Hmmm...I don't find this compelling, at all.
Perhaps the notions are so pervasive that they were integrated into my mind and way of thinking early on due to the initial popularity of this writing?
Perhaps the notions are so pervasive that they were integrated into my mind and way of thinking early on due to the initial popularity of this writing?
There's a gap between accepting that the mind is ultimately made up of neurons firing and what it feels like to be a mind made up of neurons firing.
Depending on one's upbringing, they likely hold deep unexamined beliefs - bedrocks of thinking - that more or less boil down to: the mind feels like some mystical thing. People can believe in the science of biology and conceptually understand that they're the product of long spans of evolution while still feeling like the mind is quite a mystical and mysterious thing.
And it can be hard to cut through this feeling without intentionally uprooting those unexamined beliefs. I know this from personal experience. My upbringing involved the deep conditioning of a religious world view that instills these mystical ideas. I left it behind in my late teens. It wasn't until my mid 30s that I started to deeply appreciate how embedded those feelings were, and even though I didn't believe them when examining them rationally, I realized they were still there in my underlying thought processes, influencing my interpretation of everyday things.
So I wouldn't say it's just that people "still believe the mind is some mystical thing" (although this group does exist), but that "the default mode of experience for many people is the one that feels mystical".
Nature itself plans trajectories to minimize action, the integral of a Lagrangian: it's literally just a number, but it decides the motion of molecules and galaxies. What's wrong with a moral system based around minimizing a pain integral, subject to constraints? Still just a number. But one that can easily take an important position in our decision-making, and find a deep-seated place in our minds as well.
Of course, we probably ended up with morals in the first place as a distillation of game-theoretic heuristics, which helped us trust and cooperate with each other, which would have been an evolutionary benefit. But as with anything else, we're accountable to the drives that evolution left us with, not evolution's reasons for putting them there. The morals are in our minds, not in nature, but either way it's numbers all the way down.
Maybe we're deeply wrong about our intuitions, and actually no conscious experience is happening in the brain at all, despite the brain having an incorrect model about itself which predicts this (and causes it to make utterances claiming that it has experiences). That's the school of thought known as eliminitivism. Under this view, all suffering is a myth, in the same way that luckiness and angels are.
If we have some internal decision-making process that pushes us to make decisions that minimize a pain metric, the sign we attach to the "pain" number will make a very big difference, both in internal state and resultant observed behaviour.
Edit: or if you dont like that explanation, why should a consensus of a calculation have any more merit than an individual calculation?
Consensus matters because if people around you disagree with you they will kill you or put you in prison. At rock bottom this is how all laws and ethical norms are created.
It would be honest to admit that we don‘t know why consciousness subjectively feels like anything. Pointing to complexity or integrated information doesn‘t explain this at all. It‘s easy to imagine a complex process that doesn‘t have a subjective experience.
so it's not "just a calculation"? I am NOT trying to make a joke/reference to Clinton, but I think in these philosophical conversations, we have to step back even further and question what our definition of "is" is.
Again, I'm a CS grad who has never taken philosophy, so I'm sure this has been explored to death by people who own this field. But there's absolutely a point in philosophy where you can't even rely on "what is true": slamming my fingers in the doorway IS painful (to me), but it IS also "just a calculation" to almost everyone else in the universe. Just as Einstein proved, two observers can experience different realities, fundamentally, two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door).
What do you mean by "just a calculation" here, and how does everyone else's experience of pain apply?
You seem to be implying that for everyone who is not the 1st person subjective experiencer of pain, the only possible representation of that pain is some form of "calculation". You seem to further imply that this reduction somehow says something specific about the nature of pain itself. Am I reading this right?
Sure, you could choose to use some process of calculation as one way to measure pain, but this isn't the only way to conceptualize it, nor is it the only way that people experience it.
e.g. mirror neurons are interesting to consider. We have in our brains these neurons dedicated to experiencing what we observe others experiencing. We cringe when we see someone suddenly become involved in a painful accident. We recoil when we see something horrific. The nature of what the observer experiences is almost certainly very different than what the person in pain is experiencing, but there's a shared experience for those in proximity.
Whatever pain is or isn't, the fact that its effects can be localized to a single person and the fact that it may be calculable in some way seem unrelated to each other.
> two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door)
You hurting your finger in the door and me not feeling the exact thing you experienced are independent facts about the state of the world when the door slamming occurred. Mutual exclusivity seems misapplied here.
That is an assumption, and a dangerous one at that. What you speak of is a kind of 'empathy', a feeling of emotions by Proxy... not everyone actually has that... some people don't cringe at other's pain, for some: their pupils dilate.
That's a tangent to the current discussion, but yeah... some 'calculate your pain', other's 'calculate the pleasure your pain cause in them'...
But to add to the discussion, pain isn't localizable to one person, not always, at least... so is emotion/feeling mappable a calculation of the neurons? (maybe/probably)
Not exactly. I'm showing the abusrdity of people who think that the brain is just a computer and that its results: "just a number" fly in the face of their reality of experiencing pain. If it's just a number, why don't they slam their hand in the door and show us?
> You seem to further imply that this reduction somehow says something specific about the nature of pain itself. Am I reading this right?
By their own definition, "the nature of pain itself" is just a number, just a result of a huge calculation of trillions of neurons with substantially higher numbers of networks. The terrifying sound, the facial expressions, the visceral "gut-feeling", thats all just pattern recognition (on your behalf), there's nothing more to it than a calculation, right?
> Mutual exclusivity seems misapplied here.
technically correct but only because we could, in theory, both inflict pain on ourselves simultaneously using the doorway.
In any case, the mystical and physical are not fixed. Imagine explaining the consequences of relativity to a skeptical individual of times past. Think of his response to the notion that time itself is a variable and can move at different rates for different people in different circumstances. It sounds like absurd mystical sci-FI nonsense. Except it's real, so now has been promoted from the mystical to the physical.
So what a skeptic of today would label "mystical" will almost certainly change over the centuries and millennia yet to come. Scarcely more than a century ago, state of the art transport was a horse, computers did not exist, quantum physics did not exist, relativity did not exist, human flight was widely believed to be impossible, and so on endlessly. It seems unlikely in just a century that we've even scratched the surface of knowledge yet to come, let alone meaningfully penetrated into it.
This is exactly my objection. I fully believe were mechanical machines, fully believe in determinism, I think human behavior /thoughts will fully be explained mechanically etc but I cannot find any way to deny consciousness or qualia and reduce them to physical properties (lest we augment our definition of physical to include consciousness as a fundamental property. I also contest the notion that doing so would be "mysticism" or any less scientific than having added "mystical" properties like force/energy and randomness into the standard model of physics). It seems the motivation for this has far more to do with desperately trying to cram everything into materialism than following sense.
Until one can give any kind of plausible explanation as to how feeling/qualia can become an emergent property of matter, it is a complete mystery. My thoughts are it is impossible as they are completely orthogonal and complimentary properties. Qualia is the experience of going through the physical process. Pain is the experience of having this mysterious thing called force acted upon pain receptors hooked up to a working neural system. The physical description can explain exactly what happens, but yet it leaves us with an experience that has no physical description. How can that be?
Lastly, there will always be unanswered questions or presumptions in science (how did the universe emerge? what makes up energy?), so while the attempt to do is formidable, the presupposition that consciousness must be explained by science is nonsensical.
Dennet's eliminative materialism isn't some well accepted philosophical position. In fact, its one the most rejected. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5042 https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlation...
We just had a long discussion about this if you're interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40254047#40257234
I'll also add the eliminative materialism is probably not the precise position to describe his views on consciousness. You could be the polar opposite of Dennett, like a Jerry Fodor, and still be a staunch anti-realist about consciousness (a view that I think Fodor even entertained). I take EM to be an assault on folk psychology, which may or may not include qualia, and illusionism is probably the better term for his position on qualia.
Where I disagree completely is qualia. Dennet makes some arguments about how any attribute/description we can ascribe to qualia is contradictory. As I see it, a failure to describe it with language has no bearing on the fact that it exists as a mental phenomenona.
Out of curiosity, have you read any of the newer attempts to vindicate the view that most now call illusionism? I doubt you will find it compelling, but leastwise it serves as an update with some pretty new arguments and fresh blood. You might find it amusing: https://philarchive.org/archive/KAMHCY-2
The first argument given for illusionism is merely stating physical processes are strongly anagaolous to mental pheneomena. Ok agreed, but this is equivalently supports a panpsychic view. It just states "if one adds anomalousness as a premise for illusion, and then further assumes that illusionism is a possibility, then we have strong evidence of illuionism". Huh?? Cant one make the exact same argument for panpschyism? If one adds a premise that physical properties are anomalousness with conscious experiences, and then one supposes that the possibility of panpsychism is evidence for panpsychism then we ought to believe in panpsychism. Besides, what about a synonymous relationship between two things denotes one is illusionary and a product of the other? All this does is show that a singular criteria of illusion is met.
The second argument is even more bizarre. It starts with the premise that consciousness/conscious phenomena can be explained fully by physical properties (but not right now, but science will obviously explain it surely, one day). Is this so obviously true that zero words are given to it's justification?
Then the rest of the article is an argument to how one cannot treat the "obviousness" of experience so casually...
It doesnt seem to me that illusionists actually deny conscious phenomena. More so, they call it an "illusion" and claim this makes the hard problem equivalent to the easy problem. i.e it becomes reducible to giving it a physical explanation. But if all is meant by "its an illusion" is "its really just a physical process", it doesnt grant any useful pathway. It seems very circular.
All this makes me really wonder if some of us truly are p zombies and thst the illusionists have managed to figure out a test for it.
Normative pain means there are a set of beliefs and actions that are attached to certain states that carry connotations of goodness, badness, etc. I would consider this usage the cousin of projectivism, where we project moral properties onto physical states of affairs.
>The first argument given for illusionism is merely stating physical processes are strongly anagaolous to mental pheneomena. Ok agreed, but this is equivalently supports a panpsychic view. It just states "if one adds anomalousness as a premise for illusion, and then further assumes that illusionism is a possibility, then we have strong evidence of illuionism".
I think this is a good point, but I do see a lot of illusionist and panspychist arguments as attempting to hollow out the middle ground positions. Thus Chalmers "If I were a physicalist I would be a illusionist". I think the arguments can still be interesting if it leaves us with a dichotomy.
And Im not so sure materialism necessitates reduction of consciousness. It entirely depends on what one considers to be "material". I would hold for example, that if consciousness were a fundamental property of all matter, it would fit any functional meaning of the term "material" as it relates to scientific inquiry.
By "materialism" what we really seem to mean here is "a conservatory position on what constitutes material". If one accepts consciousness as a property of matter, then it becomes a materialist view, no?
As the map gets better and better, it’s seen as more and more acceptable to look at that map as if it provides ultimate answers. But it still has nothing to tell us about primordial existence.
Consciousness sits in the same category of unexplained and possibly unexplainable.
Who knows. Maybe all matter truly is conscious and the spectrum of available conscious states scales with the complexity of the matter’s configuration. In either case, I don’t feel that a purely mechanical explanation is necessarily relevant to the question people often claim it answers.
Looks like a good thread. Thanks.
This leads to the idea that we will cease to exist to just be unbelievable, as it's contrary to everything we have ever experienced. From this I think we get the idea of some essence separate from our biology and the idea of its continuation after death.
This is argument from authority.
In Penrose's case, while his position is mildly interesting, most other scientists and philosophers interested in consciousness and mind/brain questions completely reject it.
No, it isn't. An argument from authority would be me claiming that X is true because Penrose says so. The parent poster had said "I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology." To which I responded with a data point: a highly respected physicist (indeed, an authority) who professes to be, essentially, a Cartesian dualist. I wasn't even claiming that X is true.
HNers do seem to love casually slinging claims of logical fallacies at each other.
Had you started with: "There are a handful (and I do mean a mere handful) of scientists, most of them with no background in either brain or computation science, who think ...." and then later mentioned Penrose, you'd be right.
But you chose to lead with his nominal status derived from his life as a talented and (rightfully) celebrated mathematician, thus attempting to improve the otherwise less than marginal status of the quantum-centric view of consciousness with his authority.
We're looking at a protection system from the inside. Brains are internally interconnected distributed systems, but we're evolved not to feel that way. Trying to reconcile that drives philosophers and theologians into inventing dualism, souls, and other hacks to explain the concept of a unified mind. That goes back at least two millennia and hasn't helped much.
Brains are distributed systems. They have features to drive them towards eventual internal consistency. Failures of those features underlay schizophrenia and similar disorders. Has neuroscience explored eventually-consistent system theory yet? That might be useful.
[1] https://wolpertlab.neuroscience.columbia.edu/sites/default/f...
If everything is determined by biology, and biology is determined by chemistry, and chemistry is determined by physics (quantum or classical). The next question is: "from where does 'choice' come from? if the sum of each part contains none to begin with, how can it emerge without 'proto-choice properties'?"
The conclusion from this view must be one of two:
1) That 'choice' is an unfounded axiom, an illusion of subjective qualities that we misinterpret as our 'will'.
2) Though if we do have 'will', and ability to exert control via choice, and not be controlled by physically determined processes... perhaps that is this notion of 'chance/random' which we seem to have to deal with.
A consequence of point 2 is that if that is our ability to choose, how can we choose better than the baseline 'random' as we apparently do?
Dennett has you covered there too. His book "Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting" is a must-read on this topic.
I'm talking about objective reality, not subjective experience. The free will I'm interested in knowing if it exists or not is one we (in theory) could possible eventually measure (a difference in what physical processes say we should do and what we actually do). I'm interested in 'actual' free will, the ability to do what you would otherwise not.
Illusionary free wills are boring to discuss - as they are merely redefining our experiences in terms feed-back systems... which obviously exist - but that's not free will, that's our understanding and knowledge about observable systems.
The only free will that matters is: can we defy physics, or are we subjects of physics from now until the end of time. Are we free to choose the actions or is physics determining the actions we take. Are we in control of our lives or is the universe and we just lie to ourselves to keep on keeping on?
If everything is run by physics - that make you physics' sweet submissive.
edit: reading the back cover - the idea's of control vs freedom and elbow room are familiar, and in my opinion entirely misguided from the point I raise above... a feedback-system that allows you to control results is not a good definition of free will. What free will in that case is: is being able to choose anything in response to that feedback system... which has yet to be shown to be the case... and good arguments argue that it is impossible.
Reading the back cover is certainly not an adequate way to assess the contents (not that it ever is, but is certainly is not in this case).
Also - having read the short story - 'Where Am I' relies heavily on the author's incredulity to make their arguments... which is unconvincing to me. Not being able to conceive of something is different than the reality of that thing. It's a story about confusing subjective experience with objective reality. The reality of the 'self' is different than your own point of view of what that self is. Your subjective experience is just that: subjective and not objective...
He also makes dubious claims in that story like 'the self can move faster than the speed of light'... That's going to need some evidence to claim something that fantastical...
It is a fantastic story, fun and fantastical, and asks interesting questions...
Just because something isn't physical doesn't mean that it is mystical or magical; it is just a different kind of Stuff. The idea that only physical things exist is intuitively pretty compelling to me, but I've found arguments to the contrary to be much more convincing.
Suppose that you were to manually fire neurons in this person's brain, so as to exactly simulate the brain's response to red-frequency photons hitting the retina. Would this give them such an understanding? I would guess that most people would say yes. So one can learn subjective experiences without needing the perception to actually occur. In some sense the subjective experience is physically encoded in the details of the neural intervention.
The interesting question is where is the line on the spectrum between verbal explanations and direct neural intervention, at which such an understanding becomes impossible to impart?
If you ask me, there is nothing short of direct firsthand experience that will allow you to understand what it is like to see the color red.
Here's some further reading on that argument, if you're interested: https://iep.utm.edu/know-arg/
Perhaps pedantic, but I'd argue there is no perception going on, since the senses are not involved.
> the important part is that you are making them experience redness firsthand
To me the important part is this: knowledge of the experience of redness can be transferred to a someone, without them going through the process of seeing redness, but purely by means of changes to their neural states. Framed this way, it is not so difficult to swallow that similar neural changes could also happen in response to reading or being told about seeing the colour red.
I can see where you are coming from with the idea that you could trigger those neural changes through some other process. It's an interesting idea, and I wonder if it could be true in practice somehow. Regardless, I'd still argue that you are manipulating the brain in one way or another to create a firsthand experience of seeing the color red. If you can explain redness fully in terms of physical systems and processes, then somebody having that firsthand experience for the first time shouldn't be thinking "oh, so that's what it is like to actually see red."
If these are purely physical processes, then that knowledge should have come along with your complete knowledge of all of physics. You should also know what it is like to have experiences that your brain doesn't have the hardware for, like a bat's experience of echolocation. It seems like an unfairly high bar to clear; how could you understand an experience without having it firsthand? But if you are committed to believing that conscious experience is a physical thing, then I think you are also committed to believing that it can be fully described in physical terms. Physicalists do have arguments that try to explain how you could pass that bar in theory or dodge the commitment altogether, but personally I think those arguments are pretty weak.
I mean, I think I totally agree here. It's just that I think a "full" explanation would be able to include a description of "what it is like". And that somebody having the firsthand experience would think "Yup, that matches what I read it would be like". The cynical side of me feels that people who deny this will ever be possible are being a little pessimistic or unambitious.
> You should also know what it is like to have experiences that your brain doesn't have the hardware for, like a bat's experience of echolocation.
I don't think that this necessarily follows. The hardware defines limits to what an individual can understand. I will never have a full understanding of the location and velocity of every atom in the universe - even if in principle a physical description of it could exist - because my brain's hardware is insufficient to represent the model. Likewise I cannot expect a human to know what it's like to have a bat's experiences. But there could in principle be a super AI that can understand both human and bat experiences.
The value of this story, in my opinion, isn't just that these are neat things to think about. There are deep unanswered questions here that challenge how we understand the connection between materialistic science and a non-materialistic belief in "self", and push the limits of theories of ethics. For example, right up to the very end it keeps throwing new questions at you, such as "What is justice when 'two' people have identical claims on a fundamental right? Namely, which of them gets to keep the body? Which of them gets the estate? Which of them is married?"
Dennett's story is a powerful instigator of thought on these topics.
It's popular to think of "ourselves" as a sort of "ghost in a machine," and we particularly assume the ghost resides in the brain, but I don't think that's what people are at all. I don't think either our brains or the rest of our bodies are separable from our selves.
That's not to say you can't validly discuss how to treat the body and/or the brain, but I think the person here, the I, has died.
Is there a minimum number of organic connections we need to be alive?
How would you convince this person that their 'I' has died?
I think these questions are exactly along the lines of the question this story begs.
"Convincing a person that their 'I' has died" is a category error, like a married bachelor. Corpses can't know they're dead, and anything simulating life for the corpse isn't a person to convince.
There might be some other entity deserving of rights that does exist. I'm not about to argue that only persons deserve rights. I don't think a horse is a person, but I do think it has a right not to be abused. There's a meaningful discussion to be had about what rights the corpse and simulation ought to have in this circumstance.
But "convincing a person their 'I' has died" is self-contradictory. Being able to put the words together in a syntactically coherent sentence doesn't make the idea possible.
In that case, the question is still valid: how would you convince the non-person "I" that the "I" is dead?
(I can see how the original "person I" might be dead after such a change, but it doesn't really make the premise invalid.)
Keep in mind, this is all in the context of why I don't find the article compelling. It's because I disagree with one of the fundamental premises of its proposed hypothetical situation, one so fundamental that the thought experiment is dull without it.
I'm not here to change your mind. I'm just explaining why I don't find the thought experiment interesting. Suspension of disbelief about some core thing you believe to be true about the world is fun for the sake of science fiction stories, but it's dull for the sake of philosophical thought experiments.
I'm curious now instead why you'd grant rights to entities that don't have an "I". Isn't that pointless? Or is it a mistake on my part, i.e. maybe there's no "I" but there's still a "you"?
In the "you" case, do you think the thought experiment could be reframed as an attempt at answering the question "where is the you?"?
The legal system (at least in the U.S.) seems to need to call something a "person" in order for it to have rights (e.g., corporations), but I don't think the legal system is the origin of rights.
"I" and "thou" go together as references to personhood, so I wouldn't distinguish between the two. (And I'm mostly using "thou" here instead of "you" to show I'm referring to the concept rather than you personally. The "I/Thou" philosophical concept also has precedent of using the term.)