Isn't that like being a bit pregnant? Sorry - couldn't help it... :wink:
2 minutes ago


Well... There have been many times when it has been a bit like there was something big inside me that I wanted to push out, but the linear structure of language provided a painfully narrow orifice through which to do so. So maybe so. ;)

Perhaps the babbling you’re hearing is a result of your tone deafness to unfamiliar paths of thinking.


Nope that wouldn't be it. I'm autistic, and a bit savantish, and quite familiar with unfamiliar paths of thinking. Paths of thinking that don't involve words among them. ;-)

"In order to go beyond a way of thinking, you first have to demonstrate a proper understanding of it."


This seems to me a prima facie false statement. Do you have an argument for it?

Do I need a "proper understanding" of ancient Greek cosmology in order to go beyond it? What does "proper understanding" even mean in such a case? Or to ask it another way, did Einstein need a proper understanding of luminiferous aether to go beyond it?

No offense intended, but your statement strikes me as something a member of a priesthood might say, in an attempt to cow anyone who might suggest it might be reasonable to dismiss the priesthood's theobabble.


"An interesting article thanks! I wonder how long protections such as:

The researchers addressed questions about the potential misuse of the technology. Decoding worked only with cooperative participants who had participated willingly in training the decoder. If the decoder had not been trained, results were unintelligible, and if participants on whom the decoder had been trained later resisted or thought other thoughts, results were also unusable.

will last!"

Speaking as an electrical engineer, with a long time interest in the uniqueness of brains, I'm quite confident that without the AI having been trained on a specific individual's brain, the AI would not be able to decode that individual's linguistic thought.

However, in cases where a more advanced AI:
1) had been trained to decode a specific individual's thoughts
2) had the ability to provide input to the individual (spoken word, images, video, etc.) in an attempt to 'interrogate' the individual's thinking
...I wouldn't be too confident that the individual would be able to thoroughly prevent the AI from learning something that the individual didn't want known.

Recent AI testing has been done...


Even more recent...

https://www.eedesignit.com/oh-no-ai-now-reads-minds/

I think consciousness is casual. But I'm hoping someone who agrees that it is, indeed, nothing but physics, but also thinks it is causal, can explain how they believe both things, since they appear to contradict each other. Because, otherwise, I'm looking at panprotopsychism. Which is an awkward ideas. Even if true, it doesn't seem to be anything about which we can do more than speculate.


I highly recommend Peter Tse's The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation.

https://www.amazon.com/Neural-Basis-Free-Will-Criterial/dp/0262528312

Confession: I've read the sciency first half of the book and haven't finished the more philosophical second half. So I can't say whether I agree with Tse on libertarian free will or not. However I do agree with him that what he calls criterial causation is what should be under consideration in order to have a scientifically informed discussion of the subject.

Exactly, because Hume's method is to portray reason as infallible, then demonstrate the fallibility of our assumptions about causation, and induction in general, and conclude therefore that these types of reasoning are not properly called "reason". That is a problem, because it leaves these processes without any category, no means to understand them, therefore no means to address and rectify their problems. Instead, we ought to class them as forms of reasoning which are more fallible than some others, therefore these forms of reasoning have issues which need to be addressed.

Ah, wonderfully insightful I think.

I'm not well informed enough about Hume's argument to assess the accuracy of your interpretation of Hume's thinking. But having put a fair bit of consideration into how minds might emerge from brains with the benefits of modern scientific findings, I think Hume having an overly simplistic view of reasoning was unavoidable. If only we had a time machine and could go back and talk to him.

"What goes on in a computer doing a calculation is, no doubt, entirely governed by physics. But it is also governed by mathematics - that's why we call it a calculation. Of course, humans have organized the computer to ensure that's the case. So the basis of the physical processes in a computer is mathematics and the basis of that situation is that humans have arranged it..."


Perhaps I am interpreting you overly literally, but as an electrical engineer I would put it differently.

I would say that a computer is constructed such that, in a (weakly) emergent sense, the computer behaves as if it were governed by mathematics/software. However, it would be suggesting overdetermination to claim that the behavior of the computer is governed by mathematics as well as physics. (I'm not sure what "governed by mathematics" would mean.)

I can't speak for what others are thinking when they say that "a computer is performing a calculation", but what I am doing in that case is taking pragmatic advantage of speaking simplistically in terms of the emergent properties a computer was designed to have.

"...Yet the basis of human activity is physics. But physics left to itself does not produce computers."


I'd say physics left to itself produced stars, which produced the elements of which the Earth is composed. Physics occurring on the Earth through evolution produced brains, and brains can reasonably be considered computers. (Though not digital computers.) The operation of brains is still physics and resulted in the production of digital computers. So in a roundabout way physics left to itself did produce digital computers. We just don't tend to think of ourselves as being aspects of "physics left to itself".

Thoughts?

If consciousness does not arise from the physical properties we know, and it does not arise from something like panprotopsychism (and I'm sure many here do not believe it does), then what?


I'm virtually certain consciousness arises from the sort of information processing which neural networks are good at. Though I'm not going to go into detail about why I am so certain.

Not to say there aren't a lot of unknown details to how consciousness arises, but doesn't information processing seem likely to be the substrate on which consciousness is built?

I've never understood why so many philosophers seem credulous towards panpsychism.

FYI, your counterargument commits the fallacy of denying the antecedent.