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Why is continuity in that sense important rather than the sheer experienceness of experience?

by mbrock 8y ago

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
  This whole question is obviously kind of tiresome in how it’s repetitively treated on internet boards every day, but I think it’s still fundamentally baffling and I’m always curious to interrogate people who seem to have “figured it out” in some sense. You say conscious beings are obviously just finite state automata. That’s curious to me because it seems strange that I would essentially be a certain mathematical structure. I agree that my structure can in principle be explained as an automaton (except that my lack of a boundary means that I have to be described with a universe-sized map that can’t fit in the universe) but why is it like something to be an automaton? Maybe you’re saying something like this. I have an illusion that there is some subjective realm of experience, exemplified by the visual field, a kind of mirror universe that is mysteriously connected to the “outer” world, and this illusion is what leads to mistakes like body-mind dualism. In fact there is no such subjective realm, and my perception is not different in kind from any other causal system’s different reactions, it’s just so complex and finely tuned that this “illusion” appears especially because of the illusion of continuity. I can’t steelman the argument properly because I really don’t understand, and unfortunately I haven’t read Dennett. It seems to me that why there is perception is as mysterious as why there is energy and these do seem like separate questions so far. Some kind of monism seems reasonable but I don’t see how experience can be assumed to be downstream from the mathematical laws of fundamental physics—that seems like an unproven assumption that’s philosophically tricky and extremely contentious. Happy to hear any thoughts or pointers.
  - trevyn 8y ago
    Could this be partially an issue of semantics? - Why do we have subjective experience? vs - What causes us to have/creates subjective experience? - For what reason/purpose do we have subjective experience? - How is subjective experience implemented? The last three seem to be reasonably well fleshed out in the literature. Do you interpret “why” to have an additional meaning?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - naasking 8y ago
    > You say conscious beings are obviously just finite state automata. That’s curious to me because it seems strange that I would essentially be a certain mathematical structure That's a complex topic, touching on metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of mathematics. To summarize, explaining the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics without simply adopting a Platonist-type ontology requires making more assumptions than simply accepting the existence of mathematical objects. At that point, it's also more parsimonious to then conclude that our world is simply one such object, rather than positing that both mathematical objects and matter exist. > but why is it like something to be an automaton? I think your steelman is pretty close, and you can see exactly this approach in mechanistic theories of subjective experience: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0050... Since this is Hacker News, an apt analogy might be how single CPU computers simulate concurrency via task switching. Our brains undergo similar signal switching between perceptual signals coming from our internal model of the world, and our direct perceptions of the external world, and this creates the illusion. > Some kind of monism seems reasonable but I don’t see how experience can be assumed to be downstream from the mathematical laws of fundamental physics—that seems like an unproven assumption that’s philosophically tricky and extremely contentious Absolutely. That's why Dennett has spent 50 years researching and writing on the topic. It's a tangled web that requires what he calls perceptual inversions to make it intuitive. But of all philosophers, he's probably spent the most time with neuroscientists, physicists and other philosophers. A lot of people don't like what he says, but he's definitely worth reading if this a question that interests you.

Why is continuity in that sense important rather than the sheer experienceness of experience?

by mbrock 8y ago

Why is continuity in that sense important rather than the sheer experienceness of experience?

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
This whole question is obviously kind of tiresome in how it’s repetitively treated on internet boards every day, but I think it’s still fundamentally baffling and I’m always curious to interrogate people who seem to have “figured it out” in some sense. You say conscious beings are obviously just finite state automata. That’s curious to me because it seems strange that I would essentially be a certain mathematical structure. I agree that my structure can in principle be explained as an automaton (except that my lack of a boundary means that I have to be described with a universe-sized map that can’t fit in the universe) but why is it like something to be an automaton? Maybe you’re saying something like this. I have an illusion that there is some subjective realm of experience, exemplified by the visual field, a kind of mirror universe that is mysteriously connected to the “outer” world, and this illusion is what leads to mistakes like body-mind dualism. In fact there is no such subjective realm, and my perception is not different in kind from any other causal system’s different reactions, it’s just so complex and finely tuned that this “illusion” appears especially because of the illusion of continuity. I can’t steelman the argument properly because I really don’t understand, and unfortunately I haven’t read Dennett. It seems to me that why there is perception is as mysterious as why there is energy and these do seem like separate questions so far. Some kind of monism seems reasonable but I don’t see how experience can be assumed to be downstream from the mathematical laws of fundamental physics—that seems like an unproven assumption that’s philosophically tricky and extremely contentious. Happy to hear any thoughts or pointers.
- trevyn 8y ago
  Could this be partially an issue of semantics? - Why do we have subjective experience? vs - What causes us to have/creates subjective experience? - For what reason/purpose do we have subjective experience? - How is subjective experience implemented? The last three seem to be reasonably well fleshed out in the literature. Do you interpret “why” to have an additional meaning?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- naasking 8y ago
  > You say conscious beings are obviously just finite state automata. That’s curious to me because it seems strange that I would essentially be a certain mathematical structure That's a complex topic, touching on metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of mathematics. To summarize, explaining the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics without simply adopting a Platonist-type ontology requires making more assumptions than simply accepting the existence of mathematical objects. At that point, it's also more parsimonious to then conclude that our world is simply one such object, rather than positing that both mathematical objects and matter exist. > but why is it like something to be an automaton? I think your steelman is pretty close, and you can see exactly this approach in mechanistic theories of subjective experience: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0050... Since this is Hacker News, an apt analogy might be how single CPU computers simulate concurrency via task switching. Our brains undergo similar signal switching between perceptual signals coming from our internal model of the world, and our direct perceptions of the external world, and this creates the illusion. > Some kind of monism seems reasonable but I don’t see how experience can be assumed to be downstream from the mathematical laws of fundamental physics—that seems like an unproven assumption that’s philosophically tricky and extremely contentious Absolutely. That's why Dennett has spent 50 years researching and writing on the topic. It's a tangled web that requires what he calls perceptual inversions to make it intuitive. But of all philosophers, he's probably spent the most time with neuroscientists, physicists and other philosophers. A lot of people don't like what he says, but he's definitely worth reading if this a question that interests you.