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Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
221–230 of 356 posts
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#222An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…
The Goff answer to this is that since you've used intrinsically conscious matter to build this machine, it is conscious.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#223Heh, that's a funny coincidence. I was just reading about panpsychism (and some variations of it) earlier today, specifically this article on forgotten philosopher James Ward: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james-ward/ It seems really alien to our current mental metaphysical model, but if you study the subject and analyze the arguments, it's not as absurd as it seems. It's important to realize that when philosoph…
> virtually no one is positing that a rock is conscious in the same way a human being is. Well, I would argue that virtually no human is actually conscious in the way we tend to posit that humans are conscious. I think we tend to underestimate the link between our understanding of our experience of consciousness and how memory formation and recall works. Our own experience of our consciousness is as much an illusions…
> Well, I would argue that virtually no human is actually conscious in the way we tend to posit that humans are conscious.
Word. I don't have much more to add to that other than yes. I think that humans are delusional in their understanding of how advanced we are as a conscious form of life. We are not that much different from simple machines.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#224An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…
Feelings are just that: numbers. A combination of tiny electrical currents and chemicals moving around inside your head.
I would never make a copy of my brain (or somebody else's) with the intention of disconnecting it later.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
What differs this scenario from individual neurons firing together in order to make the human mind? Can you keep taking that line of thinking down to the subatomic properties of the neurons themselves? I'm guessing this is the argument for panpsychism. The emergent property of human consciousness could be seen as the culmination of all the individual parts themselves have some form of primitive consciousness.
Isn't that argument roughly as useless as attributing the ability of a watch to show time down to each individual mechanical component? It's technically true, but not very useful to elucidate what actually makes the watch a watch. For example, it sounds kind of silly to say that a single watch gear has some form of primitive time-keeping ability, or has some form of primitive ability to tell me whether I'm running la…
Well it is still useful but not to you directly. The distinction being that the right intermediary could make use of it.
If you had a physics model it could describe it perfectly but it would likely involve a very large group of matricies and linear algebra constraints. You technically could work through every equation given a large set but examining the watch yourself would likely be quicker, if not learning to be a sufficiently good watchmaker.
However if you assemble a computer model to handle every component's interaction individuallt and a physics engine to do number crunching you could get a working mathematical model of the clock.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#226Panpsychism is incredibly silly. It's just obfuscated dualism. It literally doesn't explain anything, and it's obviously wrong for the simple reason that it gives no way to explain why humans act on their conscious experience and have it modelled internally as a conscious experience.
The brain's use of electrical pulses or DNA doesn't result in an innate internal model of electricity or DNA. Similarly, if a proton has ‘experience’, then clearly ‘experience’ is a property completely outside of the computation the mind performs, and so we should not have introspective awareness of it. (Or rather, if we were to, the question of why would be no easier than the original Hard Problem.)
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#227Read Bernardo Kastrup's, a Dutch computer scientist and philosopher, criticism on panpsychism: " https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html https://iai.tv/articles/will-we-ever-understand-consciousnes... https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/emtud2/bernardo... He proposes an alternative answer for the mind-body problem; idealism instead of materialism https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html
For some reason I enjoy trying to share intuitions for idealism. Let me try to do so here. First, notice that it's impossible to prove which metaphysics (materialism, idealism, solipsism, Last Thursdayism, simulationism...) is correct. Next, notice that the situation is even worse: you can't even assign probabilities to those possibilities without making assumptions about whatever is "outside" reality -- which are by…
Well put! Can I quote this?
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's an assumption that consciousness must be a result of emergent properties. I am not sure something like that has been definitively proven. I think there will never be a proof of consciousness that will satisfy the standards set by scientific experimentation.
OK, my use of "emergent" is not appropriate either, it's just difficult to say anything as I have no clue what is behind it, if it is emergent, if it is an inherent property of universe, if it is outside universe in some "machine" or superbeing or whatever. Those are great sci-fi and philosophical topics, not sure about science itself as we know it right now though.
Just saying, what if it is the scientific method itself is what limits what we can explore with consciousness? There is also an underlying assumption that the scientific method can explain everything ...
... it is a far cry from the early scientists who considered Nature as an intelligence one has to trick or seduce into giving up its secrets through the scientific method. That to hold an objective or skeptical stance was to pretend that there is such a thing as absolute objectivity.
These days, the modern stance is the default, not the radical stance.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#229There's an interesting podcast where Philip Goff and Sean Carroll discuss about various aspects of panpsychism. Sean plays a very good devil's advocate, so if you enjoy a nice friendly critic of the above ideas, I highly recommend this episode! https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/11/04/71-p...
The list of guests on that podcast is just astonishing. From Thorne to Grimes, MacFarlane to Greene, from wine to robot abuse. Never fails to impress.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#230An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…
The problem is time and experience, two things you cannot give to a software mind. Humans are inherently social and our brains are developed over socializing time. Our brains are shaped by fetal, post-natal, and childhood socialization and experience. The craziest edge cases of human childhood show: if you grow up without socialization, in isolation/solitude, your brain will be vastly underdeveloped and you will have…
It would be harder to emulate but I see no intrinsic reason you couldn't.