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I understand, though I think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater here, especially since unlike quantum-woo BS, the hard problem of consciousness or

I understand, though I think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater here, especially since unlike quantum-woo BS, the hard problem of consciousness or the essence of "matter" is nowhere near being solved, (and I would argue unsolvable using any scientific method), so I try to differentiate between people's subjective feeling about it vs their competence in the scientific realm.

abritinthebay 9y ago
Ehhh, I think the thing that is most telling about both of those is that many scientists don’t see that as even well founded as problems. Amongst neuroscientists it’s often called “the hard non-problem” for example.
- placebo 9y ago
  With all due respect, I take the opinion of neuroscientists on the hard problem of consciousness as seriously as I'd take the opinion of a Zen master on issues in neuroscience. The fact that neuroscientists might one day deliver an explanation of the soft problem of consciousness (i.e understanding exactly how the brain works and the exact correlation of every state and process to the corresponding subjective experience) will not bring any of us one iota closer to understanding the hard problem. In this case, the fact that one does not recognise there is such a problem implies ignorance more than anything else.
  - fossuser 9y ago
    I'm not sure why you think this is a separate hard problem that can't be solved by understanding how things work. History is filled with examples of problems thought to be unsolvable until they weren't. Many things were in a mysterious realm of non-explanation before being explained by science. It could be that the current problem is poorly defined or the wrong questions are being asked, but nothing suggests it's an unsolvable problem 'using any scientific method'. You can also easily see the material nature of consciousness by looking out how physical things affect it (brain tumors, LSD, alzheimer's). Particle physicists are also continuing to work on the building blocks of matter. You can use science to figure out the nature of reality in the state that it really is, not just how it appears to us in our mental models of it. The map is not the territory.
    - placebo 9y ago
      Ok, I'll try to explain myself better: First, of all, it should not surprise you that there are limits to what can be achieved with reason or knowing how things work: Within the boundary of what can be thought about there are already problems that can be proven to be unsolvable, such as finding an algorithm that can tell whether a program will halt or not (undecidable problems), or finding a formal system of rules that is both complete and consistent (Gödel's incompleteness theorem). Now regarding physics - you said it yourself: The map is not the territory. Physics is nothing more than an ever improving map. It will never be the territory. The mental models you speak of are exactly the ever changing map which attempts to fit reality (which is what exists prior to giving it a name) to concepts which make sense to us. It is crucial to understand that our concepts/thought about reality will only ever be a subset of reality. Equations are nothing more than a description - they are not the thing in itself. Consider the question Stephen Hawking phrased: "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" The last thing is understanding the difference between the soft problem and the hard problem of consciousness. These two problems are not on the same level at all. The soft problem can be successfully used as the "God of the gaps" type argument and therefore I could in principle agree that it can be eventually be resolved (though I might argue regarding the time frame required to solve it). The soft problem is "simply" fully understanding the functionality of the brain, part of which includes an explanation of which physical processes in the brain are followed by which experiences. The hard problem asks a completely different question: how does a physical process give rise to a subjective experience? Saying that the subjective experience is just some illusion while the physical process is real is silly considering your only access to reality is via your subjective experience, followed by your theories on what that experience means (including the thought that there are such things as physical objects). Now the reason the hard problem of consciousness appears solvable to many people comes from the mistaken view that consciousness is an emergent phenomena of physical processes, that the "subjective" is emergent from the "objective". These terms are of course necessary for science to exist, but as many wise people who have meditated long and hard on this matter have suggested, the nature of consciousness exists prior to concepts, prior to the division of reality by the mind into subjective and objective and therefore prior to (and so beyond the scope of) scientific inquiry.

abritinthebay 9y ago

Ehhh, I think the thing that is most telling about both of those is that many scientists don’t see that as even well founded as problems. Amongst neuroscientists it’s often called “the hard non-problem” for example.

placebo 9y ago
With all due respect, I take the opinion of neuroscientists on the hard problem of consciousness as seriously as I'd take the opinion of a Zen master on issues in neuroscience. The fact that neuroscientists might one day deliver an explanation of the soft problem of consciousness (i.e understanding exactly how the brain works and the exact correlation of every state and process to the corresponding subjective experience) will not bring any of us one iota closer to understanding the hard problem. In this case, the fact that one does not recognise there is such a problem implies ignorance more than anything else.
- fossuser 9y ago
  I'm not sure why you think this is a separate hard problem that can't be solved by understanding how things work. History is filled with examples of problems thought to be unsolvable until they weren't. Many things were in a mysterious realm of non-explanation before being explained by science. It could be that the current problem is poorly defined or the wrong questions are being asked, but nothing suggests it's an unsolvable problem 'using any scientific method'. You can also easily see the material nature of consciousness by looking out how physical things affect it (brain tumors, LSD, alzheimer's). Particle physicists are also continuing to work on the building blocks of matter. You can use science to figure out the nature of reality in the state that it really is, not just how it appears to us in our mental models of it. The map is not the territory.
  - placebo 9y ago
    Ok, I'll try to explain myself better: First, of all, it should not surprise you that there are limits to what can be achieved with reason or knowing how things work: Within the boundary of what can be thought about there are already problems that can be proven to be unsolvable, such as finding an algorithm that can tell whether a program will halt or not (undecidable problems), or finding a formal system of rules that is both complete and consistent (Gödel's incompleteness theorem). Now regarding physics - you said it yourself: The map is not the territory. Physics is nothing more than an ever improving map. It will never be the territory. The mental models you speak of are exactly the ever changing map which attempts to fit reality (which is what exists prior to giving it a name) to concepts which make sense to us. It is crucial to understand that our concepts/thought about reality will only ever be a subset of reality. Equations are nothing more than a description - they are not the thing in itself. Consider the question Stephen Hawking phrased: "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" The last thing is understanding the difference between the soft problem and the hard problem of consciousness. These two problems are not on the same level at all. The soft problem can be successfully used as the "God of the gaps" type argument and therefore I could in principle agree that it can be eventually be resolved (though I might argue regarding the time frame required to solve it). The soft problem is "simply" fully understanding the functionality of the brain, part of which includes an explanation of which physical processes in the brain are followed by which experiences. The hard problem asks a completely different question: how does a physical process give rise to a subjective experience? Saying that the subjective experience is just some illusion while the physical process is real is silly considering your only access to reality is via your subjective experience, followed by your theories on what that experience means (including the thought that there are such things as physical objects). Now the reason the hard problem of consciousness appears solvable to many people comes from the mistaken view that consciousness is an emergent phenomena of physical processes, that the "subjective" is emergent from the "objective". These terms are of course necessary for science to exist, but as many wise people who have meditated long and hard on this matter have suggested, the nature of consciousness exists prior to concepts, prior to the division of reality by the mind into subjective and objective and therefore prior to (and so beyond the scope of) scientific inquiry.