Question on physical laws and consciousness

[Luke Skywalker]

Ignoring the first bit because again you seem to have the retarded idea that there is some step between have neural net that is self-aware and predict consciousness. The same fundamental principles that define neural nets also define any acts that those neural nets can perform. Consciousness is no different than any other task a mind can perform.

Prove it. Explain to me the physical laws that predict that I have a set of subjective qualia that you do not have access to.

Also, explain why rocks and stars do not have this quality. And if you try to employ circular reasoning and say "because they do not have neural networks", I will laugh at you.

How else do you expect physics to predict that consciousness will arise outside of it predicting the rise of neural nets capable to attaining consciousness?

More circular reasoning! Nowhere do physical laws predict that these neural nets will attain consciousness, they merely predict that neural nets with certain electrical impulses that can will the human body to move and respond to stimuli exist. But human locomotion, arousal, etc, are not the same thing as me having an inner video camera within my head!

We can model the rise of neural nets, we know of at least one specific kind of neural net that can be 'conscious'

No physical law predicts that neural nets could be conscious (show me otherwise!). That you've noticed conscious is hard to define scientifically is because it doesn't really have a physical definition even though it clearly exists, and that is the problem.

I have already suggested ways to test such things such as taking an accurate working model of a human brain that we know is conscious and changing parameters until it no longer meets the criteria for consciousness, or any other mental value we wish to test.

You still haven't learned how to read, eh? This is testing through observational data, which I already pointed out has clearly linked consciousness to brain activity. This is not the same as explaining this through first principles.

This has to be the 23rd time I've pointed out the distinction between evidence through empirical observation (which nobody denies exists!) and a first principles derivation.

If you line 10 people up a row and they die whenever you do this, you have a clear, empirical observation that can be made scientific with sufficiently controlled test runs. This does not mean you have a first-principles explanation of why this happens.

That sounds like a creationist asking me to answer every question they have about science or concede that science is invalid.

Funny, since I got that exact troll-request from you.

Qualia can be tested though,

You mean in the neuroscientific studies that I've referenced myself as different from what I'm talking about for the 24th time?

Given that several members in this thread have differing ideas for what consciousness is and one even asserts that consciousness as a whole may not exist in a testable way, how is it trolling to ask you to define your terms?

For one thing, you have no scientific aptitude whatsoever, and so would not be able to do anything with the term.

Secondly, the very fact that no objective definition can be given for something that objectively exists (as I've already demonstrated on multiple occasions) is proof of my point.

Thirdly, you snipped out my justification - I can easily explain why humans cry without needing a precise definition of tears, or anything for that matter that occurs in our physical reality with a reasonable definition, from why Julius Caesar died to why the sky is blue, using a rough first-principles foundation. You've been asked to do this on multiple occasions with consciousness, and each evasion gets even funnier than the last.

[Simon_Jester]

Hey, Luke? For someone who started the thread saying:

...So I'm a little tired and I've no delusions that this is a brilliant question that nobody has thought to have asked or answered before, is there something simple that I'm missing?

...

You sure come across as overconfident, overbearing, underinformed, and in general a poster child for the
Dunning-Kruger effect. And... you are what, a college sophomore plus or minus a little? You should, at this time, still seriously want to grow and become more intellectually fit as a fully developed thinking human. If you want that for yourself, stop and think this through.
________________________________

Multiple people with real credentials and work experience in relevant fields have tried to tell you various things about your opinions on this subject. They have told you your opinions are unfounded. They have told you that you are using terms imprecisely. They have told you that philosophically your position is problematic. They have told you specific, scientifically known things about how thought works and how neural patterns in the brain can interact and how this relates to our qualitative experience of the world.

You have been persistently rude, dismissive, and repetitive in your responses to all these people.

Their knowledge is broad (acquired over long timescales) and deep (including actual professional work in fields related to the understanding of thought, intelligence, and consciousness). Your knowledge, by comparison, is relatively narrow (highly limited to specific fields, by all evidence I've seen so far) and shallow (since you have not even completed one undergraduate degree, let alone extensive graduate education and work experience in relevant fields). They have informed you that in light of their (broad and deep) knowledge, you with your narrow and shallow knowledge are making fundamental errors, errors they have seen before because unlike you they have been studying this matter for much longer and have repeatedly seen people at all levels of knowledge and understanding discuss the subject.

And yet you have the temerity to accuse them of ignorantly parroting buzz words and not knowing basic facts about their own professions.

Contrary to what you may have picked up by reading this forum or others like it in childhood, accusations of intellectual dishonesty, bias, and fallacious reasoning are NOT just shit people fling at each other randomly. They are specific, highly significant arguments about the structure and validity of your opinions, and the ability to recognize such fallacies and point them out was actually a huge step in the evolution of human reasoning power. Ignore that at your peril. Treat it like it's just people slinging shit and the appropriate response is to screech and posture like a monkey whose social status in the monkey tribe is threatened... and you will become a true and complete idiot.
______________________________

For example:

When people accuse you of repeatedly denying a thing without proving that denial is justified...

If you aspire to be a smart person, you listen to them.

ONLY after you have engaged with their argument extensively, questioned them about their views, and taken a moment to double-check yourself are you justified in saying "oh, they're just ignoring my repeated explanations!" At which point you should disengage yourself from the conversation, because there's a fairly high chance, in my experience, that you are wrong about having adequately explained this subject. Repeatedly calling people stupid for not 'understanding' an explanation that is actually gibberish, just because you've repeated the gibberish four times, makes you look like an utter fool.

So my advice is, either listen politely to the people accusing you of poor reasoning, at least long enough to really understand the reasoning behind the accusation... Or leave the damn thread. One or the other.

That especially includes Ziggy and Starglider, although I suspect both of them have already decided they don't have time to indulge the belligerent ignorance you have displayed to them. I would, in their shoes.

Now, if you would like to have a reasoned discussion on the subject, I for one offer my services- on one condition. I expect you to restate your position to me in clearly defined terms. No screeching about how you've already explained it 23 times, because I am not going back through fifty posts on this thread to ferret out multiple times you said vaguely related things that may or may not contradict each other and which you may or may not still stand by. If I do, the whole thing will decay into a mass of quote spaghetti.

Hell, maybe we could make a Coliseum thing out of it; the thing's been gathering dust for four and a half years.

[Jub]

Prove it. Explain to me the physical laws that predict that I have a set of subjective qualia that you do not have access to.

I can have access to them you numb skull. Given advanced enough technology I can crack your head open, plug in some wires and rip the experiences from your brain to be experienced at my leisure. Given that we predict such actions to be within the realm of the possible, what makes qualia any different than a computer processing inputs.

Also, explain why rocks and stars do not have this quality. And if you try to employ circular reasoning and say "because they do not have neural networks", I will laugh at you.

That is literally the answer. They don't accept the same inputs we do, aren't as complex as a conscious creature is and thus must be tested in different ways. A rock literally can't know that I've yelled at it or hit it with a hammer and thus it's obvious that it won't have any subjective experience related to that event.

More circular reasoning! Nowhere do physical laws predict that these neural nets will attain consciousness, they merely predict that neural nets with certain electrical impulses that can will the human body to move and respond to stimuli exist. But human locomotion, arousal, etc, are not the same thing as me having an inner video camera within my head!

Except that you do have a camera in your head and we're starting to understand why as technology advances. Given that physics can predict that the physical structure of one Luke Skywalker will exist and given that Luke is conscious, physics can and do predict the rise of consciousness.

No physical law predicts that neural nets could be conscious (show me otherwise!). That you've noticed conscious is hard to define scientifically is because it doesn't really have a physical definition even though it clearly exists, and that is the problem.

Then there is clearly a need for you to define the term in order for this discussion to continue. Either that or you need to accept that consciousness is a property that is tied to a physical medium and move on.

You still haven't learned how to read, eh? This is testing through observational data, which I already pointed out has clearly linked consciousness to brain activity. This is not the same as explaining this through first principles.

This has to be the 23rd time I've pointed out the distinction between evidence through empirical observation (which nobody denies exists!) and a first principles derivation.

If you line 10 people up a row and they die whenever you do this, you have a clear, empirical observation that can be made scientific with sufficiently controlled test runs. This does not mean you have a first-principles explanation of why this happens.

Yes but one can't get to first principles without first making observations, these observations have yet to be made and thus we don't know where to start working out anything further.

Funny, since I got that exact troll-request from you.

Where did I ever ask you to prove something that is impossible?

You mean in the neuroscientific studies that I've referenced myself as different from what I'm talking about for the 24th time?

You've yet to clearly define what you mean and where you feel the divide is. You can claim that I'm simply not reading your posts well enough, but everybody aside from you in this thread has the same issue with your posts. Where does the divide between the physical and the qualia exist and how do you expect us to give you a first principles answer to something with no basis in physics?

For one thing, you have no scientific aptitude whatsoever, and so would not be able to do anything with the term.

Secondly, the very fact that no objective definition can be given for something that objectively exists (as I've already demonstrated on multiple occasions) is proof of my point.

You asked the question dumbass. Your thread literally has the word question in the title, now define what you has asked about or fuck off.

[Luke Skywalker]

Oh, look, another me-tooer! Let's see what this jokester has to say:

You sure come across as overconfident, overbearing, underinformed, and in general a poster child for the
Dunning-Kruger effect. And... you are what, a college sophomore plus or minus a little? You should, at this time, still seriously want to grow and become more intellectually fit as a fully developed thinking human. If you want that for yourself, stop and think this through.

OK, so far, nothing but ad hominems, but this is OK; often times you preface your real arguments with ad hominems. That's fine.

________________________________

Multiple people with real credentials and work experience in relevant fields have tried to tell you various things about your opinions on this subject. They have told you your opinions are unfounded. They have told you that you are using terms imprecisely. They have told you that philosophically your position is problematic.

This is the classic SDN.net style me-tooing post: you point out that "lots of other people have told you that you are wrong" to get brownie points, but don't bother to actually refute specific contentions I make or make any original material of your own.

Next.

They have told you specific, scientifically known things about how thought works and how neural patterns in the brain can interact and how this relates to our qualitative experience of the world.

More evidence of a me-tooer: you can't be bothered to read. The question of how neural patterns in the brain can interact and relate to our qualitative experience is not something I ever bothered to argue with because I agree with the science. The question is where the PHYSICS BASED, not neuroscientific/observational, mathematical derivation comes from.

This is a point I've been repeating dozens of times over the course of this discussion.

You have been persistently rude, dismissive, and repetitive in your responses to all these people.

Because I literally repeated the above point (there's obviously scientific evidence that consciousness is caused by physical processes but not an elementary QM one) dozens of times and you still misinterpret it!

Their knowledge is broad (acquired over long timescales) and deep (including actual professional work in fields related to the understanding of thought, intelligence, and consciousness). Your knowledge, by comparison, is relatively narrow (highly limited to specific fields, by all evidence I've seen so far) and shallow (since you have not even completed one undergraduate degree, let alone extensive graduate education and work experience in relevant fields). They have informed you that in light of their (broad and deep) knowledge, you with your narrow and shallow knowledge are making fundamental errors, errors they have seen before because unlike you they have been studying this matter for much longer and have repeatedly seen people at all levels of knowledge and understanding discuss the subject.

And yet you have the temerity to accuse them of ignorantly parroting buzz words and not knowing basic facts about their own professions.

Contrary to what you may have picked up by reading this forum or others like it in childhood, accusations of intellectual dishonesty, bias, and fallacious reasoning are NOT just shit people fling at each other randomly. They are specific, highly significant arguments about the structure and validity of your opinions, and the ability to recognize such fallacies and point them out was actually a huge step in the evolution of human reasoning power. Ignore that at your peril. Treat it like it's just people slinging shit and the appropriate response is to screech and posture like a monkey whose social status in the monkey tribe is threatened... and you will become a true and complete idiot.
______________________________

For example:

When people accuse you of repeatedly denying a thing without proving that denial is justified...

If you aspire to be a smart person, you listen to them.

ONLY after you have engaged with their argument extensively, questioned them about their views, and taken a moment to double-check yourself are you justified in saying "oh, they're just ignoring my repeated explanations!" At which point you should disengage yourself from the conversation, because there's a fairly high chance, in my experience, that you are wrong about having adequately explained this subject. Repeatedly calling people stupid for not 'understanding' an explanation that is actually gibberish, just because you've repeated the gibberish four times, makes you look like an utter fool.

So my advice is, either listen politely to the people accusing you of poor reasoning, at least long enough to really understand the reasoning behind the accusation... Or leave the damn thread. One or the other.

Don't patronize me, you ignorant little pea brained worm. This entire post consists of nothing original or non-derivative, but instead vague sound bites, ad hominem attacks, and declaration of victory absent in any argumentation or refutation of my own. Moreso, you clearly misrepresent positions that have been clarified on multiple occasions so that you can "me-too" others who at least bothered to make original arguments.

That especially includes Ziggy and Starglider, although I suspect both of them have already decided they don't have time to indulge the belligerent ignorance you have displayed to them. I would, in their shoes.

Starglider claimed that physics does not apply to neuroscience. How the fuck am I supposed to take him seriously?

Now, if you would like to have a reasoned discussion on the subject, I for one offer my services- on one condition. I expect you to restate your position to me in clearly defined terms. No screeching about how you've already explained it 23 times, because I am not going back through fifty posts on this thread to ferret out multiple times you said vaguely related things that may or may not contradict each other and which you may or may not still stand by. If I do, the whole thing will decay into a mass of quote spaghetti.

Hell, maybe we could make a Coliseum thing out of it; the thing's been gathering dust for four and a half years.

If you don't know what my position on something is and are not willing to look for it, you fucking ask me, you do not assume you know what it is, as you've tried to do on multiple occasions here.

I'd welcome a debate with you, however dull and shallow it may be. You are welcome to initiate it.

[Jub]

Luke, we're done here. You have nothing more to say and you attack Simon a poster that is among the nicest and most reasonable people I interact with on this board when he's legitimately trying to help you. You are a child without enough life experience to know why you are wrong and without enough grace to back down properly.

I can be guilty of some of the negative traits you've shown in this thread myself, as can most on this board, but as people here will attest to I man up when I'm wrong. I've done this to the point where I risked being banned to resolve a matter of principle.

[Luke Skywalker]

Yeah, because it's not like this entire board was founded on the allowance of flames or something, and Simon was clearly being totally cordial to me, because it's OK as long as you're being passively-aggressive.

Yes, I'm younger than you, but to put it bluntly, I'm also a lot smarter than you. This isn't a question of a difference in opinion - this is just you failing to recognize basic logical connections and elementary school science.

I can have access to them you numb skull. Given advanced enough technology I can crack your head open, plug in some wires and rip the experiences from your brain to be experienced at my leisure. Given that we predict such actions to be within the realm of the possible, what makes qualia any different than a computer processing inputs.

Prove it.

Oh, and also good job at taking advantage of block-quoting to only address the latter half of my request and not the former. I'm waiting for your first-principles proof that subjective qualia should arise from neural activity.

That is literally the answer. They don't accept the same inputs we do,

What is it about the arrangement of these particles you call inputs that makes them more prone to produce subjective qualia?

Remember, physics, not neuroscientific correlations we all agree on.

aren't as complex

So? Where in the laws of physics does it say that complexity produces subjective qualia, and why don't super-intricate machines or other constructs do it?

as a conscious creature is and thus must be tested in different ways. A rock literally can't know that I've yelled at it or hit it with a hammer and thus it's obvious that it won't have any subjective experience related to that event.

More circular logic. Where in Schrodinger's equation, Maxwell's laws, Newton's laws, molecular bonding theory, etc, do you get the idea that qualia emerges from neurons?

Except that you do have a camera in your head and we're starting to understand why as technology advances. Given that physics can predict that the physical structure of one Luke Skywalker will exist and given that Luke is conscious, physics can and do predict the rise of consciousness.

Concession accepted. "Given that Luke is conscious" is used as a premise, not a prediction of physics. You still appeal to the tautology that the existence of consciousness is proof that physics predicts it, but the entire question is how it does so, not necessarily whether!

Then there is clearly a need for you to define the term in order for this discussion to continue. Either that or you need to accept that consciousness is a property that is tied to a physical medium and move on.

I've already defined it for you. That it's tied causally to a physical medium does not mean it is itself a physical medium. If it is a property of physical materials, you have to present a working model of why it only applies to some physical models and not others.

Yes but one can't get to first principles without first making observations, these observations have yet to be made and thus we don't know where to start working out anything further.

Incorrect, we already have enough observations to have a rough first principles understanding of relevant macroscopic behavior in the universe.

Now, if we make the observation that neural activities create consciousness, what we are missing is a mathematical model that reduces to quantum mechanics.

Where did I ever ask you to prove something that is impossible?

I'll just point out that you never bothered to defined the terms you wanted me to prove, just as you wave your hands about.

You've yet to clearly define what you mean and where you feel the divide is. You can claim that I'm simply not reading your posts well enough, but everybody aside from you in this thread has the same issue with your posts. Where does the divide between the physical and the qualia exist and how do you expect us to give you a first principles answer to something with no basis in physics?

Are you seriously incapable of recognizing the difference between physical phenomena and qualia? That you recognized that a rock lacks the latter should be enough evidence for you.

You admitted it's like an inner camera - physical things are not like inner cameras. We know this from all of modern science.

You asked the question dumbass. Your thread literally has the word question in the title, now define what you has asked about or fuck off.

I have already defined it shitface, it's the inner camera that exists in your mind, the experiences that (your unsubstantiated wiring argument aside) are not attainable by others and not composed of elementary particles.

[Jub]

Prove it.

You mean like the work the team at UC Berkeley has done with taking the data gathered by an fMRI scanner and used it to compile video of what people were seeing? Link to this one here and here. Or how about the work we've done changing the behavior of animals through invasive and non-invasive external stimulus? Just a wiki link this time but that can be found here Or we could talk of simulations of half of a mouse brain if you would rather do that.

We're cracking this shit faster than you might think.

Oh, and also good job at taking advantage of block-quoting to only address the latter half of my request and not the former. I'm waiting for your first-principles proof that subjective qualia should arise from neural activity.

Given that subjective ideas such as qualia and consciousness exist only as descriptors for complex patterns of neural activity within brains of a certain structure and complexity the proof would be of those structures. Any observations of qualia and consciousness would come as by products of understanding the physical structures of the brain. Thus a first principles explanation of the brain is a first principles explanation of qualia and consciousness.

What is it about the arrangement of these particles you call inputs that makes them more prone to produce subjective qualia?

Remember, physics, not neuroscientific correlations we all agree on.

This question doesn't make sense, you can't use physics to describe a subjective poorly defined term such as qualia. This is exactly what people were saying when they said that physicists, or in your case undergrad engineers, should avoid discussions of biology and cognition.

Incorrect, we already have enough observations to have a rough first principles understanding of relevant macroscopic behavior in the universe.

Yet we lack the understanding of how these things interact in our brains to create thought. We don't know how the brain works in enough detail to construct such a model.

Now, if we make the observation that neural activities create consciousness, what we are missing is a mathematical model that reduces to quantum mechanics.

Why are you so hung up on this mathematical model when we're literally taking our first steps into cracking how and why we're able to think at all?

I'll just point out that you never bothered to defined the terms you wanted me to prove, just as you wave your hands about.

This is a complete non sequitur. What terms have I failed to define?

Are you seriously incapable of recognizing the difference between physical phenomena and qualia? That you recognized that a rock lacks the latter should be enough evidence for you.

You admitted it's like an inner camera - physical things are not like inner cameras. We know this from all of modern science.

You fail to recognize that what you call qualia can be classified in many ways and that the term qualia itself doesn't apply to anything testable by physics. There literally is no qualia particle, the only reason qualia exists is because the neurons firing in human brains makes us think that it does. Outside of the idea of qualia stored in the physical make up of the brains that know of it qualia doesn't exist.

I have already defined it shitface, it's the inner camera that exists in your mind, the experiences that (your unsubstantiated wiring argument aside) are not attainable by others and not composed of elementary particles.

This isn't a coherent or scientifically testable definition of the term. Try harder.

[Iroscato]

Luke, your exit from this board will be swift, amusing and quite frankly a little arousing if you keep this shit up. Take a little look in Parting Shots, you should see what I mean. Try to stop acting like a jumped-up smartass and be cool. Works wonders for your ego. People will like you more.

[Luke Skywalker]

Jub. You acknowledge that we've tested qualia scientifically already - why not just use the definition you clearly have for yourself!?

[Jub]

Jub. You acknowledge that we've tested qualia scientifically already - why not just use the definition you clearly have for yourself!?

Why should I have to provide that when you're the one who asked the question. I also dislike the term qualia and have never really defined it to myself. I know how to, or at least have theories, about how to test the various ways the brain interacts with the world, but I don't think describing how we can use fMRI to get crude images from a person's head will help to define first principles for describing qualia.

The issue is that you want a very detailed physics explanation for something that you can't even define in a way that would make it testable. Beyond that, you admit that things like qualia are purely subjective and don't have a physical basis, so why should we expect a study of physical things to describe them at all?

[Luke Skywalker]

Why should I have to provide that when you're the one who asked the question.

So you have a satisfactory definition, obviously since you have referred to it yourself and made scientific claims, and even quoted research to it, but you are deliberately withholding it from me because it isn't your "job" to do so? (then why should I take any of your arguments or research seriously by the same reasoning you refuse to provide an explanation?)

You're clearly in the full on debate-mode where you're more concerned with winning the argument than coming up with a solution, even though speculating solutions is the point of the thread!

Now that you have a definition, provide a first principles foundational explanation for it in the same way you could for literally anything else.

I also dislike the term qualia and have never really defined it to myself.

I'm sorry if you dislike the word, but you seem to selectively suspend your disliking for it whenever you quote evidence on it that suits your argument.

The issue is that you want a very detailed physics explanation for something that you can't even define in a way that would make it testable. Beyond that, you admit that things like qualia are purely subjective and don't have a physical basis, so why should we expect a study of physical things to describe them at all?

Because we have a neuroscientific explanation, and neuroscience is...a science! And all sciences are in principle reducible to theoretical physics.

[Jub]

So you have a satisfactory definition, obviously since you have referred to it yourself and made scientific claims, and even quoted research to it, but you are deliberately withholding it from me because it isn't your "job" to do so? (then why should I take any of your arguments or research seriously by the same reasoning you refuse to provide an explanation?)

Actually, I've purely posted things related to what I think you define qualia as. I don't have a definition to give you because I think the term is useless and the idea of qualia itself is philosophical slop parading around pretending to be science. If you want to ask me how to measure the way the brain interacts with external stimulus and what our current understanding of that is go ahead and I'll see what other things I can dig up for you, but I can't give you a definition I don't have.

I'm sorry if you dislike the word, but you seem to selectively suspend your disliking for it whenever you quote evidence on it that suits your argument.

No, I'm providing proof for things that I think are what you mean when you use the term, but given that I am not you I'm at best guessing at what evidence I post will fall within your criteria. Hence my repeatedly asking you to define your terms so I can provide answers to your questions.

Because we have a neuroscientific explanation, and neuroscience is...a science! And all sciences are in principle reducible to theoretical physics.

Neuroscience is in its infancy right now. Plus while we may not have the detailed back to first principles grand theory of thought down yet what we do have is pretty damned cool. We can understand how light is detected by the eye, passed to the brain, and processed by the brain enough to apply that to restoring a limited amount of sight to the blind. We can get blurry images from a crudely done scan of a brain, we can model the way mice brains work and get them to behave in ways we expect a mouse to, we can do so much but you seem to think that's not a worthy accomplishment unless a random person online can back it all up with hard math.

Sorry kid, but that's not how life works. If you want that kind of info go talk to a professor at your university who specializes in the field and when you do try to be more respectful to him than you have been to the people in this thread.

[Luke Skywalker]

No, I'm providing proof for things that I think are what you mean when you use the term, but given that I am not you I'm at best guessing at what evidence I post will fall within your criteria.

Well, you're right. That inner camera inside the brain is exactly what I'm looking for. Don't pretend that you know what you're talking about when you say this isn't "scientifically testable" - it's been tested all the time in neurology! You even linked to a research paper!

Now that we've established that Science does take the subject of qualia seriously, give me that first principles derivation, or whatever other mental gymnastics you've conjured to cover up the fact that you can't provide one.

Neuroscience is in its infancy right now.

So? You obviously think the research is legitimate because you linked to it as evidence and belittled me when you thought I was denying its validity. So, use its definition to explain how it's possible within modern physics.

(Look, you obviously got caught redhanded in a double standards and are now creating ad hoc explanations for why it's ok for you to talk about qualia and then ignore all of my points for not having a definition. Just. Stop. It.)

you seem to think that's not a worthy accomplishment

You are a liar. Where did I say I didn't think neuroscience was a worthy accomplishment? I've stated dozens of times that I accept neuroscience as a legitimate field, and this thread is just asking for a deeper explanation! Appreciating what we have and wanting to know more are not mutually exclusive, and there's nothing disgusting or small minded about the latter.

Again, you are grasping at straws after your "I don't have a definition!" excuse was exposed. Get to work and explain how qualia exists within physics.

Sorry kid, but that's not how life works. If you want that kind of info go talk to a professor at your university who specializes in the field and when you do try to be more respectful to him than you have been to the people in this thread.

Conflict was initiated by "Stardust" and "Starglider", not myself. The only difference is they did it in a backhanded manner, and I called them morons straight up. The entire motto of this board is that the latter isn't intrinsically worse.

[Jub]

Well, you're right. That inner camera inside the brain is exactly what I'm looking for.

A person as smart as you claim to be should be able to take the dick out of his mouth* long enough to say what he means rather than circling for three pages and pissing a ton of people off a long the way. Now, I'm going to take a shot at define the term for you, but it would be nice if you could use something less vague than 'That inner camera inside the brain...'.

When you type the word qualia, do you really mean to say something like; the study of how the human brain processes and stores the results of external stimuli? If this is the case, why didn't you spit that out in the first place?

*Sorry to our gay board members if this insult offends you. It's not meant to be a shot, it's just that the mental image is too perfect for me not to use here.

Don't pretend that you know what you're talking about when you say this isn't "scientifically testable" - it's been tested all the time in neurology! You even linked to a research paper!

Now that we've established that Science does take the subject of qualia seriously, give me that first principles derivation, or whatever other mental gymnastics you've conjured to cover up the fact that you can't provide one.

If this is what you meant by qualia why have you never defined the term in any clear and useful sense of the term? Are your math skills choking off the part of your brain that lets you spit out your thoughts in a way that other people can understand?

So? You obviously think the research is legitimate because you linked to it as evidence and belittled me when you thought I was denying its validity. So, use its definition to explain how it's possible within modern physics.

How the fuck should I know? I'm not in that field and just showed up here to shoot the shit and see what guys like Starglider and Ziggy had to say on the matter. If you hadn't been such a little prick and shit up a perfectly fine premise I'd have stuck to lurking and learning new shit about neuroscience.

You are a liar. Where did I say I didn't think neuroscience was a worthy accomplishment? I've stated dozens of times that I accept neuroscience as a legitimate field, and this thread is just asking for a deeper explanation! Appreciating what we have and wanting to know more are not mutually exclusive, and there's nothing disgusting or small minded about the latter.

Again, you are grasping at straws after your "I don't have a definition!" excuse was exposed. Get to work and explain how qualia exists within physics.

You don't have anything more to say about this subject than I myself do and unlike me you can't even figure out a jumping off point to get yourself started on thinking about this. On top of that your being a little shit drove off the people who could have answered your questions for you.

I'm not an expert in this field, I'm not much of an expert in any field tbh, instead I've spent my days cultivating a bunch of minor but useful skills in a ton of areas. If you want to talk cars, sports, physics, neuroscience, logic, history, or just about any damned thing I can at least grok the basics and ask questions that allow myself to do further research on the topic, but I am not and never claimed to be an expert at anything, let alone something as crazy hard as neuroscience.

What I can do is point of flaws in your argument and try to force you to at least define things so that I can do the research and get an answer.

Conflict was initiated by "Stardust" and "Starglider", not myself. The only difference is they did it in a backhanded manner, and I called them morons straight up. The entire motto of this board is that the latter isn't intrinsically worse.

Indeed being an asshole isn't a ban-able offence or anything, but it's still less than smart to drive off people who could be explaining things to you because you're too young, dumb, and full of cum to calm down and listen to your elders.

[Luke Skywalker]

A person as smart as you claim to be should be able to take the dick out of his mouth* long enough to say what he means rather than circling for three pages and pissing a ton of people off a long the way.

I actually recall using that description in the first or second page, and then repeating it multiple times to yourself, with you repeating the phrase to me on multiple occasions.

It's like you literally have no idea what's going on.

Now, I'm going to take a shot at define the term for you, but it would be nice if you could use something less vague than 'That inner camera inside the brain...'.

It worked fine for you to cite and stand by research on it, you fucking hypocrite.

When you type the word qualia, do you really mean to say something like; the study of how the human brain processes and stores the results of external stimuli? If this is the case, why didn't you spit that out in the first place?

Back down and concede before I humiliate you by posting all of the times where I used exactly that phrase.

I had to catch you in your hypocrisy to get you to concede.

How the fuck should I know?

Because you led me on to believe you did, with phrases like "give me a clear definition so we can help you out", and lectures on neuroscience, and, you know, asking for a clearer definition so you could give me what I wanted!

Now after I've finally flushed you out by catching you in your own double standard, you reveal that you had no intention of answering the question all along?

Indeed being an asshole isn't a ban-able offence or anything, but it's still less than smart to drive off people who could be explaining things to you

There you go again with the mental disconnect between what you read and what you reply with; I didn't start this exchange.

because you're too young, dumb, and full of cum to calm down and listen to your elders.

So I'm young, but I don't see how that has anything to do with scientific aptitude. You have no background or aptitude in science, so your age is irrelevant here.

[Zeropoint]

Are you seriously incapable of recognizing the difference between physical phenomena and qualia?

Qualia ARE physical phenomena.

To the extent that "qualia" are a real thing, they exist as patterns of data stored where the brain's "software" expects to find sensory data. For example, 0xFF0000 represents "bright red" if it's stored at an address where the code expects to find color data. The redness is not inherent to the bit pattern--the same data would be interpreted as "NBSP-NULL-NULL" if encountered at a location expected to have ASCII text.

If a robot points its color sensor at an object, and this results in the value 0xFF0000 being placed in a register where the robot's code will look for color data, then when the code checks that register, the robot "has the subjective experience" of seeing the color red.

If a human places her hand on an object, and this results in <a pattern of neural activity caused by the physical interactions between concrete and the human sensory system> being placed in <an area of the brain> where the <human's mind> will look for <tactile sensations>, then when the <mind> checks that <area of the brain>, the <human> "has the subjective experience" of <feeling the texture of concrete>.

[Luke Skywalker]

the <human> "has the subjective experience" of <feeling the texture of concrete>.

There is no first cause explanation for why this "subjective experience" occurs as a consequence of the patterns you mentioned, but not, for example, when a sun undergoes nuclear fusion.

The problem with your software analogy is that it's really, really easy to explain how software appears out of physical laws, like why hardware can produce lights on a screen or store data. Because the software itself is just elementary particles, whether it's the elementary particles of the memory card or the elementary particles of the photons you see coming out of your screen.

If someone asks you why computers have software but peanut jars do not, you can easily explain why.

But you cannot explain why, using fundamental particle interactions, neural activity creates this subjective experience without the circular argument of pointing out that it does.

[Jub]

I actually recall using that description in the first or second page, and then repeating it multiple times to yourself, with you repeating the phrase to me on multiple occasions.

I might have missed it if it wasn't in a post directed at me. Care to re-post your exact definition and explain why it was so hard to copy paste it so we could avoid this back and forth?

It worked fine for you to cite and stand by research on it, you fucking hypocrite.

I took a guess after pages of back and forth and was lucky enough to stumble upon something that met your definition. Also the definitions you have given are vague and ill defined, if I gave you nothing as I was doing you would have whined that I was repeating myself, now you're whining that I took a wild ass guess and scored a hit... Go fuck yourself.

Back down and concede before I humiliate you by posting all of the times where I used exactly that phrase.

I had to catch you in your hypocrisy to get you to concede.

If you had any desire to conduct this debate properly you could have reposted it with at least the level of clarity that my definition had ages ago. Your failure to reply to a direct question is not on me.

Because you led me on to believe you did, with phrases like "give me a clear definition so we can help you out", and lectures on neuroscience, and, you know, asking for a clearer definition so you could give me what I wanted!

Have I not attempted to do so by linking you to those studies? When did I need to become an expert to be able to provide insight into something?
Plus pot calling kettle black much, I mean I am clearly more informed about this subject than you are our those links wouldn't have been news to you. Hell half of those stories I linked to I heard about here in SLaM and recalled well enough to google them for you.

Now after I've finally flushed you out by catching you in your own double standard, you reveal that you had no intention of answering the question all along?

I'm not an expert so I don't have a broad enough knowledge to answer a poorly defined question. If you narrow things down for me I can research them and by using my above average research skills attempt to answer your questions.

So I'm young, but I don't see how that has anything to do with scientific aptitude. You have no background or aptitude in science, so your age is irrelevant here.

I have a broad background in many things and a decent skill at information retrieval, just because I haven't gone to school for any given thing doesn't mean I don't know more than you do about it. All it means is that I will bow to the experts if/when they choose to pipe up and correct me.

[Simon_Jester]

Finally got a chance to reply to Luke. I am going to try to avoid any insulting remarks other than ones that are, well, self-evidently correct as a matter of fact and which actually constitute advice Luke could profit from.

Oh, look, another me-tooer! Let's see what this jokester has to say...

I was participating in this thread from this morning; unfortunately the computer ate my first post or I'd have had another one some time on the morning of the sixth. Please try to remember these things before mocking people for being late joiners and me-tooers.

You sure come across as overconfident, overbearing, underinformed, and in general a poster child for the
Dunning-Kruger effect. And... you are what, a college sophomore plus or minus a little? You should, at this time, still seriously want to grow and become more intellectually fit as a fully developed thinking human. If you want that for yourself, stop and think this through.

OK, so far, nothing but ad hominems, but this is OK; often times you preface your real arguments with ad hominems. That's fine.

Nonono.

See, if you remember your dictionary, an ad hominem is when I argue "the person claiming this is bad or inferior, therefore their argument is wrong." That is not what I'm doing. I'm claiming "the person claiming this is doing something inappropriate, not realizing it, AND their argument is wrong."

Since the entire reason there's something wrong with your argument is because you're doing some important thing(s) wrong, that is not an ad hominem.

It's like, if you were trying to drive screws into wood with a hammer, and I say "your problem is, you're treating those screws like they were nails and it isn't working," that is not an ad hominem.

And if I remark that you come across as defensive and obtuse when you repeatedly insist that you're doing it right, that's not an ad hominem either. At worst it's an insult- it isn't really even that- but at worst it's an insult, and you've said far more insulting things on this thread already, so you are in no position to criticize me on that, even if I were insulting you unfairly, which honestly I'm really not.

Moreover, if I remark that the professional carpenters who've told you you're doing it wrong are helpful and you should listen to them, and that by yelling at them and insulting them you make yourself look sophomoric and foolish... that is ALSO not an ad hominem.

I am not saying "you have an attitude problem, therefore your argument is incorrect." I am saying:

"You have made a mistake. Your attitude problem contributes to the mistake you're making, and if you want to become an effective thinker and debater, you really do need to stop and get your mind in order so your attitude problem stops getting in the way."
_______________________________

Multiple people with real credentials and work experience in relevant fields have tried to tell you various things about your opinions on this subject. They have told you your opinions are unfounded. They have told you that you are using terms imprecisely. They have told you that philosophically your position is problematic.

This is the classic SDN.net style me-tooing post: you point out that "lots of other people have told you that you are wrong" to get brownie points, but don't bother to actually refute specific contentions I make or make any original material of your own.

Actually, since you never really replied adequately to my post from this morning, I already refuted a number of specific contentions you made, and made original material of my own.

Before I try again, I wish to point out that others have already done a great deal of work here... and that you didn't listen to them.

Please, for the sake of not turning into an idiot, please listen to what I'm saying. Dismissing it out of arrogance will not help.

They have told you specific, scientifically known things about how thought works and how neural patterns in the brain can interact and how this relates to our qualitative experience of the world.

More evidence of a me-tooer: you can't be bothered to read. The question of how neural patterns in the brain can interact and relate to our qualitative experience is not something I ever bothered to argue with because I agree with the science. The question is where the PHYSICS BASED, not neuroscientific/observational, mathematical derivation comes from.

This is a point I've been repeating dozens of times over the course of this discussion.

And dozens of times, including by me, you have been told that this issue is less important than you think it is, for a whole pile of very good and compelling reasons... and that even though it's not that important there are STILL considerable amounts of scientific knowledge that specifically shed light on the question you just asked.

You have ignored seemingly all of this, and in the process several analogies have sailed completely over your heads. The more technical the explanations you are given, the quicker you are to dismiss them as "oh, you just memorized a bunch of buzz-words you don't understand."

Please, stop and think this through. What you're doing is wrong, and it's bad for you.

You have been persistently rude, dismissive, and repetitive in your responses to all these people.

Because I literally repeated the above point (there's obviously scientific evidence that consciousness is caused by physical processes but not an elementary QM one) dozens of times and you still misinterpret it!

If you would please read other people's posts more closely, you would find that there is no particular misunderstanding of what you actually said.

Others have noted that, for example, dwelling on quantum mechanics in a thread about consciousness is unhelpful. Which, frankly, it is. And they only did that after you talked about quantum mechanics in a way that very strongly suggested that you did expect it to be relevant. Or that, by a logical extension that should have been obvious to anyone who knows what quantum mechanics is, that any single, specific subset of the laws of physics would have little direct application. Indirectly, maybe it acts as a security blanket for you to say "all can be derived from the configuration of incalculable numbers of particles interacting under a set of equations that I couldn't apply to them all if I had a computer the size of the Solar System; all's well with the world!"

But that entire line of questioning is you wanting a security blanket, not you accurately reflecting lines of questioning that are of interest to science as a whole. The only thing you have that's remotely interesting is the question "what is the physical basis for qualia," and you've been so busy dancing around shaking your arrogance and ignorance in people's faces, you didn't even notice when that question was answered.

Their knowledge is broad (acquired over long timescales) and deep (including actual professional work in fields related to the understanding of thought, intelligence, and consciousness). Your knowledge, by comparison, is relatively narrow (highly limited to specific fields, by all evidence I've seen so far) and shallow (since you have not even completed one undergraduate degree, let alone extensive graduate education and work experience in relevant fields). They have informed you that in light of their (broad and deep) knowledge, you with your narrow and shallow knowledge are making fundamental errors, errors they have seen before because unlike you they have been studying this matter for much longer and have repeatedly seen people at all levels of knowledge and understanding discuss the subject.

And yet you have the temerity to accuse them of ignorantly parroting buzz words and not knowing basic facts about their own professions.

Contrary to what you may have picked up by reading this forum or others like it in childhood, accusations of intellectual dishonesty, bias, and fallacious reasoning are NOT just shit people fling at each other randomly. They are specific, highly significant arguments about the structure and validity of your opinions, and the ability to recognize such fallacies and point them out was actually a huge step in the evolution of human reasoning power. Ignore that at your peril. Treat it like it's just people slinging shit and the appropriate response is to screech and posture like a monkey whose social status in the monkey tribe is threatened... and you will become a true and complete idiot.
______________________________

For example:

When people accuse you of repeatedly denying a thing without proving that denial is justified...

If you aspire to be a smart person, you listen to them.

ONLY after you have engaged with their argument extensively, questioned them about their views, and taken a moment to double-check yourself are you justified in saying "oh, they're just ignoring my repeated explanations!" At which point you should disengage yourself from the conversation, because there's a fairly high chance, in my experience, that you are wrong about having adequately explained this subject. Repeatedly calling people stupid for not 'understanding' an explanation that is actually gibberish, just because you've repeated the gibberish four times, makes you look like an utter fool.

So my advice is, either listen politely to the people accusing you of poor reasoning, at least long enough to really understand the reasoning behind the accusation... Or leave the damn thread. One or the other.

Don't patronize me, you ignorant little pea brained worm. This entire post consists of nothing original or non-derivative, but instead vague sound bites, ad hominem attacks, and declaration of victory absent in any argumentation or refutation of my own.

Hey, I tried giving you a post full of substance this morning. You ignored it.

So I am prefacing any further discussion with you with this: I urge you to stop, take a breath, and apply some humility and mental flexibility to your situation. You're making a fool of yourself and so far you haven't even noticed, and that's bad.

Moreso, you clearly misrepresent positions that have been clarified on multiple occasions so that you can "me-too" others who at least bothered to make original arguments.

The misrepresentations exist entirely in your head, Luke, that's my point. If you cannot and will not free your mind from this trap of Dunning-Kruger arrogance, you cannot be a worthwhile participant in intellectual discussions. You're doing the same thing in two threads simultaneously- repeatedly dismissing expert testimony because clearly NO ONE UNDERSTANDS YOUR GENIUS, or they would OBVIOUSLY agree with whatever sophomoric idea you just came up with.

Come on, man; you're smarter than this!

That especially includes Ziggy and Starglider, although I suspect both of them have already decided they don't have time to indulge the belligerent ignorance you have displayed to them. I would, in their shoes.

Starglider claimed that physics does not apply to neuroscience. How the fuck am I supposed to take him seriously?

Starglider claimed no such things.

Look, let's be frank. By your own admission elsewhere, you haven't even completed a physics minor. You sound like you're shaky on partial differential equations, which are pretty much a prerequisite for a rigorous grasp of quantum mechanics. Because its most basic concepts are stated in the form of a partial differential equation.

As such, I have to ask, do you know any quantum mechanics? Do you have a coherent understanding of what it is and is not for, what it can and cannot usefully do? I mean, in theory you could have obtained such an understanding without learning the math. But so far you have given me little reason to believe you have.

I've taken one undergraduate and two graduate courses on the subject, and I assure you- it is a hell of a lot more useful for understanding the behavior of individual particles than it is for understanding objects the size of a cell in the brain. If you really want a meaningful, mathematical, rigorous explanation of the physical basis for consciousness and qualia... the word "quantum" is not going to appear and will serve only to distract people. Schrodinger's equation will not make an appearance. Nor will the field theory equations.

Which is what Starglider said- you just didn't pay enough attention.

Now, if you would like to have a reasoned discussion on the subject, I for one offer my services- on one condition. I expect you to restate your position to me in clearly defined terms. No screeching about how you've already explained it 23 times, because I am not going back through fifty posts on this thread to ferret out multiple times you said vaguely related things that may or may not contradict each other and which you may or may not still stand by. If I do, the whole thing will decay into a mass of quote spaghetti.

Hell, maybe we could make a Coliseum thing out of it; the thing's been gathering dust for four and a half years.

If you don't know what my position on something is and are not willing to look for it, you fucking ask me, you do not assume you know what it is, as you've tried to do on multiple occasions here.

I did ask. I even responded, in writing, on Page 2.

But, since you have repeatedly asserted (angrily) that other people are misunderstanding you, I thought that, in order to clarify the situation, you might want to take a chance to restate your position. In a clear, unambiguous way. With no random side remarks, no random crap, no "oh but I was misunderstood" involved, just you using your writing skills to represent your actual opinions as accurately as you can.

Because I really am skeptical of the idea that the reason people keep misunderstanding you over and over is that suddenly everyone except you has been struck with a stupidity-causing virus or something. I think that, if you are actually interested in having this discussion, you really should take some time to restate your actual position, rather than just asserting that it's "obvious" from the weighted average of a dozen posts and yelling at literally everyone who disagrees with you for having misunderstood you.

Again, if you want to have a real discussion and not just an excuse to waste time calling successful professionals in demanding fields "stupid," you really should take some time out to restate your position.

It would probably take considerably less time and effort than you've already wasted insulting people for trying to teach you something about science.

I'd welcome a debate with you, however dull and shallow it may be. You are welcome to initiate it.

I just did.

[Luke Skywalker]

Qualia is the sensations you feel in the little "video camera" that goes on in your mind, ie, experiences that only you can feel and that cannot directly be picked up by any physical instrumentation. Once again you run into tautologies when you ask for a scientifically rigorous definition because the entire problem is it's hard to do so, because all other observations can be described mathematically through constituent elementary particles or properties of said particles, except for consciousness! Yet it doubtlessly exists, just as everybody here agrees.

^directed at you, which you responded to.

Consciousness as in the electrical impulses that can be observed is NOT the mystery we are discussing.
Consciousness as in the subjective qualia, the "inner video camera" in our minds, is what we are discussing.

Furthermore, it isn't "self evident" at all that neuroscience leads to conscious minds. It's evident to us because we clearly observe it just by the definition of observation, but from our laws of physics you can't come up with the idea of there being an inner "camera" in people's minds at all. But that's besides the point - the point is I asked for a first principles explanation for the final leap from neural activity to consciousness, and all your puny brain could muster is the word "self evident", as though that were an equation or something.

directed at you, you responded.

More circular reasoning! Nowhere do physical laws predict that these neural nets will attain consciousness, they merely predict that neural nets with certain electrical impulses that can will the human body to move and respond to stimuli exist. But human locomotion, arousal, etc, are not the same thing as me having an inner video camera within my head!

directed at you, you not only responded but used the phrasing!

You admitted it's like an inner camera - physical things are not like inner cameras. We know this from all of modern science.

directed at you

I have already defined it shitface, it's the inner camera that exists in your mind, the experiences that (your unsubstantiated wiring argument aside) are not attainable by others and not composed of elementary particles.

Directed at you!

What "above average research skills"?

Have I not attempted to do so by linking you to those studies?

Dude, I'm not even exaggerating a single iota when I say that I've explained to you that I'm looking for a physics, not neuroscience, definition more than 12 times by now, usually multiple times in every post of mine. Your cluelessness is getting kind of comedic.

I'm not an expert so I don't have a broad enough knowledge to answer a poorly defined question.

Then why the fuck did you suggest you were going to try, and why did you try to bluff that you knew what you were talking about until you were finally flushed out?

I have a broad background in many things

LOL, so when you say to defer to your "elders" who are presumably more experienced in the subject, it's really just a guy who's read some Wikipedia articles?

Versus someone who at least is in the process of a formal education in a marginally related field?

What veneer of superiority did you seek to maintain again?

[Zeropoint]

But you cannot explain why, using fundamental particle interactions, neural activity creates this subjective experience without the circular argument of pointing out that it does.

So . . . your big claim is that we don't have 100% complete knowledge of how the brain works? I don't think anyone here disagrees with that. We freely admit that there's a gap in our knowledge here and that we're very excited about filling it, as we've been making exciting progress toward recently.

There is no first cause explanation for why this "subjective experience" occurs as a consequence of the patterns you mentioned, but not, for example, when a sun undergoes nuclear fusion.

Stars aren't information storage and processing systems; brains are.

Because the software itself is just elementary particles

Well, no. It would much more accurate to say that the software is represented by an arrangement of elementary particles which includes both the stored information and a system capable of manipulating that information.

If someone asks you why computers have software but peanut jars do not, you can easily explain why.

If you give me ENOUGH peanut jars, I can run Doom on them, although the frame rate won't be very good.

[Luke Skywalker]

Finally got a chance to reply to Luke. I am going to try to avoid any insulting remarks other than ones that are, well, self-evidently correct as a matter of fact and which actually constitute advice Luke could profit from.

And just what credentials do you have to give me "advice" I could "profit from"? You've registered for a particular internet forum for a longer time?

I was participating in this thread from this morning; unfortunately the computer ate my first post or I'd have had another one some time on the morning of the sixth. Please try to remember these things before mocking people for being late joiners and me-tooers.

Late joiners and me-tooers are not the same. I just addressed somebody's late entrance with perfect civility - your problem is you suddenly jump in with "we've won, look at how beaten you are!" rhetoric rather than actual arguments. It's nothing to do with how many pages have gone by.

I don't understand why I should take seriously the advice of someone who can't grasp such elementary concepts.

See, if you remember your dictionary, an ad hominem is when I argue "the person claiming this is bad or inferior, therefore their argument is wrong." That is not what I'm doing. I'm claiming "the person claiming this is doing something inappropriate, not realizing it, AND their argument is wrong."

You're full of shit. Nowhere in your post did you make any warrant for why my argument is wrong; you only addressed my personal qualities.

Since the entire reason there's something wrong with your argument is because you're doing some important thing(s) wrong, that is not an ad hominem.

Being rude (as though you were being particularly polite, or that the rudeness was not initiated out of nowhere by another participant) has nothing to do with whether my argument is logically valid. Appealing to authority also is a logical fallacy.

"You have made a mistake.

You should have focused on this point, actually addressing the specific arguments made during the debate, rather than trying to educate me on how to become a "more effective thinker". As though you somehow had some manner of superiority over me in that field.

Actually, since you never really replied adequately to my post from this morning, I already refuted a number of specific contentions you made, and made original material of my own.

They are not very good:

I don't see why the fact that this is tricky to do strikes you as so problematic. Qualia (the things you're talking about) occupy a well-known relationship with patterns of neural activity.

Well known in that we can establish observational correlations. Not well known in that they are evident or even theoretically compatible with fundamental physical laws.

(this has been repeated as a point probably more than anything else in this thread)

We understand how the taste of sugar triggers neural activity. We understand that we evolved to find sugar pleasant. We understand that the neural activity triggered by sugar is related to a certain (sugary) qualia.

Nothing here is anything I've disputed.

This last part of the relationship is not fully understood in the sense that we don't know why sugar tastes pleasantly like sugar, instead of pleasantly like something else. But that doesn't mean there is no mechanism.

There is no first-principles mechanism, yet there is one for everything else in reality. Me taking a shit, a dog running, computers showing lights, human attractiveness can in theory be boiled down into elementary particles obeying mathematical laws.

The problem here is that qualities such as tensile strength can reduce to elementary properties such as spin and angular momentum, but "qualia" and "pleasant taste" do not evidently aggregate from particles behaving through fundamental forces.

]And dozens of times, including by me, you have been told that this issue is less important than you think it is, for a whole pile of very good and compelling reasons... and that even though it's not that important there are STILL considerable amounts of scientific knowledge that specifically shed light on the question you just asked.

This is the only argument you provided, in effect:

Except that in most cases, this is a terribly inefficient way to understand a complex physical system.

Efficiency isn't the concern here. We're not dealing with practicalities; we are dealing with the philosophical (or scientific, if that suits your ears better) incapability.

Fundamental physics has properties and wave equations that do not collude with qualia.

I'm not saying anything new, either; all these points have already been made.

Others have noted that, for example, dwelling on quantum mechanics in a thread about consciousness is unhelpful. Which, frankly, it is.

You still don't understand what's going on, do you? The point is the principle that quantum mechanics could technically explain why you take a dump, why airplanes fly and why dogs pee, but not qualia.

Starglider claimed no such things.

You lie to my face, and claim the moral high ground?

Starglider:

Why would physics be concerned with the structural details of nervous systems?

Look, let's be frank. By your own admission elsewhere, you haven't even completed a physics minor. You sound like you're shaky on partial differential equations, which are pretty much a prerequisite for a rigorous grasp of quantum mechanics. Because its most basic concepts are stated in the form of a partial differential equation.

As such, I have to ask, do you know any quantum mechanics? Do you have a coherent understanding of what it is and is not for, what it can and cannot usefully do? I mean, in theory you could have obtained such an understanding without learning the math. But so far you have given me little reason to believe you have.

I've taken one undergraduate and two graduate courses on the subject, and I assure you- it is a hell of a lot more useful for understanding the behavior of individual particles than it is for understanding objects the size of a cell in the brain. If you really want a meaningful, mathematical, rigorous explanation of the physical basis for consciousness and qualia... the word "quantum" is not going to appear and will serve only to distract people. Schrodinger's equation will not make an appearance. Nor will the field theory equations.

Which is what Starglider said- you just didn't pay enough attention.

I have literally responded to every single brilliant argument you've made in this post a hundred times over. I could have simply copy-pasted prepackaged responses and been done with it.

The question is not that quantum mechanics is practical in predicting the behavior of neurons - this should be obvious from my analogy that quantum mechanics can predict people taking shits. There's a different principle going on that you should have figured out by now.

[Jub]

Qualia is the sensations you feel in the little "video camera" that goes on in your mind, ie, experiences that only you can feel and that cannot directly be picked up by any physical instrumentation.

This is still a terrible definition and one ignorant of the fact that qualia can be tested in a physical fashion by probing the brain. The biggest confusion in all of this is that you seem to understand that qualia and neuroscience are linked, but won't accept that what explains one won't explain the other.

Notice how much clearer something like "Qualia, the study of how the human brain processes and stores the results of external stimuli" is when compared to "Qualia is the sensations you feel in the little "video camera" that goes on in your mind, ie, experiences that only you can feel and that cannot directly be picked up by any physical instrumentation." Your definition is rambling, unclear, and shows little thought about the subject matter. It's also broad in that 'video camera' doesn't really tell us that much about what you actually mean.

I'd expect a university student to be able to phrase a question in a manner that can be answered.

For the rest of this you keep repeating that ineffective camera phrase and assert that I myself used it. I used it only to throw it back at you because at no point was I ever completely sure what you were even asking about. You also waffle back and forth between rejecting us trying to explain the term in relation to neuroscience and demanding that we do so.

We've been saying from the start that the way to understand qualia is to observe the brain. This is because most neuroscience is observational science where math and experimentation meet, it's also a young science and asking for a grand unified theory of neuroscience is like me asking for the ever elusive unified theory of relativity, I would do so not expecting any hard or defined answers because such a theory doesn't yet exist in the very greatest of minds and most ideas for finding one thus far have failed. Neuroscience isn't even that far yet and I doubt anybody on this planet could answer your question in the way you demand it be given your ill defined terms and piss poor way of explaining things.

Dude, I'm not even exaggerating a single iota when I say that I've explained to you that I'm looking for a physics, not neuroscience, definition more than 12 times by now, usually multiple times in every post of mine. Your cluelessness is getting kind of comedic.

Why do you need this from a physics standpoint? Why is showing what neuroscience can do somehow invalid if a physicist hasn't signed off on it?

Then why the fuck did you suggest you were going to try, and why did you try to bluff that you knew what you were talking about until you were finally flushed out?

Because perhaps I'd heard of something that might be relevant to the discussion in my travels, or maybe with clarification we could get to the point where we realized that your question has no answers because the philosophy behind it is flawed? I never claimed to be an expert, but I was trying to help by getting you to clearly state what you wanted.

LOL, so when you say to defer to your "elders" who are presumably more experienced in the subject, it's really just a guy who's read some Wikipedia articles?

No, if we were talking history or law I'd be sure to give Thanas his due, in the field of AI research I'd ask what Starglider thinks and so on. My knowledge might not be university grade, but I do actually read texts on the subjects that interest me and seek out knowledge at my level to digest.

Versus someone who at least is in the process of a formal education in a marginally related field?

You've passed a few entry level courses in a field you've demonstrated that you know shit all about, do you want a fucking cookie?

[Luke Skywalker]

So . . . your big claim is that we don't have 100% complete knowledge of how the brain works? I don't think anyone here disagrees with that. We freely admit that there's a gap in our knowledge here and that we're very excited about filling it, as we've been making exciting progress toward recently.

The problem is that while we can understand how properties such as angular momentum and spin could aggregate into tensile strength and density over macroscopic scales, or reduce to Newton/Maxwell, there is no argument for how quantum mechanical functions could aggregate into subjective qualia over arbitrary configurations of data.

Stars aren't information storage and processing systems; brains are.

You're still arguing in circles. What is the physical cause for these information systems causing qualia? There's a clear physical cause for hardware storage systems to cause software!

Well, no. It would much more accurate to say that the software is represented by an arrangement of elementary particles which includes both the stored information and a system capable of manipulating that information.

...because the arrangement of particles is such that they interact in a manner through physical laws that produces whatever you want on the screen.

If you give me ENOUGH peanut jars, I can run Doom on them, although the frame rate won't be very good.

And there is no extra-physical "qualia" going on behind it. Why?

[Luke Skywalker]

This is still a terrible definition

YOUR PROFESSIONAL RESEARCH SOURCES USED IT, and you claimed I had never given it to you before!

I'll take your concession.

I used it only to throw it back at you because at no point was I ever completely sure what you were even asking about.

Just show some integrity and admit that I did provide you the definition in clear wording in multiple occasions, and we can move on. I just provided quite irrefutable evidence to that effect.

You also waffle back and forth between rejecting us trying to explain the term in relation to neuroscience and demanding that we do so.

I never demanded you explain it in terms of neuroscience because I stated explicitly multiple times that I already know neuroscience can explain it.

Once again, this has to be the 39th time I've explained this to you.

asking for a grand unified theory of neuroscience is like me asking for the ever elusive unified theory of relativity

The unification of GR and QM has not been accomplished, but both theories are mathematical in nature, and so a quantum theory of gravity is in principle possible - and many self-consistent ones have been developed.

The question of how spins and momentums can aggregate to create qualia is not something that even has any foundation in modern science.

Why do you need this from a physics standpoint?

Why are you just asking me this now? Did it finally get through to you that...

...wait, I already answered this question, didn't I?

It's a conceptual/foundational thing, because we know that all other sciences, and indeed all of reality, can be explained through physics in principle, and so qualia being different seems out of place.

But now you've goalpost shifted all the way back into questioning the use of the OP, which is funny that you've continued to debate it.

Why is showing what neuroscience can do somehow invalid if a physicist hasn't signed off on it?

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

I NEVER DENIED THE VALIDITY OF COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE IN ANY POST, AND CLEARLY DELINEATED TO YOU THE OPPOSITE SENTIMENT. MY QUESTION IS MORE PHILISOPHICAL IN NATURE. WHAT PART OF THIS DO YOU NOT FUCKING UNDERSTAND?

Because perhaps I'd heard of something that might be relevant to the discussion in my travels

You pontificate about showing deference to your elders and then reveal that you've absolutely no qualifications beyond your own travels?

No, if we were talking history or law I'd be sure to give Thanas his due, in the field of AI research I'd ask what Starglider thinks and so on. My knowledge might not be university grade, but I do actually read texts on the subjects that interest me and seek out knowledge at my level to digest.

So you're trying to speak to me from a position of haughty authority because you've "read texts on the subjects"?

I've read texts on the subjects, and by texts I mean university textbooks.

You've passed a few entry level courses in a field you've demonstrated that you know shit all about, do you want a fucking cookie?

Jub, you literally have no authority to speak on any of these issues, and you have one of the most glaring inabilities to understand the English language I've ever seen. The problem with debating with you is that, as I demonstrated through pulling quotations, YOU HAVE TO REPEAT THE SAME SENTENCE 20 TIMES OVER 2 PAGES TO YOU before you finally address it!

And then you claim you have "above average research skills" WTF does that even mean? Why couldn't you use them to fact check yourself before you decided to deny my ever using the camera analogy?