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbm471EZkcQ

Perhaps some might say that this is only an artificial approach...and that we are not really seeing someone's visual images as they dream. However, again, keep in mind that there are always, perhaps, epistemic gaps between the model and what is modeled. In particular, our own mental images model some "un-experientiable" aspects of the quantum blur of the physical (noumenal) reality outside of our subjective, phenomenal perception. A video of the percepts which constitute subjective perception (e.g., visual images) will also, no doubt similarly be significantly different from the mental images which they purport to model.

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*https://physicsworld.com/a/electron-microscope-sees-single-hydrogen-atoms/#:~:text=Physicists%20in%20the%20US%20claim,image%20such%20a%20light%20atom

Dear Karl Sipfle many thanks for the nice answers and the cited papers. Overall, it appears to me that we are not on the same page. I will answer point by point, but I am a little bit slow (due to some issues).

• Karl: Point 2: This is self-evident. It can only be broken down so far and then one sees it or does not.

Well to me, it is really not self-evident at all.

• "Feeling is wholly, ontologically different from information. You can arrange ball bearings all day long into any informational pattern you want and you will not get a pig. Unlike with information, it matters what the stuff is, what physics actions are occurring."

Sure, feeling is fundamentally different from information; no doubt about that. But it is possible theoretically that feeling is created as a byproduct of information processing. In that case, simulated information processing would again give rise to feeling. This is why I can't be sure about it.

Vahid Rakhshan In the broadest sense it is technically possible philosophically that when information is manipulated in some manner feeling just appears for no further apparent reason. The technically possible philosophically is a large bin of fruitlessness.

There is almost no reason to believe this. It does not match what Einstein called the character of our universe. In our universe, things that happen have substantive connections to each other of some kind. So far that always include energy and operations on energy.

Conversely, it is readily imaginable that the actual physical processes that carry and manipulate information for a given example (such as the brain) might include/interact with the physical process that is pain.

Pain is real, natural, irreducible, unique, and an action rather than an object. By definition then it must be a physical process.

Pain did not arise from our earlier selves, our selves arose from pain and other things, assembled by evolution into specific physical constructions.

"Information" is a concept we came up with. It is a distillation of the patterns of actual things. By itself, it isn't anything, except an idea in our heads. Same for mathematics. It is descriptive of other things (and as made by us, descriptive of itself).

Notice too that if you drop a rock on your foot, you, a real construction in the physical universe, will feel pain, there is a why, a chain of influence, you can see it, even if we can't see it all the way down.

There is no physical happening ever observed made to happen by choosing to run the same computation by both human mind and a computer. Nor is there a basis to support such a speculation.

Lastly, feeling is not just a byproduct. You can see this because it is not simple unstructured detritus tossed off, like metal fragments, or steam or smoke or heat. From base feeling and information our highly evolved brains make elaborate feelings and emotions. These are located in specific places in the brain and interact with other brain regions and functions in a logically sensible manner with appropriate relative physical placement. Evolution has made use of the phenomenon of feeling.

You can term magnetism the same way as a "byproduct" of electric charge motion. We have ourselves harnessed it for useful purposes. Feeling is a phenomenon of the physical universe that has been discovered and harnessed by evolution.

I've written papers about this, but this is pretty much all I can say. This is the water to which I lead the esteemed horse. :)

KS

Hi Karl Sipfle Hi Vahid Rakhshan sorry to miss all the fun so far.

starting with Karl's initial list:

I agree in part that 1. sensation is signal input, but not data input - data input involves a coding scheme conversion, the input in living minds is transduced (passed neuron to neuron without conversion according to a scheme) - For example in a robot, vision may be introduced by cameras, lidar, or some other sensor, digitized and transferred in bulk to a computer memory that may handle a series of frames as values in memory locations.

Those frames, representing buffers can be analytically compared by the processor, and some aspects of some of that data may be put into working memory or logged as long term memory or retained as original raw data with time code.

In living beings, the signals that are input represent colors and light for an arguably rectangular array of visual view content that is mapped directly to individual neurons after passing through the thalamus. The visual cortex receives the input signals in a point for point matching scheme - local neurons in the cortex are affected by the excitation and based upon the signal content of a few neighboring primary sensory cortical neurons a high speed preprocessing (faster than 20hz) edit is made:

A. to shunt the signal or not shunt the signal to another visual processing area in the cortex as well as

B. to prevent or allow the signal to continue to loop with its thalamic neural partner at 10hz and subsequently become linked in the matrix of memory engrams.

Sensation is a bottom up signal flow in the brain: From sensory organ (skin, eye, cochlea, semicircular canals, tongue, etc.) to the thalamus - one to one neural hard wiring - and from the thalamus to cortex - one to one neural hard wiring.

The result being cortical neural activation.

Activation of cortical neurons is mental contents. so sensation becomes mental contents and mental contents become associative memory.

However, at the same time, active mental contents cause reflexive reactivation of resting cortical neurons in engram patterns that have some similarity in arrangement - in particular those resting cortical neurons that have ARC protein spine deposits where the now active pyramidal neuron axon branches connect (providing enough of those spines are activated).

Note: Some resting cortical neurons are more reactive (require fewer spine activations to become active while resting) In particular these are cortical neurons that were part of mental contents in the last 5 minutes (AKA short term memory) or those neurons that have been chemically sensitized (eg psychedelic sensitization via 5-Ht2a receptor activation) - this provides weighting or favoring of some cortical neurons to be more readily part of mental contents,

Perception therefore occurs from mental contents according to associative memory patterns as a reflex reactivating cortical neurons that are part of associative engrams.

Thus perception is also mental contents, however perception is not a thalamic bottom up feed, it is a cortical top down feed to the thalamus.

With both sensation and perception, which are the mental contents that form associative memory, the cortical activation is sustained for a series of feed back pulses with the thalamus.

We can after decades of brain research assess which parts of the cortex handle primary sensation types (auditory, visual, skin etc.) but we know that associative memory includes all these parts in concert as synchronously part of memory formations (engrams). Therefore mental contents generally refers to any thalamo-cortical activation which can be associated (pyramidally crosslinked with ARC protein spines)

so back to my edited version of Karl's list based upon these neural correlates:

One is the overall gestalt abstraction which is a kind of series of snapshots of what is being currently being associated from all mental contents (activities in all lobes of the cortex) that have been shunted while mental contents arise - all taken together in the general associative frontal cortex. The frontal cortex can output to both the hypothalamus (to steer attention by suppressing the thalamus selectively) and the limbic system which generally affects the chemistry of mood, threat, satisfaction etc.

The other "feeling" like thing that is going on is what is traditionally termed "short-term memory" which I mention above - and that amounts to all those cortical neurons that have been recently activated (or chemically tweaked to be more reactive) and are thus more likely to become part of ongoing perceptive reflexes. This may produce the flow-ish feeling aspect of what we are up to - and also the guide for what we are engaged with.

In a way you could say that feeling is the engagement that comes out of being conscious and doing whatever we are doing.

Karl Sipfle

in this link - Article The Nature of Fundamental Consciousness - - - PsyArXiv downl...

My senton: this is one of a well developed example of speculative fiction.

in this link

Article The Primary Pitfalls on the Road to Understanding Consciousn...

I agree that a serious consideration of a reduction of primary terms in the overall study of mind makes sense, although I do not see that your list is any more compelling than that of Abhidamata sangaha (http://www.abhidhamma.com/frameset.html?http://www.abhidhamma.com/abhidhamma_charts.html) which is probably 800 years old, different, and equally erroneous, although the abhidhamma emphasis on the valences pleasure, pain and indifferent develop into a foundation of understanding of karma - which in a sense is an eastern concept of a subatomic particle.

In all views that are attempted, however, the idea of citta or mind moment is significant, and I think we are at a technical stage in which we can define it as 1/10th of a second, more or less.representing the corticao-thalamic feedback loop that is at the base of sustaining mental contents long enough to support memory formation and perception.

The rest builds from that, hopefully with real neural correlates and realistic neural states that can be tested electrically and chemically.

Jerry Waese thanks a lot for your enlightening answers to Karl. I learned a lot. I don't have much to say other than that I tend to agree more with you here.