Re: Does Searle's "Chinese Room" argument imply that consciousness is non-scientific?

JGCASEY <jgkjcasey@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 28, 3:29 am, c...@xxxxxxxx (Curt Welch) wrote:
...

We as brains, can really only understand and sense neural
signals.

I don't see the highest level, the brain, as a suitable
level to talk about things like "understanding" if we
want to understand what is happening when something like
ourselves "understand", any more than a lower level, the
neuron, (or your atoms) as being suitable to talk about
"understanding" behavior.

Also the brain does not "sense" neural signals but rather
some higher level pattern made up from these signals. When
I look at an image I don't sense the pixels I sense the
subject matter of the image.

The brain is made up of temporal pattern detectors. That's all you need to
understand about understanding in order to understand how the brain
understands. The implementation details of how to build these temporal
pattern matching devices and how they get programmed by learning is all
very important if we want to build AI, but if all you want to do is
understand what understanding is, then you need go not further than to
understand it's the act of a temporal pattern matching hardware devices.

Each thing we can understand, or sense, or respond to, or be aware of,
requires the brain to have the power to match a different pattern. That's
the correct level of abstraction to understand understanding (not the brain
as a whole, or the atom). However, the neuron is the basic building block
of the brain's ability to detect patterns (that's all a neuron is - a
pattern detection device) so you can pretty much pretend it is the correct
level to understand understanding.

In fact, the brain probably uses small networks of neurons to perform
pattern matching functions, so when we finally have the brain all figured
out, the level of abstraction best use to explain understanding, would be
more like the AND gate, than the transistor, in a computer and more like a
small network of neurons instead of individual neurons in the brain.

...

If people actually believed in materialism like they say
they do, they wouldn't be so confused about consciousness.

Whereas I would state the opposite. It is their description
of the physical world that makes it hard to describe their
own internal observations.

The brain infers a physical world from its experiences
(internal events) constructed from its sensory inputs but
those experiences are not themselves contained in the
sensory input and thus not part of the inferred model of
the physical world.

Huh? That makes no sense to me.

The internal events you speak of are nothing more than the output of a
pattern matching circuit. For example before we can understand what a dog
is, the brain must have hardware which is able to correctly detect all the
different sensory patterns we will recognize as a dog. It must create an
internal signal which means "I sense a dog". It must have pattern matching
hardware that creates as output, the dog signal. That internal dog signal,
is the brain's awareness of dog.

The "dog experience" as you seem to talk about above, is not in the sensory
signals. That's correct. It's in the output of the dog pattern matching
circuit. It's in the signal which is generated internally by the dog
pattern matching hardware.

When you write, "The brain infers a physical world" I translate that to
"the brain has pattern matching hardware which generates dog signals, and
cat signals, and everything else it "infers" about the physical world - a
different signal for each.

But then you say the since the information inferred is not part of the
sensory inputs, it's not part of the inferred model? Huh?

It's in the internal sensory signals generated by the pattern matching
hardware.

In other words, when the dog pattern matching hardware detects a dog
pattern in the input signals, it creates yet another, internally generated,
SENOSRY SIGNAL, which the rest of the brain is able to respond to just as
if it were a direct sensory input from the "dog sensor".

The internally generated dog signal is what the brain infers about the
external environment. We are able to sense the presence of dogs around us,
because those neurons which make up the "dog pattern matching circuit" are
the "dog sensors" in our brain. We have a dog sensor in our brain just
like as have light sensors in our eyes and sound sensors in our ear.

Each neuron acts as a sensor. It's sensing the temporal firing patterns of
other neurons. We have a brain full of 100 billion sensors each of which
are tuned and wired to sense a different aspect of all the signals in the
brain - they are all acting as brain activity sensors - all 100 billion of
them. But each one of them is wired to detect a different pattern of brain
activity.

Of course there is the naive view that an object is red
in color because that is what its color is, whereas the
red is in fact an internal event and simply the way the
brain codes or processes sensory differences we call
colors.

We see red for the same reason we see dog. It's because we have a red
sensor, and we a dog sensor. Everything we can sense exists for us because
we have pattern matching hardware in our brain sensing those things.

Red doesn't exist in the world, it exists in our brain just like dog exists
in our brain. It exists as the output of a pattern matching circuit. If
you had the right type of brain scanner and brain probe, you could force
your red signal, or your dog signal, to become active in your brain just by
hitting a button on the computer controlled brain probe. And every time
you hit that button, you would suddenly sense red, or dog, or any other
thing you wanted to make pop into your head at the touch of a button. The
same machine could read out your thoughts while you had them, to a level
beyond your own ability to realize what you were thinking about. But
sadly, we don't have any sort of brain probing tools to work with so people
could experience first hand how their brain worked.

Science has moved us beyond the naive world view so now
we can understand the physical world is a construction,
which may be differently viewed by different brains,
although we assume a single real physical Universe is
the source of the data used by brains, which are also
part of that Universe, to build a model of the Universe.

That's right. And how the brain does this is trivial to understand. The
brain is nothing more than a billion different pattern matching circuits
and the output of each creates our awareness of every thing our brain
understands about both he physical world and the mental world (which of
course is just the physical operation of the brain).

Your brain has no direct knowledge of the physical world
only the patterns of its inputs.

That's true. But it also has access to all the internal signals each part
of the brain generates which is the brain's understanding of what's "in"
those raw sensory inputs.

How do you know if
something exists "out there"?

Because we have pattern matching hardware in our brain which produces
unique outputs for each of the things that "exist" for us. Nothing exists
for the brain until a circuit is constructed which generates a signal which
is the thing that exists for us.

At the low level, we have signals from the eye where each pulse represents
something to the effect of "a small amount of light exists at this moment
at this point of the retina". The only thing the brain "knows" about at
that point, is what that signal represents. But as each addition piece of
signal processing hardware is added, and each new internal signal is
generated by the hardware, the brain becomes aware of more and more stuff
existing. Not only does it know about all the light, but it also knows
there's a dog pattern in those lights because it's got dog-pattern sensors
as part of the brain.

How do you know if you are
dreaming or not?

No one I've met knows when they are dreaming. They only know it after the
fact when they wake up. This is because whatever the brain creates for us
is our understanding of reality. When we are dreaming, we don't have
anything to compare it to in order to know if it's a dream. Dreams are as
real as normal reality because they are the same for us - it's all neural
activity.

And when the brain creates a reality for us in which the mental events are
separate from the physical events, the universe looks to us as if mental
events are not physical events - and we have no way of knowing it's just a
virtual creation of the brain instead of the way the physical world really
is because whatever the brain creates for us, is what we believe is real.

What kind of physical world would you
infer if your only input was a binary switch? How could
it change as the number and value states of those inputs
were increased?

Switches are normally seen as output devices, not input devices.

If you only had a binary input, we could still infer just about everything
we already infer - it would just take a lot longer because the data flow
would be a lot slower - unless the data flow wasn't slower and that single
binary input was feeding us sensory data a rate that equaled the normal
flow of sensory data over many parallel channels - at which point we could
still infer the same sort of stuff.

The main limiting factor of what a brain can infer has nothing to do with
the number of inputs. It's mostly a function of how much pattern matching
hardware it has to work with. A brain that only has 10 pattern matching
circuits can only be conscious of 10 different things. Where as one with
100 billion pattern matching circuits, can be conscious of 100 billion
different things.

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
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