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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

#531

Post by germandiago »

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…

My comment was going to say something similar. It starts like: hey, think this, it is time to think this full stop I say so.

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

#532

Post by alexwebb2 »

prmph wrote: post #514
alexwebb2 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser. This is exactly what don't know, and is interesting to explore. > 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 So if your brain was somehow cloned, you'd exist in two places at the same time? It seems possible for two separate consciousness to have the…

> So if your brain was somehow cloned, you'd exist in two places at the same time?

There’d be two Mes – two instantiations of the Me pattern co-occurring. And that would likely be confusing for both of us!

> To illustrate, two instances of a programs can share the exact same binary code (the "pattern") and yet they are separate instances.

Exactly! If we suspend a Docker image, transfer it to a new compatible host machine, and fire it up, we consider it a resumption of the same process (pattern) in a different instance.

Likewise, say we found a mathematical function that would compute the entire state of that Docker image at that moment, and then wiped the image – such that there was no current physical instantiation of it anywhere, on any machine – and subsequently used the function to regenerate it bit for bit.

A dualist would say there’s something fundamentally different about the human analogue of that; that the Mind has a separate existence Elsewhere – and not just in the mathematical sense of patterns not requiring instantiation to still be patterns, since that would apply to all patterns, Minds or not.

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

#533

Post by lanstin »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #362

Here's a trippy idea I have about consciousness, which arose from thinking about recent AI advances and also watching kids develop. I think children's main "cost function" is the ability to predict the future. This might start out, for example, as being - how will this vertical line move as I move my head. Later, where is the ball going. And they are essentially building a "world model" in their brains, starting with…

This theory maps very well onto (at least some parts of) modern neuroscience; how emotions are made is taking this model, that the brains MO is predicting how the body will need to be tuned in the near future, as a way to explain how emotions arise and are perceived. “How Emotions are Made” by LisaFeldman Barrett.

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

#534

Post by beaker52 »

bonobo wrote: post #456
beaker52 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many people appear to be mesmerised by their own place in the physical world, and taken by this powerful idea that the physical world is the source of it all, giving rise to everything through physical laws and processes, like our brain, a product of quaint physical processes, giving rise to consciousness. To me, that idea seems entirely back-to-front. To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious e…

I find your position quite interesting but I feel like it still suffers the same issues I've seen in other "mind-first" arguments (I'm sorry for any ill-defined terms as I'm not a philosopher myself), such as p-zombies (how do you know other people are conscious as well?) and the origin of it. I think both positions (physicalism vs mind-first) suffer from the same issue that is to reach the bottom of it all, except p…

> I'm sorry for any ill-defined terms as I'm not a philosopher myself

Don't worry. You're in good company.

> How would this work if, from your perspective, I'm also conscious and not a p-zombie?

It's impossible for me to say that you are conscious. I only watch my own movie. In that movie, others appear to be watching their own movies. Their movies exist only as content in my movie. I cannot say for certain whether or not there really are conscious experiences like mine occurring. All I can say is that I am being given the impression that there are.

> Do I give rise to the world, or do you?

I do. Or at least, something impresses the world upon me. You are a feature of the world that is impressed upon me, and, disappointingly (for me at least), there's no way to confirm it through this movie that I am watching. I am left having to "make up my own mind" about whether or not I choose to believe you are anything but a p-zombie extra, in what is (as far as I can see of the conscious spectrum I am able to perceive), a single screen, single reel movie. But I'm just guessing, hoping, wishing, because that's all I can do from this limited vantage point.

> Do we all collectively create a single world from our consciousness in a "Sandman's Dream of a Thousand Cats" way?

It's a cute idea. Design by committee. Books/predictions of the future seem to have this annoying property of becoming true, lending to this idea. Who knows?

> And if we're all p-zombies except you, why bother arguing with us?

What else am I supposed to do? If you have unimaginable wealth, infinite time and the ability to conjure anything into existence, exactly what are you to do? Perhaps you might dream up what having the opposite of your existence might be, and set about convincing yourself that you are a time-ful, perishable human-being bound by physics and inevitably limited by the finite energy available in the universe, stumped by entropy. Perhaps you even role play as the puppets on the ends of your fingers, while convincing yourself that they're just as real as you are, so you can feel what it's like not to be the majesty of your own lonely empire. What else am I supposed to do, than to go along with it? If we destroy the illusion, we're back to square one - and then what?

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

#536

Post by jffhn »

n4r9 wrote: post #449
trollbridge wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We don't experience the sun going up and down, we experience its direction changing relative to the horizontal plane, and it is not an illusion: it matches planetary motion. The mistake arises when interpreting the raw experience. Sensations don't lie. Another example: Metal feels colder than plastic, but the sensation is right again: you are loosing more heat when touching metal.

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

#537

Post by snowwrestler »

I think what is needed, and what will happen, is to pull apart concepts like intelligence, consciousness, and language use, and create narrower and more rigorous definitions of what those are.

My go-to analogy is the concept of heat and warmth, which was the subject of philosophical speculation and inquiry for centuries. But ultimately it was not useful or predictive until it was redefined very narrowly by scientists as a specific measurable attribute of a collection of molecules. Arguably this redefinition itself was an important component of the establishment of “science” as a discipline distinct from philosophy.

This let scientists work with heat rigorously, even though non-scientists still have a largely colloquial vocabulary about it, e.g. “this coat is warmer than my last one.” On matters like consciousness, we’re all still smashed together into colloquial land, arguing about definitions when we think we are arguing about concepts.

I do think the current advancements in AI may help us develop the new vocabulary we need to quantitatively reason about intelligence and language, and in doing so, help better define / constrain what the we mean by consciousness. We think of LLMs now as a tool we can use to do work, but another view is that they are a sensor that directly correlates physical inputs to intelligent outputs. Sort of like how burning can be used to measure the energy contained in various materials, in addition to keeping us warm.

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

#538

Post by kevin42 »

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.

“We experience it, therefore it exists” proves less than it seems. It proves there is an experience to explain. It does not prove that consciousness is what it appears to be from the inside. A mirage is still seen, but the thing it seems to show is not really there. Consciousness might be real in that same limited sense, while our folk model of it could be deeply wrong.

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

#539

Post by aerodexis »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #515
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…

The major reason for the never-ending disagreements on the nature of consciousness is that pretty much 100% of the time no-one ever rigorously defines what (things) they are actually talking about, and the word is so overloaded and poorly defined that any discussion therefore devolves into people talking about different things, as well as the discussion being so vague as to be meaningless. There are of course other r…

> with things like religious beliefs and human ego meaning that people come to the discussion with a major bias and fixed views rather than even being open to any rational discussion.

You're forgetting that attempting to have a "rational" discussion is itself a bias inherited from the many centuries of intellectual development that occurred between the middle ages and now - the parts that the article conveniently skips over entirely.

The "debate" here doesn't function to generate an answer, but to narrow down the scope of the question into the very constrained domain. When ppl debate "consciousness" they are re-affirming their opinion that humans are inherently rational agents (hence "scire" -> "to know"), rather than agents that can live, feel, think and will, which would require a different term, like "soul".

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

#540

Post by alexashka »

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…

They know because of the algorithm:

Hear a thing and store it and the associated vibe - yay/nay.

Step 2:

Mindlessly repeat stored information and vibe when it feels appropriate.

Step 3:

Wait for somebody else to do the work of refuting/verifying your info + vibe.

Step 4:

Go to step 1.

When you realize this is what all people are doing almost all of the time (and many, all of the time), you are liberated.

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