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> Brains are made of neurons and thus have a property their parts do not; ergo, emergent behavior. I think you're being too quick. Let's think about things tha
by TelmoMenezes 11y ago
> Brains are made of neurons and thus have a property their parts do not; ergo, emergent behavior.
I think you're being too quick. Let's think about things that we know to be emergent structures/behaviors: cities, societies, the human body, ecosystems, etc. In all of them, you can recognize that the network of interactions is too complex for human intelligence to fully grasp, but you can pin-point the building blocks. It's not magic. We know how DNA directs the synthesis of proteins, how proteins fold, how they combine to form larger structures, etc. It's not possible to fully grasp the full mechanism that is a human body, or a society, but this is because it's too complicated, not because we don't know the components.
With conscious we don't have that. It's an all-or-nothing proposition. What is your consciousness made of? Can you identify building blocks? If not, then you just have faith in emergentism, but you don't have a serious scientific theory.
If eventually you can identify building blocks, and emergentism is correct, then surely these parts will belong to smaller chunks of the system. Eventually neurons are part-conscious. Otherwise how could the big thing emerge? So, in this case, there is something fundamental about matter that we know nothing about.
Or, consciousness is more fundamental than mater. Serious people have also proposed this throughout the ages -- call it platonism maybe. This is an unfashionable philosophical position theses days, but as valid as materialism. Both are perfectly compatible with current scientific theories.
- icebraining 11y agoPlatonism still has to explain why that fundamental consciousness arises only in particular material configurations, ie., if it underlies mater, why isn't all mater conscious? What are the building blocks necessary to channel that underlying consciousness?
- TelmoMenezes 11y agoThere is no known experiment one can perform that tests if something is conscious or not. We know we are ourselves conscious, so we assume that entities resembling us also are, and entities that are too different are not. Maybe that's the truth, but for now it's just a personal belief, not a scientific theory. For something to be a scientific theory it must be testable and falsifiable. Some people actually believe that all mater is conscious -- this position is referred to as panpsychism. Some people believe they are the only conscious entity in the universe -- this is solipsism. These positions may sound absurd, but they are not more or less scientifically credible than the mainstream one. They all fit the observable reality, and none of them can be tested. We all have our intuitions and personal beliefs, but from a scientific standpoint I think that the only rigorous attitude is to remain agnostic on this. Otherwise we fall into the same intellectual traps as mysticism. The scientific attitude is above all to doubt, not to blindly believe.
- titzer 11y agoEven though solipsism is not falsifiable, falsifiability is not the only measure of scientific credibility. E.g. solipsism is less credible than materialism, since more observations support materialism and are relatively hard to explain under solipsism, not the least of which are object permanence, the apparent existence of other people who seem more intelligent than the solipsistic mind, disagreement, injury, pain, Occam's razor... Falsifiability doesn't apply to essentially any metaphysics, anyway. Which is where all the woo about panpsychism and morphic resonance and whole series of theories that make consciousness into some weird thing outside our universe. The question is what metatheories are _compatible with observation_, or at the least, under _what level of gymnastics_ they are. All this talk about "we don't know what consciousness is; therefore XYZ" is filled with woo. Even if we don't know what conscious is or can't exactly _test_ for it, most people agree there are at least different levels of sophistication of consciousness, and that some animals appear to be at least partially conscious. That's not odd if we explain this in relation to brain capacity and along normal evolutionary lines. Is it anything other than the evolution of brains really necessary to explain consciousness? Why do you believe so? So what new dimensions of reality would you like to request in order to explain consciousness? Does anyone have any evidence these other dimensions exist? No, of course they don't.