Hacker News Reader

Comment by pegasus | Hacker News Reader

There's definitely a sizable contingent of people who desperately want to believe consciousness is just electrical impulses in our brain. Because "what else could it be"? The fact is that we just don't know, and "abiding in the not-knowing" is for many the most uncomfortable thing ever. Especially for the curious- and rational-minded people this forum tends to attract. I'm one of them, too.

View on HN

It is basically reductionism, or in the extreme atomism, and (as I understand it) it has largely fallen out of fashion both in the philosophy of science and in the philosophy of mind, since it heyday in the 1970s. And I don’t see it coming back into fashion any time soon.

I can definitely see why reductionism would appeal to an educated public. We learn about the periodic table; we are able to break sentences down to words, down to letters; to break an executable down to binary code, to machine instruction, to electrical currents flowing through semiconductors. Why shouldn’t we be able to do the same with conscious thoughts? It is certainly an appealing thought process.

As I understand it, reductionism started to fall out of favor because of the rise of quantum mechanics and chaos theory, where we have a lot of weird phenomena which cannot be explained by reducing the particles down to the sub-sub atomic (or rather they are better explained by describing the interactions directly).

Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory don't preclude reductionism, and I wouldn't say it has fallen out of favor as a whole. Certain types certainly have, but not the overall idea.

Also, nothing about the idea of the mind only being made up of physical processes means things have to be deterministic.

It doesn’t preclude it correct, however it provides a pretty strong examples of where reductionism is lacking, which what I believe has turned a lot of philosophers of science against pure reductionism (I am probably oversimplifying here. An expert science historian [which I am not] could probably write a whole book about why reductionism is not as popular today as it was in the 1970s).

There are a whole lot more physical processes going on in our bodies then just neural activity. And my best guess is that is exactly where reductionism fails. It is possible that neural activity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for consciousness. It is also possible that we are looking in the wrong direction, that consciousness arises via interactions with the world. In either case (of which I find the former quite convincing) we will never be able to describe the mind by just looking at neural activity.

I am actually of the opinion that cognitive scientists are doing an excellent job describing the mind with our current theoretical models which excludes the tough questions of consciousness.

I feel like these are separate things... neural activity being necessary but not sufficient for consciousness does not mean reductionism is wrong, it just means the fundamental building block is not a neuron.

It might not even be possible to fully understand the physical mechanisms that underlie consciousness, but that doesn't mean there has to be something more than physical mechanisms.

I didn’t say it was wrong, I said it was lacking and unpopular among modern philosophers of science. If you want to explain consciousness as arising from interaction with the environment (like Ted Chiang did in yesterday’s article) holism is a much better approach, same if you want to use evolutionary explanations, like Daniel Dennett did at the turn of the century.

I think reductionism is simply to limited of a philosophical framework for modern science and philosophy.

Yes. Even to this reductionist, “neural activity” is insufficient to describe to consciousness in the same way that “it’s physics” is insufficient to describe how a car works.

I could put a bunch of metal and rubber and gasoline in a pile and light it on fire — all the necessary ingredients for a car — but it wouldn’t create a working automobile. The arrangement of the objects and processes matters.

In the same way, if you put a bunch of brain cells together in a Petri dish, but their connections or firings were disordered, I wouldn’t expect consciousness. “Neural activity” is thus insufficient on its own, but this I doesn’t mean reductionism is incorrect. It just means you didn’t correctly reduce the problem to the correct constituent parts. You left some out.

Reductionism is a theoretical framework. It is neither right nor wrong, Sometimes a theory based on reductionism is wrong, but reductionism it self is never wrong.

Reductionism usually includes interactions of the lower parts (unless you are an atomist; in which case go back to ancient Greece), I never denied this. However even with the interactions, reductionism is still a lacking framework to describe consciousness. If it wasn’t so lacking it would be more popular among the people who actually study the mind.

If the mind is made up only of physical processes, then the only way it could be non-deterministic is if the physical processes themselves were non-deterministic. In that case neither the mind nor the physics can be reduced to a deterministic model in any meaningful sense where the same inputs would generate the same outputs, so reductionism falls apart if you introduce non-deterministic physics as the base.

Nit: A truly educated public would not take reason (empirical evidence, denial of the magical, unseen, or superstitious) to mean that we must assert that we live in a clockwork universe or assert an explanation of the mind based on observable Newtonian physics and electrical phenomena. Confusing a clockwork model of the universe with reason, or thinking that the choice between that and superstition is binary, is actually a pre modern and uneducated way of framing the problem of how the universe works, and if it's the recourse of the "educated" shows a dangerous regression from how educated they were 50 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com