Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism • Hacker News Board

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#261

Post by jaldhar » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

arnoooooo wrote: post #185

jaldhar wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advaita Vedanta accepts six pramanas (means of justified knowledge). Pratyaksha (sensory perception), anumana (inference), shabda (the words of the Vedas), upamana (comparison), arthapatti (presumption), and abhava (negation). Experience (anubhava) is NOT pramana.

I meant experience in the form of sensory perception, followed by inference and comparison. I suppose you mean experience that would be tinted by interpretation ?

Ultimately all experiences are mediated by ego (ahamkara) Advaita Vedantas says that ahamkara is a delusion caused by maya (delusion and imperfect cognition) so Brahman can only be known by a negative way I.e. “de-experiencing” all false cognitions. The Upanishad says Neti Neti (“[it is] not [this] [and] not [that]”) What remains is Brahman.

Does anything remain? This is the big point of contention between Buddhists and Advaitins. We say there is, that say there isn’t. However the Mahayana concept of Tathagatagarbha does come to a similar conclusion in a roundabout way.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#262

Post by Lambdanaut » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

jhedwards wrote: post #260

Lambdanaut wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans down to inorganic matter. This is stretching the meaning of 'experience'. If I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform? This is the part where materialism has the burden of proof to explain a mechanism for how, suddenly, snow doesn't experience de-formation. You get it. You've made the logical link of connections…

I don't get this. I have an experience because I have specialized organs for delivering _information_ to a central information processing unit which can evaluate the experience in a way that is _temporally decoupled_ from the event itself. There is no such mechanism in snow, it doesn't convert "deformation" into data separately from the physical fact of its deformation.

What you have are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and a few other pieces of earth, water, and air that are dancing around each other in a very complex way in order to dance up a very complex experience that has interesting properties that the snow does not exhibit in its experience of simple deformation.

Your very special organs are nothing but melted snow(water) deforming against broken up rock(carbon), repeatedly, in beautiful fractal patterns that have emerged through evolutionary processes over billions of years.

These evolutionary processes that turned Snow into You.

The _information_ is higher order deformation.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#263

Post by mannykannot » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

DonaldFisk wrote: post #188

mannykannot wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, Searle's Chinese Room, for which the widely accepted response is the system reply: the system as a whole, and not one element of it, is conscious. Consider performing the algorithm of Alpha Go Zero through a million people equipped with pen and paper. One can hardly argue against this being possible in principle, but what is playing the game? This is not proof that AGI will automatically be conscious, or even jus…

There are two distinct meanings of consciousness being used here: my own experience of consciousness in me (it's always first person), and the conclusions people make about consciousness in other people or animals - that they're conscious because they're like them in important ways. The Chinese Room argument is confusing because it conflates intelligence (understanding Chinese) with consciousness (knowing what it's l…

That is a good argument, though you may not agree with my reason for saying so. Clearly, the system as a whole can discriminate a wide range of colors, despite the fact that no single component, including the person who is executing the process, can do so. This is the essence of the system reply, and I think this thought experiment illustrates it well.

There is a sense in which the system has an experience (necessarily first-'person'), but it is nothing like what we experience on seeing color. It is no more or less an experience than an ordinary color meter would have, and it lacks any awareness or concept of having an experience, no memory of it, no recognition of a similarity to previous experiences or of it being unlike any previous experience, no ability to imagine such experiences, no expectation of future experiences, and no emotional reaction to it ('my favorite color!') It is an experience only in the weakest sense possible.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#264

Post by zackmorris » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

uoaei wrote: post #250

Another point to make on panpsychism: how do people who reject the theory explain hierarchical life? To what level is a human conscious if its component cells aren't? Are ant colonies "conscious" due to the complexity of the behavior of the ants? Does that make ants less conscious? To an alien visitor, ant colonies can be considered single organisms, because they act with intent toward a specific goal and react to sp…

That's a good point. One things aliens have that we don't is the ability to merge and divide consciousnesses (like Vulcans do). This has been explored in science fiction but not so much in the real world. Although some siamese twins share a consciousness:

https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/the-hogan-twins-share...

Within the next 10 or 20 years, we'll have the technology to connect brains to computers, and eventually join brains together and separate them. That will at least give us a theory of how the basic building blocks of consciousness work, perhaps along the lines of how people can lose an entire hemisphere of their brain and still be conscious. Maybe we'll find that only a tiny golfball-sized portion of the brain is required for consciousness. Maybe something smaller.

For example, the twins obviously have their own personalities, but how much of that overlaps into a single definition of self? It could be that there are always two entities. But my gut feeling is that we'll find that consciousness can merge and divide fairly effortlessly, working like a fractal to retain full memories from both halves. It will be a strange experience (a bit like psychedelics) but within a century will be commonplace.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#265

Post by shkkmo » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 6:47 PM UTC

memling wrote: post #207

shkkmo wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> virtually no one is positing that a rock is conscious in the same way a human being is. Well, I would argue that virtually no human is actually conscious in the way we tend to posit that humans are conscious. I think we tend to underestimate the link between our understanding of our experience of consciousness and how memory formation and recall works. Our own experience of our consciousness is as much an illusions…

> Our own experience of our consciousness is as much an illusions as our experience of the world. When we consider and attempt to discuss our own experience of redness, we are generally left with only our memory of that experience which influenced be a great deal of post-processing, compression and abstraction. I believe the mental states in which you can actually experience pure redness is very different from the st…

To abuse that analogy, it's turtles all the way down until eventually it's not turtles but the border where that transition happens is blurry because "Turtle" is just an artificial human created category. Like the "chicken and the egg" paradox, reality is most likely that things change a little with each step until the category "chicken" eventually doesn't apply.

I do think that, like with our perception of color, there are likely fairly concrete inaccuracies in our memories of our experience of consciousness that we might be able to measure that might improve our understanding of the underlying phenomenon with fully explaining it.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#266

Post by monktastic1 » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

carapace wrote: post #227

monktastic1 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason I enjoy trying to share intuitions for idealism. Let me try to do so here. First, notice that it's impossible to prove which metaphysics (materialism, idealism, solipsism, Last Thursdayism, simulationism...) is correct. Next, notice that the situation is even worse: you can't even assign probabilities to those possibilities without making assumptions about whatever is "outside" reality -- which are by…

Well put! Can I quote this?

Thanks. Sure, I'd be honored!

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#267

Post by philodelta » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

Broadening the definition of consciousness to the literal limits seems pointless, it dilutes the already difficult to manifest definition of consciousness to complete uselessness.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#268

Post by mech1234 » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

Lambdanaut wrote: post #239

karmakaze wrote: post #214

I'm trying to be open-minded and make sense of the position. The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans down to inorganic matter. This is stretching the meaning of 'experience'. If I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform? The second leap is saying science only tells us what matter does and not "the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is, in and of its…

> The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans down to inorganic matter. This is stretching the meaning of 'experience'. If I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform? This is the part where materialism has the burden of proof to explain a mechanism for how, suddenly, snow doesn't experience de-formation. You get it. You've made the logical link of connections…

Most people's interpretation of Occam's Razor would probably disagree with you.

But more importantly- the distinction you are making does not explain anything. Regardless of whether inorganic matter has experiences, there aren't any observable phenomena that have outcomes that are effected. You can make a claim one way or the other, and the world behaves the same regardless. I tend to fall toward the stance of logical positivism on this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#269

Post by zajd » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 7:05 PM UTC

zackmorris wrote: post #264

uoaei wrote: post #250

Another point to make on panpsychism: how do people who reject the theory explain hierarchical life? To what level is a human conscious if its component cells aren't? Are ant colonies "conscious" due to the complexity of the behavior of the ants? Does that make ants less conscious? To an alien visitor, ant colonies can be considered single organisms, because they act with intent toward a specific goal and react to sp…

That's a good point. One things aliens have that we don't is the ability to merge and divide consciousnesses (like Vulcans do). This has been explored in science fiction but not so much in the real world. Although some siamese twins share a consciousness: https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/the-hogan-twins-share... Within the next 10 or 20 years, we'll have the technology to connect brains to computers, and eventu…

> Within the next 10 or 20 years, we'll have the technology to connect brains to computers, and eventually join brains together and separate them

what?

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#270

Post by Faark » Tue, Jan 14, 2020, 7:06 PM UTC

brazzy wrote: post #163

adwn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My take: consciousness is an emergent property of the system as a whole as it becomes sufficiently complex. Yes, that million people (you'd probably need more) working with pen and paper create, in combination, an additional new consciousness, albeit an absurdly slow-thinking one.

I totally agree with consciousness being an emergent property.

But can a bigger system have consciousness when individual parts of it are already conscious? I don't see why this should necessary follow. I'm sure there are somewhat similar and interesting emergent properties, but we'd probably call it something different. Probably closer to the kind of group identities we already have with lots of humans interacting. Though obviously we'll know what it feels like, just like none of my neurons will ever feel like i do.