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

741–750 of 822 posts

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

#741

Post by mikk14 »

gpderetta wrote: post #529
mikk14 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

If this actually happened, would the 'I' that replaced you be any wiser. How do you know this hasn't happened to you already? Maybe multiple times per second? > It says "something" survived the utter complete destruction of the physical body and was "put back in it" once it was reassembled. If "it" survived the complete physical destruction of the body, it must be somewhere else, detached from the body. The informati…

> If this actually happened, would the 'I' that replaced you be any wiser. How do you know this hasn't happened to you already? Maybe multiple times per second?

If this is true, that the body dies every planck time and the mind survives it, then it simply means the dualist position is true.

> The information of how to put your body and mind back must have survived somewhere, in the alien mind for example or the machine they used. But the information would still be in (a medium in) this universe and bound to this universe physical laws. I would say this is still a monist position.

I'm sorry, but you're circling back to the first message I wrote. You are giving to information magical properties that it cannot have, because they lead to a contradiction. With the same information you can make multiple copies of me at the same time. But if you make two, the experiences of one do not get magically transmitted to the brain of the other. So those are two distinct selves, even if they are made with the exact same information. This clearly does not work. It's the same issue of mind uploading that I initially argued about.

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

#742

Post by GoblinSlayer »

summarybot wrote: post #505
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…

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. Con…

If there's no nature out there, then what is hell?

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

#743

Post by qsera »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #735
qsera wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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...

These questions can be asked about idealism too. And they go ad infinitum, so you can't reduce their number even if you answer them.

Not really.

You cannot ask why consciousness exist. That would be like asking why a circle exist. To elaborate if we consider that our reality is computable from a set of physical laws and a set of random events, then it implies that the consciousness inside that reality is also computable.

The next question is whether the subjective experience those consciousness, or those consciousness themselves can exist without something actually doing the computation.

Does a circle exist before someone draw it? It does, right? and thus, if a world with consciousness is definable, then the subjective experiences inside those consciousness will happen without something actually computing it.

So all such possible worlds exist. By "exist" I don't mean the classical meaning of it. Just that there are subjective experiences going on "inside" them.

I think quantum mechanics also converge on the same idea with the multi-world interpretation of quantum events. At every point when there is a random event, the universe is split and all possibilities is realized in disjoint universes.

And I think this is the same thing as I have described above. Actually multi-world interpretation would be the final nail in the coffin for physicalism. How can material world split infinitely at every infinitely small instance ! But evidence shows that something like that is happening.

So it has to be something like what have been described above.

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

#744

Post by qsera »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #737
qsera wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its not an answer to any question It is. It is the theory of everything. > what is this "consiousness" in the end, which has in its nature, the production of all material reality to serve as a fixed causal basis for perception? If you haven't already came acrosss M.U.H, I would just direct you to https://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0646 >What madness to is it to say that mercury in a thermometer not only acts as-if it is in…

>I hypothesize that only computable and decidable (in Godel's sense) structures exist That's kinda DoA. Isn't there a proof that uncomputable things exist in mathematics, so if mathematics is true, why hypothesize that they don't exist even if we know that they exist? >but imagine consciousness appearing only in "regular" worlds, with uniform laws and behaviors.. Why this limitation? Irregular worlds with appearing c…

>Why this limitation?

This is not a limitation. The basis of this idea is that there is consciousness in this (our) world. So we know that consciousness can result from our set of physical laws and the set of all random events in this world . That is the only thing we know for sure, and the only place we can start reasoning..

We don't know if it is possible for consciousness to exist in a world where everything is random, or less regular..

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

#745

Post by nradov »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #740
nradov wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work better in what sense? Do naturalistic theories have more predictive power?

Predictive power, explanatory power, precision, consistency and matching evidence.

Really? Do you have a citation for that?

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

#746

Post by aa-jv »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #736
aa-jv wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Argue with someone who gathered evidence scientifically to demonstrate that we really, really don't know what we're talking about when it comes to the human soul: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Cases_Suggestive_of_Rei... EDIT: Downvote all you want, materialists, but reincarnation is the spanner in the works nobody wants to confront ..

Reincarnation just doesn't make sense when you consider the numbers. Why are more people being born today than yesterday? If you believe in reincarnation, for some reason brand new souls are spawning into existence. Why? How does reincarnation work for them?

> Why are more people being born today than yesterday?

Because souls split. Like rain and the ocean.

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

#748

Post by svara »

DangitBobby wrote: post #731
svara wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a separate thing." Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that? A lot of people, myself included, have the intuition that thinking that this might be possible is a sort of type error , to put it in CS terms. A bit like asking "Have you proven that ice cream? Are yo…

As far as we know math can describe all of physics and sufficiently complex physics could describe our brains, thus math could describe our brains. Does that mean we aren't conscious? Where is the chain broken?

There's nothing wrong with that chain. This is what some philosophers would call the 'easy ' problem of consciousness, to distinguish it from the 'hard' problem, which is the next step:

How do you get from a physical model of brain physiology and behavior to subjective experience of mental states?

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

#749

Post by trick-or-treat »

fssys wrote: post #519
trick-or-treat wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not fundamental to existence but fundamental to consciousness. Theoretically the person sitting next to you could be a zombie, no qualia, the lights are off, he's just having a conversation with you with nothing going on behind the scenes. And there's no way to tell, except that it's reasonable to extrapolate that since you feel something, he probably does too.

My argument is that qualia are actually cognitive artefacts bound up with language, not the base elements of "what it is to be" you or me, which is how people often speak of them, so the p-zombie concept is a bit nonsensical to me.

They are what they are (its a subjective phenomenon). I'm not claiming to know where they come from.

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

#750

Post by prmph »

pixl97 wrote: post #652
prmph wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser. This is exactly what don't know, and is interesting to explore. > 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 So if your brain was somehow cloned, you'd exist in two places at the same time? It seems possible for two separate consciousness to have the…

>and yet still not be the same. You're making a fundimental mistake here on understanding substrates. If I take a hard drive an copy it, is it the same hard drive? Well, no, we'd both agree they are two different hard drives, that's pretty easy to see. But what if we are executing data off the hard drive. Initially it would operate as if it were the same, the data on the hard drive would have zero ability or knowledg…

> you are never the same unless you can start taking snapshots at the plank scale. You are always changing at the chemical level.

And yet there is a sense of continuity. Are you saying the if your are killed and replaced by an immortal being with your same memories, thought patterns, and body, that'd be an acceptable continuation of you? You'd be ok with that as a form of attaining immortality?

Post reply on HN