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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

#731

Post by DangitBobby »

svara wrote: post #221
thepasch wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience You are still presupposing the premise here, in multiple ways: 1) "My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a s…

> My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a separate thing." Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that? A lot of people, myself included, have the intuition that thinking that this might be possible is a sort of type error , to put it in CS terms. A bit like asking "Have you proven that ice cream? Are yo…

As far as we know math can describe all of physics and sufficiently complex physics could describe our brains, thus math could describe our brains. Does that mean we aren't conscious? Where is the chain broken?

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

#732

Post by anon-3988 »

visarga wrote: post #465
prmph wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure. I know for sure what I am perceiving. Forget about if it is a simulation or not: it is still what I am perceiving. There is nothing else I can be sure of. So you are correct that it is, in some sense, un-explorable. However, if the above is the reason, then nothing else is explorable also; you cannot prove that we are not in a simulatio…

> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure. Who invented the words "consciousness" "reality" "fundamental" that you are now using? you are using language invented elsewhere while claiming you can't be sure of its reality. Are you also claiming you can't be sure someone had to create and raise you to get to the point of asking such questions? We are downstream from parents and s…

> Are you also claiming you can't be sure someone had to create and raise you to get to the point of asking such questions? We are downstream from parents and society.

Yes exactly. You are sure of nothing except the fact this now exists. The simulation could collapse in the next second. I could awake from this dream.

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

#733

Post by qsera »

mjburgess wrote: post #530
summarybot wrote: post #505

Earlier 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…

>discovers that it is only a camera located at some point in space and time.

It discovers no such thing. It can only measure the signals coming from the sensors. That is its ground truth. If a sensor can produce a signal without having an image fall on it, then that would be what the camera sees.

So in this case, it would perceive the image of a camera in a mirror, but that would not be the reality.

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

#734

Post by fs_tab »

I think that having a point of view (having an "inside") has a great deal to do with survival. You probably don't need a brain to have a subject. You probably just need dynamics with the right causal structure.

When you look at a cell, you can clearly see how the dynamics are existential and already do the work of classifying inputs as "good" or "bad" (eg: paramecium encounters acid, this triggers an electro chemical cascade in the membrane cortex which results in the organism quickly changing direction away from the bad gradient). There's no mind obviously in the human sense, but the fact remains that this system has developed into something that can discriminate between good and bad for itself, because without this integration, it wouldn't exist.

The cell is as close to a machine as possible. But it's not a machine because people make machines to have specific purposes. Each part is already labeled and designed. You can shut down a machine that's running, and start it back up with very predictable behavior (since you designed it).

The cell is a process that uses physical matter to keep its own possible futures available. Machines also support processes and goals, but these are externally imposed. The cell's ultimate goal is to continue being the reason for its own existence. Maybe this is where all goals come from.

So I guess experience is what happens when you have enough layers above this machinery that you you are no longer connected directly to the world, "you" can only meet the world through internally generated/classified electrochemical states from the body. These states have valence because the system is already organized around maintaining these states within metabolic limits. Think...hunger. You don't feel hungry. You ARE hungry. Hunger is a part of how "you" are constituted.

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

#735

Post by GoblinSlayer »

qsera wrote: post #662
markhahn wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>that is, reality exists and consciousness is "painted" on top of that? Because it brings along more questions like "Why does the reality exist"? "Why does the reality looks like this, and not like something else"? Any answer that brings up more questions that it answers is not a very good answer IMHO...

These questions can be asked about idealism too. And they go ad infinitum, so you can't reduce their number even if you answer them.

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

#736

Post by solenoid0937 »

aa-jv wrote: post #121
solenoid0937 wrote: post #6

Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable . It cannot be disproven in the same way you can't disprove the existence of God, and so arguing with people that believe in it is largely pointless.

Argue with someone who gathered evidence scientifically to demonstrate that we really, really don't know what we're talking about when it comes to the human soul: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Cases_Suggestive_of_Rei... EDIT: Downvote all you want, materialists, but reincarnation is the spanner in the works nobody wants to confront ..

Reincarnation just doesn't make sense when you consider the numbers. Why are more people being born today than yesterday?

If you believe in reincarnation, for some reason brand new souls are spawning into existence. Why? How does reincarnation work for them?

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

#737

Post by GoblinSlayer »

qsera wrote: post #648
mjburgess wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>I hypothesize that only computable and decidable (in Godel's sense) structures exist

That's kinda DoA. Isn't there a proof that uncomputable things exist in mathematics, so if mathematics is true, why hypothesize that they don't exist even if we know that they exist?

>but imagine consciousness appearing only in "regular" worlds, with uniform laws and behaviors..

Why this limitation? Irregular worlds with appearing consciousness are mathematically definable just fine, easily even.

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

#738

Post by GoblinSlayer »

narag wrote: post #622
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's strange, hard determinists are eliminativists, and eliminativists don't believe in consciousness, but I never saw them speaking about both at the same time.

They don't believe in consciousness... at all? I guess they don't recognize consciousness for some definition of it that includes agency.

That's one of their arguments: if a human is eliminated, then there's nothing to attribute agency to.

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

#739

Post by capitol_ »

phkahler wrote: post #470
trollbridge wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The main reason we believe consciousness exists is because we all experience it. So it’s hard to deny.

>> The main reason we believe consciousness exists is because we all experience it. What about the NPC meme? LLMs behave like NPCs, and some people seem no more conscious than an NPC (I didn't invent that meme).

Isn't that just an insult people throw around? Or maybe some psychopath that tries to justify their worldview.

I have never had an conversation with someone who seems like an NPC.

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

#740

Post by GoblinSlayer »

nradov wrote: post #511
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naturalistic theories tend to work better, and science is inching in towards the problem, so far it was naturalistic.

Work better in what sense? Do naturalistic theories have more predictive power?

Predictive power, explanatory power, precision, consistency and matching evidence.
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