This is an almost stereotypical reductionist view - yes, we know a lot of fine details of how consciousness and cognition and experience work, but we absolutely do not understand their nature. That's like saying chemistry is all you need to understand how a bacterium works. You'll be able to decipher a lot of the mechanisms, but how the system developed and how the pieces fit together is always going to remain beyond your grasp without more specific research.
Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter
51–60 of 216 posts
Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter
#52This is how I see it:
- Consciousness is out of the scope of physics. You have to leave the common "physics is everything" perspective to understand consciousness, however counterintuitive that is.
- Physics is just a tool to describe the patterns of our subjective experience / consciousness.
- The hard problem is, why does positioning atoms in a piece of matter (brain) trigger the perception of color or pain?
- Dualism and solipsism are approximately correct, depending on the specific definitions, which vary a lot.
Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But it could also be labelled ideal or mental, from a different categorization scheme. Whatever label you put to the category , they are all in the same one.
Wouldn't it depend on what sort of attributes phenomena in the category are supposed to have? If we say that everything is material, then presumably we mean that there is a criteria for what makes something material, probably along the lines of what physicists use to make physical theories. Otherwise, our category should just be called "everything".
I've always found that line of argumentation very disingenuous[1].
Of all the explanations we have for anything that has ever been explained, anywhere in any time, they all fall in the physical/material category.
This of course doesn't mean there could never be another explanation. But the time to take it seriously is when serious evidence is presented.
Just because we can imagine a certain reality in which events, actions and things might occur in a different way, doesn't mean it is this reality.
[1]The argument is disingenuous, not you of course.
Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter
#54This is how I see it: - Consciousness is out of the scope of physics. You have to leave the common "physics is everything" perspective to understand consciousness, however counterintuitive that is. - Physics is just a tool to describe the patterns of our subjective experience / consciousness. - The hard problem is, why does positioning atoms in a piece of matter (brain) trigger the perception of color or pain? - Dual…
Physics seeks to find out how things work. Questions might not be answerable but that doesn't put it out of the scope of physics.
The hard problem you pose (positioning atoms... triggering perception of color or pain), what else is that but a physics problem?
Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't say that's really a problem, because there's a perfectly fine scientific explanation of why it doesn't (couldn't) "capture" this. The experience of color or taste is triggered when information is fed to the brain through specific pathways. The pathways that are activated when we read about something are different and don't reach the same places, so any information you acquire through reading and cognition…
> the experience of color or taste is triggered when information is fed to the brain through specific pathways The question is why the experience is triggered. Why does moving atoms at specific positions trigger the perception of color or pain? Current physics doesn't have an answer for that, even in theory, assuming we can see exactly what happens in the brain.
The thing is, though, that even if "physics" did have an answer to this, it's not a given that we would understand it. Our incapability to wrap our head around reductionist explanations of qualia does not entail that they are inaccurate, only that they fail to satisfy us. I mean, let me put it this way: what do you expect from an answer?
For example, in order to understand why atoms moving in certain ways produce a taste, do you need the explanation to trigger some experience or memory of a taste? If so, you will never understand.
Or do you expect the answer to be short? What if qualia tend to be as complex as the brains that experience them (for holistic reasons), so the proof for our own qualia spans trillions of pages? I think that's actually quite probable, but you'll never understand in that case either.
The space of naturalistic explanations of things is humongous and we're already mass producing objects so complex no single individual could hope to understand every aspect of them. If you're going to start with "moving atoms at specific positions" in order to understand a defining aspect of a system made out of hundreds of billions of complex switches connected in obscure ways, let me tell you that you're going to need several Libraries of Congress before you're done.
Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter
#56> Those who make the Very Large Mistake (of thinking they know enough about the nature of the physical to know that consciousness can’t be physical) tend to split into two groups. Members of the first group remain unshaken in their belief that consciousness exists, and conclude that there must be some sort of nonphysical stuff: They tend to become “dualists.” Members of the second group, passionately committed to the…
Saying that conciousness isn't real because it's an emergent phenomenon of non-conscious processes is like saying that turbulence isn't real, because it's an emergent property of non-fluid particles. I mean sure, at the level of atoms, it's just particles interacting locally, but that doesn't mean that at certain scales, turbulence isn't a better way of looking at their group behavior.
Technically though describing consciousness as emergent property of neural functioning is a conjecture, though a very credible one.
Unlike turbulence, I only have one case where I have ever seen this consciousness which I am trying to explain as an epiphenomenon, namely my own. All others consciousness (if they even exist which I can't prove directly) are not remotely observed in the same way, they are self reported by other people.
So you have the question of why I can only directly perceive that emergent property in exactly one brain and not others.
Likewise you'd have to explain why the emergent property is apparently continuous through my whole lifetime over which my brain changes enormously.
Finally you'd have to deal with the hypothetical case where I am duplicated molecule for molecule and then ask which consciousness would I have direct access to, the duplicate or the original.
So while dualism is obviously patently absurd, the idea of consciousness as epiphenomenon, while promising, needs work too.
Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter
#57Integrated Information Theory[0][1] is the first approach to solving these problems that make sense for me. It takes an axiomatic approach and provides a computable method to associate both a level of consciousness and the content of the experience to an arbitrary causal system. Unlike all these unscientific philosophical considerations it can actually be used to create testable hypotheses.
[0] http://integratedinformationtheory.org/ [1] http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...
Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter
#58"Human conscious experience is wholly a matter of physical goings-on in the body and in particular the brain." Is there any proof of this? The while article seems to hinge on this assumption and then go on from there. We can't see or measure consciousness (brain activity yes, consciousness no). We only experience it. The article makes far to many naive assumptions without any proof.
All the proof you need is the existence of psychoactive chemicals, the effectiveness of transcranial magnetic stimulation, evidence from fMRI studies, and the selective personality alterations that occur in cases of localized brain damage.
I don't think so, consciousness seems from another dimension, you feel that you are present in this world while even if you build the most complex machinery you don't obtain that result.
I am obviously just speculating because I don't see an obvious connection between matter and consciousness even if they are linked in some way. The article doesn't give any clarity about this problem stated by Leibniz et al.
Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter
#59"Human conscious experience is wholly a matter of physical goings-on in the body and in particular the brain." Is there any proof of this? The while article seems to hinge on this assumption and then go on from there. We can't see or measure consciousness (brain activity yes, consciousness no). We only experience it. The article makes far to many naive assumptions without any proof.
If you assert that consciousness has no physical cause, then that's all you can say about it. You're skyhooking.
you can take the wrong turn Penrose took and posit that it's due to quantum effects, as a sort of middle ground.
My way of looking at it is that we use "consciousness" as a default bucket for things we don't have instrumentation to measure, or otherwise have a functioning predictive model for.
Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter
#60Integrated Information Theory[0][1] is the first approach to solving these problems that make sense for me. It takes an axiomatic approach and provides a computable method to associate both a level of consciousness and the content of the experience to an arbitrary causal system. Unlike all these unscientific philosophical considerations it can actually be used to create testable hypotheses. [0] http://integratedinfor…
I don't see why any of that is necessary. It seems just as mystical and hand wavey as other attempts to talk about consciousness, from what I've browsed.