Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

noemamag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 822 posts

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

#661

Post by pygy_ »

jfyi wrote: post #606
pygy_ wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re. color and wavelength, some of the colors one can experience are only accessible in after-images, not through direct retina stimulation.

Show me what is subjective about it then. What makes one illusion created out of flesh more real than another? How are any of these experiences subjective if you can already relate their nature so easily and universally? You are describing biomechanics, not subjective experience.

Are you saying that you are a literal philosophical zombie?

Do you understand the difference between feeling the pain in your toes when you shoot in a door frame and what you experience when you see someone else do the same.

Also not everyone can relate to these sensations, it is not universal. Some people don't feel any pain in their body (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pa...).

See also colorblindness as a common example, or tetrachromacy, which is posited in some individuals with at least two X chromosomes, and the norm in several species of birds.

Their color space has four dimensions.

People who lose parts of their brains can lose the ability to conceptualize the ability encoded by the region they lost.

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

#662

Post by qsera »

markhahn wrote: post #653
qsera wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have fixed perception in your dreams also. See, you have this observation of subjective experience. One hypothesis for wher this come from, require only consciousness, and the second requires consciousness as well as a whole universe. And the second hypothesis brings up even more questions. Where did this universe come from? Who created it? Why was it created? The simple answer is that only consciousness really e…

simple question: why not the opposite? that is, reality exists and consciousness is "painted" on top of that? IMO, anti-materialists are merely uncomfortable with the degree to which they understand neuroscience and related topics (including, btw, capabilities and limits of LLMs). Chalmers, for instance, basically insists that the Hard Problem is Hard simply because he finds it hard.

>that is, reality exists and consciousness is "painted" on top of that?

Because it brings along more questions like "Why does the reality exist"? "Why does the reality looks like this, and not like something else"?

Any answer that brings up more questions that it answers is not a very good answer IMHO...

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

#663

Post by qsera »

markhahn wrote: post #650
qsera wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>reality is all that which is extended in space and time You are missing the fact that "space" and "time" are also illusions painted on consciousness.

we need to distinguish accounts that are merely self-consistent, and those that are more useful. the reality-is-illusion meme is self-consistent (panpsychism, simulationism, dream-of-god-ism, whatever). merely being self-consistent isn't good enough. the alternative (and there is only one) is physicalism and its epistemology, science. the main appeal of this is parsimony, often referred to as Occam's Razor.

> those that are more useful.

Oh it is useful. It answers questions like "why do reality exist". "who created it", "What was before it"...Or may be I should say it does not really answer them but makes the questions irrelevant.

Just like how earth centric hypothesis posed questions like "Why is everything circling the earth and why is earth special", and heliocentric hypothesis made that irrelevant by proving that it is just an illusion caused by observing from the earth.

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

#664

Post by rixed »

roncesvalles wrote: post #231
H8crilA wrote: post #191

Earlier 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…

They are easy to recognize, they call themselves "physicalists" :)

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

#665

Post by funimpoded »

Eisenstein wrote: post #611
funimpoded wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you say that displaying image of something on a screen qualifies as actually happening? Yeah, of course. What I'm addressing is "if we turn 100% of everything about neurons into numbers we can do calculations on those numbers and it's the same as that stuff actually happening with real neurons". Which is entirely wrong. A trajectory calculation isn't different from actually firing a projectile because it's no…

So are saying that if we made a computer out of neurons that it could be capable of consciousness whereas an electronic one could not?

Yes, brains apparently can do consciousness.

Can descriptions of brains do consciousness? I don't know why we'd expect that they could. You can describe a fire in all the detail you like, and burn nothing.

Can electronic brains be conscious? I dunno. If I had to guess? Sky's-the-limit ignore-all-physical-and-temporal-constraints? Probably. Within the bounds of what humans will ever achieve? Maybe. I doubt they'd look as little-removed from tabulation machines as ours are, though. Like I definitely don't think you get there solving math problems. That would be surprisingly metaphysical.

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

#668

Post by namero999 »

etiam wrote: post #444
wowoc wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thomas Nagel's definition of consciousness is pretty good: "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."

What do you find good about that?

The like-ness properly capture in one go the first-person and the phenomenal aspects of consciousness.

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

#669

Post by namero999 »

aledevv wrote: post #139

> ..idea anticipated centuries ago by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza: that our Soul could be a phenomenon of the same basic nature as any other phenomenon in nature. Even the current Artificial Intelligence revolution is showing us that: what was thought to be purely immaterial and intangible, that is, human abstract Reasoning and Thoughts, are actually tangible, physical, and even machine-reproducible .

Cognition/intelligence is not consciousness. Information processing vs phenomenality. AI is intelligent (it's in the name) but not conscious.

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

#670

Post by pardon_me »

everdrive wrote: post #558

I've actually been waiting for this. All you need to do is ask the rhetorical "But if there's something that it's like to _be_ [thing / animal / whatever]" Once you ask that, you never need to explain anything. This is a magical process that can never be touched by observation or explanation.

I've been wondering if imagination is the closest thing to free will we have.
Post reply on HN