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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

#481

Post by tim333 »

geye1234 wrote: post #284

> During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul. This is absolutely, completely, demonstrably false. Soul-body dualism was largely a 17th-century innovation, although Plato somewhat anticipated it. Most medieval Catholic thought rejected it (and continues to do so), being quite clear that the soul/mind and the body are one entity. How can people in g…

>...[God says] all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.

from the book of

>prophet Ezekiel, exiled in Babylon, during the 22 years from 593 to 571 BC

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

#482

Post by dwd »

karol wrote: post #461
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…

Get familiar with Donald Hoffman - plenty of good podcasts with him.

I feel like Hoffman's core idea really tries to pull string theory into our understanding of reality. If reality has 10, 11, or 26 dimensions and we can only perceive 4 of them then there are dimensions where other things could exist.

I like his interface theory and the idea that our perception is an evolutionary fitness for purpose, but his conscious agents is straight out pseudo-religious/panpsychism.

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

#483

Post by yubblegum »

hnfong wrote: post #463
yubblegum wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no problem here. [I may have shared this thought experiment before here using a different handle.] Let us assume there exists in our planet an undiscovered island that has developed independent of other human societies. This is not an island of primitives. The inhabitants pride themselves on their scientific and empirical approach to knowledge acquisition, however they are not quite on par with the rest of t…

Interesting. I don't think the GP's objection is fatal either (for reasons mentioned in another reply), but let me try to poke holes in your argument. If I understand your analogy correctly, you're saying the brain here acts as an intermediary between the real consciousness and the physical world, and not really the underlying thing that generates consciousness. But this seems to contradict actual experience -- if so…

I don't think the insistence on the requirement of 'hard disconnect' is reasonable. Per the brain as transceiver analogy, you are jiggling a part and may get 'static' while you are doing it. Stop the jiggling and static stops. Jiggle too hard and the part disconnects from its socket (knock them out /g) and you'll have the desired disconnect from the "World of Warcraft".

p.s. Realized I didn't address your "subjectively". This is true, since the radio analogy was to address the analog of neuroscientists examining people with damaged brains. You want to know what the 'radio' feels :)

So this is in fact an interesting aspect you bring in. The answer to this is: this seems to conflate 'ego' and 'self'. This is a different problem: Is the self the same as the ego? My own view on this is that is the ego is not the true self.

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

#484

Post by iainmerrick »

visarga wrote: post #437
nemomarx wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought that the mechanisms there create the experience or the illusion of a continuous self or something in that direction. When you've experienced it breaking down (automatic actions happening before you remember deciding to do them is a big contributor to the floaty dream like effect) you start to think maybe there's several systems and the observation and memory parts are just making sense of them. We…

There is a very good explanation here - not what brains do, but what brains MUST do. Can we walk left and right at the same time? Can we drink coffee before brewing it? No. There is a bottleneck, a serial action bottleneck on the body. So the parallel brain activity must serialize on the output channel. It has to, or face ruin. If action is serialized in time by physical necessity, then information processing must al…

There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing

What? Why not?

It's physically possible in terms of limb motion. It's very difficult for most people to actually do, sure; but impossible?

or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way

There's the idea that a lot of the brain's "conscious decisions" are actually post-hoc rationalisations of unconscious decisions. If so, there's no reason those decisions have to be unified. Maybe the consciousness of the decision and its outcomes must be unified; maybe that's somehow connected to what consciousness really is. Or maybe not!

I don't think there's enough information to say.

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

#485

Post by visarga »

zchrykng wrote: post #445
smackeyacky wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Part of the argument is that you can only know what you experience. But, if this is a simulation, "you" could be a program running on a computer and your every experience is just piped directly into your consciousness without any underlying physical reality. You might even not be interacting with other people in the simulation, it could be just you and everything else is simulated without being similar to whatever ex…

> "you" could be a program running on a computer

If you are in a sim, then the sim execution is an expensive process, it produces heat and consumes energy. If you are in reality, a material body, then keeping alive also consumes energy. The debates about consciousness often assume a cost-free regime, a platonic perspective. I think this is wrong. We have much to gain thinking about how a process provides its own energy, or how it balances costs and gains. Maybe we can find answers about consciousness too if we chase down the cost recursion path.

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

#488

Post by squidbeak »

yubblegum wrote: post #454
squidbeak wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this line of thought is that consciousness can be damaged when it's physical container is damaged. A piece of falling masonry can be enough to shear off large parts or all of it. If consciousness was fundamentally distinct, this wouldn't be the case, would it?

There is no problem here. [I may have shared this thought experiment before here using a different handle.] Let us assume there exists in our planet an undiscovered island that has developed independent of other human societies. This is not an island of primitives. The inhabitants pride themselves on their scientific and empirical approach to knowledge acquisition, however they are not quite on par with the rest of t…

This is a facile thought experiment, and I'm surprised it's weakness hasn't already occurred to you.

But as it hasn't, let's change your island to an island of supremely skilled butchers. Your islanders are apparently capable of reassembling the mystery radios to restore function, so let's allow my island's butchers the skill of dismembering flesh atomically - and reassembling it exactly. Perhaps via quantum knives and very strong prescription lenses.

Their own religion has long prohibited them from peering into their tribe's flesh - and their tribe is all there is on that remotest of islands. But the day a missionary washes up on shore they see an opportunity. They can finally take a proper look. They begin with his head - by far the most interesting part of him, with the delighted and friendly if slightly smug smile and neverending chatter.

Once dismantled and laid out in trillions of tiny pieces in a large hall - a bit like a crashed plane - they decide to reassemble his head in different configurations - to test how the behaviour would change with each layout. There's an unusual fruit on the island which allows them almost superhuman focus and speed - so that billions of reconfigurations can be completed over an afternoon.

BUT WHAT DO YOU KNOW...? Every single reconfiguration results in a totally inert missionary! No more drunk on the milk of paradise look, and no more "Hallelujah!"s. Just a lump of meat. Perplexed - they decide there must have been something truly unique about the missionary's head's original layout and composition - so reassemble him in the way they found him. But when they have done this - calamity! - he doesn't come on any more. They check their work 18 times - but not a single atom is dislocated. And so the wise islanders come to the only conclusion possible, and hurry to note it in their scientific literature:

"Radios aren't animals. And anyone pretending otherwise is a ginormous silly billy."

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

#489

Post by yubblegum »

squidbeak wrote: post #488
yubblegum wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no problem here. [I may have shared this thought experiment before here using a different handle.] Let us assume there exists in our planet an undiscovered island that has developed independent of other human societies. This is not an island of primitives. The inhabitants pride themselves on their scientific and empirical approach to knowledge acquisition, however they are not quite on par with the rest of t…

This is a facile thought experiment, and I'm surprised it's weakness hasn't already occurred to you. But as it hasn't, let's change your island to an island of supremely skilled butchers. Your islanders are apparently capable of reassembling the mystery radios to restore function, so let's allow my island's butchers the skill of dismembering flesh atomically - and reassembling it exactly. Perhaps via quantum knives a…

> "Radios aren't animals. And anyone pretending otherwise is a ginormous silly billy."

The results presented to the scientific community of the island was that the "mechanisms" are "thinking machines". They clearly did not think the boxes to be 'living creatures'.

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