7 ms·

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, wh

by 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.

by vokep 8y ago

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.