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That's a grossly ungracious summary, but yes: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You need to show some evidence of specialness first, otherwis
by Udo 10y ago
That's a grossly ungracious summary, but yes: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You need to show some evidence of specialness first, otherwise it's just wishful thinking.
I suspect the "quantum brain" movement is in part so popular because it tricks people into thinking its claims are not extraordinary. That's why I speculated that its insidiousness comes from the fact it's a New Age pseudoscience which caters to people's pre-existing sense of superiority over the rest of the cosmos. I contend that quantum spirituality holds little appeal for materialists.
- aetherson 10y agoLike literally 100% of all humans -- billions of people -- have attested to the experience of consciousness. Directly. Constantly. Not in a vague, "sometimes I think I feel something" way, but literally everyone feels it. The claim that it must not exist [1] despite that overwhelming experience, is the extraordinary claim. I don't know what consciousness is or does, and perhaps it doesn't actually exist, but the belief that it must not exist because if it did exist that would make reductive statements about the brain a little harder, is a religious belief. It's "I can't explain this and it's inconvenient to what I want to believe, so it must not exist." [1] Or de facto not exist, as in the hand-wavey claim that consciousness is some kind of byproduct of any sufficiently complicated system that arises from a totally unclear mechanism to no purpose or result.
- teraflop 10y agoWhy the particularly unsubtle strawman? Nobody in this thread has made a claim that remotely resembles "consciousness does not exist" or "consciousness is a byproduct of any sufficiently complicated system". Those are both totally different from "consciousness is, or results from, a biochemical process". I think the argument you're making is much more reasonably applied in the opposite direction. The fact that we don't know exactly how consciousness works is no reason to jump to conclusions like "oh, it must be quantum-mechanical and/or incomputable", just like the fact that we don't know exactly how life evolved is no reason to say "oh, God did it."