/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.9853273]

OK /sci/ would you solve the hard problem of consciousness?
If you had unlimited funds and research slaves at your disposal, what would your concrete strategy be to solve it within your lifetime?

[Anonymous No.9853290]

>>9853273
Top-down approach.

[Anonymous No.9853330]

>>9853273
disable one different part of the brain for each subject and try combination when all individual effects are observed

[Anonymous No.9853395]

>>9853330
(1) how would you know when phenomenal consciousness gets switched on/off?
(2) if successful, you'd just find the neural correlate of phenomenal consciousness, but how would that solve the hard problem?

[Anonymous No.9853552]

>>9853330
We've already been doing this to figure out the functions of different parts of the brain, yet we still haven't solved the hard problem of conciseness

[Anonymous No.9853567]

Kantian idealism, temporal scrutiny, information integration theory, plant consciousness, mindfulness meditation, triune brain.

[Anonymous No.9853695]

>>9853567
>>9853567
how does this relate to the question brainlet?

[Anonymous No.9853699]

>>9853567
this theory is overrated nonsense.

.plus triune brain is debunked/

[Anonymous No.9853700]

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

[Anonymous No.9853709]

>>9853273
my solution would be to overcome the subject-object/mind-matter dichotomy
i.e. don't "solve" the hard problem, dissolve it by showing it rests on philosophical presumptions that can be rejected
to do that, we need to do "conceptual archaeology" to figure out how we ended up with the dichotomy in the first place
it obviously goes back at least to descartes, but imo it probably has roots in the beginning of the western tradition with plato's distinction between appearance and reality
so the hard problem isn't really for cogsci/neuroscience, it's for philosophy and history of ideas

[Anonymous No.9853711]

>>9853709
but u rissk sollipsism this way.

[Anonymous No.9853716]

>>9853700
>lesswrong

[Anonymous No.9853718]

>>9853273
>OK /sci/ would you solve the hard problem of consciousness?
start by defining "consciousness"

[Anonymous No.9853728]

>>9853711
how so

[Anonymous No.9853736]

>>9853718
but... "the hard problem of consciousness" precisely refers to a particular definition of consciousness
that's why the phrase gets used, because the original Chalmers paper convincingly disambiguated "consciousness" thereby defining the "hard problem" apart from the "easy problems"
>The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.
>The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:
>the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
>the integration of information by a cognitive system;
>the reportability of mental states;
>the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
>the focus of attention;
>the deliberate control of behavior;
>the difference between wakefulness and sleep.
Chalmers is pointing out that all those different phenomena are sometimes referred to as "consciousness" so the term is ambiguous
he goes on to say that the sense of "consciousness" that poses a "hard problem" (i.e. one that isn't susceptible to functional/neural explanation) is consciousness in the sense of experience/phenomenality/what-it's-like
>source: http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

[Anonymous No.9853737]

>>9853728
because when it comes down to it, everything we know about is grounded in phenomena and in a sense, all fact about the world are theory laden in this phenomena. we can break down conepts and ideas philosophically but at the end of the day all we will find is that concepts are mind-dependent and you risk dissolving an idea of an external world from this. its true what berkeley said that you cannot think about or imagine a tree which isnt one created in the mind. its almost paradoxical in some sense but i dont see a way around it.

[Anonymous No.9853746]

>>9853737
but i thought you were gonna explain how dissolving the mind/matter distinction would lead to solipsism--aren't you instead just giving an unrelated argument for idealism now?

[Anonymous No.9853755]

>>9853746
well i think maybe it is idealism but i think sollipsism always logically follows. especially since the worlds construccts are not just dependent on mental constructs but YOUR constructs. someone whos never seen a tree before will see the tree differently to berkeley. so would someone in a culture where they consider trees as evil.

maybe you dont have to accept solipsism but i think u have to accept in a tractacusian sense a world we cannot speak about.

[Anonymous No.9853773]

>>9853755
what i mean is, aren't you just arguing for idealism/solipsism now rather than explaining how dissolving the mind/matter dichotomy would lead to idealism/solipsism?
when i refer to dissolving the dichotomy, i don't mean reducing matter to mind--that's an artifact of the dichotomy itself

[Anonymous No.9853778]

>>9853773
but im saying if you dissolve this dichotomy then you have a world that is intrinsically mentlistic... do you not agree. given that all our knowledge is mentalistic. if you unify the ontological structure of the world. it must therefore be mentalistic. if you dont do this then yu are continually presented with the hard problem of phenomena. how can we dissolve boundaries without mentalising the world.

[Anonymous No.9853781]

>>9853773
i would question to you then. what do you actually mean by dissolving the boundaries. it sounds like you are just telling us what the problem is. what we want to do. but you have nothing interesting to say about means.

[Anonymous No.9853804]

>>9853778
>but im saying if you dissolve this dichotomy then you have a world that is intrinsically mentlistic... do you not agree. given that all our knowledge is mentalistic.
i precisely don't think a post-mind/matter-dichotomy philosophy would grant that knowledge is purely mentalistic (but it wouldn't explain knowledge as a mix of mind and matter either--that's just more of the dichotomy)
the conceptual archaeology i'm talking about would show "the mental" for the construct that it is, i.e. show that it is not a philosophically inevitable category
our post-dichotomy picture of the world would depict it as neither mental nor physical, nor as something defined by its being neither mental nor physical (as neutral monists do, since their position is defined by reference to the mind-matter dichotomy as much as an outlaw is defined by reference to the law)--it would just be something else that was its own thing, sort of like a house is neither a plant nor an animal but is not defined as "a non-plant non-animal" either, and is not even something that occurs on the same "taxonomical level" as plants or animals but something that goes beyond that taxonomy altogether
post-dichotomy, we might keep some limited place for something mental and something physical, but it's likely that the entanglement of these concepts means that overcoming the dichotomy requires jettisoning them both, at least in any form recognizable to us today

[Anonymous No.9853820]

>>9853804
yeah but arent you just playing category label games and avoiding the fact that qualitatiely theres something whats its like to be something and a world independent from that? the idea of dissolving mental and physical into the same category is in someways what the hard problem is bout because the hard problem is the paradox that if u were to do that there would still be something unexplainable about the what, how are why of first person experience which most would say should be synonymous with a brian and its neurons.

can u not see knowledge as mentalistic. think duheme-quine hypothesis and apply it to the mind. just like observing a star might require assumptions about telescopes so does knowledge require some about the implicit observer of the knowledge... our minds.

[Anonymous No.9853848]

>>9853820
>arent you just playing category label games
i don't see why you would think that
if there's such a thing as a "label game" it would be something like if a materialist is arguing with a theist who says "i define a soul as whatever gives life to a being, do you believe such a thing exists?" the atheist says "yes obviously because i believe in living beings" and the theist says "then you believe in souls QED"
i don't see how anything i've said bears any resemblance to that
>qualitatiely theres something whats its like to be something and a world independent from that
i don't think you're getting the idea of overcoming the mind/matter distinction yet
the way you're conceptualizing things here depends on the distinction
for example, what do "qualitatively" and "what it's like" really mean, and why lump them together? and why oppose them to "world" and "the independent"--and what do those terms mean? what ideas do you draw on to answer these questions and why? this actually strikes me as a good example of the cartesian heritage of the distinction
>the idea of dissolving mental and physical into the same category
who said anything about "same category"?

anyway overcoming the dichotomy is obviously extremely hard and many genius thinkers have failed, so i obviously don't know how to do it myself
all i'm saying is i see this as the way to go

[Anonymous No.9853874]

>>9853848
but can you not see is that if you disslve all these destinctions, the only epistemic certainty is sucject- (if not mind-) dependent and this is the problem. Everything is epistemically subjective. An objective world is unaccessible by definition. The world is necessarily subjective and necessarily independent. We are not seeing the outside world in vision, we are saying the consequences of light on our sensory receptors. In a way, vision is no different from hearing. Just as we hear sounds as consequences of objeccts, not objects themselves, images in vision are the same thing and everything else in perception.

so what is the mind-matter distinction?
id also argue that the manner you are saying it depends on how im conceptualising things implicitely supports my view that everything is mind-dependent. its an example of it you cannot get something mind-independent or independent in the duheme-quine sense which makes regards to anything otherswise as epistemically barren.


>for example, what do "qualitatively" and "what it's like" really mean, and why lump them together? and why oppose them to "world" and "the independent"

if you dont oppose them then you get idealism. I would look at the distinction as what is conceptually invariant from our phenomena/qualia. i think regardless of how you define these things theres a probllem of causally linking the two. and for me if you dissole the boundaries you get idealism or sollipsism. if you take it as a brute fact, you still get something epistemologically unsatisfying... a hard problem.

>who said anything about "same category"?
i think youre overinterpreting what i mean

[Anonymous No.9853898]

>>9853874
>the only epistemic certainty is sucject- (if not mind-) dependent and this is the problem. Everything is epistemically subjective. An objective world is unaccessible by definition.
this is cartesianism though
and what you're saying here...
>if you disslve all these destinctions, the only epistemic certainty is sucject- (if not mind-) dependent
... is actually self-contradictory--- "the only epistemic certainty is subject" is a proposition that only makes sense if the subject-object distinction has not been dissolved, yet you're saying dissolving the distinction will leave us with that proposition

[Anonymous No.9853913]

>>9853898
well im doing it from my own non-idealist perspective. what im trying to say is dissolving it would result in an idealism whereby the only thing to exist is subjective. infact the ony reason we don resort to thaht now is because its unintuitive even though all epistemic possibility is in that subjective arena.

maybe it was a contradictory sentence but i didnt mean for it to be.

>this is cartesianism though
why is it cartesianism?

[Anonymous No.9853928]

>>9853913
>what im trying to say is dissolving it would result in an idealism whereby the only thing to exist is subjective.
what i'm suggesting is basically that we should find a way to deny the existence of both the mental/subjective and the physical/objective, we should reject both of those concepts somehow
it's hard to imagine how to do that, i agree -- but if we did it, we obviously could not then conclude that all that exists is subjective
that's all i'm saying

[Anonymous No.9853962]

>>9853928
but i dont think we can dissolve it in an epistemologically sattisfactory way, with the best example of that being a p-zombie.

In the fact that we can fully specify something functionally but yet not specify all the information about it.

Even if u were to regard qualic and physical phenomena as the same substance you still have this explanatory gap.

[Anonymous No.9853972]

>>9853962
you're not thinking outside the box enough friend
let me ask you, do you think all people everywhere have always believed in "the mind"?

[Anonymous No.9854007]

>>9853972
what do you mean outside the box?

i dont know, you tell me the answer to that.

The mind is not intrinsic to my thinking though. The problem occurs with any kind of observer.
the significance is that the patterns of information that exist about the world are not context-independent and its this context dependence that adds to any problem of deduction about the real world and leads you to certain kinds of dualism. it also lends difficulty to objective conceptions of the real world and if u were to imagine a real world it wouldnt be the same as the perceived context dependent one.


An analogy maybe is seeing the world as the image on the lense of a microscope. This image has everything known about the world but doesnt really tell you any information about the lense itself. Furthermore the photons causing the image have their own ontology different from the lense and its image (i.e. photons not glass). if you took away the lense then there is no image though and no information. we have no real access to the reality outside of using the lense which we can also change relatively inconsequentially (e.g. glass vs plastic etc etc). If you have no access to the information or photons outside the lense you might think the lense is the only thing in existence. we know though that something is causing the image though. photons. are they the same as the image? no.

someone who has access and knowledge of all the information about the lense and photons etc will tell you how this happens but if the image on the lense is the only information you have access to. this is impossible.

this problem of observer isnt just about minds but in science too. e.g. look at how we can perceive the world in terms of particles but also as waves. it shows the gap between the observer and his measurements and the world they perceive (or think they perceive) . a scientists concept of the world depends on their instruments and interpretation.

[Anonymous No.9854025]

>>9854007
>The mind is not intrinsic to my thinking though. The problem occurs with any kind of observer.
what's the difference between a mind, an observer, and a subject? it sounds to me like you're making the subject/object distinction in terms of observer/observed but feel free to explain the difference
>An analogy maybe is seeing the world as the image on the lense of a microscope. This image has everything known about the world but doesnt really tell you any information about the lense itself. Furthermore the photons causing the image have their own ontology different from the lense and its image (i.e. photons not glass).
I don't get this analogy. if the world is the image on the lens, then what is the lens? and what are the photons?

[Anonymous No.9854058]

>>9854025
>it sounds to me like you're making the subject/object distinction in terms of observer/observed

i am.

>I don't get this analogy. if the world is the image on the lens, then what is the lens? and what are the photons?

forget that its the world. the point is that the image on the lense doesnt tell you about the lense or the photons hitting the glass. the point is that there would be no information for the observer without the lense.

the observer is getting information via the lense but it isnt synonymous with what caused that image.

and im saying this distinction is the ontological grounds of dualism.

and from our perspective you might say .. well its all atoms, the lense, the glass, the photons. but if everything an observer experiences is just that image on the lense then you have deep problem of explaining the whole issue because of the limits of what information is accessible to you.

[Anonymous No.9854084]

>>9854025
the lense is analogy to the perception from our mind. the photons are analogy to the real world which causes that perception.

i should actually change the analogy because its not the best but the point is just that there is a causal indirectness in that an image (e.g. maybe a photo that has been developed is a better example) is not the same as what caused it (the photons... our reality)

[Anonymous No.9854196]

>>9854025
the beautiful thing about that kind of analogy is that its more than an analogy in the sense of how it mirrors how vision or any sensory system works in general. though it could never solve any hard problem i think it demonstrates it in an interesting way such as how the image on the lense can never explain the lense which i think kind of brings us to this point of how intrinsic properties of any kind including qualia are difficult to explain or communicate as they are almost like a brute force or fundamental. and then you realise any conception of a physical world depends on it. whilst we imagine a physicalist world, a conception of it we have is still very much ingrained in the structure of our phenomenal mind.

sometimes i think an extrinsic world is almost programmed into our mind for evolutionary advantage and without it it could be easy to think of the world sollipsistically.

[Anonymous No.9854404]

>>9854058
i mean, i basically share your dualist picture of things as things stand right now
but that's the picture that gives rise to the hard problem, so that's what i'm hoping we'll rise above eventually
i don't know if you've been meaning to give an argument that it's impossible in principle to get beyond it
if you have, i don't think it works, because your argument is obviously made from the perspective of the whole subject/object dualist picture itself

[Anonymous No.9854430]

>>9854404
well it is but i think theres reason enough to separate the concepts. i kind of think it emerges naturally in how we perceive the world. i find it difficult to dissolve the concepts of mental vs material. its a problem yes.

do you not find the idea of the p-zombie a good argument?

[Anonymous No.9854434]

>>9853273
I have already solved it. Everything in the universe has a soul which can observe things to a degree that its host's physical structure allows.

[Anonymous No.9854460]

>>9854434
this doesnt solve the hard problem because it doesnt explain why a soul should have a "what its like" feeling.

[Anonymous No.9854468]

>>9854460
It doesn't have to explain anything because such feelings are an intrinsic part of being a soul. No physical explanation can be given to it; it just is.

[Anonymous No.9855952]

>>9853273
>waste unlimited funds and research slaves pursuing some philosopher's fiction derived from baseless tradition rather than merit or truth
I'd pretend to do that but instead work on things that are worth pursuing.

[Anonymous No.9856075]

[Anonymous No.9856761]

The solution is that the universe is actually a mind like an extreme sub-conscious that all individual minds share. Physical reality is the shared subjective reality that we have our roots in. You can think of an individual like a branch of a tree connected at the base to the trunk which is the mind of God essentially. I really think this is the answer it can explain why brains appear to be computers too when in actuality the consciousness doesn't arise from computation because computation and conscious experience are unrelated.