Information is dark matter. Absence of information is dark energy. A shower thought of mine...
Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
141–150 of 356 posts
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spoken like the stereotypical materialist.
Was Jesus Christ a materialist? "Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead." (Matthew 8:22)
Actually, he was, and Abrahamic religions are probably the reason for materialism in science.
It all starts with the distinction between heaven and the earth, the spirit and the flesh… Abrahamic religions are fundamentally dualistic, by contrast with eastern religions like hinduism or buddhism wich have had the concept of non-duality for long.
My understanding is that the only places you find a form of non-duality in Abrahamic religions is in their mystical variants.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#143Oh, it's cool the universe (both laws and initial energy/mass distribution) provides a mechanism to blow things apart and squish them together on so many time scales and in so many ways. The universe is so dead and cold overall, but extraordinarily verdant in places like Earth, a tiny place in a sliver of time.
I don't think it's consciousness (or some form of entelechy) built into space-time. It's more like a kind of complexity-seeking at the several interlocking scales in a gravity well that happens to sit in some ambient heat.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#144An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…
To build on your thought experiment: > So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? If you answer "yes" to this question, what happens if you split the computations of that simulated brain over a million people equipped with pen and paper? Where is its consciousness happening now? I have yet to hear a satisfying answ…
> what happens if you split the computations of that simulated brain over a million people equipped with pen and paper? Where is its consciousness happening now?
The thing with information is that it is not as localized as other physical quantities like spin, mass, or even energy. Conversely if the information were localized we would call it lack of thereof. Information between systems mean correlation between them. Same goes with information processing where changes in one system corresponds to changes in the other. It happens in between.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#145An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…
To build on your thought experiment: > So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? If you answer "yes" to this question, what happens if you split the computations of that simulated brain over a million people equipped with pen and paper? Where is its consciousness happening now? I have yet to hear a satisfying answ…
million? There are over 100 trillion neural connections in the human brain. And look up artificial vs biological neuron. With sheer number and added complexity of biological neurons, there's likely not enough atoms in the Universe to provide enough ink and paper to run this simulation.
Also, you run into the problem of time slices. One step in a simulation of my brain is not conscious. There must be some self-reference going on in there that give us this illusion over time that I doubt a pen and paper model could capture.
I'm of the school of thought that a turing machine, let alone pen and paper, might not even be capable of this simulation. For example, it's possible that there are quantum effects going on in biological neurons that touring machines are not equipped to simulate.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters My guess? No, it won’t be conscious or even meaningful. More fundamentally, our inability to answer this question drives at our ignorance of our own neurology. We don’t know the building blocks of thought. It might happen at the neurochemical or electrochemical level. It may even depend on quantum effects.
As a neuroscientist, I have the opposite intuition. If we swap out one Neuron with a digital version you’ll be the same person. Do that 84B times and at the end of the day I see absolutely no reason why you would lose consciousness or sense of self.
That only works if neurons do generate consciousness. The only thing we know is that their activity seems to correlate with consciousness. My guess is that you can't build a digital Neuron, at least not one that has consciousness properties. That's because I take neurons to be what consciousness looks like when viewed through our senses.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
It uses handwavy definitions, it's untestable and makes a lot of assumptions without providing any new predictions.
Nothing about the topic consciousness is fundamentally testable. Which is why it's often a topic for philosophy rather than science.
Actually, we all have consciousness, and can therefore experiment.
A lot of experiments have been done about consciousness through meditation, psychedelics, etc.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#148Am I the only one who thinks the consciousness question is really quite easy to understand and answer? The illusion of consciousness is obviously beneficial. For example, I could tell a computer, through the use of sensors, to report that it's in pain when it's hit. But you wouldn't take it seriously, or care for its suffering, because it hasn't also declared that it is under the illusion that its suffering has a kin…
You seem to be misunderstanding the question of consciousness. It's not about how you observe others to appear conscious, but about how you yourself observe your own consciousness. > It's a lie our brain tells us [...] Who is "us"? Or, to be more precise, if your brain tells you that you're experiencing pain, than what is " you ", and what is " experiencing "? That's the question of consciousness. This is not somethi…
>you can only observe it in yourself
I don't think you can really observe it either. I doesn't look like I can name any property of "it", I can only be aware of "it".
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he/she wants something that isn't circular and therefore meaningless.
Again, you put restriction of meaningful answer. But why not beautiful answer? Or poetic answer? Or funny one? Ultimately you still decided what you want first and then trying to find what fits.
> why not beautiful answer? Or poetic answer? Or funny one?
Because it's not useful.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but this barely scratches the surface. The key problem of consciousness is not what we have an experience of (eg. "you're a real thing that thinks and feels"). It's the fact that it is possible to have any experience at all. Yes, it seems quite likely that a great deal of what we are conscious of is an "illusion" created in our brains, albeit some rather handy illusions. But that doesn't get even one step clos…
>core philosophical problem of how we (or anything else) is able to experience anything at all By `how` you mean the mechanics of it or something else?
> By `how` you mean the mechanics of it or something else?
He means something else, but human language really has a problem of expressing this.
I'd say he means what remains to be explained once you have explained the mechanical how.
To where or what or who are the experiences relaid? What is it?
Also known as the question of "what the hell is I".