5 ms·

> Therefore, we could as well extend that presumption to a being sharing structures with similar functions. This is more or less the current mainstream stance.

> Therefore, we could as well extend that presumption to a being sharing structures with similar functions. This is more or less the current mainstream stance. I think it's fine to do it for practical purposes, for example deciding that animals cannot be ethically subjected to certain treatments by virtue of the complexity of their nervous systems. But this is reasonable doubt + principle of precaution. I'm fine with that. What we cannot do is make this presumption and pretend that we are still within the realms of serious science or philosophy. The technical name for this presumption is emergentism, that consciousness somehow arises from the interactions of matter. I believe that the reason why this hypothesis is so popular, and even confused with scientific fact, is that it is the less weird. Avoiding weirdness is a common pitfall in the history of science, it leads to temporary dead-ends.

hopler 8y ago
It's fine to say that science does not support the claim that animals have consciousness, as long as you also agree that science does not support the claim that humans have consciousness. I don't understand what you are saying about emrgentism being non scientific. Emergentism is the reason the reason that the Universe today has so many properties that it didn't have when it was a miasma of isolated hydrogren or whatever around the time of the Big Bang.
- xamuel 8y ago
  Science does not support the claim that humans have consciousness! You know that you are conscious, but you have no way to falsify the hypothesis that everyone OTHER than you is a philosophical zombie. (If you discover such a test, then congratulations, you are now a scientist up there with Aristotle, Newton and Einstein.)
  - vinceguidry 8y ago
    All you're saying here is that science isn't philosophy.
  - simonh 8y ago
    Dennett has shown, to my satisfaction at least, that the philosophical zombie paradoxes are logically incoherent. I see the zombie paradoxes as pulling a similar trick to the Chinese Room. They both try to trivialise the problem to a simplistic model, but of course the problem is not simplistic. The Chinese room would have to be the size of a planet, containing millions of trillions of symbols and would take the man inside it the lifetime of the universe to perform simple linguistic processing and cognitive tasks. Likewise the philosophical zombies are cast as simple dumb mechanisms that are somehow performing a stupendously complex and little understood process, except 'not really'. They're both just rhetorical sleight of hand.
    - xamuel 8y ago
      Showing that paradoxes are incoherent is a logical exercise, not a scientific one. If we use a truth-table to show "P and not P" is always false, that's logic. If we repeatedly drop a ball and observe that it falsifies "balls don't fall", that's science. Stop confusing the two. Dennett has not provided a laboratory experiment X such that if "simonh is the only conscious being in the universe" is true then X has one result, and yet when we run the experiment we see a different result.
      - simonh 8y ago
        Hold on there just a cotton picking minute. You're the one that invoked philosophical zombies. So they're science when you invoke them, but only philosophy when I do? I would rather say that it seems likely science in the strict sense cannot either support or refute the existence of consciousness. It's essentially a philosophical question.
        xamuel 8y ago
        >I would rather say that it seems likely science in the strict sense cannot either support or refute the existence of consciousness Yes, that's the whole point of my first comment. Glad that we ended up agreeing!
        the_af 8y ago
  - subroutine 8y ago
    Related to what TuringTest already stated above: We can make estimated guesses about how things work based on their physical and functional similarities to other things. We have billions of data points showing that neurotypical adult humans think and behave similarly. To assume you're the only human who experiences consciousness would be like assuming you have a qualitatively unique, incredible, special cognitive ability not shared by any other conspecific, despite being generated from more-or-less the same template as the other billions of humans, and despite not standing out in any qualitative way with regard to mental abilities. So it seems the logical/scientific baseline (the null hypothesis if you will) is that, probabilistically, any given neurotypical adult human is not going to be cognitively endowed with some, covert, exotic mental experience while the rest are zombies. So if that is your claim, I'd say it's on you to prove it.
    - xamuel 8y ago
      Yeah, I'm not saying you or I are the only consciousness in the world... that's almost certainly false (barring ridiculous extreme cases like solipsism etc.) The point is, this isn't science. Compare it to arguments for extraterrestrial life where we say, "There are such-and-such number of stars... Blah blah... Therefore we're probably not alone", but at the end of the day, we don't actually learn for certain that extraterrestrial life exists. We would have to make actual contact in order for that to occur. This might sound impractical and ivory-tower, but bear in mind, early humans would have made similar arguments for geocentrism, waving away early heliocentric proposals as mumbo-jumbo.
      - subroutine 8y ago
        I think you are suggesting (but let me know if I'm wrong) that consciousness is not a testable or measurable phenomena, and therefore we cannot make scientific claims about who/what experiences it. All you can know for certain is that you have it (if you have it). Ok, so you have consciousness; you know it, but I can't be certain. Nevertheless, I hook you up to an EEG machine, and embed electrode arrays in various brain regions. We have a conversation, show you some images, run through some tasks, etc. and then drip some sedative into your IV. Soon you drift into a deep and dreamless sleep. Run the same tasks and indeed you are completely unresponsive. Later you wake up, and I show you how your neural nets respond and oscillate at particular frequencies when u are awake and then show you the marked difference right after you fall asleep. We do this over a bunch of sessions until you yourself can recognize the neural signatures of your conscious awake brain vs your unconsious asleep brain. Would you say in that experiment we did something scientific to study consciousness?
  - the_af 8y ago
    > Science does not support the claim that humans have consciousness! You know that you are conscious, but you have no way to falsify the hypothesis that everyone OTHER than you is a philosophical zombie. I think this is more of a philosophical thought experiment than a scientific one. It's true that it's hard to define what consciousness even is, but I'm pretty sure the working hypothesis is that whatever it is, both you and I have it. Scientists do not work under the assumption that anyone could be a philosophical zombie, because that's not a productive stance; no science -- as a meaningful social human enterprise -- can be conducted from a position of complete solipsism. Similarly, scientists do not think "well, I cannot prove other people exist outside my mind"; that's an unproductive stance, outside the realm of scientific thought.
    - xamuel 8y ago
      The thought experiment isn't science, I never claimed it was. Science is for studying physical things in the real world. The thought experiment in question is for studying the scientificness of a claim. The scientificness of a claim is not a physical object in the real world. Traditional science (rolling balls down inclines, etc.) would all remain perfectly valid even if I'm the only conscious being and the whole world is in my mind. Science experiments still suggest laws to explain how that world in my mind works. (Note, I'm not advocating solipsism, I'm merely refuting your claim that solipsism is inconsistent with science.)
      - the_af 8y ago
        I'm not arguing that solipsism is inconsistent with science. I'm arguing it's unproductive. Solipsism, the brain-in-a-vat, philosophical zombies, etc, are all rejected by science as a human activity because they are useless as starting points. The starting point of all science is "something can be known about the universe beyond my own mind". Without it, there can be no science, nothing to be known or understood. Therefore, science can safely assume that whatever consciousness is (as perceived by the scientist), it's likely shared by other healthy human beings that behave similarly to the observing scientist. It can also make educated guesses about other organisms (or even unhealthy human beings). > Traditional science (rolling balls down inclines, etc.) would all remain perfectly valid even if I'm the only conscious being and the whole world is in my mind. I don't think so. If the external universe is a completely whimsical figment of your imagination, you can infer nothing from it, and no experiment is meaningful. Your starting point must be to assume the universe outside your mind is real.
- TelmoMenezes 8y ago
  > It's fine to say that science does not support the claim that animals have consciousness, as long as you also agree that science does not support the claim that humans have consciousness. It doesn't. Can you name the scientific theory that predicts the existence of consciousness? We know it exists from direct experience, nothing else. > I don't understand what you are saying about emrgentism being non scientific. Emergentism is the reason the reason that the Universe today has so many properties that it didn't have when it was a miasma of isolated hydrogren or whatever around the time of the Big Bang. In this context the philosophical term "emergentism" is commonly used to refer to the theory of mind, not the general concept of emergence. But no, emergence is not the cause for anything. Emergence is a human mental model, developed to deal with complexity, for example: "life emerges from chemistry". A brain the size of Jupiter might be able to maintain a mental model of all the fundamental building blocks of chemistry interacting to create complex biological organisms. We don't have a brain the size of jupiter, so we need shortcuts. The Universe clearly becomes more complex the more time passes, having started from a state of zero complexity. This is a direct consequence of the laws of physics, but there is no explanation for why the laws of physics are a certain way. They are just brute facts. If you keep asking "why" you will eventually bump into a wall.
cco 8y ago
Maybe I'm confusing something, does your comment imply that consciousness is not the result of matter interacting with other matter?

hopler 8y ago

It's fine to say that science does not support the claim that animals have consciousness, as long as you also agree that science does not support the claim that humans have consciousness. I don't understand what you are saying about emrgentism being non scientific. Emergentism is the reason the reason that the Universe today has so many properties that it didn't have when it was a miasma of isolated hydrogren or whatever around the time of the Big Bang.

xamuel 8y ago
Science does not support the claim that humans have consciousness! You know that you are conscious, but you have no way to falsify the hypothesis that everyone OTHER than you is a philosophical zombie. (If you discover such a test, then congratulations, you are now a scientist up there with Aristotle, Newton and Einstein.)
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  All you're saying here is that science isn't philosophy.
- simonh 8y ago
  Dennett has shown, to my satisfaction at least, that the philosophical zombie paradoxes are logically incoherent. I see the zombie paradoxes as pulling a similar trick to the Chinese Room. They both try to trivialise the problem to a simplistic model, but of course the problem is not simplistic. The Chinese room would have to be the size of a planet, containing millions of trillions of symbols and would take the man inside it the lifetime of the universe to perform simple linguistic processing and cognitive tasks. Likewise the philosophical zombies are cast as simple dumb mechanisms that are somehow performing a stupendously complex and little understood process, except 'not really'. They're both just rhetorical sleight of hand.
  - xamuel 8y ago
    Showing that paradoxes are incoherent is a logical exercise, not a scientific one. If we use a truth-table to show "P and not P" is always false, that's logic. If we repeatedly drop a ball and observe that it falsifies "balls don't fall", that's science. Stop confusing the two. Dennett has not provided a laboratory experiment X such that if "simonh is the only conscious being in the universe" is true then X has one result, and yet when we run the experiment we see a different result.
    - simonh 8y ago
      Hold on there just a cotton picking minute. You're the one that invoked philosophical zombies. So they're science when you invoke them, but only philosophy when I do? I would rather say that it seems likely science in the strict sense cannot either support or refute the existence of consciousness. It's essentially a philosophical question.
      - xamuel 8y ago
        >I would rather say that it seems likely science in the strict sense cannot either support or refute the existence of consciousness Yes, that's the whole point of my first comment. Glad that we ended up agreeing!
      - the_af 8y ago
- subroutine 8y ago
  Related to what TuringTest already stated above: We can make estimated guesses about how things work based on their physical and functional similarities to other things. We have billions of data points showing that neurotypical adult humans think and behave similarly. To assume you're the only human who experiences consciousness would be like assuming you have a qualitatively unique, incredible, special cognitive ability not shared by any other conspecific, despite being generated from more-or-less the same template as the other billions of humans, and despite not standing out in any qualitative way with regard to mental abilities. So it seems the logical/scientific baseline (the null hypothesis if you will) is that, probabilistically, any given neurotypical adult human is not going to be cognitively endowed with some, covert, exotic mental experience while the rest are zombies. So if that is your claim, I'd say it's on you to prove it.
  - xamuel 8y ago
    Yeah, I'm not saying you or I are the only consciousness in the world... that's almost certainly false (barring ridiculous extreme cases like solipsism etc.) The point is, this isn't science. Compare it to arguments for extraterrestrial life where we say, "There are such-and-such number of stars... Blah blah... Therefore we're probably not alone", but at the end of the day, we don't actually learn for certain that extraterrestrial life exists. We would have to make actual contact in order for that to occur. This might sound impractical and ivory-tower, but bear in mind, early humans would have made similar arguments for geocentrism, waving away early heliocentric proposals as mumbo-jumbo.
    - subroutine 8y ago
      I think you are suggesting (but let me know if I'm wrong) that consciousness is not a testable or measurable phenomena, and therefore we cannot make scientific claims about who/what experiences it. All you can know for certain is that you have it (if you have it). Ok, so you have consciousness; you know it, but I can't be certain. Nevertheless, I hook you up to an EEG machine, and embed electrode arrays in various brain regions. We have a conversation, show you some images, run through some tasks, etc. and then drip some sedative into your IV. Soon you drift into a deep and dreamless sleep. Run the same tasks and indeed you are completely unresponsive. Later you wake up, and I show you how your neural nets respond and oscillate at particular frequencies when u are awake and then show you the marked difference right after you fall asleep. We do this over a bunch of sessions until you yourself can recognize the neural signatures of your conscious awake brain vs your unconsious asleep brain. Would you say in that experiment we did something scientific to study consciousness?
- the_af 8y ago
  > Science does not support the claim that humans have consciousness! You know that you are conscious, but you have no way to falsify the hypothesis that everyone OTHER than you is a philosophical zombie. I think this is more of a philosophical thought experiment than a scientific one. It's true that it's hard to define what consciousness even is, but I'm pretty sure the working hypothesis is that whatever it is, both you and I have it. Scientists do not work under the assumption that anyone could be a philosophical zombie, because that's not a productive stance; no science -- as a meaningful social human enterprise -- can be conducted from a position of complete solipsism. Similarly, scientists do not think "well, I cannot prove other people exist outside my mind"; that's an unproductive stance, outside the realm of scientific thought.
  - xamuel 8y ago
    The thought experiment isn't science, I never claimed it was. Science is for studying physical things in the real world. The thought experiment in question is for studying the scientificness of a claim. The scientificness of a claim is not a physical object in the real world. Traditional science (rolling balls down inclines, etc.) would all remain perfectly valid even if I'm the only conscious being and the whole world is in my mind. Science experiments still suggest laws to explain how that world in my mind works. (Note, I'm not advocating solipsism, I'm merely refuting your claim that solipsism is inconsistent with science.)
    - the_af 8y ago
      I'm not arguing that solipsism is inconsistent with science. I'm arguing it's unproductive. Solipsism, the brain-in-a-vat, philosophical zombies, etc, are all rejected by science as a human activity because they are useless as starting points. The starting point of all science is "something can be known about the universe beyond my own mind". Without it, there can be no science, nothing to be known or understood. Therefore, science can safely assume that whatever consciousness is (as perceived by the scientist), it's likely shared by other healthy human beings that behave similarly to the observing scientist. It can also make educated guesses about other organisms (or even unhealthy human beings). > Traditional science (rolling balls down inclines, etc.) would all remain perfectly valid even if I'm the only conscious being and the whole world is in my mind. I don't think so. If the external universe is a completely whimsical figment of your imagination, you can infer nothing from it, and no experiment is meaningful. Your starting point must be to assume the universe outside your mind is real.
TelmoMenezes 8y ago
> It's fine to say that science does not support the claim that animals have consciousness, as long as you also agree that science does not support the claim that humans have consciousness. It doesn't. Can you name the scientific theory that predicts the existence of consciousness? We know it exists from direct experience, nothing else. > I don't understand what you are saying about emrgentism being non scientific. Emergentism is the reason the reason that the Universe today has so many properties that it didn't have when it was a miasma of isolated hydrogren or whatever around the time of the Big Bang. In this context the philosophical term "emergentism" is commonly used to refer to the theory of mind, not the general concept of emergence. But no, emergence is not the cause for anything. Emergence is a human mental model, developed to deal with complexity, for example: "life emerges from chemistry". A brain the size of Jupiter might be able to maintain a mental model of all the fundamental building blocks of chemistry interacting to create complex biological organisms. We don't have a brain the size of jupiter, so we need shortcuts. The Universe clearly becomes more complex the more time passes, having started from a state of zero complexity. This is a direct consequence of the laws of physics, but there is no explanation for why the laws of physics are a certain way. They are just brute facts. If you keep asking "why" you will eventually bump into a wall.

cco 8y ago

Maybe I'm confusing something, does your comment imply that consciousness is not the result of matter interacting with other matter?