3 ms·

There's nothing wrong with trying to understand the brain and more generally the machine aspect of ourselves. Yes, these scientists are doing valuable work. B

by pegasus 11y ago

There's nothing wrong with trying to understand the brain and more generally the machine aspect of ourselves. Yes, these scientists are doing valuable work. But in some very real way none of this can’t ever even begin to answer the question of what consciousness is. Any such question and any possible answer are still pheonomena that arise inside consciousness. Can science explain subjectivity? Does a machine have subjective experience the same way as we do? Is it even possible to create a strong AI? I think people have an intuition that none of this research can ever bring us closer to answering these questions. > What happens when the science will eventually come up with technology to recreate (by all external empirical evidence) a human consciousness? Would you still say it's a "question outside science"? Your question already presupposes that this will be possible. To you, it’s a question of “when” not of “if”. Your argument for that is the progress we’ve lately seen in AI. To me, and many others, this is like somebody saying that they’re closer to flying because he climbed a hill taller than others. But even assuming that this will have happened, does this mean that we’re machines and nothing more? Or that we’ve just fooled ourselves with a clever contraption? I know it’s frustrating, and many people want to swipe this under the rug, but it’s clear we still won’t know for sure.

language 11y ago
>Any such question and any possible answer are still pheonomena that arise inside consciousness. This is an important point, but I don't think the best course of action is to mark consciousness as something that lies outside the scope of science. I certainly think that there are some broader problems to be solved which involve how one deals with investigation into a domain that appears to be reflexive. "Consciousness" is a valid domain of investigation, but the question to ask becomes "Can we come to an agreement over how to distinguish what we are investigating?" Additionally, can we really call consciousness an "object" of investigation? The problem is that we, the subject, are investigating an object, which is us, the subject. It seems like there is some analogue of the subject-object problem that injects itself into the situation at that point. The investigation of consciousness (among other things) becomes muddled when the majority of participants in the discourse can't stabilize on how to actually distinguish or demarcate consciousness as an object of investigation - that problem is tangled because the act of explaining consciousness presupposes consciousness. Similarly, we must use the condition of living in order to explain life, and we must use the condition of "being embedded in language" in order to describe language. One cannot escape those systems in their attempts to describe them. A scientist's description of consciousness must necessarily account for the process by which he describes it. But this isn't anything too radical or new. I'm not sure this means that it's something beyond the grasp of science.

by pegasus 11y ago

language 11y ago

>Any such question and any possible answer are still pheonomena that arise inside consciousness. This is an important point, but I don't think the best course of action is to mark consciousness as something that lies outside the scope of science. I certainly think that there are some broader problems to be solved which involve how one deals with investigation into a domain that appears to be reflexive. "Consciousness" is a valid domain of investigation, but the question to ask becomes "Can we come to an agreement over how to distinguish what we are investigating?" Additionally, can we really call consciousness an "object" of investigation? The problem is that we, the subject, are investigating an object, which is us, the subject. It seems like there is some analogue of the subject-object problem that injects itself into the situation at that point. The investigation of consciousness (among other things) becomes muddled when the majority of participants in the discourse can't stabilize on how to actually distinguish or demarcate consciousness as an object of investigation - that problem is tangled because the act of explaining consciousness presupposes consciousness. Similarly, we must use the condition of living in order to explain life, and we must use the condition of "being embedded in language" in order to describe language. One cannot escape those systems in their attempts to describe them. A scientist's description of consciousness must necessarily account for the process by which he describes it. But this isn't anything too radical or new. I'm not sure this means that it's something beyond the grasp of science.