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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

#551

Post by qsera »

mjburgess wrote: post #542
qsera wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>reality is all that which is extended in space and time You are missing the fact that "space" and "time" are also illusions painted on consciousness.

Alas, no I am not. They're properties of the world which consciousness measures. A mountain is painted in the ink of a photo, the mountain is not an illusion. You're focused only on the measurement, and not what is measured.

The point is that all existence is built on top of consciousness.

I understand your difficulty. It is hard to imagine the universe disappearing if all consciousness cease to exist the next second.

But is that really hard? Don't everything in your dreams disappear when you wake up?

Let me ask another question. Can you differentiate between a consciousness observing a universe, and a consciousness with a sensation of a whole universe, built in?

And the point of that is our subjective experiences only require consciousness, and not a universe that is independent of it.

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

#552

Post by jdiaz5513 »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #521
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 part…

I agree with you except for one important nuance:

I think what many people are doing is looking for something that is fundamentally a higher dimensional object (dim>4) which casts a 4D spacetime shadow (our bodies) by shining a torch on _that_ shadow. Still doesn't allow for any satisfying direct observation.

This kind of dimensional analysis is part of the focus of my current research program.

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

#553

Post by cameldrv »

jffhn wrote: post #544
tim333 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the debate isn't whether consciousness exists. It's largely whether it's the product of normal neurons doing their thing or something more. Also the details of how it works of course.

It cannot be just a product of the body, else it could not have effect on the body and our tongues could not be moving speaking about it.

Chalmers’ claim is that the fact that it really exists and the fact that we can talk about it are unrelated and basically a coincidence, which I think is completely absurd… If you really believe in qualia IMO you have to bite the bullet and say that there must be physics that we don’t yet understand.

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

#554

Post by sleepyams »

I think that whether we think of consciousness in terms of dualism, or if we think of it as emergent from natural behavior, it really doesn't matter functionally. Either way we are positioning it as something inaccessible from our realm or control.

I believe that we can at least posit some kind of mechanism through which emergence can happen. In my opinion we should look at language and how language evolved. However, i also believe we should expand our study of natural language to things like network protocols, and observe the "protocol hourglass" structure that has emerged from the internet protocol stack.

In my mind, the concepts of control and autonomy are what need to be revisited. We conflate the two: we are autonomous IF we are able to exert control on the environment. However, I think the reality might be that autonomous systems are more similar to an API in the sense that we can interact along the boundary but through the API we cannot exert control over the internal structure of the system (through knowledge or physical control).

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

#555

Post by funimpoded »

Eisenstein wrote: post #522
funimpoded wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Would you say that displaying image of something on a screen qualifies as actually happening?

Yeah, of course.

What I'm addressing is "if we turn 100% of everything about neurons into numbers we can do calculations on those numbers and it's the same as that stuff actually happening with real neurons". Which is entirely wrong. A trajectory calculation isn't different from actually firing a projectile because it's not precise enough but because it's something else entirely.

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

#556

Post by amanaplanacanal »

fssys wrote: post #520
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly my take also. Qualia and consciousness are the same thing. I have it, other humans appear to have it, other mammals appear to have it, LLMs don't.

you think qualia are the soul then!

I don't know what you mean by the word soul. I associate it with dualist religious thought. But maybe you mean something else?

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

#557

Post by grantcas »

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…

[dead]

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

#558

Post by everdrive »

I've actually been waiting for this. All you need to do is ask the rhetorical "But if there's something that it's like to _be_ [thing / animal / whatever]"

Once you ask that, you never need to explain anything. This is a magical process that can never be touched by observation or explanation.

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

#559

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

raincom wrote: post #543
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One can build scientific theories without rigorously defining terms: a stipulative definition is enough. Best example is Darwin's "Origin of Species"; here, Darwin didn't rigorously define "species": 'No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.' Many in the social sciences fetishize definitions, operating under the false notion…

I'd say that comes down to a matter of degree, and as a quibble it's certainly not a scientific theory if it's not worded sufficiently precisely to be testable and falsifiable. With Darwin it was really about where did all the variety of animals come from, and with speciation/variation being a process rather than an event, it really doesn't make much difference how one defines "species" (can't interbreed is a useful starting point). Of course Darwin was also just speculating about some mechanism of hereditability existing, so at the time this was more of a thought experiment than theory.

The trouble with discussion of "consciousness" is the sheer degree of ill-definedness - it is such a hand wavy and multi-facted concept, that it's not possible to even begin any meaningful discussion without defining a better vocabulary and breaking the concept down into pieces. Are you talking about subjective experience, mental awareness, free-will, altered state of consciousness, or what, or more likely simultaneously some mish-mash of all of the above and more!

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

#560

Post by pygy_ »

jfyi wrote: post #425
pygy_ wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even then, in different contexts, a major chord can sound jarring and a minor one satisfying. That being said the nature/culture duality is often not the right way to frame these issues. It's both, intertwined.

Well, right, it's contextual. We each have a series of inputs that add up to these contexts. This doesn't mean it can't be explained, it just means there needs to be context. If you give the blind man a sensor that converts color data to something he can input, and then provide inputs giving the feeling you want to portray associated with that color, you have explained it. If you feel red is angry, all you need to do…

Color perception has nothing to do with light wavelength. Color is a subjective perceptual space.

If you zap your occipital cortex with electromagnetic pulses, you'll experience color flashes (phosphenes).

If a blind person who can read baille does the same, they'll experience tingling sensations in their fingers [1].

People can have visual experiences through somesthesic stimuli (you can give muddy waters divers sonar-based sight by stimulating their skin with an electrode array).

AFAIK, it is not however know whether someone who was blind at birth and whose brain didn't learn to see could have such experiences.

1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00221-007-1091-0 full text: https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/50371662/s00221-007-10...

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