4 ms·

If I understand it, they seem to be advocating for some sort of dualism. However consider a cpu, it runs on known physical perspectives. But imaging trying to r

by foxes 5y ago

If I understand it, they seem to be advocating for some sort of dualism. However consider a cpu, it runs on known physical perspectives. But imaging trying to reverse engineer by examining what happens inside an operating system/program running on it. You can get quite interesting emergent behaviour from a relatively simple system (a processor). So just because physics seems relatively simple, I don't think that has to mean consciousness is easier. I feel its more emergent.

lbrandy 5y ago
> they seem to be advocating for some sort of dualism. This paper is doing the opposite. It's arguing that other papers/ideas advocating dualism are going the wrong way and purely physicalist explanations are the best path forward.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Purely materialist explanations, you mean? Platonic dualism, as advocated by folks like Max Tegmark, isn't non-physicalist. And it needn't be dualist even — if the world is made of math and the materials emerge by implication.
  - bobthechef 5y ago
    What does it mean to be "made of math"? This reads like gibberish to me. Mathematics deals with formal abstraction. Geometry, for example, abstracts the spacial characteristics of matter from matter and focuses on them solely while ignoring everything else. (This actually reminds me of Bertrand Russell's structuralist account of physics and how it omits much if not most of reality.) (Also, Platonism does posit an immaterial realm of the forms in which all material things participate. But this participation relation is problematic, something Aristotle pointed out in the Third Man Argument and something Plato himself knew.)
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      "Gibberish": Plato, Russell, Penrose and Tegmark? Made of math is as Aristotle noted: "All is number" — Platonic-Pythagoreanism was at the heart of classical civilization and the enlightenment. I can only suppose that there is something about these ideas that deeply disturbs or even frightens. But I wouldn't dismiss them as gibberish.
hsn915 5y ago
The things that happen when a program execute are all emergent behavior, but it's behavior that is well understood and we know everything about how it emerges. It's all just that, a "behavior". Things that move. Signals propagate across wires. Pixels light up. All the is well understood. Consciousness is nothing like that.
- foxes 5y ago
  Why not? Series of complicated bio-electrical interactions? Vast numbers of connections, neurons firing together? Even our limited attempts at neural networks are not very well understood, and that is just code running on well understood computer. A brain is way more connected and complicated than something like deep mind, even if you think of that stuff like a first order approximation. So if we cant easily do that, seems an actual brain with way more recurrence and structure is much harder. I think there are experimental results though, we can look at an brain scan and nearly deduce what people are looking at, although don't quote me I would have to find the paper. Seems pretty physical.
  - shawxe 5y ago
    Because the web application is only an emergent phenomenon once consciousness has already entered the equation. Without an observer, the website is nothing more than the sum of its parts; only we view it as something else. The CPU, machine code, all of the I/O mechanism, eventually just create an illuminated image on a screen that is only its emergent whole when viewed by a conscious observer who sees it that way. Far from having an even remotely non-referential understanding of consciousness, we don't even have a non-referential understanding of the referent website as it exists in our perception--it just comes back to the same questions that a lot of physicalists seem to refuse to even acknowledge. I know that when I view this screen I see what I see as red, and I know that the material of my brain and the screen are responsible for that, but that does nothing to address what the referent red is in the first place. How can consciousness be an emergent construct when emergent constructs are only identifiable as distinct from the sum of their parts by making use of consciousness?
  - shawxe 5y ago
bobthechef 5y ago
The CPU (or rather, the entire computer) isn't magically generating out of nothing something new. In a certain sense, there is no OS on a computer per se and apart from human interpretation. It is what Searle calls the "observer relative". This is in opposition to things which have objective reality apart from human observation. By analogy, look at text on a page. Per se, these are blobs of ink on a page. They are text only by convention: the person who arranged these blobs was using this convention when arranging these blobs, and you need to know the convention to interpret them as text. Too often, "emergence" is one of those "gap" explanations that tries to produce something from nothing. Yes, independent things can enter into interactions and relations that result in states of affairs that they alone could not have produced. That's obvious. You don't get a pile of oranges without a bunch of oranges. But a state of affairs of individual objects doesn't transcend being a state of affairs of individual objects as long as you maintain that they are still individual objects.
LinAGKar 5y ago
There is no reason to believe that the CPU is conscious though, and if it turned out to be, we can't explain it. In fact, there is nothing to suggest other people are conscious other than that they're probably the same as you. The only one you can be sure is conscious is yourself.

by foxes 5y ago

lbrandy 5y ago

> they seem to be advocating for some sort of dualism. This paper is doing the opposite. It's arguing that other papers/ideas advocating dualism are going the wrong way and purely physicalist explanations are the best path forward.

dr_dshiv 5y ago
Purely materialist explanations, you mean? Platonic dualism, as advocated by folks like Max Tegmark, isn't non-physicalist. And it needn't be dualist even — if the world is made of math and the materials emerge by implication.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  What does it mean to be "made of math"? This reads like gibberish to me. Mathematics deals with formal abstraction. Geometry, for example, abstracts the spacial characteristics of matter from matter and focuses on them solely while ignoring everything else. (This actually reminds me of Bertrand Russell's structuralist account of physics and how it omits much if not most of reality.) (Also, Platonism does posit an immaterial realm of the forms in which all material things participate. But this participation relation is problematic, something Aristotle pointed out in the Third Man Argument and something Plato himself knew.)
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    "Gibberish": Plato, Russell, Penrose and Tegmark? Made of math is as Aristotle noted: "All is number" — Platonic-Pythagoreanism was at the heart of classical civilization and the enlightenment. I can only suppose that there is something about these ideas that deeply disturbs or even frightens. But I wouldn't dismiss them as gibberish.

hsn915 5y ago

The things that happen when a program execute are all emergent behavior, but it's behavior that is well understood and we know everything about how it emerges. It's all just that, a "behavior". Things that move. Signals propagate across wires. Pixels light up. All the is well understood. Consciousness is nothing like that.

foxes 5y ago
Why not? Series of complicated bio-electrical interactions? Vast numbers of connections, neurons firing together? Even our limited attempts at neural networks are not very well understood, and that is just code running on well understood computer. A brain is way more connected and complicated than something like deep mind, even if you think of that stuff like a first order approximation. So if we cant easily do that, seems an actual brain with way more recurrence and structure is much harder. I think there are experimental results though, we can look at an brain scan and nearly deduce what people are looking at, although don't quote me I would have to find the paper. Seems pretty physical.
- shawxe 5y ago
  Because the web application is only an emergent phenomenon once consciousness has already entered the equation. Without an observer, the website is nothing more than the sum of its parts; only we view it as something else. The CPU, machine code, all of the I/O mechanism, eventually just create an illuminated image on a screen that is only its emergent whole when viewed by a conscious observer who sees it that way. Far from having an even remotely non-referential understanding of consciousness, we don't even have a non-referential understanding of the referent website as it exists in our perception--it just comes back to the same questions that a lot of physicalists seem to refuse to even acknowledge. I know that when I view this screen I see what I see as red, and I know that the material of my brain and the screen are responsible for that, but that does nothing to address what the referent red is in the first place. How can consciousness be an emergent construct when emergent constructs are only identifiable as distinct from the sum of their parts by making use of consciousness?
- shawxe 5y ago

bobthechef 5y ago

The CPU (or rather, the entire computer) isn't magically generating out of nothing something new. In a certain sense, there is no OS on a computer per se and apart from human interpretation. It is what Searle calls the "observer relative". This is in opposition to things which have objective reality apart from human observation. By analogy, look at text on a page. Per se, these are blobs of ink on a page. They are text only by convention: the person who arranged these blobs was using this convention when arranging these blobs, and you need to know the convention to interpret them as text. Too often, "emergence" is one of those "gap" explanations that tries to produce something from nothing. Yes, independent things can enter into interactions and relations that result in states of affairs that they alone could not have produced. That's obvious. You don't get a pile of oranges without a bunch of oranges. But a state of affairs of individual objects doesn't transcend being a state of affairs of individual objects as long as you maintain that they are still individual objects.

LinAGKar 5y ago

There is no reason to believe that the CPU is conscious though, and if it turned out to be, we can't explain it. In fact, there is nothing to suggest other people are conscious other than that they're probably the same as you. The only one you can be sure is conscious is yourself.