[cortesoft]

> The only major difference I see is that beyond a certain number of transformations, people are willing to treat it as some sort of miracle, and too tired to figure out why it came up with the answer it came up with.

It’s funny, because I thought you were talking about humans here when you wrote this. We know some things about how our bodies encode information that is sent to the brain, and we know some things about how neurons receive information and act on it, but after that we get too tired and give up on how the brain works and treat it like a miracle.

It’s like we desperately want to believe our consciousness is not just electrical impulses in our brain, and we want to ascribe agency and uniqueness to the physical processes going on in our head.

[pegasus]

There's definitely a sizable contingent of people who desperately want to believe consciousness is just electrical impulses in our brain. Because "what else could it be"? The fact is that we just don't know, and "abiding in the not-knowing" is for many the most uncomfortable thing ever. Especially for the curious- and rational-minded people this forum tends to attract. I'm one of them, too.

[runarberg]

It is basically reductionism, or in the extreme atomism, and (as I understand it) it has largely fallen out of fashion both in the philosophy of science and in the philosophy of mind, since it heyday in the 1970s. And I don’t see it coming back into fashion any time soon.

I can definitely see why reductionism would appeal to an educated public. We learn about the periodic table; we are able to break sentences down to words, down to letters; to break an executable down to binary code, to machine instruction, to electrical currents flowing through semiconductors. Why shouldn’t we be able to do the same with conscious thoughts? It is certainly an appealing thought process.

As I understand it, reductionism started to fall out of favor because of the rise of quantum mechanics and chaos theory, where we have a lot of weird phenomena which cannot be explained by reducing the particles down to the sub-sub atomic (or rather they are better explained by describing the interactions directly).

[cortesoft]

Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory don't preclude reductionism, and I wouldn't say it has fallen out of favor as a whole. Certain types certainly have, but not the overall idea.

Also, nothing about the idea of the mind only being made up of physical processes means things have to be deterministic.

[runarberg]

It doesn’t preclude it correct, however it provides a pretty strong examples of where reductionism is lacking, which what I believe has turned a lot of philosophers of science against pure reductionism (I am probably oversimplifying here. An expert science historian [which I am not] could probably write a whole book about why reductionism is not as popular today as it was in the 1970s).

There are a whole lot more physical processes going on in our bodies then just neural activity. And my best guess is that is exactly where reductionism fails. It is possible that neural activity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for consciousness. It is also possible that we are looking in the wrong direction, that consciousness arises via interactions with the world. In either case (of which I find the former quite convincing) we will never be able to describe the mind by just looking at neural activity.

I am actually of the opinion that cognitive scientists are doing an excellent job describing the mind with our current theoretical models which excludes the tough questions of consciousness.

[cortesoft]

I feel like these are separate things... neural activity being necessary but not sufficient for consciousness does not mean reductionism is wrong, it just means the fundamental building block is not a neuron.

It might not even be possible to fully understand the physical mechanisms that underlie consciousness, but that doesn't mean there has to be something more than physical mechanisms.

[Windchaser]

Yes. Even to this reductionist, “neural activity” is insufficient to describe to consciousness in the same way that “it’s physics” is insufficient to describe how a car works.

I could put a bunch of metal and rubber and gasoline in a pile and light it on fire — all the necessary ingredients for a car — but it wouldn’t create a working automobile. The arrangement of the objects and processes matters.

In the same way, if you put a bunch of brain cells together in a Petri dish, but their connections or firings were disordered, I wouldn’t expect consciousness. “Neural activity” is thus insufficient on its own, but this I doesn’t mean reductionism is incorrect. It just means you didn’t correctly reduce the problem to the correct constituent parts. You left some out.

[runarberg]

I didn’t say it was wrong, I said it was lacking and unpopular among modern philosophers of science. If you want to explain consciousness as arising from interaction with the environment (like Ted Chiang did in yesterday’s article) holism is a much better approach, same if you want to use evolutionary explanations, like Daniel Dennett did at the turn of the century.

I think reductionism is simply to limited of a philosophical framework for modern science and philosophy.

[noduerme]

If the mind is made up only of physical processes, then the only way it could be non-deterministic is if the physical processes themselves were non-deterministic. In that case neither the mind nor the physics can be reduced to a deterministic model in any meaningful sense where the same inputs would generate the same outputs, so reductionism falls apart if you introduce non-deterministic physics as the base.

[noduerme]

Nit: A truly educated public would not take reason (empirical evidence, denial of the magical, unseen, or superstitious) to mean that we must assert that we live in a clockwork universe or assert an explanation of the mind based on observable Newtonian physics and electrical phenomena. Confusing a clockwork model of the universe with reason, or thinking that the choice between that and superstition is binary, is actually a pre modern and uneducated way of framing the problem of how the universe works, and if it's the recourse of the "educated" shows a dangerous regression from how educated they were 50 years ago.

[noduerme]

Maybe we do. I think it's a human tendency at large to ascribe pattern or intelligence or spirit where there is only noise. If we can't even prove our own intelligence, doesn't that reinforce the idea that we're in no position to claim intelligence has emerged by running our own intellectual output through a fixed set of weights, the training of which we also designed? At best, any such intelligence would be entirely self-refential and exposed to the question of whether we ourselves are intelligent. If your position is that we are not, then there's no way an LLM could be.

[runarberg]

> but after that we get too tired and give up on how the brain works and treat it like a miracle.

I disagree. We know very well how neurons work, and we have a pretty good idea of how neural activity translates to behavior. In other words, we have a pretty good idea on how the brain works. We stop at consciousness because as of yet it is in the realm of philosophy, not science. We don‘t know what consciousness is or even whether or not it is useful for science and we are simply waiting for the philosophers guides us out of that situation.

Note that both cognitive psychology and behavioral psychology has done fine without tackling consciousness. When neuropsychology emerged in the 1980s it complemented both these fields perfectly. The situation is the opposite with the philosophy of mind which grew significantly around the same time.

There have been some attempts to describe consciousness as an emerging phenomena out of neural activity, but so far all of these attempts have failed, or at least failed to turn consciousness into a useful term in psychology (the way gravity is a useful term in physics). I think it is equally likely that these attempts have failed because consciousness may simply not be a useful term in psychology, that is as likely as it is that we simply don‘t understand it well enough.

[danielmarkbruce]

Saying we have a good idea of how the brain works massively overstates the case...

We know how neurons fire. We do not know how a brain turns that into thought, meaning, intention, experience and on and on. That is not "pretty well understanding the brain", it's understanding some components and hand waving the thing we actually care about.

[runarberg]

What I actually care about is how neural activity translates to behavior. And we have a good enough idea of that that we can design SSRI medicine to treat depression, or neurological tests to detect Alzheimer. As for experience we do know something and we are learning more with cognitive psychology, in e.g. priming experiments etc.

I feel like the search for consciousness is to psychology what the search for the Aether was for physics and chemistry. I think it is a worthwhile search, and maybe we will discover something important during that search, but we should also be prepared to find out that the thing might not exist, or it’s presumed properties are better explained with a different model.

[danielmarkbruce]

SSRIs are not evidence that we understand how neural activity becomes behavior. They are evidence that you can perturb a system usefully without understanding it very well. That is exactly my point.

Respectfully, you are miles out of your depth here.

[runarberg]

I don‘t see why you felt the need to insult me here. We are having a very common disagreement here, one which philosophers of science have been actively debating for several decades.

My point with the SSRI is that we know that serotonin is a chemical which incites certain neurons, and we know that a lack of activity of neurons in that general area in the brain is correlated with depression, so scientists were able to accurately predict that keeping the serotonin in that brain area for longer would increase brain activity there and decrease the level of depression.

This counts as pretty good understanding in my books at least. It teaches us very little about consciousness but my point is that it doesn’t have to. Just like Newton’s theory of gravity did not have to teach us about some deeper cosmological truth.

[danielmarkbruce]

It's not an insult to suggest one is out of the depth on a topic, especially when it isn't one's field of expertise. You are giving the pop science explanation of various things.

[cortesoft]

> Just like Newton’s theory of gravity did not have to teach us about some deeper cosmological truth.

I would also argue that Newton's theory of gravity was not a pretty good understanding of gravity.

[xnfcxnr]

i know the sun shows up every day and i know if i go inside my basement i dont get a tan. do i understand the sun?

[runarberg]

Some schools of the philosophy of science would argue that you do. However you are describing is a very different acquisition of knowledge then what scientists did when developing SSRI medicine. We had to:

1. take pictures of brain activity under different conditions to see which regions were active during different moods,

2. sacrifice a bunch of mice to see which neuro-chemical activated which neurons,

3. predict that inhibiting the re-uptake of a specific neuro-chemical would activate that region,

4. predict that activating that region would decrease the level of depression

In your solar example you would have discovered melanin and its relation to your skin tone, and you would have studied the effects ultra-violate radiation has on your melanin levels. Then you would have predicted that staying out of the sun will not give you a tan.

[noduerme]

Yes, but our friend's apt analogy shows the danger of absorbing Plato's cave as the one thing you learned in Uni. If everything is a shadow on the wall then, of course, every type of study you just mentioned is merely another set of shadows. Nothing can be proven, and the coin of the realm is not to disprove anything but merely to signal your disbelief. Arguing with data for the power of reason against such a philosophy is pointless, as sincere as your response was (and I did appreciate it).