[fsckboy]

>It appears that the initial assertion is that consciousness is somehow special and also somehow not a product of fundamental properties of matter. Both of those appear to be taken as axiomatic. Might the whole debate be summed up as “we decided to go looking for magic and decided that it’s magic and thus can’t be found”?

you've definitely hit upon the problem, but you have it exactly backward. The people who say that consciousness is completely explained by physical laws are failing to acknowledge that consciousness is not physical. Consciousness affects physical things (you think, plan, and put out your hand and move something). How does this happen? Saying "it's all physical laws" is handwaving away quite a bit of nonphysical phenomena, relying on "the science of the gaps".

it may very well turn out that orgasm feels like it does because that's a property of physics, but you can't just assert these sorts of things, you have to prove them.

my personal preference for an idea about this is that there is no physical world, it's all information and computation, it's all abstract; our intuition about the physcial world is an artifice; thus, the mind being abstract makes perfect sense, what else could it be.

[orwin]

No, planning, thinking, moving your body is not the hard problem, it's the "easy problem" just like processing information is. We see which part of your brain "lit" when you plan, when you order etc.

The "hard problem" is subjective experience (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_character_of_experi...), which is different. You can have different way of explaining it, and what GP is saying is a proto-illusionism, probably not as well thought as it could be, but philosophers wrote on this quite recently (the idea is from ~2010): https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/springer-journal/the-illusion-of...

[chaboud]

So, in the absence of fully bearing out the complete pathways of experience (effectively, mapping, at the atomic, and possibly quantum level, everything in a person), we’re going to assert that some non-physical phenomena are afoot? That seems like we’re fishing in deeper and darker corners for the soul because we decided to ascribe significance to perception and experience.

It’s still not clear to me why qualia are anything more than the enshrinement of labels. Replace “description” with neuro-interfaced simulation, and the whole argument dissolves.

By asking someone to prove that consciousness is not a product of something outside of physics, you’re demanding that they prove a negative.

Let’s put it more simply: we have no evidence to indicate that human thought or experience require anything beyond the elements and nature of the physical universe.

Otherwise, we’re just trying to explain complexity not yet understood with religious attribution, and we should hang up our science spurs right now.

[fsckboy]

you're mixing two things I'm saying, that we already know enough to realize that the hunter gatherer intuition of physical things becomes quite inadequate at the nano scale, so it's time to abandon it; despite that physics and physical share the same etymology, I'm not saying to abandon physics. And that consciousness and our imagination of things that don't exist do not require physical existence of things (using that intuition) so how can we say that we know what imagination is?

saying "but I believe in the materialist interpretation of modern science because I run from religion, that fusty old thing I fear, so I insist that consciousness be explainable by physical laws" is not a proof. I am an atheist, but our consciousnesses have created religion, so it exists as much as our other thoughts. What we see with our eyes we also are convinced exists, but in our heads, thinking about it, it has the same nature as our other thoughts, and imaginings.

[chaboud]

Okay. That I’m partly down with. Naming of objects is convenient, but very few objects that we name and count are, in fact, single things. That said, the categorization and grouping are awfully convenient for day to day living.

- that’s a long edit, but I’ll reply with a short one:

I’m not running from religion. I’m suggesting that enshrining consciousness as something ineffable and then demanding that it be fully mapped out by physics to not otherwise be a symptom of the preternatural is a sophistic argument.

[yibg]

You seem to be overloading the word "physical"? Information and computation are physical manifestations of e.g. electrons and physical bits. Information are stored (as far as we know) on physical things like memory or the brain. e.g. you damage the brain and memory goes away.

[fsckboy]

my comment said that I don't believe "physical bits" exist, or at least not as physical bits, so you using the term physical bits is ignoring what I said. When you and I meet and shake hands, we don't actually touch, rather our electrons repel each other, quite firmly. I'm saying that they don't need to be physical to do that.

I'm saying "we live in a simulation", except it's not (necessarily) a simulation, all we know is that it's all there is that we know about.

[chaboud]

That becomes a bit of a silly argument, in that it ends up making no real assertion.

Similar arguments were tried in the early days of the telescope in the 17th century, asserting that what was being observed could not be trusted due to the mediation of the lenses (early telescopes were generally refractive). While imperfections can limit and govern the information available via telescopes, there is no reason to believe that said information is false or somehow governed by anything other than physical phenomenon. It was, and is, the height of sophistry to make such an assertion.

[fsckboy]

my argument is only to get you to unassert that you know anything about the nature of the mind. (the other part, about the simulation, is how I find it more comfortable to think about the universe, but i have no proof, just like to point out that it's just as plausible)

[chaboud]

We actually (myself included, to an extent) know a great deal about the mind, perception, and cognition. There’s lots still to learn, but we’ve been poking, prodding, and experimenting for a long time.

I’ll give an example that is related to my current day job, where we make devices with displays (e.g., TV’s). I have commonly had people say that picture quality and color on televisions is subjective. However, until we’re into advanced features like content-adaptive processing, it isn’t. Instead, color is objectively and reproducibly measurable as a set of physical properties, and the mappings of those properties to the TV-buying public is very aligned with the science behind color theory.

Now, color theory as we apply it is a blend of physics (very, very reproducible) and perception. The perceptual part of color is largely reproducible over large populations, but there are certainly mutations, conditions, and variances that lead to some degree of varied perception, up to and including blindness (though TV’s these days throw off enough infrared that their brightness is generally detectable by non-sighted users). So, might we all be living in a simulation? Or a simulation of a simulation? Sure. But that has no practical impact because it is an unanswerable question.

Conversely, operating with the assumption that the physical-world sensing and reasoning apparatus available to me isn’t some complex prank is working out pretty well for the trillions+ creatures out there (insects could be an interesting discussion) that appear to be going about their daily lives. Why ask people to prove a negative?

In the meantime, we’ll continue to try to better understand how minds work.

[fsckboy]

when people talk about the hard problem of consciousness or the mind-body problem, they're not talking about the brain aspect (which might sum up what you're referring to) but "what does this feel like" aspect. Why would electro-chemical-chromodynamic processes in brain feel like anything at all? what is that mechanism? will we be able to recreate it, either in a dish, or in a brain we construct? how will we know, since I can't even be sure you feel the same things I feel.

I'm not trying to create a big woo-woo mystery, i'm just saying rationalists should not be quick to assume they know what is going on or where the answer lies.

[rini17]

Even if it's all computation, it might be worth it to distinguish sentient and not sentient computations. I think trying to arrive to it by examining particles is a detour at best.

[fsckboy]

if sentient computation exists as a subset of a computational structure (our universe) it must be said that the computational structure is sentient.

[rini17]

That's like saying all movement must have originated from some Prime Mover. Why is there need for such forced assumptions.

[adrianN]

We don’t have a definition of consciousness that allows you to determine whether an electron is conscious or not. Until we have that it’s quite pointless to discuss whether this phenomenon is magic or not imo. Furthermore, I don't think it's trivial to distinguish between magic and physics.

[tbrownaw]

> The people who say that consciousness is completely explained by physical laws are failing to acknowledge that consciousness is not physical.

That sounds an awful like you're taking as axiomatic that consciousness is non-physical i.e. magic.

[fsckboy]

you are asserting you know what consciousness is. I'm saying I don't know.

[lo_zamoyski]

> The people who say that consciousness is completely explained by physical laws are failing to acknowledge that consciousness is not physical.

There's a confusion here between "explained by physical laws" and "physical". The problem of qualia, I claim, shows that physics is not exhaustive when it comes to matter. Its methods are necessarily and entirely quantitative, which means anything that doesn't satisfy this presumption of quantifiability is either ignored, or given some frankly bad pseudo-reduction to the quantifiable (and even then, it relies on a tacit Cartesian sort of dualism to work, which is usually unacknowledged).

I make the initial distinction between "physical law" and "physical" because an Aristotle or an Aquinas would not deny that, say, dogs and cats and myriad animals are conscious (they would find the notion absurd), even as they hold that, of the animals, only human beings possess intellects, which, owing to their capacity for abstraction, must be immaterial. What does that mean? It means that just because physics cannot account for consciousness, either today or at all by virtue of its methods and scope, it does not follow that consciousness cannot be material. It may not be exclusively material perhaps, and perhaps consciousness, like "being", is analogical in meaning, and our use of the term suffers from a fallacy of univocity that it has only one meaning.

> my personal preference for an idea about this is that there is no physical world, it's all information and computation, it's all abstract; our intuition about the physcial world is an artifice; thus, the mind being abstract makes perfect sense, what else could it be.

While I reject mechanistic metaphysics, the notion that everything is "information" or "computation" is incoherent, or at the very least, stands in for something else, like idealism, which has its own set of problems. "Computation" comes from the Latin "computare", i.e., "com" ("with, together") and "putare" ("to reckon"). That is to say, computation is semiotic, so to speak. It is intentional, about something else. So it makes no sense to speak of computation as the ground of reality, because it is an operation that presupposes reality. Information suffers from analogous problems. You would only be passing the buck by appealing to them.