If the mind is an immaterial object and not a material object, then one does not have to explain how consciousness arises from material substances, does one? It doesn't.

If an immaterial mind is caused by the brain, there needs to be an explanation for how that works.

The problem is that materialism cannot explain how consciousness can arise from non-conscious stuff (e.g., working brain) when that stuff is put together a certain way. It can't even hint at the framework of a possible explanation. It can try and avoid the problem by claiming consciousness is illusionary, or other such non-sense, but that era is almost over.

The explanation is that consciousness cannot arise from non-conscious stuff. It's an absurdity. Since we know consciousness exists, therefore, we know there is no non-conscious stuff.

Now, what do you think the mind-body problem is, and how was it solved?

Yes and yes. And it was solved ages ago. Plato. Avicenna. Descartes. Locke. Berkeley. Read them.

You're saying the mind-body problem was solved? What's the solution?

Athena, we were just talking about serfs and slaves yesterday after watching Simple History's video on "Life in Medieval Times"! We also got into a discussion about political power gradually accruing to the peasant class over centuries. We do a lot of drawing contests, and the one elective they go to every day (I have them all day except for one period is more exact) is computerized automated design (CAD). I highlight classical music with Doodelchaos's awesome Linerider videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIz3klPET3o&ab_channel=DoodleChaos
and similar stuff. I try and give them a rounded education.

Thanks, Athena. I teach 6th grade, which is all subjects. I have the same group of kids all day (virtually, now).

That's funny you mention it, I just had a training on implicit bias. It was very good. No one was demonized. I think we need more of those trainings.

I commend you on your honesty here. How do you deal with it when you do catch yourself? Have you found an alternative way of differentiating grades?

Thank you. Yeah, computerized grading helps. Same with deliberately not looking at names on assignments. This is mostly a problem when I'm doing final grades/subjective grades (e.g., reading fluency) and deciding who deserves a bump up. I just step back and try and look at the student objectively.

Talk about the time you fell for a logical fallacy.

When I'm grading students, and it's a tough call on the grade, I often find myself giving the black students a lower grade. I catch myself doing this all the time.

Good discussion!

That's a pretty cynical view, Kenosha. I'm not sure I buy it. I think I have a pretty good concept of, say, a million. Although, to your point, I have no conception of what 2 to the millionth power is, except it's really big. Even if you wrote it out, it's just "really big". So I grant you that some numbers are "unthinkable" (and what does the existence of unthinkable numbers entail?)

But if math is just a rules game, how did we come up with innovations like imaginary numbers, which have real-world applications? Doesn't that require understanding of math on a conceptual level, rather than something that's just rules-based?

"Because manipulating the final symbol according to a small set of rules learned in childhood is trivial and does not require comprehension of the entire number."

That's true. But your position entails that for any number over 143,672, when we do math we're not really understanding anything, we're just playing a rules game. That doesn't seem right. Do you believe that?

No, because we don't conceive of numbers in this way. We don't have a concept of 143,672ness. We can relate 143,672 to 143,671 by comparing six symbols each one of an ordered set (the decimal base) and noting that all are the same but the last, and that the last digit of the former is later in the set than that of the latter.

When we consider numbers like 9,479,284,479,946,424,742,057,043,748,258,831,164,859,380,423,470,964,125,667,852,865,110,732,989,169,568,826,863,358,101,582 we can't even do that. It's just "a very big number". We can break it down, but at no point are we considering 9,479,284,479,946,424,742,057,043,748,258,831,164,859,380,423,470,964,125,667,852,865,110,732,989,169,568,826,863,358,101,582ness.

I'm going to push back on this. I agree that for any absurdly long number, it's hard to imagine how we can hold it in our minds, and yet, for any number, I can add 1 to it and figure out what the answer is. How am I able to do that if the number is so large I can't properly think of it?

The words and sentences get longer and longer. But you don't need to be able to think of an infinitely long number for this to be a problem for materialism. You just need the existence of X+1 amount of possible thoughts, where X is the number of brain states possible at any given time.

Though I do not think the mind is a brain, I do think “the infinite use of finite means” could provide a way to avoid your problem. Just as a finite number of letters could conceivably be used to create an infinite number of sentences, a finite number of “brain states” could produce an infinite number of thoughts.

No, because the brain is finite in size. It can only be configured X many unique ways. If you had a brain that was thinking different thoughts for an infinite amount of time, you would have an infinite amount of thoughts. It would seem that a working brain at any point in time has an infinite number of possible thoughts it can think of, but that contradicts materialism, which says there's only a finite amount of possible thoughts that can be thought of.

Are some numbers unthinkable?

I'm OK with there being a finite number of possible thoughts, given that the finite number of possible thoughts is really very hugely huge. Unless you can actually count all the grains of sand in the world (a very hugely huge finite number) or all the variations possible for snow flakes (no two are alike, supposedly) then the world is not impoverished by a finite number of sand grains or snow flakes. Or possible thoughts.

And it isn't enriched by an infinite number of possible thoughts, sand grains, or snow flakes. Just one of my extremely finite opinions, of course.

That's not my point, though. My point is it seems like there are an infinite number of possible thoughts to we can think of, and that's not possible, given materialism. So either materialism is wrong, or there aren't an infinite number of things we can think of.

I don't know whether there are an infinite number of thoughts.

There are infinitely many possible thoughts, since there are infinitely many numbers, and each number can be thought of (or is that true? Are there some numbers we can't imagine?)

I don't know where to begin thinking about an infinite number of thoughts.

My argument doesn't require that. It just requires there to be an infinite number of possible thoughts, because, if materialism is true, there are only a finite number of possible thoughts.

There are only a finite number of birds possible.

It goes into a new body the next time the universe branches off.

Well I just said, I disagree with the notion that we should give up on a physical model of consciousness. There is no guarantee in this universe of solving any problem in any given time, and we're making faster progress now than ever.

We haven't made any progress on the Hard Problem. For the questionsHow are we conscious and Why are we conscious, science has nothing to say but conjecture. It's panpscyhism or computation or integrated information theory or quantum computations in brain microtubules. The fact that there's not even a framework for an answer to the Hard Problem is evidence of the fact that no progress has been made on it. I expect that lack of progress to continue. I think it's fundamentally incoherent to think that non-conscious stuff can produce consciousness, and that's why you're seeing such frustration on the part of materialists when it comes to consciousness, and why there's a temptation to handwave it all away, like the behavioralists did and people like Dennet still do.

I also disagree about choosing a philosophy by elimination. There's always the possibility that there is another framing that we haven't thought of yet."

Possibly, but from where we're at epistemically, it really comes down to "is there stuff outside the mind, is everything mind/thought, or is it some combination of stuff outside the mind and mental stuff?" In other words, physicalism, dualism, or idealism seem to be exhaustive. I don't think we're going to be discovering another "ism" to add to those three.

No.

I don't think the brain produces consciousness because I think materialism is highly improbable (due to its ongoing failure to make progress on the Hard Problem) and dualism is incoherent. That only leaves idealism, and that entails brains don't exist (at least as physical things).

"You are the one that have asserted that neurology cannot produce consciousness."

This doesn't make sense. I have asserted that it's highly improbable that science will produce an EXPLANATION of how non-conscious matter produces consciousness. I base this on the complete lack of progress so far on the Hard Problem.

I don't accept the brain produces consciousness. The existence of some non-conscious stuff is simply asserted to be the case without a shred of evidence to back it up. Mercifully, the era of materialism is fast approaching an end.

I found this a very interesting read:

https://www.academia.edu/42985813/The_Idea_of_the_Brain_A_History_By_Matthew_Cobb

Our latest theories allow us to create artificial memories in the mind of a mouse. Very recently the theories about memory were highly speculative and all over the map, and now we understand the mechanism (for one kind of memory). I think new knowledge like this will lead to the discovery of the mechanisms underlying conscious experience.

I have a family member working in this field and I'm hoping that he will be the one to make the breakthrough. I reckon people his age can expect to live to at least 120 and to be active at least into their 80s. So I'm confident that within another 40 or so years I can give you an answer.

Solving the memory problem is an "easy" problem, because the answer is simply some brain mechanism. Solving the question: why does a working brain produce the sensation of stubbing a toe, but when I put it in the blender and add some electricity, I don't get anything? So there are three questions that need to be answered: what is it about a particular configuration of atoms and forces that gives rise to conscious experience? How does a particular configuration of atoms and forces give rise to conscious experience? Why are we conscious, what purpose does it serve?

Solving the memory problem won't get you anywhere closer to the answer to those three questions. And if you think there will be an answer in 40 years, you would expect there to be some progress in the short term. I see progress on solving mechanical issues, but I don't see any progress in solving any Hard Problems.

What progress? The theories about how matter produces consciousness are highly speculative, all over the map, and there's nothing close to a consensus around any of them.

Since we know consciousness exists
— RogueAI

We do?

Do you see the absurdity of your question? This is why I don't waste my time with Dennett or his followers. They inevitably end up doubting really obvious stuff like their own consciousness, and then it devolves into a semantics game. No thanks.

How do you know that the work I've linked doesn't tell you how non-conscious stuff produces conscious experience?

Because the Hard Problem hasn't been solved. Ergo, the book you linked doesn't solve it.

"Look, the means by which this non-conscious stuff produces consciousness must, if it exists, be some process or mechanism that is a property of this non-conscious suff. It just seems really odd to me that you'd claim interest in such a mechanism and then refuse a study of the exact non-conscious stuff you would need to know about in order to ascertain if the production of consciousness was among their feasible properties."

I don't think neuroscience is going to solve the hard problem. The idea that you can mix non-conscious stuff around in a certain way and add some electricity to it and get consciousness from it is magical thinking. Since we know consciousness exists, we should doubt the non-conscious stuff exists. We have no evidence that it does anyway. Why assume it exists?

You are confusing the easy problem (neural correlates of mental states) with the Hard Problem (how does non-conscious stuff produce conscious experience). Chalmer's paper is a great place to start. This is also good: https://iep.utm.edu/hard-con/

http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

The pain is to some degree quantum superposition, and that is what "qualia" can refer to. The what it is like is a property of physical matter (maybe a quantum field phenomenon?), as unintuitive as it seems to our wiring mechanism corrupted brains. The matter brains are composed of is intrinsically thinking/feeling stuff, just like it has a shape, size and texture. There are more than ten thousand kinds of neurons in the human brain and their electric fields interacting with different combinations of glial cells, probably explaining much of the variety.

This sounds like panpsychism. The matter that makes up the brain is intrinsically thinking/feeling stuff? I assume you mean neurons? What about the matter what makes up the neurons? Is it thinking/feeling too?

If we're making astonishing progress, shouldn't somebody have seen something that points the way to a mechanism by now? What's your timeframe on how long we should tolerate the lack of progress on the mind/body problem before we start questioning fundamental assumptions?

I've always wondered that too.

Talk of qualia muddies the water. Take something simple, like the pain of stubbing a toe. How does the feeling of pain emerge from non-thinking/feeling stuff? Science has no answer. Science has had no answer for a long long time. I expect science to continue to flounder.

I ask the people who still hold out hope that science will explain consciousness: what do you base that hope on?

I said it was a hypothesis, not a particularly good one!

In these discussions, I really am at a loss to explain how the Dennet's and Churchlands of the world actually the believe the stuff they're saying. I think it has less to do with how they experience the world and more to do with a certain mindset that views consciousness (and everything associated with it) as "woo".

Have you heard of "aphantasia"? There are people out there who are really and truly different from other people when it comes to mental experiences. I don't see why different/lack of mental experiences can't be a hypothesis for why disagreements about stuff like qualia get so heated.

I'm sorry, I totally misread what I quoted you as saying. Must be euphoria hangover from Biden winning. I read you as saying: if science can given an explanation like evolution for why life changes, why can't it do it for consciousness and why is it taking so long?

Anyway, the reason to be maudlin about progress is because there hasn't been any (on the hard problem). We're really good at finding neural correlates to mental states, but on the questions of how are we conscious and why are we conscious, the theories are all over the place: panpsychism, mysterianism, it's-all-an-illusionism, computationalism, etc. There's no consensus on anything. The only other place this shows up in science is the lack of consensus to explain what's going on with quantum mechanics.

Yes, a person from long ago wouldn't be able to figure out why there's lightning. It may be that we're in that position regarding consciousness, and in another thousand years we'll have it nailed down, but as Isaac said

If I ask "why do we have noses" an evolutionary, or physiological account suffices as an answer, but for some reason such an account is insufficient for the 'hard problem' enthusiasts. I've yet to get clear on why.

He's right. Why is consciousness so hard for science to figure out? Why have we made essentially no progress on an explanation?

It may be that there is no answer to that question.

If materialism is right, and inanimate matter exists, there's an explanation for how it gives rise to conscious experience. We might never KNOW the explanation, but that's different than there not being an answer.

The Hard Problem isn't about explaining how consciousness arises from inanimate matter. The "easy" problem is explaining how the functions of consciousness work, easy in the sense that science already has the tools to do that. The Hard Problem is about explaining experience. It's not clear that science does have the conceptual tools for that.

What an odd thing to say. How does consciousness arise from inanimate matter? If that's not a hard problem, I guess there should be an answer to that question, right?

ETA: I see Khaled beat me to it.