Hacker News Reader

Comment by pas | Hacker News Reader

Isn't panpsychism orthogonal to materialism?

Isn't the trivial solution in the non-material case just regular mumbo jumbo? Ie. the connection between the consciousness and the body is severed by propofol while it's active, and so memories are not formed to keep you sane, or whatever? It stops when it gets to Nirvana, etc?

All the attempts to explain it with non-materialism seems to very bluntly fail Ockham's razor. Sure, before fMRI and anesthesia it was a lot easier to compare the two theories and not see the huge extra burden for proof of any kind of non-materialism.

View on HN

Occam's razor specifies that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." Materialism cannot be true, despite it's seeming simplicity. Therefore one must multiply the entities until one can arrive at a true, simple explanation with the fewest number of extant entities.

The mind is not a physical thing, despite it being connected with and informed by the brain. Consciousness and the body cannot be separated, because consciousness is not physical and thus no separation can take place. Consciousness 'winks out' when the mind is anesthetized. This is not possible for a physical object but eminently possible for an non-physical (abstract) one. Physical objects are subject to state change, while abstract entities exist, well, differently. It may involve state change, but it also may simply be there/not there.

Abstract things can still exist, when you learn things, it is an abstract thing, the mind, interacting with other abstract things, learnings. These abstract things interact with the physical world through the instrument that evolved to allow them to do so, the human body and mind.

There's another example I can use. When we model a system using state machines, the diagrams of those machines provide a representation of the workings of the model. We can point, on the state diagram, what the underlying system running the state machine is doing. But that 'pointing' isn't the actual system, it's an abstract thing that helps our minds understand the underlying system it's running on.

Did you catch the invocation of the law of parsimony in the last paragraph? The very existence and usefulness of Ockham's Razor invalidates materialism. Entities are not physical objects.

> Materialism cannot be true, despite it's seeming simplicity

[citation needed]

The mind is not a physical thing, that's correct, but we need not claim the existence of anything non-material to explain the mind. The mind - or more specifically consciousness is made of information, which is 100% encoded in matter, hence materialism. (See Joscha Bach's detailed description of this.)

> But that 'pointing' isn't the actual system, it's an abstract thing that helps our minds understand the underlying system it's running on.

Yep, and that's platonism in a nutshell, but that doesn't contradict materialism either.

Entities are encoded in our brains.

> The mind is not a physical thing...

You could have stopped there. A thing that is not physical, exists. Bye bye materialism. Materialism is monism, holding that things are only made of one kind of 'stuff', specifically physical stuff. You can't get around that by saying that "you don't need to invoke anything non-material to explain" non-physical things. The mind is the non-material thing. As soon as you say it exists, you've thrown out materialism. The thing you're trying to defend is physicalism, which is an entirely different ball of wax. Physicalism is exactly the sort of 'multiplication of entities' that I was referring to in the first paragraph of my original reply.

> Entities are encoded in our brains.

That doesn't make them physical, any more than '4A' is the same thing as 'J' because that's it's ASCII representation. An encoding is not the thing. The representation in the brain is physical, the thoughts in the mind concerning them as well as the entities themselves aren't.

I'm not familiar with philosophy this much, but it seems strange to assign structure, organization and other conceptual meta-things the same thing status as we assign to matter.

The mind is a description of the organization/structure/function of a chunk of matter. And the matter part completely determines the non-material part, hence materialism, no?

Occam's razor = the theory with the fewest parameters should be preferred, or often interpreted as the simplest theory.

Do you think that humans universally or even have historically interpreted physicalism as a simpler theory than a non-materialist one? I don't think so

I think you speak from an already materialist perspective, in that you accept the physical world as something that really exists out there, and that your own subjective being is less tangible or somehow illusory compared to that. That is the opposite way round from how Buddhists felt it obvious to consider it, which was to always frame everything from the first person, human experience (the five skandhas, the eight consciousnesses, etc.)

Personally, I think it's simpler and more obvious to have that first person explanation from the point of view of where I actually seem to be, rather than an explanation that everything I see is real but somehow I am not. Why would I see my immediate experience of reality as less real than the objects that I perceive to be external to me?

When some physicalists talk about consciousness being an illusion, they're generally talking about the experience of being the centre of reality, they don't mean we don't have these experiences. They're addressing the fact that the brain isn't always conscious, that consciousness seems to go away completely in some situations, so for them it's not a permanent aspect of ourselves. That's all.

I prefer not to use the 'illusion' terminology because I think it's misleading. We do have a real experience of consciousness, just not always. For me Buddhism and panpsychism, and the idea of consciousness as being fundamental is a hierarchy inversion error.

If consciousness is a computation or an emergent phenomenon of brain activity processing information, then we are a kind of information system. It doesn't therefore follow that all information systems are in some way conscious. That's like saying horses are all animals, therefore in some way animals are all horses. Yes we have some things in common with all information processing systems, so we have some of the same features like persistent memory and such because we're members of the same conceptual category, but that doesn't make us the same thing.

I think consciousness is the more fundamental thing, because it’s the only thing I ever have experience of, and that everything else arises from that (including the physical world). To me that’s the simplest explanation

Taking a step further, I think neither consciousness nor physical reality really exists, it’s all emptiness (see Heart sutra)

I don’t see how that’s a simple explanation. We know we lose consciousness, totally, on a regular basis yet when we awake the world is still there. It’s always consistent and doesn’t radically change as our consciousness changes. We can set devices to record activity in the world while we are unconscious, and their recordings seem consistent. The simplest explanation seems to be that the world is real and persistent, but our consciousness is transient.

If the world arises from consciousness, we would expect that changes in conscious states would persistently alter consensus reality. But we never see that happen.

Again see the Heart sutra

> Occam's razor = the theory with the fewest parameters should be preferred, or often interpreted as the simplest theory.

> Do you think that humans universally or even have historically interpreted physicalism as a simpler theory than a non-materialist one? I don't think so

Backtracking a bit from that little word "theory", it's foremost about being able to formulate predictions about the real world. So, designing a suspension bridge over there, how much steel do use per cable? 1 ton? 2 tons? 42? Use the eight consciousnesses, sure, but get the answer, build the bridge, and be the first one to cross it.

If you don't have two competing theories that offer a prediction, there is nothing to apply the Occam's razor to.

A theory which is a mix of physics (for steel bridges, etc.) and Buddhism (for this or that domain) does work for many predictions. It is also inherently much more complex than "only use physics".

I think you are getting confused between the word theory and the word model, which are often interchanged in physics unfortunately.

A "model" is predictive, but a "theory" explains. A theory of consciousness has no need to predict the future. A model of consciousness would. This word has just been mixed up a lot in science. The reason is that theories in physics are almost always also predictive models. However, this is not usually explicitly the case in philosophy.

> A theory of consciousness has no need to predict the future.

If you don't feel the need to predict anything about consciousness in the real world, I'd say I won't be interested in such a "theory" (or "explanation"). But glad to see your take on the definition of the term.

Going back to Occam's razor, if you only apply it to get the simplest map (in some sense of "the simplest"), and abandon verifying whether it predicts the territory or not, it seems a blank map always wins.

>Do you think that humans universally or even have historically interpreted physicalism as a simpler theory than a non-materialist one?

To be fair with humans, the simpler theory is almost always "my neighbour is a witch, she did it"

Hand waving complexity as that thing you feel in your gut instead of having some proper definition for it was and still is the standard human experience

> To be fair with humans, the simpler theory is almost always "my neighbour is a witch, she did it"

Then why appeal to Occam’s razor?

there was same problem earlier as well with deep sleep.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com