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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

#521

Post by BoxOfRain »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #473
mordymoop wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I still think we're looking for a shadow by shining a torch at it personally; we have a rather chauvinistic view on what consciousness 'ought' to look like and this fundamentally shapes what we're looking for. We assume that consciousness has to resemble human consciousness, something we can't even measure very well in people let alone extrapolate into other kinds of being.

For the sake of argument, let's take a particularly long-lived species and say oak trees have some form of awareness. An oak tree's perception of time would be completely out of line with ours, from its perspective it'd be this writhing, visibly expanding thing that can't even register individual humans since we're there for such a short period of its existence. If it were aware on some level, we wouldn't be able to tell either way because we can only really conceive of human-like minds; even though an 'oak tree mind' would look nothing like ours because it would be driven by entirely different evolutionary conditions. I don't think it's possible for us to be entirely objective when it comes to naturalistic theories of consciousness, we cannot avoid being biased by our 'version' of what we're studying.

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

#522

Post by Eisenstein »

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.

Would you say that displaying image of something on a screen qualifies as actually happening? Writing data on a storage medium? What about a roomba vacuuming a floor?

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

#523

Post by fssys »

ravenical wrote: post #442
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yes

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

#525

Post by aerodexis »

prmph wrote: post #471
visarga wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So it's through the senses that one attains mathematical knowledge?

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

#526

Post by Tier2Capital »

H8crilA wrote: post #287
trick-or-treat wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's called solipsism. I went through it as a lad, I think it's not uncommon.

I assure you that I am not conscious (and a human, not an LLM). Therefore at least partial solipsism is true.

what do you mean youre not conscious?

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

#527

Post by andoando »

criddell wrote: post #507
andoando wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet the mere fact that I am conscious is a greater truth than any of my perception of the "physical" world. Neither does pure materialism rest on falsifiable beliefs, in that I could claim nothing exists outside my conscious experience.

Just as one can say the neocortex named itself, it's your brain declaring that it is conscious. If ten years from now your phone tells you it is conscious, would you believe it? What criteria would you use to decide?

I didnt say that I solved the problem, merely that I, myself, know that I am concious.

If we go falsifiability, again, I can equally say how do I know your concious, or even that how do I know youre alive and breathing beyond the moments that I myself am observing you?

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

#528

Post by kajaktum »

Reading Ashtavakra Gita gives me more insight into this than any other literature that I have read. The ultimate reality is that: There's nothing else other than this. This is all there is.

To anyone discussing whether or not consciousness exist, tell me do you have proof that other people have consciousness? There's simply no credible answer to this question other than "well they have to be...cause we share the same material". But that is a experiment with a sample of 1. The weird thing is, if you are able to proof someone else's consciousness, that is just an extension of your own consciousness.

Next question, how do you prove that you are not sleeping right now? What proof do you have that you are not living inside an illusion? You have surely experienced the illusion of understanding i.e. you realized that you "understanding" or the feeling of "understanding" was wrong. What is to say that this is not happening now?

In reality, there is nothing to discover. There is just this and that is all there is.

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

#529

Post by gpderetta »

mikk14 wrote: post #301
energy123 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you are destroyed in your sleep by aliens and replaced by an atomically identical duplicate. Would you call this "you"? If not, what if the aliens recycled the atoms from your original body to make the new body, putting each original atom into the same original spot with the same position and momentum (ignoring quantum and uncertainty principle). What if they recycled 99% of the atoms from your original body,…

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.…

If this actually happened, would the 'I' that replaced you be any wiser. How do you know this hasn't happened to you already? Maybe multiple times per second?

> It says "something" survived the utter complete destruction of the physical body and was "put back in it" once it was reassembled. If "it" survived the complete physical destruction of the body, it must be somewhere else, detached from the body.

The information of how to put your body and mind back must have survived somewhere, in the alien mind for example or the machine they used. But the information would still be in (a medium in) this universe and bound to this universe physical laws. I would say this is still a monist position.

A true dualist believes that consciousness survives outside of a medium in this universe.

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

#530

Post by mjburgess »

summarybot wrote: post #505
mjburgess wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure. These statements conflate, as idealists do, epistemology and ontology. What we know "for sure" has no bearing on what's real. These are entirely separate questions. What an ape might, or might not, feel certain (or any which way about) says nothing about where an ape finds itself. Of course, this is a great injury to our ego, and sens…

Largely I find your points reductionist and insulting to the very sacred experience that is unfolding for you and me. Consciousness is a primary or even a priori phenomenon from which all of your surmisals stem. You have got it backwards. The fact someone once saw an ape, or saw a nebula, or made a measurement of brain waves, these all had to happen within human-experience. The experiencing itself is irreducible. Con…

You can read my other comment. You're also committing the genetic fallacy.

Yes, a hand can measure itself. Yes, consciousness as a measurement process of reality can expose to the conscious agent that its own consciousness is a merely a process in the world.

Just as a camera, in photographing a mirror, discovers that it is only a camera located at some point in space and time.

The "back to basics" pov you're talkign about is one which actually abandons everything consciousness tells you about the world, because you're afraid of what you've found.

An ape without a mirror thinks, of course, it is god. What an insult to find the face of this god is only that of an ape.

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