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"In a nutshell, the problem is this: You’re conscious. But if you’re just made of non-conscious matter, why and how exactly could consciousness arise from that?
by argimenes 2y ago
"In a nutshell, the problem is this: You’re conscious. But if you’re just made of non-conscious matter, why and how exactly could consciousness arise from that?"
Another way of phrasing it which highlights the fallacy is:
"In a nutshell, the problem is this: You’re alive. But if you’re just made of non-alive matter, why and how exactly could life arise from that?"
Just because we don't know exactly how life arose from non-biotic matter doesn't mean that non-biotic matter is alive. And just because we don't know how consciousness arose, exactly, doesn't mean that all matter is conscious.
- llamaimperative 2y agoEh, not really. There are things all along the alive-dead spectrum. “Life” is readily explained as, essentially, chemical reactions. There’s nothing going on in a living thing that you can’t explain in terms of unliving things. The original emergence of life is rather mysterious/special, but the mechanics of how it now propagates out of “dead” matter is not. This is not true of consciousness. We cannot find any evidence of anything in particular that would “turn the lights on” in matter that didn’t previously have the lights turned on.
- mapcars 2y ago> There’s nothing going on in a living thing that you can’t explain in terms of unliving things. There are myriads of things you can't explain about life in any terms. Just that you did not go deep enough to experience them.
- llamaimperative 2y agoProvide examples. It’s chemical, electrical, and thermal reactions all the way down. The one exception is consciousness.
- mapcars 2y agoSamadhi, shoonya
- llamaimperative 2y agoSo consciouness.
- ninkendo 2y agoProvide a definition of consciousness that isn’t circular and we can get a discussion going. That’s the thing that seems to be missing from every one of these discussions… everyone just seems to assume some vague, fuzzy definition of consciousness and nobody calls anyone on it. My 2¢: we don’t have a working definition of consciousness. Every attempt at doing so is self referential and/or completely subjective. The term is meaningless and every discussion on whether something is conscious or not is a complete waste of time and energy.
- llamaimperative 2y ago> every discussion on whether something is conscious or not is a complete waste of time and energy Then don't participate! :)
- ninkendo 2y agoTouché!
- sambapa 2y ago"we don’t have a working definition of consciousness. Every attempt at doing so is self referential and/or completely subjective." What a great definition of consciousness!
- temporarely 2y ago> please provide a definition There is no requirement for definition. Each and everyone of us (gpt bots excluded) experiences consciousness continually, in various modalities. The experience is shared. For example, considering the nature of consciousness and the possible mechanics behind it, we could consider sights. Seeing. We all see things in our minds (and only in our minds!) and we have the first 1/2 of the process pathway mapped out. Light hits a matrix of cells in the 'sensor' which then encodes the sensory data as chemical signals which then side-effect a neural net. Kindly explain -- using physics -- to YOURSELF how you got from a changed states to perception of light in your mind. The experience of consciousness is not a mystery nor is it 'obscure'. Follow up is to note that it is equally wrongheaded to ask if a rock or something/someone else is conscious. Can you explain what you experience in terms of known science and please no hand waving about 'the most complex structure in universe'. The said structure changes states. There is no 'projection room' in the "neural net". There is no decoding final stage that takes matrix input and maps it to a 2D representation (generative AI) etc.
- yzydserd 2y agoLike, a strawberry?
- llamaimperative 2y agoI don’t understand the question
- bubblyworld 2y agoI agree with the spirit of your comment, but I also think it's a little bit premature to say that life is readily explained as chemical reactions. For instance, ecologists study natural selection (i.e. the dynamics of life as we know it) at a much higher level than that, and for good reason! We really don't know how to reduce high-level aspects of behaviour down to matter and interaction yet - not even close. Biology is the ultimate spaghetti code - there are causal loops between all the layers of abstraction (I guess as a result of enormous optimisation pressure and lots of time). I think that makes full-scale reductionism like you're describing a bit hopeless.
- llamaimperative 2y agoI didn't mean to suggest we understand every interaction from molecular to organism scales, but there's no reason to think that that stack of unfathomably complex and highly chaotic interactions is anything but chemical/electrical/thermal interactions.
- bubblyworld 2y agoI know that's not what you meant, but consider that there may be no feasible way to map those interactions onto a theory of chemical/electrical/thermal interactions even in principle. Scientifically speaking, in this case it's meaningless to say that those interactions "are nothing but chemical/electrical/thermal interactions", because you have no predictive power at that level whatsoever! This can true even though the constituents of any organism must obey the laws of physics at a microscopic scale. edit: Anyway, we probably don't disagree about much here, I just think that this appeal to reductionism is a common fallacy.
- llamaimperative 2y agoIt's not really true that we have "no" predictive power. Everywhere we've ever looked in any system anywhere in the universe, we've found nothing except the reactions that I've described. Even in biological systems. We use this knowledge every day to predict and produce new drugs (though again, we are not very good at it).
- ASalazarMX 2y agoWe are just monkeys trying to explain the universe and failing miserably because we're not smart enough to understand it at the basic level. Having failed repeatedly, some monkeys declare it mysterious and unknowable because they are too proud to embrace our limitations. That we are not able to understand how, doesn't prove that life and consciousness arise from anything besides physics. Magic doesn't exist. I'm not foreign to the irony of a dumb monkey declaring something doesn't exist, but I think it's been overwhelmingly clear through the ages that magic never has had any direct effect outside our imaginations.
- llamaimperative 2y agoNo one is claiming it arises from anything besides physics, or at least I’m not.
- ASalazarMX 2y agoOh, I re-read your original comment and you're right. You said the origin of life is mysterious/special, and that we can't find how consciousness starts, but never attributed that mystery/specialness/lack of evidence to magic. I think the wording made me assume you thought those processes had supernatural aid instead of the the incessant trial-and-error of the universe. That's a common argument when discussing the origin of life and consciousness.
- llamaimperative 2y agoAh yes, you’re reading me correctly now! Apologies for the lack of clarity.
- mistermann 2y ago> Magic doesn't exist. This itself seems a bit magical. Do atoms exist? If so, when did they start to exist?
- mistermann 2y agoSimilarly, injecting the word "just" into a description of the problem space doesn't make it true, though at scale it can make it seem that way.