7 ms·
A good place to start, if you are a firm skeptic and not willing to even attempt faith or your own empirical experiences, is a book called Entangled Minds. Ther
by forgotmypw17 6y ago
A good place to start, if you are a firm skeptic and not willing to even attempt faith or your own empirical experiences, is a book called Entangled Minds. There is not a single claim made in this book which does not have a reference to a proper peer-reviewed paper attached to it, iirc several hundred papers in all. It firmly supports consciousness being in at minimum earthworms, and probably even ,,lower,, creatures.
Once you actually open your mind to this idea, you will begin to see it everywhere, and with practice be able to connect, communicate, and derive mutual benefit. It,s up to you to take the first step, though.
Of course, you can also choose to remain in the safe comfort of materialism. I know from experience that it can be a very lonely place. I wish you a happy journey, wherever it may lead.
- kharak 6y agoIs there a good podcast or Youtube video for starters? Highly sceptic of the idea and therefore intrigued.
- forgotmypw17 6y agonot that i am aware of, sorry.
- anoonmoose 6y agoYou can start with the last time Radin's work was savaged in the comments of an HN article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26066233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26066233
- forgotmypw17 6y agofirst they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win :)
- anoonmoose 6y agonot everyone who gets ignored, laughed at, or attacked ends up winning sometimes they just end up ignored and/or laughed at
- forgotmypw17 6y agoFWIW, I try not to argue anything I have not personally experienced with my own senses... Thank you for interacting with me.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoAs mentioned, I've not found a good accessible podcast or YouTube video on the matter, so maybe that means it's up to me to make one. It's not my forte, so I don't know when that will happen. However, here's an experimental method you may find helpful in your quest for knowledge: Find a creature, any creature, who appears in your life somehow... a cat, a dog, a worm, a rat, an insect, anyone you notice. Rack your brain as hard as you can until you begin to see some semblance of feelings and desires in them, as well as a way in which you can help them achieve it. Now, go ahead and do that thing, and do your best to ensure that it works out. When you're done, start paying attention to what happens to you in your daily course of existence. If you're into mindfulness meditation, here is where you apply that. If you like, please return here and report your results, I'd love to hear from you! If the thread is already closed, you can find a way to contact me via my profile.
- geophile 6y agoI have no doubt that lots of organisms are conscious, maybe even earthworms. And I certainly believe that I am! My only point is that in the popular articles I've seen on consciousness, that discuss IIT, I have not, over many years, seen any description of a test of the theory, or even a statement of how it could be tested.
- someguyorother 6y agoThere's probably a hard limit to how much you can know about consciousness in general. Say, for instance, that what IIT measures isn't consciousness but memory. It tells you that when you take general anesthetic, the IIT measure in the brain decreases. But it's hypothetically speaking possible that when you get anesthesized, you're still aware and feel everything that's happening to you (in the sense of having qualia), only that it never gets recorded to memory. The result is the same: it appears, in retrospect, that you lost consciousness. But you can't prove that you actually did, only that your memory of the past behaves as if you did. This seems fundamental, unless we through some future discovery can nail down what consciousness is. The consciousness-status of past me is just as opaque as that of other people.
- dr_dshiv 6y agoHow about a single neuron? After all, a single neuron is far more complex than a worm—just like a company is far less complex than the people who compose it.
- morpheos137 6y agoA single neuron is not an independent self replicating organism so I would not say a single neuron is alive (on its own) per my definition, although it is part of a larger living creature.
- dr_dshiv 6y agoAre people actually independent self-replicating organisms. We are all parts of a superorganism, no? Each of our experiences are composed of the experiences of (billions?) of other people. We aren't islands.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- morpheos137 6y agoDo you suppose neurons consider the super organism they are part of? No. So why should humans. Yes "we" are all fragments of the unified human experience, but our role, as individuals is to live as individuals.
- dr_dshiv 6y agoHmm, not sure I agree. I think our role is to create a harmonious global society. But to do that, we need to take care of yourself, our friends and family, etc. And do neurons know about us? Well, they only know what they know. I think what they know could potentially be an empirical question. Some neurons are far more complex and connected than others.
- phcordner 6y agoHow? A worm is a whole multicellular organism. A neuron's just a cell, one that's specialized into a single function. All a single neuron does is pass a signal to the synaptic cleft in response to a chemical or electrical signal at the other end. It's a simple subunit of a larger system. Saying a single neuron is more complex than a worm is like saying a cat6 ethernet cable is more complex than a blast furnace.
- morpheos137 6y agoI am a non-materialist and I think consciousness is not a thing. So there's that position too. What do humans, mammals and earthworms have in common that AI or robots do not (as yet?) I would not say it is consciousness (because my position is there is really no such thing) but rather they have in common the fact that they are alive and subject to the Darwinian replication program and guided by common mental processes like, thought, emotion, memory, proprioception, sensation. By non-materialist I mean I do not see matter as distinct from information. I believe the only thing that exists is information. What is information? It is structure and meaning and pattern and potential. Information is entwined with entropy.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nynx 6y agoHow does believing that all things are information differ from believing all things are matter? Those sound just like two sides of the same coin to me.
- morpheos137 6y agoMaterialists see information as deriving (resulting) from a spatial - temporal - state distribution of matter or energy. Informational people see information as giving rise (causing) to matter and energy. I subscribe to the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis more or less and am sympathetic to Cyclic Conformal Cosmology. Thus cause and effect are reversed.
- anthk 6y agoI always was more impressed on why information on the atoms (how interact between themselves) is not as researched as the matter itself, is truly fascinating.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoWe think we have it so hard with our 9-5 jobs and 2 weeks vacation. Meanwhile, atoms have been working without as much as a fucking smoke break for literally billions of years! >_<
- andi999 6y agoThe Amazon description says: "Radin shows how we know that psychic phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis are real, based on scientific evidence from thousands of controlled lab test". Actually as far as I understand we know that telepathy does not work, and even more so with psychokinesis. Did you read the book, can you point me to the scientific evidence of psychokinesis?
- forgotmypw17 6y agoyes, i have read the book, and it is full of detailed descriptions of experiments with references. as a hacker, you should have little difficulty finding these and reviewing them. unfortunately, i have not the time or motivation to be your personal research assistant.
- RichardCA 6y agoWell, then, it's a real shame that he never tried to claim the Randi Prize.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoWhy would he give a rat's ass about someone's hostile contest?
- gowld 6y agoBecause he might like $1M
- forgotmypw17 6y agoI am familiar with the contest, and I think it is about as winnable as getting a claim paid on the cheapest insurance policy. It's designed to promote an agenda the contest designer is strongly attached to, not as a truth-seeking device.
- anoonmoose 6y ago
- slibhb 6y ago> Of course, you can also choose to remain in the safe comfort of materialism. To me it seems that materialism (or physicalism or any monism) inevitably leads to panpsychism. If there's only one kind of substance, it's either conscious or it's not, so everything has consciousness or nothing does. Panpsychists go with the former, probably because they think they are conscious, material beings.
- xVedun 6y agoI would be curious to see how the author would respond to this fairly detailed criticism of his book: [1] One excerpt from this amazon review goes "If you are impressed by statistics, blips on fMRI screens, taking correlations as proof of causality and meta-analysis as equal to replication, then you might like this book. If you are interested in what wild speculations parapsychologists are coming up with these days, then this is the book for you. If you are looking for evidence that psi is explained by quantum physics, you'll be disappointed." [1] https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VIDRICPX3ROL/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1416516778 https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VIDRICPX3ROL/ref=cm_cr_srp_d...
- forgotmypw17 6y agoThe other day I was riding the train and a guy called me an idiot. Are you also interested in knowing how I responded to his claim? why did you choose to post that particular review out of all the others? why not, for example, this one? "Consider the possibly that classical physics is not only wrong but way wrong." "A wild ride through the data supporting psi. I was for many years a reductionist like Michael Shermer. However, after reading more and books like this, my mind has accepted the reality that we know very little about where we came from and what really drives our human..."
- tayo42 6y ago> There is not a single claim made in this book which does not have a reference to a proper peer-reviewed paper attached to it, I'm skeptical of this claim in general, there's a lot of research that either isn't reliable, biased or gets twisted to support a claim. Then this i think becomes pop science, low quality sounds realistic to me kind of things. When you have to emphasize "based on science" my bs sensor goes off. Idk if anyone else feels that way, I feel like have to approach a lot claims skeptically in fields I don't know enough about.
- forgotmypw17 6y agowell, from past experience, if i don,t address the ,,hard science,, aspect of it, i just get laughed at, especially at a place like here, where scientific beliefs reign supreme. that,s why i stress that fact. i found it not only convincing, but also to have practical applications which are not difficult to arrive at with a little thinking. if you are a well-intentioned tinkerer and hacker not limiting yourself to digital devices with a manual, you may find it intriguing.