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> It’s not the existence of this inner voice he finds mysterious. “The phenomenon to explain,” he said, “is why the brain, as a machine, insists it has this pro

> It’s not the existence of this inner voice he finds mysterious. “The phenomenon to explain,” he said, “is why the brain, as a machine, insists it has this property that is nonphysical.” There are plenty of real, non-physical things. Evolution is real, and non-physical, you can describe it using mathematical formulas. Math decides how the real world happens. Think about, oh, say, a road. What's the difference between a road and a random patch of asphalt? Collect the differences in your mind and those are the definition of a road. That something is a road and not just a patch of asphalt has real consequences for the world around us. There is the world of ideas. Things held in the mind, in the consciousness of people have real-world effects on the physical world around us. Ideas can have properties, all of these properties are themselves non-physical. You can compare ideas to each other. One could place on a continuum things that are wholly physical, and things that are wholly non-physical. Road properties and evolution closer to the physical, story themes and potential political platforms closer to the non-physical. The non-physical would seem to be infinite, whereas the physical would be finite. So many, many, many more things in existence are non-physical than physical. If consciousness itself were something on the same order as an idea, then it would lose none of its potency. People who argue this think they are arguing over reality, but are only debating semantics.

snowwrestler 10y ago
Are there non-physical things? I doubt it. Let's take the road. Obviously the mass of the road itself (the object) is physical and has physical characteristics like its components, the chemical composition of its components, the elements in the chemicals, the particles and forces in the atoms of the elements, etc. Now let's take the idea of a road. Where does that idea actually reside? In the brains of living beings, which are themselves physical. Ideas are information, and information is physical. You need energy to create and maintain it, and it can be quantified in terms of the entropy spent to create it. It is a persistent pattern of mass/energy. The "world of information" only seems infinite to us because we are so inefficient at working with it outside each of our own minds. Think of the incredible amount of mass and energy that must be expended to create a road, or even a book, or even an SD card. By contrast, our 8 lb. lump of brain stores and returns vast quantities of information with seemingly no effort on our part. But of course thinking does require physical effort. An inert human, thinking in a chair, still requires food.
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  The problem with this line of thought is that it completely upends classical cause and effect. Things have effects in proportion to their size. The sun has a way bigger effect on us than Jupiter does. But when you get to the scale of ideas, the logic upends. The pen should not be mightier than the sword, but is because ideas have outsized effects on the world compared to their physical size as merely electrons moving in brains. But logic can be maintained by extending existence out to the non-physical. Ideas can be bigger than other ideas, and you can logically evaluate them. You just have to figure out the rules first.
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    The pen is mightier than the sword only because the pen can create ideas that inspire and guide a lot of swords. Ideas without physical actions don't cause any effect. Ideas only outweigh actions to the extent that they result in larger actions. If you start with any historically impactful idea and carefully trace its impact, you will see quite a lot of mass and energy moving around along the way. And what is a sword without an idea? It lies there, inert, no threat to anyone. So when people talk about "the pen vs. the sword," what they're really talking about is a competition of ideas. Behind every sword there is thought--and pens can help change thought. But none of this means that thought and ideas are non-physical. The relative impact of competing ideas might be non-linear and unpredictable, but physical systems can be non-linear and unpredictable.
hackinthebochs 10y ago
>many more things in existence are non-physical than physical. What does non-physical existence even mean? This isn't an idle question. Surely we know what physical existence is: some capacity to interact; be causally affected or causally affect other physical things. This definition is a bit circular in some sense, but it has closure which is important. The word "exist" has a foundational importance in all of human intellectual activity. What is the analogous notion of non-physical existence that supports it sharing this term? >If consciousness itself were something on the same order as an idea, then it would lose none of its potency. When we say consciousness exists, we're not saying something of similar importance of how a child might say giant pink elephants exist. They're both ideas, but we mean something very different.
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  > The word "exist" has a foundational importance in all of human intellectual activity. Are you sure about that? I have a personal mental exercise / thought experiment where I try to iterate on my understanding of what it means to exist. But I wouldn't call that foundational. I maybe run through it once a month or so. Certainly it's attained a great deal of importance, but really, iterating on my understanding is never going to really get me anywhere. Anything can be said to "exist". If you are thinking about it, it's currently existing in your mind as thought. If you're not thinking about it, but have thought about it in the past, then it exists in your memory. If you've never thought about it, then it's a potential that you could experience someday. It could also exist as a potential quantum state that nothing living could ever consider. I'm reminded of the "library" where every possible grouping of characters is tied together with a math function and you can search for whatever you want. Considering whether everything ever written 'exists' or not just kinda lost its thunder to me. If everything meets some criteria, then it's the criteria that needs to be examined, not the everything. Archimedes wanted to move the world with his lever, but really, it's way more interesting to just move half. You'd have to somehow escape your own mind before you could truly consider something that doesn't exist somewhere. I don't think existence, in that sense, is as big of an idea as people seem to think. The way I usually use it is to get at the fundamental quality of being human. I think about agency, goals, limitations, purpose. These things seem way more interesting than trying to drive at the fundamentals of everything. What it means for me to exist is way cooler to think about than what it means for my bed to exist.
tjbrennan 10y ago
The thing that consciousness has that is not simply an idea is sensation. At a certain point, it becomes indescribable.
Razengan 10y ago
> There are plenty of real, non-physical things. ... Think about, oh, say, a road. What's the difference between a road and a random patch of asphalt? ... There is the world of ideas. Things held in the mind, in the consciousness of people have real-world effects on the physical world around us. ... Indeed, and Music may be the most prominent example of that! It's basically a bunch of things inducing vibrations in a physical medium. To other beings that noise may very well be no more meaningful than static on our television screens, if they can even hear in those frequencies, let alone be able to pick out the different instruments used in a piece. We have built an entire industry and a sub-universe of knowledge around it. Rules, notation, tools, a system of writing it down, and recording it and sharing it. People gain celebrity through it and are remembered for their achievements in it. Music is one of the best example of things that exist only in our heads and still profoundly effect OUR world. Now just imagine an alien species that, for example, can sense their planet's magnetic fields in the same detail that we sense sound waves. Imagine them making their "music" by manipulating those fields. They could have an entire culture and industry around it, a sub-universe that would be practically meaningless if not completely invisible to us.
- visarga 10y ago
  > just imagine an alien species that, for example, can sense their planet's magnetic fields Radio?
- hasenj 10y ago
  It's amusing to think about, really. A person getting rich and fame for finding creative ways to manipulate air vibrations in certain patterns, because these patterns give some special sorts of mental tingles to people who experience them.
  - vinceguidry 10y ago
    Oh don't stop there. He's rich because of these little pieces of paper that, for some reason, are so valuable you can remove the physical artifact of pieces of paper and represent them solely with bits in a computer system. And fame? How in the world would you connect that to the physical?
kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
> There are plenty of real, non-physical things. Evolution is real, and non-physical, you can describe it using mathematical formulas. Math decides how the real world happens. Math is an invention of man it doesn't exist in the real world. There is matter and energy and they interact. Quantities of stuff exist but there are no numbers. That is extrapolation and modeling with man-made tools. Math decides nothing as it is not a fundamental aspect of reality.
- ta_donk_gt 10y ago
  > Math is an invention of man it doesn't exist in the real world I see this from time to time, and certainly opinions can differ, but I tend to cringe when I see this idea pushed. From my perspective, math is not an invention of man, but a discovery. Math is an intrinsic part of the universe, that we continue to discover and piece together. Certainly we have invented the symbols and the terminology, but the underlying concepts...these laws, these truths exist whether we discover them or not, whether we give them names or not.
  - cardoni 10y ago
    Amen. Well-stated.
  - roywiggins 10y ago
    Right, but there are things like surreal numbers that feel more like constructs- useful, interesting and so forth, but not discovered in the real world so much as a tool built out of available materials. Math dances along the edge between discovery and invention.
    - majewsky 10y ago
      > there are things like surreal numbers that feel more like constructs The fabric of the physical realm usually doesn't care about anyone's feelings. > but not discovered in the real world so much as a tool built out of available materials The fallacy here is that you assign different valuation between discovering a thing through observation, and discovery through thinking. For example, the Higgs boson was conjectured many years before it was first observed. Following your argument, I could argue that the Higgs boson was invented by us. What's true is that we made up the Higgs boson, but that didn't change the unobserved existence of it. In the same way, we may have made up surreal numbers, but that doesn't discard the possibility of their unobserved existence out there somewhere.

snowwrestler 10y ago

Are there non-physical things? I doubt it. Let's take the road. Obviously the mass of the road itself (the object) is physical and has physical characteristics like its components, the chemical composition of its components, the elements in the chemicals, the particles and forces in the atoms of the elements, etc. Now let's take the idea of a road. Where does that idea actually reside? In the brains of living beings, which are themselves physical. Ideas are information, and information is physical. You need energy to create and maintain it, and it can be quantified in terms of the entropy spent to create it. It is a persistent pattern of mass/energy. The "world of information" only seems infinite to us because we are so inefficient at working with it outside each of our own minds. Think of the incredible amount of mass and energy that must be expended to create a road, or even a book, or even an SD card. By contrast, our 8 lb. lump of brain stores and returns vast quantities of information with seemingly no effort on our part. But of course thinking does require physical effort. An inert human, thinking in a chair, still requires food.

vinceguidry 10y ago
The problem with this line of thought is that it completely upends classical cause and effect. Things have effects in proportion to their size. The sun has a way bigger effect on us than Jupiter does. But when you get to the scale of ideas, the logic upends. The pen should not be mightier than the sword, but is because ideas have outsized effects on the world compared to their physical size as merely electrons moving in brains. But logic can be maintained by extending existence out to the non-physical. Ideas can be bigger than other ideas, and you can logically evaluate them. You just have to figure out the rules first.
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  The pen is mightier than the sword only because the pen can create ideas that inspire and guide a lot of swords. Ideas without physical actions don't cause any effect. Ideas only outweigh actions to the extent that they result in larger actions. If you start with any historically impactful idea and carefully trace its impact, you will see quite a lot of mass and energy moving around along the way. And what is a sword without an idea? It lies there, inert, no threat to anyone. So when people talk about "the pen vs. the sword," what they're really talking about is a competition of ideas. Behind every sword there is thought--and pens can help change thought. But none of this means that thought and ideas are non-physical. The relative impact of competing ideas might be non-linear and unpredictable, but physical systems can be non-linear and unpredictable.

hackinthebochs 10y ago

>many more things in existence are non-physical than physical. What does non-physical existence even mean? This isn't an idle question. Surely we know what physical existence is: some capacity to interact; be causally affected or causally affect other physical things. This definition is a bit circular in some sense, but it has closure which is important. The word "exist" has a foundational importance in all of human intellectual activity. What is the analogous notion of non-physical existence that supports it sharing this term? >If consciousness itself were something on the same order as an idea, then it would lose none of its potency. When we say consciousness exists, we're not saying something of similar importance of how a child might say giant pink elephants exist. They're both ideas, but we mean something very different.

vinceguidry 10y ago
> The word "exist" has a foundational importance in all of human intellectual activity. Are you sure about that? I have a personal mental exercise / thought experiment where I try to iterate on my understanding of what it means to exist. But I wouldn't call that foundational. I maybe run through it once a month or so. Certainly it's attained a great deal of importance, but really, iterating on my understanding is never going to really get me anywhere. Anything can be said to "exist". If you are thinking about it, it's currently existing in your mind as thought. If you're not thinking about it, but have thought about it in the past, then it exists in your memory. If you've never thought about it, then it's a potential that you could experience someday. It could also exist as a potential quantum state that nothing living could ever consider. I'm reminded of the "library" where every possible grouping of characters is tied together with a math function and you can search for whatever you want. Considering whether everything ever written 'exists' or not just kinda lost its thunder to me. If everything meets some criteria, then it's the criteria that needs to be examined, not the everything. Archimedes wanted to move the world with his lever, but really, it's way more interesting to just move half. You'd have to somehow escape your own mind before you could truly consider something that doesn't exist somewhere. I don't think existence, in that sense, is as big of an idea as people seem to think. The way I usually use it is to get at the fundamental quality of being human. I think about agency, goals, limitations, purpose. These things seem way more interesting than trying to drive at the fundamentals of everything. What it means for me to exist is way cooler to think about than what it means for my bed to exist.

tjbrennan 10y ago

The thing that consciousness has that is not simply an idea is sensation. At a certain point, it becomes indescribable.

Razengan 10y ago

> There are plenty of real, non-physical things. ... Think about, oh, say, a road. What's the difference between a road and a random patch of asphalt? ... There is the world of ideas. Things held in the mind, in the consciousness of people have real-world effects on the physical world around us. ... Indeed, and Music may be the most prominent example of that! It's basically a bunch of things inducing vibrations in a physical medium. To other beings that noise may very well be no more meaningful than static on our television screens, if they can even hear in those frequencies, let alone be able to pick out the different instruments used in a piece. We have built an entire industry and a sub-universe of knowledge around it. Rules, notation, tools, a system of writing it down, and recording it and sharing it. People gain celebrity through it and are remembered for their achievements in it. Music is one of the best example of things that exist only in our heads and still profoundly effect OUR world. Now just imagine an alien species that, for example, can sense their planet's magnetic fields in the same detail that we sense sound waves. Imagine them making their "music" by manipulating those fields. They could have an entire culture and industry around it, a sub-universe that would be practically meaningless if not completely invisible to us.

visarga 10y ago
> just imagine an alien species that, for example, can sense their planet's magnetic fields Radio?
hasenj 10y ago
It's amusing to think about, really. A person getting rich and fame for finding creative ways to manipulate air vibrations in certain patterns, because these patterns give some special sorts of mental tingles to people who experience them.
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  Oh don't stop there. He's rich because of these little pieces of paper that, for some reason, are so valuable you can remove the physical artifact of pieces of paper and represent them solely with bits in a computer system. And fame? How in the world would you connect that to the physical?

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago

> There are plenty of real, non-physical things. Evolution is real, and non-physical, you can describe it using mathematical formulas. Math decides how the real world happens. Math is an invention of man it doesn't exist in the real world. There is matter and energy and they interact. Quantities of stuff exist but there are no numbers. That is extrapolation and modeling with man-made tools. Math decides nothing as it is not a fundamental aspect of reality.

ta_donk_gt 10y ago
> Math is an invention of man it doesn't exist in the real world I see this from time to time, and certainly opinions can differ, but I tend to cringe when I see this idea pushed. From my perspective, math is not an invention of man, but a discovery. Math is an intrinsic part of the universe, that we continue to discover and piece together. Certainly we have invented the symbols and the terminology, but the underlying concepts...these laws, these truths exist whether we discover them or not, whether we give them names or not.
- cardoni 10y ago
  Amen. Well-stated.
- roywiggins 10y ago
  Right, but there are things like surreal numbers that feel more like constructs- useful, interesting and so forth, but not discovered in the real world so much as a tool built out of available materials. Math dances along the edge between discovery and invention.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    > there are things like surreal numbers that feel more like constructs The fabric of the physical realm usually doesn't care about anyone's feelings. > but not discovered in the real world so much as a tool built out of available materials The fallacy here is that you assign different valuation between discovering a thing through observation, and discovery through thinking. For example, the Higgs boson was conjectured many years before it was first observed. Following your argument, I could argue that the Higgs boson was invented by us. What's true is that we made up the Higgs boson, but that didn't change the unobserved existence of it. In the same way, we may have made up surreal numbers, but that doesn't discard the possibility of their unobserved existence out there somewhere.