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Why is this subject so fraught? The brain is a wet computer. Reality is its internal model of the external world informed by imperfect sensory inputs. Conscious

Why is this subject so fraught? The brain is a wet computer. Reality is its internal model of the external world informed by imperfect sensory inputs. Consciousness is what thinking feels like. When the brain ceases to function, the individual is destroyed. So what? There's no mystery here. The knowledge to be gained has to do with the operation of the brain, not the nature of "consciousness", whatever that is. As far as I'm concerned, after Wittgenstein, philosophy has had nothing to do. All the "big questions" are either answerable scientifically as a matter of neurology or they're ill-posed and nonsensical. Actually, I'm wrong: philosophy does have an occupation these days. It's complicit in the creation of utter nonsense like continental thought and critical theory, all of which amounts of sophistry that justifies us in exercising our world impulses toward magical thinking. Why bother?

Swizec 8y ago
In ancient greece they were just as certain that consciousness comes from the liver. It's hard to know which facts that are completely obvious and self-evident to us today, will be considered silly and misguided in the future as you new evidence arises.
- quotemstr 8y ago
  Sure, and they also used a geocentric model of the solar system. Should we weigh our certainty of the truth of the heliocentric model the same as they weighed the truth of the geocentric model despite our vastly superior scientific methodology and body of evidence?
  - fiatjaf 8y ago
    You only think you know so much because you don't know what you don't know. For example, a "model" cannot be "true". A model is a model, reality is a different thing.
    - akvadrako 8y ago
      You don't know that. Models could be just as real as non-models, whatever those are.
      - quotemstr 8y ago
        Platonist.
      - fiatjaf 8y ago
        You are right, but I'm not talking about this and you know it. I was saying that this gentleman, quotemstr, is confusing and mixing the model with the reality that it is trying to model.
  - BalinKing 8y ago
    True, but we don’t have nearly the same amount of evidence for the nature of consciousness as we do for the structure of the solar system... instead, we’re relying largely on philosophy and “self-evident” facts.
PhearTheCeal 8y ago
>The brain is a wet computer. >Consciousness is what thinking feels like. Do you think computers are conscious?
- quotemstr 8y ago
  Sufficiently smart ones, certainly. I've seen no evidence that we've built one yet, but we will eventually, and when we do, I'd ascribe exactly as much consciousness to a computer as I do to a human. I don't believe "p zombies" exist --- or, rather, I believe we're all p zombies.
  - nyolfen 8y ago
    p-zombie is a fantastic insult for people you disagree with, though
  - fiatjaf 8y ago
    So you believe in things without evidence that they exist? That's very scientific of you.
    - 21 8y ago
      If I believe that aliens exist somewhere in the universe, is that unscientific?
      - nradov 8y ago
        Yes belief in aliens is unscientific. There's nothing wrong with such a belief but no matter how you dress it up with Drake Equation calculations it's equivalent to a religious belief taken on faith.
        21 8y ago
        So the vast majority of physicists which believed that the Higgs would be found were also acting like on a religious belief taken on faith.
woodruffw 8y ago
> As far as I'm concerned, after Wittgenstein, philosophy has had nothing to do. All the "big questions" are either answerable scientifically as a matter of neurology or they're ill-posed and nonsensical. Science is in the business of answering what is. It can't answer normative questions, i.e. those about what ought to be. That, at the very least, is one of the domains that philosophy is still both sensible and productive.[1] As others have pointed out below, this article was written from the analytical perspective -- the tradition that stands in contrast to continental thought and critical theory. [1]: Which is only to say that only a single counterexample is needed to invalidate a claim about "all the big questions." There are plenty of fields besides ethics where philosophy inquiry continues to be relevant and productive.
- quotemstr 8y ago
  I don't think the formal study of ethics is productive either. An ethical system is either descriptive or normative. Does philosophy produce theories that accurately describe human behavior? Psychology and sociology and economics do a much better job of building predictive models. Does ethical philosophy build normative models that describe what ought to be? Sure. Do these models influence actual human behavior? Not a bit. So why bother building castles in the sky?
  - PhearTheCeal 8y ago
    The U.S. Code is essentially a castle in the sky. It's quite useful though.
  - woodruffw 8y ago
    > Does ethical philosophy build normative models that describe what ought to be? Sure. Do these models influence actual human behavior? Not a bit. So why bother building castles in the sky? Ethical views regarding natural rights are the basis for liberal democracy, either (depending on your metric) the largest or second largest form of political organization today. I'd call that "influencing actual human behavior." Ethical views regarding harm reduction form the basis of modern medical treatment. "Do no harm" is a normative statement, and I know plenty of doctors who seem to be influenced by it. These are the simplest of examples. Abrahamic religions encourage their adherents to behave based upon duty, another normative staple. Individuals act based on rational self interest, and a great number of philosophers have argued that they ought to do so. The list goes on.
fiatjaf 8y ago
If you restrict the realm of phenomena to just what you can explain and thus believe it is real, then you will conclude that you can explain everything.
kashyapc 8y ago
> [...] philosophy has had nothing to do That's an extraordinary claim (which is dubious at best); and we both know the quote about extraordinary claims. Sure, there's a ton of pseudo-philosophy these days, but to brush all of philosophy with the same stroke is just lazy. To jog your memory about the "value of philosophy" from one point of view, take a read of this previous thread here (titled: 'Physics Needs Philosophy. Philosophy Needs Physics'): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17102317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17102317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17108865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17108865
- hjorthjort 8y ago
  What is the quote, coukd you tell me?
  - woodruffw 8y ago
    "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." It's Carl Sagan, apparently.
monktastic1 8y ago
> Consciousness is what thinking feels like. Most people don't play around with their consciousness enough to realize that there's such a state as consciousness without thought. You can of course argue that it doesn't exist, but I invite you to actually get there before making up your mind. At that point it becomes clear that you've been overlooking something obvious that is likely to turn your metaphysics on its head. The closest analogy I can give is lucid dreaming. In a regular dream, you might see a flower and work out all the processes that cause you to see it. When you become lucid, you suddenly see the gaping flaw in your model.
zeroxfe 8y ago
> Why is this subject so fraught? ... Why bother? Because there isn't a good scientific explanation yet. Just lots of theories that are very difficult to prove. I tend to agree that we are just "wet computers" -- it seems pretty obvious (to many of us), however that doesn't meet the bar for good science.
ravenstine 8y ago
> Consciousness is what thinking feels like. How does it feel that way at all? You say there's no mystery, but you're stopping short of the actual questions that make the experience of consciousness intriguing.
- quotemstr 8y ago
  What questions?
  - genidoi 8y ago
    Why do you need a subjective first person experience when humanity could operate just as well as a society of philosophical zombies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
    - quotemstr 8y ago
      I reject the premise. Why do we need to accept that there is a difference between "me" and an "automaton"? The whole idea supposes, unnecessarily, that consciousness is real, then demands we explore its nature. It's angels on pinheads!
      - komali2 8y ago
        You are engaging, right now, in philosophical meditation on the nature of consciousness. You can't reject the premise that we are automatons outright just by saying so. You're standing on the prow of a MASSIVE philosophical ship of people arguing exactly the same... But just next to you is an equally large ship of people arguing the opposite. Nobody has been able to prove conclusively one way or the other whether or not people are automatons. Nobody has been able to conclude that consciousness is even real. This is just "I think, therefore I am." Maybe it feels good, but it's just another philosophical theory. There's many others. If you have no interest in participating in them that's fine, but you are participating anyway :p
colordrops 8y ago
"The brain is a wet computer. Reality is its internal model of the external world informed by imperfect sensory inputs. Consciousness is what thinking feels like. When the brain ceases to function, the individual is destroyed." The problem is that those are just superficial statements that don't capture the nature of reality at all. It's like saying "there's ground under my feet, and a sky above me, that's the nature of the universe." It just seems that you just packed your bags and moved on because the nature of reality and consciousness is not your interest.
- quotemstr 8y ago
  I feel like a lot of people defend philosophy on the basis of transcendal sentiment, which says that says there ought to be something more to the world than the ground and the sky, as it were, usually phrased as the "meaning" or "purpose" or "nature" of something. I understand the feeling. It's natural to probe. But what if it really is all just ill-defined sentiment? Why should we imagine there is something "more" there, that there is a "nature" of things beyond that which we can measure? The principle of parsimony demands that we reject extraneous abstractions, and I don't see anything forcing us to acknowledge that the nature of reality is a legitimate object of inquiry as distinct from physics and math.
  - komali2 8y ago
    I want to try to reply, but I have the (possibly misguided) feeling that any attempt to penetrate the wall of scathing cynicism you've erected here will be met with just that. I apologize if that's unfair, just hear me out: Going with the principle of parsimony - consciousness is arguably inefficient. I recommend some Peter Watts for fun sci fi inquiry into what a technically advanced species without consciousness should look like. So why have it? Given that nobody can answer the question of what exactly consciousness is, why it developed, and how we could replicate it, I disagree that the study of consciousness has to be "looking for something more." If the brain is "a wet computer" (and if you have time I do challenge you to support this statement), why is it seemingly non deterministic? Or is it actually deterministic, and we just don't have the modelling technology to sufficiently grab all the variables? I think I can predict your reaction - "of course it's deterministic! The universe is deterministic, and brains are just a part of the universe!" I think that is the inevitable rational point of view, sure. I'm not saying we need to leave room for a god... I'm saying literally, nobody knows for sure. So why not study these questions?
williamdclt 8y ago
The thing is, even if you were right (and I think you are) and this was definitely proven, this knowledge is useless outside of purely scientific curiosity. Okay, our whole perception of reality and individuality and consciousness is an illusion. Well, we still live in this illusion: even if at a fondamental level we're deterministic machine, that's not how we feel, that's not how we experience reality. Even if I know that there's no free will, it won't be a satisfactory answer to people doing dumb shit around me. It won't be a satisfactory answer to me being bored in a purposeless job I hate. It doesn't solve the problem that some things seem right and other seem wrong. Knowing that the brain is a wet computer is just as useful as knowing that particles are made of vibrating strings: that's interesting but doesn't help me interact with the reality I experience. "morale", "justice", "happiness", "love" might be perceptory illusions but that's still what we experience, and you can philosophize about all of that. That being said I agree totally that turning to philosophy to determine the "nature of our experience of reality" is a dead-end, it's up to science.
- deltron3030 8y ago
  It gets real when you're hungry, when your stomach/gut is in command.
md224 8y ago
Do you value anything? Does anything matter to you? If something does matter to you, why? If it matters because it achieves a specific end, why does that end matter? Is it a trick of the brain? Are you simply forced to behave as if things matter when in reality you believe everything is pointless and nobody has any value beyond the hedonistic gratification they can provide you? If someone murdered everyone you cared about, would you claim that your grief stems from an illusion, a mistake? You’re free to answer “yes” to all of these. I just think it’s a really sad way to live.
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  I just think it’s a really sad way to live. And of course someone can then ask: Why is that a really sad way to live? Thus is the infinite epistemic loop. There is no "root" in the field of epistemology - it's turtles all the way down. The French existentialists recognized this reality, and the response was: "make your own root and proceed from there." Ok fine, all that does is make the illusion more meaningful individually, it says nothing of the grounding of the illusion.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    The only way I can see that we can ground this illusion, especially wrt. morality/ethics and values, is by observing that humans all have shared brain architecture, by virtue of evolution and reproduction. We have some shared intuitions in our firmware, which would serve well for the purpose of grounding e.g. morality. This of course means that we've only delayed the problem until the point when we meet other minds with different architecture - be it aliens, sentient AIs, or whatever. But that's kind of the point the whole AI risk movement has been making - that values and intelligence are orthogonal; there's no reason to assume that an intelligent non-human mind will automatically share values and moral intuitions with us.
filipoi 8y ago
> As far as I'm concerned, after Wittgenstein, philosophy has had nothing to do. After which Wittgenstein? From Tractatus? Or from Philosophical Investigations? You rather sound like you prefer Tractatus but Wittgenstein still had something to say about philosophy after Tracatus. Are Philosophical Investigations nonsensical? And what about Tracatus? You sound so certain about philosophy... But how come that we can even dabate about philosophy? How can we understand those nonsensical philosophical questions if they are nonsensical? And how do you define what is nonsensical? Aren't such inquiries purely philosophical questions? In your comment you used so many purely philosophical terms but you still claim that philosophy is utter nonsense... I guess we should agree that your post is utter philosophy.
gmaster1440 8y ago
> The brain is a wet computer. Reality is its internal model of the external world informed by imperfect sensory inputs. Consciousness is what thinking feels like. You're undermining the hard problem of consciousness[1] by ignoring subjectivity of experience. Even if one day we understand everything there is to know about the brain in a materialistic manner, it's not clear that we'll also understand the emergence of subjective experience from it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
ivanhoe 8y ago
Religious and philosophical questions aside, consciousness is an extremely interesting subject as a high-level way to learn about the brain inner workings. It's our abstraction for modelling and talking about the focused thinking process, while brain also handles many other complex tasks in the background that we're not usually aware of - but these layers of "thinking" influence each other, so it's all much more complex than just "what thinking feels like".
xamuel 8y ago
Philosophy has done plenty since Wittgenstein. It takes hundreds of years for it to become household knowledge. So of course anyone who doesn't actively study it will feel it hasn't moved much. (Most laymen still don't know Wittgenstein.) I'll plug my own recent physico-philosophical paper, a 2-page argument that a certain not-too-contrived simulation hypothesis is falsifiable, using an unexpected deus-ex-machina: soft errors :) https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf "A type of simulation which some experimental evidence suggests we don't live in"
nickthemagicman 8y ago
I agree that alot of the philosophy about the subject of conciouness is rediculous. But from scientific standpoint it's pretty fascinating. If your experience of reality is limited to your senses then what's out there that we can't sense. Dogs have hundreds of times greater sense of smell than us, they have a whole'nother world that were not privy too. Think of what's potentially out there in reality/physics/the universe that our senses can't access. I agree how does the wet computer work is a pretty fascinating question. But you have to ask that in tandem to how our sensors work and how physics of our reality works.
amelius 8y ago
> Consciousness is what thinking feels like. Ok, please enlighten me how I make my laptop feel intense pleasure while it is compiling my code.
RivieraKid 8y ago
> Reality is its internal model of the external world informed by imperfect sensory inputs. Consciousness is what thinking feels like. Problem is, these are vague claims that many would disagree with. It's not that simple. Why does thinking feel like anything? What does "feel" even mean? The mystery is, why does moving physical particles in the brain sometimes trigger the perception of "seeing green" and sometimes it triggers the feeling of tiredness? Or what about this thought experiment. You probably believe that a computer program can feel pain. But you can execute the program by hand, with pen and paper. Does this create the feeling of pain too? > As far as I'm concerned, after Wittgenstein, philosophy has had nothing to do. All the "big questions" are either answerable scientifically as a matter of neurology or they're ill-posed and nonsensical. I agree with the sentiment. I think most of philosophy is BS, lot of words about nothing and most questions are really about linguistic - once you properly define terms, the problem disappears. But the problem of consciousness is an exception.
andybak 8y ago
> Consciousness is what thinking feels like. And seeing is what vision looks like? Your statement seems reminiscent of the Homunculus Fallacy https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/104/Homunculus-Fallacy https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...
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noncoml 8y ago
You say your brain is a complicated computer and your senses are the IO. Would I be right to say that time is also another form of input to our brain hence making it another IO? Would you also say that it is possible then to model our brains as a function and the IO as arguments? Does a function have consciousness or is it the application of the function what gives it consciousness?

Swizec 8y ago

In ancient greece they were just as certain that consciousness comes from the liver. It's hard to know which facts that are completely obvious and self-evident to us today, will be considered silly and misguided in the future as you new evidence arises.

quotemstr 8y ago
Sure, and they also used a geocentric model of the solar system. Should we weigh our certainty of the truth of the heliocentric model the same as they weighed the truth of the geocentric model despite our vastly superior scientific methodology and body of evidence?
- fiatjaf 8y ago
  You only think you know so much because you don't know what you don't know. For example, a "model" cannot be "true". A model is a model, reality is a different thing.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    You don't know that. Models could be just as real as non-models, whatever those are.
    - quotemstr 8y ago
      Platonist.
    - fiatjaf 8y ago
      You are right, but I'm not talking about this and you know it. I was saying that this gentleman, quotemstr, is confusing and mixing the model with the reality that it is trying to model.
- BalinKing 8y ago
  True, but we don’t have nearly the same amount of evidence for the nature of consciousness as we do for the structure of the solar system... instead, we’re relying largely on philosophy and “self-evident” facts.

PhearTheCeal 8y ago

>The brain is a wet computer. >Consciousness is what thinking feels like. Do you think computers are conscious?

quotemstr 8y ago
Sufficiently smart ones, certainly. I've seen no evidence that we've built one yet, but we will eventually, and when we do, I'd ascribe exactly as much consciousness to a computer as I do to a human. I don't believe "p zombies" exist --- or, rather, I believe we're all p zombies.
- nyolfen 8y ago
  p-zombie is a fantastic insult for people you disagree with, though
- fiatjaf 8y ago
  So you believe in things without evidence that they exist? That's very scientific of you.
  - 21 8y ago
    If I believe that aliens exist somewhere in the universe, is that unscientific?
    - nradov 8y ago
      Yes belief in aliens is unscientific. There's nothing wrong with such a belief but no matter how you dress it up with Drake Equation calculations it's equivalent to a religious belief taken on faith.
      - 21 8y ago
        So the vast majority of physicists which believed that the Higgs would be found were also acting like on a religious belief taken on faith.

woodruffw 8y ago

> As far as I'm concerned, after Wittgenstein, philosophy has had nothing to do. All the "big questions" are either answerable scientifically as a matter of neurology or they're ill-posed and nonsensical. Science is in the business of answering what is. It can't answer normative questions, i.e. those about what ought to be. That, at the very least, is one of the domains that philosophy is still both sensible and productive.[1] As others have pointed out below, this article was written from the analytical perspective -- the tradition that stands in contrast to continental thought and critical theory. [1]: Which is only to say that only a single counterexample is needed to invalidate a claim about "all the big questions." There are plenty of fields besides ethics where philosophy inquiry continues to be relevant and productive.

quotemstr 8y ago
I don't think the formal study of ethics is productive either. An ethical system is either descriptive or normative. Does philosophy produce theories that accurately describe human behavior? Psychology and sociology and economics do a much better job of building predictive models. Does ethical philosophy build normative models that describe what ought to be? Sure. Do these models influence actual human behavior? Not a bit. So why bother building castles in the sky?
- PhearTheCeal 8y ago
  The U.S. Code is essentially a castle in the sky. It's quite useful though.
- woodruffw 8y ago
  > Does ethical philosophy build normative models that describe what ought to be? Sure. Do these models influence actual human behavior? Not a bit. So why bother building castles in the sky? Ethical views regarding natural rights are the basis for liberal democracy, either (depending on your metric) the largest or second largest form of political organization today. I'd call that "influencing actual human behavior." Ethical views regarding harm reduction form the basis of modern medical treatment. "Do no harm" is a normative statement, and I know plenty of doctors who seem to be influenced by it. These are the simplest of examples. Abrahamic religions encourage their adherents to behave based upon duty, another normative staple. Individuals act based on rational self interest, and a great number of philosophers have argued that they ought to do so. The list goes on.

fiatjaf 8y ago

If you restrict the realm of phenomena to just what you can explain and thus believe it is real, then you will conclude that you can explain everything.

kashyapc 8y ago

> [...] philosophy has had nothing to do That's an extraordinary claim (which is dubious at best); and we both know the quote about extraordinary claims. Sure, there's a ton of pseudo-philosophy these days, but to brush all of philosophy with the same stroke is just lazy. To jog your memory about the "value of philosophy" from one point of view, take a read of this previous thread here (titled: 'Physics Needs Philosophy. Philosophy Needs Physics'): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17102317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17102317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17108865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17108865

hjorthjort 8y ago
What is the quote, coukd you tell me?
- woodruffw 8y ago
  "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." It's Carl Sagan, apparently.

monktastic1 8y ago

> Consciousness is what thinking feels like. Most people don't play around with their consciousness enough to realize that there's such a state as consciousness without thought. You can of course argue that it doesn't exist, but I invite you to actually get there before making up your mind. At that point it becomes clear that you've been overlooking something obvious that is likely to turn your metaphysics on its head. The closest analogy I can give is lucid dreaming. In a regular dream, you might see a flower and work out all the processes that cause you to see it. When you become lucid, you suddenly see the gaping flaw in your model.

zeroxfe 8y ago

> Why is this subject so fraught? ... Why bother? Because there isn't a good scientific explanation yet. Just lots of theories that are very difficult to prove. I tend to agree that we are just "wet computers" -- it seems pretty obvious (to many of us), however that doesn't meet the bar for good science.

ravenstine 8y ago

> Consciousness is what thinking feels like. How does it feel that way at all? You say there's no mystery, but you're stopping short of the actual questions that make the experience of consciousness intriguing.

quotemstr 8y ago
What questions?
- genidoi 8y ago
  Why do you need a subjective first person experience when humanity could operate just as well as a society of philosophical zombies? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
  - quotemstr 8y ago
    I reject the premise. Why do we need to accept that there is a difference between "me" and an "automaton"? The whole idea supposes, unnecessarily, that consciousness is real, then demands we explore its nature. It's angels on pinheads!
    - komali2 8y ago
      You are engaging, right now, in philosophical meditation on the nature of consciousness. You can't reject the premise that we are automatons outright just by saying so. You're standing on the prow of a MASSIVE philosophical ship of people arguing exactly the same... But just next to you is an equally large ship of people arguing the opposite. Nobody has been able to prove conclusively one way or the other whether or not people are automatons. Nobody has been able to conclude that consciousness is even real. This is just "I think, therefore I am." Maybe it feels good, but it's just another philosophical theory. There's many others. If you have no interest in participating in them that's fine, but you are participating anyway :p

colordrops 8y ago

"The brain is a wet computer. Reality is its internal model of the external world informed by imperfect sensory inputs. Consciousness is what thinking feels like. When the brain ceases to function, the individual is destroyed." The problem is that those are just superficial statements that don't capture the nature of reality at all. It's like saying "there's ground under my feet, and a sky above me, that's the nature of the universe." It just seems that you just packed your bags and moved on because the nature of reality and consciousness is not your interest.

quotemstr 8y ago
I feel like a lot of people defend philosophy on the basis of transcendal sentiment, which says that says there ought to be something more to the world than the ground and the sky, as it were, usually phrased as the "meaning" or "purpose" or "nature" of something. I understand the feeling. It's natural to probe. But what if it really is all just ill-defined sentiment? Why should we imagine there is something "more" there, that there is a "nature" of things beyond that which we can measure? The principle of parsimony demands that we reject extraneous abstractions, and I don't see anything forcing us to acknowledge that the nature of reality is a legitimate object of inquiry as distinct from physics and math.
- komali2 8y ago
  I want to try to reply, but I have the (possibly misguided) feeling that any attempt to penetrate the wall of scathing cynicism you've erected here will be met with just that. I apologize if that's unfair, just hear me out: Going with the principle of parsimony - consciousness is arguably inefficient. I recommend some Peter Watts for fun sci fi inquiry into what a technically advanced species without consciousness should look like. So why have it? Given that nobody can answer the question of what exactly consciousness is, why it developed, and how we could replicate it, I disagree that the study of consciousness has to be "looking for something more." If the brain is "a wet computer" (and if you have time I do challenge you to support this statement), why is it seemingly non deterministic? Or is it actually deterministic, and we just don't have the modelling technology to sufficiently grab all the variables? I think I can predict your reaction - "of course it's deterministic! The universe is deterministic, and brains are just a part of the universe!" I think that is the inevitable rational point of view, sure. I'm not saying we need to leave room for a god... I'm saying literally, nobody knows for sure. So why not study these questions?

williamdclt 8y ago

The thing is, even if you were right (and I think you are) and this was definitely proven, this knowledge is useless outside of purely scientific curiosity. Okay, our whole perception of reality and individuality and consciousness is an illusion. Well, we still live in this illusion: even if at a fondamental level we're deterministic machine, that's not how we feel, that's not how we experience reality. Even if I know that there's no free will, it won't be a satisfactory answer to people doing dumb shit around me. It won't be a satisfactory answer to me being bored in a purposeless job I hate. It doesn't solve the problem that some things seem right and other seem wrong. Knowing that the brain is a wet computer is just as useful as knowing that particles are made of vibrating strings: that's interesting but doesn't help me interact with the reality I experience. "morale", "justice", "happiness", "love" might be perceptory illusions but that's still what we experience, and you can philosophize about all of that. That being said I agree totally that turning to philosophy to determine the "nature of our experience of reality" is a dead-end, it's up to science.

deltron3030 8y ago
It gets real when you're hungry, when your stomach/gut is in command.

md224 8y ago

Do you value anything? Does anything matter to you? If something does matter to you, why? If it matters because it achieves a specific end, why does that end matter? Is it a trick of the brain? Are you simply forced to behave as if things matter when in reality you believe everything is pointless and nobody has any value beyond the hedonistic gratification they can provide you? If someone murdered everyone you cared about, would you claim that your grief stems from an illusion, a mistake? You’re free to answer “yes” to all of these. I just think it’s a really sad way to live.

AndrewKemendo 8y ago
I just think it’s a really sad way to live. And of course someone can then ask: Why is that a really sad way to live? Thus is the infinite epistemic loop. There is no "root" in the field of epistemology - it's turtles all the way down. The French existentialists recognized this reality, and the response was: "make your own root and proceed from there." Ok fine, all that does is make the illusion more meaningful individually, it says nothing of the grounding of the illusion.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  The only way I can see that we can ground this illusion, especially wrt. morality/ethics and values, is by observing that humans all have shared brain architecture, by virtue of evolution and reproduction. We have some shared intuitions in our firmware, which would serve well for the purpose of grounding e.g. morality. This of course means that we've only delayed the problem until the point when we meet other minds with different architecture - be it aliens, sentient AIs, or whatever. But that's kind of the point the whole AI risk movement has been making - that values and intelligence are orthogonal; there's no reason to assume that an intelligent non-human mind will automatically share values and moral intuitions with us.

filipoi 8y ago

> As far as I'm concerned, after Wittgenstein, philosophy has had nothing to do. After which Wittgenstein? From Tractatus? Or from Philosophical Investigations? You rather sound like you prefer Tractatus but Wittgenstein still had something to say about philosophy after Tracatus. Are Philosophical Investigations nonsensical? And what about Tracatus? You sound so certain about philosophy... But how come that we can even dabate about philosophy? How can we understand those nonsensical philosophical questions if they are nonsensical? And how do you define what is nonsensical? Aren't such inquiries purely philosophical questions? In your comment you used so many purely philosophical terms but you still claim that philosophy is utter nonsense... I guess we should agree that your post is utter philosophy.

gmaster1440 8y ago

> The brain is a wet computer. Reality is its internal model of the external world informed by imperfect sensory inputs. Consciousness is what thinking feels like. You're undermining the hard problem of consciousness[1] by ignoring subjectivity of experience. Even if one day we understand everything there is to know about the brain in a materialistic manner, it's not clear that we'll also understand the emergence of subjective experience from it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

ivanhoe 8y ago

Religious and philosophical questions aside, consciousness is an extremely interesting subject as a high-level way to learn about the brain inner workings. It's our abstraction for modelling and talking about the focused thinking process, while brain also handles many other complex tasks in the background that we're not usually aware of - but these layers of "thinking" influence each other, so it's all much more complex than just "what thinking feels like".

xamuel 8y ago

Philosophy has done plenty since Wittgenstein. It takes hundreds of years for it to become household knowledge. So of course anyone who doesn't actively study it will feel it hasn't moved much. (Most laymen still don't know Wittgenstein.) I'll plug my own recent physico-philosophical paper, a 2-page argument that a certain not-too-contrived simulation hypothesis is falsifiable, using an unexpected deus-ex-machina: soft errors :) https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf "A type of simulation which some experimental evidence suggests we don't live in"

nickthemagicman 8y ago

I agree that alot of the philosophy about the subject of conciouness is rediculous. But from scientific standpoint it's pretty fascinating. If your experience of reality is limited to your senses then what's out there that we can't sense. Dogs have hundreds of times greater sense of smell than us, they have a whole'nother world that were not privy too. Think of what's potentially out there in reality/physics/the universe that our senses can't access. I agree how does the wet computer work is a pretty fascinating question. But you have to ask that in tandem to how our sensors work and how physics of our reality works.

amelius 8y ago

> Consciousness is what thinking feels like. Ok, please enlighten me how I make my laptop feel intense pleasure while it is compiling my code.

RivieraKid 8y ago

> Reality is its internal model of the external world informed by imperfect sensory inputs. Consciousness is what thinking feels like. Problem is, these are vague claims that many would disagree with. It's not that simple. Why does thinking feel like anything? What does "feel" even mean? The mystery is, why does moving physical particles in the brain sometimes trigger the perception of "seeing green" and sometimes it triggers the feeling of tiredness? Or what about this thought experiment. You probably believe that a computer program can feel pain. But you can execute the program by hand, with pen and paper. Does this create the feeling of pain too? > As far as I'm concerned, after Wittgenstein, philosophy has had nothing to do. All the "big questions" are either answerable scientifically as a matter of neurology or they're ill-posed and nonsensical. I agree with the sentiment. I think most of philosophy is BS, lot of words about nothing and most questions are really about linguistic - once you properly define terms, the problem disappears. But the problem of consciousness is an exception.

andybak 8y ago

> Consciousness is what thinking feels like. And seeing is what vision looks like? Your statement seems reminiscent of the Homunculus Fallacy https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/104/Homunculus-Fallacy https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...

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noncoml 8y ago

You say your brain is a complicated computer and your senses are the IO. Would I be right to say that time is also another form of input to our brain hence making it another IO? Would you also say that it is possible then to model our brains as a function and the IO as arguments? Does a function have consciousness or is it the application of the function what gives it consciousness?