461–470 of 822 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't tell the difference between a person and an mp3 player saying the same words, even if the words are about inner life musings. And you can't tell the difference between a person exhibiting many behavioral actions and something I could rig up with an electric motor and a light sensor to exhibit tropism, seeking things, avoiding other things. But if you only had a remote controlled roomba to interact with the…
This is an interesting take but are you not equating intelligence with consciousness?
In other comments I've distilled that down to "It can't be about what a thing can do, but about what a thing chooses to do." Which is a bit too distilled by itself but whatever.
The ability to solve a puzzle is just a correlation, probably a required ingredient, not significant itself.
The comment above was more focussed on it's parent about what you can deduce from outside observations. It's not true that there is nothing to go on. It's merely true that you can come up with a lot of examples of observations that don't prove anything.
Hearing something say "I think, therefor I am." doesn't prove that it thinks or is. Seeing something solve a puzzle or care for a baby doesn't prove that it is the same as you who can also solve puzzles and would care for a baby.
And yet, no matter how limited your means of expression were, if you had any means of acting at all, you could and would make yourself known. How I don't know because it's infinite and context sensitive. You would do something that only has meaning to me or other immediate observers because it would somehow refer to other immediate context.
You're nothing but a remote controlled roomba, and just to make the point we'll artificially remove the obvious easy direct possibility of writing letters out on the floor or tapping out morse code by bumping into something, etc. You can only communicate by actions. You don't know morse code and something like that simple doesn't occur to you because not everyone thinks like that or is good at thinking of things like that.
Yet... You see me looking around for something, and you push the cookie I dropped across the floor to where I see it. Then when I reach for it you move in the way because you wish to tell me I'm not supposed to have sugar & carbs, and indeed I do get that message. No single act like that says or proves much by itself, but stuff like that adds up to a pattern that exceeds the same sorts of things any dog routinely does, and none of it requires hardly any brute brainpower. Or maybe it does require brute brain power but it doesn't have to mean an ability to solve impressive puzzles. IE a dog will absolutely model that you are looking for that cookie and will absolutely desire to please you by bringing it to you, but will not joke with you by bringing a particular type of cookie that you both know you don't like. But it could be trained to do all the same outward actions. It has the brainpower to figure out even very complicated rules.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with this line of thought is that consciousness can be damaged when it's physical container is damaged. A piece of falling masonry can be enough to shear off large parts or all of it. If consciousness was fundamentally distinct, this wouldn't be the case, would it?
There is no problem here. [I may have shared this thought experiment before here using a different handle.] Let us assume there exists in our planet an undiscovered island that has developed independent of other human societies. This is not an island of primitives. The inhabitants pride themselves on their scientific and empirical approach to knowledge acquisition, however they are not quite on par with the rest of t…
I don't think the GP's objection is fatal either (for reasons mentioned in another reply), but let me try to poke holes in your argument.
If I understand your analogy correctly, you're saying the brain here acts as an intermediary between the real consciousness and the physical world, and not really the underlying thing that generates consciousness.
But this seems to contradict actual experience -- if somebody's head is hit very hard, they kind of get knocked dizzy for a moment. Their consciousness halts, until their brain recovers. If your analogy truly holds, then subjectively it should feel more like disconnecting from World of Warcraft. "The real consciousness" fiddles their fingers idly while waiting for reconnection, and once they reconnect they'd have a recollection (on the non-physical, consciousness side) of what happened during the physical blackout.
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…
Does that mean when a boxer is knocked unconscious we should call a philosopher to fix it?
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…
Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure. I know for sure what I am perceiving. Forget about if it is a simulation or not: it is still what I am perceiving. There is nothing else I can be sure of. So you are correct that it is, in some sense, un-explorable. However, if the above is the reason, then nothing else is explorable also; you cannot prove that we are not in a simulatio…
Who invented the words "consciousness" "reality" "fundamental" that you are now using? you are using language invented elsewhere while claiming you can't be sure of its reality.
Are you also claiming you can't be sure someone had to create and raise you to get to the point of asking such questions? We are downstream from parents and society.
The whole discussion here is anchored on individual level, but we are not viable outside society. It's like extracting one cell from one organ and saying it is mysterious why it is like that, while ignoring the organism and the evolution.
If society fails, human die too. If a human makes a fatal mistake, the cells in their body die too. We depend on top level doing its job to keep the lower layers viable.
"Many felt confounded or degraded by the idea of sharing a family tree with donkeys. [...] Amid the current cultural backlash against progressive ideas, today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear, transcendent souls. [...] The current debate on consciousness is influenced by our entrenched traditional ideas of ourselves"
Whose fear? Don't generalize, Carlo. These may be fears rooted in the modernist and Cartesian legacy, but they are only "traditional" if you think the world came into being during the 17th-18th century. Look back further and you find an Aristotelian and Thomistic view that also rejects metaphysical dualism. The soul here is the form of the body, which is to say, its formal cause. It isn't some ghost haunting a corpse or a puddle of ectoplasm. It is a principle. In this view, everything that is alive has a soul, which, again, is the name we give to the form of a living thing. Soul is just a class of form, and everything that exists has form.
What makes human beings different from other animals is, at the very least, that we possess intellects (and so, ontologically speaking, any embodied being with an intellect is human). The human intellect, according to this view, cannot be purely material, even if it relies on matter and even though it is united with bodily operations. The reason for this is that abstraction cannot occur in matter alone, as abstraction involves a mental operation of conceptual separation of the form of a thing as given in the senses. Matter (specifically what's called prime matter) is merely the principle of instantiation, and so it cannot "host" forms without instantiating that form. In other words, form + matter = thing.
"During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul."
No that is not how people viewed the body and the soul in the Middle Ages (or in, say, Catholicism). That is a very Cartesian view of human beings, that we are two things, not one.
"The body was an interconnected bunch of matter that decayed and died. The soul belonged to a transcendent spiritual world independent from vile matter."
Matter wasn't vile, unless you were some kind of Gnostic or Cathar heretic or whatever. The physical was seen as good, as created by God, and human beings were understood as spiritual-corporeal unities that are by one nature both spiritual and physical. (The "spiritual" here has to do with the intellectual and free nature of man; again, not ectoplasm or ghosts). Indeed, if anything, Christianity elevated the dignity of the physical. Why bother with a resurrection after death if matter sucks? Why would the body and blood of Christ be so precious to Catholics if matter is evil? It is Gnostic dualism and similar movements that construed the physical as evil, but these were heretical movements, not views characteristic of the Middle Ages.
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All that being said, I think the author would benefit greatly from a rigorous study of Aristotelian metaphysics, both to avoid these sorts of caricatures (as well as any misconceptions of science), but also to deepen his understanding. I think his rejection of dualism is on the right track, but he is missing out on a rich and robust intellectual tradition that has been sidelined by exactly those sorts of modernists that perpetuated this whole intellectual muddle in the first place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I said brain power isn't interesting because it doesn't prove anything. There are things that we absolutely know are not conscious yet have a lot of brain power, ie countless pieces of simple deterministic software that we can explain all the way down to the atoms like a sewing machine. Yes other animals have demonstrated brain power that exceeds some humans, or even all humans while they are young enough, if you jus…
A cat reaching for a cuddle is conscious or not? They recognise individuals and communicate desires well past the bounds of food or other basic needs into affection.
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…
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…
They espouse consciousness or subjective experience is fundamental and contained in all matter.
There's a long history of anti-dualism in Kabbalist traditions, Christian Mysticism and Gnosticism.
For example, the Gospel of Thomas sayings #3, #77 and #113.
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.
What about the NPC meme? LLMs behave like NPCs, and some people seem no more conscious than an NPC (I didn't invent that meme).