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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

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Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#291

Post by kuhewa »

kbrkbr wrote: post #284
kuhewa wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that is not true. Science does not get its merit from philosophical underpinnings, but from working in practice. In the day-to-day practice of science i.e. when empirical inquiry 'works', there certainly are underpinning philosophical assumptions, whether or not they are reconsidered or appreciated with every experiment. The implicit in the act of hypothesis testing, some variant of which most scientists in…

Thank you for your thoughtful comment. You have many good points. Let me just say that Popper has been philosophically criticized to the point that some say it is a dead horse. Why are we still using this mixture of Fisherian and Neymar-Pearson hypothesis testing (that is if we don't use bayesian methods)? Because it practically works well, not because Popper was right or found a deep philosophical truth. These metho…

> I also think bending philosophy to apply to practical advice like "use the tool that works" will not leave much to the notion of philosophy.

I reckon maybe there's something to this. One thing that comes to mind though is: Granting the fact the NHST is now broadly used by practitioners without knowledge of its background simply because it works, I am not sure that necessarily indicates the background isn't important, as my ignorance of my monitor's inner workings does not mean that electricity is not important.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#292

Post by FartyMcFarter »

denismenace wrote: post #263
paxys wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software can always be reverse engineered by looking at hardware. When you don't have the source code what else is there to do?

Software can't be reverse engineered by looking at hardware. The hardware that we use could run arbitrary software, so you wouldn't be able to find out which software it is running.

Runnable software is always stored in some sort of hardware, it doesn't exist by itself.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#293

Post by MagicMoonlight »

csomar wrote: post #260
IshKebab wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nonsense. You don't lose your identity when you fall asleep. Consciousness is clearly a thing that you can have or not have. A brain can exist without it being conscious.

You don't lose your consciousness when you fall asleep. You time travel to the point where you wake up.

That’s not true though. If that were the case you wouldn’t be able to sleep off an argument.

Sleep clears the system and reboots it. That’s why all your short term memory gets wiped too if it wasn’t written to disk.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#294

Post by xmonkee »

IshKebab wrote: post #258
xmonkee wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will always fail because the premise is wrong. Consciousness does not arise in the brain. Brain activity correlates to impressions in consciousness, but consciousness is not a “thing”. Consciousness is equivalent to identity. You are that which sees all this that you see. Consciousness IS you. You don’t arise in your own brain.

This is nonsense. You don't lose your identity when you fall asleep. Consciousness is clearly a thing that you can have or not have. A brain can exist without it being conscious.

You don't "lose" consciousness when you fall asleep. Sleep is not the absence of consciousness, but the consciousness of absence. What's missing is what you think of as your "mind". If that's not the case, then ask yourself who is it that is sleeping? What registers the coming and going of the mind? That's you, the consciousness. If consciousness was going away, you would never know that you slept.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#295

Post by RoyalHenOil »

skybrian wrote: post #286
kaba0 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science is not an observable thing in itself like ant behavior is. Science (especially the scientific method) is a framework/pattern of thought that can be used to state/observe things about the universe. Why that pattern of thought is correct in stating anything is absolutely part of philosophy.

I'm under the impression that science is what scientists do, which does seem to be observable?

Not exactly. Scientists are labelled scientists based on the methodologies they use and the fields they study in (which we call science).

When a person practices science, they are called a scientist. When a scientist exhibits a behavior, that behavior is not necessarily called science.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#296

Post by RoyalHenOil »

kbrkbr wrote: post #265
kuhewa wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My philosophy professor had a multi-volume (non-English-language) textbook called “Introduction to the science of philosophy”, so, uh, I dunno. I too am not sure what you are implying there. The enterprise, assuming it had some merit, sounds like evidence of complementarity? > it brings along the burden of pointing out some holes in the scientific enterprise, a general conception of how to fill them, and at least s…

I hold a master in philosophy and it was my first big love. Over the years I came however to a conclusion opposite to yours. > Also, philosophy underpins science. Whenever a hypothesis is tested, there is are philosophically-grounded assumptions being made. The epistemological implications for any given scientific finding depend on the underlying philosophical framework being assumed. I think that is not true. Scienc…

My education and work history are in the biological sciences (although I have admittedly recently made a career change).

To my mind, science (formerly known known as natural philosophy) is a subset of philosophy. However, it is a subset that has grown to dwarf the other subsets and is given separate, special attention. You do not learn much, if any, science in a philosophy degree because philosophy degrees now focus on philosophies that have not been spun off into separate degrees/fields.

Within the sciences, you do learn philosophy (or at least it factored highly in my undergraduate degree), but it's not about Aristotle or Nietzsche. It's about the assumptions and logic underpinning the scientific method, statistical analysis, etc.

My introductory classes, at least, covered a number of arguments and assumptions that (to my ear) are very much questions of philosophy. For example, scientific inquiry is dependent on the assumption that the laws of the universe are consistent across time, meaning that experiments performed now can nonetheless offer insight into past and future phenomena.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#297

Post by RoyalHenOil »

jdietrich wrote: post #283
kuhewa wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment appears to imply Bayes theorem is all you need for a scientific framework and outside of that is just inadequate mathematical know-how to deploy it. I find it amazing really, a quintessential straight-from-the-summit [1] HN comment for a couple reasons: First, it appears to imply that such a probabilistic inductive approach to science would be free of any philosophical baggage or assumptions, when deploy…

>First, it appears to imply that such a probabilistic inductive approach to science would be free of any philosophical baggage or assumptions I'm arguing that philosophical baggage is irrelevant to the current practice of science, because the overwhelming majority of published papers have serious and obvious methodological deficiencies that we have collectively agreed to ignore. Science as practised today is a desper…

Something to keep in mind is that science is not only practiced in cutthroat academic institutions. Arguably most of the science being practiced today is happening in R&D departments across the world, where there is a strong financial incentive to beware of false positives due to the expense of policy changes.

I worked in private agricultural research for many years, and the issues you describe here did not apply to us. A single instance of statistical significance was insufficient to make any assumptions or adjust any policies. Of course we would present those results if we got them, but nobody was getting excited about it until we got the same results consistently several more times, in several different locations, with several different research teams. Being the first to get a positive result was no more meaningful that being the 10th to get a positive result. Promotions were based on your ability to design and conduct solid research, regardless of the outcome.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#298

Post by RoyalHenOil »

csomar wrote: post #260
IshKebab wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nonsense. You don't lose your identity when you fall asleep. Consciousness is clearly a thing that you can have or not have. A brain can exist without it being conscious.

You don't lose your consciousness when you fall asleep. You time travel to the point where you wake up.

As someone who has some oddities around sleep and consciousness (sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, self-awareness during the process of falling asleep, and a couple of other similar experiences that are extremely difficult to describe), which I suspect may caused by undiagnosed narcolepsy, it is clear to me that sleep is a much more complex process than that and does not necessarily involve loss of consciousness.

Indeed, even people with normal, healthy sleep patterns still dream during the REM portion of sleep, even if they do not remember it later. Consciousness is not an on/off thing.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#299

Post by Kim_Bruning »

ttctciyf wrote: post #264
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my statistics, suddenly I really want to know what your (educational/professional) background is. Are you a philosopher, or a psychologist, or a sociologist, or ? (I'm coming from biology, but that's a big field. Narrowing it down a bit: an eclectic mix of ethology, neurophysiology and bioinformatics)

Your statistics ?! Please elaborate! You are exploring possible links between humanities engagement and pathologically convoluted sentence structure, eh? :) But anyway, my bachelors degree was a "combined major" of comp. sci. / philosophy, several decades ago. I still have a strong interest in philosophy of mind but not in any professional capacity. Hope it helps.

I didn't actually keep track of complexity of sentence structure as a function humanities engagement level yet, but... good idea!

According to my ad-hoc statistics, basically the position on consciousness breaks down as follows:

1. Physics/chemistry: "We don't know what Consciousness is, but let us propose a new particle-of-the-day to explain it"

2. Humanities: "We don't know what Consciousness is, but let us propose a new field of science/state of being to explain it"

3. Life sciences: "We don't know what Consciousness is. The last umpteen-thousand papers explained things in terms of known physics and chemistry, so let's explain Consciousness in terms of known physics and chemistry"

4. IT/AI: "We're all gonna die!" (bonus points for being technically correct at all times)

5. Philosophy of Mathematics <- mathematicians are sort of crazy, philosophers are sort of crazy; crazy^2 might just have some sane(?) words on this. (Alan Turing was one of these, and see what kind of trouble HE kicked up!)

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#300

Post by alienicecream »

pa7x1 wrote: post #266
alienicecream wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claiming something might be emergent is a way of hand waiving away your responsibility to explain the mechanism in your hypothesis. It means nothing.

I think you misunderstand what it means for a property to be emergent. It's not about hand waiving its origin, but about highlighting that the property progressively appears ("emerges") as the scale of the system changes in some direction. What I'm suggesting with the above, is that there is nothing magical or distinctive about the mechanisms that generate consciousness vs. those that generate the understanding of se…

Is a map conscious? It is a model of the environment. Would you classify it as conscious if it could give you output on demand? Is Google maps conscious but a paper map not?
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