Why do people think there is some magical "consciousness" thingy other than what we observe, a machine in a wet box
Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
21–30 of 184 posts
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#22Personally, it amazes me how many people find it difficult to believe or accept, that human consciousness would just be an emergent property of how neural cells function and are connected together. That all of human consciousness would reside on a higher level than the laws of molecular physics and chemistry. That consciousness emerges from the level of cell biology. No need to postulate anything supernatural, or any…
As a software guy I think of it as trying to understand the execution of a complex web app by examining the machine instructions. At that level, how things happen is very apparent but why they do is pretty much lost.
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
But is there infinite regress -- does it have a representation of itself representing itself. I find a more prosaic version of this question quite interesting too. If you can feel a touch/heat anywhere on or in your body its represented in the brain somehow, somewhere. For a moment (i) imagine the brain is sensitive to touch (it isn't because lack of 'pain' receptors) (ii) that the representation of a sensitive part…
Yeah sure it does - probably you can conjure a cartoon in your mind of a brain modeling a brain modeling a brain all the way out to infinity. Maybe you already did when you were coming up with this problem. edit: since the other poster edited their comment, this was only responding to the infinite regression question, not their bizarre point about touch sensitivity
Similar to the idea of the "infinite image". Take a 640x480 square, and permute every possible combination of pixels.
By definition: that space must contain a sizeable, or even complete, portion of all human knowledge that can ever be scrolled or exist in that image space.
A lot of noise too, but the complete cure for cancer (if possible), FTL (if possible), immortality: what answers absolutely cannot be represented as several variations of the pixels of a 640x480 image?
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#24Here's my attempt at a tldr. 1. The laws of physics at the time scales, space scales, and energies of the human brain are "known" and we have deep reasons to believe that more will not be discovered. He spends a great deal of space explaining and arguing that the credence that physics is "complete" in this regime should be very, very high. 2. Given the current laws of physics, there is no place or room for non-physic…
How does free will play into this? If the world is run by all physical laws, then I had no choice typing this out and submitting it, rather then closing the tab right now.
My "decision" isn't real.
If it is an actual conscious choice, that was not calculatable by the exact state prior, then consciousness is fundamental.
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#25This paper reminds me of one of the "wow" moments I had when first studying neuroscience: a professor passed on the realization that everything in the universe we can observe and understand must have a neurobiological representation. Reality as we experience it is in fact always represented in brain activity.
In the tv-series Big Bang Theory, there is a moment where Sheldon (a theoretical physicist) and Amy (a neuroscientist) argue, whose discipline is more important and fundamental. Sheldon says that physics studies the fundamental building blocks of the universe. And just like your professor, Amy says something along the lines that neuroscience studies the processes that study the fundamental building blocks of the universe.
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#26Here's my attempt at a tldr. 1. The laws of physics at the time scales, space scales, and energies of the human brain are "known" and we have deep reasons to believe that more will not be discovered. He spends a great deal of space explaining and arguing that the credence that physics is "complete" in this regime should be very, very high. 2. Given the current laws of physics, there is no place or room for non-physic…
How does free will play into this? If the world is run by all physical laws, then I had no choice typing this out and submitting it, rather then closing the tab right now. My "decision" isn't real. If it is an actual conscious choice, that was not calculatable by the exact state prior, then consciousness is fundamental.
It depends what you mean by free will. Non-philosphers almost always mean "libertarian" free will when they say that, and yes, this same argument also basically outlaws libertarian free will as well. There is no physical mechanism by which you can alter your brain physics to "choose" things.
Carroll and others have a compatibilist notion of free will which is a more subtle concept that I'm not sure I'm qualified to actually explain.
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#27It is interesting to me that the only thing in the universe that we can observe directly it's also thought to be the least understood.
We experience physical phenomena by proxy only - through the senses and sensors we built, followed by an interpretation by our brain; while we can observe our consciousness by just observing ourselves from "within".
I do not mean to question the paper, just pointing out that I find this fascinating.
In fact I strongly believe that consciousness is - in the end - the result of physical processes.
What I do question is that we understand what we mean by "physics". Physics is a model of the world, a model that we created based on our understanding how things ought to be, namely that all things are separate and that thus we can explain reality (and hence consciousness) by analyzing (i.e. dividing) the model more and more. Who says that that is a correct representation of the world?
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#28A few thoughts. 1. Sean is leaving CalTech at the end of next year. It's not a huge surprise, given his interests, that he is pursuing the issues in the philosophy of mind that intersect with quantum physics. Most work in this area is unadulterated quackery, and he is one of the few physicists who understands philosophy well enough to not make me cringe. 2. Most physicists implicitly engage in ontological metaphysics…
> 4. I wonder if Carroll's future work in philosophy will cause him to revisit the many-worlds interpretation of QM, which a fair share of philosophers believe carries too much metaphysical baggage. The idea of many worlds "existing" is a philosophical idea; it's not something you learn from studying physics.
I think he would argue it carries the least metaphysical baggage as the worlds exist in the equations we have, unlike things posited by other interpretations.
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#29Personally, it amazes me how many people find it difficult to believe or accept, that human consciousness would just be an emergent property of how neural cells function and are connected together. That all of human consciousness would reside on a higher level than the laws of molecular physics and chemistry. That consciousness emerges from the level of cell biology. No need to postulate anything supernatural, or any…
Would it not surprised you if you learned that the program you wrote in C++ and compiled to machine code would produce "subjective" feelings in the CPU when executed?
Re: Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
#30This paper reminds me of one of the "wow" moments I had when first studying neuroscience: a professor passed on the realization that everything in the universe we can observe and understand must have a neurobiological representation. Reality as we experience it is in fact always represented in brain activity.
But is there infinite regress -- does it have a representation of itself representing itself. I find a more prosaic version of this question quite interesting too. If you can feel a touch/heat anywhere on or in your body its represented in the brain somehow, somewhere. For a moment (i) imagine the brain is sensitive to touch (it isn't because lack of 'pain' receptors) (ii) that the representation of a sensitive part…
To respond to your edit, I don't quite understand what you're getting at. It's quite well understood how the brain represents touch - all the sensory neurons in your skin send information to a brain region which maintains a spacial representation of your body.
Your brain isn't sensitive to touch because it's inside your skull, so that touch information wouldn't do a whole lot for you. There's no reason in principal a brain couldn't have pressure sensitive neurons inside of itself or on its surface.