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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

#421

Post by noutella »

mjburgess wrote: post #391
amelius wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing is certain: we are talking about consciousness. This means that the world does not work like this: there is physics, and above it there is consciousness which is merely monitoring the physics. This cannot be true (or is unlikely), since we are discussing consciousness and therefore the physical act of talking is driven by something that knows that consciousness exists. There must be a link back from conscio…

The link is called causation, and it is not simpler to assume its absence. It seems simpler only because no one ever works through the full consequences, because the project of doing so always fails very quickly or terminates in an inexplicable bag called "god" (or the trasncendental ego) or similar which serves to do all the work of things which cannot be explained. This kind of simplicity is a very deceitful on, be…

It does offer beauty and relief to the fact that the observable universe is something like 10^80 the volume of a humain being. At that incomprehensible scale, I think poetry and spirituality is a rather nice placeholder while loads of brilliant minds work on our understanding of physics

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

#422

Post by qsera »

mjburgess wrote: post #375
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…

> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure. These statements conflate, as idealists do, epistemology and ontology. What we know "for sure" has no bearing on what's real. These are entirely separate questions. What an ape might, or might not, feel certain (or any which way about) says nothing about where an ape finds itself. Of course, this is a great injury to our ego, and sens…

>Consciousness is a derivative, secondary phenomenon which is a measurement process occurring in the body of an ape

Can you define existence without depending on or referring to consciousness?

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

#423

Post by n4r9 »

hackandthink wrote: post #279
n4r9 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reference, that looks like a pretty thorough review. It seems to me that Chalmers already precludes the possibility of physical/materialist explanations with his claim, quoted in the first section: > There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold. This certainly doesn't feel obvious or intuitive to me. I would e…

It is neither obvious nor intuitive. But it is logical possible that we all are Zombies. In my regard the weak link is our understanding of materialism. It is to simple minded. (though panpsychism sounds really crank)

No, I mean that the logical possibility itself is neither obvious nor intuitive. If you physically copied me atom by atom, every instinct in me says that the result has conscious experience. I'd need some serious convincing otherwise.

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

#424

Post by erythro »

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…

Panpsychism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

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

#425

Post by jfyi »

pygy_ wrote: post #317
throw_m239339 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well, right, it's contextual. We each have a series of inputs that add up to these contexts. This doesn't mean it can't be explained, it just means there needs to be context.

If you give the blind man a sensor that converts color data to something he can input, and then provide inputs giving the feeling you want to portray associated with that color, you have explained it.

If you feel red is angry, all you need to do is play 400 to 484 THz into his instrument and yell at him angrily enough times for him to associate it. It doesn't seem too subjective to me.

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

#426

Post by semilin »

MrOrelliOReilly wrote: post #167

This article is pretty slim on details, but I agree with the general argument that dualism is unnecessary to explain phenomenal consciousness. The word "consciousness" has a lot of baggage, which causes us to mislabel cognition as consciousness. [1] This is why I really like using terms like "qualia" or _phenomenal_ consciousness to make explicit what we're talking about. I still don't like this new trend of dismissi…

It felt very strange to me that the author construes belief in the hard problem as some sort of spiritual baggage from unempirical religious view. He seems to want to pit the "new understandings of reality developed over the last three centuries" _against_ the idea of phenomenal consciousness, which is just absurd to me. As far as I understand, it is far more rooted in German idealism and its Cartesian roots than in any sort of religious spirit.

I'm almost convinced that those who deny the metaphysical (or, if you insist, the plausibly merely physical) force of qualia are philosophical zombies trying to persuade us against the existence of the most obviously true piece of knowledge we have! Or, more generously, they are so steeped in the premises of modern empirical science that they treat their fundamental phenomenal experience as so untrustworthy as to be disregarded, despite its actual necessity in employing those very premises.

Poor, disregarded qualia! Oh that the scientists could see how much they owe to you.

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

#427

Post by justonceokay »

kbrkbr wrote: post #371
justonceokay wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok pain might be a bad example because a robot may not have a sense of it borne of evolution. But what about “red”? If I make a robot that 99.9% correctly identifies red objects, then I think it is fair to me to say it has a concept of “redness”. Some philosophers believe that our human emotional connection to redness is special. These are the people talking about qualia. My belief after much reading is that it is no…

But does the robot identify them in your view, or in its view? If in your view, then you created a tool for yourself. Like a Geiger counter. If in its view, ask it what it thinks about consciousness and qualia.

I’ve asked the slugs and the worms and starfish and amoebas and nematodes and fish about their experience, I’m just waiting to hear back.

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

#428

Post by whack »

There is a problem with the thesis that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon. It implies that someone writing the "wrong" sequence of 0s and 1s, by hand, on a completely private journal, has committed a moral crime on par with slavery and genocide.

Full proof: https://outlookzen.com/2017/04/03/philosophical-proof-for-th...

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

#429

Post by sethev »

The Hard Problem strikes me as a "why" question and humans have a poor track record of ever answering a "why" for a foundational question (at least in a way that we can demonstrate to others). Our most successful explanations build up from simpler things to explain more complex things. But at some point, the explanation bottoms out on things we can't further explain - like the fields in quantum theory. There's currently no further thing below those that explain "why a field theory?"

If we solved the Easy Problems of consciousness, i think we would find ourselves in a similar position where most people would simply accept that we had an explanation and move on but some people with a more philosophical bent would continue to search for underlying explanations.

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

#430

Post by alexwebb2 »

mikk14 wrote: post #301
energy123 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you are destroyed in your sleep by aliens and replaced by an atomically identical duplicate. Would you call this "you"? If not, what if the aliens recycled the atoms from your original body to make the new body, putting each original atom into the same original spot with the same position and momentum (ignoring quantum and uncertainty principle). What if they recycled 99% of the atoms from your original body,…

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.…

As a monist who holds the view that you’re claiming monists can’t legitimately hold, I don’t see any difficulty at all in squaring these ideas:

- there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else

- destroying an instantiation of a pattern != destroying the pattern

And speaking of squaring ideas – if I draw a square on a piece of paper, and then light that paper on fire, I haven’t destroyed the concept of a square. I can always draw an identical square on another sheet of paper. If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.

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