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

191–200 of 822 posts

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

#191

Post by H8crilA »

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…

I am pretty sure I am not conscious, and this seems to solve the entire problem that other people have.

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

#192

Post by ben_w »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #163
ben_w wrote: post #154

Copying what I said 9 days ago when this post first appeared but didn't catch enough attention and only got two replies including my own: > I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” This is essentially saying "I don't understand therefore you are wrong". > We do not need to explain why it looks red for the same reason that we do not have to explain why the animal that we call “cat” lo…

> We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats. I believe that this is simply because of the way we train ML, with labelled data. It is quite conceivable that we could get an ML model to recognise cats just by some form of multidimensional clustering of training data.

I wish I'd phrased it better, my point was more that early vision systems had weird issues, which we were able to figure out by looking at what part of the image those models paid attention to and realising it often wasn't even part of the animal in the photo, but e.g. the plants around them. We literally had to think about what made a cat a cat to make AI good at recognising cats.

This would also impact clustering.

That said, I think even for humans there's a similar issue: we spent millennia clustering things into groups and labelling those groups, which is why the Catholic church had rules about no meat on Good Friday but fish was fine and beavers counted as fish (and there is now a podcast titled around the idea there is no such thing as a fish*). For cats, I don't see it myself but the fossa is described as "cat-like".

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Such_Thing_as_a_Fish#Title

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

#193

Post by [deleted] »

thepasch wrote: post #48
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I thought this article was awful and I want my time back from reading it. It feels like rage bait, and it worked, because it pissed me off. > That is, consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon. That's flat out bullshit, and it completely misses th…

That is a lot of anger to come out of what essentially boils down to "I don't believe/want to believe that complexity can cause subjective experience." And this bit: > I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world [...] to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that c…

[deleted]

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

#194

Post by ForceBru »

daseiner1 wrote: post #172
4gotunameagain wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats. I believe that this is simply because of the way we train ML, with labelled data. It is quite conceivable that we could get an ML model to recognise cats just by some form of multidimensional clustering of training data.

the quote from the article is just a contrived tautology that misunderstands the nature of the problem. the dualism problem is not about finding an explanation for why what we call a cat is what we call a cat. it's that you can measure anything you want but nevertheless despite confidently establishing the size of a cat, the appearance of a cat, the behavior of cats, a sophisticated taxonomy of related species labele…

I'm not particularly well-versed in philosophy, but what's the dualism here?

Of course what a cat _is_ to me is not what a cat _is_ to you, because we necessarily have different memories of interactions with cat-like beings. If you show some babies a cat for the first time, they'll necessarily see it from different viewing perspectives. Even if you put VR glasses on them and show the exact same video, they'll have different contexts: "I first saw a cat when I was sitting next to my friend", "I first saw a cat when I was thinking of ice cream", etc.

But they all saw the same cat, they'll see many other cats, who are all similar. So everyone will understand that "things like these are cats", but everyone will have their own understanding of a "cat" because their memory is different.

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

#195

Post by skirmish »

Domenic_S wrote: post #21
greygoo222 wrote: post #3

Utterly asinine article that doesn't understand its own subject matter.

> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” It regards what we would understand if we were to understand something that we currently do not understand. Forgive the muddled question, but: How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand? Rhetorical nonsense. If I'm a student about to take geometry for the first time, I can c…

> we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world

Feelings/experiences are specific patterns of specific neurons activating. Why is that hard?

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

#196

Post by grumbel »

zetalyrae wrote: post #46
thepasch wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience You are still presupposing the premise here, in multiple ways: 1) "My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a s…

> Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Which math? Why some kinds of information processing and not others? If all information processing leads to consciousness: why does consciousness stop at the boundary of the brain? Why isn't every neuron individually and separately conscious? Why not the two hemispheres of the brain? Why isn't every causally-linked volume of the universe a single mind? > Impli…

> Why some kinds of information processing and not others?

Consciousness isn't something the information processing has, it is something the information processing does. It's a function, not some magic property that happens on top.

Consciousness is simply your brains ability to figure out what part of all the sensory input it gets can be attributed to the "self", just like other parts might be labeled as cats, dogs, table and chairs, some will be labeled as self.

And I am sure one day somebody will boil that down to some nice math, since fundamentally it's about networks. If the brain wants to move a hand from one spot to another, that's easy if it is its own hand, a couple of nerve impulses and it will happen. If that hand belongs to somebody else, moving it is a whole different ballgame. That fundamental different in connectedness should be expressible.

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

#197

Post by fragmede »

daseiner1 wrote: post #185
justonceokay wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's really a head trip is that I don't actually know another human is experiencing grief either. They could be a sociopath and not actually feel emotions, but are pretending to in order to benefit them in some way.

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

#198

Post by don_esteban »

robwwilliams wrote: post #92
hackinthebochs wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying everything is conscious is also dualism. it's saying that every kind of computation (or perhaps every physical substrate) has another dimension of properties that aren't physical/structural and don't interact with the physical/structural world. So it's not an explanatory boon but rather an extravagance. The 'where is the consciousness' question is interesting but not really a hard problem. The issue can be sol…

Completely on the mark! Algorithms can differ qualitatively. Recursion.

Eh, not recursion. Self-reflection. Monitoring the state of the execution, and taking the action to guide it towards the desired outcome.

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

#199

Post by jeppester »

deyiao wrote: post #35

Humans do not have souls, nor do they possess free will in the traditional sense. What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution. In essence, consciousness is a complex information input-output system. When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.…

> What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution

> When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.

I don't see how this is different from someone saying that a concoction of random ingredients will turn into a magic potion.

The big question is how a group of cells (or potentially something else) becomes sentient. Accepting "because it would be useful" as valid explanation would be the same as accepting Darwinism as a religion rather than science.

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

#200

Post by daseiner1 »

ForceBru wrote: post #194
daseiner1 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the quote from the article is just a contrived tautology that misunderstands the nature of the problem. the dualism problem is not about finding an explanation for why what we call a cat is what we call a cat. it's that you can measure anything you want but nevertheless despite confidently establishing the size of a cat, the appearance of a cat, the behavior of cats, a sophisticated taxonomy of related species labele…

I'm not particularly well-versed in philosophy, but what's the dualism here? Of course what a cat _is_ to me is not what a cat _is_ to you, because we necessarily have different memories of interactions with cat-like beings. If you show some babies a cat for the first time, they'll necessarily see it from different viewing perspectives. Even if you put VR glasses on them and show the exact same video, they'll have di…

I don't have the energy at present to fully develop my thoughts but one thing I'll say is that in my view they did *not* see the same cat. It was the same collection of flesh & bone on four legs, certainly. But it is not the same cat.

Heidegger best revealed to me the limitations of supposedly "objective" thinking.

Heraclitus: "No man steps in the same river twice"

Post reply on HN