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I am a radical materialist and hold that consciousness is an inherent property of material. Because if if I held the belief some kinds material have consciousn

I am a radical materialist and hold that consciousness is an inherent property of material. Because if if I held the belief some kinds material have consciousness and other kinds of material don’t, I would - via calling a tail a leg doesn’t give a horse five legs logic - actually be a dualist no matter how loudly I might proclaim otherwise. Though for what it is worth (i.e. little, nothing, or less than either), I don’t have an issue with dualism because it is not an issue worth having, and both materialism and dualism are almost certainly incorrect owing to the inevitability of human fallibility. Ymmv, but that’s only to be expected.

jeremyjh 4y ago
Consciousness is computation. Any substratum that can be interpreted as computation is capable of being conscious.
- brookst 4y ago
  Are calculators conscious? GPT? Or am I misinterpreting “substratum”? I’ll admit I’m not clear on what you mean by it.
  - naasking 4y ago
    Not the OP, but such systems might be conscious in some sense. Hard to say without an actual mechanistic understanding of consciousness. We can characterize a sorting algorithm by an ordering property, but we just don't know the properties of consciousness.
    - brookst 4y ago
      Fair, and of course our colloquial understanding of “consciousness” varies. But I think most of us root consciousness in something like reflection / theory of mind, and I am highly skeptical that a calculator even remotely touches on that.
      - naasking 4y ago
        "Reflection" or "theory of mind" are still incredibly vague. We need something like this to build a formal model: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 Some existing ML have models of attention, so they might be conscious? But maybe it's not the same kind of attention that produces consciousness? It's all still very murky.
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    I didn't say calculation is always consciousness. By substratum I just mean any physical system that can hold and transform structures to represent computation. Silicon chips apply; an abacus doesn't by itself but with a manipulator following a set of a rules even that system could be conscious , though it might take millions of years to perform enough calculation to constitute a thought.
- adrianN 4y ago
  Computation is similarly hard to define as consciousness. That's the road to giving rocks some degree of consciousness. Which is fine, I suppose.
  - naasking 4y ago
    On the road but nowhere near it. Rocks can't learn anything and then act differently based on what they've learned. Basically, they have no identity or internal state. It's like the difference between an immutable record and an object with identity. Identity is a necessary but insufficient property for consciousness, rocks don't have a meaningful sense of identity so they're not conscious.
naasking 4y ago
> Because if if I held the belief some kinds material have consciousness and other kinds of material don’t, I would - via calling a tail a leg doesn’t give a horse five legs logic - actually be a dualist no matter how loudly I might proclaim otherwise. So are you a vitalist too then?
visarga 4y ago
> ... some kinds material have consciousness and other kinds of material don’t... Why are you only judging by kind of material - in other words the composition of the agent? Maybe what is missing is context, all that is around the agent. What consciousness needs is a feedback loop, a demanding environment, an internal goal, ability to learn and self replicate. The first three depend on the outside and only the last two on the inside. Others have discusses about consciousness needing the 5E's: Embodied, Embedded, Extended and Enacted in the Environment.
- brudgers 4y ago
  Maybe what is missing is context, all that is around the agent. I swallow a pebble. All the context that surrounds me, surrounds the pebble. Thus the pebble is conscious whenever I am. Sure you could object that being inside me is an entirely different context. And maybe you will argue the pebble’s context was different than mine in a way that precluded consciousness as I stood before it, as I grasped it with my fingers, and held it on my tongue. All this careful arrangement of the universe fills the logical necessity of a god in Cartesian style dualisms.

jeremyjh 4y ago

Consciousness is computation. Any substratum that can be interpreted as computation is capable of being conscious.

brookst 4y ago
Are calculators conscious? GPT? Or am I misinterpreting “substratum”? I’ll admit I’m not clear on what you mean by it.
- naasking 4y ago
  Not the OP, but such systems might be conscious in some sense. Hard to say without an actual mechanistic understanding of consciousness. We can characterize a sorting algorithm by an ordering property, but we just don't know the properties of consciousness.
  - brookst 4y ago
    Fair, and of course our colloquial understanding of “consciousness” varies. But I think most of us root consciousness in something like reflection / theory of mind, and I am highly skeptical that a calculator even remotely touches on that.
    - naasking 4y ago
      "Reflection" or "theory of mind" are still incredibly vague. We need something like this to build a formal model: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 Some existing ML have models of attention, so they might be conscious? But maybe it's not the same kind of attention that produces consciousness? It's all still very murky.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  I didn't say calculation is always consciousness. By substratum I just mean any physical system that can hold and transform structures to represent computation. Silicon chips apply; an abacus doesn't by itself but with a manipulator following a set of a rules even that system could be conscious , though it might take millions of years to perform enough calculation to constitute a thought.
adrianN 4y ago
Computation is similarly hard to define as consciousness. That's the road to giving rocks some degree of consciousness. Which is fine, I suppose.
- naasking 4y ago
  On the road but nowhere near it. Rocks can't learn anything and then act differently based on what they've learned. Basically, they have no identity or internal state. It's like the difference between an immutable record and an object with identity. Identity is a necessary but insufficient property for consciousness, rocks don't have a meaningful sense of identity so they're not conscious.

naasking 4y ago

> Because if if I held the belief some kinds material have consciousness and other kinds of material don’t, I would - via calling a tail a leg doesn’t give a horse five legs logic - actually be a dualist no matter how loudly I might proclaim otherwise. So are you a vitalist too then?

visarga 4y ago

> ... some kinds material have consciousness and other kinds of material don’t... Why are you only judging by kind of material - in other words the composition of the agent? Maybe what is missing is context, all that is around the agent. What consciousness needs is a feedback loop, a demanding environment, an internal goal, ability to learn and self replicate. The first three depend on the outside and only the last two on the inside. Others have discusses about consciousness needing the 5E's: Embodied, Embedded, Extended and Enacted in the Environment.

brudgers 4y ago
Maybe what is missing is context, all that is around the agent. I swallow a pebble. All the context that surrounds me, surrounds the pebble. Thus the pebble is conscious whenever I am. Sure you could object that being inside me is an entirely different context. And maybe you will argue the pebble’s context was different than mine in a way that precluded consciousness as I stood before it, as I grasped it with my fingers, and held it on my tongue. All this careful arrangement of the universe fills the logical necessity of a god in Cartesian style dualisms.