The real problem of consciousness
First, I take it that 'problems' of consciousness only arise if you assume that physical things are what ultimately exist, such that consciousness has to be found a home in that picture (a project that is then problematic).
This is already problematic - for if making a particular assumption generates problems that would not have arisen otherwise, then the sensible thing to do is to give up the assumption, not double-down on it!
But anyway, let's make that assumption and try and figure out exactly how this generates a 'problem of consciousness'.
It seems to me that a lot of what is represented to be problematic isn't at all. For example, that consciousness is strange and that we have unique access to our own conscious states. All kinds of state are strange. Shape is nothing like colour. But that in no way implies that such states cannot be states of one and the same thing. Physical things have shape and colour despite those qualities being nothing remotely like each other. Similarly, no matter how peculiar consciousness may be, and no matter how unlike other physical properties, this is no obstacle in itself to it being a state of a physical thing.
Likewise, pointing out that we can explain a physical object's behaviour without having to posit any conscious states also raises no problem at all. It certainly doesn't imply that concious states can't be among the states a physical thing can have. I can explain how my key unlocks the door without having to posit colour of either - that doesn't raise a problem of colour or imply that colour can't be a property of physical things. Likewise for consciousness then.
That we can easily conceive of physical things lacking conscious states seems to me not to raise any real problem either. At most it seems to show that conscious states are not essential states of a physical thing in the way that shape and size seem to be. But that doesn't (to my mind anyway) imply that physical objects cannot have such states contingently. I don't see why a state of a thing has to be a necessary state of it in order to be a state of it.
So far, so much red herring. What's the real problem then?
The real problem - one that I, at least, can see 'is' a problem - is that you can't get out what you don't put in. For example, you can't make something that has size by combining lots of sizeless things. That's just not going to work. The only way to make a sized thing, is to combine things of size - no size in, no size out.
Similarly then, you aren't going to be able to make a conscious object out of objects that are not already conscious (or at least disposed to be). For that would be alchemy. Call it 'strong emergence' if one wants - but that's just a label for what is in fact something coming from nothing. Thus, as our brains are made out of atoms, then either atoms have consciousness (or are disposed to) or brains simply can't have consciousness.
As our conscious states clearly exist, we must therefore conclude (it seems) that either we are an atom - and that, as such, there are trillions upon trillions of us in our body.....that I am just one atom among a vast citadel of conscious atoms composing my body (which, though coherent, seems farcical), or conscious states are states of something quite different to any physical thing. Of course, drawing that latter conclusion means giving up the starting assumption.....which most contemporary philosophers are not willing to do.....hence 'a hard problem'.
This is already problematic - for if making a particular assumption generates problems that would not have arisen otherwise, then the sensible thing to do is to give up the assumption, not double-down on it!
But anyway, let's make that assumption and try and figure out exactly how this generates a 'problem of consciousness'.
It seems to me that a lot of what is represented to be problematic isn't at all. For example, that consciousness is strange and that we have unique access to our own conscious states. All kinds of state are strange. Shape is nothing like colour. But that in no way implies that such states cannot be states of one and the same thing. Physical things have shape and colour despite those qualities being nothing remotely like each other. Similarly, no matter how peculiar consciousness may be, and no matter how unlike other physical properties, this is no obstacle in itself to it being a state of a physical thing.
Likewise, pointing out that we can explain a physical object's behaviour without having to posit any conscious states also raises no problem at all. It certainly doesn't imply that concious states can't be among the states a physical thing can have. I can explain how my key unlocks the door without having to posit colour of either - that doesn't raise a problem of colour or imply that colour can't be a property of physical things. Likewise for consciousness then.
That we can easily conceive of physical things lacking conscious states seems to me not to raise any real problem either. At most it seems to show that conscious states are not essential states of a physical thing in the way that shape and size seem to be. But that doesn't (to my mind anyway) imply that physical objects cannot have such states contingently. I don't see why a state of a thing has to be a necessary state of it in order to be a state of it.
So far, so much red herring. What's the real problem then?
The real problem - one that I, at least, can see 'is' a problem - is that you can't get out what you don't put in. For example, you can't make something that has size by combining lots of sizeless things. That's just not going to work. The only way to make a sized thing, is to combine things of size - no size in, no size out.
Similarly then, you aren't going to be able to make a conscious object out of objects that are not already conscious (or at least disposed to be). For that would be alchemy. Call it 'strong emergence' if one wants - but that's just a label for what is in fact something coming from nothing. Thus, as our brains are made out of atoms, then either atoms have consciousness (or are disposed to) or brains simply can't have consciousness.
As our conscious states clearly exist, we must therefore conclude (it seems) that either we are an atom - and that, as such, there are trillions upon trillions of us in our body.....that I am just one atom among a vast citadel of conscious atoms composing my body (which, though coherent, seems farcical), or conscious states are states of something quite different to any physical thing. Of course, drawing that latter conclusion means giving up the starting assumption.....which most contemporary philosophers are not willing to do.....hence 'a hard problem'.
Comments (418)
You put that as though it ought to be obvious? It seems questionable to me. Doesn't it lead (inexorably or not) down one or more of Zeno's rabbit holes?
I'm alive to the analogy between consciousness and colour. Shape: sure, at least if you present it alongside colour. Size: I suppose so, I guess, since after all, you remind me about shape, and that was compared to colour. But now how does your worry about size, which intuitively I find uncompelling, convert to colour (which for me is a more promising analogy with consciousness anyway)?
Illuminate a previously unilluminated object and it becomes coloured. So what's the problem? Would you be arguing that previously the object wasn't non-coloured at all, but had the specific colour of black? Then (if so) couldn't "sizeless things" be a specific size (of zero)? And the colour analogy then isn't readily aligned with your position on size (if that position is against allowing a change in size from zero to positive).
Or would you be arguing that the colourless object received a positive quantity of colour when illuminated?
Still, I mustn't put words in your mouth.
I recommend you work on understanding fallacies of composition.
Like the word Infinity.
In principle, like a forest emerges from a set of trees, or photosynthesis from photochemical reactions.
I don't mean that plants are conscious, but they share some basic abilities. For example, they identify and interact with their environment. If a plant would develop legs and the ability to move, it might also have to develop a nerve system in order to remain viable. Organisms co-evolve with their environment.
Some insects might be conscious. Fish, birds, and mammals are definitely conscious. Computers can be programmed to mimic consciousness, but mimicry doesn't make anything conscious. We can't "fake it til we make it".
So how does consciousness emerge? Either it's a matter of research, or of understanding that a conscious state is a brain event on a different level of description.
Combining objects of different weights will result in a whole that weighs more than any of its parts. The weight is said to be weakly emergent. But you can't get weight from that which has none. Or at least, if one could, then such weight would be 'strongly' emergent.
Likewise, one can combine shaped things to make an object that has a shape none of its parts possess - that shape would be weakly emergent - but one cannot combine shapeless things and thereby make a shaped thing (or at least, if one could, then the resulting shape would be 'strongly' emergent). Your forest from trees example is an example of weak emergence - and though there's nothing problematic about weak emergence, it is not weak emergence that we're talking about.
In other words, one cannot get a 'kind' from that which does not possess it - for that would be to get out what was in no sense there in the originals. And it is because strong emergence seems incoherent that there is a problem of consciousness for the physicalist. For they must either just insist that something can come from nothing - which is ad hoc - or they must insist that the basic units of matter have consciousness - which also seems ad hoc - or they must give up their physicalism and admit that consciousness is a property of something non-physical.
It is no use, note, simply to say we need to investigate the matter. The point is that no amount of further investigation will do anything to address such problems, for all one would be doing is stipulating that something is coming from nothing 'at this point'. And that's not an explanation, but a stipulation where an explanation sshould be.
Is there a problem in the idea of making a sized thing from that which has no size? If you agree that this sounds impossible, then you should agree that there is also a problem in the idea of getting a conscious thing out of things that have no consciousness, for the same impossibility attends it.
If it is objective, then one would have to suppose atoms to be coloured if they are to be capable of creating something coloured (for now the colour is a feature of the object itself, not a disposition to cause a colour sensation in a perceiver of the object).
On the other hand, if colour is subjective then one does not.
The point though is that strong emergence seems impossible, as it is a case of getting something out that was in no way present in any of the ingredients.
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Where do you think 'kinds' come from? If one cannot get a kind from that which does not possess it, then there could be no kinds, only particulars.
Photosynthesis emerges from photochemical events, and consciousness from brain events, regardless of whether we categorize the parts or the wholes as kinds of this or that.
@wonderer1 need not say it; you have presented a textbook example.
Read the wiki page he linked. It is educational.
I'm not sure how helpful that debate is. I say violet is a class (or kind or type or category or set) of illumination events, which an object may or may not exemplify. Obviously, a suitably lit Violet is the go-to exemplar of a violet illumination event (or light event). Similarly a trombone has a trombone sound, in that it helps create sound events of that type or class. More usually of course there is no eponymous exemplar, but plenty of others.
Such a class of physical events is decidedly vague (or fuzzy), and determined originally by socially coordinated perceptual judgement. Physics merely describes the already established fuzzy (but reasonably stable) borders. Does that make the class subjective? The question lacks force, for me. Glad to hear your view.
Quoting Clarendon
But is size a feature of the object itself, and not a disposition to cause a certain class of size-measurement event? Can't it be both? The (size) event class could be as fuzzy as a class of colours (illumination events), but then wouldn't it still be a property of the object? Or does objectivity require (at least theoretically) crisp borders?
The person who thinks consciousness can strongly emerge from physical entities that do not already possess it is insisting that consciousness just pops into being out of nothing - that really does seem like magic and we would not accept such a proposal in other contexts. When the magician pulls a rabbit from a hat, we do not think that the hat really was empty and then a rabbit simply formed in it out of nothing - we assume a rabbit had been cleverly secreted somewhere. No rabbit in, no rabbit out.
Weak emergence is fine, but strong emergence is magic.
My earlier points where just setting the stage for this being the real problem. As those other 'problems' don't really get started. There's nothing in the peculiarity of consciousness that precludes it from being a property of physical things. It doesn't matter how radically dissimilar it is from other widely accepted physical properties - such as size and shape - it is, for that in itself does not indicate that it can't be a property of something with those other properties (anymore than differences between shape and size preclude those from being properties of one and the same thing).
Maybe there's some quantum physics explanation we haven't discovered yet.
So the problem is not one that arises through a lack of information. We seem to have incoherence. Burying it in a mass of information won't help stop it being incoherent. At some point the 'explanation' of how consciousness emerges from ingredients wholly lacking in it will have to say 'and hey presto - consciouness arises at this point'....which isn't an explanation at all, of course, but just an announcement of the magical arrival of consciousness.
I'm trying to grasp your central doctrine,
Quoting Clarendon
I don't buy it. Like I said, I don't see the size analogy avoiding the usual Zeno rabbit holes. Whereas I'm fascinated by colour (who isn't!) and I see an analogy. Consciousness might be a class of brain events just as colours are classes of illumination events or musical tones are classes of sound events. I pointed out that a cup, say, has no colour (or is zero-coloured) when in a cupboard, but acquires colour as soon as exposed to light. Colour from no colour?
Granted, that's not about composition. Yet.
I don't think I follow. The point about size was simply to illustrate the principle that you cannot get something from nothing. Combining sizeless things will clearly never enable you to create a sized thing. Likewise, combining weightless things cannot give you something that has weight. Combining zeros cannot give you 1. And so on.
When it comes to colour, well if colour is objective, then atoms must have it if anything made of them is to. Whereas if colour is subjective, then it is not analogous to consciousness
However, my point has nothing to do with that. I am making a much simpler claim: you cannot generate a property of a given kind from ingredients that wholly lack that kind. No appeal to Zeno helps here. Even if space were infinitely divisible, it would remain true that combining things with no extension whatsoever cannot yield extension. That is not a problem about infinity. It is a problem about creation from nothing.
Regrding your example of an object in a cupboard. If colour is objective, then the object in the cupboard has it even when in the cupboard (it wouldn't be an objective propery otherwise). When we open the cupboard and it becomes illuminated such that we can now see its colour, nothing new has been created. Either colour is objective, in which case the relevant physical properties were already present, or colour is subjective, in which case the colour resides in the interaction between object, light, and perceiver. In neither case do we have a new kind arising from nothing.
As I suspect no such explanation will be forthcoming, I'll attempt it myself.
First, the fallacy of composition - which, really importantly, is not always a fallacy - consists of inferring, without further justification, that because each part of a thing has, or lacks, some property, the whole must therefore have or lack it. So because a brick is small, it is then inferred that a wall made of bricks must also be small.
That inference is indeed invalid in cases of weak emergence. New shapes can arise from old shapes, new sizes from old sizes, new weights from old weights. In such cases it would be fallacious to deny the whole a property merely because the parts lack it.
But my argument is not about weak emergence. It concerns strong emergence. The claim is that a wholly new kind of property cannot be generated from combining things that lack it. Combinatuiion and arrangement can produce new instances of an existing kind of property, but it cannot bring an entirely new property into existence. It is for strong emergence that no fallacy is involved. No size among the parts, then no size will belong to the whole. That's not fallacious.
Consciousness is a completely different property from size, or shape. If, then, one supposes complex bundles of atoms to have it, one would have to suppose the atoms possess it else one would be supposing a wholly new property to arise from combining things that lack it.
What about fusion? If you take a bunch of hydrogen atoms and squeeze them, you don't get fusion. You don't get anything like fusion. Ah, but if you take a huge amount of hydrogen and gravity squeezes it hard enough, you get this entirely new phenomenon emerges: fusion. Perhaps the Integrated Information Theorist can make a similar argument: when enough information processing happens (a critical mass, if you will), this entirely new phenomenon emerges: consciousness.
I know there are problems with this line of reasoning: fusion could have bee predicted from first principles, while consciousness could not.
It must be that those atoms have a disposition to fuse under certain circumstances. So this is not a new kind of property that arises from nowhere, but a disposition that was always present but is only activated when the atoms are under the right kind of pressure.
Applied to consciousness, to make the analogy work one would have to say that atoms are dispositionally conscious (else we'd have strong emergence). Perhaps they are - but attributing a disposition to be conscious to atoms seems about as hard a bullet to bite as attributing acutal consciousness to them, imo.
I think that initiative was a bit later than this. :wink:
Consciousness means that you are awake, and able to see things around you, and respond to others in rational linguistic manner in interpersonal communication. You are also able to do things for you in order to keep your well being eating drinking good food, and sleeping at right times caring for your own health, your family folks and friends.
It is not something in atoms and particles of physical existence of some spooky nature.
Consciousness seems to consist of qualia - pieces of qualitative, unstructured stuff. Such pieces of stuff seem to be part of any traditional metaphysics that posits the existence of things with relations between them. The pieces of qualitative, unstructured stuff are the things, which have relations to other things, including to their own parts (which, too, are things other than the whole that contains them).
So, it seems that consciousness fits naturally into traditional metaphysics of things and relations. The problem that remains is to find out how a thing (quality) relates to other things (its "correlates"), probably especially to its parts, since consciousness as we know it seems to depend on the internal structure and a particular kind of internal complexity of the conscious thing. That may involve an irreducible nature of the composition relation by which the qualities of parts are somehow "included" in the quality of the whole.
Have you read any cognitive science or evolutionary psychology related to the origin of intelligence? This is a well studied subject, although there are lots of questions that remain unanswered. Your explanation comes across as more “seems to me” science without any particular evidence backing it up. Seems to me it’s wrong.
Not to be pedantic, but E = mc^2. Matter, which has mass, is created out of energy, which has no mass, everywhere and always.
Quoting Clarendon
This is clearly wrong. Living organisms developed out of nonliving matter. If you don’t think that’s true, let’s not get sidetracked by discussing it here.
Again, this is clearly not true. You should read some cognitive science and cognitive psychology.
Benzene, which has a sweet gasoline-like smell, is made up of hydrogen and carbon, neither of which have odors.
This is not typically what people who believe in the hard problem of consciousness mean when they say “consciousness.” For them, it means an awareness of subjective experience. That type of consciousness is not limited to humans or other animals with near-human intelligence. This discussion has a problem which is common to this type of discussion— they fail to define what they mean by “consciousness.”
Examples are not only plentiful, I suspect almost everything, living or nonliving, that everyone on this site has ever interacted with has properties its constituents lack. It is the norm. It is what nature does. Criminy.
Depending on how far down you go. It's obviously everything, if you get to subatomic particles.
Sure. But if you think where the meaning of consciousness comes from, it is just a word describing awareness of biological being. It has little to do with subatomic particles. Stretching the meaning of the word that far sounds like seeing a rainbow and saying - there must be a divine being up there somewhere doing some painting.
I wasn’t finding fault with anything you said. I was pointing out that the term was [not] well defined in the OP. That is a common problem with discussions about consciousness.
Bracketed text was added to correct the original statement.
Agreed.
E = mc2 is not a case of something coming from nothing. Energy has mass equivalence. Mass is not conjured out of an absence of all relevant properties. This is weak emergence grounded in antecedent physical structure and laws and not an example of strong emergence.
Second, the origin of life is not a counterexample either, for either you don't mean conscious life - in which case we have weak emergence - or you mean conscious life, in which case we have strong emergence.
Third, appealing to cognitive science or psychology simply changes the subject. Those fields study correlations, functions, and mechanisms given that consciousness exists. They do not address the metaphysical question of how consciousness could come into existence from ingredients that entirely lack it.
I wasn't saying you were. I was just reiterating the point that philosophy doesn't deal with atoms and particles in physical or biological science. Only thing it deals with is the meaning of words and sentences one uses and makes in communication and statements for clarity and logical coherence.
Invoking an “irreducible composition relation” does not help either. It simply labels the point at which something genuinely new appears without explaining how that is coherent. Calling the relation irreducible is another way of saying “here be magic”.
FTFY.
I think strong emergence is saying that matter has the potential to become conscious under the right circumstances.
With weak emergence, we're saying matter has the potential to become liquid. In a sense liquidity comes from no-liquidity.
The parts may lack consciousness as we know it (sensations of pain, redness, sweetness, etc.) but they don't lack qualities. Every thing in itself is an unstructured quality. And consciousness as we know it consists of unstructured qualities - qualia.
Quoting Clarendon
That composition relation might ultimately be the set membership relation, which is at the foundation of mathematics (set theory) and is regarded as fundamental, irreducible. Pure mathematics doesn't talk about qualities or sensations, only about relations that are reducible to the set membership relation, but it doesn't seem to make metaphysics incoherent if we add qualities to it. Actually, we could just say that the qualities are the sets in themselves.
Uh huh.
Is it just consciousness?
Are there any other properties of things that, in your judgment, would require strong emergence?
What's wrong with that? It's what we did with gravity.
That seems to be the only option available to the physicalist if they are not to invoke magic.
I don't think there is anything incoherent in the idea of atoms - and by atoms here, I mean whatever the basic unit of physical stuff may be - having conscious states. But this does mean that we are atoms, not brains or anything like that. Atoms. Or at least, if one insists upon the truth of physicalism this would be the conclusion we are driven to. (I don't think we should insist upon the truth of physicalism as that seems to assume what should be discovered or refuted).
Revisiting your point here, I don't believe that consciousness is something which can be defined clearly.
Does it cover only being awake with the knowledge of self identity?, or seeing objects too?, what about intelligence?, how about characters and personality, will power?, creativity?, thinking? etc etc.
One thing for sure is that consciousness is not something that "emerges" from physical entity. Of course, it starts in the biological body, but it evolves into very complex abstract ability and functions of the biological body which has foundation in the lived experience with the social and cultural back ground.
It doesn't belong in the category of physical force or mechanical nature.
I see.
I was wondering if you had other examples of deductions that rely on this principle:
Quoting Clarendon
With other examples, we could compare the case of consciousness.
Aside from that, this "truth of reason", as you describe it, strikes me as patently false.
I am saying that atoms have qualities. Are they the same qualities as we find in our consciousness? Probably not. Whether the atoms are conscious depends on whether you include their qualities in consciousness, it's a question of definition of consciousness.
There is no example of a feature strongly emerging. If you know of one, say. Strong emergence is ruled out a priori by reason, and there is no example of it either to challenge what our reason tells us. Not, that is, unless you insist that consciousness itself is the example - but that's clearly question begging.
One kind of state cannot transform into, or generate, another kind of state at all. Size does not become shape, even though anything shaped will have size. Likewise, shape does not become size. Perhaps even more vividly and aptly, a conscious state does not turn into a geometrical state. No amount of rearranging experiences yields triangles or lengths. And conversely, no amount of rearranging geometrical states yields consciousness.
The same holds in general. A state can only confer its own kind of state on anything it is part of. The shapes of atoms can confer shape on the larger object they compose. The sizes of atoms can confer size on the larger object they compose. But the size or shape of atoms cannot confer consciousness on the object they compose.
So saying that atoms have states, and consciousness is a state, will not work, I think. Unless the base states are already of the phenomenal kind, appealing to organisation merely assumes that one kind of state can give rise to a fundamentally different kind.
Every object has a quality - a piece of unstructured stuff. The qualia of consciousness are qualities too, but that doesn't mean that all qualities are qualia. Which qualities are qualia depends on the definition of consciousness. If you define that all qualities are qualia, then you have panpsychism. But in any case, it is qualities in and qualities out.
Anyway, one can't get it out without putting it in, is my point. One can't construct it from that which does not have it at all - that would be no different from trying to get a thing of size by assembling things of no size. It's just not going to work.
I'm not sure how to proceed here.
Against my better judgment, I glanced at the SEP article on emergent properties to see if I could get a handle on the terminology here, but it's a nightmare, as usual.
Your principle that "you can't get out what wasn't put in" seems much too strong.
Living things grow, they metabolize nutrients and excrete waste, some of them move around, and eventually they die. Their organs and tissues don't do those things on their own, and certainly the chemicals, the molecules, the atoms those components are composed of don't. An engine can give motion to a vehicle it is installed in; the components of an engine cannot do that. One atom and another might be roughly the same size, but when combined with others of their kind, one forms a hard substance, one a liquid, another a gas. Mountains create micro-climates around them, but the dirt and rock they are made of do not, and the plain next door might be made of the same dirt and rock. Any ecosystem is sensitive to changes in its climate or changes in the population of the organisms that in part constitute that ecosystem in a way that no individual or species is. Crowds routinely behave in ways that do not reflect the individual choices of their members. A central bank might lower interest rates with the intent of lowering mortgage rates, but cause the yield on bonds to rise, thus causing mortgage rates to rise — or not, you never can tell. I'm about to use a microwave to heat my coffee, but my microwave manages this not by being made of things that can heat coffee; I cannot get the same effect by removing the glass platter and just sitting my cup on that.
It seems to me everywhere you see more than what was put in, wholes that are not the sum of their parts, unintended consequences.
I expect you'll say all of these are "weak emergence", by which you don't so much seem to mean what your size and shape analogies would suggest, as that you think you understand them. I think consciousness is just like all these, and it is brought about by evolution, which is notably proficient at producing novelty.
By the way, I agree that you cannot deduce what is not contained in assumptions.
Quoting Clarendon
I responded:
Quoting T Clark
Now you respond:
Quoting Clarendon
You didn't say "something coming from nothing." You said "You can't get weight from that which has none." Energy has no mass and thus no weight. You can get mass, and thus weight, from energy. Instead of responding to my criticism, you're misrepresenting the issue you originally raised. You're not playing fair.
I think the main problem with saying this is that it presumes more knowledge about consciousness than we actually have.
Strong emergence is a bare beginning of a theory. As the theory progresses, we would say more and more about what consciousness is such that it is the type of thing that emerges where there was none before.
If the theory subsequently breaks down, it will be because it's colliding with facts. There isn't a fundamental logical problem with the hypothesis.
So your example presupposes the very principle you think it refutes.
We can be surprised by a conclusion of a valid argument, just as we can be surprised at the shape that combining some shaped things gives us. But that's weak emergence, not strong. A strongly emergent conclusion is just another name for an invalid conclusion.
Re the 'something it is like' of conscious states - it seems unique to them; their defining feature.
Strong emergence is not a provisional scientific hypothesis. It is the claim that a wholly new kind of state can arise from ingredients that entirely lack that kind. That's not a thesis that can be confirmed empirically.
Quoting T Clark
This was a mistake. I should have written "was not well defined."
Quoting Corvus
I strongly disagree. The problem isn't that it can't be defined, it's that it hasn't been in this discussion.
Clarendon wrote:
Quoting Clarendon
When they say "problems of consciousness," I assume that includes the so-called hard problem, an idea originated by David Chalmers. He wrote "The 'Hard Problem of Consciousness' is the problem of how physical processes in the brain give rise to the subjective experience of the mind and of the world." That's a pretty clear definition and it is not the same as:
Quoting Corvus
It's not that your definition is wrong, it just seems to be something different than what Clarendon is talking about. It's certainly different from what Chalmers was saying.
You're doing it again--Misrepresenting what you originally said and acting as if that addresses my comment.
I'm all done with this conversation.
It's like with gravity. We knew basically that it's the reason apples fall. Beyond that, we knew nothing. The first hypothesis was that it's some kind of force. That turned out to be wrong.
Likewise, we know what we're referring to when we talk about consciousness, but we have no scientific theory that explains what it is.
The first hypothesis was that it's a little bit of God. Another is that it's strongly emergent. The theory does entail that consciousness is the kind of thing that can be strongly emergent.
You're saying nothing can be strongly emergent, but your reasoning also rules out weak emergence, which numerous posters have been trying to point out.
So your example was never a counterexample. It presupposes[/i] the very principle you're trying to use it to refute.
Walking away does not change that.
The gravity analogy misses the point. Gravity was always a physical magnitude governed by laws. What changed was the theory, not the kind of thing being explained. No new ontological category appeared.
Consciousness is already fixed as a kind: a subjective state, something it is like. Any theory must account for that.
Strong emergence does not propose a better theory of a known kind. It proposes that a new kind appears from ingredients that wholly lack it. That is not a scientific hypothesis but a metaphysical stipulation.
Quoting T ClarkClarendon was talking about consciousness. Are you saying intelligence and consciousness are the same thing?
Quoting T ClarkThat is one of the two main problems. The other is that few agree on any definition.
Quoting Srap TasmanerBut those properties can be explained by the properties of the constituents. Individual atoms aren't solid. But we know how the properties of individual atoms explain solidity in groups of atoms. We know how the properties of individual molecules of H2O explain the fact that solid water floats in liquid water.
We know how the properties of the atoms and molecules of living things account for metabolism.
We have no guess as to how the properties of atoms, or molecules, or cells, or any kind of structures, explains consciousness.
"Account for"? Meaning what, exactly? That you could deduce the great variety of living things on earth just from studying carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and so on? Could you instead study electrons and neutrinos and photons and whatnot, and get even better results?
Clarke's Laws:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
If the properties of primary particles were different than they are, we would not have the atoms, molecules, cells, or anything else in the universe, that we have.
No. You’re right. I used the wrong word, although what I said applies to consciousness as well.
Okay, I think I get it now. You and @Clarendon believe that all natural science can be reduced to physics, and that all natural phenomena can be explained by physics, with the sole exception of consciousness. Yes?
"Have you read any cognitive science or evolutionary psychology related to the origin of consciousness? This is a well studied subject, although there are lots of questions that remain unanswered."
Which questions [I]have[/I] been answered? Do you have any reading suggestions on this? I can't make head or tail of Peter Tse, but he starts [I]The Neural Basis of Free Will[/I] by dating:
"We do not understand how consciousness can be realized in physical neuronal activity" is an important thing. If someone has written that we [I]do[/I] understand this, I am extremely interested.
Can you give me an example of anything other than consciousness and its creations that cannot be explained by physics?
Almost everything, depending on how you flesh out "explained by".
Not really a discussion I was looking to have, but this has been really helpful, so thanks!
I've never quite gotten the fascination consciousness has for people around here, why it seems so super special, and it's because we start from very different ideas about—among other things, probably—the unity of science.
It's the very last thing anybody would give up. If someone was going to strip you of one off the following - vision, hearing, ability to do even simple math, all memories of some particular topic, anything what you would care to name - OR your consciousness, which would you rather keep than consciousness? You have to lose one of those things OR consciousness. What would the other option have to be for you to say, "I absolutely cannot give that up. Take my consciousness."
You cannot understand the problem of consciousness without understanding what consciousness means and implies. My point was consciousness is function and ability of the living biological agents, not something emerges from matter. Do you still disagree on the point?
Here’s a link to a David Chalmers paper. He’s the guy who came up with the idea of the hard problem of consciousness, which I reject. Still, at the beginning of this paper, he lays out a pretty good summary of the problems he thinks can be effectively addressed by scientific inquiry. In the course of doing that, he also gives a pretty good summary of the different ways of thinking about consciousness.
https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf
For a cognitive science approach to consciousness, I like Antonio Damasio “Feeling and Knowing.”
Quoting Patterner
This isn’t entirely true. Certainly there’s a lot that needs to be explained, but that’s true of many scientific inquiries. I don’t think it’s true that any aspect of consciousness or the mind in general cannot be studied effectively by science.
There’s no reason it can’t be a function of living biological agents and also emerge from matter.
I disagree with that. Matter cannot give birth to consciousness. Could you give some examples of consciousness emerged from matter?
You can study consciousness by science. But the problem is, you will not see or observe actual consciousness itself, no matter what you dissect and look into. It is not in the form of matter.
You will only observe the telltale signs, functions and behavior of consciousness from the conscious living people and animals.
Can you tell me which aspects of consciousness have been studied by science? I know there has been a lot of work done on the neural correlates of consciousness. But that's about which parts of the brain are active when specific thoughts and/or feelings are being reported. I have not heard how a part of the brain, or the physical activity taking place in it, has a felt experience if itself. Which I guess explains why I've never heard them called the "neural [I]causes[/I] of consciousness."
I have Antonio Damasio's “Feeling and Knowing.” I really like it. But I don't see him addressing this. He says x, y, and z are happening, but not how those events have a felt experience of themselves. As Chalmers says in in [I]The Conscious Mind[/I]:[quote=Chalmers] That is, consciousness is surprising. If all we knew about were the facts of physics, and even the facts about dynamics and information processing in complex systems, there would be no compelling reason to postulate the existence of conscious experience. If it were not for our direct evidence in the first-person case, the hypothesis would seem unwarranted; almost mystical, perhaps.[/quote]
Quoting CorvusYes. Just as studying the motion of galaxies might suggest the existence of what we call [I]dark matter[/I], it is not a study [I]of[/I] dark matter.
:up: :fire:
Sez you.
Quoting Corvus
The only one I know of is the one we are discussing.
Quoting Patterner
Quoting Patterner
We are fully in the realm of "the hard problem of consciousness." We've discussed it here on the forum many times. Some people think it's a big deal. Others, including me, just don't get why it's considered a problem at all. Never the twain shall meet. I'm not particularly interested in taking it up now.
Quoting Patterner
Of course it is. It may not tell us all we need to know, but there is not just one way of studying.
Quoting T ClarkFair enough.
Quoting T ClarkWe are inferring the existence of dark matter by studying the movement of galaxies. We are not learning anything else about it in this manner, and can't study it in any other manner.
Seems to me, from a scientific point of view you’re dismissing even the possibility of speculation.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether scientists can study consciousness. Nothing. The point is a very simple one. You can't get out what you don't put in. You can't get a sized thing from combining sizeless things.
This argument is valid: 1. If umbrellas are up, it is raining. 2. Umbrellas are up. 3. Therefore it is raining. The conclusion contains nothing not already there in the premises. It extracts their implications, but it does not add anything. Whereas this is invalid: 1. if umbrellas are up, it is raining. 2. Umbrellas are up. 3. Therefore I am rich. That conclusion doesn't follow from those premises. Why? Because nothing it claims is in the premises.
Now unless you think that you can make a sized thing from sizeless things, and that you can validly extract a conclusion about wealth from premises that don't mention it in any form, then you accept that you can't get out what has in no way been put in.
Thus, applying that same principle to consciousness, you cannot get consciousness out unless it has been put in. Thus, if you think that a complex physical thing has consciousness, then you must - on pain of believing in magic - believe that some of its components had consciousness. Otherwise, whence came it?
Note: I am not challenging 'science'. Nothing in science challenges what I've just said. Nothing in science challenges the idea that you can't get out what you didn't put in. It is those who believe that you can get a wholly new kind of property from ingredients none of which possess it who are being unscientific.
If you care to read about consciousness, you will notice that it is a vast subject. There are range of different views on the topic from the hard materialism to psychologism, idealism, functionalism and even spans to religious spritualism.
One thing that is common with the topic is that they all view consciousness as "awareness" based on the biological living body and brain. The point you must remember is that awareness is NOT the same thing as matter or brain itself.
Awareness and consciousness is the word describing aspects, operations, states and functions of mind, not the physical matter.
Quoting T Clark
If you keep reading the OP's post, he has not been talking about science or matter. Rather he means consciousness must have come from something that you put into the mind, not from nothing.
I think what he means is, that when you see physical objects (input into your mind), your consciousness must be also physical in nature (output), because the physical matter input cannot come out in any other form than physical matter.
So it appears that you are not reading the OP accurately.
There is no problem in revisiting already discussed topic in the past, if new truths could come out from it. After all, many folks are still discussing the topics in discussion over 2000 years ago in philosophy.
Coordinate geometry does in fact represent a line as a combination of points. Of course, it is not just a combination of points, it is points plus structure. But then nothing is just some other thing, otherwise it would be that other thing. Water is not just hydrogen and oxygen, but you do get water with all its uniquely watery properties from those two very un-water-like substances - no alchemy involved.
That is not the problem I am raising. Explaining an object’s behaviour without mentioning one of its properties is not in itself a problem. We can explain how a key opens a lock without mentioning its colour. Does that mean there's a problem with locks and keys having colour?
My problem is not about explanatory superfluity. It is about generation: how a property of a wholly new kind could come into existence from ingredients that entirely lack it. (Indeed, it can't - and so the problem confronting the physicalist is that they must either abandon their physicalism or attribute consciousness to base materials).
I think people are making the mistake of thinking that because Chalmers coined the (somewhat unoriginal) phrase 'the hard problem of consciousness' then any hard problem must be the one he was talking about. My project was to find a genuine hard problem and distinguish it from pseudo problems.
Note: Chalmers believes in the strong emergence of consciousness. So he doesn't seem to recognize the problem I am raising.
I think you did, but I also think "pseudo" problem is probably wrong. We can't really explain consciousness, or describe its instantiation.
Quoting Clarendon
I am under the impression he has dealt to this exact issue? I don't recall what his response is at present though. I've not read his last couple.
But he has no solution to it. His response is to posit fundamental psychophysical laws. That is, he thinks we can just say that at a certain level of complexity and arrangement it is a law of nature that consciouos states strongly emerge. Now, that's not a solution at all. For one cannot overcome a profound metaphysical problem by simply relabeling it. We can call this special law a 'hey presto' law, for that is what it is. It just says 'and at this point - hey presto - consciousness appears, despite in no way being present up to this point'.
This is why Chalmers would rather we see the 'hard' problem as consisting of the pseudo problems I mentioned in the OP and not foreground the real problem - for the real problem is one that defeats him.
Note too that Chalmers is as committed a physicalist as the next contemporary philosopher, for though he calls himself a 'property dualist', this is once more a matter of labels rather than substance. For he means by this just that he thinks consciousness is not reducible to any other arrangement of states. But that's true of size and shape, but it would be absurd to call oneself a property dualist because one holds that shape is not reducible. Kinds of state are, by their very nature, not reducible- they would't be basic if they were!
The fact is that property dualism makes no real sense (unless by it one means simply that there is more than one kind of property). If one does not think consciousness is a property of a wholly distinct kind of entity, then one is not a dualist about consciousness. For states cannot exist absent the objects of which they are states. And so one can't in all seriousness describe oneself as a 'property dualist' where consciousness is concerned if one holds - as he does - that it is nevertheless a property of an arrangement of physical things.
I never claimed otherwise. When one level of organization emerges from another, they aren’t the same thing. Living organisms are not the same thing as the chemicals that make them up.
Quoting Corvus
Yes, that’s what @Clarendon has been saying. I’ve already told him I disagree with him. Now it appears I disagree with you too.
In general, that’s true, but I’m not interested in taking it up right now.
You and I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. As I noted previously, I think it’s a good time to end the conversation.
I think perhaps confusing types of property like size and shape with consciousness might be causing some issues here...
Quoting Clarendon
I think you're perhaps just finding a target to knock down with this. It seems that he's fairly squarely given you an answer (albeit, not a solution - but to expect this in order to charge someone with failing is rich particularly among philosophers). In 1995 he was squarely across this issue:
"Even when we have explained the performance of every cognitive and behavioral function in the vicinity of experience, the question of why there is experience at all remains unanswered.”
and then further on, he's given other comments:
"The emergence of consciousness from the physical is not like the emergence of liquidity from molecules. It is not conceptually entailed by the physical facts."
He is rejecting strong emergence by complexity alone here. So far, so good.
His solution is that consciousness is a fundamental property of the building blocks. It's wholly unsupported, but has complete explanatory power. If things are conscious, then they are. We are not drawn to further questions until we're given some reason to suggest otherwise... In the case of the strong materialist, there are already questions on the table. For someone like Chalmers, or even Jaegwon Kim, those questions arise but can be answered in novel ways. That's all that's going on, is that Chalmers hit a dead-end and was/is looking for cracks in the pavement. I think, anyway.
I mean, he is certainly aware that it is hard to see how consciousness could arise from the physical. But he treats this as a difficulty about explanation or theory choice, rather than as a principled barrier grounded in reason. He doesn't articulate the point I am making: which is that it is hard because you'd be trying to get out what you haven't put in. When that is highlighted as the hard-making factor, it goes from hard to insurmountable. Consciousness must be attributed to the base - so atoms have now to be said to have consciousness - or physicalism must be abandoned. I am not merely pointing out that we lack a scientific story or that conciousness is weird. the whole project of trying to make sense of consciousness against a physicalist background is misguided from the get go.
Chalmers’s response is to posit fundamental psychophysical laws: at a certain level of organisation, consciousness appears. But claerly that does not address the problem at all. It simply stipulates around it. It is a “hey-presto” move: consciousness appears because the laws say so. Only in this case too. Everywhere else you can't get out what you don't put in - logic, and so on. But in this one case there is this magical exception - you can get consciousness out without putting it in. So let's not beat about the bush: Chalmer's theory of consciousness is that it's magic - it just magically appears. You can't normally get a real rabbit out of an empty hat, but you can get real consciousness out of a meat hat, despite none having been put in.
That is precisely why he does not foreground this issue. Taken seriously, it would undermine the entire physicalist framework within which he wants to work. So he treats consciousness as a datum to be accommodated, rather than as the decisive reason why physicalism cannot make sense of consciousness in the first place. And thus he is driven to suppose magic occurs.
He'd have us believe that the 'hard' problem of consciousness is one to do with its apparent explanatory superfluity - we don't hve to posit conscious states to explain why our bodies do what they do. But that's a strawman problem compared to the one I'm drawing attention to.
I just gave you a direct quote where he does.
Quoting Clarendon
This misunderstands Chalmers to a degree I have to ask - have you read any?
That does not articulate the problem I am raising. He is saying what I said he says - that consciousness is expalnatorily superflous.
I have read him. I think you need to read him more carefully. you seem to be committing the fallacy I mentioned earlier. That is, of thinking that as he has talked about a 'hard' problem of consciousness then any hard problem of consciousness is the one he's talking about.
No. That's not what he's saying. What he's saying is that all our work is ahead of us.
I don't quite think this is going to go anywhere. Take care.
I am saying a physical base that contains nothing of the phenomenal kind - so, no consciousness - cannot intelligibly generate anything that has it. That is why appeals psychophysical laws do not answer the objection. They stipulate that consciousness appears at some level of complexity without explaining how a new kind can arise from ingredients that lack it.
So yes, I have read Chalmers. My point is that he does not confront this stronger problem head on. He treats the hardness as a challenge due to consciousness's explanatory superfluity, rather than recognizing that there is a principled barrier to ever getting consciousness out when it hasn't been put in.
But if you're just going to insist that any hard problem of consciousness must be whatever Chalmers is talking about - and that it suffices to have raised the problem I am raising just to say 'it's hard to explain how physical things can be conscious' then yes, I agree that we are not going to get anywhere.
Yep, didn't miss this. I think you're either missing that it's been dealt with, or you are not being honest about reading Chalmers.
If consciousness is a fundamental property of matter, your question is superfluous. If you do not grasp this, you will continue to ask that question and you will never get an answer in Chalmer's terms.
If you wanted my position, you could ask for it.
I haven't denied that consciousness can be a fundamental property of matter. I don't think it is. But I haven't denied the possibility. I have said quite explicitly - numerous times now - that the physicalist must either attribute consciousness to the base (which is what that would be doing) or give up physicalism
This is all pitiful pseudoscience—“you can't get out what you don't put in”— baloney.
Have you thought about working that up into an article?
I don't find this question as helpful as you do, because I think the "stuff" model used here doesn't capture what we're interested in. There are no non-physical things on offer.
Set aside consciousness for a moment.
What about something like your voice? The sound you make when you speak is obviously physical, and produced physically by physical, if biological, machinery. Physical as you like. But that's not your voice. Your voice is the individual pattern of pronunciation and accent and prosody and timbre, and we could ask about those individually as well. We know how you as an organism produce sound—there's no mystery about the mechanisms involved—but there are a lot of different voices you could have ended up with, and nothing about your physical makeup that could predict this one.
A similar example is gait. I've been told I have my father's walk. My brother does not. It's again a clearly physical process, but the pattern of how I walk, or how I stand, my carriage and posture, there are who knows how many possible patterns of behavior I could have ended up with, all using this same body and the same mechanisms.
These are not even processes exactly that we're talking about, but patterns in how those processes occur. Obviously a better analogy for consciousness than a "thing".
So would you call your voice or my gait a physical thing? Not walking and talking, mind you, which we can just stipulate are physical processes, if not things, but voice, gait, carriage, and so on.
Clarendon, may I interest you in going back to your original post and provide me the opportunity to dissect it?
When you start your OP with First, I take it that 'problems' of consciousness only arise if you assume that physical things are what ultimately exist,, this is already problematic and doesn't do justice to the principles of physicalism. Physicalism is a supervenient principle -- the proponents of physicalism never claimed that the physical is what ultimately exists. I stand to be corrected if you could point me to the right direction.
A supervenient thesis doesn't claim that there's ultimate reality represented by only one entity -- that job was done by the pre-socratics. And we're not in that epoch anymore.
What physicalism claims is that there is causation, there is energy, there's science to support the entailment of consciousness. We have progressed so much in science that we can absolutely claim that the external stimulation can change our brain. Consciousness is not one way -- it is a bidirectional interaction between the external stimuli and the mechanisms in the brain.
I don't know what else to make of this comment, Corvus, but to simply say if an opinion could be marked "Fail", this is it.
No one here, or in any philosophical writing I've read, is asking to observe the embodiment of consciousness. What would that look like? A square-triangular oblong?
And what does "You will only observe the telltale signs...from the conscious living people and animals" mean? Our whole constitution is conscious! It is certainly not just telltale signs.
It is up to you how you read and understand others opinions and interpretations on the point. No one can dictate how you feel and understand it. That is the exact point about consciousness too.
Quoting L'éléphant
Your comment sounds like a pretense just like what the politicians do and say. There is no logical or factual content in it.
Science is based on observation and experiments for their laws and theories. When science is working and claiming their own metaphysical views on the invisible or non-existent objects, often it turns to alchemy and magic with the devious pretense, hence it is sensible we keep our minds open with investigative motives on these topics, and keep the traditional philosophical traditions alert with analytic methods.
I have absolutely no idea what is in your mind, apart from a telltale sign of your unwillingness for further discussions on this topic. Happy days. :smirk:
And one more thing. I have no access to your subatomic structure for your consciousness. I doubt if anyone else does. The only way I can access your consciousness is by your mind expressed in the statements you are making. If you were in front of me while making the statements, I would also be able to see your facial expressions too for accessing your consciousness. That's all there is to it.
Nothing to do with the chemicals in your head or subatomic structure of the brain. All I know is that you have the biological living body, and nothing more I know further apart from your statements on the state of your mind. It is the most honest and realistic analysis on the consciousness of humans.
I don't know if we can set consciousness aside in any aspect of voice or gait, but we can't in all of them. The most obvious is timbre. Why do a trumpet, French horn, and trombone have different timbres? As with bananas, avocados, and tomatoes having different colors, one part of the answer is purely physics. The air going through a tube of this diameter and length vibrates differently than the air going through a tube of that diameter and length. Same with our voices. No two people have identical vocal cords or throats, so the purely physical vibrations that our speech produce in the air cannot be the same, even if just holding one vowel.
But part of the answer is consciousness. Qualia don't exist without consciousness. An electronic device that registers and compares the two of us just holding one vowel doesn't hear timbre any more than another device sees the colors of avocados, bananas, and tomatoes.
Sorry, I can't post anymore at the moment. Just beginning what is going to be a fairly horrifying day of work.
To be clear, arguments about your question were not what I was calling "pseudo-science."
Now to answer. Let me think...well...I guess the answer is "yes." The example I always come back to is biological life. Is life physical? I'd say no in the same sense we'd say consciousness isn't. Chemicals behave in certain ways. Life is just one of the ways chemicals behave. Historically, people have asked the same kinds of questions about life you're asking about consciousness. To them, there must be something else, something added beyond the chemistry.
I think consciousness is more difficult to get a grasp on because it's so personal. It feels different from the other things we interact with. And, of course, that's the problem. Subjective experience is, in our subjective experience, different from those things we call "physical."
Hey!!! You tricked me into talking about the hard problem of consciousness.
I thought this might say something like this.
Your plan is to say that your voice is different from mine because there are identifiable physical differences between us that cause you to produce your voice and me to produce mine.
Sure. But the fact remains that if I had been adopted as an infant, and grown up in a different place, among different people, I would very likely have a different voice, because I would have a different history. That history is encoded physically in my body, so that by the time I reach maturity there are recognizable patterns in my behavior, like my voice and my gait. Those patterns are pretty robust, but even they change over time, most obviously due to aging.
You could not look at infant me, however closely, and predict my adult voice, much less identify me as a human infant and predict my adult voice, because they're all the same, or note that I am a physical object and I will later make the sounds characteristic of a physical object.
It's all in there, physically, I assume. But my voice is encoded in me physically much the way my vocabulary is. It's the encoding of my history and the reinforcement of my behavior, and it leaves a physical trace, which you could, maybe, in theory, maybe, find, if we knew a helluva a lot more about the brain.
The behavior of physical objects is not reliably only a matter of the laws of physics and chemistry, but depends on their history, on information and its encoding, and, finally, on chance. Obligatory chess analogy: white played Be4 in this position "because" bishops move diagonally, is nonsense; play is in accordance with the rules, not determined by them, and not explained by them.
Why am I talking about all this? Because I think you see a gulf between the physical and the mental that I don't, and part of that is that you think the physical world is much simpler and easier to understand than I do.
Otherwise, I agree.
Second, appealing to supervenience does no work here. Supervenience states a dependency relation; it does not explain how a wholly new kind of property could come into existence from a base that entirely lacks it. It is irrelevant, then, to the issue at hand.
Third, nothing I have said denies that external stimuli affect the brain, or that there are correlations, mechanisms, and bidirectional interactions. Such observations are beside the point. They do nothing at all to explain how consciousness could arise from combining objects that entirely lack it.
So unless you think that supervenience allows you to get out what was never put in, you have not yet engaged with the argument.
Chalmers’s hard problem concerns explanation: that functional and causal accounts leave consciousness no work to do. My point is not that one at all. It concerns generation: whether a property of a wholly new kind could come into existence from a base that contains nothing of that kind at all ( to which the answer is a self-evident 'no'). You don't seem to be grasping the difference.
Chalmers does not resolve that problem. He sidesteps it by positing fundamental psychophysical laws. But that is not an answer to the generative question. It simply says that consciousness appears because the laws say so. But such laws are just labels for magic, not solutions. It's not different from explaining how the magician produced a rabbit from the apparently empty hat by simply saying 'there is a hat-rabbit law'.
So this is not a matter of my rejecting Chalmers’s solution. There's no solution to reject. But anyway, as you're clearly locked-in to thinking that any and all hard problems of consciousness are the ones Chalmers was talking about, there is - again - no point in us continuing this (about which we already agreed, I thought).
Voice, gait, accent, vocabulary, chess moves - they're all patterns of behaviour realised in physical processes that already have the relevant kind. No new kind of property appears. Nothing phenomenal is generated.
The fact that history matters, that outcomes are not predictable from initial conditions, or that laws underdetermine behaviour is completely irrelevant. Indeterminacy and complexity do not create new kinds of state; they only select among possible instances of the same kind.
So nothing you have said even begins to touch the argument. You have given a catalogue of weakly emergent patterns and treated that as if it showed how a wholly new kind of property could arise. It does not.
In just our exchange, you've been talking about and making claims about Chalmers because that's what I picked up on. I've simply said where I think you're wrong, providing quotes and brief explanation. I cna't see that you're noticing a lot of what's in those responses, and I can see (it seems) that you're adding a huge amount of subtext which isn't there.
Quoting Clarendon
This is how I know you're not reading my posts really. I've explicitly jettisoned this and referred you back to the actual point made, which is that his solution is a response to exactly this problem. If you're unsatisfied with the solution, that's fine, and make arguments. All good. I'm not litigating that. I'm just telling you I think you're objectively wrong about your charges on Chalmers. You aren't having hte same conversation I think.
Quoting Philip Anderson
In case you ever want to consider evidence against your view.
that's really all I have to say on Chalmers. The problem of consciousness I am raising is not the one he's talking about and it is not one he's done anything to deal with.
That's not at all helpful as an analogy. So, some stuff can make up water and other stuff can't. What's the lesson here?
Look, I kind of get the intuition that motivates @Clarendon. It's the same intuition that motivates panpsychists like Chalmers, his denials notwithstanding. But he hasn't presented anything even approaching an argument. It's just groping in the dark and begging the question when all else fails.
Speaking of, you should probably do that yourself. Emergence is a slippery term, but no one would call this any kind of emergence:
Quoting Clarendon
Read Bedau, who coined the terms weak and strong emergence (though I personally find them problematic).
Argument for what? The Hard Problem?
Quoting T ClarkI don't know how you define life. It seems to me it's a bunch of physical processes. Metabolism. Respiration. Circulation. Immune systems. Reproduction. Growth. What aspect of life is not physical? What aspect can't be observed, measured, followed step-by-step?
And what aspect of consciousness [I]is[/I] physical, and [I]can[/I] be observed, measured, followed step-by-step? How can we know that everything needed for the existence of consciousness is purely physical if no aspect of consciousness is?
Quoting T ClarkBut we know better, right? We know that there's no possibility that it's not just physical things bouncing around, because there can't be things we can't detect. So that's the answer.
And yet, there's not even a guess about how it works. How can we be certain this is how it works if we don't have any idea how it works?
Quoting Srap TasmanerThat's more than my plan. That's the way it works. Sure, we can intentionally change our voice. If you're old enough to know him, Rich Little made quite a living imitating people. But our normal spreaking voices are what they are because of the physical.
Quoting Srap TasmanerI agree, and never said anything to the contrary. Did you take singing lessons as a kid? Did you ever have a throat injury? An illness that affects thr throat? Did you grow up in an arctic climate?
But how each of our voices got to be the way they are is a different topic than the fact that each of our voices are the way they are. That's why people recognize our voices, even over the phone or in a recording.
Quoting Srap TasmanerYup. I just happen to have recently read this in Sara Imari-Walker's [I]Life as No One Knows It[/I]:
Quoting Srap TasmanerHeh. No, the physical is hideously complex. We have to look at things at higher levels, because the lower levels are beyond us. We can't track every molecule of air in a room. We have to look at it in terms of air pressure and temperature. And what the brain does, with 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion neural connections that are doing far more complicated things than just moving around like air molecules, is beyond any hope of our understanding.
I'm glad you picked up on what I was trying to tell you about your comment. It's just nonsense.
Quoting Clarendon
Please provide me with some references to help me better understand. What is this "ultimately" you speak of?
Quoting Clarendon
I am not appealing to supervenience. This IS what physicalism is about. I did not invent it. The reason why you don't understand it is because you haven't read about it.
Quoting Clarendon
Right. Keep on denying facts and place the domain of science into the hands of amateur philosophers.
Quoting Clarendon
You haven't been engaging in any meaningful argument in your own thread. What you do is keep denying facts and the proper argument to use.
You cannot ignore advances in science. You keep on using ultimate reality which has no sense when it comes to physicalism.
First, you misrepresent their view.
Then, from this misrepresentation, you created your own unsound argument.
Finally, you're going around in a circle.
I want you to provide citations since you're the one who bear the obligation to show that you are, in fact, presenting the view of physicalism in good faith.
It's not that hard.
I feel that you didn't need to be so vulgar and abrupt in your comment on what is after all a philosophical topic discussion. Let's be honest. The OP is very vague, and nobody seems understand what it is trying to say. And you can tell many including yourself have no single clue where the discussion is going to, or what it is about.
I gave the most accurate and realistic account of consciousness. But you somehow sound not only negative but also rude. I can only assume either you are hurt in your feelings for some reason or you are just obtuse and pretentious in your comment. Maybe both.
I have been following the discussion for some time now and I have no problem whatsoever understanding the OP.
Why don't we just use the terms 'easy consciousness' and 'hard consciousness'? Easy consciousness could be explained by physicalism in the distant future without having to explain hard consciousness.
Fair enough solar. I haven't read any of your posts before, but maybe you have written something on the topic? Not sure. But if you do follow the OP, good on you. When you read the others posts, they sound all cloud catching.
Quoting SolarWind
They talk about "hard problem" must exist. But it only exists, because they think consciousness as some sort of physical entity, or something that emerged from brain, which is not very meaningful.
Conscious is just the way biological beings with brain functions - being aware of the environment and self. There is no entity in the concept. Nothing emerges from anything. It is just a state of being alert. The only way I can tell you are conscious is, because you talk and behave like a conscious being. So in the regard, they have been barking at the wrong tree.
I am not sure, if it is meaningful for the division. Because as I said, consciousness is a word describing a biological being behaving in certain way. It is not some entity emerged from physical matter, atoms and particles in the brain making the lights flickering flashing in the head what is called consciousness.
If consciousness is physical matter with properties, then it would make sense to say, hey can I have your consciousness for few days? or I will replace your consciousness with hers .. etc. It doesn't make sense.
It makes sense to say, you are conscious because you can see the world revealing to you, and you expressed an "awe" on its beauty. Or she was conscious when she opened her eyes this morning talking about her weekend.
Quoting Clarendon
Quoting Clarendon
With respect to consciousness, to say “you can’t get out what you don’t put in” neglects the highly complex electrochemical functioning of the human brain. To reduce this function to “atoms combining” is to not take into account that the human brain is comprised of around 86 billion highly specialized neurons, one with up to thousands of connections to others, performing highly synchronized and regulated electrochemical processes, involving highly complex molecules. Brain waves arise from the overall co-ordination of this vast functioning in neuronal networks between specialized brain regions.
To say that atoms must be conscious in accounting for human consciousness is like saying atoms must be able to move because muscles can.
Atoms have electric fields and can therefore move in a group. Not a good example.
I'll give a better one: One line cannot form a triangle, but three lines can. However, 86 billion circles cannot form a triangle. That is what the OP is saying.
We cannot discuss anything physical in regards to consciousness.
I notice you both take issue with my other example, but offer nothing against my main point.
Quoting Patterner
The two main scientific theories that are used to help explain consciousness would disagree with this.
Integrated Information in Discrete Dynamical Systems: Motivation and Theoretical Framework
We have suggested that consciousness has to do with a system's capacity to generate integrated information. This suggestion stems from considering two basic properties of consciousness: (i) each conscious experience generates a large amount of information, by ruling out alternative experiences; and (ii) the information is integrated, meaning that it cannot be decomposed into independent parts. We introduce a measure that quantifies how much integrated information is generated by a discrete dynamical system in the process of transitioning from one state to the next. The measure captures the information generated by the causal interactions among the elements of the system, above and beyond the information generated independently by its parts. We present numerical analyses of basic examples, which match well against neurobiological evidence concerning the neural substrates of consciousness. The framework establishes an observer-independent view of information by taking an intrinsic perspective on interactions.
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000091
Conscious Processing and the Global Neuronal Workspace Hypothesis
We review the central tenets and neuroanatomical basis of the global neuronal workspace (GNW) hypothesis, which attempts to account for the main scientific observations regarding the elementary mechanisms of conscious processing in the human brain. The GNW hypothesis proposes that, in the conscious state, a non-linear network ignition associated with recurrent processing amplifies and sustains a neural representation, allowing the corresponding information to be globally accessed by local processors. We examine this hypothesis in light of recent data that contrast brain activity evoked by either conscious or non-conscious contents, as well as during conscious or non-conscious states, particularly general anesthesia. We also discuss the relationship between the intertwined concepts of conscious processing, attention, and working memory.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627320300520
I don't think it is so much "explaining" as finding the structural source for it.
Quoting Corvus
Since we all have it, we know what consciousness is. The role of science is to try to link consciousness - the function - with the structure - the brain.
More or less the same thing, but more accurate word is "explaining".
Quoting Questioner
It really doesn't say much. No one is denying brain is connected to consciousness. But consciousness is not brain or neurons. It is not atoms or particles.
Consciousness cannot be meaningful without time (knowledge of past present future) and space (knowledge of where one is existing in), as well as self identity. Alertness just awakened from matter is CCTV camera.
Consciousness presupposes far more than that. It needs personal history, emotions, thoughts and reasoning and imagination as well as linguistic abilities which are backed by past memories of living individual.
No, atoms, molecules, neurons, brain - that is structure. But when engaged in its highly complex function - that produces consciousness. A brain has to be working to produce awareness.
Quoting Corvus
And doesn't that just make the brain all the more the marvel of human evolution?
Yes, I said no one is denying that. But they are not consciousness.
Quoting Questioner
It does. But it needs good education and philosophical training for maximum performance. :grin:
Thanks for the encouragement! I will follow up!!
Science is working on it! But to come up with the answer that, "atoms must be conscious" is an absurd conclusion to make.
Is it only atoms in the human brain that have this magical ability? How about the atoms in a rock? Why don't they get this magical ability?
No, it really isn't. Forget hte brain for a second and focus on the structural claim being made:
400,000 non-mammals combining together wont make a mammal.
65 non-sugar crystals wont make a dissacharide carbohydrate
100 white people wont make a black person
3,545,654,646 thoughts don't make an object.
Those seem clear enough. We are simply applying the same logic to consciousness: it is a non-physical attribute that might be caused by what you're describing, but we don't know that and hte logic says even 100 trillion non-conscious objects cannot create a conscious object.
There is nothing absurd in this. You're right about most else, but the refusal to entertain this logical point. As best I can tell, the repsondants squarely addressed your main point. The above is what's in question. Quoting Questioner
This doesn't tell us anything about that question. It just tells us that in your opinion, this combination of non-conscious objects can create a conscious one. That's fine. But I would suggest they, and I, object on grounds of it being unsupported and illogical given current available information. That doesn't make it impossible and i don't thikn anyone is saying that.
For my part, my response to that above explication is that you're describing brain activity, not phenomenal consciousness. I think we'd all agree with it in those terms.
irrelevant.
there is nothing like a human mind.
I think I have already answered this. Its highly complex electrochemistry
What I'm asking is how do you get there? You seem to be saying that the human mind is so special that we can't apply general logical principles.
I wondering what it is about the human mind/consciouness (hint: not the brain) that leads you jettison that avenue when assessing the question?
Here lies your error. It is not "mere" - for it produces every thought you have. F*cking amazing
Quoting AmadeusD
Being amazed isn't an argument, just to get ahead of that.
I would not use the word "special" - just different. Maybe it's the same thing.
The examples you mentioned are about combining. The human brain does not combine. It is involved in a highly complex chemistry - I would say the most complex chemistry that exists on this planet.
So, you see, your examples are not logical, but misinformed.
Hmm. I think perhaps you're misusing many of these words in service of an emotional position. A complex is a combination. The human brain literally combines different atoms into microstructures, microstructures into brain areas and brain areas into hemispheres. This, combined with neurochemicals rushing between them, is what hte brain does. It's all combination. THe logic stands. It's not uninformed at all, it's just perhaps counter to your preferred way of thinking about the mind.
I'm just trying to understand what you're saying. It's really unclear. You're claiming something about the brain which is just not supported by what you're saying. The complex neurochemistry of the brain is not different from complex neurochemistry everywhere else. Is the suggestion that a certain level of complexity in a system magically generates a novel attribute? I understand that IIT runs this line, in a way. But your position seems to me magical thinking rather than some kind of mechanical explanation.
Are you for real?
Quoting AmadeusD
Review your grade 9 notes about the types of chemical equations. Now multiply that by a thousand and you'll have maybe a smidgeon of the chemistry that goes on in a human brain.
Quoting AmadeusD
You are talking structure, not function
Quoting AmadeusD
God, no. It's chemistry to electrical circuitry. it's on and off switches, and a whole lot of other things.
Quoting AmadeusD
My preferred way relies on evidence.
Quoting AmadeusD
Like where?
Quoting AmadeusD
it's not magic. It's function from structure.
Quoting AmadeusD
No, the brain is not mechanical.
That is a paradigm example of weak emergence.
Note, it is those who think you can get out what was not in any way put in who are being unscientific and illogical.
i suspect you have very little understanding about the function of the brain.
It was not an ad hominem. What goes on in a human brain is not "reorganization."
Call it whatever you want, the point does not alter. Unless a new kind of property is already in the base, no amount of complexity - or whatever - will conjure it. That is the point you haven't grasped.
I grasped it, and rejected it. To ascribe a special property to atoms in the human brain, but not in all atoms, flies in the face of rational thinking. Consciousness is not conjured, but produced by the action of the neurons in the human brain. I suggest you do some reading about it.
Your original post is tantalisingly close to being correct, but it misses the point in a profound way. The simple reason that consciousness was not considered part of the composition of the physical world at the beginning of early modern science, was because of the Galielian-Cartesian division. This is, first, the division between the 'primary attributes of bodies' - mass, velocity, extension, number etc = and the 'secondary attributes' - appearance, smell, colour, and so on. Added to that is Descartes' division between extended matter and the 'thinking subject' (res cogitans) said to have none of the attributes of matter.
That is why what comes to be called 'consciousness' was left out of the reckonings of physics. And as physics was taken to be paradigmatic for science generally, a so-called 'universal science', then when it came to accounting for the nature of mind, it was found to be impossible to re-insert it into a scientific paradigm which was created around the assumption that it was not included.
This is the point behind David Chalmer's original paper, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.' 'Experience' or 'what it is like to be...' refers to the subjective domain of being, which had been excluded from the reckoning by the assumption of objectivity.
But it is not about the arrangement. See? You are the one who is not grasping the point.
If there's no rabbit in the hat, you can't get one out. that's true even if it's not a hat, but a cap. it's not about understanding more about how hats work. It's about not being able to get out what wasn't put in. It's painfully simple.
Ironically given the science envy that so many seem to have, you are being fantastically unscientific. Science would never have progressed at all if scientists just proposed magical newe property generating laws - for if that is genuinely a satisfying explanation nothing further would need to be investigated.
It is scientific to recognize that you can't get something for free. Which is precisely the principle I am appealing to. And it entails that consciousness is either a property of something non-physical, or it is a property of atoms.
There is nothing simple about the functioning of the human brain.
Actually, our brains are the biggest consumers of energy in our body.
The historical diagnosis is incorrect. Consciousness has been considered a property of a non-physical thing for time immemorial. Consciousness was already understood as something that could not be accounted for in purely material terms, which is precisely why it was excluded from physics in the first place.
You mention Chalmers - but as I made clear in the OP, the genuinely hard problem I am drawing attention to is not the one that he is labelling the 'hard problem of consciousness'. Chalmers is a physicalist and what he's doing is raising a pseudo problem and just ignoring the real one (for the real one seems decisively to refute his view and establish either panpsychism or dualism.
The point being that "you can't get out what you don't put in?"
Then, explain to me the function of the following neurotransmitters -
• Dopamine
• Serotonin
• Norepinephrine
• GABA
• Glutamate
• Endorphins
• Cortisol
The point being that atoms must have consciousness?
then, explain to me why I cannot ask a rock how it is feeling?
The question has a clear historical provenance. Your argument proceeds on a number of dubious and unsupported statements.
No one claims that consciousness is puzzling merely because it is “strange” or unlike other properties. The issue isn’t that consciousness is different from shape or colour; it’s that consciousness has a first-person, qualitative character that is not captured by third-person descriptions at all. Shape and colour are both publicly observable, structurally describable properties. Conscious experience is not.
The analogy with shape and colour therefore doesn’t carry the weight you want it to. Shape and colour differ in kind, but both are describable entirely in objective terms. Consciousness is not just another objective property alongside them; it is the very condition under which anything is experienced as having properties in the first place.
Likewise, the point about explaining behaviour without reference to consciousness isn’t that this logically excludes consciousness from being physical. The problem is explanatory, not logical. If a complete physical explanation of behaviour makes no reference to experience, then it remains unclear what role experience plays, or why it exists at all. That is the explanatory gap.
The key/door and colour analogy also misses this point. Colour explanations are omitted in some causal accounts because colour is explanatorily irrelevant in those contexts, not because colour is invisible to physical description. By contrast, consciousness is not merely explanatorily idle in some cases; it appears to be explanatorily idle in principle within a purely physical account, despite being the most certain datum we have.
So the problem of consciousness is not that consciousness is odd, private, or unnecessary for explaining behaviour in some cases. It is that subjective experience resists being identified with, or derived from, objective descriptions at all, even in principle. That is the problem these analogies slide past rather than dissolve.
And all of that goes directly back to the way physical science was framed in the early modern period.
Spoken like someone who knows their argument does not hold water
Answer my questions, if you are so firm in your convictions
I am not arguing that consciousness is puzzling because it is private, first-personal, or resistant to third-person description. I made it abundantly clear in the OP that I consider all of those pseudo problems.
If you think consciousness can be generated from a base that entirely lacks it, then you are committed to getting out what was never put in. Everything else you’ve said is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
Lol! I win
That’s because you’ve defined the problem away. The very features you call “pseudo-problems” are precisely what make consciousness philosophically distinctive in the first place. Over and out.
Yes, and I suggest your immediate dismissal of literally every objection to your points speaks to perhaps needing to reflect a little.
Quoting Questioner
This has absolutely nothing to do with the claim. More of the same thing is still the same thing. This is why I suggest you are having an emotional reaction, because you sure are not presenting anything which operates as an argument for your claims.
Quoting Questioner
You argued that the brain is not merely a "combination". That is exactly what it is. You need to get from structure to function with an argument or narrative of how that occurs. You are not doing so, and therefore are not making an argument in support of your claim. You are dodging all the objections to your discreet points.
Quoting Questioner
That is, in fact, combination. It is no different that other biochemistry. You have not explained how this results in consciousness, against the logic of that not being a follow-on from neural structures. This is explicitly understood among philosophers of mind and indeed, is what indicates the problem we're discussing. I would be helpful if you could stay on one track. You have described combinatory activity in the brain. You need to explain how this, all of it non-conscious, results in first-person phenomenal experience and you are not doing that.
Quoting Questioner
Other animals. Where else would "neuro" apply? Human brains are simply more complex - more of the same. So, if you like, we can ignore humans entirely and ask you to tell me how Cats are conscious, given they have extremely less complexity than humans, but are still conscious and have first-person phenomenal experience.
Quoting Questioner
Then you need to tell me what it is, and how it works. Every single piece of information we have about hte brain is biomechanics. Please.. tell your story.
Quoting Questioner
This has an obvious answer: Not enough consciousness.
I suggest you are unaware of any popular theory about this issue. Look into Panpsychism and explore hte interplay between David Chalmers, Jaegwon Kim and Christof Koch. Lots to be understood before we can have a worth while conversation about this. Clarendon is right. You are not being intellectually honest here.
So, you believe that atoms have consciousness?
OK, so you really have no idea of what you are talking about.
For anyone who is actually interested in the subject, here is Mark Bedeau's influential paper where he introduces and defends the term: Weak emergence (1997)
You defended your thesis this whole time without ever looking up the definition of weak emergence? :confused:
Those totally uninterested in the argument are free to use the terms however they wish.
Quoting Questioner Consciousness doesn't mean intelligence or the ability to communicate. Ask a mouse how it is feeling.
It's no big deal. Just look it up. It's fascinating stuff.
I wasn't. And I don't know what "abrupt" when reading posts in forums like this.
Quoting Corvus
First, I'm neither of the above. But I didn't think your post, which I criticized, should even be the question -- meaning, I expected more from you than posting nonsense like that.
@Clarendon I will try to provide some passages from philosophers related to the Vienna Circle. Herbert Feigl probably. At the moment I don't have an access to their writings.
Thanks for pointing this out. It's a very curious piece of work, that paper. Not what I was expecting.
Quoting ClarendonHe is right, though. Quoting ClarendonThat is not weak emergence. According to you, you started with things that had weight. Weight didn't emerge.
My analogy between life and consciousness mostly has to do with the inability of people on one side of the argument to conceive that a particular phenomenon might be a manifestation of a physical process. There must be something else. For life it was "elan vital," a spark of life coming from outside. The need for that explanatory factor no longer seems to be an issue for most people. What is the spark for consciousness?
Quoting Patterner
How do we know that someone or something other than ourselves is conscious? By observing their behavior. The most obvious way is by listening to what another person says--how they describe their own first-person experience. Obviously that's not enough. Not all conscious entities have language to self-report. What I need to do to make this a better argument is to identify non-verbal patterns of behavior that demonstrate consciousness. I'm not prepared to have that discussion right now.
And when I do that, will that be enough? Is consciousness more than just patterns of behavior? I know you'll say yes. What do I say? I'm not sure. This is why I was trying to avoid a discussion of the "hard problem” until I have a better answer.
If someone wants to use weak emergence to mean something else, that is a verbal disagreement. But it is not a criticism of my claim. One might as well say 'I know someone called 'Emergence' and they're strong. Therefore there is strong emergence.
@Patterner is right about what weak emergence means. A good example is the emergence of macroscopic ideal gas behavior out of the microscopic behavior of molecules. An example of strong emergence is the development of biological life out of chemical interactions.
Oh, and I won't be responding to you again btw. You are on the 'not worth it' list.
Alas. And since you’re making up definitions for words that already have well established meanings, I assume you’re using “not worth it,” to mean “points out when I am wrong.”
I doubt that. I can roughly imagine how chemical interactions give rise to life, and much of this (DNA, RNA, neurotransmitters) has already been researched.
However, I cannot imagine at all how qualia could arise from the four fundamental forces.
To me, that's like adding up a lot of even numbers to get an odd number.
Without any logical argument, just your blurting out "Fail" and "Nonsense" to the others' point sounded abrupt and pretentious too.
Quoting L'éléphant
It appears that you feel it is nonsense due to your prejudice on something. Talking in vague science words beating around the bush clouding the point is not always a good way to do philosophy. Looking at the problem from different angle is. You seem to rubbish the latter, and blindly adore the former.
Whether or not you can “roughly imagine” how something works is not the standard by which strong emergence is determined. When we say a level of organization is strongly emergent, that means it’s rules and principles cannot be determined, constructed, in advance from the rules and principles of a lower level, even in theory. You cannot determine the principles of biology in advance from the principles of chemistry and physics.
If you’re interested, here’s a link to one of the founding documents of the study of emergence.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.177.4047.393
What were you expecting? (Just curious)
Quoting AmadeusD
I just read over your reply to me and didn't see any questions.
But it is just make believe
It seems misguided to dismiss the idea that the functioning of the brain could generate consciousness without even the most basic understanding of how a thought is produced. Reducing the action of neurons to a mere “combination of atoms” – an error in understanding that the OP argument rests upon – suggests a serious flaw in the argument.
Can you answer the following basic questions?
How is an action potential along an axon propagated?
What happens at a synapse between two neurons?
A single atom cannot accomplish what the whole brain does. Atoms do not process information, integrate signals, have memory, or exhibit awareness. Neither does a single neuron, either. It is in the interaction of the system components – large scale neuronal networks - from which consciousness emerges.
I accept the “global” theories of consciousness – a connectivist approach – which cites neuronal synchronization in the production of the normal brain rhythms that make integration and differentiation possible:
Integration reflects the unity of conscious experiences, in the sense that each such experience is unique, so it cannot be decomposed into independent components. Differentiation refers to the enormous amount of potential conscious experiences that are simultaneous, that is, the extremely large repertoire of possible conscious experiences of which one is selected.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7597170/
Ahem. I already quoted from and linked Philip Anderson. ;-)
Quoting SophistiCat
A typical, and unconvincing, philosophy paper!
I'm going to reread it more carefully, and find a version that has the graphs -- it has graphs! Philosophy papers don't present data!
I read through it quickishly, so there are probably some things I missed. He suggests that earlier definitions have trouble related to irreducible downward causation, but the actual point he makes is not some subtle gap based on a thought experiment, but that everyone who uses the standard definition cites the same one or two papers, and even those are getting pretty old. If it's a thing, where is it in the scientific literature? he asks. That was interesting.
And his definition is, roughly, something's emergent if it shows up in a simulation. Wait, what? And then he defends this, to some degree, by saying, look, y'all are going to have to get used to simulations. Why? Because that's what we do -- that is, it's a report from a guy who actually does complexity research, and, well, "we all call it 'emergence', so deal".
There was no fine-tuning of definitions to skirt earlier criticisms and anticipate objections, no thought experiments, and no subtle interpretation of everyday phenomena involving medium-sized dry goods. It wasn't -- I guess this is really the sense in which it was unexpected and atypical -- a piece of conceptual analysis at all!
And I found that terribly refreshing.
One of the things that always bothers me in philosophy discussions that deal with science is a sort of insistence that science has to work with the concepts we want it to. ("We're interested specifically in intentionality. Have you found that yet?") While science might cheerfully start with a question posed in an existing framework, like folk psychology, the expectation is that in the process of research appropriate concepts will, you know, emerge, and not only is it likely they won't align with the pre-research concepts, it's not even a goal, and it just doesn't matter whether they do. (That raises some issues for science communication, of course.)
Since he's not doing conceptual analysis at all, Bedau doesn't really bother covering all the key examples and counterexamples from the literature -- here's how my definition and my framework handles this one, etc. He gives two longish examples where he's actually been involved in the research, to show why his terminology is appropriate. It's really more like a science paper, from my limited experience of those.
Added
For comparison, this conversation made me go back to Fodor's classic paper on the special sciences, which shaped my thinking on reductionism decades ago. (And which I think Anderson's paper sits alongside, in claiming that of course you can always go down, you just can't come back up.) Fodor starts right in with issues involving the logic of "bridge laws" and their interpretation. It's all very abstract.
It's true he does not use the terms "emerge," "emergent," or "emergence," but that's what he was writing about. As for the provenance of the terms in this context, this is from E.A. Burtt's "The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science," written in 1924.
As I understand it, Burtt uses the term "evolution" here to mean developmental change in general, not Darwinian evolution. I don't know if he was the first to use the "emergent" in this context or whether it was used by others. As far as I know, Burtt did not have any influence on Anderson.
I didn't see your earlier reference.
Eh. (I'm still surprised every time someone has read something I've written.)
The physics was over my head, but I still found it fascinating. Certainly deserves two references!
Quoting AmadeusD
Quoting AmadeusD
Quoting AmadeusD
Quoting Questioner
See my above posts
Quoting AmadeusD
See my above posts
Quoting AmadeusD
See my above posts
Quoting AmadeusD
For sure, the subjective experience has not been fully explained by current scientific knowledge, but I am confident that the answer lies in the functioning of the brain.
Any other answer to me seems to be the magical wishful thinking.
They are not "thrown together." Please read my previous posts.
If that is your wish, that is fine. I was looking for clear answers. It seems others are having this same problem...
Sorry, I cannot be responsible for your lack of understanding
The logic runs directly against this. You have not given anything that could remotely support the emergence of consciousness from elements which are themselves non-conscious. We have zero examples of this elsewhere and no evidence it is the how consciousness is generated. That is your extreme obstacle. You don't even seem adequately across your own beliefs to explain them clearly.
You are, though, because you are being obtuse, defensive, refuse to stay on topic, cannot answer simple questions and refuse to accept that your position is an emotional one (which simply means its a conviction you can't support - but want to continue).
These are all on you. I have tried to tease out some answers from you to no avail - so have others. This is not my problem at all.
All that being the case, what is it that makes it impossible to determine the principles of biology ahead of time, even in theory?
I haven’t read the whole discussion (and this topic has been addressed at length elsewhere), but I thought I’d respond to your reservations. We just went through a reading of Wittgenstein’s Blue Book lecture. The first six pages (available here) claim that philosophy mistakenly uses the framework of objects for thinking, understanding, meaning as “states” (I would take consciousness as part of this group). My notes on that section are here and below that.
Because of that framework, we imagine physical mechanisms, but the reality of errors, mistakes, etc. (leading to skepticism) causes us to take the mechanism as what he calls “queer”, or what you call “peculiar”. But we just want the situation to be “problematic” for that to require (logically) an “answer” because we want inherent individuality, certainty, it being subject to knowledge, etc.
Quoting Clarendon
I take Wittgenstein’s conclusion to be that instead of being modeled on a physical object (“mechanisms”), these are logical distinctions; driven by our interests and reflected in our common judgments. This of course does fly in the face of the initial presumption.
Here's what Anderson says:
I'm not sure of the motivation for that view. Conscious states are states and states are of things. I'm taking that for granted.
I see no problem with that way of characterizing things, such that I see no motivation for thinking we are confused when we do so.
I think there is a problem in supposing conscious states to be states of physical things. Lots and lots of problems. The particular one I am drawing attention to is that unless one attributes conscious states to the basic units of matter, to attribute it to physical wholes violates a basic law of reason - one so fundamental it underpins basic logic. To suppose a whole could have a new kind of property not in anyway present already in its parts is really no different from supposing a valid argument can have a conclusion that was in no way present in any of the premises. That is, it is no different from thinking that sometimes arguments of this form - 1. if p then q, 2. p. 3. therefore R are valid.
But this doesn't imply a problem in the idea of concious states being states. It just implies that the objects of which conscious states are states are not physical ones (not complex physical ones anyway)
[I]"The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe..."[/I]
Of course it implies that. The ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe is a given, because it's what actually happened. It may not be a certainty. There may be many ways things could have gone, and any one of them might happen if we started over. But it happening the same way has got to be possible. What could rule out the possibility?
Everything that happens, happens consistent with the laws of lower levels of organization, i.e. physics. That doesn’t necessarily mean you can predict in advance how a complex system will evolve based on those laws, even in theory.
Keeping in mind this is a controversial idea.
How do you know? Maybe laws are local, or maybe they change randomly.
Wittgenstein’s point is that there is a misconception of “states” as if they are objects (not of objects), like conceptualized in the same framework that we have for objects. For example, picturing understanding as a thing (a physical mechanism, or something we “have”), rather than a judgment we make/determine. Of course I think it would be better to go to that source if that is unclear.
I thought this was in the same vein as Quoting Clarendon but asking us to consider imagining a state as not only not physical but also not like an “object”, but a logical matter.
I thought this misunderstanding spoke to your misgivings when you say “I think there is a problem in supposing conscious states to be states of physical things” just turned around rather than attributing it to things.
We'd certainly have to be a lot smarter than we are to predict such a complex thing as the biology we are familiar with. If we were as smart as we'd need to be to be able to predict that, I suspect we'd be able to develop entirely new types of biology that, while possible, just haven't happened. At least not that we're aware of. I don't know why that's not possible.
Quoting frankOne never knows. Is there reason to think they are anything but universal and consistent?
There's reason to suspect they change over time. Do you know of anything that rules out strong emergence?
But that's exactly what the claim is, not that the very world we live in is impossible, but that it was not necessitated simply by the laws of physics.
And surely that's obvious if you just consider evolution by natural selection.
Some of us think there's reason to believe consciousness is an emergent property of certain organisms. You don't, and I get that, but did you really intend to be arguing against emergence as such?
The problem I am highlighting is not, then, one that is a product of picturing things incorrectly. The problem is that some people think that in the case of consciousness, we can get out what we did not put in. That is, though they accept in all other contexts that such a notion is incoherent, they suddenly accept it when it comes to consciousness.
I’m not convinced that’s how it goes. It seems closer to this: if you are a naturalist or physicalist, how do you account for intentionality? Does your model have sufficient explanatory power? There’s nothing to “find” but there may be an explanatory gap (Just how significant will depend on what metaphysics we subscribe to.) But that's been thrashed on that other thread.
As the celebrity physicist Sean Carroll observes, science does not require explicit metaphysical explanations in order to function, even though it inevitably rests upon metaphysical assumptions. Similarly, a talented musician doesn't need to read or formally understand music theory to perform brilliantly. Technical or pragmatic success does not depend on awareness of the underlying structures that make something possible. Effectiveness in practice can be largely independent of perhaps even indifferent to the deeper intellectual commitments and theoretical presuppositions that silently sustain it.
Quoting frankQuoting Srap Tasmaner says, "An example of strong emergence is the development of biological life out of chemical interactions." Chemical interactions are physical events. A biological entity is made up of a huge number of interacting physical events. It's all explainable by the lower-level principles of physics and chemistry. One example is what I said recently about redox reactions and the electron transport chain. Another is positively charged ferrous ions in hemoglobin attracting negatively charged oxygen molecules. Another is the shape of the active site on the RNA polymerase enzyme reading the bases of the DNA template strand by shape.
If that is considered strong emergence, then strong emergence obviously exists. I would have thought it's considered a bunch of examples of weak emergence working together, and that their interconnectedness that is a biological entirety is another layer of emergence above, but still explained by what's below.
I thought strong emergence was for things that cannot be explained by physical levels below, ultimately chemistry and physics. Which does not make sense, and is why I've been saying you can't build something non-physical out of physical materials. I believe that is what physicalism is trying to say is the case with consciousness. I think consciousness is proof that there is something non-physical at work, and why I am in the panpsychism camp.
Do you think, or do you think it’s possible, to explain and predict the principles of biology from the principles of physics. Here’s a list of some of those principles— evolutionary theory, physiology, genetics, thermodynamics, and ecology. Once you’ve done that, you need to explain and predict how those principles will interact and integrate to produce biological organisms and how they historically evolve and develop as energy-processing, self-regulating systems.
So, with that said, I have decided not to engage with this topic anymore cause I feel it is insurmountable given the strong objection to this thesis.
No one needs to explain all this in detail. Are you saying that thermodynamics is not reductionist because you can't predict the weather exactly one year in advance?
Reductionism is actually correct in principle. Suppose a pile of 271,828 atoms reacts differently than expected. Then you simply define a new rule for 271,828 atoms, and everything is reductionist again.
I guess the argument that life is strong emergence would be about final cause. We could debate whether that's necessary for understanding life. Some, like Robert Rosen say it is.
The essence of emergence is that, while you can reduce all phenomena into pieces explainable by lower level laws, e.g. physics, in many cases you can not construct higher level phenomena based on those same laws even in theory. Tell me how you would determine the principles of biology I described in my previous post from the principles of physics?
I left my response to this out of my previous post. Yes, you can construct the principles of thermodynamics from the laws of physics, but you can't for the other elements listed.
If X emerged from Y, then X cannot be before Y in time. If consciousness emerged from body, then consciousness cannot know anything before existence of the body in time. But consciousness can know time before the body it emerged from by imagination. We can imagine what happened before our birth. We can imagine how life was like in ancient and prehistoric times.
Therefore consciousness cannot have emerged from body.
That is true, but it does not disprove the possibility that consciousness may have already existed in a preliminary form. It may have been “asleep” in dead matter and unaware of anything. That is panpsychism.
Yes, maybe it may have. It could be further point of discussion for clarification?
Some nights in my dreams, I see places and houses I have never been in my life, and folks I have never met in my life. Maybe that is the reason why.
Another reasoning on emergence. If X emerged from Y, then X must exist separate from Y. If X exists in Y after emergence, then X is equal to or part of Y.
Consciousness does not exist separate from body. Or does it exist in the body? Or it does not exist in the form of existence.
If X exists in the form of non-existence, then does X exist? If X emerged from Y, then it must exist. But it doesn't exist. Therefore X could not have emerged from Y.
(X= consciousness, Y= body) We need to clarify this point.
I think most physicists probably agree with you. I've given convincing you my best shot, so we should probably leave it at that. It's been a good conversation for me.
Let's take an example. X = triangle, Y = lines.
If a triangle emerged from lines, then the triangle must exist separate from the lines.
That doesn't make sense to me.
Quoting SolarWindThat's not my understanding of panpsychism in general, and not what I think about it. I don't think it's preliminary or asleep at any point, in any thing. And I don't think consciousness is awareness. I think every particle is experiencing it's own existence at all times. A particle's existence does not include mechanisms that store information, perceive anything within itself or the environment, make any decisions, or think in any way. Consciousness doesn't "wake up" when it's in beings like us. Rather, we experience much greater complexity than a particle does.
I was trying to give some ideas on emergence. It wasn't an answer for your questions to TC.
The triangle was made up with the lines. It didn't emerge from the lines.
X = liquidity
Y = the properties of particles and the laws of physics
I don't see how X exists separate from Y.
Does liquidity emerge from the properties of particles? Could you explain how it happens in detail?
In my opinion, this is an emergence. You can also draw (too short) lines that do NOT form a triangle.
So the triangle depends on the configuration, just like in a physical example.
I’ll start off with my clever response before I come back with my more straightforward one
Clever response—It’s not making the table out of wood and nails, it’s making the wood out of atoms and molecules.
Straightforward response—As I said, I can’t think of anything else to say that might convince you or at least help you understand what I’m trying to say. I don’t think my own understanding is good enough to come up with something better.
So, you are saying the triangle is not a separate existence from the lines. Is this correct?
Does it mean the triangle is the lines, and triangle exists in the lines?
It sounds something not quite correct too. Emergence is an event on its own. You don't make up things to make something to emerge. If you did, then you wouldn't call it emergence.
A triangle can only be made from the lines by your intervention either by your drawing it, or making it up with the straight lines of wire or sticks. It is your doings, fabrication or workings whatever you may call it, but it is not an emergence.
Quoting CorvusWell, since you didn't ask for much.
:rofl:
I'll do this much. I'll use water as the example, because it's amazing stuff. I suspect everybody knows a lot of this, but it's step-by-step. I'll also touch on a few other things along the way.
Protons are positively charged, so they repel each other. When they are forced close enough together, such as by the immense gravity in a star, the strong nuclear force holds them together. (And breaking protons apart releases the energy of the strong nuclear force. That's what a fission explosion is.)
Electrons are negatively charged, and attracted to protons.
Atoms are electrons circling protons. The protons are called the nucleus. In all but hydrogen, there are two or more protons held together by the strong nuclear force. (There are usually also neutrons in the nucleus.)
The number of electrons circling the nucleus is equal to the number of protons in the nucleus. The electrons occupy shells around the nucleus. The first electron shell, closest to the nucleus, can be occupied by two electrons. Once the first electron shell is filled, electrons begin filling the second electron shell, which can be occupied by eight electrons. Once the second electron shell is filled, electrons begin filling the third electron shell, which can be occupied by eighteen electrons. And so on.
A very important thing about electron shells is that the outer shell is most stable with eight electrons. This is called the [I]octet rule[/I]. If there are eight electrons in the outer shell (the [I]valence electrons[/I]), the element tends to be inert. That is, they are nonreactive/don't much interact with other elements. These elements - helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon - are called the "noble gases", because, like people of the noble classes, they don't mix with the commoners. (Helium doesn't have 8 electrons in its outer shell. It only has 2 electrons, after all. But its only electron shell, the first, is full, so it is also fairly nonreactive.)
Oxygen has eight protons and eight electrons. The first electron shell is filled with two electrons. The second electron shell has six electrons. The second electron shell wants two more electrons to satisfy the octet rule. Famously, oxygen bonds with two hydrogen atoms. The lone electrons of the two hydrogen atoms give oxygen 8 in its outer shell, and, at the same time, oxygen shares one of it's electrons with each hydrogen, filling their outer (and only) shells.
Because oxygen has eight protons to hydrogen's one, the shared electrons are drawn more strongly to the oxygen than to the hydrogens. This gives the oxygen a slightly negative charge, and the hydrogens slightly positive charges. [A water molecule is an example of a redox (reduction-oxidation) reaction. Oxygen's charge is "reduced", and the hydrogens have been "oxidized".]
Water molecules bond to each other through what are called hydrogen bonds. The hydrogen atoms of one molecule, which, if you remember, are somewhat positively charged because their electrons are drawn to the larger oxygen nucleus, are attracted to the oxygen of another molecule, which are somewhat negatively charged because they have drawn in their hydrogens' electrons. These hydrogen bonds are strong enough to hold when the temperature is low enough, and the molecules aren't moving around much. But when the temperature is higher, and the molecules are moving around enough, the hydrogen bonds are constantly forming and breaking. Liquid!!! :grin:
Even though I've reached liquidity, there's more great stuff!!
In a water molecule, oxygen has two electrons that are each paired with a hydrogen electron, and four of its own that are in two pairs, called "lone pairs". The electron clouds of the lone pairs are bigger than the electron clouds of the two hydrogen/oxygen pairs of electrons, meaning they have a stronger repulsion, so they take up more room. This forces the hydrogen atoms closer together, and the overall angle of the molecules ends up at about 104.5°. When water freezes, that angle forces the molecules into a lattice that is less dense than liquid water. That's the reason for the unusual fact that ice floats in water, instead of sinking. Which means that, while the top of the pond is frozen, life continues below. If ice sank, and the pond filled up from the bottom, life on earth would be extremely different, if it existed at all.
Another interesting thing about the shape of the water molecule is that the oxygen end of the molecule has a negative charge, and the end with the two hydrogens has a positive charge. Many things dropped into water are dissolved because, whether that are positively or negatively charged, one or the other end of the water molecule can bind to it and break it down. This is why water is called the universal solvent.
All that comes from the facts that electrons are negatively charged, protons are positively charged, and the nature of electron shells.
Also "the outer shell is most stable with eighty electrons" now says eight. Etc.
Quoting Patterner
Very thorough and detailed explanation indeed. :up: :pray: Thank you. Yes, it seems definitely a cause and effect relation exists in the process. However, could we say the process is emergence? Isn't liquidity a property of H2O in certain temperature range? And what is happening to H2O via temperature changes is just transformation of the property?
It would help for analyzing alleged emergence of consciousness for its validity, if we could further analyze what emergence means.
If consciousness emerged from brain, then why all consciousness differ from other consciousness?
Does it mean that our brain structure is all different from individual to individual? If so, how does our brain structure differ? Or is it same?
Surely if brain structure were all identical, then our consciousness must be all identical too. But we don't even know what others' consciousness is like apart from being able to see and hear their conscious actions, behaviors and expressions in words. This is another question arising.
Quoting CorvusFor consciousness to be emergent from the physical properties of the constituent parts, it would need to have physical characteristics, itself. Liquids have definite volume, but not shape. They are liquids under specific conditions. These characteristics are observable and measurable, and it can be seen that they exist, and are specifically what they are for each liquid, because of the specific properties of their constituents.
None of that applies to consciousness. The problem isn't that we cannot figure out how the physical characteristics of consciousness emerge from the properties of its constituents. That is something that, in theory, we could eventually figure out. The problem is, consciousness does not have physical characteristics.
That was my point all along too. We have agreement here. :fire: :sparkle:
Quoting T Clark
This is going to confuse a lot of folk, because what Anderson describes as "reductionism" is more commonly known as supervenience, while reductionism is what he calls "constructionism," more or less.
Quoting T Clark
This (the inability to predict the principles of a higher-level theory from the principles of a lower-level theory) is what Bedeau called weak emergence:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That is, if all you had to work with was an understanding of the principles of something like physics, then, since you can't deduce from them the principles of something like biology, your only option would be to run a simulation on a large scale and then coarse-grain and redescribe the result with a new set of principles. Under strong emergence, even that is not an option.
This is why I was surprised that you confidently asserted that biology is strongly emergent and then cited Anderson, since I don't think Anderson makes such a distinction.
That you is @T Clark not me, I believe.
Do you know the Fodor article on the special sciences I mentioned? It's from right around the same time as Philip Anderson's article. Without using the word "emergence" (that I recall), what he's talking about is precisely the sciences of emergent properties, emergent objects. Rather than claim that an emergent object (like a tornado, the classic example, or a monetary system, his) cannot be reduced to physical objects—which by and large he wants to allow they can—he focuses on the problem of the natural kinds in which you would state a scientific law, and argues at some length that the natural kinds of the special sciences cannot be natural kinds for physics. Even though the phenomena—like tornadoes—are physical, the science of them cannot be physics. He seems to land almost exactly where Anderson does, and near Bedau, for somewhat different reasons.
Everything it occurred to me to talk about clearly went in the "weak emergence" bucket. Am I right in thinking that part of the motivation for the stronger version was the idea of "multiple realizability," and in particular speculation that you might find "mind" running on wetware or hardware?
I suppose the idea does have some merit, because we do see what you might call "convergent emergence," where very different underlying systems give rise to similar systems. The most recent example I heard was the application of Cory Doctorow's theory of enshitification to US foreign policy: it's more than an analogy if you have the right abstraction for "platform" (social media, financial system, etc).
Anderson does not use the term “emergence” in his 1972 article. As I quoted above he states “The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe...”
Since the universe was constructed from those laws, there is no reason that those laws couldn't do it again. But no human, if given the power to create a Big Bang, and the power to manipulate anything using any of those laws any time and anywhere, could reconstruct this universe. Is that what you mean?
Right, but as the universe evolved, water waves came into existence, and understanding them means recognizing laws that weren't applicable to the preceding plasma. In other words, if the universe started over, some kind of emergence would happen again, right?
Quoting frankIf this do-over has the same initial conditions and properties, I would think it would produce the same primary particles. If so, I would think those primary particles would combine in the same ways we are familiar with, and we would see familiar emergences. But would we see all of them? Would H2O ever form? If so, would it ever exist in a place where it would be a liquid? Who can say?
I'm not sure that any possibility is likely. The initial conditions and their evolution into their present state were not necessary, they just happened as they did in this particular universe. There are other possibilities for more and different kinds of dimensions and time in other possible universes. There is no reason to conclude that this is the only universe in an infinite foam of diverse universes each with its unique set of dimensions and forces. In a do-over we would be one of them and not this one. Entirely different physics with or without particles would rule.
What is the ground for it being fundamental? IOW, how is it fundamental?
The universe was not constructed from or by the laws of science. Those laws describe how that universe works and its history.
Quoting Patterner
No, not really. Let’s try this…
Let’s say you decide to go for a ramble someplace with no pathways, no roads, no towns, no landmarks. You don’t make any plans. You don’t have a map or compass. You don’t have any goals. You just go out for a walk. You wander around deciding which way to go—each moment depending only on your desire at that particular moment. Or maybe you could make your decisions by rolling a die.
When you’re all done, if I’ve been watching, I can look back and see the path you we’re on, and where you went—to oversimplify, that’s reduction. But I couldn’t have predicted that path before you started.
I don’t anticipate that thought experiment will be any more convincing than my previous arguments.
Since the history and operation of the universe is the result of properties that can be described in specific, consistent ways, with great precision, there is no reason that a universe with initial conditions and properties that could be described exactly the same ways could borrow produce another universe much like this one.
Quoting T ClarkHonestly, I'm just trying to understand your position. I can see my agreement going either way.
Quoting T ClarkThat's entirely true. I couldn't have predicted it, either. What's more, even if I had had a specific destination in mind, my path to it might have been unpredictable. Obstacles and distractions could take me any number of ways. So if your point all along has been the precise path, I definitely agree. If your point is that it's impossible for me to take the same path twice, I disagree, even though it is astronomically unlikely to happen.
I might not be able to make this clear (thus pointing to the Wittgenstein) but I’ll try again; it’s not that a state is an object, but a “state” is thought of on the same terms (just not physical): direct, measurable, unique, corresponding, equatable, etc. One example would be picturing a state as a “property” (rather than a logical conclusion). The point is that our desire—to have the relationship and criteria we have to and for states be similar to that which we have for objects—is what creates the sense of a “problem”; the failure when we try to find or measure, etc. a state, as if it were fixed, rather than it being an ongoing logical determination.
That’s an entirely different question than the one on the table here.
The question is, could I have predicted it in advance? Can I predict what comes next? To be fair, emergence doesn’t generally apply to individual phenomena or events. It applies to systems—levels of organization, e.g. chemistry as compared to biology.
But no two humans brains on the entire planet are identical. No two brains have the identical shape in the pattern of gyri and sulci (ridges and furrows). Not two brains have the same circuitry, the vast patterning of connections between neurons. that develops in response to how brains are stimulated. Since we all have our individual experiences, our brains develop differently from all others.
As I see it, to suppose that we are thinking about something incorrectly requires justification. We must not start out with that assumption, for then we are a conspiracy theorist. We need to be provided with some reason to think we are in error.
I do not see how the argument I have made implies a wrongheaded way of thinking about things. The case I am making is quite simple and appeals to a self-evident truth of reason that underpins reasoning itself. Namely, you cannot get out what was in no way put in.
This principle explains why an argument whose conclusion is in no way contained in the premises is invalid. But it also means that if the ingredients of a brain are in no way conscious - either actually or as a disposition - then the brain cannot be either.
There seems nothing in that case that indicates a confused way of conceiving of things. Indeed, it seems those who think consciousness can be had by the whole even though it was not in the parts are the ones who are confused and are allowing magic in this one corner of reality - something they would not permit elsewhere.
I am not sure on that claim. It is something we don't have definite answer. Without actual detailed examination, investigation and comparison, we can never tell if they are exactly the same or not. If they are all different, then how different, and how the difference of the structure of the content of brains affect consciousness. We need detailed conclusive answer to be able to claim that they are different.
Well, we do, and the most basic knowledge of brain development will provide you with an answer.
OK, let us suppose that they are different. How does the content of brain difference affect on what aspect of human consciousness?
Intelligences vastly greater than ours might be able to predict various emergent things, like liquidity.
Even humans have figured out a few things so far, although, of course, not from scratch.
How we analyze incoming information, a thought, a memory, an instinct, represents a fixed neural pathway. We all have different neural pathways. They can be changed even into adulthood because of neuroplasticity. A brain develops (connections made between neurons) according to the stimuli it receives. Since one person's experiences are unique to the person, so too is the way the brain develops.
There are different kinds of emergence—weak and strong. We’ve mostly been talking about strong emergence like when biology emerges from chemistry. As we’ve said, in those situations, knowing the principles of the lower level of organization will not allow you to construct, predict, the principles of the higher level.
Weak emergence is a bit more straightforward. There are times when you can predict more complex macroscopic behavior from its simpler microscopic roots. A well-known example—the behavior of an ideal gas can be predicted based on the behavior of the individual atoms in the gas. In that example, properties like temperature, pressure, and volume are derivable based on knowledge of the average velocity, quantity, and mass of the atoms and molecules in the gas. I think the behavior of liquids you mentioned is probably an example of weak emergence.
Well, I have to say I've had the wrong understanding of emergence all along. I thought weak was something that could be explained by the properties of lower levels, and strong was something that could not. Consciousness being the only example of strong that anyone talked about.
This is correct. I thought that’s what I said. I guess I’ve just confused things more.
You seem to be talking about the content of consciousness, not consciousness itself. Even my own consciousness content would be different from this morning to tonight after having read some books, watched youtube videos and listened to some jazz music.
Here we are talking about consciousness not the contents in consciousness, aren't we?
How do you separate the two?
The content of consciousness is not consciousness itself, is it? The content is the input data of your experience via perception, sensation and imagination etc. Consciousness itself is your mind which is the theater of all the images, sounds and thought are appearing in.
Well, maybe we're still not on the same page. And I'm entirely willing to take the blame for that.
There's certainly no way a human intelligence could have predicted biological entities from physics or chemistry. And, for the sake of argument, let's say no intelligence could have. Still, biology [I]does[/I] emerge from physics and chemistry. Even if we couldn't start from the beginning and predict it, working backwards, we can see that every biological process can be explained by the principles of chemistry and physics.
Consciousness can't be. Those who say it emerges from sufficient complexity of whatever types of physical processes cannot explain it in the ways we can explain biological processes, and don't have a guess as to how it might work. "Enough complexity" and "It just does" are the answers. But those are not answers.
I understand it differently. Consciousness is the function of the structures of the brain. Consciousness consists of the "content" produced.
Otherwise, it would be like saying something else than the wind flaps the flag in the breeze.
Sure we can explain it. We call it biology, neurology, and psychology.
According to Robert Rosen, you'll end up without a definition for life if you try to reduce it to chemistry. He says you need final cause to understand what we mean by life. He proposes getting Kantian about it.
Would it therefore qualify as strong emergence? Debatable?
I was thinking in that way in the beginning, but it seems not much meaningful to say function of the brain when you cannot explain in detail on how the functions actually work. What is happening in your brain when you imagining an apple and when you are seeing one? What are the differences in those two different mental activities and the function of the brain? Is the apple you are seeing your consciousness?
That's fair, but I think its on you to reach across a divide in this case - the definitions proffered above are those used by the vast majority of people. "consciousness" is the abstract concept of first-person phenomenal awareness and then you can then fill it with fun stuff like bikes and empathy, the sky and Love and what have you.. Lots to be discussed there, closer to your conception, but on these initial steps I think you're certainly talking at cross-purposes with most people here. Just a heads up :)
neurons are firing
Quoting Corvus
neurons are firing
Which neurons? What is actually happening when firing? How do they differ when seeing an apple and when seeing a cup? When imagining them and remembering them?
We cannot look at [I]any[/I] aspect of consciousness and see how it emerges from any lower level process or properties.
I know enough to say this isn’t true, but not enough to get a better explanation. You wrote that you’ve read “Feeling and Knowing” by Antonio Damasio. He also wrote “ The Feeling of What Happens.” Those tell the story better than I could. If you read those and aren’t convinced, there’s not much more I could say.
I was perplexed because I probably should have agreed with Andy. But I don’t. When I attended Andy’s lecture I was pretty sure I was alive, as I am now. You’re probably confident you are alive too. Haven’t you spent your whole life, well, living? Being alive matters. It’s very different from not being alive.
Yet despite our natural confidence in our own existence, some scientists challenge it and argue that life may be just an illusion or epiphenomenon, explainable by known physics and chemistry. Physicist and public intellectual Sean Carroll is one such individual. In a crowded evening lecture on the Arizona State University campus where I work, I was aghast in my seat as Sean stated how the equations of particle physics are sufficient to explain the existence of all matter—including you and me. Jack Szostak, a Nobel Prize winner, holds a similar view, arguing that the focus on defining life is holding us back from understanding life’s origin. According to Jack, the closer you look at any of the “defining” properties of life, the more the boundary between life and nonlife blurs.[/quote]I agree with them. Life is a bunch of chemical processes, all working together to keep the unit working. The fact that the result is a unified structure seems to be emergent, though I am clearly not going to be able to figure out if it's strong or weak emergence. But is there an extra something that is Life?
But he doesn't address how ions going through ligand gated ion channels, creating depolarization in the cell body; mRNA being made in the nucleus, shipped out to the rough endoplasmic reticulum, which makes proteins that are then packaged and budded off; kinesin transporting things down to the axon terminal; and any or all of the million other things, produce consciousness.
The reason he, and everybody else in the world, does not is that consciousness isn't something physical that can be explained physically. As Chalmers said:Quoting ChalmersDamasio just lists ones physical thing or event after another, and eventually says now there is consciousness.
here's a pretty straightforward description of what happens -
How Do Neurons Fire?
Quoting Corvus
By however the circuitry is arranged to store the memory -
Where are memories stored in the brain?
Quoting Corvus
The hippocampus plays a major role in imagination, as well as memory
Where Imagination Lives in Your Brain
The ability to conjure up possible futures or alternative realities is the flip side of memory. Both faculties cohabit in the brain region called the hippocampus
I think Aristotle was the first to notice that life is associated with purpose. I don't know what an anatomy and physiology course would be like if we tried to delete that concept. It's pervasive.
If we want to make biology a branch of physics, we might try to avoid saying things like:
1, The tree grows toward the light to gain energy.
2. It needs energy so it can reproduce.
3. It needs to reproduce so the species will survive.
If you explain all of that by efficient causes, you'll find that you're still using the idea of purpose to organize your thoughts. What does that mean? I know Rosen's book left me believing it's a more profound issue. Anyway, it's too early to wave it off as folk psychology.
None of them tells what consciousness is.
Quoting Questioner
Do they mean that if you had your friend's brain, you will have his/her memories and imagination?
I’ll say it again, even though you tricked me into getting back into the discussion before. I have nothing more to offer here.
This is one way of looking at things, but if we do see it that way, then all of reality is just illusions and epiphenomena.
Quoting T ClarkI don't see the many characteristics of life as illusions or epiphenomena. They are real things, and so are you and I. I just don't see a property that we would call [I]life[/I].
I assume you mean the book [I]Life Itself[/I]. (Also the title of a George Harrison song.) It sounds great. Sadly, not available as an e-book, but not much can be done about that.
If you ever heard of [I]The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology[/I], by Hans Jonas? That also looks interesting.
Can you extract the conjured up possible future from the hippocampus, and view it? If it is physical, then it should be possible for you to do so.
Does that mean you don’t see the distinction between things that are living and things that are not as an important one?
You keep moving the goal posts. At first, you claimed that all brains are identical, and I answered that they are not. Then you claimed that consciousness is something separate from its contents, and I answered that it is not. Now, you claim, we don't know what consciousness is. Upthread, I already mentioned - we all know what it is, since we all have it.
Quoting Corvus
This is somewhat of an absurd hypothetical. If you are asking whether memories and imagination are specific to one particular brain, then the answer is yes.
Quoting Corvus
Consciousness is not physical. It is the function of the physical. It is a function of the structure operating in highly complex electrochemistry.
Can you hold knowledge in your hand? Same idea
I just asked if that is the case. I didn't claim they are identical. You are not reading the posts accurately.
My aim is not claiming or concluding. My aim is to explore and investigate asking questions arsing from the posts and replies, and learn about the topic hoping we will come to agreed conclusion on the topic.
Quoting Questioner
You got it back to front. Because you already said the answer is yes, I asked the question. If answer is yes, then logically it implies you will have your friends imagination, memories and self identity and all the mental content of his/hers. I was asking if you would say yes to the inferred case from your resolute answer "yes". It followed from your answer "yes", hence it was not an absurd hypothesis. If you still insist it is absurd hypothesis, then your answer "yes" must have been false and absurd.
Quoting Questioner
Many folks here so far agreed to that - consciousness is not physical. Then what is it? That is what we are still trying to figure out.
Quoting Questioner
Depends on how you define knowledge.
Tell us then.
A coordinated set of mental capacities that include awareness, emotions, rationalization, analysis, synthesis and responsiveness
They are not consciousness. They are just mental states and activities. You can do all those without knowing you are doing them. Consciousness means you are aware of what you are ware of. So it is the perception higher than normal perception. So, it appears that you did not know what consciousness is, but thought you did.
Okay, let's add to the list self-reflection
That's close.
I gave the feeling that some want to separate consciousness from the person who is experiencing it, and for me that is an impossibility, a non-starter
Read on Apperception in Kant's terminology, and you might change your views.
Kant made some important contributions to the understanding of cognitive science –
1. The mind is a complex set of abilities (functions)
2. The functions crucial for mental, knowledge-generating activity are spatio-temporal processing of, and application of concepts to, sensory inputs.
3. These functions are forms of synthesis. Synthesis (and the unity in consciousness required for synthesis) are central to cognition.
Where I disagree with Kant is in this -
He held that some features of the mind and its knowledge had a priori origins, i.e., must be in the mind prior to experience (because using them is necessary to have experience). That mind and knowledge have these features are a priori truths, i.e., necessary and universal. And we can come to know these truths, or that they are a priori at any rate, only by using a priori methods, i.e., we cannot learn these things from experience.
It might seem a reasonable explanation to an 18th century philosopher, but a modern understanding of evolution and neuroscience undercut the notions that consciousness exists not only separately from, but before, the organism experiencing it.
I reject Kant’s statement that - “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge, … in order to make room for faith.”
So, instead of reading more of Kant, I have just downloaded the following book. Read it, and you might change your views.
The New Science of Consciousness: Exploring the Complexity of Brain, Mind, and Self
https://www.amazon.ca/New-Science-Consciousness-Exploring-Complexity-ebook/dp/B01C1LBNQA/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0
You need to read the original work of Kant, which is CPR, not some commentaries. There are thousands of commentaries by different folks on the Kant topics, and some are totally opposite views from the others. It would be a mistake to reject Kant's ideas on mind without reading the original work of Kant.
Modern science and neurology cannot explain what consciousness is by whatever methodologies they employ and endeavor to do so. And it is called the hard problem of consciousness. Hence reading all the neurology books wouldn't tell us what consciousness is. It could tell you how mind and different perceptions work, and how brain processes input sense data, and turn to knowledge and information.
Why should I accept a theory of consciousness produced by that very same human consciousness?
You don't need to accept if you don't want or disagree. But if you are interested in the topic, you would have a read, and think about it at least. To me, it seems the most reasonable theory on consciousness so far.
From my understanding, Appeception is the perception on normal perceptions. It has nothing to do with a priori concept or experience. It is above all those. It proves the article is wrong.
How about you just explain to me what it is?
I will try do so when I have more time. Recently got quite busy here, only was popping in briefly for short comments.
Thanks. Looking forward to it.
Life Itself is a pretty heavy slog through "causally closed systems" and what not. The last chapter was pretty fascinating. I haven't read the Jonas book. It does look interesting.
Now that's a good question - but this would apply to your own, no?
Lol! Good observation! that's why I defer to science
I guess also different traditions or even labs can give conflicting answers to important questions. I think deferring to science generally is admirable though - just testing some assumptions. I think it may not be as helpful as you take it to be overall.
the only substantiated knowledge we have
I think that attitude while explaining a lot, isn't particularly mature. Understandable though
Quit with the judgments. It really makes me not want to discuss with you
But I'd like to. So, address the issue
While I understand how you have read this, that is not a judgement about you. Maturity is not solely a personal attribute. I think the theory is immature - as in, hasn't been fully thought through/doesn't take all relevant issues into account. It is not a comment on you. I imagine this happens often? Please just ask me to clarify whenever you get that impression. I can almost guarantee it's not a personal judgement.
I have addressed the issue there, in this light. The attitude is an immature one that I think needs a bit more consideration. Science-derived information can be murky, messy, contradictory etc.. etc.. "settled science" is quite rare. But we need to know things all the time - and we certianly don't defer to labs and journals for most knowledge we have day-to-day.
of accepting scientific knowledge as valid?
All the same can still be said if you throw a living entity into the group. All four things can do something that none of the other three can. However, living entities can do a [I]type[/I] of thing that none of the others can. Only living entities process information. At the very least, all have DNA, and that means information is being processed. Protein is being synthesized. That's a different category of thing than anything non-living does.
All the life processes - metabolism, respiration, circulation, immune system, etc. - are physical. But, although I couldn't guess what percentage, a whole lot of it is also processing information. Physical, but vastly more complex than anything non-living. Both because of the information processing, and because the many processes all benefit the overall entity. As opposed to, say, the earth. Even without any life, there are all kinds of systems. Plate tectonics, weather, water cycle, erosion, whatever. It's not all to keep the planet going. The planet would still be a planet if it was a giant hunk of iron, with nothing happening at all.
I think it's interesting that we have made things that process information. For the first time, something other than life is processing information. I wonder if that is the most important, the defining, characteristic of life. And what would it take for us to consider an information processing device alive.
Only if you're really interested in it. If you take the stance that final cause (or causally closed systems) is just folk psychology, I think you'll end up having to explain why a causally open system (which all dead things are) is raised above the folk level. How is it? Could it be that bias toward a certain world view, which prioritizes physics, is the real motivator? So we end up as neo-Kantians, with an array of formats for organizing things for the sake of comprehension. That would be my synopsis. It's been a while since I read it.
Well, it's not terribly expensive, so worth checking out. I've never heard of causally closed systems or folk psychology. My world view prioritizes consciousness. None of the physics matters without consciousness.
Maybe life is a result of consciousness. Living things have been altering the oceans, the land, and the atmosphere since they first appeared. Every move they've made has led to further expansion and complexity. It's as if Life is a single entity reaching for self determination. Maybe consciousness is what's been causing it all this time.
I explained myself completely. Have another go.
You are welcome. :) It is not something special. I just suddenly realised that consciousness is just a perception which perceives all the other perception. This idea is from Kant's definition of Apperception. I have not read the whole CPR myself, but did read many parts using different editions, and I recall that is the idea of Apperception.
Apperception is not related directly to a priori or experience as such, but it is the foundation of the a priori concepts. I should have looked into CPR and confirmed the passage regarding Apperception, but had no time to do so, hence just writing a quick post on it purely relying on my memory during my quick coffee break.
Scientific research on consciousness is all about how our sense input is channeled into our brain, and processed into knowledge, emotions and information. It doesn't touch what consciousness is.
One thing clear is that it is not physical. It is a perception in higher level, which perceives all the other perceptions, emotions, feelings, sensations, memories and imaginations ... etc.
And now, we are trying to make AI, which will be conscious of its own mental abilities, which will be different from our own, but which will also intentionally work to increase their survival.
I never claimed it was. You seem to be having some difficulty comprehending what is meant by the function of a biological structure. Here are a couple of quotes of things I previously posted in this thread -
[i]Consciousness is the function of the structures of the brain. Consciousness consists of the "content" produced.
Consciousness is not physical. It is the function of the physical. It is a function of the structure operating in highly complex electrochemistry.[/i]
***
If I understand correctly, you are talking about a unified consciousness that connects fragmented perceptions, emotions, feelings, sensations, memories and imaginations, etc., into a singular experience of consciousness. This is achieved through the coordinated functioning of the brain. Brain mechanisms integrate, synchronize and model information, transforming individual mental processes into a coherent “stream of consciousness”
I am not particularly interested in biological structure of brain. It is not a topic for philosophy. Philosophy deals with rational analysis on the abstract parts of the mind and universe.
Quoting Questioner
I feel you are still misunderstanding the points. Consciousness does not connect anything. It perceives the other mental events and states.
You don't have to bring in the functions of biological structure which tells you have your brain, so the brain makes all things happen in your mind. Everyone knows that. We were trying to figure out what is it that, we call consciousness conceptually and logically. It is the higher level of perception which oversees all the other perceptions and mental activities.
Apperception is the process of interpreting information in the context of existing information.
Quoting Questioner
How, Questioner? You're giving an opinion which is not well supported. How could that process result in conscious, first-personal experience? There is a massive, massive gap in your attempts to explain your position.
Clearly, science has not solved the hard problem, but it is difficult for me to accept explanations that are supported only by faith, not evidence. There's like this science-epistemophobia going on
Not sure what you mean by that. That is not what Kant said, is it?
You should accept explanations supported by reasoning and logic. Faith is for religion. You seem to be confused between philosophical reasoning and religious dogma.
Quoting Questioner
Nothing like that going on at all. Just saying biological explanations are not really in the category of philosophical interest.
Another point. Science does not always offer absolute truths on all their claims. There are always prevalent and possible errors on their observations, experiments and their reasoning for establishing theories. There are also possible frauds and fabrication on data collections and unjustified research methods for making up fake claims just to secure grants and donations.
And if and when new discoveries are made by philosophical or other scientific investigations, all the accepted old truths will collapse and become superstitious nonsense. That is science. And that is why they need philosophical reflection, analysis and verification on their claims.
Blindly revering, adoring, admiring and accepting claims just because they are scientific is naive and unintelligent attitude.
Quoting Questioner
I agree. As would anyone but Dennett, RIP, really. That is what we are asking you about, as I see it. How is it possible that those processes, none of which are conscious or contain consciousness, can result in it? You're right - there is no scientific explanation. That's why these questions keep cropping up :) I hope this clarifies somewhat.
Quoting Corvus
I agree, largely.
Quoting Corvus
That is just the definition of apperception. For Kant, this was explained as the existence of the thinking "I" viz the fact of the "i" existing in perception is apperception - perception of one's self and it's place among sensation. Kant's is just an abstract/large-grained description of the process above to me. Is there any real daylight between them to you?
Correct, science does not. They offer best explanations based on the evidence.
Quoting Corvus
That observations are always in error is a dubious claim.
Quoting Corvus
Philosophers are saints, and scientists are sinners?
Quoting Corvus
Of course.
But blindly rejecting claims just because they are scientific is naive and unintelligent, too.
Tell me, do you think that the philosophical zombie is a possibility - a human being physically identical to human being (acts like a human) but has no conscious experience?
Philosophers have been concerned with the questions surrounding consciousness for hundreds of years. All those questions really boil down to the nature of reality itself. Science may have something to contribute and to limit one's investigation solely to philosophy ignores a large body of knowledge.
Many philosophical questions will remain, no doubt. Any serious exploration of consciousness concerns itself with both the philosophy and the science of mind.
Quoting Questioner
This seems a total non sequitur. Can you make the connection, in context rather than in abstract?
Quoting Questioner
No one is doing this. That's largely why you're frustrating people: you're relying on an erroneous assumption to reject points being made. No one is saying science has nothing to say about consciousness - we're saying it doesn't, currently, have a line on this particular issue. The talk about brain structure and function doesn't get to the point we're on, though, you have been right about all that. This is why we're still trying to tease it apart.
Quoting Questioner
I'm not sure what you mean by 'science of mind' - i'm unsure there is a science of mind - precisely because science doesn't have the line on the subject we would like it to have.
To be clear, I'm not even rejecting that neural correlates of consciousness will be found. Many researches, such as Sam Harris, make that an optimistic, but not sanguine, hope. I am merely pointing out that we have no warrant to claim that this is the case, or make sweeping statements about hte nature of consciousness. We simply don't know what it is or how it works, at base.
Quoting Patterner
That is fantastic lol. Thank you.
Consciousness makes our reality - as does matter and energy - so it may be pertinent to see what physics has to say about it all. I'm not that familiar with quantum theory, but I want to learn more.
Quoting AmadeusD
Okay, I will try to be more open-minded
Quoting AmadeusD
I am currently reading The New Science of Consciousness: Exploring the Complexity of Brain, Mind, and Self - I'll fill you in as I read. Right now, I just started Chapter Two - The Science and Philosophy of Mind
Is this like a new-agey thing? If not, where is this deriving from for you?
As far as I know, there's nothing to suggest that this is at all the case except (forgive the use of the word) immature kinds of spirituality. I don't think we know enough about consciousness to make such a claim, either way. Consciousness is just the basis of sentient experience, not reality. Well, on currently available information. The world exists without us.
Quoting Questioner
Ah right, nice. Nunez. Happy to receive your updates - But he leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. He seems ignorant to most of the philosophical underpinnings of the questions he asks, and make some wild non sequiturs to conclude, for instnace, from social networks, that hte brain acts that way. Like... what, bro? But again, happy to receive your updates. Just giving disclosure, i guess lol.
I do not accept that there is a "science of mind" currently. I get the inkling he's taking from Ernest Holmes - an overtly spiritual thesis which relies on an assumption that God is at the core of everything (and essentially equates God with consciousness). Very weird reading, i have to say.
No. What produces your reality?
Quoting AmadeusD
I'll give you disclosure as I read
Quoting AmadeusD
My favourite kind!
Evidence can be fabricated and manipulated.
Quoting Questioner
Not always, but possible. Please read the post correctly.
Quoting Questioner
No one said that. You are saying it.
Quoting Questioner
There was no rejecting science. It was just identification and categorization.
Quoting Questioner
It could be a possible mental state for folks who cannot distinguish between the simple concepts, cannot read simple writings correctly, and repeating other's words in answering back.
Still sounds wrong. Where did you pick up the definition? Do you have the original texts implying above?
The thinking "I" doesn't exist in every perception and sensation, so the above is downright wrong. But if you present the relevant quotes from the original texts in CPR or any other Kant's work, we could investigate and analyze on it.
Any philosophical theory of mind needs to be consistent with what we know about biology, and in particular - with the function of sense organs and the brain. There are cognitive and neuro scientists who also work in the field of philosophy of mind (e.g. Peter Tse, Daniel Dennett).
Philosophy of mind is not neurology or biology. That was the point. There are clear divisions between the different subjects and methodology adopted.
It’s much more than a passage. He re-wrote in B all of A95-130. That the guy that came up with all this had to re-do most of it, in the name of clarity no less, may not bode so well for the rest of us.
Probably better to not seek a definition for apperception, but instead concentrate on what it’s supposed to do, in the overall Grand Scheme of Things related to human empirical cognition.
Anything you perceive has degrees: that which is foremost to attention and becomes experience of something, but also that which escapes attention but is nonetheless present to the system itself and is all that minutia the unity of which constitutes the totality of that experience.
Cognition is the former and usually represents the thing, apperception is the latter and represents the synthesis of all those representations the word used to describe the cognized thing, doesn’t list. So, e.g., tree is the thing cognized, bark (texture/orientation/color), leaves (shape/location/color), branches (size/shape/complexity), roots, dirt, and all the rest are the so-called “synthetic unity of pure apperception” the word tree doesn’t express but given from sensible intuitions of their own belong to our understanding contained in the conception “tree”, without the immediate consciousness thereof.
Anyway….so goes the hard problem.
But you have faith science will eventually solve the hard problem?
I put my faith in the scientific method, but I can't make predictions about what discoveries might be made in the future. But there is a significant body of knowledge about brain function that I do accept - notice I used the word "accept," not "believe in"
If you hold that consciousness is ultimately explainable within the scientific framework, then you are assuming that the hard problem is tractable by third-person methods. It’s a metaphysical expectation about what science can, in principle, do.
From my recollection of the reading was, the concept of apperception was originally used by Leibniz and Locke to denote unconscious perceptions or perceptions with no perceived objects. Kant borrowed the concept, and further expanded for his own ideas in CPR.
My intention was not to go over Kant's write-up in full, but just find out the core meaning of his idea on the concept, and then come to own idea of consciousness reflected from the concept.
I don't need to think your thoughts to know you have them
Not like I do
How would you go about proving that with the scientific method?
Two different structures with two different functions processing information in different ways
No, I'm asking you how would you prove a machine has thoughts at all using the scientific method. How could you determine whether any machine does or doesn't have mental states?
I machine does not have thoughts the way I understand them.
Can a machine have ANY mental states? Or is that something only brains are capable of?
I'm not an expert on AI - I wish I could remember the details of an article I read some time ago - that describes how neural networks function quite differently than computers - that these vast networks in a brain cannot be replicated in a machine.
Long story short - a machine will never approximate what a human brain can do
Quoting Corvus
What? If there was no thinking "i" there would be no sensation. This is true of both forms of 'apperception'. THe entire basis for it is the thinking I.
Quoting Questioner
That's a profoundly unscientific claim. Interesting. This seems quite common in you comments, while you commit to the scientific process, it seems. I suppose this explains a lot of the daylight.
Is this what Kant said? Or is it what you think?
I cannot understand your question quite well enough to say something less incredulous, and that's probably on me.
Provide the source supporting the claim preferably from the original text.
Quoting AmadeusD
Consider a case from dreams. You see yourself in your own dream, and it is a type of visual perception. But you have little idea who you are, and why you are in the place doing or meeting folks you don't know. Your perception has no "I" in it.
You return to your idea of self identity, only when you wake up from the dream wondering or trying to remember the content of the dream.
And there are times, you do things with no idea of your own self, if you are focused on the things you do such as driving, playing tennis or watching films listening to music etc. There are times, you forget about your own self identity immersed at the external objects or activities you do.
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B131
This is just him saying exactly what I've laid out, to be clear.
Quoting Corvus
I think you're confusing the concept of identity what the concept of "i". the "thinking i" is simply whatever mode you find yourself thinking in. It is hte thinker. Not a thinker. It is simply the thinker of a given thought you're having. The context is not changing the concept.
It seems you're explicitly making this error:
Quoting Corvus
The thinking I doesn't rely on any stable identity - the only identity is between the thought and someone thinking it at a given time. Doesn't have to the same I as twenty minutes ago for the concept to hold.
It'll be clear I think the rest is not to be responded to here, at least.
Kant was talking about apperception in conjunction with intuition exclusively. He further divides apperception into pure apperception and empirical apperception in B132, and explicates the difference in the concept.
Quoting AmadeusD
How can you have self identity with no concept or idea of "I"? The two are closely related, if not the same concept. Your point is not making sense at all.
Quoting AmadeusD
Not sure what you mean here. You need to be more clear on your points.
Quoting AmadeusD
You are the one who kept on digging into this aspect, and I was trying to clarify your points to come to some conclusion or agreement. But you ideas are not clear enough in what you are trying to say.
You need to read further B132 and beyond to understand Kant's idea on apperception. It looks like you just read a line or two from B131, and misled what Kant was talking about.
I'm unsure you're addressing what we're talking about anymore. His use of apperception requires the I, in all of it's forms. This quote proves that anything he says with regard to any representation (which is what apperception pertains to) requires a thinking I. This is clear enough my man.
If you have a retort to this, do feel free, but please be explicit about what you're disagreeing with, or how it has a bearing on what I've put forward. You may well have some slam dunk point here but I cannot understand what it is...
Quoting Corvus
What? The exact opposite of this is the mistake I'm trying to correct. You don't need a self-identity for the thinking I to exist conceptually. Any thought, whatsoever, had by any person, in any mental state is a thinking I going about it's business. Whether that mind, at that time, relates itself to the same mind at another time isn't going to change that. Again, I cannot see how your response touches the issue at hand.
Quoting Corvus
They are closely associated. Not related. And they are objectively not the same thing. I have tried my best to set you right here, because you are confusing two concepts together - which holds all the explanatory power about the things you're saying that I think are wrong.
Quoting Corvus
This is painfully clear. I shall highlight for you:
Quoting AmadeusD
Bolds 1-2: If you do not understand this line, I cannot help you. This is straight 1:1 relation claim (well, lack of relation, but you see, i'm sure).
Bolds 2-3: This means that the "thinking I" only refers to whoever it is thinking any thought at any time. The "thinking I" is not tied to any particular person, mental state or thought. You are making a pretty big error thinking that the concept includes empirical content. That is illogical.
Quoting Corvus
I have read the entire work more than once. You have admitted you have not. Onward we go..
It sounds like you are grossly misrepresenting Kant's concept of apperception with 1-2 lines you read from Wiki. Kant was not just talking about representation, but he was talking about intuition and apperception. Kant also divides apperception into two different types, which you didn't know about them.
Quoting AmadeusD
You need to correct your own misunderstanding here. You cannot think about "I" without knowing who you are. "I" is meaningless without the idea of self identity - knowing who you are.
Quoting AmadeusD
Stable identity? Is it from sociology? It doesn't sound a philosophical concept. Anyhow I disagree with your claim. The idea of your self identity is only possible under the knowledge of your own lived experience and knowing who you are. Without those elements, you don't have your self identity.
Quoting AmadeusD
Self identity is a concept which is made up with one's own lived historical experience. Please read above my points.
Quoting AmadeusD
Your claims are absurd and not making any sense at all. No point in reading the entire work, if it causes confusions. Try reading the academic commentary books with the original work.
I'm not. It just seems you don't even understand what I'm saying lol.
Quoting Corvus
Yes you can. Otherwise those with amnesia wouldn't have thoughts. That's illogical. As it was the last time you intimated it.
Quoting Corvus
You know what unstable means right? So, it's hte opposite of that. A settled, consistent identity. This is not controversial, weird or obscure. If you are unaware of this concept, that would explain why you aren't able to grasp the basic mistake you're making.
Quoting Corvus
They don't relate to anything here.
To pull it back, apperception requires a thinking I. That is a fact, by definition of those terms.
The rest of this seems more an attempt to avoid saying you aren't grokking these concepts.
Quoting Corvus
I['ve read several and watched several lectures while reading.
If your position is to not read the original book, and oyu haven't., I will leave off discusisng it with you as you are not in a position to say much of worth. That's a shame given how interested in it you are, but until you read it, I'm off.
If you did read Kant properly, then you would have mentioned on intuition and judgement aspects of Apperception, which you haven't. It just sounded highly unlikely you have read CPR in full. Not many folks do that, even if they are Kant scholars, because there are different editions of CPR, and they have different passages on the same topics due to change of Kant's own ideas.
If you really did read the whole CPR more than once as you claimed, then it sounded like you have not understood it at all, or forgot most of it.
I did read what I needed to read, not in full, but read the parts I am interested in with focus. Where it was not clear, I used the academic commentaries.
This is not good, that you inserted "]" in your post, so quoting your sentence will get derailed.
Quoting AmadeusD
This type of writing is unnecessary in philosophical discussion postings. It is not adding anything to the point, and sound emotionally abnormal. Just discuss the topic.
LOL.
Quoting Corvus
They are wholly irrelevant to what I've said (and, their use would have further supported it). This is why it is entirely clear you're not at the point in your reading that could provide any substantive discussion. Again, that's a shame given your interest.
The second post is .... bizarre.
Quoting AmadeusD Quoting AmadeusD
Your posts lack philosophical contents. They will be ignored from now on.