[smokedetector1]

This is a theory that would work, except for the fact that I know I exist. Why does materialism so desperately want to ignore that knowledge? Is that really simpler than the idea that we have a soul that interacts with the body and brain, but which also has its own nature that is separate from biology and evolution? Do we have to go 100% and say things that start with "consciousness is just"?

I'm passionate about this because I know -- from personal experience -- that this type of philosophy can really go along with denying ones own existence in a deep way. It feels great to know you're a soul that exists. I don't know why it's supposed to be "rational" to convince yourself against a simple truth that we all know intuitively. And I say that as someone who used to feel that way.

[082349872349872]

The quality of consciousness and the existence of a non-body non-brain soul seem to me like two completely orthogonal issues (I can easily imagine creatures without conscious awareness but with a soul; I can certainly imagine creatures with brain-driven consciousness but without a soul; a rock has neither; in your model people have both) so it seems unlikely that answering your two questions would move the conversation forward.

For what it's worth, I know I exist as well; can we agree that we both exist, but we have differing models for what the necessary constituents of that existence are?

[smokedetector1]

> Can we agree that we both exist, but we have differing models for what the necessary constituents of that existence are?

Of course, yes.

> I can certainly imagine creatures with brain-driven consciousness but without a soul

This would probably be the heart of the disagreement. I don't believe this is possible. Such a creature would not have qualia.

And, as a species, I don't think we're any closer to resolving this question "objectively" than we ever were. fMRIs say where blood is flowing in the brain, but that's hardly enough to explain the phenomenon of subjective experience.

By the nature of the question, we won't be able to attack it from the outside, and I don't think I could generally convince another person that they have a soul that exists, if they're inclined to explain themselves using materialism, which at this point has become flexible enough to be unfalsifiable, with the everlasting faith that someday science will fill in all the gaps.

That's why my approach now is just to poke holes in the seemingly impenetrable confidence that materialism is the only "rational" way to think.

(By the way, I'm not saying you hold that position.)

[visarga]

> fMRIs say where blood is flowing in the brain, but that's hardly enough to explain the phenomenon of subjective experience.

fMRI scans correlate well with neural net embeddings. That is a great hint. We just need to look at the semantic spaces developed in these models, by a purely mechanistic process, to see how it goes from data to semantics.

[smokedetector1]

The idea that we will just need to do that is a form of faith, no more rational (in my opinion, less so) than belief in a soul.

[CooCooCaCha]

Making up nonsense will always be easier than actually understanding reality.

Just because we can’t explain something right now does not mean you can insert whatever you want into that hole and assert it’s just as valid as any other explanation.

[smokedetector1]

It's funny how much I agree with your whole comment ;)

Also, "making up nonsense" is a very disrespectful, and intellectually dishonest, way to approach someone's understanding of life which is hard-earned through experience and thousands of hours of introspection and study. Consider that people who disagree with you on this may still be just as educated and smart as you are.

[082349872349872]

> This would probably be the heart of the disagreement

OK, sounds like we're agreed there.

If souls are required for consciousness, then I guess we could try to decide which creatures are conscious by first deciding which have souls? Would that question be any easier to answer that way around?

[smokedetector1]

I thought we were talking about "what is consciousness" rather than "which creatures are conscious." The conversation started with "consciousness is just [a series of material processes resulting in an illusion of interiority, rather than a genuine phenomenon of -- for lack of a better word -- personhood]"

I would probably say "consciousness is the soul" rather than "souls are required for consciousness," but either way I don't see how that helps the fundamental issue that it's impossible to physically prove another creature's interiority, including humans.

[visarga]

What I said was that it's all search. We search and learn, search and learn. This feels like consciousness because it is a recurrent process that feeds on itself. We create relational representations from data, and these representations encode the structure of our experiences. In other words embeddings explain away the qualitative aspects of qualia.

[smokedetector1]

Just declaring that they explain it away doesn't make it so. You've come up with a theory that, from 10,000 feet up, could correspond with certain observations of consciousness. Why should it be true?

[082349872349872]

We were talking about "what is consciousness" but rapidly hit an end.

Sorry for the lack of clarity: "which creatures are conscious" was my attempt to switch topics to a line which I had hoped might be mutually interesting.

Cheers!

[smokedetector1]

Before we stop, if you don't mind, could you answer why you are dissatisfied with the idea that there's a soul, and why we need to do away with it 100%?

To be clear, I really do take issue with the 100% aspect. There are many psychological functions that are clearly at least mediated if not outright caused by the brain and body.

But I think some people say "there's so many functions that are physical, that probably 100% are and we just don't know it yet." But that doesn't seem logically any more forced than "there's a soul that's mediated by the brain," so I don't know why people are so willing to give up the soul.