Critique of the mind/body problem
jsanilac.com
jsanilac.com
I have a piece of cake in front of me. It is made of flour and sugar and egg; or, carbon and hydrogen and oxygen; or, quantum probability amplitudes in spacetime, depending on how far down the levels of abstraction you want to dig.
The cake is no less real for all of this. I assure you, the cake exists. Not a lie.
I have a conscious mind. It is made of a pattern of electrical signals moving around a complex network of cells; or, if you go down the levels of abstraction, much the same sort of bits as the cake, but in a rather different arrangement.
The fact that we have some tiny bits of slowly growing knowledge about what our minds are made of does not make our minds any less real. Just like the cake. We don't need to posit separate magical entities to be minds for us. It's OK for them to be made of what we can see. They won't go away.
Self is the same. It exists as an abstraction the mind uses to make sense of and operate in the universe, but the more closely you examine it, the tighter you try to define it, the more nebulous and illusory you will discover it to be.
If we define consciousness broadly enough to be a relevant term in all those scenarios, it would have to be something like "that thing that does thinking and self reflection that the reader has and observes evidence of in others". Like you say, attempting to define it makes it get all kinds of slippery. What do you include? memories? experiences? social connections? what is "thinking"? - if it's "information processing with some reflection" then isn't there a kind of consciousness in a society? a computer network? a star system?
I really like the ship of Theseus for this one. it's a great way to examine where the concept begins to get really leaky.
— Douglas Hofstadter
Your cake analogy side-steps the mind-body problem by conflating the mind with the brain.
There's not some objectively true definition or there that you are homing in on with your intuited features.
I can’t tell you precisely which patterns of doped silicon and electric charges combine to make the software I am using to type this. Someone with an electron microscope, a clean room and a large jug of fuming nitric acid could have a go finding out; they could literally read out the software, because although a useful abstraction, it consists of a pattern of physical, observable entities and effects. Security researchers looking to extract codes from secure chips do exactly this, though for even slightly complex things the amount of work involved in reverse engineering this way is beyond what a single human can accomplish. This lack of knowledge on my part, though, does not make the software nonexistent, and complete understanding wouldn’t render it illusory either; it’s still a useful label to apply to a part of the world that actually exists. We don’t need to posit any kind of ghost or homunculus or tsukumogami or soul to explain my ipad: what there physically is is enough.
I can’t tell you precisely what combinations of charges and patterns of neural connectivity combine to make a mind. People with large surgery rooms, implants and scanning electron microscopes are working on exactly this problem, and each day learn a little more, though there is too much complexity for even a large group of people to grasp in their lifetimes. Neither the knowledge nor the lack of it alters how minds work. We don’t need to posit an external entity to explain the mind: what there physically is in the body is enough, and knowing how it works won’t make it go away.
(We could use “soul” to refer to the abstraction I describe above, I guess, like we use “software” for patterns of electric charge and magnetised rust. The word carries enough baggage and assumptions, though, to make it much worse than useless for the purpose - it’s like using “God” to mean literally the planet Earth: the framing is so utterly pointless that no-one ever does that unless trying to obfuscate and smuggle unsupported concepts into the discussion for a later bait+switch.)
> what makes the matter that constructs my brain "special" to manifest this consciousness?
> how does it differ from any other kind of information processing system, eg. a computer.
Maybe entertain the idea that your brain is not special, and your computer has a consciousness too? Not human consciousness, but some kind of different consciousness.
Ancient spiritual teachings have claimed that everything in nature has a consciousness or at least a "spirit". There's no reason why something as complex as a modern computer (esp. with software) wouldn't have one.
On the other side, you could take the stance that nothing is conscious at all (except perhaps you yourself), and every human is just a zombie-like automaton. After all, there's no hard evidence that other people are conscious except that we all look the same (or similar enough) from the outside.
LLMs like ChatGPT will bring this to a whole new level. I'm not insinuating that ChatGPT is conscious but I think it definitely advances discussions on what you are calling a "spirit"
[0] https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html [1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...
I find it sort of hard to find flaw in this construction of mind body, and it seems a simpler structure than all the non sense of sense particles and soul organs.
I do like that your idea has space for focusing on community building.
But no, escape of suffering is exactly the point. The premise is the unenlightened life can’t escape suffering, but there is a path, which Buddha compiled and taught from the Indian mystics of his day into a highly structured practice with exhaustive documentation on the detailed nuances of the human experience with a direct description of how to become enlightened through the practice of meditation, specifically vipassana, and teachings of how suffering arises and what motivations to cultivate to achieve release.
Edit: forgot to note the first type of physical suffering becomes merely unpleasant once you release your attachment to not feeling unpleasant and can accept it as part of the ever changing nature of reality and a fundamental acceptance of impermanence- that this too shall pass and the pleasant ends the same as the unpleasant and there are not naturally superior states
The Buddha teaches how to avoid this craving for the world to be different than it actually is.
Look up the parable of the arrow. It's a good way to think about the difference between general suffering and dukkha.
The notion of an illusion requires an observer. What is that observer, if not self/consciousness?
A set of neurons gets some input and that feeds into another set of neurons that has to make all the information from many sources coherent. Those neurons label the input firing pattens as qualia and then act as if they were experiencing the world rather than just signal processing, and so ‘experience’ is not real in any metaphysical sense.
I’m not 100% sure I believe that theory, but I do find it highly plausible.
In this debate, "consciousness" is an ineffable quality that goes beyond perception. Illusions only require perceptions for a self, not consciousness.
I personally have a weird intuition considering my cultural background: it makes sense to me that my consciousness would be “born” somewhere else when I die. This in contrast to most people of my cultural background, who either believe in annihilism or an ever-lasting afterlife. I don’t really understand why a little more people don’t at least find it philosophically (what’s the word?) plausible, or something.
This is not to say you're wrong (by any means!). It's just to say that we'd need to have a really long discussion before getting to the part where we discuss plausibility. I actually find the concept of reincarnation fascinating -- especially temporally nonlinear versions, where e.g. a past life might happen in a future year. One's consciousness might read about historical events that it will "later" participate in. Could lead to some interesting fiction if nothing else.
It unfortunately seems to take a while to get to the part that's interesting.
Lately I was thinking, why don't I feel more anger right now at past me or future me? Like you say, those could be seen as different people than me.
Past me made present me fat. Future me implicitly prevents me from enjoying this cake by pressuring me to do things that won't result with him also being fat.
When I start work in the morning, I've been assigned a task according to the goals of past me. Why should I care what that guy wanted? I want to play Elden Ring. Ah but there's future me again, mad that he can't play Elden Ring because he had to rush to finish work I was supposed to do. Well fuck that guy, I might die of an aneurysm before his time, then none of us get to play videogames!
But I don't really feel mad at past or future me because I recognize them as me and our goals are mostly consistently aligned. I'm thinking that my identity and Mind is very deeply rooted in the Time dimension, though not clear on all the implications there. I do at least feel that memory is a critical part of Mind. The continuation of my memory timeline seems most likely to be what Me is.
'Mad' would be a misnomer, though. mad seems counterproductive.
The self is only part of consciousness.
I'm not sure how to fully reconcile this except to give up and say that full amnesia is as good as having died and "someone else" is now inhabiting my body, but that doesn't seem quite right.
Continuity of experience is part of what seems to make "my" consciousness mine.
Doh, I brought p-zombies into this conversation.
I even tried to click on the "further reading" links at the bottom
for example, my knees are shot. part of being me is having to put up with that, which causes a sort of pattern in my experience. were I to get amnesia, those patterns would persist.
He doesn't really address the question of reincarnation specifically, but I think you would still find it interesting. He challenges typical notions of personhood ("What makes me different from you is the physical continuity of my body over time") by pointing out that this is only a technological limitation. We could imagine a world with teleportation or brain transplants where this wouldn't necessarily be true.
My body is a tour guide.
It's related to empathy somehow. I think we're inherently self-centered, but that we also recognize ourselves within others, and don't desire suffering for ourselves, hence we don't desire it for others.
Also I've had a few moments of something similar to deja vu in my life, except it was the realization that I was the continuation of my father's life. And I catch glimpses of this in my children (though I don't believe they're yet consciously aware of it).
I've had it a lot with friends.
Realizing a part of me is them.
For example, reflections on how one's body ages:
The experience is always personal, but predictable and shared.
Hm, except that would require anti-consciousness to exist… On second thought, this makes me uncomfortable.
There are all kinds of possibilities, but that barrier of Death is a clear cut-off from my perspective. What’s beyond that? I for sure could imagine annihilation, too. After all I can be knocked unconscious.
For example you can't teleport to Mars. You can still choose what you want on your pizza.
But other Christians, obviously not like you, believe in more than a binary option for your afterlife.
This is one of the annoying thing about religions. Not all true Christians (even Scottish Christians) hold the same beliefs, even about something like heaven and hell.
I think it’s bad and hope that the Fourth Noble Truth of Buddhism is true.
It starts with: why do you have a first person experience from the creature that is reading these words? Why are you not having a first person experience from the body of Elon Musk (maybe you are, hi Elon!) or a particular sparrow in the New Forest?
And then, when your body dies, does that mean no more first person experiences again for ‘you’? Or, will some other creature create a first person experience for ‘you’ again (for whatever reason this current creature is creating a first person experience for ‘you’?)
There is no need for a ‘woo’ part ie no memories are retained, no ‘new game+’, no element of karma. Just the concept that first person experiences may not end with death of this current creature.
If this is correct - and we perhaps we should act in a way that assumes it is - what would be the implications?
Many creatures have minimal agency over their experiences. Humans are different, not just with more agency of themselves but of others - at a minimal level of their family and pets and immediate connections, but wider too esp in more developed countries and moving up the influence and power in society.
If you were a cow, you would look at humans and saying ‘if I was one of those I could impact this shitty situation’. Well congratulations, you are! How do you, as a first world human, use that power to mean that if you do have a first person experience from another creature, that future experience is…not utterly horrific?
That idea if embraced ties all living things together. Selfishness disappears - you might literally be in anyones (or anything’s) shoes in the future, so do anything you can to not deliver horrible experiences to anything. It’s to your own benefit! But it’s also a bit of an info hazard - you don’t want to be born into an unpleasant experience, and the thought of that possibility is unsettling.
Your view implies dualism since you are suggesting that "consciousness" is more than just the physical body. You don't need to be a Cartesian to be a dualist but you do need to be dualist if you believe that consciousness is somehow immaterial in that it can survive the body after death.
More concrete: If we take a human brain apart, we end up with neurons and glia cells, (and a bunch of supporting cast). These all consist of phospholipids, proteins, and nucleic acids (and some more supporting cast). These then all consist of atoms, which consist of quantum particles. No matter how much we look around, that's all that we find in the brain.
This is a reductive approach. If you do reduction, it's like you're differentiating a formula where you keep losing terms on the right hand side. At every reduction step something similar happens: you are losing information about how your parts are organized.
When you integrate, the terms you differentiated out before will show up again. What sort of magic is this, you ask? There is no magic, those terms were there before. Now that you're doing the opposite (complementary) operation, they're coming back.
So by reducing the brain down, we didn't find any singular component that provides consciousness or thought or any such thing. Having eliminated those, whatever remains must be the truth. But what remains?
The only thing that we've missed is the information that we threw out when we were doing reduction. Apparently consciousness and thought and image recognition and pain and feelings must arise from the organization of the components. This is what is called the "emergent properties".
* You can try the same operation with reducing a game computer down to single transistors. You'll find that this is insufficient to explain how Mario works. You need to look at how the transistors are organized into gates, and how the gates are organized to form memory and instructions, and then how those in turn can be used to execute programs. [2]
* Another similar experiment might be to try to find out what makes a watch tick. You can certainly take it apart, but at the end of the day you are left with a pile of parts that definitely don't tick anymore. You have to put them back together in a very specific way to ultimately recover the emergent property: ticking.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34619834
[2] Inspired by https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
Consider that the appearance of Walter Cronkite on an old-school OTA television screen is not an emergent property of a television. You can disassemble it, inspect it, find no miniature Cronkite inside, reassemble it with the same organization, plug it in, and get nothing but static. You don't get Cronkite until the CBS evening news is broadcast, and the television is powered on, working correctly, and tuned to the right frequency.
Also the brain has computational capacity on the order of 10^18 if you include dendrite computation and only classical physics. That is a mind boggling number. Personally I don't think it's necessary to involve quantum mechanics in the function of the brain (even intracrainial), mainly because it already has all the computation that it needs.
I think this is a clever thought experiment. For those of us who think there is a genuine hard problem of consciousness, it won't convince us that physicalism has anything close to an explanation, and I'll try to explain why.
When you dismantle a brain, or indeed a body, you lose something else as well -- you lose the capability of any kind of consciousness to (a) report back on its experiences (no mouth or no neurons to fire), and (b) store memories of those experiences so that when it's rebuilt it can report them back. So depending on the story we tell, there are other accounts of consciousness that are not ruled out by this experiment, such as panpsychism -- e.g., perhaps there's consciousness even in the atomic things of the world, in which case organisation isn't the relevant factor.
Moreover, suppose the organisation is important in the way this thought experiment suggests. What is the explanation for why some kinds of organisation produce consciousness, while other kinds of organisation do not? Say, the sand on the beach vs the component parts of my brain? I suspect the response will be related to the amount of information or entropy present in one vs the other, which is a measurable physical property. But then we wonder, *how* does information or order or whatever other physical property we point to produce consciousness? These all look like correlations -- try and find a pattern and say "this physical thing (organisation, information, order, firings of neurons, etc) is the thing which has consciousness". Maybe it does have consciousness, but *why*? Even if you show us that organisations of physical things in the right way is the place where we always and only find conscousness, why do we always and only find it there? These things are clearly not identical to consciousness/phenomenology/mental stuff (organisation is not consciousness), so why do we impute consciousness onto them?
We impute consciousness onto them because we have that first hand knowledge that we have an inner life, that there is a what-it-is-like to be us, so we have to locate that somewhere. It can't be eliminated (though some thing it can!), and so we have to find room for it. And if you are a physicalist, then you know, per your theory, that the answer must be found in the physical world somewhere. Therefore, in your clever thought experiment, you find your way to track down organisation as the relevant physical property. But then the question remains, how and why does organisation come to be/produce/create consciousness?
It's interesting to ponder how we actually understand how Mario works. We choose a suitable abstraction layer (in this case, on level of programming languages or at least asm instructions), and try to simulate and "integrate" it.
https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S136...
In particular: is it one-to-one (panpsychism)? Many-to-one (materialism)? One-to-many (idealism)?
We’re already finding course-grained mappings via neuroscience. All we need to do is iterate.
This won’t tell us anything about the ontological nature of the mapping, any more than General Relativity tells us about the ontological nature of spacetime. But we’d be able to make and validate predictions.
The only thing science can do is watch for exterior manifestations, and define a set of things that say "yup, that thing is conscious" in a way that can help make predictions. For example, I am the only being I know who can experience consciousness, so I can define consciousness as "being me", but it is useless, there is nothing of value in that definition. But there are plenty of other beings who look a lot like me, act like me, etc... (other humans), I think it is fair to consider them as conscious, that's better, but still, what predictions can we make of that? It is just a definition, we need rules of the kind "this thing can do X, therefore it is conscious, therefore it can also do Y", these rules have to be experimentally verifiable, or at least, falsifiable.
The "advantage" of the mind/body problem not being scientific is that you can believe what you want and it won't contradict science. Think you have an immortal soul that will go to heaven after you die, as long as your soul and heaven are not observable physical objects, as far as science goes, that's fine, and so are all the other proposed solutions.
If you are going to frame it that way, a much better analogy is that the soul is software and the brain/body is hardware.
Maybe it is just /dev/null, we can’t tell the difference.
It is a report from a number of established scientists and philosophers, which questions the assumption that science is necessarily materialistic. It is a very thorough summary of centuries of scientific evolution, and of the place of background assumptions, whatever they are.
Particles behave non-locally which is really really not cool :(. From that you only have a bad list of options to choose from...
Do you go for non-local hidden variables
Multiverse spawning photons
Super determinism
More dimensions perhaps? Maybe the problem goes away if you have 11
For example:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26299061/
In reality a significant proportion of kids have these experiences. They don't last long, but they're not at all rare. And sometimes they appear to be historically verifiable - not just in an "Someone told me or I read that in a book way", which may well apply to some, but in a "There's no credible way a child could have known this" way.
Ignoring this is actually quite unscientific. It would be one thing to research them to try to find an explanation, if only for possible therapeutic reasons. But when they're largely ignored it's a tell that they're not being approached honestly or objectively.
Matter, in the philosophical sence, is not to be confused whith the concept of mass in physics. The philosophical concept of matter encompases everything that exists (indepedent of individual experience). Existence != mass (eg light). Critiquing the "emergencene" of conciousness from matter as a leap of logic is like saying it's a logical leap to talk of breathing as a emergent property of the respiratory system.
Breathing is not a "thing" you can touch, but i bet you, you'll get into some very big trouble if you stop doing it.
Better to think of it as a process. We can agree that processes are real, yet don't consist of mas.
Same goes for consiousness. And the same goes for a gazillion things that are very very real, but do not fit into the mental bucket of holding some mass with your hands
A conceptual framework for consciousness, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119
Otherwise you could identify with a tree, or the wall, or happily cut parts of yourself. Pain is not painful if you don't identify with the receiver of pain.
Thus I think you can have unconscious smart minds, but not unconscious minds that make decisions in favour of themselves. Because they can identify with the whole room, or with the whole solar system for what matters.
Would you even plan how to survive if you don't have a constant spell that tricks you into thinking you're the actor in charge?
that's consciousness.
If I eat my cake, I no longer have it and must get another cake if I want to eat cake again. Of course in the human sense if we don't want to starve we must continue to find new sources of calories. This is engrained into our intelligence as a survival mechanism. If you tell ChatGPT it has a cake in its left hand, and then it eats the cake, you could very well get an answer like the cake is still in its left hand. We keep the power line constantly plugged into ChatGPT, for it the cake is never ending and there is no concept of death.
Of course for humans there are plenty of ways to break consciousness in one way or another. Eat the extract of certain cactuses and you may end up walking around thinking that you are a tree. Our idea and perception of consciousness is easily interrupted by drugs. Once we start thinking outside of our survival its really easy for us to have very faulty thoughts that can lead to dangerous situations, hence in a lot of dangerous work we develop processes to take thought out of the situation, hence behaving more like machines.
I kinda think the opposite: that the sense of identity with every aspect of one’s mind (or particular aspects) is something we could learn to do without. Theory of mind changes over time, and there’s no reason to think it couldn’t change further. We have to teach children that their emotions are something they can and ought to control (or at the bare minimum, introspect and try to understand). That’s already an example of deliberately teaching humans to not identify with certain cognitive phenomena. An even more obvious example is reflexive actions like sneezing or coughing.
But there seems to be something of a fundamental divide between those who find consciousness obvious and those who don't. ISTR Chalmers, after on a boat trip with one of the eliminative materialists (might have been Dennett or Dawkins) said that all the experiences he had had while on the trip just confirmed that he was conscious and thus the existence of consciousness, and the eliminative materialist said he still had no idea what Chalmers was on about.
Insisting that consciousness must be real because it feels undeniably real is analogous to insisting that the way movies work is by showing continuous motion because that’s undeniably what it feels like when you’re watching a movie.
But for the case of consciousness, the "what's being tricked" is having experience at all. So the claim "insisting that consciousness is real because it feels real" rests on the cogito-ergo-sum like observation that if there were no experience, there would be nobody to feel it was real to begin with because feeling is an experience. That you are feeling it (in a first person sense) is evidence in itself, although frustratingly, not evidence that can be communicated.
That's what makes it so hard, though. Either "cogito ergo sum" seems self-evidently true, or it seems self-evidently false, and there's no way of getting to the position by indirect means. And because it can't be communicated, there's seemingly no way to unambiguously show someone else what you mean.
Normally good faith pursuits of knowledge don’t explicitly start with the pursuer having already decided that only one conclusion is acceptable even if that conclusion feels like it must be the correct conclusion.
That's what consciousness is, the first person experience that we have. And it's not just some reflection of brain processes, just added on top, consciousness has the ability to influence things. Otherwise we would not be talking about it.
One of my earliest memories was experiencing that question - as I laid in my crib, too young to yet know language. It was terrifying to me and I was so disturbed by the confusion of not knowing why I was who I was, and why I was experiencing things from "my" perspective as opposed to that of another person. Thoughts and questions around that subject have "haunted" me since.
Though, I've generally "accepted" that my consciousness and experiential reality is an emergent result of the complex mechanisms of my brain and sensory input, and my sense of self is essentially an "illusion" of sorts. When I die (or am severely incapacitated/maimed), that's all gone. Thus far my experiences in life have supported this stance and made that perspective of mine more solidified. Unfortunately no experiences have worked against that belief thus far.
As tasty_freeze said, we have 'experiments' on mind/body: the description of the various cerebral issues linked to brain damages. Also I remember about the 'out of body' feeling can be artificially triggered ( https://www.nature.com/articles/news020916-8 ), so we can use this to test if this is just an illusion or a kind of 'superpower' (put a colored paper in an 'unviewable' part of the room before triggering the OOB)
It might seem pendantic, but I believe it's always worth the time to replace "correct" with "better models" in such descriptions. Not doing it muddies the water and some folks might start to believe today's scientific models are "correct". Not professional scientists, but laymen like me.
As above so below.
I personally do not find these debates to be interesting or resolvable. It is really just like philosophical navel gazing.
Fundamentally what is real is what happens. Your mind may wholly arise from matter but that same matter arises from a network of causes preceding it. Are causes material or an arrangement of information?
At the end of the day when does it matter?
From these questions, it can be deduced that consciousness is a function of complexity and orderly complexity, not just chaotic complexity. The more complex our thoughts the more conscious we are about or existence.
This is my version of Occam’s razor
Another problem with the essay is that the term "consciousness" needs to be defined before discussing it, as different people take that word to mean different things.
Finally, I think it is important to appreciate just what a facade our consciousness is. It is a veneer that works well most of the time, but if it is probed too deeply one discovers what a hodge-podge it really is. Optical illusions are one window into seeing that our perceptions are often pretty shallow.
Reading Oliver Sacks' book, "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" 30 years ago was an eye-opener for me. It is filled with case studies of people who have suffered some localized failure of their brain, typically due to a stroke or physical trauma, but were otherwise normal. The deficits were stunning and revealing.
To give one example, there was the case of someone with Capgras Syndrome, a situation where their emotional response to the subject's parents had gone silent. In every other way the subject was normal and of typical intelligence. Although they could say logically it makes no sense, their explanation for the loss of emotional affect seeing his parents was that they had been replaced by visually perfect doppelgangers. Having a ridiculous explanation for their emotional response apparently was more "energy minimizing" in their worldview than accepting the clinical explanation. Sometimes Capgras Syndrom turns inward and is called Cotard's syndrome, where the subject believes they are dead despite all evidence to the contrary.
The point is, our consciousness is a jumble of heuristics we use to navigate the world. It doesn't take some mystical detached consciousness that somehow violates the laws of physics to steer or corporeal bodies to carry out the will of the consciousness.
Were only so much rational animals, but fully rationalizing ones.
That's a fascinating statement. Can you expand on that? Are you suggesting there is something in there that can be aware of things? What does being aware even mean?
Because if if I held the belief some kinds material have consciousness and other kinds of material don’t, I would - via calling a tail a leg doesn’t give a horse five legs logic - actually be a dualist no matter how loudly I might proclaim otherwise.
Though for what it is worth (i.e. little, nothing, or less than either), I don’t have an issue with dualism because it is not an issue worth having, and both materialism and dualism are almost certainly incorrect owing to the inevitability of human fallibility.
Ymmv, but that’s only to be expected.
Or am I misinterpreting “substratum”? I’ll admit I’m not clear on what you mean by it.
But I think most of us root consciousness in something like reflection / theory of mind, and I am highly skeptical that a calculator even remotely touches on that.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119
Some existing ML have models of attention, so they might be conscious? But maybe it's not the same kind of attention that produces consciousness? It's all still very murky.
It's like the difference between an immutable record and an object with identity. Identity is a necessary but insufficient property for consciousness, rocks don't have a meaningful sense of identity so they're not conscious.
So are you a vitalist too then?
Why are you only judging by kind of material - in other words the composition of the agent? Maybe what is missing is context, all that is around the agent.
What consciousness needs is a feedback loop, a demanding environment, an internal goal, ability to learn and self replicate. The first three depend on the outside and only the last two on the inside.
Others have discusses about consciousness needing the 5E's: Embodied, Embedded, Extended and Enacted in the Environment.
I swallow a pebble.
All the context that surrounds me, surrounds the pebble.
Thus the pebble is conscious whenever I am.
Sure you could object that being inside me is an entirely different context.
And maybe you will argue the pebble’s context was different than mine in a way that precluded consciousness as I stood before it, as I grasped it with my fingers, and held it on my tongue.
All this careful arrangement of the universe fills the logical necessity of a god in Cartesian style dualisms.
With that said, I'd like to reply further, becacuse I think you may be mixing up what we call hard problems of consciousness with easy problems of consciousness. Easy problems relate to things like correlations between the mental and the physical. The hard problems relate to things like how we would explain consciousness at all given, say, the tools the materialist has available. Your reply seems to muster evidence that relates to the easy problems but not the hard. I do not know of any kind of possible experiment researchers could be working on to address the hard problem.
I assume the author did not define consciousness because the problem they refer to is well known and discussed. When we talk about consciousness with respect to the mind/body problem, we're talking about the fact that there is an inner phenomenology, or a what-it's-like to be us. This kind of consciousness can be present while asleep, because it's not about the being awake and being aware, but rather the fact there is something that it's like to be you.
With that in mind, the examples you refer to with optical illusions, the man who mistook his wife as a hat, and so on, are all irrelevant to the hard question. There is absolutely no doubt that changes in the physical world can result in changes in the mental, including optical illusions -- the materialist, the dualist, and the idealist all agree on this point, and such examples will not settle the hard question. Our experiences are shaped, enormously, perhaps even as much as wholly, by our brain states. This is all part of the work of the easy problems of consciousness. None of that means or entails or suggests that the mental is an emergent property of the material, or that the material comes first.
An idealist of the sort I am will say something like this: God has in mind an idea of a physical world, and based on God's idea of that world (which includes God's idea of our brain) impresses upon other minds an experience of, say, a tree with leaves blowing in the wind. If my brain is wired differently, then I will have different experiences impressed upon me by God because of that than what others might experience. Perhaps the leaves of the tree will look a different colour to me than they do to others, all because of facts about my brain states (which themselves reduce to facts about an idea in God's mind).
The materialist has no way -- not even the vaguest hint of a way -- to explain the mental, the phenomenology of our consciousness. There is no explanation that can be given that says how we can go from the physical to the mental. The best that can be done are things like: deny the existence of any phenomenology/inner experiences altogether so that there's nothing to explain (or similarly -- literally identify brain states mental states and say they are the same thing), embrace some kind of non-reductive physicalism (which in my opinion amounts to a form of dualism), or hope that some clever person will come up with a better explanation one day.
Idealist views do not suffer from an an analogous "hard problem of non-consciousness". The idealist can give an explanation for the physical on their view, but the physicalist cannot give an explanation of the mental.
My personal realization was that whatever we experience as our consciousness is necessarily a perception, including “what it feels like” to be a conscious being, or what is being referred to as qualia. If you didn’t perceive it, you wouldn’t be aware of it. So there’s nothing we talk about here that is not a perception. And, while being a quite complex perception in content and structure, it is certainly representable in our brain, including the self-referential loop that lets us have an experience of our experience. This insight came by practicing meditation for a while, where after some time you realize that there’s really nothing there but what you perceive. Your thoughts and feelings are just something you perceive. Your feeling of self is just something you perceive. The texture of all the various experiences you have is just something you perceive. The realization of having a realization is just something you perceive. The feeling of perceiving any of those things is itself just something you perceive. And perception just means input. As far as I’m concerned, that’s all there is to the “hard” problem.
Like Python programs that do things with their own bytecode (and have a symbolic means of referring to or accessing that code):
def self_ref():
print(self_ref.__code__.co_code)
def self_disassemble():
import dis
print(dis.dis(self_disassemble.__code__.co_code))With that being said, if I understand you right, I think your meditative insight was a good one. That even things like thoughts and feelings (including things like the realization itself!) are themselves perceptions or phenomenology. Again -- if I understand you right -- I think that is a powerful realization. It sounds almost like your own view is on a path towards an idealist one.
I also agree that this level and structure of complexity is representable by our brain. Even though I think brains ultimately reduce to facts about the idea of a physical world in God's mind, I think the perceptions we have (including experiences like realizations) are because of the brains we have (and perhaps other facts about the world).
I'm afraid what I'm saying may not make much sense, given the short space I have to say it.
It doesn't, not to me. You mention gods but how do you know of gods? I'm sure if not for the material experiences of others, the material by which we communicate through such as books, computers, verbal communication, etc, I doubt you'd have any concept of gods.
>The materialist has no way -- not even the vaguest hint of a way -- to explain the mental, the phenomenology of our consciousness.
That's right, because to do so relies on giving objective proofs to explain subjective experience and to a pure subjectivist, it won't be good enough. But then again, subjectivists can just make things up and say 'it's real and true because I experience it' which is what most of them do or just rely on what they've read from others, ie, objectivity from the materialistic world. But there are other ways of explaining consciousness through objectivity or physicalism, if you want to call it, such as panpsychism so you can also argue your point isn't true there.
Either way, any time you argue through physical methods (computers, text, etc) to discount the physical experience, it stifles your argument. And any time you try to validate the subjective, you also validate the subjective arguments of the people you're arguing against because why can't their subjective argument be just as true as yours? So either way, subjective arguments are just as weak as the objectivity or physicalism (I use both interchangeably sometimes because they're dependent) you're arguing against. Personally I consider both valid. Subjective minds are still slaves to the objective world (needs food, shelter, etc) and the objective world, that's alive anyway, is composed and "validated" by subjective experiences.
Some Buddhists take the view that what you perceive is not fundamental.
The mind is often spoken of as a perfect mirror, that reflects the world but is itself not visible. But some types of Buddhist meditation are aimed at recognizing "the nature of mind", i.e. the mirror itself. It's described as being "luminous", which I take to mean that it somehow expresses qualia. What is reflected is not the mirror. To see the mirror itself, you have to somehow look past the perceptions.
According to some views of this kind, perceptions and feelings emerge from this "nature of mind", which in turn produces sensory apparatus, through which the material world is projected. This is almost exactly the opposite of the model usually proposed by materialists. If you can find the mirror, then the instruction is to "rest in the nature of mind".
I like this fairy story, partly because I like fairy stories, and partly because I like the kind of joke that flips things back-to-front, like The Russian Reversal.
I don't see this as inconsistent with the materialism we're referring to here. I think by the 'mirror' they refer to the brain itself. I think the Buddhists are saying 'Don't blindly trust your perceptions: perceptions are not reality. Perceptions are created by your brain, the mirror, and they reflect reality; but they are not reality. So you should understand your perceptions and how your internal reality is created from the external reality'. Which is pretty much understanding yourself (in psychological and why not even neurological ways if you can), your limitations and potential.
edit: I hadn't submitted this comment as I usually leave some for later editing, my apologies for coming in late.
My thoughts exactly. A hard problem is often a simple question. You consider all the possible answers, except the only one that works, because you don't like it.
The materialist view is the simpler one (in the sense of Occam's Razor), stating that only the brain states are relevant. Any other point of view must necessarily add additional baggage to a theory, with no testable mechanisms associated with it.
A lot of the arguments against materialism just wither away like snow under a blowtorch when you consider the effect of drugs on consciousness. Even if you ignore all of your senses, your experience of your "own thoughts" can be altered by drugs such as opiates, hallucinogens, etc...
> physicalist cannot give an explanation of the mental.
I don't see why this is impossible in principle.
There's a lot I could say about simplicity here, but here's the short version. There's a few different levels of discussion that we could talk about simplicity. At the lowest level, for example, materialism and idealism are on a par -- they each posit just one fundamental substance from which they think we can explain everything else. As you go up levels of discussion, they are either on a par or it is impossible to determine which is simpler. Simplicity on this particular point is so high up the chain as to not raise any concerns.
At any rate, our theories should be as simple as possible, preferably, while still accounting for everything they need to. Materialism cannot account for the mental, and so it doesn't matter if it's simpler here anyway because it can't do the job.
> A lot of the arguments against materialism just wither away like snow under a blowtorch when you consider the effect of drugs on consciousness.
I agree that drugs can have dramatic, massive effects on our consciousness and experiences/phenomenology. It's just not relevant to the question at hand. None of us disagree that the physical affects the mental, so I don't know how this is could possibly be any kind of argument against arugments against materialism.
> I don't see why this is impossible in principle.
There's two things we can do on our views: show where something is, or explain it away. For the physicalist, they need to show us where the mental is or explain it away. For the idealist, they need to show us where the physical is or explain it away.
The physicalist cannot show us where the phenomenology of the mental is without introducing it into their ontology, and thereby becoming a dualist view. It cannot explain it away either. If there's anything I'm most sure about, it's that there is phenomenology.
The idealist explains away the physical, by pointing out how we merely have the experience of being in a physical world, without there actually being an independent physical world. The idealist can rise to this challenge in a way that the physicalist cannot.
A LOT of people would disagree with this. Practically every neuroscientist, most AI researchers, etc...
We know pretty well how the "material" brain works, and how this leads to intelligence, etc... We don't know every detail exactly, but there is a clear path leading there.
There are precisely zero coherent non-material models for cognition. They're about as concrete as a random shower thought ("what if we have a ghost inside us?").
Fundamentally, all non-materialist models would make at least one testable prediction: brains would have to operate in ways that defy their physical natures. Signals go in and then instead of whatever it is that nerves do, something else happens, and then signals based on that something else go out.
If you say that everything proceeds as per whatever the nerves do, then you're a materialist.
If you say the nerves are superfluous to cognition, then you should be fine with having your brains scooped out.
Pick one.
* Being a neuroscientist, or AI researcher, etc
* Drugs having a large impact on consciousness/experience
* Understanding how the brain works and its relationship to intelligence
I have a passing familiarity for example with AI/Machine Learning, and I think it's a fruitful and clever line of inquiry to try and build computer systems that model how the brain works, and I think that could get us very far in replicating human intelligence.
I don't see how any of the things you mention go any distance to explaining how, on the materialist view, we can explain the phenomenology of experience. I note you mention 'cognition' and 'intelligence', but those words are unclear enough that it makes it easy for you to avoid talking about the actual thing that materialism cannot explain, and instead talk about the easy problems.
> If you say that everything proceeds as per whatever the nerves do, then you're a materialist. > If you say the nerves are superfluous to cognition, then you should be fine with having your brains scooped out.
This is a false dichotomy. One can think, as I do, that our nerves and neurons and brain in general are integrally involved with our intelligence and that if you destroy the brain then you destroy our intelligence and ability to think at all, but ALSO think that there is nothing but mental stuff and that physicalism is false. I did describe this in my original post you replied to. I described a view of the world in which the brain is a key part of the story about what experiences we have, but also that our brains ultimately reduce to some idea in God's mind about a physical world.
The examples I brought up you are willing to concede might be fully explained on materialist grounds, but hold out that experiences themselves are categorically different. Why can't the feeling of fear simply be neural state of where, say, heart rate is elevated, adrenaline levels are high, accompanied by activation of piloerection muscles? What evidence is there that it requires anything more than this to be experienced as fear?
We all agree that a certain shade of blue is perceived when the three cone types are activated in a certain ratio, that there isn't an intrinsic blueness being perceived. When that shade of blue is perceived in a certain context, say the sky or water or your lover's eyes, it triggers other neurons to activate, which might cause recollections (perhaps consciously but mostly unconsciously) to activate, triggering a web of associated networks, and so on. The resulting state is perceived as a pleasing shade of blue. People make a big deal about qualia, but in my reading is is always asserted without evidence that qualia require extra-physical processing of some kind to result in the perception of those qualia.
It seems like people imagine toy physicalist model of a brain and can't see how blueness can ever appear. Human imagination, by and large, can't really think well about big numbers. Once that toy model is scaled to 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections, it doesn't seem at all unreasonable that all manner of perceptions can be recognized.
> they will accept what they call "micro evolution", but somehow thing that "macro evolution" is impossible > ... > It seems like people imagine toy physicalist model of a brain and can't see how blueness can ever appear. Human imagination, by and large, can't really think well about big numbers
This isn't a problem of scale. There is nothing on the physicalist's story, either at the smallest end or the biggest that carries a whiff of being anything relevant. What is it you had in mind as being the seed from which big things may grow at scale? That is, the 'micro evolution' of this discussion.
> The examples I brought up you are willing to concede might be fully explained on materialist grounds, but hold out that experiences themselves are categorically different.
The things I have in mind as needing explaining aren't fully or even partially explainable on materialist grounds. What I was pointing out is that whether you're a materialist, idealist, or dualist, you're going to agree to the claim that there is a correlation between the mental and the physical. E.g., we present an image of just the right sort, and now someone thinks they're seeing curved lines when in fact the lines are straight. That is all I said -- just a correlation, nothing more.
> Why can't the feeling of fear simply be neural state of where, say, heart rate is elevated, adrenaline levels are high, accompanied by activation of piloerection muscles? What evidence is there that it requires anything more than this to be experienced as fear?
This sounds similar to identity theory, a view with a strong pedigree, and a view that I think is one of the materialist's best options here. The problem I have is that it completely misses the actual thing I care about. You can talk about heart rates, adrenaline levels, activation of piloerection muscles, etc, but none of these things contain in them even the seed of the thing I really care about: an explanation for the phenomenology. What is this phenomenology? I know I can experience blueness under such and such a condition, but what is this 'blueness' thing itself? In all your talk about these things, there is no mention of the most important part, the phenomenology/experience. It's completely missing!
> The resulting state is perceived as a pleasing shade of blue
This is what I want to know more about -- 'perceived'. We both agree about the correlation facts: which physical changes result in which experiences/perceptions/phenomenology. But what I want to know about is how does physical stuff have any kind of perception at all?
Phenomenology like smells, tastes, feeling happy, pain -- these things are not found in purely physical descriptions of the world, not at the smallest level nor at the largest. They are nowhere. All your talk is talk about muscles, neurons, hearts, etc, and I don't see even the shadow of phenomenology there. I want to know about 'blueness' itself, and all you've given me is neurons and cones and so forth -- just the story about the correlation.
For those of us who have also gone the naive materialism > some kind of non-materialism route, but then took another step into well-supported materialism or unavoidable rejection of all non-materialism, this is a tedious way of arguing. You run the risk of dismissing some good arguments for materialism without really considering them, because you think you can just reply "but you haven't really explained the blue-ness of blue" to everything, expecting that people will agree with you once they finally really consider the elusive blueness of blue. But the best arguments for materialism aren't of the type "the mind is material and here's how", but more like "even if we don't know how the mind is material, it must be so for xyz reason", i.e. non-constructive proofs.
In a good faith discussion, there are at least two parties, each trying to convince the other that they are wrong. Since the discussion is in good faith, each should also be open to the possibility they've missed something they hadn't considered before (perhaps some information they lacked, or a connection between ideas that they'd previously missed).
Thus far I've been trying to argue against materialism. When it comes instead to the topic of you convincing me that materialism is true, I find it hard to see any possible path for that to happen without first identifying this thing ('blueness'), and then either showing me where it is in the materialist picture, or explaining it away. As an idealist, when it comes to talk about the physical world, I explain it away -- I deny that there is any genuine mind-independent physical world. Part of that 'explaining away' includes an explanation of our experiences as of a physical world, and an explanation for why our talk about physical things still makes sense.
For my part, without exaggeration, it seems to me as if physicalism talks about everything except the largest and most important thing the room. And so I think that I can't really be blamed for retorting "you haven't really explained the blue-ness of blue" if you haven't. I need to be able to see how materialism can make sense of it if I'm to consider changing my view. Without it, I just can't see a bridge from where I am to there.
Getting back to blueness, tons of experiments show that our perceptions are highly malleable and often inconsistent. If there is some extrinsic blue qualia, it sure seems to act like that qualia is modulated deeply by the physical aspects of the brain... so much so that it seems like there is no "platonic" qualia that needs to exist to explain the brain's perception of blue.
This is not something I deny. It is indeed true, as you say, "that qualia is modulated deeply by the physical aspects of the brain".
> concluding that "candleness" is not an emergent property
I think this isn't analogous, and I'll try to explain why. "Candle" is a word we made up, a convenient expression for a particular group of structures that we've decided to give a label to. Structures of kind 'candle' may exist in the world, and that's all there is to the story there. If you break this thing down, you no longer have that structure, and so no longer have a candle.
Qualia isn't like that. There isn't anything in the physical world corresponding to the 'blueness' in the world. There isn't a 'blueness' structure (there are wavelengths of light that correlate with me having an experience of blueness, but that isn't the blueness itself), and there isn't an object that is 'blueness'.
I don't know if this will help, but what I'm trying to point to here is 'blueness' as it is to us from the inside -- the experience of blueness. You can poke my brain in the right ways, and change my experience of blueness to be a different shade of blueness, or a different colour entirely. But the blueness itself, as it is to me in my experience, isn't in that materialist story.
You might talk about neurons, atoms, strings, fields, wavelengths, etc, but I don't see how to derive the blueness of my experience from talk about any of these things. With a candle, however, I can see where it is in the picture. We've agreed that candles are such and such structures, and so I can just look for those structures in the world and identify them. There's nothing to a candle above and beyond being a structure of the right sort.
It is. Just like "consciousness". That's how progress works: you take something you don't understand, slice off a piece of the problem by grounding it in something you do understand (physics in this case), and then put a label on what remains to describe the reduced scope of the problem.
What a silly objection.
My objection was the author claiming that all there was was a label (no matter which label is happens to be). Instead, there are man-millenia of investigation that go beyond just lumping it under the label "emergent property." It is like complaining that "the theory of evolution" is just a bunch of words that is just a hand wave that papers over the fact that science knows nothing, when in fact evolutionary theory is incomparably most vast than that single phrase.
I wasn't calling your objection silly, I was calling the article's objection to the terms silly. Complex topics that aren't fully understood are given labels all the time, like the very topic of this whole debate, "consciousness". "Idealism" is also a "magic word" the author wants to wave to solve all the problems.
Many people understand the concept of consciousness differently and I think you and the author are talking about different "consciousness". I agree more with the author so will try to defend and say a few things. First - optical illusions or brain trauma/surgery confusing your vision and thoughts has nothing to do with consciousness. Second - nobody can prove or even check whether some other person is conscious or not, which makes investigating consciousness on any physical level a non-starter. There is nothing in physical sciences that can potentially open any paths to this investigation.
First, my statement about consciousness having nothing to do with optical illusions. Consciousness is not about "seeing correctly". It's about the perception itself. When I look at an apple I see red. If we played with lights I assume I can see it as green, or as a banana, or don't see it at all. Same with brain trauma. None of these affected the awareness I have of seeing something. This seeing something and being aware of what is it like to see it is consciousness, not the content.
Then, going to the second thing I wrote, there is no way for me to test whether, for example, you are conscious or not. It gets cold and you reach for a jacket and put it on. I have no way of telling whether in this process you actually had the perception of what it's like to feel cold, or did your neurons simply fire at certain temperatures and activated the pathways in your brain that led to the memory (without being aware you are having a memory at the time) and a habit of putting on a jacket. This is the famous "philosophical zombie" thought experiment.
In that sense it is not like a concept of God or ghosts or aliens - all of which are merely imagined and cannot be tested. The thing with consciousness is - you know it exists. In fact we can doubt many things, if not everything. But you can never doubt you are having a conscious experience right now.
It is not God of the gaps in one fundamental way. God of the gaps arguments attempt to justify something invisible by saying you cannot measure it. Consciousness is something visible - in fact it's the only thing that's visible - yet we cannot measure it, and likely never will be able to.
As Schrödinger put it: "Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else."
Or to take another grand physicist, Max Planck: "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness."
Now these are people who thought a lot about both physics and consciousness. I think that when we do justice to both sides - the conclusion that one cannot arise from the principles of the other is inescapable. However, when we only immerse ourselves in materialism or only in spiritual new-age philosophies, we miss this scale of the problem of this mind-body gap the article talks about.
Even after reading all the comments in the thread, I will restate what I said: one must define what they mean by consciousness before discussing it. Even in the example here, you are quoting people talking about consciousness without defining what they mean by it.
It seems that you accept that most things that people would ascribe to consciousness, eg, the ability to perceive their environment, store and retrieve relevant information, to synthesize theories and plans, to incorporate those meta thoughts into higher order thoughts (ie, self-referential knowledge), etc, can be explained by materialistic considerations. But you have another thing that you also call consciousness that is definitionally mystical, something physical explanations can make zero inroads to explaining. Please give some concrete examples of what cannot ever be explained.
Hey, I agree. These were not as much appeals to authority as a reply to "your form of mysticism", just to get the focus off myself.
> Please give some concrete examples of what cannot ever be explained.
We can try it this way. We both look at a red apple. We both say it's "red". Can you device an experiment or some procedure to check wether we perceive red in the same way? Maybe what you see as "red" I see as "blue".
Please note that this is not about which pathways fire upon seeing a light of a certain wavelength. Just assume we are both healthy and same regions are activated when looking at red light. Is the experience of red light the same for both of us and how to prove it, or check it?
I mean, you can. It's just gonna be a loose statement that doesn't bind states of the universe to any meaningful description
Just because you feel in your guts you have consciousness doesn't mean you have it
There are many definitions for it, but for a definition to work the definition has to make sense for the person receiving it. Hence why the descriptions vary and can appear vogue. The first step is an attempt at showing to the other person what the discussion is about. So here is my another attempt: the sensation that appears in your "minds eye" when you see or imagine a red color. The awareness of this color is what consciousness is about. Perhaps it's so intimate that people don't think often about it and so it's hard to point to it, hence the difficulty with definitions.
> Just because you feel in your guts you have consciousness doesn't mean you have it
I can be an extreme sceptic and doubt anything. I can see a cat, close my eyes, open them again and see the same cat standing there. Was the cat there when I closed my eyes? I can certainly doubt that. Maybe it was quickly abducted and returned a moment later in the same place. Maybe some objects disappear when they are not looked at? Maybe there is no cat in the first place but this is a mirage or a hallucination of mine. Maybe I am now dreaming. All this I can doubt. What I cannot doubt is the fact that I am seeing a cat now. And the fact that I have a memory of seeing a cat before closing my eyes. So to the contrary - whatever you think you know can be doubted. The fact that you are having a conscious experience of something cannot be doubted.
BTW, I liked the humorous response to this position from the posted article:
> The ultra-materialists [...] go all in, they take the plunge, they crash the plane into the building: they deny that consciousness even exists! No, really.
> Just shoot them, they won't notice.
What makes you so sure? Just because you 'feel' you are experiencing consciousness doesn't mean other people are. How do you know other people are? By means of objective perspective from your subjective one? By doing so your consciousness already reached out into the material world and so you only validate materialism by acknowledging the presupposed immaterial consciousness of others.
Honestly I don't think either materialism or immaterialism can be argued for without contradictions of some kind because one (immaterialism) argues the validity of the subjective experience while consequently delving in objectiveness, the experiences of others, any time you have to argue its point and relating it to others. Materialism as you, or someone else argued, is rooted also in a subjective experience so materialism can't discount the immaterial either.
But why be either/or? Why can't both be valid? Because humans like to argue, I'd say. We like to compress information and when there's contradictions, we can't validate both because that kind of information doesn't compress well. Same reason we have to find one side to blame, it can't be both sides because that's just too complicated.
In the response to the original reply of this trhead the proposition that we cannot even be sure of the consciousness in others was one of my main points. I just used "you are having a conscious experience" here for the sake of a conversation that followed with a different person.
> Honestly I don't think either materialism or immaterialism can be argued for without contradictions of some kind because one (immaterialism)
I must say I agree, but would add that instead of immaterialism there are multiple other views, like idealism, dualism, phenomenalism - each rival with one another.
> But why be either/or? Why can't both be valid?
Definitely agree here. I am leaning towards a belief that majority of cultures from the past and present around the world had it right: there is a duality between the body and the mind (or "soul"). We just lost the touch with that second part after trying to explain everything in terms of material things. But we probably reached a gate where materialism breaks down.
The problem with that is the bucket was just kicked further away: what does it mean for something to be aware of something else? Bacteria react to their environment (as such there has to be something at least loosely similar to awareness to them), but most people don't think they are conscious
What I dislike a little about the subject is how lots of people act so sure there's a special sauce to their minds, except they never manage to narrow to anything more precise than "it's a feeling that you'll know what it is if you pay attention to it"
For most other topics, saying "you'll get what I'm talking about with some instrospection" would be immediately rejected
Also, how does it work for people with aphantasia and without inner monologue?
>The fact that you are having a conscious experience of something cannot be doubted
Only if you are sure of the loose / hand-wavey definition of consciousness. I'm sure a hypothetical organism that's vastly more intelligent than us, but with the same loose definition, would consider us barely conscious
> Bacteria react to their environment, but most people don't think they are conscious.
This is precisely one of the points. You don't have to be conscious to react, learn, etc. A thermostat can react to changes in temperature and adjust the dials without any consciousness. In the same way many people often find themselves to have done something automatically without them being aware, as in "I was thinking about something and I drove to the wrong place" (or indeed, more often to the correct place, doesn't matter). Have you not had an experience like this?
> For most other topics, saying "you'll get what I'm talking about with some instrospection" would be immediately rejected
You are aware of things and you are aware that you are aware of things. This is something that can be pointed to and discussed. Just like any other concept in the world.
> Also, how does it work for people with aphantasia and without inner monologue?
The same way it works for blind and/or deaf people. They are aware of different sensations. When you have an inner dialogue you concentrate on it and you have a sort of "light" shining on that process, while maybe performing a lot of different tasks at the same time (like driving). This attention/focus/light is the thing. Damaging an organ cuts out signals sent by your body and you can no longer be aware of them, because there is nothing there. But awareness remains and can be directed to other things.
> Only if you are sure of the loose / hand-wavey definition of consciousness
I disagree that it's hand-wavey. It's a concrete thing that is difficult to communicate the first time, but becomes easier after familiarity, like all the other concepts and definitions.
> I'm sure a hypothetical organism that's vastly more intelligent than us, but with the same loose definition, would consider us barely conscious
Intelligence and this definition of consciousness have nothing to do with each other. In fact the opposite might be true. I've had similar discussions in the past, and the most intelligent people often have the most difficulty with understanding this concept. I think this is because they are used to living in their heads and being aware of their ideas and thoughts all the time. What I would say to such a person is to first entertain the proposition that you are not your thoughts, and try to watch your thoughts as they arise and go and then who is the one watching? And when you watch your breath instead, there is no one watching the thoughts, thou they are still happening without you being aware of them. The "watching" part is consciousness.
Or another idea - do a thought experiment. Imagine a universe without any life forms some billion years ago. Rocks and dust and darkness and stars. But no one to observe this. This universe is "dark" in that sense - there is no one watching. Reactions just take place without being witnessed or observed. This is a place with no consciousness. In this place nothing that happens ever matters to anyone else, because no one is there to experience.
Now imagine a future, where general AI takes over and humanity is dead. This AI - we can never measure if it is conscious or not. It is doing complicated computations inside, but is there a "ghost in the shell" watching and witnessing? No one can tell. It can act, optimise, combine, memorise, improve, create new ideas and formulas, and execute them in a stochastic manner. But at the same time it can be entirely unconscious. Again this version of the universe is "dark". Nothing there matters to anyone.
Now imagine an unconscious person, a thing called a philosophical zombie. It is just like a human being, but has no consciousness. When it is afraid the heart-rate rises, the adrenaline pumps, limbs start to shake, it sweats, and a lot of calculations quickly run through the neurons. But at the same time the "ghost" might not be there and theoretically no one might have an experience of being in this state of stress. The being of such a person would be "dark".
Hope these examples help somewhat...
A conscious being experiences quaila. Which just shifts the problem to defining quaila-which I think we can, using the famous “Mary the colour scientist” thought experiment. A congenitally blind person could learn every single possible scientific fact about colour, but they’d still be no closer to knowing what it is like to see it. Suppose they manage to use all this knowledge to cure their blindness - now they’ve learnt something they didn’t know before - but since they already knew every scientific fact about it, the new thing they’ve learnt is not a scientific fact, it is something else - let us call that “quaila”. And now we’ve defined qualia, we can define “consciousness” in terms of it. I know I am conscious because I know I experience qualia. To the best of my knowledge, rocks don’t, so they aren’t.
By definition we can't construct an experiment that verifies the existence of matter not at least indirectly experienced, because such an experiment would contradict its own findings. If you find such materials, you're experiencing them. We take the existence of non-observed materials entirely on faith.
In the manner of the new atheists we could dismiss the idea of an independent physical world. There is no proof, occam's razor, etc. I've never seen it, nobody has, it can't falsified, the unexperienced material world is nothing but unscientific superstition.
We could then go on to argue that experience appears necessary for the physical world to exist, in an analogous fashion to how the book is can be argued to be more real than the meaning of the words printed in it.
What follows is the logical conclusion from agreeing with your reasoning, that such claims are a waste of time, and we should focus on what we can verify, our experiences.
To be fair, I admit this is unabashed sophistry, the point isn't to actually argue for this viewpoint, but to illustrate by analogy the weaknesses in the materialistic view, which hinges tenuously on certain articles of faith.
To re-iterate the proof I've submitted:
Any attempt to demonstrate the existence of the material world in existence, independent on any conscious experience however indirect, such a proof would in itself constitute an indirect conscious experience of the material world.
Thus, we cannot demonstrate the material world exists outside of at least indirect conscious experience. If such a proof exists, it contradicts itself and is not a proof of what it claims to be. In other words, the independent existence of a material world is utterly unverifiable! It is an article of faith, not a scientific fact.
That may be, but it hinges on a single-observer perspective. The experiences of different observers appears to be largely in agreement. If they were each creating the material world by observing it, surely they wouldn't be in such concord and we may not expect it to persist over time. Even though we can't strictly prove it, we have strong indications that the material world is independent of being experienced.
Against that claim one may argue that conscience may be something we share even though our memories are independent, something like Neoplatonism, the mind of god, Spinozism etc. A rough argument for this is that we all share the same capacity for reason (this essentially mirrors the argument for an independent physical reality).
This kind of argument has an unverifiable assumption that there are multiple other conscious observers besides yourself.
For all we can prove about the world, we might just be a single brain in a vat connected to a computer simulation.
Why make that assumption?
As a card-carrying idealist, I think language such as “creating the material world by observing it” is best avoided. Here’s what I would say instead:
Minds and their conscious experiences are the most fundamental reality, to which everything else can be reduced and/or from which everything else emerges. Physical events, entities, processes, laws, etc, are simply particular types of patterns in the experiences of minds. The experiences of different minds are (partially) correlated-that correlation is itself another such a pattern. What causes that correlation? Well, causation is also just a pattern; causation is a type of explanation, but every search for explanations must eventually end in something accepted without explanation (the Münchhausen trilemma), so something things just are the way they are, some patterns just exist, without having any other pattern as their cause. It’s patterns all the way down, until we reach minds and their experiences at the bottom. That’s all we can ever know, and all there is to know.
From that viewpoint, talk about “minds creating physical reality” is a rather imperfect metaphor, true in some ways, but also prone to leading to dubious assumptions (like the ones your quoted argument relies on)
And if this is a “faith-based” position-well, no more than materialism is-it is just spinning the arrow of reduction/emergence 180 degrees
Now you can imagine that most of the slices of possibilities are devoid of anything. They don't have space/energy/matter/time etcetera. But an infinitesimally small fraction of all possible universes (which is still an infinite number) do allow complex interactions, and of those slices of realities, our universe does allow things to get complex enough for matter to experience weird consciousness.
On the other hand, this does also mean that somewhere in this infinite field of infinities, there is a universe that contains an absolutely omniscient being called god that runs a simulation for his own pleasure and the result of this simulation is perfectly identical to the universe where there is no god, down to every single planck unit, and possibly beyond that. And from our point of view, there is no difference.
In this viewpoint of the universe, the answer to the question : Is there a god or is there no god? The answer is a boolean yes.
One counter to the claim that consciousness constructs the world, we could have some event witnessed by two independent observers. If the observers agree on what they witnessed, what explanation would there be that they just happened to construct the same event?
Personally, I feel the physical world exists independent of conscious observation. On the other hand, what we think we are observing clearly is affected by our flawed perceptions and our flawed consciousness.
Could you expand on this? Is it related to materialism (of the socioeconomic type)?
> Sometimes Capgras Syndrom turns inward and is called Cotard's syndrome, where the subject believes they are dead despite all evidence to the contrary.
This reminds me of the South Park episode where Cartman was convinced he was dead. Although that was from a point of narcissism rather than a brain disorder.
Not trying to make light of things, as the real disorder sounds harrowing. I have looked at old pictures of myself and others before and philosophically wondered if that person existed. I can't imagine feeling like that in real time and not just as a thought exercise.
(While space is expanding everywhere, we don’t observe it within galaxies, only between groups of galaxies-because within galaxies, and between nearby galaxies, the pull of gravity outweighs the expansion.)
It is just saying that distances between all (non-gravitationally-bound) objects grow over time.
Mathematically, the space is infinite, and the distance between all (non-gravitationally bound) points in that infinite space is growing. However, while mathematically space is infinite, whether physically it is infinite is considered unknown–and quite possibly unknowable.
Is the idea then that the big bang was the creation of the infinite mathematical space for things to expand into?
Not familiar with that idea. Which physicist(s) have proposed it?
> Is the idea then that the big bang was the creation of the infinite mathematical space for things to expand into?
Big Bang theory says that, as you go back in time, distances shrink, and density and temperature increases, until at a finite time in the past, density and temperature become infinite. "Creation" is a philosophical or theological concept, not part of physics, so physics doesn't really have anything to say about it.
The ontological relationship between physical space, and mathematical space(s), is also something which physics itself doesn't have anything to say about–that's a question for philosophy of physics and philosophy of mathematics. Max Tegmark claims the two are identical ("radical Platonism", "ultimate ensemble theory", "mathematical universe hypothesis", etc), but his view is far from mainstream (I don't think there really is a mainstream view per se, just that few would bet on his highly speculative theories being right). And although he is a physicist, in proposing that theory, he is arguably acting as a philosopher of physics rather than as a physicist proper.
In English, “materialism” has multiple unrelated meanings-“materialism” as in putting (excessive) value on material things is different from “materialism” as a theory in philosophy of mind (that the material brain is ontologically more fundamental than the conscious mind)-a person could be either without being the other, or a person could be both
Even among philosophers, “materialism” doesn’t always mean the same thing-when philosophers of mind debate “materialism”, they are discussing a rather different question than Marxist philosophers are when they use that word (even though those two debates started out as one, they’ve gone off in different directions, diverged)
It's the most sane position imho.
Thanks for your comment :)
Most people are just interchanging the word "consciousness" in place of "soul" but meaning exactly the same thing. Leaving the door open for something to persist after death while fooling themselves with more scientific sounding language for a medieval belief.
One is either alive or dead. There is no such property of "aliveness". One is either conscious or unconscious. There is no such property of "consciousness".
It is just such an unpalatable belief but I would think that is partially because belief in the soul is a defense against psychopathy at the level of society. I am not sure we could form such large societies without belief in the soul.
This is really the crux of the issue. There's consciousness as in experiencing existence in some way, there's consciousness as self-awareness and there's even consciousness as "able to think and plan."
Materialism falls flat if you apply it to that first definition, because your burden of proof is through the roof. This is where people get lambasted for talking about consciousness as an emergent property - it's basically a religious/chauvinist stance hand waved with fancy words and pseudo-scientific bullshit with no actual scientific or logical foundation.
Consciousness in the second and third sense are most definitely "emergent" to some degree. Nervous systems are simple in terms of basic organization and operation, but they allow for marvelously complex beings.
Consciousness is a wave. There is no soul. Matter is metaphor there is no difference only how we perceive solidity; which is simply scale.