15 ms·

I feel therefore I am

64 points by kawera 11y ago

andyjohnson0 11y ago
I stopped when I got to "According to Maxwell’s equations, blue is ripples of electromagnetism with a wavelength of between 450 and 495 nanometres."
- ThomPete 11y ago
  I have had people stop on some essay I wrote too, come here and say "i stopped reading after...". But because they didn't read it through they didn't read the part were I was addressing what I wrote. I find this tendency pretty counter-productive to learning anything at all. "Oh there was something that is wrong" then I don't want to finalize it. I wonder if it says something about our generation or whether this is something thats always been at play (like older people who wouldn't take a punker serious because of how they look) I don't want to single you out but I just don't understand this approach to reading things. Care to comment?
  - shhhh- 11y ago
    If you don't mind my interjecting.. Between link-sharing sites like this one, print and digital publications, and never ending ad campaigns masquerading as blogs and "relate-to-me!" emails, most of us are inundated with the specious ideas and arguments of people whose reliability can be difficult to assess. A simple heuristic is stop reading if the author appears to not be grounded in the empirical tradition. Which, unfortunately, most writers aren't.
    - ThomPete 11y ago
      So basically you mostly don't read anything since most writers aren't? Not all valuable perspectives follows some strictly logical path to get to it's conclusions. And not all conclusions make high claims of validity. Some are just exploring potentials. Newton was right about many things but wrong about others. That doesn't mean his contributions aren't valuable. Imagine reading him today efter relativity and QM and then applying this approach.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        It's not that. Personally, I usually like to give the author a chance so in such cases I just start skimming instead of stopping reading altogether. But this quoted part suggests that the author doesn't understand how categories and naming things work, which is very damning in an article about consciousness.
        aarpmcgee 11y ago
        Whether that is what it suggests to you does not mean, necessarily, that it suggests that to anyone else. To me, it suggests that the author may have been a little hasty, but I would by no means take it to mean that the author doesn't understand categories... that seems like a leap to me. Of course, my presumption might also be seen as a leap. Might be just me, but being that this article in total is not about a scientific understanding of the color blue but rather about consciousness, it seems reasonable to me to read on.
        ThomPete 11y ago
        Not sure how it's damning. The premise of the article isn't Maxwells equation and the point of the quoted text isn't the validity of that specific claim but rather that there are objective definitions. In other words it might be a wrong scientific claim right there (I don't know enough about Maxwells equation) but that doesn't mean that it's damaging the rest of the article since it's not a scientific point that it's trying to make but a philosophical one. I am not saying it's ok to be sloppy or wrong just that sometimes right conclusions and useful perspectives can happen even though some of the details are wrong. It's not a scientific paper and as far as I read it shouldn't be read as such IMO. But each to their own of course.
      - jjaredsimpson 11y ago
        Yes, most things written are either obvious, duplicated or wrong. There's an enormous quantity of correct, novel and insightful content. So I filter harshly and don't bother with it. Title of the article led me to believe that it would be a essay about what the present generation of researchers of consciousness are doing differently than previous generations. That I would be presented with a new strategy to attack the problem of consciousness. I personally don't believe there is a "problem of consciousness". But I still was willing to give the article a chance. I became dubious when I read > for while any spectrometer can register blue precisely on a dial, few of us would say that it is conscious. A spectrometer does not perceive blue. Already the author is starting to set up a contrast between inanimate systems and animate ones. Which I reject. A complicated response to stimulus isn't a different thing from a response which is simple to causally explain. Eventually I read >physicalism contains a logical flaw ... something more is needed, beyond the laws of nature, to account for conscious subjective experience And I stopped because I don't agree and have no need to read the inferior versions arguments for dualism when I've already reject the better versions.
  - dogecoinbase 11y ago
    I find this tendency pretty counter-productive to learning anything at all. More specifically, I think it's symptomatic of a tendency towards performative dismissal -- the GP's comment is intended to demonstrate the superiority of their knowledge to that of the author, and simultaneously insult the author via dismissal of their work. It's purely a social display, as evidenced by their need to comment on having stopped reading (completely irrelevant to e.g. alerting people to the inaccuracy of a fact essentially tangential to the subject of the piece).
    - andyjohnson0 11y ago
      If I understand you correctly, my comment was a performance in which I simultaneously attempted to display my intellectual superiority over the author while at the same time publicly insulting her. Lets be clear. What you're describing, and mis-attributing to me, is an attempt at dominance. I'd say you need to understand two things. First, you simply don't know me well enough to make such an accusation. In fact you don't know me at all. So, despite your pseudo-clever phrasing ("social display", "performative dismissal"), all you're actually doing is making a series of assumptions about my intentions before going on to do exactly what you accuse me of. And secondly, there isn't remotely enough content to my original comment to justify your assumptions.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    >I find this tendency pretty counter-productive to learning anything at all. It can also be counter-productive to setup strawman arguments which you tear down at a later point. It takes time for anyone to read something and no one has enough time to read everything. Further, most people have read lots of things that setup strawman arguments and never tear them down. Often, people will then conclude that the author actually believes such strawmen and may avoid further reading the author. If I read to completion every piece of text that came before my eyes I would have died a long time ago.
    - ThomPete 11y ago
      I am not sure I follow you. What strawman did I set up? I made an observation. Said why I think it's counter productive from my line of reasoning. Then I asked for comments. Because there might be a good reason. Where did I make the strawman? Do you really think I don't understand it takes time to read?
      - jsprogrammer 11y ago
        I'm not necessarily claiming you setup a strawman. I'm inferring that andyjohnson0 stopped reading because he detected a strawman (or similar). I used the strawman as an example of why someone may, legitimately, stop reading any essay you wrote, or this article, or really, any piece of text they come across. >Do you really think I don't understand it takes time to read? I think you probably understand that. However, it is very difficult for you to know what value I place on my time spent engaged in various activities. At some point, it is just no longer worth my time to continue reading some pieces of text. Some things are just more important, including, possibly, posting a comment about it.
        ThomPete 11y ago
        Thats all fine and good. I do that too all the time. But I don't then go to a website and say it. I mean you want to spend time going here to write you stopped reading instead of reading a little further?
  - andyjohnson0 11y ago
    Firstly, thank you for your thoughtful comment. I'll take up your invitation to explain myself. The brevity of my comment, which I regret, was a symptom of lack of time. I have lots to do at the moment, and yesterday was particularly busy. This same lack of time caused me to abandon the article. The author's statement that Maxwell's equations connect the subjective label "blue" to a physical EM frequency range is wrong. Its not so much an error of fact as of conception. And in an article that is specifically examining the relationship between subjective concious experience and the physical world, that conceptual error is significant. But it doesn't really invalidate the author's arguments. And contrary to what I wrote, I did actually continue reading some way past the passage that I quoted. There were some interesting facts and analysis, but ultimately the structure and framing was similar to many other popular science articles I've read, and I felt it was just ground I'd already covered. That, and the above error, lead me to stop. In different circumstances I'd have continued to the end. So my reason for bailing on the article had little to do with any deficiencies it might have, but I justified my decision using what seems to me to be a glaring error. I don't think that was wrong: it is important to be selective. Wwhat I've learned is that reading long form articles when you are busy is counter-productive, and posting context-less comments is basically noise.
hashkb 11y ago
It's a decent (if roundabout) overview if you are interested in the subject but have managed to completely avoid learning or reading anything about consciousness thus far.
amelius 11y ago
(Note: completely serious post) Interestingly, when you have diarrhea, the acidity makes your stool feel like it is hot instead of sour. So it seems there is an acidity-sensor there that is connected to the temperature-sensing part of the brain instead of the acidity-sensing part of the brain.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Wouldn't an acid on your skin feel like it's hot as well? (I never had such an experience, so I don't know). I recall reading that "temperature sensors" in the skin can be triggered by many things, not just temperature.
shhhh- 11y ago
Don't bother. Folly.
- aarpmcgee 11y ago
  I'll just take your word for it then.
brianclements 11y ago
"A slew of books over the past two decades have proffered solutions to the ‘problem’ of consciousness. Among the best known are Christof Koch’s The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (2004); Giulio Tononi and Gerald Edelman’s A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (2000); Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999); and the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s bluntly titled Consciousness Explained (1991)." Used it for the book list.
- ca98am79 11y ago
  Make sure to also check out "Biocentrism" by Robert Lanza
- zzzmarcus 11y ago
  The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes is an interesting take on consciousness that seems to come up often in these types of discussions.
  - sageikosa 11y ago
    ...bonus points if you mention "Society of Mind" or "The Emotion Machine" by Minsky.
- zensavona 11y ago
  How The Mind Works and The Blank Slate (!) by Steven Pinker are very good books to read if you're interested in this topic also.
zappo2938 11y ago
A professor of philosophy and a student are talking. Student: How do I know I exist? Professor: Who's asking? Student: I am Sorry I couldn't resist. If you don't get it, search Cogito ergo sum.
- laotzu 11y ago
  Professor: What do you mean when you say "I"?
cristianpascu 11y ago
>> "When modern science swept away this dualistic symbolic schema, Europeans came to see themselves as inhabitants of a Euclidean void: we lived on a planet that orbited an insignificant star in potentially infinite space." Such a gross misunderstanding of late antiquity/medieval cosmology. "As an admirer of co-ordinate geometry, I like Tononi’s concept; at the same time, I don’t accept information theory as a bridge to subjectivity." In my master thesis on consciousness, I dealt with Tononi's thesis and, in spite of the publicity he gets, I too find his theory to be bogus. It's like saying Maxwell's equations are light. Or, put differently, it's like saying a computer is information because it processes/produces information.
- kawera 11y ago
  Is it really a gross misunderstanding or just a simplification? Keep in mind that aeon.co cater to an intelligent and well read crowd but it's not a highbrow academic publication by any means.
  - cristianpascu 11y ago
    Misunderstanding. I believe we have enough reasons to think that ancient/medieval folks were smart enough to NOT believe gods live on the Moon.
- jerf 11y ago
  "It's like saying Maxwell's equations are light. Or, put differently, it's like saying a computer is information because it processes/produces information." Sounds like you may be reaching for map/territory distinction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
weatherlight 11y ago
Philosophy is the criticism of categories for better or for worse.
ca98am79 11y ago
I think Materialism is the Flat Earth model of our era. I think everyone intuitively knows that consciousness can't come from material things, but we convince ourselves otherwise. Even science (e.g. with the observer effects of quantum physics) demonstrates this, but we try to find other ways it can't be true. An awesome book that does a great job logically explaining how consciousness may be fundamental is "Biocentrism" by Robert Lanza
- maxerickson 11y ago
  Your characterization of the observer effect begs the question.
- ThomPete 11y ago
  Agree but thats also because the we don't have the mental tools to deal with many of the consequences of this realization. Punishment, guilt, crime just to name a few. Over time we will find new ways to explain it so that it makes sense. But my guess is that it will be aided mostly be technology.
  - nhaehnle 11y ago
    Why would an answer to this philosophical debate change anything about how we deal with crime?
- jjaredsimpson 11y ago
  Materialism explains the world however. Flat earth model clearly doesn't and was obviously false even in antiquity. What model does dualism provide and how can I use it to make predictions about how consciousness is embodied in physical beings. Why is it useful to presuppose the existence of a complete separate substance to explain consciousness. To be brief dualism is woo woo. >I think everyone intuitively knows that consciousness can't come from material things, but we convince ourselves otherwise. Ok, I'll make a sweeping unsupported statement too. Dualists have limited imagination and flawed understanding of the nature of information and computation as well as a penchant for magical thinking.
ygmelnikova 11y ago
"Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth." - Paul the Apostle
dkbrk 11y ago
There are plenty of entirely worthwhile and interesting areas of research in philosophy. This is not one of them. It is entirely sufficient to understand that brains are composed of physical elements - neurons and the like, that communicate with each other with little electrical and chemical signals, and that this physical state evolves forwards with time according to physical laws. I repeat, this is all that is required to resolve every single one of these supposed "problems" of consciousness. We may not understand how a brain works in its entirety, but knowing that its behaviour is entirely described by these physical pieces bounds our understanding of its behaviour as a whole sufficiently that these problems are trivially revealed to be specious nonsense. As an analogy, I know that the microchip in my computer is built out of transistors etched onto a silicon die. I have some knowledge about microchip design, broadly speaking, and I know about things such as logic circuits, latches and clock signals, but I don't possess a complete understanding of how it functions. Still, knowing that it's just transistors bounds my understanding of its behaviour. I know, for instance, that there's no extra-physical magic pixie that makes it function. I don't wonder about the subjective experience of the floating point unit, or about whether the L1 cache is feeling or just registering the data it stores, or whether it would be possible or just concievable for a world to exist where an atom-for-atom identical processor didn't actually compute but just went through the motions of moving about some little electrical impulses. On a fundamental level, our brains are very much the same. The architecture is nothing at all alike, for example: the clock speeds and signal propagation rates are much lower, synaptic signals are at least partly analog, the brain doesn't have anything remotely close to a uniform memory space, and it continuously dynamically reconfigures itself through neuroplasticity. None of this is relevant. I did not conclude there is not a magic pixie making making my computer's CPU function because of my understanding of it's architecture and overall design, I concluded it because I know it's made up of transistors, and it's behaviour is entirely described by its transistors, and no matter how hard you try you can't make a magic pixie out of transistors. We have established that brains are made up of little physical pieces and obey physical laws. It trivially follows that every piece of data that could possible be referred to as part of our consciousness, every "feeling" or "subjective experience" is just some pattern or another entirely described by the physical state of the brain. If you see some sort of problem with this, if you see some sort of contradiction in the understanding that "you" are just a wetware-implemented algorithm that is the end result of a rather convoluted process of natural evolution and human development, that is a problem with your understanding not with reality. There is no space in this picture for looking at some pattern of neural impulses and asking whether it feels; you can answer that question however you like, but with respect to reality that question is not even wrong. David Chalmers would call this "materialism" or perhaps "physicalism". Once you move past Solipsism and decide that reality actually exists, or that we don't know that reality actually exists but it seems to so we might as well assume it does for the sake of argument, then, though this is actually a tautology, every physical thing physically exists. The problem with words such as "materialism" and "physicalism" is that using the word implies things could be any other way. There are abstract ideas, and there is reality - "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". While I might respect a position such as solipsism as epistemologically valid, beyond that particular loophole I cannot understand why philosophers who do not agree with what is generally called "empirical materialism" are taken seriously.
ivan_ah 11y ago
> With the advent of quantum mechanics they found that, in order to make sense of what their theories were saying about the subatomic world, they had to posit that the scientist-observer was actively involved in constructing reality. Nope. This is not true. The word "observer" as used in quantum mechanics, is an unfortunate historical accident. The observer need not be human at all---any measurement apparatus can act as observer, and no human beings need be present at all.
sireat 11y ago
I am still looking for a new edition of "Mind's I": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I It is a great book because of the wide range of authors (Borgess, Turing, Serle, Lem!, etc) giving a nice introduction to what was current up to 1981. What I want is a similar book that covers new findings/speculations since 1981. Ideally it would also be in a chapter format and a multitude of authors with varying ideas would be presented. I've read Chalmers, Dennett, Hof, Serle, Jeff Hawkins etc in book format but it would be nice to see something more concise.

64 points by kawera 11y ago

I stopped when I got to "According to Maxwell’s equations, blue is ripples of electromagnetism with a wavelength of between 450 and 495 nanometres."

ThomPete 11y ago
I have had people stop on some essay I wrote too, come here and say "i stopped reading after...". But because they didn't read it through they didn't read the part were I was addressing what I wrote. I find this tendency pretty counter-productive to learning anything at all. "Oh there was something that is wrong" then I don't want to finalize it. I wonder if it says something about our generation or whether this is something thats always been at play (like older people who wouldn't take a punker serious because of how they look) I don't want to single you out but I just don't understand this approach to reading things. Care to comment?
- shhhh- 11y ago
  If you don't mind my interjecting.. Between link-sharing sites like this one, print and digital publications, and never ending ad campaigns masquerading as blogs and "relate-to-me!" emails, most of us are inundated with the specious ideas and arguments of people whose reliability can be difficult to assess. A simple heuristic is stop reading if the author appears to not be grounded in the empirical tradition. Which, unfortunately, most writers aren't.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    So basically you mostly don't read anything since most writers aren't? Not all valuable perspectives follows some strictly logical path to get to it's conclusions. And not all conclusions make high claims of validity. Some are just exploring potentials. Newton was right about many things but wrong about others. That doesn't mean his contributions aren't valuable. Imagine reading him today efter relativity and QM and then applying this approach.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      It's not that. Personally, I usually like to give the author a chance so in such cases I just start skimming instead of stopping reading altogether. But this quoted part suggests that the author doesn't understand how categories and naming things work, which is very damning in an article about consciousness.
      - aarpmcgee 11y ago
        Whether that is what it suggests to you does not mean, necessarily, that it suggests that to anyone else. To me, it suggests that the author may have been a little hasty, but I would by no means take it to mean that the author doesn't understand categories... that seems like a leap to me. Of course, my presumption might also be seen as a leap. Might be just me, but being that this article in total is not about a scientific understanding of the color blue but rather about consciousness, it seems reasonable to me to read on.
      - ThomPete 11y ago
        Not sure how it's damning. The premise of the article isn't Maxwells equation and the point of the quoted text isn't the validity of that specific claim but rather that there are objective definitions. In other words it might be a wrong scientific claim right there (I don't know enough about Maxwells equation) but that doesn't mean that it's damaging the rest of the article since it's not a scientific point that it's trying to make but a philosophical one. I am not saying it's ok to be sloppy or wrong just that sometimes right conclusions and useful perspectives can happen even though some of the details are wrong. It's not a scientific paper and as far as I read it shouldn't be read as such IMO. But each to their own of course.
    - jjaredsimpson 11y ago
      Yes, most things written are either obvious, duplicated or wrong. There's an enormous quantity of correct, novel and insightful content. So I filter harshly and don't bother with it. Title of the article led me to believe that it would be a essay about what the present generation of researchers of consciousness are doing differently than previous generations. That I would be presented with a new strategy to attack the problem of consciousness. I personally don't believe there is a "problem of consciousness". But I still was willing to give the article a chance. I became dubious when I read > for while any spectrometer can register blue precisely on a dial, few of us would say that it is conscious. A spectrometer does not perceive blue. Already the author is starting to set up a contrast between inanimate systems and animate ones. Which I reject. A complicated response to stimulus isn't a different thing from a response which is simple to causally explain. Eventually I read >physicalism contains a logical flaw ... something more is needed, beyond the laws of nature, to account for conscious subjective experience And I stopped because I don't agree and have no need to read the inferior versions arguments for dualism when I've already reject the better versions.
- dogecoinbase 11y ago
  I find this tendency pretty counter-productive to learning anything at all. More specifically, I think it's symptomatic of a tendency towards performative dismissal -- the GP's comment is intended to demonstrate the superiority of their knowledge to that of the author, and simultaneously insult the author via dismissal of their work. It's purely a social display, as evidenced by their need to comment on having stopped reading (completely irrelevant to e.g. alerting people to the inaccuracy of a fact essentially tangential to the subject of the piece).
  - andyjohnson0 11y ago
    If I understand you correctly, my comment was a performance in which I simultaneously attempted to display my intellectual superiority over the author while at the same time publicly insulting her. Lets be clear. What you're describing, and mis-attributing to me, is an attempt at dominance. I'd say you need to understand two things. First, you simply don't know me well enough to make such an accusation. In fact you don't know me at all. So, despite your pseudo-clever phrasing ("social display", "performative dismissal"), all you're actually doing is making a series of assumptions about my intentions before going on to do exactly what you accuse me of. And secondly, there isn't remotely enough content to my original comment to justify your assumptions.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  >I find this tendency pretty counter-productive to learning anything at all. It can also be counter-productive to setup strawman arguments which you tear down at a later point. It takes time for anyone to read something and no one has enough time to read everything. Further, most people have read lots of things that setup strawman arguments and never tear them down. Often, people will then conclude that the author actually believes such strawmen and may avoid further reading the author. If I read to completion every piece of text that came before my eyes I would have died a long time ago.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    I am not sure I follow you. What strawman did I set up? I made an observation. Said why I think it's counter productive from my line of reasoning. Then I asked for comments. Because there might be a good reason. Where did I make the strawman? Do you really think I don't understand it takes time to read?
    - jsprogrammer 11y ago
      I'm not necessarily claiming you setup a strawman. I'm inferring that andyjohnson0 stopped reading because he detected a strawman (or similar). I used the strawman as an example of why someone may, legitimately, stop reading any essay you wrote, or this article, or really, any piece of text they come across. >Do you really think I don't understand it takes time to read? I think you probably understand that. However, it is very difficult for you to know what value I place on my time spent engaged in various activities. At some point, it is just no longer worth my time to continue reading some pieces of text. Some things are just more important, including, possibly, posting a comment about it.
      - ThomPete 11y ago
        Thats all fine and good. I do that too all the time. But I don't then go to a website and say it. I mean you want to spend time going here to write you stopped reading instead of reading a little further?
- andyjohnson0 11y ago
  Firstly, thank you for your thoughtful comment. I'll take up your invitation to explain myself. The brevity of my comment, which I regret, was a symptom of lack of time. I have lots to do at the moment, and yesterday was particularly busy. This same lack of time caused me to abandon the article. The author's statement that Maxwell's equations connect the subjective label "blue" to a physical EM frequency range is wrong. Its not so much an error of fact as of conception. And in an article that is specifically examining the relationship between subjective concious experience and the physical world, that conceptual error is significant. But it doesn't really invalidate the author's arguments. And contrary to what I wrote, I did actually continue reading some way past the passage that I quoted. There were some interesting facts and analysis, but ultimately the structure and framing was similar to many other popular science articles I've read, and I felt it was just ground I'd already covered. That, and the above error, lead me to stop. In different circumstances I'd have continued to the end. So my reason for bailing on the article had little to do with any deficiencies it might have, but I justified my decision using what seems to me to be a glaring error. I don't think that was wrong: it is important to be selective. Wwhat I've learned is that reading long form articles when you are busy is counter-productive, and posting context-less comments is basically noise.

hashkb 11y ago

It's a decent (if roundabout) overview if you are interested in the subject but have managed to completely avoid learning or reading anything about consciousness thus far.

amelius 11y ago

(Note: completely serious post) Interestingly, when you have diarrhea, the acidity makes your stool feel like it is hot instead of sour. So it seems there is an acidity-sensor there that is connected to the temperature-sensing part of the brain instead of the acidity-sensing part of the brain.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Wouldn't an acid on your skin feel like it's hot as well? (I never had such an experience, so I don't know). I recall reading that "temperature sensors" in the skin can be triggered by many things, not just temperature.

shhhh- 11y ago

Don't bother. Folly.

aarpmcgee 11y ago
I'll just take your word for it then.

brianclements 11y ago

"A slew of books over the past two decades have proffered solutions to the ‘problem’ of consciousness. Among the best known are Christof Koch’s The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (2004); Giulio Tononi and Gerald Edelman’s A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (2000); Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999); and the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s bluntly titled Consciousness Explained (1991)." Used it for the book list.

ca98am79 11y ago
Make sure to also check out "Biocentrism" by Robert Lanza
zzzmarcus 11y ago
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes is an interesting take on consciousness that seems to come up often in these types of discussions.
- sageikosa 11y ago
  ...bonus points if you mention "Society of Mind" or "The Emotion Machine" by Minsky.
zensavona 11y ago
How The Mind Works and The Blank Slate (!) by Steven Pinker are very good books to read if you're interested in this topic also.

zappo2938 11y ago

A professor of philosophy and a student are talking. Student: How do I know I exist? Professor: Who's asking? Student: I am Sorry I couldn't resist. If you don't get it, search Cogito ergo sum.

laotzu 11y ago
Professor: What do you mean when you say "I"?

cristianpascu 11y ago

>> "When modern science swept away this dualistic symbolic schema, Europeans came to see themselves as inhabitants of a Euclidean void: we lived on a planet that orbited an insignificant star in potentially infinite space." Such a gross misunderstanding of late antiquity/medieval cosmology. "As an admirer of co-ordinate geometry, I like Tononi’s concept; at the same time, I don’t accept information theory as a bridge to subjectivity." In my master thesis on consciousness, I dealt with Tononi's thesis and, in spite of the publicity he gets, I too find his theory to be bogus. It's like saying Maxwell's equations are light. Or, put differently, it's like saying a computer is information because it processes/produces information.

kawera 11y ago
Is it really a gross misunderstanding or just a simplification? Keep in mind that aeon.co cater to an intelligent and well read crowd but it's not a highbrow academic publication by any means.
- cristianpascu 11y ago
  Misunderstanding. I believe we have enough reasons to think that ancient/medieval folks were smart enough to NOT believe gods live on the Moon.
jerf 11y ago
"It's like saying Maxwell's equations are light. Or, put differently, it's like saying a computer is information because it processes/produces information." Sounds like you may be reaching for map/territory distinction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

weatherlight 11y ago

Philosophy is the criticism of categories for better or for worse.

ca98am79 11y ago

I think Materialism is the Flat Earth model of our era. I think everyone intuitively knows that consciousness can't come from material things, but we convince ourselves otherwise. Even science (e.g. with the observer effects of quantum physics) demonstrates this, but we try to find other ways it can't be true. An awesome book that does a great job logically explaining how consciousness may be fundamental is "Biocentrism" by Robert Lanza

maxerickson 11y ago
Your characterization of the observer effect begs the question.
ThomPete 11y ago
Agree but thats also because the we don't have the mental tools to deal with many of the consequences of this realization. Punishment, guilt, crime just to name a few. Over time we will find new ways to explain it so that it makes sense. But my guess is that it will be aided mostly be technology.
- nhaehnle 11y ago
  Why would an answer to this philosophical debate change anything about how we deal with crime?
jjaredsimpson 11y ago
Materialism explains the world however. Flat earth model clearly doesn't and was obviously false even in antiquity. What model does dualism provide and how can I use it to make predictions about how consciousness is embodied in physical beings. Why is it useful to presuppose the existence of a complete separate substance to explain consciousness. To be brief dualism is woo woo. >I think everyone intuitively knows that consciousness can't come from material things, but we convince ourselves otherwise. Ok, I'll make a sweeping unsupported statement too. Dualists have limited imagination and flawed understanding of the nature of information and computation as well as a penchant for magical thinking.

ygmelnikova 11y ago

"Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth." - Paul the Apostle

dkbrk 11y ago

There are plenty of entirely worthwhile and interesting areas of research in philosophy. This is not one of them. It is entirely sufficient to understand that brains are composed of physical elements - neurons and the like, that communicate with each other with little electrical and chemical signals, and that this physical state evolves forwards with time according to physical laws. I repeat, this is all that is required to resolve every single one of these supposed "problems" of consciousness. We may not understand how a brain works in its entirety, but knowing that its behaviour is entirely described by these physical pieces bounds our understanding of its behaviour as a whole sufficiently that these problems are trivially revealed to be specious nonsense. As an analogy, I know that the microchip in my computer is built out of transistors etched onto a silicon die. I have some knowledge about microchip design, broadly speaking, and I know about things such as logic circuits, latches and clock signals, but I don't possess a complete understanding of how it functions. Still, knowing that it's just transistors bounds my understanding of its behaviour. I know, for instance, that there's no extra-physical magic pixie that makes it function. I don't wonder about the subjective experience of the floating point unit, or about whether the L1 cache is feeling or just registering the data it stores, or whether it would be possible or just concievable for a world to exist where an atom-for-atom identical processor didn't actually compute but just went through the motions of moving about some little electrical impulses. On a fundamental level, our brains are very much the same. The architecture is nothing at all alike, for example: the clock speeds and signal propagation rates are much lower, synaptic signals are at least partly analog, the brain doesn't have anything remotely close to a uniform memory space, and it continuously dynamically reconfigures itself through neuroplasticity. None of this is relevant. I did not conclude there is not a magic pixie making making my computer's CPU function because of my understanding of it's architecture and overall design, I concluded it because I know it's made up of transistors, and it's behaviour is entirely described by its transistors, and no matter how hard you try you can't make a magic pixie out of transistors. We have established that brains are made up of little physical pieces and obey physical laws. It trivially follows that every piece of data that could possible be referred to as part of our consciousness, every "feeling" or "subjective experience" is just some pattern or another entirely described by the physical state of the brain. If you see some sort of problem with this, if you see some sort of contradiction in the understanding that "you" are just a wetware-implemented algorithm that is the end result of a rather convoluted process of natural evolution and human development, that is a problem with your understanding not with reality. There is no space in this picture for looking at some pattern of neural impulses and asking whether it feels; you can answer that question however you like, but with respect to reality that question is not even wrong. David Chalmers would call this "materialism" or perhaps "physicalism". Once you move past Solipsism and decide that reality actually exists, or that we don't know that reality actually exists but it seems to so we might as well assume it does for the sake of argument, then, though this is actually a tautology, every physical thing physically exists. The problem with words such as "materialism" and "physicalism" is that using the word implies things could be any other way. There are abstract ideas, and there is reality - "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". While I might respect a position such as solipsism as epistemologically valid, beyond that particular loophole I cannot understand why philosophers who do not agree with what is generally called "empirical materialism" are taken seriously.

ivan_ah 11y ago

> With the advent of quantum mechanics they found that, in order to make sense of what their theories were saying about the subatomic world, they had to posit that the scientist-observer was actively involved in constructing reality. Nope. This is not true. The word "observer" as used in quantum mechanics, is an unfortunate historical accident. The observer need not be human at all---any measurement apparatus can act as observer, and no human beings need be present at all.

sireat 11y ago

I am still looking for a new edition of "Mind's I": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I It is a great book because of the wide range of authors (Borgess, Turing, Serle, Lem!, etc) giving a nice introduction to what was current up to 1981. What I want is a similar book that covers new findings/speculations since 1981. Ideally it would also be in a chapter format and a multitude of authors with varying ideas would be presented. I've read Chalmers, Dennett, Hof, Serle, Jeff Hawkins etc in book format but it would be nice to see something more concise.