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Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

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Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#271

Post by red75prime »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #65
dilap wrote: post #27

An 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…

> down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters My guess? No, it won’t be conscious or even meaningful. More fundamentally, our inability to answer this question drives at our ignorance of our own neurology. We don’t know the building blocks of thought. It might happen at the neurochemical or electrochemical level. It may even depend on quantum effects.

I have trouble accepting that existence of something that appears so high-level as consciousness could depend on implementation details.

We don't experience minutiae of activations of billions of neurons, or the work of glia. We experience "executive summaries" of them. So it's natural to assume that those summaries can be represented in another physical form.

Why physical representation of those "summaries" are there? Because it's a way our brains do high level decision making.

This leaves out the question why we experience anything at all. And I have trouble imagining that there are physical processes (quantum or not), which create a mysterious consumer for "executive summaries". If it was so, we would have decision-making pathway and useless subjective experience pathway. It's hard to explain from evolutionary standpoint.

I prefer to think that "executive summaries" abstracted from physical representation just exist without any need for mysterious consumers. Not unlike how natural numbers exist according to mathematical platonists.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#272

Post by FisDugthop »

imoldtoo wrote: post #258
Veedrac wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alice: We can agree the brain is conscious, yes? Bob: Of course. Alice: But what if you scaled up all the neurons in the brain a factor of 2? Would it still be conscious? Bob: Sure, if it's the same system running the same way. There's no reason to expect it to matter. Alice: Then if it was a factor 4 larger? Bob: Absolutely. Human brains are sized as they are as a matter of evolutionary coincidence. Bird neurons are…

This scaling argument only works if the consituent molecules, atoms and particles also scale proportionally. If you scale the system but keep one end tied down it isn't the same system.

Presumably the grandparent is thinking of organisms like Pando [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#273

Post by monktastic1 »

rjldev wrote: post #235
monktastic1 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Very nice, your mouse pointer analogy is really good!

Thank you!

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#274

Post by marcAKAmarc »

ajuc wrote: post #165
marcAKAmarc wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"There's no qualities in the universe, just quantities and we arbitrarily assign labels (qualities) to them." I understand your standpoint. I feel pretty frustrated with these questions too - especially when people throw large assumptions around like panpsychism. However, I gotta disagree with the idea notion that no qualities exist in the universe. Afterall, isn't every single thing a part of the universe, includin…

> Afterall, isn't every single thing a part of the universe, including thoughts, feelings, and experience? They are, but they aren't fundamental. They are just our interpretation of the state of the universe (which is quantitative). > without watching a scan of your brain, and without collecting any sort of scientific data about your nervous system, you were most likely able to discern the difference between those tw…

All good points.

> "They are, but they aren't fundamental. They are just our interpretation of the state of the universe (which is quantitative)."

I see the logic here, but I think I can poke a hole in it with this line of logic:

1.)Everything I experience has both a quantitative reality (state of the universe) and a qualitative reality (interpretation of the state of the universe).

2.)I can't observe a quantitative reality without qualitative reality.

3.)I can't say for sure that quantitative reality gives rise to qualitative reality, because I've never observed a quantitative reality without the qualitative component.

I think you are right that, in the context of classical physics, qualitative experiences are not fundamental. But I also don't think classical physics has a place in the discussion about subjective reality.

>Is "NullPointerException" a thing that exists just because java programs can throw it?

Very interesting comparison of exceptions to qualia, and really illustrates the "chicken or egg" side of the discussion quite well.

To respond to your question, No. In a literal sense it exists to tell the programmer (or in the worst case, a normal computer user) that something in the program went wrong, which is the whole thing actually.

To continue with the discussion from a programming standpoint... Exception messages are our stand in for some type of qualia, and "NullPointerException" is an example of a quantitative representation of a specific quality, and Java as the biological brain and the gateway to the outside world. The consciousness in this metaphor is the programmer (or user) that reads the exceptions as output on the screen, and quality is experienced when the programmer feels (or interprets) the words on the screen that say "NullPointerException".

I could try to posit a few things here that support the existence of consciousness -

1.) the mere existence of error messages or output in general (qualia) supports the case of the existence of users (or consciousness within yourself).

2.) If I can successfully trigger multiple errors, process them, and discern one error message from another, then I am most certainly using a computer (and obtain consciousness).

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#275

Post by SamBam »

arnoooooo wrote: post #241
rabbitonrails wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that I am conscious?

If you are a human, I don't know for sure, but it seems reasonable to assume.

It's not a matter of assuming, it's a pretty serious point: Is there any test you can imagine that will prove anything about another person's consciousness?

If not, then any discussion about consciousness is "handwavy" and "untestable."

Tests about your own consciousness are interesting, but ultimately can't answer anything about consciousness in general, because they are by definition n=1, since you can't know if my results are actually the result of consciousness.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#277

Post by SamBam »

kypro wrote: post #180
danharaj wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define an illusion without first positing a being that can experience (hence conscious) an illusion? What does it mean that consciousness is a 'lie our brain tells us', who are we? Are you assuming some form of cartesian dualism, or perhaps you are making a sort of homunculus argument? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument

By illusion I just mean there isn't really a physical pain (sub atomic elements don't feel pain) but our brains still act as if we experience pain from the perspective of a self. From this perspective the self is a real thing, you are a conscious human, not a collection of atoms - you matter more than your matter. Let me try this another way... Imagine an identical universe with one difference - no one is conscious.…

> but our brains still act as if we experience pain

That's fine for someone else's brain -- I can see it act as if a person is experiencing pain -- but I know that I experience pain. I'm not just going through the motions, I experience it.

Again, your argument is a homunculus argument -- that your brain is lying/whatever for the benefit of something else inside that is experiencing the "illusion" of consciousness. Again, you can't have an illusion of consciousness, because an "illusion" requires consciousness.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#278

Post by mnowicki »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #94
keiferski wrote: post #73

Heh, 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…

Not sure if can even be attempted. If turns out to be a phenomenon that originates in a sub-Plank's scale then "machinery" isn't something conceptually possible there.

If consciousness, or any phenomenon that effects our physical world in a way we can perceive, originated from some mechanism that takes place on a sub-plank scale, then I think that it would be conceivable for some super advanced machinery to be able to effect or even replicate said phenomenon. Just not with our current level of technology

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#279

Post by turk73 »

slacka wrote: post #145
adwn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To build on your thought experiment: > So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? If you answer "yes" to this question, what happens if you split the computations of that simulated brain over a million people equipped with pen and paper? Where is its consciousness happening now? I have yet to hear a satisfying answ…

million? There are over 100 trillion neural connections in the human brain. And look up artificial vs biological neuron. With sheer number and added complexity of biological neurons, there's likely not enough atoms in the Universe to provide enough ink and paper to run this simulation. Also, you run into the problem of time slices. One step in a simulation of my brain is not conscious. There must be some self-referen…

I was working on a response same as yours. Only thing I can offer is that maybe we can create consciousness without having to "simulate" all those neurons, as in, there is some more reasonable sampling that will give a reasonable approximation.

I do think it is self-referential and that is how consciousness emerges.

I disagree that there are quantum mechanical effects, but what do I know? I do kind of feel like I'm in more than one place at the same time right now.

It's "Turing" not Touring, btw. And no, the brain is not a Turing machine.

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