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What is it like to be a thermostat? (1996)
- kubb 1y agoI really don’t like the part of philosophy which takes some word from the natural language and tries to deduce a formal definition for it with necessary and sufficient conditions. I don’t like it because it’s so fundamentally unproductive, trying to fit formal logic onto the fuzziness of the language.
- PunchTornado 1y agoisn't this the whole branch of analytical philosophy?
- kragen 1y agoIsn't that all of math and science?
- JohnKemeny 1y agoNo, on the contrary. Mathematics is about structures within, using its own language. Natural language is completely separated from mathematics (although most mathematicians use natural language to communicate mathematics).
- kragen 1y agoOnly pure mathematics fits your description, and while perhaps it is ontologically prior to applied mathematics and science, the human activity of studying pure mathematics seems to have historically arisen from applied mathematics and never entirely escaped it, while applied mathematics seems to have historically arisen from science. And the first step in reducing some phenomenon of the contingent world, such as "heat" or "work" or "light" or "circle" or "strategy", to an abstraction you can apply math to, is precisely to "take[] some word from the natural language and tries to [invent] a formal definition for it with necessary and sufficient conditions." That's how you start applying the hypothetico-deductive method to anything. You might argue that physics and math aren't "philosophy", but Plato, Newton, Kant, and Gauss would say you were full of shit.
- Retric 1y agoThat’s more a modern interpretation coloring history. “Applied mathematics” has always disagreed with reality. It’s only recently that we’ve gotten so good at understanding the world that the differences seem less pronounced. Ancient Egyptians didn’t know why the height of a pile of grain doesn’t grow linearly with the amount of grain in a column etc, instead mathematics was seen as a useful shortcut. Which has always been what applied mathematics ends up as. > You might argue that physics and math aren't "philosophy" There’s a far longer list of famous people including philosophers, scientists, etc who disagree with that idea than agree with it. Fundamentally they operate in different directions with philosophy attacking from the top down and science and mathematics from the bottom up. Plato specifically disagreed with the notion that observation alone can lead to truth.
- kragen 1y agoNonsense. You seem to want to redefine "philosophy" to mean "philosophy that doesn't work", which admittedly is a widespread definition today among the common people. But if we stipulate that definition, it has the practical problem that we cannot tell whether what Chalmers is up to here is "philosophy" or not until we find out whether it was a productive line of inquiry or not, perhaps in two or three hundred years. Whether Plato believed that you could figure out the area of a triangle or the composition of matter from pure logic, or whether that required empirical observation, is irrelevant to the fact that he considered figuring out the area of a triangle or the composition of matter to be properly part of philosophy. This is an assertion that it would never have occurred to anyone to challenge until very recently, with the advent of the useless popular definition of "philosophy" you seem to be championing for some random reason.
- Retric 1y agoSure, nonsense meanwhile you seem to misunderstand one of the earliest philosophical debates. Plato specifically argued for truth independent of physical reality where Aristotle believed in empiricism. As to your edit> You seem to want to redefine "philosophy" to mean "philosophy that doesn't work", which admittedly is a widespread definition today among the common people. But if we stipulate that definition, it has the practical problem that we cannot tell whether what Chalmers is up to here is "philosophy" or not until we find out whether it was a productive line of inquiry or not, perhaps in two or three hundred years. Hardly, I specifically mentioned that some philosophers are open to observation but they get there as a philosophical stance first. Meanwhile Thomas Aquinas and many others argued that truth flowed from religious text. It’s easy to dismiss such reasoning especially when it disagrees with observed reality but that doesn’t erase such people from history. Edit2: I’m done responding to your edits.
- jampekka 1y agoI don't think this is it. There is definitely a lot of philosophy that tries (and consistently fails) to construct formal definitions of some "true ontologies". But this is more about trying to figure out reasonable definitions that people could agree about. The problem in many branches of philosophy is becoming the opposite: people debating without shared definitions and thus not even talking about the same thing. Chalmers has been central in trying to find reasonable shared definitions for (some of) the many different phenomena that are all too often referred to as "consciousness".
- kubb 1y ago> this is more about trying to figure out reasonable definitions that people could agree about That’s part of what I dislike. It’s not enough (for the philosopher) for the definition to be useful inside a field of study. It has to be binding for everyone, presumably because it then can be used to persuade people in other matters.
- jampekka 1y agoA lot of philosophy is about finding, refining and arguing about definitions and that process can't be really separated from the "content". This stems largely from the very problem that it's hard/impossible to find rigorous formal ones.
- xtiansimon 1y ago> “…I don’t like it because it’s so fundamentally unproductive…” For who? It’s wonderful for creative thinking [1]. It’s unproductive to deliver _new_ facts. https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2017/spring/feature/louis-kahn-visionary-0 https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2017/spring/feature/louis-kah...
- kragen 1y agoOne of the most peculiar facts about conscious beings is the way they invert causality. Normally we think, for example, of a fire under a teakettle as being a cause for the water in the kettle eventually boiling. But if I asked you, "Why is this stove burner on?" it would be entirely normal for you to answer, "I'm making tea." Mystically, the tea that does not yet exist, and will never exist if it turns out we're out of tea leaves, is purportedly causing the water to boil (in the future), which in turn is causing the fire to burn, all through the medium of your conscious intention to make tea. It's really a quite surprising ontological claim, and yet nothing could be more quotidian, at least for those of us in the tea-drinking parts of the world. I walked to the electronics store yesterday morning and bought some opamps. I find it amusing to think of opamps as bringing intentionality to circuits: they invert causality in precisely the same way as you do when you are making tea. The non-inverting input voltage is the op-amp's intention, the inverting input voltage is its observation which it interprets as a model of the world, and its output current is the behavior it controls according to that model to bring the world into accordance with its intentions. The op-amp's behavior is only effective if there is a "structural similarity" between the world as the op-amp imagines it and the world as it really is, namely, if spewing out more current on its output will raise its inverting input relative to its non-inverting input, and sucking in more or spewing out less will lower it; we normally call this the negative-feedback condition. An op-amp hooked up backwards so the feedback instead is positive and drives it into overload is, in this analogy, like an insane or otherwise irrational person who keeps taking actions that predictably achieve the opposite of their intention, like posting comments on HN in order to enjoy thoughtful conversation. When we design analog circuits with op-amps, we do routinely use the same kind of inverted-causality reasoning we use with the tea. Suppose it succeeds at making its inputs equal; what then is the situation that must prevail in the circuit? Oh, Vo = V1 + V2 - V3 - V4. Or Vo = -5Vi. And so it is, at least if the op-amp's feedback is not frustrated, or so effective that it sends the circuit into oscillation. Op-amps (and thermostats) are clearly doing something that shares important features with human goal-directed activity, to the point that it seems practically useful to ascribe intentions to it, saying "this op-amp wants these currents to be equal" in a way that it isn't useful to say "this weight wants to move downward". So I wonder what it is like to be an LM324N op-amp. I imagine it to be a very simple sort of existence, if not always a happy one. I prefer to be a human, but, failing that, I'd rather be a bacterium than an op-amp. So it's amusing to see that Chalmers had the same thought. I wonder if I got it from him through indirect memetic contagion. (Though as far as I can tell he doesn't discuss oscillation, positive feedback runaway, or this peculiar inversion of causality. But I really doubt those are original to me, either.)
- OgsyedIE 1y agoThermostats are a great toy model for introducing feedback systems in control theory and individual neurons are analogous in a lot of ways that are interesting to think about. But this article ain't it.
- dudeinjapan 1y agoMuch of biology and biomes relies on negative feedback loops. The fact our body stays at 37C within +/- 0.5C is pretty remarkable. We already know what it's like to be a thermostat... because we are all thermostats.
- rzzzt 1y agoAlso pressure regulators and maintainers of solution levels in liquid.
- jampekka 1y agoDepends on your interests. Chalmers is probably the most influential philosopher of consciousness, and I find the most reasonable. The article definitely shouldn't be dismissed off-hand, but it may be a bit difficult to appreciate as is, as it's more of a brief comment in a lot wider discussion. Good starting point to the topic is Chalmers' "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness". https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf
- notpushkin 1y agoThe article in in an iframe, so it breaks reader mode in Firefox. This works for me: about:reader?url=https://consc.net/notes/lloyd-comments.html https://consc.net/notes/lloyd-comments.html
- dr_dshiv 1y agoThermostats were invented by the Dutch genius Cornelis Drebbel (aka de rebel) around 1600, based on alchemical principles. This cybernetic alchemist also invented functional air conditioning, a perpetual motion machine (wound a clock powered by daily changes in barometric pressure), solar powered fountains and the first functional submarine (along with torpedos). I have a full sized replica of his wooden submarine in Amsterdam. He also invented a mechanism for generating oxygen — necessary for the rowers, of course. His thermostat was used to incubate eggs. It appeared in Chinese literature, with illustrations, within 50 years. https://drebbel.net/2013%20Drebbels%20Athanor.pdf https://drebbel.net/2013%20Drebbels%20Athanor.pdf This is pre steampunk — alchemy-punk? Both Shakespeare and Ben Johnson wrote plays with characters based on Drebbel. He also invented magic lanterns (projection devices) and camera obscures for painters. He was widely discussed by members of the Royal Society, but had been generally forgotten. Largely because a few early Dutch scientists thought he was a charlatan.
- KevinMS 1y agoStop trying to explain consciousness as something emergent from things. Its easier to explain it the other way around.
- theletterf 1y agoCould you elaborate? Things emerge from consciousness? I don't follow.
- balamatom 1y agoHow do you know that there's something instead of nothing?
- jrvieira 1y ago_René has entered the chat_
- KevinMS 1y agoThis is new to you? Its only the foundation of two major world religions.
- theletterf 1y agoAh, I see. I sort of hoped it wasn't that.
- qwertox 1y agoHas there been found a way to properly explain consciousness at all? You frame it as if there's a wrong way and a correct way. We're still watching the effects of the colors of the oil paint smeared on our hands while we just have an idea of the painting, but we don't even know if using a brush would be better than using a painting knife. If you explain it the other way around, you'll also face some serious issues. Do we live in a shared reality, independent of us, which allows us to "come in" and interact with other beings, with pre-set rules of how this reality shares ours and other's interactions among all of us, or is this an all-encompassing reality which is the result of the imagination of a single being, possibly even one seeing itself through multiple simultaneous interaction points we call conscient beings in this place we call reality, which this thing has invented all by itself, from the ant walking over a grain of sand to you reading this message on a screen, a screen "we" first had to invent? If not even that is clear, how can anything be easy about any of this?
- balamatom 1y agoThis is basically the premise of a very funny embargoed novel. Find me at the Echo Bazaar after sundown.
- kalavan 1y agoI just have to find a way to deal with all this prisoner's honey first.
- Gerjek 1y ago[dead]
- sobiolite 1y agoI don't understand why consciousness is considered mysterious anymore. We know intelligent systems broadly work by learning, updating and querying a predictive world model. For accuracy, a sufficiently powerful system must necessarily start to include its own state and potential actions in this world model. This creates a recursive self-knowledge that produces self-awareness. The ongoing process of analyzing and acting upon this self-model is consciousness.
- kalavan 1y agoIt's considered mysterious because of the hard problem of consciousness. Describing a mechanism that could be considered analogous to consciousness "from the outside" is pretty easy (just do self reference). But the subjective quality of "what is it like to be X" is not easily captured by such descriptions - not unless you make some kind of panpsychist assumption that everything that has self-reference is subjectively conscious. That said, a number of materialists say that there's no there there, and thus no problem. We're just all deluding ourselves into thinking that we have subjective experience. I don't think that argument is very strong, but it is made, and could explain why some find the whole business of consciousness seemingly trivial while others consider the hard problem to be very hard. More information can be found at https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/ https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/
- throw0101d 1y agoThe title is a play a famous philosophy paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?": > Nagel challenges the possibility of explaining "the most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena" by reductive materialism (the philosophical position that all statements about the mind and mental states can be translated, without any loss or change in meaning, into statements about the physical). For example, a reductive physicalist's solution to the mind–body problem holds that whatever "consciousness" is, it can be fully described via physical processes in the brain and body.[5] […] > The paper argues that the subjective nature of consciousness undermines any attempt to explain consciousness via objective, reductionist means. The subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a system of functional or intentional states. Consciousness cannot be fully explained if the subjective character of experience is ignored, and the subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a reductionist; it is a mental phenomenon that cannot be reduced to materialism.[6] Thus, for consciousness to be explained from a reductionist stance, the idea of the subjective character of experience would have to be discarded, which is absurd. Neither can a physicalist view, because in such a world, each phenomenal experience had by a conscious being would have to have a physical property attributed to it, which is impossible to prove due to the subjectivity of conscious experience. Nagel argues that each and every subjective experience is connected with a "single point of view", making it infeasible to consider any conscious experience as "objective". * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
- gitroom 1y agolol been down so many rabbit holes about how we even know what it feels like to be anything - tbh, i never buy any of those neat clean definitions people try to sell. you think we ever actually get closer to a real answer or we just end up with better questions over time?
- turtleyacht 1y agoWe who are prey argue consciousness because we are able to ask, "What is it like to be the hunter?" But the hunters still eat us. The hunters have a faction who agitate for equal rights on our behalf, since we feel pain and suffer, and create engines (but not interstellar ones). None of us want to tell them they are a little bit wrong in the essays, having picked up rudiments of their language and writings, even though both we and they understand calculus. Or we could tell them, and propose we are just as important to the idea of an intergalactic organization, although we do just want to borrow some of their schematics around movement and weapons. (For our protection, of course.) Therefore, the only beings a conscious folk consider likewise are those who may emerge in a fashion to make war to preserve themselves. Does that mean we should expand consciousness otherwise to species that cannot?
- dang 1y agoRelated: What is it like to be a thermostat? (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42548641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42548641 - Dec 2024 (80 comments)