Consciousness: mind and brain relationship (General)

by David Turell , Thursday, July 25, 2019, 20:28 (1735 days ago) @ David Turell

An attempted explanation:

https://mindmatters.ai/2019/07/is-the-human-mind-a-computer/

"Let’s focus on a very simple, fundamental aspect of the mind: it has experiences. Philosophers call these experiences qualia. When we see the color red, hear a bell, or smell a flower, it is a subjective, first-person experience. Of course, there are physical processes involved but they result in a mental state. That mental state is what our conscious minds experience. This conscious state is the hard problem of consciousness. That’s our focus today.

***

"So, by the standard definitions of computer science, a computer is something that can be simulated on this abstract mathematical device. But an abstract mathematical device cannot experience qualia or consciousness. If they could, we would expect mathematical formulas like the quadratic formula or the area of a sphere to experience consciousness. But that seems absurd, so we must conclude that a computer cannot exhibit consciousness. Put another way, consciousness is not a form of computation.

***

"...consciousness is not computation but something else, generated coincidentally with computation in the physical realm.

"It should be noted that computers are actually very limited. All they can do is transform inputs into outputs. While any computing system can perform any computation (assuming sufficient time and memory), computation alone does not enable the system to act. To do anything, a computer must interact with non-computer devices in its environment—typically, screens, keyboards, mice, printers, speakers, etc.

***

"The conscious mind is not computation. However, this does not mean that computation is not involved with consciousness. Rather, the conscious mind is better understood as something that interacts with the computer than the computer itself. In particular, our conscious minds appear to be observing the outputs of our physical brains, acting as computers. What we experience as qualia are thus those inputs, manifested in our minds.

***

"we know by direct experience that we have conscious minds experiencing qualia. We also know that our brains engage in speech and writing about consciousness and qualia. It seems a highly implausible coincidence that our brains would talk about consciousness without receiving some sort of input from our consciousness. As such, they must be under some form of control by the conscious mind of the brain.

"Furthermore, I would suggest that the idea that consciousness is separate from the brain “computer” makes sense of our own experience of mind. We experience a limited degree of understanding and control over our own mind. We have a subconsciousness of which we are not fully aware. We are unaware of the details of our own thought processes. Often we have thoughts we do not want. It is as though we have some control over the inputs into our conscious mind, but it is limited. Some research suggests that we have free won’t rather than free will. That is, our conscious minds may not be able to freely choose our actions but they can veto those actions.

"However, if the conscious mind is not generated by computation, what is it generated by? Most crucially, is the conscious mind generated by a physical system? This depends on what exactly we mean by “physical.” If consciousness were shown to be caused by something non-physical, the domain of physics would simply be expanded to include the new domain. As such, consciousness is not explicable by physics as we understand it today but it is impossible to show that no physics would ever explain it. The question is simply ill-formed unless we stipulate a specific definition of “physical.”

"In any event, consciousness is not computation. There is simply no way to generate consciousness out of strictly computational tools. Instead, consciousness is something which interacts with computation. This is why we experience minds over which have partial but not complete control and knowledge. As for the causes of consciousness itself, we can know little except that they are something quite different from the laws of nature we have so far uncovered."

Comment: Doesn't solve the problem but explains how the brain as a computer interacts with consciousness, which must be seen as separate but 'attached' to the brain, whatever 'attached' means.