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> How do consciousness and intention emerge from materials that are not alive and that have neither consciousness nor intention? I think the question shoud fir

> How do consciousness and intention emerge from materials that are not alive and that have neither consciousness nor intention? I think the question shoud first be not about "how", but rather - "does consciousness emerge from the materials". Most cultures in the past have maintained ideas about the duality between spirit and matter. Nowadays we are so adept at manipulating matter we always explicitly assume that everything must be material in one way or another. But here is this consciousness thing that does not give in. And there is no angle to it where it can ever give in. If somebody creates a machine and claims it to be conscious nobody can test if that is so. And further - nobody can even test wheather the inventor is conscious himself.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
It seems to me that consciousness emerges when things arranged in some particular way are acted upon some principle, which is true even for simple behavior, like a rock falling to the ground. If you put a sail on a boat, it will catch the wind and move across the water. It's not the sail alone that moves the boat, nor the wind, but their interplay. A sail without wind doesn't get moved, and a wind without anything to catch it doesn't move anything. May be a bit of an unintuitive conclusion, but I think may be that we are catching the consciousness like a sail catches the wind, and this is the same "wind" that we call the forces of nature, that we only can perceive as patterns in how things around us appear to change.
filippp 5y ago
I think neuroscience could in principle show that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, by giving a full account in terms of the brain of why it seems to us that we're conscious. Whether it will is another question.
- Scarblac 5y ago
  There'd still be a "me" there who would be having that illusion. Regardless of whether we know exactly how it works or not, I have a subjective experience.
chermi 5y ago
*Edited because I can't type* I do not understand this argument. I'm going use the word magic for whatever you're calling this non-"materialistic" spiritual explanation. I'm not trying to be a jackass, that's truly the best word I can find for it. I don't think magic is a bad thing, I just don't think you should summon magic until you need to. Magic is not an explanation, it's a non-explanation. It's non-falsifiable (blah-bity Popper, yeah yeah). Our adeptness at manipulating matter is not the origin of wanting (at least mine) to find a 'materialistic' explanation for something. It's the desire to have a predictive (read, useful) model of that thing, even if the model is not complete. Once you poke deep enough at any model you will find that there is some hand-wavy "magic" at the bottom. That is, there is some part that we don't know yet, either because we can't do the math, because we can't measure due to difficulty of experiment, or because of fundamental bounds where maybe you might be justified in starting to invoke some magic. Despite best selling books about some quantum mysticism bullshit, I have yet to see an inkling of evidence for invoking magic for consciousness. From a physics perspective, biological systems are freaking hard, we have no reason to expect them to crack easily. And that's without us (physicists) understanding nearly enough about biology!
- _fnhr 5y ago
  > I do not understand this argument. The unfortunate thing is that, I think, I understand your side. But something happened, I read some book or heard some talk that placed a seed of doubt in my mind. At first it was just a seed and I oscillated back and forth between being 100% materialist and between entertaining the proposition that there is something beyond matter in this world. But as time went on I began to shift towards the "non material" interpretation for consciousness more and more. It's not an explanation, I agree. But there is nothing to explain. Me claiming that consciousness might not arise from matter is not an attempt to explain it. I just see no way how it can be investigated in material terms. If you see a person on the street there is no way you can tell if he or she is conscious. And I don't see a possibility of there ever being a way. Sadly, I don't know what started this doubt in me, so I cannot share it with you. You brought physicists for some reason, and I know a few, like Schrodinger, who thought about consciousness and came to the same conclusion. Here is his quote: "Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else." I haven't read about Max Plank, but heard he had similar views. If I had to guess my starting point was a book called "the problems of philosophy" by Bertnard Russell [1]. He tries to answer the question "are there any statements to which all reasonable men would agree". And one of the conclusions the book comes to is that you cannot claim anything as objective without assumptions, and that the most objective thing is your subjective experience. For example if you saw a cat, turned your head, and then looked back at the cat - was the cat there when you were not looking or was it gone? In the book Russell convincingly demonstrates that if someone maintains the cat was gone when you were not looking - you cannot prove logically to that person that he is wrong. In other words - you would not be able to start with his worldview and lead him to contradictions. Hence his "theory" about cat disappearing cannot be disproven without assumptions about how material objects behave. Not sure if this is helpful, but I wanted to reply. [1]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm
Scarblac 5y ago
We do know that if we add chemicals, say we drink some amount of alcohol, that can alter our consciousness. That wouldn't happen if it were completely nonphysical.
mannykannot 5y ago
You seem to be adopting a double standard here. It is true that materialists cannot explain how minds work, but dualists can do no better, and, furthermore, they cannot point to any remotely similar phenomenon that is non-physical. Your claim that "there is no angle to it where it can ever give in" is just as much a speculative intuition as the claim that minds are the result of physical processes. The position you take in your last paragraph is one of solipsistic skepticism. Do you approach every epistemic issue with the same level of skepticism, or do you only adopt it with regard to the proposition that minds are the result of physical processes?

marginalia_nu 5y ago

It seems to me that consciousness emerges when things arranged in some particular way are acted upon some principle, which is true even for simple behavior, like a rock falling to the ground. If you put a sail on a boat, it will catch the wind and move across the water. It's not the sail alone that moves the boat, nor the wind, but their interplay. A sail without wind doesn't get moved, and a wind without anything to catch it doesn't move anything. May be a bit of an unintuitive conclusion, but I think may be that we are catching the consciousness like a sail catches the wind, and this is the same "wind" that we call the forces of nature, that we only can perceive as patterns in how things around us appear to change.

filippp 5y ago

I think neuroscience could in principle show that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, by giving a full account in terms of the brain of why it seems to us that we're conscious. Whether it will is another question.

Scarblac 5y ago
There'd still be a "me" there who would be having that illusion. Regardless of whether we know exactly how it works or not, I have a subjective experience.

chermi 5y ago

*Edited because I can't type* I do not understand this argument. I'm going use the word magic for whatever you're calling this non-"materialistic" spiritual explanation. I'm not trying to be a jackass, that's truly the best word I can find for it. I don't think magic is a bad thing, I just don't think you should summon magic until you need to. Magic is not an explanation, it's a non-explanation. It's non-falsifiable (blah-bity Popper, yeah yeah). Our adeptness at manipulating matter is not the origin of wanting (at least mine) to find a 'materialistic' explanation for something. It's the desire to have a predictive (read, useful) model of that thing, even if the model is not complete. Once you poke deep enough at any model you will find that there is some hand-wavy "magic" at the bottom. That is, there is some part that we don't know yet, either because we can't do the math, because we can't measure due to difficulty of experiment, or because of fundamental bounds where maybe you might be justified in starting to invoke some magic. Despite best selling books about some quantum mysticism bullshit, I have yet to see an inkling of evidence for invoking magic for consciousness. From a physics perspective, biological systems are freaking hard, we have no reason to expect them to crack easily. And that's without us (physicists) understanding nearly enough about biology!

_fnhr 5y ago
> I do not understand this argument. The unfortunate thing is that, I think, I understand your side. But something happened, I read some book or heard some talk that placed a seed of doubt in my mind. At first it was just a seed and I oscillated back and forth between being 100% materialist and between entertaining the proposition that there is something beyond matter in this world. But as time went on I began to shift towards the "non material" interpretation for consciousness more and more. It's not an explanation, I agree. But there is nothing to explain. Me claiming that consciousness might not arise from matter is not an attempt to explain it. I just see no way how it can be investigated in material terms. If you see a person on the street there is no way you can tell if he or she is conscious. And I don't see a possibility of there ever being a way. Sadly, I don't know what started this doubt in me, so I cannot share it with you. You brought physicists for some reason, and I know a few, like Schrodinger, who thought about consciousness and came to the same conclusion. Here is his quote: "Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else." I haven't read about Max Plank, but heard he had similar views. If I had to guess my starting point was a book called "the problems of philosophy" by Bertnard Russell [1]. He tries to answer the question "are there any statements to which all reasonable men would agree". And one of the conclusions the book comes to is that you cannot claim anything as objective without assumptions, and that the most objective thing is your subjective experience. For example if you saw a cat, turned your head, and then looked back at the cat - was the cat there when you were not looking or was it gone? In the book Russell convincingly demonstrates that if someone maintains the cat was gone when you were not looking - you cannot prove logically to that person that he is wrong. In other words - you would not be able to start with his worldview and lead him to contradictions. Hence his "theory" about cat disappearing cannot be disproven without assumptions about how material objects behave. Not sure if this is helpful, but I wanted to reply. [1]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm

Scarblac 5y ago

We do know that if we add chemicals, say we drink some amount of alcohol, that can alter our consciousness. That wouldn't happen if it were completely nonphysical.

mannykannot 5y ago

You seem to be adopting a double standard here. It is true that materialists cannot explain how minds work, but dualists can do no better, and, furthermore, they cannot point to any remotely similar phenomenon that is non-physical. Your claim that "there is no angle to it where it can ever give in" is just as much a speculative intuition as the claim that minds are the result of physical processes. The position you take in your last paragraph is one of solipsistic skepticism. Do you approach every epistemic issue with the same level of skepticism, or do you only adopt it with regard to the proposition that minds are the result of physical processes?