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A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

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Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#101

Post by drupe »

geuis wrote: post #96
tweaqslug wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Philosophy is precisely the domain of things that cannot be objectively testable because they are grounded in experience. You can not prove that you are conscious (especially in a world of LLMs) but you know it to be true. Should I assume you are an automaton simply because I can’t prove you are conscious?

Consciousness is not philosophy. In the past, it was. People didn't have the tools or theoretic background to even approach it in an empiric way. However we now have at least the basics to hypothesize and perform experiments. So it's no longer philosophy and is in the realm of understanding what actually are the mechanisms of consciousness.

We can find "neural correlates" of consciousness, but nothing we do right now can prove that experience/awareness is taking place somewhere other than where oneself is experiencing/being aware.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#102

Post by kazinator »

antihipocrat wrote: post #99
geuis wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A lot of philosophy is testable and the inspiration for scientific enquiry. Philosophy contains logic as a major area of study and the results of this work are core tenets in mathematics which enables the ability to conduct rigorous science. Science itself is the product of philosophical enquiry.

Science is the product of philosophical inquiry if you ask philosophers.

Just like the Internet is the work of Al Gore, if you ask Al Gore.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#103

Post by skissane »

geuis wrote: post #95
skissane wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your position is self-refuting: you are dismissing philosophy, yet simultaneously making philosophical claims in doing so-claiming that all knowledge is empirical is itself a philosophical claim (empiricism)

This is a philosophical argument, therefore dismissible by science. Unless you can rephrase your argument as something testable, it's philosophy and thereby not relevant.

> This is a philosophical argument, therefore dismissible by science.

The claim I just made - that dismissing philosophy on empirical grounds is self-refuting because it relies on the philosophical position of empiricism - is not “dismissible by science” - there is no experiment or observation capable of proving or disproving that claim.

Also, the assumption you seem to be making - that all genuine knowledge comes from empirical science - can be countered with the argument that mathematical theorems (e.g. those of Gödel) are true and can he known to be true, but they are not known or knowable by means of empirical science

> Unless you can rephrase your argument as something testable, it's philosophy and thereby not relevant.

What you just said is not testable, hence by its own terms is philosophy and thereby not relevant - it condemns itself as irrelevant

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#104

Post by perching_aix »

geuis wrote: post #82
skissane wrote: post #61

Articles like this annoy me: it seems to want to comment on philosophy of mind, but shows zero awareness of the classic debates in that discipline - materialism vs idealism vs dualism vs neutral monism, and the competing versions of each of those, e.g. substance dualism vs hylemorphic dualism, eliminativist vs reductionist/emergentist materialism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism, panpsychism, Chalmers’ distinction…

[flagged]

You're describing the scientific method. Philosophy is not for "understanding the universe". Surely it cannot be blamed for not fulfilling a goal you only imagine it to have.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#105

Post by corimaith »

heyjamesknight wrote: post #19
layer8 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emergence has no “into”, IMO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

All of those examples are emergence "into". The snowflake emerges into the mathematical patterns emanating downward. The termite cathedral emerges into the architectural context of the observer. Without emanating structure, there is no "emergence"—just a proliferation of chaos and error.

Sounds similar to Plato's Theory of Forms.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#106

Post by mmooss »

geuis wrote: post #82
skissane wrote: post #61

Articles like this annoy me: it seems to want to comment on philosophy of mind, but shows zero awareness of the classic debates in that discipline - materialism vs idealism vs dualism vs neutral monism, and the competing versions of each of those, e.g. substance dualism vs hylemorphic dualism, eliminativist vs reductionist/emergentist materialism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism, panpsychism, Chalmers’ distinction…

[flagged]

> I don't care what your ideas are. If they aren't testable, they're your opinion.

Most of the life and the world involves beliefs that aren't testable. The lack of testability doesn't mean it's arbitrary; testing is just one tool (the most effective one, I believe). But if you restricted yourself to that, if we had no other qualification or judgment, we couldn't achieve anything.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#107

Post by The_Colonel »

geuis wrote: post #95
skissane wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your position is self-refuting: you are dismissing philosophy, yet simultaneously making philosophical claims in doing so-claiming that all knowledge is empirical is itself a philosophical claim (empiricism)

This is a philosophical argument, therefore dismissible by science. Unless you can rephrase your argument as something testable, it's philosophy and thereby not relevant.

You're missing the point - your claim of "hypothesis has to be testable otherwise can be dismissed" is itself philosophical (philosophy of science). You're claiming that your claim can be dismissed.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#108

Post by crooked-v »

ggm wrote: post #89
mcswell wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a linguist, article like this also annoy me by the claims that "X [whales, dolphins, parrots, crows...] uses language." We have known since 1957 that there is a hierarchy of "grammars", with finite state "languages" being near the bottom, and transformational grammars at the top. Human languages are certainly at a minimum at the context free phrase structure grammar level. My point is that by using the word "langu…

This. it nicely encapsulates why AI aficionados use words like "hallucinate" which become secret clues to belief around the G part of AGI. If it's just a coding mistake, how can the machine be "alive" but if I can re-purpose "hallucinate" as a term of art, I can also make you, dear reader, embue the AI with more and more traits of meaning which go to "it's alive" It's language Jim, but more as Chomsky said. or maybe…

The correct term isn't "hallucinate", it's "bullshit". I mean that in the casual sense of "a bullshitter" - every LLM is a moderately knowleable bullshitter that never stops talking (In a literal sense - even the end of responses is just a magic string from the LLM that cues the containing system to stop the LLM, and if not stopped like that it would just keep going after the "end".) The remarkable thing is that we ever get correct responses out of them.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#109

Post by skissane »

School-Cotton wrote: post #100
mcswell wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a linguist, article like this also annoy me by the claims that "X [whales, dolphins, parrots, crows...] uses language." We have known since 1957 that there is a hierarchy of "grammars", with finite state "languages" being near the bottom, and transformational grammars at the top. Human languages are certainly at a minimum at the context free phrase structure grammar level. My point is that by using the word "langu…

I’m a linguistics layman, but can’t you make an even stronger claim about human language? Apparently there are certain constructs in Swiss German that are not context-free.

From another viewpoint, all human language is only at the finite-state level - a finite state automaton can recognise a language from any level in the Chomsky hierarchy provided you constrain all sentences to a finite maximum length, which of course you can - no human utterance will ever be longer than a googolplex symbols, since there aren’t enough atoms in the observable universe to encode such an utterance

Really the way people use the Chomsky hierarchy in practice (both in linguistics and computer science) is “let’s agree to ignore the finitude of language” - a move borrowed from classical mathematics

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#110

Post by koakuma-chan »

anon291 wrote: post #77
marcus_holmes wrote: post #73

I found it fascinating how this discussion dovetails with the discussion around free will. In both cases, defining the actual thing under discussion is hard. If you can accurately predict a decision in advance, is that "free will"? If an organism reacts to a stimulus in an appropriate manner, is that "intelligence"? In both cases, we're complex chemical organisms doing all of this with complex chemistry. If we rule o…

One's observations of one's own agency is really the only thing one can be assured of. And this is where these arguments that seek to reduce intelligence to purely mechanistic processes breaks down. For sure, everything the article is saying is true, and indeed, the system could be classified as intelligent, but this is a wholly different question from 'agency' or 'free will'. Even exceptionally dumb people have free…

> Even exceptionally dumb people have free will

“Free will” does not exist because the world is deterministic. In other words, if you have made a decision, you couldn’t have made any other decision, so there wasn’t any choice in the first place. A persons IQ has nothing to do with this.

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