7 ms·

A materialist rejects "consciousness" as a fruitful term, observing that it often leads to confusion and non-sequiturs, as contradictions often do. The paper it

by dkural 11y ago

A materialist rejects "consciousness" as a fruitful term, observing that it often leads to confusion and non-sequiturs, as contradictions often do. The paper itself shows how certain definitions of consciousness would have these outcomes. Materialists would say that you need a functional definition of consciousness: If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it's a duck. It's a bit like talking about a "soul". Humanity, for the longest time, thought there was a soul, separate from our mere bodies. They just had a "feeling" that it was real, despite not being able to provide a functional definition of what it is. Consciousness is no different. Coherence of the self is an illusion.

foldr 11y ago
>They just had a "feeling" that it was real, despite not being able to provide a functional definition of what it is. If you think it's hard to define what a soul is, try defining what it is for something to be "material".
- juliangregorian 11y ago
  Just replace "material" by "measurable".
  - foldr 11y ago
    And have fun defining "measurable"!
_delirium 11y ago
> A materialist rejects "consciousness" as a fruitful term Some certainly do, more specifically eliminative materialists: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/ But my read is that this article is intending to throw a challenge in the direction of philosophers who advocate a materialist understanding of consciousness, but who aren't eliminative about the concept of consciousness. I.e. they believe it's meaningful to call humans "conscious", and they also believe that the phenomenon has a materialist explanation. This article aims to force them to either drop the concept, or accept that it can be applied very broadly.
wfo 11y ago
The vast majority of humans still believe there is a soul so I think it's fair to say Humanity still thinks so.
- Retra 11y ago
  The vast majority of humans have never been in space, yet Humanity has.
  - wfo 11y ago
    Actions are very, very different from beliefs when we anthropomorphize an abstract notion of a race of people. Humanity is a logical 'or' of all its actions. Beliefs, the operation is much more complicated.
    - juliangregorian 11y ago
      Unsurprisingly, logic not seeming to be one of your strong suits.
      - wfo 11y ago
        This is purely an unsubstantiated insult devoid of content please follow the HN guidelines.
- juliangregorian 11y ago
  You don't speak for me.
  - rosser 11y ago
    I didn't get the impression he was trying to.
  - wfo 11y ago
    You don't speak for humanity. Believe in souls or not most people do and we need to understand that when we use abstract words like 'humanity believes in x'.
cristianpascu 11y ago
>> They just had a "feeling" that it was real To say this is quite ignorant of the past few (24?) centuries of philosophy, including those centuries and thinkers when philosophy was part of religious thinking.
xenophon 11y ago
Well, that's precisely the point of the article. According to the author, the United States indeed "walks like a duck and talks like a duck," to the extent that it is homeostatic (feeds itself, defends itself, undertakes coordinated actions such as trade embargoes) and large scale information transfer does occur between its constituent subsystems (humans, say). Of course there is something intuitively bothersome about that: somehow, we don't believe that there is something it is like to be the United States, but we do believe there is something it is like to be xenophon. That's why the core question isn't absurd at all -- the author is trying to understand what truly differentiates a conscious system.
- noobermin 11y ago
  As I said below, if you really are a materialist, then this shouldn't bother you. As a materialist, you can't judge something from the inside, you can only apply the duck rule.[0] And the US, a book club, a couple, all of these deliberate, form consensus, act for self-survival...they act like living things just like us bags of meat do, so they should be "concious", just like a person or a rabbit or a duck is. Or, if this still does bother you, may be you should question your faith in materialism.
- SilasX 11y ago
  It doesn't seem like that much of a bullet to bite. If you accept that many-celled organisms can be conscious, and that eusocial colonies (ants, bees) behave more like intelligent organisms than any one member, it's not much if a stretch to say "hm, a country belongs on that scale". It's moderately surprising that a consistent system would put the US at eg 25% of a human by consciousness, but it's not the kind of thing that makes you say "oops I made a wrong choice somewhere". The lense of homeostasis (or autopoiesis more generally) is useful: it does allow you to put things on a meaningful, insight-yielding scale: there are humans, and rocks, and then fire and hurricanes somewhere in between. So what does it take to make something past human in the scale?
  - foldr 11y ago
    It's a huge bullet to byte if you think about the ethical implications downstream. Individualism assumes that the relationship between a nation state and the individuals that make it up is exactly not like this.
sebringj 11y ago
Marvin Minsky said something to the effect of "We stand on the shoulders of giants but we quickly jump off them when they found out to be wrong." Ancient wisdom is not something that should be respected in terms of understanding the universe if it is known to contradict it.
pron 11y ago
An illusion to whom? And of what? :) But while materialists may reject consciousness as a fruitful term, there's a problem with finding a functional definition of consciousness -- or even one that agrees enough with what we colloquially understand consciousness to be -- as consciousness, as we understand it, plays absolutely no observable function. Dismissing offhand as an illusion something that is not just perceived to be real but perceived to be the realest thing there is, is just waving away a really hard problem. I can accept that consciousness may be an illusion, but that doesn't make it any less elusive, as illusion itself pre-supposes consciousness. And suppose that you come up with a theory of when consciousness -- or its illusion -- emerges. How can you possibly test that? There is a huge difference between, "we can't talk about it in a scientifically meaningful way" and "there is no it to talk about". The former most certainly does not imply the latter.
- vidarh 11y ago
  Coherence of self is demonstrably an illusion, because we have seen experiments of people with severed brain stems. In that situation the brain halves still insist on there being a self, and insist on knowing the motivations for actions taken by the other brain half, despite not having any direct connection, and often being provably wrong (e.g. researchers have manipulated data, presented them to one brain half as decided by the other, and gotten the brain half to explain its motivations for making choices that were actually made by the researchers). Similarly, you can sever the connection between the brain and the gut (which also contains a mass of neurons) and the gut will continue to operate independently, yet the gut can affect your emotional state and other parts of what we tend to consider as "self". We are government by a range of independently operating systems that combine to create "self" in some form. Note that this does not mean that consciousness have to be an illusion, but the illusion single, coherent unified self is created by and actively perpetrated by our brains, papering over all kinds of holes.
  - pron 11y ago
    Oh, I am not arguing with that. I'm just saying that the fact consciousness itself cannot be defined scientifically at this point doesn't mean you can just wave it away as "an illusion" without further explanation.
kr4 11y ago
Who said that there's no definition provided? as per my understanding of Upanishads which are the most profound works on consciousness: consciousness (atman/soul) is self-existent, ever-blissful non-material energy. it has no beginning and no end. It never born so never dies. it's the absolute truth because it's not subjected to change, death and decay. Material reality is only a relative truth because it's always changing. Whole of our body cells recycle every year. But we're still aware of the body as before. that awareness is the non-material atman, which associates, itself with this body as long as it's bound. Yogis for ages have been able to go to the source – atman – by silenting the mind and its modifications (vritis) and have been able to observe the causal, subtle and gross planes of existence along with wheel of time. Hence Upanishad declares: "That which cannot be observed through mind rather through which mind gets the ability to observe is atman"
- verbin217 11y ago
  We materialists want a material definition for this thing you call non-material. What is it. Define it so we can analyze it with our material-limited instrument, empiricism. Otherwise we're forced to conclude that it does not "exist" (is material) and downvote you for being so stupid.
  - kr4 11y ago
    I've defined it already. As far as experience is concerned, there are multiple systematic paths (under different branches of Yoga) to experience this non-material thing which is self only, but unfortunately you can't do it with your very limited material senses. Do you realize the subtle level at which brain operates? when your instruments can't fathom subtleness of your brain, how can such instruments even get the glimps of consciousness which is subtler than mind. It hardly takes an year or two under proper guidance and full commitment to get glimpses of this subtlemost thing, do you dare to invest? If you fanatically stick to a viewpoint without even evaluating the other view with an open mind, you risk of repeating what religious fanaticism did with pre-modern scientists in the west. And regarding downvotes, do you think I care? I could have posted more popular comment in favor of materialism to gain more material points :p Edit: To learn more, you can read autobiographies of two living yogis [0] and [1]. A succinct yet most authoritative practical guide is Yoga Sutras [2]. 0. http://www.amazon.in/If-Truth-Be-Told-Memoir/dp/9351368068/ http://www.amazon.in/If-Truth-Be-Told-Memoir/dp/9351368068/ 1. http://www.amazon.com/Apprenticed-Himalayan-Master-Yogis-Autobiography-ebook/dp/B007F2I3F0 http://www.amazon.com/Apprenticed-Himalayan-Master-Yogis-Aut... 2. http://www.swamij.com/index-yoga-meditation-yoga-sutras.htm http://www.swamij.com/index-yoga-meditation-yoga-sutras.htm
gbog 11y ago
A materialist? Which one are you talking about? Marx? Descartes? And saying that consciousness is a fruitless concept is a bit short, when this very concept is unavoidable when trying to know what is humanity. It's so fruitless that hundreds of books have been written to try to grab a part of it. It is also central to psychoanalysis, and to many major novels of the last century. Fruitless you said?
gbog 11y ago
A materialist? Which one are you talking about? Marx? Descartes? And saying that consciousness is a fruitless concept is a bit short, when this very concept is unavoidable when trying to know what is humanity. It's so fruitless that hundreds of books have been written to try to gab a part of it. It is also central to psychoanalysis, and many major novels of the last century. Fruitless you said?

by dkural 11y ago

foldr 11y ago

>They just had a "feeling" that it was real, despite not being able to provide a functional definition of what it is. If you think it's hard to define what a soul is, try defining what it is for something to be "material".

juliangregorian 11y ago
Just replace "material" by "measurable".
- foldr 11y ago
  And have fun defining "measurable"!

_delirium 11y ago

> A materialist rejects "consciousness" as a fruitful term Some certainly do, more specifically eliminative materialists: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/ But my read is that this article is intending to throw a challenge in the direction of philosophers who advocate a materialist understanding of consciousness, but who aren't eliminative about the concept of consciousness. I.e. they believe it's meaningful to call humans "conscious", and they also believe that the phenomenon has a materialist explanation. This article aims to force them to either drop the concept, or accept that it can be applied very broadly.

wfo 11y ago

The vast majority of humans still believe there is a soul so I think it's fair to say Humanity still thinks so.

Retra 11y ago
The vast majority of humans have never been in space, yet Humanity has.
- wfo 11y ago
  Actions are very, very different from beliefs when we anthropomorphize an abstract notion of a race of people. Humanity is a logical 'or' of all its actions. Beliefs, the operation is much more complicated.
  - juliangregorian 11y ago
    Unsurprisingly, logic not seeming to be one of your strong suits.
    - wfo 11y ago
      This is purely an unsubstantiated insult devoid of content please follow the HN guidelines.
juliangregorian 11y ago
You don't speak for me.
- rosser 11y ago
  I didn't get the impression he was trying to.
- wfo 11y ago
  You don't speak for humanity. Believe in souls or not most people do and we need to understand that when we use abstract words like 'humanity believes in x'.

cristianpascu 11y ago

>> They just had a "feeling" that it was real To say this is quite ignorant of the past few (24?) centuries of philosophy, including those centuries and thinkers when philosophy was part of religious thinking.

xenophon 11y ago

Well, that's precisely the point of the article. According to the author, the United States indeed "walks like a duck and talks like a duck," to the extent that it is homeostatic (feeds itself, defends itself, undertakes coordinated actions such as trade embargoes) and large scale information transfer does occur between its constituent subsystems (humans, say). Of course there is something intuitively bothersome about that: somehow, we don't believe that there is something it is like to be the United States, but we do believe there is something it is like to be xenophon. That's why the core question isn't absurd at all -- the author is trying to understand what truly differentiates a conscious system.

noobermin 11y ago
As I said below, if you really are a materialist, then this shouldn't bother you. As a materialist, you can't judge something from the inside, you can only apply the duck rule.[0] And the US, a book club, a couple, all of these deliberate, form consensus, act for self-survival...they act like living things just like us bags of meat do, so they should be "concious", just like a person or a rabbit or a duck is. Or, if this still does bother you, may be you should question your faith in materialism.
SilasX 11y ago
It doesn't seem like that much of a bullet to bite. If you accept that many-celled organisms can be conscious, and that eusocial colonies (ants, bees) behave more like intelligent organisms than any one member, it's not much if a stretch to say "hm, a country belongs on that scale". It's moderately surprising that a consistent system would put the US at eg 25% of a human by consciousness, but it's not the kind of thing that makes you say "oops I made a wrong choice somewhere". The lense of homeostasis (or autopoiesis more generally) is useful: it does allow you to put things on a meaningful, insight-yielding scale: there are humans, and rocks, and then fire and hurricanes somewhere in between. So what does it take to make something past human in the scale?
- foldr 11y ago
  It's a huge bullet to byte if you think about the ethical implications downstream. Individualism assumes that the relationship between a nation state and the individuals that make it up is exactly not like this.

sebringj 11y ago

Marvin Minsky said something to the effect of "We stand on the shoulders of giants but we quickly jump off them when they found out to be wrong." Ancient wisdom is not something that should be respected in terms of understanding the universe if it is known to contradict it.

pron 11y ago

An illusion to whom? And of what? :) But while materialists may reject consciousness as a fruitful term, there's a problem with finding a functional definition of consciousness -- or even one that agrees enough with what we colloquially understand consciousness to be -- as consciousness, as we understand it, plays absolutely no observable function. Dismissing offhand as an illusion something that is not just perceived to be real but perceived to be the realest thing there is, is just waving away a really hard problem. I can accept that consciousness may be an illusion, but that doesn't make it any less elusive, as illusion itself pre-supposes consciousness. And suppose that you come up with a theory of when consciousness -- or its illusion -- emerges. How can you possibly test that? There is a huge difference between, "we can't talk about it in a scientifically meaningful way" and "there is no it to talk about". The former most certainly does not imply the latter.

vidarh 11y ago
Coherence of self is demonstrably an illusion, because we have seen experiments of people with severed brain stems. In that situation the brain halves still insist on there being a self, and insist on knowing the motivations for actions taken by the other brain half, despite not having any direct connection, and often being provably wrong (e.g. researchers have manipulated data, presented them to one brain half as decided by the other, and gotten the brain half to explain its motivations for making choices that were actually made by the researchers). Similarly, you can sever the connection between the brain and the gut (which also contains a mass of neurons) and the gut will continue to operate independently, yet the gut can affect your emotional state and other parts of what we tend to consider as "self". We are government by a range of independently operating systems that combine to create "self" in some form. Note that this does not mean that consciousness have to be an illusion, but the illusion single, coherent unified self is created by and actively perpetrated by our brains, papering over all kinds of holes.
- pron 11y ago
  Oh, I am not arguing with that. I'm just saying that the fact consciousness itself cannot be defined scientifically at this point doesn't mean you can just wave it away as "an illusion" without further explanation.

kr4 11y ago

Who said that there's no definition provided? as per my understanding of Upanishads which are the most profound works on consciousness: consciousness (atman/soul) is self-existent, ever-blissful non-material energy. it has no beginning and no end. It never born so never dies. it's the absolute truth because it's not subjected to change, death and decay. Material reality is only a relative truth because it's always changing. Whole of our body cells recycle every year. But we're still aware of the body as before. that awareness is the non-material atman, which associates, itself with this body as long as it's bound. Yogis for ages have been able to go to the source – atman – by silenting the mind and its modifications (vritis) and have been able to observe the causal, subtle and gross planes of existence along with wheel of time. Hence Upanishad declares: "That which cannot be observed through mind rather through which mind gets the ability to observe is atman"

verbin217 11y ago
We materialists want a material definition for this thing you call non-material. What is it. Define it so we can analyze it with our material-limited instrument, empiricism. Otherwise we're forced to conclude that it does not "exist" (is material) and downvote you for being so stupid.
- kr4 11y ago
  I've defined it already. As far as experience is concerned, there are multiple systematic paths (under different branches of Yoga) to experience this non-material thing which is self only, but unfortunately you can't do it with your very limited material senses. Do you realize the subtle level at which brain operates? when your instruments can't fathom subtleness of your brain, how can such instruments even get the glimps of consciousness which is subtler than mind. It hardly takes an year or two under proper guidance and full commitment to get glimpses of this subtlemost thing, do you dare to invest? If you fanatically stick to a viewpoint without even evaluating the other view with an open mind, you risk of repeating what religious fanaticism did with pre-modern scientists in the west. And regarding downvotes, do you think I care? I could have posted more popular comment in favor of materialism to gain more material points :p Edit: To learn more, you can read autobiographies of two living yogis [0] and [1]. A succinct yet most authoritative practical guide is Yoga Sutras [2]. 0. http://www.amazon.in/If-Truth-Be-Told-Memoir/dp/9351368068/ http://www.amazon.in/If-Truth-Be-Told-Memoir/dp/9351368068/ 1. http://www.amazon.com/Apprenticed-Himalayan-Master-Yogis-Autobiography-ebook/dp/B007F2I3F0 http://www.amazon.com/Apprenticed-Himalayan-Master-Yogis-Aut... 2. http://www.swamij.com/index-yoga-meditation-yoga-sutras.htm http://www.swamij.com/index-yoga-meditation-yoga-sutras.htm

gbog 11y ago

A materialist? Which one are you talking about? Marx? Descartes? And saying that consciousness is a fruitless concept is a bit short, when this very concept is unavoidable when trying to know what is humanity. It's so fruitless that hundreds of books have been written to try to grab a part of it. It is also central to psychoanalysis, and to many major novels of the last century. Fruitless you said?

gbog 11y ago

A materialist? Which one are you talking about? Marx? Descartes? And saying that consciousness is a fruitless concept is a bit short, when this very concept is unavoidable when trying to know what is humanity. It's so fruitless that hundreds of books have been written to try to gab a part of it. It is also central to psychoanalysis, and many major novels of the last century. Fruitless you said?