He's arguing, there is no superior source of insight to science. So that is more than 'remotely like that'; it is actually that. — Wayfarer

No. You are simply reading your preconceptions into the quotes you posted.

If someone offered you a million dollars on the condition you could never drink again...I wouldn't take the money. — RogueAI

If someone is making the offer, please send them my way. I'd take the million in a heartbeat.

What I object to with determinism as usually presented is, 'hey we (scientists) know what the real causes of everything is...' — Wayfarer

Who really says anything remotely like that? You seem to enjoy posting quotes from people who you see as supporting your view. Why resort to a straw man in the case of views you disagree with? It comes across to me as anti-physicalist propagandizing. Why don't you provide quotes, of actual statements made by the people whose views you oppose, rather than put words in the mouth of a figment of your imagination?

That's where it becomes scientistic rather than scientific - everything has to be explainable within the procrustean bed of physical causation. — Wayfarer

I generally see people's use of "scientistic" as indicative of an anti-science bias on their part. Anyway, you are putting up a strawman again, and trying to paint physicalists with views they do not hold.

The simple fact is that you haven't considered physicalism in a charitable way, and so don't know what it is like to look at things from a physicalist perspective. It's not that "everything has to be explainable within the procrustean bed of physical causation." It that those who seriously study the causation of things, find through life experience that explanations that don't conform to the Procrustean bed, never seem to yield reliable predictions.

Science is enforced humility:

What is the core, immutable quality of science?

It's not formal publication, it's not peer review, it's not properly citing sources. It's not "the scientific method" (whatever that means). It's not replicability. It's not even Popperian falsificationism – the approach that admits we never exactly prove things, but only establish them as very likely by repeated failed attempts to disprove them.

Underlying all those things is something more fundamental. Humility.

Everyone knows it's good to be able to admit when we've been wrong about something. We all like to see that quality in others. We all like to think that we possess it ourselves – although, needless to say, in our case it never comes up, because we don't make mistakes. And there's the rub. It goes very, very strongly against the grain for us to admit the possibility of error in our own work. That aversion is so strong that we need to take special measures to protect ourselves from it.

If science was merely a matter of increasing the sum of human knowledge, it would be enough for us all to note our thoughts on blogs and move on. But science that we can build on needs to be right. That means that when we're wrong – and we will be from time to time, unless we're doing terribly unambitious work – our wrong results need to be corrected.

It's because we're not humble by nature – because we need to have humility formally imposed on us – that we need the scaffolding provided by all those things we mentioned at the start.

You don't understand the perspective, because you simply don't have the life experience required to have developed such a perspective. By all means, demonstrate something that doesn't fit the Procrustean bed, but I'm not going to hold my breath, nor spend a lot of time addressing quotes of the sort you like to post in the meantime.

Ironically it presupposes dualism, because it imagines the felt quality of experience as something "ghostly" that exists over and above the neuronal processes.

:100:

So many of the arguments against physicalism presuppose dualism, and are simply question begging. I think we are so encultured to thinking dualistically about mind and body that (at least in the West) it is hard for people to recognize that they are begging the question.

I added a link just before your post showed up. It's a very brief discussion of the differences.

The argument against free will always seems to undermine the point of philosophical dialogue. I mean, if one’s opinions are determined prior to discussion, how could any act of rational persuasion prevail? Nobody could ever change their mind about anything, if it were true. — Wayfarer

You are mistaking determinism for fatalism. On determinism your mind can change in response to events. The way things are determined is ongoing and there is no reason to think that events occurring in philosophical dialogs can't change our minds.

https://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/free-will/fatalism/determinism-vs-fatalism

It seems to me as if you are aren't really engaging with my question, and are instead presenting a red herring.

Do you think you can know the initial conditions of a system with perfect precision? Is this something you have done?

...if you know the initial conditions of a system with perfect precision, you can predict its future state with certainty. In quantum mechanics, this determinism is replaced by inherent probabilistic behavior. — Wayfarer

Is the determinism replaced, or is it simply the case that you can't know the initial conditions of a system with perfect precision?

In AI news...

But are machines capable of this type of thinking? In the late 1980s, Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn, philosophers and cognitive scientists, posited that artificial neural networks -- the engines that drive artificial intelligence and machine learning -- are not capable of making these connections, known as "compositional generalizations." However, in the decades since, scientists have been developing ways to instill this capacity in neural networks and related technologies, but with mixed success, thereby keeping alive this decades-old debate.

"For 35 years, researchers in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and philosophy have been debating whether neural networks can achieve human-like systematic generalization," says Brenden Lake, an assistant professor in NYU's Center for Data Science and Department of Psychology and one of the authors of the paper. "We have shown, for the first time, that a generic neural network can mimic or exceed human systematic generalization in a head-to-head comparison."

Any question in which the object is beyond description is incorrect. — Rocco Rosano

Is it incorrect to ask what the value of π is?

Keep thinking about it.

That sounds like a circular statement. — Corvus

Might that be because you equate "logic" with "thought"?

Contentless logic is a pseudo logic, or logic in just a shell with no meaning. — Corvus

Yes, that is kind of the point. When you understand logic you understand that any meaning it has is a logical consequence of the inputs to the logic, and the inputs are not logic. It's good to be able to recognize the distinction.

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?