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It's not a question of our contemporary understanding being sufficient to model a human brain. Rather it's that there is little or no reason to believe the bra
by tux1968 9y ago
It's not a question of our contemporary understanding being sufficient to model a human brain. Rather it's that there is little or no reason to believe the brain and consciousness are pure unassailable magic. So it should be within the scope of future scientific understanding.
- goatlover 9y agoThe brain and consciousness need not be magic for the philosophical issue to arise. The fundamental question is objectivity vs subjectivity. Consciousness is subjective, yet science is an objective affair. Can the objective be used to explain the subjective, or is the objective an abstraction from intersubjective experiences? If it's the latter, then the project to explain everything in scientific terms is doomed, because it will always leave something out. If it's the former, then subjectivity is not fundamental, but arises from the objective world. How this is so is a difficult matter (no pun intended). Either way, there is no magic involved, just a question of where philosophical assumptions begin. You can start with matter or the mind and see where it takes you.
- tux1968 9y agoEither consciousness lives in the physical constructs of the human brain or it is supernatural / "magic". If the first case is true, then there is every reason to believe it is open to the scrutiny of the scientific process. What we know for sure is that there are very many scientific questions about the brain that still remain to be answered before we have to throw up our hands and admit that it is all ineffable. IMO science is doomed to always leave something out as you say.. it will reach a fundamental building block that simply exists, can not be expressed in terms of something else and might as well be called God. But i just haven't heard any convincing arguments that consciousness can't be understood before we reach that point.
- KennyCason 9y agoI don't think it's just your opinion. :) I think Godel and many other logicians/mathematicians/philosophers would agree we are likely doomed to "always leave something out", particularly in the sense that we will fail to create "the perfect logic" that can explain everything. Oh the joys of living "in the system".
- coldtea 9y ago>The brain and consciousness need not be magic for the philosophical issue to arise. The fundamental question is objectivity vs subjectivity. Consciousness is subjective, yet science is an objective affair. Pain is also "subjective", but we understand pain, who it develops and moves in the body, etc. Plus, that consciousness is subjective is another way of saying we haven't mapped it specifically, so this is a kind of circular logic. The "subjective" part is just a set of states of an objective construct (the brain, which is a physical object).
- marcoperaza 9y agoWe can understand everything we'd like about how brain processes pain, but it's questionable whether we can know how that processing then becomes the subjective experience of pain.
- tux1968 9y agoI don't understand why this notion of subjective experience keeps being raised. Why is it important? Once we know enough to create a synthetic brain, it really doesn't matter what its subjective experience is, we will judge it the same way we judge our fellow humans. And this is fine since we have no way to truly know the subjective experience of say color for any other human either. Yet we don't question each others claim of consciousness. It's enough that we can both say "blue" to name the ~ 490–450nm wavelength of light regardless of our personal subjective experience of it.
- marcoperaza 9y agoBecause subjective experience is not a one way affair. It clearly plays at least some functional role. The proof of that is that we're having a conversation about it.
- tux1968 9y agoBut the same conversation could be had with a synthetic brain. It's no more important than any other feature of brain functionality. What I don't understand is how this concern about subjectivity limits us in understanding consciousness and brain functionality. It doesn't mean we can experience the subjective states of a synthetic brain or another human, but we can definitely replicate the physical aspects of the brain that produce them.
- wu-ikkyu 9y agoDefine "magic". If we cannot understand something, does that make it magic? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.