Personally, I think that this technology replicates the 'mindless' parts of the human brain.
— pfirefry

Evidence? — T Clark

I'm saying “replicates <…> brain” because the fundamental mathematical model was influenced by how brain neurons work (each neuron receives multiple inputs and then emits own signal). "Replicates" also refers to humans using their brains to imagine complex things based on simple cues. Although we aren't always able to create vivid pictures in our minds, we're still capable of drawing detailed paintings or unconsciously filling gaps in our vision (blind spots).

By 'mindless' I mostly mean not displaying the faculty of will. As a program, it just does what it's being designed to do. If it was considered mindful, we would have to deal with an ethical issue, but that's not the current state of affairs. Although imagination is a faculty of mind, it doesn't seem to create a mind by itself.

Come to think of it, AlphaGo was the first computer Go program to beat the world's best professional Go players just about five years ago. It used a deep neural network to form an 'intuition' about the best moves for a given board and the winning percentages of those moves. By 'intuition' I mean that it didn't receive instructions about how to evaluate moves, but instead it observed a lot of Go matches and learned to predict what moves a human would do on a given board or how likely they are to win. Then it used a Monte Carlo tree search algorithm to find the most optimal move.

Are we allowed to say that AlphaGo had the faculty of will under the constraints of the game of Go? Perhaps we are, but it still seems far-fetched to say that AlphaGo had a mind. Nonetheless, I'm not opposed to the idea that some day combining mindless AIs with different faculties will result in a mindful system. If so, then it's just a matter of time.

How would you summarise your arguments? Here's is my attempt:

1. We cannot trust a perfect epistemological system because it can deceive us
2. We need an epistemological system to avoid a complete chaos of thought

Here is the logical answer: We need an imperfect epistemological system. Or perhaps multiple such systems to continuously challenge and balance each other out.

Would it then be in our best interest to choose the latter man, over the former to receive a new heart? — Cobra

There are two ways to answer to your question, but I think that you'll find both of them unsatisfactory:

1. Yes, it's in our best interest to prolong the life of the latter man. It's a simple answer, but the reality is much more complicated. There are millions of ways to challenge this answer by introducing new variables to the equation.
2. You should refer to the existing clinical and ethical guidelines for organ transplantation. The problem of morality of organ transplantations is relatively old and incredibly complex. Luckily for us, there are guidelines that have been developed through extensive time and effort. It's very difficult to challenge them in a way that they haven't been challenged already.

I'll offer an answer that I personally find satisfactory. Why not give both men a new heart? It seems like the novelty of the transplantation described in the OP is that we can genetically modify pig hearts and offer them to the people who otherwise wouldn't receive a hearth. Sounds like a win for everyone. We should celebrate this.

You have to prove that nothing causes consciousness. That's a very tall order. Proving that any one thing is self-explained has an incredibly high burden of proof, and arguably may be impossible. — Philosophim

If proving something like this seems impossible, then what makes you ask for a proof? :smile:

All I'm saying is that it's hard track the causality of the universe back to the point of singularity, since that's far removed from our times. Perhaps we would learn something about the first cause of the universe if we examine the first cause of the mind, because we can witness the lifespan of mind unlike the lifespan of the universe.

Thank you for explaining this. I always wondered why my programs didn’t fly.

My interest in philosophy comes from programming. When you program, you create small functional models of the real world. If your program is used by millions of people, any wrong assumptions that you're making about the world will become apparent and they will cause your program to misbehave. You need to think deeply about the world to avoid making wrong assumptions, because any bugs in your software would lead to financial losses.

One wrong assumption that I made in the past was that there is a globally agreed upon list of countries that doesn't change over time. Huge mistake! As an example, Puerto Rico is considered to be a territory of the United States, but according to the ISO 3166 standard it has a standalone country code. I made a mistake that caused my program not to expose Puerto Ricans to the functionality that was supposed to be available to all of the U.S. users. I also struggled with whether Hong Kong and Singapore should be displayed in the country list in the UI. I think the industry best practice is to display them for some users but not for others.

To illustrate how programmers can be seen as philosophers, check out these lists of falsehoods programmers have identified in their thinking:

• Falsehoods programmers believe about names
• Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses
• Falsehoods programmers believe about time

All subjective experience is caused by consciousness, but consciousness does not give birth to itself (not an illusion). Does this make consciousness the first cause?

According to an online dictionary, virtuous means "having good moral qualities and behaviour", and moral means "relating to the standards of good or bad behaviour, fairness, honesty, etc. that each person believes in, rather than to laws".

Two things should happen for gladiators to be virtuous:

1. Their behavior should be seen as good or admirable by others. I don't know if that was the case. Maybe people watched them because they were interesting to watch, but not because those fights were the manifestation of good.
2. They should believe in what they do. Being a gladiator should be seen as their choice among many other less virtuous alternatives. I'm not sure it if was the case either.

I'm thinking about professional wrestling matches, where people put in a show to entertain others. I don't see them as virtuous for doing entertainment. Serial killers also come to my mind. Some of them treat their doings as a form of art, but that doesn't make them virtuous. On the other hand, killing can be seen as virtuous in proper circumstances.

Thank you, that’s a well-articulated answer. I think it’s a valid standpoint, and it’s quite realistic that the problem will just fade away over time similar to other questions that were asked in the past, such as “How to obtain the philosopher’s store?”, “Why did God create us?”, “How to tell a witch from not a witch?”

the hard problem of consciousness claims that mental activity can not be reduced to physicality — Hermeticus

According to whom? I just watched a quick interview with David Chalmers where he very clearly articulated that scientific methods (such as MRI) will definitely help us understand the activity of the brain. He called this the easy problem of consciousness because he did expect breakthroughs in this area. He even clarified that 'easy' should not be taken literally. The easy problem of consciousness is as hard as the hardest scientific problems that we're dealing with.

The MRI breakthrough only supports his distinction between the 'easy' and the 'hard' problems. It takes us closer to solving the 'easy' problem (what do activities in the brain look like?), but doesn't move the needle on the 'hard' problem (what is it like to be something?).

Perhaps your opinion is that we only need to solve the 'easy' problem of consciousness, and that we don't need to take the 'hard' problem seriously. I don't mind that. It sounds pragmatic.

The easy problem of consciousness attempts to explain how the brain works as a complex mechanism by observing causes and effects, such as the activation of neurons or the presence of an EM field. It's called 'easy' because we already have scientific methods for measuring and explaining such processes. For example, we can track how light travels through the eyeballs, how it gets converted to electric signals, and how those signals travels through different regions of the brain.

Given enough time, we can build a comprehensive understanding of all processes that are carried out in the brain. But even if we have such an understanding, it's still unclear why these processes cannot be carried out in complete absence of an experience. I.e. how does individual experience manifest itself? We know that we experience our existence as human beings, but does a river experience its? Does a computer experience existence while it performs millions of complex computations? It doesn't seem like, but how could we know for sure? The hard problem is hard because the scientific method doesn't have good ways to approach this problem just yet.

Thanks! That’s a good answer, well articulated too. You’re saying that once we understand the nature of an illusion, the illusion no longer affects us.

The way I saw it was that our perception is inaccurate, and we cannot change or perception, therefore we need to come to terms with the idea that everything we perceive is an illusion. But you made a case that an illusion is when we incorrectly interpret what we perceive. Although we cannot change our perception, we can change our interpretation, therefore we can overcome the illusion.

Now I can see what people mean when they say something is not an illusion. But paradoxically, we can only overcome an illusion when we accept that it exists and affects us. By saying that something is an illusion we’re making the illusion disappear, according to your post. I’m fine with that.

Once you interpret the sensory data correctly the illusion disappears — Harry Hindu

Where is the illusion? Is there not really a dog wagging its tail when i experience a dog wagging its tail? — Harry Hindu

Sometimes it's not really a dog, but a bush shaking in the wind that you momentarily mistaken for a dog. Your experience was real, and it matched the experience that you would have if there was a dog, but there wasn't a dog.

Is your experience joyful when you're seeing a dog wagging its tail? Perhaps a person next to you experiences fear because they're afraid of dogs. Don't we call it an illusion when things appear differently in our experience from what they actually are? Do we ever perceive things exactly the way they are? Can an experience exist without containing at least some illusion in it?

I think there is always an element of illusion in everything we perceive. E.g. does the dog have a color in your experience? We know that the color perception in humans is somewhat arbitrary. It only ties to a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The things in the universe are not inherently colorful, but it's the human brain that perceives them as such. Is it not reasonable to say that color is kind of an illusion? Would this necessarily undermine our experience and knowledge about colors?

There's nothing for the brain to be about in the pitch dark of night - might as well turn it (the brain) off, why waste energy? — Agent Smith

If you're curious about the nature of sleep or wish to improve your sleep, there is a good book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. In this book, Matthew claims that all animal species sleep, including those who can see in the dark:

Without exception, every animal species studied to date sleeps, or engages in something remarkably like it. This includes insects, such as flies, bees, cockroaches, and scorpions; fish, from small perch to the largest sharks; amphibians, such as frogs; and reptiles, such as turtles, Komodo dragons, and chameleons. All have bona fide sleep. Ascend the evolutionary ladder further and we find that all types of birds and mammals sleep: from shrews to parrots, kangaroos, polar bears, bats, and, of course, we humans. Sleep is universal.

He also argues that sleep is so important for living organisms, that even evolution, as creative as it is, couldn't find a way to eliminate it despite all of the survival benefits that would come from it.

Thank you for your replies! I must be repeating countless discussions about consciousness that already happened on this forum. I don't intend to keep this going for much longer. Maybe it'll be my post on this topic.

Could we reword the claim "consciousness is an illusion" as "consciousness is created by neural activity in the brain"? This should address the questions about how the consciousness is borne. Let's say we make this claim because we can see the correlation between neural activities and consciousness: no activity means no consciousness, and altered activities correlate with altered states of consciousness.

In saying the above, we're also saying that nothing other than neural activity in the brain gives birth to consciousness.

If we ask a conscious individual about how they perceive their consciousness, they are likely to say that consciousness just exists unconditionally (like god). We don't perceive consciousness as the firing of billions of neurons.

In other words, the inner workings of consciousness don't seem to accurately represent the physical reality that gives birth to consciousness (neural activity in the brain). This crease a basis for us to suggest that "consciousness is an illusion" (i.e. a deceived appearance), meaning that the way we perceive consciousness does not accurately represent the physical reality of how the consciousness is being borne.

I hope you can follow my train of thoughts, even if you already see some flaws in it. With everything above considered, when you say that "consciousness is an illusion" is necessarily wrong, I perceive it is as a claim that consciousness is not the result of neural activity in the brain. This means that consciousness exists unconditionally. I can see some merit in that, but I'm also not fully satisfied by it. I can see it as a form of Curry's paradox: "If consciousness exists, it exists unconditionally", which means that "consciousness exists unconditionally".

I can agree that the statement "consciousness is an illusion" is somewhat paradoxical, but I don't think that denying the statement straight away is a fair way to end a discussion on this topic. I think a better way is to offer a more elaborate and less contradictory way to think about consciousness.

I think that you're right and there is a technicality that makes "the mind is an illusion" self-contradictory. But despite the technicality, I cannot resist to explore this further, just because the phrase makes an intuitive sense to me. So bare with me for asking ridiculous questions.

Is the statement "trees are made of wood" necessarily wrong? Something can't be borne by its very own self. Wood is created by trees, therefore trees cannot be made of wood, because they cannot give birth to themselves. Is there a flaw in this logic?

That's a well-articulated post, thank you! Your terminology is much sharper than mine, and agree with everything that you said.

Even if we're wrong about everything, there can be no doubt that there is a subject who is wrong. — Wayfarer

What if the subject that you're talking about is not an atomic thing? What if it can be divided into multiple parts? Some studies suggest that if we split the two halves of the brain, each half will act independently from another. Do we end up with two subjects, or still one subject, or perhaps no subject at all? If we start removing brain cells one at a time, undoubtably we will begin with a subject but end up with none. If the subject is not an illusion, then what would happen to it once we disconnect all the brain cells?

Consider some definitions of illusion — Wayfarer

I see! I didn’t use the word illusion in a negative sense, just neutral. Hope you can see what I mean. For example, this comment is not me, but an illusion of me talking to you. Does it mean that any one of us is deceived in a negative sense? I don’t think so. Is there a better word than “illusion” that we could use to avoid negative connotation?

You don't seem to agree that consciousness is an illusion, do you? What alternative perspectives do you have in mind?

Personally, the idea of consciousness as an illusion makes sense to me. If it's not an illusion, then it's something that exists in physical world. Something that we can point to in time and space and maybe even touch it. But that doesn't seem to be the case to me.

Maybe I need an example. Let's say we have a film strip with a movie on it. We can use a movie projector to show that movie. One could argue that the film strip is a physical thing that exists in the physical world, but the movie is an illusion created by projecting that film strip. The movie exists and it carries some meaning, but it's not a physical thing. That's why we can call it an illusion.

We could think of consciousness as a movie. The brain cells act as a hardware to project consciousness. I think Dennett bases a lot of his ideas on studying the inner workings of the brain, and how those ideas are used to create functioning AIs. It's not easy to see consciousness in individual brain cells, but all cells combined seem to project consciousness. Is this consistent with your world view?

They most certainly do represent the limits of what we can sensibly talk about. — creativesoul

That’s true! Without a language we cannot communicate with others. Imagine finding yourself in a country where everyone speaks a different language. Your life there would be very limited until you learn how to understand others and express yourself. And when you do, your world would “expand”: you’d learn about their culture, history and traditions.

This goes even further. If you can’t talk about something, you also cannot effectively reason about it in your head. Your ability to think is limited. There are many fields of study where journey to proficiency starts with building a vocabulary. For example, someone can listen to a piece of music and think “The sound just changed in an interesting way“, but a musician will think “It was a dominant seventh enharmonic modulation to the key of G”. One could argue that the musician has a more complex inner world (vocabulary) when it comes to music, which allows her to make inferences that other people wouldn’t. This is how we can associate language with internal limitations. My favorite thing is that we can always learn new concepts and keep expanding beyond our past limits.

It’s not only the case for technology, but for organizations as well. If you have a company with more that 100 people, no single one of them will have the knowledge about everything that’s going on there. There is even less understanding of all the details across the board In a company of 1000 people. When it comes to governments, they have ridiculously little understanding of what is happening.

Conclusion: It's impossible to prove Time is unreal (U). — Agent Smith

You got it slightly wrong. If we want to use reductio ad absurdum to prove that "Time is unreal", then we need to show that the opposite scenario "Time is real" leads to a contradiction.

Contradictions can exist under the assumption that "Time is real", so in theory we can actually show that "Time is real" leads to contradiction.

It's actually impossible to prove that "Time is real" through reductio ad absurdum, assuming that contradictions rely on time (which I'm not convinced is the case)

Does the definition of contradiction involve time? I looked in a few online dictionaries, but didn’t find any mentions of time there.

It's a fun paradox! Although the staircase becomes very close to a straight line, we should remember that none of its outward corners ever fall on the diagonal line that goes through the staircase. Therefore, the lengths are never equal.

The staircase method of approximation is used a lot in mathematics. But mathematicians don't look at the length of the path: they look at the area occupied by the shape. Luckily, the area is much more straightforward—nothing paradoxical there!

A lot of information security is based on cryptographically-secure randomness. Such random number generators allow you to produce sequences that others cannot reliably predict.

Although you can deterministically predict them because you know the initial configuration, it remains fully random for others as long as they don't know the configuration and don't have access to the generator. Not truly random, but effectively unpredictable. Like the square root of 2.

One could argue that technology is the vehicle for creating order from chaos. Think how much order is requires for the Internet to exist, and for us to be able to access the Internet from devices that fit in our hands. By the definition in the OP, technology is the absolute good.

However, there is a flip side. Scientists agree that entropy continually grows in the universe over time. How can order emerge in a universe that becomes more chaotic every moment? In the book A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking explains that maintaining order over time requires a lot of energy by itself. Energy transforms into heat, thus making the universe more chaotic when order emerges. This is one of the reasons that we link technology with global warming.

In other words, more order causes even more chaos.

We're not punishing them, we're trying to stop them from offending again. — T Clark

That sounds very similar to our existing criminal justice system. Its goal is not to punish people, but to prevent future offences in the society. What's important is to establish law—the likelihood of being punished—in the society, but not punishments themselves.

My stated assumption is that there is no free will. In that case, we would assume that all actions are determined — T Clark

I'd call this metaphysical position less useful, because I think the existence of free will is not relevant for justice. Even if all actions are determined, the justice system still needs to deal with a lot of uncertainty. I.e. we know things have happened the way they were supposed to happen, but we just don't know the details. We still need to spend a lot of time to deconstruct the events, create different narratives and decide on which narrative is the most plausible. I think this works really well with the assumption of determinism.

Ok, pfirefry, if solipsism is true, then either you're a bot or I am. I'm not. How 'bout you? — Cuthbert

If solipsism is true, you cannot obtain 100% evidence to confirm that I’m not a bot. This seems accurate to me. But I’m a man (or bot) of faith. I don’t need 100% evidence about things, so it doesn’t bother me :grin:

If anyone proves anything to anyone else, then solipsism is false. — Cuthbert

That’s not 100% fair to solipsism. Would you keep posting in this thread if you learned that all participants were just AI driven bots? Some AI bots can generate pretty realistic comments nowadays. You cannot always assume that every thing that you meaningfully interact with has a mind. This will become even trickier in the future, as the AI technology advances. I generally agree with your argument, but it should also be taken with a grain of salt.

Update: this seems to be a newbie restriction, which goes away after posting 5 times. Now I can edit my comments, yay!

You don't need to engage in an argument about this. What Bert is saying is that he can only experience his own consciousness and his own feelings, but not yours.

Here are a few examples:

• Different people have different tolerance to spicy food. Let's say you cannot handle anything spicy but Bert is highly tolerant. You are at a restaurant and you've ordered the same dish. Bert eats it and feels nothing, but you take a bite and your mouth is on fire! This experience of yours is inaccessible to Bert. You can describe your experience to Bert, and he'll probably understand it, but you cannot transfer your experience directly to Bert. Your experience is yours, and his experience is his.
• Let's say Bert is colour blind but you can see colours just fine. You can probably convince Bert that you can see things that he can't. But there is no way you can make Bert experience colour the way you do. Even worse, let's say Bert isn't colour blind. You both look at a red apple and you agree that it's red. But what if Bert's experience of red is closer to your experience of blue than your experience of red? What if in your minds you see different colours, but you don't realise the difference? You see red and you say "It's red", but Bert sees blue and he says "It's red", because that's the name he associates with the colour. It is a possibility that is easy to reject but impossible to disprove. You could only disprove it if you could transfer experiences between minds. The purpose of solipsism is to emphasise that experiences aren't transferable.

In other words, solipsism is a standpoint that you can embrace and try to understand, and it would teach you something without taking anything from you.

metaphysical positions are neither true nor false. They have no truth value. They are more or less useful in a particular situation at a particular time. — T Clark

Makes sense. Like axioms.

wouldn't we treat someone who has done something wrong but does not have free will differently that one who does have free will — T Clark

Are our actions different if we assume no free will is involved than if we assume there is? — T Clark

We would treat them differently if we could observe different patterns of behaviour from them, or if we could reasonably expect different responses to our actions, either form them or from the society. We would focus not on the past, but on how our actions would impact the future.

What considerations would we apply to distinguish between someone with free will and someone without?

If the difference was impossible to detect, we would probably treat them equally. Even if we had a device that would tell us who has free will and who doesn't, as long as they their behaviours are indistinguishable we should treat them as equal.

In practice, such a device would probably create inequality in the society, but only because the human nature is flawed.

So, what’s the answer? Does it make sense to hold people accountable for their actions given that there is no free will? — T Clark

Does it make sense to hold a virus accountable for infecting our bodies? Perhaps not, but it still makes sense to take action against it.

What if the virus had free will? Perhaps we would take a different set actions to influence how it executes its free will. But if it executes its free will in a way that doesn't please us, that's when we can hold it accountable. Lesson: accountability starts after will is executed, but we don't call it accountability if we don't presuppose free will.

I wrote a comment about what makes the question of free will matter and how we should be looking at it to avoid going in circles. I also agreed that we should hold ourselves and others accountable regardless of the answer to the question of free will. While my comment is going through moderation, here are a few more thoughts to bring this discussion closer to the premise of the OP.

I brought up the question of determinism vs FW because I think it partially addresses the premise of the OP. The OP asks us to assume that there is no free will. I take it as we should assume that the universe is fully deterministic. But here is a thought: what if free will can still exist in a deterministic universe? This would make the whole premise contradictory, as long as it's talking about our universe and not a different, imaginary universe.

Finally, I've read about some criminal cases. With some of the worst criminals, it does seem like they don't have free will: they choose to commit crimes again and again, oftentimes against common sense. The criminal system works well with the absence of will: this person is a criminal, they don't seem to control their own actions and therefore we need to send them into prison for the benefit of society.

Another example: this person has committed a crime. We see their regret and perhaps if they could go back in time they would not commit it again. But it doesn't matter, because the crime has been committed, and we have no choice by to put them in jail. In other words, it doesn't matter how this person will exercise their free will in the future, we will still hold them accountable now.

Hi there! I won't focus too much on accountability, because I think the answer is obvious: yes, we should keep holding each other accountable. Practically speaking, the answer to the question of free will doesn't drastically change our behaviour regarding accountability.

Now, here are my thoughts about why the question of FW still matters. This question highlights the contradiction between the following observations:

1. The universe has laws that it abides. It seems to be deterministic.
2. The human beings have the ability to make choices and control their behaviour. At least that's how we experience our existence.

So the question is how can free will exist in a seemingly deterministic universe. Although we can argue that the universe must not be deterministic or that free will must not exist, I tend to think that there is an answer which allows both statements to hold true. Knowing the answer would help us better understand how the nature of human existence connects to the nature of the universe.

Perhaps that's not the discussion you were trying to have. The discussion about accountability seems boring because you're right: it doesn't matter, practically speaking.