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This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I assume you don't believe consciousness is a p
by slopinthebag 5mo ago
This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I assume you don't believe consciousness is a physical property in the brain, so what entity is actually experiencing that consciousness? Or, what does it even mean to experience consciousness? Or are these not even the right questions?
- therealdrag0 5mo agoThose are the questions and there’s stacks and stacks of philosophy pages written about it. Go have a whirl.
- pixl97 5mo agoIs a video game a physical property of a computer?
- slopinthebag 5mo agoYes
- pixl97 5mo agoSo then we can assume consciousness is a physical property of brains, as we can measure the electrical signals of consciousness versus when we are unconscious.
- bulbar 5mo agoWe have general purpose hardware and we have hardware that's hard wired for specific purposes like ASICs and we have everything in between. And we are only doing it for a few decades. Evolution had million of years of "try and error".
- doctoboggan 5mo ago> This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I was about to post the exact opposite question? How could it not be an emergent property? Unlike consciousness, the concept of emergence is pretty well defined: An emergent property is a characteristic or behavior that a complex system has, but which its individual components do not have on their own. Consciousness itself doesn't have a well agreed upon definition, but I would posit that _most_ people would agree humans have it, and _most_ people would agree individual cells (neurons) do not have it. If you agree with those two statements, then consciousness is an emergent property by the definition I gave above
- bulbar 5mo agoI think the alternative is that our brain, somehow, is connected to some metaphysical aspect of reality which is what most religions believe.
- kelseyfrog 5mo agoAnother alternative is that consciousness exists on the map, and unfortunately we're confusing that with the territory.
- fc417fc802 5mo agoAren't you saying the same thing? It seems like the metaphysical and the map would be analogous here. Of course both of those suffer from the recursive problem of just kicking the can one level up. But I guess that's fundamentally unsolvable so who cares.
- kelseyfrog 5mo agoI feel like someone confusing the map and territory can exist without needing to invoke the metaphysical. Maybe, I'm misunderstanding tho
- fc417fc802 5mo agoIf something happens "on the map" doesn't that imply the map to exist and be some sort of metaphysical thing? As opposed to a purely theoretical construction.
- kelseyfrog 5mo agoI think you can be a monist and still have a map. To me it's similar in the sense of "all models are wrong, some are useful." A mathematical model (a map) doesn't require a metaphysical foundation to exist. Right?
- eszed 5mo agoNot a gotcha at all, but I don't have a satisfying answer, nor am I confident there even is one. Best I can do is to say that I think consciousness and sense of self are at the very least closely related, and perhaps the very same phenomenon. "I" am the entity that realizes my own consciousness; consciousness is the qualia that makes "me" separable from all other entities. Or something like that. This gets to the "dorm room bullshitting" level right quick.
- slopinthebag 5mo agoYeah, I guess what I'm trying to ask is that if it is an emergent property but not a physical part of the brain, doesn't that imply something metaphysical about consciousness? Almost as if it's a non-physical phenomenon? At least when I hear people talk about emergent behaviour I see it as a refutation of the spiritual, but to me it seems like it actually implies we have a "soul". Idk, it's really hard to articulate my thoughts here and yes it is pretty close to the conversations I had in college on various substances. Lol.
- eszed 5mo agoI don't know if it implies that. Someone up-thread mentioned temperature as an emergent property: individual atoms don't have it, but a sufficiently large group of them do. That would, I guess, make temperature meta-physical in the most literal possible sense. That's not how we typically think of that term as applied to consciousness or soul or whatever, but I'd agree it fits, without implying any kind of specialness beyond that.