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

Definitely in disagreement. 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. We can say that consciousness is natural but it is yet to be determined the nature of experiential-ness and how it is identified with or arises from the physical aspects that correlate with it.

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'd have some quibbles as what is "science" but it would be going on a tangent. Is social science a "science" just because it uses data? Perhaps. But is there some aspects that make it different than say physics? Is engineering "science proper" or more of an applied aspect to the research done in "science proper"? Is mathematics and computational theory a science or is it more that it is its own thing that can be then applied to science? Yes neural networks can be studied, but I don't want to get in the weeds of how to parse out the term "science" (perhaps you can open another thread on that if you want to discuss it further).

Rather, I want to focus on the idea of the difference between what is going on in the Chinese Room experiment and an actual experiencer or interpreter of events that integrates meaning from the computation. Thus, the term we would be parsing would be "meaning" and what that means. What does it mean to truly have a "point of view" versus computing. What is it to have behavior/process only rather than a "what it's like-ness" to it?

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

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.

Is social science a "science" just because it uses data? Perhaps. But is there some aspects that make it different than say physics? — schopenhauer1

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.

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

Yes, and very close to what I am getting at in the OP. People tend to take the mental "for granted", and thus people mistakenly hold an implicit (hidden) dualism, not in their stated view, but in how they use language surrounding the mental and physical events. They might not even realize they are doing it. Neurons networking becomes some mental event, and it's already committed a category error.

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

Agreed. Any further would be going into ideas like, "Is using quantitative methods on human behavior already assuming the stance it wants to present?" and on and on.

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

It is the essence of a hierarchical view of scale that processes at one level must be completely consistent with the rules of all lower levels. Biological processes can't violate chemical principles, but chemical principles are not adequate to determine biological principles. Principles of building design must consider the properties of building materials.

The case of consciousness seems even more unfathomable. — Patterner

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.

But, while everything about the brain and body are physical, consciousness does not seem to be. — Patterner

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.

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

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.

mental states are identical to brain states — RogueAI

No more than biological processes are identical to chemical processes.

No more than biological processes are identical to chemical processes. — T Clark

Isn't every biological process a chemical process?

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

I do recognize the difference in kind between neurological processes and mental experiences. I just don't think it matters. I don't think neurological processes are the same as conscious experience. I think neurological processes express themselves as conscious experiences in the same sense chemical processes express themselves as biological processes.

I think that's enough for me till the next discussion.

To vastly oversimplify, chemistry doesn't make biology, it manifests as biology. — T Clark

But can biology be reduced to chemistry, or is there an attribute that biological organisms possess that non-organic chemistry does not? The no case is given below:

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

No, not at all. As I said to @Patterner and @Quixodian, chemical processes manifest as biological processes, they are not the same thing.

But can biology be reduced to chemistry, or is there an attribute that biological organisms possess that non-organic chemistry does not? — Quixodian

No, biology can not be reduced to chemistry. That's not at all inconsistent with the argument I'm making.

Now I really am done.

OK, I see. I went back through your posts on this thread, and you do acknowledge the difficulties of reductionism, so kudos for that, and I stand corrected.

But your first entry was this one:

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

What the argument is claiming is that the subjective feeling of experience ('what it is like to be'...) eludes scientific description:

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...

So, I don't see how that is a circular argument. It's an argument about the shortcomings of objective explanations in respect of subjective experience. The evidence for that is deductive, rather than empirical, but I don't see how it is circular.

There is a lot here.

But as Bertrand Russell points out, in a long quote, worth citing in full:

"To return to the physiologist observing another man’s brain: what the physiologist sees is by no means identical with what happens in the brain he is observing, but is a somewhat remote effect. 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". When he says that certain physical events in the brain are accompanied by mental events, he is thinking of physical events as if they were what he sees. He does not see a mental event in the brain he is observing, and therefore supposes there is in that brain a physical process which he can observe and a mental process which he cannot.

This is a complete mistake. In the strict sense, he cannot observe anything in the other brain, but only the percepts which he himself has when he is suitably related to that brain (eye to microscope, etc.). We first identify physical processes with our percepts, and then, since our percepts are not other people’s thoughts, we argue that the physical processes in their brains are something quite different from their thoughts. In fact, everything that we can directly observe of the physical world happens inside our heads, and consists of "mental" events in at least one sense of the word "mental".

It also consists of events which form part of the physical world. The development of this point of view will lead us to the conclusion that the distinction between mind and matter is illusory. The study of the world may be called physical or mental or both or neither, as we please; in fact, the words serve no purpose. There is only one definition of the words that is unobjectionable: "physical" is what is dealt with by physics, and "mental" is what is dealt with by psychology. When, accordingly, I speak of "physical" space, I mean the space that occurs in physics."

- Bertrand Russell "An Outline of Philosophy"

We fool ourselves into thinking we leave our bodies to look at a brain from a "neutral" perspective - this is not what actually happens.

:100: :clap:

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

If we acknowledge that we know things only as they appear to us, then the dialectical counterpart of as-they-are-in-themselves becomes obvious. We realize that what we know of things as they appear gives us no guarantee that that knowledge tells us anything about how they are in themselves, and for me it seems that we cannot but think that they have some existence in themselves independent of our perceiving and understanding them. Even if that existence is unknowable to us, it doesn't follow that the idea that there is such an existence is incoherent.

That is how it seems to me at least, and since there is no fact of the matter about what is coherent or not; it really comes down to what seems incoherent to the individual. So, if it seems to be an incoherent thought to you, I am never going to convince you that it is coherent and vice versa.

Also, I don't see how thinking that thought could lead one astray, as it really has no implications for what really matters; the world as it appears to us; it is only thinking in and about that empirical manifest context that being wrong could have consequences, or so it seems to me.

As I see it it also follows that intellectual honesty demands that we just don't know, which opens up the field for metaphysical speculation, which is fine and can be a very positive and creative thing provided we don't believe that there can be evidence for such speculations or that anything we might believe about such speculations could be anything more than a matter of faith.

I think the fact is that you are never going to convince people to give up such speculations and faiths, anyway, even if it could be, per impossibile, proven that they are somehow, in themselves and acknowledged as being faith-based, a negative activity.

Right, however that doesn't seem to support your argument.

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

This seems to accord very well with Kant's notion of the ding an sich. We know things only as they appear to be and as we model them.

:up: It seems we have reached the end of our disagreement such as it might have been.

that doesn't seem to support your argument. — Janus

Which argument doesn't it support? I've often, although very inelegantly, advanced an argument very like this:

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

The way I tried to put it is that you could never see in neural data anything corresponding to a rational inference, because rational inference is internal to thought. (I remember having this argument with Mars Man, and I reckon you're one of the few who's been around long enough to know that reference!)

It seems we have reached the end of our disagreement such as it might have been. — Janus

:up:

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

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.

Although, yes, behavior is obviously a big factor in our decision. The octopus is not even in our phylum, but we assume some degree of consciousness there. Although the eyes help.

but what would an AI have to do to convince us? Their behavior will have to be far more convincing than any animal's, since they are so very different from us. extraterrestrials could be as different from us as any AI we make. Would we give them the benefit of the doubt?

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

Indeed.

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 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.)

Yes, he even mentions something to that effect about not knowing the intrinsic nature of physics and that this intrinsic nature is irrelevant to the contemporary use of physics.



Indeed, a lot of this stuff (not all to be fair) are stories about what we guess the brain does in relation to mind.

I've seen you quote this, I believe. I got it from reading Russell's book and thought it was quite well put.

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 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:

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. 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.

Yes, I think I understand your position and it seems like you understand mine. And there we are.

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.

I have no problem saying chemistry "manifests" as biology. But it is still reducible to the chemistry. — Patterner

I'm still here because we've moved away from talking about consciousness and toward the nature of the hierarchy of scales, which I am really interested in. 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

you do acknowledge the difficulties of reductionism — Quixodian

You and I have been in similar discussions before and I've tried to make my attitude towards reductionism clear. See my previous post to @Patterner.

Have you read "More is Different" by P.W. Anderson? — T Clark

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 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.

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

I have not. Thank you.

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.

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.

Well that also is only what consciousness is. It is awareness of and recognition of what’s happening. — Darkneos

I believe otherwise.

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

That's true.

And an illusion that is viewed as real by itself seems strange.