Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by NickM 5196 days ago
I don't happen to believe in mind-matter dualism, but at the same time, I also don't believe it's possible to scientifically prove it one way or the other.

Can science truly explain where consciousness comes from? I would argue it cannot, because consciousness is a subjective experience, and is not objectively measurable.
2 comments
ma2rten 5196 days ago
Actually, can science truly prove anything about the world with certainty? I think claiming that would be ignorant of the way science works: You make assumptions, based on those assumptions you build a model and then (optionally) you show that your model correctly predicts some effect. If the assumptions you made do not hold, your proof does not hold either.

Related to that question: Is consciousness really subjective? Is it not the only thing I as a person can experience objectively?

EDIT: I don't understand why I am beeing down voted? I am just trying to explain my point of view. I don't think religion can prove anything with certainty, either. Nobody can. You can just make more or less strong assumptions.

link
spindritf 5196 days ago
> the way science works: You make assumptions, based on those assumptions you build a model and then (optionally) you show that your model correctly predicts some effect

Theories with predictive power are the essence of science and models are optional, not the other way round. Science is not materialistic, it would be valid even if the world we perceive was "fake", a virtual simulation for example. As long as it's consistent enough for us to make predictions, it's all good.

link
ma2rten 5196 days ago
Theories with predictive power are the essence of science and models are optional, not the other way round.

I was thinking about Math or some subfields of Computer Science where you don't need any predictions (I'd think other disciplines have these purely theoretical subfields as well, but I dunno). I am not sure what the formal definition of a model is, but I think you'd agree you need some kind of non-trivial logic argument, otherwise it becomes, well... trivial ("X happens because we assume X happens").

Maybe I should have left that optional-remark or explained it further, it might be the reason I was downvoted in the beginning. First I also had a (semi-)joke in there about gaining citations being the ultimate goal of science, people might have though I was one of those fundamental Christians mocking science. It's very easy to get misunderstood if all people know about you is what they read in a comment of a few lines.

link
Florin_Andrei 5196 days ago
I agree with the difficulty of providing proof.

But I'm in perpetual discomfort with the way contemporary science is shunning anything "subjective" like it's the plague. Yes, we get it, you ("you, Science") despise uncertainty, and the subjective domain is deeply fuzzy and non-rigorous. But it leads to this robotic, industrial approach to things that should be more human - see the way hospitals work, for example.

I don't have any solutions, either. I'm just saying there's something rotten in this particular Denmark.

link