4 ms·

I agree with you that the brain is nothing else but its physical makeup (whether that's synapses or more). But that's not the point of contention -- the point

I agree with you that the brain is nothing else but its physical makeup (whether that's synapses or more). But that's not the point of contention -- the point of contention is whether those synapses are enough to explain (or explain away) consciousness. And to me it is plainly obvious that physical stuff (synapses or whatever) can never explain (or explain away) consciousness. (side note: there is absolutely, undeniably, a correlation between brain states and mental states -- but that does not entail that mental states reduce to or are explained entirely by brain states)

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> there is absolutely, undeniably, a correlation between brain states and mental states -- but that does not entail that mental states reduce to or are explained entirely by brain states It's not plain correlation. It's long been experimentally demonstrated that you can circuit-bend[0] an animal or a human live, by poking in their brain[1]. If in those cases, altering brain state creates/affects behavior and mental states, then there isn't really a place for a non-physical-stuff consciousness. If it existed, it's demonstrably overridable by purely physical interventions, which implies you could just make a physical-stuff consciousness, at which point why postulate a non-material one? -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_bending https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_bending [1] - Then there's obviously alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, that have a slower onset.
- vonjuice 3y ago
  You can give alcohol to a driver and it will affect their driving. However, if you're an alien and you don't know the exact workings, you might conclude that alcohol affects cars.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Hence my point about circuit bending. We're at the stage equivalent to that alien a) being able to electroshock the driver, and b) observe them getting out of car and functioning independently, therefore c) conclude that the driver is the thing controlling the car.
    - mistermann 3y ago
      Some hints: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic_(psychology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic_(psychology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-valued_logic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-valued_logic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_a_negative https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_a_negative https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness (that which is actually being described) - see also: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-javaschools-2/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Counterhint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_statistics
        mistermann 3y ago
        "where probability expresses a degree of belief in an event". I'm generally ok with beliefs, provided they are realized as such.
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Logic as applied to the real world is just beliefs too; using probability for the math is a way to account for uncertainty, instead of rounding everything up or down to impossible standards of "true" or "false".
        mistermann 3y ago
        > Logic as applied to the real world is just beliefs too I disagree. For example: how can humans operating on scientific principles so consistently stack hundreds of "just" beliefs on top of each other to achieve things like landing things on the moon, as just one very old example? I suspect there is more to it....I believe that all beliefs are not equal, and I'll go even further: some beliefs are true, and some beliefs are not true. > using probability for the math is a way to account for uncertainty That "account for" has a different meaning than "perfectly resolve" seems highly relevant. > instead of rounding everything up or down to impossible standards of "true" or "false" Of the two of us, who is rounding things up or down to an artificial truth?
- haswell 3y ago
  Poking at the brain or consuming certain substances causes changes in the phenomena experienced in consciousness. But doesn’t seem in any way explanatory of consciousness itself, i.e. the owner of the brain’s awareness of those state changes. I think this points at the somewhat nebulous definition of consciousness, which at its core seems categorically separate from the phenomena that can be experienced (and manipulated by poking at the brain) within it. This is why some have theorized that everything is conscious, and the human experience of consciousness just happens to be particularly rich and complex due to the complexity of the human organism. This would suggest that a sufficiently advanced computer could also be conscious, with the specific experience mediated by the architecture of the computer. (I’m not endorsing this position, but it’s an interesting thought experiment to help separate experiences in consciousness from consciousness itself).
- Winsaucerer 3y ago
  I never denied the claim that changing the brain can change mental states. I think that the experiences we have are ones we have because of physical states (primarily, the brain). I just do not think that the experiences themselves are physical things, and on a purely naturalistic explanation of the universe experiences would not exist. You are right that on naturalism there isn't really a place for non-physical-stuff consciousness. And yet, the existence of non-physical-stuff is the one thing I am most sure of, the one and only thing I have access to. So the challenge is to explain it (or explain it away). As you say, there's no place for it in a naturalist view of the world, and I agree.
  - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
    By analogy/homology: Technically, software isn't exactly physical either, of course. It works with information contained in physical states, but isn't -technically- itself physical. Arguably this can be demonstrated by moving it to a different physical representation (magnetic, optical, diode charges, dynamic memory cells; little endian, big endian; AMD, Intel, ARM, Turing Machine In Game Of Life, Minecraft Turing Machine) without affecting its behavior or functionality. I don't think there's anything particularly mysterious about this kind of phenomenon, per-se. You could grok the behavior of the software by poking at the hardware its running on for long enough; but it might be more useful to split the problem into separate layers that are easier to reason about. (Hence the need for reduction and emergence)
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > I just do not think that the experiences themselves are physical things, and on a purely naturalistic explanation of the universe experiences would not exist. But they could be. Elsewhere in this thread, I mentioned computer science is effectively a branch of physics now, because we can connect computation with thermodynamics, and e.g. put lower bounds on amount of energy required to perform certain computation. Therefore, if you consider experiences to be "execution", some specific computations done by our brains, then they still are physical things. Might be tricky to point and prod at them in the structure of our brain, but physical concepts that are smeared over space or time are nothing new - think e.g. waves, whether EM waves or mechanical waves or virtual waves, think of the boiling soup they make out of their medium, and how e.g. Fourier transform can tease them all apart anyway.
- geye1234 3y ago
  > If in those cases, altering brain state creates/affects behavior and mental states, then there isn't really a place for a non-physical-stuff consciousness. This does not follow. The altering of brain state affects behavior; from this we can deduce that there is a correlation between the two, and that there is a causal link between the two. We can't deduce from this that they're the same thing or that one is reducible to the other: this is illogical. More generally, it is illogical to claim that brain states are the same as mental states (thoughts). There are several reasons for this. One is that reducing thoughts to brain states means a thought cannot be correct or incorrect. For example, one series of mental states leads to the thought "2+2=4"; another series leads to the thought "2+2=5". The correctness of the former and the wrongness of the latter refers only to the thought's content, not the physical brain state. If thoughts are nothing more than brain states, it's meaningless to say that one thought is correct -- that is to say, it's a thought that conforms to reality -- and that the other is incorrect. A particular state of neurons and chemicals cannot per se be incorrect or incorrect. If one thought is right (about reality) and another thought is wrong (not about reality), then there must be aspects of thought that are distinct from the physical state of the brain. If it's meaningless to say that one thought is correct and another is incorrect, then of course nothing we think or say has any connection to reality. Hence the existence of this disagreement, along with the belief that one of us is right and the other wrong, presupposes that your position is wrong. No amount of neurological study will undermine this argument. More generally, describing one aspect of reality in greater and greater detail doesn't gainsay those who claim there are other aspects. You can describe the inner workings of the brain in as much detail as you like -- it is nonetheless logically certain that human thought is not reducible to brain states, even though it obviously correlates with them.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > One is that reducing thoughts to brain states means a thought cannot be correct or incorrect. For example, one series of mental states leads to the thought "2+2=4"; another series leads to the thought "2+2=5". The correctness of the former and the wrongness of the latter refers only to the thought's content, not the physical brain state. > If one thought is right (about reality) and another thought is wrong (not about reality), then there must be aspects of thought that are distinct from the physical state of the brain. Of course there is. Computation. Observation. A correctness of a thought isn't a function of thought itself, it's a function of thought and reality. Correctness of a thought is not a physical label. It's not a state. It's something you evaluate, something you compute with respect to knowledge you observe. The way I see it, you're confusing a thought with computed properties of it. There is no privileged notion of correctness and nature does not put XML tags with correctness score on neurons.
simiones 3y ago
> (side note: there is absolutely, undeniably, a correlation between brain states and mental states -- but that does not entail that mental states reduce to or are explained entirely by brain states) How does this make sense? There is some divine being that only sometimes looks at the actual synapses to decide if it should feel nauseous or happy?
- vonjuice 3y ago
  No. Nauseousness or happiness are states that can only happen when mind and matter are intertwined in the form of a living brain. Much like there is no divine being that decides "I'm going to make this dense star a black hole", a black hole and the attached phenomena are consequences of matter and forces interacting. Emotions are thoughts (brains and the attached phenomena) are consequences of matter and mind interacting.
- corimaith 3y ago
  What OP is describing is the strong form of emergence, that emergent behavior cannot be fully understood or predicted by understanding each of the individual parts. Aka the whole is more than the sum of the parts. If you fully understood the laws of physics at an atomic level, would it be sufficient to recognize a cpu as turing complete if you see one? It's a debatable position in philosophy against the reductionism OP is describing, and maybe a bit magical but I'd find it the more interesting of the two positions to hold.
  - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
    So reduction and emergence are obviously each other's complement. (A bit like differentiation and integration) > If you fully understood the laws of physics at an atomic level, would it be sufficient to recognize a cpu as turing complete if you see one? This is testable if you take an alternate universe with very few laws. Somewhat canonically, do you understand a Turing machine built in Conway's Game of Life if you understand the 2 rules of that game. (Or 4 rules, depending on how you count). The only way to understand it is to play the game.
  - Winsaucerer 3y ago
criddell 3y ago
If a group of scientists in 1923 were given a working iPhone, would they have a chance at figuring out how the ChatGPT icon is able to launch something that talks or where Grand Theft Auto is in the machine? Is trying to figure out how the brain works by looking at synapses and blood flow and electric fields similar to trying to see how an iPhone works by looking at transistors and electric fields?
- Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  Others have had similar lines of thought! * https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108%2802%2900133-2 https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108%2802%29... Can a biologist fix a radio? * https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?
- 0thgen 3y ago
  This is a crucial point to make. Even if every natural phenomenon can be reduced to very early-level processes (e.g., physics), earlier levels of analysis have little predictive value at later levels of analysis. Does anyone have a term for this from philosophy of science literature?
  - BirAdam 3y ago
    If I understand what you’re asking, the term would be emergence. In philosophy this means that that behavior, property, or attribute arises from parts or components that do not show that behavior, property, or attribute themselves either in part or in whole.
  - throw4847285 3y ago
    I don't know the term for it, but it's the most common non-strawman version of the anti-reductionist argument. If you want to ruin your day, you can try and parse through the SEP page on reductionism. It's a doozy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-reduction/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-reduction/
- 3y ago
dwaltrip 3y ago
> the brain is nothing else but its physical makeup > physical stuff can never explain consciousness These statements seem contradictory to me, can you elaborate? Also, you don't provide your reasoning for the second statement. Why do you believe that physical stuff can't cause consciousness? What is your definition of "physical"?
keefle 3y ago
I wholeheartedly agree. For those interested check out the hard problem of consciousness And I have a thought I would like to share here, an attempt at arguing for why it might be impossible for a physical pure materialistic model of the world to explain consciousness In a pure physical materialistic world, we can represent everything as laws, interactions between materials, guided by a set of rules. That's it. If we had a absolute knowledge, we can represent those rules, all of them, as a set of mathematical and logical equations. I reduce the material world to a mathematical world of rules and laws, an abstract world. Saying consciousness could arrise from a pure material world, is akin to saying the mathematical equations and laws, combined, can be conscious. As in, there is a system of rules that if tuned in a certain way can think. Since rules are abstract, and by definition rules don't think. No combination of them no matter how complicated can think The initial rebuttle I have in my mind is that "well you are conflicting the system with the objects governed by it", I feel there is a better way to phrase the initial proposal to address this issue, but I just wanted to throw this idea out there
- Winsaucerer 3y ago
  I think you're on the right track here. I usually try to reason down a similar line. I wouldn't say that the claim is that the equations and laws combined can be conscious. Instead, I would say that none of the equations or laws that we come up with involve mental attributes (such as consciousness or qualia) as either inputs or outputs. You look at all the proposed laws of the universe, and they involve things like energy, mass, time, position, work, etc, as inputs or outputs. No equations have inputs of these sorts of natural quantities and outputs that entail consciousness or that first-person experience. We can see from these equations how things like tree leaves blowing in the wind, or mountains, might arise. These things involve motions and mass and things interacting with each other. While we might not be able to paint the full picture, we can see that the inputs and outputs of those equations are the right kinds of things that might plausibly lead to mountains and leaves blowing in the wind, at the right scale. We can't see from these equations anything that might plausibly lead to the first-person experience, the what-it's-like to be something. Note that the naturalist cannot then just inject these mental/consciousness related parameters into their equations. That would amount to a form of dualism, and destroy their project. What I think the naturalist needs to do is somehow explain away consciousness, because I don't see any path they could take to explain it in purely natural terms. They need to deny that there's anything here that needs explaining at all.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> there is absolutely, undeniably, a correlation between brain states and mental states -- but that does not entail that mental states reduce to or are explained entirely by brain states It's not plain correlation. It's long been experimentally demonstrated that you can circuit-bend[0] an animal or a human live, by poking in their brain[1]. If in those cases, altering brain state creates/affects behavior and mental states, then there isn't really a place for a non-physical-stuff consciousness. If it existed, it's demonstrably overridable by purely physical interventions, which implies you could just make a physical-stuff consciousness, at which point why postulate a non-material one? -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_bending https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_bending [1] - Then there's obviously alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, that have a slower onset.

vonjuice 3y ago
You can give alcohol to a driver and it will affect their driving. However, if you're an alien and you don't know the exact workings, you might conclude that alcohol affects cars.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Hence my point about circuit bending. We're at the stage equivalent to that alien a) being able to electroshock the driver, and b) observe them getting out of car and functioning independently, therefore c) conclude that the driver is the thing controlling the car.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    Some hints: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic_(psychology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic_(psychology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-valued_logic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-valued_logic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_a_negative https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_a_negative https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness (that which is actually being described) - see also: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-javaschools-2/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Counterhint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_statistics
      - mistermann 3y ago
        "where probability expresses a degree of belief in an event". I'm generally ok with beliefs, provided they are realized as such.
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Logic as applied to the real world is just beliefs too; using probability for the math is a way to account for uncertainty, instead of rounding everything up or down to impossible standards of "true" or "false".
        mistermann 3y ago
        > Logic as applied to the real world is just beliefs too I disagree. For example: how can humans operating on scientific principles so consistently stack hundreds of "just" beliefs on top of each other to achieve things like landing things on the moon, as just one very old example? I suspect there is more to it....I believe that all beliefs are not equal, and I'll go even further: some beliefs are true, and some beliefs are not true. > using probability for the math is a way to account for uncertainty That "account for" has a different meaning than "perfectly resolve" seems highly relevant. > instead of rounding everything up or down to impossible standards of "true" or "false" Of the two of us, who is rounding things up or down to an artificial truth?
haswell 3y ago
Poking at the brain or consuming certain substances causes changes in the phenomena experienced in consciousness. But doesn’t seem in any way explanatory of consciousness itself, i.e. the owner of the brain’s awareness of those state changes. I think this points at the somewhat nebulous definition of consciousness, which at its core seems categorically separate from the phenomena that can be experienced (and manipulated by poking at the brain) within it. This is why some have theorized that everything is conscious, and the human experience of consciousness just happens to be particularly rich and complex due to the complexity of the human organism. This would suggest that a sufficiently advanced computer could also be conscious, with the specific experience mediated by the architecture of the computer. (I’m not endorsing this position, but it’s an interesting thought experiment to help separate experiences in consciousness from consciousness itself).
Winsaucerer 3y ago
I never denied the claim that changing the brain can change mental states. I think that the experiences we have are ones we have because of physical states (primarily, the brain). I just do not think that the experiences themselves are physical things, and on a purely naturalistic explanation of the universe experiences would not exist. You are right that on naturalism there isn't really a place for non-physical-stuff consciousness. And yet, the existence of non-physical-stuff is the one thing I am most sure of, the one and only thing I have access to. So the challenge is to explain it (or explain it away). As you say, there's no place for it in a naturalist view of the world, and I agree.
- Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  By analogy/homology: Technically, software isn't exactly physical either, of course. It works with information contained in physical states, but isn't -technically- itself physical. Arguably this can be demonstrated by moving it to a different physical representation (magnetic, optical, diode charges, dynamic memory cells; little endian, big endian; AMD, Intel, ARM, Turing Machine In Game Of Life, Minecraft Turing Machine) without affecting its behavior or functionality. I don't think there's anything particularly mysterious about this kind of phenomenon, per-se. You could grok the behavior of the software by poking at the hardware its running on for long enough; but it might be more useful to split the problem into separate layers that are easier to reason about. (Hence the need for reduction and emergence)
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > I just do not think that the experiences themselves are physical things, and on a purely naturalistic explanation of the universe experiences would not exist. But they could be. Elsewhere in this thread, I mentioned computer science is effectively a branch of physics now, because we can connect computation with thermodynamics, and e.g. put lower bounds on amount of energy required to perform certain computation. Therefore, if you consider experiences to be "execution", some specific computations done by our brains, then they still are physical things. Might be tricky to point and prod at them in the structure of our brain, but physical concepts that are smeared over space or time are nothing new - think e.g. waves, whether EM waves or mechanical waves or virtual waves, think of the boiling soup they make out of their medium, and how e.g. Fourier transform can tease them all apart anyway.
geye1234 3y ago
> If in those cases, altering brain state creates/affects behavior and mental states, then there isn't really a place for a non-physical-stuff consciousness. This does not follow. The altering of brain state affects behavior; from this we can deduce that there is a correlation between the two, and that there is a causal link between the two. We can't deduce from this that they're the same thing or that one is reducible to the other: this is illogical. More generally, it is illogical to claim that brain states are the same as mental states (thoughts). There are several reasons for this. One is that reducing thoughts to brain states means a thought cannot be correct or incorrect. For example, one series of mental states leads to the thought "2+2=4"; another series leads to the thought "2+2=5". The correctness of the former and the wrongness of the latter refers only to the thought's content, not the physical brain state. If thoughts are nothing more than brain states, it's meaningless to say that one thought is correct -- that is to say, it's a thought that conforms to reality -- and that the other is incorrect. A particular state of neurons and chemicals cannot per se be incorrect or incorrect. If one thought is right (about reality) and another thought is wrong (not about reality), then there must be aspects of thought that are distinct from the physical state of the brain. If it's meaningless to say that one thought is correct and another is incorrect, then of course nothing we think or say has any connection to reality. Hence the existence of this disagreement, along with the belief that one of us is right and the other wrong, presupposes that your position is wrong. No amount of neurological study will undermine this argument. More generally, describing one aspect of reality in greater and greater detail doesn't gainsay those who claim there are other aspects. You can describe the inner workings of the brain in as much detail as you like -- it is nonetheless logically certain that human thought is not reducible to brain states, even though it obviously correlates with them.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > One is that reducing thoughts to brain states means a thought cannot be correct or incorrect. For example, one series of mental states leads to the thought "2+2=4"; another series leads to the thought "2+2=5". The correctness of the former and the wrongness of the latter refers only to the thought's content, not the physical brain state. > If one thought is right (about reality) and another thought is wrong (not about reality), then there must be aspects of thought that are distinct from the physical state of the brain. Of course there is. Computation. Observation. A correctness of a thought isn't a function of thought itself, it's a function of thought and reality. Correctness of a thought is not a physical label. It's not a state. It's something you evaluate, something you compute with respect to knowledge you observe. The way I see it, you're confusing a thought with computed properties of it. There is no privileged notion of correctness and nature does not put XML tags with correctness score on neurons.

simiones 3y ago

> (side note: there is absolutely, undeniably, a correlation between brain states and mental states -- but that does not entail that mental states reduce to or are explained entirely by brain states) How does this make sense? There is some divine being that only sometimes looks at the actual synapses to decide if it should feel nauseous or happy?

vonjuice 3y ago
No. Nauseousness or happiness are states that can only happen when mind and matter are intertwined in the form of a living brain. Much like there is no divine being that decides "I'm going to make this dense star a black hole", a black hole and the attached phenomena are consequences of matter and forces interacting. Emotions are thoughts (brains and the attached phenomena) are consequences of matter and mind interacting.
corimaith 3y ago
What OP is describing is the strong form of emergence, that emergent behavior cannot be fully understood or predicted by understanding each of the individual parts. Aka the whole is more than the sum of the parts. If you fully understood the laws of physics at an atomic level, would it be sufficient to recognize a cpu as turing complete if you see one? It's a debatable position in philosophy against the reductionism OP is describing, and maybe a bit magical but I'd find it the more interesting of the two positions to hold.
- Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  So reduction and emergence are obviously each other's complement. (A bit like differentiation and integration) > If you fully understood the laws of physics at an atomic level, would it be sufficient to recognize a cpu as turing complete if you see one? This is testable if you take an alternate universe with very few laws. Somewhat canonically, do you understand a Turing machine built in Conway's Game of Life if you understand the 2 rules of that game. (Or 4 rules, depending on how you count). The only way to understand it is to play the game.
- Winsaucerer 3y ago

criddell 3y ago

If a group of scientists in 1923 were given a working iPhone, would they have a chance at figuring out how the ChatGPT icon is able to launch something that talks or where Grand Theft Auto is in the machine? Is trying to figure out how the brain works by looking at synapses and blood flow and electric fields similar to trying to see how an iPhone works by looking at transistors and electric fields?

Kim_Bruning 3y ago
Others have had similar lines of thought! * https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108%2802%2900133-2 https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108%2802%29... Can a biologist fix a radio? * https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?
0thgen 3y ago
This is a crucial point to make. Even if every natural phenomenon can be reduced to very early-level processes (e.g., physics), earlier levels of analysis have little predictive value at later levels of analysis. Does anyone have a term for this from philosophy of science literature?
- BirAdam 3y ago
  If I understand what you’re asking, the term would be emergence. In philosophy this means that that behavior, property, or attribute arises from parts or components that do not show that behavior, property, or attribute themselves either in part or in whole.
- throw4847285 3y ago
  I don't know the term for it, but it's the most common non-strawman version of the anti-reductionist argument. If you want to ruin your day, you can try and parse through the SEP page on reductionism. It's a doozy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-reduction/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-reduction/
3y ago

dwaltrip 3y ago

> the brain is nothing else but its physical makeup > physical stuff can never explain consciousness These statements seem contradictory to me, can you elaborate? Also, you don't provide your reasoning for the second statement. Why do you believe that physical stuff can't cause consciousness? What is your definition of "physical"?

keefle 3y ago

I wholeheartedly agree. For those interested check out the hard problem of consciousness And I have a thought I would like to share here, an attempt at arguing for why it might be impossible for a physical pure materialistic model of the world to explain consciousness In a pure physical materialistic world, we can represent everything as laws, interactions between materials, guided by a set of rules. That's it. If we had a absolute knowledge, we can represent those rules, all of them, as a set of mathematical and logical equations. I reduce the material world to a mathematical world of rules and laws, an abstract world. Saying consciousness could arrise from a pure material world, is akin to saying the mathematical equations and laws, combined, can be conscious. As in, there is a system of rules that if tuned in a certain way can think. Since rules are abstract, and by definition rules don't think. No combination of them no matter how complicated can think The initial rebuttle I have in my mind is that "well you are conflicting the system with the objects governed by it", I feel there is a better way to phrase the initial proposal to address this issue, but I just wanted to throw this idea out there

Winsaucerer 3y ago
I think you're on the right track here. I usually try to reason down a similar line. I wouldn't say that the claim is that the equations and laws combined can be conscious. Instead, I would say that none of the equations or laws that we come up with involve mental attributes (such as consciousness or qualia) as either inputs or outputs. You look at all the proposed laws of the universe, and they involve things like energy, mass, time, position, work, etc, as inputs or outputs. No equations have inputs of these sorts of natural quantities and outputs that entail consciousness or that first-person experience. We can see from these equations how things like tree leaves blowing in the wind, or mountains, might arise. These things involve motions and mass and things interacting with each other. While we might not be able to paint the full picture, we can see that the inputs and outputs of those equations are the right kinds of things that might plausibly lead to mountains and leaves blowing in the wind, at the right scale. We can't see from these equations anything that might plausibly lead to the first-person experience, the what-it's-like to be something. Note that the naturalist cannot then just inject these mental/consciousness related parameters into their equations. That would amount to a form of dualism, and destroy their project. What I think the naturalist needs to do is somehow explain away consciousness, because I don't see any path they could take to explain it in purely natural terms. They need to deny that there's anything here that needs explaining at all.