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Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

philpapers.org

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Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#111

Post by Koshkin »

Arun2009 wrote: post #96
foxhop wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too! However why stop at Indian philosophy?

My aim is evaluate the metaphysical claims of Indian philosophy from the perspective of the most holistic account of reality that we can acquire in the 21st century. This will obviously include studying other streams of knowledge that has anything to say about reality. As to why Indian philosophy - this primarily stems from my Indian background. I have always wondered if the claims of Indian philosophy can be validat…

> other streams of knowledge

The Road to Reality by Penrose, perhaps.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#113

Post by [deleted] »

bobthechef wrote: post #76
creamytaco wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is another wow moment that follows from the one you mentioned: The universe you experience is different than my own. We use language and shared culture to consensually hallucinate a "shared" universe but no such thing truly exists for us. We can perceive objects and describe them in similar ways but the fact remains that we can't access the universe that the objects truly exist in (if that even exists) since, fo…

> The universe you experience is different than my own. How would you know this if you've never experienced how I experience it? > We use language and shared culture to consensually hallucinate a "shared" universe but no such thing truly exists for us. You seem to suggest that culture is some shared fantasy superimposed on reality, but how could it be given your solipsism? How could anything be shared? > We can perce…

[deleted]

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#114

Post by Arun2009 »

Koshkin wrote: post #111
Arun2009 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My aim is evaluate the metaphysical claims of Indian philosophy from the perspective of the most holistic account of reality that we can acquire in the 21st century. This will obviously include studying other streams of knowledge that has anything to say about reality. As to why Indian philosophy - this primarily stems from my Indian background. I have always wondered if the claims of Indian philosophy can be validat…

> other streams of knowledge The Road to Reality by Penrose, perhaps.

That book has been gathering dust on my shelf for the last 10 years :-)

I only recently completed an undergraduate sequence in quantum mechanics. I still have general relativity and quantum field theory left, which will take some more time to do properly. I also don't know how moral it'd be to wade into those waters without being on a first name basis with Jackson and Goldstein.

Suffice it to say that there's a lot of work to do. But time is something that I have!

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#116

Post by gpsx »

gliptic wrote: post #28
vehemenz wrote: post #14

A few thoughts. 1. Sean is leaving CalTech at the end of next year. It's not a huge surprise, given his interests, that he is pursuing the issues in the philosophy of mind that intersect with quantum physics. Most work in this area is unadulterated quackery, and he is one of the few physicists who understands philosophy well enough to not make me cringe. 2. Most physicists implicitly engage in ontological metaphysics…

> 4. I wonder if Carroll's future work in philosophy will cause him to revisit the many-worlds interpretation of QM, which a fair share of philosophers believe carries too much metaphysical baggage. The idea of many worlds "existing" is a philosophical idea; it's not something you learn from studying physics. I think he would argue it carries the least metaphysical baggage as the worlds exist in the equations we have…

In the paper, Carrol goes through great pains to try reject people changing the laws of physics because they don't understand consciousness. This is exactly how I view people taking up the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, where the wave function of the entire universe collapses when a random person makes an observation. Instead I take Schrodinger's equation (and the many worlds interpretation) as the rule and what we observe illuminates how _we_ work, or more specifically how the brain and consciousness work.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#117

Post by foxes »

hsn915 wrote: post #33
foxes wrote: post #5

If I understand it, they seem to be advocating for some sort of dualism. However consider a cpu, it runs on known physical perspectives. But imaging trying to reverse engineer by examining what happens inside an operating system/program running on it. You can get quite interesting emergent behaviour from a relatively simple system (a processor). So just because physics seems relatively simple, I don't think that has…

The things that happen when a program execute are all emergent behavior, but it's behavior that is well understood and we know everything about how it emerges. It's all just that, a "behavior". Things that move. Signals propagate across wires. Pixels light up. All the is well understood. Consciousness is nothing like that.

Why not?

Series of complicated bio-electrical interactions? Vast numbers of connections, neurons firing together?

Even our limited attempts at neural networks are not very well understood, and that is just code running on well understood computer. A brain is way more connected and complicated than something like deep mind, even if you think of that stuff like a first order approximation. So if we cant easily do that, seems an actual brain with way more recurrence and structure is much harder.

I think there are experimental results though, we can look at an brain scan and nearly deduce what people are looking at, although don't quote me I would have to find the paper. Seems pretty physical.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#118

Post by srean »

skohan wrote: post #65
srean wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. What I am asking is something different, although I did not word it properly -- Is it even possible for the brain to be sensitive to touch everywhere, or must a teeny-weeny dead-zone exist.

Why would it need to exist? I feel like you're reaching for a philosophical argument here for a question which is already adequately resolved by physics and biology.

Nothing to do with philosophy but with existence of fixed points. Are you familiar with the mathematical notion of a fixed point (think y-combinator) and fixed point theorems ?

The gist of it is that if there is a continuous mapping from a set to itself with the property that the mapped points are closer than the original points there must exist a point that maps to itself.

Now if the pain location mapping is smooth and a contraction (not implausible because number of cells in the brain is smaller than the number of cells in the entire body), there would be a neuron in the brain that would have been self aware in the sense that its pain mapping would have mapped to itself.

Note it is possible to avoid having a fixed point for a mapping from a set itself (consider a permutation of numbers 1..n so that no number is in its own place).

It is just an intriguing notion -- is a fixed point, self aware neuron possible

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#119

Post by srean »

skohan wrote: post #67
srean wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Even you crack the skull open and poke the brain, it wont feel a thing even when conscious. The skull, the skin will feel, but the brain itself has no pain/tactile receptors. Many surgical procedures on the brain are done with the patient very much awake.

Yeah exactly, why would it?

I am just adding to your explanation. The brain is insensitive not because it is "inside your skull" but because of the lack of pain receptors in the brain.

Our bone marrow is inside our bones. Trust me, it is not pleasant to touch.

Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

#120

Post by srean »

fighterpilot wrote: post #102
srean wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right. Things that we agree on being named the same we call 'real'. Imagine this, say what everyone perceives as the color red I perceive it as what everyone else perceives as yellow. But since I have been taught the name of the colors by these people, I will end up matching the names of the colors although I am perceiving something very different. This needs to be considered in debates on whether animals have…

> say what everyone perceives as the color red I perceive it as what everyone else perceives as yellow. This is part of the "knowledge argument": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

The philosophers Hobbes and Calvin do not disappoint https://i.redd.it/h2pt1xw3d9801.jpg
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