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I'm saying there is no mystery -- that people invoke mystery as an avoidance tactic when they have cognitive dissonance about an otherwise well-established conc

by trevyn 8y ago

I'm saying there is no mystery -- that people invoke mystery as an avoidance tactic when they have cognitive dissonance about an otherwise well-established conclusion, or when they find some pleasure in invoking the unknown and philosophizing. There should be nothing mysterious in 2018 about a biological being that has an internal self-model, memory, and processes sensory stimuli and internal neural firings over time, both of which have a direct relation to the physical basis of that self-model. That is what self-awareness is. "Experience can't be explained by science because science only arises in experience" sounds profound but contributes nothing -- if you invalidate the content of your experience, then you no longer have any reliable axioms on which to build any argument whatsoever, and we might as well all go home. The Sam Harris video you linked makes a good point -- that we want an explanation of consciousness that intuitively makes sense. I'm saying that if you study enough AI and neuroscience, it does intuitively make sense. His counterexample of explaining the "brittleness of glass" is intuitively OK with us even if we don't actually personally understand all of the details of the molecular and atomic interactions, because it does not fundamentally challenge our beliefs of who we are. If there's some explanation of consciousness that does challenge our beliefs of who we are, you better believe you're going to need a more comprehensive and complex explanation before you're going to intuitively believe it.

bencollier49 8y ago
This isn't meant as an ad-hominem, but it still staggers me when I see comments like this. There seems to be a class of people who are unable to see the gaping chasm left by science in its inability to describe the reasons for our ability to experience subjective consciousness. We would need a scientific revolution to understand it. Neuroscience has nothing to say; physics has little to say. The OP article makes the point that we haven't got near to cracking the problem. Personally, I think we have a category issue. We simply don't know what category to put consciousness in, and all attempts to solve it thus far have been category mistakes.
- trevyn 8y ago
  From the OP article: “Researchers have learned a great deal about the neural mechanisms underlying global states of consciousness, distinctions between conscious and unconscious perception, and self-consciousness. Further progress will depend on specifying closer explanatory mappings between (first-person subjective) phenomenological descriptions and (third-person objective) descriptions of (embodied and embedded) neuronal mechanisms.” I wouldn’t call that “haven’t got near to cracking”, especially when the technologies needed to specify those closer mappings are clearly defined and already under development.
  - bencollier49 8y ago
    They make the point that they don't know if their entire perspective and approach is misconceived: "We cannot yet know whether today’s students will find the solution to the ‘problem of consciousness’ or whether the problem as currently set forth is simply misconceived." And all the while we're making that same category error: Mapping subjective experience to neural correlates. This is like someone claiming that they know how internal combustion works because when they push the pedal the car goes faster.
- trevyn 8y ago
  I mean, how would you concretely propose we make better progress on this?
  - bencollier49 8y ago
    I think any advance that does take place will be a huge curve-ball from outside the field. That said, I think there may be reasons to believe that we will simply be unable to explain it. If I was going to make a call, I'd guess that formal logic may at some point prove our inability to come up with an explanation.
    - naasking 8y ago
      > If I was going to make a call, I'd guess that formal logic may at some point prove our inability to come up with an explanation. I'd take that bet. Physics already tells us that humans are merely finite state automatons (due to the Bekenstein bound), so the logic needed to describe us needn't even be that powerful. And given our behaviours were largely shaped to be fairly energy efficient due to evolutionary pressures, consciousness will turn out to be one or more cognitive tricks that convey some adaptive advantage. The hurdle people typically have to accepting this inevitability is because of the internal perception of cognitive continuity, but this property is clearly false. There's are many obvious cases where continuity fails, like sleep, anaesthetic, etc.
      - mbrock 8y ago
        Why is continuity in that sense important rather than the sheer experienceness of experience?
        naasking 8y ago
        How do you know the redness you woke up seeing this morning is the same redness you experienced yesterday? Continuity is one way. There are many intuition pumps discussing surgical or other interventions that tweak qualia in various seemingly reasonable ways, to the extent that the concept of qualia itself becomes increasingly unreasonable. Dennett has covered a lot of this ground.
- naasking 8y ago
  > But if you're talking about the mystery that is your own subjective being, then we may never solve that problem. For your consideration: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0050... > Personally, I think we have a category issue. We simply don't know what category to put consciousness in, and all attempts to solve it thus far have been category mistakes. Consider the possibility that the category you've implicitly created for consciousness doesn't actually exist.
  - bencollier49 8y ago
    Yes, I've considered that; naturally, considering it's the fashion at the moment. There's no reason to assume that something which people have described for thousands of years doesn't exist, just because a bunch of people working with a science rooted in objective measurement have found something that they're unable to model in any way. It'd be nice to think that consciousness wasn't real, because then science could explain mostly everything. Very comforting. But it can't.
    - naasking 8y ago
      Do you believe in Thor too because people believed in him for thousands of years? And consciousness does not have the long history you describe. And "unable to model" is a huge stretch. You can't measure something that has no definition or understood boundaries. When the rest if our perceptual and cognitive faculties are explained, you'll find there's nothing left for consciousness. It's the new god of the gaps argument.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  > We simply don't know what category to put consciousness in, and all attempts to solve it thus far have been category mistakes. This is a case where more science could probably help philosophy.
mbrock 8y ago
http://www.kfs.org/jonathan/witt/t563en.html http://www.kfs.org/jonathan/witt/t563en.html Tractatus 5.6.3 presents the metaphysical problem quite clearly. The perceiving subject is a limit of science, kind of like the big bang which is also fundamentally and inescapably mysterious. You cannot prove or disprove the simulation hypothesis. Of course we exist within a deep and unfathomable mystery, no matter how accurately we can make predictions with the differential equations of physical science. It’s all fundamentally mysterious and not admitting that is ridiculous.
- saalweachter 8y ago
  Just to point out, things like "what happened before the Big Bang?" are only beyond science until someone comes up with an experiment that tests a theory that encompasses what happened before the Big Bang. Math can prove things unprovable from a specific set of axioms, but in the physical sciences it's a matter of imagination. The question of what stars were made of was once unknowable; now it is a robust field of study. What happened before the Big Bang is unknowable... by current scientific understanding and techniques. Maybe once we unify physics or build colliders the size of solar systems it will become understandable; maybe not.
- trevyn 8y ago
  It’s not mysterious or important, it’s just where we find ourselves. If we are literally unable to see outside the bounds of the universe or the simulation, it is irrelevant to our experience, because it does not change how we should act. Boggling the mind on the subject does not create larger meaning where literally none exists. Humans have an instinct to make things mysterious and more meaningful than they are because it drives their curiosity and need to explain, which drives their ability to predict, which fulfills the mandate of life to win competition for resources and grow. Introspecting and understanding the perceiver thus answers the question easily. Wittgenstein did not have fMRI machines.
  - mbrock 8y ago
    I don’t make any claims about this mystery or try to deal with it in any pseudoscientific way. My stance is something like: empirical science is the functioning mode of investigating and predicting the patterns of observable reality, and there’s no other way of objective inquiry, but there are limits to objective inquiry and it’s proper to say that the existence of the objective and subjective reality is fundamentally mysterious while acknowledging that there is no point to “mysticism” beyond amusement or aesthetic inspiration in the form of awe. The regularity of physical law is also a mystery.

by trevyn 8y ago

bencollier49 8y ago

This isn't meant as an ad-hominem, but it still staggers me when I see comments like this. There seems to be a class of people who are unable to see the gaping chasm left by science in its inability to describe the reasons for our ability to experience subjective consciousness. We would need a scientific revolution to understand it. Neuroscience has nothing to say; physics has little to say. The OP article makes the point that we haven't got near to cracking the problem. Personally, I think we have a category issue. We simply don't know what category to put consciousness in, and all attempts to solve it thus far have been category mistakes.

trevyn 8y ago
From the OP article: “Researchers have learned a great deal about the neural mechanisms underlying global states of consciousness, distinctions between conscious and unconscious perception, and self-consciousness. Further progress will depend on specifying closer explanatory mappings between (first-person subjective) phenomenological descriptions and (third-person objective) descriptions of (embodied and embedded) neuronal mechanisms.” I wouldn’t call that “haven’t got near to cracking”, especially when the technologies needed to specify those closer mappings are clearly defined and already under development.
- bencollier49 8y ago
  They make the point that they don't know if their entire perspective and approach is misconceived: "We cannot yet know whether today’s students will find the solution to the ‘problem of consciousness’ or whether the problem as currently set forth is simply misconceived." And all the while we're making that same category error: Mapping subjective experience to neural correlates. This is like someone claiming that they know how internal combustion works because when they push the pedal the car goes faster.
trevyn 8y ago
I mean, how would you concretely propose we make better progress on this?
- bencollier49 8y ago
  I think any advance that does take place will be a huge curve-ball from outside the field. That said, I think there may be reasons to believe that we will simply be unable to explain it. If I was going to make a call, I'd guess that formal logic may at some point prove our inability to come up with an explanation.
  - naasking 8y ago
    > If I was going to make a call, I'd guess that formal logic may at some point prove our inability to come up with an explanation. I'd take that bet. Physics already tells us that humans are merely finite state automatons (due to the Bekenstein bound), so the logic needed to describe us needn't even be that powerful. And given our behaviours were largely shaped to be fairly energy efficient due to evolutionary pressures, consciousness will turn out to be one or more cognitive tricks that convey some adaptive advantage. The hurdle people typically have to accepting this inevitability is because of the internal perception of cognitive continuity, but this property is clearly false. There's are many obvious cases where continuity fails, like sleep, anaesthetic, etc.
    - mbrock 8y ago
      Why is continuity in that sense important rather than the sheer experienceness of experience?
      - naasking 8y ago
        How do you know the redness you woke up seeing this morning is the same redness you experienced yesterday? Continuity is one way. There are many intuition pumps discussing surgical or other interventions that tweak qualia in various seemingly reasonable ways, to the extent that the concept of qualia itself becomes increasingly unreasonable. Dennett has covered a lot of this ground.
naasking 8y ago
> But if you're talking about the mystery that is your own subjective being, then we may never solve that problem. For your consideration: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0050... > Personally, I think we have a category issue. We simply don't know what category to put consciousness in, and all attempts to solve it thus far have been category mistakes. Consider the possibility that the category you've implicitly created for consciousness doesn't actually exist.
- bencollier49 8y ago
  Yes, I've considered that; naturally, considering it's the fashion at the moment. There's no reason to assume that something which people have described for thousands of years doesn't exist, just because a bunch of people working with a science rooted in objective measurement have found something that they're unable to model in any way. It'd be nice to think that consciousness wasn't real, because then science could explain mostly everything. Very comforting. But it can't.
  - naasking 8y ago
    Do you believe in Thor too because people believed in him for thousands of years? And consciousness does not have the long history you describe. And "unable to model" is a huge stretch. You can't measure something that has no definition or understood boundaries. When the rest if our perceptual and cognitive faculties are explained, you'll find there's nothing left for consciousness. It's the new god of the gaps argument.
mannykannot 8y ago
> We simply don't know what category to put consciousness in, and all attempts to solve it thus far have been category mistakes. This is a case where more science could probably help philosophy.

mbrock 8y ago

http://www.kfs.org/jonathan/witt/t563en.html http://www.kfs.org/jonathan/witt/t563en.html Tractatus 5.6.3 presents the metaphysical problem quite clearly. The perceiving subject is a limit of science, kind of like the big bang which is also fundamentally and inescapably mysterious. You cannot prove or disprove the simulation hypothesis. Of course we exist within a deep and unfathomable mystery, no matter how accurately we can make predictions with the differential equations of physical science. It’s all fundamentally mysterious and not admitting that is ridiculous.

saalweachter 8y ago
Just to point out, things like "what happened before the Big Bang?" are only beyond science until someone comes up with an experiment that tests a theory that encompasses what happened before the Big Bang. Math can prove things unprovable from a specific set of axioms, but in the physical sciences it's a matter of imagination. The question of what stars were made of was once unknowable; now it is a robust field of study. What happened before the Big Bang is unknowable... by current scientific understanding and techniques. Maybe once we unify physics or build colliders the size of solar systems it will become understandable; maybe not.
trevyn 8y ago
It’s not mysterious or important, it’s just where we find ourselves. If we are literally unable to see outside the bounds of the universe or the simulation, it is irrelevant to our experience, because it does not change how we should act. Boggling the mind on the subject does not create larger meaning where literally none exists. Humans have an instinct to make things mysterious and more meaningful than they are because it drives their curiosity and need to explain, which drives their ability to predict, which fulfills the mandate of life to win competition for resources and grow. Introspecting and understanding the perceiver thus answers the question easily. Wittgenstein did not have fMRI machines.
- mbrock 8y ago
  I don’t make any claims about this mystery or try to deal with it in any pseudoscientific way. My stance is something like: empirical science is the functioning mode of investigating and predicting the patterns of observable reality, and there’s no other way of objective inquiry, but there are limits to objective inquiry and it’s proper to say that the existence of the objective and subjective reality is fundamentally mysterious while acknowledging that there is no point to “mysticism” beyond amusement or aesthetic inspiration in the form of awe. The regularity of physical law is also a mystery.