joeberon

As a doctor in quantum physics, we probably will be able to test between interpretations in the future, so you should not use this as an argument.

What's this got to do with "emerging as a field"? Yes Maths is hard, yes generally people don't like to do it, but that doesn't mean it hasn't "emerged as a field".

What are you talking about? Mathematics has well and truly "emerged as a field" lmao

AI/ML research is not "way bigger" than astrophysics lol

Your comments are marked as "dead" and must be vouched for by a member of the community with high enough "karma" (such as myself). It is a Hacker News anti-spam feature that you seem to have become the victim of.

It may not reflect reality in any way but I still have this fundamental "worry" or feeling regardless. This machine is still worrying about it.

I can't find a reason to deny that

Yes, people who believe that consciousness is an emergent property of sufficiently complicated systems would say that a sufficiently complicated computer experiences qualia and is conscious.

Yeah I think you have to misrepresent to get people in, but personally I don't like that. I would rather we don't lie about it and Buddhism (for example) dies than we misrepresent it.

This is personally my feeling of it too. I think the boundaries between us are illusory, and that it is all continuous and fuzzy. So a universal consciousness is no issue for me, one that is neither singular nor separate.

Faith is a fundamental part of Buddhism.

Even if you decided to become a Buddhist now, it is really unlikely you would be able to achieve significant progress, because we are in the Dharma ending age and only extremely high capacity individuals have the chance to liberation...

If you are interested in Buddhism, your best chance at liberation is to put your faith in Amitabha's vow and hope for a rebirth in his Pure Land, which is basically the ultimate Buddhist training camp.

Namo Amitabha Buddha!

> Have you considered that maybe the only path to victory for Buddhism is by being flexible enough to rise above the bollucks?

If it were true that such flexibility in doctrine were necessary for liberation, the Buddha would have taught it.

I'm not interested in convincing you to take up Buddhism at all. You can if you want, it would be good for you, but I fundamentally don't care. The thing I do care about, is if you're gonna do it, don't go out and start pretending that Buddhism is something that it really isn't, especially if you have not done much research into it.

Personally, I would prefer you don't get involved in Buddhism at all rather than try and draw some narrow metaphors out of Buddhist texts for use in your secular life.

Yeah that's a pretty common experience actually. There are a lot of memes on tiktok and twitter joking about "gaining consciousness" as a child. I think a lot of people remember moments as young children where they first truly felt like real separate beings.

I haven't experienced that the teachings need to change personally, but yes the emphasis needs to. Unfortunately westerners are being fed teachings that are more like "this meditation will make you experience a sober LSD trip" and "this one will cure your depression" and "this will give you insight into the nature of reality", because that's what westerners want. But what they actually need is teachings on compassion, loving kindness, etc, which they are in no way interested in. Ultimately you cannot have one without the other. There are no eastern spiritual paths that don't integrate both insight and compassion.

> Teachings need to be updated and modernized as we progress as society.

I don't think there's any way to do that without understanding them, but to understand them fully you basically have to become a Buddha...so it is not clear how to do this without removing essential parts of the teachings, as are often done when surgically transposing bits of eastern philosophy into the west

Personally I think most people who argue consciousness is an emergent property of complicated physical systems would believe that the machine would still be conscious after replacing every neuron with a chip

That's the problem and exactly why I say I don't think it can't be explained via a vague feeling. I've never seen someone who says there is a hard problem of consciousness adequately explain to someone why there isn't. The poster is now making what seem more like appeals to emotion throughout the thread now: "are you saying that sufficiently complicated blocks of matter are conscious?" and the like. This is what always happens.

While I personally believe there is a problem, I cannot explain why, and for a long time I didn't think there was a problem

> Any block of matter arranged just so is conscious in that framing, which differs from the religious framing.

That is literally the secular materialist view of consciousness, yes.

I don't have it, because it's not my argument, it's their argument, and it's clearly making you emotional so I think it's better to stop it here.

A vast majority of people who believe that consciousness is an emergent property would also say that a sufficiently advanced computer is exactly as conscious as you or I. At least when I believed that human consciousness was an emergent property I believed that an advanced robot would be totally conscious.

Yeah I think a more interesting problem is asking what the difference between an electronic robot that behaves in every way like a human, and a human, is. Or further, an electronic robot where every single neuron in the human was completely simulated. I thought about this a lot when I was a teenager lol, surely in this case such a robot must have a subjective experience just as we do, but why?

Those same people might say that it is just the experience of "being the computer" rather than seeing it from afar. But I don't know, because personally it isn't an argument I find convincing.

As an aside, I think you have to be a bit arrogant or closed minded to assert that they actually can see the problem. I really don't think my wife is lying or being nefarious when she says she doesn't see a problem. I trust her and others when they say they don't see a problem.

Well we do know emergent phenomena that occur as abstractions. Probably the most obvious example is a computer program. At a basic level, the computer really doesn't look like it's doing useful work, it just processes lists of rules and stuff, but actually the emergent behaviour is that I am browsing Hacker News. What is the difference between a computer and a rock? Well there isn't actually a fundamental difference, other than that the computer is physically arranged such that it is doing some complicated calculation resulting in this rich UI experience.

I think it's the same with the brain. Why is there consciousness in this brain and not in a rock? Well because the brain is set up to perform a complicated "calculation" and the rock is not. Just like the program's behaviour only exists as an emergent property of the computer's physical state, so does consciousness arise as an emergent property from the brain's physical state.

EDIT: to clarify this is why it is justified to say there is not a problem, but I do not personally find it satisfying

Eastern philosophy isn't impenetrable, and people who cannot penetrate it aren't hampered by cultural difference.

Even for natives of those cultures, penetrating that philosophy often takes years of spiritual practise and training. The reason is that it isn't about ideas, it's an actual body-mind training and transformation of being. It isn't something you just sit and talk about and discuss, although it can include that, but also it must come with actual implementation to occur.

That's the main difference I've noticed between western philosophy and eastern philosophy which makes them difficult to integrate. The former is almost always understood by the experience of so-called "ordinary beings" and communicated in terms of intellectual arguments, whereas the latter cannot really be understood unless you actually physically and spiritually transform your very being.

For example, I used to practise Soto Zen, and Dogen's philosophical writings are very popular there. Western philosophers, or just general non-practitioners, absolutely bash their heads against his writing, it's just so difficult to wrangle and there's no connection. In Soto Zen we understand it by sitting zazen (seated meditation). Literally, the only way I know to understand it is by doing meditation practise. Then next time you read it and you have a deep connection with it that you can't explain in a way that someone who hasn't had that connection would understand. Western philosophy seems to not be compatible with those kinds of transformations. If it cannot be explained in a way that is somehow independent of the observer's own practise, then it is not considered rigorous, but also such a thing is impossible when talking, for example, about Zen.

So far the only answer I've seen people give to the question is "what problem? There's no problem". Basically, there are many people who don't (or also have convinced themselves that they don't) perceive an incongruity between their personal subjective experience and the idea that consciousness is just an emergent phenomena of a physical system. I haven't found a good way to explain it, I just know that there's something wrong or missing.

So basically it seems there's three camps:

Those that feel the incongruity and don't know a solution.

Those that feel the incongruity and have found their own solution (which is usually what people will call "religion").

Those that do not feel the incongruity.

I don't personally see a way to justify it if someone doesn't feel the problem in their bones.

That's why many people, including myself, believe that it has been so long since the Buddha's nirvana that it is now much harder to attain liberation in this world. That's why I practise to be reborn in Amitabha's Pure Land.

I imagine Chinese lay Buddhists are often Pure Land rather than Chan no? I used to practise Soto zen with a teacher but now I’m Pure Land, but I don’t know which tradition yet. Pure Land doesn’t need a teacher or temple to be safe and effective though: you just recite Amitabha Buddhas name.

I think modern western Buddhists seem to reject anything that they don’t perceive right at this moment. Really they should at least be agnostic. Regardless the Buddha did teach too extensively about such things for it to make sense to ignore them. People try and say he was talking metaphorically, or that it was his shallower teaching for stupid people (even Thich Nhat Hanh says this! Imo to appeal to the western ego, because he does not say similar things in his Vietnamese teachings). I just think people need to step back for a minute and really think about why they want to identify as a Buddhist and what their relationship to the Buddhas teachings is

One problem for those people is that the motivation is wrong unless there is right view. If you don’t realise samsara, and don’t realise that everything is on fire (see fire sermon) and wish to escape, then why are you practising? Unfortunately for a lot of secular people the answer is: because I had a crazy psychedelic trip and I just feel that something deeper is there that I must explore. And this causes all kinds of issues, because they have no idea how to separate any insight they might have had in their trip from straight up visuals or intense emotions. Further they are interested in the truth for the sake of the truth, and the Buddha explicitly said that such paths can lead to madness. It’s just very dangerous to go deep into Buddhist insight practise without having proper motivations or guidance.

There was never a transmission of Buddhism that rejected all of the core teachings and doctrine. Why would you even want to call yourself a Buddhist if you reject Buddhism? It is just fashion to these people. It’s like being a communist who thinks private ownership of the means of production is good, it makes no sense.

Also, your idea of what Chan is like is very ahistorical and orientalist. It has always been steeped in tradition, why do you think so many massive monasteries were built in the mountains? Not only that but each monastery was even themed around a specific sutra. If you think it is “free wheeling” you should read the reports in the Platform sutra. It’s clearly just as formalised and rigid as other Buddhist traditions.

Chögyam Trungpa was literally a sexual abuser and an alcoholic by the way.

Then there’s no problem