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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 e

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.
- cosmojg 4y ago
  "I am a strange loop." — Douglas Hofstadter See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
kar5pt 4y ago
The cake analogy works for the brain, not the mind. The brain is the abstract unification of all your neurons and electrical impulses into a single entity. The mind is...well...it's difficult to define exactly what the mind is, but it's related your experiences and is clearly a completely different kind of thing than the physical hunk of meat between your ears. Your cake analogy side-steps the mind-body problem by conflating the mind with the brain.
- kirkules 4y ago
  It never ceases to amuse me how confidently "it's difficult to define" and "clearly it's this way" can appear in the same thought/sentence about the mind.
  - kar5pt 4y ago
    Yes. Something can be difficult to define exactly, yet also have clearly recognizable features. You haven't thought about it very hard if this "amuses you".
    - kirkules 4y ago
      No, you dohave a valid list of features you want to group together, but attaching them to a word you have not clearly defined -- especially in this incredibly fraught case -- is just confusing you. If you haven't decided on a definition, you can't agree on a definition with anyone you are conversing with, and you will just talk past everyone. That is how this topic usually goes. There's not some objectively true definition or there that you are homing in on with your intuited features.
- tsukikage 4y ago
  The mind is software that your brain runs. Whatever else software is, it is also an actual physical pattern of states of the substrate it is running on, and this pattern is sufficient to explain everything it does. I can’t tell you precisely which patterns of doped silicon and electric charges combine to make the software I am using to type this. Someone with an electron microscope, a clean room and a large jug of fuming nitric acid could have a go finding out; they could literally read out the software, because although a useful abstraction, it consists of a pattern of physical, observable entities and effects. Security researchers looking to extract codes from secure chips do exactly this, though for even slightly complex things the amount of work involved in reverse engineering this way is beyond what a single human can accomplish. This lack of knowledge on my part, though, does not make the software nonexistent, and complete understanding wouldn’t render it illusory either; it’s still a useful label to apply to a part of the world that actually exists. We don’t need to posit any kind of ghost or homunculus or tsukumogami or soul to explain my ipad: what there physically is is enough. I can’t tell you precisely what combinations of charges and patterns of neural connectivity combine to make a mind. People with large surgery rooms, implants and scanning electron microscopes are working on exactly this problem, and each day learn a little more, though there is too much complexity for even a large group of people to grasp in their lifetimes. Neither the knowledge nor the lack of it alters how minds work. We don’t need to posit an external entity to explain the mind: what there physically is in the body is enough, and knowing how it works won’t make it go away. (We could use “soul” to refer to the abstraction I describe above, I guess, like we use “software” for patterns of electric charge and magnetised rust. The word carries enough baggage and assumptions, though, to make it much worse than useless for the purpose - it’s like using “God” to mean literally the planet Earth: the framing is so utterly pointless that no-one ever does that unless trying to obfuscate and smuggle unsupported concepts into the discussion for a later bait+switch.)
harha_ 4y ago
I have a really hard time grasping what consciousness truly is. Why is it so that our brain processing information the way it does it causes us to experience the world around us. Who am I to be born in here, to experience my life, what makes the matter that constructs my brain "special" to manifest this consciousness? After all it's just information being processed using certain molecular structures, how does it differ from any other kind of information processing system, eg. a computer.
- hnfong 4y ago
  You posed lots of questions that I don't know the answer to, but I can comment on these: > what makes the matter that constructs my brain "special" to manifest this consciousness? > how does it differ from any other kind of information processing system, eg. a computer. Maybe entertain the idea that your brain is not special, and your computer has a consciousness too? Not human consciousness, but some kind of different consciousness. Ancient spiritual teachings have claimed that everything in nature has a consciousness or at least a "spirit". There's no reason why something as complex as a modern computer (esp. with software) wouldn't have one. On the other side, you could take the stance that nothing is conscious at all (except perhaps you yourself), and every human is just a zombie-like automaton. After all, there's no hard evidence that other people are conscious except that we all look the same (or similar enough) from the outside.
  - yomly 4y ago
    emergent behaviour in complex systems is still reasonably simple, (eg OpenOffice won't print on a Tuesday [0] or moving my mouse makes Windows faster [1]) but maybe that makes it easier for us to appreciate how behaviour can emerge from distal properties interacting in a system. LLMs like ChatGPT will bring this to a whole new level. I'm not insinuating that ChatGPT is conscious but I think it definitely advances discussions on what you are calling a "spirit" [0] https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html [1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why-did-moving-the-mouse-cursor-cause-windows-95-to-run-more-quickly https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...

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.
cosmojg 4y ago
"I am a strange loop." — Douglas Hofstadter See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop

kar5pt 4y ago

The cake analogy works for the brain, not the mind. The brain is the abstract unification of all your neurons and electrical impulses into a single entity. The mind is...well...it's difficult to define exactly what the mind is, but it's related your experiences and is clearly a completely different kind of thing than the physical hunk of meat between your ears. Your cake analogy side-steps the mind-body problem by conflating the mind with the brain.

kirkules 4y ago
It never ceases to amuse me how confidently "it's difficult to define" and "clearly it's this way" can appear in the same thought/sentence about the mind.
- kar5pt 4y ago
  Yes. Something can be difficult to define exactly, yet also have clearly recognizable features. You haven't thought about it very hard if this "amuses you".
  - kirkules 4y ago
    No, you dohave a valid list of features you want to group together, but attaching them to a word you have not clearly defined -- especially in this incredibly fraught case -- is just confusing you. If you haven't decided on a definition, you can't agree on a definition with anyone you are conversing with, and you will just talk past everyone. That is how this topic usually goes. There's not some objectively true definition or there that you are homing in on with your intuited features.
tsukikage 4y ago
The mind is software that your brain runs. Whatever else software is, it is also an actual physical pattern of states of the substrate it is running on, and this pattern is sufficient to explain everything it does. I can’t tell you precisely which patterns of doped silicon and electric charges combine to make the software I am using to type this. Someone with an electron microscope, a clean room and a large jug of fuming nitric acid could have a go finding out; they could literally read out the software, because although a useful abstraction, it consists of a pattern of physical, observable entities and effects. Security researchers looking to extract codes from secure chips do exactly this, though for even slightly complex things the amount of work involved in reverse engineering this way is beyond what a single human can accomplish. This lack of knowledge on my part, though, does not make the software nonexistent, and complete understanding wouldn’t render it illusory either; it’s still a useful label to apply to a part of the world that actually exists. We don’t need to posit any kind of ghost or homunculus or tsukumogami or soul to explain my ipad: what there physically is is enough. I can’t tell you precisely what combinations of charges and patterns of neural connectivity combine to make a mind. People with large surgery rooms, implants and scanning electron microscopes are working on exactly this problem, and each day learn a little more, though there is too much complexity for even a large group of people to grasp in their lifetimes. Neither the knowledge nor the lack of it alters how minds work. We don’t need to posit an external entity to explain the mind: what there physically is in the body is enough, and knowing how it works won’t make it go away. (We could use “soul” to refer to the abstraction I describe above, I guess, like we use “software” for patterns of electric charge and magnetised rust. The word carries enough baggage and assumptions, though, to make it much worse than useless for the purpose - it’s like using “God” to mean literally the planet Earth: the framing is so utterly pointless that no-one ever does that unless trying to obfuscate and smuggle unsupported concepts into the discussion for a later bait+switch.)

harha_ 4y ago

I have a really hard time grasping what consciousness truly is. Why is it so that our brain processing information the way it does it causes us to experience the world around us. Who am I to be born in here, to experience my life, what makes the matter that constructs my brain "special" to manifest this consciousness? After all it's just information being processed using certain molecular structures, how does it differ from any other kind of information processing system, eg. a computer.

hnfong 4y ago
You posed lots of questions that I don't know the answer to, but I can comment on these: > what makes the matter that constructs my brain "special" to manifest this consciousness? > how does it differ from any other kind of information processing system, eg. a computer. Maybe entertain the idea that your brain is not special, and your computer has a consciousness too? Not human consciousness, but some kind of different consciousness. Ancient spiritual teachings have claimed that everything in nature has a consciousness or at least a "spirit". There's no reason why something as complex as a modern computer (esp. with software) wouldn't have one. On the other side, you could take the stance that nothing is conscious at all (except perhaps you yourself), and every human is just a zombie-like automaton. After all, there's no hard evidence that other people are conscious except that we all look the same (or similar enough) from the outside.
- yomly 4y ago
  emergent behaviour in complex systems is still reasonably simple, (eg OpenOffice won't print on a Tuesday [0] or moving my mouse makes Windows faster [1]) but maybe that makes it easier for us to appreciate how behaviour can emerge from distal properties interacting in a system. LLMs like ChatGPT will bring this to a whole new level. I'm not insinuating that ChatGPT is conscious but I think it definitely advances discussions on what you are calling a "spirit" [0] https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html [1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why-did-moving-the-mouse-cursor-cause-windows-95-to-run-more-quickly https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...