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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

#611

Post by Eisenstein »

funimpoded wrote: post #555
Eisenstein wrote: post #522

Earlier 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…

So are saying that if we made a computer out of neurons that it could be capable of consciousness whereas an electronic one could not?

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

#612

Post by Eisenstein »

redwood wrote: post #609
Eisenstein wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 makin…

That perspective is 'biological exceptionalism' and requires that there is something specific to biology that allows consciousness while precluding anything not biological. For that to be convincing there must be a mechanism and no one has proposed anything other than a soul for that.

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

#613

Post by jdiaz5513 »

usernametaken29 wrote: post #177

The author should read up on embodied cognition. Their arguments have been discussed at length. It’s all old stuff really. Good stuff too. I don’t see how the article succinctly describes this or contributes otherwise

Fully agree, and I am mildly disappointed to see nobody has brought up Maturana and Varela in this entire thread.

The deeper layer is autopoiesis - the conceptual foundation authored by them that embodied/4E cognition builds on.

They defined cognition as a necessary property of self-referencing, self-maintaining boundaries in an information-theoretic/topological sense, not bound to any specific physical process.

This dissolves the dualism Rovelli targets in a way that pure materialist/eliminativist arguments don’t manage cleanly. Autopoiesis is fully physical (mathematically modelable, biologically grounded) but it locates consciousness in structural relationships and informational dynamics rather than a purely physical substrate.

Thompson’s Mind in Life (2007) is the contemporary version, and Varela’s later work integrates phenomenology directly.

I hold that it may be possible to use the toolkits of set/category/group/type theory to formalize these relationships.

Would be a vastly different conversation thread here if this work was more well known.

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

#614

Post by [deleted] »

D-Machine wrote: post #571
raincom wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But with "consciousness" we don't have even a stipulative definition, more like 40 different competing definitions ( https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT ) which are in many cases only loosely related, and generally are talking about very different things. When the situation is this bad, I am skeptical you can make scientific progress.

[deleted]

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

#615

Post by horacemorace »

mannanj wrote: post #575
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…

That's nice. Do you have a go to for conversations with less mindful people or people without a training in meditation/mindfulness? For example, for people who have no experience and yet speak from a frame of strong identity and identification to their thoughts as though they are them, I like to ask "Who's the one who witnesses the thoughts?" and it kind of ties a brain-knot in their head. Funny enough most people wh…

From an internal perspective, thoughts are both the witness and the witnessed. The problem only comes when trying to apply our language which is firmly rooted in this artificial dualism.

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

#616

Post by bonobo »

beaker52 wrote: post #534
bonobo wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I see, thanks for your reply. I'm still with physicalism so far, but I see your point. It gave me more room for thought.

> You are a feature of the world that is impressed upon me.

I was disappointed here for a while thinking about my NPC nature and place in this world, then I realized *YOU* must be a (very persuasive I'll admit) feature of the world that is impressed upon *ME*. Now I'm fine again. Thanks to myself for giving rise to such an interesting p-zombie like you.

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

#617

Post by horacemorace »

dwd wrote: post #494
nemomarx wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought that the mechanisms there create the experience or the illusion of a continuous self or something in that direction. When you've experienced it breaking down (automatic actions happening before you remember deciding to do them is a big contributor to the floaty dream like effect) you start to think maybe there's several systems and the observation and memory parts are just making sense of them. We…

Anil Seth calls the "hard problem" at best a distraction, or hand-waving to avoid answering what he calls the real problem: linking what we experience to the physical brain mechanisms. In his theory, consciousness is a "controlled hallucination" about what is outside of us. Our senses serve to reinforce or correct the predictions our brains are making. (we have a serious latency issue) You'll find he's saying a lot o…

Sounds also like Daniel Dennett.

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

#618

Post by [deleted] »

qsera wrote: post #422
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…

>Consciousness is a derivative, secondary phenomenon which is a measurement process occurring in the body of an ape Can you define existence without depending on or referring to consciousness?

[deleted]

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

#619

Post by [deleted] »

qsera wrote: post #422
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…

>Consciousness is a derivative, secondary phenomenon which is a measurement process occurring in the body of an ape Can you define existence without depending on or referring to consciousness?

[deleted]

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

#620

Post by qsera »

mjburgess wrote: post #563
qsera wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've been an idealist. I understand all the arguments. The base fallacy at the heart of all this is the one I mentioned. On the very last point: the conclusion that consciousness is thin, like a photograph, and the world thick -- follows from the most complete explanatory account of how consiousness works. The idea that there is no world, or that the world is a thin transcendental ego -- this abandons the project of…

You have fixed perception in your dreams also.

See, you have this observation of subjective experience. One hypothesis for wher this come from, require only consciousness, and the second requires consciousness as well as a whole universe. And the second hypothesis brings up even more questions. Where did this universe come from? Who created it? Why was it created?

The simple answer is that only consciousness really exists and everything is painted on top of that.

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