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Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

nytimes.com

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Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#131

Post by gyim »

cgio wrote: post #103
bertiewhykovich wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is dualism's patent absurdity obvious?

Because if something occurs outside the current laws of physics it does not mean it's not natural, rather that the laws of physics need to adjust and take it into account.

Except that if your conscience (and everything in you) is under the _laws_ of physics, it implies that you are a deterministic or randomized machine. But then it is not easy to explain free will, for example. You could say that if it exists, it is a physical phenomenon, but what laws does it conform to? So most naturalists say that free will is just an illusion, but I personally would not call this a "patently obvious" choice. (I think it is a "Very Large Mistake")

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#132

Post by radarsat1 »

carapace wrote: post #88

This is terrible. Is is even an argument? I was reading "Hard problem of consciousness" Wikipedia article this morning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness I'm not sure this adds anything to that. The author seems to want to say that consciousness is primary and that the physical universe, matter, is consciousness somehow, so poof no more mystery. But this doesn't touch the "hard problem" so w…

> You have a body but you're not your body

Not only that, but you're you because you're not someone else's body. That sounds tautological but I think it's important. I think a big part of what gives someone consciousness is identity, and what gives us identity, is the idea of us being an island isolotated within our body and therefore distinct from other conciousnesses.

Which sounds pointless, but I think it's actually significant if you start to consider the eventual effect of identity on "shared consciousness" via technologically-enabled telepathy, which we may actually see one day in the far future.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#133

Post by lmcinnes »

stcredzero wrote: post #109
lmcinnes wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think elimitavists like Dennett don't deny that things go on, just that consciousness, in he form of this magical thing, doesn't exist. The demonstration of that being that many of the things people believe about consciousness that make it so magical and hard to explain simply aren't true. People are often mistaken about their own consciousness, so perhaps the remarkable mysterious thing that we can't explain doesn…

But he puts it like this: "Consciousness is an illusion." I guess he's just clickbaiting us. What you're saying is that he actually means is: "Our culturally inherited notion of consciousness is incomplete and in some ways misguided." Well of course. You can say that for physics and various sciences.

Yes, his 'Consciousness is an Illusion' in clickbait is a sense. Mostly he is trying draw attention to the fact that the thing he is trying to explain is not the thing other people are saying is unexplainable. The commonly accepted notion of what consciousness is ... he doesn't believe that exists. But that's just because he thinks we are deluding ourselves about what we are actually experiencing as consciousness -- the thing we think about when we talk about consciousness? That's just an illusion, and the real workings are just mundane, and you'll just say "that's not really consciousness" if I explain them.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#134

Post by _1tem »

wyager wrote: post #129
_1tem wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with claiming that consciousness is just a complicated computation is not merely that we simply haven't advanced our study enough to understand it. The problem is that what we know so far about the nature of computation seems to directly contradict and falsify the notion that consciousness is just computation. To put it simply: our knowledge of computational complexity, algorithms, and general problem sol…

> our knowledge of computational complexity, algorithms, and general problem solving shows that our human intelligence performs far more sophisticated operations than are possible given the number of neurons that exist in our brains This is not true. I wish I could respond with something more interesting, but that's all there is to it. You are just saying something that is incorrect. Our brains are information-theore…

> Our brains are information-theoretically and complexity-theoretically entirely reasonable.

I know this has been the traditional view of most information theorists. But many philosophers (and a few computer scientists) challenge that view. See Fodor's frame problem[1]. The basic idea is this: yes, our brains are complexity-theoretically reasonable after the problem is defined given a set of inputs, outputs, and problem states. However the real issue is how our brains formulate the problem in the first place - how to sort through the combinatorially explosive amount of information in order to narrow down what is relevant to a problem. This objection has never been satisfactorily answered by information theorists in my opinion. The answers given by info theorists always seems to presuppose the existence of a problem formulation before solving it.

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frame-problem/

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#135

Post by lmcinnes »

goatlover wrote: post #33
kanzure wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be analogous to telling a physicist trying to provide an explanation for why objects fall to the ground that it might simply turn out to be false that objects fall to the ground at all. It is false. Gravity is not about "ground" nor does it require that everything fall to the ground, indeed there seem to be forces on objects stronger than the force of gravity. The ability to falsify concepts is critically…

I think you missed the point you were replying to. That objects fall to the ground is an undeniable observation. Having conscious experiences falls into the same category. For that matter, we experience objects falling to the ground. Gravity is an explanation of our experiences of falling objects. The experience comes first, then the explanation. If there was no experience of falling, there would be no explanation of…

I think he grasped the point. The trick here is reframing. Someone says "objects fall to the ground is an undeniable observation", and the other responds "No, your looking at it the wrong way; objects do something but you just think that's falling to the ground, in practice it's something else that has the appearance of falling to the ground". The responder isn't denying your observations, they are denying your interpretation of what you've seen.

The same applies to eliminitavists. They aren't denying that something happens that feels to you like experience, they are suggesting, however, that it may not be the thing that you think it is. They'll often point to people's own misunderstandings of their consciousness as examples that we can, in fact, actually be wrong about our own first person experiences. One example of this is the fact that we think we experience full field colour vision. In practice we have colour vision only in a narrow field in the center of our full visual field. You can perform experiments on yourself to demonstrate that this is in fact true. Another example is the sense of continuity to consciousness, which again, can be demonstrated to actually be false. If our "consciousness" is sufficiently different in reality from what we normally presume to be consciousness then, in some real sense, consciousness as we commonly think of it indeed doesn't exist. That doesn't mean there is nothing, just that calling it consciousness with all the associations that implies is perhaps sufficiently misleading as to be wrong.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#136

Post by _1tem »

breuleux wrote: post #97
_1tem wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I expect from an answer to the hard problem of consciousness is a basic high level explanation for how the moving of atoms in certain ways can actually give rise to qualia. You seem to be starting with the presumption that it does. But I'm not convinced that the moving of atoms alone can possibly give rise to qualia, because our knowledge so far about how atoms move seems completely different from our experience…

> My high level knowledge of how atoms move provide sufficient assurance and understanding of how a Macbook Pro experience is created. I don't think it does per se . In a world where computers didn't exist you would probably not be able to say whether a MacBook Pro is a thing that could possibly exist or not just from fundamental knowledge of physics. If I gave you the most low-level possible description of physics,…

> Perhaps I'm wrong, but I do feel like I understand it: what defines or distinguishes, say, my qualia of red, is how it primes my brain into thinking about red things, how it changes my mood, how it behaves relative to every other concept, which makes it about as complex as my entire brain would be.

Over here it seems like you're defining consciousness by its relation to other objects. In other words, you're reducing consciousness to its visible outputs, such as behaviour, mood, etc. If that's all consciousness is, I fully agree with you that we have sufficient knowledge of physics to explain it. But that's not what I'm referring to. When I talk about consciousness, I'm referring to something that is completely independent of its outputs. Is it not conceivable that a man who is missing both his arms and legs, mute, blind, and deaf, can still have a conscious ego? So what is that experience? This is the question which has no parallel in our knowledge of how atoms move.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#137

Post by p1esk »

RivieraKid wrote: post #49
p1esk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the most interesting comment in this thread.

Maybe, but it makes little sense.

Makes perfect sense to me. Consciousness is how the process of backpropagation feels to a sufficiently complex neural network.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#138

Post by ilaksh »

themgt wrote: post #105

I feel like a lot of the replies here are missing what's actually a quite subtle, thoughtful argument: The German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz made the point vividly in 1714. Perception or consciousness, he wrote, is “inexplicable on mechanical principles, i.e. by shapes and movements. If we imagine a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and be conscious, we can conceive of it being enlarged in suc…

This quantum biology stuff is just a way for dualists to hang on to their religious or mystic beliefs.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#139

Post by ilaksh »

empath75 wrote: post #34
kanzure wrote: post #3

> Those who make the Very Large Mistake (of thinking they know enough about the nature of the physical to know that consciousness can’t be physical) tend to split into two groups. Members of the first group remain unshaken in their belief that consciousness exists, and conclude that there must be some sort of nonphysical stuff: They tend to become “dualists.” Members of the second group, passionately committed to the…

Saying that conciousness isn't real because it's an emergent phenomenon of non-conscious processes is like saying that turbulence isn't real, because it's an emergent property of non-fluid particles. I mean sure, at the level of atoms, it's just particles interacting locally, but that doesn't mean that at certain scales, turbulence isn't a better way of looking at their group behavior.

Glad you mentioned 'emergent' and the turbulence example because it is going in the direction of the phrase I was thinking of in response to the Leibniz thing -- 'metasystem transition'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasystem_transition

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#140

Post by ilaksh »

mynegation wrote: post #12

To echo callesgg elsewhere in this thread, my own pet "theory" is that conciousness is a metacomputation, i.e. not just a process of neural reactions to outside events, but reaction to a process of reaction. For example, understanding the need to convey acquired information to another being to the same species eventually led to the development of language. Figuring out that brain forgets information led to the develo…

"metacomputation" -- that reminded me of this from Wikipedia on metasystem transition:

"Turchin has applied the concept of metasystem transition in the domain of computing, via the notion of metacompilation or supercompilation. A supercompiler is a compiler program that compiles its own code, thus increasing its own efficiency, producing a remarkable speedup in its execution."

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