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> I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. I can respect this, but I think you have much bigger proble

> I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. I can respect this, but I think you have much bigger problems than consciousness if you're a materialist. Current natural philosophy and physics is far from anything resembling a materialistic worldview. Where we are right now in both QM and GR can best be described as a highly precise description of what happens, but at the expense of forcibly ignoring the essence of what constitutes material reality. In the case of QM, the "just run the equations" view of the world has been dominant since Einstein reluctantly ceded ground on this issue. To put a finer point on it, unless physicists can provide a materialistic explanation for entanglement or wavefunction collapse, we're still very much in an ethereal, immaterial world. (fwiw, I am something of a materialist, which is why I have thought of this problem beforehand.)

zozbot234 5y ago
Entanglement is part of material reality - the "classical" world where there is no entanglement is a simplified approximation. The fact that it might feel less "material" to us is an irrelevant feature of improperly-applied intuition. It's no different than someting like e.g. the wave nature of light. In fact, complex entangled states made of many interrelated "qubits" or degrees of freedom are one of the most promising candidates for the physical correlate of similarly-complex phenomenological experience. Complex-enough quantum computers might just feel stuff, as a matter of basic reality.
- abernard1 5y ago
  > Entanglement is part of material reality Yes, but what is material reality? The current understanding of entanglement in QM is indistinguishable from math. And then we need to ask: are the equations real? Seriously, are they? Or are they just an approximate description of something we don't understand that well? Because if entanglement is part of material reality as defined by the good ol' gauge theorists and the equations, then we really do live in a math equation, and it's not clear how or why that math equation runs the way it does. Or what it runs on for that matter. Or if it exists at all and our senses are just hallucinating this. This is fundamentally different from the understanding of philosophical, physical materialism.
  - simonh 5y ago
    For me, material reality is tied to the notion that the world is consistent and conducive to analytical reasoning, that it functions like a machine. It has components which relate to each other in consistent ways that we can model and understand. The fact that these components are best described by field equations rather than newtonian mechanics is incidental. The main alternative viewpoint to materialism, dualism, posits some further 'external' influence that acts on the world to account for phenomena we poorly understand like consciousness, and for some people psychic or religious phenomena. I think that's just fuzzy thinking, and I don't even really know what they mean. How can something not 'of the world' interact with the world? Surely 'the world' is everything that can act on or influence each other, right? I'm not sure how else to define it.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      I'm pragmatically a materialist, just because I don't find use in speculating about the immaterial (by definition.) But although I thought I was so much smarter than Descartes when I was younger, I still can't figure out why I'm in me and not as much in you, and somehow partially in the computer I'm typing on. That I'm more in my head than in my hands, but I'm in both. I really have no access to that. I've just taken a couple of extreme positions, and hope that one day somebody can come up with some way to reduce or test them materially, although I accept that I can't even speculate about a way to do it. One is a panpsychism. The material world exists within a substrate of perspectives, and as material objects pass through them, the perspectives momentarily attach to those objects, and whatever is mechanically connected to them. This happens at an arbitrary rate (depending on the density of the perspective substrate and the relative speed of the material passing through it.) If we call the amount of time that a perspective is located "centrally" enough in a human nervous system to have access to it a "moment," then for a moment, that perspective thinks it is me. This assumes that perspectives are distinct for purposes of explanation, but they don't have to be - maybe an infinite number of perspectives think that they are me at any particular moment, and in the next moment, an entirely different set. The other is that there's a particular geometry of electromagnetic activity that captures perspectives, and minds happen to conform to that geometry. I don't think these are any more insightful than "the soul talks to bodies through the pineal gland." I can only hold onto them as more abstract and generalized. There's no material way to tell when you've captured a perspective, and we each only know of the existence of one with certainty. We could be Buddhist and say that the universe is one fragmented confused perspective, or say that we're a bunch of islands; either way, we have no material basis for those beliefs. The only thing we know is that we're not P-Zombies. We don't know that others aren't P-Zombies, just us.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Entanglement as an explanation for anything about consciouness is exactly the same as saying "it's all magic", and exactly as meaningless, leaving nothing to talk about.
hibernator149 5y ago
Yes, I agree with your points. Superdeterminism could be a way to salvage my worldview. Even so, accepting non-determinism from QM does not cause me as much cognitive dissonance than the problem of conscioussness.
- abernard1 5y ago
  > accepting non-determinism from QM I think it's deeper than non-determinism. We can imagine an extraordinarily precise "random" number generator that is software, more than capable of fooling all measurements we as humans make of it. It would also be non-deterministic. It would also, importantly, not be real. Until we can confidently say that the equations of physics are not actually themselves reality, we can't say materialism is even a thing. To be a materialist requires belief that what we know is a description of reality and not reality itself, and that would be true even if we had a deterministic "Newtonian" pre-QM view of the world coupled with advanced theory.
mannykannot 5y ago
> To put a finer point on it, unless physicists can provide a materialistic explanation for entanglement or wavefunction collapse, we're still very much in an ethereal, immaterial world. Maybe the lesson of physics is that the material world is not like how we might imagine it, based on our everyday intuitions. If you accept that the world is not moving and not flat, that bodies continue in motion unless acted on by a force, and that Lorentz transformations represent the relationship between different inertial frames, then you already accept things that are counter to everyday intuitions. Hopes for explanations that are not ultimately grounded in "that, as far as we know, is just how things are" might be wishful thinking.

zozbot234 5y ago

Entanglement is part of material reality - the "classical" world where there is no entanglement is a simplified approximation. The fact that it might feel less "material" to us is an irrelevant feature of improperly-applied intuition. It's no different than someting like e.g. the wave nature of light. In fact, complex entangled states made of many interrelated "qubits" or degrees of freedom are one of the most promising candidates for the physical correlate of similarly-complex phenomenological experience. Complex-enough quantum computers might just feel stuff, as a matter of basic reality.

abernard1 5y ago
> Entanglement is part of material reality Yes, but what is material reality? The current understanding of entanglement in QM is indistinguishable from math. And then we need to ask: are the equations real? Seriously, are they? Or are they just an approximate description of something we don't understand that well? Because if entanglement is part of material reality as defined by the good ol' gauge theorists and the equations, then we really do live in a math equation, and it's not clear how or why that math equation runs the way it does. Or what it runs on for that matter. Or if it exists at all and our senses are just hallucinating this. This is fundamentally different from the understanding of philosophical, physical materialism.
- simonh 5y ago
  For me, material reality is tied to the notion that the world is consistent and conducive to analytical reasoning, that it functions like a machine. It has components which relate to each other in consistent ways that we can model and understand. The fact that these components are best described by field equations rather than newtonian mechanics is incidental. The main alternative viewpoint to materialism, dualism, posits some further 'external' influence that acts on the world to account for phenomena we poorly understand like consciousness, and for some people psychic or religious phenomena. I think that's just fuzzy thinking, and I don't even really know what they mean. How can something not 'of the world' interact with the world? Surely 'the world' is everything that can act on or influence each other, right? I'm not sure how else to define it.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    I'm pragmatically a materialist, just because I don't find use in speculating about the immaterial (by definition.) But although I thought I was so much smarter than Descartes when I was younger, I still can't figure out why I'm in me and not as much in you, and somehow partially in the computer I'm typing on. That I'm more in my head than in my hands, but I'm in both. I really have no access to that. I've just taken a couple of extreme positions, and hope that one day somebody can come up with some way to reduce or test them materially, although I accept that I can't even speculate about a way to do it. One is a panpsychism. The material world exists within a substrate of perspectives, and as material objects pass through them, the perspectives momentarily attach to those objects, and whatever is mechanically connected to them. This happens at an arbitrary rate (depending on the density of the perspective substrate and the relative speed of the material passing through it.) If we call the amount of time that a perspective is located "centrally" enough in a human nervous system to have access to it a "moment," then for a moment, that perspective thinks it is me. This assumes that perspectives are distinct for purposes of explanation, but they don't have to be - maybe an infinite number of perspectives think that they are me at any particular moment, and in the next moment, an entirely different set. The other is that there's a particular geometry of electromagnetic activity that captures perspectives, and minds happen to conform to that geometry. I don't think these are any more insightful than "the soul talks to bodies through the pineal gland." I can only hold onto them as more abstract and generalized. There's no material way to tell when you've captured a perspective, and we each only know of the existence of one with certainty. We could be Buddhist and say that the universe is one fragmented confused perspective, or say that we're a bunch of islands; either way, we have no material basis for those beliefs. The only thing we know is that we're not P-Zombies. We don't know that others aren't P-Zombies, just us.
ncmncm 5y ago
Entanglement as an explanation for anything about consciouness is exactly the same as saying "it's all magic", and exactly as meaningless, leaving nothing to talk about.

hibernator149 5y ago

Yes, I agree with your points. Superdeterminism could be a way to salvage my worldview. Even so, accepting non-determinism from QM does not cause me as much cognitive dissonance than the problem of conscioussness.

abernard1 5y ago
> accepting non-determinism from QM I think it's deeper than non-determinism. We can imagine an extraordinarily precise "random" number generator that is software, more than capable of fooling all measurements we as humans make of it. It would also be non-deterministic. It would also, importantly, not be real. Until we can confidently say that the equations of physics are not actually themselves reality, we can't say materialism is even a thing. To be a materialist requires belief that what we know is a description of reality and not reality itself, and that would be true even if we had a deterministic "Newtonian" pre-QM view of the world coupled with advanced theory.

mannykannot 5y ago

> To put a finer point on it, unless physicists can provide a materialistic explanation for entanglement or wavefunction collapse, we're still very much in an ethereal, immaterial world. Maybe the lesson of physics is that the material world is not like how we might imagine it, based on our everyday intuitions. If you accept that the world is not moving and not flat, that bodies continue in motion unless acted on by a force, and that Lorentz transformations represent the relationship between different inertial frames, then you already accept things that are counter to everyday intuitions. Hopes for explanations that are not ultimately grounded in "that, as far as we know, is just how things are" might be wishful thinking.