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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

#801

Post by sbdaman »

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…

It's because he's not a philosopher and is wading into a long-standing philosophical debate and hand-waving away all the actual issues in contention.

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

#802

Post by silent_cal »

sbdaman wrote: post #800
silent_cal wrote: post #797

The author demonstrates a common misunderstanding about medieval philosophy. The medieval Scholastic tradition does not maintain that the body and the soul were "distinct entities", or that matter was "vile". In fact that kind of thinking was the position of gnostic groups that Christian thinkers were resolutely opposed to. Read St Augustine's "Confessions" if you don't believe me. Scholastic philosophers taught that…

Physicist writing on the hard problem of consciousness. It's like a caricature of annoying physicists.

Yes, the same type of confusion we are used to hearing from pop physicists like Lawrence Krauss, Neil Tyson, etc.

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

#803

Post by [deleted] »

D-Machine wrote: post #571
raincom wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can build scientific theories without rigorously defining terms: a stipulative definition is enough. Best example is Darwin's "Origin of Species"; here, Darwin didn't rigorously define "species": 'No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.' Many in the social sciences fetishize definitions, operating under the false notion…

But with "consciousness" we don't have even a stipulative definition, more like 40 different competing definitions ( https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT ) which are in many cases only loosely related, and generally are talking about very different things. When the situation is this bad, I am skeptical you can make scientific progress.

[deleted]

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

#804

Post by chongli »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #759
chongli wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you figure that? The Chinese Room has had many replies but no clear refutation.

That's because Chinese Room is an assumption, not an argument.

Completely wrong. Please read up on the argument and the debate around it before continuing [1].

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

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

#805

Post by selcuka »

unparagoned wrote: post #621
justonceokay wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the kind of religious thinking the GP is talking about. What other frontier of science do people claim will never be solved, except the existence of a god? Why are you so sure it cannot be touched?

No I don't think the GP was talking about that, and that's the problem. The hard problem by definition is a frontier that science will never be able to solve. So I can be sure because that's how it's described in the Chalmers paper introducing the hard problem. The hard problem is Chalmers proof that physicalism could never be true. Like I said if science can explain something then that by definition is an easy probl…

> The hard problem is Chalmers proof that physicalism could never be true.

This is not fully correct. His position has been "naturalistic dualism", that is, consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality alongside physical properties. In other words, he thinks that physicalism can explain consciousness, but not in the way standard materialists claim. He says that consciousness does not automatically emerge after a certain number of synaptic connections in the brain. There may be another fundamental, physical requirement for it to occur.

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

#806

Post by qsera »

alsetmusic wrote: post #786
qsera wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> You are missing the fact that "space" and "time" are also illusions painted on consciousness. Both of these can be measured. They are not illusions. Money is an illusion made up by people and agreed upon for basically the whole of the world economy, but not real. Space between me and the lamp on my desk is very real. The age of the world and the age of the universe is very real.

Just like the sensation of hearing a voice is an illusion created by your brain from the vibrations in the air, the perception of depth is an illusion created from the parallax between your eyes. We seem to have an easy time understanding that sound is an illusion, but have a really hard time considering that space and time are similar illusions...They are just some number (like the number of vibrations) that the brain creates a perception for you.

That you can measure it does not change the fact.

>Money is an illusion

Money is a number. Brain does not create an illusion for money, at least not in the sense we are considering here.

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

#807

Post by Eisenstein »

funimpoded wrote: post #711
Eisenstein wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are attacking a strawman without answering the question.

Do I think supernatural things like thoughts not being represented in physical reality exist? I defer to Russell's Teapot on this one and lean toward "no". If they do, then attempting to reason about anything gets pretty iffy anyway. Who knows what might exist or be true, in that case!

There is nothing that says that if thoughts are not made in brains they must be supernatural. You are making conclusions not based on evidence or argument.

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

#808

Post by DangitBobby »

svara wrote: post #748
DangitBobby wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There's nothing wrong with that chain. This is what some philosophers would call the 'easy ' problem of consciousness, to distinguish it from the 'hard' problem, which is the next step: How do you get from a physical model of brain physiology and behavior to subjective experience of mental states?

Maybe I misunderstood you. You said this:

> 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.

Which I took to mean, people who think it's possible for math to result in consciousness is a "type error".

You gave this in response to:

> Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?

So overall I'm confused what you actually believe and what you think is the "type error" here.

Maybe you meant that emperical proof is not possible. Which seems obvious, which is (I think) entirely the point of asking that rhetorical question: they know no one has had the emperical proof required to suggest consciousness doesn't arrive from math.

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

#809

Post by DangitBobby »

chr1 wrote: post #758
svara wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with that chain. This is what some philosophers would call the 'easy ' problem of consciousness, to distinguish it from the 'hard' problem, which is the next step: How do you get from a physical model of brain physiology and behavior to subjective experience of mental states?

In that chain there is no distinction between subjective experience of mental state and evolution of physical state of the brain. If you believe that the 'hard' problem exists then that chain must be modified. What most of the p-zombie supporters say is merely equivalent to adding an external observer. It is like saying that a player following a sim in a game, makes sims actions more meaningful, which is kind of true…

> If you believe that the 'hard' problem exists then that chain must be modified.

I don't agree any more than I'd agree that knowledge of the strong force being a fundamental aspect of the way the universe functions is the same thing as understanding why there is a strong force (ignoring any version of the anthropic principle of course).

The hard problem asks _why_ consciousness exists, not just the mechanism. You can take the position that p-zombies are not possible and I would with you. That might give me some insight into consciousness to the effect of "consciousness is a requirement for introspection and desired preservation of self which improves the fitness of an organism that develops it" but it doesn't tell me _why_ or _how_ subjective arises.

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

#810

Post by mock-possum »

> Despite the arrogant claims of those who say science can “explain everything,” most phenomena, from thunderstorms to protein folding, escape our full understanding. We still can’t cure the flu or accurately predict the weather two weeks ahead. We do not know the basic physical laws of the universe. And even where we are confident that we know the basic underlying natural laws, we still cannot account for what they imply. I am confident that my bicycle diligently obeys the laws of particle physics, yet those laws are useless when it breaks down. To fix it, I ask a mechanic, not a particle physicist.

Oh I hate this.

We ‘still’ can’t do any of those things yet. Science provides a framework for discovering and coming to understand and yes eventually accurately predict the motions of the underlying systems that give rise to these phenomenons.

And getting a mechanic to fix your bike is a matter of specialization, not some failure of science.

Does anyone actually enjoy hearing other people talk this way? Who is this for?

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