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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

#131

Post by koolala »

dsign wrote: post #126
sambapa wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this comment is serious, then you may have the beginnings of AI psychosis

I would say "AI psychosis" is a very healthy disease to have. I mean, how should people react to seeing a clump of hardware produce coherent text at a level many actual humans cannot? The spread of reactions we are seeing in people-the disagreements, the extreme sycophancy on one end, and the abject denial on the other, is within parameters. My life was wrecked by religious dogma, the type that is sustained on "big m…

Computers create coherent math results at levels far beyond humans. A world calculator vs. a number calculator isn't that different.

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

#132

Post by colordrops »

These conversations drive me insane. There isn't even an clear or even consensus definition of consciousness, yet here we are all acting like we are talking about the same thing. "It's right there, don't you see it? That's consciousness! We just need to define what it is so we can figure out if it's real or not".

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

#133

Post by exe34 »

childintime wrote: post #120
jwilliams wrote: post #111

Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood. So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that). We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you e…

Stephen Wolfram is fascinated with his discovery of computation at the heart of the universe. Life itself may be like that, emerging then noticing itself and that it is alive - has the property of life. Then when it's governed by a "soul", or perhaps better said, constrained by it, then our awareness is of what we can't otherwise see, the laws that govern us, inevitably from a 5th dimension, as we stand in the shadow…

It's important to remember, when Stephen Wolfram says "I discovered...", he uses it in the sense that most people say "Today I learnt ...".

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

#134

Post by andoando »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #6

Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable . It cannot be disproven in the same way you can't disprove the existence of God, and so arguing with people that believe in it is largely pointless.

Yet the mere fact that I am conscious is a greater truth than any of my perception of the "physical" world.

Neither does pure materialism rest on falsifiable beliefs, in that I could claim nothing exists outside my conscious experience.

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

#135

Post by card_zero »

orwin wrote: post #107
selcuka wrote: post #15

> This contradicts everything we have learned about nature. It doesn't contradict anything. It simply means that there is a gap in our current understanding, which may (or may not [1]) be scientifically explained in the future. The default reflex of the opponents of "the hard question" (i.e. those who deny the existence of such a question) is to attach a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the…

My position is that the qalia are simulated by our brains as an evolutionary response to "this organism has to recognize it's continuity and unity across space and time", and the more the brain is developed, the strongest this impression has to be. I'll admit my position was built not to explain the hard problem of consciousness, but to find a philosophical answers to animals and newborn reactions to the mirror test,…

Hanlon's razor? That one is "never assume malice where stupidity will do". You want Occam's razor, or the word "parsimonious".

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

#137

Post by lostmsu »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #113
orwin wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My position is that the qalia are simulated by our brains as an evolutionary response to "this organism has to recognize it's continuity and unity across space and time", and the more the brain is developed, the strongest this impression has to be. I'll admit my position was built not to explain the hard problem of consciousness, but to find a philosophical answers to animals and newborn reactions to the mirror test,…

How do we experience that though?

The neural connections get rewired.

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

#138

Post by skirmish »

zetalyrae wrote: post #71
thepasch wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If all information processing leads to consciousness Did you actually read what you just responded to?

Why some kinds of information processing and not others? As I wrote elsethread: why are some types of information processing "privileged" to create phenomenal experiences, while others run "in the dark"?

> Why some kinds of information processing and not others?

Using Rovelli's example: why some clouds create a thunderstorm and not others? It is just a complex phenomenon that happens only under right conditions.

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

#139

Post by aledevv »

> ..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.

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

#140

Post by barrkel »

jwilliams wrote: post #111

Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood. So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that). We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you e…

The problem isn't really consciousness, it's qualia. Specifically, pain and suffering.

If we create a machine that is able to print on the terminal 'I feel pain', how do we know when to believe the machine is feeling pain?

This isn't enough:

    echo "I feel pain"
Is a very complicated set of matrix multiplications enough?
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