51–60 of 822 posts
1. How do we determine consciousness?
2. How should we handle moral consideration of a non-biological system?
The first question is a red herring. It cannot be answered. We need to focus on the second question.
We understand everything a CNN or Transformer does, but we have no idea how to relate that to qualia. This may also be why we need to run endless tests and don't have a theory that let's us predict how well the network processes anything.
Humans do not have souls, nor do they possess free will in the traditional sense. What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution. In essence, consciousness is a complex information input-output system. When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.…
The hard question doesn't argue that consciousness is not a product of evolution. It probably is. It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.
I don’t think consciousness exists, at least not in the way people talk about it. First, there’s no clear definition that everyone agrees on. Second, there’s no way to test whether something has it. Does a cow have it? A dog? A spider? If you can't test for it and even define it, how can you claim its real?
It’s possible that you’re not conscious. So your subjective view may be correct for you. To those who are conscious, this argument doesn’t really matter, and the proof is simply in the pudding.
How exciting to see new writing from Carlos Rovelli! He's one of the few physicists and philosophers of science (ancient or modern) who steadfastly rejects a priori assumptions that rely on things other than our observations. He also echos the modern belief that observer and actor are two sides of the same quantum event. I highly recommend any and all of his books.
If his writing is like this article, I'll pass. And not because I disagree with his conclusions, but because I think he fundamentally misses the point in his description of the problem in the first place. I thought this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 , does a better job of describing the problem space and what a potential solution could like than all the words that Rovelli wrote in his article…
Thus, it's worth exploring all these heavy hitter physics thinkers. You won't agree 100% with any of them but you might develop your own version of things by reading a lot of them.
> It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such. This has to be one of the most dumbfounding pseudo-philosophical sentences I've ever read. Metaphysics by definition is unfalsifiable and unscientific; it exists on a parallel plane from empiricism and is derived only through intuition, reason, and…
There is no hard problem of consciousness not because of the baffling arguments against it in this article, but because materialism is not true. This article and the entire description around the hard problem just shows the amount of mental gymnastics needed to deny what is front of everyone in every instant of their lives. Matter and mind are not the same and mind is not produced from matter. That there are correlat…
Can you explain any of this in a way that doesn't boil down to "it's magic and you just have to believe that it's happening because it is?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. > Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness. This is what the article is positioned against. > We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. Isn't this an equivalent declaration? I understand the desire to cling t…
> How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something? I know what it means to have an experience that is illusory. For example, a mirage, or a drug-induced hallucination. What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all. An illusion is a type of experience, isn’t it? If the experience is illusory,…
It might not make sense to you now, but that's because of what we know or what we think we know, today (hence my ancient Greeks analogue). Look at the Gazzaniga effect, people seamlessly make up an "experience" narrative out of absolutely nothing. Whatever experience was claimed there probably didn't exist prior to the point of questioning, and then was wholly manufactured. Thus, that particular experience was a fabrication.
> If the experience is illusory, then who/what is being deceived?
Why does there need to be a who/what being deceived for something to be an illusion? A mirror functions regardless of whether someone is there to pretend there is a soul in it.
We come from a race that took two thousand years (after it was first proposed) to accept the brain as the seat of the mind, over the heart — just because the heart physically reacts in times of emotion, while the brain remains inert.
Whatever the truth is, humanity probably won't know it until enough generations of the old guard indoctrinated in the old ideas have passed on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s possible that you’re not conscious. So your subjective view may be correct for you. To those who are conscious, this argument doesn’t really matter, and the proof is simply in the pudding.
No conscious person can know if another person is conscious. There is no 'sensation' of experiencing another conscious. Given how many people can and have been fooled by AI, this lack of ability to sense another consciousness is clear.