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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
#82> It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such. This has to be one of the most dumbfounding pseudo-philosophical sentences I've ever read. Metaphysics by definition is unfalsifiable and unscientific; it exists on a parallel plane from empiricism and is derived only through intuition, reason, and…
There are a lot of problems with the article, but this isn't one of them. The history of science has been one of dispatching one irreducible "essence" after another. Essence meaning some essential property of a phenomena that defines it and distinguishes it from all other phenomena. Science is in the business of reducing these once seemingly irreducible essences to more basic structure and dynamics. The last hold out…
It absolutely is a problem with the article. Science deals with physical phenomena; metaphysics quite literally means beyond physics. It's ridiculous to say that consciousness is the last hold out, as if there aren't a million other unanswered questions about meaning, essenence, and experience.
Here is a parallel argument for you. The history of science has been one discovery after another which leaves us with new, increasingly complex unanswered questions about phenomena. It is reasonable to think that if/when we reduce consciousness through science we will find that there are more increasingly complex unanswered metaphysical gaps.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is there to explain about psychedelics? There is nothing special to them. They affect the bodily aggregates of a being and cause the contents of the experience to change. So does eating a donut. There is no contradiction with what I said because I already conceded that mind and matter are closely interlinked and that changes in the body affect the contents experienced by the mind. But the "hard" problem of consc…
> As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience. Two things here: 1) How do you know I have a mind? How do I know you have a mind? 2) What is even your definition of "mind", and why (at least I suspect) is "the ongoing result of information processing facilitated by the complex interlinked network of neurons in the brain" not…
I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.
As for why any materialist explanations are unsatisfactory is that even if you managed to map every physical interaction in a sentient being, you are only mapping physical phenomena. Maybe that is enough to account for how that maps into the contents of the experience.
I am not arguing about how the contents are generated though. I am arguing about the "field" of subjective experiencing, which I called a mind. How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind? The simplest answer is that it is not, even if those material aggregates are deeply involved in how the contents presented to this field are generated.
Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water, but materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any experience of mental events.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
If his writing is like this article, I'll pass. And not because I disagree with his conclusions, but because I think he fundamentally misses the point in his description of the problem in the first place. I thought this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 , does a better job of describing the problem space and what a potential solution could like than all the words that Rovelli wrote in his article…
One great thing about quantum physics it that is isn't solved. To paraphrase Feynman, if you think you understand it, you're wrong. Thus, it's worth exploring all these heavy hitter physics thinkers. You won't agree 100% with any of them but you might develop your own version of things by reading a lot of them.
I really like your response, but it also can help explain why I really dislike this essay.
I fully understand and appreciate that there are lots of things about quantum physics, and heck, the universe at large, that are unsolved and that we don't understand. I would actually expect that in order for us to understand consciousness better that we'll need to fill some of the gaps of the quantum world.
The reason why I didn't like the article is that I felt like it's misrepresenting the problem, as the comment I linked described. I'll try to explain with an analogy: In the late 1800s before the discovery of quantum physics, many physicists felt that the physics of the universe was solved and fully understood - the universe was basically just like a set of billiard balls set in motion a long time ago, and the future position of all those balls could be known if their states were known in the past. In that "pre-quantum" world, people still understood that emergent behavior could arise from complexity (even just classical complexity). This article just felt really hand-wavy to me by arguing "complexity is enough". For example, if a similar article were written in 1899, but then later we discovered quantum physics and eventually had a good understanding of how consciousness can arise from quantum interactions, I suppose the author could state "See, I was right - just more complexity!" But it would totally miss the point that "the missing piece" was actually the discovery of quantum physics in the first place, not just more classical complexity.
So I felt this article was strawmanning the problem to begin with. I don't have to believe in "magic" or "souls" or religion to believe that the tools we have to describe complex emergent phenomena are not sufficient to describe the subjective experience of consciousness, but Rovelli seems to be saying that "more complexity" is just the answer to everything.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot of problems with the article, but this isn't one of them. The history of science has been one of dispatching one irreducible "essence" after another. Essence meaning some essential property of a phenomena that defines it and distinguishes it from all other phenomena. Science is in the business of reducing these once seemingly irreducible essences to more basic structure and dynamics. The last hold out…
It absolutely is a problem with the article. Science deals with physical phenomena; metaphysics quite literally means beyond physics. It's ridiculous to say that consciousness is the last hold out, as if there aren't a million other unanswered questions about meaning, essenence, and experience. Here is a parallel argument for you. The history of science has been one discovery after another which leaves us with new, i…
Reducing a complex phenomena to more basic structure and dynamics just is to eliminate any open metaphysical questions about that phenomena. That's why the big philosophical debates center around monism vs dualism rather than n-pluralism. Science has dispatched all other essences from mainstream consideration.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience. Two things here: 1) How do you know I have a mind? How do I know you have a mind? 2) What is even your definition of "mind", and why (at least I suspect) is "the ongoing result of information processing facilitated by the complex interlinked network of neurons in the brain" not…
I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon. As for why any materialist explanations are unsatisfactory is that even if you managed to map every physical interaction in a sentient being, you are only mapping physical phenomena. Maybe that is enough to account for how that maps into the contents of the experience. I am not arguing…
> I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.
So that's a religious argument, then. It's real because enough people believe that it is.
> How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind?
How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?
> The simplest answer is that it is not
You keep saying "simple" when what I think you're actually saying is "easy." They are not equivalent things. In the same sense that I think the "hard" problem of consciousness should really be called the "complex" problem.
> Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water
At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#87Good first step of demolishing (yet again) the phlogiston of the brain. Even Chalmers does not argue for the hard problem with any vigor today.
Rovelli’s arguments were made a dozen times over by Dan Dennett, and made better.
His critique of qualia is unsatisfying because it never reaches Einstein’s problem: what the heck is the physicist’s meaning and mechanism of this thing we call “Now”? Rovelli owes us that answer. He spent a decade telling us absolute time is not fundamental, no universal present, no master clock. Take the clock out of the universe and the Now gets harder, not easier: if there is no clock out there, what builds the one the organism plainly runs on? Answer that, then explain consciousness and qualia to the neurophilosophers.
Now is probably a process built by asynchronous wetware to survive. Humberto Maturana said the mechanisms that construct it are atemporal. And yet here we all are, reaching for clocks and synchrony to explain the Now. The irony should not be lost on Rovelli.
The neuroscience is in print already: Bickle et al., Eur J Neurosci 2025 (doi:10.1111/ejn.70074. interview with R. Williams) where the wall clock is named as neuroscience’s most tacit and least examined assumption.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If all information processing leads to consciousness Did you actually read what you just responded to?
Why some kinds of information processing and not others? As I wrote elsethread: why are some types of information processing "privileged" to create phenomenal experiences, while others run "in the dark"?
Mainly because of recursive processes that modulate attentional focus, but of a special sort that we are just beginning to understand.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#89Earlier 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…
> Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Which math? Why some kinds of information processing and not others? If all information processing leads to consciousness: why does consciousness stop at the boundary of the brain? Why isn't every neuron individually and separately conscious? Why not the two hemispheres of the brain? Why isn't every causally-linked volume of the universe a single mind? > Impli…
>The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness.
It's special pleading. What empirical knowledge you could acquire that would let you understand a tesseract? There are many things that are difficult to understand.
Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation. Anesthesia is strong evidence that there is some physical process that is the person. The hard problem only really needs consideration if we get to a…
> The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation. Yes. I think it's possible with sufficient understanding, the hard problem will dissolve. But, the question we can ask today is: what kind of explanation would explain away the hard problem of consciou…
It would have to explain how we construct “Now” from atemporal cells that are without a clock.