8 ms·

Hmmm...I don't find this compelling, at all. Perhaps the notions are so pervasive that they were integrated into my mind and way of thinking early on due to th

Hmmm...I don't find this compelling, at all. Perhaps the notions are so pervasive that they were integrated into my mind and way of thinking early on due to the initial popularity of this writing?

jhbadger 2y ago
It's a bit like how Francis Crick, after he left DNA research and went into neuroscience, wrote a book called "The Astonishing Hypothesis" with the premise that the mind is nothing magical but simply the product of all those neurons in your brain, even if we don't understand yet exactly how. Lots of people (including me) thought "well, of course, what's so astonishing about that?", but I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology.
- haswell 2y ago
  > I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology There's a gap between accepting that the mind is ultimately made up of neurons firing and what it feels like to be a mind made up of neurons firing. Depending on one's upbringing, they likely hold deep unexamined beliefs - bedrocks of thinking - that more or less boil down to: the mind feels like some mystical thing. People can believe in the science of biology and conceptually understand that they're the product of long spans of evolution while still feeling like the mind is quite a mystical and mysterious thing. And it can be hard to cut through this feeling without intentionally uprooting those unexamined beliefs. I know this from personal experience. My upbringing involved the deep conditioning of a religious world view that instills these mystical ideas. I left it behind in my late teens. It wasn't until my mid 30s that I started to deeply appreciate how embedded those feelings were, and even though I didn't believe them when examining them rationally, I realized they were still there in my underlying thought processes, influencing my interpretation of everyday things. So I wouldn't say it's just that people "still believe the mind is some mystical thing" (although this group does exist), but that "the default mode of experience for many people is the one that feels mystical".
  - gosub100 2y ago
    I'm certain this topic has been addressed many times, but I can't see how to reconcile basic morality with "it's just a calculation". Tell me I should not inflict pain on sentient beings while subscribing to the belief that pain is simply one particular result of a massive mathematical calculation. It's literally just a number/matrix.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      Perhaps you're not over-valuing pain, but under-valuing numbers. There's no reason to think that morality can't or shouldn't center around minimizing a pain metric. That would put it in line with any other trajectory-planning-under-constraints problem. Once you've done a bit of work in trajectory optimization, you start to feel the numbers come alive, and develop a visceral feeling for them. I wince when I see a car scrape to the edge of its traction limit as it rounds a corner at high speed. Nature itself plans trajectories to minimize action, the integral of a Lagrangian: it's literally just a number, but it decides the motion of molecules and galaxies. What's wrong with a moral system based around minimizing a pain integral, subject to constraints? Still just a number. But one that can easily take an important position in our decision-making, and find a deep-seated place in our minds as well. Of course, we probably ended up with morals in the first place as a distillation of game-theoretic heuristics, which helped us trust and cooperate with each other, which would have been an evolutionary benefit. But as with anything else, we're accountable to the drives that evolution left us with, not evolution's reasons for putting them there. The morals are in our minds, not in nature, but either way it's numbers all the way down.
      - N0b8ez 2y ago
        Consider whether we should define electrons to be "positive" or "negative": there isn't any fact of the matter, it's merely a convention. But it doesn't seem like experiencing pain works this way: pain feels a particular way. If pain is just a mathematical entity, there shouldn't be any particular way that it feels, since it's just a symbol. Maybe we're deeply wrong about our intuitions, and actually no conscious experience is happening in the brain at all, despite the brain having an incorrect model about itself which predicts this (and causes it to make utterances claiming that it has experiences). That's the school of thought known as eliminitivism. Under this view, all suffering is a myth, in the same way that luckiness and angels are.
- adonovan 2y ago
  No less a scientist than Roger Penrose is (arguably) in that camp: his excellent “The Emperor’s New Mind” is about the paradox of free will in a mechanistic universe, and the question of where among the laws of physics might consciousness fit. (Spoiler alert: the collapse of the quantum wave function has a different character from all the other laws.)
  - tasty_freeze 2y ago
    That is a rather tenuous thing to base an argument (and a book) on. Quantum wave collapse is not understood at all, to the point there are physicists who deny collapsing even happens.
  - euroderf 2y ago
    Lee Smolin (a physicist) argues that all this talk of determinism (as opposed to free will) has a real impact on people, leading to fatalism and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, and that this has real impact on prospects for public policy responses to the crises we as a species face.
  - Animats 2y ago
    Rudy Rucker points out, in one of his SF books, that free will and random number generators are the same thing.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    > No less a scientist than Roger Penrose This is argument from authority. In Penrose's case, while his position is mildly interesting, most other scientists and philosophers interested in consciousness and mind/brain questions completely reject it.
    - adonovan 2y ago
      > This is argument from authority. No, it isn't. An argument from authority would be me claiming that X is true because Penrose says so. The parent poster had said "I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology." To which I responded with a data point: a highly respected physicist (indeed, an authority) who professes to be, essentially, a Cartesian dualist. I wasn't even claiming that X is true. HNers do seem to love casually slinging claims of logical fallacies at each other.
- Animats 2y ago
  People get into philosophical trouble with this because humans have a hard-wired system for what's part of your body and what isn't. That's a survival trait. Problems with that system cause phantom limb syndrome, self-injury, and other body-model disorders.[1] We're looking at a protection system from the inside. Brains are internally interconnected distributed systems, but we're evolved not to feel that way. Trying to reconcile that drives philosophers and theologians into inventing dualism, souls, and other hacks to explain the concept of a unified mind. That goes back at least two millennia and hasn't helped much. Brains are distributed systems. They have features to drive them towards eventual internal consistency. Failures of those features underlay schizophrenia and similar disorders. Has neuroscience explored eventually-consistent system theory yet? That might be useful. [1] https://wolpertlab.neuroscience.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/papers/HagWol04.pdf https://wolpertlab.neuroscience.columbia.edu/sites/default/f...
- altruios 2y ago
  So this leads down to some interesting consequences. If everything is determined by biology, and biology is determined by chemistry, and chemistry is determined by physics (quantum or classical). The next question is: "from where does 'choice' come from? if the sum of each part contains none to begin with, how can it emerge without 'proto-choice properties'?" The conclusion from this view must be one of two: 1) That 'choice' is an unfounded axiom, an illusion of subjective qualities that we misinterpret as our 'will'. 2) Though if we do have 'will', and ability to exert control via choice, and not be controlled by physically determined processes... perhaps that is this notion of 'chance/random' which we seem to have to deal with. A consequence of point 2 is that if that is our ability to choose, how can we choose better than the baseline 'random' as we apparently do?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    > The next question is: [ ... ] Dennett has you covered there too. His book "Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting" is a must-read on this topic.
    - altruios 2y ago
      I've give it a read. But if it's just rehashing John Locke's prisoner dilemma of perceived choice vs actual choice... I'm talking about objective reality, not subjective experience. The free will I'm interested in knowing if it exists or not is one we (in theory) could possible eventually measure (a difference in what physical processes say we should do and what we actually do). I'm interested in 'actual' free will, the ability to do what you would otherwise not. Illusionary free wills are boring to discuss - as they are merely redefining our experiences in terms feed-back systems... which obviously exist - but that's not free will, that's our understanding and knowledge about observable systems. The only free will that matters is: can we defy physics, or are we subjects of physics from now until the end of time. Are we free to choose the actions or is physics determining the actions we take. Are we in control of our lives or is the universe and we just lie to ourselves to keep on keeping on? If everything is run by physics - that make you physics' sweet submissive. edit: reading the back cover - the idea's of control vs freedom and elbow room are familiar, and in my opinion entirely misguided from the point I raise above... a feedback-system that allows you to control results is not a good definition of free will. What free will in that case is: is being able to choose anything in response to that feedback system... which has yet to be shown to be the case... and good arguments argue that it is impossible.
- Quailman84 2y ago
  I think most of the philosophers Dennett is engaging with aren't suggesting that the mind is magical or mystical, but simply that subjective phenomena (thoughts, perceptions, etc) cannot be fully explained in exclusively physical terms. To give a popular argument, you can imagine a scenario where somebody has completed a perfect and complete explanation of the physical processes of human color perception. Would this explanation grant a reader who had never seen color an understanding of what it is actually like to see the color red? The argument goes that if you can't explain something in purely physical terms, then that thing isn't purely physical in nature. Just because something isn't physical doesn't mean that it is mystical or magical; it is just a different kind of Stuff. The idea that only physical things exist is intuitively pretty compelling to me, but I've found arguments to the contrary to be much more convincing.
  - n4r9 2y ago
    > Would this explanation grant a reader who had never seen color an understanding of what it is actually like to see the color red? Suppose that you were to manually fire neurons in this person's brain, so as to exactly simulate the brain's response to red-frequency photons hitting the retina. Would this give them such an understanding? I would guess that most people would say yes. So one can learn subjective experiences without needing the perception to actually occur. In some sense the subjective experience is physically encoded in the details of the neural intervention. The interesting question is where is the line on the spectrum between verbal explanations and direct neural intervention, at which such an understanding becomes impossible to impart?
    - Quailman84 2y ago
      If I'm understanding your thought experiment correctly, you are saying that you could stimulate the right part of the brain to cause the person to have an experience of seeing the color red without actually perceiving something red. I think that it would be right to say that they would have gained a more complete understanding of what it is like to perceive the color red, but that's only because you have caused them to actually perceive the color red—that perception just didn't reflect reality. I think we could argue about the definition of "perception", but the important part is that you are making them experience redness firsthand. If you ask me, there is nothing short of direct firsthand experience that will allow you to understand what it is like to see the color red. Here's some further reading on that argument, if you're interested: https://iep.utm.edu/know-arg/ https://iep.utm.edu/know-arg/
cvoss 2y ago
Interesting! Not compelling because you already have your own answers to the questioned posed? Or perhaps not compelling because you don't find the questions to be interesting/relevant? The value of this story, in my opinion, isn't just that these are neat things to think about. There are deep unanswered questions here that challenge how we understand the connection between materialistic science and a non-materialistic belief in "self", and push the limits of theories of ethics. For example, right up to the very end it keeps throwing new questions at you, such as "What is justice when 'two' people have identical claims on a fundamental right? Namely, which of them gets to keep the body? Which of them gets the estate? Which of them is married?" Dennett's story is a powerful instigator of thought on these topics.
- smeej 2y ago
  I don't find it compelling because I don't buy the premise, that a person whose brain has been separated from his body is anywhere at all. A simulation of life isn't life, and that's all this is. You have, on the one hand, a corpse relieved of its brain being used as a puppet, and on the other, a brain kept firing in a vat. It's popular to think of "ourselves" as a sort of "ghost in a machine," and we particularly assume the ghost resides in the brain, but I don't think that's what people are at all. I don't think either our brains or the rest of our bodies are separable from our selves. That's not to say you can't validly discuss how to treat the body and/or the brain, but I think the person here, the I, has died.
  - dkz999 2y ago
    Is someone with a cochlear implant dead? How about someone using a BCI to move a mouse? Or a locked-in patient? Is there a minimum number of organic connections we need to be alive? How would you convince this person that their 'I' has died? I think these questions are exactly along the lines of the question this story begs.
    - smeej 2y ago
      I don't know how many, but that doesn't keep me from knowing it's more than zero. "Convincing a person that their 'I' has died" is a category error, like a married bachelor. Corpses can't know they're dead, and anything simulating life for the corpse isn't a person to convince. There might be some other entity deserving of rights that does exist. I'm not about to argue that only persons deserve rights. I don't think a horse is a person, but I do think it has a right not to be abused. There's a meaningful discussion to be had about what rights the corpse and simulation ought to have in this circumstance. But "convincing a person their 'I' has died" is self-contradictory. Being able to put the words together in a syntactically coherent sentence doesn't make the idea possible.

Hmmm...I don't find this compelling, at all. Perhaps the notions are so pervasive that they were integrated into my mind and way of thinking early on due to the initial popularity of this writing?

jhbadger 2y ago

It's a bit like how Francis Crick, after he left DNA research and went into neuroscience, wrote a book called "The Astonishing Hypothesis" with the premise that the mind is nothing magical but simply the product of all those neurons in your brain, even if we don't understand yet exactly how. Lots of people (including me) thought "well, of course, what's so astonishing about that?", but I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology.

haswell 2y ago
> I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology There's a gap between accepting that the mind is ultimately made up of neurons firing and what it feels like to be a mind made up of neurons firing. Depending on one's upbringing, they likely hold deep unexamined beliefs - bedrocks of thinking - that more or less boil down to: the mind feels like some mystical thing. People can believe in the science of biology and conceptually understand that they're the product of long spans of evolution while still feeling like the mind is quite a mystical and mysterious thing. And it can be hard to cut through this feeling without intentionally uprooting those unexamined beliefs. I know this from personal experience. My upbringing involved the deep conditioning of a religious world view that instills these mystical ideas. I left it behind in my late teens. It wasn't until my mid 30s that I started to deeply appreciate how embedded those feelings were, and even though I didn't believe them when examining them rationally, I realized they were still there in my underlying thought processes, influencing my interpretation of everyday things. So I wouldn't say it's just that people "still believe the mind is some mystical thing" (although this group does exist), but that "the default mode of experience for many people is the one that feels mystical".
- gosub100 2y ago
  I'm certain this topic has been addressed many times, but I can't see how to reconcile basic morality with "it's just a calculation". Tell me I should not inflict pain on sentient beings while subscribing to the belief that pain is simply one particular result of a massive mathematical calculation. It's literally just a number/matrix.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    Perhaps you're not over-valuing pain, but under-valuing numbers. There's no reason to think that morality can't or shouldn't center around minimizing a pain metric. That would put it in line with any other trajectory-planning-under-constraints problem. Once you've done a bit of work in trajectory optimization, you start to feel the numbers come alive, and develop a visceral feeling for them. I wince when I see a car scrape to the edge of its traction limit as it rounds a corner at high speed. Nature itself plans trajectories to minimize action, the integral of a Lagrangian: it's literally just a number, but it decides the motion of molecules and galaxies. What's wrong with a moral system based around minimizing a pain integral, subject to constraints? Still just a number. But one that can easily take an important position in our decision-making, and find a deep-seated place in our minds as well. Of course, we probably ended up with morals in the first place as a distillation of game-theoretic heuristics, which helped us trust and cooperate with each other, which would have been an evolutionary benefit. But as with anything else, we're accountable to the drives that evolution left us with, not evolution's reasons for putting them there. The morals are in our minds, not in nature, but either way it's numbers all the way down.
    - N0b8ez 2y ago
      Consider whether we should define electrons to be "positive" or "negative": there isn't any fact of the matter, it's merely a convention. But it doesn't seem like experiencing pain works this way: pain feels a particular way. If pain is just a mathematical entity, there shouldn't be any particular way that it feels, since it's just a symbol. Maybe we're deeply wrong about our intuitions, and actually no conscious experience is happening in the brain at all, despite the brain having an incorrect model about itself which predicts this (and causes it to make utterances claiming that it has experiences). That's the school of thought known as eliminitivism. Under this view, all suffering is a myth, in the same way that luckiness and angels are.
adonovan 2y ago
No less a scientist than Roger Penrose is (arguably) in that camp: his excellent “The Emperor’s New Mind” is about the paradox of free will in a mechanistic universe, and the question of where among the laws of physics might consciousness fit. (Spoiler alert: the collapse of the quantum wave function has a different character from all the other laws.)
- tasty_freeze 2y ago
  That is a rather tenuous thing to base an argument (and a book) on. Quantum wave collapse is not understood at all, to the point there are physicists who deny collapsing even happens.
- euroderf 2y ago
  Lee Smolin (a physicist) argues that all this talk of determinism (as opposed to free will) has a real impact on people, leading to fatalism and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, and that this has real impact on prospects for public policy responses to the crises we as a species face.
- Animats 2y ago
  Rudy Rucker points out, in one of his SF books, that free will and random number generators are the same thing.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  > No less a scientist than Roger Penrose This is argument from authority. In Penrose's case, while his position is mildly interesting, most other scientists and philosophers interested in consciousness and mind/brain questions completely reject it.
  - adonovan 2y ago
    > This is argument from authority. No, it isn't. An argument from authority would be me claiming that X is true because Penrose says so. The parent poster had said "I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology." To which I responded with a data point: a highly respected physicist (indeed, an authority) who professes to be, essentially, a Cartesian dualist. I wasn't even claiming that X is true. HNers do seem to love casually slinging claims of logical fallacies at each other.
Animats 2y ago
People get into philosophical trouble with this because humans have a hard-wired system for what's part of your body and what isn't. That's a survival trait. Problems with that system cause phantom limb syndrome, self-injury, and other body-model disorders.[1] We're looking at a protection system from the inside. Brains are internally interconnected distributed systems, but we're evolved not to feel that way. Trying to reconcile that drives philosophers and theologians into inventing dualism, souls, and other hacks to explain the concept of a unified mind. That goes back at least two millennia and hasn't helped much. Brains are distributed systems. They have features to drive them towards eventual internal consistency. Failures of those features underlay schizophrenia and similar disorders. Has neuroscience explored eventually-consistent system theory yet? That might be useful. [1] https://wolpertlab.neuroscience.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/papers/HagWol04.pdf https://wolpertlab.neuroscience.columbia.edu/sites/default/f...
altruios 2y ago
So this leads down to some interesting consequences. If everything is determined by biology, and biology is determined by chemistry, and chemistry is determined by physics (quantum or classical). The next question is: "from where does 'choice' come from? if the sum of each part contains none to begin with, how can it emerge without 'proto-choice properties'?" The conclusion from this view must be one of two: 1) That 'choice' is an unfounded axiom, an illusion of subjective qualities that we misinterpret as our 'will'. 2) Though if we do have 'will', and ability to exert control via choice, and not be controlled by physically determined processes... perhaps that is this notion of 'chance/random' which we seem to have to deal with. A consequence of point 2 is that if that is our ability to choose, how can we choose better than the baseline 'random' as we apparently do?
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  > The next question is: [ ... ] Dennett has you covered there too. His book "Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting" is a must-read on this topic.
  - altruios 2y ago
    I've give it a read. But if it's just rehashing John Locke's prisoner dilemma of perceived choice vs actual choice... I'm talking about objective reality, not subjective experience. The free will I'm interested in knowing if it exists or not is one we (in theory) could possible eventually measure (a difference in what physical processes say we should do and what we actually do). I'm interested in 'actual' free will, the ability to do what you would otherwise not. Illusionary free wills are boring to discuss - as they are merely redefining our experiences in terms feed-back systems... which obviously exist - but that's not free will, that's our understanding and knowledge about observable systems. The only free will that matters is: can we defy physics, or are we subjects of physics from now until the end of time. Are we free to choose the actions or is physics determining the actions we take. Are we in control of our lives or is the universe and we just lie to ourselves to keep on keeping on? If everything is run by physics - that make you physics' sweet submissive. edit: reading the back cover - the idea's of control vs freedom and elbow room are familiar, and in my opinion entirely misguided from the point I raise above... a feedback-system that allows you to control results is not a good definition of free will. What free will in that case is: is being able to choose anything in response to that feedback system... which has yet to be shown to be the case... and good arguments argue that it is impossible.
Quailman84 2y ago
I think most of the philosophers Dennett is engaging with aren't suggesting that the mind is magical or mystical, but simply that subjective phenomena (thoughts, perceptions, etc) cannot be fully explained in exclusively physical terms. To give a popular argument, you can imagine a scenario where somebody has completed a perfect and complete explanation of the physical processes of human color perception. Would this explanation grant a reader who had never seen color an understanding of what it is actually like to see the color red? The argument goes that if you can't explain something in purely physical terms, then that thing isn't purely physical in nature. Just because something isn't physical doesn't mean that it is mystical or magical; it is just a different kind of Stuff. The idea that only physical things exist is intuitively pretty compelling to me, but I've found arguments to the contrary to be much more convincing.
- n4r9 2y ago
  > Would this explanation grant a reader who had never seen color an understanding of what it is actually like to see the color red? Suppose that you were to manually fire neurons in this person's brain, so as to exactly simulate the brain's response to red-frequency photons hitting the retina. Would this give them such an understanding? I would guess that most people would say yes. So one can learn subjective experiences without needing the perception to actually occur. In some sense the subjective experience is physically encoded in the details of the neural intervention. The interesting question is where is the line on the spectrum between verbal explanations and direct neural intervention, at which such an understanding becomes impossible to impart?
  - Quailman84 2y ago
    If I'm understanding your thought experiment correctly, you are saying that you could stimulate the right part of the brain to cause the person to have an experience of seeing the color red without actually perceiving something red. I think that it would be right to say that they would have gained a more complete understanding of what it is like to perceive the color red, but that's only because you have caused them to actually perceive the color red—that perception just didn't reflect reality. I think we could argue about the definition of "perception", but the important part is that you are making them experience redness firsthand. If you ask me, there is nothing short of direct firsthand experience that will allow you to understand what it is like to see the color red. Here's some further reading on that argument, if you're interested: https://iep.utm.edu/know-arg/ https://iep.utm.edu/know-arg/

cvoss 2y ago

Interesting! Not compelling because you already have your own answers to the questioned posed? Or perhaps not compelling because you don't find the questions to be interesting/relevant? The value of this story, in my opinion, isn't just that these are neat things to think about. There are deep unanswered questions here that challenge how we understand the connection between materialistic science and a non-materialistic belief in "self", and push the limits of theories of ethics. For example, right up to the very end it keeps throwing new questions at you, such as "What is justice when 'two' people have identical claims on a fundamental right? Namely, which of them gets to keep the body? Which of them gets the estate? Which of them is married?" Dennett's story is a powerful instigator of thought on these topics.

smeej 2y ago
I don't find it compelling because I don't buy the premise, that a person whose brain has been separated from his body is anywhere at all. A simulation of life isn't life, and that's all this is. You have, on the one hand, a corpse relieved of its brain being used as a puppet, and on the other, a brain kept firing in a vat. It's popular to think of "ourselves" as a sort of "ghost in a machine," and we particularly assume the ghost resides in the brain, but I don't think that's what people are at all. I don't think either our brains or the rest of our bodies are separable from our selves. That's not to say you can't validly discuss how to treat the body and/or the brain, but I think the person here, the I, has died.
- dkz999 2y ago
  Is someone with a cochlear implant dead? How about someone using a BCI to move a mouse? Or a locked-in patient? Is there a minimum number of organic connections we need to be alive? How would you convince this person that their 'I' has died? I think these questions are exactly along the lines of the question this story begs.
  - smeej 2y ago
    I don't know how many, but that doesn't keep me from knowing it's more than zero. "Convincing a person that their 'I' has died" is a category error, like a married bachelor. Corpses can't know they're dead, and anything simulating life for the corpse isn't a person to convince. There might be some other entity deserving of rights that does exist. I'm not about to argue that only persons deserve rights. I don't think a horse is a person, but I do think it has a right not to be abused. There's a meaningful discussion to be had about what rights the corpse and simulation ought to have in this circumstance. But "convincing a person their 'I' has died" is self-contradictory. Being able to put the words together in a syntactically coherent sentence doesn't make the idea possible.