Free speech vs Censorship

[The_Doc_Man]

If you believe that consciousness is some result of the brains existence, then is a pocket calculator semi-conscious? Essentially the brain is just a structure of atoms, like the pocket calculator. You get inputs and outputs. One is more complex than the other, yet why should organic equate to consciousness and silicon not?

Your argument is dashed the moment you load the computer chip in that calculator with the program for a camera. Your hand-held calculator with the wrong will surely not run correctly even though the hardware has not changed. It is the software loaded in the brain's hardware, affected by experience (content), that leads to consciousness. I suggest/hypothesize that consciousness is actually the result of the brain's internal network and a type of associative memory that lets our memory call up solutions to what we have faced before.

 

[Jon]

Your argument is dashed the moment you load the computer chip in that calculator with the program for a camera. Your hand-held calculator with the wrong will surely not run correctly even though the hardware has not changed. It is the software loaded in the brain's hardware, affected by experience (content), that leads to consciousness. I suggest/hypothesize that consciousness is actually the result of the brain's internal network and a type of associative memory that lets our memory call up solutions to what we have faced before.

Some questions that my provide food for thought...

A newborn is yet to have experience outside of the mothers womb. Are you suggesting that a newborn is not conscious?

Let's go back further. As an egg is fertilised, there is no prior experience. Are you saying that this entity has zero consciousness and then all of a sudden it is conscious as soon as it has its first experience, whatever that may be?

Is the pocket calculator not all hardware, since you cannot load any software onto it because it has no backup memory?

I do not see any evidence that experience causes consciousness. But if you think it does, how after an Excel spreadsheet that someone has used a lot before. Is that experience? Is the spreadsheet conscious, or maybe the PC that runs the spreadsheet?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

A newborn is yet to have experience outside of the mothers womb. Are you suggesting that a newborn is not conscious?

In the "self-aware" sense, a newborn is not conscious in either sense of the word. There are cognitive tests that suggest it is at least a couple of weeks before everything is "up and running" inside.

Let's go back further. As an egg is fertilised, there is no prior experience. Are you saying that this entity has zero consciousness and then all of a sudden it is conscious as soon as it has its first experience, whatever that may be?

See previous answer. And then to this question, NO. Let's take it back to before the egg is fertilized. Is that egg conscious? (For clarity, let's agree that we are using "conscious" in the sense of self-aware, just as the newborn question must be in that sense.

Is the pocket calculator not all hardware, since you cannot load any software onto it because it has no backup memory?

Most of those have a boot ROM. Two jobs before my Navy job, I worked for a company that made "intelligent remote terminal units" - micro computers that could be placed "in the field" and send back reports via telemetry. They were programmed with E-pROMs to define what they monitored and what they reported.

I do not see any evidence that experience causes consciousness. But if you think it does, how after an Excel spreadsheet that someone has used a lot before. Is that experience? Is the spreadsheet conscious, or maybe the PC that runs the spreadsheet?

The question is whether the program under scrutiny can self-adjust in response to externally imposed situations. Excel cannot. (Hell, it barely handles what it is SUPPOSED to handle.) Self-adjustment, the ability to respond differently the 2nd time you encounter something, is part of but not all of consciousness. Google's "favoritism" algorithms are closer to consciousness than Excel ever would be, and I am not saying that Google is conscious either.

 

[Jon]

@The_Doc_Man To bring up the egg question is a good point. But let us take it one step further, to the level of the cell. Is the cell itself conscious? Could that cell, with a low level of consciousness, pass it on to a higher order entity? One cell - with little consciousness - when aggregated into millions of cell - is conscious, if it is a brain. But maybe also anything with a cell has a level of consciousness to it.

Can a paralysed person self adjust, or do you not consider them conscious because you cannot observe movement?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Even paralyzed persons normally can react or show non-trivial responses and respond to the 20-questions game. The ONLY time I've ever heard of a person being unable to react was if they were unconscious, catatonic, brain damaged, heavily drugged, or a victim of "locked in" syndrome (VERY rare). Self-adjust means you won't mechanically give the same answer every time you are asked the same question. At least once, the self-adjusting person might respond "you asked me that already - don't waste my time"

Asking if a single cell is conscious is like asking if a given transistor is a computer. Consciousness, if it is a second-order emergent phenomenon, doesn't apply to the parts but only to the whole.

A neuron is a single cell, but by itself it only fires or does not fire. Yet it is your neurons that make your brain what it is. The single-cell question applies even to neurons.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

Facebook is moving its content moderation staff from Commiefonrnia to Texas, to rekindle free speech on the platform and so that the moderation is more realistic and less politicized...

Mark Zuckerberg

https://twitter.com/x/status/1876612227807236310

 

[AccessBlaster]

Yup, Facebook is laying off some of their best fact-checkers.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

Yup, Facebook is laying off some of their best fact-checkers.

Is that a deliberate misspelling?

 

[Isaac]

Is that a deliberate misspelling?

Do you mean Yup? In the US we have a habit of sometimes pronouncing Yep Yep and sometimes pronouncing Yep as Yup, and also sometimes spelling it that way. I would almost like to think there is some miniscule, tiny difference in the attitude expressed, but now that I say that, I can't think how to put it into words.

 

[AccessBlaster]

Yup was the last thing I was questioning in that post, "it just shows to go ya".

 

[The_Doc_Man]

In that case, "Yup" is a colloquialism and as such is a common substitute for "yes" and "yep." Sometimes I "channel hop" when I'm not on the forum - usually because I've been on the Ancestry site and have gone brain-dead. There is a show called "Storage Wars" that involves people bidding on abandoned storage lockers to see if they can make money on the deal by salvaging the contents. One of the regulars uses "Yup" (or a drawn-out version thereof) as his alert to the auctioneer that he wants to make a bid. Therefore, I wouldn't be surprised to hear it used quite often among the people who watch that kind of show. However, to really appreciate the show, you DO need to be near brain-dead and looking for something mindless to provide noise while you recover from something or another.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Given the nature of some of the shows now on TV, Pat, there must be a lot of train wrecks out there 'cause I keep finding them.

But oddly enough, about ever three or four shows I actually learn something when someone finds a really obscure item. Pawn Stars is another show that has the same effect. Antiques Roadshow is yet another one, both the USA version and the UK version.