Comment by Winsaucerer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Winsaucerer | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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.

> 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 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.

This is clearly an area that you are not much familiar with, and this is evidenced by the fact that you think that the following give some reason to think I'm wrong:

* 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.

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