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Some of these results seem to be picking up on general abstract concepts moreso actual visual cues. for example, one sample has bright colored wooden park bench

Some of these results seem to be picking up on general abstract concepts moreso actual visual cues. for example, one sample has bright colored wooden park benches as input, and some generic brown wood furniture as an output. Perhaps a strange artifact of training biases, but a little disturbing at a glance. Extracting current visual data out of one's brain is one thing, but being able to potentially identify abstract thoughts is a whole different level of invasiveness.

zwkrt 4y ago
So there’s this philosopher Daniel Dennett. In broad strokes, he’s generally liked by philosophically minded scientists and disliked by the philosophy community. His position is that we will slowly chip away at the magic of consciousness as we get better and better tools to scientifically explore the brain. The consciousness is not some magical force that enters us but just a giant bag of tricks that our brain plays. Furthermore, that the “hard problem of consciousness”, i.e. “what it is like” to be something is not immune to the scientific process. I’ve always been defferential to his viewpoint, but this is the first time his arguments have felt justified. It’s surprising but in hindsight makes sense to me that when you look at a specific representation of an object that your brain internally kind of “draws a picture” of an abstract representation of that kind of object. You can probably think of the location of 100 trees, but it’s pretty ridiculous to think that your brain actually has pictures of 100 trees in 100 different drawers. You look at a tree and your brain draws a kindergarten picture of a tree. Here lay the platonic forms? Cool stuff.
- goatlover 4y ago
  > The consciousness is not some magical force that enters us but just a giant bag of tricks that our brain plays. That's kind of a straw man of what Dennett's opponents argue. No philosopher seriously says that consciousness is a magical force entering the brain. Rather, they make arguments that materialism (physicalism) fails to account for consciousness, whatever that entails for metaphysics or epistemology. Some are naturalists, but not physicalists. Some are idealists. Some like David Chalmers propose a kind of property dualism. Others might be neutral monists or think we're cognitively closed to the solution. Or panpsychists were everything has a bit of consciousness. Materialism is a metaphysical assumption. We don't know the truth of what reality fundamentally is (it could be a simulation for all we know). We also don't know how to bridge the subjective/objective divide, as Thomas Nagel has argued. Another way of framing the argument is that the objective world is an abstraction across many subjective experiences, where consciousness is abstracted in favor of mathematical forms. That works well for describing/predicting patterns in nature we observe, including the brain, but then when you turn it around to explain the mind, it runs into difficulties, since the abstracted-away subjectivity has been left out. There's no need to muddy the waters with the word "magic". We don't know everything, and some things we might never know. We do know that we have experiences of color, sound, taste, smells, feels, dreams, inner dialog and what not. That's not magic, it's just how we experience being in the world, whatever the world and our experiences are. Here's a view opposing Dennett's from Jaron Lanier: http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - sitkack 4y ago
    I love philosophy for the fun discussion, but when folks say there is more than Physics to something when we know so little about everything. Yes it could be true, but coming from someone who is already so unskilled in the sciences, they have no real basis to make those claims. It is like someone making conjectures about the properties of prime numbers while knowing almost no mathematics.
    - goatlover 4y ago
      No different than claiming everything can be explained by physics. The basic argument against that for consciousness is that you don't get sensation (colors, tastes, feels) from physical properties, because they lack those sensations. Physical meaning our science of how the world works, which is abstract and mathematical, and not the world itself, to avoid metaphysical assumptions/circularity.
      - sitkack 4y ago
        > consciousness is that you don't get sensation (colors, tastes, feels) from physical properties There is no unexplained magic here, are you saying human experience of the world breaks cause and effect? Color is our interpretation of the frequency of light, taste the chemical composition, if by feel you mean touch, our skin can resolve nm scale bumps. To say something is un-explainable is a cop out. Esp for the folks that say, "there has to be more" without showing why is unscientific.
- necovek 4y ago
  While I am certain there is nothing (too) special about consciousness, it still is a mixture of a large number of inputs (nerves, senses) and complex processing machinery dealing with constant chemical processes, some of which are slow to respond to chemical changes (like some hormones like TSH which take a few weeks to "stabilize" provided stable FT3/FT4 hormones). Finally, add all of those throughout an entire life up to that point. Basically, we'll make some statistical conclusions, but we won't be able to get fully repeatable nor even measurable conditions to fully understand it ever. Perhaps if we go full Nazi again and experiment on live, unwilling participants. Lest people forget, even with the rest of medicine and much simpler organs we have directly poked and prodded, we are still far away from fully understanding them, and the best of our knowledge borders on "in 90% of cases".

zwkrt 4y ago

So there’s this philosopher Daniel Dennett. In broad strokes, he’s generally liked by philosophically minded scientists and disliked by the philosophy community. His position is that we will slowly chip away at the magic of consciousness as we get better and better tools to scientifically explore the brain. The consciousness is not some magical force that enters us but just a giant bag of tricks that our brain plays. Furthermore, that the “hard problem of consciousness”, i.e. “what it is like” to be something is not immune to the scientific process. I’ve always been defferential to his viewpoint, but this is the first time his arguments have felt justified. It’s surprising but in hindsight makes sense to me that when you look at a specific representation of an object that your brain internally kind of “draws a picture” of an abstract representation of that kind of object. You can probably think of the location of 100 trees, but it’s pretty ridiculous to think that your brain actually has pictures of 100 trees in 100 different drawers. You look at a tree and your brain draws a kindergarten picture of a tree. Here lay the platonic forms? Cool stuff.

goatlover 4y ago
> The consciousness is not some magical force that enters us but just a giant bag of tricks that our brain plays. That's kind of a straw man of what Dennett's opponents argue. No philosopher seriously says that consciousness is a magical force entering the brain. Rather, they make arguments that materialism (physicalism) fails to account for consciousness, whatever that entails for metaphysics or epistemology. Some are naturalists, but not physicalists. Some are idealists. Some like David Chalmers propose a kind of property dualism. Others might be neutral monists or think we're cognitively closed to the solution. Or panpsychists were everything has a bit of consciousness. Materialism is a metaphysical assumption. We don't know the truth of what reality fundamentally is (it could be a simulation for all we know). We also don't know how to bridge the subjective/objective divide, as Thomas Nagel has argued. Another way of framing the argument is that the objective world is an abstraction across many subjective experiences, where consciousness is abstracted in favor of mathematical forms. That works well for describing/predicting patterns in nature we observe, including the brain, but then when you turn it around to explain the mind, it runs into difficulties, since the abstracted-away subjectivity has been left out. There's no need to muddy the waters with the word "magic". We don't know everything, and some things we might never know. We do know that we have experiences of color, sound, taste, smells, feels, dreams, inner dialog and what not. That's not magic, it's just how we experience being in the world, whatever the world and our experiences are. Here's a view opposing Dennett's from Jaron Lanier: http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sitkack 4y ago
  I love philosophy for the fun discussion, but when folks say there is more than Physics to something when we know so little about everything. Yes it could be true, but coming from someone who is already so unskilled in the sciences, they have no real basis to make those claims. It is like someone making conjectures about the properties of prime numbers while knowing almost no mathematics.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    No different than claiming everything can be explained by physics. The basic argument against that for consciousness is that you don't get sensation (colors, tastes, feels) from physical properties, because they lack those sensations. Physical meaning our science of how the world works, which is abstract and mathematical, and not the world itself, to avoid metaphysical assumptions/circularity.
    - sitkack 4y ago
      > consciousness is that you don't get sensation (colors, tastes, feels) from physical properties There is no unexplained magic here, are you saying human experience of the world breaks cause and effect? Color is our interpretation of the frequency of light, taste the chemical composition, if by feel you mean touch, our skin can resolve nm scale bumps. To say something is un-explainable is a cop out. Esp for the folks that say, "there has to be more" without showing why is unscientific.
necovek 4y ago
While I am certain there is nothing (too) special about consciousness, it still is a mixture of a large number of inputs (nerves, senses) and complex processing machinery dealing with constant chemical processes, some of which are slow to respond to chemical changes (like some hormones like TSH which take a few weeks to "stabilize" provided stable FT3/FT4 hormones). Finally, add all of those throughout an entire life up to that point. Basically, we'll make some statistical conclusions, but we won't be able to get fully repeatable nor even measurable conditions to fully understand it ever. Perhaps if we go full Nazi again and experiment on live, unwilling participants. Lest people forget, even with the rest of medicine and much simpler organs we have directly poked and prodded, we are still far away from fully understanding them, and the best of our knowledge borders on "in 90% of cases".