A hymn of the technoreligion?

Given the complexity of the human brain, comprehending it theoretically and thereby eliminating dysfunctions produced by the brain's organic defects probably requires more-than-human-intelligence (via cognitive augmentation and/or AGI). Technical capabilities of indefinitely postponing human senescence (i.e. disease & aging) is worth the price / risk of "them understanding us better than we understand ourselves" (or them), no? I think so. — 180 Proof

Yeah, I can appreciate such possibilities, but I can imagine a lot of dangers humanity is woefully unprepared to understand.

It's so much simpler than that. How can anything that doesn't make any difference make a difference to survival? — petrichor

Sure, but in light of the metabolic cost of useless brain tissue we have reason to understand that carrying around superfluous brain should be actively selected against. More energy efficient zombies should outcompete members of a population which need to consume more to feed epiphenomenally conscious brain tissue that only monitors what is going on in the brain but produces no output.

Again, this is blatantly wrong, and I'm sure you know it. Energy is not measured by waves structures, it is measured by electrical voltage. — Metaphysician Undercover

I suspect you are confusing volts with electronvolts:

In physics, an electronvolt (symbol eV, also written electron-volt and electron volt) is the measure of an amount of kinetic energy gained by a single electron accelerating from rest through an electric potential difference of one volt in vacuum. When used as a unit of energy, the numerical value of 1 eV in joules (symbol J) is equivalent to the numerical value of the charge of an electron in coulombs (symbol C). Under the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units, this sets 1 eV equal to the exact value 1.602176634×10−19 J.[1]

Why would we rationally want that? — 180 Proof

Why would we think wanting is rational? :wink:

I just asked the question in hopes of thinkers thinking about it. I'm more interested in hearing other's thoughts to learn how they might inform my own.

The purpose of the question was to ask you, 'do you consider consciousness to be something explainable via the scientific method... — kudos

I don't know the limits of scientific investigation, but I certainly think it can be much better understood than it is now. It's a heavily interdisciplinary area of study.

What are your thoughts on the compatibility of epiphenomenalism and the evolution of consciousness by natural selection? It seems obvious, at least on the surface, that if consciousness were not somehow causally efficacious, it couldn't possibly make any difference to behavior, and therefore could not be selected for. — petrichor

Right. Brain tissue is metabolically expensive and it doesn't make sense in evolutionary terms that neurology supporting non-causal consciousness would evolve.

That said, I don't think we have any other option than to settle for simplistic intuitions about the causal role of consciousness. Brains are simply much too complex for the minds they instantiate to form a detailed picture of what's going on. So the way consciousness is causal is necessarily different (much more complicated) than our intuitive sense of the causality.

I think psychologist Jon Haidt's image of the rider and the elephant conveys important aspects of the situation we find ourselves in.

It makes me suspect that people haven't thought it all through sufficiently. — petrichor

Well, to be fair, I'd say that it's not within human capability to think it through *sufficiently*. (Depending of course on what "sufficiently" is taken to mean.) Without substantially better technology than is available now, the best we have is partially informed conjectures.

Even if we had a complete 'schematic' of the brain, what would we do with it? I'm an electrical engineer who has worked with brilliant engineers and scientists, and I know that that sort of complexity is beyond the ability of humans to grasp in a comprehensive way. Of course modern AI is becoming a necessary tool in neuroscientific experiments, but maybe there is a limit to the extent to which we want AI's to understand us better than we understand ourselves?

Jenna Ellis pleads guilty in Georgia:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/24/politics/jenna-ellis-fulton-county/index.html

I don't know.

So do you thereby think applying the scientific method to an individual by a scientifically informed individual is superior to being seen and psychoanalyzed by a psychiatrist? — kudos

It's rather apples and oranges, and I don't see it as making much sense to compare the value of them. A combination of the two seems likely to be superior to either one alone. For that matter, one might hope the psychiatrist was well informed scientifically.

Would you prefer mental diagnosis made by an AI algorithm, as is currently being performed with some success, as opposed to another human? Which do you think will understand your condition of life better? — kudos

Things are too much in flux in the AI world for me to want to venture an opinion. I would think an AI and a human would understand an individual in different ways, and there is likely to be value to both in the near future, if not at present.

What is your position that doesn't fit any of the options? It seems to me that these five options should cover all positions. There are only four possible combinations of answers for two yes/no questions. I have three yes/no questions, but if you say no to consciousness, the other two questions are pointless. I don't see how there could be any other options.

Consciousness?
If yes:
Causally efficacious?
Evolved? — petrichor

I would have voted for the first option:

We are conscious, epiphenomenalism is true, and consciousness evolved by natural selection. — petrichor

...except that I see epiphenomenalism as based on simplistic thinking. My view is similar to the view Peter Tse expresses in this abstract. (unfortunately a wall of text)

You're right, I am not that informed on scientific explanations of consciousness, as opposed to scientific inquiry pertaining to consciousness, because I think there is no point in explaining it scientifically with speculations instead of observations. By all means please prove me wrong by demonstrating the ways in which there is. — kudos

Speculation has always been part of science. Informed speculation is where hypotheses come from, and consideration of the speculations of scientifically informed people is an important part of how science progresses.

Because of the technological challenges and ethical issues involved in studying working human brains, we have to settle for speculation to a large extent in neuroscience. Of course we might throw up our hands and just say that God wants some people to be autistic, schizophrenic, bipolar, etc. I find considering scientifically informed speculation to be of vastly greater practical and humanistic value.

Neither of the reviews propagate the 'genetic fallacy'... — Wayfarer

I didn't suggest that the reviews were propagating the genetic fallacy. I said, "...it looks like you are promoting a genetic fallacy..." ...by bringing up reviews of an older work, as if they are relevant to the argument more recently presented.

None of the above.

Critical reviews of Humphrey by Galen Strawson and Mary Midgley (although I disagree with Strawson's panpsychism, subject of this thread.) — Wayfarer

Thanks. However neither of those reviews have to do with the article I linked. So it looks like you are promoting a genetic fallacy:

The genetic fallacy (also known as the fallacy of origins or fallacy of virtue)[1] is a fallacy of irrelevance in which arguments or information are dismissed or validated based solely on their source of origin rather than their content. In other words, a claim is ignored or given credibility based on its source rather than the claim itself.

The fallacy therefore fails to assess the claim on its merit. The first criterion of a good argument is that the premises must have bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim in question.[2] Genetic accounts of an issue may be true, and they may help illuminate the reasons why the issue has assumed its present form, but they are not conclusive in determining its merits.[3]

BTW, this article (which @Luke started a thread about awhile back) touches on related stuff.

I have no problems with rigorous scientific inquiry. — kudos

But you aren't informed about rigorous scientific inquiry on this subject. So your point is moot, and you can only offer your ignorant opinion.

What is the point of explaining consciousness? It is a fruitless and useless exercise in vain-glory. — kudos

For me it has been a quite fruitful and useful in understanding being on the autism spectrum and understanding humanity more generally.

It's understandable that you haven't felt the need to educate yourself in a similar way, but it would be silly of you to consider yourself meaningfully informed about the topic.

I see no reason why not to extend the concept of consciousness to ordinary objects like a rock or a waterfall that are not even able to move themselves. — kudos

There is much that can be learned about differences between rocks, and organisms which have evolved sense organs and brains. Perhaps a lack of such learning plays a role in your view?

But whence "mental representation" versus the prior "behavioral inputs/outputs"? How is it this difference in degree at least SEEMS to be a difference in kind? What is it, this change, this "mental representation"? — schopenhauer1

I would think an important aspect of it is that more neural net resources allow for more detailed memories. (Somewhat analogous might be the qualitative difference between the eight bit graphics of video games of the 1970s and the CGI we see today.)

By having a greater amount of memory (allowing for more detail in modelling our interactions with the world) we are able to develop more accurate and detailed models of ourselves in the world. That accuracy and detail provide a qualitative difference.

So the big deal I see is that sponges have very basic neural networks that most scientists agree is behavioral but without a mental representation of the world. However, with animals like jellyfish, worms, and insects, the neural nets equates to a mental representation (however basic) of the world. My challenge is to understand what this fundamental difference between the two is. That right there is the essence of the origins of the hard problem of consciousness. However, this seems like an impossible question. It would seem on the surface, there shouldn't be any qualitative difference whereby on one side of the divide a certain number of neurons means no mental representation and on the other side, it does. What does that even mean? — schopenhauer1

This 2021 article says that sponges don't have neurons but do have cells that may have some neuron like functionality. However, the investigation is very preliminary.

Also, it is an open question as to what extent very simple creatures like worms might achieve a rudimentary mental representation. Neurons can automate behavior without mental representation and I'm skeptical towards the idea that worms (or jellyfish) have even the most rudimentary mental representations. (Although projects like Open Worm may eventually provide evidence one way or another.)

Sheer quantity of neurons matters. Quantity of neurons plays a significant role in how complex the interconnections between neurons can be. It is (very crudely) analogous to the way that a higher transistor count in a microprocessor can allow for more complex calculations performed within a given unit of time. With 'surplus' neurons available an organism can have neurons which aren't directly involved with getting from sensory input to behavioral output. A network of 'surplus' neurons can sit alongside the neurons which manage basic survival, and instead of monitoring sensory inputs or participating in causing motor responses, the surplus network can monitor both the outputs of sensory neurons and motor neurons and learn about patterns to the organisms own operation that the more primitive I/O networks are not able to learn.

So this higher level monitoring might recognize something like, 'My automatic response the last time I saw something like that was to eat it, but the result was bad.', and manage to interfere with the behavioral output, so as to avoid a reoccurence of such a bad event.

I'd suggest that neurons available to learn a more complex way of interacting with the world are a prerequisite to mental representation. The more such 'surplus' neurons there are in a brain the more complex the mental representation can be.

:up:

I might respond further later, but for now I want to say I appreciate the thoughtful response.

It's a slogan — Vera Mont

Was reading through this thread, and it was so pleasant to finally read a post where someone recognized this.

Yes, the process of evolution has been enormously complex, and perhaps, "Surival of the fittest.", is a step in the wrong direction from "Shut up and study this tangled bank."

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us… Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

To religious people, it seems to me that when they talk about God, they are SOMETIMES really projecting their own values onto God, and then they claim that they are speaking with God's authority, when they are really just giving their own opinion — Brendan Golledge

That made me think of this video. I'd be interested in hearing what you think of it.

Science in Pursuit of Truth, an eternally incomplete pass. — Vera Mont

:rofl:

Science pursues truth, namely scientific truth. It does not pursue non-scientific truth, such as philosophical or political truths. — Leontiskos

"Science" is an abstraction. Right?

It's people who pursue truths. Scientific or otherwise. Right?

People often claim that nothing has intrinsic value while simultaneously believing that things have intrinsic value. — Leontiskos

I don't believe things have intrinsic value, though I understand that I see things as valuable like I see things as yellow. It is an aspect of the sort of creatures we are, to see things as valuable.

What they mean to affirm is, "Nothing can be publicly and scientifically demonstrated to have intrinsic value." — Leontiskos

Why do you think that? Could it be you aren't as good a mind reader as you think yourself to be?

...for the honest point of departure for reasoning is always what we believe to be true, even though provability also has its place. — Leontiskos

Sure. So I believe value is something our minds project on the things in the world, rather than that things in the world have intrinsic value. Certainly there is much in the world that I see as valuable, because I'm the sort of creature that models the world that way. Do you have more than a naive intuition, that value is 'out there' rather than in the eye of the beholder?

To deny the existence of intrinsically valuable things makes no sense to me. — Leontiskos

Try this. Suppose your impression of things as valuable is like your impression that things have color - an aspect of how your brain models the world. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that I see things as valuable, like I see things as red?

Why think there is information available to us, other than that which can come to us via configurations of physical stuff?
— wonderer1

All kinds of things. A lot of what we nowadays take for granted, or at least, see around us all the time, not long ago only existed in the domain of the possible, penetrated by the insights of geniuses who navigated a course from the possible, the potential, to the actual, by peering into that domain, which at the time did not yet exist, and then realising it, in the sense of 'making it real'. One parameter of that is physical, and it's an important parameter, but not the only one. — Wayfarer

Poetic, but it doesn't come across to me as a response coming from having seriously considered the question.

"Domain of the possible"? Is that a metaphor, or something reified in your thinking?

...penetrated by the insights of geniuses who navigated a course from the possible, the potential, to the actual, by peering into that domain, which at the time did not yet exist...

The bolded part doesn't seem to make sense if taken ontologically. Are you conflating epistemic with ontic?

Well, that didn't take long – 3 out of 18 dominoes have fallen so far. — 180 Proof

I wonder if we are about to see a race to see who can get their plea bargaining done before that door closes.

Chesebro...

Another one bites the dust.

As you've made a claim that 'Meaning depends on a physical interpretive context' so I'm asking, what do you mean by that? — Wayfarer

The state of a brain seems a pretty key factor.

But how does it come to be so encoded, what is it that does the encoding and what interprets the code? I think you will find that they are very big questions, so I'm not trying to elicit an answer - like Feynmann says! - so much as a recognition that the answer is not obvious, and also not something that can be understood in terms of physics. — Wayfarer

Yeah, a lot of other sciences besides physics are important in developing understanding. So yes they are big questions with complicated explanations. Work on answering them is ongoing.

As far as I can discern, the only instances of codes are the biological code - DNA - and in languages. — Wayfarer

We can apply our ability to interpret to things other than codes. For example fossils.

Divine command theory has a conception of the good. It conceives of the good as that which is divinely commanded. — Leontiskos

It's also associated with claims of horrendous things being divinely commanded.

'Physical' meaning what, exactly? — Wayfarer

What do you mean by 'exactly'? I've grown to think more and more like Feynman:

“You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit and if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else, but I don't have to know an answer, I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me.”
― Richard P. Feynman

I think you most likely have an intuitive sense of what people mean by physical, and you'll just have to work with your intuition, because I can't give you mine. I also think you know enough about physics to know that any exact claim would be unjustifiable.

I can encode information - a recipe, a formula, a set of instructions - in all manner of physical forms, even in different media, binary, analog, engraved on brass. In each case, the physical medium and the symbolic form may be completely different, while the information content remains the same. — Wayfarer

Right. You have a variety of ways of interpreting things, which can be applied to a variety of ways information can be encoded in the structure of physical stuff. That's one of the more interesting things about homo sapien brains.

So how can the information be physical? — Wayfarer

By being encoded in the structure of physical stuff.

Why think there is information available to us, other than that which can come to us via configurations of physical stuff?

I don't think that, "Because once upon a time someone said he had it all figured out, and other people believed him.", amounts to a good reason.

What's encoded in configurations of physical reality is that we are all social primates here. As Plantinga points out (though I think more unintentionally than intentionally) the likelihood - that there is good reason to question the reliability of our cognitive faculties - is high. Just look at the Israel thread to see how often people jump to wrong conclusions.

No, I see subjects only in subject-object relations. There is no being a subject without having an intentional relation to an object known, willed, hoped for, etc. All of this is essentially intentional. Nothing about it demands physicality. — Dfpolis

You seem to simply beg the question that intentionality can exist without physicality. The problem is that you can't provide any evidence of intentionality without physicality, so it seems you take the possibility of intentionality sans physicality on faith.

So, what you are doing is generalizing from a single form of knowing, to all knowing. Clearly, there is no logical justification for this kind of induction. — Dfpolis

There is no deductive justification, but it remains an unfalsified hypothesis (that knowing depends on an information processing substrate). Feel free to try to present some evidence falsifying the hypothesis.

Think about information. While it can be physically encoded, it is not physical. What computers process is not information in virtue of any physical property. Label a bit’s physical states a and b, and ask what the byte aababbab means? Reading left to right and interpreting a as 0, and b as 1, the byte means 00101101. Interpreting a as 1 and b as 0, it is 11010010. Reading right to left, it means 10110100 or 01001011. Thus, a, an arbitrary physical state, lacks intrinsic meaning. — Dfpolis

Meaning depends on a physical interpretive context. The fact that aababbab doesn't have any clear meaning outside a physical interpretive context isn't relevant to anything. To treat it as an eight bit number, something would have to translate whatever a and b are to valid bits (binary digits) which can only take the value 0 or 1. As soon as a physical interpretive context is assigned to aababbab then aababbab will have the meaning it has within that context.

Since information is not it's encoding, there is no contradiction in having intelligibility without a physical substrate. — Dfpolis

As far as I can tell there is no intelligibility outside a physically interpretive context so I think that you need to provide some reason to believe that there can be intelligibility outside a physically interpretive context.

Finally, your assumption that human intentionality supervenes on brain states is demonstrably false. Consider my seeing an apple. The same modification of my brain state encodes both my seeing an apple and my retinal state being modified. So, one neural state underpins two distinct conceptual states. — Dfpolis

You seem to be getting inputs and outputs confused. Your retinal state supervenes on the physical effect of an apple reflecting light from a light source into your eye. Your brain state supervenes on your retinal state. When you are thinking about the apple you see, you will have a different neural state than when contemplating light striking your retina. so I don't know what you have in mind when talking about one neural state underpinning two distinct conceptual states.

It is relevant because it shows that matter is not essential to all objects of thought. Ask yourself how physical states can determine immaterial contents. For example, what kind of physical state can encode Goedel's concept of unprovability? — Dfpolis

Physical ink arranged on physical paper serves just fine for encoding Godel's theorems. Neural states can encode the concept. You are just presupposing without supporting evidence that "objects of thought sans a physical information processing substrate" refers to anything.

Anyway, I don't expect saying this to make any appreciable difference in your thinking in the short term, and I'm quite confident that you aren't going to be able to provide any evidence supporting your view. So this seems like a good place to agree to disagree. I'm not very inclined to get into long winded discussions like this, so I'll likely let you have the last word.

This is an important point; we are bedeviled by polemics. the battle between the "too otherworldly" and the "too this-worldly". On account of this state of conflict and confusion we are killing ourselves or at least allowing ourselves to be killed. — Janus

:100:

What becomes apparent in this sort of process analysis is that it is very hard to define the boundaries of a "person" as a system. If I write a reminder to myself on a post-it note and this later causes me to remember an errand I have to run, is this my being determined by the environment or a form of self-determination? — Count Timothy von Icarus

To take that a little farther, suppose you ask your spouse to remind you of something which you subsequently forget. It is only due to your spouse's timely reminder that you manage to do what you had wanted to do.

Did your spouse play a causal role in you doing what you did?

More generally, don't we play a causal role in each other's thinking, and subsequent behavior?

Yes, that is my position. It is possible that I am wrong, that I do not recognize wisdom because I am not wise. By the same token, unless someone is wise they may be wrong when attributing wisdom to Aristotle or anyone else. Is there anyone here able to make that determination? — Fooloso4

I don't see wisdom as a binary matter. I see degrees of wisdom, in different ways, in a lot of people. Was Aristotle committing a nirvana fallacy?

Sure, we do have a good understanding of how vision works in terms of the processes involved. But I am talking about the experience of yellow or blue, such as seeing the sky on sunny day, that phenomenon of blueness is not encountered in the theory of how photons hit the retina and then goes to the brain and so on. — Manuel

Ah ok. As far as the way light spectrums are symbolized in our minds with the qualia we experience, that is certainly less well understood, and I suspect we are a long way from having the technology needed to figure that out in detail, but I certainly don't think that is a good reason to think it a matter of brute fact.

Regarding free will, Peter Tse has done some serious neuroscientific thinking on that. However I'd guess most people would need to adjust their idea of what is meant by "free will" to agree that free will is what Peter Tse is talking about.

To put it in a trivial manner, we see red and yellow objects, this is as evident as things can be, but we do not find red or yellow in the fundamental constituents of the universe. Too bad. We have to accept both. — Manuel

This aspects of our visual system is pretty well understood. There is a somewhat complicated relationship between the wavelengths arriving at a spot on our retina and the color we see. Understanding of this relationship is what allows you to see yellow on your computer display even though your computer display doesn't emit any light with the wavelength corresponding to yellow.

We certainly can be scientifically informed about the details of how it works. We don't treat it as a brute fact because an explanation is available to anyone willing to put in the effort.