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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

#681

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

dpark wrote: post #651
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 q…

There is no gatekeeper to internet discussions, so nobody is stopping you from joining in.

If you feel qualified to add something useful to the discussion, or just to throw your unqualified opinion in for that matter (whichever the case may be), then go ahead. I'm certainly not stopping you.

As may be expected the conversation is already a garbage fire.

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

#682

Post by nothinkjustai »

a13o wrote: post #354

It’s going to be a long road, but I think as LLMs and their offspring create more and more convincing arguments for silicon consciousness we will conclude that consciousness is about as real as humours, and we’ve all been p-zombies this whole time. Maybe the literary creature shoe should have started on the other foot, and sent us in search of proof that we are or are not p-angels. That at least puts the burden of pr…

How can you even argue that we’re p-zombies? I know that I’m not. I assume others aren’t. Maybe you are?

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

#683

Post by pardon_me »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #362

Here's a trippy idea I have about consciousness, which arose from thinking about recent AI advances and also watching kids develop. I think children's main "cost function" is the ability to predict the future. This might start out, for example, as being - how will this vertical line move as I move my head. Later, where is the ball going. And they are essentially building a "world model" in their brains, starting with…

Considering the brain functioning as prediction machine, we are constantly correcting the error between sensory perception and our inner reality. This is classic (closed) control loop[1] with self-correcting characteristics updated by adaptation through learning and experience.

At first the process is subconscious, then chaos enters as our conscious awareness develops, morphing the control loop into second or third order states of "correcting corrections" as we perform inner tasks such as ruminating, or external tasks such as group discussion and logical planning.

The perfect prediction machine would be a simulation running an entire up-to-date universe model, but between our limited physical resources and available energy in reality, our evolved aim is efficiency, by creating a state of awareness and reactive patterns with minimal information (lowest entropy). We do this by making assumptions, testing the world, then processing the response and updating our control loop. The tradeoff is lack of precision, as a model without complete information has guaranteed errors.

Children who form a more realistic core worldview through guidance, opportunities and experience are best set up to create solid foundations which are more adaptable to future unexpected situations. Whether this is learning emotional response in social settings or math, the ability to integrate future conscious experience depends on early neuronal structures formed by subconscious expectations of the world. If measurement error is too great from expectations and our current loop/wavelength, our options are to discard this information or learn from it by reflecting on sources of inevitable prediction error through reasoning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_loop

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

#684

Post by joquarky »

PyWoody wrote: post #411
vidarh wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe sounds like variation of Berkeley's subjective idealism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_idealism

In case anyone is wondering, yes, the town of Berkeley, California is named after him. Also, it's pronounced BARK-Lee.

If he wanted it to be pronounced that way he should have changed the spelling.

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

#685

Post by mmnfrdmcx »

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…

> I have a corollary hypothesis which is that only young people are actually conscious. One day you go to bed and your mind never wakes up, but your body keeps on living the automaton till you actually die.

Thank you for a new existential fear unlocked. Why do you believe this?

Reminds me of https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/they-die-every-day

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

#686

Post by jfyi »

pygy_ wrote: post #661
jfyi wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you saying that you are a literal philosophical zombie? Do you understand the difference between feeling the pain in your toes when you shoot in a door frame and what you experience when you see someone else do the same. Also not everyone can relate to these sensations, it is not universal. Some people don't feel any pain in their body ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pa... ). See also…

No, I am saying the concept of a p-zombie relies on a flawed premise. I am asking you to explain what is fundamentally "subjective" about these experiences.

How are colorblindness and extended color perception any different from full blindness which we already addressed? These are issues of scale of perception, there is nothing subjective about them. You either process the data or not.

Can you experience sympathetic pain without having already experienced pain? I don't see any subjectivity there.

If there are multiple people that experience no pain, how are they subjectively different in their experience of no pain? Really, the more I look at it, arguing subjectivity from the null experience seems a particularly bad hill to die on. If a broken hardware bus generates a subjective experience of its own absence, then an unplugged microphone has a "subjective experience of silence."

Ultimately, I still think you are describing biomechanics, not subjective experience.

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

#687

Post by dec0dedab0de »

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.

what if you are the only conscious being?

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

#688

Post by mmnfrdmcx »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #362

Here's a trippy idea I have about consciousness, which arose from thinking about recent AI advances and also watching kids develop. I think children's main "cost function" is the ability to predict the future. This might start out, for example, as being - how will this vertical line move as I move my head. Later, where is the ball going. And they are essentially building a "world model" in their brains, starting with…

you might enjoy the first chapter of Diaspora by Greg Egan

https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html

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

#689

Post by mjburgess »

qsera wrote: post #663
markhahn wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> those that are more useful. Oh it is useful. It answers questions like "why do reality exist". "who created it", "What was before it"...Or may be I should say it does not really answer them but makes the questions irrelevant. Just like how earth centric hypothesis posed questions like "Why is everything circling the earth and why is earth special", and heliocentric hypothesis made that irrelevant by proving that it…

It makes the questions incoherent.

This isnt a benefit, it's a sign that the semantics you're giving language fail to actually model its meaning.

The position isnt self-consistent, unless you engage in the typical idealist peformance of pretending not to know what these questions mean.

In the end, idealism is defeated by the very implausibility of this performance. The idealist, is implicated in the rich ontology of the real world by the very use of language itself. Presupposed is this ontology, and the ordinary truth of ordinary propositions requires it.

If the question, "what was here before I existed?" is meaningful, then idealism is wrong. And it is meaningful, therefore it is wrong.

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

#690

Post by juanre »

So the hard problem of consciousness is no more once you accept that we have souls. Which is essentially giving the problem a new name and burdening it with more historical baggage.

Michael Pollan's "A World Appears" is a much more interesting and nuanced take. Very much recommended.

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