It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by simiones » Mon, May 18, 2026, 9:42 AM UTC

skirmish wrote: post #153

dfabulich wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rovelli writes, "I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”" Carlos Rovelli has failed to understand the arguments for dualism, and is proudly sure that they must be nonsense. If there's ever to be a "solution" to the dualism/materialism argument, it cannot possibly end in a "slam dunk" where it turns out that one side or the other was simply nonsensical . IMO, the problem is actually…

> If there's ever to be a "solution" to the dualism/materialism argument, it cannot possibly end in a "slam dunk" where it turns out that one side or the other was simply nonsensical. Huh, evolution vs. creationism, many arguments happened over many years, yet one side was simply nonsensical. > if we ask what "we" know, as a society of scientists and philosophers That is how science is done; if you reject that approa…

I don't think creationism is nonsensical, it's just wrong. But the concept overall is not nonsensical - in principle, if the universe were very different, a god could have molded humans out of clay and breathed life into them or whatever other fairy tale is preferred; it's not a logically inconsistent, so it's not nonsensical. Even something like Lamarckism is not nonsensical.

If you want to see an obviously nonsensical world view, you need to look at something like the Time Cube "theory". Rovelli is essentially claiming that dualism is more in this area - which I agree with the GP is quite unlikely for such a long discussed and influential philosophical idea.

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

#202

Post by daseiner1 » Mon, May 18, 2026, 9:42 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #197

daseiner1 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

bingo

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

#203

Post by fssys » Mon, May 18, 2026, 9:42 AM UTC

trick-or-treat wrote: post #144

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?

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

No, qualia are not fundamental to existence, this is an example of Wilfrid Sellars' "myth of the given" - to have a quale of a colour or a shape appearing in your vision you must have a concept of that colour/shape. Qualia in that sense are not prior to cognition. Maybe we can say they are necessary as an element of concept formation and language, ie for sapience.

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

#204

Post by bambax » Mon, May 18, 2026, 9:44 AM UTC

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 never quite understood what we mean by "consciousness" but I find fascinating that most modern philosophers who describe themselves as materialists / non religious can argue in the same sentence that there is something special and extra-natural about the human experience.

It's one or the other: either nature is all there is, and therefore, consciousness is a purely natural phenomenon, that we can investigate, and probably eventually replicate, and can't deny to other beings or to machines upfront; OR there is something outside reality that we might as well call God.

I'm strongly in the former camp, but I don't have issues with the latter one. What upsets me is the inconsistency of those who try to support both ideas at the same time. They shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways.

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

#205

Post by grumbel » Mon, May 18, 2026, 9:44 AM UTC

light_hue_1 wrote: post #52

There's a simpler way to state this: the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has. We understand everything a CNN or Transformer does, but we have no idea how to relate that to qualia. This may also be why we need to run endless tests and don't have a theory that let's us predict how well the network proces…

> the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.

The problem with that common definition is that it doesn't make much sense. Every philosopher that ever talked or wrote about the hard problem and qualia did so with plain old physics, by moving their mouth or using their hands to move a pen or keyboard. You can, in theory, trace how those physical interactions happen, all the way down to the neurons. Meaning the reason why they talked about qualia boils down to plain old physics.

There is no scenario where the easy problems are solved and the hard problem remain. For there to be a hard problem, the easy problems must be unsolvable, but then you don't need a hard problem, since the easy problems are already hard.

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

#206

Post by card_zero » Mon, May 18, 2026, 9:47 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #197

daseiner1 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that so trippy? They can also lie about other things. Where they were in 2013, what's in their pockets, whether they've been eating vegetables. You may never feel sure, but you can form a theory from clues eventually.

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

#207

Post by twak » Mon, May 18, 2026, 9:48 AM UTC

bambax wrote: post #204

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 never quite understood what we mean by "consciousness" but I find fascinating that most modern philosophers who describe themselves as materialists / non religious can argue in the same sentence that there is something special and extra-natural about the human experience. It's one or the other: either nature is all there is, and therefore, consciousness is a purely natural phenomenon, that we can investigate, and p…

I've yet to find a falsifiable definition of consciousness.

I do believe in intelligence (which is measured against a particular task) and ego (which inflates the self over the other).

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

#208

Post by xyzsparetimexyz » Mon, May 18, 2026, 9:49 AM UTC

simiones wrote: post #175

suzzer99 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my question: Is our consciousness fundamentally different than a gorilla's? If the answer is no, then I'd ask if a gorilla's consciousness is fundamentally different than a baboon's? I think that answer has to be no by definition, assuming the first answer is no. And so on, until we get to where a human's consciousness is not fundamentally different than a tube worm, just a continuum of degrees. I'm not sure w…

> consciousness effectively hits zero somewhere around reptiles Note that at least one species of fish have been shown to very consistently pass the mirror test (they try to clean up a mark on their body they can only see in a mirror, then go back to the mirror to check, and repeat a few times). So, at least if you consider the mirror test to be a sign of consciousness in animals, then you might want to extend this t…

The mirror test is just about intelligence. A p-zombie could easily pass it.

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

#209

Post by justonceokay » Mon, May 18, 2026, 9:50 AM UTC

zetalyrae wrote: post #11

The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove? > A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible cons…

I’ll bite, I think your individual neurons are “just as” conscious as your whole body/environment system. They can’t advocate for themselves in words, but they have their own goals and interactions and decisions and needs.

Your aliens don’t know what it’s like to be you. But if these aliens decide to use your blueprints to print out a human, and the human says “ouch”, is it still the hard problem? This is what I don’t get.

Of course the music is different than just reading the score. A description of a process is not the process itself. We cannot know what it is like “to be” a bat but we also don’t know what it is like “to be” a spleen cell. Or the European futures market. Or a colony of ants, or the United States. These processes are complicated and intelligent, though not generally thought of having qualia. But I think it is only our hubris that differentiates the experience of an individual organism from that of our subsystems or supersystems.

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

#210

Post by RealityVoid » Mon, May 18, 2026, 9:51 AM UTC

cgio wrote: post #183

RealityVoid wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I really should go back to finish reading GEB. I loved the beginning, but for some reason I dropped off somewhere in the first 1/3. I'm not sure I fully get the point, although I have a vague sense I agree with you. :)