[newsmania]

> If it's not neurons that produce consciousness then there must be some other physical phenomena that generates experience.

Not necessarily. If you think about it, consciousness is not physical. My thoughts have no mass. My experience of the color red has no height or width. Why should we assume that something that is not physical must come from The physical world? I think the best argument is that neuron functioning correlates with thought. However, as we know, correlation does not necessarily mean causation.

I think one big hurdle for understanding consciousness is that people still have a matter – only mindset. I think people need to recognize that consciousness is not material. Then they will begin to make progress on the fundamental question, which is how something that is not material can arise from matter, or whether it comes from another source.

[bicubic]

Your thoughts actually do have mass, just like the data encoded on an SSD or hard drive has mass. If thoughts are the activity state of the brain, then the mass of the thoughts would be derived from the potential energy of the electrical impulses driving those thoughts. Your memories also have mass through a slightly different mechanism.

You could also construct a physical storage medium that doesn't change mass to encode data, e.g. an array of objects which are rotated to encode state.

This spiritualistic view that thoughts have no mass == consciousness is not material is demonstrably wrong at both sides of the equation. Thoughts certainly have mass, and consciousness is certainly material as is evidenced by observing anyone with severe traumatic brain injury or degenerative brain disease.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31326/is-a-hard-...

[gonehome]

I don't buy that at all.

It seems much more likely that consciousness is an emergent property of a neural network with the right feedback mechanisms in place and probably with some close tie in with language.

Poke someone in the brain and consciousness changes, take a tiny bit of LSD and consciousness changes - it's not a magical property.

[rixed]

> If you think about it, consciousness is not physical. My thoughts have no mass.

Could you (or anyone else who knows the meaning of "physicalism") come up with a clear definition of what "physical" means for you? Each time I read something suggesting that consciousness might not be physical I completely lost track of the meaning, a bit like when I read that some experience (or chemical!) is not "natural".

Certainly, it has nothing to do with mass or energy (or you would merely postulate the existence of some new particle with this and that properties). It certainly does not mean, either, that it is not composed of matter (like for instance sound or temperature), or you would have said "immaterial".

Maybe that's because of those years spent studying physics, but I just can't get what could exist but still not be physical (or natural) as for me those are equivalent.

[pizza]

(if thoughts are a result of non-time-reversible computational process then) observing the logical state of a computation requires a minimum quantum of energy per bit, pretty much necessitating a physical mechanism that compensates for entropy increase (but the amount of energy is only just barely greater than zero per bit, so all I can say for certain is that to be able to think is not beyond physical constraints)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

[mikeash]

Does a JPEG containing the color red have mass? Are JPEGs non-physical?

[cgio]

The JPEG itself is not physical, its storage is as is its reflection on a screen and these are two separate materialisations of the JPEG. If we assume it's the JPEG of a picture, it is the process of transforming a physical image into a physical storage of that image. The process itself is "non-physical"/mass-less (i.e. the algorithm), its realisation is physical (storage of instructions and execution).

[glenstein]

The JPEG can be thought of as an informational abstraction. However, it is always instantiated on some physical medium and it can't exist independent of some sort of instantiation.

As for consciousness, it may not depend on brains, but it may turn out to always depend on some physical medium and physical process, and that would be enough to show that it's a physical phenomena.

[cgio]

This assumes not only materialisation but also objectification of consciousness. It could be that it is a process that mediates physical phenomena without itself being physical. A hole is not physical but it's realised in the midst of physicality.

[glenstein]

The JPEG-as-analogy-for-consciousness assumes materialization of consciousness. Insofar as we're using JPEGs as a metaphor for consciousness, the fact that JPEGs can be regarded as an informational abstraction translated across different physical mediums is perfectly compatible with a physicalist story of how consciousness occurs, which was the point of this whole sub-thread.

>A hole is not physical but it's realized in the midst of physicality.

Yet no one seems to think this poses some metaphysical problem requiring us to go "beyond" physics to explain holes.

[newsmania]

I may not understand your point correctly, but I would say yes, they do. The JPEG is an arrangement of atoms in an SSD. This is different from my experience of the color red that I see on the screen. The color red is physical. It is a type of photon with a tiny mass and volume. However my experience of it has no mass.

[gonehome]

If you're willing to accept that a JPEG is an arrangement of atoms in an SSD then why isn't the experience of the color red an arrangement of neural impulses in the brain?

[rout39574]

No; the JPEG is a pattern.

There are a variety of ways we could recognize the pattern.

+ The series of bits you start with.

+ The bitmap on the screen.

+ the BMP which would also generate that bitmap.

+ The GIF which results in the same frame.

+ The emotional impression you take away from it. "That meme I remember so well"

And so on.

The JPEG is closer to qualia than is the arrangement of bits; closer to "your experience".

[glenstein]

I don't agree with the person you are replying to at all. But I can still respect their point that there's a distinction to be made (or at least argued for) that the kinds of explanations we give for JPEGs are ultimately physicalist explanations. Everything on your list is a different physical medium a JPEG could be realized on (though maybe some would debate the last one).

But the person you are replying to probably wants to argue that qualitative experiences aren't realized on any physical sort of anything, let alone translatable across various physical mediums.

Now, again, I think that argument is wrong- I think these experiences happen in our brain, though it's currently unclear exactly how - but I at least understand their impulse to put those experiences in a different category than a JPEG, and why the ability to translate a JPEG across different mediums wouldn't speak to the concern they are raising.

[guscost]

Well, technically photons are massless and don't have "volume" in the common sense of that word. Red photons do have a particular energy, but I don't think any photons in the real world have exactly the amount of energy that a theoretical "red photon" is defined to have.

[corey_moncure]

The JPEG is not a JPEG until it's processed by a program. Until then, it's just an arrangement of bits. Likewise, light has no color until it's absorbed by your retina and processed by your brain. Until then, it's just a photon of a certain wavelength.