noahfor

Each neuron in the brain is connected to so many other neurons. All a neuron can do is send messages to other neurons telling them to either send a message or not send a message, and then depending on the messages it receives the other neuron wll either send a message or not send a message. If this is not exactly the way it works it doesn't really matter.

If there were as many people as there are neurons in my brain, all with cell phones, and each person represented one of my neurons, so each person has a certain amount of phone numbers and can call these numbers and tell the other people to call their numbers. Anyway, if this calling sequence mimicked the sequence of neurons firing in my brain now. Would this system of people calling on cell phones suddenly become conscious and think it was sitting at a computer, not the individual people, but the thing as a whole. Fun question I think.

I think it would.

nezmot

You'll have to wait until the world's population reaches either 100 billion, with everyone having their own telephone number and all being awake at the same time, or 200 billion assuming everyone has a number and goes to bed normally. The world's population is something like 6 1/2 billion at the moment, so we've got some time to go yet.

CSflim

Yes and no.

It wouldn't "become" conscious. It would be conscious.

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Jinn

I guess I see where your premise is, but the problem is that neuronal activity is not just about communcation but also about processing. It's akin to asking if you gave a computer years worth of data, would it eventually become conscious. I think it wouldn't, and the reason is that you haven't given it a way to process that data into meaningful chunks. If you gave it this paragraph, but you didn't tell it that it had to take every character and convert it to the typeface requested and disaplay it on a rasterized screen, we'd never see it. If our neurons just sent messages across our brain we'd be one huge waste of a telegraph. However, end to end, there are processing units, like the CPU of a computer, which takes this "data" and makes something useful of it. The things we see are truly cell activity in the eye and the neuronal transmission to the "processing centers," where it is converted into something we understand.

Truly, for your metaphor to work.. there'd have to be processing centers listening in on all of those phone calls, parsing the data for relevant data and converting it to relevant "conscious" data.

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CSflim

Jinn Kai: noahfor said that the 'phone network' exactly mirrored the structure of the neurons. It is the organisation structure of the neurons that does the processing. Hence the people + phones network is capable of processing data.

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Jinn

Structure appeared nowhere in this thread until you typed it.

This is the OP's definition of what the neurons would do, and this alone is not what gives us intelligence nor consciousness.

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noahfor

But the higher-level processing is a result of the neural structures, which are just determined by connections between neurons, which would be imitated by the specific numbers each person had in their phone. I don't really know how to say it, but the bottom line is that all the processing in the brain is done by neurons and people with phones can be analogous to neurons. Right, It is the structures which process the information, but these structures are defined by which neurons are connected to which, which is analogous to the numbers in the phone.



Any language about this kind of thing is going to be pretty vague. What I was saying is that the system would result in a consciousness. Whether you call the system conscious or not doesn't really matter. Is my brain conscious or I'm I a consciousness created by my brain.

CSflim

Artifical neurons are modeled in the way noahfor described. Real neurons are reasonably similar. What do you feel is the vital ingredient that is missing?

Certainly the possibility of modelling a computer system (such as a cpu) using people on mobile phones in the manner described is certainly possible. The missing ingredient is not processing as you described.

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CSflim

Certainly - it is a minor linguistic quibble. But an important one, as the image of a system 'becoming' conscious leads to an increased possibility of a conceptual mistake. It conjures up an image of consciousness suddenly 'descending' on the ready made system, adding an 'extra' component.

Furthering this thread's analogy of a computer system - Suppose we take a simpler example and get a few dozen people, and organise them analogously to a simple adder circuit. Once the structure is in place, it makes more sense to say that the structure is an adder, rather than it becomes an adder, as the idea of a "becoming" conjures up the idea of an 'event' 'happening' which is not accurate.

Like I said; minor terminological quibble.

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noahfor

So you think that consciousness is not an extra component. I suppose I do have the image of a consciousness 'descending' onto the system. I just think that the consciousness is more than the functioning system.

Zeraph

I'm assuming by consciousness you mean self awareness. If that's the case, sorry, but no. It would be the equivalent of a baby brain in a jar. It would have no senses, no information input, no experience, no nothing. The brain is also a lot more complicated than what you described. Take a physiological psychology course if you want to know what I mean, no way I'm explaining it all.

We don't even start out with a self awareness right off the bat, takes the better part of the first year to have any rudimentary self awareness (starting at around 1-2 months.) And the reason? We first learn that we have a body, then we learn language/gestures, both are needed for self awareness.

noahfor

Well, do I have to be self aware to perceive? Don't people experience ego loss on psychedelics, in which they have no sense of self and are still conscious. Do I have to know I'm perceiving in order to perceive.

The cell phone being would have experience in the structure formed by the specific numbers in each phone, and senses could be mimicked by artificially "stimulating" the people who represent the neurons that receive information from the sense organs.

Why does conscious perception depend on sense of self. Isn't the sense of self a perception like any other. We have never been without it so we can't imagine perception without it. Maybe.

Sorry, I'm sick and I'm just trying to keep myself entertained with all these posts.

roachboy

what do you think a perception is?

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noahfor

It is something in itself, so nothing more can be said about it, but I would consider the word awareness as being synonymous with perception, so calling it self awareness doesn't really clear anything up. What do you think it is?

nanotech

Nice subject.

Instead of this nice and innovating, but hard to apply idea, how about a simpler idea? There is a creature that has a 100 billion or more telephones in it (brain), he has a powersupply(heart), stimulation system (spinal cord), he has a processor of information inside the brain and he has everything you want. Of course you know I'm talking about humans.

Can we try to wake this creature up after he dies, instead the much harder invention stated above? We cannot, scientists for hundreds of years tried to give life to humans after they died, but they did nto succeed becuase life is in the possetion of God.

"Lifespans is in the hand of God, nobody knows it but him" verse from the Quran

So the answer is how can we create a life with a billion phone calls if we cann't give life to a person who just died? We cannot.

CSflim

Nanotech: It is considered bad form on this board to supply 'proof' of a proposition by quoting from a religious text, unless the thread is specifically about religion in the first place.

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nanotech

ok, I used science and religion as well. Science in the first part, religion in the second part. I am open to both and not biased towards one only.

John Henry

If by 'conscious', you mean 'aware', then is answer is that we don't know, but we have no reason to assume that this system of phones would be conscious. We could create an artificial neural network which would respond to a set of stimuli in exactly the same way as a real neural network that it had been modelled on, but this would not mean that it was conscious.

Speaking as a conscious being myself, I can say that there is an element of consciousness, which distinguishes it from mere responsiveness and that this is not externally observable. Given that we cannot externally observe this defining element of consciousness, why should we assume that it exists inherently and exclusively in the structure of neurons? Admittedly we don't have anywhere better to put it yet, but that's no reason to jump to conclusions about where it is.

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Nimetic

For myself.. I'm essentially of the view that the brain can be simulated through alternate means (I'm from a maths/phys/comp-eng background).

But... at the same time, I've learnt a lot more about neurons in the last 15 years. And... unless I'm mistaken, many of the mechanisms of the brain are not modelled in artificial neural networks.

Having said that, I'm not an expert in either of the relevant fields. I'd be interested to know what progress is being made. And as I say, I see no theoretical reason why the entire brain cannot be emulated.

asaris

I think that's a good point, Nimetic. I don't know whether or not we'll ever be able to construct a neural network such that it is indistinguishable from a human being. But a network of cell phones seems sufficiently distinct from a neural network that I think I can say with some certainty that that won't ever become (or be) conscious.

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nezmot

The thing is that the structure of the human brain is extremely different to that of a telephone system. Prior to birth, there are millions more connections and active neurons in the infant mind - in the first few months of life much of what goes on in a child's mind is stripping down many of these un-used connections. This allows the brain to map itself out, to re-shape itself depending on what inputs it gets from the outside world. If you blindfold a child, raise it in darkness, or if it is congenitally blind, it will fail to develop the pathways necessary to process visual information - or more precisely, the normal pathways will be stripped out through non-usage.

I don't see an analogous process in the telephone network - nor do I see there being any particular response to events. If a child responds to its surroundings, what does a global telephone network respond to? What 'surroundings' can it be aware of? I think you need to have an outside world before you can achieve conciousness - it's an evolutionary tool, just like flippers, claws or pointy teeth - without anything to respond to, I just don't see how it could evolve.

pavel_lishin

Because we're the only conscious beings on the planet that we are aware of, and we define consciousness in terms of ourselves - and that demands having a self. Anything too wildly different from our idea of consciousness won't be recognized as self-aware by us.

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nsfx

Aye, this is a good point. The only tools we have to measure consciousness or identify conscious entities are things like the Turing Test. I can't think of a single way to prove consciousness a priori, i.e., with mathematics or logic.

Nimetic

The most recent stuff I've been hearing is about glial cells. Apparently they contribute more than was previously expected.

(Sorry, I'm tired at this end, from work... I may write some crap by accident).

But getting back to the neurons. I don't have the relevant book on me, but the chemical activity at the connections is the bit that seems complex. I'm biased of course, I'm better at electronics than chemistry... And hey, my electronics is not so good either.

Anyways. The basic summary seems to be that electrical signals between one neuron and another do not pass directly. Instead that pass through the synapse via neurotransmitters.

And there are a variety of neurotransmitters out there.

Additionally, there seem to be a variety of chemical feedback loops and so on. With different neurotransmitters having different significance in different brain areas. This is a key area of research - in that drugs affecting these connections have a huge market (eg ritalin, SSRI antidepressants, appetite suppressants, stimulants and so on).

On the structural side - there is stuff in the science press each month in relation to research on dementia treatments. I don't understand all of this, but elements of these articles relates to memory formation/retention. Interestingly, we seem to remember stuff much better under particular circumstances. Once again, there is a chemical "substrate" (elements of which could probably be modelled fairly easily). Our mood/hormones affects are ability to remember... Which explains, I suppose, why I can clearly remember my first day of school, breaking up with my first girlfriend, and those occasions where I've been physically threatened/at-risk.

Its a great area. Sometimes I wish that I'd studied more biology.

xepherys

Interesting on both sides... but I have questions.

First, how does perception equate to consciousness? By the earlier definition of perception, plants can perceive their surroundings. They grow so as to give themselves an advantage with sunlight, and their root systems grow so as to be stable, but still supply ample water and nutrients from the ground. I do not, however, believe that plants are conscious, though they may be "self-aware" to some degree or another.

Also, as mentioned, there are chemicals that alter paths and change the way the brain works. It really is much, much more than neurons firing back and forth.

pavel_lishin

Unless you want to flip straight to solipsism, I'd say perception of some kind is a requirement for consciousness. This is my human-consciousness bias coming through, but I can't fathom anything gaining consciousness and self-awareness without having something other than itself to relate to. Without Other, how can you have Self?

A question about chemical balances is, can it be modeled by something more or less binary? The brain isn't anything near binary - neurons have multiple inputs and outputs with varying levels of stimulation coming and going out, but would it be possible to sum it up with binary logic? Or would it be too complex to simulate?

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Dungeon_Shade

Kinda makes you realize how amazingly powerful the human brain is, doesn't it? And to think, our intelligence is still extremely limited.

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