It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness • Hacker News Board

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

#651

Post by dpark » Mon, May 18, 2026, 6:54 PM UTC

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #610

dpark wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trouble is you don’t how much time anyone else has spent studying. How can you tell who else has “spent decades thinking about things like intelligence and evolution, perception, qualia, have read dozens of papers on subjects like cortical microarchitecure”? You can’t but you still dismiss others as unqualified.

> it needs to be backed up with some grounded rationale

This was my point. Address the claim and not the qualifications.

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

#652

Post by pixl97 » Mon, May 18, 2026, 6:54 PM UTC

prmph wrote: post #514

alexwebb2 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a monist who holds the view that you’re claiming monists can’t legitimately hold, I don’t see any difficulty at all in squaring these ideas: - there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else - destroying an instantiation of a pattern != destroying the pattern And speaking of squaring ideas – if I draw a square…

> If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser. This is exactly what don't know, and is interesting to explore. > there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else So if your brain was somehow cloned, you'd exist in two places at the same time? It seems possible for two separate consciousness to have the…

>and yet still not be the same.

You're making a fundimental mistake here on understanding substrates.

If I take a hard drive an copy it, is it the same hard drive? Well, no, we'd both agree they are two different hard drives, that's pretty easy to see.

But what if we are executing data off the hard drive. Initially it would operate as if it were the same, the data on the hard drive would have zero ability or knowledge that it was copied. As the execution continued in two different places in physical reality the state of the hard drives would change.

Coming back to people, you are never the same unless you can start taking snapshots at the plank scale. You are always changing at the chemical level. Cells die, new ones are created, organs spurt out chemicals in varying amounts that alter your mental state, you 'remember' memories and by doing so rewrite them, new information enters from your senses and changes the physical makeup of the structure of our brain via re-enforcement/de-enforcement. Simply put this idea of you is an ethereal moving target. Copying that doesn't change it, each one of them will still think they are the you that has lived up till this point. When looking at both, you'll see their lives diverge, but unless they learn about each other, each you will never know that's the case.

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

#653

Post by markhahn » Mon, May 18, 2026, 6:55 PM UTC

qsera wrote: post #620

mjburgess wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

simple question: why not the opposite?

that is, reality exists and consciousness is "painted" on top of that?

IMO, anti-materialists are merely uncomfortable with the degree to which they understand neuroscience and related topics (including, btw, capabilities and limits of LLMs). Chalmers, for instance, basically insists that the Hard Problem is Hard simply because he finds it hard.

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

#654

Post by cameldrv » Mon, May 18, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

DubiousPusher wrote: post #583

cameldrv wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're approaching the definition of magic here aren't we. And I think this is what really divides this discussion. There is one set of people who insist that things must be explainable. And if something is explainable, it yields to science and is no longer magic. On the other side, you have people who insist that there are things which do not yield to science. So whether they admit it or not, they insist upon the exi…

Not at all. Saying that science does not yet explain some observed phenomenon is precisely how one starts to make scientific progress. Saying that qualia don’t exist because they are “magical” is like someone telling you lightning doesn’t exist before the understanding of electromagnetism.

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

#655

Post by tim333 » Mon, May 18, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

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.

Yeah. There's something to be said for sticking to the little known as far as possible.

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

#656

Post by qsera » Mon, May 18, 2026, 6:59 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #632

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…

>The point is that all existence is built on top of consciousness. Then if all conscious beings (lets say humans are the only ones for sake of argument) die, then existence ends. Simply put, this does not happen because consciousness occurs in a substrate. Take the thought experiment of the boltzmann brain, it still requires the assembly of probabilistic entropy to occur, it is not nothing.

>Then if all conscious beings (lets say humans are the only ones for sake of argument) die, then existence ends.

The starting idea is that there can be no definition of existence other than "something a consciousness can detect (directly or indirectly)". So if there is no consciousness, there is no existence.

But I think there could be a difference between death of all conscious beings, and consciousness itself disappearing. Consciousness could also be something that evolution found a way to tap into.

>Take the thought experiment of the boltzmann brain, it still requires the assembly of probabilistic entropy to occur, it is not nothing.

Yea, take that. I think the number of possible worlds where a simple life form spontaneously assembled and evolved to a human following the laws of that world, are enormously larger than a world where a full human brain spontaneously assembled all by itself. It is just statistics that we find ourselves in a world of the former kind and not a brain alone in an empty universe..

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

#657

Post by delecti » Mon, May 18, 2026, 7:02 PM UTC

kodt wrote: post #639

delecti wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there people who say that digitizing one's conscious moves their mind? If I upload a file from my computer to to a server, the file still exists on my computer (until deleted). I've never thought that a mind upload would work any differently. I think that many who talk about consciousness digitization handwave away what happens to their body/brain afterwards, but I don't necessarily think that means they think th…

depends if you do a copy paste or cut and paste

My point is that the word "upload", without context indicating otherwise, does not imply that the original is changed in any way.

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

#658

Post by pardon_me » Mon, May 18, 2026, 7:06 PM UTC

robmccoll wrote: post #497

hallole wrote: post #455

Earlier 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,…

This is what humanity will inevitably end up trying to do with computing, and a great argument for why we could be in a simulation.

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

#659

Post by pixl97 » Mon, May 18, 2026, 7:08 PM UTC

funimpoded wrote: post #549

morpheos137 wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a dubious asertion. At high enough resolution the model converges on the modeled.

"Resolution" has nothing whatsoever to do with it. No amount of scribbling graphite onto paper will produce a butterfly.

[citation needed]

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

#660

Post by pixl97 » Mon, May 18, 2026, 7:09 PM UTC

beaker52 wrote: post #251

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…

So many people appear to be mesmerised by their own place in the physical world, and taken by this powerful idea that the physical world is the source of it all, giving rise to everything through physical laws and processes, like our brain, a product of quaint physical processes, giving rise to consciousness. To me, that idea seems entirely back-to-front. To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious e…

>I simply don’t buy that my consciousness comes from my physical brain, it seems more likely that my brain comes from my consciousness

Cool, I'll give you some drugs that alter the physical reactions in your brain and turn off your consciousness, then tell me all about it....

oh.