I subscribed to the Journal of Consciousness Studies for three years and was disgusted by the poor quality of the work. It's not an area of study but a club for people who need to get published. — FrancisRay

There is a matter of perspective here. You should have seen the state of things 36 years ago, when I started looking into the subject. The progress in understanding since then has been substanantial. Considering the complexity of the subject under study, the technological difficulties in gathering detailed information, and the (IMO) warranted ethical restrictions faced by researchers, I'd say we social primates are doing pretty good.

The notion of knowledge being contaminated or distorted by human subjects seems absurd given that we are speaking about human knowledge. — Janus

:100:

But isn't it exactly the same as we all (?) do when we memorize the standard multiplication tables and recall what 12x11 is. — Ludwig V

Yes, it just seemed relevant to me to point out that there are a variety of mathematically legitimate ways that can yield correct mathematical results and therefore it seems weird to me to focus so, on whether some particular rule was used in some specific case. So I brought it up in hopes of getting a better idea of what Kripke was trying to get at.

(Incidentally, how do you deal with 2 to the power of 35? — Ludwig V

With a calculator. :wink:

Many famous scientists in history were not atheists or anti religious as your quotes... — Corvus

About those 'quotes'...

Wikiquote says the one attributed to Heisenberg is misattributed.

The second 'quote' has no attribution and Google doesn't seem to recognize it.

Finally, Einstein also said:

The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. ... For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.
Gutkind Letter (3 January 1954), "Childish superstition: Einstein's letter makes view of religion relatively clear". The Guardian. 13 May 2008. Wikiquote

I am an old earth guy but I don’t believe in Speciation. — Isaiasb

Then in your case, isn't the answer to your title question, "Somewhat, yes."?

Can it be by accident that all birds, beasts, and men have their right side and left side alike shaped (except in their bowels), and just two eyes and no more on either side of the face, and just two ears on either side of the head, and a nose with two holes and no more between the eyes, and one mouth under the nose, and either two fore legs or two wings or two arms on the shoulders and two legs on the hips, one on either side and no more? Whence arises this uniformity in all their outward shapes but from the counsel and contrivance of an author?

From the evolution of tetrapods.

Are you a young earth or old earth creationist?

Thanks for taking the time. I'm reading PI right now, but haven't gotten that far.

Insightful stuff.

other rules like quus. there are probably a multitude of them which are consistent with all of the addition you have ever done so far in your life and you can't rule them out. — Apustimelogist

Does Kripke question the extent to which consciously following a rule even applies?

For example, having worked with digital logic a fair bit, I have all the powers of 2 up to 2^13 memorized and if I see 2048 + 2048 I simply recognize that the sum is 4096 without following any step by step decimal addition rules.

What is supposed to be the significance of arriving at sums via different cognitive processes?

Our language allows "the" to modify "event," thus indicating the latter is a noun i.e., a thing. Does this syntax present a fallacy? — ucarr

I wouldn't call it a fallacy so much as being an aspect of the way our brains model the world in simplistic manageable chunks. I suppose it creates the potential for false analogy fallacies, but off the top of my head I can't think of relevant examples.

Gore Tex patterns.



Rather wooish of that article to treat the superficial similarity between inflated/stretched matter and biologically grown brains as more than the superficial similarity that it is.

Given the speed of light, the cosmos would make for an awfully slow working brain.

So it remains that "God is truth" and such aphorisms do not convey factual information. Theology, taken literally, is nonsense. — Banno

Worse than nonsense, I think, if it results in not being able to make a distinction between God and truth.

You imply events are not things. Why aren't they? — ucarr

Pragmatically speaking, distinguishing things and events as different ontological categories is extremely valuable, and this is so strongly intuitively obvious to me I'm not sure where to begin.

Perhaps it is events all the way down, and our seeing 'things' is just a matter of the way our brains represent events, due to it being (arguably) evolutionarily adaptive for our brains to be as they are.

Seeing events as things is just something our brains do, the science of which can be understood to a substantial degree. So seeing things is an aspect of how we are able to be rather long lasting events.

Picking one example, I say we don't customarily measure the volume (as distinguished from intensity) of our emotional states. Nonetheless we regard them as indisputably real. For this reason, the robust discreteness of scientific truth does not cover the entire spectrum of essential human experience. — ucarr

Perhaps periods of time in an emotional state are more reasonably understood as events than as things? I'd say that from such a perspective our inability to discuss the volume of an emotional state becomes a non-issue. Furthermore, apropos to discussing events, the duration of time spent in an emotional state is a meaningful measure.

Simply pointing to an object and uttering simple words sound like a limited elementary ability of language use by young children just starting to learn languages rather than key ability for the general language users. — Corvus

Sounds like something that happens routinely in engineering labs.

Points to waveform on oscilloscope and says, "The op amp doesn't have the balls to do the job."

Because I am speaking on the desire to not allow a higher power to have any basis over them. — Isaiasb

And telling lies about atheists and agnostics is justified because of that?

I didn't believe in Absolute Truth but I was confident in my beliefs. — Isaiasb

So why is it that you weren't able to look at your own experience of being an atheist and recognize the following statement as nonsense?

Agnostics and atheists alike fight for their belief in nonbelief, and their desire to be contemptuous in believing nothing. — Isaiasb

Ironically I have been an atheist longer than I have a Christian. — Isaiasb

Were you a person who believed nothing when you were an atheist?

Then enlighten me on what they think. — Isaiasb

Nah, you'll have to step outside your cultural bubble and learn what atheists and agnostics think for yourself, if you want to see through the propaganda that you have been fed.

For a few reasons, the biggest is that it is a new thing. For all of human history until the last century Atheism was seen as something that is false. Atheism fights a God they don't believe in. In doing so they replaced God with Science, and in doing so they don't have to worry about a higher power with higher morals. — Isaiasb

None of that answers my question. I get the impression you don't actually know any atheists or agnostics well enough to have much understanding of the way they think.

Agnostics and atheists alike fight for their belief in nonbelief, and their desire to be contemptuous in believing nothing. — Isaiasb

Why do you believe that?

There is already an amount of research around replicating microorganism behavior with a combination of logic gates - which is the fundamental computational mechanism in electronics. Example nice read:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2010/12/building-logic-gates-with-bacterial-colonies/ — Generic Snowflake

The article is about replicating logic gates with microorganisms, not vice versa as you suggest.

I think the reason no one has challenged the minor is because we all believe that we possess a knowledge of our acts which is not mediated. This is different from our knowledge of the acts of others.
— Leontiskos

If all knowledge of action is mediated by neural processes, then we may well all be mistaken in thinking that we possess non-mediated knowledge of our own actions. We "feel" our own actions "from the inside" it seems, and we see, or hear the actions of others, but if feeling as well as seeing and hearing is mediated by prior neuronal activity, the immediacy may be merely phenomenological, which then just be to say that knowledge of our actions seems immediate, which is of course true. — Janus

:100:

@Leontiskos

The reason I haven't challenged the minor is because I am lazy. Not because there is not good reason to.

I'll point out, however, that Koch is a neuroscientist, and he also says they can't explain it. — Patterner

Sure. To me it seems quite explainable that we can't totally explain it. Humanity is still developing the conceptual and techological tools that would be required to do so in any comprehensive way. (Making the big assumption that human minds are capable of grasping an explanation that would necessarily have extraordinary complexity.)

Like many matters of scientific understanding, understanding of the mind's relationship to the brain is a matter of looking at many scientific findings relevant to piecing together an enormous jigsaw puzzle. There is a lot to learn, to have a well informed opinion of what the picture looks like. (And facing that picture is something a lot of people have a negative emotional reaction to, at least for a time.)

Greene doesn't give a non-robust scientific explanation. — Patterner

Greene is a physicist, not a neuroscientist. Try Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness.

That is all consistent with idealism. — RogueAI

Inasmuch as idealism is unfalsifiable, it is rather uninteresting that you find the evidence I presented doesn't falsify idealism.

Why should we suppose there exists a physical brain made of non-mental stuff? — RogueAI

I don't see "should" as having all that much to do with what we suppose. However, in the case a loved one of yours having a stroke in your presence, I hope it will occur to you that your loved one has a physical brain, and getting your loved one to a doctor who knows about brains is important.

All good examples. They're all about the information processing aspect of cognition, however, and leave open the possibility that this functional level of consciousness is superficial. I was being sloppy suggesting there is no evidence,and should have said no overwhelming evidence. — FrancisRay

:up:

There is no physical experiment that could prove consciousness has a physical basis, and while this does not prove it doesn't it might be argued that it's an unscientific claim. What would be your view on this? — FrancisRay

Strictly speaking, science doesn't prove anything. On the other hand, science has provided us with some of the most reliable beliefs we have. That human consciousness is the result of evolution of brains within a social primate lineage seems an enormously well supported and reliable belief to me. Arguably, of more scientific interest is whether you can present evidence falsifying physicalism.

From a scientific perspective, I'd say physicalism should be seen as a working hypothesis for which there is a lot of supporting evidence and a dearth of reliable falsifying evidence.

As I said in my previous post, a leading expert in neurology and the study of consciousness, and a leading expert in the properties of particles, forces, and the laws of physics, say we do not know how consciousness is produced by neurons, properties of particles, forces, and the laws of physics. — Patterner

I want to emphasize aspects of what Brian Greene wrote:

We have yet to articulate a robust scientific explanation of conscious experience. We lack a conclusive account of how consciousness manifests a private world of sights and sounds and sensations. We cannot yet respond, or at least not with full force, to assertions that consciousness stands outside conventional science.

We don't know nearly as much as we would like. However, I've been watching progress in neuroscience for the past 36 years, and that progress has been huge. Don't mistake, "There is a huge amount left to learn.", for, "We don't know anything about it."

Just as obviously though, this has some effect on our freedom "to do things," because our ability to bring states of affairs about that we prefer is totally grounded in what we think the causal impact of our actions will be. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's not clear to me that greater capability for doing things successfully is an indicator of greater freedom. Contrary to your suggestion that 'we must master nature, “subdue it and have dominion over it,” in order to enact our will', my experience shows that nature never bends to my will. Getting things done as an engineer is substantially a matter of understanding that nature is going to be nature and working with it to the extent that I am able to understand how to.

However, this is a good thread and I don't want to derail it into a free will vs determinism discussion.

What evidence is there that consciousness arises from matter? — FrancisRay

The effect of general anesthesia in suppressing consciousness.

The effect of mind altering drugs.

The fact that human intuition 'looks like' the result of the way information processing occurs in neural networks.

All sorts of ways minds can be impacted by brain damage.

Must we? Really? — Amity

It does seem that people are quite 'free' not to do so. :wink:

I myself would say that of such things, exact measurement is impossible in principle and thus we do the best we can, which is usually pretty well, and this not a failure or a deficiency, but instead a success. — tim wood

:100: +/-0.000000001

Why would anyone think matter gives rise to consciousness? — FrancisRay

Because the person took a serious look at the evidence, perhaps?

How does superveniance substance metaphysics require any less speculative ifs? Superveniance became dominant at a time when physics looked completely different than it does now and has stuck around in philosophy, I'd argue, largely through inertia and the fact that no one replacement has become a rallying point for opposition. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Pragmatically, recognizing that there are abstract levels of stuff supervening on other stuff is how humanity has been able to achieve the scientific advancements we have. The instrumentation physicists use to test theories is designed with such understanding in mind. People having an understanding of supervenience seems to play a rather critical role in us having the basis we have, for thinking about nature with the degree of accuracy that we do.

If this forum is any indication some philosophers seem to get obsessed with defining supervenience in a rigorous way. (Or tearing down attempts to do so.) It seems to me, that a person who recognizes supervenience has no need, or even use, for a rigorous definition. I see understanding things in terms of supervenience as an epistemic tool that it is important to know how to use. It's a matter of being able to zoom one's limited cognitive faculties in and out to look at things at different levels of abstraction. It's a matter of cognitive skill or talent.

,

But if we unify our understanding of gravity, space-time as a metric field, and all the other fields into one thing, one substance, then substance does absolutely no explanatory lifting at all. It turns out there isn't multiple substances responsible for the way the world is, there is one type of "stuff" and the changes, process, in it account for all entities. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm not sure what your point is. My view is not based on that being false. My view is based on observed regularities. Including of course, sciences other than physics.

Is this related to my question, "What basis do you have to think that it is possible for a mind to exist, sans an information processing substrate for the mind to supervene upon?"

It seems it'd be possible to deny this is the right question though, or even a meaningful one. If information is primarily process (good arguments for this exist) and if the pancomputationalist physicists are correct and information is our core ontological primitive, then superveniance itself is a mistaken concept. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's a lot of highly speculative ifs.

And I'm inclined towards this view because:
-Consciousness and other natural phenomena appear to require strong emergence.
- Jaegeon Kim's argument that strong emergence cannot exist given a substance metaphysics is convincing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Kim doesn't seem to think that consciousness requires strong emergence. He ends his book Physicalism, or Something Near Enough with:

So here is the position that has emerged. It begins by embracing ontological physicalism. Taking mental causation seriously, it also embraces conditional reductionism, the thesis that only physically reducible mental properties can be causally efficacious. Are mental properties physically reducible? Yes and no: intentional/cognitive properties are reducible, but qualitative properties of consciousness, or “qualia,” are not. In saving the causal efficacy of the former, we are saving cognition and agency. Moreover, we are not losing sensory experiences altogether: qualia similarities and differences can be saved. What we cannot save are their intrinsic qualities—the fact that yellow looks like this, that ammonia smells like that, and so on. But, I say, this isn’t losing much, and when we think about it, we should have expected it all along.

The position is, as we might say, a slightly defective physicalism—physicalism manqué but not by much. I believe that this is as much physicalism as we can have, and that there is no credible alternative to physicalism as a general worldview. Physicalism is not the whole truth, but it is the truth near enough, and near enough should be good enough.

Thus, if it seems like we need strong emergence. Since substance superveniance rules this out, then it seems like superveniance isn't the right concept. Plus it has other unresolved problems. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As I think the Kim quote shows, Kim doesn't seem to think that we need strong emergence.

If you come up with something other than fallacious reasoning, get back to me. Just as a reminder, the question is, "What basis do you have to think that it is possible for a mind to exist, sans an information processing substrate for the mind to supervene upon?"

Thanks!

Ah, so you have incredulity AND bluster.

Not enough of a reasoned basis to mention?

How about answering my question? Do you have something more than incredulity for an argument?

Yeah, a latching relay could be used to implement a one bit memory, and may be more helpful in visualizing things discussed in the book.

I would be more sympathetic to atheism if science could explain consciousness. As it is, I think it's more likely we're aspects of a universal one-mind. — RogueAI

What basis do you have to think that it is possible for a mind to exist, sans an information processing substrate for the mind to supervene upon?