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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

#471

Post by prmph »

visarga wrote: post #465
prmph wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure. 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 s…

> You are using language invented elsewhere while claiming you can't be sure of its reality.

Your senses are the only thing on which this statement rests. Your don't know anything like "language", "invented" etc. All you know is what your mind and your senses tell you.

And, yes, engaging with you on this topic, and my argument, is also included in what I refer to as my perception. I have no way to prove that you are even conscious, or that anything like language or invention actually are real, whatever real means.

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

#472

Post by rirze »

visarga wrote: post #447
Joker_vD wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"Yes."

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

#473

Post by GoblinSlayer »

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…

Naturalistic theories tend to work better, and science is inching in towards the problem, so far it was naturalistic.

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

#475

Post by mikk14 »

energy123 wrote: post #388
mikk14 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if they destroyed and reassembled only 0.5% of your brain? What's your dividing line? 0.36%? 0.0188%? Apologies, I read too quickly and skipped over this. See one of my sibling comments. I concede this is problematic for my position and I need to think harder on how to solve it, but I don't think it's unsolvable. The placeholder answer is that there must be a certain level of damage -- the precise % probably d…

There's nothing you need to solve because definitions of words are subjective social constructs that are neither correct or incorrect. Definitions are axioms. You have chosen to define the word "you" to require continuity, under some rubric. By that definition, a copy of you isn't really you. That's correct under your axiom , but it is incorrect under other axioms. The functionalists I am trying to channel in this co…

Sorry, perhaps I just don't know what "monism" truly means, I admit my ignorance, but if we just limit ourselves to the mind-body problem, I just meant that a dualist position considers the mind as separate from the body, and monism rejects that.

The functionalist point of view you propose doesn't seem to be to be useful at all in this context. Let's backtrack. The original example I provided you when you asked about whether there can be somebody proposing monism and at the same time holding dualist positions was asking:

"If I do mind uploading, do I die?"

You can be creative in redefining what the word "I" means, which is what you engaged with, but when push comes to shove and I do the actual mind uploading, then the self that experienced my qualia since birth will irreparably stop experiencing qualia (aka: dying) and be replaced by another self. You're free to call that self as if it was me, and be all happy it can do the same things I could do, but that's not gonna change the fact that my previous self (the only "I" that matters to me) died.

Would you step in the Star Trek teleporter knowing that you will die, and think you haven't died just because you have been replaced by a different being that is functionally equivalent to you? I sure as hell will never do it.

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

#476

Post by pasta67 »

But there is dualism in our minds - we have two spheres of brains and one of those is in master position over other and synchronize both parts. As a result the enslaved part of our brains is silent watcher. But sometimes brains get damaged and these mechanisms malfunction.

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

#477

Post by morpheos137 »

funimpoded wrote: post #278
cortic wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing that we know of in carbon based structures that violates universal causality, even in quantum scales where causality becomes more vague it is replaced by a measurable randomness. So there should be no reason we cannot reduce these phenomena to actual quantifiable and there for Computable elements.

Computing something isn’t the same thing as it actually happening.

That is a dubious asertion. At high enough resolution the model converges on the modeled.

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

#478

Post by mikk14 »

alexwebb2 wrote: post #430
mikk14 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these scenarios would result in "me" from a monist perspective. The destruction is a discontinuity point, I died there and then, and then the next planck moment a new being was created with all my memories. But "I" died. The functionalist answer, as you understand it, is dualist. It says "something" survived the utter complete destruction of the physical body and was "put back in it" once it was reassembled.…

As a monist who holds the view that you’re claiming monists can’t legitimately hold, I don’t see any difficulty at all in squaring these ideas: - there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else - destroying an instantiation of a pattern != destroying the pattern And speaking of squaring ideas – if I draw a square…

> if I draw a square on a piece of paper, and then light that paper on fire, I haven’t destroyed the concept of a square. I can always draw an identical square on another sheet of paper. If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.

If you have a son and you kill him, you haven't destroyed the concept of a son. You can always make a new son. If the son had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.

Is that the same son? Do you not go to prison for murder?

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

#479

Post by tsss »

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…

I don't think people will ever admit that they're not that special. We already know that animals are "conscious" and still treat them with disdain.

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

#480

Post by Joker_vD »

visarga wrote: post #447
Joker_vD wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> How come?

Well, you gotta spend the eternity somehow, so maybe the soul just got bored and started inventing miserable experiences for itself.

Yes, it's ridiculous.

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