211–220 of 604 posts
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Some people are convinced by p-zombies and The Knowledge Argument that not everything we experience can be reduced to matter interactions.
How is that different than saying the function of the lungs, kidneys and heart can't be reduced to matter interactions? How is the brain special?
If we are talking about intelligence or "agency", then I don't see why something other than carbon can do it. But if we are talking about "there's there there", then I am not sure if we will ever find an explanation for this. Let's say that X is what gives rise to "there's there there". What does this tell me? Nothing. This is perhaps the most interesting, most important, and most baffling mystery of the universe. It…
The debate reminds me of a sequence in Werner Herzog’s 1972 documentary ‘The Flying Doctors of East Africa’ where multiple people are asked to point at a picture of an eye. Some have difficulty with the task. Even though it’s not scientific it makes you realize how much of what we see and recognize is a learned behavior through year of social training rather than an innate ability.
Here’s the scene (starts at 40min it’s in German but you can auto translate subtitles): https://youtu.be/MZ3MMEe3Qmk?si=i0ydc3DN3aohnrIO
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people are convinced by p-zombies and The Knowledge Argument that not everything we experience can be reduced to matter interactions.
How is that different than saying the function of the lungs, kidneys and heart can't be reduced to matter interactions? How is the brain special?
We don't even know whether other human beings are conscious, man. The only thing which we might say with much certainty is that things which are more "like us" along some metric are more likely to be actually conscious, and things which are less "like us" are less likely to be so. Maybe everything is conscious. Maybe nothing except one's own self. But you'll never truly know one way or another, even if humanity inven…
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That’s not what science is at all. If reality changes science will adapt.
You are declaring it to be a fact that science is flawless. Defining something to be true by definition can certainly cause it to be appear to be true (read some forum discussions among even smart people on the internet if you do not believe this), but it doesn't guarantee that it will be.
The human brain is a marvel of mechanical and electrical engineering, not a mystical, otherworldly device. Maybe there is something going on at a quantum level to explain the incredible performance our brains achieve, but that is still nothing that we can't build.
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I don't see how we can learn to experience qualia. If the author means self awareness instead of consciousness that would make more sense.
any art or music class that is successful in reaching its students will probably change what you think, how you think it, and gradually should change what you feel, how deeply you feel it, and to what extent you can analyze and converse with those feelings you have. If that sounds like intellectual activity above the level of qualia, the same is true for something as simple as the taste of food. We learn what apples…
I believe that computationalism is by far the best foundational explanation of higher cognitive phenomena, as all other explanations involve some unscientific form of mysticism at one point or another. From this perspective, the answer to the question in the paper's headline is trivially true. Computationalism implies multiple realizability. It's worth noting that computationalism is independent from physicalism and…