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> This strategy typically involves what Keith Frankish has called illusionism about consciousness: the view that consciousness is or involves a sort of introspe

• chimprich 9y ago
  > What's an illusion? One problem I have with illusionism is that if consciousness is an illusion, what is it that is being fooled by the illusion? Presumably the answer is that the illusion is fooling itself, which to me implies that either there is something there that is "real" to believe the illusion, or that the definition of an illusion in this case is so far from our usual definition that the term does not have much in the way of explanatory power.
  • narag 9y ago
    The root of that evil seems to be determinism or IOW dualism.
    • KennyCason 9y ago
      Are determinism and dualism considered to be one-in-the-same? I tend to think of dualism as being a sort of fundamental duality for example "nothing - something" or they way I prefer to word them, "something - not something". However, determinism tends force a cause-effect, or hierarchical, or directional meaning. For example, determinism in relation to my above nothing/something duality would be "from nothing came something" or something of that flavor. However, would could also say that there was no deterministic relationship and that both nothing and something mutually depend on each other to exist. i.e. there is not directional arrow of relationship. (I'm not a professional philosopher)
      • danbruc 9y ago
        Are determinism and dualism considered to be one-in-the-same? Not at all, they are more like opposites of each other. Dualism in this context refers to the idea that there is something non-physical in addition to the physical body and brain that makes you conscious, a soul or something along that line. If you think that dualism is wrong and you are just a bunch of atoms governed by the laws of physics, then you probably think determinism is true, i.e. the choices people make are not really free choices but just the results of the initial conditions and the laws of physics (which may actually be non-deterministic, for example if the randomness of quantum physics is real, which makes the naming potentially a bit confusing).
        • state_less 9y ago
          Yep, even if the process is stochastic, and the result is determined by some mixture of present state and randomness. It's still determined. If we replayed everything with the same random variables, we'd get the same result. It's hard to walk away from this determinism since we apply it to the rest of the world so often. It seems really suspicious to not also apply it to ourselves.
        • KennyCason 9y ago
          Got it. I didn’t think they were, or that you necessarily implied. I think I got mixed up with the last bit of wording in the commenters sentence and his intent. I’m also realizing based on a couple of responses that my thoughts on dualism probably fall out of what the majority of people consider dualism to mean. I.e. not just limited to the mind body problem. Thanks for the clarification :)
        • visarga 9y ago
          > you think that dualism is wrong and you are just a bunch of atoms That's what I am - a self replicating, self adapting bunch of atoms that manages to keep being alive for a few decades. Not just any bunch of atoms. Any self replicating system has interesting properties not found in non-replicators.
      • narag 9y ago
  • tpm 9y ago
    Reading your words this article came to my mind, which I think is interesting in itself and may provide a hint of the answer. Chasing the Rainbow: The Non-conscious Nature of Being https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01924/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0192...
    • patcon 9y ago
      > Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage—not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself. I think and theorize on consciousness quite often, but this angle was new to me and kinda blew my mind. Thanks for sharing :)
      • visarga 9y ago
        In AI there have been experiments where agents need to communicate and cooperate in order to solve tasks. They developed a kind of "language", as a result. It's just what happens when cooperation has an evolutionary advantage. An agent needs to model its environment in order to plan successful strategies. But when the environment contains other agents, it becomes necessary to model them too - thus, create representations that can predict future actions of those agents. When applied on the agent itself, these models create the "ego", a representation useful in predicting the agent's own future actions. All this is necessary in order to maximise rewards in the game (and by game, I mean life, for humans, and the task at hand for artificial agents).
    • chimprich 9y ago
      Thanks, an interesting perspective, but I am very much unpersuaded by the argument. At one point they say "we favor Huxley's analogy which regarded “consciousness” as being like a steam whistle on a train—accompanying the work of the engine but having no intrinsic influence or control over it". If consciousness has no impact on cognition, how are we even having this discussion? Our experience of consciousness is driving our arguments about how we are perceiving it. There must be some influence at the very least.
  • posterboy 9y ago
    > One problem I have with illusionism is that if consciousness is an illusion, what is it that is being fooled by the illusion? If false==true, what is true?
  • pc2g4d 9y ago
    Agreed. The "illusion" approach has always seemed somehow self-referential to me. Who/what is being fooled? Does being mistaken about something (which computers/algorithms can obviously be) somehow endow the thing with self-awareness and inner experience? We could trick a machine into believing it is conscious (`var conscious = true;`) but it's doubtful that that would change the mechanical, nonselfaware nature of its existence.
    • bloaf 9y ago
      My understanding goes like this: The brain is a super information processing machine. It executes incredibly and unimaginably complex algorithms without our knowing about it. But one of the things it does is to construct simplified models of itself, and these simplified models are what we are "aware of." More precisely, these simplified models are what consciousness is. The "illusion" is that consciousness is somehow in the driver's seat. It isn't at all. It is just a kind of post-hoc shorthand that the brain uses for itself. It's more like a log file than an executed piece of code. My typing out these words didn't come from my "consciousness," they came from the brain's incredibly complex algorithms. But my consciousness is taking the credit; it gives the abstract, executive summary version of how my goal of expressing some point led to my word selection. All those "inner experiences" along the way are essentially notational.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      • visarga 9y ago
        You are missing an important part of the puzzle. Yes, the brain creates models of the world and body. But it is locked in a loop of "agent <-> environment", more precisely "perception -> decision -> action -> reward learning -> repeat". This is what grounds the model in reality. The model is still imperfect (an illusion) but a useful one, with regard to maximising human rewards while minding the affordances and limitations of the environment. The source of meaning is not the brain itself, but the game. The game between agent and environment, where the agent collects rewards and tries to reduce losses. All meanings stem from the game itself, meaning is not 'secreted' by brains in a jar. The illusion objection is just an observation that any model, no matter how complex it is, is an approximation. The "ego" itself is a model of the agent, an approximation of the agent. But a useful one, a grounded approximation, that tracks reality as it changes. At the very least the model is good enough to make sure genes get into the next generation, otherwise there would be no more model to talk about. That's the source of meaning and consciousness - it's a loop, a bootstrapped meaning based on self replication. I often see debates about consciousness ignoring the environment and the game (or life). That's a sad situation for philosophy, in my opinion. They got scared of behaviorism decades ago, and now ignore reinforcement learning. But RL is our best bet at cracking the mind-body problem.
• mannykannot 9y ago
  If I am following your last two paragraphs, you object to physicalism because it recognizes only one kind of 'stuff', yet it is fine that, under objective idealism, "'mind stuff' is the best 'thing' that we can use to describe everything." Is that not inconsistent?
  • vinceguidry 9y ago
    I object to physicalism because it doesn't allow for abstraction. It's basically being willfully blind to "everything humans think about and do." A chair is a collection of atoms and the forces that bind them, our ideas of chairs and their purpose are just meaningless fluff. If we reframe to say that the atoms and forces of the chair are made of the same stuff as our thoughts, then that's way more in-line with how humans actually do things.
  • rosser 9y ago
    Not at all. Objective Idealism doesn't claim physicalism is wrong because it only has "one kind of stuff", but rather about what kind of stuff that one "stuff" is. The failure many see in physicalism is that the physical sciences can't (yet, if ever) tell us how there's a qualitative nature to our experience — that it feels like something to experience at all. How the eye turns photons into nerve signals, and increasing amounts about how the brain processes those signals into content, sure. What it's like to experience color, or even how there is such a thing as experiencing color and not merely electrochemical signals traversing myelinated tubes, not so much. Consider, however: all of the content of your experience could somehow be false (think of how true and vivid a dream can feel, for example), but the simple, content-irrespective fact that you are having an experience can't be faked, can it? Wouldn't you still have an experience of having a faked experience? This is variously called an illusion, an emergent phenomenon, the "hard problem of consciousness", and many other things, with varying degrees of politeness. Objective Idealism posits instead that this very experiential-ness itself is the fundamental "stuff" of reality, and that all of the content of what you experience, — specifically including the experience you have of being an individual, distinct "you", and even the phenomena that we call "matter" and "energy", themselves — somehow supervenes on it. For now, the question isn't falsifiable, so it's often also dismissed as meaningless — not least by people who subscribe to physicalism and don't want to play any more, when this line of inquiry comes up... EDIT: phrasing.
• justinpombrio 9y ago
  > My main problem with physicalism is that it doesn't handle abstraction well. I'm fine with monism over dualism but you need some kind of functionality with which to consider different kinds of 'stuff'. Otherwise a rock, Conway's Game of Life, and Lord of the Rings are all on the same plane of existence. Yes! This bothered me as well, until I recently encountered Sean Carroll's philosophy of "Poetic Naturalism": 1. There are many ways of talking about the world. 2. All good ways of talking must be consistent with one another and with the world. 3. Our purposes in the moment determine the best way of talking. One way of talking about the Game of Life simulation running in my other browser tab is as a bunch of electrons bouncing around in my computer's CPU. Another way of talking about it is as a cellular automaton obeying Conway's rules. And they're consistent with one another; e.g., if I stop the electrons by shutting down the computer, I expect the automaton to stop running. In retrospect, it's pretty obvious. But it must not have been _too_ obvious, because it presents a viewpoint that isn't quite physicalism and isn't quite dualism, and people have been arguing back and forth about that for a long time. Sean Carroll, The Big Picture https://www.amazon.com/Big-Picture-Origins-Meaning-Universe/dp/1101984252 https://www.amazon.com/Big-Picture-Origins-Meaning-Universe/...
  • coldtea 9y ago
    >2. All good ways of talking must be consistent with one another and with the world. 2 sounds dubious. There are good ways of talking about world that are incompatible between them (e.g. quantum mechanics and general relativity, but even more so, opposing viewpoints not based on objective disagreement but value judgements).
    • lmm 9y ago
      QM and GR are compatible in everyday regimes. They're not compatible for extremely small, extremely dense things - but it's fair to say that implies that at least one of them is not a good way of talking about extremely small, extremely dense things.
    • TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
      It all sounds dubious, and amounts to "It depends which model you use", which isn't necessarily a profound insight - although if you're used to confusing models with reality, it might be. We simply have no model for consciousness. We have absolutely no idea what it is. It isn't even worth getting started with dualism vs materialism when both are - ultimately - constructs created inside, and possibly by, the thing/experience/whatever we're trying to describe.
• stcredzero 9y ago
  So vinceguidry's Razor, is to pick the explanation that produces the most satisfying annoyance?
  • vinceguidry 9y ago
    More of a lemma, really. You know when you're on the right track when you can make materialists' blood boil.
    • stcredzero 9y ago
      I'm a materialist who says things like: "Based on the frequency of the self-reports, the 'god-shaped hole' is clearly a real phenomenon." (1) How do you distinguish if you are making people mad because you are making bad arguments vs. making people mad because you are piercing the veil of their tribal biases? (1) - (And therefore, any mental states which people have experienced resulting from the "god-shaped hole" are clearly within the range of normal behavior in the evolutionary heritage of Homo sapiens. Therefore, the feelings associated with religious faith and hope are merely the birthright of human beings, whether or not one believes in a particular deity or is a materialist. I cite myself as a datum.)
      • vinceguidry 9y ago
        I don't really think I'm going to make anyone mad. Tribal biases are way too strong for that. "God-shaped hole" is a bit silly, the primary purpose of spirituality is to allay fears of uncertainty. Materialism allays those fears the same way that belief does. Any position on that spectrum is as valid as any other. Spirituality, the reckoning with of the profoundly unknowable, is equally doable by both materialists and by believers, and I often see people who proclaim themselves as uber-materialist and hyper-critical of religious idiocy, go whole-hog with their own forms of myth, legend, priesthood, and dogma. If materialists read the Bible with the same reverence that they read Shakespeare with, they'd see why their positions are so silly. David and Goliath is a phenomenal read on the dynamics of ego and courage. If Shakespeare had been born in that day, he'd have been on the committee writing the Bible. It's just that the Bible is so old that you need to actually understand history to really grasp it. Of course, there's an entire industry of people devoted to making it accessible. Religion deals with far, far, far more than just the stuff of belief. My position on materialism vs everything else is that since all positions on the spectrum are equally likely to be true, and there are far more positions on the spectrum that aren't materialism than that are, then materialism is vanishingly unlikely. Reductionist scientific reasoning is a poor tool to parse the metaphysical landscape with. More realms than just the physical can be conceived of without even having to consider the supernatural. These realms need to be unified somehow if we want to avoid the illogic of dualism.