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Why is stress contributing to diseases materialism-inconsistent? In all cases it has a physical mechanism through which the disease is caused. > Idealism, mate

by chr1 2y ago

Why is stress contributing to diseases materialism-inconsistent? In all cases it has a physical mechanism through which the disease is caused. > Idealism, materialism, dualism, etc. concern theory of mind Idealism/dualism used to be about other things too. Stepping away from them allowed us to find physics. Now it is concerned with theory of mind only because the other things are explained by physics. > believed in Aristotle’s takes, too—by being Christian. I was talking about the actually measurable things he was saying about physics, his takes on soul being successful is irrelevant, since we still do not have any experiment proving that soul exists. > “does consciousness arise from atoms?” Science is concerned with the question "whether there exists a Turing machine, output of which is indistinguishable from behavior of a human". This is what most scientists and materialists mean when talking about conciousness. The other questions are specifically crafted in a way to not have answers, so that idealism/dualism etc. can pretend that they do something useful, while not doing anything.

strogonoff 2y ago
You seem to insist on painting dualism/idealism/… as a contender to physics. This is a category error that can only be explained by implicitly treating physics as religion. It is not uncommon—many of us are from a generation that is freshly atheist after generations of religious adherence, so once you encounter physics it is tempting to use it as an outlet for all that bottled up religiosity—but is wrong. Physics is orthogonal to materialism and idealism. The core of any natural science (including physics)—empirical observation—implies the existence of the observer as ground truth, but that’s as far as it goes; beyond that is philosophy (or, indeed, religion). > In all cases it has a physical mechanism through which the disease is caused If the aforementioned stress is the root cause of the physical consequences, then that is materialism-inconsistent. > Idealism/dualism used to be about other things too. ? > Stepping away from them allowed us to find physics. This is incorrect. The fact that many (or most) natural scientists that outlined and progressed physics as we know it today, Faraday, Newton, Mendel, Euler, Maxwell, all the way back to Aristotle, were some form of dualist (mostly Christian) is well-documented. > I was talking about the actually measurable things he was saying about physics Such as? > since we still do not have any experiment proving that soul exists There is no experiment that can prove that materialism, idealism or dualism are correct. Those questions are not in scope of natural sciences for that exact reason ;) > Science is concerned with the question "whether there exists a Turing machine, output of which is indistinguishable from behavior of a human" That is not natural science, that is philosophy and theory of mind. See behaviourist or illusionist theories of consciousness—there are scientists who believe in them, too. Have you heard of the Chinese room thought experiment or the concept of philosophical zombies?
- chr1 2y ago
  > If the aforementioned stress is the root cause of the physical consequences, then that is materialism-inconsistent. E.g. stress increases production of certain hormones, raises blood pressure etc., which over time can be harmful. How is this materialism-inconsistent? > Have you heard of the Chinese room thought experiment or the concept of philosophical zombies? Yes, i don't find them particularly convincing. Chinese room is merely a misunderstanding on the part of Searle, because no one argues that computer carrying out the arithmetic operations does the thinking. The program running on the computer does the thinking, and it does not matter what mechanism is used to implement the computation [1]. And philosophical zombies is just a circular argument. Indeed, in the same way i can argue that there exists a combination of letters, (namely "satki") after reading which the conscious part of any human dies and he becomes a philosophical zombie, completely indistinguishable from his former self, and yet not a person. > That is not natural science, that is philosophy and theory of mind. Creating software that does things similar to what mind does, is now not simply a science but already a field of engineering, so i don't understand what do you mean. In general i don't have problem with religions claiming things orthogonal to physics, but your interpretation of idealism is directly in conflict with it. If we manage to simulate brain with high enough accuracy and it does not produce a behavior similar to human behavior, that will be a proof that you are right and computationalism is wrong. But if we manage to do it, you can still say that computation is secondary, and results we get are because a soul gets attracted to a specific type of computation every time it is carried out, (which will be truly orthogonal to physics), or you can still use the philosophical zombie argument, but it is not different from "satki-zombie" argument above. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    > stress increases production of certain hormones, raises blood pressure etc., which over time can be harmful. How is this materialism-inconsistent? Because this roughly simplifies to “stress causes disease” with extra steps inbetween. Materialists are allergic to such claims. > because no one argues that computer carrying out the arithmetic operations does the thinking. The program running on the computer does the thinking, and it does not matter what mechanism is used to implement the computation [1] That’s a theory in philosophy of mind, too—a non-falsifiable speculation, like the rest of them. > Creating software that does things similar to what mind does, is now not simply a science but already a field of engineering, so i don't understand what do you mean. You said “science is concerned with an implementation of device that behaves like a human would”. I said what we are talking about here is not about that, but about whether that implies there is a consciousness or it’s an unthinking machine. Whether outputting things like a human is enough to consider software conscious, thinking and self-aware in a human-like manner (and thus we are abusing human-like thinking, conscious and self-aware creatures by using ML the way we do), whether consciousness is the substrate as opposed to material world (like Schrödinger, among others, believed), etc. That’s the point of what materialism/idealism/dualism is about, making computers and programs is irrelevant. > If we manage to simulate brain with high enough accuracy and it does not produce a behavior similar to human behavior, that will be a proof that you are right and computationalism is wrong No, it only means there is a program that produces behavior similar to human behavior—the “proof” you imagine is not a proof, which can trivially be demonstrated logically (as Chinese room shows). Manipulating syntactic tokens as an LLM does does not mean understanding and manipulating ideas like a human does, unless you hold a particular non-provable and non-falsifiable theory of mind.

by chr1 2y ago

strogonoff 2y ago

You seem to insist on painting dualism/idealism/… as a contender to physics. This is a category error that can only be explained by implicitly treating physics as religion. It is not uncommon—many of us are from a generation that is freshly atheist after generations of religious adherence, so once you encounter physics it is tempting to use it as an outlet for all that bottled up religiosity—but is wrong. Physics is orthogonal to materialism and idealism. The core of any natural science (including physics)—empirical observation—implies the existence of the observer as ground truth, but that’s as far as it goes; beyond that is philosophy (or, indeed, religion). > In all cases it has a physical mechanism through which the disease is caused If the aforementioned stress is the root cause of the physical consequences, then that is materialism-inconsistent. > Idealism/dualism used to be about other things too. ? > Stepping away from them allowed us to find physics. This is incorrect. The fact that many (or most) natural scientists that outlined and progressed physics as we know it today, Faraday, Newton, Mendel, Euler, Maxwell, all the way back to Aristotle, were some form of dualist (mostly Christian) is well-documented. > I was talking about the actually measurable things he was saying about physics Such as? > since we still do not have any experiment proving that soul exists There is no experiment that can prove that materialism, idealism or dualism are correct. Those questions are not in scope of natural sciences for that exact reason ;) > Science is concerned with the question "whether there exists a Turing machine, output of which is indistinguishable from behavior of a human" That is not natural science, that is philosophy and theory of mind. See behaviourist or illusionist theories of consciousness—there are scientists who believe in them, too. Have you heard of the Chinese room thought experiment or the concept of philosophical zombies?

chr1 2y ago
> If the aforementioned stress is the root cause of the physical consequences, then that is materialism-inconsistent. E.g. stress increases production of certain hormones, raises blood pressure etc., which over time can be harmful. How is this materialism-inconsistent? > Have you heard of the Chinese room thought experiment or the concept of philosophical zombies? Yes, i don't find them particularly convincing. Chinese room is merely a misunderstanding on the part of Searle, because no one argues that computer carrying out the arithmetic operations does the thinking. The program running on the computer does the thinking, and it does not matter what mechanism is used to implement the computation [1]. And philosophical zombies is just a circular argument. Indeed, in the same way i can argue that there exists a combination of letters, (namely "satki") after reading which the conscious part of any human dies and he becomes a philosophical zombie, completely indistinguishable from his former self, and yet not a person. > That is not natural science, that is philosophy and theory of mind. Creating software that does things similar to what mind does, is now not simply a science but already a field of engineering, so i don't understand what do you mean. In general i don't have problem with religions claiming things orthogonal to physics, but your interpretation of idealism is directly in conflict with it. If we manage to simulate brain with high enough accuracy and it does not produce a behavior similar to human behavior, that will be a proof that you are right and computationalism is wrong. But if we manage to do it, you can still say that computation is secondary, and results we get are because a soul gets attracted to a specific type of computation every time it is carried out, (which will be truly orthogonal to physics), or you can still use the philosophical zombie argument, but it is not different from "satki-zombie" argument above. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind
- strogonoff 2y ago
  > stress increases production of certain hormones, raises blood pressure etc., which over time can be harmful. How is this materialism-inconsistent? Because this roughly simplifies to “stress causes disease” with extra steps inbetween. Materialists are allergic to such claims. > because no one argues that computer carrying out the arithmetic operations does the thinking. The program running on the computer does the thinking, and it does not matter what mechanism is used to implement the computation [1] That’s a theory in philosophy of mind, too—a non-falsifiable speculation, like the rest of them. > Creating software that does things similar to what mind does, is now not simply a science but already a field of engineering, so i don't understand what do you mean. You said “science is concerned with an implementation of device that behaves like a human would”. I said what we are talking about here is not about that, but about whether that implies there is a consciousness or it’s an unthinking machine. Whether outputting things like a human is enough to consider software conscious, thinking and self-aware in a human-like manner (and thus we are abusing human-like thinking, conscious and self-aware creatures by using ML the way we do), whether consciousness is the substrate as opposed to material world (like Schrödinger, among others, believed), etc. That’s the point of what materialism/idealism/dualism is about, making computers and programs is irrelevant. > If we manage to simulate brain with high enough accuracy and it does not produce a behavior similar to human behavior, that will be a proof that you are right and computationalism is wrong No, it only means there is a program that produces behavior similar to human behavior—the “proof” you imagine is not a proof, which can trivially be demonstrated logically (as Chinese room shows). Manipulating syntactic tokens as an LLM does does not mean understanding and manipulating ideas like a human does, unless you hold a particular non-provable and non-falsifiable theory of mind.