Do I know you from some other forum? Did we cross paths once and it ended badly?

Anyway, suppose you built a machine that was functionally equivalent to a working brain. How would you test whether it's conscious or not?

I never said you could build a functioning brain out of anything. Your question was regarding whether something with the same function as a brain would be conscious; my answer is yes. It doesn't follow that you can build a functioning brain out of rocks, liquorice or thin air: that is a purely technological problem. But _if_ you built something with the same functioning as a conscious brain out of rocks, then yes, that system would by definition be conscious.

I figured we would reach this point. I think this is where the materialist position collapses into complete absurdity. I know that's a person opinion, but I have some questions that you won't be able to answer that kind of illustrate the absurdity of it all.

1. Why should we assume that consciousness can arise from rocks? Rocks are nothing like neurons, nothing like mental states, so why is that not an immediate category error?
2. How can conscious arise from rocks? What is the explanation for how the rocks become conscious? How many rocks are needed? What do you do with the rocks to make the rocks conscious (see what I mean about the absurdity of this)? Why is the act of whatever you do with the rocks important? Why does one set of rock interactions produce experience x, while a different set of rock interactions produces experience y, while a different set produces no experience at all?
3. How could you verify whether such a system is in fact conscious?
4. What other physical processes besides rock interactions can produce consciousness?

(2) lays bare the absurdity of it all, but I think (3) is catastrophic. It's impossible to verify that anything other than you is conscious. That's just a brute fact about our epistemic position in the world. The existence of other consciousnesses is assumed but can never be proven. You can't leave your mind and check for the existence of other minds. That leads to the following problem for materialism: suppose you've got this awesome theory of consciousness and it predicts that that object over there is conscious. How do you prove it? You can't. No physicalist theory of consciousness will ever be verified. It's impossible in principle. No matter how clever the theory is, you can never get inside the object it says is conscious or isn't to examine its internal mental states or lack thereof. The physicalist project to understand consciousness is doomed to failure.

Note that this is not a god-of-the-gaps argument. There are a lot of things that cause physicalism to fail with regard to consciousness and none of them have anything to do with god:
1. The absurdity of consciousness coming from rocks
2. The total lack of explanation for how consciousness can possibly arise from doing stuff with rocks.
3. A category error in thinking that non-mental stuff can produce mental events
4. The impossibility of verification of any physicalist theory of consciousness

It’s an interesting question, and I haven’t read the rest of the thread yet, but I think there’s a misunderstanding here. Both your descriptions here assume both consciousness and a working brain exists.

Those are safe assumptions. Do you doubt brains and/or consciousness exists?

Producing a feeling is not the same as producing consciousness, and I’m not sure how you would ‘arrange’ feelings or experiences as you’ve described without a working brain.

Assuming a working brain is required for consciousness is just that: an assumption. Idealists always concede that point. They shouldn't. I will concede that it appears the brain is a necessary condition for consciousness. Are we justified in assuming appearances are as they seem? Sometimes. Sometimes not. The materialist cannot just assume brains exist and are required for consciousness. They have to argue that what seems to exist external to our minds actually does exist external to our minds. Since we can't leave our minds and verify whether anything external to our minds exists, there's no way to prove materialism. It is simply taken on faith that external stuff exists. It's no different than refuting Berkeley by kicking a rock.

Anyway, even if brains are required for consciouness, there is still the issue of brain states producing new additional experiences, but experiences incapable of producing additional brain states. What do I mean by experiences? Simple: listen to music while you stub your toe looking at a sunset. Nothing additional is created by that arrangement of experiences. Nothing additional is ever added to the universe by mental states. What do I mean by additional? At time t, there are x number of experiences that have ever happened. At t+10 min, there will be many more additional experiences. That doesn't happen the other way around. Mental states never result in the addition of anything. Nothing physical is added to the universe from mental states. I think a materialist has to argue why that dichotomy exists. I think bringing up entropy is going to lead to substance dualism.

The ‘feeling of stubbing your toe’ is a complex interrelation of ideas, including notions of ‘self’, ‘body’, ‘toe’, ‘movement’ and ‘impact’ as well as ‘unpleasant’, ‘sharp’ and ‘pain’. Potentially, it can all be rendered as a pattern of electric current through matter without understanding any of these ideas - provided that matter has sufficient experience to recognise and describe the pattern as ‘the feeling of stubbing your toe’. Otherwise how would you confirm this?

It sounds like you're talking about consciousness from neurons/switches. See my post right above yours for my concerns on that.

Conversely, one can theoretically arrange all of the above ideas in a particular way to construct a mental state that matches this pattern of electric current - without anyone ever actually stubbing their toe.

Do you think mental states can exist on their own, without any substrate? That's how I read what you're saying.

Those are good points. Instead of consciousness from moving rocks around, what about simulated consciousness? If one believes that consciousness can be simulated, then one believes that a collection of electric switches can produce consciousness. The questions I have about that are:
1. Why should we assume that consciousness can arise from switches? Why is that not a category error?
2. How can conscious arise from switches? What is the explanation for how the switches become conscious? How many switches are needed? In what order? Why is the act of switching important? Why does one set of switching operations produce experience x, while a different set of switching operations produces experience y, while a different set produces no experience at all? Is electricity required?
3. How could you verify whether such a system is in fact conscious?
4. What other collections of switches are conscious? Phones? My desktop computer?
5. What other physical processes besides switching operations can produce consciousness?

You just did by posting that, but so what. All we do here is waste time. What is your question you want me to answer?

Why doesn't the creation of new mental states violate entropy?

Can you name them?

No, there was a group of computationalist materialists over at the International Skeptics Forum in its heyday who were completely invested in that comic (and Hofstader's book Godel, Esher, Bach). The line of thinking was pretty simple to follow: if consciousness can be simulated, then it can be produced through switching operations. Switching operations can occur in lots of different substrates, like a system of pipes, water, pumps, and valves (for some reason, the materialists over at the ISF preferred ropes and pulleys). Such a system, if it was functionally equivalent to a working conscious human brain, would also be conscious.

None of this so far is controversial. How they got to "you can simulate consciousness by moving rocks around" was exactly what the comic claims: you can build a turing-complete computer by moving rocks around, if you have enough time and rocks. If you can compute by moving rocks around, and consciousness can be simulated on a computer, then consciousness can be simulated by moving rocks around. They even talked themselves into believing a bunch of people writing 1's and 0's on pieces of paper could also produce conscious moments.

I think they're actually correct in that chain of logic. If you're willing to believe in a conscious system of pipes and water, why not rocks being moved around in a certain way? Under materialism, consciousness shouldn't be substrate dependent, and if you can replicate the computational processes going on in some brain state(s) by moving enough rocks around, that collection of moving rocks, if it's computationally equivalent to brain state(s), should be conscious. The problem is that at the end of that chain of logic is an absurdity: the possibility that a universe of conscious beings are being simulated by someone moving rocks around.

I am only asking because I heard many preachers say, "I've met many such and such that said such and such". I think it's a rhetoric and I am having a hard time believing it any more. If you met many materialists who said this or that, some names must have stuck in your mind.

I can name you message board names, but they won't mean anything to you. There was a substantial group of people who did buy in to what that comic was saying. I would be surprised if there weren't some materialists here who would agree with it.

I am fully aware that you can say, "Joe Montague, Harry Griffin, Michele Adieu, Robert Frankovic, Debbi Gaal, and Rosemary Thimble." I ask you to be honest. Did you actually met MANY materialists who said what you claim they all said?

I met many materialists who believe that it was possible to simulate consciousness by moving rocks around, yes.

Now, let me ask you, can consciousness be simulated on a computer?

What was the question again? The one about walking and legs?

I'm encouraged that you think it's a fairy tale! I have encountered many materialists who agree wholeheartedly with the conclusion in that comic. Maybe you see why I think it's absurd that consciousness could arise from wiring switches together, running a current through them, and turning them on and off in a certain way. If you can't get consciousness from moving rocks around (you can't), why should you get consciousness from turning switches off and on?

So, do you think it's possible to simulate consciousness?

Same question to you, 180. Do you believe it's possible to simulate a universe of conscious beings by moving rocks around? If not, where do you and that comic I linked diverge?

A brain doesn't have to be conscious, so I'd word it as: something functionally equivalent to my brain would have the capacity for consciousness. You're conveying incredulity but there's no way this is news to you.

Let's explore this because this is important. Take a look at this comic:
https://xkcd.com/505/

Do you believe it's possible to simulate a universe of conscious beings by moving a bunch of rocks around in a certain way? If not, where do you and that comic diverge?

Yes, uncontroversially. This is a philosophy forum, I'm well aware of the difficulty in claiming to know anything beyond that I'm a thinking thing, but as much as one can be certain of anything else, I'm at least certain of that.

You're more certain that physical matter exists than of pretty much anything else? What do you base this high level of certainty on?

Also, regarding consciousness, do you believe that something that is functionally equivalent to the brain will be conscious, whatever the substrate? The example that is often given is setting up an enormous system of valves, water, pumps and pipes that is functionally equivalent to a working brain and then running it. Do you think such a system would produce consciousness? How about a system of electric switches opening and closing? Do you think that if you open and close the switches in some way, the system of switches will be conscious? If so, why? Also if so, why would that particular combination of switching actions give rise to a conscious moment of, say, stubbing your toe, while a different set of switching operations give rise to, say, the beauty of a sunset?

If so, why do you think it's taking so long to come up with an explanation for how the brain produces consciousness
— RogueAI

Those are not related things.

Sure they are. If science can't solve consciousness, then it's first going to appear as an "explanatory gap" until people realize science isn't equipped to solve it. I think that's where we're at at the moment and why we're seeing people like Christof Koch turn to panpsychism.

Also, you did not give an explanation for why consciousness has been such a tough nut to crack for so long. In an interview, Paul Davies called it the number one problem in science. I may be going out on a limb with idealism, but you are certainly going out on a limb denying there's a hard problem (which you do later on). Do you think that our brains just aren't equipped to handle the consciousness problem? But then that is ad hoc: we can detect gravity waves now, but we're still in the dark about how brains produce consciousness? That shouldn't be. That's a problem for materialists.

There is no necessary cause for a brain to come to understand consciousness. If humans hadn't evolved, perhaps no brain would even have a concept of consciousness. I don't think rats, crows and dolphins spend their time thinking about this stuff.

But we do spend our time thinking about such stuff, and science prides itself on its explanatory power, and in this one area, there has been a definite lack of progress that is starting to become embarrassing, leading people like Giulio Tononi to speculate, without a shred of proof or way to verify, that consciousness is a result of information processing. That's pretty out there, but IIT is all the rage now.

For example, suppose 1,000 years from now the Hard Problem remains. Would you reexamine your belief that consciousness arises from matter?
— RogueAI

The hard problem is not a problem, it's a protest. It's even worded by Chalmers as such. There is nothing to wait for.

How do brains produce consciousness? There is no answer, of course, which suggests there is something to wait for: the answer to how brains produce consciousness. If "there's nothing to wait for", why are so many people wasting their time trying to explain it? Your answer is not believable.

As for running and legs and brains, we have an explanation for running/walking. We have no explanation for the emergence of consciousness from the actions of neurons.
— RogueAI

An of-the-gaps fallacy again. Science hasn't explained it yet, therefore it must be God/panpsychism/dualism/whatever other ism I favour.

You're not reading what I said. The reason walking/running and legs isn't like consciousness emerging is because we have an explanation for walking/running and walking and running and legs all belong to the same ontological category. We don't have an explanation for consciousness (we don't even have an agreed upon definition of it), and mental states and physical states are ontologically different things.

If you find yourself making this argument, stop, catch yourself, and remember: no one finds this a good argument when it's not used in the service of their pet theory. And more honest people don't think it a good argument period.

If physical states can cause mental states, why not vice-versa?

I'm not making a god-of-the-gaps argument. I'm saying materialism will never explain science because there's a category error going on: material things cannot, in principle, give rise to consciousness, just as consciousness cannot give rise to material things.

I suspect you're going to say that a collection of electric switches, if arranged some particular way and turned on and off some particular way, will produce consciousness. This goes to the heart of the matter. A conscious collection of switches is already an absurdity, and it entails an additional absurdity: That a collection of valves, pipes, and water, if functionally equivalent to those switches that produce a conscious moment, will also be conscious. I think the debate is over when you make that claim. I think it's an obvious absurdity, so my argument against materialism isn't "god-of-the-gaps", it's a reductio absurdum: physicalism leads to conscious systems of valves and pipes and water (among other things). To which I respond: absurd.

His general point stands: legs are a prerequisite for walking; walking does not cause legs. Atomic structure is a prerequisite for materials; material structure is not a prerequisite for atoms. A prerequisite for atoms is massive, charged particles; atoms are not a prerequisite for massive, charged particles. Or, more simply, trees are a prerequisite for forests; forests are not a prerequisite for trees.

Do you believe the brain is a prerequisite for consciousness? If so, why do you think it's taking so long to come up with an explanation for how the brain produces consciousness? Also, how long would you be willing to wait before giving up? For example, suppose 1,000 years from now the Hard Problem remains. Would you reexamine your belief that consciousness arises from matter? What about 10,000 years from now? Also, would you agree that anything that is functionally equivalent to a working brain should be conscious?

As for running and legs and brains, we have an explanation for running/walking. We have no explanation for the emergence of consciousness from the actions of neurons. Also, "Running" and "legs" exist in the same ontology, just like "wet" and "water" and "river". No new ontological categories are required for those examples. Not so with physical states and mental states. They are obviously ontologically different things.

"You have an invalid assumption: that every hierarchical relationship in physics is or ought to be a two-way street. That is not a peculiarity of physics (just your conception of it) so, no, it's a problem for physicalists that consciousness is a function of brains but cannot create brains."

If physical states can cause mental states, why not vice-versa? In other cases in physics where A causes B but B can't cause A, there's an explanation. What's the physicalist explanation for why matter can produce mental states, but not vice versa?

Fear and love are mental states, and they produce all kinds of material consequences, like fights and babies

Fair point. I will amend my claim to "you don't get new/additional matter from mental states".

When alarmed, your body will produce adrenaline, when in love, oxytocin. The whole field of mind-body medicine relies on this.

All of that is compatible with idealism. Science does NOT say that adrenaline is some non-conscious stuff. Science is mum on metaphysics.

That premise rests on the assumption that mental states aren't physical states.

Why should we assume physical states even exist? What evidence do you have for the existence of the non-conscious stuff these physical states are supposedly made of?

There is no reason to believe that physical stuff isn't mental stuff.

Sure there is. Think of some music. Is there music playing in your skull right now? Does your mind seem to have weight? Does it seem to be about the size of both your hands put together? Is your imagination bound by the size of your brain? Why are some parts of the brain conscious and some parts not? What is the explanation for how consciousness arises from matter? If you don't know that, then what is the framework for the emerging explanation for how consciousness arises from matter? If you don't know that, then your belief system is severely lacking in explaining something as fundamental as consciousness. That's catastrophic, as far as I'm concerned.

There is no forthcoming explanation because no explanation is possible. Non-conscious stuff doesn't produce consciousness. It's a category error that leads to absurdities. I don't know if you in particular think a functional equivalent to a human brain made of flushing toilets would be conscious, but I've met plenty materialist who do think that, and it's not hard to get a materialist to agree to that absurdity.

There's no other intelligible option given what we know.

Pretty much every other option is better than brain=mental states. I'll use a favorite example of mine. Imagine two ancient Greeks talking about their mental states. Pretty easy to do, right? Now, if mental states are the exact same thing as brain states, and if those ancient Greeks are meaningfully talking about their mental states (which they are), it follows they're also meaningfully talking about their brain states. But of course ancient Greeks had no idea what the brain was even for, let alone describing brain states to each other. Therefore, mental states aren't brain states.

"The reason it is a one way street is because mind is not opposed to physical stuff, it is physical stuff. It's the physical stuff of which we are most acquainted with in merely having experience."

If you got a bunch of switches and ran a current through them and turned them on and off in a certain way...would consciousness be produced?

"Walking from legs" is not the same as "consciousness from non-conscious stuff".

"I feel that philosophy is the last place anywhere where claim should be censored or criticised politically."

I'm sure there are good utilitarian/consequentalist arguments for why ""Chinese people are inferior to Europeans"" should be censored here.

"Ergo, if I = something that's thinking, you are me, I'm you, you're Descartes, Descartes is me, so and so forth until I = everyone."

I don't agree with that. "I" /= "something that's thinking". "Something that's thinking" is a necessary condition for the self to exist, but it's not a sufficient condition. I like the definition of the self as "this particular conscious awareness".

Tautologies don't refute themselves. The Cogito is tautological, but it's also saying something about the world: you can doubt a lot of things, but you can't doubt that you're a thinking being, which heavily implies the primacy of mind.

Here's Descartes, confidently asserting, "I exist" and there's patients with Cotard delusion insisting, as confidently if not more so that "they don't exist."

It's a delusion. A necessary condition for uttering any sentence (esp. "I don't exist") is existence. We can quibble about what "I" means, but putting that aside, a person who claims they don't exist is wrong. The only thing that can refute Descartes is the existence of a nonexistent thinker.

Science is great at improving the dream we're all having.

I have a low understanding of this. It seems to me that a number like 2 is just a label for the idea of "a thing and a thing", and that 1+1 has to equal 2 because if you have a thing + a thing, necessarily, you have thing and thing (2). What am I missing?

Didn't Xeno's Paradox get solved?

I'm saying not having children on the basis of protecting an abstract being from being forced into suffering is not a moral issue. It's an imaginary one. When a sense of morality extends no further than the skull, can be accomplished in the comfort of one's home and without any interaction with real beings, I would argue it isn't morality at all.

I was thinking the same thing too, but I thought of it a different way. When people have kids, they're not literally bringing a new person into the world, they're creating a set of conditions that will result in new person X. So then the question becomes, is it moral to create a set of conditions that will actualize a potential person who can't give consent (because they don't exist yet)?

I think some morality applies there because I think it would be evil to create a set of conditions that would bring a person into the world to experience abject suffering (say the parents want to have a kid to torture it). It would be evil to do that even if the attempt failed. But if it's evil to do it, and the attempt failed, and there's no new person, who was harmed?

There was a Ren and Stimpy episode, where Stimpy forced Ren to wear a happiness helmet, which made him very happy. When Ren eventually gets it off, he's not happy with Stimpy. I kind of agree with him. Even if I have an absolute good I still can't force it on someone. That's a violation of their autonomy.

So, in the OP's example, even if Willy Wanka took everyone to literal Heaven, where they'll experience the most blissful state imaginable, he violated their autonomy, which makes it immoral. That's kind of a deontological position, I guess. A utilitarian would not agree.

I have created this world and will force others to enter it.

Do these "others" exist before you force them to enter your world?

I guess you're right. I don't make a conscious effort to ignore my shadow. It just sort of gets filtered out of my conscious awareness.

To ignore something requires you to notice it in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if animals just don't even notice the things in their visual field that don't represent threats or food, like the a cloud moving across the sky. The cloud probably never even rises to the level of conscious awareness. Some unconscious filtering mechanism probably is at work. This could be either learned or instinctual.

The other alternative is that the animal is constantly noticing it's shadow and choosing to ignore it, which would require some higher-level thinking.

Yes, "ignoring" implies a choice in the matter. Technically, my cat was not reacting to her shadow. Like Tim said, it's probably a learned response.

Continuity of phenomenal self-awareness is personal identity

I agree, so what happens when that continuity is broken by periods of non-consciousness? Death and rebirth?

It seems fantastical that a creature could simultaneously evolve an apparatus for seeing and an apparatus for processing the visual information by chance. We know it happened because of the fossil record, but we don't know what the odds of that happening randomly are because with a sample size of one, we can't conclude that evolution on Earth was an entirely random process.

Why necessarily? Couldn't the laws of the universe be different such that H20 is a mineral?

This is the line of thought Kripke addresses.

If H2O was a mineral in a universe with different laws, wouldn't it be H2O*? Presumably, the different laws of nature that allow H2O to become a mineral would affect either the Hydrogen, Oxygen, or chemistry of their interaction, so that you're really talking about something other than what we mean by H2O.

I was wondering if this holds true in a simulation too. Could the simulators take H2O, as it's currently understood by us, and make it become a mineral just be changing the simulation?

This is what I was getting at with InPitzotl: What does "Water is H2O" even mean in a simulation? All references to the external world in a simulation are just labels for bits of computer code. If simulations are even metaphysically possible, which I doubt.

So we agree that sometimes "H20” means water and sometimes it doesn't. Right?
— frank

From my second post:

H20 is water, but water is not necessarily H20.
— Fooloso4

I would argue that there are possible worlds where reality is a simulation and H2O isn't water.

Ok, that was a good discussion.

If this is a simulation, what would you define water as? A combination of things or computer code?

If you agree that we can make hydrogen and oxygen using electrolysis while simultaneously reducing the total amount of water in direct accordance with the model of chemistry, then in what sense does your claim that it's not a combination of things mean something?

It means reality is such that water is not made of particles, but is an idea. That's a meaningful statement about reality. Proving it is hard, but idealism certainly isn't meaningless.

If you're not talking about the nature of things, you're talking about how things seem to be. The idealist chemist will, of course, agree with the materialist chemist about what appears to be going on. If that's what you mean by "mechanics", then, yes, the idealist and materialist will agree on what they're perceiving, but that's not interesting.

I have no problem with water appears to be H2O. I have a problem with water is (=) H2O. When you unpack "water is H2O" you immediately run into a problem: "water is H2O" means, among other things, that water is a combination of things. I don't agree that water is a combination of things.

Pretty much. You have exactly the same mechanics here as you do with materialism. The only difference is that you posit those things to be composed of ideas.

There's a difference between observed behavior and the true nature of things. An idealist and materialist aren't going to agree on the mechanics of things, because an idealist will always say, "the dreamer is the reason we're seeing what we're seeing" to the question "Why are we seeing this?". The materialist, of course, will not accept that as an answer. That's the mechanics of the issue (which I take you to mean "how things really are").

As an idealist, I'm not going to claim that water is an idea that is made up two distinct ideas joined together. For one, that's incoherent (again, there's the difference between how things appear to be and how things really are- water appears to be made of hydrogen and oxygen. Water is not actually made of hydrogen and oxygen), and for another, I don't have to claim that, because reality is a dream and the foundational substance of things is thought and ideas. Thought and idea can be literally anything, except a logical contradiction.

"I don't think this works in practice. We don't have idealists trying to fly by wishing they can fly. They still live in the same world self proclaimed materialists do, and still buy the same airplane tickets."

The fact that this is a dream doesn't entail that I think I'll be able to fly. I act just like materialists do, but at the foundational level, I don't agree with their claims, such as I don't believe water is made of anything. It appears to be that way, but it's not.

An idealist in a chemistry class will still note twice as much gas being collected at the negative probe as they would at the positive probe. Such consistent behaviors of the idea-of-water and the idea-of-DC-circuits, which seems independent of the wishes of the person performing the experiment, deserves names to call them for pragmatic reasons. "Hydrogen" is a perfectly good name for the gas that comes out at the negative end; that's what other English speakers call it. "Oxygen" is a fine name to call what comes out at the positive end. You could even go so far as to get a PhD in chemistry; even win Nobel prizes for it, and still be an idealist... all you're committing to is that somehow these descriptions are describing ideas.

An idealist in chemistry, when asked "why are you observing what you're observing", will ultimately claim, "I observe whatever the mind(s) creating this reality are projecting." The materialist chemistry teacher will not agree with that.

Much appreciated.