And what if you start off from outer data? The inner stuff does is the summery of the whole picture.

From the point of view of a biochemist, the consciousness is the emergent property of the activity of genes involved in the cellular network of the brain. Therefore, the study of consciousness should be done at the functional level of the genes of the central nervous system with the methods of the systems biology. This suggestion is, however, a starting point.

But shouldn't we try to define consciousness independent of the existence of a brain (or organism)?

To me, consciousness is simply the awareness of our mental processes as they are happening. But this awareness is only a belief, as our individual realities are only perceptions that no one else, but ourselves, can experience. For example, no one compare my level of happiness to someone elses level of happiness just like no one can compare my experience of the color blue to someone elses experience of the color blue. As such, how would we expect to get into the mind of a machine to verify it is experiencing reality the way we believe reality ought to be experienced?

Dariusz,

what do you mean with the word simply in the context of awareness?

We understand happiness because we are human. Naturally we don't feel your happiness and we don't have your experience but we can understand because of our mirror neurons so we have an model of you in our mind which is similar to ourself.

Giovanni,

I am not sure that I understand your answer. What is the role of gene in an information processing unit like the brain is?

The word 'simply' is modifying the word 'consciousness', not 'awareness'. I am saying that my understanding of consciousness is not overly complicated.

When thinking about awareness, though, I almost feel like I get stuck in a loop. Like, I am aware of myself being aware of myself being aware of myself being aware.... Its almost like my current mental self swaps with my former mental self the moment I become aware I was thinking about being aware. I find myself in a race condition for as long as I continue to think about this awareness.

Perhaps consciousness is the ability to recognize this race condition and have the will power to break out of it?

Yes, ther is a loop,

Wilfried, you may be able to understand 'happiness' from your point of view, but you will never be able to understand 'my' happiness, because you are not me. Your understanding of my happiness is, at best, a reflection of yourself, which may not be entirely accurate. If I told you I was happy and terminally ill, would you be able to understand my happiness? :)

Now imagine if we assessed to be so complex to understand (neurophysiology and philosophically) human consciousness (and their distinct behavioral and cognitive phenotypes) as appealing / dare / venture to understand a supposed canine or feline consciousness about to undertake actions to characterize legally (or even politically, but not scientifically) that there is an animal consciousness and therefore we should pray (or even require the society) by the abolition of the animals.

Dear Wilfried, I do not know your scientific background but, at the best of my knowledge, I believe that consciousness is a feature of living systems. It is common experience that it comes from the co-ordinated activities of the brain. The brain activity results from the activities of individual nervous cells that, interpreting information extra- or intra- cellular, activate the expression of their genes for an answer. All cells work this way and brain cells are no exception. Unfortunately, the central nervous system is still an organ of frontier because of its complexity. It is a biphasic system (solid / liquid i.e. membranes / cytoplasm) which is not based on the chemistry of the aqueous solutions but on the chemistry of biphasic systems that is less understood. However in recent years through the techniques of Functional Neuroimaging is possible to study the human brain while it is operating. In addition, in animal models can be used all “omics” methodologies so I think the molecular basis of consciousness will eventually be known.

We are definitely far away from understanding these concepts perfectly. Understanding life itself is equally complex, though at least we have a working definition there as "entropy-preserving (or decreasing)" systems - which can also be interpreted as "information processing systems" - if we go by the definition that reducing the entropy is the same as information gain.

However, when one starts thinking about consciousness, many things need to be more clearly defined. For instance, if I say: "I am conscious" - I would have to be very careful when defining "I". What is the conscious part of me? All my body/cells/tissues? Only the brain? Some parts of the brain? Each part of the brain individually? All the parts put together? -> and so on... Some would even argue that it is not the matter in the brain but the process that has awareness or that there is some form of "soul" in there, though I personally doubt that.

Yet, the main problem is that - I would not be able to prove my consciousness to others - only I am directly aware of my awareness, everyone else can only infer a high probability of my awareness based on their observations of my actions. In the context that You have brought up, we would like to be able to measure the awareness and detect the consciousness in other (artificial systems). Yet, I am not sure that we would be able to.

Measuring intelligence or ability or even similarity to human intelligence (like Turing test) is a different thing altogether.

Measuring consciousness... I would not even know where to begin. I think we need a deeper understanding of our own brains and how they work - before we start generalizing to other things. Once we gain an understanding of the inner workings of our own consciousness - we would be able to look for the same type of biochemical or information processing patterns in other things in order to estimate whether they are conscious or not.

Nenard,

your answer is very (!) interesting. Now I have to trace the semantic contexts of awareness and consciousness. The German language did not distinguisch this expressions. I think 'awareness' means the same like the expression 'quaia'. It means that I am aware of all sensations I have while consciousness means, 'I know that I am aware'.

Do you agree?

If you agree, the question of the zombie behavior occurs. A zombie must be aware but there is no consciousness. I think here is the key to answer my initial question.

Flavio,

you are playing with words. What understands an alien of the movement with legs, if he only reads the word "movement?" What explains this phrase?

In a special sense you are right. A computer or a four-stroke engine are also nothing special. But if you only have the plan, you don't understand its function. If there is only an expression there is no functional understatement. Witgenstein said "what is the meaning of red? We understand English." That's O.K. we understand the impression of red colour, but there is no declaration of this phenomenon. Here we need physical answers also chemical, biochemical and neuronal ones to understand the reaction chain from the interaction of electromagnetic waves of 700 nm with some molecules in our retina up to the awareness of red colour in our mind.

Naturally it may be possible that I don't understand your statement. Should this be the case, I beg for your pardon.

Wilfried,

Consciousness is where I am located and I speak to you because built-in into my language ability there is an assumption that you have a similar consciousness/awareness. In metaphysical meditation, Descartes wanted to find a solid foundation of knowledge and so proceeded by doubting everything that could not be absolutely certain and end up with the "I am a thing that think". I then proove that this cannot be doubt. Although we cannot doubt our consciousness because this is the center point from which we act, we observe, we think etc , we do all that from the inside, subjectively. Now you are asking to find an objective critera for deciding if an entity has such a consciousness. We do not use such critera for our consciousness. When we interact with other humans, the assumption that they also have a consciousness is always confirmed by that behave as we would expect them to behave if they have. So our implicit hypothesis is continually supported by our experience. We are mammal and have a lot of similarities with other mammals and we implicitly attribute them with a non-discursive awareness/consciousness and this assumption is confirmed by our experience with them. For example, if a mammal get hurt and start screaming. We kind of know what the animal is going through. Now if we go down the evolutionary road and look at a bacteria. Most of us do not have made extensive observation of their behaviors but only saw a few static electronic microscope image and have very little information. They have a lipid membrane, have a metabolism and thus needs to feed, can move and some have flagella motor, can repair themself, can split in two almost identical copy. When I look at a bacteria I can imagine that they have a primitive form of consciousness which correspond to center of the dynamic of what is being a bacteria trying to stay alife but I can as well imagine that here is a cute little piece of machinery totally blind, without any such center of awareness having a will of its own to stay alife. A sufficient condition for a bacteria to be a machine would be the knowledge of a mechanism which would totally explain the behavior of the bacteria. The abiogenesis problem will have to be solve for us to know if such mechanism exist.

Flavio,

" there is nothing special about the product of our biological machine. "

Do you know about a machine who wonder about if there is something special about it? All the machine we have made do not wounder more than the door knob when we open the door with it. All machine I know are tools. Are you a tool? I do not think that you can with a magic wand evaporate the consciousness problem by simply saying it the product of a mechanism. I studied colour vision many years and nothing that you said above sustain your claim. Reducing an aspect of an organism to a mechanism, reducing thousand of aspects to thousand of mechanisms do not sustain the claim the the whole organism is a mechanism. I do not a proof that it is not but my hypothesis is as good as yours.

Louis,

your description is accurately. A bacteria is a living thing, it reacts but there is no conscioursness and also no awareness. The signal processing is basically the game of chemical molecules. If you have some billions of cells a new phenomenon emerge.

However, it still lacks a functional description. Only if two sides of a coin can be identified the coin has worth. Philosophy alone can not explain the world. However, it helps to put the science in a framework of sense so an holostic picture results.

My question asks for a Turing-Test of consciousness. I think the best way would be to have a social component in this test because we cannot be social if we are not conscious.

The theory of complex systems says that when we are dealing with a system composed of a huge number of members (objects, or whatever you prefer) that interact with each other, you cannot predict or know in advance the outcome of their global activity (which is called emergent property). The system must be huge, with a number of items exceeding the number of interacting objects that physicists say that there are in the known universe, i.e. more than 10 exp80. Given that consciousness is the result of the biological activity of a huge number of brain cells, we can neither predict nor interfere in any way from the outside. We can only phenomenologically ascertain that is operating, for example, by the neuroimaging, but from these experimental observations we can never ascertain which type of consciousness emerges from those activities. A similar example is the protein folding. About proteins and their composition we know everything, but we are not able to predict from the sequence which fold will assume that sequence on the basis of the enormous number of interactions among its amino acid components during folding, because the calculated possible folds are greater than 10 exp120. The folding is a boundary problem of biology for over 50 years, and is still there. According to me, try to interact with the complex phenomena at the ground of consciousness is very difficult if not impossible.

I am not so pessimistic. There must exist some activities which would not be observerd if there is no consciousness. What do you think about mirror experiments?

Giovani,

>

I agree that we cannot predict because of the complexity but we can interfere. I am interfering with you consciousness by talking to you and you are interfering with mine. By doing so our mutual consciousness kind of get entangled through the communation exchanged.

It would be great if there would be a master cell of consciousness but there is none. The brain activity emerge this phenomenon. What we can observe is the behavior of anybody, so we can conclude if there is consciousness or not.

Each interaction with a conscious person results in a interfering brain activity if the person is aware of this interaction. However, the changes in brain function can not be clearly assigned to the interaction in a repeatable manner, which greatly hinders the scientific hypothesis formation.

The brain is a highly dynamic structure, which never occupies a former state again. To draw conclusions from the brain activity is therefore pointless. Even more pointless is the attemp to describe consciousness at a molecular or cellular level as this is obviously an epiphenomenon of the functional interconnection of individual brain areas. Therefore, we should infer from the behavior of a system on its internal state (consciousness). This would be a Turing test of consciousness.

Wilfried, great question. Have you read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes? His overall theory is a bit far fetched but he offers an interesting definition of consciousness. Jaynes believes our consciousness rests in what he refers to as our "analog I". To Jaynes, our ability to construct a sort of "virtual" world, analogous to the world around us, inside our minds which we can move our "analog I"s around in to plan and problem solve is what makes us conscious. Volition plays a big part too. Our ability to take virtual test runs of possibilities in our minds to help decide the best choice for any problem, ultimately giving us the freedom to choose, is also an important feature of Jaynes' concept of consciousness. I don't agree with all Jaynes had to say in that book, but it's worth thinking about.

Hope, the esteemed learned members involved in this discussion may throw some light on a related question - what constitute mind. I am pasting the link to this thread. Thanks to Sean Wofford for bringing this interesting thread to my knowledge.

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_there_any_commonly_accepted_definition_or_conceptual_model_of_Human_Mind?cp=re72_x_p2&ch=reg&loginT=8wQeE_iJPJL2ymYBAUAGmzYs9dqmNbA_6PZHiNmRRq8%2C&pli=1#view=51b505cfd2fd64162300007b

Rakesh,

Thanks for your link.

If you make a test for detecting consciousness. Then, it is possible to make a machine that mimic a behavior that would make it pass the test. Would that machine be conscious ?

Hi Naseer,

everything depends on your formal computational definition of "consciousness".

I suggest you to learn the TOGA Meta-theory. (see also: http://erg4146.casaccia.enea.it/HID-server/RepSoph-v10.pdf) In this context, the answer on your question can be precisely analyzed. - Good luck - Adam

The discussion is at a dead end, so I would like to reanimate the discussion.

Are we able to distinguish conscious behavior and nonconscious behavior which is simulating conscious behavior but is still a zombie.

Alexandres question is also interesting and not answered yet. Well, I think it is not possible to mimic real conscious reactions.

A zombie would never be surprised (zombies have no emotions) because it never expects anything. So it would not wonder if a tiger appears in front of him. Surprise is a fast emotional reaction. If a zombie has to analyze and rate the new situation in relation to the previous situation I expect a measurable delay. This could be an indicator for a procedural analysis without any quale-quality.

Wilfried,

Turing did not set the bar so high for intelligence. He did not ask what should be a proof of intelligence? He simply requires that through a series of questions and answers the interviewer get the impression that the entity answering was doing so intelligently. Suppose that I ask you to provide me a proof that you are a conscious person. I know that you are but I am asking you to provide me a proof. You cannot provide a proof of consciousness. It is something that each of us has a proof for himself or herself but this is the type of experience that cannot be communicated. We can only send words to each other. It is most likely that you are a conscious being sending me these words but this is not a proof. Proofs are statements about other statements. Experience is not something that can be proven to anyone else.

Louis,

this question is quite current in ethology. Scientists observes animals to find indicators for conscious behavior. In social groups - so my hypothesis - you can find such behavior, because the individual has to calculate his role and his relation to others and - this is essential - their behavior in relation to himself. So the individual must have a concept of himself mirrored in the mind of the others individuals to anticipate their behavior.

Wilfried,

I see that you are not asking a proof of consciousness but indicators for an animal theory of mind from behavior. Since a few months I am gradually developing the idea of biological extended self which is a concept including a theory of mind and which I think has developed in all kind of social phenomena such as family, tribe, religion, nationalism, etc etc. Biology is the science of biological self based around metabolism. Rosen has elaborated the essential role of anticipation for all form of biological organisms. Anticipation is partly the anticipation of outside world changes and partly depend on the needs of the organism, the goals of the organism. An animal seeing the movement of a tree do not care do anticipate so much about that. Anticipation is tightly couples to what the animal care either to avoid or to acquire and is tightly couples with the whole sensory-motor strategy at its disposal. All the feelings and emotions of the animal are reflection of the built-in life priority in a given situation. What the animal care most is not only its biological self but its biological extended self. A mother will care more for its cub (which is part of its extended self) than for its biological core self. All animals living in group have to have an extended self coordinating this group behavior and including the wellfare of the group as its own welfare. So the biological self survival instinct is extended to the group corresponding by the extended self. Human have a highly culturally programmable extended self. You see some people burn themself or blow themself to death as if for saving their own life, or mother or soldier sacrificing their life for their extended self.

Louis,

thanks for your very clear description of social life and the necessities to survive.

I totally agree with you.

You are also right with the statement, I am not asking a proof of consciousness but for indicators for a theory of mind from behavior. The aim is not so different to the initial question. We have to scan the behavior for indicators which give us a hint for the question we asked. The indicators verify the hypothesis by logical conclusion so it becomes a proof for the hypothesis in this context.

Louis,

the idea I formulated above is also one of my questions. Here is the link:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_living_in_a_hierarchical_social_group_necessary_for_the_awake_of_conciousness

I agree with you and Rosen that anticipation is the key skill of the brain.

The brain depends of sensual input information. This information is not chaotic, so the brain is able to find structures in this input. The greatest achievement of the brain is to make predictions about his input. This creates security and is thus of crucial importance for the brain and its owner. In this mechanism, the key to understand qualia and consciousness is hidden.

Wilfried,

The sensory-motor part of the brain is into a relational loop with the unwelt. So we have this loop: - unwelt - sensing -caring -acting -unwelt

The caring part is connecting what is going on in the unwelt with the built-in objective of the agent, what the agent care for. The agent can be in multiple mode of actions and there are many type of trigger events that can emerged in the sense-acting loop dynamic. During its life span the agent will learn and so integrated new anticipatory/behavior modes each with class of associated trigger class events. What the agent care for that are not physically within the boundary of the agent is what I defined as its extended self. It is what the world mean for the agent, what make the agent act.

Louis,

I agree fully with your description. It is funny that you use the german expression "umwelt". I think there is the connotation of ecosystem/environment etc.

Well, but this feedback is not what I described above. Prof. Trehub described in the retinoid system the subjective representation of objects in the systems "umwelt". He defines the representation is a basic kind of consciousness (may be qualia of the represented object). I am not sure that I understood him fully, but if so, I think it is possible to work with this definition, but it is not enough.

The subjective representation is not the crucial point. Each representation could be transformed with a simple mathematical formula into a "subjective" representation by a co-ordinate transformation to a special reference point in the represented area. Each simple robot with a little microprocessor is able to do this operation. The problem is: nobody would say the microprocessor is conscious or has any qualia - it is only mathematics.

Wilfried,

I am using the word 'umwelt' instead of 'environment' because the later term sudgest the world as we (humans) experience it and this sudgest an objective world. I am using the word ''unwelt'' in the sense of Von Uexkul 's book : theoretical biology meaning a "self-centered subjective world as seen from the perspective of a particular organism in a particular mode of activity" A bacteria on your arm is not experiencing the same unwelt as you do at the same location.

I have a background in control engineering. Feedback control is the norm. But the functional cycle of Von Uexkull is much more profound than understanding the concept of feedback control. It is a totally new psychological mind set. Forget about input, output. Think about a living organism as a loop dynamic. In a loop dynamic any event in the loop, be it locate inside or outside the organism can be both a cause and an effect. It is the Kantian philosophy for the formalization of biology.

If you build a robot along this model, there will not be any consciousness within the system. If you consider the agent to be a living organism then it is different. A model describing an aspect of a natural system is not total reduction of the natural system to the model. It describes only a given aspect of the reality of this system. Consciousness cannot by definition be described. You said ''it is only mathematics'' which mean that you intuitively agree with me here. We are back to Kant distinction between the phenomenal and reality (noumenal). We cannot describe consciousness but we experience it, it is our reality that we live. Although I do not think that consciousness will ever be described, I want through understanding the closest it is possible to go which is a description of the boundary of the noumenal.

Experientially we are at the center of the noumenal and my goal is to describe the rational boundary of the numenal. This discription is the evolutionary path of rationality both in biological history, in ontogeny, in the immediacy of consciousness. The three are intimately linked and there are also intimiately linked to the whole history of the cosmos in the NOW of your intimate consciousness. This is quite a program but it is the necessary program for understanding consciousness as the boundary of rationality in the creative act.

Louis,

I do not agree with all, but with most you have said. I'll try to paraphrase:

Kant: There is a phenomenal (reality) and we experiences a part of that (noumenal).

The noumenal is subjective and we cannot describe in words what we experiences because the words we use means my idea (noumenal) of a real thing (phenomenal) and you hear this word and you understand it, but it is your experience (different noumenal).

The experience is part of the consciousness. There is a development in ontogenesis and in consciousness.

Is this near of your last answer?

Where is the link to the whole cosmos? Do you mean, that the evolution of the cosmos was necessary to build a situation, that our solar system could develop?

That's a lot of effort for little result.

I don't have such a teleological sight. I think it is an evolutionary step (with the similar aim like Teilhard de Chardin's point omega) similar to the principle of the minimization of energy, there may exist such a principle to become more and more conscious.

This is a nice game in philosophy.

Why do you think a robot that works like a mammalian brain has no qualia and is not conscious? I don't think so. A system may build in different manner, but if the principle construction is equivalent, so are the results also equivalent.

The only problem is, we don't know the principles a mammalian brain works. The look to the neuronal connections will bring no insight to this question. The tools determines the conditions of the solution. Biological systems have neurons, therefore is a brain the optimal solution for biological information processing. We have transistors which works different. It is not opportune to build a brain-like system with transistors.

I think, the billion of years of the evolution have found a really good system to solve the problems of survival. Also the human culture is an admirable thing. So it is worth to think about an artificial system with consciousness. Naturally it is also a challenge to think about such an enigmatic problem.

Wilfried,

The core decision making model of a robot cannot be creative in a genuine way. If it could be creative, it means that there is a recipy for creativity which is denying the very concept of creativity.

I identify qualia to core self and identify the core self of any biological being to what give rise to it; it is the process that nature uses to produce (with an element of creation in the mix) this being. Although we can understand/model aspects of this process, we have not all models and these models are not integrated in the sense of emerging as a single process of evolution in the now, and more fundamentally this evolution in the now will leave the field of possible understanding at the quantum boundary. Creativity is not something we create, it is something that spontaneously emerged in the noumenal where there is no modeling possible in principle. But our task is no less than understanding all the visible parts of this whole process.

It is precisely because we can model core decision aspect of the robot that the robot is not conscious or has no qualia. The qualia of a being is the core decision (not rational) aspect of a being that naturally emerge in the process of evolution of nature and whose nature can only be traced back to the core creative nature.

Modeling creation is a self-contradiction.

‘’ there may exist such a principle to become more and more conscious.’’

The very principle of creation in nature is a principle of growth that necessarily optimize emergence of structures maxizing growth which at its core is creativity and it is why on all planets it is possible life will emerge and if it is possible intelligence or self-conscious life will emerge, and it is why civilisation will rise if it avoid destroying the ecosystem to the point of stellar intelligence a coming together in a collective intelligence and I do not see why the process of collectivisation/cooperation of higher being would stop. But lets go back on the ground before getting crazy.

Louis,

I feel more than I can understand your position. In your words is a touch of something enigmatically secret. In this point our positions are a little different. That doesn't matter. Let's discuss more on the ground, which principles are necessary for the emergence of qualia and consciousness.

Wilfried,

The only way to stay on the ground is for me to forget core consciousness, creativity all that bring the whole thing into being and simply describe the logical steps, or structural layers, that are necessary for a very primitive life form (functional cycle of Von Uexkull). Like you I do not beleive in the groping in the dark approach of trying to understand the astronomical complexity of the neural connection with brute force approach of new imaging techniques. I do not deny the interest of all this research but it is too complex to proceed that way. This made me remember to a personal experience in the early years of my research in computer vision and I was looking at a tree and trying to imagine how computational vision process that would detect all the edge of million of leaves could unite them into leaf and then into branches and into a tree. I was seeing all these leaves moving in the wind and it seemed to me impossible to such a bottom up process could be carried up. It is then that I started to observe my own visual process very carefully and got the impression that my perception seems to proceed in the reverse direction, it seems to detect the whole tree and go from there to detect the details when necessary only. I later discover the whole ancestry of this way of looking at visual perception stemming from Goethe and the Gestaltist and finally came up with my own mathematical proposition. We have a similar situation here. There are those trying to discover the simplicity starting with the mapping out of the complexity, and there are those, me among them, that think that we first need to discover the simple things from and move our way towards complexity. This is the principle of understanding in the direction of evolution and not in reverse de-constructive direction. Both are usefull but the the basic clues can only come from the simple first direction, because it is easier to understand what is simple, and then researchers coming from the other direction may meet in the middle. To be a theoretical researcher in any field, here biology, it is necessary to proceed from the simple to the complex , to proceed in the direction of evolution.

It is not necessary to go in the detail while doing that. Again that would be too complex and thus impossible as a first attempt. I believe in the power in von Uexkull approach of the functional cycle because I naturally came to it at the end of my Ph.D. thesis. I was calling this (I did not know about Uexkull at the time) the sense-acting loop. It was first conceive a generalization of visual perception to a whole cycle of action. It was then conceive as a prototype of a model of the sensory-motor system and then I discovered Piaget research going in this direction with its model of a learning : assimilation, accomodation, equilibration. But the key innovation in my approach was that natural structures in nature are made of surfaces and that processing everywhere in the living is about surface information (images). So my notion of sense-acting loop was a notion image sense-acting loop with my general approach of analysing image structure that could be used to process everything. The most difficult mental road block that I had to overcome before I could come to this notion of image structure was to give up the idea that vision process explicitly represent the 3D world out there. The key is to take appearance seriously and stop thinking in term of what they represent. The appearances are all there is and the structures are the structure of these appearances: images.

Louis:"If it could be creative, it means that there is a recipy for creativity which is denying the very concept of creativity. "

I think this is one of the places where the definition gets in the way of trying to understand properly. By defining creativity so brittlely there is no hope of ever being able to understand what goes into making it. It becomes un-decomposable and therefore forces a mystery into being the minute you try to push past it.

We therefore need to talk about something like creativityalpha, which is indistinguishable from creativity but can be decomposed, and this breaks parsimony.

I have noticed that there are a lot of places where this type of lock point colors your philosophy Louis, and where my own thinking is less fettered, I wonder if this is a Left-Right brain thing, or just that I am a bit weird.

Louis,

your story of perceiving a tree is a very good metaphor but I did not understand your remarks about creativity.

Graeme,

How would you decomposed creativityalpha?

Wilfried,

I have been reading some papers from Alva Noe recently. He said that consciousness is not something in the brain something we do. It is action that require a brain, but also a body and a world around this body for any action to be done. He took the example of dancing. Is dancing happening in the brain? It would be crazy to say that. It is a performance, any feeling of dancing cannot be conceived without a partner, a dancing floor, a music, and a body and yes a central nervous system. But dancing is happening in all of these places, and not in the brain alone. Is the feeling of driving a porch is in the brain? No, it is the participation of a porch, on a road, in the traffic, of your body. Why would you say that driving the porch is happening only in your brain? So for Alva Noe, consciousness is a doing, a doing that need the participation of a lot of things and cannot be understood by searching inside the brain alone. The question of consciousness, of a self, of an actor/DOER, of freedom are all linked to creativity/emergence. This was understood for the first time in the romantic period. I think that we are living a second romantic period in cognitive science and robotic. The 1960 to 1980 was an enlightment period focusing on rationality and mechanism, and since the mid 1980's we are seeing the limitation of the desambodied brain, mechanical models without emergence and embodiement.

Louis:"How would you decompose creativityalpha?"

Louis, there would be a recipe for creating creativityalpha and because creativityalpha is not actually creativity this would not break the definition of creativity.

Happy New Year

to all who have contributed their valuable posts and to all who will do this soon.

Dear all,

Merry Christmas to you and a happy new year.

I found an interesting article about criteria of consciousness ...

Criteria for Consciousness in Artificial Intelligent Agents

https://accetnure.academia.edu/RaulArrabales

https://www.academia.edu/18600287/Criteria_for_consciousness_in_artificial_intelligent_agents

In my opinion, the origin of consciousness is related to needs(motivations -before thoughts and before feelings or even emotions, l"ike being thirsty" or feeling cold) in an enviroment with difficult access to water (or food or heat)-sentient motivation. The external method to detect consciousness should be in consecuence: behavioural flexibility and intentional trial-error outputs(repairing behaviour).

Dear Wilfried,

''What could be proof of consciousness?'''

Consciousness itself. If you read Descartes's first two meditations (1644 where he decided to cast away any knowledge that is not entirely certain and at the end of the process he end up with one total certainty that he was thinking , here in the form of doubting. Husserl in his Cartesian's meditation (1931) recognized that all phenomenon of consciousness can'nt be doubt. So consciousness contrary to knowledge (the res extensa of Descartes) is necessarily true. I remember one extremely hot evening in the desert of Baha California and for some strange reasons my wife was cold and had shivered. Can we say: what is the proof that you are cold? It is so hot, it has to be all in your head. Experience is what it is and need no proof. They are people who had their arm amputed and which have pain in their amputed arm. Is it true? Yes it is true. Experience is its own proof. If you experience pain into your amputed arm then you really experience pain in your amputed arm. that you have an arm or not is irrelevant to this truth.

I agree only with one thing in your preamble: consciousness is related to anticipation. Living entities are self-creating interaction, basically their body are anticipation machine and their consciousness are the creative process at their core which enter into action everytime the anticipation machine is failing, which means almost at every moment. It is entering into action as growth of the anticipatory machine, its patching up at every moment of its breaking down.

Schrodinger ¨in his book “Mind and matter” (1958) made a similar claim:

''The ensuing organic development begins to be accompanied by consciousness only inasmuch as there are organs that gradually take up interaction with the environment, adapt their functions to the changes in the situation, are influenced, undergo practice, are in special ways modified by the surroundings. We higher vertebrates possess such an organ mainly in our nervous system. Therefore consciousness is associated with those of its functions that adapt themselves by what we call experience to a changing environment. The nervous system is the place where our species is still engaged in phylogenetic transformation; metaphorically speaking it is the “vegetation top” (Vegetationsspitze) of our stem. I would summarize my general hypothesis thus: consciousness is associated with the learning of the living substance; its knowing how (Konnen ¨ ) is unconscious''

Regards,

- Louis

Dear Louis,

I like reading your answers full of deep insights.

You wrote of the body as a anticipation machine. Well, the body is essential for consciousness and mind. IMHO the body is the basis of experience. With the body we measure the world and the sensations are the result of our activities. The anticipation machine is in our head. We try to guess the next sensorial input on the statistical computation of our experience. The result of all is aware like the peak of an iceberg. This experience is represented by a model of the surrounding and the mind is operating with this model.

Such a model does not so interesting because there is no meaning in it. The meaning results to the relation to the body and its sensations. There are needs and emotions which attributes situations and objects of the model. This situation is also self-referential and this is the crucial problem where we can find qualia and consciousness. I agree, only what is in the mind is existing and true. So I think I am. This fact cannot be used as evidence because it is tautological. The result of mindful thinking and experience is behavior. May be we can use smart behavior as proof for consciousness and this is what Alan Turing tried: Turing Test.

Best Regards

Wilfried

Dear Wilfried,

It is true that to say that experience exist is a tautology. Realizing it is a tautology is also realizing we are in it totally immerse in it. Is there stronger proof of existence. It is like two prisoners debating the reality of the jail. One prisoner ask the other, proof to me we are in jail. The other say, if you cannot escape these walls then not escaping these walls is called being in jail. So unless you escape, I consider that you are like me, in jail.

The central nervous system mostly in our head is part of our body , mostly busy coordinating this bodily anticipation machine, as all its other peripherals. Don'nt you see in the way your arms and hands organisized a trace of anticipaton of grasping? Don'nt you see in the legs some anticipation of walking and running? Etc... But none of that would be working if the body would not be in the type of surrounding it is anticipating and so this to is part of you although outside of the bodily skin. In it part of the anticipation process that you are. By moving to the process level then the sink boundary exist for many subconscious process and essential to their maintenance but is not essential to the interaction process that you are especially in communication with other human being. In such process we both enter into each other , both interaction become entangled into each other anf the interaction process ceased to be two and become one temporally in certain respects, Umwelten entanglement.

I think we constantly in our communicative Umwelten untanglement Turing test our communication partner. Suppose that a artificial both would hide under an RG member and would be called Johny Thephony. Since we constantly observed our communication partners and try to always anticipate them, either they are totally anticipated and we know this is a complete idiot or a machine, or do not anticipated them at all and their answer are totally incoherent and again we conclude it is either an idiot or a badly design machine that should be scraped, or we are surprised in a positive way, in a way we did not anticipate and which make us learned something and we then make them pass our Turing test knowing that this test is never definitively tested, every communicatio update our anticipation and is always more demanding. We are Turing Test Machines. And Turing rightly used this fact in order to come ups with a formal Turing Test which is just expression of what we naturally do without noticing.

Designer of artificial agent able to talk abot scientific and philosophical topic could then register their agent on RG. If for example, Johny Thephony would get a respectable RG score then we could say it passed the Turing Test of the RG community. I am not sure it is a very strong Turing Test. I can probably design a agent that we simply repeated what other say and congratulate them and being impressed. And since my Johny Thephony would be 24 hrs a day , participating like no other, he may get very quickly a high RG score. Better, I would call her Rita and used a very attractive picture.

Regards,

- Louis

Yes, Rita and an attractive picture - that's it!

Umwelt and mind are a cybernetic control loop and we anticipate not what will happen outside, but we anticipate our sensory signals (inside) - we do not have other information... I hardly believe in this case if both signals fit (the anticipated and the sensory signals) we have qualia.

Dear Wilfried,

Von Uexkull formalized the Umeltenas cybernetic control loop which underlies all subjective worlds. The agent, the whole control loop (not simply the part in biological organism) include everything: the agent and its world. It is a monad, there is no window into a monadic world, everything is included in it . The exterior (from our kind of God's eye view of it) shows up in that world in a filtered way relevant to it as well as what is going on in the organism body that is relevant to its interaction. Von Uexkull was very clear that this Umwelt cybernetic description was the basic experiential structure of the subjective world of the organism did not explain the hard problem. He left it as a mystery the question of the why there is a subjective world. He clearly saw that such scientific description do not explain why organism are not zombies, why we are not zombies. But he also clearly saw that the structure of these subjective world is intimatly the same of the Umwelt scientific description. He was not so naive as many of current philosophers and scientists that the essence of subjectivity could enter science.

Regards,

- Louis

Hi, colleagues, I want to focus on the "proof" in the question that Cosmin asked. It seems to me that for a being to prove that it is conscious, it must necessarily produce authentic communication. Since action, like the knee jerk in a test for reflex action, may not always be initiated by the actor. Authentic communication presupposes initiation by the actor and a deliberate transmission of some thought aimed at something/someone other than the self. The challenge is that one might need to prove that an action was initiated by the actor.

Dear Christopher,

Ask anybody that have a dog or a cat if they they beleive their pet see, smell, feel pain, feel joy, feel sad, are sometime hungry, etc. I am sure they will all be totally certain that they are. These animals do not speak but they express their feelings, they let us know in very obvious way what they feels. Dogs look at us in the eyes and try to get our attention and it is clear they they know if they capture it or not. Etc. All this are non verbal but real communications and for everybody very convincing that these animals are conscious.

Of course with humans we can have language communication. I personnally would not doubt that a human which is mute and deaf person is as conscious as any other and would determine this by visual communication throw bodily expression. No normal people would have no problem torturing their pets. This itself is a proof that we know they feel something. And those do willing to torture animals or other humans would not do it if they thought they fell nothing. Nobody being mad at a robot would try to punish the robot by trying to inflict pain since we are convince they do not feel anything.

Regards,

- Louis