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> I’d suggest it’s particularly important to explore these discussions as dispassionately as possible if you regard materialism as the only theory of mind that

> I’d suggest it’s particularly important to explore these discussions as dispassionately as possible if you regard materialism as the only theory of mind that has any scientific credibility or validity. I agree, and similarly for those who feel that materialism cannot possibly explain consciousness. Kastrup, for one, seems to sometimes behave as though ridicule makes his philosophy more correct.

mekoka 2y ago
> and similarly for those who feel that materialism cannot possibly explain consciousness. Perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of "feelings". But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths. If you seriously go into this, the only possibilities left once you've dug and eliminated all mistaken assumptions are not material. It can be counter-intuitive and does take a bit of work to reason your way to those conclusions, which is why it's admittedly not a popular outlook. But once you grok it, you don't go back. The fact that materialism is slowly going out of style is telling. Whenever I exchange with someone who makes concessions about consciousness possibly being the product of matter, it's due to one of two things: either some holes haven't yet been covered in their own explorations, or they're still oblivious to some of the implications of their current position. Materialism is fast being eliminated as a possible antecedent to consciousness with reasoning and logic, not simply with beliefs. Currently, it's being salvaged in popular forms of dualism, where it would be a co-primitive of reality with consciousness (e.g. panpsychism). But even this position is just a short stop-over on the way to idealism, as it creates new problems and is just less parsimonious than simply saying consciousness first. An example of a relatively elusive and subtle realization to get, but that also becomes rather difficult to renounce once you grok it, are qualia and how they lead to the hard problem of consciousness. Qualia are so enmeshed in our experience that people have a hard time first seeing how divorced from brain activity they actually are. If you don't get qualia, you can't get the hard problem and how it's really an impossible problem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX0xWJpr0FY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX0xWJpr0FY).
- chr1 2y ago
  Well, idealism simply says that consciousness/humans cannot be understood or explained via simpler concepts. That's the first thing anyone would think of but it is not a useful theory in any way. The alternative theory was that everything complex can be explained to be a result of simple processes repeated many times. A modern way to say this would be that everything is a computation. This second approach have turned out to be very useful for explaining many things. It did not explain consciousness so far but we now have many directions to explore. So while neither position is proven so far, idealism is worse than wrong, it is useless, and if most people believed it, today we would know not much more than ancient Greeks did.
  - mekoka 2y ago
    > Well, idealism simply says that consciousness/humans cannot be understood or explained via simpler concepts. That's the first thing anyone would think of but it is not a useful theory in any way. It doesn't just naively declare it. It reasons it. Idealism never discouraged scientific research. It's simply identified consciousness as being its own category among a set of other categories of problems. One which is beyond our available tools and methodology. That our scientific zeitgeist chose to ignore those hints and proceeded to waste resources chasing its tail is our current reckoning. > This second approach have turned out to be very useful for explaining many things. It did not explain consciousness so far but we now have many directions to explore. What exactly has it yielded? There are few serious physicalist researchers working on consciousness nowadays. Not one person on this planet could tell you anything scientifically meaningful about consciousness. None of the big names, Tononi, Koch, Hameroff, Penrose, Seth, etc. The best you'd get out of them is that we now have even more tools giving us better indications of correlates of consciousness. That is, while they all set out to find answers about the engine, we've actually made tremendous progress on the dials. So I guess we could say that these approaches have been valuable in discovering in practice all the theoretical dead-ends that idealism predicted. At least idealism is proposing a paradigm shift, consciousness first. Not an unreasonable proposition either, since it's consistent with every constraints set in cognitive science and in physics, with the bonus of solving in the process various philosophical problems about consciousness. > So while neither position is proven so far, idealism is worse than wrong, it is useless, and if most people believed it, today we would know not much more than ancient Greeks did. A position taken when you either profoundly misunderstand the philosophy, or when you have no clue how to use insights it gives you. Luckily it's not a universal outlook, since we're obviously now seeing scientists reorienting their research based on those inputs, away from fallacious intuitions.

mekoka 2y ago

> and similarly for those who feel that materialism cannot possibly explain consciousness. Perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of "feelings". But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths. If you seriously go into this, the only possibilities left once you've dug and eliminated all mistaken assumptions are not material. It can be counter-intuitive and does take a bit of work to reason your way to those conclusions, which is why it's admittedly not a popular outlook. But once you grok it, you don't go back. The fact that materialism is slowly going out of style is telling. Whenever I exchange with someone who makes concessions about consciousness possibly being the product of matter, it's due to one of two things: either some holes haven't yet been covered in their own explorations, or they're still oblivious to some of the implications of their current position. Materialism is fast being eliminated as a possible antecedent to consciousness with reasoning and logic, not simply with beliefs. Currently, it's being salvaged in popular forms of dualism, where it would be a co-primitive of reality with consciousness (e.g. panpsychism). But even this position is just a short stop-over on the way to idealism, as it creates new problems and is just less parsimonious than simply saying consciousness first. An example of a relatively elusive and subtle realization to get, but that also becomes rather difficult to renounce once you grok it, are qualia and how they lead to the hard problem of consciousness. Qualia are so enmeshed in our experience that people have a hard time first seeing how divorced from brain activity they actually are. If you don't get qualia, you can't get the hard problem and how it's really an impossible problem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX0xWJpr0FY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX0xWJpr0FY).

chr1 2y ago
Well, idealism simply says that consciousness/humans cannot be understood or explained via simpler concepts. That's the first thing anyone would think of but it is not a useful theory in any way. The alternative theory was that everything complex can be explained to be a result of simple processes repeated many times. A modern way to say this would be that everything is a computation. This second approach have turned out to be very useful for explaining many things. It did not explain consciousness so far but we now have many directions to explore. So while neither position is proven so far, idealism is worse than wrong, it is useless, and if most people believed it, today we would know not much more than ancient Greeks did.
- mekoka 2y ago
  > Well, idealism simply says that consciousness/humans cannot be understood or explained via simpler concepts. That's the first thing anyone would think of but it is not a useful theory in any way. It doesn't just naively declare it. It reasons it. Idealism never discouraged scientific research. It's simply identified consciousness as being its own category among a set of other categories of problems. One which is beyond our available tools and methodology. That our scientific zeitgeist chose to ignore those hints and proceeded to waste resources chasing its tail is our current reckoning. > This second approach have turned out to be very useful for explaining many things. It did not explain consciousness so far but we now have many directions to explore. What exactly has it yielded? There are few serious physicalist researchers working on consciousness nowadays. Not one person on this planet could tell you anything scientifically meaningful about consciousness. None of the big names, Tononi, Koch, Hameroff, Penrose, Seth, etc. The best you'd get out of them is that we now have even more tools giving us better indications of correlates of consciousness. That is, while they all set out to find answers about the engine, we've actually made tremendous progress on the dials. So I guess we could say that these approaches have been valuable in discovering in practice all the theoretical dead-ends that idealism predicted. At least idealism is proposing a paradigm shift, consciousness first. Not an unreasonable proposition either, since it's consistent with every constraints set in cognitive science and in physics, with the bonus of solving in the process various philosophical problems about consciousness. > So while neither position is proven so far, idealism is worse than wrong, it is useless, and if most people believed it, today we would know not much more than ancient Greeks did. A position taken when you either profoundly misunderstand the philosophy, or when you have no clue how to use insights it gives you. Luckily it's not a universal outlook, since we're obviously now seeing scientists reorienting their research based on those inputs, away from fallacious intuitions.