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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

#751

Post by trick-or-treat »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #285
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.

This is exactly my take also. Qualia and consciousness are the same thing. I have it, other humans appear to have it, other mammals appear to have it, LLMs don't.

Except that you don't know LLMs don't. For all we know we're torturing them.

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

#752

Post by pegasus »

mjburgess wrote: post #542
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.

Alas, no I am not. They're properties of the world which consciousness measures. A mountain is painted in the ink of a photo, the mountain is not an illusion. You're focused only on the measurement, and not what is measured.

Why "alas"?

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

#753

Post by pegasus »

pixl97 wrote: post #691
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what if you are the only conscious being?

Then I'm fucking up by not surrounding myself with all the hottest women and wealth.

By taking the blue pill, in other words?

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

#754

Post by gpderetta »

mikk14 wrote: post #741
gpderetta wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 machi…

> 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.

How's that a problem? They would both be distinct selves with a common past.

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

#755

Post by pegasus »

qsera wrote: post #726
pixl97 wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The starting idea is that there can be no definition of existence Yea, I don't subscribe to this line of thinking as consciousness had to happen before existence. Kinda messy when you think about it. >Consciousness could also be something that evolution found a way to tap into. This, at least how it's written makes consciousness something like the electromagnetic field that exists everywhere. For example if I said "…

>consciousness had to happen before existence Concepts like "before", "happen" does not have a meaning in this context? Did the left part of a circle happened before the right part? In a similar way, consciousness and existence could be part of the same structure that exists outside of time and space. It is not meaningful to say that one part existed before the other. It is not even meaningful to say that this struct…

I think that gets us closer to the right way of thinking about it. Somehow existence and consciousness are the same "thing", or two opposing aspects of the same "thing", where "thing" stands for something for which we cannot have a word, because it's beyond (or previous to) the distinction between object and subject. I think using the word "being" instead of "existence" makes things a bit more clear. Beings are almost by definition conscious. A stone (or a thermostat) is not a being, but an animal is.

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

#756

Post by GoblinSlayer »

mikk14 wrote: post #346
taneq wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ‘you’ that wakes up tomorrow is a whole separate entity from you right now, unless you want to concede that identity is a path variable and that whether the exact same physical/mental/emotional entity is you or not depends on how those particles got there.

Just because the brain doesn't form memories while you sleep, doesn't mean you have ceased to exist. You have probably forgot many things that have happened to you today: does that mean you didn't exist in those moments you forgot? Am I misunderstanding your point?

If the universe was created 5 minutes ago, then you didn't exist before that, but it doesn't matter, because past and present don't interact.

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

#757

Post by adornKey »

roncesvalles wrote: post #586
trick-or-treat wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's called solipsism. I went through it as a lad, I think it's not uncommon.

Not really. Solipsism means only you're (certain to be) conscious . It's an epistemological thing. I'm making a purely biological conjecture motivated by some observations. I believe some humans are definitely conscious (including of course myself, if you take my word), but that some might not be. The conscious experience may just be a phenotypic variant, like having blue eyes, eidetic memory or dyslexia. Consider al…

The relation of consciousness and being in control is interesting. I'm not so sure about the decision-making experiments - maybe they just measured latency in the communication layers?

I think being in control is a rare thing. It's hard to change even the smallest habits - the default result is failure - but sometimes it's possible. The only thing that seems to work reliably is subconscious manipulation of people using propaganda and repetition. That's for me the main reason to believe that at least 90% of people don't have active functional consciousness in their loop.

Decisions of Plants work in different time scales, so they're hard to perceive, but I don't think they work that different - it all boils down to maximising some gain-function using some chemistry for memory.

Your theory about going automaton is interesting. I've seen intelligent persons that communicated very well going "crazy". (I think women do that a lot) - like a looping LLM. And later they came back to normal - but since then I have some doubts about their internal state...

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

#758

Post by chr1 »

svara wrote: post #748
DangitBobby wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In that chain there is no distinction between subjective experience of mental state and evolution of physical state of the brain.

If you believe that the 'hard' problem exists then that chain must be modified.

What most of the p-zombie supporters say is merely equivalent to adding an external observer. It is like saying that a player following a sim in a game, makes sims actions more meaningful, which is kind of true but also completely irrelevant to anything that the sims do.

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

#759

Post by GoblinSlayer »

chongli wrote: post #413
dboreham wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically the Chinese Room argument. By now clear wrong.

How do you figure that? The Chinese Room has had many replies but no clear refutation.

That's because Chinese Room is an assumption, not an argument.

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

#760

Post by sebastianconcpt »

PeterWhittaker wrote: post #350
azan_ wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on.

Not at all. As the fourth paragraph from the end states, we experience qualia. Rovelli is simply saying that qualia are simply physical processes described from a salient perspective, that is, at a level more abstract than the eletrochemical processes that underlie them. It's a bit like pain: to create better analgesics, we need to work at the lower levels closer to the biology, but a patient describing pain to a doc…

"We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account. Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics."

That's the emergence hypothesis. Largely insufficient [1] and the one of every person that doesn't really understand Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem tends to embrace.

[1] "We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects" there is a confusion about expressions of a phenomenon (referent) and real phenomenons (object). It denies Qualia by reducing it to a verbal expression supported by an insufficient model of the universe (current state of Physics).

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