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

181–190 of 822 posts

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

#181

Post by justonceokay »

unparagoned wrote: post #150
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…

No the hard problem is impossible to solve using science even a billion years in the future. If science can in theory explain consciousness ever then it’s an easy problem.

This is the kind of religious thinking the GP is talking about. What other frontier of science do people claim will never be solved, except the existence of a god? Why are you so sure it cannot be touched?

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

#182

Post by yashasnadigsyn »

venk12 wrote: post #110

Philosophers have had these rifts(an similar lines of arguments) forever. From Plato vs Aristotle (300 to 400 BC) (idea of forms vs nicomachean), In India Adi Shankara (around 700 CE) vs Madhavacharya (1200 CE) (dualism vs non-dualism) - there is a common thread to all of these arguments. But eventually, for me it comes down to a statement J Krishnamurti made (& it makes the most sense to me): "The self is a problem…

Adi Shankara follows non-dualism and Madhvacharya follows dualism. It is referenced reverse in your reply.

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

#183

Post by cgio »

RealityVoid wrote: post #156
barrkel wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Qualia is tied to the nature of existence. If you... let's say... make a humanoid robot with replaceable limbs, and you magically imbue it with AGI abilities, the qualia of losing a hand will be very different than a biological entity. It can always just swap the arm. Temporary loss of autonomy might still be distressing, but impressing our own perception of experience on a being that fundamentally lives in a differe…

That’s valid also from the point of view that pain is a key signal to avoid injury. I am not sure it’s the best example of qualia and it could be simulated by self preservation signals (e.g. the touch sensor on a Roomba). The extension of pain (in Hofstadter sense) is probably more appropriate as qualia (e.g. the pain of losing someone you love).

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

#184

Post by metalman »

blather. another example of weak blather of the weeeeeeee! I'm so full of words variety, that fails to interesting or memorable, like someone so high on mushrooms that they are claiming to be able to see there own ears, who if asked what consiousness is will give a similar answer, unless you ask how consiousness relates to rubber bands, which will get a similar answer with rubber band anologies.

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

#185

Post by daseiner1 »

justonceokay wrote: post #173
trick-or-treat wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the same thing. You can't have consciousness without qualia and vice versa.

Ok pain might be a bad example because a robot may not have a sense of it borne of evolution. But what about “red”? If I make a robot that 99.9% correctly identifies red objects, then I think it is fair to me to say it has a concept of “redness”. Some philosophers believe that our human emotional connection to redness is special. These are the people talking about qualia. My belief after much reading is that it is no…

Isn't what makes the experience of love special the experience of love? a robot can hold hands and kiss and bring flowers home far more efficiently than i can. is that what love is? A robot CAN write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But the outward signal of grief is not evidence of an internal experience of it.

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

#186

Post by simiones »

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"?

That would be part of the empirical facts we might hope to gather, if this is indeed the right direction for the explanation.

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

#187

Post by skirmish »

selcuka wrote: post #59
anon291 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No conscious person can know if another person is conscious. There is no 'sensation' of experiencing another conscious. Given how many people can and have been fooled by AI, this lack of ability to sense another consciousness is clear.

That's the basis of the p-zombies thought experiment discussed (and dismissed without any real arguments) in the article.

P-zombies cannot be argued about, if you reject their existence your opponent will call you a p-zombie (happened to Dennett).

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

#188

Post by card_zero »

barrkel wrote: post #140
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?

Pain and suffering. In fact just suffering, right? We don't care about signals resulting from adverse conditions. We care about ideas. So we don't really care about suffering, as such, but about the harm it does to ideas and idea creation. Then consciousness is having an idea about what's going on.

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

#189

Post by don_esteban »

zetalyrae wrote: post #39
randallsquared wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation. Anesthesia is strong evidence that there is some physical process that is the person. The hard problem only really needs consideration if we get to a…

> The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation. Yes. I think it's possible with sufficient understanding, the hard problem will dissolve. But, the question we can ask today is: what kind of explanation would explain away the hard problem of consciou…

> But, the question we can ask today is: what kind of explanation would explain away the hard problem of consciousness? What is the signature the model must satisfy? I don't think there's a good answer to that.

I think that is a question more about the people to whom you are explaining the solution to the hard problem of consciousness. The natural tendency (as with 'what is AI?') is to say 'ah, but that is the easy part, the hard part is '.

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

#190

Post by simiones »

robwwilliams wrote: post #90
zetalyrae wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation. Yes. I think it's possible with sufficient understanding, the hard problem will dissolve. But, the question we can ask today is: what kind of explanation would explain away the hard problem of consciou…

It would have to explain how we construct “Now” from atemporal cells that are without a clock.

This problem, while interesting in its own right, is entirely irrelevant to consciousness. Especially because, regardless of how it's achieved, it's actually very clearly known that we do have temporal processes in our body - our tell-tale hearts being quite an iconic example.
Post reply on HN