The Mind’s Body Problem
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Except some of us don’t share this belief, at least not as it is normally understood. Don’t get me wrong, I believe I am different from crows and monkeys and dolphins…
…I just believe these differences to be quantitative, not qualitative - and it is the qualitative differences most articles like this opine upon (souls, levels of self awareness absent in other creatures, etc.).
Given that I do not believe in souls, it is easy(ish) for me to consider qualitative differences and conclude that only arrogance would support my dismissing self awareness among crows and monkeys and dolphins.
They may have it. They may not. And if they do, it may be alien to ours, so different they don’t think we have it either.
I am very comfortable believing and asserting that the differences between us and them are merely quantitative, more or less muscle here, more or less specific brain function there, perhaps largely equivalent affective function.
The Tracy-Widom universality class posits that when a critical mass of simple things is achieved, those things begin to operate in complex concert, thus reaching new qualitative potentials.
Food for thought.
You are more likely to defend yourself and attempt to prolong your life if you believe you are worthy of life -- that you have free will, that life is meaningful, etc.
It would be evolutionarily advantageous for us to evolve a hard-coded belief that any time we question our self-awareness, consciousness, free will, etc. the hard-coded belief kicks in to say "yes, of course you have these things" and thus you will prolong your life, breed, and reinforce this.
Curious if anyone has come across this in philosophical or biological readings.
Yeah, this is touched on in Philosophy of Mind classes. It's just a very uninteresting and reductionist view that's probably wrong, so no one really takes it seriously, much like solipsism or the idea that we live in a simulation.
Our entire experience informs us that the world is real, that other minds are real, that our own self-awareness and sense of me-ness is real. There's no real reason to doubt any of it, other than playing clever little logical gotcha' games. A caveat here is that philosophers do write about the reality of things in very deep and meaningful ways and Cartesian skepticism is certainly worth studying.
The most important word here is "sense" -- I don't think anyone can argue that the sense of individuality isn't real. But how much of our personal narratives are true, and how much of them do we make up to try and make sense of an otherwise chaotic existence? That isn't a fluffy philosophical musing; it's a core question of human psychology.
Some Buddhist teachings speak of "word sickness", where we spend so much of our lives living in abstractions that we are unable to experience the present moment as it actually is. We've drawn boxes around phenomena to try and classify everything, without realizing that we do this in ways that reinforce our own identities and sense of meaning in the world. We tend to treat the things we are good at as more important than the things we aren't, for instance. So how much of one's concept of self is really real, and how much has been invented to coalesce a sense of identity?
The borders of me-ness are also interesting to consider. There's already a slight feeling that tech like cellphones could become an extension of our body. Will that feeling change if we start implanting tech?
With social insects like ants, is an ant more like an individual organism or are ants just limbs with the hive as the "me"?
Everything we observe goes through our first-person-perspective, therefore there's no such thing as a "scientific" POV. We come to consensus, true, but it's still through first-person-experiential phenomena, and not some kind of external "science" validator.
> The borders of me-ness are also interesting to consider. There's already a slight feeling that tech like cellphones could become an extension of our body.
I'm not sure what cellphones have to do with anything, there are much better examples of the "fuzziness" of identity: conjoined twins, multiple personality, schizophrenia, dementia, corpus callosotomy, etc. These are all edge cases, though. We still barely understand the degenerate case.
I dunno, we have some pretty exquisite sensing machines today. Including machines that can sense the workings of the hardware running our first-person-experiential experiences.
Just because the bitstream happens to come in today via our eyeballs doesn’t make the actual bitstream any less objective and truthy.
For sure. One of the early stages of many Buddhist meditation practices involves reflection on this question, looking for the "me" using various methods. Eventually the realization is of the emptiness (sunyata) of self and all phenomena. There's nothing that can be solidly considered self (atman). The Heart Sutra is one of the texts that elaborates on it:
You are making the mistake, as many do, of assuming that the illusion is not real. The illusion is real, but the ego, which is created by the illusion, is not real.
One would say seeing a person floating during a magician act was real because we experienced it, but the only thing real was the illusion performed by the magician.
Gobbledygook nonsense. People much smarter than both of us have been asking these questions since the dawn of time, best get to some reading.
Ps. I’m not “link!”-ing you, just asking for a way to learn something without burying myself for a lifetime into works which mostly disagree with each other.
It contains papers by most important philosophers in the field of 'philosophy of mind'. The papers are surprisingly accessible, and require little to no prior knowledge.
How are derealization, depersonalization and similar conditions explained?
For example, we only spend spend small portions of our lives in a fully conciliatory state aware of the present. Much of the time we are in undressing sleep, or in a state of fugue or flow in which we are acting unconsciously. When we become consciously aware of the present sometimes it can be disorienting as we transition into full consciousness. So consciousness comes and goes frequently every day. I imagine these semi-conscious or flow states are the standard mental mode for many animals. Thus consciousness if not illusory is certainly ephemeral and transitory.
Then there’s the fact that our conscious experience of the rodent is largely synthetic. That is, in many ways it is a post-hoc construction. We take many actions unconsciously and then construct post-hoc logical justifications for why we did them. We experience deja vu, or e.g. when a phone rings sometimes we think we experienced knowing the phones was going to ring before we are aware of the sound. We construct a conscious experience after the fact and sometimes we get it wrong. Conscious thoughts are only a small part of our ongoing mental activity, including decision making, and not always in the driving seat.
We are so much more than our conscious experience, which is only a fairly small subset of our actual ongoing mental activity, which itself is continuously influenced by the needs and responses of the body beyond the brain.
Second, your idea only works if there is also a mechanism that would cause us to value consciousness, free will, etc. You have to explain the reason that those things would make life "meaningful" (i.e. be motivational) for an animal. I'd argue, as the Devil's advocate, that they actually don't and we can probably live without them perfectly fine. I think some people do.
I don't know if this solves anything, but the way that I think about it is that the the mind is just the body's UI to the body. The body is the machine and the operator of the machine and the mind is just like the Windows desktop. I think I got this from something Donald Hoffman said. He talks about ideas similar but different from yours by the way. Might be worth a search on YouTube for you. He definitely doesn't think we see reality the way it is and has accumulated good evidence and theory for that and has spent a lot of time connecting it to evolutionary biology.
Reminds of “I think therefore I am” except a body doubting self-awareness shows the body is aware of the thing it doubts the existence of. Nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
But it is an assumption that the body is aware of itself. That is part of the same illusion.
When you dream, does that dream feel real?
I.e. the question "does that dream feel real" is only answerable when I have woken up and interpret my recent memories of that dream, which can easily be post-factum rationalization that has nothing to do with what I actually felt back when I was dreaming.
One would be to say that Illusions are merely incorrect interpretations of sensory data. They can be experienced by beetles, and even amoeba.
A more sophisticated definition might say that an illusion is when a subject, which has a mental model of a situation, incorrectly interprets sensory data to create a major mismatch between their mental model of a situation and reality. If we take this definition, then since many mammals or even vertebrates construct mental models of situations, they can all experience illusions. For example an animal seeing a reflection of itself, or it’s prey.
> they can all experience illusions
> mental model
The OP was trying to explain away consciousness as some illusion, while the person you responded to rightly pointed out "An illusion can only happen to conscious beings, so saying that it's an illusion doesn't add anything explanatory to the mystery of consciousness".
Your attempt to define/explain what 'illusion' might be is similarly unhelpful, because you are appealing to mental/consciousness related terms like 'interpretation', 'experience', and 'mental model'. It seems like you're depending on the very thing you're trying to explain away, just as the original 'illusion' claim did.
I became curious about it a few years ago - surely free will should be easy to see.
So far I have not observed a single choice independent of environment, conditioning, bodily needs, desires, thoughts, instincts or personal preferences. I have not chosen any of the above. I may be the only human without free will, or maybe what we call free will is a bundle of things that we don’t have any control, or “will” over.
However, your interpretation of reality is an illusion caused by hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
Based on your description this view sounds like it would be in the wheelhouse of the likes of Dan Dennett and Keith Frankish, the latter of which argues for a view called Illusionism [0]. Just note in this case "illusion" doesn't mean "not real", but more like "isn't what you think it is".
[0] https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionis...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anattā#No_denial_of_self
All we are is a bundle of our six senses (the 6th sense being thought). If you take away these senses, where are you?
We need a sense of self to navigate our way through the world, and the senses help the brain create time and space and movement.
If we turned each node/stream off one at a time, the brain eventually generates simulations of each stream. This is how sensory deprivation hallucinations occur.
It's fascinating to think that our sense of self is a modular construction. It's so easily disrupted. Viewing it from this frame of modularity makes it much easier to understand no-self.
The internet feels very real, but has no physical form. If everyone turned off their computers there would be no internet. Like our sense of self, its emergence is dependent on the whole, not individual parts. A brain without sense organs is not a self, a computer without a network is not the internet.
Our selves are fleeting, made up of transitory, temporary information. "The internet feels proud today" is an absurd sentence. Isn't it absurd then to say "I feel proud," if 'I' is an amalgamation of sensory information?
Sorry for the digression, I let the meditation you triggered run free.
What do you mean by thought exactly? I guess you don't mean thinking, because you still aware of yourself if you are not thinking about something. But if by "thought" you mean "awareness" or "consciousness", then that doesn't add anything. And of course, if you take it away there is nothing left.
Exactly.
Though if you think about the results... I will just say if you are heavily grounded to idea of 'free will you' maybe skip on reading it.
If you combine it with 'free-will' concept it paints a bleak picture of what is it to be conscious.
It’s all over biology, accepting this would mean the end of philosophy
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/various/wheel202...
I wish we had a way to communicate this stuff better, we’ve been trying for a long time..
Just like you cannot really describe an unknown taste to someone, or describe colors to a blind person, etc.
When I am hungry, when I am fed, I think differently. When I am tired, when I am rested, I think differently. When I am sober, when I am drunk, I think differently. All showing a very clear relationship of thought:body.
The hard problem relates to how meat/the body could have consciousness at all. Showing more examples of changes to the physical body resulting in changes to thoughts/mind/consciousness does nothing to address the hard problem. Come up with your best description of the physical world, and you won't find consciousness anywhere in it unless you mix it in explicitly -- and mixing it in explicitly amounts to a dualism.
Many of us think we can explain things like trees, rocks, motion, planets, etc, in terms of more fundamental physical things. We can reduce these things to lower level physical things. Once you've got all the atoms in the right place, the right forces in motion, you have a rock. There's nothing else left to say -- a particular rock is nothing more than these things appropriately arranged.
Consciousness, on the other hand, is irreducible -- it cannot be reduced to just lower level descriptions of this sort. If you try, inevitably you'll leave something out.
>Consciousness, on the other hand, is irreducible -- it cannot be reduced to just lower level descriptions of this sort. If you try, inevitably you'll leave something out.
These are just empty assertions without any proof. To show that there really is a hard problem you can't just say "nobody has given a physical explanation of consciousness at this moment in time", you have to prove that such a thing would be impossible, even just in theory/principle, or sometime in the future when we have better science and tech.
As a counterpoint, I would like to offer the following: our thoughts, while we are thinking about consciousness and puzzling over it and writing posts on HN about it, are manifested in the physical world as neuron firings and chemicals in the brain. A sufficient explanation of the physical world would include an explanation of how and why these thoughts emerged (through a chain of previous thoughts), and this explanation, I think, has a good chance of showing that the hard problem is just a collection of easy problems after all.
You should take these comments in a different spirit that I intended — I am representing the side of philosophers that thinks ‘the hard problem of consciousness is a real and hard problem’. In short, I’m presenting what this side of the debate thinks, and I absolutely think what I said is true. There are philosophers who disagree with those who say what I say, and we certainly haven’t offered anything that’s convincing enough to be considered a proof. I didn’t claim to have a proof, though I think my confidence is warranted.
> As a counterpoint, I would like to offer the following: our thoughts, while we are thinking about consciousness and puzzling over it and writing posts on HN about it, are manifested in the physical world as neuron firings and chemicals in the brain. A sufficient explanation of the physical world would include an explanation of how and why these thoughts emerged (through a chain of previous thoughts), and this explanation, I think, has a good chance of showing that the hard problem is just a collection of easy problems after all.
Here you present that which looks very much like a standard reductionist physicalist account. For what it’s worth, I think reductionist physicalism is the only physicalism worth giving consideration to, but it doesn’t do anything to explain the thing that I'm really concerned about, how such firings and chemicals are/produce experiences/consciousness. When looking at the physical story alone (the neurons firing, etc), there's no reference to consciousness/experiences. It doesn't appear at all until the physicalist says "and c-fibers firing just are pain" -- at which they are like a magician, having pulled something from thin air.
>When looking at the physical story alone (the neurons firing, etc), there's no reference to consciousness/experiences.
You can't say that right now, because we're not anywhere near having the capability for "looking at the physical story alone". There's like 80 billion neurons which we can't currently inspect at a reasonable granularity (in space and time), furthermore there's no theory for how to integrate the data of 80 billion neurons with all their firings and states into higher level explanations.
>It doesn't appear at all until the physicalist says "and c-fibers firing just are pain" -- at which they are like a magician, having pulled something from thin air.
Sure, the physicalist who says just that is stupid. The computationalist who says that the information processing which the brain performs in reaction to c-fiber firings gives rise to the subjective experience of pain is more justified.
It’s not a problem of scale, but a problem of kind. No one can give an account of the exact motions of waves, of the waving of leaves in the wind, etc. Physicists struggle with providing the exact movements and outcomes of even very simple systems, let alone the movements of things at the level of the ocean’s waves or leaves in the wind. But I suspect most of us think that at least there’s the right kinds of things at the lowest level of physics to account for this. We’ve got particles (or waves, or fields, or strings, or whatever it turns out to be) that with just a little imagination we can see, when aggregated together in large quantities, could amount to waves in the ocean, or leaves waving in the wind. There’s the right kinds of activities at the lowest level that are plausibly all that’s needed to make up these large scale phenomena.
With consciousness, however, there’s nothing in the lowest level that we can point to and say “maybe piling up more of this would amount to consciousness”. There’s things in the lowest levels of physics we can point to and say “these are movement-like events”, but no analogous “these are consciousness-like events”. No candidate precursors to consciousness, to there being experiences and things that have experiences. What I’m saying is that there isn’t even the beginning of a plausible story here. There is, so far as I can see, nothing at the lowest level that is a plausible starting point for consciousness.
Suppose that we have two contending theories, and when we compare their relatives virtues and vices, we find in most ways they’re on a par. However, there’s one, and just one, sticking point — one theory cannot even begin to explain or account for a significant (perhaps the most significant to us) part of reality, while the other has no analogous problem. That gives us reason to prefer the other.
I think that an idealism something like George Berkeley’s (but not exactly Berkeley’s) is just such a theory. I think reductive physicalism and a particular idealist theory do about as well as each other on a great many points, except this one. The idealist theory can account for or explain physical stuff, but the physicalist theory can’t even begin to account for or explain mental stuff.
And what’s the problem with non-reduction? Let me try it. Can you reduce plasma? It’s an emergent property of “atoms” and fields.
Can I try to reduce hard consciousness? It’s an aggregate form of a complexity, which is complex enough to try to self-describe and probably fall into some misconceptions. QED?
Edit: Also, it’s theoretically possible to build a human out of atoms, or take a human, and slowly and continuously transform it into a less conscious being, back and forth. Or into more or less believing into some sort of philosophy, back and forth again (which happened to many philosophers naturally). If you can volume-down the consciousness, doesn’t that mean that it’s not even “a thing”, only a property?
A failed reduction would be a case where we try to say “x is really just y+z”, and in doing so we fail. “x” isn’t able to be accounted for wholly just in terms of “y+z”. That’s not a specific example, but we could make up some examples, some worse than others. An example: “chairs are just bits of wood stuck together”. Problems: there are plenty of things that are chairs that have no wood involved, and plenty of bits of wood stuck together that aren’t a chair. Or “money is nothing more than the physical notes and coins”, which is an attempt at reduction that misses out important things about the shared value we place on these notes and coins.
> And what’s the problem with non-reduction? Let me try it. Can you reduce plasma? It’s an emergent property of “atoms” and fields.
At some point, all our views will have irreducible components. For physicalists, our world of trees, oceans, stars, and so forth is made up of all and only physical stuff (I’m setting aside here questions about, for example, what mathematical things are). The physicalist says that they can explain things in terms of just physical stuff, but they won’t be able to answer the question of what physical stuff itself is made up of — at some point, there’s something that’s fundamental from which everything else is built. For the physicalist, the most fundamental physical objects exist but cannot be reduced to something else.
So there’s no problem with non-reduction per-se. There’s only a problem when your ontology says “everything is composed of just such and such”, and then someone points to a thing and says “this thing isn’t composed of just such and such”. For the physicalist, consciousness/the mental is that thing which isn’t amenable to explanation in terms of just physical stuff.
For a dualist, or an idealist of, say, Berkeley’s variety, there is no problem with consciousness being irreducible, because those ontologies take consciousness to be fundamental. Moreover, I'm not aware of any analogous problem for idealists -- no mirrored hard problem of non-consciousness (the dualist solves this problem by inflating their ontology with both physical and mental irreducible substances and/or properties).
Regarding your specific example, there are non-reductionists who think that there are layers within science, and certain higher layers (e.g., chemistry) can’t be explained purely in terms of lower layers (e.g., physics). That is, chemistry can’t simply be reduced to, say, really complicated purely physical interactions.
> Can I try to reduce hard consciousness? It’s an aggregate form of a complexity, which is complex enough to try to self-describe and probably fall into some misconceptions. QED?
Are you saying that consciousness is merely an aggregate form of a complexity? You’ve lost me here at ‘self-describe’. Without appealing to any non-physical terms/concepts, what does it mean for something complex to be self-describing? I genuinely don’t know what you mean, so you’d need to share more for me to understand your proposal, and how it tells us anything about how consciousness is really just such and such physical states (and nothing else).
> Edit: Also, it’s theoretically possible to build a human out of atoms, or take a human, and slowly and continuously transform it into a less conscious being, back and forth. Or into more or less believing into some sort of philosophy, back and forth again (which happened to many philosophers naturally). If you can volume-down the consciousness, doesn’t that mean that it’s not even “a thing”, only a property?
No-one has done what you propose (continuously transform a human into a less conscious being), so it’s just a view you hold, and it may or may not be possible. Also, you’re using the word ‘conscious’ here a little different. It’s a word with different meanings in different contexts. In some circumstances, we speak about degrees of consciousness — e.g., being asleep is a state of being unconscious. But for the mind-body problem, what philosophers have in mind (or at least, those philosophers who think there is a hard problem) is the fact that there is something having experiences. E.g., as Nagel puts it, there’s something that it’s like to be a bat. In the same sense, there’s something that it’s like to be asleep (whether or not you remember it). So whether you’re less or more conscious in the sense of sleep (or of continual transformation), it’s always conscious in the sense that there’s something that it’s like to be that.
If we suppose that the continual transformation you propose is indeed possible and the way the world works, then it shows what we already know — that there’s at least a one direction causal link from the physical to the mental. But we already know that’s the case. The hard problem is explaining how, using only physical terms and concepts, you get the mental from the physical. I don’t see how being able to scale up or down the intensity/volume/quality of the consciousness by tuning the physical entails that consciousness is nothing more than physical stuff appropriately arranged.
Yes, essentially that.
You’ve lost me here at ‘self-describe’. Without appealing to any non-physical terms/concepts, what does it mean for something complex to be self-describing?
No, not self-describing, but trying to do that (see the original wording). I was basically portraying all of us in this thread. “A complexity big enough to ask questions and trying to answer them”. But at the same time I don’t deny consciousness from animals who ask easier questions like where’s the food at.
Also, you’re using the word ‘conscious’ here a little different
I see that after your explanations. What I was describing is “smart” to you, not “conscious”. But I think these two are (cor)related because smart means complex, simply by information laws. So I’m aware of true-consciousness which you’re talking about, but am looking at it from a different angle.
as Nagel puts it, there’s something that it’s like to be a bat. In the same sense, there’s something that it’s like to be asleep (whether or not you remember it). So whether you’re less or more conscious in the sense of sleep (or of continual transformation), it’s always conscious in the sense that there’s something that it’s like to be that.
But can’t we extend that to something that it’s like to be a chair? Or air, or empty space. We don’t perceive anything momentarily, it’s a process. And if it is a process, it means its state has to be stored somewhere. Isn’t that our subject? If yes, then you can gradually reduce the processing capabilities and state volumes until both become zero.
Consciousness does not have a precise definition. It's a very nebulous concept.
And yet, it is more familiar and sure to us than anything else :) Ala Descartes, I can doubt that the rock I see exists, that perhaps I am deceived, but I cannot doubt that there is an 'I', some conscious self, that is having that experience.
The above definitely does not apply to consciousness.
What is obvious is that you are ignorant of the field and still feel superior to everything in it. I don't understand this level of narcissim or lack of reflection, but good luck with that.
But maybe the problem is that after you cut the crap there's not that much philosophy of mind left to be done. Who would want to read a book that just says "well, guess we'll have to wait for neuroscience to figure out the details"?
I actually find Buddhism and various mystical practices fascinating because they involve practical disciplines. They actually invoke mental states and get repeatable results.
Meanwhile neuroscience is busily sorting it all out once and for all, as science has done so many times before on so many previously intractable questions of natural philosophy. I’m confident we’ll figure it all out, but maybe not in my lifetime. Probably in those of my children though.
Not everybody. Those who do we generally consider ignorant and arrogant when they do so.
Any explanation of consciousness agreed on generally as settled in the same way other great theories (relativity, quantum mechanics, evolution, etc) are settled would be famous.
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I guess they know and they don't care.