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I think we should be careful about materialistic reductions of awareness. Because some rats dreamed detours that ended up being correct in waking rat life, it
by shomp 1y ago
I think we should be careful about materialistic reductions of awareness. Because some rats dreamed detours that ended up being correct in waking rat life, it does not follow that all instances of deja vu are misfirings. It's a tempting connection to draw, but it does not actually explain how the detours were dreamt to begin with, and this points to a deeper question about awareness in general. If I were pressed for an analogy, I might say something like "just because all books have ink does not mean that all ink lives in books." You know what I mean? There's a superset of experiences that cannot be easily explained away by caching, as tempting as it might be.
- Antibabelic 1y agoMaterialistic reduction has gotten us quite far in science.
- mallowdram 1y agoNot exactly. We don't know where optic-flow reactions that integrate senses, emotions, motor systems in the slightest. Study neural reuse or coordination dynamics. Some relationship between the brain and the world that isn't easily found in the brain alone is responsible.
- akomtu 1y agoIt's also arrested our development. It's like a skill we've got comfortable with and now we arent willing to go further.
- idiotsecant 1y agoMaterialistic interpretations of the world around us are quite literally the only useful ones. If we didn't do that we'd be sleeping in caves and hitting each other with heavy rocks.
- mallowfram 1y agoWrong. Materialistic only got us to a level. Now we're looking past materialism in neural reuse, coordination dynamics and ecological psychology and neurobiology. The causes are out there in contradictory correlations.
- idiotsecant 1y agoLiterally everything is materialist. If it's not it either A) doesn't actually exist or B) you just don't understand it yet. It's inherent to the meaning of the word.
- mallowfram 1y agoA word is a material? You can show me the brain state that corresponds repeatedly and with continuous accuracy a single word? I don't think so. You can train a computer to correspond to an individual's idiosyncratic brain state for their word voxels, but no one has yet to reduce the material to a single repeatable voxel state. “We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.” Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024 The problem with the materialist POV is it doesn't solve the most basic question of brain states. No not everything is a material. There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that require material to some extent, but are not material themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not even be a requirement of life. We may just be material sinks.
- altruios 1y ago> There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that require material to some extent, but are not material themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not even be a requirement of life. We may just be material sinks. I understand. There is a however a flaw in that thinking. There is no oscillation that exists outside of some material/medium to oscillate. I agree it is important to distinguish the water from the wave. There is no light wave without the photon. Thus - I strongly suspect - there is no consciousness without the brain (or similar medium).
- dwd 1y agoOr writing papers on Panpsychism. While I hold a similar view as Sean Carroll that it is basically hand-waving to say we'll never understand consciousness, I can't discount Donald Hoffman's Interface theory of perception and that evolutionary fitness requires we only perceive four dimensions (but there could be more as hypothesised in string theory).