So if I read that right, there's no difference between myself and my desk, ergo my desk is conscious and that Buddhists are probably right.
It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
601–610 of 822 posts
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
And for that reason, we'll never discover the soul. It will perpetually be that "something" that we are missing in our understanding of things. Assume for a minute that we have the basic picture correct, that there is no non-physical soul: your belief would have us searching for the rest of time! Isn't it best to suspend the question? There probably isn't any simple causative explanation (as in the example you provid…
Maybe - let's assume that we could simulate a human brain to a high level of fidelity starting from a known good state and emulate its input and output. Do you think we could poke at it enough and ask the simulated person about their experience enough to discover the mechanisms behind what we experience as a soul? It's logistically and computationally insanely complex to pull off, but if we could build such a system,…
MMAcevedo
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#603You can affect your consciousness by hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. Pretty good argument for me to believe it is a physical phenomenon.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't disagree - for a long while I believed that the study of "consciousness" was the result of a linguistic mixup and best dealt w/ via Wittgenstein.
However, if you move past surface appearances, you can think about what kind of cultural "work" is being done spending effort on this mixup. What's happening is that, in the noosphere, the cloud of concepts around "consciousness" is battling it out with the cloud of concepts around "soul" over which cloud of concepts best describes what it means to be human, with big implications on what it means to be good person. Now we're dealing with a mix of Aquinas and Latour.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#605This 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…
This is why the comparison to people’s reactions to Darwin/evolution is just wrong - people had thought experimented things that looked like evolution, but when we were able to measure it we could start linking it to the real physical world. AFAIK consciousness is the only thing that we know for certain is real, but have no way of measuring it. People are still conscious when they lose sense of self, and blacking out or surgical sedatives might be related to memory more than losing consciousness, these affect qualities of consciousness but aren’t consciousness itself. This article reads like “I f’ing love science” level thinking, saying people are ignorant for thinking consciousness is not just a physical process, but zero understanding of scientific process.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#606Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Show me what is subjective about it then. What makes one illusion created out of flesh more real than another?
How are any of these experiences subjective if you can already relate their nature so easily and universally? You are describing biomechanics, not subjective experience.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
No, the genetic fallacy is not germane here. You are conflating the derivation of knowledge and direct knowing, which are distinct. You conflate the ingredients on the back of the label for the taste of the sweets in the pouch. The taste of sweetness is what I am indicating, not the list of ingredients. Also, you are suggesting that there is an impersonal objective spacetime irrespective of observer which is false. There is a generalized case that works for the figures projected for measuring the distances to solar bodies from other solar bodies. But you are basing your analysis on the hidden assumption that the material reality is first. This is an unchallenged assumption in modern science which leads you astray.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 no…
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Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a lot of people interpret philosophers' arguments differently and it isn't always clear what a philosopher themselves truly believes. For example Searle's Chinese room thought experiment... On the one hand you can easily construe it to imply that he believes there's something fundamentally special about human consciousness that cannot be reproduced by a machine. On the other hand you could interpret his persp…
> you can easily construe it to imply that he believes there's something fundamentally special about human consciousness that cannot be reproduced by a machine. On the other hand you could interpret his perspective, which I think is more in line with his real perspective, as implyimg that replicating the human mind machine requires truly replicating it physically I'm not sure I understand. If we must replicate a huma…
Your comment does serve the point I was making. Still there is a perspective that if you could artificially reproduce the human mind top to bottom, a truly perfect reproduction in other words, then you ought to be able to trigger an identical consciousness. In other words yes special type of machine is needed for the machine nevertheless not some special soul.
Of course the counterpoint and maybe the one you're making is that special machine ought to be simply called a soul machine and we could all agree it would be very difficult to reproduce it and it is intrinsically special... but maybe that's for the very specific form of Consciousness we have... but maybe there are other forms
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#610Earlier quoted context omitted.
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’…
Being an amateur has no bearing on how knowledgeable someone is about a subject, but for an opinion to be useful (or just interesting) it needs to be backed up with some grounded rationale, otherwise it is just that - an opinion.