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Whether David Chalmers believes that consciousness doesn't come from the brain depends on what you mean by "comes from." He believes that physics can completely
by simonster 13y ago
Whether David Chalmers believes that consciousness doesn't come from the brain depends on what you mean by "comes from." He believes that physics can completely describe the physical world; he does not believe in souls and interactionist/Cartesian dualism. Instead, he suggests that information may have both physical and mental manifestations.
While I once found this line of reasoning convincing, I'm no longer so sure it matters. While consciousness itself may be non-physical, under the assumption that physical effects have only physical causes, we should be able to explain why we say we are conscious in physical terms. I'm not sure that an explanation of the latter will also explain the former, but in the end, I don't think we will care. I think we will find that the everyday concept of "consciousness" mixes together many different ideas, each of which are simpler to solve on their own than they are when we consider them together.
Roughly a century ago we went through a similar process with the concept of life. People wanted to know what makes a thing alive, and many intelligent scientists were drawn to the idea that there is something innate to a living organism that makes it alive. After decades of biological research, we're still not sure what makes an organism alive, in the sense that the line between living organisms and inert biological material is not well-defined, but we know how living organisms reproduce and grow, and that's really what matters.
- dgallagher 13y agoAfter decades of biological research, we're still not sure what makes an organism alive, in the sense that the line between living organisms and inert biological material is not well-defined, but we know how living organisms reproduce and grow, and that's really what matters. It might be as simple as "it's alive while it's a functioning machine." A disassembled car is just parts and can't drive/be-alive, but assembled it is a car and can drive/be-alive.
- Tichy 13y agoI've come to the conclusion that it is yet another useless question. Or perhaps "it's alive if it interests us". Is the great red spot on Jupiter alive? I don't know, but who cares if it is interesting enough to study? Imagine we finally manage to land on an alien planet, and all we find is robots "living" there. Would we go "ah, too bad, we didn't find life"?
- dgallagher 13y agoI don't think the question is useless, but rather very difficult to answer. We simply don't know enough yet to answer it, but might someday. As for alien life, I expect if there's anything out there, it's probably intelligent, redundant, and efficient. Who knows what form that could take? It might be robots, or computers, a mesh network, or something else entirely. Whatever form it takes, it'll be limited by the constraints of the universe (or multiverse, or whatever "reality" is). A lot of people's ideas about aliens are molded from television and movies. Historically we've had humans playing those characters, severely limiting how "alien" they can be. While very inspirational and valuable, it has the negative of potentially pigeon-holing peoples minds.
- Tichy 13y agoThe interesting question in my opinion is, why do we find something interesting. For example if we hope to find alien life, what do we hope to find? That is the real question, not some arbitrary definition of life.