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by robmclarty
4539 days ago
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Cool. First of all, just let me say, that arguing about consciousness today has been very exciting and fun. Thanks for participating :D My position is not the norm, for sure. I used to think along the lines you're describing (some sort of Churchland connectionism or dynamic system), and was driven to find a way of reducing consciousness to something that could be reproduced in a computer. But the more I learned the more I saw the gap between neurons and experience. I don't know for sure if it couldn't eventually be explained with some future advanced physical/chemical/biological theory, but right now there seems to be a big gap. If we could look at all the pieces leading up to experience under a microscope, I still don't think there would be a way of seeing someone's experience or subject it to proper scientific scrutiny short of actually being that someone. That is, I don't believe that any set of facts would ever allow me to know what it's like to be someone else. I think the monism Nagel describes in the book I linked to is an interesting idea of how things like consciousness, cognition, value, and intentionality can be compatible with materialist realism while still being something different without necessarily deriving from divine intervention or subjective idealism. |
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See... but if you take a connectionist approach, it should in fact validate your intuition that you can't experience like someone else short of being them.
Making an analogy with neural network models, you can't transfer the weights from a network to another with a different structure and expect it to produce the same states. The experience imprints in the structure, and from that structure emerges the experience. And that's a ridiculously simple model, with ideal neurons and nothing else in the organism modeled... imagine the richness of behavior of the real thing.
I don't know... maybe it's our bias to believe matter is messy, filthy and mundane and that our consciousness, all the richness of our thoughts and emotions can't be explained only by it... but I actually find no less fascinating to think that is from structure alone that may arise sentient beings capable of living and breathing and feeling, out of the same atoms you find in the dirt.