6 ms·

How is that different than saying the function of the lungs, kidneys and heart can't be reduced to matter interactions? How is the brain special?

• ikrenji 2y ago
  well the brain is special because it gives rise to consciousness. lungs, kidneys and heart don't
  • astrange 2y ago
    There's a lot of nerves and bacteria in the digestive system that might contribute some of it. That and various hormonal glands and reproductive systems.
  • anon84873628 2y ago
    The brain evolved to be intelligent. Intelligence is the ability to model the outside world in order to make predictions and then choose an optimal course of action. More intelligent beings are generally more "fit" in the evolutionary sense. Hence how humans have conquered all the ecosystems on the planet. Turns out, consciousness/experience/qualia is an unexpected side effect of this process. We can "feel" the intelligence happening. Where we humans get lost is believing that it has any meaning, or that we are somehow in control. We're not; the feeling of free will is just a other trick of qualia.
  • nprateem 2y ago
    We don't know that either. We may be a collection of interacting consciousnesses arising from different organs that all pass around the baton called "I".
    • ikrenji 2y ago
      we know that people don't become someone else after a heart transplant for example
• naasking 2y ago
  You have to Google and read those thought experiments to see why. You may not be convinced (I'm not), but they give good reasons. We have mechanistic explanations for all of those organs, and even if we lack some explanation, we know one is possible in principle. They argue this isn't the case for consciousness.
  • card_zero 2y ago
    OK. Philosophical zombies react to external events in exactly the same way as normal people, including internally, but we are told they lack conscious experience. Thus the thought experiment is set up from the start to find that conscious experience is something non-physical - or else the p-zombies don't really do what they're claimed to do, which is to react identically to everyone else. There's a dubious implication that conscious experience is completely cryptic, with no effect on the outside world (such as a person speaking the words "I consciously experienced that"), or at least that all such effects are shallow enough that they can be perfectly faked. If this is true, we ought to question why it's such a big deal. What's so great about consciousness? Why associate it with rights? The Knowledge Argument is about a scientist who learns "everything" about colors intellectually but doesn't see them until years later, and seeing a red tomato is a revelatory experience even after all that book-learning, so it implies that experiences are beyond knowledge, or beyond physics, or beyond tomatoes or something. But really all it shows is that intellectual learning is dry and dusty and limited. Like with the p-zombies, the premise is wrong. The scientist didn't really learn everything before having the experience, but could have done in principle but for the limits of communication, description, and simulation as we know those things presently. (And then the real experience would not have had any surprising or revelatory quale about it.)
    • naasking 2y ago
      > Thus the thought experiment is set up from the start to find that conscious experience is something non-physical The point is that if you accept that p-zombies are possible, then you accept that consciousness is not necessarily physical. If it's not necessarily physical, then physicalism is false. > really all it shows is that intellectual learning is dry and dusty and limited. What it's attempting to show is the limit of factual knowledge. If physicalism is true, then everything that can be observed must reduce to objective third person facts. But, Mary has all of the objective third person facts. So if you find it implausible that Mary would be able to infer the experience of red before actually observing a rose, even with all of those facts, then you're admitting the existence of first person subjective facts, which cannot be reduced to objective third person facts, not even in theory. Daniel Dennett has some great responses to these challenges.