But haven't we not known what we are from the beginning of time up to this very instant? Can not our perception of consciousness grow?

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The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

We do know: you are what you eat. Seriously, you're asking if we're on a path of consciousness-raising. I don't know-- some believe they can raise their own consciousness via mental and physical exertions of various kinds. I suppose we must allow that someone who perceives a higher consciousness may have actually achieved it. My guess is that "higher consciousness", objectively speaking, should involve, in the introspective image space, a sense that consciousness does not belong to our identity but is shared among identities, in the emotional image space, a profound empathy for others, and in the behavioral image space, random acts of kindness and generosity. But that's just a guess.

That's the power light.
The switched me off and on at the wall and I'm fine again.

Grant Hutchison

Oh-oh. Syntax error.
Better reboot again.

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Orion's Arm . The Starlark . Voices: Future Tense . OA Flickr set

Well, that's what the philosophers get to argue about. According to how they think consciousness works, the "zombie" concept works or doesn't work.
I think I'm with Dennett on philosophers' zombies. He describes our reaction to them as "accepting the zombic hunch": we think we can imagine such an entity, but when we get down to thinking about the imaginary details, it all gets a bit light and hazy. Susan Blackmore's book, Conversations on Consciousness, is replete with examples of people getting themselves in a mental pickle over the concept of zombies.
For the purposes of Joe Durnavich's discussion, though, the validity or otherwise of the zombie thought experiment isn't particularly relevant. If we can entertain Dennett's zombic hunch, and examine our reactions to the concept, we can decide what we think about people who show the behaviour of empathy without empathy taking place in their heads. Likewise those who behave lovingly without experiencing love, behave angrily without experiencing anger, or evince sadness without feeling sad.
A lot of people find that rather disturbing. The case of Harold Shipman, the British doctor who killed an unknown number of patients, points up that feeling: he was widely regarded as an empathic and caring doctor, and then it turned out he'd been murdering patients for their money. There was revulsion because of the violation of trust, for sure, but the simulation of caring was another feature that people had trouble dealing with.

No, there's no functional neural definition of consciousness, apart from to say that a complete absence of activity in a biological brain is not compatible with consciousness, or indeed life.
I personally think we're starting to tease out aspects of consciousness from fMRI and other fast scanning techniques, but that's just a hopeful seeking towards some final understanding of consciousness, not any kind of definition.
With regard to electronic devices, I'm utterly agnostic. If we don't know how brains do "it", I wouldn't care to make any statements about how electronics might do it.

Grant Hutchison

<<simulates laughter>>

Grant Hutchison

My point is that perhaps psychology, and sciences in general, have their own pace that we shouldn't interfere with. Maybe the "divergent schools of thought" stage is a necessary phase to get to grander things. We should give scientists some room to explore and to make mistakes.

To give you a different example, simply amassing large amounts of data without attempting to draw any inference from them is not science; yet observation is an important stage in the development of a science. Until the 19th century, most of biology consisted of observing, describing and classifying hundreds of living beings -- a task similar to coin or stamp collection. This was not science yet, but it laid the foundation for Darwin and Mendel's breakthroughs. Another example: at first, chemists grouped the elements according to essentially arbitrary criteria. This was not science, but without that stage it's unlikely that Mendeleev would have discovered the periodic table.

Don't get me wrong, I understand where you are coming from. You are worried that scientists, and other people, have a tendency to infer too much from their data. I agree with this concern entirely. However, in the same spirit, I am cautioning that we shouldn't fall into the opposite extreme of dismissing everything that isn't data, or directly inferrable from physical data.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

In this forum, and especially this thread, "nonsense" is a perfect response. I love to see people living passionately. With a single word, you put me in physical contact with your passion. It's a wonderful aspect of human (and animal, I suppose) interaction. (And note to others: the word itself is not passion incarnate. It's a mistake to think there is any one thing you can point to that is "passion"--including a feeling--yet passion is very real and very relevant in our lives.)

Well, I just introspected, and I perceived the feeling of seriousness. So, by your account, then, I am serious and no further discussion is required. Seriously, I knew that the exact nature of my internal state was not your primary concern. You were more concerned about my ideas, how well they would hold up in practice, and why someone seemingly reasonable like me should hold them.

Here is my point from another angle: You suggest that actions are merely symptoms and that introspecting an inner state shows you what empathy really is. I am not denying the feeling. The problem is that there is no way for you to know what others are introspecting when they say they feel empathy. But limiting yourself to introspection, you have no way of knowing that that particular specific feeling you are having right now is empathy. There are no criteria that would let you identify it as such.

You may respond that you know it is empathy because it is the feeling you have when you are showing empathy to others, but that would only demonstrate my point that the term "empathy" functions in the broader social context. Since the feelings others have when they show empathy may be different--we just can't know--it shows that the feeling itself can't be the distinguishing characteristic of empathy.

A related problem is that your introspection is a single case. There is no way to generalize from your single case of what you think is empathy to the rest of us.

But in your view, you can't know what someone else's inner states are. Only he can introspect those. They can't be the relevant element. We have contempt for deception because of what happens in the longer term. The car salesman appears to show you empathy and you later see him doing the same act on another prospect at which time you realize it was just an act to get the sale. It is human action and its consequences that are relevant to us.

For these types of thought experiments to work, you have to follow them through in detail, which can be difficult to do well. A true zombie would be indistinguishable from a human, so it is hard for me to see why you would not be cheered up if he came over and took you out to a ballgame and paid for everything.

What if you were feeling down and your dog jumped on your lap, wagging its tail, jumping excitedly, and licked your face? Might you feel a little bit cheered up by that? If so, the dog's actions are what cheered you up. The exact nature of his inner states didn't matter as long as the dog interacted with you in the way it did.

I discussed this in my response to Grant. The problem is that if the inner state is the important thing, and only introspection shows you the inner state, you cannot know what inner state anything else--human or not--has. Empathy, generally, involves more than just the inner states

One could argue that if a true zombie simulated empathy then whatever was required to allow it to simulate the empathy would have produced something nearly exactly like true empathy. You have to think about what would go into simulating empathy. The zombie would have to assess your internal state from external cues. It would have to understand that state in order to select the proper responses. Then it would have to react in such a way that you were convinced it understood what you felt. Once these three things have been achieved, you have empathy. It isn't simulated empathy anymore, it is true empathy.

I would say the same if two programs interacted the same way. If one had an internal state that the other correctly inferred from external cues and was able to communicate that back, I would see that as empathy. The inference can only be derived from knowledge of internal states that allows one to understand the other through minimal cues. It is possible to understand that internal state in another only through experience of the state. Even if the "experience" of the internal state has been programmed it can still be considered an experience. Using the knowledge of cause and effect one program can view the other and see its external state then recall its' own memory of an internal state that produced a similar external state. When it recalls the internal state it is experiencing empathy. The empathy becomes known to the other program when the empathic program communicates in a manner that convinces the other that it has accessed that internal state.

We don't peel open peoples brains to examine internal states. We perceive external cues that we use to do a look up in our own history of experience to find one that matches those external cues. We do not have to have the exact same experience as the person we empathize with in order to have an understanding of what they may be feeling. We can fake it, but unless we're pretty good actors or the encounter is short the deception will probably be known.

When we recall memories of events that produced similar external states we re-experience the emotions that are a part of the memory. When we do that, we then have tuned our own brains to a similar state as the person that caused us to search our memory. At that point both people in the encounter are experiencing similar feelings brought on by events that could be completely separate in time and space.

Empathy is one of the most important parts of social interaction. Someone alluded to its roots in a previous post. It might have been one of the first social behaviors that led to cooperation and communication.

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The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

Ah, the old behaviourist two-step.
I just gave a fairly clear description of empathic activity in myself; most people respond to a description like that by saying, "Yeah, I get that too." So we can reach agreement about qualia without ever having to exhibit qualia-related behaviour to each other, and without ever having to peer into each other's perceptual world. It's a non-issue.

It may be that nothing ever happens in the longer term. But we would still have contempt for deception because it is deceitful; because it misrepresents an internal state. One way to realise this is to consider a vivid novel written from the "omniscient observer" point of view. We are made party to the internal states of the characters, as well as their external behaviour. When do we feel contempt for the deceitful character? When it is reported that his internal state is different from his external behaviour, or when he finally reveals his true nature by behaving badly? I certainly don't wait until the heroine is tied to the railway track, and I doubt if others do so.

You need to follow the thought experiment carefully, as you say. You are invited to imagine something with no internal life, which behaves as if it has emotions. Behaviourists generally like to dodge that one by denying the possibility, or denying the possibility of acquiring the knowledge. That's not the thought experiment: you just think about how you'd feel. Most people don't like how they'd feel. They find their emotional investment is in the internal state, rather than the external show. Unsurprisingly, a bit of bluster about how the wouldn't ever really know just makes them feel worse rather than better.

The thing I hate about dogs is their uncritical enthusiasm, so I'm a bad person to ask. But people who like dogs enjoy that sort of behaviour (so they tell me, in their vigorous defence of dogginess) because they believe it is unsimulated: that the dog is in some way sincere, or at least incapable of dissimulation. They are making an assumption about the dog's simple internal state.

Grant Hutchison

Not if the "mistakes" mean not being scientists any more. There is such a thing as backtracking, and if we had made some wrong turn in doing science, I could see that argument-- but it seems that science's progress is accelerating, not slowing, so now is no time to give up on its most fundamental principles.
Yes, the former is what I called "google science", and we can agree it is not all science is trying to do. We want to organize, not just predict, to create a sense of understanding. A google engine doesn't really organize, it categorizes and searches. Understanding is an important part of science, and this relates to the concept of "what is an explanation", and that's the interface between science and philosophy. But it's still an interface-- when the two actually permeate each other, science has lost something, not gained it.
But what part of what Mendeleev and company did benefited from not dismissing everything that isn't data, inferrable from data, or useful for organizing data and guiding new experiments? To me that is saying that scientists shouldn't dismiss what isn't science. I agree that they shouldn't, indeed I've leveled that exact criticism at Dawkins and self-proclaimed skeptics of his ilk, but I don't think we should try to mix it with science either. It dilutes it, like homeopathy.

I said directly inferrable from data. The periodic table is inferrable from the data, but not directly (not easily) -- or others would have made the inference long before Mendeleev. To make his discovery, Mendeleev could not rely just on data collection and number crunching. He needed an insight into a pattern that was not readily apparent, he needed to venture a guess, to take a leap of imagination. I'm saying that this step in his discovery was not scientific in the rigid sense you seem to wish to apply the word. It was neither data nor directly inferrable from data. But if you dismiss it you'll be throwing away the creative, speculative part of science, which a crucial one.

What if Lemaître's Big Bang theory was suggested to him by his faith in the Genesis narrative? Should we therefore prohibit future scientists from using religion as an inspiration for their theories? This is all that I'm questioning. I am all for making a careful distinction between proven science and unproven inferences or extrapolations. But I also believe that unscientific tools and paths (like faith or, say, adopting -- or even believing in -- a particular interpretation of QM) can sometimes help a particular scientist to advance science.

The lines of reasoning used by scientists, their creative inspirations if you will, do not need to be all strictly scientific, as long as the end result can be scientifically established. It seems a bad mistake to attempt to "purify" the paths that thinking people take to go from idea A to idea B. So long as in the end we manage to agree that B is the right destination, it should not matter which route each individual takes to get there. By all means, let's allow scientists to stray from the righteous path of science -- so long as they still find their way back in the end.

Can you see my point at all? I've been getting an uneasy feeling that we're talking very much past each other, lately...

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

The periodic table is an example of something that helps organize data, and guides predictions. That is certainly a crucial part of doing science, and is exactly what is lacking in the nonscience I criticize. You might imagine that the things I criticize might someday lead to something that actually is science, but the same could be said of other human activities that are more easily recognized as nonscience. We must have a way of telling science apart from nonscience, or else we have no way to know what results or discoveries share the authority of science, and which ones share the authority of astrology and homeopathy.

I never limited science to what was data or directly inferrable from data, but I require that it help organize data and/or help guide the identification of new useful data. The key point is that the chosen image space determines the type of data one receives, and it is what one uses that data for that determines whether or not one is doing science. The usefulness of what you do with that data then determines the importance of the science you do. These are all general properties of science, none of it relies on the details of the chosen image space and that's why it is so futile to argue in principle about which image space is the "best one". We just try them and see.

It makes no difference where the inspiration comes from. Where is the step in the scientific method that goes "evaluate the validity of the source of inspiration"? That is irrelevant to science, what is relevant is the methodology. This is what I'm saying, science is not defined by its goals or by its results-- all we do with those is judge the value of science. But science is defined by its methodology, and if we are introducing stages in the process (like "argue philosophically over which image space is the valid one to decide the prevailing school of thought"), then we are simply not doing science.
No, we should prohibit them from using religion to argue that they can be doing science by following some other methodology (like "know the answer in advance, and find evidence to support it"). If they use religion to inspire them, but follow scientific methodology sincerely (not a sham of it), then they are doing perfectly good science (and indeed some perfectly good science was done precisely that way).
It's not the level of proof that counts, for that will always be an open question. It is the methodology that counts as part of the proof, that is what we must decide in the here and now.
Again I have no issue with a scientist using nonscience in any way they choose, as long as they properly label it as nonscience (and stop criticizing others who use nonscience in other ways!). So I don't mind if a scientist says that a particular interpretation of QM helps them picture how to do QM. Indeed, that's what I have argued interpretations are for. What bothers me is when they seem to think they are debating which interpretation is scientifically most correct. I don't see any point in such a debate when it is based in philosophy rather than data-- the scientific theory is always the minimal one, the one that they all have to possess to conform to scientific methodology. Anything else leaves the methodology and becomes a personal belief structure-- i.e., nonscience. The only thing that could bring it back into science is using it to organize experimental data in a testable way that makes predictions or guides new experiments.
I have never said otherwise, there is no "scientific mechanism for generating scientific hypotheses". If there were, we could build apparatus to advance our science for us. But there is the ability to tell what a scientific hypothesis is, and that has to do with how you will test it. One has to be able to say "if experiment A comes out X, then my hypothesis is supported, but if it comes out Y, which is also possible according to the null hypothesis, then my hypothesis is refuted". I don't see statements of that nature in the pseudo-science that I criticize.
That is like saying "it is a bad mistake to require empirical evidence in support of conclusions, for that would be an attempt to purify the process of reaching conclusions". Science is precisely the effort of purifying the paths of reaching conclusions about objective reality (there are other purposes for "thinking" that science does not include), that's why we invented it. I'm not requiring anything other than distinguishing science for one of its own defining characteristics.
But what route will we use to agree that B is the right destination? This is the issue (scientific methodology defines that route, no other route can be counted as science).

I can agree with that if we further add: so long as they don't pretend they are still on the path to the point that there would be no need to find their way "back". It is not the straying I object to, that is a personal choice-- it is the lack of recognition of the straying, blurring the lines between a scientist and other ways of straying from science. In other words, I don't say "you can't stray, you have been sentenced to being a scientist", I say "stray all you like, it's a free country, but don't pretend that you bring the authority of science with you on your way, and don't look down your nose at the other people who are not on that path for other reasons."

Indeed, it all reminds me a bit of a scene from the WWII classic movie "A Bridge Too Far". At one point, the British troops are wandering behind German lines, having had almost everything go wrong that could, and they see a group of inmates from a bombed insane asylum, also wandering. The implication was not "look at those insane people who have lost their way, how different is the situation of the well-planned invasion", but rather "how little difference is there between the plight of those inmates, who have no idea what is happening or what they are doing, and the British troops, who also have no idea what they are doing at the moment, and no good is likely to come of it for either contingent." My analogy may stress the plight of these individuals, and no direct analogy is implied between nonscientists and insane people, it merely points out the absurdity of the claim "I'm not lost I just don't know where I am".
I think this latest exchange will greatly clarify why I don't think my position is really that far from yours.