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> they assume consciousness emerges through purely mechanical means. From my view, all the evidence points in exactly that direction though? Our consciousness

> they assume consciousness emerges through purely mechanical means. From my view, all the evidence points in exactly that direction though? Our consciousness can be suspended and affected by purely mechanical means, so clearly much of it has to reside in the physical realm. Quantum consciousness to me sounds too much like overcomplicating human exceptionalism that we have always been prone to, just like geocentrism or our self-image as the apex of creation in the past.

CuriouslyC 1y ago
Your memory formation gets inhibited and you become unresponsive under anesthesia. The brain still processes information. Let's take a step back from the "how" and talk about the what. The fundamental dichotomy is emergent consciousness versus panpsychism. The irony is that even though panpsychism is seen as more fringe (because materialists won, smh), it's actually the explanation preferred by Occam's razor. Emergent consciousness needs a mechanism of emergence as well as separate dimensions of consciousness and matter, whereas panpsychism is good as is. To go one step farther, idealism simplifies a lot of the weirdness around panpsychism. It's a strange world to live in where the elegant worldview that answers difficult problems cleanly is marginalized by an epicycle-laden one that creates paradoxes just because the elegant view refutes the dominant religious paradigm and anthropocentrism.
- antonvs 1y ago
  Panpsychism doesn’t explain anything, it just asserts that consciousness doesn’t have an explanation, that it just “is”. It’s not impossible that something like panpsychism could be true, but knowing that wouldn’t get us any closer to understanding consciousness. It also raises more questions than it answers, such as how an integrated consciousness arises within a brain/mind, whereas it presumably doesn’t in, say, a hamburger patty. Ironically, attempts to explain that start to hint that such an explanation might not need to rely on panpsychism in the first place - i.e. if you can explain how consciousness arises from a sum of parts, you may not need to postulate that it exists independently of that combination of parts.
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    Those questions you mentioned apply across the board, just in nuanced variants. Do you really think that postulating a non-physical system that we can't describe in physical terms (red is not a wavelength), somehow magically creates a new dimension of "feeling" when the bits are arranged in the "right order" is less complex than the hypothesis consciousness forms arranges itself into "structures" in much the same way as matter does? As for explaining consciousness, we can't even prove consciousness exists, so the thought of trying to explain "what" it is seems rather premature, but then that's humans for ya.
    - myrmidon 1y ago
      I honestly don't see what the whole framework gets you. Red (or all qualia) is just the reaction of your nervous system to a stimulus. Since that reaction is shaped by common context/associations, the "subjective experience" is quite comparable between similarly raised humans. I think the whole philosophy of mind/subjective experience field is one of the few remaining anti-reductionist hold-outs, but I simply don't see a good enough motivation to stick with that view, especially given the abysmal historical track record for anti-reductionism (just consider early chemistry/alchemy, early biology, astronomy, ...).
      - CuriouslyC 1y ago
        I'm cool with scientists taking the "shut up and calculate" approach, after all we have to do science, and if you can't do experiments you're doing philosophy. The problem here is the same problem as with quantum hypotheses -- people have forgotten their materialist perspective is an experimental framework and are trying to claim the map is the territory and put the cart before the horse.
      - antonvs 1y ago
        Calling that anti-reductionist is misunderstanding the issue. > Red (or all qualia) is just the reaction of your nervous system to a stimulus. Yes, Chalmers would call that one of the easy problems. Computers can do that - react to sensor data, which they have internal representations of - and most people don't assume they're conscious. The hard problem is how you get from that to a conscious experience of those stimuli, which we tend to assume that computers (and LLMs?) don't have. That's not an anti-reductionist position, it's pointing out the fundamental philosophical difficulty in making that leap from non-conscious organizations of matter to conscious ones. Even a hard-core materialist/reductionist who is honest will acknowledge that, assuming they've understood the issue.

CuriouslyC 1y ago

Your memory formation gets inhibited and you become unresponsive under anesthesia. The brain still processes information. Let's take a step back from the "how" and talk about the what. The fundamental dichotomy is emergent consciousness versus panpsychism. The irony is that even though panpsychism is seen as more fringe (because materialists won, smh), it's actually the explanation preferred by Occam's razor. Emergent consciousness needs a mechanism of emergence as well as separate dimensions of consciousness and matter, whereas panpsychism is good as is. To go one step farther, idealism simplifies a lot of the weirdness around panpsychism. It's a strange world to live in where the elegant worldview that answers difficult problems cleanly is marginalized by an epicycle-laden one that creates paradoxes just because the elegant view refutes the dominant religious paradigm and anthropocentrism.

antonvs 1y ago
Panpsychism doesn’t explain anything, it just asserts that consciousness doesn’t have an explanation, that it just “is”. It’s not impossible that something like panpsychism could be true, but knowing that wouldn’t get us any closer to understanding consciousness. It also raises more questions than it answers, such as how an integrated consciousness arises within a brain/mind, whereas it presumably doesn’t in, say, a hamburger patty. Ironically, attempts to explain that start to hint that such an explanation might not need to rely on panpsychism in the first place - i.e. if you can explain how consciousness arises from a sum of parts, you may not need to postulate that it exists independently of that combination of parts.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  Those questions you mentioned apply across the board, just in nuanced variants. Do you really think that postulating a non-physical system that we can't describe in physical terms (red is not a wavelength), somehow magically creates a new dimension of "feeling" when the bits are arranged in the "right order" is less complex than the hypothesis consciousness forms arranges itself into "structures" in much the same way as matter does? As for explaining consciousness, we can't even prove consciousness exists, so the thought of trying to explain "what" it is seems rather premature, but then that's humans for ya.
  - myrmidon 1y ago
    I honestly don't see what the whole framework gets you. Red (or all qualia) is just the reaction of your nervous system to a stimulus. Since that reaction is shaped by common context/associations, the "subjective experience" is quite comparable between similarly raised humans. I think the whole philosophy of mind/subjective experience field is one of the few remaining anti-reductionist hold-outs, but I simply don't see a good enough motivation to stick with that view, especially given the abysmal historical track record for anti-reductionism (just consider early chemistry/alchemy, early biology, astronomy, ...).
    - CuriouslyC 1y ago
      I'm cool with scientists taking the "shut up and calculate" approach, after all we have to do science, and if you can't do experiments you're doing philosophy. The problem here is the same problem as with quantum hypotheses -- people have forgotten their materialist perspective is an experimental framework and are trying to claim the map is the territory and put the cart before the horse.
    - antonvs 1y ago
      Calling that anti-reductionist is misunderstanding the issue. > Red (or all qualia) is just the reaction of your nervous system to a stimulus. Yes, Chalmers would call that one of the easy problems. Computers can do that - react to sensor data, which they have internal representations of - and most people don't assume they're conscious. The hard problem is how you get from that to a conscious experience of those stimuli, which we tend to assume that computers (and LLMs?) don't have. That's not an anti-reductionist position, it's pointing out the fundamental philosophical difficulty in making that leap from non-conscious organizations of matter to conscious ones. Even a hard-core materialist/reductionist who is honest will acknowledge that, assuming they've understood the issue.