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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

#331

Post by donkeybeer »

mikk14 wrote: post #230
energy123 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anyone who supports both ideas at the same time. Are you saying that philosophers do? Most philosophers are materialists or computational functionalists, while being monists. This means they aren't dualists, and it means they do not adopt the supernatural explanation. But they are careful not to rule out dualism. There's this pattern I've observed in discussions about philosophy. First there's a rejectio…

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…

[dead]

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

#333

Post by LoganDark »

smackeyacky wrote: post #323
LoganDark wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is knowable isn’t it? We know our brains play a variety of tricks to get a cohesive view out of two wildly complicated but deeply flawed meat sensors. That fits the definition of a simulation.

What's unknowable is whether or not there are real stars that correspond with what you seem to observe; not whether or not your observations themselves are the real stars.

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

#334

Post by SamPatt »

47282847 wrote: post #257
fragmede wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's really a head trip is that I don't actually know another human is experiencing grief either. They could be a sociopath and not actually feel emotions, but are pretending to in order to benefit them in some way.

What are emotions, really? It’s a bit easier than consciousness to research but still many theories exist. A popular one is that emotions always appear because the work(ed) to one’s benefit. They are always meant to manipulate the environment. With sociopaths, do they simulate, generate, push away, ignore, control, their emotions, more or less than others? Also psychopathy/sociopathy is difficult to research because…

Emotions do seem to act as signaling, but is that the same as an attempt at manipulation for the benefit of the individual?

It seems conceivable in social groups that having an honest accounting of how people are feeling (via emotions) available to the group might benefit the group in achieving their goals while not always benefiting the individual.

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

#335

Post by sebastianconcpt »

jwilliams wrote: post #111

Rovelli 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…

Is not undefinable. Unless you have an incomplete model to understand the universe. Which is exactly our case.

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

#336

Post by mikk14 »

energy123 wrote: post #307
mikk14 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these scenarios would result in "me" from a monist perspective. The destruction is a discontinuity point, I died there and then, and then the next planck moment a new being was created with all my memories. But "I" died. The functionalist answer, as you understand it, is dualist. It says "something" survived the utter complete destruction of the physical body and was "put back in it" once it was reassembled.…

What if they destroyed and reassembled only 0.5% of your brain? What's your dividing line? 0.36%? 0.0188%? > The functionalist answer, as you understand it, is dualist. I think you're misunderstanding that words are social constructs which can point to abstract categories rather than necessarily single concrete objects at a particular moment in time (although words can also do that). Like if you have multiple tennis…

> What if they destroyed and reassembled only 0.5% of your brain? What's your dividing line? 0.36%? 0.0188%?

Apologies, I read too quickly and skipped over this. See one of my sibling comments. I concede this is problematic for my position and I need to think harder on how to solve it, but I don't think it's unsolvable. The placeholder answer is that there must be a certain level of damage -- the precise % probably doesn't matter as much as exactly which parts you destroy -- that is incompatible with keeping continuity.

For the rest, as a social construct, if we incinerate me to create a clone of me that is identical to the original at the subatomic level I agree that, for everyone else in society, it is me. But my self has still died and whatever replaced it is having its own experiences. And it matters very little what everybody else thinks: if tomorrow an imposter convinces everybody else that they are me, they aren't me for me. Their experiences aren't magically beamed to my brain.

Your tennis ball example is again a textbook dualist position. You can have a tennis match with different balls which is functionally identical to have it with the same ball, because the ball in the game is an abstraction that lives _outside_ the ball itself. But, assuming balls can feel when they are hit by the racket, the ball you used in the previous point and now is lying on the sideline does not feel being hit when the next point starts with another ball.

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

#337

Post by staticassertion »

jwilliams wrote: post #111

Rovelli 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…

That's like saying that "water" is a philosophical invention and so if you accept that water is a thing then you've put it into a special category.

You can derive consciousness as a somewhat obvious conclusion of empirical study of behaviors, we have multiple fields of study that lay out cognitive function and criteria.

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

#338

Post by hoppp »

To me it seems consciousness is a log file that records the results of brain activities originating from different parts of the brain.

This log file is loaded into working memory.

I have aspergers and that's sort of how I experience my own consciousness, the result of different brain processes, summarised in a log.

People are mainly subconscious and not that many things propagate to consciousness and get recorded in the log, because it's a bottleneck.

Instead of recording the whole process of emotionally tagging things, people just "feel" something without reasoning. Only the emotional tag or intuition is recorded in the log but not the process to get to it.

Non-verbal communication is emitted and processed subconsciously, which is hard for me because of the autism and I arrived to the conclusion that fundamentally human consciousness is a spectrum and how much is recorded into it depends on neurodiversity.

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

#340

Post by otikik »

otikik wrote: post #313
david-gpu wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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") do…

Serves me well for answering a comment before reading the article. This is basically what the author says, even pointing to the Philosophical zombie and all. Shame on me.
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