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> 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 ultimat

> 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.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      Sign conventions are not arbitrary in trajectory planning, though. You'll get very different results if you solve for a robot trajectory that moves from A to B while minimizing motor energy consumption, than if you solve for maximum energy consumption. You'll notice the difference - it's a mistake you'll only make once! If we have some internal decision-making process that pushes us to make decisions that minimize a pain metric, the sign we attach to the "pain" number will make a very big difference, both in internal state and resultant observed behaviour.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  It shouldn't be that hard: you don't like suffering, right? There you go! Those numbers/matrices are bad because they feel bad.
  - gosub100 2y ago
    so all thats necessary for someone to inflict pain is to claim they personally enjoy it?
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      No, they need to convince a large portion of society that it's good enough to allow. So far the arc of human history has shown this to be a difficult argument to make at scale and at length.
      - gosub100 2y ago
        but "they" don't exist to the agent inflicting pain. "they" are just a number, by definition. Just the result of a calculation... Edit: or if you dont like that explanation, why should a consensus of a calculation have any more merit than an individual calculation?
        llamaimperative 2y ago
        Well no, the agent's model of the other person is just data, but this model is so convincing that most people don't perceive it as such and they're thoroughly convinced of the realness of the other person. Consensus matters because if people around you disagree with you they will kill you or put you in prison. At rock bottom this is how all laws and ethical norms are created.
- quonn 2y ago
  And it isn‘t just a number. A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something. It would be honest to admit that we don‘t know why consciousness subjectively feels like anything. Pointing to complexity or integrated information doesn‘t explain this at all. It‘s easy to imagine a complex process that doesn‘t have a subjective experience.
  - gosub100 2y ago
    > A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something. so it's not "just a calculation"? I am NOT trying to make a joke/reference to Clinton, but I think in these philosophical conversations, we have to step back even further and question what our definition of "is" is. Again, I'm a CS grad who has never taken philosophy, so I'm sure this has been explored to death by people who own this field. But there's absolutely a point in philosophy where you can't even rely on "what is true": slamming my fingers in the doorway IS painful (to me), but it IS also "just a calculation" to almost everyone else in the universe. Just as Einstein proved, two observers can experience different realities, fundamentally, two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door).
    - haswell 2y ago
      > but it IS also "just a calculation" to almost everyone else in the universe What do you mean by "just a calculation" here, and how does everyone else's experience of pain apply? You seem to be implying that for everyone who is not the 1st person subjective experiencer of pain, the only possible representation of that pain is some form of "calculation". You seem to further imply that this reduction somehow says something specific about the nature of pain itself. Am I reading this right? Sure, you could choose to use some process of calculation as one way to measure pain, but this isn't the only way to conceptualize it, nor is it the only way that people experience it. e.g. mirror neurons are interesting to consider. We have in our brains these neurons dedicated to experiencing what we observe others experiencing. We cringe when we see someone suddenly become involved in a painful accident. We recoil when we see something horrific. The nature of what the observer experiences is almost certainly very different than what the person in pain is experiencing, but there's a shared experience for those in proximity. Whatever pain is or isn't, the fact that its effects can be localized to a single person and the fact that it may be calculable in some way seem unrelated to each other. > two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door) You hurting your finger in the door and me not feeling the exact thing you experienced are independent facts about the state of the world when the door slamming occurred. Mutual exclusivity seems misapplied here.
somenameforme 2y ago
All possible explanations for existence have a 'well okay, but what created that' issue. Whether you start with a God, or with a quantum fluctuation, one is left asking - okay well what created the God, or what created the void in which quantum mechanics (and who created such a system to begin with) burst forth. There is no answer to these questions, because regardless of the story - it always ends (or in this case, begins) in the same very uncompelling way - 'Well it just always was.' In any case, the mystical and physical are not fixed. Imagine explaining the consequences of relativity to a skeptical individual of times past. Think of his response to the notion that time itself is a variable and can move at different rates for different people in different circumstances. It sounds like absurd mystical sci-FI nonsense. Except it's real, so now has been promoted from the mystical to the physical. So what a skeptic of today would label "mystical" will almost certainly change over the centuries and millennia yet to come. Scarcely more than a century ago, state of the art transport was a horse, computers did not exist, quantum physics did not exist, relativity did not exist, human flight was widely believed to be impossible, and so on endlessly. It seems unlikely in just a century that we've even scratched the surface of knowledge yet to come, let alone meaningfully penetrated into it.
andoando 2y ago
>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. This is exactly my objection. I fully believe were mechanical machines, fully believe in determinism, I think human behavior /thoughts will fully be explained mechanically etc but I cannot find any way to deny consciousness or qualia and reduce them to physical properties (lest we augment our definition of physical to include consciousness as a fundamental property. I also contest the notion that doing so would be "mysticism" or any less scientific than having added "mystical" properties like force/energy and randomness into the standard model of physics). It seems the motivation for this has far more to do with desperately trying to cram everything into materialism than following sense. Until one can give any kind of plausible explanation as to how feeling/qualia can become an emergent property of matter, it is a complete mystery. My thoughts are it is impossible as they are completely orthogonal and complimentary properties. Qualia is the experience of going through the physical process. Pain is the experience of having this mysterious thing called force acted upon pain receptors hooked up to a working neural system. The physical description can explain exactly what happens, but yet it leaves us with an experience that has no physical description. How can that be? Lastly, there will always be unanswered questions or presumptions in science (how did the universe emerge? what makes up energy?), so while the attempt to do is formidable, the presupposition that consciousness must be explained by science is nonsensical. Dennet's eliminative materialism isn't some well accepted philosophical position. In fact, its one the most rejected. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5042 https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5042 https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlations?category=Philosophical%20questions&variable=Consciousness%3A%20eliminativism https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlation... We just had a long discussion about this if you're interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40254047#40257234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40254047#40257234
- jhickok 2y ago
  I think this (qualia) is certainly the heart of the issue, and I personally go back and forth from some kind of quietism (or some kind of mysterianism), and some kind of illusionism. The latter position I would have found utterly topic-changing for the better part of 2 decades, but now I am finding it more plausible as I lose confidence in first-person reports and a series of related phenomena (documented by people like Eric Schwitzgebel). I'll also add the eliminative materialism is probably not the precise position to describe his views on consciousness. You could be the polar opposite of Dennett, like a Jerry Fodor, and still be a staunch anti-realist about consciousness (a view that I think Fodor even entertained). I take EM to be an assault on folk psychology, which may or may not include qualia, and illusionism is probably the better term for his position on qualia.
pfdietz 2y ago
Another unstated assumption is that one necessarily exists. After all, every last experience we have ever had has been with ourselves being there, experiencing it. This leads to the idea that we will cease to exist to just be unbelievable, as it's contrary to everything we have ever experienced. From this I think we get the idea of some essence separate from our biology and the idea of its continuation after death.
- filipezf 2y ago
  I have entertained the idea (if you believe in the quantum many worlds) that everyone will experience themselves as aging to infinitely old age, because in the parallel worlds, well, you don't exist.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Saying that something will happen across the multiverse is stating a certainty, so long as it's physically and logically possible. Every absurdly unlikely thing will happen in that sense. Everybody will, somewhere (and somewhen) become purple with flashing yellow spots. That's very different from saying "I expect to experience this happening", which is a statement about what's probable.
  - sekh60 2y ago
    If you want a grim take on this looking into the quantum immortality thought experiment. I can't remember who wrote it, I think maybe Chalmers, but the idea is that while the experiencer is immortal, they will still accumulate injuries, old age, etc. It would not be a very pleasant immortality.

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.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    Sign conventions are not arbitrary in trajectory planning, though. You'll get very different results if you solve for a robot trajectory that moves from A to B while minimizing motor energy consumption, than if you solve for maximum energy consumption. You'll notice the difference - it's a mistake you'll only make once! If we have some internal decision-making process that pushes us to make decisions that minimize a pain metric, the sign we attach to the "pain" number will make a very big difference, both in internal state and resultant observed behaviour.
llamaimperative 2y ago
It shouldn't be that hard: you don't like suffering, right? There you go! Those numbers/matrices are bad because they feel bad.
- gosub100 2y ago
  so all thats necessary for someone to inflict pain is to claim they personally enjoy it?
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    No, they need to convince a large portion of society that it's good enough to allow. So far the arc of human history has shown this to be a difficult argument to make at scale and at length.
    - gosub100 2y ago
      but "they" don't exist to the agent inflicting pain. "they" are just a number, by definition. Just the result of a calculation... Edit: or if you dont like that explanation, why should a consensus of a calculation have any more merit than an individual calculation?
      - llamaimperative 2y ago
        Well no, the agent's model of the other person is just data, but this model is so convincing that most people don't perceive it as such and they're thoroughly convinced of the realness of the other person. Consensus matters because if people around you disagree with you they will kill you or put you in prison. At rock bottom this is how all laws and ethical norms are created.
quonn 2y ago
And it isn‘t just a number. A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something. It would be honest to admit that we don‘t know why consciousness subjectively feels like anything. Pointing to complexity or integrated information doesn‘t explain this at all. It‘s easy to imagine a complex process that doesn‘t have a subjective experience.
- gosub100 2y ago
  > A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something. so it's not "just a calculation"? I am NOT trying to make a joke/reference to Clinton, but I think in these philosophical conversations, we have to step back even further and question what our definition of "is" is. Again, I'm a CS grad who has never taken philosophy, so I'm sure this has been explored to death by people who own this field. But there's absolutely a point in philosophy where you can't even rely on "what is true": slamming my fingers in the doorway IS painful (to me), but it IS also "just a calculation" to almost everyone else in the universe. Just as Einstein proved, two observers can experience different realities, fundamentally, two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door).
  - haswell 2y ago
    > but it IS also "just a calculation" to almost everyone else in the universe What do you mean by "just a calculation" here, and how does everyone else's experience of pain apply? You seem to be implying that for everyone who is not the 1st person subjective experiencer of pain, the only possible representation of that pain is some form of "calculation". You seem to further imply that this reduction somehow says something specific about the nature of pain itself. Am I reading this right? Sure, you could choose to use some process of calculation as one way to measure pain, but this isn't the only way to conceptualize it, nor is it the only way that people experience it. e.g. mirror neurons are interesting to consider. We have in our brains these neurons dedicated to experiencing what we observe others experiencing. We cringe when we see someone suddenly become involved in a painful accident. We recoil when we see something horrific. The nature of what the observer experiences is almost certainly very different than what the person in pain is experiencing, but there's a shared experience for those in proximity. Whatever pain is or isn't, the fact that its effects can be localized to a single person and the fact that it may be calculable in some way seem unrelated to each other. > two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door) You hurting your finger in the door and me not feeling the exact thing you experienced are independent facts about the state of the world when the door slamming occurred. Mutual exclusivity seems misapplied here.

somenameforme 2y ago

All possible explanations for existence have a 'well okay, but what created that' issue. Whether you start with a God, or with a quantum fluctuation, one is left asking - okay well what created the God, or what created the void in which quantum mechanics (and who created such a system to begin with) burst forth. There is no answer to these questions, because regardless of the story - it always ends (or in this case, begins) in the same very uncompelling way - 'Well it just always was.' In any case, the mystical and physical are not fixed. Imagine explaining the consequences of relativity to a skeptical individual of times past. Think of his response to the notion that time itself is a variable and can move at different rates for different people in different circumstances. It sounds like absurd mystical sci-FI nonsense. Except it's real, so now has been promoted from the mystical to the physical. So what a skeptic of today would label "mystical" will almost certainly change over the centuries and millennia yet to come. Scarcely more than a century ago, state of the art transport was a horse, computers did not exist, quantum physics did not exist, relativity did not exist, human flight was widely believed to be impossible, and so on endlessly. It seems unlikely in just a century that we've even scratched the surface of knowledge yet to come, let alone meaningfully penetrated into it.

andoando 2y ago

>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. This is exactly my objection. I fully believe were mechanical machines, fully believe in determinism, I think human behavior /thoughts will fully be explained mechanically etc but I cannot find any way to deny consciousness or qualia and reduce them to physical properties (lest we augment our definition of physical to include consciousness as a fundamental property. I also contest the notion that doing so would be "mysticism" or any less scientific than having added "mystical" properties like force/energy and randomness into the standard model of physics). It seems the motivation for this has far more to do with desperately trying to cram everything into materialism than following sense. Until one can give any kind of plausible explanation as to how feeling/qualia can become an emergent property of matter, it is a complete mystery. My thoughts are it is impossible as they are completely orthogonal and complimentary properties. Qualia is the experience of going through the physical process. Pain is the experience of having this mysterious thing called force acted upon pain receptors hooked up to a working neural system. The physical description can explain exactly what happens, but yet it leaves us with an experience that has no physical description. How can that be? Lastly, there will always be unanswered questions or presumptions in science (how did the universe emerge? what makes up energy?), so while the attempt to do is formidable, the presupposition that consciousness must be explained by science is nonsensical. Dennet's eliminative materialism isn't some well accepted philosophical position. In fact, its one the most rejected. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5042 https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5042 https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlations?category=Philosophical%20questions&variable=Consciousness%3A%20eliminativism https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlation... We just had a long discussion about this if you're interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40254047#40257234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40254047#40257234

jhickok 2y ago
I think this (qualia) is certainly the heart of the issue, and I personally go back and forth from some kind of quietism (or some kind of mysterianism), and some kind of illusionism. The latter position I would have found utterly topic-changing for the better part of 2 decades, but now I am finding it more plausible as I lose confidence in first-person reports and a series of related phenomena (documented by people like Eric Schwitzgebel). I'll also add the eliminative materialism is probably not the precise position to describe his views on consciousness. You could be the polar opposite of Dennett, like a Jerry Fodor, and still be a staunch anti-realist about consciousness (a view that I think Fodor even entertained). I take EM to be an assault on folk psychology, which may or may not include qualia, and illusionism is probably the better term for his position on qualia.

pfdietz 2y ago

Another unstated assumption is that one necessarily exists. After all, every last experience we have ever had has been with ourselves being there, experiencing it. This leads to the idea that we will cease to exist to just be unbelievable, as it's contrary to everything we have ever experienced. From this I think we get the idea of some essence separate from our biology and the idea of its continuation after death.

filipezf 2y ago
I have entertained the idea (if you believe in the quantum many worlds) that everyone will experience themselves as aging to infinitely old age, because in the parallel worlds, well, you don't exist.
- card_zero 2y ago
  Saying that something will happen across the multiverse is stating a certainty, so long as it's physically and logically possible. Every absurdly unlikely thing will happen in that sense. Everybody will, somewhere (and somewhen) become purple with flashing yellow spots. That's very different from saying "I expect to experience this happening", which is a statement about what's probable.
- sekh60 2y ago
  If you want a grim take on this looking into the quantum immortality thought experiment. I can't remember who wrote it, I think maybe Chalmers, but the idea is that while the experiencer is immortal, they will still accumulate injuries, old age, etc. It would not be a very pleasant immortality.