Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion

Some people feel there is no way for such a "feeling" to form spontaneously out of the cold, dead matter. Since some matter doesn't experience this feeling, how does it spontaneously form, out of no-feeling, at some threshold configuration? What is this threshold exactly? These people think it must special, since we can imagine (in principle) a clump of matter interacting physically in time to simulate the external appearance of a human mind, yet remain no-feeling on the inside.

Other people don't seem to grasp what the problem the first people are posing might possibly be. The "feeling" is simply a property of the universe which arises in some physical configurations. Computers can have subjective experience and even today's computers might have it in some form. There is no discrete, magical step required.

I find myself continually switching teams on this matter. The second position might be more believable after we find some laws governing the relationship between physical configurations and the nature of the resulting experience. But since subjective experience is necessarily... subjective, it seems very hard (impossible?) to test.

Fair enough - this 'statistical argument' is a convenient explanation that can always be invoked, but in this case I don't really consider it to be very satisfactory as an explanation of the phenomena I have been told about (I would put the likelihood for something like those phenomena to happen 'by chance' to be so abysmally low that it seems impossible).

> There is this one reason that it's literally the job of science. Science isn't a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book, it's the aggregation of everything that reliably works for extracting information about observable reality.

I disagree. "Science (from the Latin word scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.". This is far from saying 'science can answer any question'. But again, you're free to believe that science can do that. I just don't happen to believe it can.

> But is it? The hint is given by the fact that there's more than one thinking human in existence. You may feel that answers about your subjective experiences are out of reach of science, but to the extent subjective experiences have any impact on reality, you can use science to study my subjective experiences (as expressed by me), and I can do the same to you.

I think your answer to the other thread makes it clear that we have some insurmountable philosophical differences here. If you believe that showing the correlation between a configuration of atoms and the subjective experience that accompanies that configuration to be 'an explanation' of that subjective experience, we have very different expectations of what constitutes an explanation.

This isn't true. The word is often used to describe that. But science is first and foremost a method. It's not the knowledge itself. It's not the techniques. There are other techniques besides scientific ones that we use to obtain information about the world. Math, for instance, isn't science. Statistical methods are not scientific methods.

Science concerns itself with obtaining empirical basis for causation. Studying the physical world does not provide insight into every problem we have. You don't try to debug your software problem by hooking up a multimeter to your CPU! We need to use alternative methodologies than scientific ones.

To lump them all under one word is wrong. Your categories are off, which makes your following statement:

> It's just that the sentence "science can't ever answer a question about reality" is a category error - it's saying "the set of ways you can answer questions about reality with can't be used to answer a question about reality". Nonsense."

... even more wrong.

Science is closer to a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book than it is to your assertion. You're using the word science to describe what epistemology calls justification. In epistemological terms, knowledge is a justified true belief. Science is a form of justification. There are other forms.

Since science is empirical, relying on the material world, then the assertion starts to carry water if and only if you can first prove physicalism. I personally am fully on board with materialism, but will rebel very hard against physicalism. Calling math a form of science feels very wrong. I'm on the fence about positivism, I need to think more about it.

> A car's horsepower is in the engine.

Where is it in the engine? The engine can go 180hp. But the engine does not contain 180 hp. That's what the concept of an ability or a power is. A broken engine cannot go 180 hp. But, if as you say, it is in the engine, then that distinction would be irrelevant. We would still say a broken engine can go 180 hp. But we don't.

> Similarly, if brain can compute, it is a computer. It's also an organ.

Right, you'll see I have never said the brain can't compute. But that doesn't mean it is simply a computer. If the assumption that the brain is a computer is to stand then the abilities of a computer should be compared to the abilities of a brain, or a person. There are those that match. We agree on that. But there are those that do not. And that means the assumption that the brain simply is a computer is flawed. It is an organ that can compute. But to extend from that that it is a computer is eliding the crucial difference between the two. That is your assumption.

> Evidence needed. Why would it [imagination] not be computational?

Let's ignore that the premise you are making: that imagination is computational, requires you to support it as well;

> imagination-like computations

> A fuzzy search on a graph

> A series of simulations with relaxed constraints and somewhat randomized initial states

All require you to posit things that are -like, or somewhat like imagination. But computers are programmed. They can't think new thoughts. They are closed deterministic systems. That their output seems imaginative or novel does not mean the computer has the ability to imagine, it means the computational output was unexpected to you or the people who wrote the code. The idea that imagination is computational is a category error.

> not a big leap to conclude that imagination is nothing but a more complex variant of such computations

This is actually an enormous leap. Can computers imagine? You will find zero agreement in that regard. That doesn't prove your point. You'll need to provide evidence that computers can actually violate their programming, cannot just compute and instead imagine. But that's not what computers do. Computers compute. That they can do things that seem like imagination to you does not mean they can imagine.

>> It means you can fuzzily model the brain on a computer, but that model will have glaring gaps.

> Models exist on a map, not in the territory. So do brains and computers. The territory is made of whatever sub-quark substrate the reality is made of. When you say "brain", what you're really referring to is a model, and a pretty black-boxy one. Viewing the brain as a computer is an attempt to apply a model that's little more transparent (and therefore more useful); as long as it matches observable evidence (and it does), it's the right thing to do.

Excuse my original words, I meant "fuzzily model the brain as a computer

Again, I don't think applying the computer as a model is completely invalid. But it has limitations. You can't just brush off those limitations when you talk about the brain as a computer. They fundamentally mean the comparison is less useful. Supposing it is 1 to 1, which you are doing leads you to build on assumptions that are unsupported. You have to accept that the assumption that the brain is a computer has serious criticisms brought against it. And you have to defend that assumption. You can't simply ignore them and argue that you are right.

For instance viewing the brain as computer frequently does not match the observable evidence. We can imagine. Computers cannot. That is observable. So how do you support the assumption that the brain is a computer in spite of that?

What you're asking is for computers to be rational. That given garbage input, it will produce intelligible output. Computers cannot do this unless you program them to.

Human minds are non-deterministic in many, many, many ways. Hand the same input to the same mind and you'll get a different output every single time, unless the mind willed itself to act rationally. But they are deterministic enough that you can study their behavior. Other brains are not as non-deterministic, so their behavior is easier to study.

Look at it from a thermodynamic standpoint. Biological systems arose to conserve order against entropy. A fully-deterministic system will shed order, it's only through non-deterministic means that biological systems can conserve order.

The mind is the most complex system nature has devised that can not only slow the aggregation of entropy, but also create order! It's not breaking the laws of physics, but yet it can create all kinds of order.

Conway's Game of Life is an excellent illustration of the concept. You have to work hard and study the domain in order to find stable systems. Otherwise they just drop to equilibrium fast.

You'll see in my comment above this one that I agree that the brain is a physical thing. But abilities and powers are not physical. That's not voodoo magic. That's what abilities are. Think about horsepower. The horsepower of a car does not reside in any one physical thing, not the carburetor, or the intake manifold, or the piston, or the wheels; it's an ability of the car: it is able to go at such and such horsepower. That is what horsepower is.

The same applies to computation. Computing something is an ability, but we have many more intellectual and cognitive abilities beside computing things.

As a result

> a sufficiently powerful computer with a physically accurate simulation of a brain would produce virtually identical results to a real brain.

is just you are assuming that it will work, but nothing about computers supports that in the slightest. That's just a guess.

> A team of scientists able to sufficiently model the physics of the brain (and presumably the entire central nervous system, I imagine a disembodied brain simulation would experience a horrific form of locked-in syndrome) would not need to be concerned about emergent properties of the simulation such as a sense of consciousness, or thought, or imagination. Those things will just happen once the simulation is perfected.

All of this is still an assumption.

Again, that doesn't mean you are right or wrong: it means its an assumption. You have to accept the limitations of your assumption and the limitations of modelling the brain on a computer are large and glaring.

> Indeed the cognitive neuroscience folk, etc, would be invaluable to actually understanding, training, interpreting and caring for the brain simulation, and figuring out if its behaviours and interactions constitute consciousness etc, so I do not think this has to even be framed as programmers pretending to know about brain stuff vs brain people who dismiss any notion of computationally recreating consciousness. It would be a team effort that works both ways, but is already doomed to fail if half the team thinks it's impossible from the get-go.

You are assuming here that only the programmers are heading down the right path. But you don't know that. It's entirely reasonable (and I would say much more supportable) to say that the programmers are heading down the wrong path: their path will lead to nothing at all. That's because the programmers have fallen to a category error.

You think they need to model the brain on a computer for it to make sense. But there is actually very little if anything to support that.

Brains are brains. Computers are computers. That computer science can be fuzzily applied to the study of brains around the ability to compute does not mean the study of brains is computer science or that brains are computers.

I'll read GEB :)