4 ms·

But physics isn't a full description of reality. It certainly hasn't conquered consciousness and qualia and subjective experience.

kaibee 3y ago
> It certainly hasn't conquered consciousness and qualia and subjective experience. I'm not sure how you're so certain of this. It is entirely possible that all we need to do to create a conscious mind is run a full molecular dynamics simulation of a detailed enough human brain scan. We know the equations to do this, we just don't have nearly enough computational power.
- jchanimal 3y ago
  That would only be possible if qualia has no causation. In the case where our experiences have real effects they cannot be fully described by a Turing architecture.
- prometheus76 3y ago
  Already you've sneaked in the presupposition that consciousness is only a result of your brain activity. Have you ever not eaten for two days? Or not slept for more than 24 hours? Have you ever had an itch under a cast that you couldn't itch, and been constantly distracted by it? You think that doesn't affect your consciousness?
  - kaibee 3y ago
    > Already you've sneaked in the presupposition that consciousness is only a result of your brain activity. What else could it be? The interesting question is how and why. > Have you ever not eaten for two days? Or not slept for more than 24 hours? Have you ever had an itch under a cast that you couldn't itch, and been constantly distracted by it? Sure, I've done all of those things, but they all cause physical changes in the brain. These physical changes then directly affect your qualia-type experience of reality.
    - prometheus76 3y ago
      Have you read "What is it like to be a bat?" by Thomas Nagel? It's readily available online as a pdf. It discusses the hard problem of consciousness and the mind-body problem that I only briefly and poorly hinted at with my earlier questions. Reductionism doesn't work for consciousness. At all.
- colordrops 3y ago
  How are you certain? Has someone published a paper that I'm not aware of that settles this? You are missing a dimension here by the way. Even if we could find a physical location of the brain that lights up when the color red is experienced, that doesn't have any explanatory power for the nature of subjective experience. How can it be possible to experience being a brain, being a brain itself? Not just observing another brain and correlating brain activity with reported experiences. Experience and consciousness are axiomatic and precede theory about the physical world. You started with sensory experience and perception, and built models of how your brain works on top of that, not the other way around.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    > Experience and consciousness are axiomatic and precede theory about the physical world. Actually, they seem unnecessary to any theory about the physical world. They likely don't exist, but if they do, it's just bad psychology that wasn't quite debilitating enough for evolutionary pressure to weed them out. I don't even think I'm conscious myself in the way you imagine yourself to be. "Consciousness" probably belongs in poetry, it definitely doesn't belong in philosophy and that goes double for real science.
    - colordrops 3y ago
      So just ignore first hand experience as a phenomenon at all? That seems like a huge thing to pull the wool over. It absolutely belongs in philosophy, and is one of the core topics in any philosophy program, and I'm not talking about "real science", which is precisely why I said that physics doesn't explain it.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        There's nothing to ignore. Some evolved monkeys have vivid imagination, which they mistake for reality. Phenomenon noted, time to move on to important things.
        3y ago
robotresearcher 3y ago
It hasn’t conquered beauty and comedy and love either. The things you mention will turn out to be folk human notions without satisfying scientific descriptions. They are no less real for it, but we simply don’t ask physics to describe love. I suspect consciousness will turn out to be an idea that is not amenable to physics or computational explanation as a coherent single phenomenon.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  As a joke, evolution adapted humans to have malfunctioning brains.
- colordrops 3y ago
  Right, so to get back to the original point of the thread, the universe is not necessarily confined by the Physical Church-Turing Thesis

kaibee 3y ago

> It certainly hasn't conquered consciousness and qualia and subjective experience. I'm not sure how you're so certain of this. It is entirely possible that all we need to do to create a conscious mind is run a full molecular dynamics simulation of a detailed enough human brain scan. We know the equations to do this, we just don't have nearly enough computational power.

jchanimal 3y ago
That would only be possible if qualia has no causation. In the case where our experiences have real effects they cannot be fully described by a Turing architecture.
prometheus76 3y ago
Already you've sneaked in the presupposition that consciousness is only a result of your brain activity. Have you ever not eaten for two days? Or not slept for more than 24 hours? Have you ever had an itch under a cast that you couldn't itch, and been constantly distracted by it? You think that doesn't affect your consciousness?
- kaibee 3y ago
  > Already you've sneaked in the presupposition that consciousness is only a result of your brain activity. What else could it be? The interesting question is how and why. > Have you ever not eaten for two days? Or not slept for more than 24 hours? Have you ever had an itch under a cast that you couldn't itch, and been constantly distracted by it? Sure, I've done all of those things, but they all cause physical changes in the brain. These physical changes then directly affect your qualia-type experience of reality.
  - prometheus76 3y ago
    Have you read "What is it like to be a bat?" by Thomas Nagel? It's readily available online as a pdf. It discusses the hard problem of consciousness and the mind-body problem that I only briefly and poorly hinted at with my earlier questions. Reductionism doesn't work for consciousness. At all.
colordrops 3y ago
How are you certain? Has someone published a paper that I'm not aware of that settles this? You are missing a dimension here by the way. Even if we could find a physical location of the brain that lights up when the color red is experienced, that doesn't have any explanatory power for the nature of subjective experience. How can it be possible to experience being a brain, being a brain itself? Not just observing another brain and correlating brain activity with reported experiences. Experience and consciousness are axiomatic and precede theory about the physical world. You started with sensory experience and perception, and built models of how your brain works on top of that, not the other way around.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  > Experience and consciousness are axiomatic and precede theory about the physical world. Actually, they seem unnecessary to any theory about the physical world. They likely don't exist, but if they do, it's just bad psychology that wasn't quite debilitating enough for evolutionary pressure to weed them out. I don't even think I'm conscious myself in the way you imagine yourself to be. "Consciousness" probably belongs in poetry, it definitely doesn't belong in philosophy and that goes double for real science.
  - colordrops 3y ago
    So just ignore first hand experience as a phenomenon at all? That seems like a huge thing to pull the wool over. It absolutely belongs in philosophy, and is one of the core topics in any philosophy program, and I'm not talking about "real science", which is precisely why I said that physics doesn't explain it.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      There's nothing to ignore. Some evolved monkeys have vivid imagination, which they mistake for reality. Phenomenon noted, time to move on to important things.
      - 3y ago

robotresearcher 3y ago

It hasn’t conquered beauty and comedy and love either. The things you mention will turn out to be folk human notions without satisfying scientific descriptions. They are no less real for it, but we simply don’t ask physics to describe love. I suspect consciousness will turn out to be an idea that is not amenable to physics or computational explanation as a coherent single phenomenon.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
As a joke, evolution adapted humans to have malfunctioning brains.
colordrops 3y ago
Right, so to get back to the original point of the thread, the universe is not necessarily confined by the Physical Church-Turing Thesis