Re: Making your mind up

On 12/04/2024 13:56, Martin Harran wrote:

On Thu, 11 Apr 2024 21:32:18 -0500, DB Cates <cates_db@hotmail.com>
wrote:
 

On 2024-04-11 2:42 AM, Martin Harran wrote:

On Wed, 10 Apr 2024 10:19:45 -0500, DB Cates <cates_db@hotmail.com>
wrote:

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>

As discussed just a couple of months ago, science, at least at this
point in time, cannot explain consciousness of which decision-making
is a subset.

Is this an accurate description of the problem though? I thought the most common dualist position at this point was that science cannot explain *qualia*, and that explaining the underpinnings of various visible behaviors could never even in principle account for them. When you say "consciousness" in that sentence do you mean "qualia" or "any aspect of consciousness at all"? And is "decision-making" not a visible behavior? Certainly this whole conversation seems to have built arguments on visible manifestations of it (like coming to a decision after sleeping on it, or changing one's mind).

>
Except that there are scientists working on the problem and believe they
have some promising ideas (there is a short discussion in last months
Scientific American on AI)

 They have been promising for rather a long time. As I pointed out to
you two months ago, in Matthew Cobb's book "The Idea of the Brain", he
refers back to a meeting of 20 scientists in Quebec in1953 for a 5-day
symposium on 'Brain Mechanisms and Consciousness'. Opening the
symposium, Horace "Tid" Winchell Magoun, regarded as one of the
fathers of neuroscience, warned his colleagues of 'the head-shaking
sympathy with which future investigators will probably look back upon
the groping efforts of the mid-twentieth century, for there is every
indication that the neural basis of consciousness is a problem that
will not be solved quickly'. Cobb observes that "Tid would probably
have been amused to learn that nearly seventy years later the neural
basis of consciousness is still not understood, nor, the optimism of
Science magazine notwithstanding, is there any sign of an answer on
the horizon."
 Has there been some major development since that book was published of
which I am not aware?

Plenty. Scanning technology has improved and has allowed to connect brain functioning to all kinds of conscious processes and behaviors to an extent they didn't imagine in 1953 or whenever it is they came up with the joke of the astronaut saying "I've been hundreds of times to space & have never seen God" and the neurosurgeon answering "I've operated on hundreds of brains & have never seen a thought". Dualists now straight-up grant that brain processes *correlate* to conscious activity and see dualism as a claim that this correlation isn't identity. Of course for science "correlations" is all one can ever study so it isn't an issue for developing our understanding.
The more basic behavioral tools of breaking down consciousness & mental life into distinct processes via double dissociations, studying people with brain and/or psychological disorders and running experiments have also continued bearing fruit. Antonio Damasio for example who wrote classics in the field mostly uses such methods IIRC and his first book is in 1994, over 40 years after 1953.
The study of animal and machine cognition has also made huge strides since 1953. Most of classic experiments with chimpanzees and other great apes that taught us how similar yet different from us they are were made after then. 1953 IIRC was still behaviorists looking at basic reflexes in rats and pigeons; all the cool work into the surprising intelligence of dolphins, orcas, elephants, corvids (notably Caledonian crows) as well of course as our closest relatives came after. All the classic research into human vs animal language came after. These all tell us a lot about what our consciousness is or might be and isn't.
Let's not even get into machine intelligence, which barely existed as a field in 1953 and teaches us a huge deal about human intelligence mostly (so far) by showing us what it isn't. In 1953 people still thought that a computer would have to be intelligent like a human in order to beat one at chess. Alison Gopnik's books like "The Philosophical Baby" and "The Gardener and the Carpenter" are pretty good about unifying those different strands of animal, machine & human cognitive research to give insight into consciousness (and many other things).
Anil Seth wrote "Being You" in 2021 and I think it probably gives a decent account of the current state of neuroscience and cognitive science on the question of consciousness specifically. In terms of that quote he'd probably say that it's accurate insofar that 70 years between 1953 and 2021 is by no means "quickly" and that even now one can't say the hard problem has been solved or dissolved quite yet, but that our *understanding* of the neural basis of consciousness has advanced leaps and bounds.
I'm especially surprised at you highlighting decision-making as inexplainable because ISTM it's one of the most investigated. It's what "System1/System2 thinking" is about for example.

 Incidentally, I said some time ago that I think that if we do
eventually get an understanding of consciousness, it is more likely to
come from work on machine learning and AI rather than neurology. I
said that some time before the recent explosion in AI applications and
that explosion reinforces my thinking.

I think the field of AI as it currently stands, those I hear most about at least, would benefit hugely from looking into what the research into human & animal cognition has been doing the past few decades. A lot of the talk seems stuck in, well 1953 is a good date actually - the idea that intelligence is an ineffable, incomprehensible black box to the point the Turing Test is the only way it can be tested even in principle. Which would come to a surprise to those who study animal cognition and human cognitive development.
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