6 ms·

"Put another way, this is the premise that the mind arises out of ordinary physics... If you are very religious, you might believe that a brain is not possible

by md224 10y ago

"Put another way, this is the premise that the mind arises out of ordinary physics... If you are very religious, you might believe that a brain is not possible without a soul. But for most of us, this is an easy premise to accept." The thing that irks me about this is how it reinforces a common (and in my opinion, false) dichotomy: either you believe the mind is explicable in terms of ordinary physics or you believe in a soul and are therefore religious. I feel like there should be a third way, one that admits something vital is missing from the physicalist picture but doesn't make up a story about what that thing is. There is a huge question mark at the heart of neuroscience -- the famed Explanatory Gap -- and I think we should be able to recognize that question mark without being labeled a Supernaturalist. Consciousness is weird!

TillE 10y ago
That's just vitalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism Either everything exists in the material world, or it doesn't. There's really no way of avoiding that binary. If you think there's something else, that is by definition supernatural.
- colechristensen 10y ago
  There's no reason that something else can't exist in the material world, I think the parent is just pointing out the third way is thinking there's something else material outside our current understanding. If God exists, there's no reason there couldn't be new phyisics describing how his world works.
  - thedufer 10y ago
    If the something else is physical but outside of our current understanding, then it doesn't prevent us from creating AI by simply simulating a biological brain. Thus, that is the same as the physicalist view in the context of the argument in question.
    - malka 10y ago
      You need to know what tovsimulate though. But we could imagine to create an "ai" from pure meat. Grey matter linked to sensor and ouput systems. Kinda nightmarish
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  Also see, at least, Phenomenology[1] and Heidegger[2].[3] Neither of them are Vitalism or religious.[4] [1] - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ [2] - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/ [3] - Wikipedia tends to be a pretty horrible source for reading about philosophy, so I don't like to link to it for this. The plato.stanford.edu site is better, at least for Analytics, not so much for Continentals. So I hesitate to link to it for this either. Better to just go to the primary source material, or take a course at one of the rare schools which focus on Continental thought, so you don't get the wrong idea by learing about Continental philosophy from Analytics who all too often see Continentals contemptuously as "not philosophy" or as just some version of Analytics, both of which miss the point. [4] - Though some, particularly some Christian Existentialist thinkers have in fact interpreted Heidegger's thought from a Christian perspective. But that view, as most any other about Heidegger, really depends on who you ask. Many others interpret Heidegger's thought strictly non-theistically.
- goatlover 10y ago
  It's not at all binary. Read some more philosophy. Materialism hardly encompasses all the non-supernatural views. First of all, the world could be mathematical, informational, computational, or a simulation. It could have universals in addition to material particulars. Consciousness might not be reducible to the material, or the material could all have a conscious component. There might be other things, like societies or biology, which are strongly emergent. Or maybe there is no material world. Maybe it's all mental. Perhaps there is a third substance, a neutral monism giving rise to mind and matter. Maybe the noumena is beyond human categorization and perception. Perhaps our experience of the world is such because we are the animals we are, and not because we have access to reality in itself. Man is the measure and all that. And on and on. There are various anti-realists debates. There is Humean skepticism of causality. None of these issues need invoke the supernatural, although they don't necessarily rule it out. David Chalmers can propose consciousness as an additional feature of nature which is nonphysical (tied to informationally rich processes like certain mental or computational states), without proposing any supernatural element.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    There's really just one question - either it works in a way we can figure out, or it doesn't. The former is "materialism", the other (for now) is "supernatural", with the possible caveat that we may one day prove that some laws governing the universe are fundamentally not comprehensible for human minds, and all other minds humans could ever create (in a Gödel's incompleteness theorem style).
- 1_2__3 10y ago
  But doesn't our understanding of what is natural and what is supernatural - where the line between them lies - evolving constantly? Is it vitalism (or some other investment in the supernatural) to believe that what constitutes the material world is not yet fully explored or understood, and that the answers to some of our questions on humanity and consciousness will be found there?
- Almaviva 10y ago
  > If you think there's something else, that is by definition supernatural. First, how others perceive your words usually matters more than the precise definitions you have in mind. If I describe myself as believing in the supernatural, it has a lot of connotations I don't want. Second, the possibility that consciousness (in some sense) could be built into physics themselves. So it doesn't contradict that the brain is made of subatomic particles, but the workings of the universe have more correlations built in that could work at different levels. Something I think is comparable is that many cosmologists think that the arrow of time, which events come before which, can be explained by a universe with initial conditions of extreme low entropy. So there's nothing within the universe that explains why the initial conditions were like that, but it's a real property of our universe. Maybe consciousness could be an end state that the universe is progressing toward. Is that really so much weirder than working from an initial state of extremely low entropy?
jimmcslim 10y ago
Any recommendations on decent pop-sci books that explore the latest understanding of the origin and mechanism of consciousness? Is anyone exploring this third way at all?
- Retric 10y ago
  Pop-sci is useless in this area. There is plenty of good research on the topic, but pop-sci on the brain is just as bad as pop-sci on quantum mechanics or computers. EX: People making decisions based on eye tracking not matching up with the subjective experiences. Or the classic you chose not to do something, but your arm is already in motion and you can't stop it fast enough.
  - gfody 10y ago
    Maybe I'm miscalibrated on what's considered "pop sci" - but anything sensationalizing those EEG experiments or debunking "free will" shouldn't count IMO. That garbage nobody should be reading.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      > or debunking "free will" Interesting. I thought that "free will" was utterly debunked by the economy :). Not to mention the advertising industry, which is basically applied exploitation of the limits of human "free will" :).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- gfody 10y ago
  I read theory-of-mind pop sci constantly, I'd say Penrose has the vitalist perspective and Kurzweil has the physicalist perspective. Hofstadter is a lovely read too (physicalist).
- kobeya 10y ago
  Daniel Dennett's book Consciousness Explained.
Retric 10y ago
Explanatory Gap is BS. This is what happens. Then why does it not describe how it feels? You are not wired up to understand the low level effects, it's simply not a useful. At the same time it does describe how it feels, if we started using firing of C fibers instead of Pain people would assume they understood what was going on.
JamilD 10y ago
The roundworm (c. elegans) only has 302 neurons, and about 7,000 synapses, but is capable of social behavior, movement, and reproduction. The entire connectome has been mapped, and we understand how many of these behaviors work without having to resort to additional ontological entities like your "third way". If this complex behavior can be explained using only 302 neurons, I have no doubt that the complexity of human behavior and consciousness can be explained using 100,000,000,000 neurons.
- goatlover 10y ago
  But it can't all be explained just using neurons. Those neurons exist as part of a body. That body lives in an environment. Those environments include other people. You can't understand the totality human behavior without including bodies and environments. It can't all be reduced to neuroscience. It's true for the worm as well. You can't understand everything about the worm without emulating the other 600 or so cells, and putting it into environments similar to what biological worms occupy. The lego mindstorm worm is interesting, but it's hardly the natural state of the worm.
- auganov 10y ago
  Are you sure? My understanding is that this connectome has been rather unfruitful in explaining its behavior.
  - JamilD 10y ago
    We can't explain everything completely right now. However, for example, we can model behaviors like klinotaxis and movement toward chemical gradients using only 10 neurons [0]! I find it completely fascinating — we don't have the full picture, but we can isolate different behaviors and examine how the neurons contribute to that action. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3_BjL20Roc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3_BjL20Roc
- cgio 10y ago
  There is an implicit assumption there that scale is colinear with sophistication. It could be that only 5 neurons give rise to the complexity of consciousness, it could be that the number of neurons is irrelevant but rather their configuration is important. Also, there is a problem there if it explains only some of the behaviors. What happens with the rest, where are they coming from, if we have fully mapped the connectome?
deleted 10y ago
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SerLava 10y ago
I don't understand why people have such a weird problem reconciling the brain with the mind. It IS all physical. It's also an unimaginably complex fucking shitload of tiny physical objects working incredibly quickly. If your brain was big enough to see the parts working like little gears of a clock, it would probably be planet sized, or something like that. Huge. I would EVEN say it doesn't raise any interesting philosophical questions. Are computers silicon, or magic? Is a book paper, or magic? Is the economy magic, or a bunch of people buying shit everywhere? Knowing that the brain is physical doesn't make me question myself or doubt control over my life or any silly shit like that. Yes all of my actions are technically "predetermined" by the Big Bang, but not in an interesting way, at all. Semi-related, if you made a giant brainlike calculator out of water pipes and valves and shit, and asked it a question, then turned all its pipes and valves for a while... it would probably just say "please kill me."
- lucker 10y ago
  I don't think there's a problem reconciling the brain with the mind, if by 'mind' one means problem-solving ability. The problem is in reconciling the brain with consciousness. There is, as far as I know, no theory that explains how consciousness can arise from matter.
  - SerLava 10y ago
    I don't know that they're really different. It's just a first-person frame of reference. When something else is conscious, or something else has a mind, that's the same thing.
    - mbrock 10y ago
      "Just" — but why should there be any "perspective" at all?
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - 10y ago
marcosdumay 10y ago
Well, if you believe that despite having no evidence of something unexplained by physics happening in the brain, it's still a religious myth, it doesn't matter the name you give it. And if you have any piece of evidence, you can be sure the people at the nearest physics dept will love to hear it.
seiferteric 10y ago
One thing I rarely see discussed is the possibility that the brain is just too complex to practically reproduce. That is to say, that it is technically possible, but not practical. Evolution had billions of years, working in a massively parallel way to work this out after all. It's possible that the brain is a huge tangled mess of rules and special cases that we will never be able to fully understand and reproduce. Also, even if we are able to produce a basic intelligence, why do we assume it will ever get to the point where it can understand itself well enough to self improve? It's possible there is a threshold we won't be able to get past for self improvement to be possible.
- Almaviva 10y ago
  > Evolution had billions of years, working in a massively parallel way to work this out after all. And it also got to work on it with a hundred billion stars with earth-like planets, in each of a hundred billion galaxies, and (maybe) in a basically infinite space of universes. All in parallel with infinite time to play with. Is it so far-fetched to postulate that humans will hit our limits before getting this far?
  - seiferteric 10y ago
    Great point, the anthropic principle dictates we only see the successful outcome. Evolution is working across the entire universe (or even multiverse) so we really don't know how long it could take for human (or greater) level intelligence to emerge.
- narag 10y ago
  It's possible that the brain is a huge tangled mess of rules and special cases that we will never be able to fully understand and reproduce. It doesn't seem possible. Our brain, like the rest of our bodies, develops from a single cell. It's DNA (maybe also some other markers) that directs the differentiation of every part. So DNA is where the blueprints of that huge mess would be. I believe that self-organization is a better way to explain how mind emerges. There's a basic try and error mechanism with strong rewards. The rest is the result of a life of learning.
okreallywtf 10y ago
You could say that that 3rd way IS part of the physicalist picture already I think. As you say, there are such gaps in our understanding at this point we cannot say we've probed the depths of our brains and still found nothing. It is like searching the ocean for something that by all accounts should be in the ocean, and deciding that perhaps the thing cannot be found, despite having large portions of the ocean still to search. It is too early to make that claim. I'm not saying that there are not smug philosophers or scientists or just internet nerds that will declare the problem solved, clearly it is all in the brain and there is nothing magical to it but I think they would be incorrect. Modern physics is incredibly esoteric and shares more with meta-physics than what we tend to observe (which classical physics can explain satisfactorily for the most part). I don't think being physicalist is any impediment to having spirituality and and a sense of wonder about the universe and our place in it - the main difference to me is that we can't just accept a deus ex machina and call it a day. That may sound condescending but it isn't a choice for me personally.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
It doesn't seem like a false dichotomy. It's about whether you believe there are things that are fundamentally not comprehensible in the universe. Things that are magic in the sense of "fuck it, that doesn't make sense, let's go get drunk instead". If you believe that all phenomena can in principle be understood given enough time and effort (including even building a better intelligence to figure it out), then you have materialistic belief.

by md224 10y ago

TillE 10y ago

That's just vitalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism Either everything exists in the material world, or it doesn't. There's really no way of avoiding that binary. If you think there's something else, that is by definition supernatural.

colechristensen 10y ago
There's no reason that something else can't exist in the material world, I think the parent is just pointing out the third way is thinking there's something else material outside our current understanding. If God exists, there's no reason there couldn't be new phyisics describing how his world works.
- thedufer 10y ago
  If the something else is physical but outside of our current understanding, then it doesn't prevent us from creating AI by simply simulating a biological brain. Thus, that is the same as the physicalist view in the context of the argument in question.
  - malka 10y ago
    You need to know what tovsimulate though. But we could imagine to create an "ai" from pure meat. Grey matter linked to sensor and ouput systems. Kinda nightmarish
pmoriarty 10y ago
Also see, at least, Phenomenology[1] and Heidegger[2].[3] Neither of them are Vitalism or religious.[4] [1] - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ [2] - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/ [3] - Wikipedia tends to be a pretty horrible source for reading about philosophy, so I don't like to link to it for this. The plato.stanford.edu site is better, at least for Analytics, not so much for Continentals. So I hesitate to link to it for this either. Better to just go to the primary source material, or take a course at one of the rare schools which focus on Continental thought, so you don't get the wrong idea by learing about Continental philosophy from Analytics who all too often see Continentals contemptuously as "not philosophy" or as just some version of Analytics, both of which miss the point. [4] - Though some, particularly some Christian Existentialist thinkers have in fact interpreted Heidegger's thought from a Christian perspective. But that view, as most any other about Heidegger, really depends on who you ask. Many others interpret Heidegger's thought strictly non-theistically.
goatlover 10y ago
It's not at all binary. Read some more philosophy. Materialism hardly encompasses all the non-supernatural views. First of all, the world could be mathematical, informational, computational, or a simulation. It could have universals in addition to material particulars. Consciousness might not be reducible to the material, or the material could all have a conscious component. There might be other things, like societies or biology, which are strongly emergent. Or maybe there is no material world. Maybe it's all mental. Perhaps there is a third substance, a neutral monism giving rise to mind and matter. Maybe the noumena is beyond human categorization and perception. Perhaps our experience of the world is such because we are the animals we are, and not because we have access to reality in itself. Man is the measure and all that. And on and on. There are various anti-realists debates. There is Humean skepticism of causality. None of these issues need invoke the supernatural, although they don't necessarily rule it out. David Chalmers can propose consciousness as an additional feature of nature which is nonphysical (tied to informationally rich processes like certain mental or computational states), without proposing any supernatural element.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  There's really just one question - either it works in a way we can figure out, or it doesn't. The former is "materialism", the other (for now) is "supernatural", with the possible caveat that we may one day prove that some laws governing the universe are fundamentally not comprehensible for human minds, and all other minds humans could ever create (in a Gödel's incompleteness theorem style).
1_2__3 10y ago
But doesn't our understanding of what is natural and what is supernatural - where the line between them lies - evolving constantly? Is it vitalism (or some other investment in the supernatural) to believe that what constitutes the material world is not yet fully explored or understood, and that the answers to some of our questions on humanity and consciousness will be found there?
Almaviva 10y ago
> If you think there's something else, that is by definition supernatural. First, how others perceive your words usually matters more than the precise definitions you have in mind. If I describe myself as believing in the supernatural, it has a lot of connotations I don't want. Second, the possibility that consciousness (in some sense) could be built into physics themselves. So it doesn't contradict that the brain is made of subatomic particles, but the workings of the universe have more correlations built in that could work at different levels. Something I think is comparable is that many cosmologists think that the arrow of time, which events come before which, can be explained by a universe with initial conditions of extreme low entropy. So there's nothing within the universe that explains why the initial conditions were like that, but it's a real property of our universe. Maybe consciousness could be an end state that the universe is progressing toward. Is that really so much weirder than working from an initial state of extremely low entropy?

jimmcslim 10y ago

Any recommendations on decent pop-sci books that explore the latest understanding of the origin and mechanism of consciousness? Is anyone exploring this third way at all?

Retric 10y ago
Pop-sci is useless in this area. There is plenty of good research on the topic, but pop-sci on the brain is just as bad as pop-sci on quantum mechanics or computers. EX: People making decisions based on eye tracking not matching up with the subjective experiences. Or the classic you chose not to do something, but your arm is already in motion and you can't stop it fast enough.
- gfody 10y ago
  Maybe I'm miscalibrated on what's considered "pop sci" - but anything sensationalizing those EEG experiments or debunking "free will" shouldn't count IMO. That garbage nobody should be reading.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > or debunking "free will" Interesting. I thought that "free will" was utterly debunked by the economy :). Not to mention the advertising industry, which is basically applied exploitation of the limits of human "free will" :).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
gfody 10y ago
I read theory-of-mind pop sci constantly, I'd say Penrose has the vitalist perspective and Kurzweil has the physicalist perspective. Hofstadter is a lovely read too (physicalist).
kobeya 10y ago
Daniel Dennett's book Consciousness Explained.

Retric 10y ago

Explanatory Gap is BS. This is what happens. Then why does it not describe how it feels? You are not wired up to understand the low level effects, it's simply not a useful. At the same time it does describe how it feels, if we started using firing of C fibers instead of Pain people would assume they understood what was going on.

JamilD 10y ago

The roundworm (c. elegans) only has 302 neurons, and about 7,000 synapses, but is capable of social behavior, movement, and reproduction. The entire connectome has been mapped, and we understand how many of these behaviors work without having to resort to additional ontological entities like your "third way". If this complex behavior can be explained using only 302 neurons, I have no doubt that the complexity of human behavior and consciousness can be explained using 100,000,000,000 neurons.

goatlover 10y ago
But it can't all be explained just using neurons. Those neurons exist as part of a body. That body lives in an environment. Those environments include other people. You can't understand the totality human behavior without including bodies and environments. It can't all be reduced to neuroscience. It's true for the worm as well. You can't understand everything about the worm without emulating the other 600 or so cells, and putting it into environments similar to what biological worms occupy. The lego mindstorm worm is interesting, but it's hardly the natural state of the worm.
auganov 10y ago
Are you sure? My understanding is that this connectome has been rather unfruitful in explaining its behavior.
- JamilD 10y ago
  We can't explain everything completely right now. However, for example, we can model behaviors like klinotaxis and movement toward chemical gradients using only 10 neurons [0]! I find it completely fascinating — we don't have the full picture, but we can isolate different behaviors and examine how the neurons contribute to that action. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3_BjL20Roc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3_BjL20Roc
cgio 10y ago
There is an implicit assumption there that scale is colinear with sophistication. It could be that only 5 neurons give rise to the complexity of consciousness, it could be that the number of neurons is irrelevant but rather their configuration is important. Also, there is a problem there if it explains only some of the behaviors. What happens with the rest, where are they coming from, if we have fully mapped the connectome?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

SerLava 10y ago

I don't understand why people have such a weird problem reconciling the brain with the mind. It IS all physical. It's also an unimaginably complex fucking shitload of tiny physical objects working incredibly quickly. If your brain was big enough to see the parts working like little gears of a clock, it would probably be planet sized, or something like that. Huge. I would EVEN say it doesn't raise any interesting philosophical questions. Are computers silicon, or magic? Is a book paper, or magic? Is the economy magic, or a bunch of people buying shit everywhere? Knowing that the brain is physical doesn't make me question myself or doubt control over my life or any silly shit like that. Yes all of my actions are technically "predetermined" by the Big Bang, but not in an interesting way, at all. Semi-related, if you made a giant brainlike calculator out of water pipes and valves and shit, and asked it a question, then turned all its pipes and valves for a while... it would probably just say "please kill me."

lucker 10y ago
I don't think there's a problem reconciling the brain with the mind, if by 'mind' one means problem-solving ability. The problem is in reconciling the brain with consciousness. There is, as far as I know, no theory that explains how consciousness can arise from matter.
- SerLava 10y ago
  I don't know that they're really different. It's just a first-person frame of reference. When something else is conscious, or something else has a mind, that's the same thing.
  - mbrock 10y ago
    "Just" — but why should there be any "perspective" at all?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- 10y ago

marcosdumay 10y ago

Well, if you believe that despite having no evidence of something unexplained by physics happening in the brain, it's still a religious myth, it doesn't matter the name you give it. And if you have any piece of evidence, you can be sure the people at the nearest physics dept will love to hear it.

seiferteric 10y ago

One thing I rarely see discussed is the possibility that the brain is just too complex to practically reproduce. That is to say, that it is technically possible, but not practical. Evolution had billions of years, working in a massively parallel way to work this out after all. It's possible that the brain is a huge tangled mess of rules and special cases that we will never be able to fully understand and reproduce. Also, even if we are able to produce a basic intelligence, why do we assume it will ever get to the point where it can understand itself well enough to self improve? It's possible there is a threshold we won't be able to get past for self improvement to be possible.

Almaviva 10y ago
> Evolution had billions of years, working in a massively parallel way to work this out after all. And it also got to work on it with a hundred billion stars with earth-like planets, in each of a hundred billion galaxies, and (maybe) in a basically infinite space of universes. All in parallel with infinite time to play with. Is it so far-fetched to postulate that humans will hit our limits before getting this far?
- seiferteric 10y ago
  Great point, the anthropic principle dictates we only see the successful outcome. Evolution is working across the entire universe (or even multiverse) so we really don't know how long it could take for human (or greater) level intelligence to emerge.
narag 10y ago
It's possible that the brain is a huge tangled mess of rules and special cases that we will never be able to fully understand and reproduce. It doesn't seem possible. Our brain, like the rest of our bodies, develops from a single cell. It's DNA (maybe also some other markers) that directs the differentiation of every part. So DNA is where the blueprints of that huge mess would be. I believe that self-organization is a better way to explain how mind emerges. There's a basic try and error mechanism with strong rewards. The rest is the result of a life of learning.

okreallywtf 10y ago

You could say that that 3rd way IS part of the physicalist picture already I think. As you say, there are such gaps in our understanding at this point we cannot say we've probed the depths of our brains and still found nothing. It is like searching the ocean for something that by all accounts should be in the ocean, and deciding that perhaps the thing cannot be found, despite having large portions of the ocean still to search. It is too early to make that claim. I'm not saying that there are not smug philosophers or scientists or just internet nerds that will declare the problem solved, clearly it is all in the brain and there is nothing magical to it but I think they would be incorrect. Modern physics is incredibly esoteric and shares more with meta-physics than what we tend to observe (which classical physics can explain satisfactorily for the most part). I don't think being physicalist is any impediment to having spirituality and and a sense of wonder about the universe and our place in it - the main difference to me is that we can't just accept a deus ex machina and call it a day. That may sound condescending but it isn't a choice for me personally.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

It doesn't seem like a false dichotomy. It's about whether you believe there are things that are fundamentally not comprehensible in the universe. Things that are magic in the sense of "fuck it, that doesn't make sense, let's go get drunk instead". If you believe that all phenomena can in principle be understood given enough time and effort (including even building a better intelligence to figure it out), then you have materialistic belief.