Comment by eternalban | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eternalban | Hacker News Reader

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But you're stuck in sort of meta duality yourself: you assert a distinction between reality and phenomena (such as consciousness). Did we actually -prove- that consciousness can not be a property of reality and is mere emergent phenomenon as YB and company claim? (note: consciousness =/= intelligence. Our little black boxes are at best approaching 'intelligence'.)

YB starts off with ~'we all agree mind is a product of the brain'. No, we do not all agree. Did we ever find the 'bottom' of matter? Has are search to find 'irreducible particle' succeeded? Is it not the case that as we threw more energy into our apparatus we found more elementary matter? Did we in fact finally arrive at a coherent unified model that fully explains material reality without "mathematical woo"?

So the honest position is that we have patchwork understanding of reality at various scales, and the reductionist program of Democritus et al has not been conclusively shown to be the ultimate truth. It seems that mind is bounded by the body but that 'boundary condition' depends on various reductionist assumptions about materiality.

I didn't assert anything except for what was in the comment. I linked to the Wikipedia article which has a lot of different viewpoints.

If anything I was just trying to suggest that the mind (or soul) and body aren't completely separate things as some religious or pre-scientific viewpoints might hold (touched on in part of the Wikipedia article I linked to).

Maybe I didn't do a great job of stating where I was coming from.

You sound like Donald Hoffman when he was on the Lex podcast. I agreed with a lot of things he said.. I mean the idea that literally reducing things to smaller and smaller particles is not the ultimate explanation of things makes total sense. Along with the idea of using these mathematical exotic geometries instead or something.

Where he loses me is going from embryos to humans that are somehow dictating the shape of reality. We have great explanations for development and evolution. But there doesn't seem to be a good explanation at all for how fully formed minds somehow shape reality in the past. Or how this works with less intelligent life.

> I didn't assert anything except for what was in the comment.

That seems to be the case. I take that assert back.

p.s. just checked out the wiki for Donald Hoffman. Thank you for the reference, TIL. Have to listen to that podcast, but have some idea what are the problematic open Qs that you mention. [I'm not apparently not allowed to vote on hn so take my +1 in spirit ..]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36043188

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