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It is the simplest one-sentence argument for physicalism! If consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon, then it should be no surprise that everyone with a h

by bsza 3y ago

It is the simplest one-sentence argument for physicalism! If consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon, then it should be no surprise that everyone with a healthy brain has one, including you. If it isn’t, then what supernatural event caused it to appear specifically in you?

bowsamic 3y ago
Matter isn’t like that though. Consciousness is unique in being a phenomenon that is totally singular and unique. There are no phenomena in the physical world that aren’t considered as part of a wider collection of other physical phenomena. Eg this atom in relation to that. There is no this and that subject, there is only One. Not even getting into the fact that mental states are already non physical
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  ""Consciousness is unique in being a phenomenon that is totally singular and unique"" I think the problem with the argument is that you are giving way too much credit to consciousness. You are giving an opinion on its uniqueness from the point of view of a Conscious entity that itself hasn't grasped it's own Consciousness. The really exciting part of all the latest AI tech, you can prove 'state of a neural net' is the 'state of experiencing the phenomena'. For Brains. They can now do an MRI on a brain, and re-construct what image it is thinking about. So, State of Neurons = Phenomenal Experiences. The Phenomena you are saying is not physical, is really the physical state of the brains neurons.
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    The experience of seeing something is completely different from the physical state of the neurons that see though. You have to be "in" the physical state in order to have the actual experience. Any physical description of the neurons does nothing to capture the actual experience of being those neurons, and that's the gap.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      I agree with that. But if you have one person reporting an experience and can capture the 'physical state'. And then take someone else and have them report an experience, and capture the 'physical state'. And they match, then you can start making the relationship. Then if my mind is captured, and I'm thinking something that correlates, then I can 'assume' i'm experiencing what the other person is. It will always be imperfect. I agree the experience of each person is unique. But-> The whole problem of the 'eye-can't-see-the-eye' means the eye doesn't exist is also kind of just playing with logic. So just because we can't embody the experience of another person, doesn't mean we can't reason about how that experience is being generated.
      - bowsamic 3y ago
        I agree there might be a relationship between the physical state and the actual experience of it, but ultimately they cannot be bridged. There's only one way to bridge that gap and it's to "be" the physical state, and that's a concept that has absolutely no analogy in physical phenomena. But it's even worse than you say, because those relationships are generated purely within the mind, we don't find them outside the mind, so really all physicality is an illusion, it's all ultimately internal.
        FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        Or even worse, the phenomena doesn't exist internally or externally. They are a combination of the processing of the sensory inputs and the internal model. So the 'phenomena' is really the processing of the inputs, no substance at all because it is the processing itself. Kind of what was described in 'Being You', by Anil Seth. Our reality is a 'controlled hallucination'. Though I don't like the terminology because it is to easily misunderstood. But. Guess, I fall on side that we can still study how Phenomena is generated internally. And still be able to understand it. Just because we can't experience the exact same phenomena as someone else, shouldn't mean we can't figure out how it is generated.
        ta8645 3y ago
        > so really all physicality is an illusion, it's all ultimately internal. You don't really believe that. If you did, you would be fine jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, or something even more fatal.. because the physical "doesn't matter", only the internal.
- naasking 3y ago
  > Not even getting into the fact that mental states are already non physical Conjecture, at best. All thought experiments purporting to show this non-physicality are deeply flawed. We literally have no reason to conclude that mental states are non-physical.
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    To me it’s a self evident truth but unfortunately I can’t demonstrate it
    - naasking 3y ago
      Is it as self-evident as the absence of an object placed in your blind spot?
      - bowsamic 3y ago
        Yes
        naasking 3y ago
        Then I agree that it appears self-evident, but then we must admit that it then doesn't follow that it must be true!
foldr 3y ago
You're saying that people shouldn't be surprised that they're conscious. That may be true, but it's irrelevant to the argument I was talking about. The relevant fact there isn't merely that you're conscious, but that you are (consciously) the particular person that you are. Bowsamic orignally posed a question that gets at the relevant fact: "Why am I me and not someone or something else?" However, the argument here doesn't rest on this question being puzzling. The argument is simply that the relevant fact of personal identity (whether puzzling or not) does not seem to reduce to any specifiable set of physical facts. The form of the argument is exactly like a Platonist argument against physicalism: "2+2=4" is a fact and does not reduce to any set of physical facts; therefore not all facts are physical facts. This argument does not require the assumption that truths of arithmetic are surprising or difficult to explain. However, I think the irreducibility claim is more compelling in the case of personal identity than for mathematical truths.
- bsza 3y ago
  To a physicalist, the only way to interpret the question "why am I me and not someone else?" is "why is my physical body identical to my physical body and not identical to another physical body?". The framework simply doesn't allow alternative interpretations. This interpretation is a tautology, because in the universe, things are identical to themselves, and only to themselves. If you are using an abstract definition of "yourself" (such as your brain's internal representation of you), you are no longer talking about physical objects, so of course your question can't be answered using physical facts alone. Similarly, "2+2=4" is a statement about our abstract representation of the world, not the real world itself. That we can reason about integers without relying on facts about the real world doesn't mean that integers are any more "real" than unicorns - or for that matter, your concept of "self".
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    That's why it's a good argument against physicalism. According to what you just said, everything we ever experience is talking about "not the real world itself" according to physicalism, therefore why does it ever make sense to assert the "real world itself" over what we actually experience? It's like watching a movie and believing in the movie more than the fact you are sitting watching a screen.

by bsza 3y ago

bowsamic 3y ago

Matter isn’t like that though. Consciousness is unique in being a phenomenon that is totally singular and unique. There are no phenomena in the physical world that aren’t considered as part of a wider collection of other physical phenomena. Eg this atom in relation to that. There is no this and that subject, there is only One. Not even getting into the fact that mental states are already non physical

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
""Consciousness is unique in being a phenomenon that is totally singular and unique"" I think the problem with the argument is that you are giving way too much credit to consciousness. You are giving an opinion on its uniqueness from the point of view of a Conscious entity that itself hasn't grasped it's own Consciousness. The really exciting part of all the latest AI tech, you can prove 'state of a neural net' is the 'state of experiencing the phenomena'. For Brains. They can now do an MRI on a brain, and re-construct what image it is thinking about. So, State of Neurons = Phenomenal Experiences. The Phenomena you are saying is not physical, is really the physical state of the brains neurons.
- bowsamic 3y ago
  The experience of seeing something is completely different from the physical state of the neurons that see though. You have to be "in" the physical state in order to have the actual experience. Any physical description of the neurons does nothing to capture the actual experience of being those neurons, and that's the gap.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    I agree with that. But if you have one person reporting an experience and can capture the 'physical state'. And then take someone else and have them report an experience, and capture the 'physical state'. And they match, then you can start making the relationship. Then if my mind is captured, and I'm thinking something that correlates, then I can 'assume' i'm experiencing what the other person is. It will always be imperfect. I agree the experience of each person is unique. But-> The whole problem of the 'eye-can't-see-the-eye' means the eye doesn't exist is also kind of just playing with logic. So just because we can't embody the experience of another person, doesn't mean we can't reason about how that experience is being generated.
    - bowsamic 3y ago
      I agree there might be a relationship between the physical state and the actual experience of it, but ultimately they cannot be bridged. There's only one way to bridge that gap and it's to "be" the physical state, and that's a concept that has absolutely no analogy in physical phenomena. But it's even worse than you say, because those relationships are generated purely within the mind, we don't find them outside the mind, so really all physicality is an illusion, it's all ultimately internal.
      - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        Or even worse, the phenomena doesn't exist internally or externally. They are a combination of the processing of the sensory inputs and the internal model. So the 'phenomena' is really the processing of the inputs, no substance at all because it is the processing itself. Kind of what was described in 'Being You', by Anil Seth. Our reality is a 'controlled hallucination'. Though I don't like the terminology because it is to easily misunderstood. But. Guess, I fall on side that we can still study how Phenomena is generated internally. And still be able to understand it. Just because we can't experience the exact same phenomena as someone else, shouldn't mean we can't figure out how it is generated.
      - ta8645 3y ago
        > so really all physicality is an illusion, it's all ultimately internal. You don't really believe that. If you did, you would be fine jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, or something even more fatal.. because the physical "doesn't matter", only the internal.
naasking 3y ago
> Not even getting into the fact that mental states are already non physical Conjecture, at best. All thought experiments purporting to show this non-physicality are deeply flawed. We literally have no reason to conclude that mental states are non-physical.
- bowsamic 3y ago
  To me it’s a self evident truth but unfortunately I can’t demonstrate it
  - naasking 3y ago
    Is it as self-evident as the absence of an object placed in your blind spot?
    - bowsamic 3y ago
      Yes
      - naasking 3y ago
        Then I agree that it appears self-evident, but then we must admit that it then doesn't follow that it must be true!

foldr 3y ago

You're saying that people shouldn't be surprised that they're conscious. That may be true, but it's irrelevant to the argument I was talking about. The relevant fact there isn't merely that you're conscious, but that you are (consciously) the particular person that you are. Bowsamic orignally posed a question that gets at the relevant fact: "Why am I me and not someone or something else?" However, the argument here doesn't rest on this question being puzzling. The argument is simply that the relevant fact of personal identity (whether puzzling or not) does not seem to reduce to any specifiable set of physical facts. The form of the argument is exactly like a Platonist argument against physicalism: "2+2=4" is a fact and does not reduce to any set of physical facts; therefore not all facts are physical facts. This argument does not require the assumption that truths of arithmetic are surprising or difficult to explain. However, I think the irreducibility claim is more compelling in the case of personal identity than for mathematical truths.

bsza 3y ago
To a physicalist, the only way to interpret the question "why am I me and not someone else?" is "why is my physical body identical to my physical body and not identical to another physical body?". The framework simply doesn't allow alternative interpretations. This interpretation is a tautology, because in the universe, things are identical to themselves, and only to themselves. If you are using an abstract definition of "yourself" (such as your brain's internal representation of you), you are no longer talking about physical objects, so of course your question can't be answered using physical facts alone. Similarly, "2+2=4" is a statement about our abstract representation of the world, not the real world itself. That we can reason about integers without relying on facts about the real world doesn't mean that integers are any more "real" than unicorns - or for that matter, your concept of "self".
- bowsamic 3y ago
  That's why it's a good argument against physicalism. According to what you just said, everything we ever experience is talking about "not the real world itself" according to physicalism, therefore why does it ever make sense to assert the "real world itself" over what we actually experience? It's like watching a movie and believing in the movie more than the fact you are sitting watching a screen.