I recognize the distinction between mental and physical events and processes in the same sense that I recognize the distinction between chemical and biological events and processes. The fact that you don't is an indicator of how unlikely we are to come to agreement. — T Clark
An important aspect of neuroscience is developing scientific understanding of the information processing that occurs in brains. Neuroscience involves knowledge of other relevant sciences such as physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. Yes, technology plays a huge role in humanity's ability to make progress in understanding the information processing which occurs in brains, but that is fairly tangential to the question of what is being learned in neuroscience. — wonderer1
I don't understand where you are coming from because it seems incredulous to me that you don't recognize the difference in kind and not just degree between the sensation of red, or seeing an apple, versus the physiological correlates such as electromagnetic frequencies, optic anatomy, neural anatomy, and the like. — schopenhauer1
Is social science a "science" just because it uses data? Perhaps. But is there some aspects that make it different than say physics? — schopenhauer1
Agree. I listened to a Q&A with Bernardo Kastrup where he says one of the common objections to his 'analytic idealism' is actually based on the fact that the questioner can't see the point of the 'hard problem of consciousness' argument. They can't grasp why a precise objective description cannot but omit the ontic dimension of felt experience. There are quite a few worthy contributors to this forum who are dismissive of the argument on those grounds. — Quixodian
I know you said you didn’t want to digress, but consider the idea that physics is concerned with objects the behavior of which can be minutely described in objective terms. That is the sense in which physics (and so, physicalism) are considered paradigmatic for science generally. But the social sciences are not concerned with objects, but the behaviors of subjects which introduces a dimension that defies physical reductionism. — Quixodian
I look at it this way... If we saw a skyscraper made entirely of liquid water, we would be stunned. To put it mildly. The properties of water and/or H2O molecules do not allow for such a thing. — Patterner
The case of consciousness seems even more unfathomable. — Patterner
But, while everything about the brain and body are physical, consciousness does not seem to be. — Patterner
How is it that those same physical things and processes are making something very different at the same time? That seems to be asking quite a lot. — Patterner
It's more that I don't understand where you are coming from because it seems incredulous to me that you don't recognize the difference in kind and not just degree between the sensation of red, or seeing an apple, versus the physiological correlates such as electromagnetic frequencies, optic anatomy, neural anatomy, and the like. — schopenhauer1
To vastly oversimplify, chemistry doesn't make biology, it manifests as biology. — T Clark
Chemical reactions in non-living systems are not controlled by a message … There is nothing in the physico-chemical world that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences' (that is characteristic of organic processes such as mitosis and reproduction) — What is Information? Marcello Barbieri
Isn't every biological process a chemical process? — RogueAI
I think what bothered me most about this particular iteration of the conflict is it's blatant circularity. The evidence that there is a hard problem of consciousness is that it consists of mental processes which can't be studied by science because of... the hard problem of consciousness. Of course, as I noted, all these arguments come down to this same contradiction. — T Clark
Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. — Chalmers, Facing up to...
To me that sounds like direct realism. Respectfully, what work is being done by 'as they appear' ? Are you thinking in Flatland terms (a great little book) ? Perhaps in Reality there's a sphere, but we flatlander humans see only a circle, a projection of the sphere into our smaller world ? If so, it's a beautiful idea. But I still find it a bit paradoxical, as if a beautiful analogy is leading us astray. — plaque flag
We fool ourselves into thinking we leave our bodies to look at a brain from a "neutral" perspective - this is not what actually happens. — Manuel
that doesn't seem to support your argument. — Janus
From what he sees, therefore, he cannot judge whether what is happening in the brain he is observing is, or is not, the sort of event that he would call "mental" - Bertrand Russell. — Manuel
I think how similar something is to us also has a lot to do with whether or not we think it is conscious. we give the benefit of the doubt to each other. We’re the same species, after all. Other primates are an awful lot like us, and we assume they have at least a pretty good degree of consciousness. But the farther something is from us taxonomically, the less sure we are. This is why Nagel chose the bat. It’s a mammal. It’s a lot closer to us than a wasp or a flounder. All mammals have a neocortex, and nothing else does.Sure, it all might be possible, but we do not believe that, we conclude that it is likely other people are conscious and that aliens would be conscious, based on physical evidence alone. — Jabberwock
Indeed.Back to the unbridgeable chasm. Some people see it that way and others don't. As I noted, that's where the argument runs into a brick wall. — T Clark
I agree entirely. Because consciousness is at least as important to the existence of cities as buildings. Cities are the next step up from the combination of physical and mental properties. (I wonder if we could have anything we would call a city without buildings.)Back to my architectural argument. The properties of materials and characteristics of buildings are physical, but at the next step up, the properties of cities are not. They are social, economic, organizational, political. — T Clark
I don't know if you're saying something I'm not catching. I don't know what the best wording to describer three idea is, but Kurzweil spells it out like this:To vastly oversimplify, chemistry doesn't make biology, it manifests as biology. That's one of the ways it is expressed in the world. In the same way, neurology doesn't make consciousness. Consciousness is a manifestation, an expression, of neurology. — T Clark
I have no problem saying chemistry "manifests" as biology. But it is still reducible to the chemistry. Just as the pressure inside a balloon could be thought of as, and calculated using, the individual air molecules hitting the inside surface of the balloon. If we could possibly manage such numbers.It should be noted, before we further consider the structure of the neocortex, that it is important to model systems at the right level. Although chemistry is theoretically based on physics and could be derived entirely from physics, this would be unwieldy and infeasible in practice, so chemistry has established its own rules and models. Similarly, we should be able to deduce the laws of thermodynamics from physics, but once we have a sufficient number of particles to call them a gas rather than simply a bunch of particles, solving equations for the physics of each particle interaction becomes hopeless, whereas the laws of thermodynamics work quite well. Biology likewise has its own rules and models. A single pancreatic islet cell is enormously complicated, especially if we model it at the level of molecules; modeling what a pancreas actually does in terms of regulating levels of insulin and digestive enzymes is considerably less complex.
I have no problem saying chemistry "manifests" as biology. But it is still reducible to the chemistry. — Patterner
…the reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a constructionist one: The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. In fact, the more the elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws, the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of science, much less to those of society.
The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other. That is, it seems to me that one may array the sciences roughly linearly in a hierarchy, according to the idea: The elementary entities of science X obey the laws of science Y… — More is Different - P.W. Anderson
you do acknowledge the difficulties of reductionism — Quixodian
Have you read "More is Different" by P.W. Anderson? — T Clark
I have no earthly idea what Aristoyelian causes are. But I was thinking wondering about the minimum definition of "city." If a certain number of people live in a given area, but do not have any structures, all sleeping on the ground. Can nomadic communities be called cities, even if they don't bother with tents? Way of on a tangent, I know. But no consciousness, no city, whatever the setting.I wonder if we could have anything we would call a city without buildings.
— Patterner
Aren't we getting into Aristotelian causes? A building design could be considered a building without materials. A city plan could be considered a city without buildings. — T Clark
I have not. Thank you.Have you read "More is Different" by P.W. Anderson?
…the reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a constructionist one: The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. In fact, the more the elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws, the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of science, much less to those of society.
The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other. That is, it seems to me that one may array the sciences roughly linearly in a hierarchy, according to the idea: The elementary entities of science X obey the laws of science Y…
— More is Different - P.W. Anderson — T Clark
Is that not exactly how the universe was constructed? It does not imply we can do that, but that is exactly how things work. At least physical things.The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.
I believe otherwise.Well that also is only what consciousness is. It is awareness of and recognition of what’s happening. — Darkneos
That's true.I also didn’t think they really rebutted the objection that illusion only makes sense if you have a reality to compare it to. If you don’t know what reality is then the term illusion looses all meaning. The same would apply if you said everything is an illusion, the term would be meaningless. — Darkneos
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