/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9503556
>Why do particular configurations of matter give rise to consciousness?
you're begging the question, many people don't consider consciousness a material phenomenon

>>9503556
Why do particular configurations of matter give rise to automobiles? What philosophically separates a pile of dirt from an automobile?

>>9503572
>many people don't consider consciousness a material phenomenon
I like how you're suggesting it's a matter of a opinion. It doesn't matter what idiots "consider."

>>9503572
Yeah you're right. But that doesn't sidestep the question entirely. Regardless of whether consciousness itself is material, it's still *associated* with particular configurations of matter (e.g. the human brain, as created in the womb and developed through a lifetime). Unless you're a solipsist I suppose.

Here's my hypothesis: General relativity seems to indicate that eternalism is true, i.e. that all "times" (spacetime foliations) are equally real or on the same ontological footing. The only reason why things seem to "happen" or "change" is because, in each "slice" of you through spacetime, you have memories of previous slices. Every slice of "you" has memories of the past which give rise to the illusion that things have changed, but that's only because of those memories! In a sense, "you" from five minutes ago is literally thinking "right now", and "you" from five minutes in the future is also literally thinking right now (i.e. having subjective experiences). It's just that you don't have access to "past-you" and "future-you"'s memories/experiences so it seems like they don't exist. Every "slice" of you from of your life (and other people's) is conscious at the same time.

Thoughts?

>>9503609
>Everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot
Great argument! You convinced me regarding both your intelligence and the validity of your opinion!

>>9503620
I don't know enough about GR to distinguish this from nonsense, I have to admit, but your final statement
>Every "slice" of you from of your life (and other people's) is conscious at the same time
especially doesn't seem to make sense to me. Isn't every slice of you conscious in *ITS* time? times being equally real doesn't make them equal

>>9503620
Alright, I seem to be picking up what you're putting down.

This process could happen with it without conciousness though, so I'm not sure what link you propose between the two

>>9503620
So separate argument, only because you're interested and have thought about it for a bit

Imagine the ship, where each part gets replaced over time, (((they))) say every two years or so there's a statistical likelihood that every atom in your brain has been replaced by another, how "slowly" does this replacement have to be for us to retain conciousness?

Can I digitise my brain atom by atom? Slowly?

>>9503696
Yeah, that ties into whether functionalism is true, or the underlying material substrate matters.

I've also been thinking about whether consciousness/sentience is a "static" phenomenon.

What I mean by that is this: Suppose we could "pause" a brain (or a computer simulation thereof, if you think computer simulations can be conscious), so that all neural activity is temporarily frozen. Suppose that just before pausing, the entity was feeling intense pain. When the simulation is paused, is that sense of pain "ongoing"? In other words, is consciousness a property of configurations, or is it a "process"? If it's the latter, how can this be reconciled with eternalism, i.e. the position that there is no change, as Parmenides argued?

Of course, the entity itself, when unpaused, wouldn't notice whether it was "paused" or not (I think). But that still leaves the question of whether consciousness ceased entirely during the pause or was *itself* paused.

>>9503626
By foliation I meant this: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2710/what-does-foliation-mean-in-the-context-of-a-foliation-of-spacetime..

For more background, see the Rietdijk–Putnam argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rietdijk%E2%80%93Putnam_argument..

>Isn't every slice of you conscious in *ITS* time? times being equally real doesn't make them equal

It seems to me that "time" isn't real, not in the sense that clocks aren't useful, but in the sense that "time" more like a coordinate like longitude and latitude than "change". In other words, there is no "sliding spotlight" to spacetime that demarcates the "true" present.

Hence what I meant is that every "slice" of you "is" conscious, in the same sense that, say, electrons "are" negatively charged, in a timeless sense. It's kinda hard to talk about in natural language, but I'm using the word "is" in a timeless sense. Thus the only thing that distinguished you-reading-this-sentence-literally-right-now from you-five-minutes ago is a difference in time coordinate, not existence.

Could you supply your definition of consciousness? It's hard to answer the question unless you have a firm grasp on what you're talking about. In a the case of consciousness especially, because I think people try to discuss it and get confused because they don't actually know what the subject of their discussing is

some cellular automata are functionally complete, so just implement the universe in it.

>>9503884
Subjective experience? Literally what you're experiencing right now (unless you happen to be a p-zombie...)

>>9503944
I intuitively understand what you mean, but just to say "what I'm experiencing right now" is not very much to work with. What can you extrapolate from that? I guess my point is that maybe you should do some research into what the scientific and philosophical consensus is about consciousness.
To answer your original question. I think consciousness is more a spectrum of self awareness, and it varies with how sophisticated a given brain is. There is no point at which a thing becomes conscious, there is not a line to draw. I think we make a mistake when we talk about consciousness metaphysically, like it is anything more than a process of our minds that developed over time, as a biological necessity. The more a mind can understand and notice, the more likely it is to survive, or something like that.

>>9503556
>particular configurations of matter give rise to consciousness
Why do you think that's the case?
Maybe a rock is "sentient" as well.

>>9503620
you are completely correct that time is an illusion, but the big mystery is why causality goes one way and not the other way
>in before “muh entropy”

>>9503556
Consciousness reduces to behavior.

>>9503556
If you can create an automaton, that is capable of tracking information about other objects, then there is no reason why it could not track information about itself.

>>9504116
OP here. I actually think it's plausible that things which aren't traditionally considered "conscious" do have some consciousness, but it is so minuscule as to be approximately zero for all practical purposes. For example, a thermostat might be "conscious" but only in a very minimal sense. A modern supercomputer would plausibly be "more conscious" but, again, only minimally so. Basically something along the lines of Integrated Information Theory in one of its various forms.

>>9504138
But the question is why is that tracking (sometimes) associated with subjective experiences?

>>9504137
False.

>>9503556

>arguing undefined concepts

>>9504388
Elaborate.

>>9504379
Wrong.

>>9504457
Incorrect.

>mfw I'm a closet dualist

>>9504125
Doesn't time-symmetric determinism imply that the *future* causes the past just as much as the past causes the future?

In that case, the world is like the solution of a differential equation with certain boundary conditions, but it doesn't have a fundamental "directionality."

>>9504507
How could you interpret someone who doesn't believe qualia are real as a dualist? That's as far away from dualism as is possible.

>>9504541
OH SHIIIIIIIITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

>>9504546
I think he's saying Dennett is looking at him disapprovingly. Might be wrong though.

I am studying cellular automata and other simple programs right now and i think they are the most promising research areas for things like consciousness and behavior (and more).

>>9504137
behavior is supervenient on consciousness which is supervenient on biology

>>9504609
>behavior is supervenient on consciousness
Behavior isn't supervenient on consciousness. You don't even need consciousness for behavior to happen, behavior is just what entities do. An inanimate process like a storm has behavior.

>>9504615
conscious beings have complex, purposeful behavior that implies consciousness

>>9504621
What if that implication *is* all that "consciousness" amounts to? i.e. It's a product of the abstracting of behavior into a conceptual shorthand the brain makes use of?

>>9504429
Consciousness is not something you or anybody understands to the point where you can define it in a way that differentiates it from non-consciousness (you're arguing whether a thermometer's conscious or not).
How can you figure out what phenomena occur in which configurations of matter if you haven't even delineated the phenomenon you're observing?

>>9504597
Tell us more, anon San.

I still can't wrap my head around how I'm able to picture things in my mind. Like what's going on inside that let's me do that?

>>9505496
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SraJ29twdQ

>>9505065
I agree with you entirely. That's the whole point of this conversation. To *try* to figure these things out. I'm emphatically *not* claiming I have the answers.

>>9503621
You are consciously experiencing this thread right now, aren't you? Obviously consciousness is a thing. It's not a material thing but it's an emergent property of things. Stop being a faggot.

Well entanglement suggests a possible violation of space and time, like a singularity where all resides. What if the source of things is a hologram and we are also there. And one of the properties of that existence is an intelligence that spans the entire universe, just add resources

>>9504178
OP, this idea is plausible. It's taken seriously by some cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind.

But I think IIT has been pretty convincingly torn down.
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

>>9505496
>I still can't wrap my head around how I'm able to picture things in my mind. Like what's going on inside that let's me do that?
Everyone here loves to shit on eliminative materialism, but it provides a pretty reasonable explanation for that: You don't literally have pictures in your mind, you just believe you do and behave as though you did because it's convenient and useful for you to have this behavioral quirk built in. And as for why you aren't just compelled to act without any sort of belief or behavioral schemes like that, it's because that's the difference between reflexive or instinctive behavior vs. more complex "conscious" behavior. By having you believe the notion of things "appearing" to you in your mind the brain gets behaviors in response to the abstract concept of sensory stimuli as though they were objects in themselves, which allows for the sort of behavior that distinguishes humans from other animals on this planet in most cases like the construction of elaborate technologies including the computers we're communicating through.
It all comes back to the basic point that your brain doesn't need to actually ink out a literal image to make this work, it just needs to get you to behave as though the abstract concept of "visuals" or "sounds" exist as objects so you can behave off of them, in a very similar way to how we do this more deliberately with the non-real concept of money for example (no such thing as a Euro or a US Dollar exists in physical reality, but we behave off of the notion they do exist because our behavior in this way is useful and convenient as an alternative to dealing solely with concrete bartering systems).

>>9503556
>Why do particular configurations of matter give rise to consciousness?
They don't.

Think about it this way. Is a particle conscious? Is there something it's like to be an electron? Of course not. But we know we're conscious and we suppose some animals might be conscious as well - if not self aware. But is a roundworm, with it's 302 neurons, conscious? What about an organism with 10 neurons? 5? 1?

At some point, arranging unconscious particles in a particular way miraculously gives rise to consciousness. There's an explanatory gap here that we will never be able to bridge - the hard problem of consciousness.

A simpler explanation would be that consciousness is the ontological primitive. In the same way someone with disassociate identity disorder has separate (dissociated) personalities (alters) within one cognitive space, we are disassociated alters within a larger cognitive space - a mind at large.

Our brains amplify consciousness to produce self awareness, but they do not generate consciousness - they are in consciousness, like whirlpools in water.

This idea is known as idealism.

>>9505906
This post is convincing but doesnt change my opinion of consciousness. Information integration is definitely one aspect and I think neuroscience through guys like tononi, friston, kelso, rabinovich and many others etc etc has shown we are capable of making very convincing powerful mathematical descriptions about the brain and by extension consciousness even if we havent worked out all the biological details yet.

I also think one important issue is that we define consciousness by this single token example of what is our own. How do we know to what and how far to generalize notions of consciousness. We can't. Because we define it on this one token and do so as I wd understand via our intuitions. It makes any definition of consciousness we choose to create either somewhat arbitrary or very restrictive. I think people react very strongly and emotively when faced with the possibilities of what can and cannot be conscious, and do so intuitively.

The hard problem though is one i dont think is solvable through our limited perspective and may even be illusory.

The Triforce
>Is a perfect square no. of segments
>Computes all numbers 0-9 when expressed in programming language and calculator circuitry to however much your memory can express
>Ring 0 so Terry A. Davis approved
>Euler Circuit
>Euler Path

ALSO NON-SCIENTIFIC
>Wards off evil spirits in Shinto
>Grants wishes
>Caused by hot fairy goddesses having 3 ways (3 is company and 4 is a crowd)

>>9503620
What does "at the same time" here really mean? It's like you're superimposing some super-time that exists up and beyond the regular time. If time simply exists as an extra dimension, it seems like you have to abandon concepts like future, past, "same time" alltogether.

Also, am I to take it that every version of "me" in the different time dimensions are separate conscious agents, such that it would be true to say the phenomenal experience I feel in 10 seconds from now belongs to a different entity? Because if all time slices belong to the same phenomenological subject, it seems all experiences should all happen at once for that subject, if time is not linear.

>>9503572
>Religitard shits up the thread in the first reply

>>9503620
This is my comfy knowledge, 4 1 m singularity with two eyes first.

Thoughts.

>>9509816
>If time simply exists as an extra dimension, it seems like you have to abandon concepts like future, past, "same time" altogether.
Not him, but that's not true. Replace future, past, and same time with in front of, behind, and same place and you get a location based equivalent that doesn't appeal to that fallacious "super-time" concept which you correctly identified as a problem a lot of people have when trying to talk about time in this way.
In fact relativity where this talk of four-dimensional spacetime mostly comes from deals a lot with the concept of simultaneity, you don't lose simultaneity just because you're dealing with time as an extension of space. What you do lose is *absolute* simultaneity, meaning there is no one state of "now" that all locations in the universe are synced up with at any given moment. Instead, which other parts of spacetime share in a given "now" is dependent on the frame of reference.
>the phenomenal experience I feel in 10 seconds from now belongs to a different entity?
I would personally agree that there's nothing inherently connecting any two moments of spacetime together just because they're located next to each other. We behave as though there is as a matter of convenience.
>it seems all experiences should all happen at once for that subject
"At once" is an example of that "super-time" fallacy you yourself brought up. It only has meaning inside the context of spacetime (as simultaneity), not outside. You wouldn't say every part of your body is all located in the same square inch just because it all exists. Similarly, all of a span of time doesn't exist in the same moment just because it all exists. There's a moment of you ten years ago with all the memory and conditions of that moment together and giving that "you" a sense of "now," and there's you ten years in the future from "here" where "you" might be getting ready to retire from the workforce or whatever. All observers at all moments believe it's "now."

>>9503848
>Suppose that just before pausing, the entity was feeling intense pain.

what if the entity didnt even have a consciousness but just acted like it did?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

>>9504125
>you are completely correct that time is an illusion, but the big mystery is why causality goes one way and not the other way

i recently read about an experiment that showed entropy working in reverse. last week.

>>9512602
Unbreak me some eggs.

>>9504137
>Consciousness reduces to behavior.
Not logically, since behavior can occur without any underlying experience, but consciousness is always an experience of something.

>>9512678
>consciousness is always an experience of something.
No, that's the thing being disputed by a stance of "consciousness reduces to behavior."

>>9512678
>>9512682
PS: This part:
>Not logically, since behavior can occur without any underlying experience
Is not a valid argument.
A reducing to B doesn't imply that there is no B that isn't A.
Or to rephrase with concrete examples, squares reduce to rectangles, that doesn't mean all rectangles are squares.
Similarly, if consciousness reduces to behavior, that doesn't mean all behavior is consciousness. Saying behavior can occur without consciousness isn't a valid argument against the claim consciousness reduces to behavior.

>>9505496
>>9503556
See, you've got things backwards with this view that your body is in some theater and you can recreate images of things outside your body inside your head.
The truth is everything you see AND think is just signs dude. Your entire lived experience is all a story you're telling yourself.
There's no such thing as like some sort of external matter some combination or arrangement of which gives rise to being and consciousness, at least not anything we can directly access or know.
The world is like a computer simulation that simulates itself, and each of us generate our own thing, clashing with each other time to time trying to impose our story on others, or syncing up stories with others, thereby driving history through the alteration of signs.

>>9512593
>what if the entity didnt even have a consciousness but just acted like it did?
like a computer bot?
anyway, there's probably some test someone can think up that an unconscious zombie would fail even though he appeared conscious. Something like the mirror test or asking it "What do you think I think you should be thinking right now?" or have it write an essay explaining the meaning of "I was looking back to see if you were looking back to see if I were looking back to see if you were looking back at me." just anything that requires self-reflection and theory of mind. Because I don't think you can have theory of mind or even functionally emulate having it mechanically without having a developed self-consciousness.

>>9512719
>here's probably some test someone can think up that an unconscious zombie would fail even though he appeared conscious
The entire point of the philosophical zombie argument is there is no observable way to differentiate them from non-zombies.
This is very important because it's what allows for the conclusion that there's something distinct from physical / behavioral details for which there's an explanatory gap constituting the "hard problem of consciousness."
If you don't respect this condition then the argument fails and dissenters can simply say "that physical / observable difference you used to differentiate zombies from non-zombies explains consciousness without the need to appeal to some new science of qualia."

>>9503598
underrated

>>9512690
>>9512682
No, dude. I understand Behaviorism better than they understand themselves, because they don't bother to understand things like metaphysics because they uh don't understand metaphysics usually. The behaviorism he's talking about likes to pretend like consciousness is somehow an illusion, denying any sort of real ego, subject, or anything that would actually be having that illusion. It is the stupidest shit. They also have these weird fixed definitions that lead them to argue shit like we don't have free will unless you can flap your arms and fly away, or unless it is impossible for anything to ever influence you, just real weird shit, like slept through half of college, or didn't read the whole book, but still got a degree and felt entitled to assert their half-baked theories as correct. Not saying that there isn't value in there research and a few concepts, but their attempts at philosophical statements are ridiculously juvenile.
I'll rephrase for you:
>Consciousness requires there to be a "having an experience", and "having an experience" is not reducible to behavior, therefore consciousness can not be reducible to behavior.
Behaviorists try to get around this by just saying that "having an experience" is some sort of illusion, but understanding this argument apart from its attempt at an authoritative negation, we find it to be quite meaningless, total nonsense, something that which no one can adequately explain. What on Earth could they mean, there's absolutely no content there.
Having an experience is more real than the autists who try to mechanize and abstract everything into exploitable formulas.

>>9512729
Well I mean it obviously just presumes that there's no observable way to differentiate them, that's part of the definition they constructed for the thought experiment. And while there might be some random event that causes a zombie to answer correctly from time to time it is just as conceivable that an empirical test could determine the non-zombies in reality.
And I don't think there is a "hard problem of consciousness" because that very problem is structured off received assumptions of humans as individuals, bags of meat walking around a planet somehow able to think.

>>9512757
>I understand Behaviorism better than they understand themselves
You didn't understand that the existence of behavior without consciousness isn't an argument against consciousness reducing to behavior, so I don't think it was unfair of me to point that out. In fact it would be unfair to me to not point that out because it didn't actually dispute what you were using it to try to dispute.
>"having an experience" is some sort of illusion
I make a point to never call it an "illusion" because that's a term which has connotations of the whole "experience" concept being disputed (which isn't an argument in favor of "experience" being valid by the way, any more than the word sunrise is an argument in favor of geocentrism being valid-- language reflects what people believe, and when the argument is one about people believing in something that isn't true, then of course the language will reflect that false belief).
Instead of "illusion," I'd describe the situation as us behaving and believing in terms of a false belief, that's all.

>>9512773
>I don't think there is a "hard problem of consciousness"
Well then there's no reason for you to use the philosophical zombie argument since that's the specific thing that argument is meant to establish.

>>9512777
But the brain is so much more than behaviour and theories of consciousness make you look like a caveman. You ever done neuroscience?

>>9512777
There's no neuroscientific evidence for your view.

>>9503556
A configuration of matter will never create consciousness. Consciousness comes first and then matter. The physical world is not fundamental, it is a fabrication of the spiritual world. And of course the spiritual world's master is almighty God.

>>9505946
>you just believe you do and behave as though you did because it's convenient and useful for you to have this behavioral quirk built in

I like the point you're making and find it quite interesting. At the end of the day, though, how do you reconcile something like the experience of pain with eliminative materialism? I mean the first-person experience, not just its biological function.

>"At once" is an example of that "super-time" fallacy you yourself brought up. It only has meaning inside the context of spacetime (as simultaneity), not outside. You wouldn't say every part of your body is all located in the same square inch just because it all exists. Similarly, all of a span of time doesn't exist in the same moment just because it all exists. There's a moment of you ten years ago with all the memory and conditions of that moment together and giving that "you" a sense of "now," and there's you ten years in the future from "here" where "you" might be getting ready to retire from the workforce or whatever. All observers at all moments believe it's "now."

This is exactly what I was trying to get at. You put it better than I did. By this hypothesis, all observers in the spacetime manifold are timelessly experiencing "now." They believe change is happening because of memory, even though their brains are "static", so to speak.

Memory is what gives rise to the "psychological" arrow of time. We remember the past but not the future. I recall reading an interesting paper about this in the context of computation, but can't find it right now.

I wonder if there are languages that are conducive to thinking about reality tenselessly, and thinking about time as a "coordinate" rather than "becoming," if that makes any sense.

>>9513020
>But the brain is so much more than behaviour
Two responses to that:
A) I acknowledge there's also physiology (e.g. your blood pressure increasing isn't really a behavior but is sometimes part of your responses to sensory stimuli), although that's not relevant except that I occasionally need to say something along the lines of "I acknowledge there's such a thing as physiology" so people don't try to nitpick about that.
B) If you mean "qualia" are literally real and that's the "so much more" stuff you're referring to, then I'll point out that's the thing I'm disputing in the first place so it doesn't make much sense for you to assert that, obviously that's what you believe and that's what I don't believe, the point is to argue why you believe that's the case.
>>9513036
There isn't neuroscientific evidence either for "qualia" being literally real phenomena or against "qualia" being literally real phenomena, and the burden of evidence is on the positive claim that it does exist in a literally real way that constitutes a "hard problem of consciousness" / "explanatory gap" in need of something extra beyond ordinary physical cause and effect relationships to account for. What I'm really arguing for is that you don't need this extra claim because everything makes sense fine without it provided you're not under the impression the brain is incapable of producing a (useful) false belief.
I personally find it much easier to suppose a false belief in literal "experience" is possible than I do to suppose what our brains do constitutes a special super-physical class of phenomena not explicable in terms of ordinary physical cause and effect relationships. I'd also argue the idea of "qualia" being literally real isn't even falsifiable since it's a claim for something that goes beyond the ordinary physical world, and if the ordinary physical world is in fact all there is then you could never find evidence either way that is anything other than physical evidence.

>>9513107
Have you ever experienced pain?

>I'd also argue the idea of "qualia" being literally real isn't even falsifiable
Some things are true and unfalsifiable, pace Popper.

>>9513117
>Have you ever experienced pain?
That's not a very good question considering "experience" being literally real is the exact thing we're debating. I'm pretty sure the only reason you're asking it is so you can go:
>Wow, look at how he's denying something so obviously real!
Which isn't an argument since it's not like a false belief has to be a weak belief, and a very strong false belief would lead you to behave as though the reference of that belief is obviously real.
That said this goes back to the "physiology too" clarification. Pain in particular involves a lot of physiological activity alongside the behavioral stuff e.g. blood pressure rising like I mentioned earlier isn't really a behavior and is potentially going to be a part of what happens when you report being "in pain." What I'm saying there isn't though is the "qualia" notion where there's an "experience" of "what it's like to feel pain." That's the part I'm saying is really a (useful) false belief where the brain abstracts out all the actual stuff going on when you report this state and encapsulates it into one convenient fictional object that it has you believe in and behave around.

>>9513117
>Some things are true and unfalsifiable
That doesn't matter since you would never be able to prove it wrong even if it were wrong, which is why no statements are both scientific and not falsifiable.

>>9513107
I haven't said anything about qualia but I'm saying the brains architecture doesnt suggest its just about behaviour.

And your view isnt supported by evidence. You suggst theres a reason why we have qualia. An adaptation. But no where in our brain does there seem to be a mechanism for this. Your idea is as unsupported as qualia...

The problem with your view is that the brains physical makeup can plausibly work for a pzombie. Yes you dont believe in qualia so good but the problem is. Wheres the mechanism for your illusion ill just call it that for short. There is none. You have no way to explain it. You say it has some value to humans as if its a real thing but you dont explain a mechanism. Thats a serious problem with your view. Based on what we know about the brain, it can also work perfectly fine as a pzombie if we substitute the lack of qualia with a lack of your imaginary mechanism.

You guys may not have qualia but I do, and you'll never convince me otherwise. I am qualia, all of my memories are of qualia, all I have right now are qualia. Qualia is everything

>>9513107
Tfw you dont realise your view isnt very falsifiable either. In fact i actually believe that your view is pragmatically identical to people who like the idea of qualia. Its just semantics which creates this barrier between you and everyone else. If you mean by qualia isnt real that it isnt some physical property in the universe then no one here i guarantee believes that either but qualia is a conceptual bookend for something empirical they cant explain. In some ways youre the one whos made the unnecessary step of trying to explain it. And in a way which is intrinsically difficult to falsify.

>>9513128
Also your language is problematic. You talk like the brain is doing something for you to make it easier for you as in theres two agents in the story. You should clarify what you mean. What is the exact function or use for this in terms of brain processing and dont use it in reference to a "you" since "you" are an emergent property of that same brain and presumably both "you" and "qualia" are parallel products of the same machinery. Not that one is for the other and vice versa. Clarity please.

>>9513142
Yes you think your arguments in the last few months have been successful because its a good argument. No theyve been succeasful because your whole idea is difficult to falsify and possibly impossible to unless you clarofy the exactitudes of your idea.

>>9513107
Id also only agree with your views on behaviour if you thought all neural activity was synonymous with behaviour which i thinm is just a srrupid thing to say.

>>9512682
But its plausible to have consciousness without behaviour so what are you talking about.. are you using a flimsy holistuc definition of behaviour? You know we have definitions for a reason.

>>9503556
Sounds more like a question made for /his/ or /lit/.
So far I know of no scientific explanation of why matter gives rise to consciousness.

>we finally have a cellular automation thread and its about consciousnesses
Do you hate me?

>>9513593
Fine. What is the best Life-like automata?

>>9513204
>You suggst theres a reason why we have qualia. An adaptation.
There's a reason why we *report* having "qualia" and behave *as though* "qualia" were literally real things.
That's not the same as suggesting there's a reason "why we have qualia" because that statement implies the reference of the reporting (i.e. the alleged state of "experiencing the color blue" as opposed to the uncontroversially verifiable *report* someone could make where "I see the color blue" is announced) that is "qualia" are real phenomena which is what I'm arguing isn't true.
>>9513236
>You talk like the brain is doing something for you to make it easier for you as in theres two agents in the story.
There are multiple processes in the brain. And there's a distinction between reflexes or even instinctive behavior vs. more complex "deliberate" behavior. And in this distinction you have brain processes influencing how that "deliberate" behavior plays out in less direct ways than with a reflex, or even an instinct, and the less direct / more convoluted way this works is through one process responding to another with the multiplicity of "agents" you've brought up as something you believe doesn't make sense. There's nothing particularly mysterious about this arrangement, you could have a relatively simple artificial program involving multiple processes responding to each other too. Just because you can refer to a brain and the person that brain resides in as though they were one single entity doesn't mean there aren't multiple processes responding to one another inside the brain.
>But no where in our brain does there seem to be a mechanism for this.
Of course there are mechanisms in the brain for producing the outward behavior we exhibit. I'm taking a reductive stance, what I'm arguing does exist isn't anything in question, the only thing in question is whether what I'm denying the existence of really does exist.

>>9513614
I am too much of a brainlet to understand these yet but I learned symbolic logic so its a start.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8

>>9513204
>>9513621
I'll also add one more point in response to this:
>But no where in our brain does there seem to be a mechanism for this.
If what I'm arguing is true and the act of reporting "experiences" / "qualia" along with the act of behaving as though these "experiences" / "qualia" were literally real are actual processes the brain supports, then we should expect to see cases where these processes get disrupted.
And we do see that, with cases like the phenomenon of blindsight where the subject *reports* being blind but it can be demonstrated they're still taking in ocular stimuli and responding to it e.g. if you put obstacles in their path like a trash can they might walk around them successfully.
This constitutes evidence there are physical / biological processes responsible for our behaving as though we have "experiences" that can be referenced since we have examples where taking in sensory stimuli and reacting to it still happen in the absence of this extra step of acting as though there were an "experience" object representing this stimuli and responding to that abstract object instead.
The difference between reporting and behaving around a *reference* of "experience" vs. just responding to stimuli while not reporting any associated reference of "experience" is what I'm arguing is the real thing going on when "qualia" is reported, If nothing else, the conclusion I'm trying to present to you with all this is to say that this difference can be accounted for entirely through physiology and behavior i.e. there is no need to appeal to some extra-physical new science of "qualia" or to believe there's a "hard problem of consciousness" that goes beyond what ordinary physical mechanisms can explain.

>>9513128
I didn't mean to be sneaky. Well, maybe bit ;-)

It's an honest question though. I'm open to the possibility I'm wrong, but I really just don't see how to reconcile eliminative materalism with my subjective experience. If pain is an illusion, who or what is being fooled by that illusion?

>is really a (useful) false belief
Who or what holds these false beliefs?

>you would never be able to prove it wrong
Something that is true can never be proven wrong. Therefore, all true things are unfalsifiable. :-)

>>9513223
This is what I'm getting at. Can posts on a basketweaving board, which I perceive subjectively, convince me that this very same subjective experience doesn't exist?

I appreciate the point >>9513665 is making, in that qualia isn't as clear-cut as it seems and certain aspects of it can be illusory, but at the end of the day there's still some subject being fooled. At least, that's true in my case.

>>9513593
Unrelated, but I've read about Langton's ant and the highway conjecture, which states that for any finite initial configuration of marked cells, the ant eventually builds a highway.

It has a resemblance to the Collatz conjecture, i.e. it's a Π2 statement of the form "for all [starting points] there exists [some stopping time] such that [a particular condition is satisfied]").

Through a simple and elegant argument, it's been proven that the ant's trajectory is always unbounded, but has there been any further progress than this? I couldn't find any on Google Scholar.

>>9513593
Interestingly, Dennett and others have used cellular automata to discuss free will.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cellular-automata/#CAFreeWill

>>9513593
>>9514900
Also see Seth Lloyd's paper, A Turing Test for Free Will: https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.3225

>>9514873
>If pain is an illusion, who or what is being fooled by that illusion?
Like I said earlier, I make a point of not calling it an "illusion" because that's a term people associate with the same "experience" concept being discussed here. I use "false (but useful) belief" to describe what's going on because beliefs don't have that same semantic baggage. An "illusion" makes people think of some guy hallucinating an oasis in a desert which they then pounce on and say "see, he's still having an experience!" Belief and behavior on the other hand don't have that problem. If you believe you're having an "experience" and behave around that concept of having an "experience," this is something that can take place without that "experience" concept necessarily mapping to a literal real world phenomenon. It's sufficient that you have a (fictional) reference point you can talk about and behave in response to. Just like you behave in response to real world physical objects (e.g. you might step out of the way if a bicyclist comes up from behind you), you could behave in response to non-real world pseudo-objects, things that aren't really there and which you don't really have any sort of "experience" of, but which get their pseudo-existence from your behavior around the premise that "they" do exist. There's a major parallel to how abstract objects in computer programs work here. Instead of having to work directly with physical machinery, programmers can behave around these make believe abstract objects and get computers to respond in the ways they want. It's a convenient fiction (will continue with another post).

>>9514873
>>9514940
>Can posts on a basketweaving board, which I perceive subjectively, convince me that this very same subjective experience doesn't exist?
You're assuming your conclusion by saying you "perceive subjectively" and that you're discussing a "subjective experience." That's basically saying "if X is true how can X not be true?" And the answer is, well, X was never true to begin with, you just believe it's true.
>qualia isn't as clear-cut as it seems and certain aspects of it can be illusory, but at the end of the day there's still some subject being fooled
I don't think the existence of a "self" is the same as the question of whether "qualia" exist. I went into this a little earlier when I brought up the fact the brain has more than just one process going on at any given time. So it's not actually any sort of logical problem to speak in terms of how you're being led to believe and behave in certain ways. Yes, you could refer to both "you" and "your" brain as all the same entity, but there's also the reality that what underlies you're apparently "deliberate" / "conscious" behavior isn't the same process as other activity going on in your brain which that former underlying process might respond to. Certainly you wouldn't say for example that you are the process that leads you to believe you're in pain when you stub your toe, right? You would identify with a distinct other process that's being acted on by that "pain" process. Or if you suddenly remember something, you wouldn't identify with that appearance of memory, right? It would seem largely out of your control, like something that happens to you. There are many examples of this multiple process principle in action because the brain isn't so simple as to only run one unified program.

>>9514900
>>9514904
Yeah, it is impossible not to have similar thoughts. I tend to think cellular automata pose a significant threat to most, but not all, forms of philophical determinism.

>>9514956
I meant to say simple programs. The classic cellular automata with no probability/quantum twist are deterministic. Some, like Rule30 above, do have to be run to see what they produce, but they are deterministic.

>>9513621
Dude im aware theres multuple brain processes but thats got nothing to do with what i said about you and the brain. Theres a problematuc ontological distinction and youre not using evidence just phenomenological intuition.

When i said reason/adaptation about qualia i was just stating ur idea in shorthand. Im aware of what you mean.
>>9513665
Blindsight isnt the fucking same. If u knew about the brain u wd know this. Its just a disconnection problem and the product of an evolutuonarily old part of the brain.
Its just a prodyct of early visual processing connecting to motor areas such as in the midbrain.

I can show its not relevant to your view because what would be relevant is if a person could still see and respond to the same information a blindsighted person cannot see and yet still have no experience or reporting of it. You say a blindsighted person has no experience but that is only because they cannot see rhe stimuli. Thats a confound. You need them to be able to see but have no experience to bolster your view.

This is pzombie conceivable and the problen you should solve and need a mechanism for if we are designed to report qualia. It needs to either be a mechanaism or intrinaic to the brain systen which is identical to my view of qualia. Ofc you need a mechanism.


>>9513665
What you also dont seem to undertand is that the people youre arguing against dont see qualia as non or extra physical.
Is this all?

>>9514873
No unfalsifiable doesnt mean it can never be proven wrong. It means theres no way to test if ita wrong. Something true can hypothetically be wrong if it has predictions that are differentiable to other theories and arent satisfied. An unfalsifiable thing is something which doesnt make predictions which differentiate it from other theories or are ad hoc.

>>9514940
Unfalsifiable.

No mechanism.

Suggests. qualia false beliefs of qualia have causal impact which pzombie arguments would suggest they didnt as qualia doesnt.

Suggests inadvertantly that qualia is abstract when it is concrete.

Doesnt realise all brain constructs are pseudo ones and this has nothing to do with a false belief in qualia.

Fails to acknowledge a difficulty in distinguishing the belief someone saw something and the belief that they had a qualia. I dont believe theres a distinction and this negates the need for your false belief mechanism as qualia is ontologically indistinguiahable from the brain processes that we wd say create them.

>>9514955
If you have a you and qualia though, you dont address that they might emerge in parallel and not conditionally on eachother. I.e. qualia beliefs may not function to serve a you, but may emerge in parallel with you. You dont address that this is a possibility.

>>9517416
>You say a blindsighted person has no experience but that is only because they cannot see rhe stimuli
Define "see," because it sounds like you're defining it as "qualia are literally real and it's only seeing if you have these qualia," which would be a circular argument.
They behave in response to visual stimuli but don't have access to the fictional (but useful) "what I'm seeing" concept and can't refer to it or behave in more complicated ways around it.
All I'm saying is that part they're missing is enough to explain what people believe is "experience." I was asked what purpose it would serve to have a fictional prompt for behavior. Well, that's exactly the purpose it serves: All the ways we behave in reference to visual stimuli (and in meta-reference to our references to visual stimuli) that someone with blindsight doesn't. We have this arrangement as a useful adaptation because a less primitive brain process bouncing off of a fictional reference point representing the abstract concept of visual stimuli results in a significantly different set of behavior than what lower level visual stimuli responses on their own would get you.
You don't need a literal "experience" construct to explain this, you just need what's missing in blindsight to be there and people start behaving differently because a less primitive brain process has access to a reference point that blindsighted brains don't.
The burden's on you to explain why we should believe something on top of this is going on since it certainly isn't necessary for anything extra to be there in order to produce people who believe they have "experiences," report they have "experiences," and behave as though they have "experiences." The only argument I can think of for why these "experiences" need to be literal phenomena floating around in need of a new science to account for is that you're very certain your belief about them being really there is a true belief, which isn't much of an argument in my opinion.

>>9517430
>all brain constructs are pseudo ones
The distinction is between something that *only* exists as a reference point the brain makes use of to drive behavior vs. something in the world that exists independent of your own mental processes.
e.g. Would you agree there's a difference between a rock vs. the color blue?

>>9517430
>No mechanism
What's not there in blindsight is a mechanism (more than one mechanism really, but same idea). Something in the brain that can either be present or not present can result in behavior that accounts for what people refer to as "experience."

>>9517436
I can define see as identification. Blindsighted people dont have visual information. Visual information is non existent. They cant identify anything because the info is not there. A genuine example is having access to all the visual information and identifying things with no qualia. Blindsight doesnt work because they dont have the information access at all.

The point of a pzombie is its exactly the same as a person. A blindsighted person isnt. You need a person who can identify objects but doesnt have qualic belief for it to be a good example.

>>9517439
You can literally argue from several perspectives that all visual constructs are fictional reference. Vision is very bad at matching real physical measurements And id say a rock is djifferent to blue in the sense that rock is a transmodal concept when blue is purely visual. Its not fair to compaee and the concept of a rock is stilll somewhat arbitrary. It doesnt objectively fit anyrhing in real life and also when u say rpck it comes with other linguistic and conceptual associative baggage that when youre telling me to think of a rock, no its not objective.

>>9517445
But youre not just talking about experience. Youre talking about a false belief about experience which has adaptive value.

>>9503905
I'll just leave this here

>>9513593
>>9513614
>>9503905
every time I tried to open a CA thread I got flamed or 0 replies. I gave up. But what keeps me lurking are the rare diamonds. Let me be one for you.

Pic related

I researched CAs for quite some time so ask me stuff

>>9513614
>What is the best Life-like automata?
I don't know the answer but Conway's Game of Life is turing complete which means it can compute any given function. The Wolfram Language uses CA for some if not all of it's processes so I could imagine it is the lifest-like automata for now…

>>9513645
I had the link to a site where you could use a game of life calculator in your browser and you saw the little gliders speeding around, it looked like a clockwork

>>9517915
>The point of a pzombie is its exactly the same as a person. A blindsighted person isnt.
P-Zombies being capable of existing is an argument in favor of "qualia" being real, not an argument against "qualia" being real. The point of the p-zombie argument is to try to establish someone identical to a normal person in every physical way but lacking "qualia" can exist. If you're arguing against the existence of "qualia" then you'd be looking for the opposite: that there are physical / behavioral mechanisms accounting for why people report having "qualia.
>I can define see as identification.
Being able to identify and refer to "what you're seeing" *is* the "qualic belief." Instead of just being able to respond to visual stimuli in a more direct / primitive way, non-blindsighted people can respond to an abstract reference point representing their visual stimuli, and that's the functionality that leads people to believe "qualia" are real things.
>You can literally argue from several perspectives that all visual constructs are fictional reference.
You could argue a rock is the same as the notion of "what it's like to see blue," but only if you claim there is no world independent of your mind and senses. If you don't deny a world independent of your mind and senses then there's a big difference between a rock and the notion of "what it's like to see blue," namely that a rock is something multiple parties (both human and mechanical) can corroborate the existence of a rock, but no separate parties can do the same for your alleged "experience of seeing blue."
Now there's also an abstract reference point representing the visual stimuli from a rock, and it is similar to the abstract notion of "seeing blue," but the rock itself is something distinct from that. A rock still exists even though the person responding to it is blindsighted, whereas an abstract reference point representing the visual stimuli from a rock is not available if the person is blindsighted.

>>9504137
Read up on the hard problem brainletto

What's with all the philosophers here? You are just converting this discussion into something true and unfalsifiably moronic, devoid of any scientific information. Just reading your debate over what is literally the realest reality and having a contest on who uses the cooler wordz makes me want to puke.

pls leave this thread and take all your qualia, thought crash-dummies, neuroesoteric mumbo jumbo to >>>/x/

Read Stephen Wolframs: A New Kind of Science and then come back. This thread is about automatons.

>>9503620
>Every "slice" of you from of your life (and other people's) is conscious at the same time.
The problem here is "at the same time"...
If you would be overprecise, all particles of your body are in different timezones right now. We know timezones in hours, but they can as well be seconds or milliseconds. So we know how long a second takes, but how do we describe an instant moment? It's magic and also the reason why after >>9503696
>digitizing your brain atom by atom
it won't be "yours" anymore, it might be similar from a pety human standpoint, but if it produces any consciousness it can never be the same as yours. making it A brain but never YOUR "second" brain.

It's hard to talk scientifically about the difference between what is "YOU" and what is a "copy of YOU", what is "real" and what is "illusion", what is "time" and what is a "moment"... it's also not the terms you should be using tbqh

all I can say is that you won't come far with natural language to grasp this topic, only math will make those concepts understandable in a way you might even able to use them as tools in programs.

>>9509869
>he pointed out the huge and obvious flaw in my reddit-tier philosophy!
>fucking religitard!

>>9518267
not the guy you were replying to but dude, it's pretty clear the first poster was a troll or had no idea because a true scientific mind would have called it a physical phenomenon. And it's pretty clear consciousness as far as it is defined, is very "real" and based on psychical responses to physical stimuli, so yes, nowadays science does consider it to be a "material" phenomenon.

a much better question would've been: "why do particular configurations of matter don't give rise to consciousness?" Because it seems nobody has thought about the possibility of consciousness being a relative attribute rather than an absolute.

meaning something can be "a bit" conscious, but that implies nothing is or can ever be completely without consciousness, and nothing is or can ever be fully conscious.

It seems to me that dualism and binary thinking is were almost every western spiritualist has misunderstood the ancient knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_numeral_system

>>9518140

I know what the pzombie argument is. My point is that if you can hypothetically have pzombies with the same brain but no qualia then you can also give pzombies lesions which give them impairments and abilities exactly the same as the blindsighted people too. They have the same behaviour. If we can make plausible blindsight pzombies then blindsight cannot be a good example.

I dont mean qualic see. I mean the brains visual system is divided into several modules which function to do certain things. Some for motion, colour, deprh, identifying forms. Theres specific areas for idenrifying certain types of objects.
Qualia is not the Same as the brain mechanisms correlating with them. This falls into my argument above. We can imagine a pzombie with an inferotemporala object area for identifying objects but which dont have qualia.

>>9518140
But the world independent doesnt necessarily have a correspondence to the one in our heads apart from the fact it works. Like having someone spending their whole life fondling in the dark or blindfolded. Their world concept its completely different from ours who can see or those with echolocation and its different from the scientific ideas of population dynamics where the world is a product of lots of particles and the interacting forces. The point is that rocks and blue are derived from the same brain processes and neither directly reflect a concrete thing in the outside world.

Tbh i think the main difference between ineffable qualic things like colour or feelings and also other things like rocks which we can define very well, is that describable objects are defined from a spatiotemporal coordinate system so you can mediate them easily in language or drawings or other analogies that also use spatiotemporal coordinates to define them. Emotions and colour are not derived on spatial maps which makes it impossible to have analogies that can be used to describe them. I think its a communication issue. Not that one type of information is qualitatively different to another.

>>9518140

>>9518281
>would've been: "why do particular configurations of matter don't give rise to consciousness?" Because it seems nobody has thought about the possibility of consciousness being a relative attribute rather than an absolute.

There are ralks about this in this post i think. Integration theory.

>>9503620
This is just the basic block universe view innit?
>>9504125
Because those are the laws of physics. As for why they are what they are, I've no idea, except that intuitively Tegmark's ultimate ensemble thing makes sense.

Consciousness is the medium of the pure intuitions of time and space and nothing more.

>>9518281
lol

>>9518027
Where do I go to study it? Do they teach it in biology courses?

This is where I want to get to eventually https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3hPvusB0ds

>>9504546
>>9504570
Really read carefully what Dennett says. He is a panpsychist and afraid to admit it. Chalmers even confronted him on this once.

>>9518543
I've read Dennett's stuff and I don't see how that could be the case. He's strongly opposed to the proposition that any sort of reported mental phenomena really exist beyond being a narrative center of gravity i.e. there is no actual object that constitutes your center of gravity but we can pretend it exists and get use out of that act of pretending. He also makes a point of insisting what does exist underlying reported mental phenomena is brain activity, which is also completely opposite to the stance all things are mental phenomena.
I think people (probably yourself included) who are convinced reported mental phenomena are real might project panpsychism onto Dennett because he argues againet dualism and you personally don't buy that the one sort of substance remaining after you dispell dualism could be physical instead of mental.
Also Chalmers "calling someone out" isn't something to weight much value to considering he literally wrote a paper on "what it's like to be a thermostat."
>>9518148
Everyone knows about the claimed "hard problem," not everyone agrees there is such a thing. The idea of a "hard problem" also comes from David "what is it like to be a thermostat" Chalmers and I'd estimate more people than not have signficantly different views on this topic compared to his own.

>>9518615
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00201748908602190

>>9518140
>If you're arguing against the existence of "qualia" then you'd be looking for the opposite: that there are physical / behavioral mechanisms accounting for why people report having "qualia.
It seems trivial that there is such a thing. How else could we even have this discussion about "qualia" by typing with our physical hands controlled by our physical nervous system?

>>9518644
That only includes the first page, but you're welcome to try to make your own argument that Dennett being a panpsychist is more than just people who believe in panpsychism projecting onto his anti-dualism with their own assumption that the one sort of substance in a non-dualistic universe can't be physical.

>>9518685
>It seems trivial that there is such a thing.
You say that, but just a few posts above you another anon has asserted there is no fundamental difference between a rock vs. the notion of "what it's like to see blue:"
>>9518292
^And speaking of this post, my response to this:
>Tbh i think the main difference between ineffable qualic things like colour or feelings and also other things like rocks which we can define very well, is that describable objects are defined from a spatiotemporal coordinate system so you can mediate them easily in language or drawings or other analogies that also use spatiotemporal coordinates to define them.
Is I completely disagree. We have an example of how scenarios without an independent world are structured: They're dreams, and they are very different from waking scenarios. I absolutely cannot manifest a telecommunications system and post a message to you through it using my will alone. I can only send this message because many different people did a massive amount of work learning how the physical world actually works and applying it to networking and computer science. This is not just a matter of it being easier to map to language, the notions of reported "experience" can be altered in dreams or on drugs i.e. just through manipulation of the subject, whereas no amount of subject manipulation will change how an actual telecommunications network operates.

>>9518769
>no amount of subject manipulation will change how an actual telecommunications network operates

Incorrect, cut a few wires

>>9518769
>You say that, but just a few posts above you another anon has asserted there is no fundamental difference between a rock vs. the notion of "what it's like to see blue:"
With "such a thing", I meant a physical correlate of whatever we call "qualia", not "qualia" itself. However I disagree that discovering the physical correlates of qualia would disprove that qualia exist. It would just show that they aren't magical.

>>9518784
Cutting wires isn't "subject manipulation," at least not in the sense I'm using that phrase.
To clarify, no amount of manipulation of a subject (person) will change a telecommunications network in any directly causal way e.g. feeding someone psilocybin isn't going to make wires disappear just because that person's notions of what they're "experiencing" has been altered.

>>9518790
I don't see how "qualia" (if defined as something other than and additional to behavior and physiology) could ever both exist and be non-magical. To go with the low hanging fruit there I'd see big problems with interaction between these two sorts of phenomena (physical and extraphysical). In a way this is a good problem though because it makes the "qualia" realism claim falsifiable-- Would just need to test whether there is anything the brain does physically that behaves differently from what ordinary physics alone would predict. The reason this would work as a test is because interaction by definition cannot exist without impacting the behavior of the things that are interacting.
I don't think any such impact on the brain not explained by ordinary physics will ever be found.

>>9518734
Well you see that's the great thing about Dennett, you can project whatever view you'd like onto him, because his arguments inevitably boil down to "Consiousness isn't magic". From there he just goes on to trying to pose everyone he disagrees with as believing in magic.

>>9518817
OK, at least you admit you don't have an argument then, will proceed to disregard your future posts.

>>Dennett also has a response to the "Mary the color scientist" thought experiment. He argues that Mary would not, in fact, learn something new if she stepped out of her black and white room to see the color red. Dennett asserts that if she already truly knew "everything about color", that knowledge would include a deep understanding of why and how human neurology causes us to sense the "quale" of color. Mary would therefore already know exactly what to expect of seeing red, before ever leaving the room. Dennett argues that the misleading aspect of the story is that Mary is supposed to not merely be knowledgeable about color but to actually know all the physical facts about it, which would be a knowledge so deep that it exceeds what can be imagined, and twists our intuitions.

How do people take this man seriously? This is 6 year old argument tactics.

>>9518812
Idealists wouldn't tear their asses over qualia if wasn't magical, it's the whole point.

>>9518281
>a true scientific mind would have called it a physical phenomenon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUW7n_h7MvQ

>>9518812
>I'd see big problems with interaction between these two sorts of phenomena (physical and extraphysical)
Interaction could be one-way. Pic related.

>>9518812
>>9518953
To elaborate: As of now, I think some form of panpsychic epiphenomenalism is most plausible, i.e. mental events are caused by physical events (but do not cause them) and mental events, to quote SEP, are fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world.

>>9518861
>How do people take this man seriously?
Because the alternative is believing there's a somehow extra-physical pixie magic in need of a new science to account for, on the basis of taking reported "experience" claims literally even though there has never been any independently verifiable evidence any part of the physical world is behaving in a way physics is falling short of predicting where new "qualia" science will fill in the blanks.
If you do a formal study and someone reports a certain kind of "experience," you cite their *report* as the evidence for what you're looking into (or maybe a brain scan). You don't cite their "experience." Because you have no reason to assume the report has any sort of truth value to it. What you have is a report.
And all that said there isn't any attempted explanation of the reported "qualia" claim that doesn't go against your intuitions one way or another. The whole point of why this is such a contentious topic is that whatever the explanation it definitely isn't anything close to intuitive or else everyone would agree on the answer. So just pointing to a Dennett quote and saying it's obviously childish and untrue isn't a very reasonable approach here.
>>9518953
I don't believe an interaction could be detectable one way only unless you really mean a reductive stance where there's no impact in the direction back towards the physical because the non-physical component is abstract and fictional (and I would agree with that stance if it is what you mean).
>>9518959
I don't believe that because I think the way the world predictable through maths and physics is extremely different from the reported "experiential" world like in dreams or on drugs. The latter seems determined by the condition of the reporting party's physical brain while the former adheres to little details that no one subject needs to be aware of for this adherence to happen. Physical systems like computers only work when you take this difference seriously.

>>9519224
>If you do a formal study and someone reports a certain kind of "experience," you cite their *report* as the evidence for what you're looking into (or maybe a brain scan). You don't cite their "experience." Because you have no reason to assume the report has any sort of truth value to it. What you have is a report.

This is a non sequitur but I'm sure you are aware of that.

>>9519285
It's not, the difference between a report and the claimed "experience" reported is the fundamental topic being discussed.

>>9519348
Are you talking about a person's report to themselves, or other people's reports to a person?

>>9518959
>i.e. mental events are caused by physical events (but do not cause them) and mental events, to quote SEP, are fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world.
But if you look at mental events that way, there *has to be* some sort of interaction from the mental events back to the physical realm. Otherwise, how could we ever even contemplate mental phenomena with our physical brain?

>>9519471
In the case you're responding to I'm referring to a person in a study making a report of "experience," but outside of that context I would agree that people also make reports "to themselves."
This is a claim that often leads to an argument about how reporting to yourself doesn't make any sense. But I maintain it makes perfect sense and the apparent lack of sense is only due to the sloppiness of how we use "self" as a concept. In normal everyday conversation we tend to lazily apply "self" to anything a given person does as though their brain were running one incredibly simple unified program that does everything.
In reality, the brain is running many different convoluted, overlapping, and always changing patterns of activity, and the "self" idea is more like an after the fact story used to try to rationalize all that activity together into a convenient lie about what "you" have been doing.
And constantly these different patterns of activity bounce off of one another, with varying degrees of autonomy to the extent where you can say one pattern is effectively reporting information to another pattern.
To bring this back to a more concrete / specific example, I'd point to memory. If you form a memory of having had an "experience" of "seeing blue" when taking in visual stimuli of the sky, you now not only have the visual stimuli your brain activity is responding off of-- You have the additional pattern of the report one instance of brain activity made to other instances of brain activity which constitute your memory of what you believe you "experienced." And this additional pattern can then be bounced off of by brain activity in similar ways to how the original stimuli was bounced off of by brain activity. I'm of the opinion this sort of reportability explanation goes a long way towards accounting for alleged "qualia" without the need to claim any of said alleged "qualia" are literal phenomena in need of a new "hard problem" science.

>>9518798
Let me first say I am not the one you've been speaking to (though I was the one you replied to just now).
I agree that the wire would still exist even if you weren't experiencing its existence. However, I don't see how that lends your argument any more or less credibility. Whether what you experience is reflective of real reality is not the question, the question is whether there is a "you" that is experiencing things. Meaning, blindsight doesn't mean anything - you can still be fed false information. Actually, it would lend credence what you are arguing against. If one can still act without "experiencing" it, then action is not dictated by experience. If this is the case, experience is not necessary (yet still exists). This would lend credence to the idea of there being an independent "self".

>>9520038
>I agree that the wire would still exist even if you weren't experiencing its existence. However, I don't see how that lends your argument any more or less credibility.
The specific thing being argued at that point was whether there was a distinction between the claimed reference of the report "I'm seeing blue" vs. an actual rock in the physical world.
If you agree there's an independent physical world (and it sounds like you do given your statement about the wire existing regardless of anyone's sensory responses to it or lack of sensory responses to it), then that means you agree with my side of that specific argument.
>Whether what you experience is reflective of real reality is not the question
No, that most certainly is the question, with a bit of adjustment anyway-- I wouldn't say "whether what you experience is reflective of reality," I would say "whether the alleged 'experience' you report is literally real.'
>the question is whether there is a "you" that is experiencing things
I completely disagree with that. The question of a "you" (e.g. whether there is a "you," and what underlies this concept of "you" if it doesn't really map to the unified action orchestrating thing "we" tend to treat "it" as) is something different from the question of whether "qualia" actually exist in a non-fictional way. You could potentially have a "you" and not have "qualia," or not have a "you" and have "qualia," or have a "you" and have "qualia," or not have a "you" and not have "qualia." They concepts are distinct and not necessarily dependent on each other.. The claim there's an "experience of seeing blue" can be debated just as easily between people who do believe in a literal "self" as it can between people who instead believe "self" is an after the fact rationalization that isn't really responsible for any of what the brain does.
>If one can still act without "experiencing" it
You're conflating "experience" with "behaving as though there is an experience."

I think emergency is the right answer here. Simple things giving rise to complexity each of its individual parts cannot achieve on their own. Like a colony of ants or atoms forming matter. Or matter giving rise to consciousness, assuming the latter is a thing.

>>9520095
I don't think emergence is really an answer for anything here. You can in fact explain how ants result in an ant colony or how atoms result in matter through the individual parts, the emergence is just a case of it becoming a useful alternative to start speaking in terms of the new more built up super-structure instead of speaking in terms of the more granular component parts. There's nothing about an ant colony that defies ant based explanation.

>>9520112
I don't think there's a much better answer to what OP is asking though. OP is not asking about the exact process (how) but the reason of it even happening (why); the latter is through emergency. We've got a bunch of cells that interact together, and a specific configuration is able to give rise to consciousness.

This, however, might not be just a human property and nearly everything could have consciousness. We're not even sure if consciousness requires neurons or not.

>>9520132
I don't see how emergence constitutes a reason. You're just saying maybe matter produces "consciousness."

>>9520140
To be honest, consciousness is still a fuzzy term because we haven't even defined it properly and we don't even know whether it's just something us humans have, if most or every being with a neuronal system have, or if it's intrinsecal to matter (panpsychism is being considered as a hypothesis by some scientists; if proven, consciousness is probably not related to intelligence at all).

>>9519224
>extra-physical pixie magic

>>9520152
Maybe the "pixie" part was unfair, but the "extra-physical" and "magic" parts were an accurate assessment.

>conciousness
>special for some reason

>>9520158
Yeah, it's going to be pretty embarrassing after aliens make first contact with us and realize we've dedicated this much effort to obsessing over how special our own skull jelly must be.

>>9520177
that's not what I had in mind at all

>There are neural correlates of consciousness
>Therefore, consciousness is an illusion/does not exist

This is the core argument of hard problem deniers. I have yet to see a coherent explanation of how the second follow from the first. And if you think this is a straw man correct with your own propositions, but good luck with that.

I'm very much ok with leaving consciousness as an open question. But for people to believe that the book is closed and shut on this issue is just absurd to me. We aren't even close to understanding the majority of these neural correlates that they harp on so heavily.

>>9520186
Physicalism is not eliminative.

>>9520186
I do think it's a bit of a strawman; this sort of argument is often posed by people not really familiar with what the hard problem is about.

An actual response to the hard problem from an eliminativist would look something like the following:

>What you say about consciousness can be traced to physical processes in the brain.
>The human brain has evolved to maximize babymaking, not understand the nature of itself.
>Therefore, your intuitions about phenomenal consciousness are most likely wrong.
>There is no phenomenal consciousness, only behavior.

this guy is so difficult to listen to... so much autism
but I don't feel he is contradicting me, all he is saying that, in all cases, we will still be left with the great questions, where do we come from? where do we go? what is life? We may be able to manipulate or even create consciousness but we would never be able to fully understand or conserve it.

>>9518499
Comp Sci and Logic (from Philosophy), the teachings of Logic is the key to understand automatons. It's about syntactic and semantic language analysis and how to build meaningful languages.

>>9518944
this guy is so difficult to listen to... so much autism
but I don't feel he is contradicting me, all he is saying that, in all cases, we will still be left with the great questions, where do we come from? where do we go? what is life? We may be able to manipulate or even create consciousness but we would never be able to fully understand or conserve it.

>>9518499
Comp Sci and Logic (from Philosophy), the teachings of Logic is the key to understand automatons. It's about syntactic and semantic language analysis and how to build meaningful languages.

>>9520186
>We aren't even close to understanding the majority of these neural correlates that they harp on so heavily.
I think you're still not touching on the key of the hard problem: even if we would understand all these neural correlates in minute detail, we would still not be any closer to an answer to the hard problem.

>>9503620
nothing to do with general relativity and everything to do with nonsense wording that idiots would buy

>>9504178
>a thermostat is conscious
thats a braindead bastardization of the word

it seems like every heavily discussed word ends up boiling down to "x is everything";"everything is everything"

>>9504563
>time-symmetric determinism
why is everyone wetting their pants over other's baseless philosophies?

>>9518769
you dont understand what im tryigng to say. Yes there is an independent world and we can use it but that doesnt necessarily day anything bout the representatjonal nature of information in our brain. I agree yes there is an outside world and it works but thats not my point.

Do you accept that sensory input is not isomorphic to the outside world?

Your dream analogy is seriously flawed because all information in dreams and imagination is gathered from the outside world. We dont make it up. Its becoming more accepted that disembodied cognition like dreaming is sampling a generative model of our sensory inputs. I think if you look at neuroscience now youll see how normal waking state is oncreasingly seen as the same as things like dream states or psychotic ones. Jist constrained. Inferential fictive constructs of the world. Not designed to be true but to work.

The analogy is of scientists cannot prove their theories and must make undue assumptions about the world.
The only thing a scientist can do is make predictions and see if they work. This doesnt prove theories because there can be better ones.

Our brain is the same it makes hypotheses and falsifies them. It cannot prove what it perceives and there may be better models of the world. Infact there has to be. The brain also tries to minimise the cost of producing models.
Now please dont try to conflate the brains use of models and scientific models of the world. This convo is about how the brain makes models of perception not what we can say in a scientific or philosophical sense.

>>9518769

>>9518769

Do you remember my point. We can perceive the same environment in variohs ways. Vision hearing freling echolocation infrared etc etc. There are huge number of ways to get a perceptual representation of the environment and they are all necessarily very different. It shows that though there is an objective world there are a huge number of ways we can represent (not it) but meaningful correlations and relations within it. And so in this sense you do underestimate how subjective your notion of a rock is as its dependent on your ecological niche and your sensory inputs. E.g. what is a computer to a cat. You also talk as if colour doesnt have a representational meaning in the real world.

You also didnt even rebut what i said. I just think the problem is qualia is that its unintelligible to other people and the reason for this that the way things like colour and emotions arent defined by spatial relations on a 2d field. When this happens you can make communicable abstract analogies. Not to do with an essential different nature between them.

I think our problem with qualia is purely a descriptive one. And i have to say i think your use of the independent world as a standing point is redundant if a universal absolute essentialistic notion of it cant be stood on epistemically. And it cant. It can in an abstract sense but not concretely.

>>9519224
What if you think that their brain activity identical to the experience?

>>9520186
>This is the core argument of hard problem deniers.
No it isn't. For one thing you started out by assuming "consciousness" is an actual thing by writing:
>There are neural correlates of consciousness
Which of course doesn't make sense when you say it doesn't exist in the second line because you're effectively saying "X exists therefore X doesn't exist." Nobody is making that argument.
The real argument is "there's no reason to assume just because people report having ''qualia' that this means their reports are referring to a real non-physical phenomenon in need of a new science to account for."
People who believe there is a "hard problem" are the ones taking the extra step by assuming the fact we report something means what we report must correspond to a real thing existing physical science doesn't explain.
There is no burden of proof on anyone who refrains from making that unnecessary assumption.

>>9519224
I dont see how the corroboration of evidence has anything to do with the existence of something. Many things have existed which we havent had good evidence of until now. Doesnt mean they dont. I also dont see how why ones personal experience or "report" has to be automatically invalidated. We evaluate evidence through our own experience, how would we corroborate evidence like you say if our experiences cannot be reliable or useable. Im also am writing under the assumption that notions of qualia dont necessarily need to be extra-physical. I dont think that at all.

For your last paragraph: we do experience the outside world through the same experiential world. Cars may drive independent of our experience but we do need experience aka a brain to observe, understand and express the fact the car is driving or moving. Or even the concept of it.

>>9519224

>>9519545
What if you look from the perspective that mental and physical events are just two different observable expressions of the same reality.

>>9520495
>>9520504
I already did make a distinction between your reported "experience" of "seeing" or otherwise "sensing" a rock vs. the actual rock.
Similarly, I already did make a distinction between your reported "experience" of "seeing blue" vs. an actual physical phenomenon like light.
There is a major difference between an independent real world phenomenon vs. subject specific reported notions of "experience." This major difference is why it does make sense to refer to the latter as "fictional" and why not all things are "fictional" in that way (which was the original thing you disagreed with that prompted this whole tangent).
>Do you accept that sensory input is not isomorphic to the outside world?
Nobody would ever claim sensory input is identical to the entirety of the independently world, for a number of reasons e.g. obviously no one receives sensory data about everything that exists in the entire universe and obviously human eyes don't normally take in visual stimuli from the vast majority of the electromagnetic spectrum.
>all information in dreams and imagination is gathered from the outside world. We dont make it up.
The point is you could very easily, in a dream, believe you've magically conjured a computer into existence through willpower alone and that it works and lets you post messages to a website, whereas regardless of what you believe while awake your computer will only work if a massive amount of discernment and application of physical phenomena have taken place. Dreams being influenced by the outside world doesn't invalidate that difference. There are two different levels of scenario in a dream, one is the independent physical world and the other is the plot of the dream. The outside world influence is an issue of that first level, not the second level. The brain's activity for example is at that first level i.e. it exists in the world and not just as a plot point in your dream. Character limit, will continue.

>>9520112
Yes this is true but its much easier to explain things in terms of super structures than every single interacting part.

Plus superstructures are relevant and interesting to our lives. We could talk about wind purely in terms of partical interactions but thats not necessarily useful to us living in a macroscopic world. Same applies to explaining behaviour and thinking.

>>9519762
I agree with this but your problem is you use words which make you sound like youre talking about something completely different.
E.g. behaving as if had an experience isnt that clear. But seems like youre basically saying there is only neuronal activity and experience cannot be scientifically analysed (or explained) above reference to this activity (or communicated intersubjective reports).

Consciousness is the epiphenomenal result of the maximization of integrated information at 500 microseconds, the rate at which mammal brains hum. We're reacting in a real universe with rigid properties, but human life as a matter of phenomenology is an illusion born of a particular arrangement in matter. This isn't surprising or mysterious, but an adaptive function in mammal evolution.

The mammal brain is constructed such that it behaves like a fishing net in a river or a radio antenna. It manifests consciousness and mind by giving them tangibility through the rapid exchanging of particular information. The real, scientifically measurable world is where these interactions take place, but the epiphenomenal result, consciousness, is the first person experience of human life formed out of human physiology reacting in the real world.

Natural laws select for neurobiology in the form of a camera which takes very low resolution images and is utterly incapable of capturing the world in itself due the incommensurability of information foreign to evolutionary advantage manifested in biological reality. Since we're trapped inside this camera we're limited to imprecise representations of the actual world in the form of language and other false, remembered aspects of human experience (the predictive nature of experience is necessary because without it we would be completely disoriented by a single non-contextualized input. We see what we expect to see. Inputs are filtered through a network of prior experiences and appraised as their manifestation in the mind's eye. The criterion of their judgement is evolutionary advantage). Math and measurement are the closest things we have to actual truth since they're perfectly predictive and rationally proportional to what's actual there, but since these things are ultimately ideas constructed from symbols of the mind what's actually there can never be exactly known or expressed.

>>9520495
>>9520504
>>9520562
Continuing: You could have a dream plot where your brain mutates from nuclear radiation after WWIII bombings happen which gives you the ability to read other survivors' minds. This is *very* different from the brain in your head, in the independent world, that exists and ultimately generates the activity allowing that dream plot to happen. We should not confuse the two. Your actual brain is what's influenced by the outside world, the dream plot brain is a total fiction with no adherence to any sort of physical cause and effect logic. The dream could introduce literally any ridiculous premise conceivable and none of it will require any sort of logical underpinning like a happenstance of the real world would have.
In the real world if you send someone to the moon you have to actually do the work of learning physics and rocketry and properly applying it to make it happen. In a dream plot none of that work is required and it's sufficient for travel to the moon to simply happen even though neither you nor any of your dream characters have any understanding of physics or rocketry.
This is the basis for my use of "fictional" vs. "real." There are fictional assertions the brain deals in which are entirely tied to you as the subject and these are not the same as the real happenstances which operate regardless of your own brain activity and beliefs. You being under anesthesia doesn't stop the Earth from revolving. I don't even see this as up for debate really that this difference matters in an extremely significant way. The fictional reference point of "what it's like to see some rock" is 100% tied to you personally and isn't at all the same as a real world rock that exists before you were born and will exist after you die. We have useful behavior in response to the former as an additional adaptation beyond just responding to a real world rock like an amoeba without creating an abstract reference point to further respond to (might continue again)

>>9520495
>>9520504
>>9520562
>>9520594
>I think if you look at neuroscience now youll see how normal waking state is oncreasingly seen as the same as things like dream states or psychotic ones.
The whole reason I brought up dreams is because I'm arguing they *are* the same as the fictional reference points we report as "experience." I never argued they were different.
I think you're confusing the fictional reference points we report as "experience" with the independent physical world. I've been arguing that independent world is what's radically different from dream plots or the useful fictional abstractions we behave around while awake. I really want to make it clear that there's a huge difference between fictional notions your brain makes use of vs. real world phenomena.
>We can perceive the same environment in variohs ways
There is a huge difference between the fictional reference points you report when "perceiving" vs. the environment itself.
>And so in this sense you do underestimate how subjective your notion of a rock is
There is a huge difference between the fictional reference points you report as "seeing a rock" vs. the rock itself.
>what is a computer to a cat
There is a huge difference between the fictional reference points a cat behaves around when interacting with a computer vs. the computer itself.
>You also talk as if colour doesnt have a representational meaning in the real world
There is a huge difference between the fictional reference points of "seeing color" vs. light itself.
>I just think the problem is qualia is that its unintelligible to other people and the reason for this that the way things like colour and emotions arent defined by spatial relations on a 2d field
No, no, no. I can't say no to this enough. There is a huge difference between the fictional "qualia" you report having vs. the real world. It's not just a matter of "qualia" being difficult to describe because it's not spatial.

>I am aware of being a P-zombie

.t hard problem deniers

>I am experiencing the illusion of consciousness

.t hard problem deniers

>>9520562
But we cannot make this distinction based on experience alone... its epistemically impossible.

Think in analogies to think therefore i am and descartes problems validating his experience. One cannot make a consistent distinction.

The only way you can do that is to make reference to an outside world scientific world. This would mean that the distinction is not intrinsic to the experiences we are comparing.


In your last paragrapgh surely the fact that you have real rocks and dream rocks actually works against your argument. If youre saying the only difference is the extrinsic physical world (which is true) then this stops being a comparison about different mental phenomena doesnt it.
>>9520562

Belief in qualia is literally dumber than belief in god.

>>9520619
Yes independent world is different to experience. The point is that the independemt world is not objectively accessible.

The last part is that our descriptions of the physical world are mental constructs. Some are ineffable amd incommunicable like colours and others are not. We call the former qualia. The raw experiemce even though all of our other constructs are also borne out of mental inference and are so. This is an essential part of how we define qualia no? Albeit this view gives ontological and epistemic primacy to the mind. But that is a necessary revelation at times.

>>9520619
Yes independent world is different to experience. The point is that the independemt world is not objectively accessible.

The last part is that our descriptions of the physical world are mental constructs. Some are ineffable amd incommunicable like colours and others are not. We call the former qualia. The raw experiemce even though all of our other constructs are also borne out of mental inference and are so. This is an essential part of how we define qualia no? Albeit this view gives ontological and epistemic primacy to the mind. But that is a necessary revelation at times.

I think this hard problem is a necessry paradox. I think there is no hard problem scientifically but under the construal of a universal ontology there is a hard problem for conscious agents that invent an objective universe of why there is a "what its like". I dont think they can ever be reconciled. Will always be a barrier by the nature of indirect realism. Universalist ontology must be given away and known that ontology and epistemics are inseparable.

>>9520082
> I wouldn't say "whether what you experience is reflective of reality," I would say "whether the alleged 'experience' you report is literally real.'

That seems like a baseless rejection. Why would the qualia, or in this case the 'self' need an objective view of reality?

Also, your question is nonsensical when it is put your way. If we experience a "self", or "qualia", then they exist. This isn't to say that qualia leads to action, but that experience exists which is unquestionable - illusion or not.

>whether there is a "you," and what underlies this concept of "you" if it doesn't really map to the unified action orchestrating thing "we" tend to treat "it" as

A meaningless distinction, you are defining experience as being a precursor to every action - it need not be. Experience also need not be reflective of reality. In fact, the fact that it can be fooled is evidence of its existence rather than it being an illusion.

>You're conflating "experience" with "behaving as though there is an experience."

No, I'm not. I strictly stated that experience is independent of action. See: If one can still act without "experiencing" it, then action is not dictated by experience

>>9520575
*500 milliseconds

>This qualia that I am experiencing is surely just an illusion due to the mechanisms of neural processing
>This qualia that I am experiencing
>I am experiencing...

oh....

>>9503556
all is consciousness, physical reality doesn't exist. "physical reality" is an idea in your "head" or "brain" both of which are also just ideas/thoughts/concepts and not real things. relative things, objective things, dualism, these are illusions of the thinking mind, the rational mind. but when you look into it you realize that "rationality" isn't all that rational. it's all either circular logic or infinite regress.

parmenides, eastern philosophers, and the first skeptics seemed to understand the truth about reality and consciousness but most don't wanna listen, they're having too much fun spewing their bullshit.

>>9522381
Exactly. Even if qualia is a product of neural correlates and even identical, you have to be a fucking dense idiot to ignkre that we have experience. Utter cunts.

Is it solipsistic in here or is it just me?

>>9503598
We define a certain configuration of matter to be an automobile. Unless you’re of the position that subjective experience does not actually exist, that’s not the case with consciousness, which is not defined by the structure of the brain. What you’re doing is sophistry

>>9505651
>consciousness exists therefore all my opinions on it are true and indisputable

>>9503620
This isn’t even a point related to the subject. Why shouldn’t each ‘slice’ of me experience anything at all?

>>9520575
thanks, this definition satisfies me.

now can someone please point the philosophers to with their qualia mumbo jumbo to >>>/x/ ?

it hurts so much reading this incomprehensible bullshit.

>>9522918
They're trying to articulate particular contents of consciousness. Just as there are particular properties of the real world, so too with our subjective experiences. The measurements in relative states of being are commensurate across common experience. Art and intimacy are the most common mediums for communicating such information, continental philosophy is the articulation of our shared illusion of being.

>>9522381
That's more of a semantic gotcha than an attack of an actual flaw in their argument.

They are stating that "experience of qualia" is nothing more than a functional system reporting that it experiences qualia. It's deceiving itself about the nature of its own mind. To quote Dennett: "It merely seems to you that you are conscious, but you aren't."

To truly attack this you need to make the argument that the phenomenal knowledge you have is undeniable, and that you cannot be deceived that you do experience phenomenal things.

>>9522381
That's more of a semantic gotcha than showcasing an actual flaw in their argument.

They are stating that "experience of qualia" is nothing more than a functional system reporting that it experiences qualia. It's deceiving itself about the nature of its own mind. To quote Dennett: "It merely seems to you that you are conscious, but you aren't."

To truly attack this you need to make the argument that the phenomenal knowledge you have is undeniable, and that you cannot be deceived that you do experience phenomenal things.

>>9523743

Only a conscious being could convince itself it's not conscious. Think about it.

>>9523746
>"It merely seems to you that you are conscious, but you aren't."
>It merely seems to you
>seems to you

What do you know... there it is again.

>>9523746
>To truly attack this you need to make the argument that the phenomenal knowledge you have is undeniable, and that you cannot be deceived that you do experience phenomenal things.

This is a self defeating argument. In order to be deceived in the first place, you need something which can experience deception. Key word here is experience.

>>9523772
>>9523748

Only if you necessitate that deception requires a phenomenal subject. With a functionalist/computational view of the mind, you don't need to be phenomenally aware to be deceived. When the computer asks you to input what day it is, and you lie, that is a deception in this view. The computer instantiates information that is not true. Eliminativists argue that this is how it works in your brain as well, just with more layers of complexity.

>>9523784

The computer isn't asking anything, nor does it have any concept of deception or days of the week, it's simply running code (that was created by a conscious being). That view doesn't work I'm afraid.

>>9520715
>I am aware of being a P-zombie
This comes down to the need to be clear about what our words mean and to do the work of cutting them down to rigorous size, because if you go into this topic with sloppy baggage filled multiple meaning words like how you're using "aware" in that sentence you won't get anywhere.
Awareness in the sense someone arguing eliminative materialism is arguing isn't qualia, it's just the capacity to refer to something. As an example here's a paper about a robot that passed the mirror test (something usually given to animals where they're marked somewhere on their body they can't normally see while under anesthesia and then given a mirror to see if they notice the mark on themselves using the image of the mark on their body in the mirror).
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pmichel/publications/Michel-SelfRecognition.pdf
At this point you can claim the robot has qualia. But I think the better use of this information is to say that the mere act of being able to reference something isn't the same as the thing people like Chalmers are trying to prove exists with thought experiments like the p-zombie argument. A p-zombie can refer to itself or any number of other things. Referring to things isn't interchangeable with qualia existing.

>your experience of consciousness is an illusion, therefore consciousness does not exist

This is a semantic word came. You are shifting the defining of consciousness from its first usage to its second usage.

The THINGS which you are experiencing are illusory, yes. But the fact that you are experiencing something is what we mean by consciousness. Well what I mean at least. Dennett can bend definitions all he wants but that doesnt make him right. The factuality of what is being experiencing does not have any impact on the fact that you are experiencing something.

>>9523818
Keep moving those goal posts and changing definitions.

>>9523800
>The computer isn't asking anything
Yes it is.
>nor does it have any concept of deception
Having a concept of deception isn't the same as having the capacity to be deceived.
>or days of the week
It does have some concept of days of the week. It takes in information about days of the week and behaves in response to the information. Just because this is an extremely primitive and shallow concept doesn't make it not a concept.
>it's simply running code
You're simply running code.

>>9523825
Nothing's being "changed." You cannot have a meaningful discussion with ambiguous terms, the first step to getting anywhere is to be specific about what you mean. But of course you don't want a meaningful or honest discussion, you just want to fling poop because the topic upsets you.

>>9523800
>The computer isn't asking anything, nor does it have any concept of deception or days of the week
With more layers of complexity, it could.

>it's simply running code (that was created by a conscious being)
Yes, and as the computational theory of the mind argues, that's in a roundabout way just what the brain does too.

>That view doesn't work I'm afraid.
It doesn't work because you refuse to even try to comprehend views you disagree with. I'm actually a very strong defender of the hard problem, but "It's wrong because it's wrong" is a shitty argument.

>Optical Illusions exist
>Therefore, consciousness doesn't

Nice one Dennett-san

>>9523826

>Yes it is.

Nope, you are reading a question off a machine. If I read a question in a book, is that book asking a question, or is the author?

>Having a concept of deception isn't the same as having the capacity to be deceived.

Both require consciousness to work. If you truly believe that your experience is a deception, then how do you know that's not a deception too?

>It does have some concept of days of the week. It takes in information about days of the week and behaves in response to the information. Just because this is an extremely primitive and shallow concept doesn't make it not a concept.

So when I press the print button on my printer, the printer has a concept of printing as well as knowing concepts about the things it is printing?

>You're simply running code.

This is like socially acceptable schizophrenia.

>>9523836
>With more layers of complexity, it could.

Citation needed. This is like saying that a computer plane simulator could become an actual plane once the graphics get to a certain complexity. It can only ever simulate, it can never become the actual thing it is simulating.

>Yes, and as the computational theory of the mind argues, that's in a roundabout way just what the brain does too.

Therefore the brain was created by a conscious being?

>>9523925
>If I read a question in a book, is that book asking a question, or is the author?
Are you familiar with the original thought experiment behind the phrase "Turing machine?" I will lazily link to and quote from the relevant wikipedia article in case you or others following this discussion are not:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine
>A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation that defines an abstract machine,[1] which manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules.[2] Despite the model's simplicity, given any computer algorithm, a Turing machine capable of simulating that algorithm's logic can be constructed.[3]
So actually a question in a book isn't that far off from the original symbols on a tape of a Turing machine.
At this point you might object "that's what I'm saying though, that programs aren't the same as people!"
But I want to be clear that the concept of a Turing machine is the fundamental thing all computation (with a couple nitpicky attempted exceptions which I won't get into here) boils down to. And while there are people (like Penrose) who claim human brains do something more (in terms of cognition, not in terms of supporting bodily processes like breathing which is trivially different from what computation does and not really relevant to the topic) than what a Turing machine can do, nobody as far as I know has come up with an irrefutable proof cognitive functionality is definitely not a computable thing.
So two possibilities from here: A) You prove the brain's cognitive functionality is not computable and you'll be right about both programs and books not asking questions or B) People eventually succeed at building Turing machines which result in programs that can do what we do cognition-wise, in which case, as counterintuitive and "schizophrenic" as it may seem to you, the programs and the book can be said to be asking a question because what we do when asking question will reduce to what they do.

>>9523962

Yes I'm well aware of the Turing machine. However, the Turing machine was constructed by conscious beings, its inputs come from conscious beings, its programmed processing of the inputted data comes from conscious beings, and its output is interpreted by conscious beings.

What's more likely? That something separate from the physical world exists and we call this "consciousness", or that non-conscious matter magically simulates consciousness while having no concept of consciousness (because how could it?).

Not only is this happening, but this non-conscious stuff is simulating the concept of deception, and letting you in on the deception, so it's not really a deception any more, or is it? Is it a deception of a deception? I mean where do you stop with this nonsense?

>>9524003
>What's more likely? That something separate from the physical world exists and we call this "consciousness", or that non-conscious matter magically simulates consciousness while having no concept of consciousness (because how could it?).
Neither? How are you getting those two as the only two possibilities? I guess the latter is the closest to what I'd agree with, except I wouldn't say it's magical, I wouldn't say it's merely "simulating" anything, and I wouldn't use a sloppy term like "consciousness."
Also your view isn't conventional despite your attempts to appeal to what seems normal vs. weird, the more standard view today is that the human brain is ultimately computable. People like Penrose and Searle are in the minority.

>>9523954
>Citation needed.
Well, it could certainly ask you things. Whether or not it could have concepts like we have comes down to what concepts actually are. Here the you could posit that a concept is just complex functions in your brain dictating behavior. Just as you have a concept of what a car is, a self driving car also has a concept of what a car is, so that it can keep its distance and avoid driving into them. You can say you don't think this is the case, but if I ask you what it is about humans that makes us conscious that a machine just can't have, you have no idea yourself, so why take such a strong stance on machines never being able to be conscious? If you say "it's just code", then I say, it's just neurons interacting. If phenomenal consciousness is a real, unknown phenomena, nothing stops it from existing in both machines and humans.

>This is like saying that a computer plane simulator could become an actual plane
Not necessarily. To qualify for being a "real plane", you'd have to be able to fly through the air. A simulator just simulates the process inside the computer. When it comes to having concepts, asking things, being conscious even, there isn't a strong reason to believe this is substrate dependent in that same way, i.e that it has to be instantiated in biology to qualify as having the same properties. If you have a strong reason, let me know what precisely that is. (note that saying we are conscious is not an argument, since that doesn't disprove that machines can be conscious too.)

>Therefore the brain was created by a conscious being?
In the computational view of the mind, the information processing of the brain is not fundamentally distinguished from a computer processing information. I'm not especially interested in whether or not the system was created by a conscious being or not; it says absolutely nothing about the conscious status of the system. If I grow a human in a lab, is it not conscious because I made it?

>>9524003
>non-conscious matter magically simulates consciousness while having no concept of consciousness
What do you think a brain is?
>this non-conscious stuff is simulating the concept of deception
The fact the brain uses non-true beliefs is not controversial or in question, not even in the slightest, so this is a ridiculous complaint. It would be harder to find examples of cases where the brain *is* dealing in terms of 100% fidelity to objective reality.

Animism is the only real answer here. there's a reason it was the first spirituality, it's the closest anyone's ever gonna get to how things really work.

>>9524011

Do you know what I mean when I type the word "awareness"?

If you don't know what that's referring to, then you must not be aware or you can't read English. If you do know what it's referring to, then you must also be aware, because only something that is aware, could know what awareness was in the first place.

Not only this, but if you know what non-consciousness is referring to (which you subscribe to), then you must also know what consciousness is, can't know one without the other, so how again does consciousness not exist?

>>9524030
> If you say "it's just code", then I say, it's just neurons interacting.

It's not just neurons firing in the brain. If you watched someone's brain lighting up, are you also experiencing what they're experiencing? If they think a thought, can you know what that thought is just by looking at neurons firing on a screen? If someone starts playing a song in their mind, can we all hear it?

There's a separation between experience, and what's being experienced. Science can study the latter, but not the former.

>To qualify for being a "real plane", you'd have to be able to fly through the air.

And by that logic I would say that to qualify for being conscious you have to be conscious in the first place. If you want to be something, you have to be that something, not a simulation, very simple.

>In the computational view of the mind, the information processing of the brain is not fundamentally distinguished from a computer processing information.

Pseudo-science. Where's the evidence for this wild claim?

>If I grow a human in a lab, is it not conscious because I made it?

Did you grow it, or did it grow itself? Like if I plant a seed and a plant grows, did I grow it or did it grow itself when it was in the right conditions?

>>9512593
What if we are all p zombies merely behaving as if we weren't and the feeling of consciousness is how it manifests?
We are all p zombies simulating what it is like to have a consciousness so our "acting" is better.

>>9503556
>consciousness
>>>/x/

>>9524076
>The first attempt at solving a problem is the best.

>>9524100
>if you know what non-consciousness is referring to (which you subscribe to)
Except that's wrong, I very clearly addressed that already you dishonest retard:
>>9524011
>I wouldn't use a sloppy term like "consciousness."
>I wouldn't use a sloppy term like "consciousness."
>I wouldn't use a sloppy term like "consciousness."

>>9524115

So what "non-sloppy" term would you use?

>>9524100
>It's not just neurons firing in the brain.
Again, that all hinges on us having phenomenal consciousness in the first place. You've essentially baked the conclusion into your premises. All the computationalist has to do is just deny that what you're talking about is more than a functional system being deceived about its nature.

>To qualify for being conscious you have to be conscious in the first place. If you want to be something, you have to be that something, not a simulation, very simple.
You're not actually addressing what I'm saying. Let's say I give it to you that you and me, along with other humans, have phenomenal consciousness. Now we say, gee, what is this thing, and try to figure out what it is. What's then to say that this can't in theory also exist on a computer, since you don't know what it is? I think drawing some hard line between real/not real when it comes to computers is not getting at an actual hard difference, but just subjective categorizations by us. Computers process information that results in output. We process information that results in output. We also happen to have phenomenal consciousness. Now tell me what it is in principle that prevents that machine to also have it. If you cannot know of anyone else's consciousness but your own, so how can you so firmly deny a machine's potential consciousness?

>Pseudo-science. Where's the evidence for this wild claim?
You're the one asserting that they are different. I could also dodge the actual argument and call that claim psudo-science, but I'm not a dishonest hack trying to defend my position to the death, while refusing to consider different points of view. :^)

>Did you grow it, or did it grow itself? Like if I plant a seed and a plant grows, did I grow it or did it grow itself when it was in the right conditions?
I don't see how the answer to that tells us anything about whether or not the plant is phenomenally conscious.

>>9524122
I would use different terms depending on what we're actually talking about. "Consciousness" is a bad word to use in a discussion like this because it's full of fifty different vague meanings and almost certainly no two people arguing about it will be using it in the same way.
It's a pet peeve of mine when people start mixing up qualia with the ability to reference something ("awareness"), or when people mix up qualia with having a concept of "self." When those conflations happen it becomes difficult to communicate and when you make the effort to help people like that by more clearly pinning down the meaning they accuse you of avoiding their argument, which is obnoxious since there's no way to deal with an argument based in a sloppy terms that doesn't involve clarifying with specifics.
But to try to pull back from all this mess and make a simple argument:
A) Any attempt at an explanation on this topic will seem weird. It's a weird topic. We should get over it.
B) The conventional view on everything people report about their own alleged mental states is that it's all a product of the physical brain. Evidence that made this view conventional includes the reliable way chemical agents or physical trauma produces changes in reported mental states.
C) If B is true, then other physical structures can probably produce the same results the brain can, at least in principle (in practice it might be very difficult).
D) Similarly, the conventional view on how brains work is through the connections between neurons, not something special about the neurons themselves like the Penrose theory claims, and this view leads to the likely possibility the brain's activity is computable.
E) If the brain is computable, then in principle it is not doing anything that any other Turing complete machine can't also do, which would support the eliminative materialism view that there is nothing more than physiology, computation, and behavior going on when mental states are reported.

>>9503598
>What philosophically separates a pile of dirt from an automobile?
any philosophy that can't separate the two should be ignored.

>>9508085
Is the Legend of Zelda lore the True Religion?

>>9524193
>any philosophy that can't separate the two should be ignored.
Enjoy samsara, pleb.

>>9524187
I like how you emphasise clarity of speech. Some people in this thread dont and it males conversation or debate impossible.

>>952410
Whats your view imbecile?summarise

Can someone precisely define the problem for me so i can work it out?

>>9503556
This thread is great.

My 0.02 dollars: consciousness is a figment of imagination. Everything is only physical but humans segregate it for the sake of organization/understanding. What fascinates me is not the underlying physical processes that produce/represent consciousness but the manner in which something goes from inanimate to animate, unconscious to conscious. If everything is only physical, then inanimate to animate is fundamentally as simple as boiling water to gas, which is both fascinating and terrifying.

>>9525578
>consciousness is a figment of imagination
Addendum: consciousness is thus a figment of consciousness. We are only "conscious" because we are conscious, ad infinitum. Peculiar observation.

>>9525581
Agreed and doesnt this make things difficult epistemically i.e. the onyology of the world and qualia etc. We dont have the tools when we view things from a mind.

>>9525578
>This thread is great.
No. Nobody has said anything important so far.

>>9525578
>What fascinates me is not the underlying physical processes that produce/represent consciousness but the manner in which something goes from inanimate to animate, unconscious to conscious.
You have to understand what produces consciousness in the first place, fuckwit imbecile.

>>9503620
stoner's bullshit.

>>9525576
To fully understand the problem, you have to first understand that consciousness is a broad term that can mean a lot of different things. Let's make it clear what kind of consciousness we're talking about first. Most commonly, consciousness simply refers to the function of the brain: How we react to environmental stimuli, control our behavior, categorize information, and use language. It seems like biology can in principle easily account for everything that goes on here. This leaves out the other side to consciousness, which is commonly referred to as "phenomenal consciosuness", which is what the hard problem is about. Here we are asking the question of why it feels like anything to be you from the inside, why all the functions of the brain emerging from every molecule interaction doesn't just happen without a phenomenological subject there to experience it. To pose it in a slightly different language: Why there is an "I" present? An "I" does not need to be present, hypothetically, for you to exhibit the exact same behavior.

Phenomenal consciousness is the only thing in the world where outlining the behavior doesn't seem to get you anywhere. For every other thing, no matter how complicated, it can in principle be reduced to the complex behavior of elementary particles (or quantum interactions); axioms like "things exist in the universe and behave a certain way" usually buys you a lot of explanatory power over any phenomena, but when it comes to phenomenal consciousness, this approach runs into a wall. No matter how something behaves, it seems it shouldn't be able to amount to anything but more behavior, yet we also get phenomenal experience. This highlights a big gap between explaining how something functions, and explaining phenomenal experience. From this gap between function and experience, we can infer that we're dealing with something radically different here; something where the behavior doesn't even begin to account for the core phenomena.

>>9525622
I don't think you understood what I meant by "produce."

>>9525830
God damn now I finally understand what the duality fuss is all about. Good post.

>>9525830
So why do some people think phenomenal experience doesnt really exist and is a false belief.

>>9505535
WTFFF

Is Stephen Wolfram the only legit living Polymath today? I'd say yes.

>>9527174
Well, for one it's a pretty hard concept to lay out precisely in words, so our limited language makes it easy for misunderstandings. I think a big chunk of hard problem deniers are people who haven't really taken the time to understand what it's about.

Others probably do understand it, but reject it based on the premise that it is possible to be deceived about having phenomenal experiences. Others ignore it because that makes everything much simpler; current overarching materialistic worldviews gets to stay intact; some of those people acknowledge the problem but puts faith into neuroscience to somewhere in the future give us the a full understanding that doesn't involve metaphysics or "new science". These sort of reductionist views are often grouped together and referred to as "hope for a miracle", which I think describes them pretty well. I think denying the existence of phenomenal consciousness (like Dennett and others) is a much stronger approach. At least there you are directly addressing the problem.

>>9525830
So for you the idea of the "I" is included in the term consciousness?By phenomenal consciousness don't you actually just mean self-awarness?

>An "I" does not need to be present, hypothetically, for you to exhibit the exact same behavior.
says who?

to you what is the difference between something being conscious to something being self-aware?

but desu asking the question what is phenomenal consciousness is disturbingly similar to asking what god is, or what a soul is and why it exists.

>>9528280
>So for you the idea of the "I" is included in the term consciousness?By phenomenal consciousness don't you actually just mean self-awarness?
"I" here is simply a roundabout way to refer to your phenomenal self. The language is not explicit; hopefully reading all of it the phenomena I'm talking about should intuitively make sense to the reader.

It's possible for something to be self-aware in a functional sense, but lack phenomenal consciousness. A system can have a model of itself, use that model to predict the future, use a mirror to recognize itself in, etc, without there being something that it's like phenomenally to be that system.

>says who?
This is following physicalism. Everything is particle interactions, everything that follows should also be more particle interactions, emerging into complex behavior. But looking at the behavior alone doesn't ever seem to ever be able to account for why there is phenomenal consciousness, since this isn't about the function or behavior of something. Denying phenomenal consciousness is of course a route you can take here, but after observing my own consciousness, that's impossible for me at least.

>>9528334
Yea how can you deny it when existences' entirity is perceived through phenomenal consciousness. Being conscious of or aware of information.

Surely something that models itself against an external world like you say, implies it has phenomenal consciousness. It just maybe a different kind or even less advanced than ours. Functionally we can imagine it without but surely thats just because the way we describe the world will not allow that.

>>9503556
>Can a cellular automaton generate subjective experiences?
game of life is turing complete, and anything turing complete can (in theory) give rise to consciousness.

but it's hardly efficient.

>>9528537
>Functionally we can imagine it without but surely thats just because the way we describe the world will not allow that.
Yes, and that's what the hard problem is getting at - if the way we describe the world cannot get at what phenomenal consciousness is at its essence, then surely that way of describing the world is incomplete; this is the explanatory gap, the hard problem at the core.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap

We can't have our cake and eat it too. If we bite the bullet and say there is phenomenal consciousness, then how do we then go about accounting for it with our current models of the world, while keeping them consistent?

>>9520259
>Therefore, your intuitions about phenomenal consciousness are most likely wrong.
>There is no phenomenal consciousness, only behavior.
Nice non-sequitur you got there, faggot.

>>9520423
Elaborate.

>>9520428
>baseless philosophies
t. unironic brainlet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-symmetry

>>9524076
>Animism
Ironically, we're coming around full circle with the idea of panpsychism, which is that objects traditionally considered non-conscious do have subjective experiences to varying degrees (albeit possibly very alien to our own).

>>9524105
>the feeling of consciousness
Well there's your problem m8.

>>9529355
I think the premises follow. If you can be wrong about your "phenomenal intuition", then it follows that it might not exist. At that point the onus is on the people claiming there is phenomenal consciousness to prove its existence. It certainly doesn't disprove the existence of it, just as you can't disprove the existence of a god, or the magical teapot behind Jupiter; the eliminativists just hold the belief that it doesn't exist, just as an atheist would about the existence of god.

>>9525578
>consciousness is a figment of imagination
>figment of imagination
wew lad

>>9525612
>Important
It's pretty simple and was figured out decades ago. Consciousness is the epiphenomenal result of information processing in the brain which came into being through mammalian evolution. There's no such thing as "reality," we're each living according to the more or less identical illusion playing in a brain which was determined entirely through the function of natural selection. We're animals and not very complex ones at that.

What is there to be important when you're just some stupid fucking animal who's only capable of carrying out his biological imperative.

>>9525578
>consciousness is a figment of imagination
Consciousness and imagination are the same thing, dude.

>>9512707
I get a Berkeley vibe from this but also dude weed lmao

I pretty much agree with you in spirit though

>>9518027
Holy SHIT anon that is cool.

>>9530647
behold http://www.instructables.com/id/OTCA-Metapixel-Conways-Game-of-Life/

>>9518030
damn that's fucking cool

>>9530450
The hard problem of consciousness is a type of virtue signaling: You get to make definitive statements about issues that have an air of profundity and importance, all the while achieving nothing of value.

>>9530672
Virtue signalling things that show someone has 55 IQ

- They think about the hard problem of consciousness
- They think about whether a self driving car should kill 5 kids or 1 adult if given the choice
- They care about global warming and believe it will kill humanity and caused hurricanes and African migration to Europe (versus economic/welfare incentives).
- They think about technological progress and want to control it because of "ethics of inequality"

Any of the above subjects are signs someone is a fucking retard monkey that deserves death.

>>9528610
I dont see why you should throw away something because our models dont account for it. I think we should still be able to say we are phenomenally conscious. We wouldnt be able to say "i understand this model" if i werent. Tbh understanding the gap has no practical implications.

Is this a good qualia analogy?
You can write sentences about the world in ink. It has descriptive information but is written in ink. The ink itself has nothing to with the information and you could use any other medium functionally to write the sentence.

I cant seem to close it off.

But anyway, what if phenomenal conscious is just a brute fact of conscious systems.. just the way it is.

>>9529405
I dont see how that necessarily follows.

In fact being wrong about it suggests it exist.

You cant mistake your pewter bath for bronze if you dont have a bath.

>>9531027
See:
>>9523784

If you have the intuition that there is a God, then if that intuition can be wrong, it follows that God might not be real.

In that same way, if you have the intuition that you are phenomenally conscious, and that intuition can be wrong, it follows that you might not be phenomenally conscious. You might say, but having any intuition, or thought whatsoever is being phenomenally conscious! But that is exactly the sort of premise that this argument rejects.

>>9531009
>I dont see why you should throw away something because our models dont account for it. I think we should still be able to say we are phenomenally conscious.

I'm not talking about throwing away specific scientific models, I'm talking about overarching metaphysical statements like, "everything in the universe is physical, "everything is reducible to particle interactions". And here, "physical" doesn't have to mean matter is some kind of hard stuff, but just that all that exists in the universe is things that exhibits some behavior. These sort of worldviews stop working if we are to be a realist about phenomenal consciousness, since it doesn't seem to be either about the behavior of particles nor anything that resembles physicality.

>Tbh understanding the gap has no practical implications.
For me personally, I don't care so much about the pragmatic implications. I'm curious how the world works, I want to know what phenomenal consciousness is for the sake of it. But I think it also has tons of practical implications for ethics. If you care about the well-being of conscious creatures, and you want to build AI's to do slave labor, you'd want to make sure you don't accidentally create suffering in those AI's.

>>9530765

>>9532791
What if he is unironically right?

>>9503609
I agree. Materialists should be disregarded.

>>9522903
cogito ergo j'ai raison

>>9518615
>He's strongly opposed to the proposition that any sort of reported mental phenomena really exist beyond being a narrative center of gravity i.e. there is no actual object that constitutes your center of gravity but we can pretend it exists and get use out of that act of pretending
you answered your own question here
if there is nothing more to your having a mind than for it to be useful to interpret you according to the intentional stance, then thermostats (and plants, and atoms, etc) have minds to exactly the degree to which it is useful for us to interpret their behaviour intentionalistically
so dennett's theory implies that thermostats, plants, atoms, etc. have primitive minds, which makes him a pan(proto)psychist

>>9503572
how could it even conceivably be a material phenomenon?
take a whole-cloth hallucination, which seems to be an instance of mere qualia/phenomenality with no mind-external correspondent
what does such a hallucination consist of?
it seems to just consist of the fabric of your visual experience, i.e. pure color qualia
do you think if you zoomed in on it enough you'd see that it really consists of particles? but where would those particles even be, since the hallucinated object does not exist in physical space? and how would you "zoom in" on a hallucination in the first place, since you can't physically put a microscope up to it?

>>9504541
time symmetry is broken

>>9531151
Your analogy doesnt match. In the proper analogy i would say your intuition about god being wrong doesnt mean god doesnt exist.

Aka your logic still doesnt follow. Your argument doesnt necessarily reject the phenomenal.

The computer example is too simple. Instantiating false information is not the same as a delusion or deception.

I personally believe something as complex to have an intuition like a human will necessarily be phenomenally conscious.

>>9531181
Im actually a physicalist in the way you describe but still believe in phenomenal consciousness. I dont think the explanatory gap is metaphysical. Im a realist in so far as phenomenal consciousness corresponds to brain activity though i would say this is indirect realism.

"How it feels" is a functionally empty concept but so is the idea of a fundamental physical substance since all useful physical concepts are about interaction. Energy and matter have no coherent definition outside of a functionalist one.

In that sense you could argue that energy "don't really exist"

>>9533223
>>9531151

Shit first paragraph i meant to say "false intuition about god doesnt mean intuition itself doesnt exist"

Also i see the logic of what you say now looking at it twice - sorry i was looking at it a different way in my head.

But what i would say like i did above is that intuition necessitates the consciousness.

I would say -

You can be conscious of a box in the room but be wrong in a realist sense i.e. hallucination.

You can be conscious also of your consciousness and be wrong in the sense that you have misconceptualised your own consciousness.

But the fact you are conscious and this is the vehicle of your knowledge or false belief in these situations means that if phenomenal consciousness didnt exist you wouldnt be in any state to know anything.

You can be wrong about the content of consciousness. But the consciousness has to be there.

In this sense though your argument is valid and sound but it has uncertainty - you say
"Consciousness might not exist since we can be wrong about intuitions" etc etc (paraphrase)

But the definitive version "our intuitions are wrong/right so consciousness is wrong"

This i think is what i think i meant about your argument not following and when i said "proper analogy" above which supports what ive just explained here.

>>9531151
>>9533254

>But the definitive version "our intuitions are wrong/right so consciousness is wrong"

* the definitive version " " doesnt follow so your argument doesnt actually reject anything

are Richard Brown and Pete Mandik here? Hey, why'd you assholes quit making spacetimemind?

>>9503556

What's subjectivity other than deeply ingrained patterns obscured by complexity?

>>9533350
>what's a hurbity other than a flurbity and a gurbity?

>>9530765
so economic/welfare incentives caused hurricanes?

good to know...

>>9533183
The "visual fabric" is the brain.

>>9533350
You might get a pass if dropped "deeply ingrained". Wtf does that even mean?

>>9533551
what a complete non-answer

>>9533183
Well, considering that everything you see is just light rays activating arrays of neurons, making you perceive the outer world in a certain way that may not necessarily be objective (color is just to differentiate wave lengths/we don't even perceive the whole spectrum), you could use the same argument against normal vision as in "ZOOM IN ON COLOR IRL. YOU CAN'T? THAT'S CAUSE YOU'RE IMMATERIAL!"

Well, no. You see, our perceptions are just patterns formed by neurons according to stimuli. A hallucination is just pattern without stimuli. Still materially observable.

>>9518027
I'm really interested in doing research related to CA and complex systems in general. I don't know if I should major in CS or Math or Philosophy. My current plan is to major in compsci with a focus on theoretical compsci and just learn about the necessary logic and philosophy on the side. Do you recommend another path?

>>9534061
There's a master's called Computational Science in Amsterdam (given jointly by the two universities there), it might interest you.

>>9520314
what do you mean by "Logic from philosophy" what about mathematical logic?

>>9533854
Just saying. It's a physical process.

>>9533891
>you could use the same argument against normal vision
yes, the problem is not unique to hallucination, it arguably arises for all perceptual experience and all conscious experience in general
hallucination is just the most obvious illustration
the rest of what you said gives absolutely no solution to the problem, though
>our perceptions are just patterns formed by neurons according to stimuli
there's basically no meaning to these words in this context
if what you see is just a "pattern formed by neurons", how can you see it at all? your eyes are pointing outward, not inward towards your brain, you can't see individual neurons anyway, not to mention the fact that it's dark inside your skull

>>9534359
think about this, i gave an argument that explains why the hallucination can't conceivably be physical, and your response is just "It's physical" with no further explanation

What are your thoughts on the inconceivability / zombie argument, which goes like this:

P1: A person physically indistinguishable from you that lacks phenomenal experience is conceivable.
P2: If P1 is conceivable, then P1 is metaphysically possible in another universe.
P3: Since both universes are functionally indistinguishable, a functional account of phenomenal experience is impossible.
C: Physicalism is false.

What are your thoughts on the inconceivability / zombie argument, which goes like this:

P1: A person physically indistinguishable from you that lacks phenomenal experience is conceivable.
P2: If P1 is conceivable, then P1 is metaphysically possible in another universe.
P3: Since both universes are physically indistinguishable, a physical account of phenomenal experience is impossible.
C: Physicalism is false.

>>9535423
Two thoughts on this:
1) If sound, it only defeats a very strong version of physicalism which says the identity between mental and physical states is metaphysically necessary. Physicalism could be (and, I think, is usually) held as a metaphysically contingent claim: i.e. in our universe, as it happens to be, all mental states are identical to certain physical states. Compare materialist theories about life: Nobody ever takes the time to consider whether if angels or spirits existed they would be alive; what a mechanist about life says is that, as it happens, in our actual universe, all life is constituted by a certain chemical/physical arrangement. Materialists don't have to care about other metaphysical or conceivable possibilities.
2) Zombies are probably metaphysically possible (just having the internal physiology that facilitates certain functions and behavioural responses to the environment is not the same thing as being conscious). But for all we know right now, they might be physically impossible--that is, as a matter of (metaphysically) contingent fact about the laws of our universe, a certain neurophysiology might by (physical) necessity cause or instantiate consciousness.

>>9535339
My point is that we don't see the world. We see it according to how our neurons activate which isn't entirely a true representation of the world.

As far as we know it may actually be a massively mangled version of the world. One that has merely been evolutionarily effective. We *know* that there's a lot of stuff in real world that we can't perceive and we also know that a lot of what we perceive isn't real. So I could argue that we don't really "see" the world. You could say all our perception is technically a hallucination based on the way our brain codes information. Just because it's consistent and we're used to it, doesn't make it objective.

>i gave an argument that explains why the hallucination can't conceivably be physical
Your argument was essentially "since the molecules we perceive aren't outside our heads, they can't be physical". But why can't they be the molecules inside our head that produce perception? Why can you grasp the fact that we perceive outwardly entities (which, as I said, isn't true anyway) but not inwardly?

>>9530450
The world needs more memes of this quality.

>>9534061
If u wna do complex systems do physics or math or engineering even. Top neuroscientists have those degrees now.

>>9535496
>As far as we know it may actually be a massively mangled version of the world.
right, this is part of the argument for my claim that the problem exists for all perception
you're agreeing with me here
>Your argument was essentially "since the molecules we perceive aren't outside our heads, they can't be physical". But why can't they be the molecules inside our head that produce perception?
what you're implying here is that when someone hallucinates a pink elephant, they are perceiving molecules inside their own head
first off, we don't perceive things inside our own heads (we can't look in there, it's dark, etc)
secondly though, it doesn't help to explain what the pink elephant is made of
just think about it: there's a concatenation of shapes and colours which constitute this apparent pink elephant that somehow forms part of the person's visual experience at some moment: what do those coloured shapes actually consist of, and where are they located?
it's not like there's a set of neurons inside the brain that form into the shape of an elephant and assume a pink colour, and there's no elephant-shaped object in front of the person
you can say there's neural activity producing an image of a pink elephant, and i'll agree with you, but the question is: where is that image and what does it consist of? and the only possible answer seems to be "inside the mind, and mind-stuff"

>>9535614
My point is that there never exists a pink elephant in the first place, EVEN IF you actually were to paint an elephant pink and watch it, it would STILL ONLY BE a perception. The pinkness of it is just a creation of your brain, just as any other visual parameter.

Then why do we perceive the pink elephant as such if it's not the objective reality? Because that's the best our neurons can do. You would not be asking "but where is the object of our perception" if you realized that the perception is in its entirety a product of our Umwelt.

The pinkness of the elephant comes from the combination of impulses we receive from our eyes, which over our lifetimes we've grown accustomed to treat as "pink color". But it doesn't exist. It has no bearing on the actual world.

Let us go down a level to a simpler qualia - pain. Would you also ask "but where does pain come from? do neurons form pain inside me and my nerves describe its shape and translate that to my experience?" No. Pain is just action potential coming from neural pathways that have always designated "unwanted feelings". It doesn't actually exist, objectively. It's just binary "yes" or "no" where 00000 is nothing, 01000 is a scratch and 01101 is burning on left arm. There IS no "painful arm", the qualia is just your brain doing the maths.

>>9535634
This is all obvious and it still doesn't answer the hard problem.

>>9503696
>(((they))) say every two years or so there's a statistical likelihood that every atom in your brain has been replaced by another
sounds like bullshit, neurons don't get replaced anywhere that fast

>>9535640
Yes I'm not denying the hard problem of consciousness. My point is that without being able to actually perceive the objective world, we can't really be sure if what we perceive is so out of the ordinary as we may think afterall.

>>9535634
>My point is that there never exists a pink elephant in the first place,
>The pinkness of it is just a creation of your brain, just as any other visual parameter.
agreed
so that gets us to this:
>there's neural activity producing an image of a pink elephant ... but the question is: where is that image and what does it consist of?

>>9535640
>>9535644
How is asking yourself if you are conscious and being conscious some 'hard' problem people like to masturbate over? Has intellectualism come so far that you guys just jerk off over idealism?

>>9535458
I believe some researchers have established that consciousness (or some form of meta-awareness) is less computationally intensive.

>>9535650
Before you start on hallucinations you should think about the images formed from normal vision. Those don't exist in the world either. You could say the visual image refers to objects in the world but they are not identical.

The thing with hallucinations are that they form without reference to the outside world. It's a malfunction of the visual system.

>>9535709
>

>>9535640
The hard problem is nonsense. Just because we don't know where mental images, the stuff of consciousness is, and how it is formed, doesn't mean we can never find out.
It's very possible that neuroscience will find the dynamics and structural makeup of the cartesian observer.

>>9535802
>The absolute state of reductionist shitters that actually believe science will bail them out and save their 70 IQ tier identity theories "somewhere in the future".

>>9535861
That's not an argument.

>>9535650
Fuck you

>>9535644
The point you should say is that its a paradoxical impossibility. We cannot know what an unperceived world is like for we are perceiving it.

>>9535641
Neurons dont but the atoms inside neurons do otherwise metabolism wdnt be a thing.

>>9535789
But they are in the world. They are brain interactions. Why is that so hard for people to get.

>We will eventually understand how the brain works
>Therefore, consciousness doesn't exist

So... this is what 'intelligent members of MENSA' do? They like to pretend they are stupid because they are too stupid to be smart?

*SHRUG*

What I like about this realization is that now I'm allowed to add as many Nitrogen moles as I want to my chemical compounds. Explosive orgy bomb time!

>>9536872
Go suck your weib wifes trap cock.

>>9535802
>The hard problem is nonsense. Just because we don't know
That's literally the problem, you braindead fucking tool.

>>9535709
>hard problem of consciousness
>How is asking yourself if you are conscious
Try again

>>9503556
>consciousness

>>9537986
Why is this problem "hard" when there's many unsolved problems. We don't have direct access to other minds? That's not a peculiar problem. Everything we know comes from inference.