15 ms·

Critique of the mind/body problem

97 points by tomcam 4y ago

andrewfromx 4y ago
I like to think the earth is conscious and watch it breath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW-bmEF0nDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW-bmEF0nDE
humanistbot 4y ago
So it is a standard philosophical problem? They aren't meant to be solved. They're meant to make us reconsider our assumptions and reasoning.
- kbelder 4y ago
  We've spent several thousand years solving philosophical problems. The ones that are left are pretty tough.
hilariouswhip 4y ago
The mind-body problem sounds too Cartesian. A dualism that is a bit too outdated. I personally have a weird intuition considering my cultural background: it makes sense to me that my consciousness would be “born” somewhere else when I die. This in contrast to most people of my cultural background, who either believe in annihilism or an ever-lasting afterlife. I don’t really understand why a little more people don’t at least find it philosophically (what’s the word?) plausible, or something.
- wk_end 4y ago
  I've had this same thought too...something like, if there's an infinite number of possibilities of ways to be experiencing something, why should "I" (untethered from everything that made me "I" of course) ever be "experiencing" nothing?
  - hilariouswhip 4y ago
    Yep, something like that!
- powerset 4y ago
  At some point in the long to infinite history of the universe there will eventually be born a creature with a configuration of neurons sort of similar to the configuration you had before you died. So it's sort of reasonable to say that's you. Plus time passes quickly when you're dead, so to you it will feel like no time at all.
  - rileyphone 4y ago
    Heat death is coming soon enough - now is all there is.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    what you're talking about was called the Boltzmann brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
  - hilariouswhip 4y ago
    Sort of a if-everything-can-happen-it-will-happen scenario. But not what I was talking about.
- amalcon 4y ago
  This kind of idea tends to lead to debates on what the self even is: what is "my" consciousness? How would even a hypothetical omniscient determine that my consciousness had been "born" somewhere (and/or somewhen) else? It's a ship of theseus problem: what is the attribute that makes the consciousness "mine"? This is not to say you're wrong (by any means!). It's just to say that we'd need to have a really long discussion before getting to the part where we discuss plausibility. I actually find the concept of reincarnation fascinating -- especially temporally nonlinear versions, where e.g. a past life might happen in a future year. One's consciousness might read about historical events that it will "later" participate in. Could lead to some interesting fiction if nothing else. It unfortunately seems to take a while to get to the part that's interesting.
  - drdec 4y ago
    You don't even need to get to the point where your consciousness is inhabiting other people to get into this. Today's you is different from yesterday's you and tomorrow's you - you all have different experiences and memories. The you of this moment only exists in this moment and is already gone.
    - amalcon 4y ago
      Indeed! This is another one of the fascinating paths to which this idea may lead.
    - komali2 4y ago
      I am definitely not as well read as I like here but I do think about this subject a lot and in particular I've been chewing on Time. Lately I was thinking, why don't I feel more anger right now at past me or future me? Like you say, those could be seen as different people than me. Past me made present me fat. Future me implicitly prevents me from enjoying this cake by pressuring me to do things that won't result with him also being fat. When I start work in the morning, I've been assigned a task according to the goals of past me. Why should I care what that guy wanted? I want to play Elden Ring. Ah but there's future me again, mad that he can't play Elden Ring because he had to rush to finish work I was supposed to do. Well fuck that guy, I might die of an aneurysm before his time, then none of us get to play videogames! But I don't really feel mad at past or future me because I recognize them as me and our goals are mostly consistently aligned. I'm thinking that my identity and Mind is very deeply rooted in the Time dimension, though not clear on all the implications there. I do at least feel that memory is a critical part of Mind. The continuation of my memory timeline seems most likely to be what Me is.
- hkpack 4y ago
  When I was thinking about the same concept, I wanted to make another leap - that everyone else is also different instances of you / me. There is actually no need to die, to “reborn”. Your consciousness can exist in multiple instances!
  - weard_beard 4y ago
    Supposing the speed of light is a hard limit. How might a sufficiently advanced society explore the universe? Construct vessels from what is already there. My body is a tour guide.
    - candiddevmike 4y ago
      You're a vessel between two places you've never been.
      - MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
        The mystery of The Other.
  - SamPatt 4y ago
    The older I get the more I believe some version of this. It's related to empathy somehow. I think we're inherently self-centered, but that we also recognize ourselves within others, and don't desire suffering for ourselves, hence we don't desire it for others. Also I've had a few moments of something similar to deja vu in my life, except it was the realization that I was the continuation of my father's life. And I catch glimpses of this in my children (though I don't believe they're yet consciously aware of it).
    - sshine 4y ago
      > the realization that I was the continuation of my father's life I've had it a lot with friends. Realizing a part of me is them. For example, reflections on how one's body ages: The experience is always personal, but predictable and shared.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  What if you don't want to be reborn into a possibly horrifying/painful/miserable existence? What is option B? An eternity of watching? At some point time has to stop, and then what, things just repeat?
  - layer8 4y ago
    Why does time have to stop? How would that even work?
  - User23 4y ago
    What makes you think you have optionality?
    - candiddevmike 4y ago
      Getting philosophical, if there isn't an option, then you could extend that to say free will doesn't exist at all. At some point you will run out of "lives" to respawn into, at least intelligent ones.
      - komali2 4y ago
        I don't know if that tracks that lacking some optionality indicates total lack of free will. You lack infinity options compared to the ones you have but you can still make plausible arguments for free will. For example you can't teleport to Mars. You can still choose what you want on your pizza.
        User23 4y ago
        Right. You might not be able to pick your afterlife. Atheist materialists believe that you definitely can't. Except maybe for some kind of digital upload shenanigans maybe, but I don't see how that's an afterlife and not just a copy that is its own separate entity. Christians like me believe that you have a binary option for your afterlife. Buddhists and Hindus believe that you have a continuum of options. Bear in mind I mean specifically believing that you have optionality. Socrates for example was agnostic on what happens after death, but he never indicated, at least not that I recall reading in Plato, that he thought he had a choice. Rather he thought none of the possibilities were worse than capitulating to the court.
- throw7 4y ago
  Maybe you were born in the mind of God?
- simonsquiff 4y ago
  Yes I’ve been having the same thoughts - essentially ‘reincarnation without the woo’. It starts with: why do you have a first person experience from the creature that is reading these words? Why are you not having a first person experience from the body of Elon Musk (maybe you are, hi Elon!) or a particular sparrow in the New Forest? And then, when your body dies, does that mean no more first person experiences again for ‘you’? Or, will some other creature create a first person experience for ‘you’ again (for whatever reason this current creature is creating a first person experience for ‘you’?) There is no need for a ‘woo’ part ie no memories are retained, no ‘new game+’, no element of karma. Just the concept that first person experiences may not end with death of this current creature. If this is correct - and we perhaps we should act in a way that assumes it is - what would be the implications? Many creatures have minimal agency over their experiences. Humans are different, not just with more agency of themselves but of others - at a minimal level of their family and pets and immediate connections, but wider too esp in more developed countries and moving up the influence and power in society. If you were a cow, you would look at humans and saying ‘if I was one of those I could impact this shitty situation’. Well congratulations, you are! How do you, as a first world human, use that power to mean that if you do have a first person experience from another creature, that future experience is…not utterly horrific? That idea if embraced ties all living things together. Selfishness disappears - you might literally be in anyones (or anything’s) shoes in the future, so do anything you can to not deliver horrible experiences to anything. It’s to your own benefit! But it’s also a bit of an info hazard - you don’t want to be born into an unpleasant experience, and the thought of that possibility is unsettling.
  - hilariouswhip 4y ago
    Woo is merely the output of 100+ fireside retellings of a theory by someone who tried to construct a metaphysical theory without the woo.
- larryfreeman 4y ago
  If "consciousness" is "born" somewhere else when you die, you would still need to explain how "consciousness" is bound to a physical body while you are alive. Your view implies dualism since you are suggesting that "consciousness" is more than just the physical body. You don't need to be a Cartesian to be a dualist but you do need to be dualist if you believe that consciousness is somehow immaterial in that it can survive the body after death.
superb-owl 4y ago
IMO there’s a version of the problem that’s very solvable: define the mapping between physical and conscious states. In particular: is it one-to-one (panpsychism)? Many-to-one (materialism)? One-to-many (idealism)? We’re already finding course-grained mappings via neuroscience. All we need to do is iterate. This won’t tell us anything about the ontological nature of the mapping, any more than General Relativity tells us about the ontological nature of spacetime. But we’d be able to make and validate predictions.
gizajob 4y ago
Consult Wittgenstein
s_m_t 4y ago
Seemed to left have out the simplest explanation. Consciousness doesn't exist. Unrelated but it is a bit strange to me that a lot of (most? nearly all?) atheists believe in consciousness.
- bitwize 4y ago
  I was gonna say, what if consciousness is a trick of the brain? Like, we just do what we do and at every moment like Maxwell Smart our brain goes, "I meant to do that!" and so it feels like we made decisions "consciously"?
  - md224 4y ago
    It's not just about conscious action but also perception, being conscious of things. I don't know how that could be a trick.
    - csantini 4y ago
      I suspect that's a trick, too. I speculate that as soon as you get a digital mind sophisticated enough to model the world and itself, you soon must force the system to identify with the system at every cycle. Otherwise you could identify with a tree, or the wall, or happily cut parts of yourself. Pain is not painful if you don't identify with the receiver of pain. Thus I think you can have unconscious smart minds, but not unconscious minds that make decisions in favour of themselves. Because they can identify with the whole room, or with the whole solar system for what matters. Would you even plan how to survive if you don't have a constant spell that tricks you into thinking you're the actor in charge? that's consciousness.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        A lot of the things going on with ChatGPT make me wonder if AI is actually very limited in its intelligence growth by not having sensory organs/devices the same way a body does. Having a body that you must keep alive enforces a feedback loop of permanence. If I eat my cake, I no longer have it and must get another cake if I want to eat cake again. Of course in the human sense if we don't want to starve we must continue to find new sources of calories. This is engrained into our intelligence as a survival mechanism. If you tell ChatGPT it has a cake in its left hand, and then it eats the cake, you could very well get an answer like the cake is still in its left hand. We keep the power line constantly plugged into ChatGPT, for it the cake is never ending and there is no concept of death. Of course for humans there are plenty of ways to break consciousness in one way or another. Eat the extract of certain cactuses and you may end up walking around thinking that you are a tree. Our idea and perception of consciousness is easily interrupted by drugs. Once we start thinking outside of our survival its really easy for us to have very faulty thoughts that can lead to dangerous situations, hence in a lot of dangerous work we develop processes to take thought out of the situation, hence behaving more like machines.
andrewflnr 4y ago
Also known as the Hard Problem of Consciousness... right? Which I would assume this author can't have escaped hearing about. Don't get me wrong, it's a very solid explainer on why the Hard Problem is Hard, but it's weird to not see that term.
dbrueck 4y ago
I can't decide if the font makes me angry or not.
- smeej 4y ago
  Angry's not the word for me. It annoys me just enough that I can't keep reading long enough to get to the interesting part. And based on the comments, I don't think anyone else has either.
  - cdot2 4y ago
    I actually really like the font.
- threatofrain 4y ago
  Turn on readability mode, which is built into browsers like Firefox and Safari.
jbandela1 4y ago
> But allow me to play angel's advocate. Perhaps the brain is just like RAM on which consciousness in this world needs to run, whereas the soul, which exists elsewhere, contains a hard drive that stores all the data and a processor that makes certain decisions; so that even if the RAM is destroyed, the hard drive and processor persist, but the machine in this world stops working properly. If you are going to frame it that way, a much better analogy is that the soul is software and the brain/body is hardware.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I don’t really get the analogy anyway. What are we supposed to have some eternal hard drive that persists after our deaths, but which we can’t access while interacting with the physical universe? Maybe it is just /dev/null, we can’t tell the difference.
- danwills 4y ago
  I think there are some interesting parallels here with Michael Levin's group's work where they also make the hardware/software analogy. Genes/DNA are said to build The 'hardware', that a bioelectric 'software' runs on. A key part of the discovery is that it's not just neurons that form bioelectric networks of cells (via gap junctions etc), even single-celled organisms (in biofilms etc) do it too!
- roywiggins 4y ago
  If it were true, it would be in principle testable, because particles inside our brains would have to behave contrary to the known laws of physics in order to be influenced by the soul.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
I ascribe to the idea that we have no true self, that consciousness is an illusory tool of the subconscious mind, which is a manifestation of the internal processes of the brain. The consciousness and feelings and senses we experience are second order effects of those processes. This can be easily observed through meditation and building the ability to exist without conscious thought arising, but being able to fully live life without it. It maps closely to a modern interpretation of Buddhism. The rest of Buddhism is how to exist in that state without suffering, which requires you to manifest a fundamental desire to build community and be helpful without exploitation. This makes sense because we are animals evolved to build communities and be helpful, and when we don’t despite immediate perverse pleasure that state dissipates leaving a suffering. The process of being a community mammal and the places those desires stem from a self reinforcing ways of building happiness by experiencing states our meat heads reward us for not just now but in an ongoing sense. I find it sort of hard to find flaw in this construction of mind body, and it seems a simpler structure than all the non sense of sense particles and soul organs.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- komali2 4y ago
  Isn't an important aspect of Buddhist philosophy the inescapable nature of suffering in life? That it shouldn't necessarily be avoided? So why is existing in that state "without suffering" necessary? I do like that your idea has space for focusing on community building.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    There are two types of suffering in Buddhism, physical and suffering that arises from ignorance and attachment. The entire point of the Buddhist philosophy is the cessation of the second type of suffering. Enlightenment or nirvana is a state free of suffering and is the goal. It comes with an idea of escape from the cycle of birth and death, which is often construed to be mystical but is more an escape from the attachment of meaning to birth and death, along with entanglement in thought and emotion, pleasure, avoidance of pain, etc. This state doesn’t a lack of emotion, including negative ones or a lack of unpleasantness, but a lack of anxiety, depression, rumination, and the variety of other ways we torture ourselves with. But no, escape of suffering is exactly the point. The premise is the unenlightened life can’t escape suffering, but there is a path, which Buddha compiled and taught from the Indian mystics of his day into a highly structured practice with exhaustive documentation on the detailed nuances of the human experience with a direct description of how to become enlightened through the practice of meditation, specifically vipassana, and teachings of how suffering arises and what motivations to cultivate to achieve release. Edit: forgot to note the first type of physical suffering becomes merely unpleasant once you release your attachment to not feeling unpleasant and can accept it as part of the ever changing nature of reality and a fundamental acceptance of impermanence- that this too shall pass and the pleasant ends the same as the unpleasant and there are not naturally superior states
danbruc 4y ago
Unless I am getting totally fooled, my mind is influenced by the physical world and influences it in return. So there is a two way interaction between minds and the physical world, on which physics has a pretty good grip. Given the complexity of humans it will certainly not be an easy endeavor but at least it seems not hopeless right from the beginning. Then on the other hand our inability to make sense of quantum mechanics makes me wonder if our grip on reality is actually that good.
- zerodensity 4y ago
  I mean they have the math down it's the interpretation (and for us mortals the math) that's causing all the confusion. Particles behave non-locally which is really really not cool :(. From that you only have a bad list of options to choose from... Do you go for non-local hidden variables Multiverse spawning photons Super determinism More dimensions perhaps? Maybe the problem goes away if you have 11
Kim_Bruning 4y ago
I was just pointing out the other day that emergence is not magic. It's just the complementary operation to reduction. [1] More concrete: If we take a human brain apart, we end up with neurons and glia cells, (and a bunch of supporting cast). These all consist of phospholipids, proteins, and nucleic acids (and some more supporting cast). These then all consist of atoms, which consist of quantum particles. No matter how much we look around, that's all that we find in the brain. This is a reductive approach. If you do reduction, it's like you're differentiating a formula where you keep losing terms on the right hand side. At every reduction step something similar happens: you are losing information about how your parts are organized. When you integrate, the terms you differentiated out before will show up again. What sort of magic is this, you ask? There is no magic, those terms were there before. Now that you're doing the opposite (complementary) operation, they're coming back. So by reducing the brain down, we didn't find any singular component that provides consciousness or thought or any such thing. Having eliminated those, whatever remains must be the truth. But what remains? The only thing that we've missed is the information that we threw out when we were doing reduction. Apparently consciousness and thought and image recognition and pain and feelings must arise from the organization of the components. This is what is called the "emergent properties". * You can try the same operation with reducing a game computer down to single transistors. You'll find that this is insufficient to explain how Mario works. You need to look at how the transistors are organized into gates, and how the gates are organized to form memory and instructions, and then how those in turn can be used to execute programs. [2] * Another similar experiment might be to try to find out what makes a watch tick. You can certainly take it apart, but at the end of the day you are left with a pile of parts that definitely don't tick anymore. You have to put them back together in a very specific way to ultimately recover the emergent property: ticking. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34619834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34619834 [2] Inspired by https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
- buildsjets 4y ago
  It's interesting to ponder how those quantum particles which make up a brain might be entangled with other particles elsewhere or elsewhen in this or other universes. Consider that the appearance of Walter Cronkite on an old-school OTA television screen is not an emergent property of a television. You can disassemble it, inspect it, find no miniature Cronkite inside, reassemble it with the same organization, plug it in, and get nothing but static. You don't get Cronkite until the CBS evening news is broadcast, and the television is powered on, working correctly, and tuned to the right frequency.
tasty_freeze 4y ago
I'm a materialist, and believe consciousness is an emergent property. The essay writer was pretty rudely dismissive of the idea, mocking it as if people who hold that stance think the words "emergent property" is all that needs to be said. It is "just a magic word to cover over something no one understands." That completely ignores that there are thousands of researchers of various stripes who are are digging into the specifics and aren't simply saying, "Aha, it is emergent and our work is done here." Another problem with the essay is that the term "consciousness" needs to be defined before discussing it, as different people take that word to mean different things. Finally, I think it is important to appreciate just what a facade our consciousness is. It is a veneer that works well most of the time, but if it is probed too deeply one discovers what a hodge-podge it really is. Optical illusions are one window into seeing that our perceptions are often pretty shallow. Reading Oliver Sacks' book, "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" 30 years ago was an eye-opener for me. It is filled with case studies of people who have suffered some localized failure of their brain, typically due to a stroke or physical trauma, but were otherwise normal. The deficits were stunning and revealing. To give one example, there was the case of someone with Capgras Syndrome, a situation where their emotional response to the subject's parents had gone silent. In every other way the subject was normal and of typical intelligence. Although they could say logically it makes no sense, their explanation for the loss of emotional affect seeing his parents was that they had been replaced by visually perfect doppelgangers. Having a ridiculous explanation for their emotional response apparently was more "energy minimizing" in their worldview than accepting the clinical explanation. Sometimes Capgras Syndrom turns inward and is called Cotard's syndrome, where the subject believes they are dead despite all evidence to the contrary. The point is, our consciousness is a jumble of heuristics we use to navigate the world. It doesn't take some mystical detached consciousness that somehow violates the laws of physics to steer or corporeal bodies to carry out the will of the consciousness.
- kurthr 4y ago
  I hold similar opinions. I find even the flaws that the latest attention based language models have to be interesting in the way they fail... by lying, making stuff up, and stating BS with certainty. Ask why they answer the way they do and it's more confident truthy sounding gibberish. That doesn't make these conscious by any measure, but it rhymes. Were only so much rational animals, but fully rationalizing ones.
GuB-42 4y ago
For me the idea is simply that the mind/body problem is not a scientific problem and "solving" it using scientific methods is impossible, but it doesn't mean it can't be "solved" by other means, typically religion. The only thing science can do is watch for exterior manifestations, and define a set of things that say "yup, that thing is conscious" in a way that can help make predictions. For example, I am the only being I know who can experience consciousness, so I can define consciousness as "being me", but it is useless, there is nothing of value in that definition. But there are plenty of other beings who look a lot like me, act like me, etc... (other humans), I think it is fair to consider them as conscious, that's better, but still, what predictions can we make of that? It is just a definition, we need rules of the kind "this thing can do X, therefore it is conscious, therefore it can also do Y", these rules have to be experimentally verifiable, or at least, falsifiable. The "advantage" of the mind/body problem not being scientific is that you can believe what you want and it won't contradict science. Think you have an immortal soul that will go to heaven after you die, as long as your soul and heaven are not observable physical objects, as far as science goes, that's fine, and so are all the other proposed solutions.
chatterhead 4y ago
Our bodies are formed by waves in all ways; even those of natural survival are formed by waves - our bodies respond like plants to light we just don't think of ourselves as photosynthetic in that way. The human eye is the greatest overall seeing object on the planet and it is 100% formed by wave information. Consciousness is a wave. There is no soul. Matter is metaphor there is no difference only how we perceive solidity; which is simply scale.
tduberne 4y ago
For anyone interested in those topics, I can really recommend the report of the Galileo commission: https://galileocommission.org/report/ https://galileocommission.org/report/ It is a report from a number of established scientists and philosophers, which questions the assumption that science is necessarily materialistic. It is a very thorough summary of centuries of scientific evolution, and of the place of background assumptions, whatever they are.
naasking 4y ago
If you want a real neuroscientific approach to consciousness instead of the idealism-woo in the article, I recommend the following paper: A conceptual framework for consciousness, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119
- MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
  https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/41/10/2076.full.pdf&source=gmail&ust=1675581562178000&usg=AOvVaw3tqSrojnHKuRjS0OnzFdez https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.jneurosci.org/conte...
- throw2500 4y ago
  Another one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
smallnix 4y ago
> [...] the least plausible theories may turn out to be the correct ones It might seem pendantic, but I believe it's always worth the time to replace "correct" with "better models" in such descriptions. Not doing it muddies the water and some folks might start to believe today's scientific models are "correct". Not professional scientists, but laymen like me.
oslac 4y ago
Materialists can be made to admit to metaphysics they do not profess to believe in probably less than 30 seconds. It is not a very serious outlook.
renox 4y ago
While the first part is interesting, the second part is poor. As tasty_freeze said, we have 'experiments' on mind/body: the description of the various cerebral issues linked to brain damages. Also I remember about the 'out of body' feeling can be artificially triggered ( https://www.nature.com/articles/news020916-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/news020916-8 ), so we can use this to test if this is just an illusion or a kind of 'superpower' (put a colored paper in an 'unviewable' part of the room before triggering the OOB)
majikaja 4y ago
It's hard to take any opinion on the subject seriously when it could potentially be coming from a p-zombie.
robinduckett 4y ago
If we can use rocks to make calculators I’m really not sure why there’s such a hard argument to make the soul something metaphysical. I believe we have consciousness as an accidental byproduct of survival. We could just as easily lose it and become cattle given enough time.
- thisismyswamp 4y ago
  bold to assume cattle have no "soul"
gtsop 4y ago
It's 2023 and we are still having this discussion because of mainstream flawed philosophy shoved in our throats every single day. Matter, in the philosophical sence, is not to be confused whith the concept of mass in physics. The philosophical concept of matter encompases everything that exists (indepedent of individual experience). Existence != mass (eg light). Critiquing the "emergencene" of conciousness from matter as a leap of logic is like saying it's a logical leap to talk of breathing as a emergent property of the respiratory system. Breathing is not a "thing" you can touch, but i bet you, you'll get into some very big trouble if you stop doing it. Better to think of it as a process. We can agree that processes are real, yet don't consist of mas. Same goes for consiousness. And the same goes for a gazillion things that are very very real, but do not fit into the mental bucket of holding some mass with your hands
raoof 4y ago
consciousness is equivalent to the halting function h(p,n) where p is a physical process and n is time, we know how to turn a physical process into a virtual process but we don't know how to turn consciousness itself into a virtual process
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
The thing is - there is evidence, but it's ignored or dismissed. In physics it's absolutely heretical and career-ending to consider that materialism may not be an ultimate and definitive truth. Or - much worse - that metaphysical experiences are actually relatively common. For example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26299061/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26299061/ In reality a significant proportion of kids have these experiences. They don't last long, but they're not at all rare. And sometimes they appear to be historically verifiable - not just in an "Someone told me or I read that in a book way", which may well apply to some, but in a "There's no credible way a child could have known this" way. Ignoring this is actually quite unscientific. It would be one thing to research them to try to find an explanation, if only for possible therapeutic reasons. But when they're largely ignored it's a tell that they're not being approached honestly or objectively.
tsukikage 4y ago
People seem to have a real issue with the idea that things are made of other things. I have a piece of cake in front of me. It is made of flour and sugar and egg; or, carbon and hydrogen and oxygen; or, quantum probability amplitudes in spacetime, depending on how far down the levels of abstraction you want to dig. The cake is no less real for all of this. I assure you, the cake exists. Not a lie. I have a conscious mind. It is made of a pattern of electrical signals moving around a complex network of cells; or, if you go down the levels of abstraction, much the same sort of bits as the cake, but in a rather different arrangement. The fact that we have some tiny bits of slowly growing knowledge about what our minds are made of does not make our minds any less real. Just like the cake. We don't need to posit separate magical entities to be minds for us. It's OK for them to be made of what we can see. They won't go away.
- MacsHeadroom 4y ago
  I assure you the cake you think exists is a lie. It is made of the same stuff as cake in your dreams, the stuff of your mind creating a useful illusion.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  The cake only exists as an abstraction created by the mind though. The universe has no conception of what a cake is and indeed even the human conception is a fuzzy heuristic. Self is the same. It exists as an abstraction the mind uses to make sense of and operate in the universe, but the more closely you examine it, the tighter you try to define it, the more nebulous and illusory you will discover it to be.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pksebben 4y ago
    came to the comments to say something like this. What the author completely glossed over was the definition of consciousness, which I think puts most of the rest of the post on shaky footing. If we define consciousness broadly enough to be a relevant term in all those scenarios, it would have to be something like "that thing that does thinking and self reflection that the reader has and observes evidence of in others". Like you say, attempting to define it makes it get all kinds of slippery. What do you include? memories? experiences? social connections? what is "thinking"? - if it's "information processing with some reflection" then isn't there a kind of consciousness in a society? a computer network? a star system? I really like the ship of Theseus for this one. it's a great way to examine where the concept begins to get really leaky.
simple-thoughts 4y ago
The author is pretty flippant. Philosophy has advanced a lot since Hume. It’s impossible to verify empirical evidence without a subject that has a built in model to intepret the data with (AB->AB->A? To quote Hume via Deleuze’s commentary on the repetition A->A->?? You must have a built in mental model to predict the next character in series). Furthermore we also know from Kant that there is “a priori transcendental knowledge” which is knowledge that has to be true in order for their to even be a subject in the first place. So no, it’s not correct that statements about the mind/body problem such as that the mind is “emergent” cannot be proven true or false, although admittedly a more precise definition of emergence is needed to say anything about it.
- morpheos137 4y ago
  I have never really understood the debate about mind / body or material vs spirit. They are two sides of the same coin. At least to me that is how it appears. Your mind is your brain in operation. Physics is Nature in operation. Nature is Spirit (or information, if you prefer) in operation. Matter / energy is certainly an illusion or at least limited perception framed by mind because that is the only way we perceive it but that does not make it any less real. In the modern age we know the rules of physics pretty well but that does not mean that that is all that there is or that matter is something more real than thought. After all there is a strong case to be made that matter and energy in the physical universe is an emergent property of a larger mind. As above so below. I personally do not find these debates to be interesting or resolvable. It is really just like philosophical navel gazing. Fundamentally what is real is what happens. Your mind may wholly arise from matter but that same matter arises from a network of causes preceding it. Are causes material or an arrangement of information? At the end of the day when does it matter?
  - simple-thoughts 4y ago
    The reason for the debate: Humans evolved to survive by using heuristics. Believing there are objects “out there” that are distinct from the self is an evolutionary adaptation. Believing in a material reality is adaptive for reproduction. But on the other hand, seeing that there is an illusion allows the exercise of power by those who understand over those who don’t. As a concrete example: someone who believes a can of Coca Cola is a “material object” that is seperate from the self has power exercised over them by marketers who understand it is an “ideal object” that exists within the self and can thus use material mediums to influence selfs for profit. Following that logic further leads to a revisitation of materialism through idealism ala Marx in German Ideology (it’s all in your mind, so try breathing underwater). Where material is formed through idealisms of power. Of course that itself is just another trick to gain power via appealing to the proles to give authority to managers. Etc etc etc…
m3kw9 4y ago
We need to ask the right questions: Why am I experiencing this person right here instead of another person in a different place? What mechanism trigger me to feel me? At what point in the conception does consciousness start, or does consciousness contain a range anywhere between 0-1? What is the selection mechanism? Is a mouse as conscious as we are? Or are they less conscious because they don’t ask these questions? Is a cell conscious or just less conscious than a mouse because it is purely reactionary? Is a fetus conscious? Is an embryo conscious? Is the very first neurons from an embryo conscious?
- amatecha 4y ago
  > Why am I experiencing this person right here instead of another person in a different place? One of my earliest memories was experiencing that question - as I laid in my crib, too young to yet know language. It was terrifying to me and I was so disturbed by the confusion of not knowing why I was who I was, and why I was experiencing things from "my" perspective as opposed to that of another person. Thoughts and questions around that subject have "haunted" me since. Though, I've generally "accepted" that my consciousness and experiential reality is an emergent result of the complex mechanisms of my brain and sensory input, and my sense of self is essentially an "illusion" of sorts. When I die (or am severely incapacitated/maimed), that's all gone. Thus far my experiences in life have supported this stance and made that perspective of mine more solidified. Unfortunately no experiences have worked against that belief thus far.
m3kw9 4y ago
Are we more conscious because we are asking why we are conscious? A bug with a simple brain less conscious because it’s more reactionary and doesn’t ponder? Is a baby less conscious for the same reason because it is purely reactionary to survival? What about a plant? From these questions, it can be deduced that consciousness is a function of complexity and orderly complexity, not just chaotic complexity. The more complex our thoughts the more conscious we are about or existence. This is my version of Occam’s razor
codingtest 4y ago
In my opinion it's a relative thing. Consciousness/soul is a quasiparticle relative to physical world. In a crystal structures, there are quasiparticles, for example a phonon that is just quanta of motion, or a hole in semiconductor, thay is just an empty place where electron can be. Despite those things not being actually "real" in physical sense, we can use same equations and principles as with real particles to describe such things. A hole cant exist outside of semiconductor crystal grid. And now imagine that all particles we consider real and physical exist too as sort of quasiparticles in some other medium. Consciousness is a same thing, its very complex oscillation/computation/information, to physical world it's same as a hole in semiconductor. If you split semiconductor crystal to atoms there wont be any holes, but in a semiconductor they exist because of properties of material as a whole. In same way consciousness exist in physical world in any medium that allows enough computation for consciousness to manifest. Fun part is a relativity aspect of reality. Imagine a beings made from a holes in semiconductor, they would study their universe and for them their particles would be real, and crystal grid of semiconductor itself would be some sort of space where their particles exist. Particles would be real, and space would be just space with specific properties. But to outside observer in our universe such beings would be made of oscillations in a chunk of semiconductor in our lab, and what they consider empty space would be a semiconductor particles for us, completely real to us while empty for hypothetic beings made of holes and phonons. And our universe is the same. Materialists just consider usual observable particles as real ones, and everything else as emergent property. In my opinion being emergent property is a relative thing and there is no reason to assume one realty more real in general than another, things are more real or less real depending on observer position relative to them. Consciousness is an emergent property of medium supporting complex computation, but at same time medium is an emergent property of consciousness. It's a same thing, there is only consciousness, in different forms of itself. Like electric and magnetic fields, that emerge from each other, but are same thing, and which one is observed depends on reference system of observer. In hypothetical example of beings made of holes in a semiconductor in a lab, what happens if we blast semiconductor to atoms? If one will assume that our lab where semiconductor was is a real reality, then that universe of quasipaeticles is now destroyed with the medium they were in. But those weren't even real particles from our perspective. And from perspective of those beings inside semiconductor reality outside never existed too, so how it can destroy their universe? What really happened is that by destroying that piece of semiconductor two realities disentangled and cant longer interact, but hypothetic beings made of holes may exist in any other universe with semiconductors, sort of creating medium for themselves. So after physical body dies, consciousness can't be observed from here, but it will exist, in other forms. Physical body is a computation, just a process, emergent property of reality, and consciousness is a process, there is no reason to assume one process is more basic and real than another. World exists because of consciousness and consciousness exists because of world, there is no difference between two. This view can't be proved in materialist sense, its unfalsifiable, so feel free to call it nonsense.
larryfreeman 4y ago
Mathematics does quite fine without a way to empirically verify. Many problems are insoluble solely because we have not approached the issue with the proper fundamental concepts clearly defined. Euclid's gift to the world was not so much the invention of a new mathematics as the invention of a new foundation to the existing mathematics with his clear and precise definitions organized into theorems justified by logical proofs.

97 points by tomcam 4y ago

I like to think the earth is conscious and watch it breath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW-bmEF0nDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW-bmEF0nDE

humanistbot 4y ago

So it is a standard philosophical problem? They aren't meant to be solved. They're meant to make us reconsider our assumptions and reasoning.

kbelder 4y ago
We've spent several thousand years solving philosophical problems. The ones that are left are pretty tough.

hilariouswhip 4y ago

The mind-body problem sounds too Cartesian. A dualism that is a bit too outdated. I personally have a weird intuition considering my cultural background: it makes sense to me that my consciousness would be “born” somewhere else when I die. This in contrast to most people of my cultural background, who either believe in annihilism or an ever-lasting afterlife. I don’t really understand why a little more people don’t at least find it philosophically (what’s the word?) plausible, or something.

wk_end 4y ago
I've had this same thought too...something like, if there's an infinite number of possibilities of ways to be experiencing something, why should "I" (untethered from everything that made me "I" of course) ever be "experiencing" nothing?
- hilariouswhip 4y ago
  Yep, something like that!
powerset 4y ago
At some point in the long to infinite history of the universe there will eventually be born a creature with a configuration of neurons sort of similar to the configuration you had before you died. So it's sort of reasonable to say that's you. Plus time passes quickly when you're dead, so to you it will feel like no time at all.
- rileyphone 4y ago
  Heat death is coming soon enough - now is all there is.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  what you're talking about was called the Boltzmann brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
- hilariouswhip 4y ago
  Sort of a if-everything-can-happen-it-will-happen scenario. But not what I was talking about.
amalcon 4y ago
This kind of idea tends to lead to debates on what the self even is: what is "my" consciousness? How would even a hypothetical omniscient determine that my consciousness had been "born" somewhere (and/or somewhen) else? It's a ship of theseus problem: what is the attribute that makes the consciousness "mine"? This is not to say you're wrong (by any means!). It's just to say that we'd need to have a really long discussion before getting to the part where we discuss plausibility. I actually find the concept of reincarnation fascinating -- especially temporally nonlinear versions, where e.g. a past life might happen in a future year. One's consciousness might read about historical events that it will "later" participate in. Could lead to some interesting fiction if nothing else. It unfortunately seems to take a while to get to the part that's interesting.
- drdec 4y ago
  You don't even need to get to the point where your consciousness is inhabiting other people to get into this. Today's you is different from yesterday's you and tomorrow's you - you all have different experiences and memories. The you of this moment only exists in this moment and is already gone.
  - amalcon 4y ago
    Indeed! This is another one of the fascinating paths to which this idea may lead.
  - komali2 4y ago
    I am definitely not as well read as I like here but I do think about this subject a lot and in particular I've been chewing on Time. Lately I was thinking, why don't I feel more anger right now at past me or future me? Like you say, those could be seen as different people than me. Past me made present me fat. Future me implicitly prevents me from enjoying this cake by pressuring me to do things that won't result with him also being fat. When I start work in the morning, I've been assigned a task according to the goals of past me. Why should I care what that guy wanted? I want to play Elden Ring. Ah but there's future me again, mad that he can't play Elden Ring because he had to rush to finish work I was supposed to do. Well fuck that guy, I might die of an aneurysm before his time, then none of us get to play videogames! But I don't really feel mad at past or future me because I recognize them as me and our goals are mostly consistently aligned. I'm thinking that my identity and Mind is very deeply rooted in the Time dimension, though not clear on all the implications there. I do at least feel that memory is a critical part of Mind. The continuation of my memory timeline seems most likely to be what Me is.
hkpack 4y ago
When I was thinking about the same concept, I wanted to make another leap - that everyone else is also different instances of you / me. There is actually no need to die, to “reborn”. Your consciousness can exist in multiple instances!
- weard_beard 4y ago
  Supposing the speed of light is a hard limit. How might a sufficiently advanced society explore the universe? Construct vessels from what is already there. My body is a tour guide.
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    You're a vessel between two places you've never been.
    - MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
      The mystery of The Other.
- SamPatt 4y ago
  The older I get the more I believe some version of this. It's related to empathy somehow. I think we're inherently self-centered, but that we also recognize ourselves within others, and don't desire suffering for ourselves, hence we don't desire it for others. Also I've had a few moments of something similar to deja vu in my life, except it was the realization that I was the continuation of my father's life. And I catch glimpses of this in my children (though I don't believe they're yet consciously aware of it).
  - sshine 4y ago
    > the realization that I was the continuation of my father's life I've had it a lot with friends. Realizing a part of me is them. For example, reflections on how one's body ages: The experience is always personal, but predictable and shared.
candiddevmike 4y ago
What if you don't want to be reborn into a possibly horrifying/painful/miserable existence? What is option B? An eternity of watching? At some point time has to stop, and then what, things just repeat?
- layer8 4y ago
  Why does time have to stop? How would that even work?
- User23 4y ago
  What makes you think you have optionality?
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    Getting philosophical, if there isn't an option, then you could extend that to say free will doesn't exist at all. At some point you will run out of "lives" to respawn into, at least intelligent ones.
    - komali2 4y ago
      I don't know if that tracks that lacking some optionality indicates total lack of free will. You lack infinity options compared to the ones you have but you can still make plausible arguments for free will. For example you can't teleport to Mars. You can still choose what you want on your pizza.
      - User23 4y ago
        Right. You might not be able to pick your afterlife. Atheist materialists believe that you definitely can't. Except maybe for some kind of digital upload shenanigans maybe, but I don't see how that's an afterlife and not just a copy that is its own separate entity. Christians like me believe that you have a binary option for your afterlife. Buddhists and Hindus believe that you have a continuum of options. Bear in mind I mean specifically believing that you have optionality. Socrates for example was agnostic on what happens after death, but he never indicated, at least not that I recall reading in Plato, that he thought he had a choice. Rather he thought none of the possibilities were worse than capitulating to the court.
throw7 4y ago
Maybe you were born in the mind of God?
simonsquiff 4y ago
Yes I’ve been having the same thoughts - essentially ‘reincarnation without the woo’. It starts with: why do you have a first person experience from the creature that is reading these words? Why are you not having a first person experience from the body of Elon Musk (maybe you are, hi Elon!) or a particular sparrow in the New Forest? And then, when your body dies, does that mean no more first person experiences again for ‘you’? Or, will some other creature create a first person experience for ‘you’ again (for whatever reason this current creature is creating a first person experience for ‘you’?) There is no need for a ‘woo’ part ie no memories are retained, no ‘new game+’, no element of karma. Just the concept that first person experiences may not end with death of this current creature. If this is correct - and we perhaps we should act in a way that assumes it is - what would be the implications? Many creatures have minimal agency over their experiences. Humans are different, not just with more agency of themselves but of others - at a minimal level of their family and pets and immediate connections, but wider too esp in more developed countries and moving up the influence and power in society. If you were a cow, you would look at humans and saying ‘if I was one of those I could impact this shitty situation’. Well congratulations, you are! How do you, as a first world human, use that power to mean that if you do have a first person experience from another creature, that future experience is…not utterly horrific? That idea if embraced ties all living things together. Selfishness disappears - you might literally be in anyones (or anything’s) shoes in the future, so do anything you can to not deliver horrible experiences to anything. It’s to your own benefit! But it’s also a bit of an info hazard - you don’t want to be born into an unpleasant experience, and the thought of that possibility is unsettling.
- hilariouswhip 4y ago
  Woo is merely the output of 100+ fireside retellings of a theory by someone who tried to construct a metaphysical theory without the woo.
larryfreeman 4y ago
If "consciousness" is "born" somewhere else when you die, you would still need to explain how "consciousness" is bound to a physical body while you are alive. Your view implies dualism since you are suggesting that "consciousness" is more than just the physical body. You don't need to be a Cartesian to be a dualist but you do need to be dualist if you believe that consciousness is somehow immaterial in that it can survive the body after death.

superb-owl 4y ago

IMO there’s a version of the problem that’s very solvable: define the mapping between physical and conscious states. In particular: is it one-to-one (panpsychism)? Many-to-one (materialism)? One-to-many (idealism)? We’re already finding course-grained mappings via neuroscience. All we need to do is iterate. This won’t tell us anything about the ontological nature of the mapping, any more than General Relativity tells us about the ontological nature of spacetime. But we’d be able to make and validate predictions.

gizajob 4y ago

Consult Wittgenstein

s_m_t 4y ago

Seemed to left have out the simplest explanation. Consciousness doesn't exist. Unrelated but it is a bit strange to me that a lot of (most? nearly all?) atheists believe in consciousness.

bitwize 4y ago
I was gonna say, what if consciousness is a trick of the brain? Like, we just do what we do and at every moment like Maxwell Smart our brain goes, "I meant to do that!" and so it feels like we made decisions "consciously"?
- md224 4y ago
  It's not just about conscious action but also perception, being conscious of things. I don't know how that could be a trick.
  - csantini 4y ago
    I suspect that's a trick, too. I speculate that as soon as you get a digital mind sophisticated enough to model the world and itself, you soon must force the system to identify with the system at every cycle. Otherwise you could identify with a tree, or the wall, or happily cut parts of yourself. Pain is not painful if you don't identify with the receiver of pain. Thus I think you can have unconscious smart minds, but not unconscious minds that make decisions in favour of themselves. Because they can identify with the whole room, or with the whole solar system for what matters. Would you even plan how to survive if you don't have a constant spell that tricks you into thinking you're the actor in charge? that's consciousness.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      A lot of the things going on with ChatGPT make me wonder if AI is actually very limited in its intelligence growth by not having sensory organs/devices the same way a body does. Having a body that you must keep alive enforces a feedback loop of permanence. If I eat my cake, I no longer have it and must get another cake if I want to eat cake again. Of course in the human sense if we don't want to starve we must continue to find new sources of calories. This is engrained into our intelligence as a survival mechanism. If you tell ChatGPT it has a cake in its left hand, and then it eats the cake, you could very well get an answer like the cake is still in its left hand. We keep the power line constantly plugged into ChatGPT, for it the cake is never ending and there is no concept of death. Of course for humans there are plenty of ways to break consciousness in one way or another. Eat the extract of certain cactuses and you may end up walking around thinking that you are a tree. Our idea and perception of consciousness is easily interrupted by drugs. Once we start thinking outside of our survival its really easy for us to have very faulty thoughts that can lead to dangerous situations, hence in a lot of dangerous work we develop processes to take thought out of the situation, hence behaving more like machines.

andrewflnr 4y ago

Also known as the Hard Problem of Consciousness... right? Which I would assume this author can't have escaped hearing about. Don't get me wrong, it's a very solid explainer on why the Hard Problem is Hard, but it's weird to not see that term.

dbrueck 4y ago

I can't decide if the font makes me angry or not.

smeej 4y ago
Angry's not the word for me. It annoys me just enough that I can't keep reading long enough to get to the interesting part. And based on the comments, I don't think anyone else has either.
- cdot2 4y ago
  I actually really like the font.
threatofrain 4y ago
Turn on readability mode, which is built into browsers like Firefox and Safari.

jbandela1 4y ago

> But allow me to play angel's advocate. Perhaps the brain is just like RAM on which consciousness in this world needs to run, whereas the soul, which exists elsewhere, contains a hard drive that stores all the data and a processor that makes certain decisions; so that even if the RAM is destroyed, the hard drive and processor persist, but the machine in this world stops working properly. If you are going to frame it that way, a much better analogy is that the soul is software and the brain/body is hardware.

bee_rider 4y ago
I don’t really get the analogy anyway. What are we supposed to have some eternal hard drive that persists after our deaths, but which we can’t access while interacting with the physical universe? Maybe it is just /dev/null, we can’t tell the difference.
danwills 4y ago
I think there are some interesting parallels here with Michael Levin's group's work where they also make the hardware/software analogy. Genes/DNA are said to build The 'hardware', that a bioelectric 'software' runs on. A key part of the discovery is that it's not just neurons that form bioelectric networks of cells (via gap junctions etc), even single-celled organisms (in biofilms etc) do it too!
roywiggins 4y ago
If it were true, it would be in principle testable, because particles inside our brains would have to behave contrary to the known laws of physics in order to be influenced by the soul.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

I ascribe to the idea that we have no true self, that consciousness is an illusory tool of the subconscious mind, which is a manifestation of the internal processes of the brain. The consciousness and feelings and senses we experience are second order effects of those processes. This can be easily observed through meditation and building the ability to exist without conscious thought arising, but being able to fully live life without it. It maps closely to a modern interpretation of Buddhism. The rest of Buddhism is how to exist in that state without suffering, which requires you to manifest a fundamental desire to build community and be helpful without exploitation. This makes sense because we are animals evolved to build communities and be helpful, and when we don’t despite immediate perverse pleasure that state dissipates leaving a suffering. The process of being a community mammal and the places those desires stem from a self reinforcing ways of building happiness by experiencing states our meat heads reward us for not just now but in an ongoing sense. I find it sort of hard to find flaw in this construction of mind body, and it seems a simpler structure than all the non sense of sense particles and soul organs.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
komali2 4y ago
Isn't an important aspect of Buddhist philosophy the inescapable nature of suffering in life? That it shouldn't necessarily be avoided? So why is existing in that state "without suffering" necessary? I do like that your idea has space for focusing on community building.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  There are two types of suffering in Buddhism, physical and suffering that arises from ignorance and attachment. The entire point of the Buddhist philosophy is the cessation of the second type of suffering. Enlightenment or nirvana is a state free of suffering and is the goal. It comes with an idea of escape from the cycle of birth and death, which is often construed to be mystical but is more an escape from the attachment of meaning to birth and death, along with entanglement in thought and emotion, pleasure, avoidance of pain, etc. This state doesn’t a lack of emotion, including negative ones or a lack of unpleasantness, but a lack of anxiety, depression, rumination, and the variety of other ways we torture ourselves with. But no, escape of suffering is exactly the point. The premise is the unenlightened life can’t escape suffering, but there is a path, which Buddha compiled and taught from the Indian mystics of his day into a highly structured practice with exhaustive documentation on the detailed nuances of the human experience with a direct description of how to become enlightened through the practice of meditation, specifically vipassana, and teachings of how suffering arises and what motivations to cultivate to achieve release. Edit: forgot to note the first type of physical suffering becomes merely unpleasant once you release your attachment to not feeling unpleasant and can accept it as part of the ever changing nature of reality and a fundamental acceptance of impermanence- that this too shall pass and the pleasant ends the same as the unpleasant and there are not naturally superior states

danbruc 4y ago

Unless I am getting totally fooled, my mind is influenced by the physical world and influences it in return. So there is a two way interaction between minds and the physical world, on which physics has a pretty good grip. Given the complexity of humans it will certainly not be an easy endeavor but at least it seems not hopeless right from the beginning. Then on the other hand our inability to make sense of quantum mechanics makes me wonder if our grip on reality is actually that good.

zerodensity 4y ago
I mean they have the math down it's the interpretation (and for us mortals the math) that's causing all the confusion. Particles behave non-locally which is really really not cool :(. From that you only have a bad list of options to choose from... Do you go for non-local hidden variables Multiverse spawning photons Super determinism More dimensions perhaps? Maybe the problem goes away if you have 11

Kim_Bruning 4y ago

I was just pointing out the other day that emergence is not magic. It's just the complementary operation to reduction. [1] More concrete: If we take a human brain apart, we end up with neurons and glia cells, (and a bunch of supporting cast). These all consist of phospholipids, proteins, and nucleic acids (and some more supporting cast). These then all consist of atoms, which consist of quantum particles. No matter how much we look around, that's all that we find in the brain. This is a reductive approach. If you do reduction, it's like you're differentiating a formula where you keep losing terms on the right hand side. At every reduction step something similar happens: you are losing information about how your parts are organized. When you integrate, the terms you differentiated out before will show up again. What sort of magic is this, you ask? There is no magic, those terms were there before. Now that you're doing the opposite (complementary) operation, they're coming back. So by reducing the brain down, we didn't find any singular component that provides consciousness or thought or any such thing. Having eliminated those, whatever remains must be the truth. But what remains? The only thing that we've missed is the information that we threw out when we were doing reduction. Apparently consciousness and thought and image recognition and pain and feelings must arise from the organization of the components. This is what is called the "emergent properties". * You can try the same operation with reducing a game computer down to single transistors. You'll find that this is insufficient to explain how Mario works. You need to look at how the transistors are organized into gates, and how the gates are organized to form memory and instructions, and then how those in turn can be used to execute programs. [2] * Another similar experiment might be to try to find out what makes a watch tick. You can certainly take it apart, but at the end of the day you are left with a pile of parts that definitely don't tick anymore. You have to put them back together in a very specific way to ultimately recover the emergent property: ticking. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34619834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34619834 [2] Inspired by https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

buildsjets 4y ago
It's interesting to ponder how those quantum particles which make up a brain might be entangled with other particles elsewhere or elsewhen in this or other universes. Consider that the appearance of Walter Cronkite on an old-school OTA television screen is not an emergent property of a television. You can disassemble it, inspect it, find no miniature Cronkite inside, reassemble it with the same organization, plug it in, and get nothing but static. You don't get Cronkite until the CBS evening news is broadcast, and the television is powered on, working correctly, and tuned to the right frequency.

tasty_freeze 4y ago

I'm a materialist, and believe consciousness is an emergent property. The essay writer was pretty rudely dismissive of the idea, mocking it as if people who hold that stance think the words "emergent property" is all that needs to be said. It is "just a magic word to cover over something no one understands." That completely ignores that there are thousands of researchers of various stripes who are are digging into the specifics and aren't simply saying, "Aha, it is emergent and our work is done here." Another problem with the essay is that the term "consciousness" needs to be defined before discussing it, as different people take that word to mean different things. Finally, I think it is important to appreciate just what a facade our consciousness is. It is a veneer that works well most of the time, but if it is probed too deeply one discovers what a hodge-podge it really is. Optical illusions are one window into seeing that our perceptions are often pretty shallow. Reading Oliver Sacks' book, "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" 30 years ago was an eye-opener for me. It is filled with case studies of people who have suffered some localized failure of their brain, typically due to a stroke or physical trauma, but were otherwise normal. The deficits were stunning and revealing. To give one example, there was the case of someone with Capgras Syndrome, a situation where their emotional response to the subject's parents had gone silent. In every other way the subject was normal and of typical intelligence. Although they could say logically it makes no sense, their explanation for the loss of emotional affect seeing his parents was that they had been replaced by visually perfect doppelgangers. Having a ridiculous explanation for their emotional response apparently was more "energy minimizing" in their worldview than accepting the clinical explanation. Sometimes Capgras Syndrom turns inward and is called Cotard's syndrome, where the subject believes they are dead despite all evidence to the contrary. The point is, our consciousness is a jumble of heuristics we use to navigate the world. It doesn't take some mystical detached consciousness that somehow violates the laws of physics to steer or corporeal bodies to carry out the will of the consciousness.

kurthr 4y ago
I hold similar opinions. I find even the flaws that the latest attention based language models have to be interesting in the way they fail... by lying, making stuff up, and stating BS with certainty. Ask why they answer the way they do and it's more confident truthy sounding gibberish. That doesn't make these conscious by any measure, but it rhymes. Were only so much rational animals, but fully rationalizing ones.

GuB-42 4y ago

For me the idea is simply that the mind/body problem is not a scientific problem and "solving" it using scientific methods is impossible, but it doesn't mean it can't be "solved" by other means, typically religion. The only thing science can do is watch for exterior manifestations, and define a set of things that say "yup, that thing is conscious" in a way that can help make predictions. For example, I am the only being I know who can experience consciousness, so I can define consciousness as "being me", but it is useless, there is nothing of value in that definition. But there are plenty of other beings who look a lot like me, act like me, etc... (other humans), I think it is fair to consider them as conscious, that's better, but still, what predictions can we make of that? It is just a definition, we need rules of the kind "this thing can do X, therefore it is conscious, therefore it can also do Y", these rules have to be experimentally verifiable, or at least, falsifiable. The "advantage" of the mind/body problem not being scientific is that you can believe what you want and it won't contradict science. Think you have an immortal soul that will go to heaven after you die, as long as your soul and heaven are not observable physical objects, as far as science goes, that's fine, and so are all the other proposed solutions.

chatterhead 4y ago

Our bodies are formed by waves in all ways; even those of natural survival are formed by waves - our bodies respond like plants to light we just don't think of ourselves as photosynthetic in that way. The human eye is the greatest overall seeing object on the planet and it is 100% formed by wave information. Consciousness is a wave. There is no soul. Matter is metaphor there is no difference only how we perceive solidity; which is simply scale.

tduberne 4y ago

For anyone interested in those topics, I can really recommend the report of the Galileo commission: https://galileocommission.org/report/ https://galileocommission.org/report/ It is a report from a number of established scientists and philosophers, which questions the assumption that science is necessarily materialistic. It is a very thorough summary of centuries of scientific evolution, and of the place of background assumptions, whatever they are.

naasking 4y ago

If you want a real neuroscientific approach to consciousness instead of the idealism-woo in the article, I recommend the following paper: A conceptual framework for consciousness, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119

MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/41/10/2076.full.pdf&source=gmail&ust=1675581562178000&usg=AOvVaw3tqSrojnHKuRjS0OnzFdez https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.jneurosci.org/conte...
throw2500 4y ago
Another one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

smallnix 4y ago

> [...] the least plausible theories may turn out to be the correct ones It might seem pendantic, but I believe it's always worth the time to replace "correct" with "better models" in such descriptions. Not doing it muddies the water and some folks might start to believe today's scientific models are "correct". Not professional scientists, but laymen like me.

oslac 4y ago

Materialists can be made to admit to metaphysics they do not profess to believe in probably less than 30 seconds. It is not a very serious outlook.

renox 4y ago

While the first part is interesting, the second part is poor. As tasty_freeze said, we have 'experiments' on mind/body: the description of the various cerebral issues linked to brain damages. Also I remember about the 'out of body' feeling can be artificially triggered ( https://www.nature.com/articles/news020916-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/news020916-8 ), so we can use this to test if this is just an illusion or a kind of 'superpower' (put a colored paper in an 'unviewable' part of the room before triggering the OOB)

majikaja 4y ago

It's hard to take any opinion on the subject seriously when it could potentially be coming from a p-zombie.

robinduckett 4y ago

If we can use rocks to make calculators I’m really not sure why there’s such a hard argument to make the soul something metaphysical. I believe we have consciousness as an accidental byproduct of survival. We could just as easily lose it and become cattle given enough time.

thisismyswamp 4y ago
bold to assume cattle have no "soul"

gtsop 4y ago

It's 2023 and we are still having this discussion because of mainstream flawed philosophy shoved in our throats every single day. Matter, in the philosophical sence, is not to be confused whith the concept of mass in physics. The philosophical concept of matter encompases everything that exists (indepedent of individual experience). Existence != mass (eg light). Critiquing the "emergencene" of conciousness from matter as a leap of logic is like saying it's a logical leap to talk of breathing as a emergent property of the respiratory system. Breathing is not a "thing" you can touch, but i bet you, you'll get into some very big trouble if you stop doing it. Better to think of it as a process. We can agree that processes are real, yet don't consist of mas. Same goes for consiousness. And the same goes for a gazillion things that are very very real, but do not fit into the mental bucket of holding some mass with your hands

raoof 4y ago

consciousness is equivalent to the halting function h(p,n) where p is a physical process and n is time, we know how to turn a physical process into a virtual process but we don't know how to turn consciousness itself into a virtual process

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago

The thing is - there is evidence, but it's ignored or dismissed. In physics it's absolutely heretical and career-ending to consider that materialism may not be an ultimate and definitive truth. Or - much worse - that metaphysical experiences are actually relatively common. For example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26299061/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26299061/ In reality a significant proportion of kids have these experiences. They don't last long, but they're not at all rare. And sometimes they appear to be historically verifiable - not just in an "Someone told me or I read that in a book way", which may well apply to some, but in a "There's no credible way a child could have known this" way. Ignoring this is actually quite unscientific. It would be one thing to research them to try to find an explanation, if only for possible therapeutic reasons. But when they're largely ignored it's a tell that they're not being approached honestly or objectively.

tsukikage 4y ago

People seem to have a real issue with the idea that things are made of other things. I have a piece of cake in front of me. It is made of flour and sugar and egg; or, carbon and hydrogen and oxygen; or, quantum probability amplitudes in spacetime, depending on how far down the levels of abstraction you want to dig. The cake is no less real for all of this. I assure you, the cake exists. Not a lie. I have a conscious mind. It is made of a pattern of electrical signals moving around a complex network of cells; or, if you go down the levels of abstraction, much the same sort of bits as the cake, but in a rather different arrangement. The fact that we have some tiny bits of slowly growing knowledge about what our minds are made of does not make our minds any less real. Just like the cake. We don't need to posit separate magical entities to be minds for us. It's OK for them to be made of what we can see. They won't go away.

MacsHeadroom 4y ago
I assure you the cake you think exists is a lie. It is made of the same stuff as cake in your dreams, the stuff of your mind creating a useful illusion.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
The cake only exists as an abstraction created by the mind though. The universe has no conception of what a cake is and indeed even the human conception is a fuzzy heuristic. Self is the same. It exists as an abstraction the mind uses to make sense of and operate in the universe, but the more closely you examine it, the tighter you try to define it, the more nebulous and illusory you will discover it to be.
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- pksebben 4y ago
  came to the comments to say something like this. What the author completely glossed over was the definition of consciousness, which I think puts most of the rest of the post on shaky footing. If we define consciousness broadly enough to be a relevant term in all those scenarios, it would have to be something like "that thing that does thinking and self reflection that the reader has and observes evidence of in others". Like you say, attempting to define it makes it get all kinds of slippery. What do you include? memories? experiences? social connections? what is "thinking"? - if it's "information processing with some reflection" then isn't there a kind of consciousness in a society? a computer network? a star system? I really like the ship of Theseus for this one. it's a great way to examine where the concept begins to get really leaky.

simple-thoughts 4y ago

The author is pretty flippant. Philosophy has advanced a lot since Hume. It’s impossible to verify empirical evidence without a subject that has a built in model to intepret the data with (AB->AB->A? To quote Hume via Deleuze’s commentary on the repetition A->A->?? You must have a built in mental model to predict the next character in series). Furthermore we also know from Kant that there is “a priori transcendental knowledge” which is knowledge that has to be true in order for their to even be a subject in the first place. So no, it’s not correct that statements about the mind/body problem such as that the mind is “emergent” cannot be proven true or false, although admittedly a more precise definition of emergence is needed to say anything about it.

morpheos137 4y ago
I have never really understood the debate about mind / body or material vs spirit. They are two sides of the same coin. At least to me that is how it appears. Your mind is your brain in operation. Physics is Nature in operation. Nature is Spirit (or information, if you prefer) in operation. Matter / energy is certainly an illusion or at least limited perception framed by mind because that is the only way we perceive it but that does not make it any less real. In the modern age we know the rules of physics pretty well but that does not mean that that is all that there is or that matter is something more real than thought. After all there is a strong case to be made that matter and energy in the physical universe is an emergent property of a larger mind. As above so below. I personally do not find these debates to be interesting or resolvable. It is really just like philosophical navel gazing. Fundamentally what is real is what happens. Your mind may wholly arise from matter but that same matter arises from a network of causes preceding it. Are causes material or an arrangement of information? At the end of the day when does it matter?
- simple-thoughts 4y ago
  The reason for the debate: Humans evolved to survive by using heuristics. Believing there are objects “out there” that are distinct from the self is an evolutionary adaptation. Believing in a material reality is adaptive for reproduction. But on the other hand, seeing that there is an illusion allows the exercise of power by those who understand over those who don’t. As a concrete example: someone who believes a can of Coca Cola is a “material object” that is seperate from the self has power exercised over them by marketers who understand it is an “ideal object” that exists within the self and can thus use material mediums to influence selfs for profit. Following that logic further leads to a revisitation of materialism through idealism ala Marx in German Ideology (it’s all in your mind, so try breathing underwater). Where material is formed through idealisms of power. Of course that itself is just another trick to gain power via appealing to the proles to give authority to managers. Etc etc etc…

m3kw9 4y ago

We need to ask the right questions: Why am I experiencing this person right here instead of another person in a different place? What mechanism trigger me to feel me? At what point in the conception does consciousness start, or does consciousness contain a range anywhere between 0-1? What is the selection mechanism? Is a mouse as conscious as we are? Or are they less conscious because they don’t ask these questions? Is a cell conscious or just less conscious than a mouse because it is purely reactionary? Is a fetus conscious? Is an embryo conscious? Is the very first neurons from an embryo conscious?

amatecha 4y ago
> Why am I experiencing this person right here instead of another person in a different place? One of my earliest memories was experiencing that question - as I laid in my crib, too young to yet know language. It was terrifying to me and I was so disturbed by the confusion of not knowing why I was who I was, and why I was experiencing things from "my" perspective as opposed to that of another person. Thoughts and questions around that subject have "haunted" me since. Though, I've generally "accepted" that my consciousness and experiential reality is an emergent result of the complex mechanisms of my brain and sensory input, and my sense of self is essentially an "illusion" of sorts. When I die (or am severely incapacitated/maimed), that's all gone. Thus far my experiences in life have supported this stance and made that perspective of mine more solidified. Unfortunately no experiences have worked against that belief thus far.

m3kw9 4y ago

Are we more conscious because we are asking why we are conscious? A bug with a simple brain less conscious because it’s more reactionary and doesn’t ponder? Is a baby less conscious for the same reason because it is purely reactionary to survival? What about a plant? From these questions, it can be deduced that consciousness is a function of complexity and orderly complexity, not just chaotic complexity. The more complex our thoughts the more conscious we are about or existence. This is my version of Occam’s razor

codingtest 4y ago

In my opinion it's a relative thing. Consciousness/soul is a quasiparticle relative to physical world. In a crystal structures, there are quasiparticles, for example a phonon that is just quanta of motion, or a hole in semiconductor, thay is just an empty place where electron can be. Despite those things not being actually "real" in physical sense, we can use same equations and principles as with real particles to describe such things. A hole cant exist outside of semiconductor crystal grid. And now imagine that all particles we consider real and physical exist too as sort of quasiparticles in some other medium. Consciousness is a same thing, its very complex oscillation/computation/information, to physical world it's same as a hole in semiconductor. If you split semiconductor crystal to atoms there wont be any holes, but in a semiconductor they exist because of properties of material as a whole. In same way consciousness exist in physical world in any medium that allows enough computation for consciousness to manifest. Fun part is a relativity aspect of reality. Imagine a beings made from a holes in semiconductor, they would study their universe and for them their particles would be real, and crystal grid of semiconductor itself would be some sort of space where their particles exist. Particles would be real, and space would be just space with specific properties. But to outside observer in our universe such beings would be made of oscillations in a chunk of semiconductor in our lab, and what they consider empty space would be a semiconductor particles for us, completely real to us while empty for hypothetic beings made of holes and phonons. And our universe is the same. Materialists just consider usual observable particles as real ones, and everything else as emergent property. In my opinion being emergent property is a relative thing and there is no reason to assume one realty more real in general than another, things are more real or less real depending on observer position relative to them. Consciousness is an emergent property of medium supporting complex computation, but at same time medium is an emergent property of consciousness. It's a same thing, there is only consciousness, in different forms of itself. Like electric and magnetic fields, that emerge from each other, but are same thing, and which one is observed depends on reference system of observer. In hypothetical example of beings made of holes in a semiconductor in a lab, what happens if we blast semiconductor to atoms? If one will assume that our lab where semiconductor was is a real reality, then that universe of quasipaeticles is now destroyed with the medium they were in. But those weren't even real particles from our perspective. And from perspective of those beings inside semiconductor reality outside never existed too, so how it can destroy their universe? What really happened is that by destroying that piece of semiconductor two realities disentangled and cant longer interact, but hypothetic beings made of holes may exist in any other universe with semiconductors, sort of creating medium for themselves. So after physical body dies, consciousness can't be observed from here, but it will exist, in other forms. Physical body is a computation, just a process, emergent property of reality, and consciousness is a process, there is no reason to assume one process is more basic and real than another. World exists because of consciousness and consciousness exists because of world, there is no difference between two. This view can't be proved in materialist sense, its unfalsifiable, so feel free to call it nonsense.

larryfreeman 4y ago

Mathematics does quite fine without a way to empirically verify. Many problems are insoluble solely because we have not approached the issue with the proper fundamental concepts clearly defined. Euclid's gift to the world was not so much the invention of a new mathematics as the invention of a new foundation to the existing mathematics with his clear and precise definitions organized into theorems justified by logical proofs.