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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

#591

Post by pygy_ »

pygy_ wrote: post #560
jfyi wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 son…

Re. color and wavelength, some of the colors one can experience are only accessible in after-images, not through direct retina stimulation.

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

#592

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

aerodexis wrote: post #568
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rather than agents that can live, feel, think and will, which would require a different term, like "soul" You're just substituting one ill-defined, and overloaded, word ("consciousness") with a bunch of others ("live", "feel", etc), and asserting that to you they mean something different. It's impossible to have a discussion on this basis, and I'm sure to many people "soul" is exactly what they mean by "consciousne…

People have made due with conceptual fuzziness, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that discussion is impossible without absolute conceptual clarity. All you are saying is that using these terms does not allow you to have a specific kind of discussion - which, a lot of the time, is one that reduces humans to mathematical objects that perform computations. Yet, if that is your goal and the definition of "soul" or "c…

> People have made due with conceptual fuzziness

Yes, but as noted elsewhere in this thread it's a matter of degree. Consciousness is such an ill-defined and overloaded word that it's hard to say it really means anything - it's more of an all-encompassing term for a bunch of largely subjective phenomena.

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

#593

Post by bluejay2387 »

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…

"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."

It's 'one' of the few places? That behaviorism seems to be define almost all modern discourse from politics to health care including about 95% of Hacker News posts as far as I can tell...

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

#594

Post by [deleted] »

pygy_ wrote: post #560
jfyi wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 son…

[deleted]

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

#595

Post by wat10000 »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #6

Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable . It cannot be disproven in the same way you can't disprove the existence of God, and so arguing with people that believe in it is largely pointless.

It would only be unfalsifiable if the connection was one-way, i.e. our souls receive input from the world but have no effect on the world. We would effectively be passengers in a meat puppet, and any influence we have on that puppet is purely imaginary. Certainly possible, but not usually how it's conceived, and then you have the question of how the meat puppets got the idea of consciousness and souls in the first place.

If souls can influence the world, as is the common belief for souls, then in principle that influence or its absence can be detected.

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

#596

Post by yogthos »

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…

[dead]

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

#597

Post by dpark »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #585
dpark wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they have an opinion, but are just not qualified to discuss it! … I really don't think there is much mystery about consciousness at all Are you actually qualified to discuss this by your criteria?

I'm not a professional neuroscientist for sure, but I've certainly spent decades thinking about things like intelligence and evolution, perception, qualia, have read dozens of papers on subjects like cortical microarchitecure, etc, and would like to think I'm well enough informed to be able to discuss things like intelligence and consciousness.

I don’t really care about whether you are “qualified” by your criteria, because I don’t hold your view that there is some specific level of education that allows one to hold and express an opinion. My point was more to point out some potential hypocrisy.

No one is obligated to humor or debate amateurs because no one is obligated to humor or debate anyone[1]. But being an amateur does not mean that the person couldn’t hold a valid or meaningful viewpoint. Dismissing someone’s opinion specifically because they are an amateur is just a special case of appeal to authority. If their opinions are fundamentally flawed, then those can be addressed head on without resorting to insisting that they don’t have the right qualifications to participate in the discussion.

[1] The “faster than light” neutrinos come to mind, too. Scientists involved in the experiments explicitly said they didn’t have time to entertain amateur theories, a valid statement.

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

#598

Post by rbanffy »

It seems that, until we have a falsifiable test for consciousness, these exercises are pointless. All we have is the ability to externally observe behavior and we can't judge what happens inside someone (or something's) mind. BTW, we don't have a good definition of mind either.

That there's nothing magical or supernatural in our minds and our consciousness is a given, otherwise, this becomes a very silly debate where everyone will have a strong position that can be neither proven nor disproven.

Maybe we are able to constrain what consciousness (or a mind, or a soul) is by figuring out everything it isn't. Does it have a mass? Can we measure its entropy?

We can, to a certain degree, identify images from the visual cortex. What else about the internal state of a brain can we extract? We did that to a fly's brain the other day - a very confused simulated fly that must have been wondering why its world had so low a resolution.

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

#599

Post by otakucode »

I mean, I would argue that they are right, but there is still a hard problem of consciousness. What properties must a system hold in order to exhibit consciousness? Personally, I think I could fairly capably argue that consciousness is an emergent property of any feedback loop composed of a large enough collection of highly interconnected adaptive components embedded within a sufficiently pattern-rich environment. Every feedback loop which meets these requirements is conscious, and removing any single one of those elements causes consciousness to disappear. I believe the property emerges in a similar manner to how 'heat' emerges from electromagnetic interactions of atoms. This definition has implications, and all that I have thought of are real. Total sensory deprivation results in loss of consciousness, for example.

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

#600

Post by mistidoi »

I found this article really frustrating.

The author takes a blurry position between non-dualist naturalists like John Searle and eliminativists like Dennett and the Churchlands and doesn't seem to engage with them at all, much less probing into the issues with those views that might motivate people like Chalmers and Nagel.

It crescendos with a hand-wave:

> The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary[.]

A number of views about consciousness are compatible with statements like that (like the ones above and many others), each with their own philosophical tradeoffs and bullets to bite. The author seems generally unaware of them yet somehow confident that they've solved the matter.

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