The Hard Problem of Consciousness

[Anonymous No.14592640]

Is just a misunderstanding by materialists.

You invented a category called matter, which has nothing to do with consciousness, and you attempt to reduce matter into another category which is experiential (consciousness)

The two categories are fundamentally incompatible, which leads you to call this "a hard problem", when in reality reducing one category of a completely different nature into another is just a definitionally impossible task.

You then hide behind complexity with this idea of "emergence". Consciousness somehow merges out of the brain activity.

Emergence and complexity is valid when you are talking about two things within the same category (matter, matter). You can't hide behind emergence when two things are of a totally different category (consciousness, matter); This is hand waving a misunderstanding.

Consciousness clearly exists, and matter can not, by its definition, explain it. Thus, it is time to start with a new basis of reality.

[Anonymous No.14592705]

sneed

[Anonymous No.14592709]

>>14592640
sneed harder

[Anonymous No.14592722]

>>14592640
Even ants have consciousness, it's just primitive in comparison with humans. There is nothing special about consciousness, everything is a byproduct of random chance over long period of time.

Also sneed

[Anonymous No.14592724]

hard problem of sneedness: does sneed emerge out of chuck while being both different categories?

[Anonymous No.14592725]

Wrong, consciousness is created by specific structures of matter because it is explained [insert arbitrarily complex system of self-referential symbols]. Since you do not fully understand such system [which I do not really understand either but somethingsomething more used to it than you], your opinion will be discarded and you will forever be labelled as a stupid person.

[Anonymous No.14592726]

>>14592725

You're wrong. Consciousness and matter are incommensurable categories, and so you will never bridge the gap between the two.

You messed up from the very start, and now you're chasing you're tail.

[Anonymous No.14592732]

>>14592726
No, you are wrong. The brain creates consciousness because I have one and I'm conscious, therefore brain = consciousness. Simple as.

[Anonymous No.14592745]

>bro you don't get it, the brain is more like an antenna, not a computer

[Anonymous No.14592750]

>>14592640
Have you been reading Berkeley?

[Anonymous No.14592757]

>>14592745
Doofus, your mind is hallucinating a brain. It doesn't even exist.

[Anonymous No.14592760]

>>14592757
I got an MRI a few days ago, pretty sure the images indicated a brain inside my school

[Anonymous No.14592763]

>>14592760
skull*

[Anonymous No.14592768]

>>14592760
Oh no, you got me. You're so smart anon! Everyone lied to you, materialism is the real deal. Well played.

[Anonymous No.14592777]

>>14592768
lmao keep on wiht your meaningless babble to justify how the brain is useless for consciousness. "the brain doesn't exist" = terminal stage of coping.

[Anonymous No.14593027]

>>14592640
>has nothing to do with consciousness
>The two categories are fundamentally incompatible
You're wrong in every sentence. Do computers suffer from hard problem too? Software and hardware are in the same relation as mind and body. Are they the same category?
>You then hide behind complexity with this idea of "emergence".
If you don't want to be affected by complex emergence, then consider simple emergence and prove that simple emergence is impossible.

[Anonymous No.14593059]

>>14592722
Ants don't have consciousness.

[Anonymous No.14593062]

>>14593027
>Software and hardware are in the same relation as mind and body.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

[Anonymous No.14593063]

>>14592640
>The two categories are fundamentally incompatible
So it seems yet in our world they coexist, you can not have one without the other. There is no such thing as consciousness without our fleshy vessels. If there was such I doubt it would be defined as consciousness, maybe a "spirit" for lack of a better word. How can you be aware of your self when there is no self. Everyone is born with consciousness, those who are not are dead, or temporarily unconscious (sleeping coma etc.). Conscious can not emerge without material form. They are connected in some way on the plane of existence and that is undeniable.

[Anonymous No.14593075]

>>14592640
god.... I fucking hate philosophy 101 faggots so fucking much. The entire thing is word salad designed to make you literally retarded. The object is cleverly removed, so you just keep going around and around and around. Picture is super fucking related.

[Anonymous No.14593082]

>>14593059
How do you know? How can you justify that claim?

[Anonymous No.14593090]

>>14593063
>you can not have one without the other
There are enough brains without consciousness.

[Anonymous No.14593113]

>>14593062
Are they the same category?

[Anonymous No.14593139]

>>14593113
No.

[Anonymous No.14593222]

>>14592640
right op you are. ramblings in this thread there are
sneeded

[Anonymous No.14593259]

>>14592640
>Consciousness clearly exists
No, cognition exists to varying degrees, consciousness is a spook.

[Anonymous No.14593289]

>>14592640
Relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gvwhQMKvro

[Anonymous No.14593293]

>>14593259
Subjective experience is happening irregardless of whether NPCs fail to understand it.

[Anonymous No.14593299]

The fact that people like Daniel Dennett exist is evidence that NPCs exist.

http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html

[Anonymous No.14593329]

>>14593293
>You can touch things, therefore souls are everywhere.
Neither Subjectivism nor experience are the same as consciousness, consciousness is a spook, vaguely defined so as to serve as a catch all.

[Anonymous No.14593372]

Chuck's feed and seed

[Anonymous No.14593480]

>>14592760
Upon measurement, you will be rendered a brain based upon what would be probable to be the case based on your avatar's specs (genetics, etc). That localised object called brain need never be rendered at any other time though besides when being observed/measured. Otherwise, it only 'exists' as evolving probability in potentia, just as all matter does and it's not causing anything. It's an output. Just as in a video game, you can smash an enemies head open and a brain may ooze out. But prior to smashing the the head the brain of the enemy did not have to be rendered. The enemy's brain also was not the causitor of the enemys behavior. The causation comes from calculations/processing and it comes from OUTSIDE (non-local) to the reality. The question is more about causation and ontology. The question is not about whether things called brains as localized objects exist upon measurement. They do. Brains and scans of brains corresponding to particular consciousnesses (in this case you) will be rendered in the minds of observers (the drs and anyone else who observed the data of the scan, including you) upon measurement, of course. Those brains will be made processed, organized and structured data (information) in the minds of observers. Physical objects (matter) including brains, are processed, organized and structured data which emerge in the minds of observers. They are virtual things and they do not cause anything. Causation must come from outside the reality (non-locally) and this causation, by the way, can include faster than light correlations such as those seen in entanglement. Why? Because all points in virtual space are equadistant from the processor. It's an IF-THEN situation, not material event causal causation. It's processing causation and it comes from outside (non-local) to the thing being processed.

[Anonymous No.14593497]

>>14592640
>You invented a category called matter, which has nothing to do with consciousness
There is no data available to categorize consciousness as a function of matter or otherwise. Both brainlet materialists and brainlet dualists will make claims either way with zero tangible evidence to back it up.

>The two categories are fundamentally incompatible, which leads you to call this "a hard problem", when in reality reducing one category of a completely different nature into another is just a definitionally impossible task.
It's not a matter of reducing one category to another. It can simply be a case of quantum mechanics v relativity where two different theoretical frameworks are equally valid yet still contradict one another.

>You then hide behind complexity with this idea of "emergence". Consciousness somehow merges out of the brain activity.
It is very possible to adhere to this theory without having a materialist standpoint. Consciousness could be interpreted as a force of the universe that functions much like gravity. The larger the mass of an object, the greater the force of gravity that acts upon it. Consciousness could be interpreted as a force that acts upon clusters of self-referencing information. The more self-referencing information is contained within once body of mass and the more dense/complex that information is, the more consciousness it would attract. This theory could satisfy the dualist viewpoint of consciousness being a phenomenon separate from the body/matter as well as satisfy the materialist viewpoint that the structure of the brain gives rise to a certain level of consciousness.

>Consciousness clearly exists, and matter can not, by its definition, explain it. Thus, it is time to start with a new basis of reality.
You haven't read Daniel Dennett, have you? He is called one of the Four Horsemen for a reason, and he was known as that for a while within the cognitive sciences before it became a popular term for prominent atheist scholars.

[Anonymous No.14593511]

>>14593480
Meds

[Anonymous No.14593523]

>>14593090
No brains are conscious. Matter isn't conscious. If you want to claim that it is, this is a form of panpsychism. Matter is not fundamental and it is virtual and rendered only upon measurement and it has no causal power. It 'exists' only as evolving probability until measured and becoming information. And I would like to hear your description of where it is that you think consciousness is localized in a brain. Where can first person consciousness be objectively observed in brains? Be specific. It can't by the way. By definition it is only ever observed first person. That which governs the autonomic functions of a consciousness when that consciousness is not experiencing phenomenal consciousness is also consciousness. It's autonomic conscious governed by what has been called in some descriptions of the apparatus of the psyche as the un-conscious.

[Anonymous No.14593537]

>>14593511
This is not an argument. It's a type of coping mechanism for not being able to elaborate an argument. It will not suffice. Argue the argument if you think you have the goods. Find a logical or empirical inconsistency.

[Anonymous No.14593538]

>>14592640
Can any anons here prove to me they have a consciousness?

[Anonymous No.14593540]

>>14593537
I can't find your argument in that schizo wall of text. Care to write it in terms of some equations?

[Anonymous No.14593545]

>>14592640
Another retarded psy-op. Your handlers are simply trying to add some diversity to the classic left-vs-right jewish dichotomy, so now they've added NPC materialism vs. NPC spiritualism into the mix and you bots keep spamming this board with these vacuous threads every day.

[Anonymous No.14593552]

>>14593497
>Both brainlet materialists and brainlet dualists will make claims either way with zero tangible evidence to back it up.
Idealism can account for both. Matter, as plank stated in picrel here
>>14593480
emerges in mind. It is only ever experienced in mind. Physical objects are processed, organized and structured data (information) rendered or localized on a spacetime screen in minds. And then the physical becomes a mental substrate. In this case the mind body problem dissolves. It is no mystery that the mental can effect the mental. The mind wants to raise the right arm which it sees in it's mind's eye, it wills it through mentation. So this is a sort of dual aspect idealistic monism. Or dual aspect informational idealism. The more shannonian 'physical' and objective info called matter and energy and the subjective first person info are both one substance. Information.

[Anonymous No.14593556]

>>14592722
>Even ants have consciousness
prove it. You can't

[Anonymous No.14593600]

>>14593540
>I can't find your argument in that schizo wall of text.
If you don't have the goods, then don't step into the forum. You find consternation with regards to my world view. You can not counter my ideas through argument. And so this causes you even more psychological injury. So In a last attempt to get some kind of assuagement, you attempt to just throw out some attempted insult of 'meds'. You appear to be a silly person. And you appear to not have the goods. There's effectively nobody here but me and you. Argue the argument. If you don't have the drive to read my posts, then that excludes you from arguing the argument I suppose. No contest.

[Anonymous No.14593605]

>>14593556
I am an ant

[Anonymous No.14593613]

>>14593600
So you can't write it in terms of any equations and have to resort to schizophrenic word salad?

[Anonymous No.14593615]

>>14593605
Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na Antman.

[Anonymous No.14593624]

>>14593613
Write what in equations? My metaphysical world view equations? My ontological opinions equations? The equations drawn from to form my world view are the standard formalisms of physics. I am not arguing for some alternative equations to describe the physical world.

[Anonymous No.14593625]

>>14592640
>which has nothing to do with consciousness
>The two categories are fundamentally incompatible
>completely different nature
>definitionally impossible task

What are all these assumptions OP? Clearly you have an outdated view. Every decade we have a deeper scientific understanding of consciousness, through psychology, neuroscience, molecular biology etc. There is so much discovered, yet no single human can know all these things simultaneously, it's just too much to synthesise, but there is undeniable progress.

Regarding your assumption, consciousness, whatever it's nature, interacts with matter, through our actions, and through the machinery of the brain. Thus we can study from a materialist perspective. Otherwise what other "basis of reality" do you suggest? The one we already have seems to be working just fine.

>inb4 why haven't we solved the hard problem of consciousness.
Just because we don't know the answer yet, doesn't mean we won't figure it out in the future.

[Anonymous No.14593628]

>>14593624
Actually, don't bother. I just saw that you mentioned that entanglement is non-local in your schizo wall of text. Back to the popsci trash with you. >>>/x/

[Anonymous No.14593632]

>>14593613
>schizophrenic word salad?
Point to an instance in my post where I used ambiguous or superfluous language. Which part is confused or unintelligible or random? Everything I wrote is concise and specific. You are appealing to it being word salad as another attempt to avoid argument.

[Anonymous No.14593638]

>ITT: pic related

[Anonymous No.14593646]

>>14593638
Too true.

[Anonymous No.14593705]

Consciousness is literally just an organization of matter that we fail to understand

Please just take a neuroscience course or something because I know people have already told you all of this

[Anonymous No.14593710]

>>14593705
>Consciousness is literally just an organization of matter that we fail to understand
Nice religious belief.

[Anonymous No.14593711]

>>14593624
Yes, entanglement does violate locality in terms of correlation. That whole bell theorem thing. No local hidden variables can ever reproduce the results of QM. Remember? Remember the aspect bell tests? Experimental verification?
>A Bell test, also known as Bell inequality test or Bell experiment, is a real-world physics experiment designed to test the theory of quantum mechanics in relation to Albert Einstein's concept of local realism. The experiments test whether or not the real world satisfies local realism, which requires the presence of some additional local variables (called "hidden" because they are not a feature of quantum theory) to explain the behavior of particles like photons and electrons. To date, all Bell tests have found that the hypothesis of local hidden variables is inconsistent with the way that physical systems behave.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test
The no communication theorem still applies but that doesn't change the fact that causation in terms of correlation are coming from outside of spacetime. Pic related explains why. There is no causation coming from inside space time. Space time is virtual and emergent and is a result of processing taking place OUTSIDE of spacetime. And brains are guess what? Objects in space time. So they are virtual objects. No causation. They can't cause shit. They are not even rendered until measured.

[Anonymous No.14593720]

>>14593710
it’s the opposite, by “we” i moreso meant “OP”

i mean not that anyone has a full or even sufficient understanding of consciousness but my point is that it should be possible to understand it completely, entirely through matter

[Anonymous No.14593730]

>>14593720
>it’s the opposite
You are beyond mentally ill if you actually think so and aren't trolling. Your belief is religious through and through.

[Anonymous No.14593742]

>>14593730
you need to read a book. i promise college professors aren’t feds trying to indoctrinate you. you need to listen to academic neuroscientists.

[Anonymous No.14593746]

>>14593480
>That localised object called brain need never be rendered at any other time though besides when being observed/measured. Otherwise, it only 'exists' as evolving probability in potentia, just as all matter does and it's not causing anything. It's an output.
YES

[Anonymous No.14593748]

>>14593742
Neuroscientists barely have a clue how the brain works even in terms of its basic functions, and I can tell you're psychotic just by the way you yourself plainly state that they have no idea how consciousness arises from a brain and next thing you're like "heckin' educate yourself, bigot!"

[Anonymous No.14593751]

>>14593705
>Please just take a neuroscience course or something because I know people have already told you all of this
Hit us with the answer then. How do the objectively observable quantities of brain matter add up and translate to the NON-OBJECTIVELY observable, first person QUALITIES of consciousness. What is the verifiable matter configuration which leads to a particular verifiable quality of consciousness that can be demonstrated and reproduced?

[Anonymous No.14593755]

>>14593751
I like how you engage with this nonhuman troglodyte seriously after he directly contradicts himself in his two-liner.

[Anonymous No.14593759]

>>14593748
i’ve already stated that we still don’t have anything close to a full understanding. my point is that they still know more than you do.

>>14593751
the point is that your “subjective qualitative” experiences are literally just as objective as the movement of any other particles, just in a much more complex system.

[Anonymous No.14593760]

>>14593711
Your pic related is total pseudoscience

[Anonymous No.14593768]

>>14593742
A neurocience class will not explain consciousness. It can't. A philosophy of mind course would be a better option, but even then, you will get much hand waiving. From 'fundamental neuroscience 3rd addition '


'Consciousness is one of the most enigmatic features of the universe. People not only act but feel: they see, hear, smell, recall, plan for the future. These activities are associated with subjective, ineffable, immaterial feelings that are tied in some manner to the material
brain. The exact nature of this relationship—the classical mind-body problem—remains elusive and the subject of heated debate. These first hand, subjective experiences pose a daunting challenge to the scientific
method that, in many other areas, has proven so immensely fruitful. Science can describe events micro-seconds following the Big Bang, offer an increasingly detailed account of matter and how to manipulate it, and uncover the biophysical and neurophysiological
nuts and bolts of the brain and its pathologies.
However, this same method has as yet failed to provide a satisfactory account of how first-hand, subjective experience fits into the objective, physical universe. The brute fact of consciousness comes as a total sur-
prise; it does not appear to follow from any phenomena in traditional physics or biology.'
https://www.hse.ru/data/2013/10/09/1280379806/Fundamental%20Neuroscience%20(3rd%20edition)%202008.pdf

[Anonymous No.14593776]

>>14593760
>pseudoscience
Plebbit called. They want their non-argument buzzword back.

[Anonymous No.14593784]

>>14593776
I'm curious what made you create such a pseudoscientific image given your complete ignorance of physics

[Anonymous No.14593786]

>>14593759
>they still know more than you do.
They don't have an inkling of a clue and they openly admit it, religious little pseud. They can't even figure out the basics mechanics of cognition, let alone consciousness.

[Anonymous No.14593788]

>>14593768
neuroscience has advanced extremely rapidly. if a book is over 10 years old, there’s a good chance it has changed, especially if what it’s saying is “umm we don’t really know”

i honestly don’t get how people don’t see consciousness as a physical thing but i guess it would contradict the common factor of most philosophy so it’s easier to not look into it most of the time

[Anonymous No.14593805]

>>14593784

[Anonymous No.14593815]

>>14593760
By the way, the pic is a series metaphysical claims and explanations observed phenomena and the ontic status of that which is called the physical world. It has nothing to do with science other than a displaying of the explanatory power of a metaphysical world view and that is informed by science. As I said here,
>>14593624
It's not a claim of new physics or science or new equations or formalisms. It's a way to make sense of the know data and observations. The worldview of an observer independent material universe does NOT fit the data and observation.

The OP was about metaphysical questions. Metaphysical world views. Materialism, substance dualism, substance monism, mind body problem, idealism, hard problem of consciousness, ontology. Metaphysics. Science can INFORM the forming of worldviews on this subject but that's it.

[Anonymous No.14593819]

>>14593815
Calling it metaphysics doesn't excuse it from being bad science. What that pic shows is that you don't understand the known physics.

[Anonymous No.14593833]

>>14593788
Go ahead and post a link to this new info of the definitive solving of the hard problem of consciousness and the mind body problem. This is big news. I am pretty up to date on the philosophy of mind and new developments though, so I have my doubts that this resolution you speak of has occurred. Maybe you have a link to a pdf of the textbook or a link to a paper or something. It's got to be in one of them. Here's several dozens of text books. Many of them very recent.
https://vdoc.pub/search/neuroscience
https://epdf.pub/search/neuroscience

[Anonymous No.14593843]

>>14593819
>Calling it metaphysics doesn't excuse it from being bad science. What that pic shows is that you don't understand the known physics.
Ok, so then you must be able to describe the 'bad science' in the pic. Feel free to.

[Anonymous No.14593859]

>>14593843
Quantized =/= having a minimum amount
Wave function collapse is not a real thing so there can be no process behind it
"Physical existence properties" doesn't mean anything and doesn't make grammatical sense
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle doesn't mean that you can't know one if you know the other. It means that there is no state where both position and momentum have sharp values
Photons and electrons are not identical to each other
That's just a few of them

[Anonymous No.14593915]

>>14593768
Hypothetically, if someday neuroscience ends up perfectly explaining how and why you think and act such and such way, including why you're saying the words "I'm conscious", to the point of exactly predicting how you are going to act a few seconds in advance, all the while remaining perfectly physical, would that affect your point of view on consciousness?

[Anonymous No.14593944]

>>14593859
>Quantized =/= having a minimum amount
Planck units.
>Wave function collapse is not a real thing so there can be no process behind it
Depends on what you mean by real. It is true that there is no 'real' wave function of 'real' physical objects that collapse. The collapse is just a defining or rendering of a thing in an event of information creation.
>Heisenberg's uncertainty principle doesn't mean that you can't know one if you know the other. It means that there is no state where both position and momentum have sharp values
It means particular pairs of quantities such as such as position, x, and momentum can't be known simultaneously to arbitrary precision. And not because of limited measurement devices by the way. It's a fundamental restriction.
>It has since become clearer, however, that the uncertainty principle is inherent in the properties of all wave-like systems, and that it arises in quantum mechanics simply due to the matter wave nature of all quantum objects. Thus, the uncertainty principle actually states a fundamental property of quantum systems and is not a statement about the observational success of current technology.

This should not be the case in an objective self existent reality by the way.

>Photons and electrons are not identical to each other
Not true. Resting mass of an electron for example
>the mass of a stationary electron, also known as the invariant mass of the electron. It is one of the fundamental constants of physics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_mass
or charge
>The elementary charge, usually denoted by e or sometimes qe is the electric charge carried by a single proton or, equivalently, the magnitude of the negative electric charge carried by a single electron, which has charge −1 e.[2] This elementary charge is a fundamental physical constant.

[Anonymous No.14593970]

>>14593944
>Planck units.
LMAO. What the fuck does that have to do with quantization. Won't even bother addressing your other idiotic replies. Just take your meds already.

[Anonymous No.14594024]

>>14593970
Planck units are the minimal amounts of particular quantities in the physical universe. It has everything to do with a discretized quantized computable universe. There wouldn't be minimum units in an objective physical reality. You could just go smaller and smaller. In a digital universe though this is not the case. There would be no half a pixel. No half a planck length.
>Quantization is the process of constraining an input from a continuous or otherwise large set of values (such as the real numbers) to a discrete set (such as the integers).

>Won't even bother addressing your other idiotic replies
I am not surprised. You haven't presented anything of substance so far in terms of replies, why would I expect anything further.

[Anonymous No.14594047]

>>14593970
By the way, that graph is from the work of brian whitworth. He doesn't have the perfect model, as he doesn't have consciousness as the computer that renders reality to the mind, but he has a lot of pieces to the puzzel. As he puts' it with regard to planck units

'Time and space are quantized. At the quantum level, everything is quantized including time and space.
Field theory needs continuity but avoids the infinities it implies by a mathematical trick called
renormalization. We pretend our world has no gaps but actually Planck length and Planck time are the
irreducible pixels and cycles of our reality, as expected in a virtual reality (see QR2.2.1).'

https://brianwhitworth.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Quantum-Realism-Part1.pdf

[Anonymous No.14594118]

>>14593027
In the computer analogy, mind states/psychology are software, neurons are hardware.
What is conscious subjectivity?

If we want to get materialist here, we might say that consciousness is a field that can be tapped into by logical systems of a certain sort (perhaps all, who knows). Ultimately, "science" is just "things we can explain mathematically and have normalized" in this sense, and even wild stuff like EM that would have been reasonably considered "magic" in centuries past is now just "oh that thing that makes my shitty Xiaming fan turn on". Perhaps one day science will have reduced the seeming magic of consciousness to yet another field interaction, as uninteresting as being able to trap lightning in a bottle.
Perhaps not. The level of simulation modeling of the human brain required to pull this off is well past the level required to generate AGI, which I assume leads to a rapid die off of human scientists soon after. AGI will have the answers; I doubt humanity ever will.
The only way we currently can prod this experimentally is to ask humans specific questions about having a subjective experience, which an awful lot seem to fail outright (see below), and even that is questionable as a method.
Neuroscience may well be able to explain the actual structure and processes of mind states and how they relate to underlying brain structure, but it would be a massive scientific leap for it to actually explain consciousness as mere emergent delusion of a material system.

>>14592722
>>14593259
>>14593497
>>14593625
>>14593705
>>14593759
>P-zombies that fundamentally cannot grasp the concept, which is maybe their own non-existence

[Anonymous No.14594143]

>>14594118

EM and the Xiaming fan are within the same category of thing, so it might be hard to create a bridge, but it is not outright impossible from the jump.

Conciousness and matter are two entirely different categories. It is not a matter of time, there is a fuck up from the point you conjecture matter.

[Anonymous No.14594154]

>>14592640
Friendly reminder to all the quantumfags here: The uncertainty principle is bullshit.

[Anonymous No.14594164]

>>14593711
god i hate tge simulation fags so much

imagine putting all of your chips on making connections between a recent newly developed technology and the whole god damn universe and existence

you could draw parallels with a dog kennel and say so basically our universe is actually a dog trapped in a kennel and we are inside the dogs neurons

like religious fags wrote the bible using omly the knowledge available at that time, and it shows

also love in this threads how little neuroscience gers mentioned when it should be the obvious go to field if you are interested in this shit

sneed goes in all fields

[Anonymous No.14594171]

>>14592640
This is the right point made with the wrong reasoning. It's not that matter and consciousness are "so different" they are incompatible. It's that the physical world is only experienced as part of consciousness.

Physicalism as an ontology and the physical sciences are abstractions that are experienced as a part of consciousness.

The problem for many proponents of physicalism is that they try to set up a mind/matter dichotomy (only so as to knock it down and explain the first through the second). Your explanation also falls into this false dichotomy. Matter is an object of conscious experience. Our thoughts about matter are obviously not matter itself. So the fundamental flaw leading to the hard problem is that you're asking a mental abstraction (a part of mental life) to explain why the whole of mental life is the way it is. You're asking an object to explain something more ontologically basic than itself. But even with a far better idea of how the mind works, with brain scans that can accurately "read thoughts," and identify the correlates of consciousness, we might still have a total inability to say why red looks red or sadness feels like sadness. To get ahead of this, some have even gone as far as to deny the existence of emotions or quality.

Abstractions that are a part of experience will never be able to fully explain all of experience.

That said, we have plenty of good reasons to be realistic vis-á-vis an external world, the world of the noumenal. We also have very many reasons to doubt that this external world is accurately depicted by our senses. Not only are our senses vulnerable to deception and illusion, but evolutionary game theory suggest that they should be adapted to show us a world in terms of fitness payoffs, not reality as it is. Hoffman's The Case Against Reality is decent on this point. 3D space-time for instance, comes from naive realism, the idea that our senses closely correspond to how the world is.

Cont.

[Anonymous No.14594175]

>>14592722
It’s very possible to make a compelling materialist case for consciousness, but attempting to casually dismiss it as not a big deal in the first place comes across as fundamentally unserious.

[Anonymous No.14594182]

>>14592640
I'll give you my own understanding of it.

>soft problem of consciousness
There's physical body, there's physical events that the physical body records the electromagnetic waves (either as light, sound, touch) in the body as sequences of electro-chemical signals. Those are the images, sounds, feels. Additionally thoughts are merely re-configurations of those pattern sequences of electro-chemical rearranged in different timeline. That's what reality is like as an ontological reality. This is what our science tells us how it must be.

>hard problem of consciousness
Why is that what we experience is different from what is ontologically real? There's two camps to this.

>realist/dualist/idealism camp
We have a consciousness that's apart from the physical structure that experiences the reality in such a way that our experience is the real-reality, the physical reality as described by sciences is merely subservient to this primal conscious force.

>nonrealist/illusion/mirage camp
The experiencer is a mirage, like the Buddhists say. And as some physicalist would probably argue, its likely a mirage conjectured as a way to navigate the world in terms of threats detection/survival. Just like the visual/auditory/touch illusions we have, this is just a mental illusion. That's not to say there aren't thoughts/feelings/etc but rather these thoughts/feelings are experienced only in context of the live streams of information we get from our physical senses and the mental processing of those results in thoughts. So there's no central consciousness but mini-consciousness from all over our body's senses. Just as a Buddhist would say.

[Anonymous No.14594193]

>>14593768
the natural property of the universe is to create more comples and complex sets of systems, until energy tuns out and heat death or any or the other theories how the universe dies

eventually the most comolex system arises - life - and in turn it vets more complex - gets conscious and self aware - now the universe has systems that can make even more comoplex systems

there i just solved the hard problem of consciousness

its like asking, where is the electricity in the electric cables

consciousness isnt immaterial, its just your neurons

we feel like its some kind of a ghost because its just a too comlex system for us to understand - but ironically its insode our head and brain and spine and nerve endings, is influenced by got flora and external factors etc etc

the - mind is an antenna crowd - are just religious and spiritual people (read:people who hate life because they are afraid of death - death is a part of life and is natural) in disquise.

[Anonymous No.14594198]

>>14594171
But Newtonian space and time is dead. Einstein's space-time also has enough holes to consider it dead, it's just that a new successor hasn't come up to bat yet.

But all that said, we still have convincing reasons not to go all in on solipsism. But what this external world is like is quite an open question. Is information the ontological basic (Wheeler, It From Bit), mental substance (Katsrup and other idealists), of some sort of, to-date-undefined physicalism (current physicalism is increasingly subject to Hemple's Dilemma in that it defaults to saying "anything science ultimately accepts is physical," and so now non-locality and the lack of a single objective physical world "out there," resulting from findings in modified Wigner's Friend experiments done with Bell Inequalities, are said to have been what was always meant by "physical."

>>14593720
I am sorry friendo, this is not the case. I thought as much when I wrapped up my undergrad in neuroscience too, but I was in for a rude awakening.

For one, physicists don't come close to agreeing on what "material" even means. Look up quantum foundations: pilot-waves, multiple worlds, and "It From Bit." It is very undecided what matter is or how it behaves at a very basic level. Are we in a pleroma of infinite realities, a universal wave function? Are we in a participatory universe where measurement today changes which path a photon through space 14 billion years ago? These are open questions. If the universe made up of matter, information, or mathematics (Telemark)?

No one has any clue how consciousness works. We don't even know how to shut it off, that is, how anesthesia actually works.

When you get to the level of biology, you'll find no agreement about what the fundamental unit of evolution is or the role of information and semiotics. It's all far from clear.

The Great Courses Mind Body Philosophy course is a great introduction here, as in Jarowski's Philosophy of Mind.

[Anonymous No.14594205]

>>14594118
What the fuck is a P-zombie?

[Anonymous No.14594243]

>>14594205
An inconceivable entity

[Anonymous No.14594247]

>>14593624
Unfortunately the standard formalism of physics have, by my count 7 major ontologies:

>Objective collapse (unfortunately, this has produced some of the actually testable hypotheses and they have failed). "The Moon has always been there but its mass is actually infinitely stretched across the universe in a wave function."
>Pilot wave (Bohm). "The Moon has always been there, the wave function is a guide for where a particle might go. Physical interaction is not local, matter can blink in and out of locations."
>Many worlds (Everett, this is the one most consistent with the Schrodinger equation and avoids ad hoc collapse). "There are infinite Moons representing all possibilities."
>Quantum information ontology ("it from bit," Wheeler). "The Moon may or may not exist when no one looks at it, but it's a two dimensional collection of information, not a 3D rock in either case."
>Consciousness causes collapse (Von Neumann). "The Moon didn't exist until someone looked at it."
>Quantum Bayesianism (which if taken to the extreme of presupposing an immortal, Turing complete machine executing all possible experiments turns the laws of physics into degrees of freedom on an observers actions in a neat conceptual flip). "Statements about the Moon are statements about hypotheses consistent will all data."
>Copenhagen, which isn't even a coherent ontology, but which can be defined as a form of logical-positivism where statements about things that are not observed are meaningless. "Asking if the Moon exists when no one looks at it is bullshit, we can only speak of what exists when we look at it. Anything else is metaphysics"


And that before you get to simulation theory.

[Anonymous No.14594254]

>>14594193
>there i just solved the hard problem of consciousness
No, you didn't.
>its like asking, where is the electricity in the electric cables
No, it is not.
>consciousness isnt immaterial, its just your neurons
No. Neurons are neurons. If this was the case, then subjective first person experienced described exhaustively by observing neurons. But in fact, this is not the case. The reason for this is because, unlike the physical universe, including neurons, you can't objectively observe someone's SUBJECTIVE consciousness. So OBVIOUSLY, consciousness is not just neurons.

[Anonymous No.14594255]

>>14592640
This book makes the point you are trying to make correctly.

Your framing is open to plenty of objections, it's not as simple as "consciousness and matter are different, they can't mix," it has to do with the status of mental models of the physical world still being themselves objects of consciousness.

In the Piercean tripartite semiotic model, physics is the symbol, not the noumena itself.

[Anonymous No.14594258]

>>14594193
>we feel like its some kind of a ghost because its just a too comlex system for us to understand
No, the reason some of us doubt that the brain doesn't account for consciousness is because is because neuroscience can't account for consciousness. See the quote from the neuroscience textbook right here.
>>14593768

Consciousness is one of the most enigmatic features of the universe. People not only act but feel: they see, hear, smell, recall, plan for the future. These activities are associated with subjective, ineffable, immaterial feelings that are tied in some manner to the material
brain. The exact nature of this relationship—the classical mind-body problem—remains elusive and the subject of heated debate. These first hand, subjective experiences pose a daunting challenge to the scientific
method that, in many other areas, has proven so immensely fruitful. Science can describe events micro-seconds following the Big Bang, offer an increasingly detailed account of matter and how to manipulate it, and uncover the biophysical and neurophysiological
nuts and bolts of the brain and its pathologies.
However, this same method has as yet failed to provide a satisfactory account of how first-hand, subjective experience fits into the objective, physical universe. The brute fact of consciousness comes as a total sur-
prise; it does not appear to follow from any phenomena in traditional physics or biology.'

[Anonymous No.14594275]

>>14594193
>the - mind is an antenna crowd - are just religious and spiritual people (read:people who hate life because they are afraid of death - death is a part of life and is natural) in disquise.
I am not claiming the mind is an antenna. I am claiming that the mind is the mind. I am claiming the physical world is something which appears in the minds of observers.
>consciousness isnt immaterial, its just your neurons
You can look at neurons all day long and you won't see a persons consciousness. You can look in a brain all day long and you won't find a persons experience. It's not localized in a brain. The other way around. Brains, like the physical world in general, are only ever seen in minds.

[Anonymous No.14594277]

>>14593705
>Consciousness is literally just an organization of matter that we fail to understand
>Fail to understand

[Anonymous No.14594282]

>>14594193
How does something getting more complex make it self-aware? I agree with everything else you said. Self-replicating far from equilibrium systems undergo selection. This favors systems that can code information about their environment within themselves. This takes off with genomes, which act as one way membranes for information about the environment. This encoding then re-emerges in nervous systems. You have organisms containing multiple informational representations of their environment at different levels of emergence. Language appears to be the fractal recurrence of this same trend towards the replication of information.

All that said, how does stacking ever higher level representations of the environment and upping the computational abilities of an organism to use said information to aid survival suddenly result in the emergence of a first person perspective.

That is the hard problem, not "how do brains evolve and do things like get an arm to move?," but rather "why do brains result in the emergence of first person perspectives at all?" And that isn't answered by neuroscience or physics. Taking information from one system to another isn't unique to life and can't be the answer. The Earth's crust records the history of rivers in riverbeds and canyons or the migratory paths of herd animals, but it isn't intelligent. A similar mass of hot hydrogen gas has more entropy than a working brain, so it's not about total entropy either, nor interconnectedness.

Obviously to think things appear to need to be networked but not too networked, high entropy but not too high entropy.

[Anonymous No.14594294]

>>14594282
BTW, my hunch is that the relative synonymity of interactions in a system is part of the key.

People will say, "well the brain is the most complex thing in the universe we've seen," as if that explains anything. Is it? How is complexity defined? Often people point to connections.

Well, gas laws are an emergent phenomenon. Behavior mimicking ideal gas laws comes from a set of individual behaviors at the molecule level that alone do not describe the overall phenomena. And gasses are very connected in the sense of any one component molecule exerting an effect on others. But with this connectedness, every interaction is roughly synonymous, with only energy variances making up the difference.

In the brain, the exact placement of each axon in relation to each dendrite matters. Which type of neurotransmitter gets released matters. There is less overall interaction, but very little of it is symmetrical.

A working human brain occupies an infitesimal number of the possible configurations of the matter than makes up the brain (brain in a blender, lovely image), but in that narrow band synonymity is extremely low.

So, brains might be difference engines, much as Spirit is in Boheme and Hegel.

[Anonymous No.14594300]

>>14594275
The human brain uses over 1000% more calories per unit weight than the average for the rest of the body, it outputs more energy than muscles do. Greater than normal intellectual activity is exhausting for this reason. Sit in an exam room busting your brain on an exam for a couple hours without moving a muscle, emerge exhausted due to intellectual energy burn.

[4118 No.14594305]

>>14594143
There's clearly some sort of connection happening between consciousness and matter, otherwise your physical mouth wouldn't be talking about your non-physical conscious experience.
Either Idealism or some sort of back-and-forth field-type interaction seems the likely answers.
All I can say is that even EM fields are not really comparable to subjectivity, and I am more doubtful we could ever really understand it to the extent we do the standard model.

I remain unconvinced that subjective consciousness is reducible by observation and logic like the stuff we call physical matter is.

[Anonymous No.14594309]

>>14594300
>The human brain uses over 1000% more calories per unit weight than the average for the rest of the body, it outputs more energy than muscles do
The question isn't about energy. The question is about thought.

[4118 No.14594313]

>>14594182
>like the Buddhists say
I don't know that this materialist/dualist/idealist division has nearly as much importance in Eastern thought, seems more like a Western hangup.
I would avoid bringing Eastern thought into the conversation at all, as my recent experiences on the boards have shown it to be a clusterfuck of different terminology and focus, and this conversation is already messy as is.

[Anonymous No.14594327]

>>14594282
>All that said, how does stacking ever higher level representations of the environment and upping the computational abilities of an organism to use said information to aid survival suddenly result in the emergence of a first person perspective
I would add that not only does consciousness not add an evolutionary advantage, it is a disadvantage. Think of anti-natalism. People that are against having children. This is becoming more popular. Think of abortion. Think of wars. Unconscious life forms could have gone on forever as unthinking self replicating automatons effectively forever. Conscious beings come up with birth control and abortion and they can also decide that life is futile and stop reproducing. Trees will never do that.

[Anonymous No.14594337]

>>14594313
Its important to bring in the Eastern thoughts because they've got a unique insight, particularly the Buddhist do. For example, the entire Indian tradition is based around understanding this division. Whether its Hindus vs Buddhists, Buddhists vs other Buddhists. I'd even say that whole western philosophy's walk into dualism/idealism has quite a lot of eastern influences. Kant/Hume/Schopenhaur/Nietzsche/Heideger/Husserl/etc are pulling the same problems the Buddhists/Hindus have been dealing with for thousands of years.

Getting the roots of the problem from many different angle can shine light upon the problem.

[4118 No.14594361]

>>14594193
>I am a P-zombie, the credo
Golf clap.

>>14594205
See >>14594243 possibly (he may just take issue with it on complicated logical grounds)
That which claims mental awareness and can speak, yet when asked about any subjective experience immediately hand waves it away as insubstantial or non-existent, and insists that all mental awareness must be equal with its simple awareness, as nothing else is possible. It exists in words, processes, and material and nothing else.
It's like that old book, where you ask a square about what it's like to be a cube, and it has a mental meltdown.

[4118 No.14594363]

>>14594198
>SCIENCE! open questions
Right. I think just because of the material success of physics, a lot of people grant it far more certainty and long-term viability as the Ultimate Truth Teller than reason would dictate.
It's a phase of Western (now mostly global) thought that has lasted about 500 years and produced some profound gains, but also one that has massive holes in it with uncertainty as to whether it can close them, either due to technical limitations or basic epistemological inability.
We stuck with Greek thought and its natural truths for 2000 years before some new thing came about and knocked it down. We all assume the new thing, which is our thing, will last indefinitely, and is the most powerful thing that could ever come around.
History scoffs at such arrogant permanence.
The next thing will remain a mystery until it shows up and starts providing clear gains over the current thing.

I severely doubt a bunch of upjumped monkeys just managed to figure it all out in the Renaissance, and now it's a matter of iterating that for a few more centuries.
>>14594258
>Science can describe events micro-seconds following the Big Bang
It claims to. Its description might change radically in ten years when a new model comes out. I would be wary of assigning too much a sense of permanence to things that we're taking almost on a priori modeling so long as it aligns with observations. Better observations, or alterations in the underlying model (which is currently flawed, see dark energy as a very appropriate example), will change whatever scientists claim about such distant moments.

Not saying that to trip you up, but rather underscore the point that it remains totally unclear whether science is reliable enough to solve all our intellectual questions, including the most difficult one of mind-body, or whether it will require a new system of inquiry, perhaps one that monkeybrains cannot fathom.

[Anonymous No.14594366]

>>14594282
The how of the question is even harder than the why. Neurons doing stuff does not explain it. You don't see neurons when you open your eyes. You don't see the inside of your brain. You see processed, organized and structured data in the form of a three spacetime screen with objects in it. But these objects are not the things in themself. These are apparently (so the story goes) reconstructions, one might even say virtual simulations of 'real' objects which are observer independent (even though experiment says they are observer dependent, just trust us, they are objective). So then what are these objects you see in your minds eye made of. Matter? Ok. Good. Then we should be able to open a brain up and observe this matter because matter is objectively observable. What? This is some kind of SUBJECTIVE matter, that can only be seen INTERNALLY. Explain in detail. If I see a mountain in my mind, what is that mountain made of? Neurons? Let's have details. Noone can give details. That is also part of the hard problem. And what about dreams. What matter are they constructed out of? And what about imagined things? Fantasies? What is an imagined fantasy made of. None of it is in fact made of matter. And all of it can in fact be accounted for with mind.

[Anonymous No.14594369]

>>14594366
>You see processed, organized and structured data in the form of a three spacetime screen with objects in it
should be
> You see processed, organized and structured data in the form of a three dimentional spacetime screen with objects in it

[4118 No.14594379]

>>14594337
>Getting the roots of the problem from many different angle can shine light upon the problem.
Certainly, but this board lacks the knowledge of Eastern thought for it to be anything other than a massive mess. It's already asking a lot to have a conversation about something as ephemeral (not taking a side with that term) and almost anti-logical as consciousness with people from STEM, philosophy, and Western religious backgrounds, where most are laymen with a partial education on any of this at best, and toss in an even more exotic perspective that basically nobody understands at an expert level here.

I just went through a long thread on what anatman meant to Buddhists, and the conversation just went around and around and in the end I'm about 90% convinced it was just due to people talking past each other on terminology or baseline assumptions. It's too nebulous a divide to lend itself readily to easy translation.

[Anonymous No.14594394]

>>14594361
>everyone who disagrees with me is a p-zombie
very clever and original
I don't get why it's so controversial to claim that p-zombies are inconceivable desu. It follows logically from the idea that the physical workings of the brain necessarily entail consciousness. For a functionalist or computationalist (i.e. the mainstream account of consc. among basically everyone except philosophers of mind) this should be dead obvious.

[4118 No.14594407]

>>14594366
It leads to the question of what a P-zombie would actually be.
How does one exist as a human, engage with the world, "see" things in some mental sense, yet lack the subjective experience?
I use P-zombie above as somewhat of a cheeky phrase, I don't know that it's a logical possibility or not, though I also struggle to understand how people can be so adamantly pure materialist on this matter without it, unless their rationalistic reductionism has overwhelmed any ability to think one inch outside the box that material science has set for them, or use basic common sense (common problem in both philosophy and STEM).

PZ: The brain processes a stream of perceptual data. It constructs an internal model, it can analyze parts of that model and apply logic to it, it applies words to such things, it says "I see a tree, it is green", it relates this process to its neurochemical state, "it makes me happy", it smiles.
Can it do that as a computer program would, just one with a personality and some level of contextual and self-generated intelligence?
Would anything engaging in such a self-referencing produce a subjective experience, or what is the exact logical-material requirement there?

This ignores dualism, or the take where a "soul" of some sort just snaps into certain bodies, but apparently there's some sort of supply and demand limitation on souls... And idealism, where it's all just a part of the mind, but that brings up its own questions.
I doubt we will find clear answers any time soon. I'm not sure we can even really start tying off possibilities just because they seem to be contrary to the general perspective of reductionist materialism, given that's just the newest phase of human thought.

[4118 No.14594411]

>>14594394 see >>14594407
I don't find them either inconceivable or a definite natural phenomenon.
That said, explain why some people cannot into subjectivity desu.

[Anonymous No.14594413]

>>14592640
Consciousness is the the echo of the divine reverberating through the simulation we call "The Universe". Atheists will deny this, but it makes it no less true.

[Anonymous No.14594418]

>>14592732
An antenna is not the same as the transmission, the brain is just a receiver, it is not where consciousness comes from.

[Anonymous No.14594420]

>>14592640
Consciousness is all, matter is an illusion

[4118 No.14594442]

>>14594418
>Hit the brain with a mallet
>Now the brain believes monkeys can fly and 2+2=5 and you are Napoleon.
>The brain is just the receiver
Come on now.
Either the receiver is important enough to completely alter the signal such that it clearly is an equal partner in the output, or your analogy is bogus. Either way you still have to deal with how the two interact and have solved nothing except waving your hands in the air and claiming "magic soul force does it".
No better a solution than waving your hands in the air and claiming "magic unnamed physical field force does it". We don't know yet, if ever.

An interesting thought experiment. What if the color green changed when you hit your head? Would you know it? How could you ever check that the green you see upon waking today was the same you saw yesterday?
All your memory records is that X was green, and the general psychological impressions that green generally gives you. Does this require a consistency in the qualia of green, or is it independent of such? I'm thinking that remembering a green moment will just have the memory tape play back X was green, and you will see that green exactly the same as your current green, so you won't know a difference.

[Anonymous No.14594447]

>>14594442
>hit the TV with a mallet
>the TV now displays a picture that is all green and has diagonal lines across it
>the TV is just the receiver
Come on now

[Anonymous No.14594458]

>>14594418
>Brain as receiver
Claiming a thing is not evidence of a thing. Until you make demonstration, such as by novel future predictions that can be tested, there is no epistemic warrant to believe this is true. All you are doing is demonstrating underdetermination.
"What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence".

[Anonymous No.14594460]

>>14594458
Claiming the brain generates consciousness is also a baseless claim since you have no evidence for it. You just forgot because everyone assumes so (wrongly).

[Anonymous No.14594466]

>>14594460
All predictions pertaining to the brain, and consciousness, that have been successful have been on that basis. You are merely asserting an ad hoc hypothesis claiming that evidence as your own, and having made no predictions yourself.
The burden of proof is on the claimant. So far, all the evidence to meet that burden has been on the basis of the theory that consciousness is a product of emergence and brains. Denying this is just a toddler tantrum.

In other words, put up or shut up. If you do not present evidence, then you are choosing to forfeit. Dishonest games like these will simply count as forfeiting.

[Anonymous No.14594476]

>>14594466
>All predictions pertaining to the brain, and consciousness, that have been successful have been on that basis.
Bullshit.

>You are merely asserting an ad hoc hypothesis claiming that evidence as your own, and having made no predictions yourself.
No, that's what you're doing.

>The burden of proof is on the claimant.
Yes, and you have presented none (and are unable to because we even the top tier neuroscientists admit we have no fucking idea how the brain works).

>Denying this is just a toddler tantrum.
Believing in fairy tales just because they are convenient is more akin to toddler behavior.

>In other words, put up or shut up
Spoken like a true dogmatic materialist.

>If you do not present evidence, then you are choosing to forfeit.
Waiting for you to present evidence that the brain creates consciousness.

>Dishonest games like these will simply count as forfeiting.
The most dishonest game is believing blindly what our culture has told you, while having no evidence whatsoever for it. Until your hypothesis includes predictive power, it is just another fart in the wind. Just because everyone else believes in it, doesn't make it true.

[Anonymous No.14594482]

>>14594476
I accept your concession.

[Anonymous No.14594484]

>>14594482
Whatever.

[Anonymous No.14594493]

Not science or math
>>>/x/

[Anonymous No.14594505]

>>14592640
3 years of neuroscience 2 years of psych and 9 years of STEM education and work here
consciousness is an illusion

[Anonymous No.14594508]

>>14594484
Nobody cares. The sooner you learn this the better it will be for you. It takes no effort to form ad hoc hypotheses like you are doing, and merely asserting them has no value as one can assert infinitely many of them. Only one of them can be true. Stamping your feet harder does not make yours more likely to be true.

You have two choices: Either learn real epistemology, or continue through life like a toddler stamping his foot.

[Anonymous No.14594604]

>>14594493

[Anonymous No.14594630]

>>14594604

[Anonymous No.14594731]

>>14594171
>It's not that matter and consciousness are "so different" they are incompatible

That's a nail in the coffin (not the only one) for linking matter to consciousness. Why do you say otherwise? There is no way to link the two because they are ontologically incommunserable.

[Anonymous No.14594738]

Trying to solve the hard problem of consciousness is a wild goose chase. We will very likely never be able to explain it. Furthermore, A.I., no matter how performatively impressive it may be, will likely never be truly conscious.

The open secret about the debate on consciousness within the scientific community is that there's not even a consensus on the fundamentals. But because science wants to have its cake at eat it too, there is this dog and pony show of a "conversation" about it, where the physicalists will loudly proclaim that although consciousness seemingly cannot be explained with classical mechanics and that it must instead rely on some quantum-mechanical phenomena, the answer nevertheless is right around the corner (despite the fact that quantum physicists and AI specialists generally disagree categorically with this assertion). The minority who have grown tired of squaring the circle instead throw up their hands and smugly dismiss consciousness as an illusion, leaving the can in place on the road for others to continue kicking.

We are nowhere even remotely close to having an explanation for consciousness. The closest thing resembling an actual answer that the "experts" offer are pretentious, long-winded litanies that amount to little more than "it's an emergent phenomenon", perhaps in hope that baudry poetics will pass as some kind of deep truth. Despite this, many still earnestly cling to the belief that if we hook enough computers together, if we just install the right software, if, if, if, then maybe, one day, the rocks will wake up.

lol ok bro

Meanwhile, the mind-body problem and the knowledge argument remain largely unresolved, addressed only with patronizingly tautological rebuttals, while the largely ignored mountain of anecdotal evidence for dualistic interpretations continues to grow.

[Anonymous No.14594743]

>>14594731
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division

Saying walls and bricks are different therefore you can't get walls from bricks...

[Anonymous No.14594747]

>>14594743

That's not is not what I'm saying.

Walls and bricks are within the same ontological category -- matter.

[Anonymous No.14594752]

>>14594747
Therefore, there is no immediate reason to claim you can't get walls from bricks.

[Anonymous No.14594755]

>>14594747
So is consciousness. Demonstrate otherwise if you want to claim otherwise. Good luck.

[Anonymous No.14594772]

>>14594755

Matter is defined to be quantitative, i.e everything there is to matter can be described by quantities and their relations.

Done.

It is intrinsically not qualitative.

[Anonymous No.14594774]

>Consciousness clearly exists, and matter can not, by its definition, explain it. Thus, it is time to start with a new basis of reality.
Based

[Anonymous No.14594779]

>>14594772
>Matter is defined to be quantitative
I reject your definition. So much for that.

[Anonymous No.14594781]

>>14594505
The fuck does that even mean? I can observe myself existing and my experience of "self" hasn't really changed since I was a kid. All the neurological trappings have but the experience-r (me) remains the same.

[Anonymous No.14594790]

>>14594779
Then you are not interested in the hard problem of consiousness, because this is the crux of the issue.

[Anonymous No.14594795]

>>14594781

It's a thought-terminating cliche within the scientific community for those who have moved on from saying "it's an emergent phenomenon".

[El Arcón No.14594800]

>The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how we have qualia or phenomenal experiences.
Given a proposed answer, how would you test the answer?

[El Arcón No.14594807]

>The hard problem of getting other people to believe that your statements about something which is subjective render it objective

[Anonymous No.14594808]

>>14594790
There is no hard problem, there is only the assertion of a problem.

The example used before is that the property of "a wall" is emergent from bricks. Qualitatively I can make this even simpler, and point out "wetness" is a property of, for example, water. The "qualitative" are merely fuzzy categories we create, not distinct at all and all are products of the material. For simplicity sake in our hypothetical world where only water makes things wet, you could not have "wetness" without H20.

This is a simple proof by negation. If the qualitative were distinct from the quantitative, you could have the quality without the quantity. There is no quality distinct from some quantity, therefore they cannot be said to be distinct. >>14594795 So, yes, it is emergent. Only it is not "a cliche" it is demonstrably the case and logically necessary.

To claim otherwise require someone demonstrate to me a quality in and of itself, and absent matter. Good luck.

[Anonymous No.14594814]

>>14594808
>To claim otherwise require someone demonstrate to me a quality in and of itself, and absent matter.
I experience myself experiencing (cartesian theater basically) and observe the same entity (myself) in the exact same way as my earliest memories despite being physically completely distinct from 4 year old me.

[Anonymous No.14594819]

>>14594808

see

>>14594738

[Anonymous No.14594827]

>>14594814
I have no idea how you think that demonstrates what I just said you'd have to demonstrate. Your memories are a product of your brain, which is physical. You would effectively have to demonstrate having a memory without a brain.

I don't get how you think what you just said counts. Not even a little. Not without assuming already that memory is somehow distinct from brains. That's just begging the question at that point.

[Anonymous No.14594828]

>>14594460
It's not a baseless claim. There is loads of evidence that the brain influenced consciousness.

1. People who suffer traumatic brain injuries undergo major changes on cognition. They can become totally different people. A conscientious person can become an impulsive mess (Phineus Gage). I've worked with TBI patients who essentially died during their injury. The person who lives on has few of the abilities or preferences of the old person and exhibits child-like reasoning and emotional controls.

The types of deficit someone has from a traumatic brain injury, stroke, drug overdose, near drowning, etc. is highly predictive of what sorts of deficits they will experience.

2. MRIs, PET scans, etc. allow us to see what sorts of brain activity are associated with which functions of consciousness. Notably, the areas the light up on a scan due to increased blood flow or electrical activity when a given function is used happen to also be the areas where performance gets hit during injury or disease. So, the occipital lobe deals with vision processing and lights up when someone looks at pictures or imagines vision. Damage to this area results in an inability to see clearly, or sometimes total blindness, including the ability to imagine sight, even if people who could see before.

3. Physical drugs alter your perceptions.

4. When patients have areas of their brains electronically stimulated during brain surgery they will vividly experience different stimuli. A classic example is a patient of Oliver Sacks distinctly hearing Guns and Roses Sweet Child of Mine, as if it was playing in the room, due to stimulation. This doesn't mean there is a "Guns and Roses," part of the brain obviously, but it does show first person perception evolving out of electrical stimulus.

5. If minds don't come from brains, how can we explain:

Cont.

[Anonymous No.14594829]

>>14594808

Grats on finding a way to dossy up an argument from incredulity

[Anonymous No.14594837]

>>14594829
Pointing out the burden of proof is not an argument from incredulity.

[Anonymous No.14594839]

>>14594827
>Your memories are a product of your brain, which is physical. You would effectively have to demonstrate having a memory without a brain.
I'm assuming that "I" can access my physical memories, because I experience doing that, but that's it. Clearly "I" experience physical reality but "I" experience "I" in ways that contradict the current consensus among scientists (that "I" am an illusion, whatever that means). I'm genuinely trying to figure out how your worldview can explain this away since it "feels" right but it directly contradicts my experience.

[Anonymous No.14594841]

>>14594828
FYI none of these things are part of what I mean by "myself" or what people who talk about the hard problem of consciousness mean by "consciousness."

t. >>14594839

[Anonymous No.14594843]

>>14594827
>>14594828
First:

>conflating consciousness with memories/intelligence/etc.

Second:

"Hey, we have this thing called the mind-body problem"

"yeah it's simple bro they interact which means consciousness is a physical phenomenon"

"...no, that's a tautology, you're just restating the problem to answer the problem"

"nope, i'm smart, this is the answer, git gud"

k

[Anonymous No.14594845]

>>14594839
I will say that it's possible my memories are all corrupted as a means to trick myself into believing that I exist, but the experience of experiencing is exactly the same going back decades so I find it pretty unlikely.

[Anonymous No.14594846]

>>14594839
>I'm genuinely trying to figure out how your worldview can explain this away since it "feels" right but it directly contradicts my experience.

I don't have to contradict your idea of your experiences. I need only point out that you have to somehow demonstrate your idea of that is true; that it is the case. People have experiences that are not real, that are not true, all the time. Just saying "Well I believe the way I experience is explained this way" is not demonstration, because you can be wrong in the framing of your experience.

>>14594843
There's nothing but a whinge in this post. Do better.

[Anonymous No.14594853]

>>14594845
That was close to my objection but not quite. I am saying the framing of the experience is what needs to be demonstrated, as merely stating that it is the case does not demonstrate the framing to be true.

It is completely possible to have false beliefs about ourselves, including our idea of our experience. In extremes there are mental illnesses very thoroughly demonstrating that to be the case. Hence, merely relating "I narrate to myself that my experience is of this quality or nature" does not evidence that it truly is.

Just adding this on to my other reply here >>14594846 in case it helps further clarify what the real issue is. The real issue is not merely "my memories are false", the issue is larger than that.

[Anonymous No.14594857]

>>14594837

Not really. Also, I'm not the guy you were originally talking to. You are essentially arguing that because you cannot conceive of a quality absent matter, it must not exist. I don't have an answer for consciousness, but clearly neither do you, but that's not stopping you from assuming that a physicalist interpretation is necessarily the default position.

[Anonymous No.14594859]

>>14594857
>You are essentially arguing that because you cannot conceive of a quality absent matter, it must not exist.
No, I am arguing that absent evidence of such there is no reason to believe it exists. You have a strawman.

[Anonymous No.14594860]

>>14594846
>I don't have to contradict your idea of your experiences.
Your idea of it being an "illusion" contradicts the first and the only universal observation you have ever made, so in order to convince me you do. Clearly that doesn't work in a formal scientific paper, but from my perspective (or the perspective of anyone else who has what I have) you sound insane. It is as fundamental to me as causality.
>need only point out that you have to somehow demonstrate your idea of that is true; that it is the case. People have experiences that are not real, that are not true, all the time.
Correct, but when the experiences are consistent and corroborated by other people you call that close enough to truth.
>Just saying "Well I believe the way I experience is explained this way" is not demonstration, because you can be wrong in the framing of your experience.
Perhaps, but most people I know have this same experience of experiences that sounds the same to me and my own has, to the best of my knowledge, stayed totally consistent.

[Anonymous No.14594862]

>>14594846

Pointing out a tautological argument isn't a "whinge", but go on

[Anonymous No.14594863]

>>14594860
*I have ever made, not "you have ever made"

[Anonymous No.14594866]

>>14594828
A. That minds only appear in animals. Why aren't rocks or my own conscious? After all, if physical nature has nothing to do with consciousness, it should be anywhere.

B. That consciousness is effected by physical things like head injuries or drinking.

C. They these things can radically alter our sense of self at a core level. DMT, Salvia, ketamine, etc. can induce full ego death. Disassociative anesthetics (terrible classification name since they are powerful hallucinogens) such as, ketamine, nitrous oxide, PCP, and DXM can produce profound effects on the sensation of time, including extreme time dialation. You can find a TED talk by Jill Bolte who was a neuroscientist who had a stroke and experienced cognitive faculties shutting down one by one, the world blurring into meaningless abstraction (made me think a lot of Hegel's pure sense certainty = pure abstraction= nothing).

So, there is plenty of things to base the theory on. The deeper problem, IMO, is that there is the open question of: "what is matter, what is physical."

Here the answer is much more thorny.

>>14594476
Top tier neuroscientists absolutely do not say "we have no idea how the brain works." What do you think they study?

You're also highly underestimating the hubris of some of these guys. Some are nuckle dragging elimitivists and deny their own qualia exist as a means of asserting they have it all mostly figured out.

But what most would say is that they don't know how first person perspective emerged from brains, not that they don't know a lot about how they work.

In any case, the hard problem might remain even if something akin to the poorly defined physicalism of mainstream science is true. Because you're asking a mental model of how minds look and behave extrinsically to define the experience of being a mind. The mental abstraction of the physical world though must always be just one thing experienced within the first person perspective, so of course it can't define it.

[Anonymous No.14594867]

>>14594859

Again, not really. I'm just saying that physicalism shouldn't be the default position.

[Anonymous No.14594869]

>>14594853
>I am saying the framing of the experience is what needs to be demonstrated
What does this mean exactly?
>Hence, merely relating "I narrate to myself that my experience is of this quality or nature" does not evidence that it truly is.
Does this not presuppose ideas about the self, self experience, and narration to the self? How can it be described without appealing to intuitive concepts about self existence?

[Anonymous No.14594874]

>>14594860
> It is as fundamental to me as causality.
Okay. It isn't for me. I don't particularly have reason to care either way. You see, to me it does not matter because whichever "is the case" has always been the case. So there's no real reason for me to base anything on merely the idea I have it right, because it'll work however it works regardless.

Major exception being: When it comes to explaining, therefore modeling and making predictions about, what actually is the case. That's all this is to me.

>Correct, but when the experiences are consistent and corroborated by other people you call that close enough to truth.
I'm afraid I don't share this idea even a little. What is close enough to truth is that which can be demonstrated. If you primarily had friends in an atheist country, for example, very few would claim experience of God. In a very religious country, many will make such a claim. What you propose would, in effect, render your standard of truth entirely contingent on what people profess to believe. That is not my standard.

>Perhaps, but most people I know have this same experience of experiences that sounds the same to me and my own has, to the best of my knowledge, stayed totally consistent.
If at a prior time most people narrated their experience with a mistaken idea of how the world works, does that mean the world once worked that way? That is the root of the problem I have with your approach.

[Anonymous No.14594880]

>>14594869
>What does this mean exactly?
I believe I explained that sufficiently here >>14594874
>Does this not presuppose ideas about the self, self experience, and narration to the self? How can it be described without appealing to intuitive concepts about self existence?
I do not see how. If ones explanation of experience were able to make predictions about the nature of experience, as you often see in cognitive modeling and other areas of science, the reliability of the model to make such predictions paints its own picture. If it were purely subjective then the truth about your experience would depend entirely on your belief in its nature, and that too could be modeled and predicted. As then it would be a matter of some choice or will to change that paradigm absent any other causation.

The thing is, stuff like that has long been tested and the matter of experiment in neuroscience. We could get into some of that, but it's a bit of a red herring at present as the main issue first seems to be what one considers acceptable evidence.

[Anonymous No.14594884]

One again, the scientific community and the nerds who gleefully parrot their assertions with their noses up their own asses don't actually have any answers. Phrases like "it's an illusion" and "it's an emergent phenomenon" are thought-terminating clichés and don't really mean anything substantive. Don't take these responses seriously, no matter how much flowery language they're wrapped in.

[Anonymous No.14594886]

>>14594867
>I'm just saying that physicalism shouldn't be the default position.
It is not merely assumed to be. That is what all the evidence currently supports. To suggest otherwise requires evidence of the nonphysical. Depicting that dishonestly by making false equivalence regarding evidence is why I am hostile to you. Any attempt to make an ad hoc hypothesis to make such an equivalence is merely that, and failing its own predictions to test is of no value whatever.

[Anonymous No.14594889]

>>14594841
I would look at narratives by brain injury survivors. Many suffer a profound loss of a sense of self. Imagine you suddenly can't understand language, see depth at all (stuck with essentially 2D vision), or remember anyone. You can't even tell human faces from other shapes or figure out where you hand, which you can still sort of move with concentration, ends and where the external world begins. It's a profound dislocation.

Anyhow, I would say with my relatives with Alzheimer's and people I've known with severe TBI that the "I" that was there is certainly no longer there. There isn't even a unified I anymore, more a congress of dysfunctional modules of personhood struggling, and failing to work together to produce an emergent whole.

Split brains are instructive here too. If you ask a split brain person what their dream job is, their two hands will write down two different answer, but they will not claim to be aware of a discrepancy. Which "I" is the real one?

I'd go with Buddhist thinkers and Hume on this one, that there is not a united I, but rather a whole constructed of different elements that is fleeting. As Nietzsche calls it in BG&E, a "congress of souls."

But this sort of separation also jives with the findings of neuroscience in that consciousness seems to work by splicing together information from multiple specialized modules.

[Anonymous No.14594891]

>>14594874
>What you propose would, in effect, render your standard of truth entirely contingent on what people profess to believe.
That is unfortunately the way that science actually works. Becoming less wrong than we used to be does not metaphysically guarantee that we have access to ANY objective truth. I think that's unlikely but I can't eliminate the possibility and I have a sneaking suspicion that "dry" human reason is incapable of addressing certain fundamental issues.

>If at a prior time most people narrated their experience with a mistaken idea of how the world works, does that mean the world once worked that way? That is the root of the problem I have with your approach.
It kind of would: If everyone once perceived the world as monochromatic and now they don't, clearly something fundamental changed. The simplest explanation is that their brains did but either way yes: In a sense, the world did "used to work that way."

[Anonymous No.14594893]

>>14594886

Ignore philosophy at your own risk.

[Anonymous No.14594902]

>>14594843
Did you even read my post before writing that? I mentioned the serious problems physicalism faced, and the lack of ability to define what is physical (all attempts fall to the horns of Hemple's Dilemma).

However, to the degree that the physical world is a useful model for interpreting empiricism and making predictions, it is certainly true that there is ample empirical support for brains causing consciousness.

Can you please show me one example of something definitely non-physical interacting with physical forces? That is, an empirically supported instance of substance dualism?

Substance dualism is shit on for good reason. The problem is that people throw the baby out with the bathwater and don't consider predicate dualism or type dualism (true emergence).

[Anonymous No.14594906]

>>14594889
I have done all that and I still can't help but feeling that I exist. I concede that what most normies consider 99% of their identity is totally fleeting but my soul - the entity that I percieve as myself - remains the same. We aren't talking about the same thing when we say "I" or "self". I'm talking about something that seems to have remained consistent since before I could talk.

It's funny because I want to believe what you do because at least it would resolve this horrible cognitive dissonance I have but I can't.

[Anonymous No.14594911]

>>14594860
>Perhaps, but most people I know have this same experience of experiences that sounds the same to me and my own has, to the best of my knowledge, stayed totally consistent.

This would apply to "the Earth is flat" and "the Sun rotates around the Earth."

Come on now, consistent experience is not a good marker for truth.

[Anonymous No.14594912]

>>14594902

>Can you please show me one example of something definitely non-physical interacting with physical forces?

Can you show me an example of a particle with negative mass?

[Anonymous No.14594915]

>>14594891
>That is unfortunately the way that science actually works.

I believe this is a false equivocation. What I am referring to pertains to reality, or that which is independent of opinion because it does not change merely because opinion says it ought. The only way I can take what you just wrote in good faith is in the social domain, and I am pointedly stating "I am not talking about the social domain". That is, not the subjective one or how you may think the social dynamics of science works.

>Becoming less wrong than we used to be does not metaphysically guarantee that we have access to ANY objective truth.

Fallibilism accepts this and inductive evidence as warrant to claim knowledge. After all, that is the "justified" and "belief" part of "justified true belief". You do not require a guarantee, you merely require showing that it works better than the alternatives at predicting reality.

>It kind of would: If everyone once perceived the world as monochromatic and now they don't, clearly something fundamental changed. The simplest explanation is that their brains did but either way yes: In a sense, the world did "used to work that way."

But that is missing the most important part of my point. Yes, for example in that case your eyes would change or brain such that differences with cones and rods and so on would correspond to some subjective sense of color. However, only seeing one color does not change the physical fact light exists at different frequencies that would activate those chemical signals.

So, again, the physical domain is not the social or subjective domain and the two cannot be equivocated in this discussion. The subjective domain does not change reality. It may change how one chooses to operate in the reality they perceive, but that is not what we are talking about.

You have an experience, you narrate it with certain assumptions, and the mere belief in the assumption is not evidence those assumptions are true.

[Anonymous No.14594916]

>>14594862
Yes but in that case it was a blatant strawmans.

[Anonymous No.14594919]

>>14594911
What? It applies to everything. You can make the same argument about the scientific method.

[Anonymous No.14594934]

>>14594808

>. The "qualitative" are merely fuzzy categories we create, not distinct at all and all are products of the material.

"IT EMERGES BRO". Again, they are ontologically separate: one is qualitative, the other is quantitative.

>There is no quality distinct from some quantity, therefore

Kek, nice "proof". What kind of retarded logic is this?

You're just assuming that matter is the basis of reality. You're essentially saying that "every conscious experience is the result of material things".

The burden of proof is on YOU.

[blah No.14594935]

>>14594906
I may need to pick a name to help distinguish anons here, as another person is also replying to you. For now, I >>14594915 am "blah" unless someone decides to troll at which point I will tripfag if possible (it's been so long I forget). Just be aware I am trying to genuinely engage, since surprisingly you have been. I wanted to comment on this part even though it's a different fork of conversation.
>I have done all that and I still can't help but feeling that I exist.
Well, you do. It is simply the nature of what that "I" is that differs from your idea of it, or so I would guess. Personally I don't see that as a problem, since whatever it really is has nothing to do with me. If it did, I could change it by whim, and my attempt at doing so doesn't seem to do anything.

>We aren't talking about the same thing when we say "I" or "self".
We aren't talking about the same idea of what it means, no, but reality is what determined that absent anyone's idea of what reality determined.

>It's funny because I want to believe what you do because at least it would resolve this horrible cognitive dissonance I have but I can't.
Can't relate. Unless there is some way to get at or investigate why there is some sense, probably personality or worldview that differs. Which one can attempt, but the problem is that I have no emotional attachment to this and most people professing as you do, well, do. At least that's been my experience. So while this is merely a conversation to me, you could personally see it as horrible or something. Funnily enough the whole thing could be precluded purely on the idea of what the consequences may be, whether or not there are any (and personally I do not think there are).

You know, afraid of that monster in the dark when there isn't one. It's a funny idea to me, but less so if someone thinks there is one. To me, though, the only way to show that is to show monsters exist. It's still analogous, you see?

[blah No.14594939]

>>14594934
The reason why I concluded as I did, and as you quote out of context, is explained in the same post. I offer you nothing further until you act like an adult.

[Anonymous No.14594941]

>>14594915
> I am referring to pertains to reality
Correct. But we can only access reality through our senses (and I consider reason/logic a kind of sense). No one in this conversation is God and therefore no one itt can declare "objective truth" like you're doing.
>You do not require a guarantee, you merely require showing that it works better than the alternatives at predicting reality.
My experience of experiencing predicts (by virtue of being identical) my future experience of experiencing and comparing it to memories I have where I was not experiencing experience but during which I experienced (in scenarios that I think are what people call ego death), it's the same. From my perspective experiencing is fundamentally free of side effects (except perhaps subsets of what most people call the will) so I cannot use it to induce physical phenomena except the speech I'm using to communicate with you, and to point out that many other people experience (observe) it as well.
>But that is missing the most important part of my point. Yes, for example in that case your eyes would change or brain such that differences with cones and rods and so on would correspond to some subjective sense of color. However, only seeing one color does not change the physical fact light exists at different frequencies that would activate those chemical signals.
Correct, but my point is that something physical and universal (from the perspective of all people) did in fact change, and there's no fundamental difference between the scientific consensus of the pre chromatic and post chromatic world: Both were interpreting reality as best they could. My point with all of that is that when scientific consensus contradicts direct experience usually there is something going on. I'm unable to share my contradictory experience directly with you but from my position I cannot rationally accept your argument any more than the first person who ever saw color could rationally accept monochromatic consensus.

[Anonymous No.14594945]

>>14594906
I totally share the same feeling. I recall a lot of deep sleep dreams, which are more repetitive strands of thought than REM dreams. There is still a perception there.

This is where atman/prakrati dualism works better than internal/external dualism.

That said, I've also read plenty of narratives of people losing this sense of self, a sense of boundaries between an I and experience. This seems almost illogical, which is prehaps why ego death is such a powerful psychological experience. I've undergone it to varying degrees, but probably not fully.

But I also experience the end of perception during deep sleep, so I can imagine this process of self ending or becoming so disrupted it no longer makes up a unified whole.

I also think it's totally possible. To subscribe to physicalism for philosophy of mind but not physicalism as an ontology. Brains may just be the extrinsic appearance of other minds for first persons in an idealist ontology where everything is mental.

[Anonymous No.14594949]

>>14594912
I fail to see the connection here.

[blah No.14594962]

>>14594941
>But we can only access reality through our senses (and I consider reason/logic a kind of sense).
This, while true, is omitting the fact reality accesses us independently of our senses. That is why we have all manner of tools to extend beyond those senses.

This is not an issue of "absolute proof". I do not need absolute certainty that I am not dreaming, and in fact to assert that would require evidence. To me, this is just trying to exclude things like evidence or testing ideas to avoid needing to. You will run from a lion no matter what, and you will not walk off a cliff. Functionally, therefore, I do not believe anyone who declares "but my senses are completely false". No attempt to discount reality will salvage you from the burden of proof, though you may wish that to be the case. Sadly, I think you need to hear that.

>My point with all of that is that when scientific consensus contradicts direct experience usually there is something going on.
Obviously if our brains were identical, to me, you would believe as I do. I do not think that matters as to our conversation, however, because if you believe "for the reasons" then pointing out those reasons are bad and better ones are available would be sufficient. If, in fact, those reasons are about what we've been discussing.

Again, and I feel you are really trying hard to side-step this, what matters in your burden of proof is showing that reality works in this way. You have to test your concept of that self and demonstrate that to be the one that best explains, models, predicts. Merely believing this to be true about yourself, well, personally I cannot fathom seeing that as evidence. Because it's a secondary statement about the "I" that is experiencing, outside of the self. Of course that is not evidence, it is the result of what I recall about the evidence, and therefore is subject to being falsified.

[Anonymous No.14594964]

>>14594949

There are no existing examples for either of these, but the possibility of hypothetical particles with negative mass is a serious consideration in theoretical physics because the math (i.e. the logic) doesn't rule them out.

[Anonymous No.14594968]

>>14594916

Oh, okay.

[Anonymous No.14594973]

>>14594939
There is no discussion to be had with you. You assume everything is the result of material things and you reason up from there.

[Anonymous No.14594976]

I feel like information theory did worlds to advance our understanding of how sensory data about "out there" can be represented in an organism. Also how this information can be used to guide organisms' behavior, and how computation shapes perception.

Unfortunately, despite considerable excitement about information ontology and the holographic universe as big paradigm shifts (and to be sure they are), I have never seen how this remotely solves the problem of how an experiencing thing develops. None of this information processing seems to require a thing that experiences.

The only thing that makes sense to me is some sort of low level panpsychism. The experience of all things interacting. And somehow, at higher levels of fractal reemergence, being continually rerepresenting in greater complexity, we get sentient, self-aware life.

That or an idealist ontology, but idealism still doesn't solve why people are aware and rocks aren't, so all the arguments in favor of physicalist "brains interacting with enviornments generate minds," remains. Except this just gets you back to square one, of how complexity by itself produces perspective.

[Anonymous No.14594981]

>>14594945
>But I also experience the end of perception during deep sleep
Me too, but I'm unable to observe/experience that actual state of non-being. It's all just a stream of experience that never really ends for me.
>That said, I've also read plenty of narratives of people losing this sense of self, a sense of boundaries between an I and experience.
I have as well, and I've had ptsd induced psychotic episodes where I certainly was operating purely on biological instinct and neurological automation, but the experiencer still experienced. Maybe I need to try acid or whatever shit induces ego death but by virtue of there being any experience at all I don't think it would convince me.
>>14594935
>Personally I don't see that as a problem, since whatever it really is has nothing to do with me. If it did, I could change it by whim, and my attempt at doing so doesn't seem to do anything.
This is likely our fundamental divergence. If I had to guess you probably experience experience the same way I do, you just don't think about the implications or have the emotional attachment to them that I do. Not meant to be an accusation and I certainly could be wrong, but that's what I perceive as most likely.
>Just be aware I am trying to genuinely engage,
I am aware and I genuinely appreciate it.
>You know, afraid of that monster in the dark when there isn't one. It's a funny idea to me, but less so if someone thinks there is one. To me, though, the only way to show that is to show monsters exist. It's still analogous, you see?
I get what you mean but the issue is that the "monster" in this case is both fundamental to my experience as well as something that is fundamentally, as near as I can tell, totally incorporeal in a metaphysical sense, so even if it exists it cannot be studied with science. From an outside perspective it's 100% rational to say that it doesn't exist, but my perspective is the only one that I have access to and it is impossible for me to ignore it.

[blah No.14594983]

>>14594973
Not an assumption. You simply desire a false equivalence I will not grant you.

[Anonymous No.14594988]

>>14594983

It's only a false equivalence if you're a fundamentalist.

[Anonymous No.14594994]

>>14594976
>“If mental processes are indeed physical processes, then there is something it is like, intrinsically, to undergo certain physical processes. What it is for such a thing to be the case remains a mystery.”

(Nagel, 1974)

>>14594294
>According to the principle outlined here, energy, along with forces and work, can be described as actualized differences of motion and tension. By observing physical systems, we can infer there is something it is like to undergo actualized difference from the intrinsic perspective of the system. Consciousness occurs because there is something it is like, intrinsically, to undergo a certain organization of actualized differences in the brain.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02091/full

Difference engines indeed.

>>14594968
The guy is just listing connections between brain activity and consciousness, and went on to comment open mindedly on the problems with mainstream materialism after. You just projected reductivist materialism on to a list of phenomena which are indeed something any non-physical explanation of consciousness will have to adequately explain.

[blah No.14595001]

>>14594981
>you just don't think about the implications or have the emotional attachment to them that I do
Given many decades to the contrary, the answer is the latter. Whatever is ultimately the case it has nothing to do with me.
>Maybe I need to try acid or whatever shit induces ego death but by virtue of there being any experience at all I don't think it would convince me.
If it helps I went the buddhist route. However, it came naturally to me anyway and I found no unique wisdom in it, because it already comported with how I saw things. It just seemed intuitively the case for me, but in ways I could not think to phrase at the time. I don't think I have some special wisdom, I just ended up with that kind of detached personality.

>I get what you mean but the issue is that the "monster" in this case is both fundamental to my experience as well as something that is fundamentally, as near as I can tell, totally incorporeal in a metaphysical sense

Which, to me, is just the unicorn I imagine in my room. To be clear, if I have an idea about something it is imaginary. So if I have an idea of a unicorn, even if real unicorns existed, that is only in my head and I would have to test the real unicorn to see if they correspond. "Truth is that which corresponds to reality".

So, you have an idea in your head about how this works to explain how you feel. The issue here is making the ideas feel "fundamental" to who or what we are, when they're contingent instead on all kinds of things that have nothing to do with who or what we really are. We can have all kinds of ideas, imaginings, about all of those things.

So what's impossible for you to ignore? The dreaded feelings that admitting someone's idea of who they are and what that means can be wrong? I don't get the emotional issue here. It's all contingent, which means there is no "you" that is really part of it, and it is not fundamental to that "you" at all.

[Anonymous No.14595007]

I wasn't going to throw-in today because of course we never get anywhere, but I'll just present my usual stance.

What bugs me about the hard problem, or at least the internet warriors who champion it, is they have a dogmatic hitch in their thinking.

Its true that neurology as it stands can only explain the data-gathering and interpreting of things, but not the "experiencer" of things. Thing is, materialism MAY also explain just that, but so many are quick to abandon that tract.

But no, everyone is quick to throw a Kastrup book in my face and say with religious fervor that "no material cause can exist." Just because we cannot know, doesn't mean that it isn't exactly a material cause. We can't just throw that out. Not even Chalmers thinks this way.

[Anonymous No.14595022]

>5000k years people trying to understand conscioussness through word salads (spirituality, religion, arm-chair philosophy)
>No progress, only confusion and irreconsiable theories

>100 years of scientific "materialist" study on conscioussness.
>Makes undeniable quantifiable progress, useful for medicine, philosophy, AI
>Many competing theories depending on empirical observations, not undefinable words nor wild imagination.
>Word salad schizos completely sidelined
>pic related

[Anonymous No.14595025]

>>14595001
>So what's impossible for you to ignore?
The omnipresent (from my perspective) self experiencing self. There is no way for me to test that it exists except for me to compare it to memories and the experiences of others, and it passes those tests. Maybe I'll end up experiencing non experience eventually or maybe neuroscience will progress to a point where we can directly transmit experience in such a way that it can be disproven but I'm skeptical of that.
>The dreaded feelings that admitting someone's idea of who they are and what that means can be wrong?
There's an element of existential dread, but no. I just cannot ignore my continued experience of myself as a discrete being. I fully understand that it might just be mental illness or self deluding emotional attachment or something on my part but I can't find any evidence that it is.
> "Truth is that which corresponds to reality".
This is correct, but I've never liked that phrase just because it implies that we are capable of determining that correspondence in all cases. History shows that we are usually more incorrect than we think we are. I think rationalism can only show you a subset of reality: It is predicated on certain intuitive ideas (causality is the most obvious) that it cannot generate. Whether that has any meaningful effect or not I don't know.

Apologies for the disordered reply but I have to go and just responded to the parts that stuck out to me. I appreciate your time.

[blah No.14595034]

>>14595025
>The omnipresent (from my perspective) self experiencing self.
Well yeah there is an experience but the fact of it does not evidence it being nonphysical or whatever. That is our whole conversation after all. Just saying that "an experience" is not evidence to declare "therefore the nature of that experience is".

> just cannot ignore my continued experience of myself as a discrete being.
I mean... are you though? Buddhists are pretty right on that sofar as I can tell. It's contingency and recursion all the way. Take away parts of the brain you take away parts of the person. They just work together and have competing little signaling wars with gated thresholds and bla bla bla. It's all contingent, same way our brick wall is contingent on bricks. "Brick wall" is not discrete in this sense either.

Just having the idea that there's some discrete thing, and then plastering that as an explanation of yourself, that is contingent too. So I don't see any cause for something emotional about it, because you don't lose what you never had. You can, however, lose all the emotional baggage and I consider that a big win.

>it implies that we are capable of determining that correspondence in all cases
I don't think so but the point was to clarify for the subsequent examples. We don't need "perfect" we just need "better", and what is better is what predicts what we don't yet know best at some given time.

[Anonymous No.14595049]

>>14594994

>The guy is just listing connections between brain activity and consciousness, and went on to comment open mindedly on the problems with mainstream materialism after. You just projected reductivist materialism on to a list of phenomena which are indeed something any non-physical explanation of consciousness will have to adequately explain.

Obviously, but that doesn't make it a strawman. Regardless, the implication of the comparison is clear. It's still ultimately tautological and doesn't move the needle.

[Anonymous No.14595051]

>>14595022

Again, see

>>14594738

[blah No.14595062]

>>14595049
All definitions are also tautologies in a proposition. What "moves the needle" are novel future testable predictions. So far, 100% of the evidence is in favor of those definitions corresponding to reality. There are no successful non-physical models of anything including this topic.

The strawman is dropping the second half of the equation. The fact all the predictions and all the successful models, all the induction, has been in support of that set of definitions as being accurate in describing reality. To the degree we can predict it reliably.

In other words: The physicalists have everything, and the non-physicalists have nothing but sour grapes and ad hoc hypotheses that never pan out.

[Anonymous No.14595068]

>>14595062

This is sleight of hand, because you're essentially pointing to advances in neuroscience and are equating that with advances in understanding consciousness. Physicalists have no testable models for explaining consciousness itself. They can't even agree on a definition.

[blah No.14595071]

>>14595068
The sleight of hand is in defining consciousness such that advances in neuroscience don't count.

[Anonymous No.14595072]

>>14595071

lol ok

[blah No.14595077]

>>14595072
This is absolutely the case. Every single time we discover and test yet more things that satisfy prior proclamations about consciousness, the people moving that goalpost move it away from what has been demonstrated in neuroscience.

Your position is just another movement of that goalpost a priori excluding consciousness from meeting any of it at all. A manifestation of hundreds of years of claims being shown to be bullshit one after another, of people claiming we "can't explain" something being shown to be mistaken.

I am not saying you, personally, had to have or did move that goalpost yourself. I am saying that goalpost always moves itself beyond the realm of evidence no matter how the evidence has advanced our understanding. That is all this "hard problem" is: One colossal group of upset people who don't want it to be explained and will keep redefining it until it can't be by some new definition every single generation.

Daniel Dennett made the exact same points extensively, with citations and evidence to go with it along the history of these claims. This is nothing new. So don't "lol ok" me.

[Anonymous No.14595089]

>>14595077

I am absolutely going to "lol ok" you, because you lot love to loudly proclaim how much progress you've made in answering this question, but you've been parroting the same non-answers for decades now. Hell, Hofstadter managed to stretch "it's emergence" and "it's recursive" into 1200 pages across two books. The dualists will shut up when you stop pretending to have an answer and actually present something substantive.

[blah No.14595096]

>>14595089
"Answer everything to please us or you have nothing"

This is just a toddler tantrum. As I said, every time an advancement is made the goalposts will just keep moving. Same thing happened with the asinine "soul" idea. As less and less gets explained by these, the goalpost moves more and more outside trying to explain anything. Notice, all of you are utterly INCAPABLE of presenting any predictions or models whatever, and adopt the disingenuous stance claiming a false equivalence of that evidence.

Sorry to say, but you lost. You will keep losing. The same way young earth creationists lost. All you have left is "I define consciousness by what you can't explain". Any idiot can spot that parlor trick.

[Anonymous No.14595101]

>>14595096

>"we're right, we have the answers and the evidence!"

"ok what is it?"

>"it's emergent / recursive / illusory

"that's not an answer

>"how dare you, we don't have to answer everything, boom gotcha"

Yeah, you totally showed us

[blah No.14595109]

>>14595101
>Lies about what people say to claim victory.
Like I said. Toddler.

[Anonymous No.14595114]

>>14595109

Nah, but thanks for highlighting one of the biggest problems with physicalists: you lot are obnoxiously flippant towards the philosophical dilemmas that dualists present you with. You don't have answers, you react poorly to being called on the fact that you have no answers.

[Anonymous No.14595119]

>>14595051
>>14594738

>We will very likely never be able to explain it
Okay, why? Sounds very defeatists, what's the point of pursuing these questions? Should we just give up and scratch our heads?

>there's not even a consensus on the fundamentals.
This is true, but it's part of the process. Still, the community operates under the shared assumption that consciousness can be studied through Physical means. Otherwise, what's the fucking point? Do we twiddle our thumbs and come up with unfalsifiable stuff?

>quantum-mechanical phenomena
This is simply god of the gaps fallacy. People who can't conceive of an answer usually put something ungraspable in its place.

>the answer nevertheless is right around the corner.
What is the answer? What are you talking about? Can you explain your position instead of shitting on people who actually do the work?

>consciousness as an illusion
There is evidence for this. But "illusion" is something that happens to consciousness. This is a circular statement. But I think what it tries to convey is that conscioussness is not what conscioussness thinks it is. And this is kind of obvious once you delve into the literature, or meditate.

>We are nowhere even remotely close to having an explanation for consciousness
Again, now we aren't. A lot of smart people are working on it. Actually, this shit doesn't get enough funding because it's not immediately practical.

>"it's an emergent phenomenon"
It is. This isn't an explanation, this simply a fact. How and why it emerges are the actual explanations.

>if we hook enough computers together, if we just install the right software
Everyone who believes this are computer scientists / Tech people, they don't know shit about consciousness except for that one acid trip they had. If you talk to actual experts in philosophy and neuroscience, you'd be surprised on how many people don't believe this. It's utterly retarded for so many reasons.

[blah No.14595124]

>>14595114
"The sleight of hand is in defining consciousness such that advances in neuroscience don't count."

I'm sorry you find being caught out on that "flippancy". Maybe try advancing testable models to make predictions, rather than moving the goalpost to discount evidence. Oh right, because every time one of you tries your models and predictions don't work. Scared?

[Anonymous No.14595128]

>>14595119

>Okay, why? Sounds very defeatists, what's the point of pursuing these questions? Should we just give up and scratch our heads?

No, we shouldn't stop, and I'm not suggesting we should. It is my OPINION that we won't find an answer.

>This is true, but it's part of the process. Still, the community operates under the shared assumption that consciousness can be studied through Physical means. Otherwise, what's the fucking point? Do we twiddle our thumbs and come up with unfalsifiable stuff?

No, and again, I agree that we should keep investigating.

>This is simply god of the gaps fallacy. People who can't conceive of an answer usually put something ungraspable in its place.

Agreed.

>What is the answer? What are you talking about? Can you explain your position instead of shitting on people who actually do the work?

You're misunderstanding. I'm criticizing scientists who assert that we're on the cusp of an answer.

>There is evidence for this. But "illusion" is something that happens to consciousness. This is a circular statement. But I think what it tries to convey is that conscioussness is not what conscioussness thinks it is. And this is kind of obvious once you delve into the literature, or meditate.

I disagree that it's obvious, as do many experts in the field. It's a lampshade.

>Again, now we aren't. A lot of smart people are working on it. Actually, this shit doesn't get enough funding because it's not immediately practical.

I agree that it should get more funding.

>It is. This isn't an explanation, this simply a fact. How and why it emerges are the actual explanations.

Again, it's a lampshade offered by many as an answer. That's my criticism.

>Everyone who believes this are computer scientists / Tech people, they don't know shit about consciousness...

Agreed, I was only highlighting the disconnect.

[Anonymous No.14595130]

>>14595124

Advances in neuroscience absolutely matter, and I will happy change my view if and when an answer arrives, but stop pretending like it's a done deal.

[blah No.14595140]

>>14595130
Stop pretending that I am pretending we have ultimate answers to things. You may frame things that way, but I do not. It is sufficient that the induction supports it, and the inductive case for this is entirely one-sided. That is as good as evidence and inference get. All you have left is "Well it isn't absolute", the last resort of the desperate and theologians.

But no, that is not enough for you, because you have a sacred cow. With which you think yourself holier-than-thou and too good for the mere plebeian task of testing your ideas like everyone else, and against all evidence will maintain because someone has not presented you an absolute refutation ontologically dismissing your idea as possible.

That's never going to happen. You know that's never going to happen. Yet you think being ridiculous, and holding double standards like this, makes you somehow special.

Yes, please, stop pretending.

[Anonymous No.14595148]

>>14594738
>>14595051
cnt from >>14595119

>The mind-body problem ... unresolved
No, it is resolved. If I take away part of your brain, you will become a completely different person with an alien mind. If I sting you with electricity somewhere, I can make you laugh and change your mood. If I focus a magnetic inside your brain, I can shut down your perception of colors. If I give you rotten psychedelic bread, you will have a religious experience. etc... There are infinite ways we can demonstrate that fucking with your body, fucks with your mind (and vice versa). I don't know how you can exclude these interactions without relying on schizo solipsism

>the knowledge argument remain largely unresolved
Yes, again, this shit takes time. We already solved perception with retarded AI. Yes, it gives the right answers, but it doesn't "know" anything. Until we achieve the perception action loop at the level of animals / humans (especially the action part), then we can try to solve this problem... But now it's too early, and we're not even close in terms of theory nor hardware.

>patronizingly tautological rebuttals
I'm curious as to what you're referring to?

>anecdotal evidence
This is why people believe the earth is flat.
The trickiest thing about this whole thing is that we are the consciousness trying to study itself, it's very hard to separate the self with its experience, from the object of study.

[Anonymous No.14595156]

>>14595128
Shit, so basically you're a naysayer?
You don't even try to explain why we won't find the answer
Damn, I feel like I wasted my time talking to you...

[Anonymous No.14595194]

>>14595124
>Maybe try advancing testable models to make predictions, rather than moving the goalpost to discount evidence.
I disagree, move the goalposts more until it makes more sense to us.

[Anonymous No.14595206]

>>14595194
Listen here you little shit who are you and why are you funny

[Anonymous No.14595210]

>>14595206
Just an inquisitive detective.

[Anonymous No.14595220]

>>14595210
Be funny in a way I can reliably contact, because if you're the same anon that's two clever jokes in a row, which is above the norm of -1.

[Anonymous No.14595277]

>>14595130

Wow, if this isn't the pot calling the kettle black. I've said more than once that I'll change my view if and when there's an answer, but you don't have one. You don't have any evidence for one. You don't have a testable model. But you still demand absolute, unquestioning reverence? Sorry, you can't have your cake and eat it too. Solve the problem, answer the hard questions, and then we'll talk. This is the ultimate question of the human experience. There are no freebies.

[Anonymous No.14595283]

>>14595156

Hardly. Science has no answers, and the philosophy supports a dualistic interpretation. That sucks for the physicalist crowd, but for better or worse, that's where we are.

[blah No.14595291]

>>14595283
Underdeterminism and related epistemic concepts raised in this thread are philosophy. They do not, in fact, support you at all, and precisely because you have no evidence of your own. You just have ad hoc hypotheses.

[Anonymous No.14595302]

>>14595148

>No, it is resolved. If I take away part of your brain, you will become a completely different person with an alien mind

Tell me you haven't actually read any cases for cartesian dualism without telling me you haven't read any cases for cartesian dualism

>Yes, again, this shit takes time

Cool, then let's meet back up when there's an answer. Until then, stop posturing.

>I'm curious as to what you're referring to?

Funny enough, there's an example of this in the thread:

>>14594843

>This is why people believe the earth is flat.

Ehh, that's not really the same thing. There are countless anecdotal accounts of phenomena that, although they are admittedly unfalsifiable, we would be foolish to disregard wholesale. It requires that we state unquestionably that 100% of unexplainable accounts are the result of either deception or misunderstanding.

[Anonymous No.14595305]

>>14595220
90% of the shit I say is crap with truth in the mixture of the crap.
But then again, everything is really.

Why do you think I'm here? People cannot stand me in the real world because it's obnoxious.
I just do it without thinking because I see the water where they see dry sand.

It irritates the fuck out of me, but I can't stop chaos, right?

[Anonymous No.14595310]

>>14595291

Again, this is a misunderstanding of what I'm saying. I can't believe that I even need to say this so bluntly, but I am not ASSERTING that cartesian dualism is correct. I am simply stating that the physicalists need to prove their case before they parade around as though the debate is settled.

[blah No.14595317]

>>14595305
Well there's a reason I mentioned it, given we share the same sense of humor it seems. Though I do not bother mixing in the crap, and I think people find that considerably more irritating.

Worth the mention anyway. Unsurprisingly I find few to none whose company I enjoy even for a brief time.
>>14595310
Proof is for mathematics and pseudoscientists. All the evidence supports physicalism. Nobody gives any shit about your retreating to "muh absolutes tho" to avoid that fact. You're just playing the same sham shell game young earth creationists, flat earthers, and other quacks do. If you don't like it, produce evidence for your cause the same way everyone else is producing evidence.

The fact is, I do get what you're saying, and I'm saying "What is asserted without evidence means you can go fuck yourself".

[Anonymous No.14595333]

>>14595317

Again, the same sleight-of-hand. You keep asserting that the evidence supports physicalism, but what you really mean is that we've made advances in neuroscience and understand the mechanisms of the brain more, and by the fact that we have made those advancements, ipso facto consciousness must fall within the physicalist realm. Fact is, you're jumping the gun. There haven't been any actual advances in answering the questions surrounding consciousness itself. There are no models. No theories. Only vague speculation and arrogance.

[Anonymous No.14595334]

>>14595317
>Though I do not bother mixing in the crap, and I think people find that considerably more irritating.
It's impossible.
I keep telling people that but they just do not get it.

Science is about maintenance, not solutions.

[Anonymous No.14595339]

thread = self-important nerds arguing like they actually understand this shit better than the scientists and philosphers who have degrees and have actually been published lol, y'all are retarded

[blah No.14595341]

>>14595333
Purely ad hoc, and that is the sleight of hand. Retreat to absolutes, use double standards, all to save your faith from evidence to be held against all evidence.

>>14595334
I have no idea what you mean by maintenance.

[Anonymous No.14595343]

>>14595333
>There haven't been any actual advances in answering the questions surrounding consciousness itself.
There's been plenty of advances.
We've made great progress.

But it's never gonna reach a goal.
But you will get somewhere and that's the most important part.

Because we have to go lewder.

[Anonymous No.14595346]

>>14595341
Solutions are mere steps.
Maintenance is about continuing onwards and reassessing those steps.

[Anonymous No.14595348]

>>14595148
>No, it is resolved. If I take away part of your brain, you will become a completely different person with an alien mind. If I sting you with electricity somewhere, I can make you laugh and change your mood. If I focus a magnetic inside your brain, I can shut down your perception of colors.

If you smash up a radio it will stop working, but that still doesn't make your theory of how radios work correct if your theory is based on little men who live in the radio preforming the music it plays. You'd be missing the radio wave, the actual source of the signal, etc.

Brains aren't what makes minds, and I do think all physicalist should agree. Because if your brain specifically is the proximate cause of your first person experiencing then, in theory, I should be able to take a super high fidelity scan of your brain at a given moment and 3D print it at my leisure. If the brain fully generated the mind, then your experience will simply jump from the time of the scan to when I snap my printer on and produce a full copy of your brain (with the requisite body or body surrogate to keep it alive of course).

But if a chemical copy of your brain isn't you, then what is? If the copy is you, then how did you, a brain with its very particular physical make up, get transformed into a code in the storage device attached to my scanner, which recorded the make up of your brain down to the atomic level?

And is the code that recorded your brain at the instant of the scan also your mind? I'd think not, because a mind is something that experiences, but the code is static, frozen. So then a mind isn't just a brain, but a brain acting through time. It's a set of processes and relations.

[Anonymous No.14595349]

>>14595341

I'm not seeing an actual rebuttal anywhere. Argument from fallacy, as they say.

[Anonymous No.14595352]

>>14595348

To put some of what you said another way, breaking the radio doesn't mean that the signal has stopped transmitting.

[blah No.14595356]

>>14595349
Pointing out you have no argument but to ignore evidence to hold belief against evidence is the rebuttal. Keep up.

>>14595346
I can see how you get there, yes. I would not use those words, as their common usage would confuse the matter, but I understand your point.

So what I took to mean by "mixing in crap" is your humor or shitposting. I was saying I do not bother with that, as virtually nobody follows fast enough to get the joke. I'm sure you know the feeling.

>breaking the radio doesn't mean that the signal has stopped transmitting
Great so demonstrate that claim, that the brain is mere receiver. Oh wait, you people never do.

[blah No.14595359]

>>14595356
Mistake. Last part was not for >>14595346.

14595352
>breaking the radio doesn't mean that the signal has stopped transmitting
Great so demonstrate that claim, that the brain is mere receiver. Oh wait, you people never do.

[Anonymous No.14595363]

>>14595348
However, it isn't just that, because I can't just print you in a void. You'd do no thinking in an absolute zero vacuum. Nor would a rebuilt version of your brain, printed using the scan I took, remain you for very long. I might be able to rebuild your exact brain as of a given instant, but as soon as I replicate it elsewhere, in a different environment, it is going to start having different thoughts. Maybe they'd notice an instant shift in the room their in and think "oh fuck, I'm a 3D printer clone." Now they have a different mind.

So it seems to me your mind can't be your brain if your entire brain, to the smallest detail, could be encoded in some other medium. That to me suggests that your mind is information, a structure of relationships.

And indeed, we don't need sci-fi technology to make this a point worth considering. You replace the vast majority of atoms in your body on a regular basis


Second, your mind doesn't exist without an environment. Vacuum is not conducive to a working brain.

Third, history matters (enviornment across time scales) because the you getting scanned and the you waking up after being printed have different experiences and thus different minds as soon as the copy is created.

Finally, your brain scan, detailed as it is, would be meaningless to an outsider from another dimension. It'd be a lot of information, but they'd have no clue how mind could come from it without also knowing are particular laws of physics. A copy of your brain in a universe with different constants? Not a mind.

Meanwhile, a perfect fidelity scan of your brain in a simulation where it interacts with a simulated enviornment that uses our laws of physics? Seems that might be a mind, but it wouldn't be a human brain.

Point being, even in physicalism brains aren't minds.

[Anonymous No.14595365]

>>14595348
>Brains aren't what makes minds
I disagree, they are fundamental.
Without them you couldn't do anything at all. You couldn't even compute any response to the context you are in.
The context is important too, but the brain is fundamental. It is the beacon in the dark.

>But if a chemical copy of your brain isn't you, then what is?
A chemical copy of my brain is not in the same universal coordinate point as my brain though.
This where it get's scary.

We haven't discovered shit about that universal point.
It's differential to an actual physical point. It's not quite the same as a 3d coordinate in a 2d rendering.
We don't know how it functions full stop.

[blah No.14595368]

>>14595359
WELP >>14595352

[Anonymous No.14595369]

>>14595356

For the millionth time, I'm not asserting that dualism is correct. I'm saying that physicalists haven't proven their case but behave as though they do. Yet you want to lecture me on false equivalence?

>>14595359
See above. Also, I'm still waiting for the physicalist explanation for consciousness. Oh wait, there isn't one.

[Anonymous No.14595376]

>>14595356
>So what I took to mean by "mixing in crap" is your humor or shitposting.
No, it's the devil in the works that is unavoidable.
I just spun it weirdly because it's literally the first thing that came to my head.
You gotta do a song and dance to get a message across sometimes. You gotta shake the brush to remove the water from it. You gotta beat the devil out of it.

[blah No.14595379]

>>14595369
>I'm saying that physicalists haven't proven their case but behave as though they do.
And for the millionth time proof is for mathematics and pseudoscientists.

You are the one pushing the false equivalence by retreating to a hypocritical standard to avoid scrutinizing your faith.

>>14595376
Who the absolute fuck are you and where do I shoot you a message. Are you on the sci IRC or something?

[blah No.14595381]

>>14595369
>See above. Also, I'm still waiting for the physicalist explanation for consciousness. Oh wait, there isn't one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained

You people have been coping and seething since 1991.

[Anonymous No.14595383]

>>14593090
There isn't, there's brains the are temporarily unconscious or dead thats all.

[Anonymous No.14595387]

>>14593075
Based non philosophy enjoyer

[Anonymous No.14595392]

>>14595365
The enviornment is fundamental too. A human brain teleported into space or on to the surface of the sun will not produce a mind.

You have multiple essential elements to the system. Like, you can claim the engine is the most important part of the car, but if you take away the drive train you don't have a car, no two ways about it. So the drive train is as much a beacon.

As you suggest, relative location matters too.

[Anonymous No.14595394]

>>14595379

>And for the millionth time proof is for mathematics and pseudoscientists. You are the one pushing the false equivalence by retreating to a hypocritical standard to avoid scrutinizing your faith.

You're really not getting this, and I'm tired of repeating myself. The physicalist interpretation is no more sacrosanct than the dualistic interpretation. Not once have I asserted otherwise. Yes, dualism needs to make its case, but SO DOES PHYSICALISM. Neither side has, it's an open debate, so get off your pedestal. If this isn't clear enough for you, then I don't know what else to say, other than I have neither the time nor the crayons necessary to explain something this simple to you over the internet. Read a fucking book.

[Anonymous No.14595397]

>>14595381

>"consciousness has been explained!"
>cites wikipedia / daniel dennett

lol, good troll

[blah No.14595398]

>>14595394
>You're really not getting this, and I'm tired of repeating myself. The physicalist interpretation is no more sacrosanct than the dualistic interpretation.
By your retarded standard you use to make this false equivalence.
>Yes, dualism needs to make its case, but SO DOES PHYSICALISM.
All the evidence supports physicalism. The case is inductively established physicalism "all the points" and dualism "zero". So you redefine the standard to make a false equivalence.
> Read a fucking book.
I have read so many thousands of books you haven't the faintest clue.
>>14595397
Yet I find a book you won't read. I suppose you think this, too, is "a troll" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02643294.2019.1670630?journalCode=pcgn20

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02643294.2019.1670630?journalCode=pcgn20

[Anonymous No.14595401]

>>14595398

HAHAHAHAHAHA

You tipped your hat, because there's no way you just unironically cited Graziano's smokescreen of a study

gg, you had me for a while there

[Anonymous No.14595402]

>>14595381
I enjoyed the book but it isn't an explanation of consciousness.

[Anonymous No.14595405]

>>14595379
I only like talking anonymously.

Here I'll explain:

Have you ever tried smoking a joint or two or something? (Don't recommend too many though, it seriously fucks your brain if you do it too much and causes stroke.)
My problem was with that shit is that it made me realize that I am in a permanently high state (to where people end up being after a joint) and have always been that way. Others finally see my point when they get high. To some people that's cool, to me it's annoying as fuck.
Getting high for me is a fucking nightmare though. I stay away from that shit now.
It's like staring diablo in the face for me, though with no visual audio hallucinations - just thoughts. To me my surroundings are horrifying, always. I see death in every bit of everything around me.

I used to wonder why kids never got my terrible jokes at school and now I realize "they don't see the context".
So generally I try my fucking best to detail it in order to just talk normally. I hate it. People get high for fun and I'm just here trying to ground myself to the floor. And the floor is also lava.

[Anonymous No.14595408]

I can't believe it took this long to get to the stupid radio analogy.

[blah No.14595411]

>>14595401
I did, in fact, unironically cite it. Continuing to prove my point, you have no actual argument.

All you have is "la la la it doesn't meet my hypocritical standard I only apply to things I want to keep believing against evidence".

>>14595405
>I only like talking anonymously.
Well, just because I'm reduced to it doesn't mean I like it. Alas.
>I used to wonder why kids never got my terrible jokes at school and now I realize "they don't see the context".
Comes with being "gifted". That is the totality of the landscape, yes, you grok the nature of it.
>So generally I try my fucking best to detail it in order to just talk normally. I hate it. People get high for fun and I'm just here trying to ground myself to the floor. And the floor is also lava.
That, too, comes with being "gifted". Frankly I don't enjoy the company of others who can't get it, and I stopped pretending that was somehow my problem a while ago.

It's a shame, but perhaps you'll reconcile it for yourself some day. In my case my solution was to just accept that I can't enjoy the company of most, and the few whose company I might enjoy tend to be of your character instead. That is, preferring distance. The irony.

[Anonymous No.14595420]

>>14595392
The gpu coordinate analogy is crucial.
It fucking terrifies me how much our universe is like a 2d image of a 3d universe.
It's more like 3d image of an infinite dimensional universe.

It's just so fucking mind boggling.
And then somehow I go to Kmart (literally, not figuratively) and suddenly I'm not thinking about that aspect of our reality. It's like realizing that something is distracting me so I stop paying attention to other things.

Then I remember things like sleep paralysis.
And it clicks.

[Anonymous No.14595422]

>>14595411

Nah, we're done. There are dozens of rebuttals of his bullshit online, feel free to look them up (you won't). Besides, you've proven quite clearly that you're more interested in jerking yourself off to your own preconceptions than you are in considering different viewpoints. Feel free to get the last word in, lob insults, mischaracterize my arguments, whatever it is that gets your dick hard and makes you feel like a Very Smart Boi.

Peace out.

[Anonymous No.14595424]

>>14593075
Yeah, but I like horror films.

[blah No.14595426]

>>14595422
Dozens of people desperate, like you, because you don't have an argument. I've thoroughly considered viewpoints like yours, and they're vacuous. That is why it is effortless to call you out on it.

Run away little squirrel, go find some nut to preach to.

[Anonymous No.14595429]

>>14595426

dude why did you take his bait

[blah No.14595437]

>>14595429
Coping with the pure soul crushing boredom of existence. That is the only reason I do anything. Probably the only reason anyone does anything.

[Anonymous No.14595439]

>>14595411
>gifted
Curse.
I feel brain damaged and I probably am in some way functionally compared to others.
Just not like how most people would see it.

I wouldn't be surprised if the thing that makes people high with pot is naturally stimulated in me somehow. That really bothers me.
I have always felt like a fucking retard trying desperately to not be a fucking retard.

Then again, I read that people considered the same for Sam Johnson. He sounds even more fucked up than me though. It ended up being his gift though.
I wish I could profit off my problems like that.

[Anonymous No.14595438]

>>14595365
>>14595392
>>14595420
Now we're talking turkey!

We're missing something big time. Some binding agent that prevents random fluctuations in the heart of stars from coalescing into a sentience, or even more terrifying, allows them to. Why is this dance of energy self-aware?

I'm a physicalist, but I think there is a lot more physical out there than we know or could ever know. This has staggering implications.

[Anonymous No.14595442]

>>14595402
To elaborate, it's frustrating that it even used the title it did at all. I think it goes to show that it you make something complex and obfuscate a bit, people will mistake complexity for veracity. Really though, we should value parismony in our theories.

The book sounds like it should answer the question: "why do I experience things," and instead of goes on a long-winded, but fairly interesting (if now outdated) narrative about all the ways perception isn't as detailed as most people think it is. "Did you know you have a blind spot and your peripheral vision is shit?" And it spends a lot of time tearing down the Cartesian theater.

It does not, actually explain the main question, "why do I experience," at all. "To explain is to explain away," is the phrase the author uses, but unfortunately he doesn't explain. It's like asking someone why you see, and they spend a few hundred pages proving your vision is pretty lousy. Which, ok, that's good to know, but you completely missed the question.

[Anonymous No.14595447]

>>14595438
>We're missing something big time. Some binding agent that prevents random fluctuations in the heart of stars from coalescing into a sentience, or even more terrifying, allows them to. Why is this dance of energy self-aware?
Exactly, I call it the natural skitzophrenic state of the universe.

We're in a fucking mental patient of a demon.

[blah No.14595448]

>>14595439
Well, yeah, it does feel like a curse.
>I have always felt like a fucking retard trying desperately to not be a fucking retard.
I'll tell you a secret: The more innate ability you have and the more aware of how limited you are because of it the more horrifying the limitations of others gets. "Wait if I suck this much that means OHMYGOD".
>I wish I could profit off my problems like that.
I mean, you could, just playing the game. The problem is the game is very boring and makes you jump boring hoops in the process. That's why quite a lot of us don't do all that well, "fail to excel", because the world isn't made for us. The usual.

[Anonymous No.14595455]

this thread is so fucking stupid

[Anonymous No.14595462]

>>14595447
Infinity is the enemy of logic, I have found. It dashes even the perceptions of our perceptions against the wall and smashes them to bits humans could never hope to reassemble. Maybe its all about chop wood, carry water after all.

[Anonymous No.14595466]

>>14595448
Let me explain with a metaphor, I have a paint brush and so do the infinite amount of friends that all live inside my head.
I'm not talking my literal head, this is just a metaphor for the state of affairs of the universe that I can see around me. But I can't really explain that shortly and succinctly any better.

So everything is in a state of universal decay, as we see with the mind of a literal person like that, a skitzophrenic.
Hence why I termed this state of the universe the "natural skitzophrenic state of the universe".

I'm pretty sure some people used the demon "beelzebub" as a reminder of such a thing. I dunno, I interpret it that way anyway.

Pic related, it's a historical diagram of her circa 1666.
She's kinda cute.

[blah No.14595474]

>>14595466
It's best to assume people do not make unique alterations to memetics like that. Otherwise you'll never be understood by anyone. Well, unless someone just "gets it" like I do, or very few others would.

Less paint brush in the hands of agents, though, and more "noise". I think you mean to imply that but I doubt you meant to imply agency behind it.

Decay? Nah. Change. Decay is just a subjective metric. Noise changes, and maybe you can find patterns you think are in that noise, but it's still noise. Best be aware of that tendency to make patterns where none exist.

[Anonymous No.14595480]

>>14595462
>Infinity is the enemy of logic, I have found
It is not friendly to the quantitative.
But it is very effective as a qualitative value. You can explain so much through it.

But that's not enough to cover what I think is going on here. Infinity is a simplistic interpretation. The reality is more graphically brutal and destructive. It is beyond infinity. It isn't a mere value, it's more easily conceived, just like how people in the past did with gods, as a state of being as an organism. We're just not at a level of intellectual progress to better describe it with the tools we have. It always falls short.
This is problem with science. It cannot possibly conceive that state of affairs without being "unscientific".

Which is why religion may actually come back swinging if science cannot acknowledge the natural and wilful malevolence in the state of the universe. It's both devouring and being devoured by itself. It is already in a state of singularity as we speak potentially, we just never saw it.

[Anonymous No.14595483]

>>14595480

[Anonymous No.14595485]

>>14595474
>Less paint brush in the hands of agents, though, and more "noise".
Yeah, it's more of a scream.
Though I've heard the term "universal sigh" before, but that's only if you cannot see past this weird kmart hell we're in right now.

[blah No.14595495]

>>14595485

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

[Anonymous No.14595496]

>>14595483
>go mad from it
People literally cake themselves in black and scream about it at gigs because they like how badass and raw it is now. I like how weird things became with this.

But I don't like how most of my backyard pretends that it's not there and returns to slumber. It's like repeating the same mistake that created this universe to begin with.

[Anonymous No.14595497]

>>14595495
>"Please Gandalf, I don't want to play cave explorer any more"
Sorry I just thought that was funny.

[Anonymous No.14595498]

>>14595496
It is nice when the fear gives way to madness proper. I'd rather be batshit insane than living in fear. Doesn't exactly pay the bills, though.

[Anonymous No.14595503]

>>14595497
>"Please Gandalf, I don't want to play cave explorer any more"

[Anonymous No.14595504]

The universe is like one eternally looping Mr Bungle record that I can't escape from.

[bodhi No.14595505]

>>14592722
nothing is random, and your consciousness is obviously nothing special, that much is obvious

[bodhi No.14595509]

>>14593075
>p-zombie spergout
def have the tisms

[blah No.14595510]

>>14595497

[Anonymous No.14595512]

>>14595505
>nothing is random
I don't think you understand "skitzophrenia" in conjunction with the concept of "determinism".
That just makes everything make sense to me, the entire universe. It just becomes so fucking obvious.

But it's also not pleasant.
People say "god is dead" and I reply "actually it's even worse than that".
It's like sitting on your hand to make it numb and then jerking off.

[blah No.14595515]

>>14595512
Eh, universe doesn't care. I don't care about the universe either. I'm pretty detached though so if you have some existential horror or dread I'm afraid I don't feel it.

[bodhi No.14595516]

>>14595485
there is literally nothing wrong with kmart. I quite enjoy their ICEEs

[Anonymous No.14595521]

>>14595516
How do you faggots still have K-Marts?
I haven't seen one in years.

[Anonymous No.14595524]

>>14595515
>Eh, universe doesn't care.
I wouldn't say that.
I think it cares a lot.
In fact, it won't leave me the fuck alone.

Ougi a cute, but God dammit give me space girl (just kidding it's fine).

[bodhi No.14595525]

>>14595521
there is only one in my city atm that I know of. When I was a kid there were probably 4 or more.

[blah No.14595526]

>>14595524
>In fact, it won't leave me the fuck alone.
Well that's kind of the definition of "existing" but hardly the definition of "caring", ya git.

[bodhi No.14595536]

>>14595348
>mfw my pineal gland has a unique MAC address so it cant be cloned

[Anonymous No.14595537]

>>14595521
Man, Kmarts are nightmare fuel now.
When I was a kid they just played the old radio and they had all sorts of brands. You'd have literally shit like Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Public Enemy, NWA, etc all playing overhead while you shopped and no one cared about it being too rough on the ears.

Now it's nothing but Kmart brand shit and all they play is calm shitty tv commercial tier pop, probably for marketing reasons and potentially now "psychological reasons" because our world is a fucking mental asylum now and has been since the GFC (not 9/11, though that started some things).
It's hell to me, someone who grew up with monsters, metal and gangsters on all sides around me, and I'm sure it would be to even older people and younger people (because they just avoid the place now). It baffles me how dumb corporate admins are now.

[blah No.14595538]

>>14595524
Put another way, don't worry, it's over before it even begins.

Or worry about that a lot.

The dichotomy of man.

[Anonymous No.14595543]

>>14595536
She's more Junko tier.
Or Jigsaw.

[bodhi No.14595556]

>>14595148
if I take away part of your radio it also stops working. What is your point?

[Anonymous No.14595558]

>>14595543
Actually, more like Silent Hill, though clumsy.

[Anonymous No.14595576]

conciousness is simply the by product of a sufficiently advanced brain. It's nothing special. It's just neurons firing off in ways that are more advanced than a nutless monkey. We like to think of ourselves as more than what we are; pretentious animals but we're not special. Nobody can refute this without going into "uohhhohoh look at this quantum uncertainty entanglement golbity gook here's some quote from a important scientist that supports my claim even though he's not a neuroscientist." I am not interested in such banal posts and you will be wasting your time.

[Anonymous No.14595578]

>>14592640
Define consciousness

[blah No.14595582]

>>14595578
Whatever can't be tested or falsified, duh

[Anonymous No.14595585]

>>14592640
As much as I'd really like to be a dualist myself there are some problems with asserting that the mind is separate from the brain. A few things include, but are not limited to;
>the concept of consciousness simply being an emergent property of things. Much like the concept of "water" is emergent from the combination of molecules.
>the problem of altered states (and cessation) of consciousness resulting from direct manipulation of the brain.
>Occam's razor also makes the materialist interperetation much more likely than anything other.

I would certainly love to see evidence of consciousness/mind being separate from the body and physical brain, however.

[Anonymous No.14595586]

>>14595339
Why do we need a degree to understand what we are?

[Anonymous No.14595595]

>>14595576
Look at that sleepy boi.

[blah No.14595607]

>>14595595
it me
Also, good night. Have whatever good fun there is to be found. Not much else to do really.

[Anonymous No.14595612]

>>14592640
for me, I feel like I solved this problem handily.

firstly, we have to define what consciousness is. with great effort I’ve come to a definition for consciousness that assumes little, applies broadly to humans and non-human animals (and beyond which I’ll get to), and is internally consistent.

consciousness is the awareness of one’s own mortality. it’s the awareness that in this moment, you are a being, and that some time in the future your being will end. one could argue there are degrees of “knowing” that one is alive and on the way to death, but I think for now that kind of hair-splitting can be saved for later.

with this definition in hand, it actually becomes quite easy to prove that literally all matter has consciousness, based on research that was unrelated to the topic. from supernovas to apoptosis and atomic nuclear decay, all things that exist in the material world are at one moment “being” and at another moment cease being, and each thing acts in such a way that resists its fate in any way its body allows. everything experiences death at a specific time for specific reasons related to the availability of energy, entropy, and/or the sustainability of the body of the being, and in some sense these things “know” to die. uranium atoms “know” to decay after a specific period of time, cells “know” when to senesce, stars “know” when to explode, and last but not least a human knows when they’re cooked.

[Anonymous No.14595655]

>>14595576
Your consciousness affects physical reality, in obvious ways, such as your ability to move objects with your hands, and not so obvious ways, such as collapsing quantum systems upon taking measurements. Until we really understand the laws of quantum mechanics we won't understand how consciousness interacts with material reality.

Here is a good book on the matter.

[Anonymous No.14595656]

>>14595612
>consciousness is the awareness of one’s own mortality.
I hate this definition.
It's meaningless.

To me it has always been within the brain, but "brainless" in the sense of it merely being an observational focal point.
But here's the problem, it's not a mere focal point in a 3d space. I am convinced we need to look at dimensions a little more carefully and deduce how out world renders and visualizes things to us, much like a 3d graphical renderer would to us on our screens.
Now memory is partially integral to it in the form of instantaneous memory, but that is it. In fact, I do not think of it as mere brain memory (or even computer memory), it's memory more in a focal sense alone. We just have this delusion that it's like our brain and our physical eyes, when in fact it's more a reproduction from a coordinate in space. But that's as far as I have gone with it. I think this the point where we focus on how that coordinate interacts and behaves with space/time for testing purposes in order to elaborate and construct hypotheses further.

Excuse me, I think I'm having a migraine so I'm cutting my thoughts short for now.

[Anonymous No.14595774]

>>14595394
Physicalism is better, because it's compatible with established science, while dualism requires supernatural processes, which is not supported by science.

[Anonymous No.14595801]

>>14595496
Too much fucking chatbots on this site.

[Anonymous No.14596032]

>>14595655
Nothim but I find your reasoning offensive.
>>14595655
>Your consciousness affects physical reality, in obvious ways, such as your ability to move objects with your hands
How did you determine that your consciousness has any effect on the behavior of your (brain and therefore) hands? My guess is that you didn't. There's no reason to suppose that consciousness implies free will, other than not liking the idea of consciousness being along for the ride. Of course we may have free will, but we don't seem to possess a faculty that lets us confirm that we do have free will. If we did then the concept of determinism wouldn't even arise in our minds.
>>14595655
>and not so obvious ways, such as collapsing quantum systems upon taking measurements
Pseudoscience. Even if this were true, a material explanation is possible. The only way of ruling out a material explanation is to observe matter while disembodied, and although that may be possible it seems most humans aren't capable of direct observation of matter.

[Anonymous No.14596038]

>>14592722
Can you prove ants have consciousness?

[Anonymous No.14596106]

>>14595655
Our minds determine actions before we are consciously aware of them

[Anonymous No.14596110]

>>14592640
>You invented a category called matter, which has nothing to do with consciousness
Proof?

>The two categories are fundamentally incompatible
Proof?

[Anonymous No.14596111]

>>14594407
>I use P-zombie
I am familiar with the term through reading chalmers. The characters in dreams are kind of like this if you think about it. They are, presumably, generated by an element of the observer's own psyche. They are simulated 'other minds'. That is to say, they are, presumably, generated by one's own un-conscious but yet the dream observer does not have insight into what determines the behavior of the characters that the observer encounters in dreams. So the observers own consciousness simulates autonomous characters with simulated 'other minds'. This makes the 'problem of other minds' very interesting with regard to the waking reality. If one's own mind can simulate other minds in the dream state in a kind of virtual world, why not in the waking state? It's interesting to try and rigorously epistemically justify other non-simulated minds.
>How does one exist as a human, engage with the world, "see" things in some mental sense, yet lack the subjective experience?
I don't think it's possible.
>I use P-zombie above as somewhat of a cheeky phrase, I don't know that it's a logical possibility or not, though I also struggle to understand how people can be so adamantly pure materialist on this matter without it, unless their rationalistic reductionism has overwhelmed any ability to think one inch outside the box that material science has set for them, or use basic common sense (common problem in both philosophy and STEM).
I don't understand it either. I think it does have something to do with the fact that they teach classical physics first. By the way, most of the founding fathers of QM did not suffer from this problem. Pic related.
>Would anything engaging in such a self-referencing produce a subjective experience, or what is the exact logical-material requirement there?
This will take another post worth of space

[Anonymous No.14596114]

>>14593139
Then OP's argument is disproven. Software is purely a product of hardware even though they are different categories.

[Anonymous No.14596116]

>>14593600
>If you don't have the goods, then don't step into the forum.
Agreed, leave. Try >>>/x/

[Anonymous No.14596119]

>>14593552
>Idealism
Predicts nothing and has zero evidence.

[Anonymous No.14596131]

>>14596119
Materialism and idealism are both metaphysical claims. Neither of them make predictions. Idealism accounts for the known science and data better than materialism though. You can't even begin the pursuit of science without postulating consciousness though, which also gives idealism the edge. As planck realized, see quote here
>>14593480
Idealism can account for the entire physical world, while materialism can not account for consciousness.

[Anonymous No.14596152]

>>14593751
>How do the objectively observable quantities of brain matter add up and translate to the NON-OBJECTIVELY observable, first person QUALITIES of consciousness.
It's subjective because it's the result of each person's brain, and each person's brain is different. How is this hard to understand? It's the easiest part of explaining consciousness but you somehow thought it was a big GOTCHA. LOL

[Anonymous No.14596159]

>>14596152
>It's subjective because it's the result of each person's brain
Each person's brain is objective. You can look at person's brains. You can not look at a person's consciousness.
>How is this hard to understand?
Because it's not true. A person's brain can be objectively observed but their consciousness can't be.

[Anonymous No.14596181]

>>14596131
Except materialism is not a claim but a basic assumption of science.

[Anonymous No.14596296]

>>14596119
And does physicalism predict anything?

There is a very bad tendency for people to conflate "scientific theories," with physicalism. They aren't the same thing.

Even Berkeley, when he kicked off modern idealism, stated that science, to the degree that it helps explain how things work and makes accurate predictions, is correct! It's just that science is explaining how fundementally mental objects interact.

For example, there is nothing about what we know about electromagnetism that says that electromagnetism can't just be an accurate description of how mental objects we experience interact with one another.

Plenty of notable scientists have been dualists. Some have been idealists. Physicalism is an ontology that says that the abstractions we create in the sciences to predict the world around us are actually the real things-in-themselves. That is, the map, our abstractions, are the territory (some would claim they are just accurate enough maps of the territory, not the territory itself).

But science relies on empiricism. "To be is to be perceived," isn't a thing that is testable. You cannot collect data in an experiment where you never experience the data; it doesn't work.

Arguably, Berkeley wins (as his contemporaries agreed as they stomped pavement stones in frustration) in that it is impossible to conceive of a thing existing without perception. Whenever we imagine a thing, as it is itself, no observer, we invariably posit an observation point. Some sort of magic God's eye or mote's eye view of the world (a cognitive technique that caused all sorts of problems in physics because observers who aren't physical fuck up the laws of physics, e.g., Maxwell's Demon when it doesn't generate heat through its memory).

But if a thing can't be conceived (conceived by anyone, ever), how can it be possible? Obviously no species, no matter how advanced, will ever observe matter without observation.

This an epistemological problem, not a scientific one...

[Anonymous No.14596310]

>>14596296
...but physicalism is an ontology, not a scientific theory. The claim that the "physical supervenes on all that is," is not a scientific hypothesis.

Philosophy of science itself has a bit of an aversion to the mainstream physicalism of popular science. With the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, you see logical positivism and the claim that claims about unobserved phenomena are meaningless, going into mainstream science.

The "received view" of scientific theories tries to divorce science from ontology. It's all about "logically grounded theories."

So, physicalism as an ontology has the hard task of showing that the physical, which is only ever known as first person mental experience, is more ontologically basic than first person experience. I don't know if it is possible for it to do so.

Idealism doesn't need to reject neuroscience. Neuroscience makes accurate predictions of how mental phenomena interact with us.

And unfortunately, neuroscience has gone down what I think is likely a blind alley with an arbitrarily defined systems approach to consciousness. That is, trying to verify that "brains produce consciousness." They clearly don't. A brain alone doesn't think. You need a body for it to work. A mind does not appear to be a static object, it's the result of informational processes. So they mind isn't reducible to the brain, that brain needs a specific enviornment, a fairly narrow range of all possible enviornments in terms of chemical composition, gravity, heat, etc. and the mind only emerges as the interaction of brain, body, and enviornment. The ontological foundations of these three might be something science can't answer.

[Anonymous No.14596325]

>>14596131
>Neither of them make predictions.
But that's wrong. Every successful scientific theory so far has been materialist. No idealist theory has ever been successful. Isn't that odd?

>Idealism accounts for the known science and data better than materialism though.
How?

>You can't even begin the pursuit of science without postulating consciousness
Consciousness is observed, no need to "postulate" it for any scientific theory.

>As planck realized
Personal beliefs of scientists are irrelevant. Newton believed in alchemy. Where's the evidence?

>Idealism can account for the entire physical world
It can "account" for anything, real or not. It's arbitrary and useless.

>materialism can not account for consciousness.
Patience, child. The adults are working on it. Keep playing with your toys and playing make believe.

[Anonymous No.14596343]

>>14596325
>Every successful scientific theory so far has been materialist.
No. Materialism is a substance monist metaphysical supposition. Has nothing to do with scientific discoveries.
> how
Because materialism can not account for consciousness.
>Consciousness is observed, no need to "postulate" it for any scientific theory.
Yes, exactly, it is self evident. Observer independent matter is not.
>It can "account" for anything, real or not. It's arbitrary and useless.
>It can "account" for anything, real or not.
True. This includes none-material things such as logic and numbers and math as well as other abstract objects. Materialism can not account for these things in-material things by definition. Yet idealism can account for all of the material world, as this guy explained well
>>14596296
>Patience, child. The adults are working on it. Keep playing with your toys and playing make believe.
I don't have to be patient, I have a worldview that can already account for consciousness, that is idealism.

[Anonymous No.14596353]

>>14596343
>No. Materialism is a substance monist metaphysical supposition. Has nothing to do with scientific discoveries.

Induction. All the evidence supports this metaphysical position so far. Ignoring induction and evidence to pretend a false equivalence is all you have. Cry. You're just a young earth creationist going "NOOOO EVOLUTION WAS NEVER PROVEN NOOOOOOOOOOO"

[Anonymous No.14596380]

>>14596353
>All the evidence supports this metaphysical position so far.
No, it does not. Induction is not made of matter by the way. Induction happens in minds. There is another thing materialism can't account for but idealism can.
>Ignoring induction and evidence to pretend a false equivalence is all you have
Induction is non-material. You can't appeal to induction. Evidence is something only ever considered in minds by the way.
>Cry. You're just a young earth creationist going "NOOOO EVOLUTION WAS NEVER PROVEN NOOOOOOOOOOO"
This has nothing to do with anything. No need to get butt hurt from a discussion by the way.

[Anonymous No.14596401]

>>14596343
>I don't have to be patient, I have a worldview that can already account for consciousness, that is idealism.
I think this is a perfect representation of your problem, and doubly affirms the parallel to young earth creationism again. "I already have a God to account for life I don't need evolution".

What you fail to realize is underdeterminism means there is always a parallel theory possible to "account for" what has already been discovered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underdetermination
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hoc_hypothesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

>>14596380
>Induction is non-material
Look the "philosopher" doesn't know what begging the question is. Or underdetermination. Or the principle of explosion. Or occam's razor. Or what an ad hoc hypotheses is. Or...

How is it you dipshits think you can claim OTHERS don't know philosophy when you clearly wipe your ass with it to hold on to your faith?

>This has nothing to do with anything. No need to get butt hurt from a discussion by the way.
Because your epistemic standard is identical to young earth creationists. So it has everything to do with it.

[Anonymous No.14596441]

>>14596343
>Patience, child. The adults are working on it. Keep playing with your toys and playing make believe.

Don't know how you got that from my post.

My point was simply that physicalism as an ontology is a metaphysical claim that cannot be vetted using empirical methods and that idealism doesn't require jettisoning science or solipsism.

It seems to be that the ontological question might very well be unanswerable.

To my mind, this isn't a huge barrier for philosophy of mind. You can posit a physicalist philosophy of mind, that physical forces give rise to and interact with minds, without having to subscribe to the idea of ontological physicalism.

That is, the "physical" may exist only as mental phenomena, but the physical sciences can still produce accurate predictions for how those phenomena interact.

And indeed, the emergence of complexity in the universe, the protean nature of information, the fractal self similarity of informational representations of being by itself, and the discovery of continuous universal laws undergirding these behaviors that act via discrete pairings of opposites, certainly reminds me of the thoughts of a particularly influential idealist, who, surprise surprise, has been making a big comeback in biology with the information theory/biosemiotics revolution. Pic related.

This dude was on some serious shit. Being is an endless cycle of reification s of what is, with fractal recurrence driving ever more informational integration, being coming to know itself as its self.

Maybe he was a sorcerer or ET?

[Anonymous No.14596457]

>>14596441
Is Hegel even an idealist in the common sense? Isn't the whole point that the absolute encompasses both sides of the subjective/noumenal divide, fixing Kant's bifrucated reality. That's what pic related suggests.

Subjective/objective is overcome in the totality of the Absolute. It's just one more dialectical bifructation on evolutionary path of all possibilities.

[Anonymous No.14596463]

>>14595348
>brain as a reciever
this is just unfalsifiable conjecture. Again you're putting something unexplainable to explain something you don't understand... aka god of the gaps.

Besides, why is this "radio wave", if it exists, not phyisical? It interacts with brain matter, thus it should be subject to study. There is no way to reconcile this except with voodoo magic. Since it's so inconceivable to you that matter can be the origin of the mind, just look at how scientists, with a few neurons, managed to replicate complex problem-solving behavior, and that's just with a few hundred cells (if I'm not mistaken). What would happen if you scale it up to billions of cells? Scale matters, just look at GPT-3 and other language models, they only work because of their scale.

You obviously don't trust science. That is an institutional and social problem, not a metaphysical one. Don't base your world view on current ephemeral politics.

>Brains aren't what makes minds
What is mind?

>high fidelity scan of your brain at a given moment and 3D print it at my leisure
This is literally impossible with current technology and its trajectory. Pop-sci like to parrot this shit because it sounds interesting, but ask any serious scientist, he'll dismiss this as nonsense. You're talking about reconstructing the body somehow, not just the brain. This is too farfetched.

>code, storage device, scanner
Okay, stop with computer analogies. It's like trying to explain rocket science with flight science. I guess what you're really asking is, if we can replicate all the physical parameters of your body, somehow, within the world of a simulation, would you still be you? That's an interesting question, my opinion is that there would be another separate you that is exactly identical. No need to over philosophize this, people think they are too special to be matter. Just stop and think.

[Anonymous No.14596474]

>>14596159
>Each person's brain is objective. You can look at person's brains. You can not look at a person's consciousness.
I don't know what you mean by "looking" at consciousness. Do you mean experiencing someone else's consciousness? You experience consciousness through your brain so of course it's subjective and not possible to experience someone else's. You would need their brain. What is the issue?

>Because it's not true.
What part of what I said isn't true? You just ignored it.

[Anonymous No.14596497]

>>14596401
>I think this is a perfect representation of your problem
I don't have a problem
>and doubly affirms the parallel to young earth creationism again. "I already have a God to account for life I don't need evolution".
You are the one who can not account for things. For one, subjective consciousness. And the brain does not account for it. You can examine ever part of a brain and you will not find subjective experience. However, I can account for both brains and consciousness in my world view. Brains, like all matter, are objects rendered to observers in minds.
>What you fail to realize is underdeterminism means there is always a parallel theory possible to "account for" what has already been discovered.
I understand all of those concepts. They all work against your worldview by the way. You are the one with the under developed theory. Mine accounts for all the known physical and metaphysical objects. You are also multiplying entities beyond necessity by postulating an unverifiable observer independent material world.
>Look the "philosopher" doesn't know what begging the question is. Or underdetermination. Or the principle of explosion. Or occam's razor. Or what an ad hoc hypotheses is. Or...
I never called my self a philosopher. Feel free to explain induction without appealing to conscious agents.
>How is it you dipshits
More butthurt. You are becoming highly ass pained.
>you claim OTHERS don't know philosophy when you clearly wipe your ass with it to hold on to your faith?
You don't know what a metaphysical worldview is, so I tried to explain it. You seem to have very little understanding of the topic in general. This is evident.
>Because your epistemic standard is identical to young earth creationists. So it has everything to do with it.
It's your lie, tell it how you want.

[Anonymous No.14596572]

>>14596296
>And does physicalism predict anything?
Yes, every successful scientific theory so far has been physicalist.

>It's just that science is explaining how fundementally mental objects interact.
Please show me one successful scientific theory that makes reference to "mental objects."

>inb4 material is mental
Begging the question and just piggybacking on the success of physicalism. If idealism says nothing beyond physicalist theories then Occam's razor dismisses it.

>For example, there is nothing about what we know about electromagnetism that says that electromagnetism can't just be an accurate description of how mental objects we experience interact with one another.
There is nothing that says it is either. It's just a useless add-on. Why can idealism only be expressed successfully in the materialist terms of atoms, energy, etc. Don't you have any ideas of your own? Apparently not.

>Plenty of notable scientists have been dualists
Plenty have been alchemists. Plenty have believed in God. So what?

>Physicalism is an ontology that says that the abstractions we create in the sciences to predict the world around us are actually the real things-in-themselves.
No, we are modeling real things. The models are just a best guess at what the real things are. And our best guesses happen to be materialist, not idealist. Isn't that weird?

>"To be is to be perceived," isn't a thing that is testable.
No one claims that. We only know of what we can perceive. Anything else is just arbitrary guesses.

>Arguably, Berkeley wins (as his contemporaries agreed as they stomped pavement stones in frustration) in that it is impossible to conceive of a thing existing without perception
I can conceive of "a thing existing without perception" but I can't conceive without perception. Sounds like you're conflating two different things. Just because I can't see without glasses doesn't mean glasses are fundamental to what I'm seeing.

[Anonymous No.14596684]

>>14596296
>But if a thing can't be conceived (conceived by anyone, ever), how can it be possible?
What does conception have to do with possibility? Nothing says reality has to conform to our limited conception. Only our model of reality does. Your logic is backwards.

[Anonymous No.14596715]

>>14596497
One giant "nuh uh" post with no actual substance. Typical.

[Anonymous No.14596717]

>>14596310
>So, physicalism as an ontology has the hard task of showing that the physical, which is only ever known as first person mental experience, is more ontologically basic than first person experience.
First person experience being fundamental has no predictive power. Matter and energy being fundamental does.

>A brain alone doesn't think. You need a body for it to work.
No one claims a brain floating in space would be conscious.

>A mind does not appear to be a static object, it's the result of informational processes. So they mind isn't reducible to the brain
The brain is not a static object, it has informational processes.

[Anonymous No.14596753]

>>14596343
>Has nothing to do with scientific discoveries.
Then why is every scientific discovery materialist? Where's the idealism in any successful theory?

>Because materialism can not account for consciousness.
Have patience. Either scientists will or nothing can. Idealism doesn't actually figure anything out.

>Yes, exactly, it is self evident. Observer independent matter is not.
And your point? "Self-evident" doesn't indicate fundamental reality, it indicates fundamental perception. Fundamental reality can only be determined by modeling and testing it, not postulating it.

>True.
Thanks for admitting idealism is arbitrary and useless.

>Materialism can not account for these things in-material things by definition.
No need to account for what isn't real in the first place. Abstractions aren't real, only physical substrates are real. Show me a number in reality without a physical substrate.

>Yet idealism can account for all of the material world, as this guy explained well
See >>14596572

>I have a worldview that can already account for consciousness
It can "account" for anything and everything because it's arbitrary. Same as magic.

>it's magic, I don't have to explain shit
>it's mental, I don't have to explain shit

[Anonymous No.14596757]

>>14596572
Occam's Razor would suggest idealism not physicalism. If the physical is actually just the mental than you have one basic ontological entity, mind.

In physicalism you have to explain why a second set of ontological entities, first person experiences, are generated by perspectiveless things in themselves.

There is no way to get physicalism more parsimonious than idealism because it's an ontology that necessarily presupposes an extra category.

Second, most, almost all, scientific theories are not "physicalist" or "idealist," they are about specific phenomena and don't get into their ontological origins.

You have a very narrow set of fields that make ontological statements, namely quantum foundations. And, surprise surprise, quantum foundations puts forth multiple theories, very few of which are classically physicalist.

You have:
>Consciousness causes collapse, granted this is fairly unpopular. This borders on idealism.

>Copenhagen. This is the most popular but also incoherent. It makes experience central to being because it is "meaningless to talk about unobserved phenomena," but note that "observation" is never defined in Copenhagen.

>"It From Bit," information ontology that is decidedly not physicalist in the common sense. It supposes information, not matter and energy are ontologically basic. Participatory Universe versions of this are closer to idealism than mainstream physicalism.

>Multiple Worlds: generally in agreement with the tenants of physicalism except that modality doesn't exist, all possibilities are actualized.

>Bohm/Pilot Wave: decidedly physicalist, but non-local.

>QBism, observer centered.

>Objective collapse - closest by far to what people think physicalism is supposed to mean. Also the only one where theories have been testable and falsified.

>"No we are modeling real things."
How can you know that something unobservable (directly or indirectly) exists. This is like Penrose's invisible angry dragon.

[Anonymous No.14596777]

>>14596441
>Don't know how you got that from my post.
He was quoting >>14596325 after referencing your post.

[Anonymous No.14596782]

>>14596684
If something is definitionally unobservable, then no entity will ever be able to discern a difference between its being and its not being. That means the two states, the things being and not being, are always and forever identical for all observers.

But logically if a things actuality is identical with its non-actuality it can have no being.

People get hung up on the limits of conception by pointing to the fallibility of human perception and reason.

>"We might not be able to think of it, but some super advanced AI might!"

That isn't how the conceivablity standard works though. It's about an idealized observer. It is not, "I specifically will never observe X" it is "X will never be observed by anyone, full stop."

If the second is true, a things being and not being are always identical.

The only way out of this is to suppose God and an absolute standpoint that sees all that is.

[Anonymous No.14596823]

>>14596757
>Occam's Razor would suggest idealism not physicalism.
No, you literally just said idealism is piggybacking on materialist descriptions of reality.

>If the physical is actually just the mental than you have one basic ontological entity, mind.
The mental is just the physical and there's only one basic ontological entity, material.

>In physicalism you have to explain why a second set of ontological entities, first person experiences, are generated by perspectiveless things in themselves.
It's not a second set. Consciousness is material. Maybe you're confused because you're treating abstractions as real things separate from the physical.

>There is no way to get physicalism more parsimonious than idealism because it's an ontology that necessarily presupposes an extra category.
There is no extra category and you're not even understanding how Occam's razor works. In order to compare physicalism with idealism they would have to make the same predictions. But idealism makes no predictions. At best, you can just look at what materialism has predicted and say "me too," but you could just as well say anything else. It's arbitrary.

>Second, most, almost all, scientific theories are not "physicalist" or "idealist," they are about specific phenomena
They are about specific phenomena, described and explained in purely materialist terms. You keep ignoring this but it doesn't change the fact that no scientific theory talks about "mental objects," just matter and energy.

>How can you know that something unobservable (directly or indirectly) exists.
It's not unobservable, we're empirically observing it. That's how models are tested.

[bleh No.14596833]

>>14596757
>Occam's Razor would suggest idealism not physicalism. If the physical is actually just the mental than you have one basic ontological entity, mind.
This is another parlor trick by not knowing what Occam's Razor means. It is the simplest explanation that explains the available evidence with the least amount of assumptions, AND is the best model (that is, most accurate predictions).

In other words, idealism is out, as it has zero explanatory power because it offers zero predictions and no models. It is not merely "the fewest assumptions" as theologians and other trolls like you misreport it as being.

>In physicalism you have to explain why a second set of ontological entities, first person experiences, are generated by perspectiveless things in themselves.

Brains are physical. Boom, done. You're playing another shell game demanding people explain wetness when wetness is a property of water and physical stimuli in the first place.

[Anonymous No.14596883]

>>14596782
>If something is definitionally unobservable
Then there is nothing to say about it.

>But logically if a things actuality is identical with its non-actuality it can have no being.
You switched from "identical to all observers" to "identical." I would like to see you prove this logically.

>It's about an idealized observer.
What if there is a hard limit to perception that even an idealized observer can't go past?

[Anonymous No.14596956]

>>14596114

Software and hardware are on the same ontological ground. Both can be talked about and related in purely the terms of matter.

[Anonymous No.14597042]

>>14596956
So is mind and body. It's all matter.

[Anonymous No.14597057]

>>14597042

Then ... explain how you get mind from mattter... That's the hard problem of consciousness.


I can explain how you can get software from hardware in purely materialistic terms.

Software is the manipulation of bits done by the hardware like the CPU, which is also just atoms, particles, fields at the lowest level. Bits are materialistic things -- electrical all the way down.

There is no hard problem of how hardware gives rise to software, since there is an explanation all within physical things.

Now, it is your turn to go from atoms, particles and fields into an experiential realm.

[Anonymous No.14597095]

>>14597057
>Then ... explain how you get mind from mattter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02643294.2019.1670630?journalCode=pcgn20
https://grazianolab.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/graziano_review_2020.pdf

Seething since 1991.

A chemical feedback loop synthesizing and simulating the senses altogether is nothing magical like you seem to need to believe. All of that is material all the way down. There is no part of "mind" that is not a product of the brain, and you cannot point to any "mind" absent matter. Your awareness itself is that attentional system, that executive functioning heuristic.

Regardless of whether or not you personally feel this explanation does not "explain everything", it is sufficient as inference to the best explanation. Which is made based on the evidence, not on feeling icky because you wanted to be special and something different.

[Anonymous No.14597172]

>>14596833
The role of a physical thing being ontologically physical, as opposed to being information or mental substance or whatever you'd like, offers zero explanatory power in the sciences.

Zilch. You get nothing out of saying "there is this fundemental stuff and all existence is made from it, but it's a noumena, thing in itself you don't actually experience, but it's everything that there is."

All the predictions of science come from empiricism. Empiricism is not physicalism, you conflate the two again and again.

>Brains are physical. Boom, done.
And so this physical stuff I experience as an object or sensation is the real thing.

But how about this: quarks and leptons and all that they compose are mental substrate, and everything said about them is just about how the objects of experience work.

Boom, same exact science. Same exact predictions, one less level of entities.

>>14597042
>What if there is a hard limit to perception that even an idealized observer can't go past?
The limits of perception are the limits of being. What does it mean for a thing to exist where, always and forever its existence or nonexistence is co-identical for all possible observers?

You have now inflated your ontology with an infinite number of potential things whose being or not being cannot be cause any difference for anyone and cannot be proved or disproved. This obvious fails Ockham's Razor in terms of parsimony by introducing limitless potential undefined entities, but an even larger issue is what "being" is supposed to mean now.

The necessarily unobservable entity is kindred of the five sided triangle, really just nonsense.

[Anonymous No.14597243]

>>14597172
>The role of a physical thing being ontologically physical, as opposed to being information or mental substance or whatever you'd like, offers zero explanatory power in the sciences.
It is all the explanatory power because it is all the evidence we have.
>All the predictions of science come from empiricism. Empiricism is not physicalism, you conflate the two again and again.
All the evidence is in support of physicalism. Just plugging your ears doing the upset toddler dance.
>But how about this: quarks and leptons and all that they compose are mental substrate, and everything said about them is just about how the objects of experience work.
Underdetermination. You present yet another ad hoc hypothesis positing more things you cannot demonstrate. The burden of proof is on you for this extra substrate.

>Boom, same exact science. Same exact predictions, one less level of entities.
I am 100% convinced you've been trolling, of course, and this is pretty damn obvious. Nobody however stupid is going to honestly write "I will add mind to what we observe" and then claim "This is one less entity". You can't count.

[Anonymous No.14597407]

>>14597243
Bro, subjective experience exists. That's one entity.

It has to because that is the only thing you experience.

A theoretical realm of noumena, as they are themselves not as they are perceived, that is: "the physical world," is the extra entity.

Physicalism has two levels. The physical world, described as best we can by the abstractions of physical science and then obviously the experienced world we actually live in.

Unless you're going to claim first person experience doesn't exist (which is retarded, but a route some physicalists take), then it is physicalism that has more entities and less parsimony.

I'm not adding mind to anything. Mind is the only thing anyone has access to. It's always there.

[Anonymous No.14597423]

>>14597243
By the way, you're profoundly misunderstanding what underdetermination is vis-á-vis philosophy of science if you think it applies to support for different metaphysical ontologies.

Second, it's not even clear if physicalism is a coherent ontology to begin with. See Hemple's Dilemma.

[Anonymous No.14597430]

>>14597095
>A chemical feedback loop synthesizing and simulating the senses altogether is nothing magical like you seem to need to believe

chemical feedback loop within material terms....

POOF

An experiential perspective.

You haven't said anything.

[Anonymous No.14597448]

>>14597430
>>14597407
>Bro, subjective experience exists. That's one entity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained
https://grazianolab.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/graziano_review_2020.pdf
Easily explained see the links for more depth.
>Unless you're going to claim first person experience doesn't exist (which is retarded, but a route some physicalists take), then it is physicalism that has more entities and less parsimony.
Incorrect. The belief in a second part of consciousness, as the paper labels an "m-consciousness" to distinguish with an information related one ("i-consciousness"), can simply be a false one. It is posed, and proposed, to invent a "hard problem" when in reality it does not exist. The same as the supposed "ghost in the machine" or homunculus pulling the levers. Stands merely as a reframing or updating of a concept like "souls" or "spirits".

Put simply, you have a theory of mind and that theory is mistaken. The same way most of mankind's intuitive theories are mistaken. That does not mean consciousness or subjective experience does not exist, it means what you purport those to be are incorrect explanations discounted by evidence.

[Anonymous No.14597455]

If a set of experiments published tomorrow showed that consciousness is actually beamed into living beings non-localy via some hitherto unknown physical force that is able to break multiple standing laws of physics physicalists would just claim: "well yes, this is a new discovery of one of the laws of physics, this is a physical phenomenon!"

And if we discover ectoplasm and ghosts and can recreate ghost summoning experiments in labs, this would get called a "physical phenomenon," too. I mean, local realism got shot to shit and so now physicalism doesn't entail local realism. Now with modified Wigner's Friend experiments we will probably discover that "of course physicalism doesn't entail one objective reality for all observers."

[Anonymous No.14597465]

>>14597448
Have you actually read the book you keep posting?

I have. It does not even try to attempt to answer the question, "why do I have experiences, but rocks do not?" It spends a lot of time showing how consciousness is not as full of perception as well think, how there is less information than we assume. This is all well and good, and instructive, but it doesn't get to the actual question of why I can feel pain or see red and a liter of hydrogen gas can't and now amount of obscurantism is going to change that.

I mean, Grim had a perfect rebuttal to this in that, even if Denette was right about everything, he has totally missed the question people have.

[Anonymous No.14597492]

>>14597465
There is a reason I am posting a PDF supplemental to the book, given the book was written in 1991.
>I mean, Grim had a perfect rebuttal to this in that, even if Denette was right about everything, he has totally missed the question people have.
This misses the point Dennett makes. The idea people have, a theory of mind, is that the theory of mind is incorrect. We have plenty of explanation as to why we have experience and rocks do not (also mentioned in the PDF). That was not what the book was about, however, and if you want that you can review the neuroscience literature on it.

[Anonymous No.14597500]

>>14597455
Physicalism as an ontology is unfalsifiable, so is idealism. Neither have any business in science as, similar to different interpretations of quantum mechanics, one's being true or the other leads to identical predictions and observations in all cases.

Hence, "shut up an calculate." Maybe idealism has a slight advantage in that "mental stuff" is at least directly accessible, so when you say reality is "made of experience," people sort of know what you are talking about, whereas physicists can't agree at all on "what is physical?"

[Anonymous No.14597512]

>>14597492
>Book called consciousness explained doesn't explain consciousness.

>Chemical reactions result in first person perspective when they reach enough complexity and recursion, never mind that plenty of presumably non-experiencing non-living systems feature more information exchange and higher connectivity. At a certain point self-similarity and information transfer results in a first person perspective because, it just does ok! It's very complex. There are so many connections, teraflops, tons of flops.

Not an answer. The transition from water to ice is much better explained. This sort of phase change should be similarly delineated.

[e No.14597544]

>>14597512
>Book called consciousness explained doesn't explain consciousness.
Sure it does. Just not what you want to call consciousness. If you want more detail and reference to models of consciousness for the year 2020, see the PDF to have further reading.

[Anonymous No.14597674]

>>14597448
>A common argument in favour of the reality of m-
consciousness could be put as follows: “I know I
have an experience because, Dude, I’m experiencing
it right now”. Every argument in favour of the literal
reality of subjective experience, that the authors of
this article have ever encountered, boils down
sooner or later to that logic. But the logic is circular.
It is literally, “X is true because X is true”. If that is
not a machine stuck in a logic loop, we don’t know
what is.

This is frankly, an embarrassing passage and could just as easily be turned against empiricism as a whole.

Eliminativists seem to have a deep problem, starting with Denette, where they think evidence against the Cartesian theater, which no one took seriously long before 1991 is equivalent with evidence for elimitivism. That is, as in the case of this paper, the idea that subjective experience isn't neatly contained in a Cartesian I, but is instead more of a disjointed storm of experience, that this solves the hard problem. But philosophers have rejected the unified consciousness for centuries. Hume certainly did, and Buddhist thinkers before him. That still does not get at " why is there sensation," which is the original question.

It's a combination of mistaking complexity for veracity and assuming that if X, then Y, so evidence of not X must be evidence of not Y, except X, the lack of Cartesian theater does not entail lack of experience, so it's proving the wrong thing.

I can think of no other example in science where a small minority swears they have answered to satisfaction one of the most pressing concerns of all of science, for decade after decade, and yet everyone else found their evidence underwhelming. That should make them question their certainty.

[Anonymous No.14597688]

>>14597674
>This is frankly, an embarrassing passage and could just as easily be turned against empiricism as a whole.
So you claim. I didn't see any demonstration of the claim.
>But philosophers have rejected the unified consciousness for centuries.
Doesn't matter how long people are wrong. I have no idea why you think that's important to mention.
>It's a combination of mistaking complexity for veracity and assuming that if X, then Y, so evidence of not X must be evidence of not Y, except X, the lack of Cartesian theater does not entail lack of experience, so it's proving the wrong thing.
Modus tollens, Not Q, therefore Not P. Can you rephrase this? I am unable to understand it as something other than rejecting modus tollens.

[Anonymous No.14597859]

>>14597688
I'm not rejecting the structure of the logic, I'm rejecting the premises.

It's the same as:
>If X is not yellow then X is not heavy.
>X is not yellow, so it can't be heavy, so I can lift this school bus.

That aside, I feel like trying to stand on empiricism, "the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience," while saying your empirical evidence suggests sense experience doesn't exist, goes without saying.

[e No.14597872]

>>14597859
Rejecting the explanation of experience, the theory of mind proposed as "experience", is not rejecting experience. It is rejecting the intuitions and labels given to experience.

Similarly, I reject your rejection as a strawman. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Anonymous No.14597895]

>>14597872
If it's a state man, it's only because elimitivism intentionally pulls a massive bait and switch with by claiming that it can explain what causes experience but then simply showing that folk theory of mind is wrong.

That doesn't answer why a super computer processing more information than any person is presumably not experiencing anything. Same for a star. Same for a corpse.

A satisfactory answer to: "what specific natural phenomena causes experience?" cannot be:

>"well we know it has to do with nervous systems, and well hey- look over here at all these ways in which folk theory of mind is wrong! Did you know you only see a tiny minority of your visual field with any sort of fidelity!? Bet you didn't see the ape guy walk through the group of actors passing a basketball! See, this thing most people would call folk theory of mind, we're going to conveniently call "consciousness," (in one of the most successful uses of obscurantism ever), and then we're going to claim that it doesn't exist.

>"Noooo! What do you mean you don't accept our answer. We are so persecuted. People only don't accept our answer for psychological reasons. What? How can you say we said experience doesn't exist at all? How dare you be confused by our shitty bait and switch!"

I genuinely think some of them actually buy their own bullshit on this and have confused "folk psychology" with experience in their own minds, but I've read enough of Dennett to start to think it's an intentional way to make intellectual hay.

But neither his book nor your paper say which processes specifically lead to experience or how, even if the technology is beyond us now, how one could construct a conscious being if they had access to a magical 3D printer. That is, they are claiming a prize in science up there with a unified physics for themselves when they clearly haven't done the work.

[Anonymous No.14597898]

>>14597895
Basically, if they actually knew what experience is caused by they should have no problem going about explaining how to build something that experiences, giving us a solid answer on the potential for AI, or being able to offer us an iron clad answer as to whether someone under anesthesia is actually put, not just paralyzed. They can't.

At best elimitivism is like a physicist claiming they have solved turbulence and then showing that every time they open their faucet enough they get turbulence, so it must be due to some pattern of interactive motion.

[e No.14597924]

>>14597895
The paper linked before references several models used in neuroscience. The claim there is no attempt to explain is, I think, made entirely out of ignorance, for you do nothing but try to attack a perceived position. I suggest revisiting the paper for mention of those models and reading literature reviews or following references to those models and their successes.

The misunderstanding you have seems, to me, to be implying we can't explain it. On the contrary the whole point of the dichotomy in that paper I just read is that "i-consciousness" can be explained just fine. As well as experience. The models have no issue explaining that at all.

[e No.14597939]

>>14597895
Put another way, and you may really want to consider this because it contradicts your notion that Dennett is engaged somehow in "intellectual hay", the statement "we have already explained it, you just can't explain something in addition to what already has been explained when it doesn't really exist".

That is why it is important to deal with "folk theory", but also other moving goalposts like "qualia" and similar dualist or other notions. The problem is assuming there is something in addition to be explained, and that carries with it a burden of proof. A burden of proof none of them ever even attempt to meet.

It makes perfect sense to say "Okay, stop, you're trying to satisfy people who can't be satisfied". Meanwhile the models we have for what we can show does exist work just fine. Saying "but you can't account for this other thing" that has never been demonstrated in response should be duly dismissed. With the claimant comes the burden.

So experience in the ordinary sense, not dualist or anything else, perfectly explained in neuroscience. To posit something else means they have to show something else. As Dennett has great success pointing out, however, nobody ever does.

[Anonymous No.14597949]

>>14597898
I'd say it's akin to if some asked a physicist about the arrow of time, and they explained the second law of thermodynamics. The next obvious question is: "well why did the universe start in a low entropy state?"

"Well it has to do with the conditions of the Big Bang," is to be sure, an answer, but it really does not answer the fundemental question, which is one about causal mechanisms on as fundemental a level as possible.

If consciousness is an emergent property or matter it should be possible to explain it in the same way we can explain how hydrogen and oxygen create the properties of water. Obviously nothing close to this bar has been met.

It's the difference between "why is water like it is," being met with the answer "because it's hydrogen and oxygen."

[e No.14597979]

>>14597949
>The next obvious question is: "well why did the universe start in a low entropy state?"
>which is one about causal mechanisms on as fundemental a level as possible.
Ya sure about that skippy?
>If consciousness is an emergent property or matter it should be possible to explain it in the same way we can explain how hydrogen and oxygen create the properties of water. Obviously nothing close to this bar has been met.
Ya suuuure about that skippy? In both cases, your personal ignorance and self evident lack of going to find out is the problem. Just because you don't know doesn't mean answers do not exist.

I'll just link that same damn PDF none of you read: https://grazianolab.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/graziano_review_2020.pdf

Oh look here's an explanation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory
Oh look here's more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_Consciousness
Frankly a much better article: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Models_of_consciousness

There have been tons throughout the years, each with increasing success, predictive power, and explanatory scope to fit the evidence. You have to ignore the entirety of neuroscience to make a claim as colossally ignorant as "we haven't met that bar". The bar has been met 40 years ago, and we've gone increasingly above it ever since.

World-self simulation is the missing part of information integration theory, and ultimately what is represented by Graziano's attention schema. These are not competing models frankly they're just different aspects of the altogether process. Where Graziano is explaining how that ends up presenting in the minds of people moreso than the other two. AST describes the same modeling simulation as earlier theories (the world simulation and self simulation explanations).

Rather than some mythos of "replacements" you have a progression of integration of prior theory with successive attempts.

[e No.14598001]

From now on I'm just starting from here https://grazianolab.princeton.edu/publications

The man goes through in successive publications making various predictions, some of which were later verified from earlier publications, and walking through concepts and old literature integrating them into the same explanation.

This is how you do it. Publish explanations, make predictions, construct models and test them. Not going "Buht muh dualism" on a fucking image board.

[Anonymous No.14598048]

This is not an answer to the hard problem. It's a hypothesis for how one might be able to think about how consciousness is formed from a systems perspective with a few unspecific references to gross neuroanatomy thrown in.

>Neuroscientists who study consciousness traditionally ask a specific question: where in the brain must information be sent, to generate subjective experience? If I am aware of an apple, is the experience genenered...(insert several possible locations for the Cartesian theater no in is claiming exists here)

>In the present proposal,
however, the traditional question is ill-posed. No matter what brain area or network receives the information about the apple, it never generates a subjective feeling of the apple. Instead, a distinct brain
system computes a specific information set about
what subjective experience is. M-consciousness becomes another computed property ultimately
linked to the apple, like colour or motion or spatial location. In the present account, without the theory-
of-mind network building a model of what a conscious mind is and adding that information to the global mix, the person would have no basis to make any claims about having a conscious experience of the apple.

lol

[e No.14598053]

>>14598048
see >>14597939
The "hard problem" is based on a falsehood.

[Anonymous No.14598054]

>>14598048
>Subjectivity isn't real, the brain just calculates what subjectivity would feel like if it were real, which is what experience is.

>You're not experiencing things you're just experiencing a stimulation of what experiencing is. I figured it all out.

[e No.14598056]

>>14598054
Congratulations on your new strawman. Care to try again?