8 ms·

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

by 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.
- chr1 2y ago
  > What exactly has it yielded? All of the physics and the sciences downstream of it came out of ancient Greek idea of materialism, the idea that things happen not because of wishes of sapient entities like gods or spirits, but because of matter mindlessly following some simple rules. There was a time when the idea that sun is just a fireball and not some thinking being was as hard to accept, as now is the idea that consciousness is merely a result of computation. Whether this idea is a dead end or not we'll see when we have a computer capable to simulate a human brain. > since we're obviously now seeing scientists reorienting their research based on those inputs, away from fallacious intuitions. Who does this? I have not seen any scientists achieving anything useful from this kind of reorientation.
  - mekoka 2y ago
    You seem to have constructed a strawman out of your very own interpretation of idealism. Idealism doesn't condemn the study of nature (i.e. science). It merely says that nature is "dreamt" and that consciousness is the primordial stuff and of a different category. Scientists generally have no problem with this, since they can go on studying observable nature as the purview of science, as it's intended. The problem begins when some, emboldened by the successes of science with nature, don't heed the warning that studying consciousness with the intuition that it's also an emergent property of nature is a category error. How has idealism been useful? It's prevented those who took the time to understand its arguments from wasting uncountable resources on non-starters, allowing to redirect those resources to something actually useful, whether in science or elsewhere. You seem to be of the notion that investing energies in an attempt to prove an intuition that can simply be reasoned as demonstrably false is justifiable. We'll agree to disagree. 30 years ago the philosopher David Chalmers, a materialist back then, had the particular distinction of articulating and cogently framing the idealist argument, better than any idealist had before, in what he coined The Hard Problem of Consciousness. Many scientists who set out to work on this problem thought that "hard" meant that it can be solved. What Chalmers really meant was impossible problem. For instance, in 1998 he entered in a friendly wager with Christof Koch, a scientist who was working on explaining how the brain gives rise to consciousness. David bet to Christof that 25 years in the future, Christof would have gone nowhere with his research. The bet expired last year, David won. In the meantime he himself had gone from a materialist to dabbling with panpsychism. He seems to currently be laying the foundation of his transition to idealism. I've been watching Koch in recent years, as he engaged with Bernardo Kastrup. I could see that as recently as 2 years ago, Koch still really didn't grok the philosophy behind "the world as mind". Only a few months ago, after Kastrup had managed to help him solidify the pieces of that intuition, I heard him admit for the first time that consciousness cannot be material. He's now reframing his work with this intuition as part of his foundations. The stories of Donald Hoffman and Kastrup himself are similar. Computer scientists who set out to build conscious machines. They respectively got into cognitive science (Hoffman) and philosophy (Kastrup) to understand the nature of consciousness and ended up idealists. Likewise in physics, there are some who still resist quantum nonlocality, which interprets local realism as false (material properties do not exist on their own, they require a "measurer" i.e. an experiencer, aka the moon doesn't exist when no one is looking). Quantum nonlocality was demonstrated experimentally and people won the Nobel prize for it (2022). Scientists who still cling to local realism, when it comes down to it, do so out of religiosity toward matter. They waste resources working on all kinds of increasingly less parsimonious theories, which clash with solidified conclusions from other fields of study. I could go on, but I'll leave it at that. Good luck with the proof of consciousness via artificial brain.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by chr1 2y ago

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.

chr1 2y ago
> What exactly has it yielded? All of the physics and the sciences downstream of it came out of ancient Greek idea of materialism, the idea that things happen not because of wishes of sapient entities like gods or spirits, but because of matter mindlessly following some simple rules. There was a time when the idea that sun is just a fireball and not some thinking being was as hard to accept, as now is the idea that consciousness is merely a result of computation. Whether this idea is a dead end or not we'll see when we have a computer capable to simulate a human brain. > since we're obviously now seeing scientists reorienting their research based on those inputs, away from fallacious intuitions. Who does this? I have not seen any scientists achieving anything useful from this kind of reorientation.
- mekoka 2y ago
  You seem to have constructed a strawman out of your very own interpretation of idealism. Idealism doesn't condemn the study of nature (i.e. science). It merely says that nature is "dreamt" and that consciousness is the primordial stuff and of a different category. Scientists generally have no problem with this, since they can go on studying observable nature as the purview of science, as it's intended. The problem begins when some, emboldened by the successes of science with nature, don't heed the warning that studying consciousness with the intuition that it's also an emergent property of nature is a category error. How has idealism been useful? It's prevented those who took the time to understand its arguments from wasting uncountable resources on non-starters, allowing to redirect those resources to something actually useful, whether in science or elsewhere. You seem to be of the notion that investing energies in an attempt to prove an intuition that can simply be reasoned as demonstrably false is justifiable. We'll agree to disagree. 30 years ago the philosopher David Chalmers, a materialist back then, had the particular distinction of articulating and cogently framing the idealist argument, better than any idealist had before, in what he coined The Hard Problem of Consciousness. Many scientists who set out to work on this problem thought that "hard" meant that it can be solved. What Chalmers really meant was impossible problem. For instance, in 1998 he entered in a friendly wager with Christof Koch, a scientist who was working on explaining how the brain gives rise to consciousness. David bet to Christof that 25 years in the future, Christof would have gone nowhere with his research. The bet expired last year, David won. In the meantime he himself had gone from a materialist to dabbling with panpsychism. He seems to currently be laying the foundation of his transition to idealism. I've been watching Koch in recent years, as he engaged with Bernardo Kastrup. I could see that as recently as 2 years ago, Koch still really didn't grok the philosophy behind "the world as mind". Only a few months ago, after Kastrup had managed to help him solidify the pieces of that intuition, I heard him admit for the first time that consciousness cannot be material. He's now reframing his work with this intuition as part of his foundations. The stories of Donald Hoffman and Kastrup himself are similar. Computer scientists who set out to build conscious machines. They respectively got into cognitive science (Hoffman) and philosophy (Kastrup) to understand the nature of consciousness and ended up idealists. Likewise in physics, there are some who still resist quantum nonlocality, which interprets local realism as false (material properties do not exist on their own, they require a "measurer" i.e. an experiencer, aka the moon doesn't exist when no one is looking). Quantum nonlocality was demonstrated experimentally and people won the Nobel prize for it (2022). Scientists who still cling to local realism, when it comes down to it, do so out of religiosity toward matter. They waste resources working on all kinds of increasingly less parsimonious theories, which clash with solidified conclusions from other fields of study. I could go on, but I'll leave it at that. Good luck with the proof of consciousness via artificial brain.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]