6 ms·

I simply don't have a strong reason at this point to believe it is sufficient. That everything is information is, IMO a tautology, and citing it as an explanati

by psyc 9y ago

I simply don't have a strong reason at this point to believe it is sufficient. That everything is information is, IMO a tautology, and citing it as an explanation is like citing matter and/or energy as an explanation. But is it inherently conscious, or is there a minimum necessary condition in terms of arrangement, data flow, or other physical evolution of a localized system?

naasking 9y ago
All good questions, but do you really have strong reasons for thinking consciousness is not physical? There seems little need to posit consciousness as some irreducible property of matter, except for those who are mysteriously uncomfortable with the idea of being purely physical beings. Most arguments against physicalism are smoke and mirrors. As for specifically what physical process produces consciousness, it's an open question that's being studied. We're currently like Ada Lovelace studying a web browser and marvelling at what it does, having little idea how it actually works, yet we're mostly convinced it's not magic. I think you'd be more forgiving if Miss Lovelace took some time trying to reverse engineer the operation of a computer and it's program. Personally, I think [1] is a great starting point on this journey. The problem of apparent subjectivity was a huge stumbling block, and I think that paper is a great stab at it. [1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
- monktastic1 9y ago
  Nice to see you again, naasking :) It doesn't require any "mysterious discomfort." Believing in the existence of a physical reality may seem like a totally reasonable extrapolation to make from our experiences, but it's not the only one.
  - naasking 9y ago
    Not the only one, simply the most plausible one! I can't answer the ultimate skeptic except to say that not only do skeptical arguments against knowledge depend on that very same knowledge, and so undermine themselves, but even if that were not so, abstract musings will never be more plausible than the concrete reality staring you in the face.
    - monktastic1 9y ago
      That's fair, but the skeptical argument isn't my main concern. The point is that subjective phenomena are the most basic facts of my existence, so it's not even meaningful for me to explain (or worse, deny) them with respect to (in favor of) things I extrapolated from them. I think last time you didn't agree that subjective phenomena were the most immediate facts of my experience. If that's still the case, perhaps I can try to be more precise.
      - naasking 9y ago
        In principle, no set of third party objective facts can capture first person subjective facts. This is part of the hard problem. The question is whether human subjectivity actually is true first person, irreducible subjectivity, or just an illusion of it. Consider the analogy to sight: seeing is believing right? And yet, at some point you'll see an optical illusion whose logical properties are simply inconsistent with other properties you've seen. Like how water appears to break pencils [1]. So how do you reconcile this? Clearly seeing can't always entail believing. Enter science. As I linked elsewhere in this thread, science can explain fake subjectivity quite well. So your choice would seem to be throwing away our best tool for objective knowledge just to preserve some special property of human minds that ultimately makes no real difference. [1] http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia/optics/bp.cfm http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia/optics/bp.cfm
        monktastic1 9y ago
        Sure, but I don't think the analogy holds. In a dream, none of the phenomena I experience (colored blobs moving about) correspond to any facts about an external reality. That's one kind of illusion, and a meaningful one. The other would be to infer "therefore I must not experiencing [the phenomenon I'm approximating as 'seeing colored blobs' or anything else]," which is nonsense. Even the thought "I am not having a conscious experience" is a conscious experience -- though even that's often not obvious. When you're having a dream, it is all an illusion (of the first kind), but to conclude that you are therefore not experiencing anything whatsoever and thus there's nothing to explain would be a grave mistake. You're not blacked out, and no amount of reasoning would make it so. The same holds here, no matter how much more consistent this reality appears to be.
- psyc 9y ago
  As I wrote above, I am only interested in hypotheses that are physical. Perhaps you mean less fundamental than a field? I'm open to that. This paper is very interesting, thank you. I read it as proposing a self-referential, possibly recursive, stack of attention processes and models. Sounds like Hofstadter's ideas.

by psyc 9y ago

naasking 9y ago

All good questions, but do you really have strong reasons for thinking consciousness is not physical? There seems little need to posit consciousness as some irreducible property of matter, except for those who are mysteriously uncomfortable with the idea of being purely physical beings. Most arguments against physicalism are smoke and mirrors. As for specifically what physical process produces consciousness, it's an open question that's being studied. We're currently like Ada Lovelace studying a web browser and marvelling at what it does, having little idea how it actually works, yet we're mostly convinced it's not magic. I think you'd be more forgiving if Miss Lovelace took some time trying to reverse engineer the operation of a computer and it's program. Personally, I think [1] is a great starting point on this journey. The problem of apparent subjectivity was a huge stumbling block, and I think that paper is a great stab at it. [1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...

monktastic1 9y ago
Nice to see you again, naasking :) It doesn't require any "mysterious discomfort." Believing in the existence of a physical reality may seem like a totally reasonable extrapolation to make from our experiences, but it's not the only one.
- naasking 9y ago
  Not the only one, simply the most plausible one! I can't answer the ultimate skeptic except to say that not only do skeptical arguments against knowledge depend on that very same knowledge, and so undermine themselves, but even if that were not so, abstract musings will never be more plausible than the concrete reality staring you in the face.
  - monktastic1 9y ago
    That's fair, but the skeptical argument isn't my main concern. The point is that subjective phenomena are the most basic facts of my existence, so it's not even meaningful for me to explain (or worse, deny) them with respect to (in favor of) things I extrapolated from them. I think last time you didn't agree that subjective phenomena were the most immediate facts of my experience. If that's still the case, perhaps I can try to be more precise.
    - naasking 9y ago
      In principle, no set of third party objective facts can capture first person subjective facts. This is part of the hard problem. The question is whether human subjectivity actually is true first person, irreducible subjectivity, or just an illusion of it. Consider the analogy to sight: seeing is believing right? And yet, at some point you'll see an optical illusion whose logical properties are simply inconsistent with other properties you've seen. Like how water appears to break pencils [1]. So how do you reconcile this? Clearly seeing can't always entail believing. Enter science. As I linked elsewhere in this thread, science can explain fake subjectivity quite well. So your choice would seem to be throwing away our best tool for objective knowledge just to preserve some special property of human minds that ultimately makes no real difference. [1] http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia/optics/bp.cfm http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia/optics/bp.cfm
      - monktastic1 9y ago
        Sure, but I don't think the analogy holds. In a dream, none of the phenomena I experience (colored blobs moving about) correspond to any facts about an external reality. That's one kind of illusion, and a meaningful one. The other would be to infer "therefore I must not experiencing [the phenomenon I'm approximating as 'seeing colored blobs' or anything else]," which is nonsense. Even the thought "I am not having a conscious experience" is a conscious experience -- though even that's often not obvious. When you're having a dream, it is all an illusion (of the first kind), but to conclude that you are therefore not experiencing anything whatsoever and thus there's nothing to explain would be a grave mistake. You're not blacked out, and no amount of reasoning would make it so. The same holds here, no matter how much more consistent this reality appears to be.
psyc 9y ago
As I wrote above, I am only interested in hypotheses that are physical. Perhaps you mean less fundamental than a field? I'm open to that. This paper is very interesting, thank you. I read it as proposing a self-referential, possibly recursive, stack of attention processes and models. Sounds like Hofstadter's ideas.