111–120 of 195 posts
I love these discussions, they make my brain hurt in a good way. However, I've trouble applying them to daily life. Is there something we should change in ourselves because of these new insights?
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What would magicians do without illusions, mere tricks, that's what. Shame on you.
The association of the word with mystery in particular doesn't help to bring clarity in discussions with a scientific context. If I said "semiconductors are an illusion", "programming is an illusion" etc. it doesn't contribute any information. It just confuses.
This idea has been extended to say things like reality could be an illusion (Matrix scenarios), or something we take to be fundamental to reality such as the flow of time could be an illusion, in that our mental experience of it is misleading us into thinking it's fundamental.
That we can be fooled by our experience of the world is not controversial. People thought the world was flat and that the moon and sun rose around a still Earth, which was the center of the cosmos. Because that's how it appeared to them.
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> as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic. Rather, the things that seem somehow magical to us we either explain scientifically, or we ignore. I don't know about you, but several of my acquaintances have reported phenomena and experiences that I have no reason to doubt, that are not solely 'in their mind' (because of the external consequences of wh…
> I don't know about you, but several of my acquaintances have reported phenomena and experiences that I have no reason to doubt, that are not solely 'in their mind' (because of the external consequences of what happened), and that cannot be explained by mechanistic laws because they involve 'backwards' transfer of information and so on. I have those too, and no offense to you personally, but I call bullshit on both…
Fair enough - this 'statistical argument' is a convenient explanation that can always be invoked, but in this case I don't really consider it to be very satisfactory as an explanation of the phenomena I have been told about (I would put the likelihood for something like those phenomena to happen 'by chance' to be so abysmally low that it seems impossible).
> There is this one reason that it's literally the job of science. Science isn't a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book, it's the aggregation of everything that reliably works for extracting information about observable reality.
I disagree. "Science (from the Latin word scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.". This is far from saying 'science can answer any question'. But again, you're free to believe that science can do that. I just don't happen to believe it can.
> But is it? The hint is given by the fact that there's more than one thinking human in existence. You may feel that answers about your subjective experiences are out of reach of science, but to the extent subjective experiences have any impact on reality, you can use science to study my subjective experiences (as expressed by me), and I can do the same to you.
I think your answer to the other thread makes it clear that we have some insurmountable philosophical differences here. If you believe that showing the correlation between a configuration of atoms and the subjective experience that accompanies that configuration to be 'an explanation' of that subjective experience, we have very different expectations of what constitutes an explanation.
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What do you mean by "exist intrinsically"?
There being a subjective perspective, having qualia, sentience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience
I don't think you need a well developed sense of self or philosophy of mind to be conscious. But I think from a systems point of view, the mind needs to be self sensing.
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Why would we need to 'feel' anything from the inside? We could operate perfectly well as 'machines' without having this 'feeling'. Also, consciousness isn't a feeling. It is what makes it possible at all to have a subjective experience of feelings in the first place. And that is mind-blowing the more you think of it.
Consciousness is the algorithm. What you call "consciousness" is how the computational processes that are you see themselves. It could work differently, but for some reasons it doesn't, and we don't understand the reasons.
Tarot is an example of a more personified version of the same archetypal phenomenon. The first few cards are indicative of susceptibility to experience, concentration of experience, awareness of experience, multiplicity of experience, and mastery of experience.
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli ( https://www.amazon.com/Order-Time-Carlo-Rovelli/dp/073521610... ) is an amazing and eye opening book on the topic of time. Carlo, a theoretical physicist who specializes in quantum gravity, slowly peels back the layers of the conceptual onion to get to some pretty strange fundamental truths about time. As a side note, the Audible book is read by Benedict Cumberbach and is a deligh…
Books like this deserve a re-read at least once. Now I know to do the audible for round 2 in a few years.
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The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes. But that's just an assumption and there are many reasons a person, let alone a brain, is not a machine or a computer or an algorithm. That it is like it? Sure, in some insignificant ways, we have the ability to compute things. But is it an algorithm? No. The idea that consciousness is an algorithm or a comp…
> The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes. The brain can compute. That's extraordinary. I say one type of thing does that, computers. You say no, two things, computers and then also brains. But when pressed to explain what is a brain if not a computer you'll just sputter (probably at length) without offering any substance. In a sense that's the wr…
I find this quote fascinating: "What I think that means is there is no holy era of time. It emerged. If, in the distant future, we find ourselves in a universe where all the stars have burned out, and all the black holes have evaporated, and all the radiation has been diluted by the dark energy that expanded our universe, and all we have is some very cold bath of photons here and there—basically thermal equilibrium;…
I find this quote fascinating: "What I think that means is there is no holy era of time. It emerged. If, in the distant future, we find ourselves in a universe where all the stars have burned out, and all the black holes have evaporated, and all the radiation has been diluted by the dark energy that expanded our universe, and all we have is some very cold bath of photons here and there—basically thermal equilibrium;…
I think it’s quite the stretch. By the same token, if I let my coffee thermo reach thermal equilibrium and don’t touch it, can I claim I’ve built a machine that stops time?