I feel therefore I am
aeon.co
aeon.co
Used it for the book list.
Nope. This is not true. The word "observer" as used in quantum mechanics, is an unfortunate historical accident. The observer need not be human at all---any measurement apparatus can act as observer, and no human beings need be present at all.
Such a gross misunderstanding of late antiquity/medieval cosmology.
"As an admirer of co-ordinate geometry, I like Tononi’s concept; at the same time, I don’t accept information theory as a bridge to subjectivity."
In my master thesis on consciousness, I dealt with Tononi's thesis and, in spite of the publicity he gets, I too find his theory to be bogus. It's like saying Maxwell's equations are light. Or, put differently, it's like saying a computer is information because it processes/produces information.
Sounds like you may be reaching for map/territory distinction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
It is a great book because of the wide range of authors (Borgess, Turing, Serle, Lem!, etc) giving a nice introduction to what was current up to 1981.
What I want is a similar book that covers new findings/speculations since 1981.
Ideally it would also be in a chapter format and a multitude of authors with varying ideas would be presented.
I've read Chalmers, Dennett, Hof, Serle, Jeff Hawkins etc in book format but it would be nice to see something more concise.
An awesome book that does a great job logically explaining how consciousness may be fundamental is "Biocentrism" by Robert Lanza
Over time we will find new ways to explain it so that it makes sense. But my guess is that it will be aided mostly be technology.
What model does dualism provide and how can I use it to make predictions about how consciousness is embodied in physical beings. Why is it useful to presuppose the existence of a complete separate substance to explain consciousness.
To be brief dualism is woo woo.
>I think everyone intuitively knows that consciousness can't come from material things, but we convince ourselves otherwise.
Ok, I'll make a sweeping unsupported statement too. Dualists have limited imagination and flawed understanding of the nature of information and computation as well as a penchant for magical thinking.
Also it mostly a wrong idea that flat earth was a popular theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth
And what is more magical thinking than the idea that consciousness can come from a ball of matter? To me, that is much more the crazier idea
Discoveries of completely unknown fundamental laws of physics that have a significant in-your-face and obvious impact on our everyday lives are playing a decreasing role in science (depending on where you draw the line, one might even argue that the last such discovery was made by Newton).
What you call crazy has become increasingly normal :)
I think it's quite funny that the so-called hard problem of consciousness has been with us for millennia, yet so few of us tackle it in the right way, instead choosing to wait for others to give us all the answers or (at worst) endlessly chewing and regurgitating the same useless conjectures and pontifications.
Geeks and math nerds (and anyone who is seriously interested in tackling consciousness) need to be doing more psychedelic drugs, I feel, and looking INWARDS, but how often does that happen?
Drugs are the easy way there. There are other ways, but require dedication and commitment and possibly utter disregard for material concerns and "consensus reality". As the ancient wise ones said regarding mysticism (direct experiential knowledge), one needs to know, will, dare and keep silent.
The answers are here, the consciousness problem has been solved more than 2000 years ago, across cultures and civilizations. As Aleister Crowley once said, "By doing certain things certain results will follow."
Yet very few feel the need to do anything these days.
Some people try to rescue dualism by saying the brain is a kind of radio talking to an outside consciousness, but we were never able to detect the signals, so I wouldn't trust that theory too much.
You certainly destroy the process of light creation in that bulb, which is the proper analogy with the consciousness of a single mind. No one is claiming that messing with a single brain affects consciousness itself, only the consciousness of that brain.
The reason why so many westerners believe in materialism today is because scientism has poisoned their minds and they cannot understand the difference between science and philosophy, and they aren't aware of the hidden metaphysical assumptions upon which their worldview rests. However among philosophy departments, there are probably much less materialists today than there were 50 years ago.
Personally I think people should ignore the entire materialist/dualist debate, and go read Wittgenstein instead (or Peter Hacker).
Still, even this does not refute any of the scientific facts so far determined. What has been measured and deduced correctly, must be correct. Everything we know about neuroscience must be true. It's just the last step that seems very, very problematic.
Subjective personal experience is a side effect of an long running information process located inside a meat computer. Why is occurs and what is "really is" are scientific questions that are incompatible with materialism.
Presupposing a second substance is magical thinking.
Reducing the complexities of the brain to "a ball of meat" is absurd. That's like saying it's magical thinking to suggest that a fragment of silicon can predict the weather.
Further, there isn't any reason to believe that consciousness is any more profound or fundamentally distinct from any other physical phenomenon in the universe, especially because consciousness is a prerequisite to the consideration of its own nature; such reasoning is akin to thinking that the universe must have been carefully designed because it's so perfectly tuned to the temperament of complex life, when there's literally no other possibility if life actually exists to wonder about why it's here.
Your reasoning just seems like an appeal to emotion. You might feel like consciousness is profound (a vague description without a clear meaning), but you haven't offered any reasoning as to why this is the case.
Some of Max Tegmark's writing as well as Lawrence Krauss' have describe gravity as the "cost" or the thing that is balanced by the expansion of space.
The expansion of space having been driven by another as yet undescribed field.
All things are physical. Consciousness is a side effect of information processing. Seems like we just have fundamentally different assumptions about what can be a valid belief.
I don't just disagree with you. I think your belief about consciousness isn't even well formed. I don't even think there could exist evidence to support a belief like "consciousness creates matter".
Confusing intuition with the truth there.
Student: How do I know I exist?
Professor: Who's asking?
Student: I am
Sorry I couldn't resist. If you don't get it, search Cogito ergo sum.
It is entirely sufficient to understand that brains are composed of physical elements - neurons and the like, that communicate with each other with little electrical and chemical signals, and that this physical state evolves forwards with time according to physical laws. I repeat, this is all that is required to resolve every single one of these supposed "problems" of consciousness.
We may not understand how a brain works in its entirety, but knowing that its behaviour is entirely described by these physical pieces bounds our understanding of its behaviour as a whole sufficiently that these problems are trivially revealed to be specious nonsense.
As an analogy, I know that the microchip in my computer is built out of transistors etched onto a silicon die. I have some knowledge about microchip design, broadly speaking, and I know about things such as logic circuits, latches and clock signals, but I don't possess a complete understanding of how it functions. Still, knowing that it's just transistors bounds my understanding of its behaviour. I know, for instance, that there's no extra-physical magic pixie that makes it function. I don't wonder about the subjective experience of the floating point unit, or about whether the L1 cache is feeling or just registering the data it stores, or whether it would be possible or just concievable for a world to exist where an atom-for-atom identical processor didn't actually compute but just went through the motions of moving about some little electrical impulses.
On a fundamental level, our brains are very much the same. The architecture is nothing at all alike, for example: the clock speeds and signal propagation rates are much lower, synaptic signals are at least partly analog, the brain doesn't have anything remotely close to a uniform memory space, and it continuously dynamically reconfigures itself through neuroplasticity. None of this is relevant. I did not conclude there is not a magic pixie making making my computer's CPU function because of my understanding of it's architecture and overall design, I concluded it because I know it's made up of transistors, and it's behaviour is entirely described by its transistors, and no matter how hard you try you can't make a magic pixie out of transistors.
We have established that brains are made up of little physical pieces and obey physical laws. It trivially follows that every piece of data that could possible be referred to as part of our consciousness, every "feeling" or "subjective experience" is just some pattern or another entirely described by the physical state of the brain.
If you see some sort of problem with this, if you see some sort of contradiction in the understanding that "you" are just a wetware-implemented algorithm that is the end result of a rather convoluted process of natural evolution and human development, that is a problem with your understanding not with reality. There is no space in this picture for looking at some pattern of neural impulses and asking whether it feels; you can answer that question however you like, but with respect to reality that question is not even wrong.
David Chalmers would call this "materialism" or perhaps "physicalism". Once you move past Solipsism and decide that reality actually exists, or that we don't know that reality actually exists but it seems to so we might as well assume it does for the sake of argument, then, though this is actually a tautology, every physical thing physically exists. The problem with words such as "materialism" and "physicalism" is that using the word implies things could be any other way. There are abstract ideas, and there is reality - "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". While I might respect a position such as solipsism as epistemologically valid, beyond that particular loophole I cannot understand why philosophers who do not agree with what is generally called "empirical materialism" are taken seriously.
It sure does not feel like a solved problem.
You do not consider there is such a thing as "hard problem"?
Sure, one can subscribe to the view that qualia is just this accident of evolution in a purely physical world, an emergent behavior of a bunch of neurons firing in unison if you will.
Even then it seems there is a lot of room for debate.
I(ha!) thought(double ha!) the article was quite good at showing the various viewpoints and progress through time(triple ha!).
But because they didn't read it through they didn't read the part were I was addressing what I wrote.
I find this tendency pretty counter-productive to learning anything at all. "Oh there was something that is wrong" then I don't want to finalize it. I wonder if it says something about our generation or whether this is something thats always been at play (like older people who wouldn't take a punker serious because of how they look)
I don't want to single you out but I just don't understand this approach to reading things. Care to comment?
Between link-sharing sites like this one, print and digital publications, and never ending ad campaigns masquerading as blogs and "relate-to-me!" emails, most of us are inundated with the specious ideas and arguments of people whose reliability can be difficult to assess. A simple heuristic is stop reading if the author appears to not be grounded in the empirical tradition. Which, unfortunately, most writers aren't.
Not all valuable perspectives follows some strictly logical path to get to it's conclusions. And not all conclusions make high claims of validity. Some are just exploring potentials.
Newton was right about many things but wrong about others.
That doesn't mean his contributions aren't valuable. Imagine reading him today efter relativity and QM and then applying this approach.
Might be just me, but being that this article in total is not about a scientific understanding of the color blue but rather about consciousness, it seems reasonable to me to read on.
In other words it might be a wrong scientific claim right there (I don't know enough about Maxwells equation) but that doesn't mean that it's damaging the rest of the article since it's not a scientific point that it's trying to make but a philosophical one.
I am not saying it's ok to be sloppy or wrong just that sometimes right conclusions and useful perspectives can happen even though some of the details are wrong.
It's not a scientific paper and as far as I read it shouldn't be read as such IMO.
But each to their own of course.
There's an enormous quantity of correct, novel and insightful content. So I filter harshly and don't bother with it.
Title of the article led me to believe that it would be a essay about what the present generation of researchers of consciousness are doing differently than previous generations. That I would be presented with a new strategy to attack the problem of consciousness.
I personally don't believe there is a "problem of consciousness". But I still was willing to give the article a chance.
I became dubious when I read
> for while any spectrometer can register blue precisely on a dial, few of us would say that it is conscious. A spectrometer does not perceive blue.
Already the author is starting to set up a contrast between inanimate systems and animate ones. Which I reject. A complicated response to stimulus isn't a different thing from a response which is simple to causally explain.
Eventually I read
>physicalism contains a logical flaw ... something more is needed, beyond the laws of nature, to account for conscious subjective experience
And I stopped because I don't agree and have no need to read the inferior versions arguments for dualism when I've already reject the better versions.
I am not just looking for correct, if i wanted that I would read scientific papers. I am looking for perspectives. Things that are useful even if they don't live up to scientific scrutiny.
More specifically, I think it's symptomatic of a tendency towards performative dismissal -- the GP's comment is intended to demonstrate the superiority of their knowledge to that of the author, and simultaneously insult the author via dismissal of their work. It's purely a social display, as evidenced by their need to comment on having stopped reading (completely irrelevant to e.g. alerting people to the inaccuracy of a fact essentially tangential to the subject of the piece).
Lets be clear. What you're describing, and mis-attributing to me, is an attempt at dominance.
I'd say you need to understand two things. First, you simply don't know me well enough to make such an accusation. In fact you don't know me at all. So, despite your pseudo-clever phrasing ("social display", "performative dismissal"), all you're actually doing is making a series of assumptions about my intentions before going on to do exactly what you accuse me of. And secondly, there isn't remotely enough content to my original comment to justify your assumptions.
It can also be counter-productive to setup strawman arguments which you tear down at a later point.
It takes time for anyone to read something and no one has enough time to read everything. Further, most people have read lots of things that setup strawman arguments and never tear them down. Often, people will then conclude that the author actually believes such strawmen and may avoid further reading the author.
If I read to completion every piece of text that came before my eyes I would have died a long time ago.
I made an observation. Said why I think it's counter productive from my line of reasoning. Then I asked for comments. Because there might be a good reason.
Where did I make the strawman?
Do you really think I don't understand it takes time to read?
I used the strawman as an example of why someone may, legitimately, stop reading any essay you wrote, or this article, or really, any piece of text they come across.
>Do you really think I don't understand it takes time to read?
I think you probably understand that. However, it is very difficult for you to know what value I place on my time spent engaged in various activities. At some point, it is just no longer worth my time to continue reading some pieces of text. Some things are just more important, including, possibly, posting a comment about it.
I mean you want to spend time going here to write you stopped reading instead of reading a little further?
Sure, there may be a point to discuss with others, or you may just want to warn them.
The brevity of my comment, which I regret, was a symptom of lack of time. I have lots to do at the moment, and yesterday was particularly busy. This same lack of time caused me to abandon the article.
The author's statement that Maxwell's equations connect the subjective label "blue" to a physical EM frequency range is wrong. Its not so much an error of fact as of conception. And in an article that is specifically examining the relationship between subjective concious experience and the physical world, that conceptual error is significant.
But it doesn't really invalidate the author's arguments. And contrary to what I wrote, I did actually continue reading some way past the passage that I quoted. There were some interesting facts and analysis, but ultimately the structure and framing was similar to many other popular science articles I've read, and I felt it was just ground I'd already covered. That, and the above error, lead me to stop. In different circumstances I'd have continued to the end.
So my reason for bailing on the article had little to do with any deficiencies it might have, but I justified my decision using what seems to me to be a glaring error. I don't think that was wrong: it is important to be selective. Wwhat I've learned is that reading long form articles when you are busy is counter-productive, and posting context-less comments is basically noise.