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> When I listen to people who actually study this (and make progress on it), they don't see to hit any limits using a physical approach Listening to the guests

by curo 4y ago

> When I listen to people who actually study this (and make progress on it), they don't see to hit any limits using a physical approach Listening to the guests of Lex Fridman on the subject, I'd say the exact opposite: very few of them are pure materialists. I recently tried to listen into a virtual conference of neuroscientists and the keynote (Susan Greenfield) specifically said, "we're not going to be able to turn the water into wine here" that we're only going to be able to discuss the neural correlates of consciousness, etc. I'm a casual consumer of "popular science" but I only see serious people acknowledge the problem as hard, or explicitly limit their discussion to what-can-be-discussed. I'd say the same for physicists interested in the subject (Richard Penrose and David Deutsch come to mind.) I'd love to hear who you think is the most convincing materialist here? EDIT: I'll add that philosophical idealism isn't rooted in a desire to be special. An advaita guru or zen monk for instance is an extreme idealist philosophically and doesn't exhibit any evidence of wanting to be special.

tacon 4y ago
>I'd love to hear who you think is the most convincing materialist here? Sean Carroll has a paper arguing that we know much more about the laws of physics than we know about consciousness, so it seems much more likely that we can explain consciousness within the current structure of physics than a brand new "something" that explains consciousness can slot into physical laws without violating all the existing confirmations of physics. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27865149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27865149
- curo 4y ago
  Great example and his critique of the zombie argument is new to me. The only reason I'd be quick to dismiss it, is because his understanding of the panpsychist position is very physical. When an panpsychist says capital-C consciousness (as opposed to arousal, etc) is the necessary premise of the material, they're not proposing it as a physical "ingredient." They're positing a non-thing uniform in all physical phenomena. It's only "attribute" is its self-evidence. And it is indeed passive (which he states as a gotchya). His argument is that we understand more about physics (quantum field theory) so we should work from that grounding. But his use of "understanding" implies "we have more information." Of course we have more information, a capital-C Consciousness background is, by definition, information-less. That's not a cop-out. We know some non-thing exists because we have our material experiences reporting to it. Our experience of it might be modulated by the physical but it's no more causal than a canvas is to a painting. The paper insists it can't be causal. True, it isn't. The canvas doesn't cause the painting even though it proceeds it as a precondition. The canvas is not an ingredient, it's a self-evident premise. It's like looking through a telescope and saying I know much more about the sky than my eyes, therefore it's silly to develop a theory of eyes that's not based in sky. The only reason we know we have a "hard problem of Consciousness" is because we each (at least one of us) knows "I am" and there's no way to take the derivations of that experience and give rise to their origin. He has one paragraph/sentence on why Consciousness can't be passive: "No compelling account of consciousness can attribute a central explanatory role to metaphysical ingredients that have no influence on these kinds of behavior." He might have more to unroll here, I'd be curious to know.

by curo 4y ago

tacon 4y ago

>I'd love to hear who you think is the most convincing materialist here? Sean Carroll has a paper arguing that we know much more about the laws of physics than we know about consciousness, so it seems much more likely that we can explain consciousness within the current structure of physics than a brand new "something" that explains consciousness can slot into physical laws without violating all the existing confirmations of physics. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27865149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27865149

curo 4y ago
Great example and his critique of the zombie argument is new to me. The only reason I'd be quick to dismiss it, is because his understanding of the panpsychist position is very physical. When an panpsychist says capital-C consciousness (as opposed to arousal, etc) is the necessary premise of the material, they're not proposing it as a physical "ingredient." They're positing a non-thing uniform in all physical phenomena. It's only "attribute" is its self-evidence. And it is indeed passive (which he states as a gotchya). His argument is that we understand more about physics (quantum field theory) so we should work from that grounding. But his use of "understanding" implies "we have more information." Of course we have more information, a capital-C Consciousness background is, by definition, information-less. That's not a cop-out. We know some non-thing exists because we have our material experiences reporting to it. Our experience of it might be modulated by the physical but it's no more causal than a canvas is to a painting. The paper insists it can't be causal. True, it isn't. The canvas doesn't cause the painting even though it proceeds it as a precondition. The canvas is not an ingredient, it's a self-evident premise. It's like looking through a telescope and saying I know much more about the sky than my eyes, therefore it's silly to develop a theory of eyes that's not based in sky. The only reason we know we have a "hard problem of Consciousness" is because we each (at least one of us) knows "I am" and there's no way to take the derivations of that experience and give rise to their origin. He has one paragraph/sentence on why Consciousness can't be passive: "No compelling account of consciousness can attribute a central explanatory role to metaphysical ingredients that have no influence on these kinds of behavior." He might have more to unroll here, I'd be curious to know.