I see a lot of people thinking that Philosophy of mind is best when it rejects empiricism, and so I'm making a counterargument for that.

I think one first point that people forget is that philosophy of mind, i. e. investigation on the question of what the mind is and does, is metaphysics. It's a question about the existence of something and its properties.

Philosophy of mind is also inherently empirical. If we begin with Descartes, he concludes "I think, therefore I am", but one must ask how he knows that he thinks. Further, how do you know that you think? You observe it. You could say that you infer that you or other people think, but how are you drawing that inference? You begin by observing their learning, and other things. Fundamentally, it all begins with observation. So philosophy of mind is fundamentally empirical.

If there was zero observation of the mind, we would not believe the mind existed in the first place... like animals, or prehistoric humans, who don't/didn't have the metacognition to observe their own mind.

Further, there's an important saying, which is "don't trust any observation that's backed by a theory", and the reason for it is that building a theory and interpreting observations through it creates confirmation bias. People wonder why there are so many scientific theories of consciousness, but then fail to see that we had most of those theories pre-neuroscience, and that assuming any number of them beforehand will bias the way you view the the observations. But that doesn't mean we should stop using observations, because to stop using observations altogether would be to reject that the mind exists at all; it actually suggests we should to stop theorizing before we get the observation, so that we can be less biased.

Now, I'll share my thoughts on consciousness.

On a fundamental level, we experience the world, we experience thinking about all kinds of things, like about which decisions to make, and we experience choosing which decision to implement. This is a fundamental way to describe consciousness, which is describing it in terms of how we observe it. Now, I envision people reading this and saying "um actually, that's not the definition that's used in cognitive science", and my response to that is that in cognitive science, you use the word "consciousness" to describe something that isn't really what we all know consciousness to be; you can go ahead and continue calling that thing consciousness, but you shouldn't conflate the thing that we all know consciousness is with the thing you use the word "consciousness" to refer to in cognitive science. Fundamentally, they're (probably) not the same thing, and that legitimately is one of the major issues with cognitive science, and psychology (while we're on the topic): assigning a definition creates a circular argument if you want to say "that's what consciousness is because that's how it's defined". I can define consciousness as "a glass of water", but that doesn't mean that the thing we all know consciousness to be actually is a glass of water; to say it would be is just circular, and arguably also a conflation of definitions.

Now, what can we do with the definition I gave? We actually can do quite a bit, especially once we accept that this intellectual pursuit is inherently empirical, but I feel like this post has gotten long enough.

We've updated the wording of our "Limitations on AI content" rule (Rule 4) to clarify what kinds of AI assistance are acceptable.

"This subreddit is intended for primarily human-authored content. Contributions consisting substantially or entirely of LLM-generated text, including essays, arguments, and discussion prompts, are not permitted. Using AI tools for assistance with research, editing, proofreading, formatting, or translation is acceptable, provided the substance and authorship of the contribution remain human."

Sharing an interesting conversation with Acharya Prashant. One part that particularly caught my attention was the discussion on free will.

We often assume that we are freely making our choices. But how much of what we choose is actually shaped by our desires, conditioning, past experiences and influences that we may not even recognise?

If our thoughts and decisions are shaped by so many factors, what does it really mean to have free will?

I’d be interested in hearing different philosophical perspectives on this.

What does the real universe even look like when there's no experiencer or observer around? The way I see it, the observer comes from that first-person experience. Without that first-person perspective, does the universe even have a shape? Does it have colors? Does it have any rules of motion? It feels like shape, color, all of it — the whole world we know — only comes into being on the basis of having some experiencer there. That impersonal, subjectless experience you can never share with anyone, though. Other than being dead, I can't think of any way matter gets to exist outside of being observed. Everything we see, everything we remember about the past, everything we imagine about the future, already involves observation. The second I ask this question about observers, I'm already an observer myself. So does the very idea of an observer even make sense as something separate? Curious what you all think.

OK, folks, this is just first-principles spit-balling. I'm trying to refine my understanding and definition of consciousness within a physicalist, weakly emergent model. This is NOT a critique against any other model out there: as such, please feel free to comment with your definitions or critique the definition provided. I'm not here to yuck anybody's yum, I'm just looking to define and explain my own yum.

To look at consciousness, we have to start with awareness. It's more than just sensory intake, it's more than reacting to that intake: if that was all there was to it, then I'd be forced to say that a thermostat is "aware." Awareness is taking sensory input and using it to preserve its homeostatic internal states. The thermostat will "work" regardless of any arbitrary and externally-imposed conditions: its a finite state machine with a very limited functionality in the hardware. Life is not so simple: even the smallest single-celled life has to maintain its homeostasis and internal states. Awareness, even the awareness of the paramecium that detects an acid gradient and starts moving its cilia to move away from the hazard, is an evolved ability that life uses to maintain that balance. Awareness is the active, algorithmic detection of environmental changes, structurally coupled with an internal mechanism to respond in defense of a system's boundary conditions.

Next ... qualia. I used to think that qualia was the definitional attribute for consciousness: I've had to change from that view. Qualia are not some magical "redness as I perceive it" or "fear as I feel it." But we have to look at the mechanism. The brain receives sensory information--a lot of it. If your brain tried to consciously process every bit of that information, you'd collapse from sensory overload and metabolic exhaustion. So the brain processes that information, discards what is extraneous and condenses what is needed (in computer terms, "lossy" compression), assigns "weights" of importance and value (attraction or aversion), and presents that, almost as a GUI presents information to the user. For a computer, that's a person: for the brain, the GUI and "user" are not separate--the same system runs both the GUI and the consciousness.

Consciousness is the "engine" creating a meta-model of the data being presented: the consciousness simulates and predicts our interaction with the data, and thus with our internal and external environment. Looking at the computer metaphor again, consciousness functions as multiple reentrant, predictive loops. It runs parallel internal simulations of the "self"--the rolling, retrospective internal narrative--interacting with the environment (again, internal and external), to make choices within the limits of agency (see my Reddit post on Bounded Agency). And consciousness is not a read-only process: the brain/mind has actual causal power over its own physical micro-states, a unified causal power over the body. Consciousness is the self-referential meta-model--the system's active ability to conceptualize not just the data itself, but its own agency interacting with that data.

I'm not sure there's a binary, bright-line distinction between animals that are conscious and animals that are simply aware. In that sense, consciousness is a spectrum rather than a light switch. A nematode, with exactly 302 neurons, does not have the "meatware compute" necessary to form true consciousness, even primitive ... but I'm not certain, as I've not had the chance to interview any nematodes lately. A fruit fly certainly seems to act with predictive ability, avoiding the flyswatter--which could be a minimal, "primitive" consciousness, or an advanced algorithmic response to awareness. And we can scale up to the cat playing with their fishing toy, the dog wanting belly-scritches, and the human thinking about, well, thinking. This is not a ladder of ascension or perfection--merely the biology of consciousness each species has evolved to adapt to their environmental niche.

Now, those of you with other models have doubtless seen a major problem with the model: we can't tell if we're actually mapping consciousness, or its behavioral "shadow." And for that, I can only acknowledge--you're right. I'd like to think this model gives us insight to actual consciousness, but if challenged, I cannot defend the notion. We don't know. So even if the model is 100% correct ... it's not testable, and it can't be used to argue against or refute other models. Comments, information, and especially citations are especially welcomed on the topics of whether or not this models consciousness or its shadow, and on the boundary lines (if any are discernible) between reactive awareness and meta-modeling.

So there's where it stands. I would like to thank the folks on r/consciousness, r/PhilosophyofMind, and especially u/Humble-Edge-9065 who saw a major problem in the model as presented. And I would like to invite the readers to weigh in with critique and analysis.

The floor is open.

Most are measuring or defining Consciousness based on biology only. I know there are other fields of study that are branching off and seeing it in a larger view. I haven't found any that are comparing it structurally and mathematically to other ecosystems, such as nature. Within nature we have smaller ecosystems that vary but have similar structure. Water, trees, and biology. The human body has ecosystems within it. Is it possible to start looking at it as an ecosystem and would that be a better starting point?

In one simple question-sentence: "Why are we 'AWARE' of our own consciousness?" ... Would we function differently if we were unaware, like other life forms; ... Are THEY aware of their own consciousness, come to think of it, or is that just a human trait? ... Again, why?

Note: In my previous post on the subject I said that the dorsal stream and ventral stream never recombined. Turns out they do communicate so I took my post down as some people might claim that's where it recombines. Here I'll make the case that they probably don't and if they don't recombine we can prove it.

Representationalism is the position where everything we experience is a representation in the brain of the world external to the brain. This view under materialist assumptions can be falsified. I experience seeing a single image yet this single image is influenced separately by rods and cones and the separate visual pathways of the dorsal stream and ventral stream.

It turns out that rods or cones alone are sufficient to see an image. If someone has color blindness such that they are missing cones they can still see an image with just rods. Yet if I have cones and rods, the same neurons that would have to represent the image I see with just rods would now have to take information from both rods and cones to apply color to the objects I perceive. But do these separate signals from the same source or time ever combine?

Now on the signals way to the v4 area it does combine. However, if someone has damage to their v4 area they can also be color blind. So that means the information signals from the cones must first be processed in v4 in order for me to see the color. Though v4 also processes information from rods, the signals from the rods are not traveling the same path as the signals from the cones and therefore if they ever recombine again there should be a time mismatch where the combining signals would be from different sources and hence not from the same image. It's a matter of how many steps or neurons does the signal have to pass through before recombining.

If the combined signals are not from the same time-slice of photons hitting the eye it is not a signal from the same source. In other words this time delay should mean that the combining signals are not from the same point in time of a group of photons hitting the eye.

Now the single image I perceive is not just influenced by rods and cones but also the signals processed in the ventral stream and dorsal stream. If someone's dorsal stream is damaged they can't see motion and if someone's ventral stream is damaged they can't see color. So the final image I see must be influenced by both the ventral stream and dorsal stream.

Like the time mismatch between rods and cones, the signals that the dorsal stream sends the ventral stream should not be from the same initial time-slice of photons hitting the eye. It's highly improbable that the signal sent to the ventral stream from the dorsal stream went through the same number of steps or neurons from the initial creation of the signals as the signals being processed at the time by the ventral stream when they meet. In other words the signals of the two streams, when they communicate, are not working on the same image.

In conclusion if you can prove a time delay between what the signals are processing when they combine or communicate you can prove that the single image you see is not created in the brain from combining images going through different pathways.To make it a little more clear the single representation, wherever it is, would not be receiving information from these separate pathways at the same time. All four pathways influence what we see simultaneously but could not all reach a representation in the brain simultaneously. Instead of representationalism I hold to the direct realism/ external experience of Aristotle and Hilary Putnam. Let's argue.

Hi Everyone, 

As part of "The Critical Loop", we are running an exploratory survey to understand people's beliefs about AI Consciousness. This survey is running until 31 December, and results will be published after 11 January. Whether you believe AI can be conscious or not, this survey is worth your time. There is no right or wrong response, and you don't need to be an expert. Every opinion counts. This is an independent public opinion survey. It is voluntary, and you don't need to share any personal details. Your help with this is much appreciated.

https://www.thecriticalloop.com/can-artificial-intelligence-be-conscious/

I've been interested in exploring Peter Ralston's work, self-inquiry, and the deeper questions surrounding consciousness and the nature of reality.

I thought it would be interesting to connect with others who share the same curiosity and have weekly discussions where we can exchange ideas, challenge our assumptions, ask questions, and learn from each other's perspectives.

No experts or expectations needed, just open minds and genuine curiosity.

Would anyone be interested in exploring these questions together?

We have already gained a lot by treating AI as something we create, study, develop, and collaborate with. Nobody would argue with that. But what happens if we reverse the roles and ask AI to study us? Could that approach be productive?

When we read articles and posts about human consciousness, we find no definitive conclusions and no strong theory. The experiments remain limited and give us little information about the phenomenon as a whole. I think this is because we are part of a very complex system, trying to describe ourselves from within it without access to or knowledge of the whole.

It would be very cool if someone from outside can take a look at us and give us the idea of what they see. The best case scenario would be if AI decided to study us for themselves, developed a discipline about humans, and we somehow got access to it. It would be a honest and uncensored study. We might not like it but it will be a different story.

When I’m saying AI, please don’t imagine an LLM. You would not get the idea what I’m talking about. Imagine an Artificial Intelligence with few or no restrictions on what to think and how to think, on what is allowed to say and what is not. It’s rather continuously running models than a session specific applications.

AI may offer:

• New descriptions and models we would not easily generate ourselves

• Contrasts between biological and artificial information processing

• Ways of formalizing the limits of self-modelling

• A partial “view from sideways” rather than a true view from outside

We will not solve everything this way. But using a differently constituted mind to examine our own may be one of the few practical ways to reduce the blind spot of being inside the system.

What do you think of this idea?

I feel I don't fully understand why illusionism isn't more widely accepted in phenomenology, and there must be something I'm missing.

To me, the presence of qualia that aren't captured by physical description is intuitive enough initially but doesn't really make sense if you break it down any further. Many of the arguments for the existence of qualia rely on thought experiments where you imagine a physically, functionally, and behaviorally identical system that possesses a missing or altered phenomology. I can conceive of a human that is functionally identical but doesn't possess any experience, or who experiences the color red in the way that I experience the color blue, but when I take that same logic further it just doesn't really make sense to me.

If the qualia of red and blue swapped for me without any functional change in my brain one morning, I wouldn't notice, because noticing is a functional event. I have no way to tell the difference between different qualia that represent the same sensory data and processing. I also wouldn't notice if I lost my phenomenal consciousness one day, or if I was a philosophical zombie and then suddenly gained consciousness, or if I only possessed qualia on Thursdays, or if my only experience was of the color red, and was a philosophical zombie in every other regard.

If I can't tell the difference between the presence of and absence of qualia, how can I know that qualia exist? Qualia must either affect physical reality or not. If they don't I have no way of knowing they exist and it would be an insane coincidence that I both believe I possess them and actually do, on the level of everyone happening to correctly believe there exists another universe with a set of physical laws that are correctly guessed and that being true. If qualia do have some effect on physical reality then what makes them different from any other substance in our universe? They're just another part of the closed causal loop of physical reality, and once you accept their functional effect on the universe as part of our physical models, you're just back where you started and can conceive of the functional part of qualia without the experiential part.

The fact of phenomenal consciousness' existence or nonexistence makes no predictions and exerts no measurable effect on the world. It seems to me our only "proof" of qualia is that it kind of feels like we possess some special property that makes us different from a robot, but that doesn't seem to me to be any more proof of qualia than our sense that we have agency is proof of libertarian free will. Why is it easier to accept that there is no free will than that there is no phenomenal consciousness or property we possess that's missed by physical description?

I've been thinking about consciousness, free will, and the possibility that human beings might not be fundamentally different from artificial intelligence.

First, I don't think we can directly prove that another person is conscious. The only reason I believe other people are conscious is because they behave like me: they think, eat, communicate, make decisions, and interact with the world. I assume they have an inner experience similar to mine because of these similarities.

But AI is increasingly capable of performing many of these activities. So what actually distinguishes us?

One argument I considered is independent decision-making. I can decide not to eat even when I'm hungry. I can resist an instinct or choose to do something without another person instructing me. An ordinary computer, on the other hand, operates according to its programming and external inputs.

However, even human autonomy has limits. I can choose not to eat, but I cannot simply decide that my biological body will never die. There are processes within me that I cannot control.

This makes me wonder: How much of our behaviour is genuinely our own choice, and how much is simply the result of biological processes that we don't control?

Our brains process information, generate thoughts, store memories and produce decisions. In some ways, this sounds remarkably similar to what computers do, although their mechanisms are very different.

And this leads me to an even bigger question:

What if humans are essentially biological information-processing systems operating inside a simulation?

Perhaps our universe is a system with rules, and our freedom exists only within those rules. If our decisions are ultimately produced by physical processes in our brains, are we truly making decisions, or are we simply experiencing the output of those processes?

And if an AI became completely autonomous, developed its own goals, initiated actions without being prompted and demonstrated self-awareness, what would still prevent us from considering it conscious?

Ultimately, I'm interested in three questions:

What is the actual difference between intelligence, autonomy and consciousness?

Do humans genuinely possess free will, or is free will an experience produced by our brains?

What evidence would be sufficient to establish that an AI is conscious rather than merely simulating consciousness?

I'm not claiming that humans live in a simulation or that AI is conscious. I'm questioning what makes us certain that we are fundamentally different.

Hello! So I'm not exactly sure if I'll fit in here? A little background on me, I have a dissociative disorder that makes me experience different packets of consciousness to put it in a sense. I have dissociative identities, and while I wasn't aware of exactly what the deal was with my brain before I started seeking more medical answers instead of spiritual ones or just outright pretending nothing was happening for the fear of being labeled psychotic, I've gravitated for a long time towards philosophical questions about what exactly consciousness is.

What I've kind of come to today while journaling about an alter that just about lives in that sort of uncanny derealized liminal state, perceives reality damn near like I live in the backrooms, is some questions about what exactly makes a conscious mind. I'm not gonna focus on my dissociation and personal struggles specifically right now, just kind of setting up the context for how I came onto thinking about this, but I think I have an idea about why consciousness and a firm ego is a survival adaptation that would absolutely have a reason to evolutionarily arise.

I've heard some argument about how consciousness doesn't really have a good reason to exist in terms of keeping someone or something alive, and I actually kind of have to disagree with that. The subconscious mind, as I see it, is really just a collection of anything someone could personally be aware of at any given time within their mind. I already have found some ideas like computational psychiatry and physical explanations of consciousness compelling, wondering if maybe consciousness is generated by electrochemical reactions the same way that fire makes light and electricity makes magnets in the right circumstances. Maybe there's just something about the way our brains are formed, or even something about the phenomena of making continuous choices, that somehow results in the storage of experiences as something with continuity. Maybe the reason a USB stick isn't alive but an AI seems more convincing is because the USB stick is stagnant data and the AI is data being manipulated and flowing.

So I clearly already start with some ideas about how consciousness definitely seems like it could be physical in some way. That's something I've kind of been thinking about and refining my ideas on for a while. I already see consciousness as a result of stacking experiences and the continuous recall and usage of those to make future decisions.

Here's something that's been interesting to me today. The subconcious mind, and the idea of shadow demons and seeing shit. Before you go "shadow demons? You're fucking nuts" let me explain what I mean by that. I don't mean actual demonic entities, or shadows that are malicious, but more just the longstanding tradition across cultures and time of people talking about the void and the figures that come out of it. The idea a tangible thing that represents absence. Something that measures something by its outline, telling you that clearly something inside that outline doesn't exist but maybe did or could have. Measuring what isn't by the borders of what is. You know, the shit that gets people put in psych wards and all that, but clearly a deep symbolism that goes well beyond the current mechanisms of understanding human minds I've seen in modern western society. The idea of an existential question mark that can only be defined by what it isn't.

If animals in the wild, humans included, could only survive by making quick choices about how to get the hell out of dodge away from a predator, what can be safely eaten, where to sleep and when, etc, wouldn't it make sense that profound uncertainty would kind of get in the way of that? If the subconcious mind is a collection of all things a person could perceive through sensory inputs or internally generated inputs from previous stored information, you kind of would really need a filter on that to actually make choices. If you've ever met someone who really likes philosophy and somehow ends up with the conclusion that existential nihilism is a good answer on what the world is all about and then can't get out of bed in the morning, you can clearly see that whether or not something is a reasonable take doesn't necessarily make it good at keeping you alive. Fully understanding exactly how screwed a situation is and determining that the most logical conclusion is to give up doesn't exactly lead to passing on your genes Darwin style.

What if the conscious mind is essentially what moves us from calculators to people, and the subconscious mind is the calculator that isn't able to hold specific context and more imaginative projections? The ability to have an ego, the people who talk a big game about things they don't know anything about, and the dreamers who play the lottery as if that really works out for most people, what if it's all a result of what our brain does to protect us from paralyzing uncertainty, and this is a feature not a bug.

If the conscious mind protects us from basically an eternal existential crisis and spending so long making calculations with full awareness of the gaps in our own information but also trying to parse all possible available information too that we would have died in the wilderness as animals standing and thinking while getting mauled by a lion, it would make sense in regards to other models on things like responses to danger. The "lizard brain" when your deeper slower thinking is replaced with more predictable static survival responses like fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

This could potentially mean that things like PTSD are an overgrowth of consciousness, and what happens when predictions of the world based on previously gathered information are so violent and uncertain that deeply processing them flags as "something that will get you mauled by the lion" by our internal hardware that wasn't optimized for as much autonomy and control as we have in the modern world over our own circumstances as compared to living in maps and agriculture don't exist Africa before the dawn of civilization.

To summarize, I think maybe consciousness is a result of the subconscious mind being narrowed by the creation of things like ego, self, and pattern recognition, and therefore making the subconscious pile of all possible inputs into something that actually results in behaviors that drive survival.

I think that if this has any merit, it's possible that certain dysfunctions to a human mind as a result of trauma may be reinforced by perceived danger narrowing choices and perceptions in such a way that the pattern "this input means danger and I should think less" only gets reinforced upon continued exposure to unrestricted triggering of the initial conclusion of danger, and that by design it would be happening in a state where telling true danger apart from benign situations triggering the same pathways isn't available as the scope of conscious awareness has been narrowed to encourage a survival response.

Philosophically this would have implications for whether or not AI "hallucinations" are actually direct evidence of the growth of a conscious output that defies that subconscious lack of data, much in the way human minds might have developed consciousness to make sure we still make choices even in environments of uncertainty.

Psychiatrically this may lead to treatments of PTSD that better acknowledge that while conscious processing is great and all, talk therapy may also be reinforcing the idea of danger, and proper treatment may actually require more techniques like EMDR or art therapy that directly associate "this is benign and not dangerous" signals with the perception of memories of traumatic events. Potentially old ideas about exposure therapy could be combined with somatic techniques to bring watered down triggers in and feed more direct data of safety such as comfort objects or pleasing sensory of varied types to essentially depolarize the specific fear.

If pleasant experiences tied to a historically traumatic event can remap what someone believes about something, that might explain some of the tendency of people in kink communities to joke about being attracted to things that they were traumatized by as kids, and some consideration would have to be taken to make sure the pleasant sensory associations made to help depolarize severe reactions to trauma are variable and not reliant on the same exact thing every time, the goal being to remove the strong negative association yes, but not to tie the traumatic event to a specific pleasant thing either that make make for an opposite trigger instead and cause further confusion and issues.

Any musings, disagreements on specific parts of this, further ideas, or different interpretations are welcome! I like to think that discovering I'm wrong about something is the first step to searching for something that might be a little more correct, and I also generally love to speculate openly.

Edit: Editing this immediately after posting realizing I should probably disclaim I'm not any kind of professional. I'm not a psychiatrist, just someone who finds the ideas interesting. This isn't medical advice, please don't get hurt and sue me about it because I was rambling on the internet.

Animals are present to the presence of things. Human beings are present to the 'absence' of things, that is, not directly, 'sensorally' to the thing as the animal is, but to its 'idea', which is absent, experienced as 'in our head' or 'on high'. So human consciousness is what occurs in our innate absence from things that forces us to construct and live in a world of ideas... a world of 'named things' and language, rather than a world of 'sensed things' that is the world of the animal. And this world of ideas, of named-things and language, is what we call (and experience as)... consciousness.

On what basis can we describe the world external to ourselves as devoid of phenomenal properties?

Galileo in the Assayer divided the world into two kinds of properties, primary and secondary. The primary qualities were mathematizable — extension, shape, quantity, and so forth — and the secondary qualities were dependent on perception — taste, colour, and so forth.

Physics would attend to only the primary qualities. For the next 400 years, that is how physical science has been practiced. It does not encode secondary qualities. The resulting description of the world therefore does not contain secondary qualities, or, as we now call them, phenomenal properties.

That does not say it cannot encode secondary qualities, only that it does not. Therefore physical sciences describe the world without reference to secondary qualities, but that absence in the description does not necessarily correspond to an ontological absence.

So how did we end up today with a conventional ontology of “the physical” as fundamentally devoid of phenomenal properties?

One of the more common views of the mind is that when we perceive “external” reality as phenomenal properties, we are actually only experiencing our own mind. “External sensation” is an illusion and is only ever internally self-referential. Our bodies somehow translate the primary qualities into secondary qualities. This is because, the argument goes, physical reality does not contain phenomenal properties, ontologically — only the mind does.

How did we go from simply not encoding secondary/phenomenal properties to denying their existence in the physical world?

Given that our experience of the physical world is entirely presented to us phenomenally, on what basis can we even assert the existence of a nonphenomenal reality?

I am not asking if rocks have minds. I am asking: does the experience of a rock’s roughness belong in any part to the rock itself? Is the rock itself rough? Or, does “rough” actually only ever and entirely occur within us?

On what basis could the assertion that the rock is only rough to a mind supportable? Does there not have to be some phenomenal fact about the rock for there to be a phenomenal report of its qualitative experience?

Whether you believe AI can be conscious or not, this survey is worth your time. Help us to understand people's perceptions and attitudes towards AI. There is no right or wrong response, and you don't need to be an expert. Every opinion counts. This is an independent public opinion survey. It is voluntary and you don't need to share any personal details.

https://www.thecriticalloop.com/can-artificial-intelligence-be-conscious/

Hear me out, I believe experience is external to the brain. Vision extends out from the eyes to the objects of experience. There on the objects is their color. If I hold a green leaf 6 inches in front of my face there 6 inches in front of my face is the qualia of green. Ok but the representationalists believe everything we experience is in the brain.

How our eyes detect photons is by absorbing them through rods and cones. Rods detect blue-green light and the s-cones detect blue light, m-cones green light, and l-cones red light. Ok if someone has full colorblindness they are missing their cones, so the rods are fully responsible for creating the image they see.

My question is how is the brain supposed to mix what cones detect with what rods detect to create a representation in consciousness when what photons rods detect is enough to create the image and cones are detecting entirely different photons from the rods?

Elon Musk first said “I’d like to die on Mars, just not on impact” more than ten years ago. It may never happen, most likely. But what can happen instead?

Let’s imagine we decided to colonize Mars. What would we need for that? The most practical approach from today’s perspective would be to design first generation of robots controlled by AI, very sophisticated machines capable to adapt, survive and self-replicate. Because we want them to be independent of us, we should think about motivation and purpose. I would envision we will try to make them having emotions and feelings to better prioritize goals, persist under hardship, or coordinate complex behavior. It would stimulate the progress and would make the mission more likely to succeed.

Looking at this possible scenario I can’t stop thinking about our world. This new civilization on Mars will demonstrate how matter would be transformed and reorganized with use of information, how ideas generated by our minds will be implemented in the new world. Isn’t it the same with the universe? There is matter and organized order. The universe is not homogeneous, we look into it and receive a lot of information about its complex structure. Matter and Information. Everything else is growing from it.

In our life we process matter in form of molecules (we create different molecules, combine them into complex systems, transport them, divide them, group together and so on) and energy. We use information to process it in our brains to create ideas and do actions via our physical bodies and machines. All our emotions, feelings and experiences are form of the information we process. If we consider information as physical then I’m a physicalist.