It's great you're digging into this, but you will need to understand that you can't both agree with Chalmer's argument, and also hold that consciousness is physical. — Wayfarer
David Chalmers: "It's not physical"
he says it might be an additional property that is associated with matter (a position which is called 'panpsychism'). But it's crucial to recognize that he doesn't say it can be explained in terms of known physical properties. He says that science has to admit consciousness as a fundamental property. By that he means it is irreducible, it can't be explained in terms of something else. — Wayfarer
Right. There's your 'thinking stuff' again. — Wayfarer
Last things first: philosophy is not logic — tim wood
Your views (near as I can tell) are reductionist, legalistic, amoral, and inhuman. — tim wood
And partner with that is the expectation that the guest and the stranger will themselves meet certain standards of behavior. I would like to see something like that employed at the US Southern border: respect, courtesy, concern and care, and the possibility of entry on meeting certain conditions. — tim wood
That is not what Chalmer's says at all. So stop saying that you're 'interpreting' or 'supporting' Chalmer's argument, when you're actually disagreeing with it. If you were honest, what you would say is 'there is no hard problem as Chalmers describes it'. — Wayfarer
Information itself is not a medium. If I transmit information electronically, the medium is copper or electromagnetic waves, or through speech as sound waves in the air. They are physical media. But the interpretation of information is not a physical process, and information is not physical — Wayfarer
Humans build radios to do that and then interpret the sounds as meaningful. There is nothing in the 'physical world', if you mean the world outside human affairs, that will do that. — Wayfarer
For decades, radio telescopes have been scanning the universe looking for signals from intelligent life. Overall, they've found none (with one possible exception.) All the signals so far have a physical or natural origin. If they found a signal originated by an alien intelligence, it would be something other than physical or natural. — Wayfarer
As noted, psychosomatic medicine, the placebo effect, etc, undercut physicalist accounts of mind. — Wayfarer
I am not understanding what you aren't understanding. Why risk the fate of a country on an issue so complex on average citizens and not experts in that field that have access to information that the general public may not. like I said in my previous post, it should be down experts chosen by elected officials. — Samlw
If someone broke into your house for a warm nights sleep when its cold outside, when you did not want to invite them in yourself, that's a violation of your sovereignty of your home.
— Philosophim
Again, the comparison doesn't meet the severity of the topic. I understand the logic you are trying to use however you simply cannot use a blanket answer from the situation you just described as the answer for a topic that is so complex as immigration. — Samlw
And I think THIS is definitely debatable. It is the moral question of whether the person in control of the land/property should or should not let a person in.
— Philosophim
This is literally the question from the start. — Samlw
They could instead fight for their own country, or move to a place in their country that is not affected by war.
— Philosophim
Both of those options are terrible, either potentially die and kill people for your country, or move to a poor place due to your country being war-torn and have a terrible quality of life. — Samlw
Can I ask what happens if a majority of a nation voted for open borders and the country gets ruined because of it? — Samlw
You are comparing someone who has potentially escaped a war zone, their family killed, scared and not knowing where to go. To someone stealing a car... — Samlw
No moral issue? Another categorical statement? Well, maybe not for you. — tim wood
Assuming they have a good reason for being here, likely necessity, there is nothing immoral about it - the necessity being instead grounds for a moral claim. — tim wood
Physical processes don't suggest conscious awareness, unless you mean behavior. The physical processes that don't suggest awareness don't suggest the absence of conscious awareness either. Nor do they suggest that awareness could not arise from physical processes.
You ask why subjective awareness at all. Presuming it is a real thing then why not? We have a subjective prejudice that physical stuff could not have subjective experience. Exactly what would be the argument supporting that conclusion? We have nothing to compare our situation with so it remains just an assumption based on intuitive feelings I think. — Janus
Again, that is not the point of David Chalmer's essay, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. I'm taking issue with your paraphrase of his argument. If you want to argue that this is what he should say, feel free. But it's not what he does say. — Wayfarer
Again, it's not what he says. He says that there is no satisfactory theoretical account of ANY conscious experience, not just of other people's or of animals. — Wayfarer
Drugs can alter mood and behavior, and brain damage can lead to significant changes in consciousness and personality. But this doesn't demonstrate that consciousness is entirely a product of brain activity. — Wayfarer
Neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections—shows that consciously undertaken actions and thoughts can have real, measurable effects on the brain’s structure and function. — Wayfarer
This is an example of top-down causation, where mental processes, such as attention, intention, and practice, influence neurophysiological changes, distinct from the bottom-up causation that is implied by physicalism. Your proposed schema is all 'bottom-up'. — Wayfarer
Furthermore, the analogy of the brain as a receiver rather than just the generator of consciousness provides a different way to look at this issue. Just as a radio receives and tunes into waves without generating them, the brain may play a focusing or filtering role, modulating and organizing conscious experience but not wholly creating it — Wayfarer
We have no scientific theories that explain how brain activity—or computer activity, or any other kind of physical activity—could cause, or be, or somehow give rise to, conscious experience. We don’t have even one idea that’s remotely plausible — Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality, Pp 18-19
What do we want in a scientific theory of consciousness? Consider the case of tasting basil versus hearing a siren. For a theory that proposes that brain activity causes conscious experiences, we want mathematical laws or principles that state precisely which brain activities cause the conscious experience of tasting basil, precisely why this activity does not cause the experience of, say, hearing a siren, and precisely how this activity must change to transform the experience from tasting basil to, say, tasting rosemary. These laws or principles must apply across species, or else explain precisely why different species require different laws. No such laws, indeed no plausible ideas, have ever been proposed. — Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality, Pp 18-19
Information doesn't exist in the same way that matter and energy do—it isn't a physical substance or force. Instead, information exists in the relationships between entities, and its significance depends on interpretation. — Wayfarer
The book itself is not one thing and its meaning another; rather, the meaning emerges through the interaction between the symbols on the page and a mind capable of understanding them. — Wayfarer
Information, in this sense, is relational. It depends on the patterns or structures that carry meaning and on the existence of an interpreter. This makes information fundamentally different from matter and energy—it’s not a physical object but something that manifests through relationships and interpretation. — Wayfarer
What I'm noting is that the standard model of science posits that the brain is the source of human consciousness, at least in terms of behavior.
— Philosophim
I think, actually, that you will find that a very difficult claim to support. You assume that this is what science posits, but there's some important background you're missing here.
At the beginning of modern science, proper, 'consciousness' in the first person sense was excluded from the objects of consideration. — Wayfarer
Now, when you say 'the standard model of science', this is what you mean (whether you're aware of it or not.) And within that model the only 'real objects' are, well, objects. If 'mind' or 'consciousness' can be said to exist, then it can only be as a product of those objects. That's why you're incredulous at the denial of a causal relationship between brain and mind - to you, it's just 'the way things are'. But I'm afraid it doesn't hold up to philosophical scrutiny. — Wayfarer
If we use the Turing_Chalmers' argument to the effect: a cyborg externally programmed to behave like a conscious human will appear to be conscious i.e., have a selfhood without that actually being the case, then we cannot be certain that an observed person is really internally conscious i.e., in possession of a selfhood. — ucarr
As you say, re: the rock's possible subjective experience, we simply assume not. So, possibly (but unlikely) the rock could be suppressing it's selfhood from expressing as behavior so as to keep its selfhood hidden from observers.
— ucarr
Another (unlikely) possibility is the rock subjectively experiences, but has no capability of expressing any behaviors. Maybe it's exactly what we think it is, but conscious. — Patterner
I've underlined the part of your above quote wherein you describe what it's like to be a color blind person without being one yourself. How is it that you can do that? You have enough information, both from science and from descriptions given by color blind persons to approximate in your understanding what the experience of color blindness is like. There is presumably some degree of separation between what the actually color blind person experiences subjectively, and your cognitive simulation of that experience but, again, I claim the difference is by a navigable degree, not by an impenetrable categorical difference. — ucarr
Or to be simpler, if you believe nations cannot do wrong or be wrong, then what is there to discuss? — tim wood
Yes and No. Yes, we know that it happens in the brain. No, we do not know HOW. That's the HPoC. — Patterner
I am the being having the subjective experience. That does not help me understand how it is achieved. — Patterner
We do not know how to go about the HP. That's why it's named the Hard. Because we don't know. How is all of that subjectively experienced? — Patterner
Physicist Brian Greene says there are no known properties of matter that even hint at such a thing. Why do I see red, rather than just perceive different frequencies, the way a robot with an electric eye might? — Patterner
These things can, and do, take place without any subjective experience. — Patterner
I think your point above makes an important clarification: there's something about the native point of view of the sentient that obstructs, so far, our understanding how (or if) physical processes give rise to the subjective experience. — ucarr
As I understand you, you're implying that the subjectivity of the sentient is insuperable i.e., it is a container which has no exit. — ucarr
If it’s true that the subjectivity of the sentient is insuperable, that then calls into question the possibility of objectivity in general. If the sentient cannot know what it’s like to be beyond its own subjective being, then it follows that the sentient cannot know what it’s like for anything, other than itself, to be, whether a stone, a galaxy or another person. — ucarr
It sounds strange, but, in my context here, when we claim to know the chemical composition/interactions of a rock, we’re also claiming to know “what it’s like to be that rock.” — ucarr
To be sure, knowing a rock by knowing its chemical composition/interactions is a much more simple phenomenon than knowing another person by knowing their consciousness, but the difference is a difference of degree, not a categorical difference. — ucarr
If we’re locked out of objectivity because of insuperable subjectivity, then we’re thrown all the way back to securing our beliefs on the basis of faith rather than on the basis of science. — ucarr
Existentialism, which is centered on “existence precedes essence,” gives us a way forward with our database of scientific disciplines and their methodologies. We, as existentialists, can assert that we don’t really know the world beyond realistic-seeming narratives that, ultimately, in the absence of epistemological certainty, we hold as true on the basis of faith. — ucarr
How do you feel about slavery? Do you think the Taliban are doing a good and admirable job of governing Afghanistan? How abut Iran? Or if the US state of Texas (et al) criminalizes abortion, well done them, yes? — tim wood
How about if the will of the American public is to deliver all of its "illegal" immigrants to England. Why should the English object? — tim wood
We know that an individual can do wrong. Your proposition amounts to saying that in a group constituted in any of a particular set of ways, those people so constituted can do no wrong, or at least nothing you could object to. Which I think is ridiculous and absurd. Are you that? Or have you just misspoke? — tim wood
You may have addressed it, but you are still using an inaccurate definition of the HPoC. As J pointed out early on: — Patterner
These things change various aspects of how the brain works, and, therefore, what we subjectively experience. They don't address how it is that we subjectively experience them at all. That's the HPoC. — Patterner
Is factually incorrect. Chalmer’s argument is directed at the inadequacy of physical accounts to accurately capture first-person experience, yours or anyone else’s. — Wayfarer
Against better judgement, I will tackle some of these arguments. — Wayfarer
Firstly, your response begs the question of whether and in what sense physical matter is conscious, or alternatively whether conscious beings are physical. You're assuming that a self-aware being can (1) be reduced to 'a brain', and (2) comprises only matter and energy. But whether these are true are the very things that need to be explained, hence, begging the question. — Wayfarer
As for the brain being aware of itself, that is another contested claim. Brains themselves aren't aware of anything unless they're embodied in a conscious being. Certainly conscious self-aware beings have brains (although there are some strange anomalies) but saying that 'brains are aware' is described in The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience as 'the mereological fallacy', that is, attributing to an anatomical part something that can only be rightly attributed to the whole being. — Wayfarer
As to ' physics of a note an air vibration against a metal Tuba?', why only tubas, of all the instruments in the world? And so what? What does that prove? — Wayfarer
The fact that Bach’s music is transmitted through the radio also has precisely zero bearing. Yes, sound waves are physical, but your hearing of the music as music is not physical, for reasons outlined in Facing Up to the Probem of Consciousness, which you don't recognize. — Wayfarer
I have been more than fair in presenting what would be needed to help your point gain footing.
— Philosophim
And I have answered them. — Wayfarer
Alright, then try to counter these points, because these points note that our autonomy is physical.
1. Drugs that affect mood and decisions. A person getting cured of schizophrenia by medication for example.
2. The removal of the brain or physical processes that result in life from the brain, and the inability of autonomy to persist.
3. Brain damage resulting in differing behaviors and consciousness. — Philosophim
Two persons understand each other to a limited degree because they share important attributes common to personhood.
We share our stories because the bond of human identity allows us to walk a mile in each others' shoes. How much we relate to another person varies widely, but the connection rarely drops to zero. — ucarr
I would agree with ucarr that the basic sense of self is plausibly thought to be the same across species. Obviously this is not an empirically checkable assertion. It seems that almost nothing in philosophy is. — Janus
As far as I know Bach composed no symphonies. Concertos yes. — Janus
FTR, Bach did not write any symphonies. — Patterner
If the brain is aware of itself, and the brain is matter and energy, then matter and energy in the right circumstances can be aware of itself. How is this inadequate? Is there evidence of some existence that is not matter and energy that is aware of itself that we know of?
— Philosophim
Because you could never arrive at an understanding of it through physics and chemistry, which is the analysis of matter and energy. — Wayfarer
You do understand that all you're arguing for - in fact, pretty well all you ever argue for - is what is called 'physicalist reductionism', don't you? — Wayfarer
In this framework, there is no need to posit non-physical substances or properties. — Wayfarer
Then you are content with whatever any country decides to do within its borders - without qualification? I doubt you mean that, but it's what you seem to be saying. — tim wood
There are plenty of people in life I don't understand. And I'm sure there are plenty of people in life who don't understand me. Bonding often comes from like goals. Survival, or accomplishing a task together require a closeness and understanding of another person up to a point to get this done. It does not require me to understand exactly what another person is experiencing in life.
— Philosophim
I assert this is an overstatement of the degree of difference_disconnection separating feelings from thoughts in terms of people understanding each other and moreover, it is therefore an overstatement of the degree of sameness_connection necessary for a human to know what it’s like to be a bat. — ucarr
I assert there is no impenetrable membrane called what-it’s-like-to-be-an-individualized-self. It’s this mistaken belief that creates the hard problem. It's this mistaken belief that falsely divides subjective from objective. Clearly, the selfhood of the self is the object of that selfsame self's consciousness.
I assert there is a reasonably accurate one-size-fits-all-what-it’s-like-to-be-selfhood, accessible to many if not all sentients, that supports the sympathy and morals essential to the peaceable animal kingdom and civilization. — ucarr
If it is not a soul, what is it?
— Philosophim
A form of existence that is aware of itself. — Wayfarer
If you take a piece of information, be it a formula, a story, a recipe, or whatever, it can be translated between different media such as binary data, handwritten, engraved in brass and so on. The information remains the same while the material form is completely different. So the information is not material. — Wayfarer
Its an identity distinction, and there is nothing in the application of this distinction that notes that our functional autonomy is not physical.
— Philosophim
Nothing that can be described only in terms of physics exhibits those atttributes. Taking all of the known laws of physics, there is no way you could arrive at a functional description of an organism. — Wayfarer
Your challenge is to demonstrate the existence of something that is not matter and energy.
— Philosophim
Your arguments, tendentious though they may be. — Wayfarer
The laws should be whatever the citizens desire in a democratic nation. Do you disagree?
— Philosophim
Can't let this pass. Care to qualify this in some way that will move it from nonsense to sense? — tim wood
My question is this: How do you decide who to let in and who to deny entry?
— Samlw
It's not clear to me that anyone here has understood the question. — tim wood
I am not disagreeing with you, I am simply asking about your independent view on what we can do about this situation, lets dive into the topic and what your personal beliefs are, maybe even come up with an idea. — Samlw
↪Philosophim I posted a response yesterday:
To say that mind is not reducible to physical constituents, is not to posit some ethereal substance or 'ghost in the machine' (if that is what 'soul' means to you)... — Wayfarer
Information would be a good candidate in our scientific age. 'Information is information, not matter or energy', said one of founders of computer science. 'No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.' Why? Because the same information can be encoded in completely different material forms, and yet still retain its meaning. — Wayfarer
When I say that living organisms display attributes and characteristics that cannot be extracted from the laws of chemistry and physics alone, I'm pointing to the fact that organisms are fundamentally different from machines. Unlike machines, which serve purposes imposed on them from the outside, living organisms exhibit intrinsic agency and functional autonomy. — Wayfarer
This fundamental distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic purpose is key to understanding why organisms cannot be reduced to mere physical or chemical mechanisms. — Wayfarer
I’m trying to get the point across that why it seems so obvious that only the physical can be real, is because of the way the problem has been set up in our culture. It is why when the question is asked ‘what alternative is there?’ the expectation is that the answer must necessarily entail something spooky. — Wayfarer
Your answers are sidestepping the purpose of the OP. — Leontiskos
What if there is not only individualized what-it's-like-to-be selfhoods but also a one-size-fits-all what-it's-like-to-be selfhood both universal and constant?
With this supposition, we can say that what-it's-like-to-be a bat living in a cave is the same as what-it's-like-to-be a human living in a college dorm. — ucarr
Morals are about doing no harm to other innocent beings. How can we value this principle governing our behavior if we don't have some semblance of a one-size-fits-all what-it's-like-to-be selfhood that we access and utilize to support the sympathy that fuels our moral thinking and behavior? — ucarr
How is it that many humans easily shuttle between an individualized selfhood and the one-size-fits-all what-it's-like-to-be selfhood that enables the bonding of friendship and love so important in their lives? — ucarr
The edifice of the arts (literature, drama, music, dance, painting, sculpture) depends upon the interpersonal identification of artist, art work and audience. Is this not, to some observable degree, a communal experience wherein the one-size-fits-all what-it's-like-to-be selfhood exerts a very useful and desirable power? — ucarr
So, after all, maybe we really do know all what-it's-like-to-be selfhoods. Isn't this access to all what-it's-like-to-be selfhoods the underlying assumption that supports the edifice of morality?
Doesn't morality lose it's existential imperative within our justice-governed lives without it? — ucarr
Another, possibly important speculation, goes as follows: the foundation of consciousness is memory. — ucarr
Think of it as a question about what the laws should be. — Leontiskos
The noting of the current limitations of science being able to objectively capture personal experience are just that, a limit.
— Philosophim
They're not that. There are limitations to scientific method in this respect as a matter of principle, which you're not seeing. It requires a different kind of approach to what has been up until now understood as scientific method. — Wayfarer
As a footnote to the above, what really is 'physical'? Is the brain physical? Living organisms? I question these assumptions, because living organisms generally display attributes and characteristics that can't be extracted from the laws of physics or chemistry alone. — Wayfarer
In my opinion that is a very cold, black and white way of looking at it. Would you turn away a human trafficking victim, would you turn away an unaccompanied minor on the border? What about an asylum seeker. — Samlw
And if you were to say we should say no regardless then I would say that you need some compassion for your fellow human. — Samlw
There is some ability to infer some obvious physiological correlations like pain or epilepsy from neuroscience, but you still fall back on the assumption that subjective experiences are still ultimately physical, without addressing the real crux of the issue — Wayfarer
We have seen that there are systematic reasons why the usual methods of cognitive science and neuroscience fail to account for conscious experience. These are simply the wrong sort of methods: nothing that they give to us can yield an explanation. To account for conscious experience, we need an extra ingredient in the explanation.
That 'extra ingredient' is missing from physical explanations: — Wayfarer
I don't think Chalmers is trying to suggest that there is a soul or essence in that sense. I'm certainly not trying to resurrect a Cartesian soul. But I also think that the physicalist picture that arises from denying the reality of consciousness (in effect) is also mistaken, because it's grounded in faulty premisses from the outset. — Wayfarer
That is your particular intepretation of the problem. David Chalmer’s original paper doesn’t say that. — Wayfarer
He never says that the problem is what it is like to be a conscious individual that isn’t ourselves. — Wayfarer
Which he proposes as a 'naturalistic dualism'. The key point being the emphasis on 'experience' which is by nature first-person. — Wayfarer
Just for the record, that isn't the standard way of stating the problem, and it isn't David Chalmers' way (he coined the phrase). You can listen to Chalmers describe it here: He defines the problem as "how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences in the mind." — J
Any thoughts we would have about it implies our consciousness, not someone else's, so it's impossible to know. — Skalidris
"How can we objectively measure and explore the purely subjective experience of being conscious?" With our current understanding of science, we can't.
— Philosophim
Well we can't, however advanced sciences become, that's what this "logical proof" is about. — Skalidris
I believe this is the point Skalidris is making: it is not about the advances in science. Even defining consciousness leads to problems. — Carlo Roosen
Any thought experiment you try will fail on me, because you are not talking about the sense of being conscious, but about the content of that consciousness. — Carlo Roosen
I am not following how we only know through contradictions (between our experiences and reality). I can imagine perfectly fine a person who infers correctly, without contradiction, that their conscious experience is representational; and then proceeds to correctly identify that there must be a thing-in-itself which excites the senses which, in turn, begins the process to construct the conscious experience which they are having. — Bob Ross
Can you cite something we could say is knowledge that did not require any experience to gain it?
The most basic example that comes to mind is mathematical knowledge. Your brain necessarily has to already know how to perform math to construct your conscious experience; and this is why mathematical propositions, in geometry, are applicable and accurate for experience: the axioms of geometry reside a priori in our brains — Bob Ross
Mathematical propositions are valid in virtue of being grounded in how our brains cognize; and they are only valid for human experience. They are true, justified, beliefs about experience—not reality. — Bob Ross
Perhaps that’s where the confusion was: the a priori knowledge we have is not knowledge about reality, but about how we cognize it. — Bob Ross
So what is a flower apart from any observation
I would say that we merely say that there is some thing which is exciting our senses, and of which we represent as what we normally perceive as a flower. — Bob Ross
And that's all the 'thing in itself' is. Its an unknowable outside of the mind existence.
Agreed; but that’s not a purely abstract thing, then. It is a concrete—unknown. — Bob Ross
Agreed, to some extent. By physical, I do not mean material: I mean mind-independent.
Even if we could not even know that it is mind-independently existing; the thing as it is in-itself is not purely logical (in that case): we are talking about some ‘thing’ which exists—we are talking in concreto. — Bob Ross
Now, once it has that capacity, of course, I agree it still has to learn how to walk; but this is disanalogous. — Bob Ross