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Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

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Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#31

Post by dilemma »

biofox wrote: post #30
themgt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always hilarious to me how many educated humans will actually go argue that they are p-zombies rather than face the paradoxes of consciousness. I guess all I'll say is, physics seems capable of explaining the evolution of our universe and e.g. the emergent complex phenomena of solar systems and planets and such. Physics and the other hard sciences do not seem to lend a lot of clarity as to how a self-organizing piece…

Maybe the fact that these opinions exist is evidence that p-zombies walk amongst us?

I know one exists, and it is pretty well-known: Daniel Dennett.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#32

Post by Smaug123 »

ableton wrote: post #22
joe_the_user wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're mobilizing a different argument here - since we can't construct it, there must be some transcendent property. I can't see how that evokes any of the paradoxes of consciousness. I mean, 200 years ago, humans didn't have a plausible idea how the sun work, should they have assumed God was behind it? Edit: and humans certainly broadly have a decent idea of the physics and chemistry that gave rise to life even if t…

The sun is a physical body, so a physical explanation makes sense. The problem is, our subjective experience isn't actually physical so the same logic doesn't apply. Our subjective experience has no mass, no shape, no size, and can't be measured. It may correspond to movements in the brain, but the experience itself is not material. For all we know we could be in the matrix, and our subjective experpence could be jus…

Ponder this: the number 15 exists but isn't material. It is an extrapolated common property of physical systems. The number $2^789 - 53$ exists but isn't material; and you've never seen a physical system which embodies that number, but there could plausibly be one.

Why could your consciousness not similarly be an extrapolated property of a physical system, without being physical itself?

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#33

Post by fmoralesc »

pmoriarty wrote: post #13

Analytic philosophers love to talk of qualia, but Continentals (Phenomenologists in particular) were on to the idea of the "lifeworld" well before (late 19th century) the Analytics came up with qualia (1929). I'd love to see the two concepts compared and contrasted. If anyone knows of such a comparison, I'd love to read about it.

The concepts of 'qualia' and 'lifeworld' are not directly comparable. Qualia are qualitative aspects of experiences, but lifeworlds are complexes of objects associated to a 'perspective' which operates on them (and possibly constitutes them) - essentially subjective worlds. The point of contact between those ideas is this: different lifeworlds could include the same objects but have a different qualitative character. The trick is that saying that the objects in two different lifeworlds are the same might make the assumption that the objects are 'given' (then, the qualitative aspect would be extrinsic to them). But if the subject of the lifeworld actively constitutes the objects of the world the objects could be different anyway, because those qualitative aspects would be intrinsic.

Imagine a meadow. An insect experiences differently than a girl who is picking flowers, and both experience it differently than a cow who pastures (I think this is Uexkull's [who introduced the notion of Lebenswelt] own example). We might assume that beyond those lifeworlds there is a real world that grounds them and includes the objects that they . But it is not clear that the objects in all those worlds are the same, because the cognition of the insect, the cow and the girl might carve the world in different ways.

Btw, historically, similar ideas where explored by William James around the same time the early phenomenologists and proto-phenomenologists (like Brentano), and James' influence through pragmatism fed back into analytic philosophy. Mainstream analytic philosophers more or less abandoned the idea for a while because of the influence of behaviorism (e.g. Ryle), but I don't think it was ever entirely expurged.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#34

Post by Smaug123 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #12
mcbits wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subjective perception is "hard" because everything we know about physics works exactly the same without it, so at this point we have literally no idea where it fits. But this is kind of a predestined result because the way we approach most science is to filter out subjective phenomena as much as possible and examine only so-called objective phenomena.

I don't think that's it. The real problem is that no science (whether physics, chemistry, biology, or even psychology -- if you deign to call the latter a science) describe what it's like to experience anything. Certainly there are measurements (like the wavelength of light), or even observations (ex: that a certain light was in the red spectrum), but the actual subjective experience of any phenomena seems to be comp…

"Poets, musicians, or artists might arguably be able to get at it, through some indirect means."

It's worth being explicit that poets can only even attempt to communicate these things to other humans, since human consciousnesses share a very large common base of properties. Similarly, affection is something most mammals [seem to] experience, but only because we've had a common number of millions of years of evolution, meaning that our brains are built to follow the same patterns; affection is not logically entailed by consciousness any more than the sensation of "red" is.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#35

Post by red75prime »

pmoriarty wrote: post #12
mcbits wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subjective perception is "hard" because everything we know about physics works exactly the same without it, so at this point we have literally no idea where it fits. But this is kind of a predestined result because the way we approach most science is to filter out subjective phenomena as much as possible and examine only so-called objective phenomena.

I don't think that's it. The real problem is that no science (whether physics, chemistry, biology, or even psychology -- if you deign to call the latter a science) describe what it's like to experience anything. Certainly there are measurements (like the wavelength of light), or even observations (ex: that a certain light was in the red spectrum), but the actual subjective experience of any phenomena seems to be comp…

> For instance, no scientific theory can tell you what seeing the color red is like.

Science doesn't stand out here. Nothing can tell you what it is like to see infrared.

Modifying your retinal cells and waiting, while your brain teaches itself to process new information, is a way to know how it will look like for you. But you still will be unable to convey this information, which raises a question: is it still an information if it cannot be conveyed.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#36

Post by placebo »

Smaug123 wrote: post #32
ableton wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sun is a physical body, so a physical explanation makes sense. The problem is, our subjective experience isn't actually physical so the same logic doesn't apply. Our subjective experience has no mass, no shape, no size, and can't be measured. It may correspond to movements in the brain, but the experience itself is not material. For all we know we could be in the matrix, and our subjective experpence could be jus…

Ponder this: the number 15 exists but isn't material. It is an extrapolated common property of physical systems. The number $2^789 - 53$ exists but isn't material; and you've never seen a physical system which embodies that number, but there could plausibly be one. Why could your consciousness not similarly be an extrapolated property of a physical system, without being physical itself?

That's a good question and the answer is that both the sun and the number 15 are concepts created by the mind because creating concepts has great survival value. You are conscious of these concepts. "Consciousness" itself is also a concept you are conscious of. We tend to confuse the map with the territory - perhaps because believing the reality of the map makes us more real and gives a sense of control over things - I wouldn't know. What I am convinced of is that consciousness (and I'm not referring to the concept of it) is not a product of the mind, but vice versa.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#37

Post by chronolitus »

I've always been more on the materialist side. Reading this, I finally managed to put a finger on something that's been bothering me.

Our brain knows it is conscious. If consciousness is an immaterial phenomenon, emerging from those processes, how can the brain know it is conscious? What way could a brain possibly have to measure consciousness? When I refer to brain, i mean the physical, scientifically measurable computing system. Several conclusions are possible:

1) The brain is conscious and can accurately measure that it is conscious. -> we should then also be able to measure this consciousness, if we figure out how the brain does. (wouldn't we have found something already?)

2) The brain is conscious and accurately guessed it is conscious. -> problem: why would the brain guess this, especially about something it can not measure?

3) The brain does not produce consciousness but thinks it does. -> Just as the metaphysical zombie, being molecule for molecule identical would assert it is conscious. (but now we're denying consciousness exists, see arguments about eliminativism in the original post)

Any thoughts?

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#38

Post by kaffeemitsahne »

chronolitus wrote: post #37

I've always been more on the materialist side. Reading this, I finally managed to put a finger on something that's been bothering me. Our brain knows it is conscious. If consciousness is an immaterial phenomenon, emerging from those processes, how can the brain know it is conscious? What way could a brain possibly have to measure consciousness? When I refer to brain, i mean the physical, scientifically measurable com…

> Our brain knows it is conscious.

Alas, there's the rub. With sufficiently high-resolution brain scans, it should be possible to backtrace what happens when someone utters, for example, the phrase "I'm conscious", or does some meditative exercise, or something. But I'm really not sure if we could learn anything more from that than we know now.

Personally I think the most logical position is panpsychism with respect to information and/or information processing. Disregarding some undiscovered physical phenomenon, this is all that happens in the brain, and I see no fundamental reason why other systems that represent or process information couldn't be conscious, as well.

Which leaves us with the problem of how to define "information" in this context, of course.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#39

Post by inlineint »

ableton wrote: post #22
joe_the_user wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're mobilizing a different argument here - since we can't construct it, there must be some transcendent property. I can't see how that evokes any of the paradoxes of consciousness. I mean, 200 years ago, humans didn't have a plausible idea how the sun work, should they have assumed God was behind it? Edit: and humans certainly broadly have a decent idea of the physics and chemistry that gave rise to life even if t…

The sun is a physical body, so a physical explanation makes sense. The problem is, our subjective experience isn't actually physical so the same logic doesn't apply. Our subjective experience has no mass, no shape, no size, and can't be measured. It may correspond to movements in the brain, but the experience itself is not material. For all we know we could be in the matrix, and our subjective experpence could be jus…

I doubt that the subjective experience of the world is as immaterial as some want to believe.

Our subjective experience of the outside world can be quantified in terms of our ability to make predictions about the world and use them. All of us make and use predictions about the perceived reality as part of our conscious experience. However, if you have accurate enough representation of the outside world in your mind, it puts physical limits on the minimum amount of entropy your brain can have. And entropy is a completely physical quantity.

There is an article [1] I found to be interesting that explains why entropy, as defined in Physics, of the same physical system can be different in eyes of different observers with different prior knowledge/reasoning abilities/etc. In a nutshell, it makes perfect physical sense because if one would take into account that all these observers can't exist without physical medium and that their mediums should also be considered to be parts of the physical system of interest.

But then it becomes clear that accuracy of the subjective representation or experiences of the outside world has a direct effect on the entropy of the underlying physical medium because this is what the second law of thermodynamics, applied to the whole system of an observer and the system it interacts with, says.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/o5/the_second_law_of_thermodynamics_...

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#40

Post by FeepingCreature »

chronolitus wrote: post #37

I've always been more on the materialist side. Reading this, I finally managed to put a finger on something that's been bothering me. Our brain knows it is conscious. If consciousness is an immaterial phenomenon, emerging from those processes, how can the brain know it is conscious? What way could a brain possibly have to measure consciousness? When I refer to brain, i mean the physical, scientifically measurable com…

Technically there's also "The brain thinks it's conscious, but has no reason to believe that. Separately, it is also conscious." Ie. Epiphenomenalism.
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