5 ms·

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

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.
        mbrock 8y ago
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.

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.
      - mbrock 8y ago

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.