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Consider all emergent phenomena that you know of. Let's say: stock market prices, ant hills, biological organisms, ecosystems, etc, etc. What all these have in
by normalnorm 7y ago
Consider all emergent phenomena that you know of. Let's say: stock market prices, ant hills, biological organisms, ecosystems, etc, etc. What all these have in common, is that they are too complex to explain in terms of individual interactions, but you can point at the individual interaction. We know that financial markets are made of transactions, of that biological organisms are made of molecular interactions, but they are too complex for us to reason in such terms.
With consciousness, the emergentists are not capable of pointing at the first principle, or building block. For me, the only coherent way to be an emergentist on consciousness is to also be a panpsychist: everything is conscious to a degree, it's just a brute fact of nature (such as, let's say, the fundamental forces).
Maybe this is the case, but I would not bet on that.
Consciousness is a phonomenon unlike any other, in the sense that scientist who study it are studying it from the inside. Science is something that happens 100% within human consciousness. This is why I suspect that it is a phenomenon that is beyond the reach of science. It could even be impossible to explain. There is no reason to assume that we can solve all mysteries.
- zadler 7y agoScience does take place within consciousness, but also outside of it, since there are discreet conscious entities that can be studied.
- normalnorm 7y agoThere is only one conscious entity that you have direct experience of, which is yourself, and as far as you are concerned, all of science is contained within your conscious experience. You (and also me) reason by analogy, and we assume consciousness in other beings, but we cannot directly observe it or measure it, in the sense that we can measure all the things on which we can do empirical investigations (e.g. an electrical field of a weight). So maybe science takes place in multiple consciousnesses (this is what I believe, but I can't prove it), but I don't see how it could take place outside of consciousness.
- hoseja 7y agoWhy can't they point to "interactions of neurons"?
- normalnorm 7y agoYou can point to a protein being expressed by DNA, and then understand how many protein molecules amount to cells, then tissues, then organs. There is a first principle guiding you all the way, even though the complexity is staggering. There is no such first principle with interactions of neurons, in the sense that we know of no quality or property of a neuron that could amount to the phenomena "consciousness", in the same way that individual transactions amount to a stock market. Without this first principle, it's just magical thinking disguised in scientific language.
- stromgo 7y agoConsciousness is a computation, and neurons are certainly capable of elementary computation. So the building block has been pointed at (neurons), and its property given (computation). Is the problem that you don't believe that consciousness can emerge from elementary computation, or you believe that it is possible but we have no proof of it?
- monktastic1 7y ago> Consciousness is a computation This is begging the question. Consciousness is the sheer seeming-ness of my experience. Perhaps it is reducible to computation, perhaps not, but this is precisely what is under contention.
- normalnorm 7y agoI have no problem with agreeing that computation can emerge from neurons. For example, one can show how different neural configurations correspond to logic gates, persistent memory (this requires recurrence) and so on. This is precisely what I mean by valid emergentist models. No magic steps, just complexity. The problem is that you start by stating that "consciousness is a computation", but I don't know if this is true, and neither do you. > Is the problem that you don't believe that consciousness can emerge from elementary computation, or you believe that it is possible but we have no proof of it? My problem is that your hypothesis that "consciousness is a computation" is not testable, and so it does not count as a scientific theory (according to the standard Popperian falsifiability criterion). Unless/until we have a scientific instrument that measures consciousness, we are just assuming things. I assume that other humans are conscious (by analogy), but I don't know it to be true in a scientific sense. So it's not a matter of what I believe or not, it's a matter of what science can investigate or not. So far, it looks like the phenomenon of consciousness is beyond its grasp.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoWhy wouldn't you bet on panspsychism ?
- normalnorm 7y agoIt's really just a personal intuition. I don't have any good argument or explanation to offer... For what it's worth, I do feel that panpsychism was my "natural" belief when I was a kid, until the adults told me it was crazy to believe in that. I still don't think it's crazy, and there are some people who I respect a lot who believe in panpsychism.
- turk73 7y agoThis comment is interesting. We have all these guys trying to predict market moves using machine learning models and falling on their faces because in order to correctly simulate the market you need all the variables, iow, you need the whole market to "simulate" the market. There may be shortcuts, e.g. statistical approaches, but all attempts at long-term predictions based on such techniques have failed. So much of our consciousness is our own bodies and the environment we live in. My knees ache, my head hurts because I slept lousy, it's freezing, I'm hungry, I'm preventing myself from freaking out about various things going on at my job, etc.