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What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

nautil.us

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Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#121

Post by guerrilla »

pessimizer wrote: post #117
guerrilla wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't conceive of how there couldn't be. Your body gets sensory input, generates your mind and then your body experiences your mind. How could that possibly be dislocated from your body... The very idea is nonsense.

But this is dualism. I don't accept a difference between mind and body as a materialist. edit: I can use a computer to remind me to use a computer to remind me about something. I can lose the use of my hands and eyes by severing biological wires. I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and the computer. I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and you, other than distance and mechanical connection (which we curren…

> But this is dualism

No, you cannot deduce dualism from what I said. You filled in assumptions that aren't present and which I don't assert. It's just physicalism (materialism is an outdated term[1]) but would also work for neutral monism[2].

> I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and the computer. I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and you, other than distance and mechanical connection (which we currently have, with some latency and signal distortion.)

What? Maybe you need a psychiatrist now? This sounds like dpersonalization or derealization.

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/

2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#122

Post by ncmncm »

pessimizer wrote: post #117
guerrilla wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't conceive of how there couldn't be. Your body gets sensory input, generates your mind and then your body experiences your mind. How could that possibly be dislocated from your body... The very idea is nonsense.

But this is dualism. I don't accept a difference between mind and body as a materialist. edit: I can use a computer to remind me to use a computer to remind me about something. I can lose the use of my hands and eyes by severing biological wires. I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and the computer. I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and you, other than distance and mechanical connection (which we curren…

"What is the difference between the speed and the car?"

The car is a thing, like your body. The speed is what the car is doing, like your mind is something your brain is doing. No problem, nothing to accept.

My own mind is something I am doing, just as I am typing just now. It should be obvious enough that neither is something you are doing.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#123

Post by jbotz »

guerrilla wrote: post #91
jbotz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The experiences are real, but the homunculus behind your eyes that you think of as yourself is an illusion. In reality there are a bunch of fairly independent processes talking to each other, sharing the perceptions, reacting to them, feedback from those reactions again become a perception, a "narrator" process that often gives running commentary in your mother-tongue, etc. The interaction of those processes feels li…

I think they were referring to Daniel Dennett, not Antonio Damasio or Anil Seth. Damasio is interested in how the self is constructed (so, similar to your idea) while Seth is saying that experience is a controlled hallucination. Dennett is the one claiming consciousness is an illusion. These are three very distinct research programs.

Except that they all agree that there is no "hard problem of consciousness", that's the part that's illusory. I think Dennett takes the illusion position too far, so I think I'm somewhere between those three. But there are others who take it further even, such as Graziano in "Consciouness and the Social Brain" whose "consciousness is an attention schema" position seems so nonsensical to me that I can't even explain it despite having the read the book.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#124

Post by ncmncm »

That was surprisingly not complete bollocks. Bollocks is the norm when anybody talks about the "problem of consciousness'.

There are legitimate questions to ask about consciousness, but nobody asks them. How does the perception of being conscious aid in survival and/or reproduction? It's kind of like wondering about what good being beautiful does for a blind, microscopic worm: not necessarily answerable, but anyway worth asking.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#125

Post by pessimizer »

guerrilla wrote: post #119
pessimizer wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean for a body to be "mine?" As a materialist, I accept that my body is an assemblage of physical influences. I have no reason to doubt that it has as much self-control as water flowing down a hill. So - does water flowing down a hill have a perspective? Where is it located? It doesn't have a nervous system to blame things on. Is it infinitely divisible? Is it distinct from me? If I pour water from one…

Don't gish gallop. > What does it mean for a body to be "mine?" You are your body. > So - does water flowing down a hill have a perspective? Where is it located? Why would it? Does it sense and produce a mind? Not that I'm aware of. You could go the pansychism route if you want though. See David Chalmers or something. > can I say that I'm any less the water as I am my hands, even though I'm controlling the water, get…

I'm not intending to. I wasn't proposing all of that as separable questions. I was proposing it as a series of statements that I have no material means to say anything about.

> Why would it? Does it sense and produce a mind?

I don't know what a mind is supposed to be in this context, or its importance. I don't identify my perspective with my thoughts. My thoughts are something a body does. My perspective is just my location. After death, my thoughts will cease. My location will not change.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#126

Post by pessimizer »

guerrilla wrote: post #121
pessimizer wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is dualism. I don't accept a difference between mind and body as a materialist. edit: I can use a computer to remind me to use a computer to remind me about something. I can lose the use of my hands and eyes by severing biological wires. I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and the computer. I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and you, other than distance and mechanical connection (which we curren…

> But this is dualism No, you cannot deduce dualism from what I said. You filled in assumptions that aren't present and which I don't assert. It's just physicalism (materialism is an outdated term[1]) but would also work for neutral monism[2]. > I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and the computer. I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and you, other than distance and mechanical connection (which we current…

Don't diagnose me, I'm not saying anything that alarms me, causes me discomfort, or makes me enjoy life any less. I just don't hold to the idea of "myself" being a cause as axiomatic. You're free to express the distinction between my control of the computer and my control of my hand, but don't call me crazy, it's rude.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#127

Post by ncmncm »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #100
guerrilla wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the connection between my perspective and my body? Your body is doing the experiencing. It is what's perceiving. Your mind is just your body's UI for the world and your body is the user.

And then step into the Star Trek transporter. :) You're obliterated, then perfectly reassembled on the other side. Is that still "you", "subjectively"? Should you or others even care about that question? And, if not, damn, that's ego-killing af.

A copy is a copy. The copy remembers everything you remember. The copy can spend your money. The copy can have sex with your spouse. Is the copy "you"? Technically no, but it doesn't matter because there are no transporters.

But you go to sleep every night. Is the person who wakes up "you"? Many of the atoms in the person who woke up were in that person's stomach, and many of the atoms in the person who went to sleep are in the air. Does the difference from the transporter thing matter? No reason it should. The person who went to sleep is not here. The one who woke up can spend that person's money, wear that person's clothes, remember passwords. Close enough is close enough.

You might choose not to spend that person's money, next day. But they won't be needing it, and you do. So, no problem.

If you perceive a problem, you are just tying yourself in knots, and are guaranteed to make no progress.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#128

Post by matt-attack »

hibernator149 wrote: post #20

My pet theory is that people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem. On a more serious note, as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. It's like I have this nice theory of everything, but it fails when I try to apply it to myself. Reminds me of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

What’s really interesting is that the materialistic view is sufficient to describe everything else in the world including all other humans. But the one thing it fails to explain is yourself and your own subjective experience.

I frankly have zero evidence that anyone else but me is experiencing consciousness. And there’s nothing you can utter that can change that.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#129

Post by pessimizer »

ncmncm wrote: post #122
pessimizer wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is dualism. I don't accept a difference between mind and body as a materialist. edit: I can use a computer to remind me to use a computer to remind me about something. I can lose the use of my hands and eyes by severing biological wires. I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and the computer. I can't pinpoint a distinction between me and you, other than distance and mechanical connection (which we curren…

"What is the difference between the speed and the car?" The car is a thing, like your body. The speed is what the car is doing, like your mind is something your brain is doing. No problem, nothing to accept. My own mind is something I am doing, just as I am typing just now. It should be obvious enough that neither is something you are doing.

I simply don't subscribe to self-causation.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#130

Post by ncmncm »

zozbot234 wrote: post #55
abernard1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. I can respect this, but I think you have much bigger problems than consciousness if you're a materialist. Current natural philosophy and physics is far from anything resembling a materialistic worldview. Where we are right now in both QM and GR can best be described as a highly precise description of what happens, but…

Entanglement is part of material reality - the "classical" world where there is no entanglement is a simplified approximation. The fact that it might feel less "material" to us is an irrelevant feature of improperly-applied intuition. It's no different than someting like e.g. the wave nature of light. In fact, complex entangled states made of many interrelated "qubits" or degrees of freedom are one of the most promis…

Entanglement as an explanation for anything about consciouness is exactly the same as saying "it's all magic", and exactly as meaningless, leaving nothing to talk about.
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