Comment by chermi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chermi | Hacker News Reader

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*Edited because I can't type*

I do not understand this argument.

I'm going use the word magic for whatever you're calling this non-"materialistic" spiritual explanation. I'm not trying to be a jackass, that's truly the best word I can find for it. I don't think magic is a bad thing, I just don't think you should summon magic until you need to.

Magic is not an explanation, it's a non-explanation. It's non-falsifiable (blah-bity Popper, yeah yeah).

Our adeptness at manipulating matter is not the origin of wanting (at least mine) to find a 'materialistic' explanation for something. It's the desire to have a predictive (read, useful) model of that thing, even if the model is not complete. Once you poke deep enough at any model you will find that there is some hand-wavy "magic" at the bottom. That is, there is some part that we don't know yet, either because we can't do the math, because we can't measure due to difficulty of experiment, or because of fundamental bounds where maybe you might be justified in starting to invoke some magic.

Despite best selling books about some quantum mysticism bullshit, I have yet to see an inkling of evidence for invoking magic for consciousness. From a physics perspective, biological systems are freaking hard, we have no reason to expect them to crack easily. And that's without us (physicists) understanding nearly enough about biology!

I don't think this line of dismissal necessarily fits. If we ended up having to expand physics to include some new (today seen as mystical) property of the universe, then you are essentially wrong here. With QM (which I doubt is related to consciousness) we had to add unmeasurable quantum phase to everything and accept certain previously-"nonphysical" new properties of systems. Similarly with other revolutionaly theories.

Magic can be disproven by explaining the phemonen with a conventional physical theory.

I don't think I follow? What am I dismissing?

I don't quite understand QM analogy. QM arose to explain new observation from more detailed measurements. Consciousness and intelligence and all things brain have been (to an extent) known 'properties' and difficult to explain (from first-principles) for quite some time. The more we probe, we answer some questions, and in the process reveal some more detail, leading to more detailed questions.

My qualm is that nowhere along this trajectory have I ever seen any need to invoke magic. It's a complex, many-body system with lots of noise, many relevant interacting length and time-scales that are difficult to cleanly separate, model, observe and probe. It's hard, but it seems we're making progress. Maybe it will take CERN, LIGO or ISS scale endeavors, I don't know.

It's not all similar, IMO, to how QM arose.

But I'm not a neuroscientist nor a historian of science.

What progress is there towards the "hard problem" of consciousness? Even a oversimplified approximation akin to the Rutherford atom? Research in the area is considered fringe anyway, as no one has any hope a researcher will get anywhere.

QM required that we accept a new phase property of matter which cannot be observed even in principle, and which causes counter-intuitive experimental outcomes that require contradictory physical explanations. This remains unsolved, physics simple sucked it up and moved on using it. The Copenhagen Interpretation essentially says some questions are not "askable" (e.g., what is the state of an unobserved electron), and observation instantantaneously changes vast-universe-wide systems via collapse of the wavefunction (pretty magical in the opinion of many). The many-worlds interpretation is even kookier, though much more intuitive, and is gaining popularity lately. If parallel universes and "spooky action ata distance" (quoting Einstein) is not magic to you then what does it take?

> I do not understand this argument.

The unfortunate thing is that, I think, I understand your side. But something happened, I read some book or heard some talk that placed a seed of doubt in my mind. At first it was just a seed and I oscillated back and forth between being 100% materialist and between entertaining the proposition that there is something beyond matter in this world. But as time went on I began to shift towards the "non material" interpretation for consciousness more and more.

It's not an explanation, I agree. But there is nothing to explain. Me claiming that consciousness might not arise from matter is not an attempt to explain it. I just see no way how it can be investigated in material terms. If you see a person on the street there is no way you can tell if he or she is conscious. And I don't see a possibility of there ever being a way.

Sadly, I don't know what started this doubt in me, so I cannot share it with you. You brought physicists for some reason, and I know a few, like Schrodinger, who thought about consciousness and came to the same conclusion. Here is his quote: "Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else." I haven't read about Max Plank, but heard he had similar views.

If I had to guess my starting point was a book called "the problems of philosophy" by Bertnard Russell [1]. He tries to answer the question "are there any statements to which all reasonable men would agree". And one of the conclusions the book comes to is that you cannot claim anything as objective without assumptions, and that the most objective thing is your subjective experience.

For example if you saw a cat, turned your head, and then looked back at the cat - was the cat there when you were not looking or was it gone? In the book Russell convincingly demonstrates that if someone maintains the cat was gone when you were not looking - you cannot prove logically to that person that he is wrong. In other words - you would not be able to start with his worldview and lead him to contradictions. Hence his "theory" about cat disappearing cannot be disproven without assumptions about how material objects behave.

Not sure if this is helpful, but I wanted to reply.

[1]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm leaving this mostly to acknowledge it and mark so I can come back later with a more thorough response.

I don't think we strictly disagree.

For one, I agree that, fundamentally, as the observers, everything is "filtered" through us whether we like it or not. So there's no getting around some notion of 'subjectivity' or 'observer' bias, at least not that I know about. But that is not at all exclusive to an improved (predictive, quantitative, model-based) understanding of the brain and consciousness. Look how much progress we've made!

BTW I'm on my phone and forget why we're talking specifically of consciousness and not AI? Is that my fault? My bad.

Oh, I brought physicists so my perspective was clear and you could understand my bias and my ignorance of actual neuroscience and CS and biology.

You say there is nothing to explain, but there is something that has not been explained (by anyone), which is how minds work. If you are claiming that they cannot possibly be explained, that is just your intuition. You are, of course, entitled to your opinions, jus as much as those whose intuitions lean the other way, but there is no particular reason for us to regard anyone's intuitions on the matter to be an indicator of which way reality lies.

The observations of Russell's that you mention - which, I believe, were considerably influenced by his working with Wittgenstein - seem to be a critique of analytical philosophy's approach to learning fundamental truths about the universe. "Hold my beer", said his scientific contemporaries, "we're going to put these worries aside and see what we can learn anyway."

Taking an absolutist view that empiricism is the litmus test for all truth is similarly magical thinking, in my opinion.

Asserting “something that isn’t falsifiable isn’t real” is just as arbitrary as asserting that there exist phenomena that are beyond the absolute boundaries of our capacity to perceive them (that is, no amount of technical innovation will allow us to observe such phenomena). The latter statement, though, seems much more reasonable of an assumption.

My "blah-Popper" comment was a joke/self-deprecating to my argue. I agree that non-falsifiability isn't strictly sufficient grounds to dismiss something, but it is a curious smell.

Edit- crap, I'm pretty new at actually participating in HN comments, I don't think I followed chain properly

I would tend to agree with your claim "the latter statement, though, seems much more reasonable of an assumption", but that does not give any particular reason to think that minds are examples of such phenomena.

Certainly not, my only goal is to assert that it is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.

Yes, the uncertainty of what can be known and the arbitrariness of empiricism make a wonderfully powerful hypothesis generator, allowing one to hypothesize against not only unverified hypotheses, but also against any claim that any given hypothesis has been empirically verified. One can, for example, employ it to say that it is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis that the apparent global pandemic is not being caused by a virus, or that homo sapiens did not evolve from other species.

I mean that’s getting into the point of being unnecessarily facetious.

If something is true from an empirical perspective that is one thing. It is another thing to say that even though we have been unable to form a conclusion from an empirical point of view, the ultimate ability to do so is given, and that all hypothesis that cannot be tested in such manner must be completely disregarded, even if they make sense.

My post was influenced by your comment about absolute empiricism being magical thinking. Now, you did qualify ‘empiricism’ with ‘absolute’, but the author of the post to which you were replying seemed to be adopting a pragmatic form of empiricism, much like the one you have adopted in the first part of your last post. It seems to me that bringing up ‘absolute empricism’ here seems to be something of a straw man (though maybe the original post was edited before I saw it.)

FWIW, I completely agree with that person’s view that saying “Well, it’s not physical” to the question of what a mind is and how it works, is a non-answer that avoids the question. Materialism has not answered that question ether, but it is a double standard to deprecate only materialism on that basis, as the author of this thread’s root post did.

The philosophy of mind seems to me to be hobbled by its fascination with zombie arguments, which are rather cleverly constructed to persuade one that a philosopher’s metaphysical speculation is a stronger guide to how the universe is than any amount of empirical physical evidence.

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