we are caught between an evolutionary need to know that our existence is meaningful and a universe that seems indifferent.
It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
141–150 of 822 posts
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's my question: Is our consciousness fundamentally different than a gorilla's? If the answer is no, then I'd ask if a gorilla's consciousness is fundamentally different than a baboon's? I think that answer has to be no by definition, assuming the first answer is no. And so on, until we get to where a human's consciousness is not fundamentally different than a tube worm, just a continuum of degrees. I'm not sure w…
Did our ancestors that used the very first tools have consciousness? If they did, was the consciousness what helped them make the tools? Or was something else in their brains that helped in the tool making? IMO consciousness is something that appears when you have enough "brain power" to spare, maybe as some side-effect of some evolutionary trait. I'm no expert and it's a very simplistic explanation, I know, but in g…
There is brain power by the ton all over the place. The answer cannot be based on what a thing can do, but on what a thing chooses to do.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#143> ..idea anticipated centuries ago by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza: that our Soul could be a phenomenon of the same basic nature as any other phenomenon in nature. Even the current Artificial Intelligence revolution is showing us that: what was thought to be purely immaterial and intangible, that is, human abstract Reasoning and Thoughts, are actually tangible, physical, and even machine-reproducible .
Was reasoning thought to be immaterial and intangible..? By whom? Materialism has been alive and well for a long time from what I can tell
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#144Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood. So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that). We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you e…
The problem isn't really consciousness, it's qualia. Specifically, pain and suffering. If we create a machine that is able to print on the terminal 'I feel pain', how do we know when to believe the machine is feeling pain? This isn't enough: echo "I feel pain" Is a very complicated set of matrix multiplications enough?
I think it's the same thing. You can't have consciousness without qualia and vice versa.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#145The 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.
> Now that's a horror story.
For us, sure; why would it be so for them?
Crows don't seem to be particularly upset by strutting around naked and eating bugs from the dirt.
The guts' idea of a horror story, if it has one, may be more like indigestion or norovirus.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#146> ..idea anticipated centuries ago by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza: that our Soul could be a phenomenon of the same basic nature as any other phenomenon in nature. Even the current Artificial Intelligence revolution is showing us that: what was thought to be purely immaterial and intangible, that is, human abstract Reasoning and Thoughts, are actually tangible, physical, and even machine-reproducible .
In the original paper about the hard problem, Chalmers does say all that stuff is explainable by science or the easy problems.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#147I may be misunderstanding the article but doesnt the fact that all other science and understanding sits on a continuum of which consciousness has (to my understading) to real footing mean that the problem is dualitic by definition?
Thats not to say that it can't be 'brought into the fold', it may well be, but until it is it has no other place that to sit outside.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#148This is hard to take seriously, the argument this article makes against the hard problem is… that it’s not hard? There is very little in the way of argument here at all, actually; it’s simply a refutation that there is any division between biological function and subjective experience, with no evidence or novel perspective to provide it any weight. Ironically, I think this article serves as quite a strong defense of…
I read it as "I'm very clever and sensible. I definitely don't believe in souls."
Like so much other material produced by people who (I suspect deliberately) confuse religion with the subjective phenomenon of existence
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation. Yes. I think it's possible with sufficient understanding, the hard problem will dissolve. But, the question we can ask today is: what kind of explanation would explain away the hard problem of consciou…
It would have to explain how we construct “Now” from atemporal cells that are without a clock.
Why? You can build a clock with any basic oscillator and we're chock full of them.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#150> This contradicts everything we have learned about nature. It doesn't contradict anything. It simply means that there is a gap in our current understanding, which may (or may not [1]) be scientifically explained in the future. The default reflex of the opponents of "the hard question" (i.e. those who deny the existence of such a question) is to attach a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the…
No the hard problem is impossible to solve using science even a billion years in the future.
If science can in theory explain consciousness ever then it’s an easy problem.