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Comment by jjaredsimpson | Hacker News Reader

Materialism explains the world however. Flat earth model clearly doesn't and was obviously false even in antiquity.

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.

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Materialism doesn't explain anything. Materialism isn't science, nor does it provide any scientific theories or models (in fact even Karl Popper was a dualist). Materilism is a metaphysical belief that paints a philosophical veneer on top of the world, and offers no practical applications whatsoever. No scientific theory loses its validity if one suddenly stops believing in materialism. Materalism is also probably either obviously false (eliminative materialism) or a meaningless tautology (Hempel's dilemma), depending on what specific flavour of materialism you prefer. However the same can perhaps be said about dualism and idealism as well (I'm certain that idealism is false, and less certain about dualism because I know much less about it).

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).

Flat earth was right enough to get someone from village a to b it just wasn't good enough to get us to the end of the world or into space.

Also it mostly a wrong idea that flat earth was a popular theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

Yes flat earth is more like a first approximation to a better theory. Materialism isn't like that imo. I believe materialism to be correct.

Materialism is also just an approximation IMO.

My comment wasn't about dualism, it was just about the idea that matter doesn't create consciousness. Consciousness can create matter, and that is not dualism.

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

Precedents for surprising meta-structures arising from the interaction of a huge number of smaller objects with complex interactions are playing an increasing role in science (think Wolfram's book, biology and the understanding of the genome, and material science for example).

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 :)

Consciousness is not a "meta-structure" created from little pieces of things, and anyone who thinks so is fooling themselves. Just take a moment to be present and aware of your own consciousness to realize this. It IS crazy to think that something as profound as consciousness comes from lots of legos put together in just the right way. That sounds like magic to me. Everything makes a lot more sense if you look at it the other way around - that consciousness makes everything else. All the difficult problems become much easier. Here's a blog post I wrote about it a while ago that got on the front page on Hacker News: http://hack.ly/articles/why-consciousness-may-not-come-from-...

Science is the religion of the 21st century.

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.

Well, you can move your hand, right? So consciousness can affect matter. And you can see stuff, so matter can affect consciousness as well. It's not a great leap to say that consciousness is a program running on a computer made of matter, rather than something mystical high and above. Also we can knock out parts of the brain and affect the corresponding parts of consciousness, so the conclusion is kinda obvious.

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.

If you break a light bulb do you destroy light itself? No, you just break a light bulb. Similarly, if someone's brain is hurt, it may not affect consciousness, just the person's brain. People have a closed mind about these things and say words like "obvious" etc.. when it may be valuable to think about things differently or from another point of view.

> If you break a light bulb do you destroy light itself?

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.

What I propose is that the light bulb doesn't create electricity, in the same way that the brain doesn't create consciousness

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