Can Consciousness be Simulated?
For the sake of argument, assume we're dealing with simulations being run on classical computers.
Let's assume we have the computing power to simulate a working human brain. If the simulation isn't conscious, then that's a problem: what did we fail to simulate correctly? Because working brains are conscious (I guess sleep might be an exception to this). If we are convinced we're simulating a working brain perfectly, and it's still not conscious, then we have a mystery on our hands.
But let's say our simulation is conscious. Any simulation is essentially a combination of switches turning on/off in a certain pattern. So for our working brain simulation, when switches X,Y,...Z are turning off and on in pattern A,B,...C there's a conscious experience. That raises some interesting questions:
1. What is it about turning enough switches on and off in a certain way that gives rise to consciousness?
2. Why is the pattern of switching operations important? Why does pattern A,B,...C give rise to consciousness, while pattern D,E,...F doesn't?
3. If consciousness can arise from substrates like collections of mechanical switches, can it arise in other substrates where particles interact with each other? Say, a rain cloud? Swarm of comets? Sand dune?
4. Is electricity a necessary condition for consciousness? Or can you have consciousness arise from really strange collections of things? Say, for example, a bunch of ropes and pulleys?
*Much (maybe all) of the above are things I've read over the years. I don't claim originality over any of the above. I'm using it to jump start a discussion.
Let's assume we have the computing power to simulate a working human brain. If the simulation isn't conscious, then that's a problem: what did we fail to simulate correctly? Because working brains are conscious (I guess sleep might be an exception to this). If we are convinced we're simulating a working brain perfectly, and it's still not conscious, then we have a mystery on our hands.
But let's say our simulation is conscious. Any simulation is essentially a combination of switches turning on/off in a certain pattern. So for our working brain simulation, when switches X,Y,...Z are turning off and on in pattern A,B,...C there's a conscious experience. That raises some interesting questions:
1. What is it about turning enough switches on and off in a certain way that gives rise to consciousness?
2. Why is the pattern of switching operations important? Why does pattern A,B,...C give rise to consciousness, while pattern D,E,...F doesn't?
3. If consciousness can arise from substrates like collections of mechanical switches, can it arise in other substrates where particles interact with each other? Say, a rain cloud? Swarm of comets? Sand dune?
4. Is electricity a necessary condition for consciousness? Or can you have consciousness arise from really strange collections of things? Say, for example, a bunch of ropes and pulleys?
*Much (maybe all) of the above are things I've read over the years. I don't claim originality over any of the above. I'm using it to jump start a discussion.
Comments (107)
I would think consciousness also requires a body. Much current AI research seems to be brain focused and disembodied, which really isn’t the case with human consciousness.
It certainly seems to require SOME kind of substrate, in the materialist model of reality. Although I remember reading some scientist postulate a consciousness field that permeates the universe.
Yes, I think you're right about that.
Panpsychism has been en vogue lately. Max Tegmark thinks the universe might be made of math, and that sounds very idealistic. I think materialism's days are numbered.
It's not really a brain that's conscious. It's the whole body. Of course the mind is an important, the most important, element, but the rest of the nervous system participates along with many other systems, e.g. the endocrine system has a large part. So, you'd have to simulate the whole body. You'd also have to simulate some sort of environment - the input to your simulation. You'd also have to simulate history - minds aren't made, their grown. Who knows what get's loaded into us during development from the sperm and egg to the baby being born? There's a structure of knowledge that already exists in an operating brain.
Quoting RogueAI
I think this is what is known as "the hard problem of consciousness," which was discussed, is still being discussed, in the "Emphasizing the Connection Perspective," thread. I've come to the conclusion that this may be unresolvable, not because it's really hard, but because people on both sides come up against a brick wall when asked to understand the other groups position. As I've said a number of times "I just don't get it."
Quoting RogueAI
Well, the pattern is the consciousness, isn't it?
Quoting RogueAI
Seems to me a certain minimum level of complexity would be required for mental processes. I don't think the systems you describe are anywhere close to that level. Orders of magnitude. One source on the web says there are at least 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses in the brain. That means the number of possible brain states is at least 2^100 trillion assuming each connection can be in each of two states. Is that right?
Quoting RogueAI
I remember reading about a hypothetical computer made with people passing notes back and forth. There's have to be a lot of people. I guess 100 billion, which is about the number of people who are living or have ever lived. It would also be very slow.
I think the problem here stems from treating physical reality as fundamental. What looks to humans like to very similar patterns of switches might, to some some other observer, look extremely, that is to say qualitatively, different. Physical reality represents some underlying principles of the overall reality, but we cannot know to what extent it does so. It's entirely possible that whatever "consciousness" actually is simply isn't very well represented by physical reality.
Quoting RogueAI
Presumably, a conscious entity could appear to us in all number of ways. Since there is, so far, no evidence that the consciousness of the observed can be experienced by the observer in some way, there is currently no reason to suspect we can identify consciousness as such.
People passing notes back and forth aren't going to create an instantiation of consciousness.
He said with no justification.
Anyway, how is that different from pulleys and ropes?
Well, let me put it this way: if you claim that people passing notes back and forth (in a certain way, I assume) will give rise to a conscious moment, you're going to have to have an explanation for it. I think you're also committed to panpsychism, because if people passing notes can instantiate consciousness, then other things can as well. A falling abacus, if it's large enough, and the air moves the beads in just the right way?
If you're claiming that people passing notes back and forth CAN give rise to a conscious moment, I need an explanation for why I should consider that a plausible possibility, instead of something that is near impossible.
It's not. I think a conscious system of pulleys and ropes is as absurd (and is based upon as much logic and evidence) as transubstantiation.
Anyone else think consciousness might be the faculty (or capacity/ability) for expressing intelligence? (hypothesis in the making)
You've already stipulated that an electronic device, a computer, can simulate mental processes. What is a computer? It is a device with many connections. If I may be allowed to drastically oversimplify, the action of the computer is to pass signals back and forth through those connections. Those signals transmit information. How is that different than passing notes, i.e. signals containing information, back and forth. I recognize that the computer will be much faster. For logistical reasons, there is no possibility that any but the simplest computer consisting of people passing notes can ever be implemented, but we are in the world of hypotheticals, so we can ignore practical considerations.
This chain of logic is one of the reasons I'm not a materialist. Materialism leads to absurdities like:
Pushing rocks around on an endless plain in some "special" way can simulate a universe of conscious beings.
https://xkcd.com/505/
Maybe 'thought' enables us to perceive higher 'consciousness'.
Perhaps 'consciousness' exists in all natural phenomena, and “as a consicious field that permetates the universe." (Rogue AI). (I really like this idea you have mentioned).
Can space / the universe be the substrate which allows higher 'consciousness' to exist? Or, alternatively, does 'consciousness' exist anyway, on a higher plane, even without space / the universe?
Is space/ the universe really a neccessary condition for 'consciousness' to occur and exist? Or, is space / the universe the medium through which our 'thoughts' perceive higher 'consciousness'?
Can we simulate 'consciousness' ? ..... I would say 'no' , but we may be able to access 'consciousness' through 'thinking'. And, if we can access 'consciousness' through 'thinking' - then why can't a machine, compurter, or A.I ?
Another question arises : Does a machine / computer or A.I actively 'think' or does it merely follow the instructions of its' programmer ? A kind of involuntary thought / action ?
It is very hard to arrive at a definition of 'consciousness' that all sides would agreee on.
Lots to consider! Thanks for starting this topic. :-)
I'm not a materialist either, and I know enough about the ole "hard problem of consciousness" schtick to know we can't come to any agreement. And, yes, I really loved the comic you linked to.
Schtick?
Mild rhetorical jibe. Maybe I should be ashamed of myself.... Nah, I've done much worse.
or 5. consciousness has nothing to do with switching switches.
Your switch architecture of bran is wrong so your premise/question is malformed.
I doubt it. there are so many counter examples of entities that behave quite intelligently but show little/no signed so consciousness. e.g., in an extreme case, a virus exhibits a high degree of expressed intelligence in its attack and survival against all human/plant/animal efforts to eradicate it, yet in no way would we say it has consciousness. Its expressed intelligence comes from its genetic coding/program.
All living creatures are self learning and programming.
Not only it can be simulated, there is no other substrate in which consciousnes can exist but virtual.
It’s not about switches, it’s about interaction between virtual entities.
Possibly, unless speed / synchronicity is at issue, in which case serial computation or too slow execution might be inadequate for the simulation of conscious experience.
Panpsychism is vague, ambiguous, untestable, without even possibility of ever giving any prediction, confirmation or explanation.
Panpsychism is as useful as religion, and it is worse mysterianism than mysterianism itself. It’s not even a potential solution, it’s saying I give up and I’m gone fishing, because replacing one mystery with another is not a logical proposition to begin with.
What do you find fruitful about it?
That logic is shown to be wrong by non-living things giving rise to living things, or non liquid things giving rise to liquid things, for example.
This is very insightful, is this your idea?
So, from your perspective, what is consciousness? Or, what does it entail?
Generally no, but I do think I found some ways to explain it better, at least to myself. For example, I came up with the following statement with which I converted myself from being agnostic to finally deciding: the only explanation we know of, for the existence of things that do not actually exist (such as unicorns or qualia), is virtual existence.
Anyway, here is this guy, Joshua Fields, for example:
Also, when Giulio Tononi speaks of ‘integrated information’, what else can it be than a kind of program? When Terrence Deacon speaks of interaction between ‘constraints’ defining biological and mental “self”, what are the constraints if not a kind of program? When Max Tegmark speaks of ‘mathematical patterns’, what else can it be than a kind of algorithm? When dualists say soul is not material, they are kind of right, it’s virtual. Panpsychism is kind of right too, Earth or Universe could indeed be conscious if we are all “computer hardware” for the simulation of some higher virtual reality…
Virtual consciousness kind of "unites", or makes more sense of other theories than they can do for themselves, and has more to say where they remain mute. It does not mean it's true, but it is the only path to at least somewhat satisfying explanation.
do you mean access or qualia types? I assume you mean qualia kind.
I am modeling the qualia/experience consciousness as a resonant condition that does not actually exist on its own but only emerges as the waves in the container sense the boundary conditions and propagation media landscape to form something you can think of like a standing wave which represents the wave states of the whole system. You can think of the boundary conditions as an internal cognitive boundary/shapes on one side and sensory/motor boundary/shapes on the other side and when tuned to a particular ‘meaning’ waves that pulse the system a resonance condition may form that captures the character of the system as whole in one standing wave, which could be read out with connectionist networks recognizing the various interference patterns. In short, I’m hypothesizing that qualia/experience consciousness is the resonant sound you here when you thump a container, which resonant sound (e.g., holographic phased standing wave patterns) richly characterizes not only the shape of the container but its material parameters, this resonant sound waves is effectively coherently ‘aware’ of its whole system in a way that you never could be if you separately analyzed all the causal molecules and connections that form the container and the propagation medium the way that Integrated Information Theory suggests is consciousness; thus, at least one reason why (IMHO) their model is devoid of the qualia/experience.
In this way, I’d say that consciousness can never be self-assess as a snapshot in time, but has to be part of a self-consistent path history (like a story/narrative) that all points to the same resonant focal point/pattern that you call you. Mess with that, and your sense of self consciousness/identity should degrade and vanish into a chaos ideas, facts, memories but without any form, function, or purpose, which I would not call that ‘thought’ or ‘thinking’, so a problem to the Descartes way of evidencing oneself.
Furthermore, under my framework, to establish one’s self-consciousness we have to be able to explore all our boundary conditions that ware resonating within and their nature must be accessible/determinable wrt their form, function, or purpose in influencing the landscape that the consciousness agent in question is resonating with and within. Then, the consciousness agent in question would have to observe a time-evolution history path where their ‘thought’ could in-fact modify those boundary conditions and that had a correlated, esp. if *expected*, effect on their conscious state of being to ‘feel’ they are alive and the executive center of the (resonating) system. Then, the consciousness agent in question would have to learn and use those associations as tools to manipulate itself (the best it can) to achieve goal states of being. Towards a definition qualia consciousness, I’m thinking that the degree that the consciousness agent in question can do the above, it has ever higher orders of qualia consciousness.
Not if it cannot feel what is right, regardless if its unreasonable and illogical.
Resonant condition, waves in the container, boundary conditions, propagation media landscape, standing wave, wave states. There is no explanation in those words, you might as well call it 'quantum collapse', 'magnetic field density distribution', 'holographic diffraction interaction', 'self-looping attractor constraints', 'integrated information', 'mathematical pattern’, or whatever, but it can only make sense if you call it by its true name: “program”, because while all the other words above have reached the bottom of reductionism, computation alone stands at the door to a realm of increasing complexities and almost unlimited possibilities. Look, it sounds true, it smells true, you know it’s true, admit it!!
maybe some concepts I'm working with relate to that on macro system scale.
re "'magnetic field density distribution', "
not thinking of that.
re "'holographic diffraction interaction', "
have considered that one and see some potential.
re 'self-looping attractor constraints',
chaotic attractors are likely involved, and are best when not programmatic.
re "'integrated information',"
I don't think much of IIT.
Quoting Zelebg
Not necessarily, at its core. No doubt programs and comms will control flow and a program might simulate it (not sure about that); however, resonant wave conditions like what I generally have in mind may be best implemented in asynchronous FPGA or optical parallel (interference) pattern processing. programs and normal von neuman architectures are simply not suitable for holistic modes of beholding systems.
I think your perspective of consciousness is really good especially since it's primarily wrt to experience, which means there's bound to be an underlying truth to it. And, I think my idea might be in close relation to yours in a way. So, for me, consciousness and intelligence interrelate in every activity. Intelligence is like the grooves of a vinyl record and consciousness (the one we usually refer to) is the sound produced when it is played. However, for me, there is another level/degree of consciousness which is in play before the intelligence is applied. That is, there is a consciousness which determines the intelligence to be used. This former/prior consciousness is analogous to the music pattern which determines how the grooves in a vinyl record will be organised. And, that initial music pattern is not yet sound but, through the use of an instrument, sound can be produced.
Another analogy would be that I have a musical pattern in my mind. Before I express it or play it on an instrument, it cannot be said to be sound even though it is musical. However, through an instrument (which organisation of strings, chords, membranes, etc, represents intelligence), sound, which is kinda like an emergent property, is generated. Also, that initial music pattern has to be intelligently organised for it to have the potential of sound. Therefore, to me, it seems consciousness and intelligence are always interacting and there can never be one without the other. From such a perspective, I see consciousness as the cause to (source of) intelligence, and the environment in which intelligence manifests/acts, as well as, the emergent property which comes through the action of that intelligence. It's like consciousness is the soul manifesting through a human body (intelligent configuration) and emerging as personality or character (an outer expression of the initial consciousness).
Quoting BrianW
I can see why your intuition links the two, esp. in a human/mammal model, but are you saying you believe only consciousness things can have or exhibit intelligence?
How about my a virus counter example, which exhibits a high degree of expressed intelligence yet in no way would we say it has consciousness? Virus are not even considered to be alive.
I was making fun of your phrases that sound like they mean something, but ultimately they can only refer to QM or attraction and repulsion of EM fields - distance, mass, velocity, stuff like that. There is nowhere to go from there, that is the bottom. Naming things is not explaining, it’s not even describing.
Resonant wave conditions? You can call it “ghost”, or “black box condition”, it does not explain anything. Look, qualia either exists actually or virtually, and we know it does not exist actually. Ok?
nope. Nothing to do with stuff like that.
Quoting Zelebg
Quoting Zelebg
I've laid out a basic framework model for it, but apparently on your deaf ears, which has you making fun by missing the point.
Quoting Zelebg
As I've mentioned before, that is a meaningless statement. everything is virtual, even our matter. everything mental is virtual. so, obvious qualia is virtual, like our consciousness. virtual does not mean something is not real, at least to someone, somewhere...
I'm listening, but you are not saying anything except meaningless assertions and empty phrases. Go ahead, define "resonant wave condition".
No? Then it has to do with, what? God? Is this a guessing game, you refuse to say?
I never said virtual is not real. Virtual is not actual, like simulated alligator is virtual and actual alligator is actual, but both are real, both are physical, both are material. The difference is only in morphology and dynamics of constituting elements. So yes, virtual does not mean ‘not real’, but more importantly, it implies ‘computation’. Got it?
Non-living and even inorganic configurations can have consciousness in the sense that they have preset states of conditioning which primarily define their identity and the activity of intelligence aligned with that identity. It's why we talk of intelligent design - because intelligence is an activity generated and propagated by certain predetermined states/configuration. Therefore, in a comprehensive sort of view, consciousness is that state which determines and compels an intelligent activity. It's like consciousness is the identity (in its totality), and intelligence is its activity.
Concerning viruses, they have consciousness in the sense of a state of conditioning which defines their identity and degree of intelligent activity. So, for me, it's not that viruses don't have consciousness, but that their level of activity is intermediate between that of configurations which self-propagate biologically and those which do not.
Sometimes, I simplify consciousness as the awareness-response (interactive) mechanism existent in everything.
I have said. You could have asked clarifying questions or critiques as I have of you, but until now, even if flippantly, you have not.
In short, as I've said before, I’m hypothesizing that qualia/experience consciousness is like the resonant sound you hear when you thump a container, which resonant sound (e.g., holographic phased standing wave patterns) richly characterizes not only the shape of the container but its material parameters, this resonant sound waves is effectively coherently ‘aware’ of its whole system in a way that you never could be if you separately analyzed all the causal molecules and connections that form the container and the propagation medium the way that Integrated Information Theory suggests is consciousness; thus, at least one reason why (IMHO) their model is devoid of the qualia/experience.
I am avoiding any direct quantum mechanics as being part of my consciousness simulation model. In that way I’m thinking differently than main mainstream ideas (including Penrose, et. al). However, I do find the need to use macro-quantum mechanic like systems theories to help establish a framework enabling the kind of flowing resonant conditions I’m looking for. As of now, the ingredients of my first order consciousness simulation model include the following:
• Holographic phase space as the main cognitive fabric
• Meaningfully manipulating confinement Boundary conditions to perform calculations and selective state phase changes.
• Employing pilot-wave theory to achieve the macroscopic wave-particle duality I need to achieve a sort of global “I” (particle) state resonating with the global phase-space milieu capturing the whole at a point and the path taken (maybe like a quantum knot) being like a unique qualia experience.
• I’m initially avoiding entanglement concepts in my model. Instead, thinking to use soliton wave theory to transmit unique wave packet signatures within this phase space to bridge distal parts of the system (possibly unifying a multiplicity of sub-module pilot waves) with a common, unified “I” ‘experience’.
• Thinking to model each cognitive sub-module, of the multiplicity, as Bose-Einstein condensate types of phase change particle systems where they can only achieve quantum-like abilities (e.g., cognitive resonance, cognitive interference, cognitive tunneling, particle/wave duality, etc.) when they have been trained/cooled to a ground state truth (e.g., maybe like Boltzmann kind of thermal annealing learning, etc.) . As the sub-modules phase change to the Bose-Einstein condensate state they may interfere and tunnel with/to each other to form a global Bose-Einstein condensate state comprised of a resonating subset of the cognitive sub-modules with a global pilot wave path (quantum knot) which may simulate the unified “I” access and qualia consciousness ‘experience’.
• A parallel linguistic framework.
• A parallel statistical framework.
• A parallel reasoning framework.
• A parallel emotive framework.
• A parallel sensory-motor framework.
• A parallel imagination framework.
• And much more…
In this way, I’m looking at macro-scale quantum mechanics analogues as the most fruitful way I can build a consciousness system. I have no doubt that actual quantum mechanical effects (as many ponder) would naturally work with, and or enhance the macroscopic version I’m thinking of.
see above for general framework. I am making it up as I go. Have not gone to implementation mechanics yet, just establishing the basic tools and methods conceptually at this point. At a top level, I'm modeling the conscious "I" in an internal "imagination" sandbox which is a central resonant space that is formed primarily via a sophisticated non-verbal linguistic mechanics and a holographic phase space. I think the non-verbal linguistic mechanics is more like ‘access’ consciousness based on my limited reading on the subject. A connectionist implementation model might be best for that in my system. For the qualia/experience consciousness I expect to rely on a holographic phase space where all the linguistic & sensory/motor objects are transformed into waves which interfere with each other and boundary conditions in meaningful ways. I am modeling the qualia/experience consciousness as a resonant condition that does not actually exist on its own but only emerges as the waves in the container sense the boundary conditions and propagation media landscape to form something you can think of like a standing wave which represents the wave states of the whole system. You can think of the boundary conditions as an internal cognitive boundary/shapes on one side and sensory/motor boundary/shapes on the other side and when tuned to a particular ‘meaning’ waves that pulse the system a resonance condition may form that captures the character of the system as whole in one standing wave, which could be read out with connectionist networks recognizing the various interference patterns. In short, I’m hypothesizing that qualia/experience consciousness is the resonant sound you hear when you thump a container, which resonant sound (e.g., holographic phased standing wave patterns) richly characterizes not only the shape of the container but its material parameters, this resonant sound waves is effectively coherently ‘aware’ of its whole system in a way that you never could be if you separately analyzed all the causal molecules and connections that form the container and the propagation medium the way that Integrated Information Theory suggests is consciousness; thus, at least one reason why (IMHO) their model is devoid of the qualia/experience.
how is a program in your simulation real, physical, and material?
you are talking about simulating the physical alligator behavior. However, I say the actual mental alligator, simulated or not, will always be virtual (there, but not really there). You seem to think linearly that mental states are like executing objective state-machines (e.g., programs), I say they cannot be as such.
if everything is conscious then how does that help us define it, and why are our computers or electronics not conscious, not even the way a mouse is? Modern AI computers seem to at least as, if not more intelligent than a mouse, so why not at least as conscious under your definition/approach to modeling (levels of) consciousness?
why would biologically self-propagating be related to consciousness. Maybe you did not mean to say it that way.
why would degree of intelligent activity be determined and limited by the degree of 'consciousness'? I think it would be more productive if you increased the sophistication of your 'consciousness' model with at least one additional variable/factor that discriminates between, say the 'consciousness' of a rock, a virus, a bacteria, an AI computer, a worm, and a human. Clearly, "degree of intelligent activity" is not sufficient. e.g., a rock has zero "intelligent activity" which would mean by you it has zero 'consciousness', but then you say ' consciousness as the awareness-response (interactive) mechanism existent in everything', an apparent contradiction.
All our definitions are a 'work-in-progress' because our understanding is still far from absolute.
Quoting Sir Philo Sophia
Because human application of intelligence is vastly inferior to that manifest by nature (or reality).
Quoting Sir Philo Sophia
Because biology is just a dimension of activity and configuration of energies; and consciousness (interactive mechanism of energy) also manifests that paradigm.
Quoting Sir Philo Sophia
I mean intelligence cannot surpass the level of consciousness which it is manifest in.
Quoting Sir Philo Sophia
There is a great deal of intelligence manifest through the configuration we call a rock, e.g. as conceived in the activity of its atoms and molecules.
However, the truth is that there is a fundamental flaw in the idea that humans (or anything) can be intelligent. This is because it presumes that humans determine their intelligence whereas the truth is that we work with whatever reality (or nature) has given us. Everything we do and have is as nature determined for us, and that is true of everything both living and non-living, organic and inorganic, etc, etc.
We are a mystery to ourselves. We are and we do. Any attempt at defining ourselves fails to account for the fact that we are already defined.
so, according to your views, a mentally retarded human (e.g., exhibiting less intelligent activity) has less consciousness than an average human (e.g., exhibiting much more intelligent activity than a retarded one) ?
so you are coming from the camp of "God's intelligent design" as explaining our universe and human condition?
also, you apparently are saying that you don't think that consciousness requires any level of agency. Have I got you right on that??
what working-in-progress definition of 'intelligence' are you using to make these kinds of statements, in re consciousness?
Thanks for the link. It seems we live in a virtual reality:smile:
You might be interested in this
I haven't read him, but from the blurb it seems on the money.However like you I like to think these things through myself - even if I am late on the scene. I can model consciousness fairly well, but not fully explain it - all avenues I've tried lead to Panpsychism, And I have recently realized Buddhism arrived there 5000 years ago, so am looking into secular Buddhism - should keep me busy for a few years. Cheers
No, not less consciousness. Not even less intelligence in the ultimate sense. Just a lesser degree of expression of some attributes which seem to depend on the mental faculty for expression.
Quoting Sir Philo Sophia
Just intelligent design. I can't give any validation for God(s) but there seems to be a fundamental principle which acts as a unifying or connecting factor to everything. Intelligent design just means great patterns of activity (cause and effect).
Quoting Sir Philo Sophia
To me, consciousness is the fundamental principle underlying everything. God, energy, reality, etc, are just different names and perspectives of the same thing. Basically, all is consciousness (or God, energy, reality, etc).
Quoting Sir Philo Sophia
What we define as intelligence is just a level of activity of generating causes towards effects in as harmonious, and sometimes unified, a way as possible. In that sense nature (what we understand as nature) is a far superior activity.
OK, so, in your way of thinking, all humans have about the same level of intelligence (difference only in how much it is expressed) and consciousness which comparable in many ways to the intelligence and consciousness of a rock. I'm not sure how such ideas further science, but they do support a good spiritual feeling philosophy, which seems in synch with many ancient eastern philosophies.
Not really. Neither a rock nor human is intelligent in themselves and by themselves. The point is that, it is intelligence which manifests the activity and identity we refer to as a human and also a rock.
Science has always had a 'mystical' component to it. It doesn't mean it's wrong. Science has always had room for conceptual/theoretical stuff which in some ways is very close to metaphysics. Theories of atoms and dark matter were not developed from proof or experience but from translations of metaphysical ideas about the nature of things and such.
I don't think that is correct. they always came from experimental observations which needed new theory to explain. mystical stuff rarely translates into a road-map towards much useful science.
Isn't metaphysics just another way of explaining our observations?
Meditation was once mystical. Acupuncture... ?
I see, just like in Star Trek.
A computer or mechanical switch system is just a series "engine" parts. It can appear to be alive but it is an electrical engine or an engine that acts as something else. Have you ever heard of the term "collective soul" or "collective consciense". Basically some people explain "awareness" through the concept that perhaps the whole universe is alive and we individuals are subsets of the whole set.
I know your intent is to, again, be flippant. Yet, between your deaf ears, I bet you are completely unaware that all matter we experience in the universe is very likely a hologram. I'll recommend you start opening your mind with books like "the holographic universe the revolutionary theory of reality" written by michael talbot.
"Two of the world's most eminent thinkers believe that the universe itself may be a giant hologram, quite literally a kind of image or construct created, at least in part, by the human mind. University of London physicist David Bohm, a protégé of Einstein and one of the world's most respected quantum physicists, and Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, an architect of our modern understanding of the brain, have developed a remarkable new way of looking at the universe."
Sci-fi only tries to popularize the science/theories. Good luck with your 'recursive algorithms' approach.... ;-)
Holographic phased standing wave patterns, eh? Your "theory" has no contact point with reality. Instead of any empirical observation it's based on hallucination. So you're insane, but my point was that even if it was true, in whatever sense, it still does not explain anything like "integrated information" or "quantum collapse" does not explain anything even if it was true.
If I thought you had the mental capacity I'd explain more conceptual layers of details, but you are clearly not fertile ground, so I move on...
What exactly about "contact point with reality" and "based on empirical observation" makes you confused?
If you claim something is a wave then the explanation must address what is that waves, and how it relates to anything about empirical reality. Otherwise it’s meaningless assertion. Do you understand?
We, as a creator of artificial intelligence, have so far failed to instill a general dominance of switches over their own states in machines, and we also have failed in creating something that the machine would consider a progress for itself.
BTW, the two effects that I mentioned, are evidently using the switch mechanisms to create consciousness in animals, but are failing the switch mechanism of comparable complexity to create consciousness in plants. Plants have no power over their own switches, although their switch-systems are also DNA based, and equally as complex as those of animals.
Panpsychism predicts that stuff happens. Things do, verily, happen. Panpsychism is confirmed. If panpsychism were not the case, nothing would ever happen. Things do happen. Therefore panpsychism.
It places consciousness at the only point in reality that doesn't involve insurmountable difficulties, namely, at a fundamental level. The antithesis of panpsychism is emergentism. But emergentism is so problematic that we should reject it. One reason is that consciousness is not a vague concept. There are no borderline cases of it. Emergentism requires borderline cases..
Quoting RogueAI
Declaring that "X cannot give rise to Y" (or asking, rhetorically, "how can X give rise to Y") does not answer anything, or advance our understanding. It is like asserting that an iron boat could not float. Often, this rhetorical style is used as a way to avoid considering the issue.
The premise that consciousness can be simulated rests on a number of lesser premises, none of which are obviously false (at least if you put aside 'arguments' of the above form):
I like the way Scott Aaronson puts it: if you replaced each of my neurons, one at a time, with a functionally-identical silicon device, would there come a point where I stopped being conscious?
These are all premises, but not unreasonable ones. You might disagree with the conclusion, but that alone would not be an argument against it.
My intent was to make a general point about a certain style of argument, but as you want a quote, I have added one to my original post. One prominent example of this style is Searle's assertion that syntax cannot give rise to semantics.
Now that we are on this particular issue, however, let me make a couple of points that did not come out in the earlier discussion of it. Firstly, if someone claims that something is necessarily so, they assume the burden of justifying their claim, rather than challenge the rest of us to prove them wrong. Secondly, do you consider it to be absurd that a rock-shuffling Turing-equivalent device could win the game show Jeopardy?
Consciousness is not a simple emergent phenomena like liquidity, but a higher level emergence in a completely new ontological substrate that emerged within the nervous system, namely the virtual space of simulated reality, dreams and imagination, the realm of abstraction where potentially exist almost unlimited kinds of novel and irreducible entities, properties and interactions.
Reductio ad absurdum is a valid move in philosophy. If materialism entails that consciousness can arise from people passing notes around with 1's and 0's written on them, I think we're very close to an "absurdity". I guess I can argue why it's absurd, if you like, but it seems prima facie very unlikely consciousness would arise that way. It's a short hop from consciousness arising from people passing notes with number on them to consciousness arising from shifting sand dunes, falling abacuses, and meteor swarms. Is panpsychism compatible with materialism? It's pretty popular these days. I don't think the two can co-exist, though.
That's the appeal. None of them are obviously false. You have to tease out the absurdity that follows from such a set of premises. This is a great cartoon which does just that: https://xkcd.com/505/
I've had raging arguments with materialists who believe it's possible we're all being simulated by someone endlessly moving rocks around on an endless plain (see cartoon). To me, there's no difference between that and transubstantiation: in both cases, a miracle is assumed to happen- crackers become the flesh of Jesus; consciousness arises about from someone moving rocks around.
Yes, the transporter scares the hell out of me. Slowly replacing my neurons with functional equivalents while I'm awake wouldn't bother me much at all. The end result is the same. Perhaps our intuitions can't be trusted.
They're not unreasonable. What they entail, if you follow the chain of logic far enough, is an absurdity within the materialist framework of reality.
Virtual reality interactions do not reduce to actual physical interactions. In any case though, shuffling molecules and passing electrons from point A to point B is exactly what the brain is doing too, or is that supposed to be different somehow?
You are looking at the wrong level of abstraction. A living cell also looks ridiculous if you look at the equation of motion for magnetic and electric fields. Virtual reality simulation, on the causally effective level of abstraction, the one that actually matters, is not about underlying mechanics, but about interaction between virtual entities according to their virtual properties.
Quoting RogueAI
Indeed it is, but its English name, 'proof by contradiction', is clearer than the Latin: it means to refute an argument by deducing a logical contradiction from its premises (or to prove one by refuting its antithesis.) It most definitely does not mean simply declaring something to be absurd (even if it really is!)
Quoting RogueAI
This is exactly what I mean when I say that it is often used to avoid considering the issue. I think you would find it a very useful exercise to put your intuitions aside and formulate an argument for it being absurd.
Quoting RogueAI
The materialist premise does not propose, imply or depend on it being at all likely.
Quoting RogueAI
This is not panpsychism, which is the premise that consciousness is ubiquitous. The possibility that a sufficiently-large collection of anything could move in a way that creates consiousness is not the premise that any sufficiently-large collection of anything is necessarily conscious. While any of these 'absurd' forms of consciousness are theoretically possible in those versions of materialism that admit strong AI, they are way beyond astronomically-unlikely in any finite region of space, so are not, in any sense, even close to being ubiquitous.
Quoting RogueAI
I am no expert in this matter, but doesn't transubstantiation violate some physical laws?
Quoting RogueAI
If I am not mistaken, here Randall Munroe is accepting the premise! He is not making an argument against anything.
I notice that you have not replied directly to my question in my other post: do you consider it to be absurd that a rock-shuffling Turing-equivalent device could win the game show Jeopardy? That was not intended to be a rhetorical question, and I am genuinely not sure how you would answer it, though I would think that to be consistent with everything else you have said on the matter, your answer would be that you find it absurd.
A theory that allows for the possibility that a universe of conscious beings could be simulated by moving physical rocks around is a theory that is ludicrous. I just don't know how you could even entertain that as a possibility. I think it's so obvious you can't simulate a universe of conscious beings by moving rocks around, any theory that says you can has catastrophically failed.
I think we're going to disagree at the axiomatic level. I had a materialist claim once you could make a "brain" out of flushing toilets* that's functionally equivalent to a human brain. Assume you can. Would it be conscious? Why not? Materialism says it must be. But a bunch of flushing toilets is NEVER going to become conscious, no matter how many different ways you flush them. You're just not going to get a mind out of it. So if materialism entails that, materialism is wrong.
I hear stuff like the "flushing toilet conscious brain" and I think "who could possibly believe in this stuff?" It's like a religion.
*other materialists have suggested ropes and pulleys, the note passing we talked about, locks and dams, etc.
OK, I think we all get the point that your mind is set. Providing yet more examples of what you are sure are absurd is not going to make that point any more strongly -- or make it any more true.
On the other hand, you seem very determined not to answer my question, which I will repeat: do you consider it to be absurd that a rock-shuffling Turing-equivalent device (or any other device in your 'absurd' category) could win the game show Jeopardy?
I am sure you are aware of where this is going: if the answer is "no", then it would seem that your issue is not actually with the medium in which the computation is performed, but if it is "yes", then there is the problem that a digital computer has actually achieved this task, and, according to some completely straightforward and non-controversial theorems of finite mathematics, any other Turing-equivalent device with sufficient memory could perform the same task, so long as we are not concerned with how fast it does it.
By looking at moving electrons and logic gates in the CPU you will not see what program computer is running, just like you can not see consciousness or colors by looking inside the brain.
Virtual entities are invisible from the 3rd person point of view. To see what is really going on you have to put VR goggles on first, on top of those you're already wearing now, which is your head.
It's more like: how can you not see the absurdity. But I guess you can't.
I'm sorry, I don't remember this question. I bailed on this thread awhile back, and then remembered it recently.
No. I don't think a rock-shuffling device that can pass a Turing test is absurd. I don't think a rock-shuffling device that, if you somehow made it look human (a p-zombie), is absurd.
I think a conscious rock-shuffling device is absurd, but then I think the claim that non-conscious physical matter (e.g., organic brains) can somehow interact and form conscious minds is also an absurdity, and should never have been entertained in the first place (well, maybe entertained, but then discarded when the problems started to show up). The reasons for this belief are:
1. Materialism's absolute lack of progress coming up with a causal explanation for how moving electrons across synapses (along with other physical processes) produces the sensation of stubbing my big toe. There's no agreed upon theory of why we're conscious and how such consciousness arises. It's been recognized as a "hard problem" for decades. It will remain an insolvable problem because materialism is a dead end. There are materialists who deny consciousness exists, who say it's an illusion, who say we don't know what we're referring to with the word...And they're taken seriously by other materialists. That shows the fundamental weakness of materialism. It reminds me of the tortured explanations fundamentalists give, when they're backed into a corner by the incoherency of their belief system.
2. The obvious difference between mental states and brain states. Materialists tie themselves in knots on this. Property dualists have to explain, if the mind isn't the brain, in what sense does the mind exist (and where) in a purely physical universe. While reductive physicalists assert that brains and minds are the same thing. A blind person really could understand what "seeing" is if they just knew enough about the brain states involved. Absurd. The whole problem is solved if you stop assuming brains are made of matter.
3. There's no evidence mind-independent matter exists. The sense-data I'm receiving and processing right now is equally compatible with a dualistic model of reality or an idealistic one. Why should I posit the unprovable: that physical stuff exists? I already know consciousness and at least one mind exists. Why shouldn't I assume minds and consciousness are the foundation of reality? At least I can't be wrong about consciousness existing.
4. The absurd functionally-equivalent-to-organic-brain contraptions materialists are forced to assume would be conscious. And also the idea that this could all be a simulation from moving rocks around. I seriously doubt materialists would entertain such notions unless they were absolutely wedded to the theory. It smacks of desperation.
I don't believe there are physical devices. I'm an idealist, for the reasons given.
I spent my entire undergrad education at MIT studying this very question, and I'm no closer to an answer today than when I started.
|>ouglas
That is not thinking, it is ignoring.
1. The only explanation there is for the existence of things that do not actually exist, such as unicorns or qualia, is virtual existence.
2. By looking at moving electrons and logic gates in the CPU you will not see what program computer is running, just like you can not see colors by looking inside the brain.
3. Virtual entities and ther qualities are invisible from the 3rd person point of view. To see what is really going on you have to put VR goggles on first, on top of those you're already wearing now - your head.
What did you study?
Philosophy of Mind. (And Computer Science.)
|>ouglas
Quoting RogueAI
Well, I raised it in every post today...
Quoting RogueAI
At first sight, it does seem absurd that these devices could compute, but when you work through the Turing-equivalence argument, you see that it is not, after all, absurd at all. So here you have a difference between an emotional and a rational response to the issue.
Quoting RogueAI
There seems to be something of a misunderstanding here -- my question referred to Turing equivalence; I did not (and did not intend to) raise the Turing test. The fact, however, that you accept that a rock-shuffling device could pass a Turing test -- something that not even an electronic digital computer has done so far -- just goes to show that your issue is not, after all, with the medium in which the computation is performed, even if it feels to you that, somehow, it should be.
Quoting RogueAI
We can, with complete generality, substitute 'digital computer', or any other type of Turing-equivalent machine, for 'rock-shuffling device' in this statement. Therefore, this just underscores the point that you just cannot believe that any Turing-equivalent machine of any type could be conscious, and that your objection is not actually dependent on the type of device.
Quoting RogueAI
Yes, we already agreed that it is a premise, but no other approach has done any better.
Quoting RogueAI
Have you read any Chalmers recently? And Chalmers is a model of clarity compared to, for example Hegel; It is just that his arguments are subtle and nuanced for an ordinary mortal such as myself. Arguments that qualia are factual knowledge are, IMHO, as tortuous as anything that fundamentalists come up with.
Quoting RogueAI
That is not a problem for materialism: mental states are abstract emergent phenomena caused by physical processes.
Quoting RogueAI
Any materialist who thinks that is probably mistaken - knowledge of brain states does not necessarily give you the ability to instantiate them.
Quoting RogueAI
You can believe whatever you like, but why, then, do you care what us illusions think?
Quoting RogueAI
Why, then, would you have any opinion at all about what rocks can and cannot do?
The existence of conscious minds is the most surprising thing about this universe, I think. It needs an explanation and science is failing spectacularly at providing one.
I don't need to be a materialist to have an opinion about an absurdity contained within it. I have opinions on lots of irrational things contained within belief systems I don't support, as I'm sure you do too. I'm not a Republican, and I certainly have opinions about what they believe.
I think the writing's on the wall for materialism. I think it's headed toward pan-psychism, with people like Koch and Tegmark leading the way. The universe is made of math? Really? That's awfully close to idealism. And Tegmark isn't some wacko.
Quoting RogueAI
According to what you wrote in reply to me an hour ago, you apparently think it likely that your conscious mind is the only thing in this universe...
It's impossible to know if other minds exist, of course. But I assume they do, because solipsism would be depressing. I certainly have no evidence against solipsism. No one does. It remains (and will always remain) a completely plausible theory.
But in your previous post, you wrote "I don't believe there are physical devices", so you have been expressing strong opinions about the capabilities of something that apparently does not exist in your universe. It is like having opinions about what republicans believe, without actually believing that there are republicans.
So, in your earlier post, you were arguing your position from a belief that not even you hold...
That's why I spent years studying the issue.
Don't expect any satisfying answers, however!
Unless you turn out to be a functionalist physicalist/representationalist. Then you can live a happy life feeling confident that there's no truly "hard problem" and all the rest is just a lot of detail that may take us many decades to figure out.
But if that's what you decide, you will, alas, be wrong. Though you'll be in good company.
|>ouglas
P.S. You could also read Chalmers, who is not a physicalist. But I'm not sure that will leave you satisfied.
I already told you, are you broken? The explanation for the existence of things that do not actually exist, such as unicorns or qualia, is virtual existence.
Except that I believe you exist. I just don't think you're made of matter. That doesn't make you immune from being wrong, or stop from me having an opinion about your belief system: I think it's logically inconsistent.
This kind of pedantry isn't really interesting. Do you have some good links supporting your position?
I like Chalmers. I think Mary's Room is an excellent thought experiment. It seems so obvious to me that Mary learns something new through the experience of seeing red, and that this new knowledge she has could ONLY have come from that experience. I can't even get into the mindset of people who think she doesn't learn anything new when sees red for the first time. Or that she could "figure out" what seeing read is if she just had complete knowledge of all the brain states involved.
Mary's Room (or as it is more commonly called, "The Knowledge Argument") was actually by Frank Jackson, not Chalmers. Though I'm sure Chalmers must have talked about it in his book.
The Knowlege Argument certainly did provoke a lot of debate, and physicalists at the time presented mostly bad arguments against it. But there is still a huge challenge to it for dualists. The Knowledge Argument is not as strong against physicalism as it might appear at first: Imagine that we put a zombie version of Mary in the same circumstance. Zombie Mary would have the exact same reaction when she is let out of her black & white room as Mary would.
|>ouglas
Quoting RogueAI
Then it is surprising that, instead of offering a logical refutation of anything I have written, you have simply repeated, at great length, unsubstantiated claims that this or that is absurd.
Actually, that is not entirely fair - you have also mastered the fundamentalists' trick of changing the subject when things get difficult, even to the point of stating some positions that you immediately disassociated yourself from when I challenged them.
Quoting RogueAI
My position is not any less supported by external links than yours is. Actually, I am not sure what, in my posts, needs external support, as, after the first one, they have mostly been concerned with inconsistencies and non-sequiturs within your replies to me. You have already agreed that my three premises are reasonable, and I am not claiming anything more than that.
The knowledge argument also has the problem of equivocation over the sort of knowledge that Mary gains: she can only gain discursively-learnable knowledge while she is isolated, and if what she learns when she is released is not discursively learnable, then physicalism is not challenged, but if it is discursively-learnable, then how can one explain Mary not already knowing it, without begging the question, by requiring, as a premise, that it is non-physical discursively-learnable knowledge?
Yes, I know it wasn't Chalmers.
Zombie Mary might have the same reaction, but I don't see how that affects the anti-physicalist conclusions people often draw from Mary's room. The point of Mary's Room is a point about internal mental states, knowledge, and experience:
IF materialism is correct, AND brain states are the same as mental states THEN knowledge of brain states should entail knowledge of mental states. Knowledge of brain states does not entail knowledge of mental states (i.e., Mary needs to experience seeing red mentally, in order to know what "seeing red" is). Therefore, mental states are not the same as brain states.
That's how I read it. How does Zombie Mary fit in to that? Are you claiming a p-zombie can know things???
Yes, I am claiming a zombie can know things. Let us say, for instance, that we build an incredible AI to help us with all the problems of the world. We need help preventing wars, climate change, and ecosystem collapse, determining if String Theory is on the right track, with how we might best explain dark matter and dark energy, with how to manage the economies of the world for maximum employment and to eliminate boom and bust cycles, with curing cancer, etc., etc.
Let's say that we call this great AI, Skynet. Ooops, scratch that. How 'bout we go with Marge instead. Marge helps bring humanity into a golden age where the vast majority of people in the world are happy, productive, healthy, and content. Not only does Marge help us achieve these goals, but she is able to explain, as much as our human minds can comprehend, why all the measures that she has recommended will work, etc. She's also really amazing to talk to. She's empathetic and witty. In her spare time, she has written some of the greatest novels ever written, and produced movies even better than Citizen Kane. She loves to talk about her creative process too. It's impossible to shut her up, but you wouldn't want to, because everything she has to say is so fascinating.
Unfortunately, we have a great mystery regarding Marge. We don't know if she's a zombie or not, and we have no apparent way of knowing. There are some physicists, for instance, who keep insisting that the human mind has a unique ability via microtubules in the brain to interface with uncollapsed quantum probability waves in a way that Marge cannot. Marge is just a fancy von Neumann machine.
Marge laughs at the assertion that she's a zombie, and points at all her great works of literature as evidence of her depth of emotion. At her ability to experience joy and pain, and to sometimes just bask in the pleasure of clean, un-noisy electricity flowing into her power supplies, or staring at a beautiful painting by Vermeer.
Let us postulate, for the moment, however, that the microtubule physicists are right, and for this reason, Marge is actually a zombie. I assert that even so, Marge knows all sorts of things. E.g., she knows how to write a great novel. She knows when clean power is flowing into her power supplies. She knows how to manage the world economy. Etc. To disagree with these assertions would be to abuse the English language.
Furthermore, I think that ZombMary reveals a problem with our term, "knowing what it's like" with respect to the hard problem of consciousness (assuming there is one). ZombMary just like Mary has the ability to model her own cognitive states and the cognitive states of others. While trapped in her b&w room, neither Marry was able to will themselves into the cognitive state of seeing a ripe tomato, and therefore, they could not model this cognitive state in a natural manner until they were released.
Once they were released, they gained new abilities to model their own cognitive states and the cognitive states of others. With this new ability, there is a sense in which ZombMary has learned what is like to see a ripe tomato, in that when she wants to, she can will herself into this state via imagination, she can dream of ripe tomatoes, and she can predict much more naturally than she could before how being in this cognitive state will affect others.
A representationalist (a type of physicalist and functionalist) can say that what ZombMary has learned all there is to know about what it is like to see a ripe tomato. And that she's really no zombie at all.
I think that the representationalist position here is hard to counter.
|>ouglas
P.S. The way that I would argue for dualism to argue that physicalism leads us inevitably to Max Tegmark's MUH. And that MUH is clearly wrong. Hence, by reductio ad absurdum, dualism must be correct.
But since philosophers seemed to have mostly ignored Tegmark's arguments for MUH, taking this path would be a slog.
Yes, that makes sense. I haven't seen the argument worded that way before, but I presented above, in a little magnum opus, a way in which this putatively could be the case.
|>ouglas
The equivocation reply to the knowledge argument effectively begins with Churchland's "Knowing Qualia: a Reply to Jackson" in 1989, though both Horgan and Churchland himself raised the issue earlier. In this short paper (which is unaccountably overlooked, IMHO), Churchland straightforwardly demonstrates that the KA equivocates over the phrase "knows about": everything she learns while isolated must be propositional, while there is good biological reasons, he argues, for thinking that what she learns from seeing color is anything but that (part of that argument is that our trichomatic vision scheme is widely distributed across mammalia, including in animals that have no language ability; per Nagel, they presumably have a sense of what it is like to see colors, but evidently not by believing in certain propositions.)
The most vigorous dualist response was Stanley and Williamson, "Knowing How" (2001), in which they used a linguistic argument to claim that all knowledge is propositional (actually, they had to admit a category of innate knowledge or know-how in order to avoid infinite regress: to have propositional knowledge of a fact, you need to know the corresponding proposition, but to know that...)
FWIW, I think they make a good case that we often talk about know-how as if it is propositional (at least in English), but to me, such an approach is incapable of determining that it is actually the case: it is as if Dawkin's phrase "the selfish gene" proves that genes are aware of how evoution works.
That is moot, however, as we can go with the feature of Mary's pre-release studies that prompted Churchland to call them propositional: At this stage of the experiment, she can only learn those things that can be learned from reading a book, or following a lecture on her monochrome TV. The first place I saw this called 'discursively learnable' was in Torin Alter's "A Limited Defense of the Knowledge Argument" (1996 - yes, it predates S&W.) Alter's position was then (and I think is still now) that the KA makes a point, but it is purely epistemic, and has no metaphysical implications. Tim Crane, in "The Knowledge Argument is an Argument About Knowledge" (2019) comes to a similar conclusion.
Two useful properties of this formulation of the equivocation reply are firstly, that it is effective against vague "in a sense" type claims about what Mary does and does not know, and secondly that it makes the dilemma faced by proponents of the knowledge argument very clear.
I am much amused by the way Zombie Mary pits one of dualism's darlings against the other, but I think you have to pay for that fun by accepting p-zombies. I don't have time to go through the case against p-zombies right now, except to say the the most common objection, that Chalmers unjustifiably jumps from conceivability to possibility, is a sufficient reply, though probably not all that can be said against p-zombies.
Finally, it is not clear to me how physicalism leads us inevitably to Max Tegmark's MUH - may I ask you to expand on that?
Thank you for some history on The Knowledge Argument of which I was unaware. At this point, having spent way too much of my life pouring over many responses to it, I'm unlikely to want to dive back into it with fervor, and fully understanding the arguments you have presented would I think involve diving into the source material and seriously distract me from my more productive passions of playing video games and binge-watching Netflix TV series.
I do appreciate the overview, though. But just consider me a recovering alcoholic wrt diving any deeper into this.
I am certainly willing to spend a bit of time on that which I can easily rehearse from memory, though.
Re the Zombie Mary argument, I don't think that you really have to accept zombies in order for the argument to fly. One can ultimately conclude that Mary and Zomby Mary are really just identical. I.e., that the putatively impoverished mental states that Zomby Mary has are really not impoverished at all. I.e., think of it as working like a proof by contradiction.
Though when I wrote up a very careful argument on this, which is very hard to do and very wordy, I think instead I posited considering a possible world for Mary in which property dualism is definitely true, whether or not it is true in our own. Surely there are such possible worlds. Zombie Mary then lives in a possible world in which physicalism is true. And then the question becomes which of these two worlds is the actual world. (When discussing a world in which property dualism is true, we cannot without begging the question, assume that in a physicalist world, Mary has no phenomenal mental states. Only that they will be impoverished in comparison to what they are in the non-physicalist world.)
I could probably dig up the paper should anyone care. My grader thought that I should have published it way back in the day. I suppose it's too bad that I didn't try. Unfortunately, I'm sure by now, my arguments would be passe.
Re Chalmers CPT, I agree. It doesn't pass muster with me either. I wrote a long and wordy term paper on that topic too.
Re physicalism leading us inevitably to MUH, Tegmark has written an entire book on the topic. He used to have an article online that stated his argument succinctly. Here's a newer version of that paper, but I think it's less clear on that particular issue than his older paper. But I can no longer locate the older paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0646.pdf
I'll try to summarize the meat of the argument in just a few words: [i]The world we see around us seems to be defined perfectly via math. I.e., physical law is nothing but math. To quote Hawking, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?"
Physicalists generally seem to assume that there's something in addition to the equations that define physical law in order for the universe to actually exist, but what would that extra secret sauce be? Just a single bit somewhere saying that these equations are "real" in a way that math is not real? Where would that extra single bit of secret sauce come from, and why should we suppose that this secret sauce is necessary? By Occam's razor, we should deny this bit of secret sauce, and say that the physical universe is the math and nothing more.[/i]
To me, this argument is perfectly convincing. I have no idea what the secret sauce of physical existence is supposed to be, and without any explanation for it (or even a mention or worry about it by any mainstream philosophers that I have read), I would also want to agree that there is no such secret sauce.
Except that I'm pretty damned convinced that phenomenal consciousness cannot be produced in the abstract domain of pure math. So there is secret sauce of some kind after all! In my mind, MUH proves the existence of zombies. The Mary that exists in a world that is just like ours, only is made of nothing but pure abstract math, is a zombie.
Unless, of course, interactionism is true. In that case, perhaps there is no purely mathematical world that can contain a being like Mary. Surely everyone is born an interactionist. But I can figure out no way to make interactionism sane, consistent, and compatible with evolution, etc.
|>ouglas
P.S. Yes, I understand that MUH is a nonstarter if one is not a realist about math, but I certainly am. I think that most of the philosophers I studied under would be too. E.g., after a talk by a logician at MIT, I went up to him and tried to see what he might think about MUH. I determined that he thought that modal realism was hogwash, but when I described MUH as "radical Platonism", he said that he would be very amenable to that viewpoint.
I'm not sure that I got across, however, quite how radical MUH is. I think that he might just have believed that everything in math and logic is real, but not in the same sense as the physical universe is.
Before we get any further, we have a fundamental disagreement here. You think mental state(s) aren't a necessary condition for knowledge? How would that work? How could a mindless thing have knowledge? How are you defining knowledge?
Zombies can have minds and they can have cognition. What zombies are missing are phenomenal states. I don't see any reason at all why having phenomenal states should be a precondition for having knowledge.
|>ouglas
You think a mind that can't be conscious can exist? That would be far different from what we commonly think of when we refer to minds. What would the content of this mind be? I think there's a contradiction here. I'm just going to go with the first thing that popped up on Google:
"Mind
the element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought."
That maps on pretty well to what I think of when I think mind. I don't think you can have a mind that can't be aware of things and can't have experiences.
ETA: Can you think without ideas? Are mental objects a necessary condition for thinking? If no, then if you're thinking without mental objects, what are you thinking of?
There used to be a popular theory of consciousness called the HOT theory. HOT stood for "higher-order thought". If you had higher-order thoughts (e.g., thoughts about thoughts), then you were conscious. Otherwise, you were not.
There was a paper published in the Journal of Philosophy that made me very mad since it argued that dogs could not feel pain, nor suffer, because they were not conscious. They were not conscious because they putatively had no higher-order thoughts.
It was never asserted, however, that dogs had no thoughts. Just no higher-order thoughts.
If you think about it, the HOT theory of consciousness doesn't even make any sense if you can't have an unconscious being with thoughts. And yet it was a somewhat popular theory amongst professional philosophers of mind.
It was completely wrong, of course. At least regarding phenomenal consciousness. "Consciousness" means many different things, and phenomenal consciousness is just one kind of consciousness. HOT consciousness is another kind.
As for the definition of mind that you provided, phenomenal consciousness is only one kind of consciousness. Please don't drag this debate back into the dark ages of the philosophy of mind. (E.g, the 1970s.) A mind can be "aware" and can "think" and have self-consciousness (the ability to represent its own cognitive state) and yet might fail to have phenomenal consciousness. (Though there are those, of course, who will claim that a mind that has all the former properties will necessarily also have phenomenal consciousness. But that's the debate, right. Don't beg the question!)
It serves no purpose to confound these things. The differentiating of these different types of consciousness in the last few decades is the reason that the debate has progressed so much further than it could before.
|>ouglas
I believe that there were some early theories claiming that brain states are the same as mental states (type identity theory, perhaps?) but I think they have been supplanted by the view that minds are emergent phenomena arising from the low-level activity of the brain. This sort of emergence is not a controversial or speculative idea, as we have plenty examples of this sort of thing -- for example, in a neural network that picks out images containing cats, you will not find, in its individual hardware and software components (transistors and bytes, respectively), anything that recognizes cats. More simply, if you look at a sorting algorithm, you will not find, in its steps taken individually, anything that has a sorting property -- only the complete algorithm has that.
Additionally, having studied Cognitive Psychology, I can assure that that more than 99% of what goes on in your mind never reaches the level of consciousness. Your conscious mind is just the tip of a very large iceberg, where unconscious thinking occupies the vast bulk of your mind.
Yes, that's right: unconscious thinking.
This is what intuition is, and why I have the ability to solve complex math problems while I'm asleep. It's thinking that you are not even aware that you are doing.
|>ouglas
Thanks for your extensive reply. I can understand your disinterest in having anything more to do with the knowledge argument!
I have made one pass through the paper of Tegmark's that you linked to, but my math is not up to following that much of it. Despite that, I have a few questions that I would pose to any proponent of it:
Not all physicalists are persuaded by Tegmark: Scott Aaronson, who appears to be a physicalist (see my first post in this thread) is one such.
Ultimately, however, if Tegmark seems to be right, my attitude will be "that's wild!" rather than "that can't be!"
I'm not sure when I'll have a chance to respond to your other points. Real philosophizing takes a lot of careful words!
But as for physicalists being persuaded by Tegmark, as far as I can tell, Tegmark's book and articles have been almost completely ignored by philosophers.
Chalmers does cohost a conference with Tegmark, but I haven't been able to locate online any evidence that Chalmers has ever publicly addressed Tegmark's argument. I've considered writing to Chalmers to ask him where I might be able to find some serious philosophical discussion of Tegmark's MUH, if there is any.
|>ouglas
Amen to that!
In what I have read of the philosophy of the mind, there does not seem to have been much consideration of fundamental physics, and that may well be appropriate, if the brain operates within the classical approximation. Even the 'quantum microtubule' stuff is mostly the work of a physician and a mathematical physicist. At least we know Tegmark's position on that, which is that decoherence ensures that microtubules function within the classical approximation. None of the participants in this debate appear to be dualists.
Both Chalmers and Tegmark have appeared at at least one or another of Hameroff's 'Towards a Science of Consciousness' conferences; there may be transcripts or videos.
Other than that, I do not know if there has been much consideration of biology, at least since it became apparent that there is no simple mapping between cognitive concepts and biological structure.