4 ms·

Not the person you replied to, but I totally agreed with him and, interestingly, cannot make sense at all of your reply. Those points especially seem to be the

by rixed 2y ago

Not the person you replied to, but I totally agreed with him and, interestingly, cannot make sense at all of your reply. Those points especially seem to be the crux of your argument but I don't see the logic supporting them: > then wouldn't it be such a coincidence that this materialistic brain happens to describe precisely what you seem to experience? > then it would be an extremely unlikely coincidence that human brains and bodies are expressing these facts which happen to correspond to our supposedly 100% passive observing "minds". I fail to see what's unlikely about the viewpoint that the mind is passively watching the movie that our body is the main character of; Or why such a one-way relationship would contradict the mind being real and "physical". Physics is full of one way functions. It is not the first time that I totally fail to comprehend one side of this very debate, and it feels like I'm missing an essential insight. I understand that in dualism the "mind" (the conscious experience) does not bring anything to the physical world and look therefore utterly useless, which is not satisfactory but does not prove or disprove anything (that's what I understand to be "the hard problem of science"), like the angels pushing the celestial bodies according to the laws of physics. I would gladly rule out the possibility of such useless conscious experience like I rule out the theory of the little angels, if not for the personal experience I have of it :) So, to follow along that analogy, it seems to me that yes indeed the moon obeys the law of physics but still somehow some little angels that I can see pretend that they push it around. And your argument sounds like "there must be an influence from these angels to the laws of physics because otherwise it's too unlikely that those angels would be seen", which sounds suspicious to me given how the laws of physics stands very well on their own. I don't know if I've made the discussion clearer or more opaque. Would you be able to rephrase your explanation differently?

DoctorOetker 2y ago
Consider the following visual phenomena / optical illusion: https://michaelbach.de/ot/sze-silhouette/index.html https://michaelbach.de/ot/sze-silhouette/index.html The silhoute may be perceived as rotating clockwise or counterclockwise. There is not in fact enough information to determine which direction objectively. Now suppose 2 types of experiments: A) someone wears spy glasses and observes this effect, and is tasked to regularly speak out what direction (s)he perceives the figurine to spin. The spy glasses records what the subject sees, but also these remarks. B) you observe this animation yourself, not wearing spy glasses, and you yourself speak out loud what direction you see the figurine spin, including occasional flips (which occur more frequently on faster / smaller variants of such animations)... ... now ... Suppose you are watching a recording of someone else's A) variant, effectively you may be seen as a passive spectator of a prerecording of this other person. While watching this spy glass prerecording you would have your own interpretation (clockwise or not) and occasional flips of direction, at the same time you would be hearing this other person's interpretation, and you might agree with this other person half the time and not for half the other, the timing of the flips wouldn't correspond etc. Even guessing a coin toss will be correct half the time. However if you yourself perform B) and speak for yourself, the statistics change, and the rotation direction your supposed 100% passive "mind" perceives corresponds with what your material body is speaking out loud all the time. How do you explain that discrepancy in statistics? How was your brain and body able to systematically express what your supposedly 100% passive "mind" homunculus observed? Hence you have "proven" your "passive mind spectator" to actually be active, and thus necessarily BE MEASURABLE. You come to the conclusion you are a materialist after all, even though the dualist simplifaction of the world is useful and pragmatic, you have shown it to be fundamentally wrong. I wrote "proven" in quotes because you can't prove to a third person this correspondence between (counter)clockwise perception and verbalization. But you have certainly proven this to yourself.
- rixed 2y ago
  I'm going to be naive and open about how your answer make me feel because I believe it may help understand why and where we don't speak the same language, at the risk of giving the impression that I'm looking down at it. Be assured that it is not the case, please bear with me. I don't see the point of the "spy glasses" since the animation we see with or without the glasses is exactly the same - supposedly the glasses do not alter the vision so the flips experienced by the observer would be the same with or without the glasses. > Suppose you are watching a recording of someone else's A) variant, effectively you may be seen as a passive spectator of a prerecording of this other person I assume you mean I'm watching at the recording made by the glasses, so that I see kind of "through the eyes" of the previous observer. I do not fully understand why you had to resort to a visual illusion. If the participant is just asked to say a random number between 1 and 10 every minute, and I'm listening to the recording of the experiment while at the same time being subjected to it myself, I will also utter the same number once every 10 minutes in average. And of course, in the "B" version of that variant of the experiment based on random numbers, I would "agree" with me all the time because there is nothing else to compare to. I don't see the connection with the question of > How do you explain that discrepancy in statistics? This sounds silly. I explain the different result from the fact that it's a different experiment. In the first case I'm comparing my own "random flips" to someone elses, and in the second I'm doing no such comparison. > How was your brain and body able to systematically express what your supposedly 100% passive "mind" homunculus observed? My passive "homunculus" does not observe the movie of the rotating figure, and does no say anything about how it experiences the movie. It merely observes my brain interpretation of the rotating figure, while it listens to my brain uttering in which direction the figure is rotating. It is "out of the loop". (for the purpose of this discussion, the brain is just part of the body, right?) Using the same experiment, let me try to demonstrate that the experiencing subject can only be passive. I do not know how you stand on the "neural networks do/do not experience self consciousness" debate, and it does not matter. For this though experiment all I need is that you agree that it is possible in theory to build a large neural network that experiences _no_ consciousness whatsoever. Just a stupid machine made of cogs and gears if you prefer that to a weight matrix, but enough of them that it has the capacity to be given a set of pictures as input and, if that set of pictures represent a movie of some rotating object, it would flash a green light if the object is rotating clockwise, and a red one if it's rotating counter-clockwise. Of course, if subjected to the optical illusion of the rotating ballerina, the machine would be confused and, sometime flashes red and sometimes green. Now, in principle, we can improve this machine to make it more "brain-like" by enlarging the simulation (or adding more cogs), until eventually we can simulate the exact body (including the brain) of the human being participating in your experiment well enough that we can predict in which direction he will see the figure rotating and when he will experience flips, because the machine will see the exact same thing in the same way and, reproducing the same brain circuitry than the human subject, will be confused in exactly the same way at the same moment. So, we can predict what the subject will "experience" with a machine that does not experience anything. Therefore, the fact that the human subject experiences anything at all is totally irrelevant to what he will say the rotation is (like the angels "pushing" the moon are irrelevant to explain the motion of the moon). And actually, similar experiences are being done at least since the 90s ; not with a large brain simulation but just by measuring the brain activity of the subject and being able to predict what he is going to say before he actually has a conscious experience of it. Three papers from a quick internet search: - https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2008.751 https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2008.751 - https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1212218110 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1212218110 - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39813-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39813-y Don't you think that all this point strongly toward a "one way function"?

by rixed 2y ago

DoctorOetker 2y ago

Consider the following visual phenomena / optical illusion: https://michaelbach.de/ot/sze-silhouette/index.html https://michaelbach.de/ot/sze-silhouette/index.html The silhoute may be perceived as rotating clockwise or counterclockwise. There is not in fact enough information to determine which direction objectively. Now suppose 2 types of experiments: A) someone wears spy glasses and observes this effect, and is tasked to regularly speak out what direction (s)he perceives the figurine to spin. The spy glasses records what the subject sees, but also these remarks. B) you observe this animation yourself, not wearing spy glasses, and you yourself speak out loud what direction you see the figurine spin, including occasional flips (which occur more frequently on faster / smaller variants of such animations)... ... now ... Suppose you are watching a recording of someone else's A) variant, effectively you may be seen as a passive spectator of a prerecording of this other person. While watching this spy glass prerecording you would have your own interpretation (clockwise or not) and occasional flips of direction, at the same time you would be hearing this other person's interpretation, and you might agree with this other person half the time and not for half the other, the timing of the flips wouldn't correspond etc. Even guessing a coin toss will be correct half the time. However if you yourself perform B) and speak for yourself, the statistics change, and the rotation direction your supposed 100% passive "mind" perceives corresponds with what your material body is speaking out loud all the time. How do you explain that discrepancy in statistics? How was your brain and body able to systematically express what your supposedly 100% passive "mind" homunculus observed? Hence you have "proven" your "passive mind spectator" to actually be active, and thus necessarily BE MEASURABLE. You come to the conclusion you are a materialist after all, even though the dualist simplifaction of the world is useful and pragmatic, you have shown it to be fundamentally wrong. I wrote "proven" in quotes because you can't prove to a third person this correspondence between (counter)clockwise perception and verbalization. But you have certainly proven this to yourself.

rixed 2y ago
I'm going to be naive and open about how your answer make me feel because I believe it may help understand why and where we don't speak the same language, at the risk of giving the impression that I'm looking down at it. Be assured that it is not the case, please bear with me. I don't see the point of the "spy glasses" since the animation we see with or without the glasses is exactly the same - supposedly the glasses do not alter the vision so the flips experienced by the observer would be the same with or without the glasses. > Suppose you are watching a recording of someone else's A) variant, effectively you may be seen as a passive spectator of a prerecording of this other person I assume you mean I'm watching at the recording made by the glasses, so that I see kind of "through the eyes" of the previous observer. I do not fully understand why you had to resort to a visual illusion. If the participant is just asked to say a random number between 1 and 10 every minute, and I'm listening to the recording of the experiment while at the same time being subjected to it myself, I will also utter the same number once every 10 minutes in average. And of course, in the "B" version of that variant of the experiment based on random numbers, I would "agree" with me all the time because there is nothing else to compare to. I don't see the connection with the question of > How do you explain that discrepancy in statistics? This sounds silly. I explain the different result from the fact that it's a different experiment. In the first case I'm comparing my own "random flips" to someone elses, and in the second I'm doing no such comparison. > How was your brain and body able to systematically express what your supposedly 100% passive "mind" homunculus observed? My passive "homunculus" does not observe the movie of the rotating figure, and does no say anything about how it experiences the movie. It merely observes my brain interpretation of the rotating figure, while it listens to my brain uttering in which direction the figure is rotating. It is "out of the loop". (for the purpose of this discussion, the brain is just part of the body, right?) Using the same experiment, let me try to demonstrate that the experiencing subject can only be passive. I do not know how you stand on the "neural networks do/do not experience self consciousness" debate, and it does not matter. For this though experiment all I need is that you agree that it is possible in theory to build a large neural network that experiences _no_ consciousness whatsoever. Just a stupid machine made of cogs and gears if you prefer that to a weight matrix, but enough of them that it has the capacity to be given a set of pictures as input and, if that set of pictures represent a movie of some rotating object, it would flash a green light if the object is rotating clockwise, and a red one if it's rotating counter-clockwise. Of course, if subjected to the optical illusion of the rotating ballerina, the machine would be confused and, sometime flashes red and sometimes green. Now, in principle, we can improve this machine to make it more "brain-like" by enlarging the simulation (or adding more cogs), until eventually we can simulate the exact body (including the brain) of the human being participating in your experiment well enough that we can predict in which direction he will see the figure rotating and when he will experience flips, because the machine will see the exact same thing in the same way and, reproducing the same brain circuitry than the human subject, will be confused in exactly the same way at the same moment. So, we can predict what the subject will "experience" with a machine that does not experience anything. Therefore, the fact that the human subject experiences anything at all is totally irrelevant to what he will say the rotation is (like the angels "pushing" the moon are irrelevant to explain the motion of the moon). And actually, similar experiences are being done at least since the 90s ; not with a large brain simulation but just by measuring the brain activity of the subject and being able to predict what he is going to say before he actually has a conscious experience of it. Three papers from a quick internet search: - https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2008.751 https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2008.751 - https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1212218110 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1212218110 - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39813-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39813-y Don't you think that all this point strongly toward a "one way function"?