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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

#311

Post by wowoc »

colordrops wrote: post #132

These conversations drive me insane. There isn't even an clear or even consensus definition of consciousness, yet here we are all acting like we are talking about the same thing. "It's right there, don't you see it? That's consciousness! We just need to define what it is so we can figure out if it's real or not".

Thomas Nagel's definition of consciousness is pretty good: "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."

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

#312

Post by LoganDark »

kaashif wrote: post #310
prmph wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure. I know for sure what I am perceiving. Forget about if it is a simulation or not: it is still what I am perceiving. There is nothing else I can be sure of. So you are correct that it is, in some sense, un-explorable. However, if the above is the reason, then nothing else is explorable also; you cannot prove that we are not in a simulatio…

Why does whether we're in a simulation or not matter for whether anything is explorable? You can explore how the simulation works, there's just some other layer you can't explore. Or maybe you can somehow. When you look at the stars, are they real or a simulation in your brain? Does that mean you can't explore them?

> When you look at the stars, are they real or a simulation in your brain?

This is unknowable.

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

#313

Post by otikik »

david-gpu wrote: post #292
jillesvangurp wrote: post #239

Neal Stephenson touches on this topic in several of his novels. Probably the most concrete of this is "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" which involves a simulation of people's scanned brains rediscovering qualia and constructing their own simulated world from scratch. In the book, two of the deceased digital "souls" eventually mate and produce digital offspring and the whole simulation starts consuming more and more resources…

> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious. Is there a distinction in your mind between consciousness and intelligence? Is it possible, for example, for a machine to solve complex problems but not be conscious? Or vice versa, can an animal or a person be very unintelligent yet still conscious?

A philosophical zombie [1] is essentially a mobile, autonomous human body devoid of consciousness. Critically, still giving all of the external cues that it has in fact consciousness. It is supposed to prove that physicalism doesn't work. "The sense of consciousness" is used like a "soul, with extra steps".

In my humble opinion, which I have no way to prove or disprove, consciousness ("as a soul with extra steps") does not exist, and we are all philosophical zombies. Consciousness "as an amalgamation of complex biological signals and neural interactions that has evolved through millions of years as a successful survival strategy" does exist, and that is all that is needed.

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

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

#314

Post by chongli »

energy123 wrote: post #234
mikk14 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if this is discussed by actual serious philosophers, but consider the issue of "mind uploading." I have seen very staunch monists seriously discussing that, if you were to produce a complete digital copy of your brain -- copying any possible information to the most minute synapse -- then you effectively "uploaded" yourself into a computer and can live a digital life. These people believe this while at th…

But you are taking an opinionated view of the resolution to the Ship of Theseus paradox. If you are a computational functionalist, then it really is "you" afterwards (or rather there's now two identical "you" until the original "you" is destroyed). A monist could also point to your hypocrisy of believing that you are still your child self despite every atom in your body having been replaced between then and now.

believing that you are still your child self despite every atom in your body having been replaced between then and now.

Oft-repeated but not true. Neurons, for the most part, are never replaced. If a neuron dies, it's gone forever. Repeated head traumas (leading to CTE) are known to cause personality changes as the brain has been permanently altered due to neuron losses.

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

#315

Post by wowoc »

skirmish wrote: post #176
k33n wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a religious argument. It’s a subjective experience argument. As a conscious person, if someone tells me they don’t believe in consciousness, then I’m inclined to believe they have a reason for saying that. They must not be experiencing consciousness the same way I am. Interestingly, a non-trivial number of people have no internal monologue ( https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue... ).…

> It’s a subjective experience argument. "Earth is flat" is also a subjective experience argument. Yet mostly nobody takes it seriously anymore. I hope "qualia" will be like this soon too.

"Earth is flat" is an objective statement. "I experience consciousness" is subjective, similarly to "I am experiencing pain". If someone tells me "pain doesn't exist" while I know it exists (because I have experienced it), I can be certain that that person is wrong. Even though I can't prove it to him.

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

#316

Post by hackinthebochs »

mightyham wrote: post #259
hackinthebochs wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? You are telling me that the discovery/development of general relativity or quantum mechanics has not thrown new increasingly complex doubts on the accuracy of previous physical models due to these new "essences" implying contradictions with classical "essences". What could possibly make you so confident that new datapoints, theories, and discoveries as it relates to consciousness will be completely flawless?

You're not using the term essence in the way philosophers mean it. An essence is a categorical descriptive/reasoning context. In mathematical terms, an essence is a lot like a descriptive/measurement basis. A naive scientist sees a world full of distinct reasoning contexts, length is categorically distinct from speed, which is categorically distinct from water, which is categorically distinct from life. The progress of science has been to progressively reduce reasoning contexts/measurement bases to other contexts/bases thus leading to a more unified theory of nature.

Quantum mechanics does increase the physics reasoning contexts owing to the incompatibility between classical and quantum mechanics. But this is not an in principle divergence in the way that philosophers understand essences. We can describe and reason about quantum mechanics and classical mechanics using the same language and the same descriptive tools, namely mathematics. When it comes to phenomenal consciousness and physical behavior, we cannot reason about them using the same descriptive language. Hence they count as distinct categorical essences until we discover the bridging principles that reduce consciousness to physical behavior.

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

#317

Post by pygy_ »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #303
themafia wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind. I know this isn't what you wanted, but the dualism struck me: A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong. Magenta is like when you play a D and an F# together. When you see it at s…

> A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong. why does a major chord sounds pleasant? and why does a minor chord sounds "sad"? Why does the locrian mode sound so unsettling? is it due to our anatomy or purely cultural?

And even then, in different contexts, a major chord can sound jarring and a minor one satisfying.

That being said the nature/culture duality is often not the right way to frame these issues. It's both, intertwined.

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

#318

Post by hackinthebochs »

gizajob wrote: post #129
hackinthebochs wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48178366

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

#319

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#320

Post by tmvphil »

It seems wild to me to write a (popular) article about consciousness in the year 2026 without addressing the elephant in the room: we are able to devise computer programs of increasing complexity that replicate more and more behaviors that were once the sole domain of humans, and at what point do we consider such computers to have experience in the sense that we have, and the sense in which calculators and thermostats do not. It seems that Rovelli is content to say that we should call experience the thing that the brain does, which is all well and good if you're a physicalist (and I am) but it does not help you at all explain which features of the brain are necessary for experience.

I think it also helps to sharpen this debate to remember that there is a moral dimension: many have adopted moral systems that widen their sphere of concern and care from the self to the community to the nation to the whole of mankind, usually under the intuitive precept that it is bad to make someone else experience suffering. Should we expand our moral conception of responsibility or care to non-human patients, and if so, which?

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