61–70 of 255 posts
I expect people will give up eventually, just as they gave up trying to explain how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're not a dualist, thoughts necessarily have to be accompanied by some change of state of the material substrate.
You assume that dualism and materialism are the only options. You ignore other possibilities, such as idealism and neutral monism.
Manzotti’s account (as described in the article) ignores dreams, or the fact that directly zapping the brain elicits experience (e.g. magnetic stimulation of the visual cortex triggers colorful flashes known as phosphenes). Graziani’s approach is more interesting, as a theory of attention, but falls short on qualia, and focuses on peculiarities of the human brain, assuming that a cerebral cortex is necessary for gene…
What makes you believe that your conscious perceptions have any specific (let alone regularizeable) kind of relationship to reality at all? In all likelihood, conscious perceptions are guided entirely by evolution, emphasizing those aspects of reality needed to keep us alive and filtering out those we can safely ignore. https://www.nature.com/articles/544296a?WT.mc_id=FBK_NA_1704...
It's also known that it's often enough evolutionary advantageous having the model of the surroundings which is more accurate than that of your competition (There's some paper I've read about that, I just don't have the time to find it now. Maybe somebody has some more ready).
Therefore the successful products of evolution correctly reflect "outside world" in their models, and even have the "safety mechanisms" and "error correction" facilities (based on the feedback, of course). There are even experiments with people: if you'd get the glasses that invert the picture you see, you'd for a while see the world top down, but if you wear them long enough, the internal adjustment of the model would happen and you'd see again up as up, even if the "signal" is provably reversed compared to what you received for your whole life.
On the opposite side (that the "accurate enough" is not "always correct") we also already know the examples where the "accuracy" breaks in humans: that's the cause of people ascribing to the agency of gods the phenomena with purely natural causes. There wasn't evolutionary need for an intrinsic development of more accurate model of these phenomena (e.g. what makes the Sun move across the sky or what the stars are). The scientific method, luckily, allowed humans as a group to overcome these limitations, e.g. Aristarchus, some 2200 years ago, that is, at least 200 years BCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sizes_and_Distances_(Ar... (note, at that time the term "science" still didn't exist).
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I've been researching and thinking about consciousness (and specifically the hard problem) for a while now, and while the whole discussion is interesting, it seems to me that invoking qualia as evidence for the existence of the hard problem (or for there being something "to explain") doesn't really make much sense. Its perfectly plausible, if not likelly, that qualia is also part of the emergent phenomenon . I'm sayi…
I don't see how it's perfectly plausible. In fact I see no reason to think it's plausible at all. What does qualia (plural, btw) "are part of the emergent phenomenon" mean in practice? That just seems to be begging the question. If you want to explain qualia, you have to do two things. The first is explain the nature of the experiencing entity. This means defining the precise mechanism by which subjective states are…
Why are you implying some kind of mental entity that "does the experiencing"?
My pet theory is there is nothing to explain. It is emergent. Over the next couple of decades, hardware performance improvements and specializations plus algorithmic breakthroughs will make AI start to crawl up the chain from useful pattern matching from messy data to useful dullard able to reason. And we still won't know why because the "insight" is buried in the network state and our little human brains cannot deal…
Consider all emergent phenomena that you know of. Let's say: stock market prices, ant hills, biological organisms, ecosystems, etc, etc. What all these have in common, is that they are too complex to explain in terms of individual interactions, but you can point at the individual interaction . We know that financial markets are made of transactions, of that biological organisms are made of molecular interactions, but…
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I find it reasonable to assume that for thought processes to occur, there must be some processing, so rocks are out. A more interesting example would be, say, trees, which do communicate with each other to some degree. Is that accompanied by some form of awareness? What's the lower bound of complexity at which consciousness kicks in? What about supraorganisms such as insect hives? Human cities? An ecosystem as a whol…
Information could be encoded in molecule oscillations and therefore 2 rocks of different temperatures would communicate it when touching (heat transfer would occur). Can this be considered processing?
Manzotti’s account (as described in the article) ignores dreams, or the fact that directly zapping the brain elicits experience (e.g. magnetic stimulation of the visual cortex triggers colorful flashes known as phosphenes). Graziani’s approach is more interesting, as a theory of attention, but falls short on qualia, and focuses on peculiarities of the human brain, assuming that a cerebral cortex is necessary for gene…
My pet theory is there is nothing to explain. It is emergent. Over the next couple of decades, hardware performance improvements and specializations plus algorithmic breakthroughs will make AI start to crawl up the chain from useful pattern matching from messy data to useful dullard able to reason. And we still won't know why because the "insight" is buried in the network state and our little human brains cannot deal…
Consider all emergent phenomena that you know of. Let's say: stock market prices, ant hills, biological organisms, ecosystems, etc, etc. What all these have in common, is that they are too complex to explain in terms of individual interactions, but you can point at the individual interaction . We know that financial markets are made of transactions, of that biological organisms are made of molecular interactions, but…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Highly unlikely, as we are not nearer conscious machines now than we were 100 years ago. There is nothing about computers that make them more conscious than e.g. radiators.
Well if you Google "conscious", the dictionary definition starts: "aware of and responding to one's surroundings" I'd suggest self driving cars do that better than radiators.
There's no reason to believe self-driving cars has any more of a subjective experience, qualia, than radiators.
My pet theory is there is nothing to explain. It is emergent. Over the next couple of decades, hardware performance improvements and specializations plus algorithmic breakthroughs will make AI start to crawl up the chain from useful pattern matching from messy data to useful dullard able to reason. And we still won't know why because the "insight" is buried in the network state and our little human brains cannot deal…