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To me, David Chalmer is really overrated as a philosopher and so are his ideas about consciousness. Essentially everything is an example of emergence and this

by prng2021 4y ago

To me, David Chalmer is really overrated as a philosopher and so are his ideas about consciousness. Essentially everything is an example of emergence and this is no different. Yes we absolutely do need to have words like "chair" as a level of abstraction. Yes we do need the word "consciousness" to talk about this quality/ability humans have which is so hard to describe but encompasses self awareness and experience (both also emergent). Underlying all these emergent phenomenon is always what Chalmers brushes off as easy. What he'd probably describe as the world of matter/energy and quantum physics. Here's a variation of a common thought experiment: Remove every atom from a person's brain, one by one until they are clinically dead. Somewhere along the way to death, that person is going to be right on the cusp of being a conscious human being. It wouldn't be a single moment. There would be a long period of removing atoms where observers could have endless debates about when the lights go out. Think of some very gradually going colorblind. Just like a gradient of color blindness, there would be a gradient of consciousness. From normal levels, to octopus levels (not literally), to newborn baby levels, bug level, etc until death. This makes it clear to me that consciousness truly is emergent from matter/energy. There's no magic behind it, just mystery because we don't understand it.

maroonblazer 4y ago
> There's no magic behind it, just mystery because we don't understand it. How is this different from, or inconsistent with, Chalmers' ideas about consciousness?
- prng2021 4y ago
  He believes that consciousness cannot be reduced to atomic level phenomena. That kind of discussion is only about his so-called easy problem. To him, there is something beyond that. I refer to that "something" as magic because I believe there isn't anything beyond matter/energy to describe all examples of emergence, including consciousness. Going to my original comment's example of removing atoms from a brain, the number of atoms, which atoms, and interactions between the atoms is the mystery.
  - jungturk 4y ago
    I agree with your two statements: > Essentially everything is an example of emergence and this is no different. > There's no magic behind it, just mystery because we don't understand it. But I still believe there's a hard problem (that is, its difficult to explain my sense of interiority using the dynamics and grammars of the substrates that surely give rise to the emergent behavior we call consciousness). By substrate I'm referring to the base layer in emergence (i.e. emergent phenomena and their dynamics emerge from a more basic layer with its own phenomena/dynamics, which is the substrate). As physics is the substrate for chemistry, and chemistry for biology, and biology for psychology, and psychology for society, etc... (please ignore the that I've surely leapt over or ignored various layers here and/or suggested some type of linearity rather than heirarchy). With each emergent layer, the explanatory power of the substrate(s) wanes. Perhaps the immediate substrate is still occasionally illuminating (e.g. I can talk about valence in terms of physical properties of electron orbits, or I can talk about metabolism in terms of the chemistry of the Krebs cycle, etc...) but it becomes difficult to talk about biology (cells, tissues, organic processes, etc...) in terms of physics. I have no doubt that physics is a substrate of biology (i.e. I'm a materialist), but its not terribly useful to deploy the standard model in explaining cancer. In the same way, I assume it to be true that physics is also a substrate of consciousness, but it isn't clear to me how our sense of interiority arises in the emergent layers. I assume its because I'm ignorant (its just a mystery), but it hasn't made the problem any less hard.
    - jungturk 4y ago
      On further exploration, attention schema theory does a good job of connecting the dots - with the layers being biology, neurology, psychology (which then hosts the elements of AST that produce the claims/experiences of consciousness) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory
    - prng2021 4y ago
      I could say that many unexplainable things have a hard problem. How is it that we can smell something and instantly our brain can recall very old memories where we noticed that smell? It seems impossible that atoms can communicate with each other so that the atoms that make up a smell can trigger other atoms in your brain to search for yet other atoms that "stored" a snapshot of a previous time and location (aka a memory). That's despite each individual atom of one memory being identical to the atoms of another memory. It's the number and arrangent of the collection of atoms for each memory that is different. However, I wouldn't create some artificial distinction for people to debate over about an "easy problem" and "hard problem" to describe how memory works. Actually to Chalmers, this entire memory process is an easy problem that may be unknown but is "simply" some interaction of atoms. I doubt he would say there's anything hard about this problem. That's absurd to me.

maroonblazer 4y ago

> There's no magic behind it, just mystery because we don't understand it. How is this different from, or inconsistent with, Chalmers' ideas about consciousness?

prng2021 4y ago
He believes that consciousness cannot be reduced to atomic level phenomena. That kind of discussion is only about his so-called easy problem. To him, there is something beyond that. I refer to that "something" as magic because I believe there isn't anything beyond matter/energy to describe all examples of emergence, including consciousness. Going to my original comment's example of removing atoms from a brain, the number of atoms, which atoms, and interactions between the atoms is the mystery.
- jungturk 4y ago
  I agree with your two statements: > Essentially everything is an example of emergence and this is no different. > There's no magic behind it, just mystery because we don't understand it. But I still believe there's a hard problem (that is, its difficult to explain my sense of interiority using the dynamics and grammars of the substrates that surely give rise to the emergent behavior we call consciousness). By substrate I'm referring to the base layer in emergence (i.e. emergent phenomena and their dynamics emerge from a more basic layer with its own phenomena/dynamics, which is the substrate). As physics is the substrate for chemistry, and chemistry for biology, and biology for psychology, and psychology for society, etc... (please ignore the that I've surely leapt over or ignored various layers here and/or suggested some type of linearity rather than heirarchy). With each emergent layer, the explanatory power of the substrate(s) wanes. Perhaps the immediate substrate is still occasionally illuminating (e.g. I can talk about valence in terms of physical properties of electron orbits, or I can talk about metabolism in terms of the chemistry of the Krebs cycle, etc...) but it becomes difficult to talk about biology (cells, tissues, organic processes, etc...) in terms of physics. I have no doubt that physics is a substrate of biology (i.e. I'm a materialist), but its not terribly useful to deploy the standard model in explaining cancer. In the same way, I assume it to be true that physics is also a substrate of consciousness, but it isn't clear to me how our sense of interiority arises in the emergent layers. I assume its because I'm ignorant (its just a mystery), but it hasn't made the problem any less hard.
  - jungturk 4y ago
    On further exploration, attention schema theory does a good job of connecting the dots - with the layers being biology, neurology, psychology (which then hosts the elements of AST that produce the claims/experiences of consciousness) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory
  - prng2021 4y ago
    I could say that many unexplainable things have a hard problem. How is it that we can smell something and instantly our brain can recall very old memories where we noticed that smell? It seems impossible that atoms can communicate with each other so that the atoms that make up a smell can trigger other atoms in your brain to search for yet other atoms that "stored" a snapshot of a previous time and location (aka a memory). That's despite each individual atom of one memory being identical to the atoms of another memory. It's the number and arrangent of the collection of atoms for each memory that is different. However, I wouldn't create some artificial distinction for people to debate over about an "easy problem" and "hard problem" to describe how memory works. Actually to Chalmers, this entire memory process is an easy problem that may be unknown but is "simply" some interaction of atoms. I doubt he would say there's anything hard about this problem. That's absurd to me.