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

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

#261

Post by justonceokay »

daseiner1 wrote: post #254
justonceokay wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll bite the bullet: if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love (or “care”, or “noticing”, or “intention”. Love is such a slippery word…) that we would have to trust. Imagine a cat-sitting robot. The robot can differentiate between individual cats. It learns how to play with the cats and feed them in in their preferred way. The cats grow to tr…

nicely done and well put. one of the better intros to the “hard problem” i’ve read, truly

Thanks. It’s mostly a distillation of thoughts I have had from reading the various spats through the years between Chalmers and Dennett. I think Dennett is much more convincing to me.

My personal take: it’s easy to imagine a robot that has a single sense, like a thermostat. As humans we don’t have a single sense, we may have millions of senses. But I bet that none of those individual systems is much more complicated than the thermostat. Consciousness is not truly differentiable from a complicated response to a complicated environment, and all things in this definition have consciousness to a degree. Even a rock “remembers” through how it has been weathered. We are not special, we are just very complicated.

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

#262

Post by n4r9 »

hackandthink wrote: post #103

Chalmers: “It is natural to hope that there will be a materialist solution to the hard problem and a reductive explanation of consciousness, just as there have been reductive explanations of many other phenomena in many other domains. But consciousness seems to resist materialist explanation in a way that other phenomena do not.” "A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications" https…

Thanks for the reference, that looks like a pretty thorough review.

It seems to me that Chalmers already precludes the possibility of physical/materialist explanations with his claim, quoted in the first section:

> There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold.

This certainly doesn't feel obvious or intuitive to me. I would expect that someone with the same neuronal make-up will have the same experience.

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

#263

Post by mikk14 »

energy123 wrote: post #234
mikk14 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if this is discussed by actual serious philosophers, but consider the issue of "mind uploading." I have seen very staunch monists seriously discussing that, if you were to produce a complete digital copy of your brain -- copying any possible information to the most minute synapse -- then you effectively "uploaded" yourself into a computer and can live a digital life. These people believe this while at th…

But you are taking an opinionated view of the resolution to the Ship of Theseus paradox. If you are a computational functionalist, then it really is "you" afterwards (or rather there's now two identical "you" until the original "you" is destroyed). A monist could also point to your hypocrisy of believing that you are still your child self despite every atom in your body having been replaced between then and now.

A true monist would realize that any experience of the uploaded being that received a copy of the brain is not felt by the original brain that has been copied. This is a fact and it is elementary to see it as true, as well as supporting the view that the copy is not the same being at all. If your description of computation functionalists is accurate, then they simply are dualists and would do good in admitting this to themselves.

Invoking the Ship of Theseus is a distraction. The Ship of Theseus paradox does not involve a full copy at the atomic level while the original still stands. If it did, the paradox would not even exists. The paradox exists because there is the key element that you do not have in mind copying/uploading: _continuity_.

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

#264

Post by narag »

energy123 wrote: post #214
bambax wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't know anyone who supports both ideas at the same time. Are you saying that philosophers do? Most philosophers are materialists or computational functionalists, while being monists. This means they aren't dualists, and it means they do not adopt the supernatural explanation. But they are careful not to rule out dualism. There's this pattern I've observed in discussions about philosophy. First there's a rejectio…

I don't know anyone who supports both ideas at the same time. Are you saying that philosophers do?

Every guy saying that free will doesn't exist is arguing exactly this. Physical causality considered an obstacle to freedom implies that the conscious entity is somehow outside the physical world.

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

#265

Post by kubanczyk »

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?

Looking around at evidence, only the ones with somewhat cute eyes can qualify for empathy. Bad luck if someone is a grass or an amoeba, but machines will be just fine.

Philosophers may squint at the suffering-in-itself long and hard, but I doubt they'll affect waking/extinguishing empathy of the masses. Exploring the suffering that fails our empathy (e.g. suffering of a wheat plant harvested) seems a highly abstract task; more abstract than high mathematics.

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

#266

Post by amelius »

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…

> If you view via a grounded, practical frame, you probably don't care about consciousness. The fact that it's undefinable is probably a major clue.

How can you say that?

It would be very interesting to know how to build robots that love their work, versus ones that hate their work. Not because it makes a practical difference to us, but because of ethics.

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

#267

Post by modernerd »

There are 325+ theories of consciousness mapped here:

https://loc.closertotruth.com/map

And a good walkthrough here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5G6Oc_V3Lw

Many of these already gave up on dualism: they already rejected the idea that mind and body are separate (e.g. panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is a feature of reality, that all matter possesses "experience" of some kind).

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

#268

Post by daseiner1 »

card_zero wrote: post #250
justonceokay wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll bite the bullet: if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love (or “care”, or “noticing”, or “intention”. Love is such a slippery word…) that we would have to trust. Imagine a cat-sitting robot. The robot can differentiate between individual cats. It learns how to play with the cats and feed them in in their preferred way. The cats grow to tr…

How does the robot work? Sound like there's some knowledge accumulated in there, and you'd be being destructive, like burning books, but the robot doesn't create ideas. Qualia, I couldn't comment on. Well, it seems the term refers to private ideas that can't be communicated. So, no.

at the risk of jumping the shark into full-on “woo woo”: what does it mean to “create ideas”? are ideas created or revealed? if ideas are created where do they come from? if ideas are revealed, then does that necessarily imply a determinism? if the robot devises a novel solution to a technical problem, isn’t that an idea? or is the robot’s solution actually the unavoidable result of the entire history of analytical thought? if the novel solution isn’t the creation of an idea, then what makes an idea an idea? if Michelangelo’s David was sculpted by an automaton, is it less beautiful? If so, why? If not, why not?

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

#269

Post by smokedetector1 »

Kbelicius wrote: post #229
smokedetector1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, who make up an experience narrative?

Never heard of Gazzaniga before reading above comment, its quite fascinating. The brain, its left hemisphere, makes up the narrative.

Sorry my comment was unclear. My point is, the process of “making up a narrative” does seem to imply a subjective experience, doesnt it? My point is, the existence of the experiencer can’t be denied. Even if the experience itself is some kind of illusion, theres no coherent way to say that there is no entity having an experience. Every attempt to do so ends up implying the existence of an experiencer (the one having the illusion of experiencing)

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

#270

Post by themafia »

pygy_ wrote: post #238

FTA: > Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness. The hard problem isn't about "why", it's about "what it's like". Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind. None of the things you say, sign or w…

> Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind.

I know this isn't what you wanted, but the dualism struck me:

A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong.

Magenta is like when you play a D and an F# together. When you see it at sunset it's like a major D chord surrounded by the sound of babies laughing. When you see it on the battlefield it's like a minor D chord wrestling against the noise of wind and rain.

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