The Nature of Consciousness | Hacker News Reader

The Nature of Consciousness

genius.com

20 pointssquircle6 comments

It's a problem when "philosophers" opine on physics without understanding physics very well. A few obvious examples:

> Long, long ago, physicists stopped asking the question 'What is matter?'

Physicists are absolutely still asking this question. One of the major open problems in physics is how to unify quantum mechanics (the law of small things) with general relativity (the law of heavy things). String theory looked promising for a while, but hasn't lead to a testable hypothesis. Whoever eventually solves this will be immortalized alongside Newton and Einstein.

> There are basically two kinds of philosophy. One's called prickles, the other's called goo. And prickly people are precise, rigorous, logical. They like everything chopped up and clear. Goo people like it vague. For example, in physics, prickly people believe that the ultimate constituents of matter are particles. Goo people believe it's waves.

This is so misguided, it's not even wrong. There are no "goo" people in physics, because vagueness is not scientific. Any decent physicist understands wave/particle duality, and will tell you that, actually, fields are the ultimate description of matter, as far as we currently know.

(BTW, putting this on Genius is clever, but painful to read. I could only browse a few screenfuls before I gave up.)

I believe the speaker, when saying that physicists have stopped asking "what is matter", means that physicists have focused themselves on questions about the rules that govern matter and energy, and not on the question of what meaning these concepts have.

If we imagine nature as a board game to which we don't know the rules, but can see some of the set of pieces set before us and observe their interactions, physics focuses on the question "what are the rules to this game?" Our speaker in this question is asking "what are these pieces made of?"

String theory, as an example, does not posit that particles are made out of strings, it posits that we can model particles mathematically with a structure that we call a "string". In this use of the word, "string" is a metaphor. What the nature of a "string" is--whether it is a coded abstraction in a computer simulation, whether the math is ground truth itself, whether this question is intractable to the human mind--is left up to philosophy.

>It's a problem when "philosophers" opine on physics without understanding physics very well

It's also a problem when physicists make assertions of fact on consciousness and psychology without understanding consciousness or psychology very well (which no one does).

Note: this was a lecture from 1969. I believe the text is on genius.com because the audio recordings of this lecture have been used in various chillstep mixes.

Here's a much more accessible version: https://www.organism.earth/library/document/out-of-your-mind...

Is this maybe what some cognitive scientists call "pseudo-profound bullshit"? [1]

I'm open to being persuaded otherwise.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

> "You see, when you make something, you put it together, you arrange parts, or you work from the outside in, as a sculpture works on stone, or as a potter works on clay. But when you watch something growing, it works in exactly the opposite direction. It works from the inside to the outside. It expands. It burgeons. It blossoms."

Reminds me of this great quote by Terrence Deacon on a podcast (I believe it was one of his Mind & Matter episodes). From memory:

> Engineering is in some sense the opposite of life: Engineering involves assembling components. Life involves differentiating wholes.

I highly recommend Deacon's 'Incomplete Nature', and I'm very psyched about his upcoming book “Falling Up: Inverse Darwinism and Life’s Complexity Ratchet”

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