Or alternatively, your comment is being downvoted for being random and off topic.
420 karma · joined April 27, 2014
The parent was asking which laws are not constructs, and your example I don't think works as an answer to that question. In what sense do you "have" that physical object? For example, what does it mean to say "I have a phone"? "Having" in that sense is a construct, not a natural thing. You might be holding the phone, you might put it down, I might hold it while you are holding it, I might pick it up when you put it down, I might look at it while you aren't, etc. But there's nothing in any of those real natural world descriptions that correspond to having, until you start to include our social constructs around possession.
But it's certainly far better than humans who are not skilled at those tasks, and that is what I find to be very impressive. I just didn't realise that these models could be this good, and they're not even as good as they will be.
I guess if you were expecting something that's going to be as good as those who are skilled in a particular field, you'll be unimpressed -- but I wasn't even expecting mediocrity.
In this particular instance, my son and his friend were unable to convince their teacher that the test/quiz was flawed, so the naive answer was the "right" one to win the teacher's approval.
Presumably, each question contains an instruction to follow. Being instructed to read all questions first doesn't mean you then do what any of the other questions instruct. Why, after reading all other 99 questions first, do you do what question 100 instructs but not what the others instruct?
Just one example, using these in games to generate unique conversations, actions, and events.
This resonates with me. I've quite often heard people say something like "I think I broke it", when they've done nothing of the sort with their computer. There's a general fear or worry that some (a lot of?) people have that if they don't use their computer with care, they'll ruin something.
Of course, you can ruin things, but that willingness to experiment is how I suspect many of us got good at these things. Trying, experimenting, breaking, and then fixing.
Easy to upgrade when you're ready.
I think of it a bit like walking. You can think about it, focus on it, control it as you please, but most of the time you just do it without thinking.
This is not something I deny. It is indeed true, as you say, "that qualia is modulated deeply by the physical aspects of the brain".
> concluding that "candleness" is not an emergent property
I think this isn't analogous, and I'll try to explain why. "Candle" is a word we made up, a convenient expression for a particular group of structures that we've decided to give a label to. Structures of kind 'candle' may exist in the world, and that's all there is to the story there. If you break this thing down, you no longer have that structure, and so no longer have a candle.
Qualia isn't like that. There isn't anything in the physical world corresponding to the 'blueness' in the world. There isn't a 'blueness' structure (there are wavelengths of light that correlate with me having an experience of blueness, but that isn't the blueness itself), and there isn't an object that is 'blueness'.
I don't know if this will help, but what I'm trying to point to here is 'blueness' as it is to us from the inside -- the experience of blueness. You can poke my brain in the right ways, and change my experience of blueness to be a different shade of blueness, or a different colour entirely. But the blueness itself, as it is to me in my experience, isn't in that materialist story.
You might talk about neurons, atoms, strings, fields, wavelengths, etc, but I don't see how to derive the blueness of my experience from talk about any of these things. With a candle, however, I can see where it is in the picture. We've agreed that candles are such and such structures, and so I can just look for those structures in the world and identify them. There's nothing to a candle above and beyond being a structure of the right sort.
In a good faith discussion, there are at least two parties, each trying to convince the other that they are wrong. Since the discussion is in good faith, each should also be open to the possibility they've missed something they hadn't considered before (perhaps some information they lacked, or a connection between ideas that they'd previously missed).
Thus far I've been trying to argue against materialism. When it comes instead to the topic of you convincing me that materialism is true, I find it hard to see any possible path for that to happen without first identifying this thing ('blueness'), and then either showing me where it is in the materialist picture, or explaining it away. As an idealist, when it comes to talk about the physical world, I explain it away -- I deny that there is any genuine mind-independent physical world. Part of that 'explaining away' includes an explanation of our experiences as of a physical world, and an explanation for why our talk about physical things still makes sense.
For my part, without exaggeration, it seems to me as if physicalism talks about everything except the largest and most important thing the room. And so I think that I can't really be blamed for retorting "you haven't really explained the blue-ness of blue" if you haven't. I need to be able to see how materialism can make sense of it if I'm to consider changing my view. Without it, I just can't see a bridge from where I am to there.
* 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.
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.
With that being said, if I understand you right, I think your meditative insight was a good one. That even things like thoughts and feelings (including things like the realization itself!) are themselves perceptions or phenomenology. Again -- if I understand you right -- I think that is a powerful realization. It sounds almost like your own view is on a path towards an idealist one.
I also agree that this level and structure of complexity is representable by our brain. Even though I think brains ultimately reduce to facts about the idea of a physical world in God's mind, I think the perceptions we have (including experiences like realizations) are because of the brains we have (and perhaps other facts about the world).
I'm afraid what I'm saying may not make much sense, given the short space I have to say it.
> they will accept what they call "micro evolution", but somehow thing that "macro evolution" is impossible > ... > It seems like people imagine toy physicalist model of a brain and can't see how blueness can ever appear. Human imagination, by and large, can't really think well about big numbers
This isn't a problem of scale. There is nothing on the physicalist's story, either at the smallest end or the biggest that carries a whiff of being anything relevant. What is it you had in mind as being the seed from which big things may grow at scale? That is, the 'micro evolution' of this discussion.
> The examples I brought up you are willing to concede might be fully explained on materialist grounds, but hold out that experiences themselves are categorically different.
The things I have in mind as needing explaining aren't fully or even partially explainable on materialist grounds. What I was pointing out is that whether you're a materialist, idealist, or dualist, you're going to agree to the claim that there is a correlation between the mental and the physical. E.g., we present an image of just the right sort, and now someone thinks they're seeing curved lines when in fact the lines are straight. That is all I said -- just a correlation, nothing more.
> Why can't the feeling of fear simply be neural state of where, say, heart rate is elevated, adrenaline levels are high, accompanied by activation of piloerection muscles? What evidence is there that it requires anything more than this to be experienced as fear?
This sounds similar to identity theory, a view with a strong pedigree, and a view that I think is one of the materialist's best options here. The problem I have is that it completely misses the actual thing I care about. You can talk about heart rates, adrenaline levels, activation of piloerection muscles, etc, but none of these things contain in them even the seed of the thing I really care about: an explanation for the phenomenology. What is this phenomenology? I know I can experience blueness under such and such a condition, but what is this 'blueness' thing itself? In all your talk about these things, there is no mention of the most important part, the phenomenology/experience. It's completely missing!
> The resulting state is perceived as a pleasing shade of blue
This is what I want to know more about -- 'perceived'. We both agree about the correlation facts: which physical changes result in which experiences/perceptions/phenomenology. But what I want to know about is how does physical stuff have any kind of perception at all?
Phenomenology like smells, tastes, feeling happy, pain -- these things are not found in purely physical descriptions of the world, not at the smallest level nor at the largest. They are nowhere. All your talk is talk about muscles, neurons, hearts, etc, and I don't see even the shadow of phenomenology there. I want to know about 'blueness' itself, and all you've given me is neurons and cones and so forth -- just the story about the correlation.
I think this is a clever thought experiment. For those of us who think there is a genuine hard problem of consciousness, it won't convince us that physicalism has anything close to an explanation, and I'll try to explain why.
When you dismantle a brain, or indeed a body, you lose something else as well -- you lose the capability of any kind of consciousness to (a) report back on its experiences (no mouth or no neurons to fire), and (b) store memories of those experiences so that when it's rebuilt it can report them back. So depending on the story we tell, there are other accounts of consciousness that are not ruled out by this experiment, such as panpsychism -- e.g., perhaps there's consciousness even in the atomic things of the world, in which case organisation isn't the relevant factor.
Moreover, suppose the organisation is important in the way this thought experiment suggests. What is the explanation for why some kinds of organisation produce consciousness, while other kinds of organisation do not? Say, the sand on the beach vs the component parts of my brain? I suspect the response will be related to the amount of information or entropy present in one vs the other, which is a measurable physical property. But then we wonder, *how* does information or order or whatever other physical property we point to produce consciousness? These all look like correlations -- try and find a pattern and say "this physical thing (organisation, information, order, firings of neurons, etc) is the thing which has consciousness". Maybe it does have consciousness, but *why*? Even if you show us that organisations of physical things in the right way is the place where we always and only find conscousness, why do we always and only find it there? These things are clearly not identical to consciousness/phenomenology/mental stuff (organisation is not consciousness), so why do we impute consciousness onto them?
We impute consciousness onto them because we have that first hand knowledge that we have an inner life, that there is a what-it-is-like to be us, so we have to locate that somewhere. It can't be eliminated (though some thing it can!), and so we have to find room for it. And if you are a physicalist, then you know, per your theory, that the answer must be found in the physical world somewhere. Therefore, in your clever thought experiment, you find your way to track down organisation as the relevant physical property. But then the question remains, how and why does organisation come to be/produce/create consciousness?
With that said, I'd like to reply further, becacuse I think you may be mixing up what we call hard problems of consciousness with easy problems of consciousness. Easy problems relate to things like correlations between the mental and the physical. The hard problems relate to things like how we would explain consciousness at all given, say, the tools the materialist has available. Your reply seems to muster evidence that relates to the easy problems but not the hard. I do not know of any kind of possible experiment researchers could be working on to address the hard problem.
I assume the author did not define consciousness because the problem they refer to is well known and discussed. When we talk about consciousness with respect to the mind/body problem, we're talking about the fact that there is an inner phenomenology, or a what-it's-like to be us. This kind of consciousness can be present while asleep, because it's not about the being awake and being aware, but rather the fact there is something that it's like to be you.
With that in mind, the examples you refer to with optical illusions, the man who mistook his wife as a hat, and so on, are all irrelevant to the hard question. There is absolutely no doubt that changes in the physical world can result in changes in the mental, including optical illusions -- the materialist, the dualist, and the idealist all agree on this point, and such examples will not settle the hard question. Our experiences are shaped, enormously, perhaps even as much as wholly, by our brain states. This is all part of the work of the easy problems of consciousness. None of that means or entails or suggests that the mental is an emergent property of the material, or that the material comes first.
An idealist of the sort I am will say something like this: God has in mind an idea of a physical world, and based on God's idea of that world (which includes God's idea of our brain) impresses upon other minds an experience of, say, a tree with leaves blowing in the wind. If my brain is wired differently, then I will have different experiences impressed upon me by God because of that than what others might experience. Perhaps the leaves of the tree will look a different colour to me than they do to others, all because of facts about my brain states (which themselves reduce to facts about an idea in God's mind).
The materialist has no way -- not even the vaguest hint of a way -- to explain the mental, the phenomenology of our consciousness. There is no explanation that can be given that says how we can go from the physical to the mental. The best that can be done are things like: deny the existence of any phenomenology/inner experiences altogether so that there's nothing to explain (or similarly -- literally identify brain states mental states and say they are the same thing), embrace some kind of non-reductive physicalism (which in my opinion amounts to a form of dualism), or hope that some clever person will come up with a better explanation one day.
Idealist views do not suffer from an an analogous "hard problem of non-consciousness". The idealist can give an explanation for the physical on their view, but the physicalist cannot give an explanation of the mental.
In short, the code it produces has to be reviewed by programmers who know what they're doing. Sometimes that speeds things up to have it produce the code and we review it, but sometimes it slows things down and it's easier to just write it yourself.
I see ChatGPT as an extremely powerful tool that can boost a programmer's productivity, but despite its incredible capability it cannot be trusted in ways that we can trust human programmers.
I've always enjoyed arguing (in the sense of a polite dialogue between two who disagree). But for me, even though I enjoy arguing, being right is more important -- which includes trying to cultivate the discipline to recognise and acknowledge when my interlocutor makes a good point, and trying to understand why they think what they do.
At university, I checked out the debating club, thinking it might be a good fit for me, but I was wrong. There, the goal seemed to be purely to win, correctness be damned. I found the arguments they marshaled towards their goal to be dishonest and contrary to the goals of increasing understanding and getting to the heart of a matter.
I can see how that could be seen as a sport or competition of sorts, but I worried about the kind of habits it might form. It is too similar to the kind of arguing I enjoy that it would be easy to slip from one mode to the other if those debate club type skills were developed and honed.
I don't know if that counts as plagiarism, but there's clearly some use of this copyright material that the authors probably didn't envision and did not grant permission for. I have no idea what the law would be in cases like this
It's not obvious to me that the implicit permission we've been granting for humans to view our content for free also means that we've given permission for AI models to be trained on that data. You don't automatically have the right to take my content and do whatever you like with it.
I have a small inconsequential blog. I intended to make that material available for people to read for free, but I did not have (but should have had!) the foresight to think that companies would take my content, store it somewhere else, and use it for training their models.
At some point I'll be putting up an explicit message on my blog denying permission to use for ML training purposes, unless the model being trained is some appropriately open-sourced and available model that benefits everyone.