6 ms·

> That argument doesn't seem valid. The notion that fairies don't exist is, in itself, a fairyological position; still, few would accept that fairyology is a le

> That argument doesn't seem valid. The notion that fairies don't exist is, in itself, a fairyological position; still, few would accept that fairyology is a legitimate field of endeavour. You are using Popper's criterion for what constitutes a valid scientific theory, but I think you misunderstand me. My claim is that saying that theoretical physics is the ultimate explanation of reality is a metaphysical position. Cosmology describes the big bang but it does not answer the question "why is it so?". Maybe there is no answer. Maybe it is not knowable. Maybe theoretical physics cannot have the total picture. These are all metaphysical questions that seem perfectly legitimate to me. If you are not allowed to ask or talk about these questions, I would say that you just accepted a religious faith. I am not trying to sell you anything except doubt and curiosity :) > Many things are accepted by most people without much reflection. Often that's because they really are as simple as they look Perhaps. Perhaps not. > What are the outstanding empirical questions about consciousness? As soon as you go down to an empirical level, you find that no mysticism is necessary: there are valid, interesting questions to be asked and answered, but they are no more outside science than questions about how, say, protein folding works. You are implicitly making the strong claim that knowledge can only be attained through empiricism. This is clearly not the case. I know that I am conscious and I assume that you are, but I cannot use empiricism to test this hypothesis, not can you use it to verify that I am, indeed, conscious. So there is something very fundamental -- in fact the only thing I know with 100% certitude -- that cannot be empirically tested. Your use of the word "mysticism" betrays the current bias against such questions. I am not proposing any woo. I'm just curious. Even being curious about certain topics nowadays gets you labelled and a "mystic". I think this illustrates the point that I wanted to make in the beginning.

lmm 8y ago
> Cosmology describes the big bang but it does not answer the question "why is it so?". Maybe there is no answer. Maybe it is not knowable. Maybe theoretical physics cannot have the total picture. These are all metaphysical questions that seem perfectly legitimate to me. If you are not allowed to ask or talk about these questions, I would say that you just accepted a religious faith. I am not trying to sell you anything except doubt and curiosity :) I see no reason to assume that question is beyond the reach of empiricism, which has been (both by its own standard and by naive common sense) effective in a way that alternatives have not. Non-empirical approaches may be able to construct self-consistent theories, but there is an infinitude of self-consistent theories, the overwhelming majority of which are useless under naive common sense. I trust empiricism because I was able to get there in Neurath's boat fashion from the everyday naive common sense that we all live by in practice. > You are implicitly making the strong claim that knowledge can only be attained through empiricism. This is clearly not the case. I know that I am conscious and I assume that you are, but I cannot use empiricism to test this hypothesis, not can you use it to verify that I am, indeed, conscious. I don't accept your claim. To the extent that "consciousness" refers to something meaningful, it refers to something empirical. (At least, my experience - under formal empiricism, naive common sense, and along the path between them - is that theories that involved entities detached from empirical consequences were misleading, and less effective than theories that did without such entities).
- foldr 8y ago
  > To the extent that "consciousness" refers to something meaningful, it refers to something empirical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verificationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verificationism You are taking a very strong (and controversial) philosophical position without perhaps realizing it.
  - lmm 8y ago
    I'm aware. I've not found the counterarguments listed there convincing. Quine's argument seems to be that since he can't see how to make the analytic/synthetic distinction rigorous it must be impossible to do so, which simply doesn't follow. And since I take the position not as an a priori principle but based on my empirical experiences of what kind of theorising has been effective or ineffective, it isn't self-defeating at all.
    - foldr 8y ago
      >And since I take the position not as an a priori principle but based on my empirical experiences of what kind of theorising has been effective or ineffective, it isn't self-defeating at all. That is the same defense Ayer used. It doesn't amount to much, since if you don't mean to say that non-empirical statements are meaningless in some kind of objective sense, then saying that they're meaningless is just a highfalutin way of saying that you personally disapprove of them.
      - lmm 8y ago
        Non-empirical statements are meaningless in the same sense that fairies don't exist. It's not a priori impossible that a non-empirical but constructive/valuable/useful statement could exist - a black swan - just as it's not impossible that a fairy could exist - but it seems very unlikely and I'd put a very low weight on someone's claim to have seen one, given how often such claims have turned out to be false. When I dismiss something as non-empirical, that's the same kind of dismissal as saying something's a conspiracy theory - formally I'm not claiming that it's outright impossible, just unlikely (though in everyday language I might say "impossible", just as we do for conspiracy theories or fairies).
biswaroop 8y ago
But you were talking about the mechanism of consciousness, not verifying whether someone is conscious or not. It may be impossible to verify if someone is conscious in the same way that I know I am, but we can associate a set of behaviors with an intelligent creature. If we empirically prove that those behaviors emerge from a collection of neural impulses, then it takes a simple assumption (almost a cognitive axiom) that the creature exhibiting those behaviors is conscious, to conclude that emergentism has been empirically verified. I feel like your position that emergentism is empirically impossible to verify is itself a strong position, and attempts to define a boundary on science when your stated goal is to place doubts on where the boundaries are. Yes it requires a few assumptions, and yes those assumptions are impossible to verify empirically. But then so are the mathematical axioms. We don't go around saying "physics is impossible to empirically verify because mathematical axioms are impossible to prove and are incomplete"
- CuriouslyC 8y ago
  Try imagining yourself as a system of molecules all responding to their environment. It is reasonable that your complexity might be a good indicator of your potential for intelligent responses. I don't think that holds for your consciousness though. If it did, that would imply either consciousness is a spectrum or the universe has a hard coded on/off switch for consciousness. The on/off hypothesis has problems with conservation of information, and if consciousness is defined as "having an internal experience" it isn't clear how that could be non-binary.
  - nickpsecurity 8y ago
    Did you say an on-off switch for consciousness? There may be one for humans. https://gwtoday.gwu.edu/gw-researchers-disrupt-consciousness-electrical-stimulation https://gwtoday.gwu.edu/gw-researchers-disrupt-consciousness... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1525505014002017 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S152550501...
    - CuriouslyC 8y ago
mythrwy 8y ago
The amount of woo that usually follows that line of reasoning though is probably why the prejudice exists. It's kinda like this: "Sure, blockchain has potential but 98% of the space is blatant scams at the moment".
mannykannot 8y ago
> I'm just curious. Yet you attack the scientific study of consciousness. I am not sure that you are as open-minded as you are presenting yourself.
- roenxi 8y ago
  Things like Newton's Laws are, in a strict technical sense, not true. We still use them because they are very nearly true. But, strictly, they are approximations of something more fundamental. That extends to a great number of very intelligent figures of the past who described reality as they saw it but, in the end, turned out not to have sufficient measuring technology to be as correct as we would understand it now. It is an extremely reasonable position that large swathes of what we believe today is also going to be wrong in this sense. For example, the great debate about whether reality is discrete or continuous (currently I think the evidence is discrete, but philosophically maybe we are a simulation run in a continuous universe). We should try and work to the current state of knowledge of the researchers, but we all know that there is a high risk of something big and impressive being discovered that changes the name of the game, like when they split the atom. We just don't know what happens next. Our understanding of consciousness also depends on who controls the dictionary and defines consciousness and surrounding terms.
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    > Our understanding of consciousness also depends on who controls the dictionary and defines consciousness and surrounding terms. I think that arguing over dictionary definitions is something of an anti-pattern in philosophical (-like) discussions. If we have a common agreement that there is something that we call consciousness, but it is a thing that we do not really understand, then pedantic arguments about exactly what the word does and does not denote are putting the cart before the horse when it comes to understanding the thing itself. It substitutes a lexicographical dispute for an examination of the thing itself, and it is not uncommon for such arguments to be used to talk around the issue by attempting to take certain positions off the table. As for scientific theories not being strictly true, that hardly distinguishes science from philosophy in general (logic excepted), where there are at least two opinions on every issue of note.
matt-attack 8y ago
Just want to say that I'm enjoying reading this discussion greatly. Please keep up the civil discourse!

lmm 8y ago

> Cosmology describes the big bang but it does not answer the question "why is it so?". Maybe there is no answer. Maybe it is not knowable. Maybe theoretical physics cannot have the total picture. These are all metaphysical questions that seem perfectly legitimate to me. If you are not allowed to ask or talk about these questions, I would say that you just accepted a religious faith. I am not trying to sell you anything except doubt and curiosity :) I see no reason to assume that question is beyond the reach of empiricism, which has been (both by its own standard and by naive common sense) effective in a way that alternatives have not. Non-empirical approaches may be able to construct self-consistent theories, but there is an infinitude of self-consistent theories, the overwhelming majority of which are useless under naive common sense. I trust empiricism because I was able to get there in Neurath's boat fashion from the everyday naive common sense that we all live by in practice. > You are implicitly making the strong claim that knowledge can only be attained through empiricism. This is clearly not the case. I know that I am conscious and I assume that you are, but I cannot use empiricism to test this hypothesis, not can you use it to verify that I am, indeed, conscious. I don't accept your claim. To the extent that "consciousness" refers to something meaningful, it refers to something empirical. (At least, my experience - under formal empiricism, naive common sense, and along the path between them - is that theories that involved entities detached from empirical consequences were misleading, and less effective than theories that did without such entities).

foldr 8y ago
> To the extent that "consciousness" refers to something meaningful, it refers to something empirical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verificationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verificationism You are taking a very strong (and controversial) philosophical position without perhaps realizing it.
- lmm 8y ago
  I'm aware. I've not found the counterarguments listed there convincing. Quine's argument seems to be that since he can't see how to make the analytic/synthetic distinction rigorous it must be impossible to do so, which simply doesn't follow. And since I take the position not as an a priori principle but based on my empirical experiences of what kind of theorising has been effective or ineffective, it isn't self-defeating at all.
  - foldr 8y ago
    >And since I take the position not as an a priori principle but based on my empirical experiences of what kind of theorising has been effective or ineffective, it isn't self-defeating at all. That is the same defense Ayer used. It doesn't amount to much, since if you don't mean to say that non-empirical statements are meaningless in some kind of objective sense, then saying that they're meaningless is just a highfalutin way of saying that you personally disapprove of them.
    - lmm 8y ago
      Non-empirical statements are meaningless in the same sense that fairies don't exist. It's not a priori impossible that a non-empirical but constructive/valuable/useful statement could exist - a black swan - just as it's not impossible that a fairy could exist - but it seems very unlikely and I'd put a very low weight on someone's claim to have seen one, given how often such claims have turned out to be false. When I dismiss something as non-empirical, that's the same kind of dismissal as saying something's a conspiracy theory - formally I'm not claiming that it's outright impossible, just unlikely (though in everyday language I might say "impossible", just as we do for conspiracy theories or fairies).

biswaroop 8y ago

But you were talking about the mechanism of consciousness, not verifying whether someone is conscious or not. It may be impossible to verify if someone is conscious in the same way that I know I am, but we can associate a set of behaviors with an intelligent creature. If we empirically prove that those behaviors emerge from a collection of neural impulses, then it takes a simple assumption (almost a cognitive axiom) that the creature exhibiting those behaviors is conscious, to conclude that emergentism has been empirically verified. I feel like your position that emergentism is empirically impossible to verify is itself a strong position, and attempts to define a boundary on science when your stated goal is to place doubts on where the boundaries are. Yes it requires a few assumptions, and yes those assumptions are impossible to verify empirically. But then so are the mathematical axioms. We don't go around saying "physics is impossible to empirically verify because mathematical axioms are impossible to prove and are incomplete"

CuriouslyC 8y ago
Try imagining yourself as a system of molecules all responding to their environment. It is reasonable that your complexity might be a good indicator of your potential for intelligent responses. I don't think that holds for your consciousness though. If it did, that would imply either consciousness is a spectrum or the universe has a hard coded on/off switch for consciousness. The on/off hypothesis has problems with conservation of information, and if consciousness is defined as "having an internal experience" it isn't clear how that could be non-binary.
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  Did you say an on-off switch for consciousness? There may be one for humans. https://gwtoday.gwu.edu/gw-researchers-disrupt-consciousness-electrical-stimulation https://gwtoday.gwu.edu/gw-researchers-disrupt-consciousness... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1525505014002017 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S152550501...
  - CuriouslyC 8y ago

mythrwy 8y ago

The amount of woo that usually follows that line of reasoning though is probably why the prejudice exists. It's kinda like this: "Sure, blockchain has potential but 98% of the space is blatant scams at the moment".

mannykannot 8y ago

> I'm just curious. Yet you attack the scientific study of consciousness. I am not sure that you are as open-minded as you are presenting yourself.

roenxi 8y ago
Things like Newton's Laws are, in a strict technical sense, not true. We still use them because they are very nearly true. But, strictly, they are approximations of something more fundamental. That extends to a great number of very intelligent figures of the past who described reality as they saw it but, in the end, turned out not to have sufficient measuring technology to be as correct as we would understand it now. It is an extremely reasonable position that large swathes of what we believe today is also going to be wrong in this sense. For example, the great debate about whether reality is discrete or continuous (currently I think the evidence is discrete, but philosophically maybe we are a simulation run in a continuous universe). We should try and work to the current state of knowledge of the researchers, but we all know that there is a high risk of something big and impressive being discovered that changes the name of the game, like when they split the atom. We just don't know what happens next. Our understanding of consciousness also depends on who controls the dictionary and defines consciousness and surrounding terms.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  > Our understanding of consciousness also depends on who controls the dictionary and defines consciousness and surrounding terms. I think that arguing over dictionary definitions is something of an anti-pattern in philosophical (-like) discussions. If we have a common agreement that there is something that we call consciousness, but it is a thing that we do not really understand, then pedantic arguments about exactly what the word does and does not denote are putting the cart before the horse when it comes to understanding the thing itself. It substitutes a lexicographical dispute for an examination of the thing itself, and it is not uncommon for such arguments to be used to talk around the issue by attempting to take certain positions off the table. As for scientific theories not being strictly true, that hardly distinguishes science from philosophy in general (logic excepted), where there are at least two opinions on every issue of note.

matt-attack 8y ago

Just want to say that I'm enjoying reading this discussion greatly. Please keep up the civil discourse!