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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

#501

Post by squidbeak »

yubblegum wrote: post #489
squidbeak wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

Quite. But for the purposes of his story, their narrator is applying them as an analogue to processes in living creatures.

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

#502

Post by mjburgess »

qsera wrote: post #422
mjburgess wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yes. Though i think you're committing the gentic fallacy here, which is the core fallacy at the heart of idealism and much 19th C. german philosophy.

The properties of the origin of somethign imply nothing about the properties of the product. That a bread factory is made of metal, does not mean bread is.

That in my statement of things in language I am conscious of what I state, says nothing about the truth (or other such properties) of what I say.

A photographic plate is made of metal, the mountain it photographs, of mud.

I am conscious, but when I say, "reality is all that which is extended in space and time" -- the truth of that proposition has nothing to do with my being consiouss -- it is a loaf of bread, a photograph, a product of a process invovling consiousness but in none of its properties, depends upon it.

Every relevant thing we do requires consciousness -- just as everythign a thermometer does requires, say, its own mercury -- but in measuring coffee's temperature, coffee is in no way mercury. And when we measre the world, by photographing it with consciousness, it is in no way conscious.

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

#504

Post by Nasrudith »

mordymoop wrote: post #434
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…

Over time I've found that by far the highest ROI move in a consciousness debate is to simply ask "Oh, interesting. How do you know that?" and watch everyone on all sides flounder. It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try. The intuitions are so strong that they seem to swamp reason. This has caused my ow…

My best contribution to that sort of debate is experience with general anesthesia. I recall being in a disconnected state wondering idly if I had died of complications without any fear as I could not feel my heartbeat or embodied emotions. That implies a heavily embodied component to consciousness. It is all body so not quite dualism but it does provide some limited observational evidence of distinct components. Combine that with what I have heard about the mechanism of anesthesia working by disabling nerve transmission that suggests that a disembodied but supported brain which does not have neural access to sensory feedbacks would be rather stoic to emotionless.

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

#505

Post by summarybot »

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…

Largely I find your points reductionist and insulting to the very sacred experience that is unfolding for you and me. Consciousness is a primary or even a priori phenomenon from which all of your surmisals stem. You have got it backwards. The fact someone once saw an ape, or saw a nebula, or made a measurement of brain waves, these all had to happen within human-experience. The experiencing itself is irreducible. Consciousness as a byproduct or secondary phenomenon as you claim, is to be expected for someone brought up in the modern era where religion and spirituality were so vehemently eschewed that men leaned too far into the other extreme and became physicalist-materialists claiming the lived experience is but a mere symphony of neurological interactions without consequence. This is a disastrous view. This is basically a swift ticket to a hell-realm. The basic posture is all wrong - you must return to the fundamental facts, namely those of your lived experience. What you claim as primary evidence are in fact secondary observations. And then you use the secondary observations to make claims about a primary nature "out there" and "distinct from" human-experiencing. This is simply not the case. This view is logically untenable. One does not study consciousness by looking at pictures and drawings and photos, just like how one does not study what music sounds like by inspecting the buttons of a saxaphone unblown. The fluid nature of the energetic capacity of mind is very difficult to discern - it's not an everyday occurence, sages spend their whole lives pursuing prayer and meditation in order to catch a mere glimpse at the primal nature of experience. Everything else flows from this. Your mind is the root of all things, it is the common denominator in all moments of your experience.

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

#506

Post by prmph »

innin wrote: post #440
mikk14 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A true monist would realize that any experience of the uploaded being that received a copy of the brain is not felt by the original brain that has been copied. This is a fact and it is elementary to see it as true, as well as supporting the view that the copy is not the same being at all. If your description of computation functionalists is accurate, then they simply are dualists and would do good in admitting this t…

There is no prove that continuity really matters. In fact who goes to say that your current conscious self is the same as your self from five minutes ago. After all you do not feel what they felt. The only thing that makes you think that the two are related or even the same is your state (memories, emotions). Why would we even think about whether cloning is able to transmit consciousness when we don’t even know if co…

In that case you don't exist, since there is no such thing as "current". Every moment in time is either past or future, assuming time is continuous. The reals are infinitely infinite.

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

#507

Post by criddell »

andoando wrote: post #134
solenoid0937 wrote: post #6

Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable . It cannot be disproven in the same way you can't disprove the existence of God, and so arguing with people that believe in it is largely pointless.

Yet the mere fact that I am conscious is a greater truth than any of my perception of the "physical" world. Neither does pure materialism rest on falsifiable beliefs, in that I could claim nothing exists outside my conscious experience.

Just as one can say the neocortex named itself, it's your brain declaring that it is conscious.

If ten years from now your phone tells you it is conscious, would you believe it? What criteria would you use to decide?

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

#508

Post by JCTheDenthog »

visarga wrote: post #485
zchrykng wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ener…

>If you are in a sim, then the sim execution is an expensive process, it produces heat and consumes energy.

If simulation theory (or similar ideas) are real, it's entirely possible that the "real world" running the simulation operates on completely different physical laws than the simulation.

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

#509

Post by hnfong »

yubblegum wrote: post #483
hnfong wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "subjective…

I must admit I've never been hit so hard that I am 100% knocked out, so I can't really speak as to the subjective experience of being knocked out (from the non-physical consciousness perspective, not the brain)... but surely it isn't like disconnecting from World of Warcraft?

That said, if the injury is serious enough I suppose it might trigger some Near Death Experience where people have reported seeing things purportedly on the other side.

So I guess that answers my original concern.

(I think you might have confused my question though, or perhaps I've confused you. No worries, my questions are answered anyway.)

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