[egjerlow]

Why would we need to 'feel' anything from the inside? We could operate perfectly well as 'machines' without having this 'feeling'. Also, consciousness isn't a feeling. It is what makes it possible at all to have a subjective experience of feelings in the first place. And that is mind-blowing the more you think of it.

[EGreg]

How do you know that what you say about consciousness isn’t just a language game you play where you define words in terms of other words that are hardly connected to anything?

“What it is like to be a bat”

“What it is like to experience something”

After having seen descriptions of all the physical components of experience:

“It is Qualia! What it is like to see red”

Having been described all the differences between sensing red and green, and people who can’t tell the difference, and the suggestion that maybe what you call consciousness is the collection of abilities to distinguish various things...

“No, it is something more”.

What is it? How is that different than saying there is a “true essence” of a thing, over and above its properties? This is what greek philosophers asked about.

“It is the sense of identity. Integrating into one experience.”

Ok so what about Theseus’ ship? If all the cells are being replaced? What about your gut brain? Coukd it have a separate consciousness living in the same body?

“These are interesting questions”.

Here is a statement I will make:

If you are careful to define your words unambgiously, in terms of RICH connections to other concepts, you will find that you won’t be able to ask a single question about the following subjects without having a straightforward and simple reductionist-sounding answer:

Morality

Consciousess

Existence

[egjerlow]

I'm not really sure what you're arguing here. I would certainly say consciousness is 'something more', and that this something more has to be something non-material (or at least using 'materials' that have wildly different properties than what we observe using the scientific method).

Theseus' ship is a problem for a purely materialistic explanation of consciousness, for, by that account, consciousness should be a function of your material makeup, and yet, it remains constant despite change in both what makes up your cells and the specific configuration of those cells.

As for RICH I don't know what that means.

[Retra]

Theseus' ship is not a problem for materialistic explanations of anything; it's a problem for anybody who thinks the nature of a thing is governed by the words used to describe it.

The fact that you would continue to call a ship the same after exchanging all its parts is not an ontological problem, it is a problem arising from the imprecise use of language or intention to use an approximate/aggregate notion of identity. (I would recommend studying topology for a more modern understanding of this.)

[egjerlow]

And yet, consciousness is something that remains, regardless of whether we name it as such, and regardless of the specific cells that make up our brains. So it's as if it is the only thing that is not named 'by us' and yet remains 'something' independent of its makeup.

[alasdair_]

> I would certainly say consciousness is 'something more', and that this something more has to be something non-material (or at least using 'materials' that have wildly different properties than what we observe using the scientific method).

If you're interested in having that idea challenged, I heartily recommend reading "Godel, Escher, Bach" - the book explains how complexity (perhaps to the point of consciousness) can emerge from "simple" systems.

[egjerlow]

I certainly am interested in this, but I also would like to note that this is not just a matter of something 'more complex' arising and that I lack the imagination necessary to see how something very very complex can arise. Rather, subjective experience is a phenomenon that, no matter how complex your system is, is qualitatively different.

It's not like this is a trivial problem that philosophers of mind have figured out long ago. As someone else mentioned in this thread, it is a very deep problem. If you want to have your view challenged I encourage you to read any introductory book to philosophy of mind.

[alasdair_]

I always like having my views challenged :) can you recommend any particular text or would the top hit on amazon be sufficient?

Also, in terms of GEB, the book shows how self-reference leads to a system being able to make statemets about itself, leading to, eventually, something more than (apparently) the sum of their parts. It’s a funky mix of philosophy and math and I think you’d like it.

[egjerlow]

https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Mind-Short-Introduction/dp...

I'll read GEB :)

[TeMPOraL]

> Theseus' ship is a problem for a purely materialistic explanation of consciousness,

Theseus's ship is not a problem for materialistic views at all. A function of matter configuration is not the same as a function of matter. In the same way, a wave on water is constantly changing its material makeup, and yet you can still call it "the same wave".

> As for RICH I don't know what that means.

Rich, i.e. non-trivial. That is, no tautologies or something slightly above tautology in the depth of information.

[hunta2097]

Why are you thinking? You are anticipating various scales of "the future", using memories of past events.

As computers try to anticipate the future more, they may also start to "experience" things.

[egjerlow]

That's one of the uses of thinking, yes, but it's hardly the only one, unless by some procrustean method you force all my thoughts to 'really' be about the future. In which case I'd say the statement is close to devoid of meaning.

Furthermore, thinking and consciousness is not the same thing.

[hunta2097]

I think I based my initial thoughts on this paper (or a citation of):

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/AnticipationControl.pdf

[TeMPOraL]

Consciousness is the algorithm. What you call "consciousness" is how the computational processes that are you see themselves.

It could work differently, but for some reasons it doesn't, and we don't understand the reasons.

[egjerlow]

Well, that's a bold claim, and it doesn't really say anything substantial, in my opinion. What does it mean to see yourself? Are the electrical impulses of your brain somehow registering themselves and then reflecting them to yet another part of the brain which.. does what exactly?

Believing that consciousness can be explained in terms of material processes is certainly a valid belief, but it is just that: a belief. Believing that a certain configuration of atoms, no matter how involved, can give rise to subjective experience is not far from believing in some kind of magic.

And before you retort that a lot of phenomena in nature are 'emergent', I will say:all those phenomena are ultimately explicable in terms of their basic atomic constituents. Consciousness is qualitatively different. You cannot start with the experience of being hungry and then somehow explain the whole process from your stomach being empty to that qualitative experience and how it feels for you.

[TeMPOraL]

> Believing that consciousness can be explained in terms of material processes is certainly a valid belief, but it is just that: a belief.

It's a belief, true, but it's kind of a privileged one, since it's so successful at explaining literally every other thing we observe about the universe. Why brains would be different?

> Believing that a certain configuration of atoms, no matter how involved, can give rise to subjective experience is not far from believing in some kind of magic.

This argument would be stronger 500 years ago, but I don't know how one can consider this "not far from believing in magic" after seeing a computer. Or, after observing brains of different animals - from insects to simians. Or, after discovering circuit-bending and realizing how similar it is to prodding a brain. There's ample evidence against the hypothesis that the human brain is the only magical object in the universe and that it somehow transcends physics.

> And before you retort that a lot of phenomena in nature are 'emergent', I will say:all those phenomena are ultimately explicable in terms of their basic atomic constituents. Consciousness is qualitatively different. You cannot start with the experience of being hungry and then somehow explain the whole process from your stomach being empty to that qualitative experience and how it feels for you.

Why? If I gave you a device that could trace the state of every molecule and charge in my brain to the extent allowed by uncertainty principle, would you still be confident in believing that? Just because we don't have a device like this doesn't mean consciousness is magic.

[egjerlow]

> It's a belief, true, but it's kind of a privileged one, since it's so successful at explaining literally every other thing we observe about the universe. Why brains would be different?

It's successful at explaining everything that can be explained in material terms, yes! Science is really good at it.

>This argument would be stronger 500 years ago, but I don't know how one can consider this "not far from believing in magic" after seeing a computer. Or, after observing brains of different animals - from insects to simians. Or, after discovering circuit-bending and realizing how similar it is to prodding a brain. There's ample evidence against the hypothesis that the human brain is the only magical object in the universe and that it somehow transcends physics.

I cannot see how any one of those things you mentioned have to do with the utter strangeness that is subjective experience? I'm not saying a brain cannot perform computations, if that's what you're getting out of this. Why you mention a computer I don't know - there is nothing that indicates a computer has subjective experience and nothing about a computer makes me believe that creating subjective states is something that can be done with atoms alone. And that is what is 'magical' about this line of reasoning.

>Why? If I gave you a device that could trace the state of every molecule and charge in my brain to the extent allowed by uncertainty principle, would you still be confident in believing that? Just because we don't have a device like this doesn't mean consciousness is magic.

See above. Even if you were to trace every molecule in my brain, you would be no closer to really explaining a subjective experience. You would be able to show correlations, yes! 'Now he's angry, look at this cluster of atoms'. But that's not an explanation of the experience as such. That's the unbridgeable gap I'm talking about.

[TeMPOraL]

> See above. Even if you were to trace every molecule in my brain, you would be no closer to really explaining a subjective experience. You would be able to show correlations, yes! 'Now he's angry, look at this cluster of atoms'. But that's not an explanation of the experience as such. That's the unbridgeable gap I'm talking about.

Personally, I don't see a basis to believe there's something more to it. I'd look at the cluster of atoms in your brain and say this is anger. This is the computational process that is anger in your brain. I don't see a meaningful difference between this and doing the same to a computer - I could point at a cluster of atoms and EM fields in the CPU and say, "this is factorization of numbers; this is how the cryptographic routine this CPU executes manifests". Why would there be anything else here?

[feanaro]

I see this kind of debate between people often. I think the crucial point is the "feeling" that is the subjective experience.

Some people feel there is no way for such a "feeling" to form spontaneously out of the cold, dead matter. Since some matter doesn't experience this feeling, how does it spontaneously form, out of no-feeling, at some threshold configuration? What is this threshold exactly? These people think it must special, since we can imagine (in principle) a clump of matter interacting physically in time to simulate the external appearance of a human mind, yet remain no-feeling on the inside.

Other people don't seem to grasp what the problem the first people are posing might possibly be. The "feeling" is simply a property of the universe which arises in some physical configurations. Computers can have subjective experience and even today's computers might have it in some form. There is no discrete, magical step required.

I find myself continually switching teams on this matter. The second position might be more believable after we find some laws governing the relationship between physical configurations and the nature of the resulting experience. But since subjective experience is necessarily... subjective, it seems very hard (impossible?) to test.

[Zaphods]

The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes.

But that's just an assumption and there are many reasons a person, let alone a brain, is not a machine or a computer or an algorithm. That it is like it? Sure, in some insignificant ways, we have the ability to compute things. But is it an algorithm? No.

The idea that consciousness is an algorithm or a computer or a machine is an assumption that is extremely popular among people in the tech industry because it confirms their assumptions, and it makes them feel like they have extremely transferable knowledge. "I know about computers. Let's assume the brain is a computer and consciousness is an algorithm. I can now comment on the brain and consciousness."

But there is very little reason to accept that assumption. This review of Harai's Homo Deus does a great job of pointing out the dead-ends that assumption leads you to. [review](https://inference-review.com/article/godzooks#When:00:35:00Z)

[tialaramex]

> The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes.

The brain can compute. That's extraordinary. I say one type of thing does that, computers. You say no, two things, computers and then also brains. But when pressed to explain what is a brain if not a computer you'll just sputter (probably at length) without offering any substance.

In a sense that's the wrong way up to explain it. Church-Turing intuitively defines computation (the things computers can do) in terms of what our brains can do, so the match is not a coincidence but it also isn't there for the reason you probably expect. Because it's an intuition Church-Turing isn't provable, but you may notice that we subsequently built an _entire world-changing industry_ upon it in a lifetime.

You pointed to a review, others have written entire books, always they can be summarised as simply arguments from incredulity. "What? Nonsense, the brain can't be a computer, I simply won't believe that". It's unfortunate that we have woken such people from their daydreaming, I have no doubt that if similarly aroused they'd give the mathematicians what for too, "What? Nonsense, how can there be numbers which aren't ratios of whole numbers, I simply won't believe it".

[Zaphods]

> The brain can compute.

You'll see in my comment and your quote that I don't say the brain can't compute. I agree, the brain can compute. But that doesn't mean it is a computer, because computing is an ability. People can do many other things aside from computing, none of which rely on computation, for instance they can imagine, which is the ability to think new thoughts. Computers can't imagine because all they do is compute: that's their programming. No amount of programming can produce imagination. Computation and imagination are categorically distinct as different intellectual powers and abilities.

You are conflating an ability with ontology. We know what a brain is. It's a collection of fatty material with neurons that do not explicitly fire exactly like a computer. Key word there is like. Church-Turing built a model of computational logic off of intuitions about the brain and formal mathematical logic. That's it's not provable doesn't prove your point; it removes any distinction between it being right or wrong: because it is a model (lets make something like the brain).

That an industry was built on computation doesn't prove anything. We know computation is an ability. For instance it's also something we can do with abacuses. We could have built an enormous industry on building elaborate abacuses. We built computers do be extremely fast at computation. We didn't build computers to be brains.

You'll notice, if you read the review, that the author of the review repeatedly cites cognitive neuroscientists, even evangelists of the singularity, philosophers, psychologists, and zoologists, who have published at length on this topic and repeatedly critcise and disrupt the simple idea that the brain is a computer or an algorithm or even a machine. An entire branch of philosophy developed off of Ludwig Wittgenstein to counter the computational model of consciousness. Numerous books in the Philosophy of Mind argue that the assumption that the brain is a computer is not just unsupported, it is logically nonsensical.

[parksy]

"No amount of programming can produce imagination" is a very bold statement to make.

The brain exists in a physical universe, made out of matter/energy, and its behaviours are entirely dictated by the laws of physics; that's a fairly accepted truth unless you have solid evidence otherwise.

The laws of physics are mathematical and can be computed by their very nature, and we are already pretty good at simulating physical interactions to a quantum level, and this ability improves over time.

At some point in time, unless there is "magic" or missing physics, a sufficiently powerful computer with a physically accurate simulation of a brain would produce virtually identical results to a real brain.

So either there must be new physics involved, or, the notion that a sufficiently advanced computer simulation can't produce imagination must be abandoned.

A team of scientists able to sufficiently model the physics of the brain (and presumably the entire central nervous system, I imagine a disembodied brain simulation would experience a horrific form of locked-in syndrome) would not need to be concerned about emergent properties of the simulation such as a sense of consciousness, or thought, or imagination. Those things will just happen once the simulation is perfected.

Indeed the cognitive neuroscience folk, etc, would be invaluable to actually understanding, training, interpreting and caring for the brain simulation, and figuring out if its behaviours and interactions constitute consciousness etc, so I do not think this has to even be framed as programmers pretending to know about brain stuff vs brain people who dismiss any notion of computationally recreating consciousness. It would be a team effort that works both ways, but is already doomed to fail if half the team thinks it's impossible from the get-go.

[Zaphods]

It's not a remotely bold statement. Think about what imagination is, and then think about whether computers can imagine. Computers can't imagine. Computers can't come up with new things because they are programmed. Programming prescribes the outputs to the same limitations as the inputs: it's a closed deterministic system.

You'll see in my comment above this one that I agree that the brain is a physical thing. But abilities and powers are not physical. That's not voodoo magic. That's what abilities are. Think about horsepower. The horsepower of a car does not reside in any one physical thing, not the carburetor, or the intake manifold, or the piston, or the wheels; it's an ability of the car: it is able to go at such and such horsepower. That is what horsepower is.

The same applies to computation. Computing something is an ability, but we have many more intellectual and cognitive abilities beside computing things.

As a result

> a sufficiently powerful computer with a physically accurate simulation of a brain would produce virtually identical results to a real brain.

is just you are assuming that it will work, but nothing about computers supports that in the slightest. That's just a guess.

> A team of scientists able to sufficiently model the physics of the brain (and presumably the entire central nervous system, I imagine a disembodied brain simulation would experience a horrific form of locked-in syndrome) would not need to be concerned about emergent properties of the simulation such as a sense of consciousness, or thought, or imagination. Those things will just happen once the simulation is perfected.

All of this is still an assumption.

Again, that doesn't mean you are right or wrong: it means its an assumption. You have to accept the limitations of your assumption and the limitations of modelling the brain on a computer are large and glaring.

> Indeed the cognitive neuroscience folk, etc, would be invaluable to actually understanding, training, interpreting and caring for the brain simulation, and figuring out if its behaviours and interactions constitute consciousness etc, so I do not think this has to even be framed as programmers pretending to know about brain stuff vs brain people who dismiss any notion of computationally recreating consciousness. It would be a team effort that works both ways, but is already doomed to fail if half the team thinks it's impossible from the get-go.

You are assuming here that only the programmers are heading down the right path. But you don't know that. It's entirely reasonable (and I would say much more supportable) to say that the programmers are heading down the wrong path: their path will lead to nothing at all. That's because the programmers have fallen to a category error.

You think they need to model the brain on a computer for it to make sense. But there is actually very little if anything to support that.

Brains are brains. Computers are computers. That computer science can be fuzzily applied to the study of brains around the ability to compute does not mean the study of brains is computer science or that brains are computers.

[vinceguidry]

Not so extraordinary. What's extraordinary isn't that brains can compute, it's that anything else can. Brains computing is ordinary. What's extraordinary about the brain isn't that it can compute. What's extraordinary about the brain is that it can be rational and self-aware, things that computers cannot do. Computers can only be deterministic. Brains can be deterministic, but they can also be non-deterministic

[TeMPOraL]

Computers can become non-deterministic in practice as soon as you botch your random number handling, or hook your input up to environmental noise. Is there anything suggesting the brain is non-deterministic in a theoretical way, not just the way computers are?

[vinceguidry]

Deterministic means that given the same input, the system gives the same output. Computers would be useless if they were not deterministic. Hooking up random input to a deterministic process will give random output. Garbage in, garbage out.

What you're asking is for computers to be rational. That given garbage input, it will produce intelligible output. Computers cannot do this unless you program them to.

Human minds are non-deterministic in many, many, many ways. Hand the same input to the same mind and you'll get a different output every single time, unless the mind willed itself to act rationally. But they are deterministic enough that you can study their behavior. Other brains are not as non-deterministic, so their behavior is easier to study.

Look at it from a thermodynamic standpoint. Biological systems arose to conserve order against entropy. A fully-deterministic system will shed order, it's only through non-deterministic means that biological systems can conserve order.

The mind is the most complex system nature has devised that can not only slow the aggregation of entropy, but also create order! It's not breaking the laws of physics, but yet it can create all kinds of order.

Conway's Game of Life is an excellent illustration of the concept. You have to work hard and study the domain in order to find stable systems. Otherwise they just drop to equilibrium fast.

[TeMPOraL]

> The idea that consciousness is an algorithm or a computer or a machine is an assumption that is extremely popular among people in the tech industry because it confirms their assumptions

No, it's not because of that. It's because it is effectively a computer. Not in the vague sense of "it has stuffs connected to stuffs and there's electricity involved", but in the more specific sense that it takes inputs, produces complex outputs, has clearly identifiable hardware and indirectly identifiable software. It even has internal structure we're only beginning to understand, but that we know enough about to reasonably infer what computations happen where. There's little reason to assume there's some metaphysical mystery here, as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic.

TL;DR: what else could it be? And before someone says "antenna", I don't buy it. "Computer" is a simpler explanation for all known facts than remote consciousness being received by the brain. See my take on this before[0]. See also: Occam's razor.

> "I know about computers. Let's assume the brain is a computer and consciousness is an algorithm. I can now comment on the brain and consciousness."

Yeah, well, sure. If I know the limit of applicability of my computer knowledge, I sure can comment on brain and consciousness. Like, I wouldn't say "it's vulnerable to SQL injection" because that would be an idiotic statement. But I could say "it implements visual processing, audio processing, collects other telemetry, and does sensor fusion in real-time in under 20 Watts, with power to spare". Because that's observation, physics, and modelling reality along a particular perspective of interest.

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19490801

[Zaphods]

> It's because it is effectively a computer. Not in the vague sense of "it has stuffs connected to stuffs and there's electricity involved", but in the more specific sense that it takes inputs, produces complex outputs, has clearly identifiable hardware and indirectly identifiable software. It even has internal structure we're only beginning to understand, but that we know enough about to reasonably infer what computations happen where. There's little reason to assume there's some metaphysical mystery here, as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic.

You're conflating the ability to compute with ontology. Computers compute. That's all they do. They're programmed to do only that. Humans have other abilities, such as imagination, that are not computational. Computers cannot imagine, not because of limited hardware or software; they can't imagine because they only compute. Imagination isn't computational. All throughout your response you are using the terminology of computers and software as if they are completely intuitive, but we have other terminology to define those things: medical terms define parts as the brain as parts of the brain not as hardware because that's a metaphor; the cerebelum is like this part of the computer. What they are is not the same as what they can do. That's not some magical mystery, or even obscure metaphysics. A car's horsepower is not in its carburetor, or its gas, or its manifold, because the horsepower of a car is what it can do, its an ability, a power. In the same sense the brain can compute, but that doesn't mean it is a computer.

What else could it be? A brain. Animals have them. They are not computers. But they can compute. The field of computer science and software development only slightly aligns with studying the brain.

> If I know the limit of applicability of my computer knowledge, I sure can comment on brain and consciousness.

Yes and when it is no longer applicable it is no longer right or wrong: it's just assumption. That you can fuzzily attach assumptions to arguments about the brain does not mean the brain is a computer. It means you can fuzzily model the brain on a computer, but that model will have glaring gaps. You can build from your assumptions but you have to accept the limitations of that assumption. Assuming the brain is a computer comes with glaring limitations.

[TeMPOraL]

> A car's horsepower is not in its carburetor, or its gas, or its manifold, because the horsepower of a car is what it can do, its an ability, a power. In the same sense the brain can compute, but that doesn't mean it is a computer.

A car's horsepower is in the engine. That's what an engine does. Burns fuel, provides work over time. Work over time is denominated in horsepower - or, in saner company, in watts. Categories like "engine" or "computer" are not excluding. That thing in the car can be "an engine", "a hunk of metal" and "an expensive paperweight" at the same time. Similarly, if brain can compute, it is a computer. It's also an organ.

> Humans have other abilities, such as imagination, that are not computational.

Evidence needed. Why would it not be computational? We can, and do, easily build imagination-like computations. A fuzzy search on a graph. A series of simulations with relaxed constraints and somewhat randomized initial states. They all resemble aspects of imagination; it's not a big leap to conclude that imagination is nothing but a more complex variant of such computations.

> It means you can fuzzily model the brain on a computer, but that model will have glaring gaps.

Models exist on a map, not in the territory. So do brains and computers. The territory is made of whatever sub-quark substrate the reality is made of. When you say "brain", what you're really referring to is a model, and a pretty black-boxy one. Viewing the brain as a computer is an attempt to apply a model that's little more transparent (and therefore more useful); as long as it matches observable evidence (and it does), it's the right thing to do.

[Zaphods]

Sorry, I didn't see that you'd replied to my comment until today.

> A car's horsepower is in the engine.

Where is it in the engine? The engine can go 180hp. But the engine does not contain 180 hp. That's what the concept of an ability or a power is. A broken engine cannot go 180 hp. But, if as you say, it is in the engine, then that distinction would be irrelevant. We would still say a broken engine can go 180 hp. But we don't.

> Similarly, if brain can compute, it is a computer. It's also an organ.

Right, you'll see I have never said the brain can't compute. But that doesn't mean it is simply a computer. If the assumption that the brain is a computer is to stand then the abilities of a computer should be compared to the abilities of a brain, or a person. There are those that match. We agree on that. But there are those that do not. And that means the assumption that the brain simply is a computer is flawed. It is an organ that can compute. But to extend from that that it is a computer is eliding the crucial difference between the two. That is your assumption.

> Evidence needed. Why would it [imagination] not be computational?

Let's ignore that the premise you are making: that imagination is computational, requires you to support it as well;

> imagination-like computations

> A fuzzy search on a graph

> A series of simulations with relaxed constraints and somewhat randomized initial states

All require you to posit things that are -like, or somewhat like imagination. But computers are programmed. They can't think new thoughts. They are closed deterministic systems. That their output seems imaginative or novel does not mean the computer has the ability to imagine, it means the computational output was unexpected to you or the people who wrote the code. The idea that imagination is computational is a category error.

> not a big leap to conclude that imagination is nothing but a more complex variant of such computations

This is actually an enormous leap. Can computers imagine? You will find zero agreement in that regard. That doesn't prove your point. You'll need to provide evidence that computers can actually violate their programming, cannot just compute and instead imagine. But that's not what computers do. Computers compute. That they can do things that seem like imagination to you does not mean they can imagine.

>> It means you can fuzzily model the brain on a computer, but that model will have glaring gaps.

> Models exist on a map, not in the territory. So do brains and computers. The territory is made of whatever sub-quark substrate the reality is made of. When you say "brain", what you're really referring to is a model, and a pretty black-boxy one. Viewing the brain as a computer is an attempt to apply a model that's little more transparent (and therefore more useful); as long as it matches observable evidence (and it does), it's the right thing to do.

Excuse my original words, I meant "fuzzily model the brain as a computer

Again, I don't think applying the computer as a model is completely invalid. But it has limitations. You can't just brush off those limitations when you talk about the brain as a computer. They fundamentally mean the comparison is less useful. Supposing it is 1 to 1, which you are doing leads you to build on assumptions that are unsupported. You have to accept that the assumption that the brain is a computer has serious criticisms brought against it. And you have to defend that assumption. You can't simply ignore them and argue that you are right.

For instance viewing the brain as computer frequently does not match the observable evidence. We can imagine. Computers cannot. That is observable. So how do you support the assumption that the brain is a computer in spite of that?

[Retra]

Computers "imagine" things all the time. The fact that we do not use the word "imagine" to describe it is immaterial. Words to not dictate the behavior.

[egjerlow]

> as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic.

Rather, the things that seem somehow magical to us we either explain scientifically, or we ignore. I don't know about you, but several of my acquaintances have reported phenomena and experiences that I have no reason to doubt, that are not solely 'in their mind' (because of the external consequences of what happened), and that cannot be explained by mechanistic laws because they involve 'backwards' transfer of information and so on. These are datapoints, they're just unfortunately not datapoints that can be used for scientific inquiry. But then again, there is no a priori reason to believe science can answer all questions we have.

Regardless of this, there is a reason to assume a big metaphysical mystery, simply because consciousness and subjectivity is unlike anything else in the world and bridging the qualitative gap between subjective experience and the mechanistical world is a completely different task than explaining, say, what makes a stone roll the way it does.

[TeMPOraL]

> I don't know about you, but several of my acquaintances have reported phenomena and experiences that I have no reason to doubt, that are not solely 'in their mind' (because of the external consequences of what happened), and that cannot be explained by mechanistic laws because they involve 'backwards' transfer of information and so on.

I have those too, and no offense to you personally, but I call bullshit on both mine and your acquaintances. In case of people I know, there was not one situation for which I couldn't find a more plausible explanation - which usually boils down to that for enough trials, even the rare coincidences sometimes happen.

> there is no a priori reason to believe science can answer all questions we have.

There is this one reason that it's literally the job of science. Science isn't a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book, it's the aggregation of everything that reliably works for extracting information about observable reality. And to be clear - I'm not saying that as someone who has Faith in Science (as opposed to religion). It's just that the sentence "science can't ever answer a question about reality" is a category error - it's saying "the set of ways you can answer questions about reality with can't be used to answer a question about reality". Nonsense.

> consciousness and subjectivity is unlike anything else in the world and bridging the qualitative gap between subjective experience and the mechanistical world is a completely different task than explaining, say, what makes a stone roll the way it does

But is it? The hint is given by the fact that there's more than one thinking human in existence. You may feel that answers about your subjective experiences are out of reach of science, but to the extent subjective experiences have any impact on reality, you can use science to study my subjective experiences (as expressed by me), and I can do the same to you.

[vinceguidry]

> Science isn't a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book, it's the aggregation of everything that reliably works for extracting information about observable reality.

This isn't true. The word is often used to describe that. But science is first and foremost a method. It's not the knowledge itself. It's not the techniques. There are other techniques besides scientific ones that we use to obtain information about the world. Math, for instance, isn't science. Statistical methods are not scientific methods.

Science concerns itself with obtaining empirical basis for causation. Studying the physical world does not provide insight into every problem we have. You don't try to debug your software problem by hooking up a multimeter to your CPU! We need to use alternative methodologies than scientific ones.

To lump them all under one word is wrong. Your categories are off, which makes your following statement:

> It's just that the sentence "science can't ever answer a question about reality" is a category error - it's saying "the set of ways you can answer questions about reality with can't be used to answer a question about reality". Nonsense."

... even more wrong.

Science is closer to a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book than it is to your assertion. You're using the word science to describe what epistemology calls justification. In epistemological terms, knowledge is a justified true belief. Science is a form of justification. There are other forms.

Since science is empirical, relying on the material world, then the assertion starts to carry water if and only if you can first prove physicalism. I personally am fully on board with materialism, but will rebel very hard against physicalism. Calling math a form of science feels very wrong. I'm on the fence about positivism, I need to think more about it.

[egjerlow]

> I have those too, and no offense to you personally, but I call bullshit on both mine and your acquaintances. In case of people I know, there was not one situation for which I couldn't find a more plausible explanation - which usually boils down to that for enough trials, even the rare coincidences sometimes happen.

Fair enough - this 'statistical argument' is a convenient explanation that can always be invoked, but in this case I don't really consider it to be very satisfactory as an explanation of the phenomena I have been told about (I would put the likelihood for something like those phenomena to happen 'by chance' to be so abysmally low that it seems impossible).

> There is this one reason that it's literally the job of science. Science isn't a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book, it's the aggregation of everything that reliably works for extracting information about observable reality.

I disagree. "Science (from the Latin word scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.". This is far from saying 'science can answer any question'. But again, you're free to believe that science can do that. I just don't happen to believe it can.

> But is it? The hint is given by the fact that there's more than one thinking human in existence. You may feel that answers about your subjective experiences are out of reach of science, but to the extent subjective experiences have any impact on reality, you can use science to study my subjective experiences (as expressed by me), and I can do the same to you.

I think your answer to the other thread makes it clear that we have some insurmountable philosophical differences here. If you believe that showing the correlation between a configuration of atoms and the subjective experience that accompanies that configuration to be 'an explanation' of that subjective experience, we have very different expectations of what constitutes an explanation.

[david-cako]

I find kabbalah very interesting, because this assertion has been made for a long time without us having something tangible to compare it to. Now we have computers, basic AI, and no signs of slowing down. What if kabbalah, or something similar, is actually how consciousness emerges across different types of observers? I.e., consciousness is a "most likely" pattern that emerges from the initial ability to conceive of time.

Tarot is an example of a more personified version of the same archetypal phenomenon. The first few cards are indicative of susceptibility to experience, concentration of experience, awareness of experience, multiplicity of experience, and mastery of experience.