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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
#342This is the Let's deal with the phenomenon of Qualia by denying its existence thesis.
Spot on.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#343I'm not sure where all this discussion about the hard problem is coming from suddenly, or why people continue to struggle to understand it. It's really very simple. The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function. It's like saying you can't explain…
> The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function
Great, I'm a physicalist so uhhhh I reject this lol. I think you can define cognitive capabilities and phenomenal experience by reducing to structure and function. You're right that it's simple though.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't what makes the experience of love special the experience of love? a robot can hold hands and kiss and bring flowers home far more efficiently than i can. is that what love is? A robot CAN write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But the outward signal of grief is not evidence of an internal experience of it.
I’ll bite the bullet: if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love (or “care”, or “noticing”, or “intention”. Love is such a slippery word…) that we would have to trust. Imagine a cat-sitting robot. The robot can differentiate between individual cats. It learns how to play with the cats and feed them in in their preferred way. The cats grow to tr…
no you didn’t kill it, it was never alive. the same way my dishwasher or vacuum aren’t killed when they break and i replace them. even if the robot “remembers”, who cares? when i bin my phone did i kill siri because she sometimes remembered things for me?
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#345> 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…
> a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day. a) it is wrong to say definitively that it is untrue. there is no acid test for the existence of God nor of spirit. b) religious and spiritual traditions have wrangled with this very question for at least 3000 years. it is not a 'scientific curiosity'. It is o…
a) there's an infinite amount of things that can't be proven/disproven and this includes all sorts of human imagination. We should focus on things that we can actually prove or disprove. The source of a god is human imagination, so you can't even prove that any god exists because you just don't know what it is (iow what exactly you're trying to prove).
b) This being a fundamental question proves scientific curiosity. We wouldn't have achieved current technology if not for scientific curiosity.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#346Earlier 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…
The ‘you’ that wakes up tomorrow is a whole separate entity from you right now, unless you want to concede that identity is a path variable and that whether the exact same physical/mental/emotional entity is you or not depends on how those particles got there.
Just because the brain doesn't form memories while you sleep, doesn't mean you have ceased to exist. You have probably forgot many things that have happened to you today: does that mean you didn't exist in those moments you forgot? Am I misunderstanding your point?
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am pretty sure I am not conscious, and this seems to solve the entire problem that other people have.
My pet theory is that I don't think all humans are conscious (in other words, some perfectly cognitively normal-seeming people are just automatons without an inner experience, like plants or LLMs). Mainly motivated by the fact that a lot of people report not having an inner monologue, and other little hints that I've picked up over the years. The "inner experience" might be totally optional to fitness, like green eye…
One step further is to ask how conscious your mind actually is. There is a lot happening on autopilot - and everybody usually checks out for a few hours at night. Maybe consciousness is a rare temporary thing.
I think evidence suggests that humans aren't conscious most of the time. So it wouldn't surprise me if 95% of the time people are just stochastic parrots. But maybe that number is even close or equal to 100%.
Intellectually a lot of humans perform worse than LLMs and a lot of people (most of them) are completely unable to process abstract concepts and basic logic at all. Can those people truly be called conscious? Is consciousness worth something without the ability to reason?
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know anyone who supports both ideas at the same time. Are you saying that philosophers do? Every guy saying that free will doesn't exist is arguing exactly this. Physical causality considered an obstacle to freedom implies that the conscious entity is somehow outside the physical world.
You are implying that consciousness has to include free will? Why?
That's backwards. People saying that there's no free will because determinism is implying that human consciousness is outside the physical world. Actually that's what TFA is about and makes a great job explaining it.
My comment was responding to energy123 questioning there are philosophers that are both materialistic and consider human consciousness is "special". The moment you separate consciousness from all the physical processes that support it (and that's what negating "free" will arguing that it's caused by material forces) you're placing it in a different "plane".
That's hardly an unheard-of position, there are many thinkers that fall for this.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#349Earlier 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 anyone who supports both ideas at the same time. Are you saying that philosophers do? Every guy saying that free will doesn't exist is arguing exactly this. Physical causality considered an obstacle to freedom implies that the conscious entity is somehow outside the physical world.
In case you didn't get it: you were invited to provide concrete examples of philosophers holding the explicit opinion you have described.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#350This is the Let's deal with the phenomenon of Qualia by denying its existence thesis.
Spot on.
Not at all. As the fourth paragraph from the end states, we experience qualia. Rovelli is simply saying that qualia are simply physical processes described from a salient perspective, that is, at a level more abstract than the eletrochemical processes that underlie them.
It's a bit like pain: to create better analgesics, we need to work at the lower levels closer to the biology, but a patient describing pain to a doctor works at a higher, descriptive level, as does the doctor. Where is the pain, what are its qualities (dull, sharp, shallow, deep, burning, etc.).