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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

#441

Post by sunir »

a13o wrote: post #354

It’s going to be a long road, but I think as LLMs and their offspring create more and more convincing arguments for silicon consciousness we will conclude that consciousness is about as real as humours, and we’ve all been p-zombies this whole time. Maybe the literary creature shoe should have started on the other foot, and sent us in search of proof that we are or are not p-angels. That at least puts the burden of pr…

Dubious. We will just see logical vs physical space once again and move on with our lives. I think we are already mostly there as a society.

I don’t know why this is a block in philosophy let alone computer science. We experience it frequently and have a fundamental theorem about it.

Plenty of movies about it as well like the Matrix.

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

#442

Post by ravenical »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #289
fssys wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You really don't need a concept of a colour or a shape, and it's a fairly typical academic fallacy to assume you do. That's directly confusing experience with categorisation and labelling of experience. If you touch a very hot object your nervous system will pull your hand away before your brain registers what's happening. The qualia of pain are pre-conceptual, preverbal, and precranial, and your consciousness only c…

Surely this implies exactly the opposite - you don't register the pain, don't feel it, until after you pull your hand away. It's a reflex action in response to heat. Qualia require a brain to process sensory input.

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

#443

Post by tim333 »

whack wrote: post #428

There is a problem with the thesis that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon. It implies that someone writing the "wrong" sequence of 0s and 1s, by hand, on a completely private journal, has committed a moral crime on par with slavery and genocide. Full proof: https://outlookzen.com/2017/04/03/philosophical-proof-for-th...

Only for a rather weird definition of moral crime.

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

#444

Post by etiam »

wowoc wrote: post #311
colordrops wrote: post #132

These conversations drive me insane. There isn't even an clear or even consensus definition of consciousness, yet here we are all acting like we are talking about the same thing. "It's right there, don't you see it? That's consciousness! We just need to define what it is so we can figure out if it's real or not".

Thomas Nagel's definition of consciousness is pretty good: "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."

What do you find good about that?

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

#445

Post by zchrykng »

smackeyacky wrote: post #323
LoganDark wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you look at the stars, are they real or a simulation in your brain? This is unknowable.

It is knowable isn’t it? We know our brains play a variety of tricks to get a cohesive view out of two wildly complicated but deeply flawed meat sensors. That fits the definition of a simulation.

Part of the argument is that you can only know what you experience. But, if this is a simulation, "you" could be a program running on a computer and your every experience is just piped directly into your consciousness without any underlying physical reality. You might even not be interacting with other people in the simulation, it could be just you and everything else is simulated without being similar to whatever existence you have.

I don't agree with this argument, but it circulates occasionally.

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

#446

Post by morpheos137 »

Mention "consciousness" get a slew of incoherent responses. There is no "hard problem." the burden of proof has always been on those who claim there is. whats it like is what it is what it is is what it is like. the question has the innanity of a circle asking "why do I have an interior?"

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

#447

Post by visarga »

Joker_vD wrote: post #378
losvedir wrote: post #370

I once read a comment on here that I found interesting but haven't been able to find it again. Basically it flipped the problem on its head. We're arguing how you start at the physical substrate and get to consciousness. They argued that you could start with consciousness and argue how you get to the physical side (experimentation via your conscious experience, etc). It was from a religious individual who called the…

This side is traditionally called "idealist", and it usually very quickly collapses into solipsism of different varieties. There is not much you can show against the "there is a single existing soul that has many different persons (as opposed to each person having a different, personal soul) that dreams about the 'physical' reality" hypothesis except "I don't think my imagination is that good", really.

What I reject most about idealism is that it is free. Life is hard and expensive, but soul is free. How come? Is our soul understood like a spherical cow?

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

#449

Post by n4r9 »

trollbridge wrote: post #419
storus wrote: post #405

This article had absolutely no proof of its statements and all it did was use past allegories. We are definitely missing something in our understanding of the world, like before we knew about electromagnetism or radioactivity. There are some mechanisms we know about that contribute to the knowledge of self that become exposed by conditions like Depersonalization/Derealization disorder from certain neurons in inflamma…

Agreed. The main reason we believe consciousness exists is because we all experience it. So it’s hard to deny.

I think the article has an interesting argument here. We also "experience" the sun going up and down in the sky. But actually this is an illusion of our vantage point on a spinning rock.

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

#450

Post by lanstin »

mordymoop wrote: post #434
storus wrote: post #405

This article had absolutely no proof of its statements and all it did was use past allegories. We are definitely missing something in our understanding of the world, like before we knew about electromagnetism or radioactivity. There are some mechanisms we know about that contribute to the knowledge of self that become exposed by conditions like Depersonalization/Derealization disorder from certain neurons in inflamma…

Over time I've found that by far the highest ROI move in a consciousness debate is to simply ask "Oh, interesting. How do you know that?" and watch everyone on all sides flounder. It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try. The intuitions are so strong that they seem to swamp reason. This has caused my ow…

Certainty would definitely appear to be premature when we don’t understand the physical characteristics or causes of consciousness. Hell, we don’t quite yet understand a cell in good mechanical detail, much less the full body/mind of a primate. Don’t know is a reasonable posture, but of course the investigators get enthused with hypothesis generation and testing. That is their job and their karma is to over generalize each useful model.
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