Even if it were possible to scan the contents of your brain and reproduce them in a digital form, there’s no reason that scan would be anything more than bits of data on the digital system. You could have a database of your brain… but it wouldn’t be conscious.
No one has any idea how to replicate the activity of the brain. As far as I know there aren’t any practical proposals in this area. All we have are vague theories about what might be going on, and a limited grasp of neurochemistry. It will be a very long time before reproducing the functions of a conscious mind is anything more than fantasy.
We don’t even know what consciousness is, let alone if it’s technically “real” (as in physical in any way.) It’s perfectly possible an uploaded brain would be just as conscious as a real brain because there was no physical thing making us conscious, and rather it was just a result of our ability to think at all.
Similarly, I’ve heard people argue a machine couldn’t feel emotions because it doesn’t have the physical parts of the brain that allow that, so it could only ever simulate them. That argument has the same hole in that we don’t actually know that we need those to feel emotions, or if the final result is all that matters. If we replaced the whole “this happens, release this hormone to cause these changes in behavior and physical function” with a simple statement that said “this happened, change behavior and function,” maybe there isn’t really enough of a difference to call one simulated and the other real. Just different ways of achieving the same result.
My point is, we treat all these things, consciousness, emotions, etc, like they’re special things that can’t be replicated, but we have no evidence to suggest this. It’s basically the scientific equivalent of mysticism, like the insistence that free will must exist even though all evidence points to the contrary.
let alone if it’s technically “real” (as in physical in any way.)
This right here might already be a flaw in your argument. Something doesn’t need to be physical to be real. In fact, there’s scientific evidence that physical reality itself is an illusion created through observation. That implies (although it cannot prove) that consciousness may be a higher construct that exists outside of physical reality itself.
If you’re interested in the philosophical questions this raises, there’s a great summary article that was published in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/436029a
On the contrary, it’s not a flaw in my argument, it is my argument. I’m saying we can’t be sure a machine could not be conscious because we don’t know that our brain is what makes us conscious. Nor do we know where the threshold is where consciousness arises. It’s perfectly possible all we need is to upload an exact copy of our brain into a machine, and it’d be conscious by default.
I see that’s certainly a different way of looking at it :) Of course I can’t say with any authority that it must be wrong, but I think it’s a flaw because it seems you’re presuming that consciousness arises from physical properties. If the physical act of copying a brain’s data were to give rise to consciousness, that would imply consciousness is a product of physical reality. But my position (and that of the paper I linked) is that physical reality is a product of mental consciousness.
Do elaborate on the batshit part :) It’s a scientific fact that physical matter does not exist in its physical form when unobserved. This may not prove the existence of consciousness, but it certainly makes it plausible. It certainly invalidates physical reality as the “source of truth”, so to say. Which makes the explanation that physical reality is a product of consciousness not just plausible, but more likely than the other way around. Again, not a proof, but far from batshit.
I think you’re a little confused about what observed means and what it does.
When unobserved, elementary particles behave like a wave, but they do not stop existing. A wave is still a physical thing. Additionally, observation does not require consciousness. For instance, a building, such as a house, when nobody is looking at it, does not begin to behave like a wave. It’s still a physical building. Therefore, observation is a bit of a misnomer. It really means a complex interaction we don’t understand causes particles to behave like a particle and not a wave. It just happens that human observation is one of the possible ways this interaction can take place.
An unobserved black hole will still feed, an unobserved house is still a house.
To be clear, I’m not insulting you or your idea like the other dude, but I wanted to clear that up.
Thanks, that seems a fair approach, although it doesn’t have me entirely convinced yet. Can you explain what the physical form of a wave function is? Because it’s not like a wave, such as waves in the sea. It’s really a wave function, an abstract representation of probabilities which in my understanding does not have any physical representation.
You say the building does not start acting like a wave, and you’re right, that would be silly. But it does enter into a superposition where the building can be either collapsed or not. Like Schreudinger’s cat, which can be dead or alive, and will be in a superposition of both until observation happens again. And yes, the probabilities of this superposition are indeed expressed through the wave function, even though there is no physical wave.
It’s true observation does not require consciousness. But until we know what does constitute observation, I believe consciousness provides a plausible explanation.
We don’t fully know or are able toodel the details of neurochemistry, but we know some essential features which we can model, action potentials in spiking neuron models for example.
It’s likely that the details don’t actually matter much. Take traffic jams as an example. There is lots of details going on, driver psychology, the physical mechanics of the car etc. but you only need a handful of very rough parameters to reproduce traffic jams in a computer.
That’s the thing with “emergent” phenomena, they are less complicated than the sum of their parts, which means you can achieve the same dynamics using other parts.
I’d say the details matter, based on the PEAR laboratory’s findings that consciousness can affect the outcomes of chaotic systems.
Perhaps the reason evolution selected for enormous brains is that’s the minimum necessary complexity to get a system chaotic enough to be sensitive to and hence swayed by conscious will.
PEAR? Where staff participated in trials, rather than doing double blind experiments? Whose results could not be reproduced by independent research groups? Who were found to employ p-hacking and data cherry picking?
You might as well argue that simulating a human mind is not possible because it wouldn’t have a zodiac sign.
Even if you ignore all the neuromodulatory chemistry, much of the interesting processing happens at sub-threshold depolarizations, depending on millisecond-scale coincidence detection from synapses distributed through an enormous, and slow-conducting dendritic network. The simple electrical signal transmission model, where an input neuron causes reliable spiking in an output neuron, comes from skeletal muscle, which served as the model for synaptic transmission for decades, just because it was a lot easier to study than actual inter-neural synapses.
But even that doesn’t matter if we can’t map the inter-neuronal connections, and so far that’s only been done for the 300 neurons of the c elegans ganglia (i.e., not even a ‘real’ brain), after a decade of work. Nowhere close to mapping the neuroscientists’ favorite model, aplysia, which only has 20,000 neurons. Maybe statistics will wash out some of those details by the time you get to humans 10^11 neuron systems, but considering how badly current network models are for predicting even simple behaviors, I’m going to say more details matter than we will discover any time soon.
Yes the connectome is kind of critical. But other than that, sub threshold oscillations can and are being modeled. It also does not really matter that we are digitizing here. Fluid dynamics are continuous and we can still study, model and predict it using finite lattices.
There are some things that are missing, but very clearly we won’t need to model individual ions and there is lots of other complexity that will not affect the outcome.
Even if it were possible to scan the contents of your brain and reproduce them in a digital form, there’s no reason that scan would be anything more than bits of data on the digital system. You could have a database of your brain… but it wouldn’t be conscious.
No one has any idea how to replicate the activity of the brain. As far as I know there aren’t any practical proposals in this area. All we have are vague theories about what might be going on, and a limited grasp of neurochemistry. It will be a very long time before reproducing the functions of a conscious mind is anything more than fantasy.
We don’t even know what consciousness is, let alone if it’s technically “real” (as in physical in any way.) It’s perfectly possible an uploaded brain would be just as conscious as a real brain because there was no physical thing making us conscious, and rather it was just a result of our ability to think at all.
Similarly, I’ve heard people argue a machine couldn’t feel emotions because it doesn’t have the physical parts of the brain that allow that, so it could only ever simulate them. That argument has the same hole in that we don’t actually know that we need those to feel emotions, or if the final result is all that matters. If we replaced the whole “this happens, release this hormone to cause these changes in behavior and physical function” with a simple statement that said “this happened, change behavior and function,” maybe there isn’t really enough of a difference to call one simulated and the other real. Just different ways of achieving the same result.
My point is, we treat all these things, consciousness, emotions, etc, like they’re special things that can’t be replicated, but we have no evidence to suggest this. It’s basically the scientific equivalent of mysticism, like the insistence that free will must exist even though all evidence points to the contrary.
This right here might already be a flaw in your argument. Something doesn’t need to be physical to be real. In fact, there’s scientific evidence that physical reality itself is an illusion created through observation. That implies (although it cannot prove) that consciousness may be a higher construct that exists outside of physical reality itself.
If you’re interested in the philosophical questions this raises, there’s a great summary article that was published in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/436029a
On the contrary, it’s not a flaw in my argument, it is my argument. I’m saying we can’t be sure a machine could not be conscious because we don’t know that our brain is what makes us conscious. Nor do we know where the threshold is where consciousness arises. It’s perfectly possible all we need is to upload an exact copy of our brain into a machine, and it’d be conscious by default.
I see that’s certainly a different way of looking at it :) Of course I can’t say with any authority that it must be wrong, but I think it’s a flaw because it seems you’re presuming that consciousness arises from physical properties. If the physical act of copying a brain’s data were to give rise to consciousness, that would imply consciousness is a product of physical reality. But my position (and that of the paper I linked) is that physical reality is a product of mental consciousness.
It’s not a flaw to not be batshit like you.
Do elaborate on the batshit part :) It’s a scientific fact that physical matter does not exist in its physical form when unobserved. This may not prove the existence of consciousness, but it certainly makes it plausible. It certainly invalidates physical reality as the “source of truth”, so to say. Which makes the explanation that physical reality is a product of consciousness not just plausible, but more likely than the other way around. Again, not a proof, but far from batshit.
I think you’re a little confused about what observed means and what it does.
When unobserved, elementary particles behave like a wave, but they do not stop existing. A wave is still a physical thing. Additionally, observation does not require consciousness. For instance, a building, such as a house, when nobody is looking at it, does not begin to behave like a wave. It’s still a physical building. Therefore, observation is a bit of a misnomer. It really means a complex interaction we don’t understand causes particles to behave like a particle and not a wave. It just happens that human observation is one of the possible ways this interaction can take place.
An unobserved black hole will still feed, an unobserved house is still a house.
To be clear, I’m not insulting you or your idea like the other dude, but I wanted to clear that up.
Thanks, that seems a fair approach, although it doesn’t have me entirely convinced yet. Can you explain what the physical form of a wave function is? Because it’s not like a wave, such as waves in the sea. It’s really a wave function, an abstract representation of probabilities which in my understanding does not have any physical representation.
You say the building does not start acting like a wave, and you’re right, that would be silly. But it does enter into a superposition where the building can be either collapsed or not. Like Schreudinger’s cat, which can be dead or alive, and will be in a superposition of both until observation happens again. And yes, the probabilities of this superposition are indeed expressed through the wave function, even though there is no physical wave.
It’s true observation does not require consciousness. But until we know what does constitute observation, I believe consciousness provides a plausible explanation.
Counterpoint, from a complex systems perspective:
We don’t fully know or are able toodel the details of neurochemistry, but we know some essential features which we can model, action potentials in spiking neuron models for example.
It’s likely that the details don’t actually matter much. Take traffic jams as an example. There is lots of details going on, driver psychology, the physical mechanics of the car etc. but you only need a handful of very rough parameters to reproduce traffic jams in a computer.
That’s the thing with “emergent” phenomena, they are less complicated than the sum of their parts, which means you can achieve the same dynamics using other parts.
I’d say the details matter, based on the PEAR laboratory’s findings that consciousness can affect the outcomes of chaotic systems.
Perhaps the reason evolution selected for enormous brains is that’s the minimum necessary complexity to get a system chaotic enough to be sensitive to and hence swayed by conscious will.
PEAR? Where staff participated in trials, rather than doing double blind experiments? Whose results could not be reproduced by independent research groups? Who were found to employ p-hacking and data cherry picking?
You might as well argue that simulating a human mind is not possible because it wouldn’t have a zodiac sign.
Even if you ignore all the neuromodulatory chemistry, much of the interesting processing happens at sub-threshold depolarizations, depending on millisecond-scale coincidence detection from synapses distributed through an enormous, and slow-conducting dendritic network. The simple electrical signal transmission model, where an input neuron causes reliable spiking in an output neuron, comes from skeletal muscle, which served as the model for synaptic transmission for decades, just because it was a lot easier to study than actual inter-neural synapses.
But even that doesn’t matter if we can’t map the inter-neuronal connections, and so far that’s only been done for the 300 neurons of the c elegans ganglia (i.e., not even a ‘real’ brain), after a decade of work. Nowhere close to mapping the neuroscientists’ favorite model, aplysia, which only has 20,000 neurons. Maybe statistics will wash out some of those details by the time you get to humans 10^11 neuron systems, but considering how badly current network models are for predicting even simple behaviors, I’m going to say more details matter than we will discover any time soon.
Yes the connectome is kind of critical. But other than that, sub threshold oscillations can and are being modeled. It also does not really matter that we are digitizing here. Fluid dynamics are continuous and we can still study, model and predict it using finite lattices.
There are some things that are missing, but very clearly we won’t need to model individual ions and there is lots of other complexity that will not affect the outcome.