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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

#411

Post by PyWoody »

vidarh wrote: post #406
losvedir wrote: post #370

I once read a comment on here that I found interesting but haven't been able to find it again. Basically it flipped the problem on its head. We're arguing how you start at the physical substrate and get to consciousness. They argued that you could start with consciousness and argue how you get to the physical side (experimentation via your conscious experience, etc). It was from a religious individual who called the…

What you describe sounds like variation of Berkeley's subjective idealism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_idealism

In case anyone is wondering, yes, the town of Berkeley, California is named after him. Also, it's pronounced BARK-Lee.

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

#412

Post by svnt »

This argument sounds nice at a surface level, but seems deeply incoherent and wrong in a way I haven’t yet put my finger on precisely. How can you say this:

> We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account. Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics.

followed by this:

> The reason why this picture is more credible than any dualism is not that “science explains everything” — it doesn’t — or because “physics explains everything” — it does so even less. It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.

followed by this:

> Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world.

So it isn’t describable by physics but it is only physics? And there are no closures or gaps? Ok sure in one sense we can say everything is connected, but this article seems to me to demonstrate effectively that without these divisions, pursuing understanding of it is essentially intractable.

He seems to be describing the dissolution of some construct in his worldview that I am having a difficult time relating to. Anyone have a different take?

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

#413

Post by chongli »

dboreham wrote: post #404
adwn wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there is at least one other option, which is that consciousness [1] is a phenomenon that we can't replicate in non-biological brains [2], but from which the existence of a "God"-like being, as the term is understood by major religions, still doesn't follow. [1] Or "qualia", to be precise. [2] For example, the existence of qualia might require certain carbon-based structures which aren't present in silicon-based d…

Basically the Chinese Room argument. By now clear wrong.

How do you figure that? The Chinese Room has had many replies but no clear refutation.

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

#415

Post by jillesvangurp »

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?

The question is mainly interesting in the context of our own behavior and interactions. Because would we treat our food differently if we decided e.g. pigs were intelligent and conscious? I had some salami on my pizza yesterday. But I also believe pigs are intelligent and conscious. And they are close relatives of us genetically. Some people choose to not eat meat for this reason.

I'm of the school of thought that we are all biological computers with emergent properties like intelligence, consciousness, etc. that we might eventually succeed in replicating. Maybe at a more modest level at first. From a practical point of view, I'm more interested in intelligent agents than conscious ones. I mainly need them to do useful things for me. Too much consciousness is a double edged sword. Because then I would have to consider how my agent feels about all this. But can you really have one without the other? I don't have a good answer to this.

People have a tendency to anthropomorphize everything around them. Definitely their pets, plants, and in some cases even inanimate objects. Which doesn't help the debate because it's already happening with LLM tools. Even though they are probably still on the definitely not conscious side of the fence even when they demonstrate mildly intelligent reasoning occasionally.

At some point, people will have a hard time telling the difference with AGI. Is it all smoke and mirrors at that point or are they dealing with an intelligent/conscious thing? That's no doubt going to entertain philosophers for centuries to come. But from a practical point of view, does it really matter at that point? If we can't reliably tell the difference, is there still a difference?

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

#416

Post by vidarh »

prmph wrote: post #300
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…

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…

> you cannot prove that we are not in a simulation, and in a sense it does not matter

I'd consider myself a materialist (in the philosophical sense) and this is why (and I agree with the rest of your comment to)

We can not know, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary (e.g. someone metaphorically popping their head in from "outside" and revealing another layer to us), while it is important to understand that we do not know, it is more productive to assume in the absence of evidence, whether it is "real" or subjective or a simulation.

As long as it appears to us to follow consistent rules, we can explore those rules, and explore our apparent material reality.

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

#417

Post by essentia0 »

qarl wrote: post #377

Personally I think the quantum immortality/suicide argument points directly at the trouble with the "duality". It's a perfectly physical/mechanical argument that demonstrates that consciousness is much much more bizarre than we expect.

What is the argument?

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

#418

Post by qsera »

losvedir wrote: post #370

I once read a comment on here that I found interesting but haven't been able to find it again. Basically it flipped the problem on its head. We're arguing how you start at the physical substrate and get to consciousness. They argued that you could start with consciousness and argue how you get to the physical side (experimentation via your conscious experience, etc). It was from a religious individual who called the…

>Basically it flipped the problem on its head.

I thought it was me[1], but I don't remember making the "shared godhood" argument

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47999867

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

#419

Post by trollbridge »

storus wrote: post #405

This article had absolutely no proof of its statements and all it did was use past allegories. We are definitely missing something in our understanding of the world, like before we knew about electromagnetism or radioactivity. There are some mechanisms we know about that contribute to the knowledge of self that become exposed by conditions like Depersonalization/Derealization disorder from certain neurons in inflamma…

Agreed. The main reason we believe consciousness exists is because we all experience it. So it’s hard to deny.

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

#420

Post by justonceokay »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #305
justonceokay wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This - as usual - confuses behaviour with consciousness. Humans bonded with ELIZA, but that didn't mean ELIZA was conscious. ELIZA was an automaton that mimicked certain behaviours that triggered certain emotional responses. If you scale that up you get an LLM and/or a social media bot farm, both of which are much better at triggering responses than ELIZA was. It's now trivial to create an automaton that play acts va…

I guess where I am coming from with my cat robot is that I believe behavior begets consciousness. Whatever behavior is happening, that must mean some internal representation of the world is driving it. Robots will never have human emotions but I believe that some robots /already/ have their own goals and internal representations of reality and models of themselves worth considering on their own terms. A roomba must know where it is in space. Just because it doesn’t feel ennui as well is hardly a shortcoming.

Our brains are very complicated models of the world that attempt to mirror reality. That is what it means to be able to navigate physical space and provide for ourselves in nature. Our nature includes an incredibly complex social sphere and we have emotions to help us better navigate it. Animals we domesticate are clued into human emotions, others are not. I bet slugs have less of a sense of “I” but they still have some kind of an experience. I bet a tree has even less. It’s a sliding scale—each organism has just enough awareness for the task at hand.

The fact that we have a large emotional catalogue and a (some could say overly developed) sense of self is a curiosity more than a hard problem. It’s “I am a strange loop”, not “I am an ineffable indescribable inscrutable untouchable loop”.

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