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> If the aforementioned stress is the root cause of the physical consequences, then that is materialism-inconsistent. E.g. stress increases production of certa

by 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

> 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.