17 ms·

From my really ignorant, but introspective, point of view, this notion that life and consciousness somewhat escape from the physical rules that govern rocks, ai

• vokep 8y ago
  The material universe doesn't care about us, but we do, and we are not separate from the universe. Consciousness is the important thing, why it all matters, why bad things are really actually bad. Pain may be expressed, but as all other consciousness itself or qualia, the experience itself cannot be measured, but is very real.
  • Symmetry 8y ago
    What do you mean that consciousness cannot be measured? We can perceive it and talk about it, can't we? Chamlers says that the reason we talk about having qualia has nothing to do, causally, with our experience of qualia but I think we can dismiss that idea out of hand. So by asking people questions about their experiences and getting large enough sample sizes we have a means to conduct a quantitative and scientific investigation of consciousness. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3971003/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3971003/
    • YjSe2GMQ 8y ago
      I think he meant that consciousness is currently irreducible. Consider this: 1. Someone figures out in a lab all possible causes of fear via the surveying method. Fear seems solved. 2. New people appear that claim to experience fear when someone taps their left feet. 3. You have to redo 1. Therefore fear wasn't solved in the first place. Replace "tapping left feet" with something more obscure, or fear with pain, to continue. Underlying problem: you cannot compute the "preimage" of fear.
      • mannykannot 8y ago
        If I am following your line of argument, it would seem to apply to biology in general, which is not complete, yet which is effective at explaining lots of things, as well as able to assimilate new discoveries.
    • PavlovsCat 8y ago
      > How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words. -- David Foster Wallace
      • Symmetry 8y ago
        It's not at all odd when you consider the bandwidths of the various channels involved.
        • cobbzilla 8y ago
          even with infinite bandwidth, you cannot reduce all qualia to bits. especially feelings.
          • PavlovsCat 8y ago
            > They developed writing, as did we. But their writing soon began to no longer just mean what it said. For them, the writing was what it said and their words were what they meant. The flow of the language froze and they began to stack individual concepts one onto the other like stones. Their language lost its spirit. They were still very clever, but without spirit. They built the tower of their words higher and higher and converted everything magical, which they feared, into dead material, and filled it with new, spiritless life. But they completely control this undead material. -- Albion ( https://i.imgur.com/8GHPl6S.png https://i.imgur.com/8GHPl6S.png ) > Among the many forms of alienation, the most frequent one is alienation in language. If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say "I love you," the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word "love" is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses. The alienation of language shows the whole complexity of alienation. Language is one of the most precious human achievements; to avoid alienation by not speaking would be foolish -- yet one must be always aware of the danger of the spoken word, that it threatens to substitute itself for the living experience. -- Erich Fromm ( https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ )
    • vokep 8y ago
      Think about it like this: What actually is the color green? sure, a wavelength of around 532nm coming into your eye causes it to happen, but thats just information. Then its processed in your brain and at some point recognized as green. Somewhere in this, you see green, but you seeing it cannot be measured. Maybe the activations of your neurons could be, and maybe that could even be fully reverse engineered to understand how the conclusion of seeing green is reached. And yet, the actual stuff in your conscious experience still isn't there, just a bunch of logic is. Now maybe we could discover some dynamics of consciousness though. If we create conscious AI or some way to inject new logic into our brain that is directly witnessed, we could probe for what configurations produce what kind of consciousness. So at least we could understand the behavior of it. But the actual stuff of it is not measurable by anything but itself.
      • mannykannot 8y ago
        I think you may be begging the question when you assume that there must be "actual stuff" that is forever beyond physical explanation. I suspect that one is more likely to understand "green" by realizing that it is a word (originally, a sound) that you have come to associate with memories of visual experiences. To say something is green is to do a comparison between an aspect of the experience of it, and aspects of some of those memories of prior experiences.
        • 09bjb 8y ago
          I think the difficult part of all this is that "experience" has been irreducible so far and extremely difficult to isolate as some kind of physical substance or variable. We can analyze the "actual stuff" in every dimension we know how, and still come no closer to explaining why it feels like something to experience green (borrowing from Thomas Nagel here). A starcraft-playing neural net can make a comparison between some of its earlier "memories" and what it's seeing now, but that says nothing about its Awareness.
        • vokep 8y ago
          I don't assume that the stuff is forever beyond physical explaination, and like I said we can perform science on the behavior of it. But ultimately the scientific method will always conclude that its ultimately an illusion and that there is only the word green, or the recognition of 532nm light. A word doesn't even need be assigned to it, its witnessed either way. I use color as an example because its very distant and theoretically could be many different ways (e.g. your experience of green may not be made of the same stuff my green is). However geometry seems far less arbitrary. Visualizing a square is more specific, the way the lines relate to space in the 2D plane if misrepresented will be wrong. I doubt we visualize such things with 100% accuracy, but we must visualize them to a certain common accuracy, and thats important, common. Basically, as far as experiencing the visual concept of a square, we all experience roughly the same object in our conscious experience. Thats where things can be studied a bit, because the behavior of consciousness given certain logic is likely absolute.
  • lawlorino 8y ago
    > why bad things are really actually bad. In a material universe there is no objective good or bad.
    • stcredzero 8y ago
      In a material universe there is no objective good or bad. I'm willing to bet that there's a sadist out there who, if they had you under their control, could eventually convince you there is definite objective bad.
      • 09bjb 8y ago
        And yet for every one of these sadists, a Viktor Frankl pops up to say "“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
        • stcredzero 8y ago
          I'd pull a nihilist into my lifeboat. I wouldn't be happy about it, though. If I had to choose Viktor Frankl or a nihilist, I'd choose Viktor Frankl. I wouldn't be happy about that either.
    • vokep 8y ago
      Pain is objectively bad. Even if in a greater moral system pain is necessary to balance things and so is "good" in that sense, even then it would be a necessary evil. (keyword evil) If there were a way without it, that would be better.
      • incompatible 8y ago
        Pain is just a way that animals experience strong motivation. People born without the ability to feel pain have serious problems, because they don't make enough effort to avoid damage.
• andai 8y ago
  Would you then agree that the interactions that burn stars also produce a form of consciousness?
  • sandov 8y ago
    Yes, Consciousness is the result of the fundamental laws of the universe. It's also an abstraction, a way to understand complex arrangements of matter, in the same way that a table is an abstraction: the matter in a table isn't made of table molecules, it's just that the way in which those molecules are arranged and stuck together makes them a table.
    • nbulka 8y ago
      Could those stars then potentially have thoughts or actions?
      • incompatible 8y ago
        It doesn't seem likely to me, since they aren't the kinds of physical processes that generate thoughts, so far as we understand it. The idea that composite objects like tables don't actually exist is called mereological nihilism.
• jewelthief91 8y ago
  I think the concept of "supervenience" would be helpful here. So the rules that govern the rocks you mentioned should ultimately depend on the rules that govern the particles the rocks are made out of. The rules that govern the air also depend on the same rules that govern the particles the rocks are made out of, however it seems to be that rocks and air have pretty meaningfully different rules that they follow. There are definable sets of rules that emerge out of other sets of rules. " X is said to supervene on Y if and only if some difference in Y is necessary for any difference in X to be possible. Equivalently, X is said to supervene on Y if and only if X cannot vary unless Y varies." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervenience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervenience
• deleted 8y ago
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• AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  I think your first paragraph is spot on. And why do people do that? I also agree that your second paragraph is the logical conclusion of a materialist starting point - that is, the physical universe is all there is. There is really no other conclusion from that starting point. But that leaves us with no free will (automatons don't decide anything). It leaves us without love. (Real love is choosing to do what's best for the other person, and we can't choose. And even what we feel as love is just neurons and biochemicals doing canned mechanistic responses.) It leaves is with no morals. (When a rock falls off a cliff, you don't say that it should have fallen differently, or not fallen at all. We don't think morals apply to mere material objects that are merely obeying the laws of physics, no matter how complex they are.) It leaves us with no truth. (Our brains evolved to get a good enough answer fast enough, not to discover truth in any absolute, platonic sense. And when we "think", we're just letting those neurons do what they're wired to do, without knowing all the bugs in the hardware.) But we also have years of experience of what it means to live as a human being. We experience choosing, loving, knowing that some things are right and others are wrong, and discovering truth. We know, via first-hand experience of living, that "complex automatons" does not adequately describe human life. It's kind of like putting on a t-shirt backwards. It covers all the places that need covering, but it just doesn't fit. And no matter how you try to move it around and re-arrange it, it still doesn't fit. In the same way, the logical conclusions of the materialist starting point don't fit our experience of what it is to live as human beings. This leaves us with two possible responses. The first is that, out of random chance, the universe has created complex automatons that have the experience of being (and the desire to be) more than automatons - to be genuinely personal, rather than just the impersonal plus complexity. Those perceptions are wrong, and those desires will forever be unfulfilled. It would be cruel, except that the universe doesn't have motivations, and to to call it cruel is a category error. The second possibility is that the materialist starting point is mistaken - that there is more than merely matter and the laws of physics. This is what I believe. More strongly, I believe that our experience of living as humans is evidence that the materialist starting point is mistaken. When the Bible says that God made man in His own image, it is saying something about this 21st-century argument. It is saying that there was a first there was personal, not impersonal, and that God (someone, not just something) created humans to also be someone, not just something. And therefore, our experience of being personal rather than impersonal is in line with what has always been.
• davebryand 8y ago
  The way that non-dualists (those that see a single consciousness of which our own awareness is an aspect <-- not a great definition) approach this is from the basis that consciousness is primary and the physical manifestations that exist around that flow from consciousness. So, from that perspective, physical rules that govern rocks are actually subordinate to consciousness. Non-dualism doesn't make any sense to the rational mind, non-dual realization usually arises in someone that has explored the realm of their own personal consciousness very deeply (meditation, contemplation, psychedelics, hypnosis, lucid dreaming, etc).
  • DennisP 8y ago
    Oh I don't know, there have been some rather well-respected philosophers who made rational arguments for idealism.
  • joe_the_user 8y ago
    I would claim a materialist perspective that views the mind and consciousness as arising out of material processes is also a non-dualistic (monist) perspective just as much as an "everything flows from consciousnes" (idealist monist) perspective. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/ Quote: "Because common sense tells us that there are physical bodies, and because there is intellectual pressure towards producing a unified view of the world, one could say that materialist monism is the ‘default option’."
    • 09bjb 8y ago
      I think the non-dualists in the parent comment here would agree, saying something vaguely Alan Watts-y along the lines of "consciousness and matter are merely two sides of the same coin and imply each other mutually." Come to think of it, "does consciousness arise from matter, or does matter arise from consciousness" is a modern Koan par excellence. FWIW, the last time I grooved on that for a while while on a psychedelic, the answer I came up was...decidedly spiritual. Caveat lector ;)
      • 8y ago
• TACIXAT 8y ago
  >I think the universe doesn't care about us Aren't statements like this holding on to the idea of a higher power after the decline of religion? You're ascribing the capability of feeling to the universe.
  • n4r9 8y ago
    Isn't it explicitly refusing to ascribe a particular feeling (caring) to the universe?
  • tbabb 8y ago
    I don't see how saying that it doesn't exhibit a feeling implies that it exhibits feelings.
    • TACIXAT 8y ago
      Take the sentence - he doesn't like dogs. This implies that he has preferences and those preferences do not contain dogs. It is one thing to say the universe lacks consciousness, or that it is incapable of care because it is inanimate. It is another to give it a preference, saying it does not care about us.
      • n4r9 8y ago
        Honestly, I think you're reading too far into the phrasing. Very few would infer that the author thinks there are things the universe does care about.
  • GregSutliff 8y ago
    That doesn’t follow at all. Rocks don’t care about us, and the reason that’s true is that rocks aren’t capable of feeling any way at all. Moreover, even if the universe could properly be said to have feelings, that doesn’t entail anything about the existence of a “higher power”. Humans feel things, but that by itself is not proof or disproof of the existence of a “higher power”
• coleifer 8y ago
  Regardless of any of that, it sure is interesting to be alive and human. We feel emotions, can talk to one another...it's all very, very wonderful and strange.
• a_lieb 8y ago
  In Tegmark's case, his hypothesis doesn't necessarily imply that consciousness escapes the laws of physics in any sense, even somewhat. He's simply arguing that consciousness is a state of matter, like liquid, solid or gas, and its properties emerge from lower-level physical laws, just like the other states of matter. Kind of a wild claim, but still compatible with strict materialism. Tegmark's theory is an expanded version of Tononi's Integrated Information Theory, which has gotten a lot of interest in mainstream cognitive science. IIT also stays well within the laws of physics. Non-materialist philosophers of mind tend to like these theories since they make consciousness correspond with fairly low-level processes, and that looks a lot more plausible than consciousness being something that only pops up in animal brains for some mystical reason. But neither IIT nor Tegmark's approach actually require any kind of escaping from the laws of physics. In fact Tononi sounds to me mostly like a materialist, although he's pretty slippery about it. Not as sure about Tegmark. Also, important to note that almost no one believes in vitalism (the idea that life itself requires special extra-physical "secret sauce" to exist) anymore. It is only consciousness that is up for debate in mainstream philosophy.