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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

#641

Post by kodt »

roncesvalles wrote: post #586
trick-or-treat wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's called solipsism. I went through it as a lad, I think it's not uncommon.

Not really. Solipsism means only you're (certain to be) conscious . It's an epistemological thing. I'm making a purely biological conjecture motivated by some observations. I believe some humans are definitely conscious (including of course myself, if you take my word), but that some might not be. The conscious experience may just be a phenotypic variant, like having blue eyes, eidetic memory or dyslexia. Consider al…

>(also if you're wondering, I don't think the boundary is along racial lines)

read the entire comment waiting for this

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

#642

Post by raxxorraxor »

smackeyacky wrote: post #323
LoganDark wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you look at the stars, are they real or a simulation in your brain? This is unknowable.

It is knowable isn’t it? We know our brains play a variety of tricks to get a cohesive view out of two wildly complicated but deeply flawed meat sensors. That fits the definition of a simulation.

Not into modern philosophy at all, but I do believe, simulated or not, that this is indeed mostly quibbling.

An engineer would ask what a simulation would simulate. This is the core of the meaning behind that word. And if the answer is reality and it hints to the fact you cannot perceive everything and you conscience tries to construct a cohesive understanding from limited perception, than I would dispute the fact. The only one who tries to do that are philosophers. Going back to my objective, not-simulated ignorance now.

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

#643

Post by rolph »

dreamlayers wrote: post #633
mistidoi wrote: post #600

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…

I find this subject frustrating. People actually know very little about it, yet they end up telling and debating complex stories about it.

[dead]

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

#644

Post by pixl97 »

prmph wrote: post #506
innin wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no prove that continuity really matters. In fact who goes to say that your current conscious self is the same as your self from five minutes ago. After all you do not feel what they felt. The only thing that makes you think that the two are related or even the same is your state (memories, emotions). Why would we even think about whether cloning is able to transmit consciousness when we don’t even know if co…

In that case you don't exist, since there is no such thing as "current". Every moment in time is either past or future, assuming time is continuous. The reals are infinitely infinite.

Hey, looks like you're finally starting to catch on to the trick the consciousness plays on you.

consciousness always exists in the past of reality around you. It is a physical process with an execution time. Light takes nanoseconds to get to your eyes. The chemical reactions in your eyes take milliseconds. Then you have that signal getting to your visual cortex. Then your brain takes a while and shoves a bunch of shit it assumes is there from pattern matching taking its own number of milliseconds. Eventually this is passed up to your consciousness to interpret 'long' after it actually happened.

But you can make it even more screwy from that point that totally screw with your perception of time. Even more fun are drugs that keep you conscious but keep you from recording short term memories so it's like that time never existed.

You are but a chemical dream upon meat hardware.

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

#645

Post by pixl97 »

JCTheDenthog wrote: post #636
pixl97 wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, this is unknowable if the creator of the simulation doesn't want you to figure out it's a simulation. Simulation or not, this is our reality, and our consciousness would be a simulation inside that simulation. Instead of a weird wobbly space universe, we'd just have an execution platform universe.

I agree completely, and I think most debates/arguments around simulation theory and similar ideas are largely pointless, though they can at least be fun sometimes.

Correct in the sense if we are able to determine that we are in a simulation. That would at least hold the promise that we could escape the VM and play with a deeper reality, though at that point the best chance is we are in nested VMs and reality is a long way away.

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

#646

Post by olalonde »

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.

As a philosophical zombie, I have to disagree here.

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

#647

Post by markhahn »

jwilliams wrote: post #111

Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood. So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that). We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you e…

I'm mystified why you think there is anything to accept about consciousness. Or are you purely talking about it being a "thing"? Yes, that's relevant to how Rovelli is treating dualism (as a made-up, unevidenced claim).

I'm always mystified why consciousness is so often claimed to be undefinable.

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

#648

Post by qsera »

mjburgess wrote: post #629
qsera wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

It's not a simple answer, because its not an answer to any question. It is "simpler" to assume the thermometer readings exist without any thing to cause them, then they move up and down, and its "simpler" to assert: it is the nature of thermometers to move up and down. This kind of simplicity isn't simplicity at all, it is to abandon saying anything. It is in the nature of consciousness to inexplicably have all the p…

> its not an answer to any question

It is. It is the theory of everything.

> what is this "consiousness" in the end, which has in its nature, the production of all material reality to serve as a fixed causal basis for perception?

If you haven't already came acrosss M.U.H, I would just direct you to https://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0646

>What madness to is it to say that mercury in a thermometer not only acts as-if it is in coffe, but in its nature, acts as if there is an entire world that it is moving through -- and its motion up and down is always according to laws and principles as if such a world existed?

Yes, that is exactly what is being proposed. Causality is an illusion. But how? Imagine an idea of a "definable world". Imagine that all definable worlds "exist", but imagine consciousness appearing only in "regular" worlds, with uniform laws and behaviors..

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

#649

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #642
smackeyacky wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is knowable isn’t it? We know our brains play a variety of tricks to get a cohesive view out of two wildly complicated but deeply flawed meat sensors. That fits the definition of a simulation.

Not into modern philosophy at all, but I do believe, simulated or not, that this is indeed mostly quibbling. An engineer would ask what a simulation would simulate. This is the core of the meaning behind that word. And if the answer is reality and it hints to the fact you cannot perceive everything and you conscience tries to construct a cohesive understanding from limited perception, than I would dispute the fact. T…

Sorry, but no.

Simulations are systems which have various rules built into them which govern (entirely) the behavior of the components of the system (at whatever levels the rules apply).

A given simulation may have rules that are believed or are intended to generate behavior within it which are similar to some other system (e.g. what we experience as "reality"). But it may just as well have an entirely different set of rules intended to create entirely different, even unknown and unpredictable, behaviors.

Any similarity between a given simulation and what we experience as reality is a property of that particular simulation. There is absolutely no reason why a simulation that is utterly different from our reality could not exist (and indeed, almost certainly already does).

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

#650

Post by markhahn »

qsera wrote: post #541
mjburgess wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Though i think you're committing the gentic fallacy here, which is the core fallacy at the heart of idealism and much 19th C. german philosophy. The properties of the origin of somethign imply nothing about the properties of the product. That a bread factory is made of metal, does not mean bread is. That in my statement of things in language I am conscious of what I state, says nothing about the truth (or other…

>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.

we need to distinguish accounts that are merely self-consistent, and those that are more useful.

the reality-is-illusion meme is self-consistent (panpsychism, simulationism, dream-of-god-ism, whatever). merely being self-consistent isn't good enough.

the alternative (and there is only one) is physicalism and its epistemology, science. the main appeal of this is parsimony, often referred to as Occam's Razor.

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