The title of this topic is about the first/third person divide, which Chalmers asserts to be fundamental to said 'hard problem', but it isn't. The qualia is what's hard. — noAxioms


This feels like a strange misunderstanding. Qualia are intrinsically first person. When people talk about first person experience being mysterious, they are talking about qualia, not mere geometric POV. — hypericin

I think that's what I said. It makes qualia the fundamental issue, not first person, which is, as you call it, mere geometric PoV.

This especially raises my eyebrows, because I remember a time you thought you were a p zombie!

Kind of still do, but claiming to be a p-zombie opens myself to the possibility that some others are not, and if so, that all of say quantum theory is wrong, or at least grossly incomplete.

No, I cannot describe thoughts in terms of neurons any more than I can describe a network file server in terms of electrons tunneling through the base potential of transistors. It's about 12 levels of detail removed from where it should be. — noAxioms

Ok, wrong word. You agreed they are the same thing. But they can't be described as the same thing. — Patterner

Not sure what two things are the same here, but I don't think I said that two different things are the same thing. Certainly not in that quote.

I am trying to understand your position.

My position is simply that nobody has ever demonstrated the simpler model wrong. Plenty (yourself included) reject that simplicity, which is your choice. But the physical view hasn't been falsified, and there is no current alternative theory of physics that allows what you're proposing. You'd think somebody would have come up with one if such a view was actually being taken seriously by the scientific community.

I really don't understand what you are going on about. A brain is a physical object. In principal, you can build a brain that does all the things brains do from scratch if you had the technological capabilities. — Apustimelogist

Given their trouble even producing a manufactured cell from scratch (a designed one, not a reproduction of abiogenesis, which is unlikely to be done), you wonder if it can even be done in principle. Certainly a brain would not be operational. It needs a being to be in, and that being needs an environment, hence my suggestion of a simulation of <a person in a small room>. The other thing questionably doable is the scanning phase, to somehow take a full snapshot of a living thing, enough info to, in principle, reproduce it. Do they have a simulation of a living cell? Are we even that far yet?

Anyway, in general, I agree with your stance, even if perhaps not with what cannot be done even in principle.

You’re missing the point. Even taking into account all of the biological lineages which become extinct, what it means to be a living system is to be self-organizing, and this self-organization is dynamic. — Joshs

Yea, which is why mechanical devices are not yet living things. It can happen. Whether it will or not is an open question at this point. A device being living is not a requirement for it to think or to have a point of view.

This means that to continue existing as that creature from moment to moment is to make changes in itself that maintain the normative self-consistency of its functioning in its environment while at the same time adapting and accommodating itself to the always new features of its environment.

You mean like putting on a coat when winter comes? What does this have to do with the topic again? The definition of 'life' comes up only because you're asserting that life seems to have access to a kind of physics that the same matter not currently part of a lifeform does not.

My position is simply that nobody has ever demonstrated the simpler model wrong. Plenty (yourself included) reject that simplicity, which is your choice. But the physical view hasn't been falsified, and there is no current alternative theory of physics that allows what you're proposing. You'd think somebody would have come up with one if such a view was actually being taken seriously by the scientific community. — noAxioms

The simpler model is proven wrong all the time. Put more accurately, scientific paradigms are replaced by different ones all the time. Since I am a Kuhnian rather than a Popperian, I dont want to say that the older view is falsified by the newer one. Rather, the frame of intelligiblity is turned on it head from time to time, leading to changes in basic concepts, what counts an evidence and even scientific method itself. From a short distance , it may seem as if there is one scientific method that has been in use for three hundreds of years, and that new discoveries about the brain are simply added to the older ones with minor adjustments. But from a vantage of greater historical depth, it can be seen that all concepts are in play, not just those concerned with how to create the best third person theory, but whether a ‘simple’ empirical model implies a physicalistic account, what a third person theory is, what a first person account is, and how to conceive the relationship between them. For instance, certain embodied enactivist approaches to the brain , such as Francisco Varela’s neurophenomneology, sweepingly rethink this relation.

So, on its own terms, what you call the ‘simple’ empirical model can’t be defined in some static, ahistorical way as third person physicalism as opposed to subjective feeling.

Certainly a brain would not be operational. It needs a being to be in, and that being needs an environment, hence my suggestion of a simulation of <a person in a small room> — noAxioms

Yes, if your aim is to get your brain to do what living brains do, you have to start by keeping in mind that a life form isn’t a thing placed in an environment. It IS an environment, indissociably brain, body and world in inextricable interaction. That has to be the starting point. As soon as we start thinking that we have to ‘invent’ a body and an environment for a device we separately invent , and ignore the fact that we ourselves were not first invented and then placed in a body and a room, we have guaranteed that our device will not ‘think’ the way that living systems think. If, on the other hand, we take as our task the modification of an already existing ecology (biological computing in a test tube), we are on the road to systems that think the way creatures ( including plants) think.

You’re missing the point. Even taking into account all of the biological lineages which become extinct, what it means to be a living system is to be self-organizing, and this self-organization is dynamic.
— Joshs
Yea, which is why mechanical devices are not yet living things. It can happen. Whether it will or not is an open question at this point. A device being living is not a requirement for it to think or to have a point of view — noAxioms

The reason it’s a question of the material is more a matter of the capacities of the material to be intrinsically self-transforming and self-organizing than whether we use silicon or dna strands as our building blocks. What I mean is that we can’t start with inorganic parts that we understand in terms of already fixed properties ( which would appear to be intrinsic to how we define the inorganic) and then design self-organizing capacities around these parts. Such a system can never be fundamentally , ecologically self-organizing in the way a living environment of organic molecules is, and thus cannot think in the way living creatures think.

This means that to continue existing as that creature from moment to moment is to make changes in itself that maintain the normative self-consistency of its functioning in its environment while at the same time adapting and accommodating itself to the always new features of its environment.
You mean like putting on a coat when winter comes? What does this have to do with the topic again? The definition of 'life' comes up only because you're asserting that life seems to have access to a kind of physics that the same matter not currently part of a lifeform does not. — noAxioms

Yes, a popular conception of both living and non-living things is that they start from building blocks, and thinking is computation, which can be performed with any material that can be used to symbolize one’s and zeros. Add in non-linear recursive functions and. presto, you have a self-organizing system. This will certainly work if what we want are machines which perform endless variations on themes set by the fixed properties of their building blocks as we conceptualization them , and the constraints of digital algorithms.

My point is really that we need to listen to those theorists (Physicist Karen Barad, Joseph Rouse, James Bridle) who suggest that material entities don’t pre-exist their interactions ( or ‘intra-actions’), and the limitations of our current models of both the living and the non-living have to do with their reliance on the concept of a building block. Just as any material will do if we think of thinking ( and materials) in terms of computational patterns of ones and zeros, no material will do, not even organic molecules, if we want to have such entities think the way life thinks.

Given that the thinking of our best engineers doesn’t even represent the leading edge of thinking of our era, it’s kind of hard to imagine how their slightly moldy concepts instantiated in a self-learning a.i., will lead to the singularity. — Joshs

I don't understand this sentiment. It's not a refutation of the possibilities of what can be created, neither is it a realistic sentiment about how the world works. Things change, ideas advance, ideas bleed over between different fields. Doubt anyone in 1950 at the time could tangibly envision technologoy that does what A.I. are doing now.

The fact that the architectures of our most self-organizing machines depend on locking in certain grounding concepts to define the parameters and properties of self-organization ( properties which will change along with the concepts in a few years as the engineers come up with better machines) means that these concepts are in fact forms of hardcoding. — Joshs

And this would apply to all living organisms: jellyfish, plants, the many kinds of brains, neural webs, etc, etc.

Regarding the distinction between 'living beings' and AI, I believe that @Joshs did a very good job in explaining (much clearer than I could) why I also think why there is a real distinction between them.

Anyway, even if I granted to you that in the future we might be able to build a 'sentient articial intelligence', I believe that the 'hard problem' would remain. In virtue of what properties of the inanimate aspects of reality can consciousness (with its 'first-person perspective', 'qualia' etc) arise?

And even it is unrelated to the 'hard problem', I think that the undeniable existence of mathematical truths also points to something beyond 'physicalism'*. That there are an infinite number of primes seems to be something that is independent from human knowledge and also spatio-temporal location. In fact, it seems utterly independent from spacetime.

*TBH, there is always the problem of what one means by 'physicalism'. I mean, I do not see how, for instance, 'panpsychism' is inconsistent to a very broad definition of 'physicalism' in which "what is spatio-temporal" includes everything that is real.
As I said before, however, I believe we can know something that cannot be included in a meaningful way in the category of the 'physcial'.

Regarding the 'magic' thing, then, it seems to me that the criterion you give about 'not being magical' is something like being 'totally understandable', something that is not too dissimilar to the ancient notion of 'intelligibility'. That is, if one has a 'fuzzy explantion' of a given phenomenon where something is left unexplained, the explanation is magical. If that is so, however, it seems to me that you assume that the 'laws of thought' and the 'laws of nature' are so close to each other than one has to ask how is it possible in purely physicalist terms?
Physical causality doesn't seem to explain, say, logical implication. It doesn't seem possible IMO to explain in purely physical terms why from "Socrates is a man" and "men are mortal" that "Socrates is mortal". If 'physical reality' is so intelligible as you think it is, it seems to me that your own view is actually not very far from, ironically, to positing an ontologically fundamental 'mental' aspect to reality.

I am not saying you are wrong here. I actually find a lot to agree here but, curiously, intelligibility suggests to me that there is a fundamental mental aspect to reality whereas if I am not misunderstading you, you seem to think that intelligibility actually is a strong evidence for physicalism. Interesting.

Given their trouble even producing a manufactured cell from scratch (a designed one, not a reproduction of abiogenesis, which is unlikely to be done), you wonder if it can even be done in principle. — noAxioms

Well this is then just a speculation about technological capability, which I referred to conditionally.

Given that the thinking of our best engineers doesn’t even represent the leading edge of thinking of our era, it’s kind of hard to imagine how their slightly moldy concepts instantiated in a self-learning a.i., will lead to the singularity.
— Joshs

I don't understand this sentiment. It's not a refutation of the possibilities of what can be created, neither is it a realistic sentiment about how the world works. Things change, ideas advance, ideas bleed over between different fields. Doubt anyone in 1950 at the time could tangibly envision technologoy that does what A.I. are doing now.

The fact that the architectures of our most self-organizing machines depend on locking in certain grounding concepts to define the parameters and properties of self-organization ( properties which will change along with the concepts in a few years as the engineers come up with better machines) means that these concepts are in fact forms of hardcoding.
— Joshs

And this would apply to all living organisms: jellyfish, plants, the many kinds of brains, neural webs, etc, etc. — Apustimelogist

I’m realizing after my last post to NoAxioms that what I’m arguing is not that our technological capabilities dont evolve along with our knowledge, nor am I claiming that the fruits of such technological progress don’t include systems that think in ways that deeply overlap thinking in living organisms. What I am arguing is that the implications of such progress, which the leading edge of thinking in philosophy and psychological sciences points to, necessitates a change in our vocabulary, a shift away from certain concepts that now dominate thinking about the possibilities of a.i.

Im thinking of notions like the evolution of our devices away from our control and beyond our own cognitive capabilities, the idea that a thinking system is ‘invented’ from components, that the materials used in instantiating a thinking machine don’t matter, and that it is fundamentally computational in nature. I recognize that those who say today’s a.i. already mirrors how humans think. are absolutely correct in one sense: their models of human behavior mirror their models of a.i. behavior. So when I protest that today’s a.i. in no way captures how we think, I’m making two points. First, I am saying that they are failing to capture how humans think. I am comparing their model of human behavior to an alternative which I believe is much richer. And second, that richer model demands a change in the way we talk about what it means to be a machine.

In a way, this debate doesn’t even need to bring in our understanding of what specific current a.i. approaches can do or speculation about what future ones will do. Everything I want to argue for and against concerning what a.i. is and can become is already contained with my dfferences with you concerning what humans and other animals are doing when they think. This gets into the most difficult philosophical and psychological perspectives of the past 150 years, and discussions about a.i. technology derive their sense from this more fundamental ground.

I think that's what I said. It makes qualia the fundamental issue, not first person, which is, as you call it, mere geometric PoV. — noAxioms

You seem to be arguing against a position that nobody takes. Neither Chalmers nor anyone else believe geometric PoV is mysterious. Everyone agrees that qualia is the fundamental issue.

and if so, that all of say quantum theory is wrong, or at least grossly incomplete. — noAxioms

Not necessarily. It is the "hard problem", not the "impossible problem". Chalmers does believe physics is incomplete, but several believe consciousness is explicable naturally without amending physics, while still acknowledging the uniquely difficult status of the hard problem.

Everything I want to argue for and against concerning what a.i. is and can become is already contained with my dfferences with you concerning what humans and other animals are doing when they think. — Joshs

I don't think there is any fundamental difference here between what I think about what humans and animals do, I think the disagreement is about relevance.

I don't think there is any fundamental difference here between what I think about what humans and animals do, I think the disagreement is about relevance. — Apustimelogist

You’re saying you think you and I are approaching our understanding of human and animal cognition from the same philosophical perspective? And what does our disagreement over relevance pertain to? Whether how one understands human and animal cognition is relevant to the production of a.i. that can think like humans and animals?

You’re saying you think you and I are approaching our understanding of human and animal cognition from the same philosophical perspective? — Joshs

Broadly, yes.

And what does our disagreement over relevance pertain to? — Joshs

When I came into this thread I was talking about the hard problem of consciousness and the plausibility that physical mechanisms can produce all human behavior. The point was that I don't believe there is anything in the field of neuroscience or A.I. that produces a doubt about the idea that we will be able to keep continuing to see what brains do as instantiated entirely in physical interactions of components as opposed to requiring some additional mental woo we don't yet understand.

t I don't believe there is anything in the field of neuroscience or A.I. that produces a doubt about the idea that we will be able to keep continuing to see what brains do as instantiated entirely in physical interactions of components as opposed to requiring some additional mental woo we don't yet understand — Apustimelogist

Yes , that’s what I thought. So that indicates a distinctly different philosophical perspective on human and animal cognition than my view, which is to closer to enactivists like Evan Thompson:

"I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn't conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically of essentially non-experiential. But, again, this point doesn't entail that nature is intrinsically or essentially experiential (this is the line that pan-psychists and Whiteheadians take). (Maybe it is, but I don't think we're now in position to know that.) All I want to say for now (or think I have grounds for saying now) is that we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental)."

“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem, but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world.

Yes , that’s what I thought. So that indicates a distinctly different philosophical perspective on human and animal
cognition. My perspective to closer to enactivists like Evan Thompson: — Joshs

I mean the quote doesn't seem distinctly enactivist to me, but more focused on the inability to explain qualia. At the same time, I can clarify that I didn't mean anything about qualia or experience in the previous post, I only meant behavior, as I mentioned in the first sentence. I just struggle to find any motivation for the sentiment that in principle physical mechanisms cannot explain all behavior, partly because that claim would entail some radical revisions to what we know about the universe that I think we should probably be more aware of by now.

Edit: and I should probably clarify more that targeting behavior specifically was due to the p-zombie thought experiment I described which is about the threat of epiphenomenalism.

The point was that I don't believe there is anything in the field of neuroscience or A.I. that produces a doubt about the idea that we will be able to keep continuing to see what brains do as instantiated entirely in physical interactions of components as opposed to requiring some additional mental woo we don't yet understand. — Apustimelogist

:100:

I'm curious as to whether @Joshs recognizes this.

"I am trying to understand your position."

My position is simply that nobody has ever demonstrated the simpler model wrong. — noAxioms

I am trying to understand the simpler model.

Ok, wrong word. You agreed they are the same thing. But they can't be described as the same thing.
— Patterner
Not sure what two things are the same here, but I don't think I said that two different things are the same thing. Certainly not in that quote. — noAxioms

You agreed that

brain states and conscious events are the same thing. So the arrangements of all the particles of the brain, which are constantly changing, and can only change according to the laws of physics that govern their interactions, ARE my experience of seeing red; feeling pain; thinking of something that doesn't exist, and going through everything to make it come into being; thinking of something that can't exist; on and on. It is even the case that the progressions of brain states are the very thoughts of thinking about themselves. — Patterner

But then you said "I cannot describe thoughts in terms of neurons any more than I can describe a network file server in terms of electrons tunneling through the base potential of transistors." So they are the same thing, but they can't be described as the same thing.

Granted, "described" might not be the best word. Maybe it's wrong wording to say the movement of air particles in a room is a description of the room's heat and pressure. But they are the same thing. And it's all physical, and mathematically described. As Paul Davies writes in The Demon in the Machine:

I mentioned that gas molecules rush around, and the hotter the gas, the faster they go. But not all molecules move with the same speed. In a gas at a fixed temperature energy is shared out randomly, not uniformly, meaning that some molecules move more quickly than others. Maxwell himself worked out precisely how the energy was distributed among the molecules – what fraction have half the average speed, twice the average, and so on. — Paul Davies

You seem to be arguing against a position that nobody takes. Neither Chalmers nor anyone else believe geometric PoV is mysterious. Everyone agrees that qualia is the fundamental issue. — hypericin

The title of Chalmers' paper quoted in the OP implies very much that the hard problem boils down to first vs third person, and that qualia are considered just 'many aspects' of that mystery. To requote from my OP:
"The first person is, at least to many of us, still a huge mystery. The famous "Mind-Body Problem," in these enlightened materialist days, reduces to nothing but the question "What is the first person, and how is it possible?". There are many aspects to the first-person mystery. The first-person view of the mental encompasses phenomena which seem to resist any explanation from the third person."

In asking 'what is the first person?', he seems to be talking about something less trivial than what we called a geometric point of view, but I cannot identify what else there is to it.

Regarding the distinction between 'living beings' and AI — boundless

That's a false dichotomy. Something can be all three (living, artificial, and/or intelligent), none, or any one or two of them.

[/quote]In virtue of what properties of the inanimate aspects of reality can consciousness (with its 'first-person perspective', 'qualia' etc) arise?[/quote]I can't even answer that about living things. I imagine the machines will find their own way of doing it and not let humans attempt to tell them how. That's how it's always worked.

I think that the undeniable existence of mathematical truths also points to something beyond 'physicalism'*.

Beyond materialism you perhaps mean. Physicalism/naturalism doesn't assert that all is physical/natural. Materialism does. That seems the primary difference between the two.
Of course I wouldn't list mathematics as being 'something else', but rather a foundation for our physical. But that's just me. Physicalism itself makes no such suggestion.
PS: Never say 'undeniable'. There's plenty that deny that mathematical truths are something that 'exists'. My personal opinion is that such truths exist no less than does our universe, but indeed is in no way dependent on our universe.

That there are an infinite number of primes seems to be something that is independent from human knowledge — boundless

Agree, but there are those that define mathematics as a human abstraction, in which case it wouldn't be independent of human knowledge. I distinguish mathematics from 'knowledge of mathematics', putting the two on nearly opposite ends of my supervention hierarchy.

Regarding the 'magic' thing, then, it seems to me that the criterion you give about 'not being magical' is something like being 'totally understandable', something that is not too dissimilar to the ancient notion of 'intelligibility'. — boundless

Let's reword that as not being a function of something understandable. The basic particle behavior of electrons and such are pretty well understood, but we're just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding of what goes on in a star, especially when it transitions. That current lack of understanding does not imply that astronomers consider stellar evolution to be a supernatural process. I mean, they used to think the gods carted the stars across the sky each night, which actually is a supernatural proposal.
Actual proposal of magic is an assertion that current ideas have been demonstrated incapable of explaining some phenomenon, such as the rotation curve of galaxies. Dark matter had to be invented to explain that, and there are those that still won't accept dark matter theory. Pretty hard to find any of it in a lab, right? So there are alternate theories(e.g. MoND), but none predict as well as dark matter theory. Key there is 'theory'. Without one of those, it's still just magic.
If one dares to promote Chalmers' ideas to the level of theory, it does make predictions, and it fails them. So proponents tend to not escalate their ideas to that level.

It doesn't seem possible IMO to explain in purely physical terms why from "Socrates is a man" and "men are mortal" that "Socrates is mortal" — boundless

That's mathematics, not physics, even if the nouns in those statements happen to have physical meaning. They could be replaced by X Y Z and the logical meaning would stand unaltered.

Well this is then just a speculation about technological capability, which I referred to conditionally. — Apustimelogist

Just the manufacture seems to defy any tech. Can't say 3D print a squirrel, finish, and then 'turn it on'. Or can you? Best I could come up with is a frog, printed totally frozen. When finished, thaw it out. Frogs/turtles can deal with that. Again, I am mostly agreeing with your side of the discussion with Joshs.

The point was that I don't believe there is anything in the field of neuroscience or A.I. that produces a doubt about the idea that we will be able to keep continuing to see what brains do as instantiated entirely in physical interactions of components as opposed to some additional mental woo. — Apustimelogist

As already noted, that was put rather well. There are claims to the contrary, but they seem to amount to no more than assertions. None of the claims seem backed.

The simpler model is proven wrong all the time. Put more accurately, scientific paradigms are replaced by different ones all the time. — Joshs

Agree. Science is never complete, and there are very much current known holes, such as the lack of a unified field theory. These continuous updates to the consensus view doesn't stop that view from being the simpler model. I am looking for a falsification specifically of physical monism, hard to do without any competing theories.

Funny that some declared physics to be complete at some point, with the only work remaining being working out some constants to greater precision. That was uttered famously by Lord Kelvin, shortly before the quantum/relativity revolution that tore classical physics to pieces, never to recover.
So yes, there very well could arise some theory of mental properties of matter, but at this time there isn't one at all, and much worse, no need for one has been demonstrated.

For instance, certain embodied enactivist approaches to the brain , such as Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenology, sweepingly rethink this relation.

Interesting reference. Seems perhaps to be a new methodology and not necessarily something that falsifies any particular philosophical stance. Maybe you could point out some key quotes that I could find in my initial scan of some of the references to this.

So, on its own terms, what you call the ‘simple’ empirical model can’t be defined in some static, ahistorical way as third person physicalism as opposed to subjective feeling.

Scientific naturalism does not preclude subjective evidence. I don't know what 'third person physicalism' is, as distinct from physicalism. 'Third person' refers to how any view might be described, but it says nothing about what the view proposes.

As soon as we start thinking that we have to ‘invent’ a body and an environment for a device we separately invent

Sorry, but my proposal did not separate anything like you suggest. There is one system with a boundary, all simulated, something that can be achieved in principle. There would be a real person in a real room, and a simulation of same. Thing is to see if either can figure out which he is.

The test requires a known state of the real subject, and that pushes the limits of 'in principle' perhaps a bit too far. Such a state in sufficient precision is prevented per Heisenberg. So much for my falsification test of physicalism. Better to go long-run and simulate a human from say a zygote, but then there's no real person with whom experience can be compared.

... ignore the fact that we ourselves were not first invented and then placed in a body ...

What does it even syntactically mean for X to be placed in X?

What I mean is that we can’t start with inorganic parts that we understand in terms of already fixed properties ( which would appear to be intrinsic to how we define the inorganic) and then design self-organizing capacities around these parts. — Joshs

Why not? With or without the design part... Designing it likely omits most of those properties since they serve little purpose to the designer.

Granted, "described" might not be the best word. Maybe it's wrong wording to say the movement of air particles in a room is a description of the room's heat and pressure. — Patterner

That's like one step away. Yes, heat is simple and can pretty much be described that way. From atoms to consciousness is about 12 steps away (my quote, and no, I didn't count). I gave the example of trying to explain stellar dynamics in terms of particle interactions.

The point was that I don't believe there is anything in the field of neuroscience or A.I. that produces a doubt about the idea that we will be able to keep continuing to see what brains do as instantiated entirely in physical interactions of components as opposed to requiring some additional mental woo we don't yet understand.
— Apustimelogist

:100:

I'm curious as to whether Joshs recognizes this. — wonderer1

If you wrote this after reading the quote I included from Evan Thompson, maybe you should re-read it. The issue isnt a choice between the physical and the mental, it’s about re-construing what both of these concepts mean in the direction of a model which is radically interactive, both post-physicalistic and post-“qualia”, post-internalistic and post-externalistic. The very concept of “qualia” as a private inner datum depends on a physicalistic metaphysics in which on one side stands third person , external, non-experiential materiality and on the other there is inner mental woo. Such a dualism tends to treat mental and physical as radically distinct, with one not affecting the other, or mental being epiphenomenal. I’m guessing your inclination is to stick with the physicalistic side of the dualism and either deny or ignore the other, as eliminative materialists like Churchland and Dennett have done.

I mean the quote doesn't seem distinctly enactivist to me, but more focused on the inability to explain qualia. At the same time, I can clarify that I didn't mean anything about qualia or experience in the previous post, I only meant behavior, as I mentioned in the first sentence. — Apustimelogist

Well, it came from the co-originator of the research field
of enactivism, and the point of enactivism is that cognition, affect and consciousness are not computational or representational processes taking place inside of a head, they are reciprocal circuits of actions distributed between brain, body and world. There is no such thing as “qualia” if qualia is meant to imply some ineffable inner inner experience. All mental phenomena of felt awareness are processes of interaction with a world, not a private, inner datum. The qualitative , experiential aspect of consciousness is emergent, but emergence cannot be possible unless what emerges is already present in some fashion in what it emerges from. That is to say, qualitative difference is produced within material interactions of all kinds, as intrinsic to materiality. This is a post-physicalistic view of the natural world.

I am looking for a falsification specifically of physical monism, hard to do without any competing theories. — noAxioms

It’s even harder to do when you haven’t read the competing theories. You could start here:

https://unstable.nl/andreas/ai/langcog/part3/varela_npmrhp.pdf

Varela’s neurophenomenology is an alternative to “physical monism” in the sense that he thought the ontology of mind requires broadening our conception of nature. If you define “the physical” narrowly (as purely third-person measurable stuff), then no, experience doesn’t fit. But if you define nature in a way that includes the lived as well as the measurable, then you get a non-reductive monism (sometimes called non-dual). Some scholars (including Evan Thompson) describe this as a form of neutral monism or non-dual naturalism: the idea that mind and matter are not two substances, but two aspects of one underlying reality. Importantly. neurophenomenology is not anti-naturalist. It’s an expanded naturalism that insists first-person consciousness is an indispensable datum of science, not an illusion.

Instead of saying “consciousness just is brain activity,” Varela says “brain activity and conscious experience are reciprocally illuminating dimensions of a single living system.” And instead of saying “consciousness is an immaterial stuff,” he insists it’s embodied, enacted, and inseparable from biological and social dynamics.

Or here:

https://smartnightreadingroom.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/meeting-the-universe-halfway.pdf

Physicist Karen Barad’s re-interpretation of the double slit experiment in quantum field theory in the direction of, but beyond Niels Bohr represents the core of her alternative to physical monism., which she calls agential realism. She is one of the pioneers and most influential members of the community that calls itself New Materialism.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337351875_WHAT_IS_NEW_MATERIALISM

Just the manufacture seems to defy any tech. Can't say 3D print a squirrel, finish, and then 'turn it on'. Or can you? Best I could come up with is a frog, printed totally frozen. When finished, thaw it out. Frogs/turtles can deal with that. Again, I am mostly agreeing with your side of the discussion with Joshs. — noAxioms

Well, you won't know just by looking at our technology. We don't know what technology will happen or can happen. Its speculation. But I said if we had the technology to do something. I think that the ultimate limit is what the laws of physics would allow you to do, what can be manipulated, which seems to be quite a lot. I remember people give examples that if you smash a glass on the floor and see it smash everywhere, there is nothing in Newtonian physics that says the reverse process can't happen: i.e. lots of sprinkles of glass from all directions gather up on the floor into a perfectly formed glass then bounce up into someones hand. This is a completely physically acceptable process; it can happen under Newtonian physics even if the initial conditions would be very difficult to produce. It just needs a method (or technology) to produce the initial conditions. There's a lot physics might seem to allow you to do in principle if you get the conditions correct, the technology to produce those conditions. But at the same time, such processes will still remaon physically acceptable in principle even if it is very difficult to get those required conditions together.

I clearly didn't read the quote properly because re-reading it I think its not that far from my view, broadly. Maybe not identical, but not really fundamentally that disagreeable. I am just quite allergic to the way that passage was written so it put me off reading it more closely.

That's a false dichotomy. Something can be all three (living, artificial, and/or intelligent), none, or any one or two of them. — noAxioms

I was making a point about the current AI and living beings. In any case, until one can find a way to generate truly artificial life, there is no 'artificial life'. But in my post, I was even conceding the possibility of sentient AI.

I can't even answer that about living things. I imagine the machines will find their own way of doing it and not let humans attempt to tell them how. That's how it's always worked. — noAxioms

That's the hard problem though. The problem is how to explain consciousness in terms of properties of the 'inanimate'. So, yeah, probably the 'hard problem' isn't a 'problem' for 'physicalism' but of all attempts to treat the 'inanimate' as fundamental and 'consciousness' as derivative from it.

In a similar way, I believe that one can also make a similar point about the 'living beings' in general. All living beings seem to me to show a degree of intentionality (goal-directed behaviours, self-organization) that is simply not present in 'non-living things'. So in virtue of what properties of 'non-living things' can intentionality that seems to be present in all life forms arise?

Note that in order to solve both these problems you would need a theory that explain how consciousness, intentionality, life etc arose. If the 'inanimate' is fundamental, you should expect to find an explanation on how consciousness, intentionality, life and so on came into being, not just that they come into being. And the explanation must be complete.

Beyond materialism you perhaps mean. Physicalism/naturalism doesn't assert that all is physical/natural. — noAxioms

? Not sure how. At least physicalism means that the 'natural' is fundamental. In any case, however, with regards to consciousness, consciousness in a physicalist model would be considered natural. And something like math either an useful fiction or a fundamental aspect of nature (in this latter case, I believe that it would be inappropriate to call such a view 'physicalism', but anyway...)

Of course I wouldn't list mathematics as being 'something else', but rather a foundation for our physical. But that's just me. Physicalism itself makes no such suggestion. — noAxioms

Interesting. I do in fact agree with you here. However, I believe that your conception of 'physical/natural' is too broad. What isn't natural in your view?

PS: Never say 'undeniable'. There's plenty that deny that mathematical truths are something that 'exists'. My personal opinion is that such truths exist no less than does our universe, but indeed is in no way dependent on our universe. — noAxioms

Right, I admit that there is no conseus and perhaps the majority view is that mathematics is just an useful abstraction. To be honest, however, I always found the arguments for that view unpersuasive and often based on a strictly empiricist view of knowledge. I believe it is one of those topics where both 'parties' (I mean the 'realist' and the 'anti-realist' about the ontology of mathematics in a broad sense of these terms) are unable to find a common ground with the opponents.

I agree with you about the fact that mathematics doesn't depend on the universe. I have a different view about the relation between mathematics and the universe. For instance, I believe that mathematical truths would still be true even if the universe didn't exist. I do see this universe as contingent whereas mathematical truths as non-contingent.

Let's reword that as not being a function of something understandable.
... — noAxioms

It seems to me that you here are assuming that all possible 'non-magical' explanations are 'natural/physical' one. This seems to me a stretch.

I also don't like to make the distinction between 'supernatural' and 'natural', unless one defines the terms in a precise way. Perhaps, I would define 'natural' as 'pertaining to spacetime' (so, both spacetime - or spacetimes if there is a multiverse - and whatever is 'in' it would qualify as 'natural').

Regarding the point you make about Chalmers, as I said before perhaps the 'hard problem' is better framed as an objection to all reductionist understanding of consciosuness that try to reduce it to the inanimate rather than an objection to 'physicalism' in a broad sense of the term.

That's mathematics, not physics, even if the nouns in those statements happen to have physical meaning. They could be replaced by X Y Z and the logical meaning would stand unaltered. — noAxioms

Yes, we can also make a purely formal syllogism. But that's my point, after all. Why the 'laws' of valid reasoning can apply to 'reality'? If mathematical and logical 'laws' aren't at least a fundamental aspect of nature (or, even more fundamental than nature), how could we even accept whatever 'explanation' as a 'valid explanation' of anything? Also: is physical causality the same as logical causality?

I believe that people who deny the independent existence of 'mathematical' and 'logical' truths/laws assert that our notion of logical implication, numbers etc are abstractions from our experience. The problem, though, is that if you try to explain how we could 'generate' these abstractions, you need to assume these laws are valid in order to make that explanation. This to me shows that logical and mathematical truths/laws are not mere abstractions. But to be honest even if I find such a brief argument convincing of this, I admit that many would not be convinced by this argument. Why this is so, I do not know...

In a similar way, I believe that one can also make a similar point about the 'living beings' in general. All living beings seem to me to show a degree of intentionality (goal-directed behaviours, self-organization) that is simply not present in 'non-living things'. So in virtue of what properties of 'non-living things' can intentionality that seems to be present in all life forms arise? — boundless

Also, I would add that the apparent 'gradation' of 'intentionality' found in 'entities' at the border of being 'living' and 'non-living' like viruses isn't really evidence for a 'reductionist' view. After all, if viruses have a rudimentary form of intentionality it has still to be explained.

In asking 'what is the first person?', he seems to be talking about something less trivial than what we called a geometric point of view, but I cannot identify what else there is to it. — noAxioms

This should be a strong clue:

The first-person view of the mental encompasses phenomena which seem to resist any explanation from the third person. — noAxioms

These phenomena are qualia.

If you still doubt this I'm sure I can find more explicit passages in the paper or elsewhere.

Regarding the 'magic' thing, then, it seems to me that the criterion you give about 'not being magical' is something like being 'totally understandable', something that is not too dissimilar to the ancient notion of 'intelligibility'.
— boundless
Let's reword that as not being a function of something understandable. — noAxioms

The definition of "magical" can only be something along the lines of:
Something that operates outside of the laws and properties of this reality.
Our understanding is irrelevant.

We don't understand how mass warps spacetime. But we don't think gravity is magic. We don't understand how dark matter warps spacetime, but doesn't interact with light or other electromagnetic radiation. But, despite not being able to detect it, we hypothesize dark matter's existence, and we don't say the motion of the galaxies is the result of magic.

That's like one step away. Yes, heat is simple and can pretty much be described that way. From atoms to consciousness is about 12 steps away (my quote, and no, I didn't count). I gave the example of trying to explain stellar dynamics in terms of particle interactions. — noAxioms

Yes. Chalmers mentions the hurricane in this video:

Who would ever guess that the motion of a hurricane would emerge from simple principles of airflow. But what you find in all those other cases, like the hurricane, and the water wave, and so on, is complicated dynamics emerging from simple dynamics. Complicated structures emerging from simple structures. New and surprising structures. — Chalners

The same for stellar evolution, which, certainly, nobody considers to be a supernatural process. There is no point in time when any part of a star, or hurricane, that we can observe in any way, is not physical, not observable and measurable in one way or another. We can measure a star's size, it's brightness, its output of various kinds of radiation. We can measure the diameter and circumference of a hurricane, its temperature, how fast it circulates, how fast it moves over the surface of the planet. We can calculate how much water it contains. The defining characteristics of stars and hurricanes are physical events that we can quantify. I don't hold it against scientists who study stellar dynamics and hurricanes that they can't calculate exactly when one will begin or end, know exactly what is going on at any point inside it, or understand it in every detail at every point at every moment.