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.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
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.This especially raises my eyebrows, because I remember a time you thought you were a p zombie!
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.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
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 am trying to understand your position.
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?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
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.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
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.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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
and if so, that all of say quantum theory is wrong, or at least grossly incomplete. — noAxioms
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. — Apustimelogist
You’re saying you think you and I are approaching our understanding of human and animal cognition from the same philosophical perspective? — Joshs
And what does our disagreement over relevance pertain to? — Joshs
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
"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
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
I am trying to understand the simpler model."I am trying to understand your position."
My position is simply that nobody has ever demonstrated the simpler model wrong. — noAxioms
You agreed thatOk, 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
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.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
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
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: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
That's a false dichotomy. Something can be all three (living, artificial, and/or intelligent), none, or any one or two of them.Regarding the distinction between 'living beings' and AI — boundless
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.I think that the undeniable existence of mathematical truths also points to something beyond 'physicalism'*.
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.That there are an infinite number of primes seems to be something that is independent from human knowledge — 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.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
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.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
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.Well this is then just a speculation about technological capability, which I referred to conditionally. — 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 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
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.The simpler model is proven wrong all the time. Put more accurately, scientific paradigms are replaced by different ones all the time. — Joshs
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.For instance, certain embodied enactivist approaches to the brain , such as Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenology, sweepingly rethink this relation.
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.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.
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.As soon as we start thinking that we have to ‘invent’ a body and an environment for a device we separately invent
What does it even syntactically mean for X to be placed in X?... ignore the fact that we ourselves were not first invented and then placed in a body ...
Why not? With or without the design part... Designing it likely omits most of those properties since they serve little purpose to the designer.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
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.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
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
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
I am looking for a falsification specifically of physical monism, hard to do without any competing theories. — noAxioms
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
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 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
Beyond materialism you perhaps mean. Physicalism/naturalism doesn't assert that all is physical/natural. — noAxioms
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
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
Let's reword that as not being a function of something understandable.
... — noAxioms
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
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
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
The first-person view of the mental encompasses phenomena which seem to resist any explanation from the third person. — noAxioms
The definition of "magical" can only be something along the lines of: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
Yes. Chalmers mentions the hurricane in this video: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
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.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
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