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It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

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Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#121

Post by aa-jv »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #6

Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable . It cannot be disproven in the same way you can't disprove the existence of God, and so arguing with people that believe in it is largely pointless.

Argue with someone who gathered evidence scientifically to demonstrate that we really, really don't know what we're talking about when it comes to the human soul:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Cases_Suggestive_of_Rei...

EDIT: Downvote all you want, materialists, but reincarnation is the spanner in the works nobody wants to confront ..

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#122

Post by mrkeen »

> The false “hard problem of consciousness” assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body.

Or a gap between my mind and the minds of the other commuters on this bus.

There are 15 or so biological machines here, but only one of them is being experienced in bright sound and colour.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#123

Post by krackers »

selcuka wrote: post #53
deyiao wrote: post #35

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.…

What you explain is intelligence, which is the subject of the "easy question". Consciousness in this context is the existence of phenomenal, or first person experiences. 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.

>It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.

It's that you can't even measure it, since the way it's defined as a subjective experience, no external measure could ever capture it. This is what gives rise to the p-zombie argument.

To get rid of that you have to accept "functional qualia" as basically equivalent to qualia, which solves the p-zombie issue and resolves half of the hard problem. From there, explaining consciousness is no "harder" than explaining other scale-depedent phenomenon in complex systems like LLMs: still hard, but at least tractable with scientific measurements and experiments.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#124

Post by gizajob »

tardedmeme wrote: post #116
zetalyrae wrote: post #11

The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove? > A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible cons…

The really hard problem is that your gut, having a neural network as complex as your brain, is also probably conscious. And all it's ever known and will ever know is the feeling of pushing food through it and tasting different types of food. Now that's a horror story.

It’s only your labels in language that are splitting this system into separate parts.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#125

Post by gizajob »

unparagoned wrote: post #95
zetalyrae wrote: post #11

The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove? > A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible cons…

I think you are misunderstanding illusionism and the hard problem. Illusionism does say that there is a conscious experience. So illusionism is convincing to many people who have conscious experiences. The alien would be able to look at the computation and describe the conscious experience it has. You could put human consciousness on an excel spreadsheet and it’ll still be conscious. Even Chalmers accepts a simulatio…

Put human consciousness in an excel spreadsheet and get back to us.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#126

Post by dsign »

sambapa wrote: post #108
deyiao wrote: post #35

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.…

If this comment is serious, then you may have the beginnings of AI psychosis

I would say "AI psychosis" is a very healthy disease to have. I mean, how should people react to seeing a clump of hardware produce coherent text at a level many actual humans cannot? The spread of reactions we are seeing in people-the disagreements, the extreme sycophancy on one end, and the abject denial on the other, is within parameters.

My life was wrecked by religious dogma, the type that is sustained on "big mysteries" and from there goes directly to imposing an odious recipe for life. So there is consolation to be had on seeing a big mystery crumble and on hearing the outcry. May another mystery crumble on my lifetime.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#127

Post by saidnooneever »

consciousness is hard because it requires a special kind of belief. we humans believe a lot of things, but this one is difficult. all is one, and that one thing is all. everything contains gender. opposites are the same thing. these are all easy things that are hard to understand/believe.

Dont pretend like you dont believe anything is step 1.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#128

Post by gizajob »

deyiao wrote: post #35

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.…

Dolphins and other creatures are likely to have similarly complex systems without “inevitably” generating a concept of “I”.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#129

Post by gizajob »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #85
mightyham wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely is a problem with the article. Science deals with physical phenomena; metaphysics quite literally means beyond physics. It's ridiculous to say that consciousness is the last hold out, as if there aren't a million other unanswered questions about meaning, essenence, and experience. Here is a parallel argument for you. The history of science has been one discovery after another which leaves us with new, i…

Reducing a complex phenomena to more basic structure and dynamics just is to eliminate any open metaphysical questions about that phenomena. That's why the big philosophical debates center around monism vs dualism rather than n-pluralism. Science has dispatched all other essences from mainstream consideration.

“Fields” such as the electric field or Higgs field are essences.
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