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Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

arxiv.org

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Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#31

Post by derrickdirge »

djtriptych wrote: post #16
irickt wrote: post #3

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6551 >>> Tegmark’s career is a rather unusual story, mixing reputable science with an increasingly strong taste for grandiose nonsense. In this book he indulges his inner crank, describing in detail an utterly empty vision of the “ultimate nature of reality.”

Unless this vision can be directly disproven, why should anyone attach labels like "grandiose" or "nonsense" or "empty"?

Can you think of something that's sufficiently 'disproven' so as to make those labels appropriate?

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#32

Post by d--b »

There is a long history of pushing the location of human consciousness further and further with technological advances. First it was god, then it was somewhere in the ether, then it was electromagnetic waves, now quantum mechanics. People just can't stand the idea that conscious thoughts are made of matter.

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#33

Post by ozy »

I don't get how very intelligent people can hold such views.

Where does the dance go, when the dancers go off stage? The dancers are not the dance, but create the dance. There is some kind of duality there.

Similar for the brain. What it does creates the mind/consciousness. Should that feel like something? Why not?

How does the brain decide on next actions? By simulating/predicting futures and "feeling" which is desired, and acting towards that future. Why would that not feel like something?

The "hard question of consciousness" is not an answer. It is a philosophical device without backing. It is unknown if qualia is actually hard, maybe most learning systems have it. What we do know: it is hard to have intuitions about it ...

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#34

Post by erik14th »

Insanity wrote: post #29

(disclaimer: I did not yet read the whole paper) This part stood out to me in their idea of how philosophy views consciousness > A traditional answer to this problem is dualism — that living entities differ from inanimate ones because they contain some non-physical element such as an “anima” or “soul”. I believe this makes it sound like philosophers are actively looking for the soul, or another explanation of conscio…

I interpret "soul", "spirit" and such terms as a poetic concept to represent the kernel of being, as in, what defines individuality. If you understand conscience as the flow of conscious states, what defines you should be the persistent aspects of those states, trying to draw a parallel with programming languages, it's spirit would be it's core functions. So, not what kind of information you have or deal with, but how you deal with it.

I just can't understand the search for a metaphysical soul, as it is not an actual search, it's just faith, hope, it's not a reasonable answer or an attempt at one, and I guess a lot of philosophers and poets use the words "soul" and "spirit" with what I said earlier in mind.

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#36

Post by Insanity »

xapata wrote: post #30
Insanity wrote: post #29

(disclaimer: I did not yet read the whole paper) This part stood out to me in their idea of how philosophy views consciousness > A traditional answer to this problem is dualism — that living entities differ from inanimate ones because they contain some non-physical element such as an “anima” or “soul”. I believe this makes it sound like philosophers are actively looking for the soul, or another explanation of conscio…

I understood Searle's "Chinese Room" argument to advocate dualism -- that there's something more to being intelligent than just behavior. Searle says the more is consciousness, but I don't see the distinction between that version of the concept and a soul or "ghost" in the machine.

Searle is actually an advocate for Biological Naturalism, the chinese room was an argument against computationalism (that the brain works like a computer). Though he admittedly does think the brain is a 'biological computer', and they have their differences.

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#37

Post by runeks »

Consciousness is a bit like the speed of light: it's defined, not measured. It's not possible to measure the speed of light because we've made this constant the basis of all other measurements. Consciousness is a lot like that: unmeasurable, and the basis of all experience.

In all frameworks there must be some unquestionable property, which defines the framework. For physics this is the speed of light, for life forms it's consciousness.

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#38

Post by thriftwy »

jjaredsimpson wrote: post #19
thriftwy wrote: post #5

Even if it wasn't nonsense, it would be. Because the description focuses on how we perceive the world; not on who is this we that perceives . The mystery of consciousness in the observer, not in what it observes.

This simply isn't true. You seem to have read the abstract and made assumptions about the arguments of the paper. Tegmark doesn't focus on the how; he spends the paper building an argument about what properties an observer must have. It's very easy to call something you don't understand, or reject a priori, nonsense. But at least try to grapple with the argument and a make criticism with substance.

Ok ok, I'll try.

Maybe there's tl;dr somewhere?

Re: Consciousness as a State of Matter (2014)

#39

Post by thriftwy »

runeks wrote: post #37

Consciousness is a bit like the speed of light: it's defined, not measured. It's not possible to measure the speed of light because we've made this constant the basis of all other measurements. Consciousness is a lot like that: unmeasurable, and the basis of all experience. In all frameworks there must be some unquestionable property, which defines the framework. For physics this is the speed of light, for life forms…

> unmeasurable

Says who?

> basis of all experience

Your consciousness is only base of your own experience. For other people your consciousness is only hypothesis to be studied.

> In all frameworks there must be some unquestionable property

I would like to study consciousness outside of frameworks where it is unquestionable - just as we can do it in e.g. classical mechanics with speed of light.

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