[losvedir]

I once read a comment on here that I found interesting but haven't been able to find it again.

Basically it flipped the problem on its head. We're arguing how you start at the physical substrate and get to consciousness. They argued that you could start with consciousness and argue how you get to the physical side (experimentation via your conscious experience, etc). It was from a religious individual who called the conscious experience God and went further into how we all share this sliver of godhood.

Does anyone who knows philosophical "camps" know the terms for what I'm trying to remember? I guess I've leaned "materialist" for most of my life, but what other common philosophies (as in the academic discipline) are there?

[Joker_vD]

This side is traditionally called "idealist", and it usually very quickly collapses into solipsism of different varieties.

There is not much you can show against the "there is a single existing soul that has many different persons (as opposed to each person having a different, personal soul) that dreams about the 'physical' reality" hypothesis except "I don't think my imagination is that good", really.

[visarga]

What I reject most about idealism is that it is free. Life is hard and expensive, but soul is free. How come? Is our soul understood like a spherical cow?

[Joker_vD]

> How come?

Well, you gotta spend the eternity somehow, so maybe the soul just got bored and started inventing miserable experiences for itself.

Yes, it's ridiculous.

[rirze]

"Yes."

[vidarh]

What you describe sounds like variation of Berkeley's subjective idealism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_idealism

[PyWoody]

In case anyone is wondering, yes, the town of Berkeley, California is named after him. Also, it's pronounced BARK-Lee.

[joquarky]

If he wanted it to be pronounced that way he should have changed the spelling.

[erythro]

Panpsychism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

[StackBPoppin]

I don't think I've shared my thoughts on here, but this sounds a lot like my thought process: what if you start with nothing but consciousness, then find a path to a physical universe?

Consciousness is inherently about awareness, so at some point the consciousness would be aware of itself. Now it has the concepts of before/after, and from that opposites, incrementing, subtracting, 1 dimensional space etc. Eventually through this process you could "spawn up" other consciousnesses each expanding their individual bubbles of experience and understanding, eventually getting complex enough to create an entire universe with physical matter that can be experienced by other consciousnesses.

[squidbeak]

The problem with this line of thought is that consciousness can be damaged when it's physical container is damaged. A piece of falling masonry can be enough to shear off large parts or all of it. If consciousness was fundamentally distinct, this wouldn't be the case, would it?

[hnfong]

There is a "The Matrix" (the movie) argument where we posit these:

1. Whatever you believe is true is true (this is how the consciousness builds worlds before there is any physical existence)

2. Our consciousness built the physical world and runs it like a simulation.

3. The reason our minds and consciousness are highly correlated to the physical situation is to make the simulation feel real. It's a specifically designed feature that to a large extent synchronizes the "host" and the simulated objects so that despite being outside of the simulation, the "host" feels like they are inside the simulation.

4. The corollary to 3 (and 1) is that if you are damaged or die in the simulation, that effect is mirrored outside the simulation too (to some extent).

----

(Never thought my adventures in metaphysics would be useful in a HN discussion thread!)

[yubblegum]

There is no problem here. [I may have shared this thought experiment before here using a different handle.]

Let us assume there exists in our planet an undiscovered island that has developed independent of other human societies. This is not an island of primitives. The inhabitants pride themselves on their scientific and empirical approach to knowledge acquisition, however they are not quite on par with the rest of the planet in terms of scientific knowledge and technology. Specifically for our purposes, they have not yet discovered Electro-Magnetism.

Now assume somehow (via a shipwreck, or whatever) these islanders come into possession of advanced transmitter/receiver communication devices, and we'll assume they are in working condition and have some sort of power source (magical internal or solar or whatever - they can be turned on).

As the scientists on this island fiddle with these boxes, they notice that certain configuration of the device interface will cause it to 'emit voices, songs, and music'. Various knobs seem to change the voice, etc. Further experimentation and they discover that speaking to the device under certain configuration seems to establish a sort of 'communication' with the box. After these blackbox approaches, they start taking apart these mechanisms (while they are turned on). Now let's just pretend the internal radio communication components are perfectly modular (in terms of functionality) and can be removed and put back as required.

They systematically begin removing various components and noting which uncanny features of these mystrious devices cease to function. One board removed and they no longer get certain band. Another board removed and the box doesn't talk back (think CB). They meticulously map out all these component to function mappings. The results are indisputable: These boxes are some sort of 'thinking machines'. The 'brains' of the machanisms is isolated to the radio elements of the devices. The 'proof' of this is that the boxes cease to speak or respond to communication when these elements are removed.

> consciousness can be damaged when it's physical container is damaged

Just like those radios.

[hnfong]

Interesting.

I don't think the GP's objection is fatal either (for reasons mentioned in another reply), but let me try to poke holes in your argument.

If I understand your analogy correctly, you're saying the brain here acts as an intermediary between the real consciousness and the physical world, and not really the underlying thing that generates consciousness.

But this seems to contradict actual experience -- if somebody's head is hit very hard, they kind of get knocked dizzy for a moment. Their consciousness halts, until their brain recovers. If your analogy truly holds, then subjectively it should feel more like disconnecting from World of Warcraft. "The real consciousness" fiddles their fingers idly while waiting for reconnection, and once they reconnect they'd have a recollection (on the non-physical, consciousness side) of what happened during the physical blackout.

[yubblegum]

I don't think the insistence on the requirement of 'hard disconnect' is reasonable. Per the brain as transceiver analogy, you are jiggling a part and may get 'static' while you are doing it. Stop the jiggling and static stops. Jiggle too hard and the part disconnects from its socket (knock them out /g) and you'll have the desired disconnect from the "World of Warcraft".

p.s. Realized I didn't address your "subjectively". This is true, since the radio analogy was to address the analog of neuroscientists examining people with damaged brains. You want to know what the 'radio' feels :)

So this is in fact an interesting aspect you bring in. The answer to this is: this seems to conflate 'ego' and 'self'. This is a different problem: Is the self the same as the ego? My own view on this is that is the ego is not the true self.

[hnfong]

I must admit I've never been hit so hard that I am 100% knocked out, so I can't really speak as to the subjective experience of being knocked out (from the non-physical consciousness perspective, not the brain)... but surely it isn't like disconnecting from World of Warcraft?

That said, if the injury is serious enough I suppose it might trigger some Near Death Experience where people have reported seeing things purportedly on the other side.

So I guess that answers my original concern.

(I think you might have confused my question though, or perhaps I've confused you. No worries, my questions are answered anyway.)

[squidbeak]

This is a facile thought experiment, and I'm surprised it's weakness hasn't already occurred to you.

But as it hasn't, let's change your island to an island of supremely skilled butchers. Your islanders are apparently capable of reassembling the mystery radios to restore function, so let's allow my island's butchers the skill of dismembering flesh atomically - and reassembling it exactly. Perhaps via quantum knives and very strong prescription lenses.

Their own religion has long prohibited them from peering into their tribe's flesh - and their tribe is all there is on that remotest of islands. But the day a missionary washes up on shore they see an opportunity. They can finally take a proper look. They begin with his head - by far the most interesting part of him, with the delighted and friendly if slightly smug smile and neverending chatter.

Once dismantled and laid out in trillions of tiny pieces in a large hall - a bit like a crashed plane - they decide to reassemble his head in different configurations - to test how the behaviour would change with each layout. There's an unusual fruit on the island which allows them almost superhuman focus and speed - so that billions of reconfigurations can be completed over an afternoon.

BUT WHAT DO YOU KNOW...? Every single reconfiguration results in a totally inert missionary! No more drunk on the milk of paradise look, and no more "Hallelujah!"s. Just a lump of meat. Perplexed - they decide there must have been something truly unique about the missionary's head's original layout and composition - so reassemble him in the way they found him. But when they have done this - calamity! - he doesn't come on any more. They check their work 18 times - but not a single atom is dislocated. And so the wise islanders come to the only conclusion possible, and hurry to note it in their scientific literature:

"Radios aren't animals. And anyone pretending otherwise is a ginormous silly billy."

[yubblegum]

> "Radios aren't animals. And anyone pretending otherwise is a ginormous silly billy."

The results presented to the scientific community of the island was that the "mechanisms" are "thinking machines". They clearly did not think the boxes to be 'living creatures'.

[squidbeak]

Quite. But for the purposes of his story, their narrator is applying them as an analogue to processes in living creatures.

[teodosin]

Is it consciousness that gets damaged, or just its contents? If you destroy an object, can you say that you've destroyed the space it occupied?

[hnfong]

There are a lot of similar ideas in various ancient/traditional spiritual/esoteric teachings. "Consciousness first" is actually the more typical assumption among the traditions that have something we'd label as a philosophy.

[amelius]

One thing is certain: we are talking about consciousness. This means that the world does not work like this: there is physics, and above it there is consciousness which is merely monitoring the physics. This cannot be true (or is unlikely), since we are discussing consciousness and therefore the physical act of talking is driven by something that knows that consciousness exists. There must be a link back from consciousness to physics. A simpler way is to assume that physics IS consciousness. Physics as a science is a kind of introspective activity.

[mjburgess]

The link is called causation, and it is not simpler to assume its absence. It seems simpler only because no one ever works through the full consequences, because the project of doing so always fails very quickly or terminates in an inexplicable bag called "god" (or the trasncendental ego) or similar which serves to do all the work of things which cannot be explained.

This kind of simplicity is a very deceitful on, because it offers to seem to explain everything with nothing, and having phrased nothing in pleasant-sounding ways, concludes that this simplicity is a virtue.

[noutella]

It does offer beauty and relief to the fact that the observable universe is something like 10^80 the volume of a humain being. At that incomprehensible scale, I think poetry and spirituality is a rather nice placeholder while loads of brilliant minds work on our understanding of physics

[visarga]

> There must be a link back from consciousness to physics.

Yes, and it is trivial to prove. One second lapse of attention and you could get bitten by a snake, or run over by a car. If the top level (consciousness) fails, the neurons die too. Cells depend on this centralized decision point to exist. There is no way to have humans without consciousness because ... they would not be able even to put the thing into the other thing to make more of us without it ... excuse the language, but the argument is solid.

[mjburgess]

Yes, it's called idealism. And the whole field of it is a pile of fallacies of ambiguity that can take years to see and treat with caution.

[dwd]

Another "camp" is panpsychism, which is often seen as a polar opposite of materialism. David Chalmers and Philip Goff are the two most prominent people pushing it.

They espouse consciousness or subjective experience is fundamental and contained in all matter.

There's a long history of anti-dualism in Kabbalist traditions, Christian Mysticism and Gnosticism.

For example, the Gospel of Thomas sayings #3, #77 and #113.

[bobson381]

Advaita Vedanta or Alan Watts style looking - essentially the idea that there are no separate things or events, sort of like Whitehead's process philosophy. Trippy stuff and a little bit out there, but consistent with some other ways of looking at things. What is real by Adam Becker goes into some underpinnings here too.

[qsera]

>Basically it flipped the problem on its head.

I thought it was me[1], but I don't remember making the "shared godhood" argument

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47999867

[karol]

Get familiar with Donald Hoffman - plenty of good podcasts with him.

[dwd]

I feel like Hoffman's core idea really tries to pull string theory into our understanding of reality. If reality has 10, 11, or 26 dimensions and we can only perceive 4 of them then there are dimensions where other things could exist.

I like his interface theory and the idea that our perception is an evolutionary fitness for purpose, but his conscious agents is straight out pseudo-religious/panpsychism.

[svnt]

Closest thing is probably Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism.

[namero999]

This is at the same time one of the most solid metaphysics and one of the least known or studied. At least for now.