/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.11360903]

Can science solve the hard problem of consciousness?

[Anonymous No.11360907]

Why is it so inadmissible to the scientifically-minded that some questions, while theoretically explainable, are simply just inaccessible to humanity and will forever remain so.

[Anonymous No.11360910]

>>11360903
>Can science solve the hard problem of consciousness?
define "consciousness"

[Anonymous No.11360911]

No, but it’s possible to demonstrate that something non physical influences decision making in the brain.

[Anonymous No.11360914]

define "consciousness"

[Anonymous No.11360916]

>>11360910
>>11360914
kys, but unironically

>>11360907
low iq

[Anonymous No.11360921]

>>11360907
Because those same people also want to make strong metaphysical claims like "everything is physical", and when you run into something you can't explain in physical terms, believing that it will forever be beyond our reach doesn't exactly bode well for the Physicalist.

Consciousness doesn't seem theoretically explainable in the same way as other problems, which is why it's especially hard, thus the name.

[Anonymous No.11360925]

>>11360921
define "consciousness"

[Anonymous No.11360928]

>>11360903
>heh I smoked some LSD and lost my sense of reality again, time to make a dogshit off topic thread on /sci/... What will it be today? Circumcision? Race? Simulation... No... IQ? Close, but no... Ah yes, let's make another shitty consciousness thread, or as we schizo trannies like to say: "qualia".

[Anonymous No.11360934]

>>11360911
do it then faggot

[Anonymous No.11360945]

>>11360921
Consciousness is all physical. If your brain is affected you can suffer from agnosia or aphasia and become "less conscious" than others.

[Anonymous No.11360947]

>>11360903
>Can science solve the hard problem of consciousness?
To me, that sounds just like a Christfag asking someone if they "believe in evolution".
Evolution is in the realm of facts and science.
Free will, the hard problem of consciousness and similar stuff are in the realm of theology, philosophy and semantics.
None of that shit involves facts.
QED: no, science can not solve the hard problem of consciousness.

[Anonymous No.11360950]

>>11360911
all movement of thought is physical. It's material thing. So what you meant is that decision in your brain is based on "something" which is also too phyiscal. Non physical. Define non physical. It isnt matter? Everything in this universe is matter. All of it.

[Anonymous No.11360951]

>>11360947
The hard problem of consciousness concerns the behavior of people thinking that there is a hard problem, and behaviors are firmly within the realm of science.

[Anonymous No.11360963]

>>11360951
The behavior you're describing is based on belief.
We each believe what we believe, independently of facts.
A Hindu, a Christian and an atheist all have different beliefs, even though they aren't living within different rules of physics, biology, etc.
Still not science.

[Anonymous No.11360965]

>>11360963
Belief is governed by the physical operation of the brain.

[Anonymous No.11360968]

>>11360911
Like fifteen people have asked to "define consciousness". This should help to define it, if only a little bit. Consciousness has nothing to do with decision making. Decision making belongs to "the easy problems" of mind. A lot of it can already be explained in purely biological and cognitive terms. And there is no reason to think that going forward we will not know more and more about decision-making. Consciousness has to do with awareness exclusively. Consciousness is often thought of as "a passive observer" of our internal decision-making processes.

[Anonymous No.11360975]

>>11360965
>muh reductionism
You might someday explain why I'm a deist and my sister is an atheist, but that still doesn't make theology science, as that can't prove which of us is right.
And explaining why we believe what we believe still doesn't solve the fundamentally philosophical hard problem of consciousness.

Philosophy doesn't involve facts, and is therefore not subject to scientific explanation.
Same for theology, and for that matter, semantics as well.

[Anonymous No.11360979]

>>11360968
If it's a "passive observer", then how are we talking about it? If it was "passive", it wouldn't have been able to influence people into talking about it.

[Anonymous No.11360983]

>>11360903
>Can science solve the hard problem of consciousness?
Yes, consciousness doesn't exist.

[Anonymous No.11360991]

>>11360975
You seem to wrongly believe that words and thoughts can only be analyzed on a surface level. Explaining exactly why somebody asks a question is the same as answering that question. They both close the query. People ask about light because they experience light. People ask about gravity because they experience gravity. People ask about consciousness because they experience _________? The cause of the query can be physically isolated so long as the query is physically made, and that answers it.

[Anonymous No.11360999]

>>11360928
Based and p-zombie pilled.
Smoke some weed, dude. Eat some LSD. But like unironically.

[Anonymous No.11361000]

>>11360991
>You seem to wrongly believe that words and thoughts can only be analyzed on a surface level.
That's a strawman.

>>11360991
>The cause of the query can be physically isolated so long as the query is physically made, and that answers it.
You're still only describing the physical process of thought, not the actual hard problem of consciousness.
You might someday explain the physical phenomenon of thought well enough to fully explain what's going on when I think about gravity, but that still wouldn't explain gravity itself.
You're mixing up the messenger and the message.
I'm off to bed, I suggest you read at least the first section of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

[Anonymous No.11361007]

>>11361000
A full explanation isn't what this is about though, just showing that it's physical and thus on the same level as something like gravity.

Also, you have yet to provide sufficient reason to believe that the problem exists outside the physical, when the only evidence you have provided for the problem IS physical.

[Anonymous No.11361011]

>>11360979
You continue to conflate consciousness and agency. We are not talking about agency here.

[Anonymous No.11361017]

>>11361011
If something exists, and we're talking about it, then a physical interaction relating to it must have physically influenced us to talk about it. Why else would we be talking about it?

[Anonymous No.11361031]

>>11361017
Now we're getting somewhere. You're right to say that there must be some linkage between one and the other. But this is exactly the thing that is unexplained.

[Anonymous No.11361038]

>>11361031
Then it must be physically measurable, because the brain is physical and able to interact with it. Any supposedly impossible questions have to be the result of somebody who didn't understand what they saw.

[Anonymous No.11361049]

>>11360903
I think reverse engineering the human brain is pretty much the only viable solution to unlocking consciousness. The technology required to replicate a human brain digitally is probably several decades, more likely centuries away, but there is at least some sound theory and the general consensus is that its possible.

[Anonymous No.11361069]

>>11361049
It will become unnecessary before it becomes feasible.

[Anonymous No.11361081]

>>11361049
I predict that the more sophisticated brain-like technologies become, the more they will resemble the physical, actual brain. In the end, we will simply re-create what already exists in the same or a very similar biochemical substrate. The problem is that because the brain appears to be a "black box", much in the same way that some of the more advanced AI we have created so far are, re-creating the brain from scratch will answer few of our questions about its functioning. Especially some of the more intractable questions like consciousness. I think we may have gone down a dead end.

[Anonymous No.11361084]

>>11360903
No

[Anonymous No.11361087]

>>11360950
>Everything in this universe is matter. All of it.
Cringe

[Anonymous No.11361126]

Why do people assume that they have perfect knowledge of the consciousness that they perceive? What reason is there to believe that everybody does not see the same consciousness? Everybody agrees that such a thing exists, and gives a description of it akin to some sort of constant. Why not say that it's some kind of universal field that the brain is able to interact with?

[Anonymous No.11361138]

science is a tool based on using observations to make predictions

apply this same tool to those very observations themselves, and the tool is beyond its use

like trying to hammer not a nail, but the very hammer itself

[Anonymous No.11361169]

>>11361087


Nice argument

[Anonymous No.11361206]

The hard problem could be said to be about how non-experiential stuff can give rise to something that experiences. But what we mean by "non-experiential"? There's a banal and obvious sense in which all the dead matter out there does indeed have experiential properties. Namely the fact that they can be *experienced* by a subject and manifest as content of consciousness. What a piece of dead matter like a rock presumably isn't is a subject of experience. So how can get a subject out of mere objects? Say that matter at the bottom level "is a little bit conscious", or consists of some kind of micro-subjects? But this doesn't explain our consciousness at all - we have this macro-sense of self that experiences as a unified single thing. I don't see a fundamental problem in the idea that it consists of micro-subjects, but it doesn't explain the subjectivity we are trying to explain.
But if you believe in the bundle theory of self you are already have conceived of "objects" being arranged in a certain way to bring about a subject of experience. Some individual sensation you have, like the red color on a physical object you see, may be "mental", but it's also just an "object" - the red sensation itself isn't a subject of experience, presumably. But if you add up all the sensations you have now and all the memories of the sensations you've ever had in the arrangement that makes up what you are on a mental level, you get a "subject of experience". But it only exists in the relations of these mental objects, and not as anything over and above it.
It was a mistake to ever think "the physical" was something radically different in nature to the "qualia" we experience. After all the only reason we ever conceived of the physical world is to organize and predict our experiences.

[Anonymous No.11361217]

What exactly is the problem of consciousness?

And what does 'solving' the problem of consciousness entail?

[Anonymous No.11361256]

>>11360903
simple answer, nobody fucking knows yet!

[Anonymous No.11361266]

>>11360903
Current science can not solve it. Partly because most scientist refuse to accept that there are things out beyond our current ability to comprehend, consciousness/sentience being one.

[Anonymous No.11361291]

>>11360903
Consciousness is the ability to perceive the environment/outside stimuli and to interpret them with associative areas of the brain, and it is all physical (magnetic light waves for color and visual perception, molecules binding for olfactory and gustatory senses, sound waves for sound, mechanical receptors and nociceptors for somato-visceral perception).
Checkmate, philosophy faggots.

[Anonymous No.11361351]

>>11360903
>>11361291
>hard problem

Feedback loop created by an organic computer not only interpreting the world through the imprecise filter of emotional response (built from the neurotransmitter level upwards) and fed by physically limited senses, but also factoring it's own internal dialogue into the mix (our "self") on top of that. What's more, it relies on a memory system that is more associative than explicit.

[Anonymous No.11361402]

>>11361007
>A full explanation isn't what this is about though
Moving the Goalposts

>>11361007
>the only evidence you have provided for the problem IS physical.
I've claimed the problem is philosophical, a viewpoint largely supported by the source I linked.
Perhaps my argument in incorrect, but if it IS correct, then the problem is beyond scientific explanation.

[Anonymous No.11361408]

>>11360921
Doesn’t the fact that consciousness developed with biological evolution prove that it’s physical beyond a reasonable doubt? The more complex the physical structure, the more complex the mind. Sure you could do some damage control by saying shit like “I-it’s an antenna!” But that would make you a moron.