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On July 07 2013 07:12 DertoQq wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2013 06:55 Shiori wrote:On July 07 2013 06:52 DertoQq wrote:On July 07 2013 06:30 SnipedSoul wrote:On July 07 2013 06:22 Roe wrote:
Wait, how can you be so certain that it's outside reality? Didn't you just say no one knows where reality is? We can't currently explain consciousness with our description of physical reality. Some people take that to mean that it exists outside the physical world. The point I was making is that if you take the approach that something unexplained by science lies outside physical reality, you have no way of proving whether or not that will always be the case. I just want to add, we can definitely explain it. We just can't prove it (and it might be wrong!). The same way Evolution can't/hasn't been proven, but it's still a damn good explanation. (and there are still plenty of people that would bet their life that evolution is wrong) Uh, in no sense is the neuroscientific understanding of consciousness as developed/conclusive as evolutionary theory. but there is still an explanation.
There is, but it's not complete enough to convince a lot of people.
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On July 07 2013 07:16 SnipedSoul wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2013 07:12 DertoQq wrote:On July 07 2013 06:55 Shiori wrote:On July 07 2013 06:52 DertoQq wrote:On July 07 2013 06:30 SnipedSoul wrote:On July 07 2013 06:22 Roe wrote:
Wait, how can you be so certain that it's outside reality? Didn't you just say no one knows where reality is? We can't currently explain consciousness with our description of physical reality. Some people take that to mean that it exists outside the physical world. The point I was making is that if you take the approach that something unexplained by science lies outside physical reality, you have no way of proving whether or not that will always be the case. I just want to add, we can definitely explain it. We just can't prove it (and it might be wrong!). The same way Evolution can't/hasn't been proven, but it's still a damn good explanation. (and there are still plenty of people that would bet their life that evolution is wrong) Uh, in no sense is the neuroscientific understanding of consciousness as developed/conclusive as evolutionary theory. but there is still an explanation. There is, but it's not complete enough to convince a lot of people.
Can you post a short summary or provide links? (sorry if it's been said earlier in the thread, it's a lot to read through at this point)
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On July 07 2013 04:23 Snusmumriken wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2013 03:15 EatThePath wrote:On July 06 2013 22:34 Snusmumriken wrote:On July 06 2013 17:55 DertoQq wrote:On July 06 2013 17:18 LuckyFool wrote:On July 06 2013 16:26 SnipedSoul wrote:On July 06 2013 07:56 LuckyFool wrote:
Human minds on the other hand aren't being built by humans. We try to mimic them, we create robots with human like minds, capable of reasoning "like" a human, but there's a complexity in the human mind that we haven't even come close to being able to understand, replicate or understand to date. Saying we can be certain it's all just chemical and electricity without fully understanding it, just seems incredibly ignorant to me. I can make the same argument about the weather. The weather is obscenely complex and cannot be predicted with any sort of accuracy outside of a window of a few days. Hell, we still can't tell with much certainty whether or not it will rain unless there's a ton of dark storm clouds coming. We know all the basic laws that govern the weather such as chemical composition of the local atmosphere, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, pressure changes, etc. The only thing we cannot figure out about the weather is how all these things interact because it's simply too complex for us to make a proper model. Is it ignorant to assume that the weather is nothing more than chemicals and thermal energy just because we don't have a complete understanding of it? I see your point but I don't really like the weather analogy. We suck at predicting the weather before it happens, but it's nothing as complicated as the human brain. We can very easily go back and see what happened to cause a weather event to occur. We can't however go back and figure out what prompted a human decision in any way. (Purely from a physical/matter standpoint) A seemingly random shift in the jet stream happens that a forecast didn't account for which changes the weather, we see this and say "well that's why it ended up sunny today!" If only understanding brain activity were as simple as shifts in a jet stream. The Weather / brain analogy is a good one. You're saying that it is not because one is more complicated than the other, how do you know that ? Complexity is something very tricky. Maybe we will be able to create perfect human AI and read mind with 100% accuracy before we can predict the weather. Complexity is not a good argument. We know how a game of starcraft work, but we will probably never (ok maybe someday, never is a long time) be able to predict the perfect way to play (like we can do with games like checkers or tic tac toe), the complexity is simply way too high. Does this mean we don't understand how the game is done ? Or that there is something mystical about starcraft ? We just know for a fact that we don't have the technology to do that. Also, don't underestimate what we know about the brain, unlike everything you might hear (scientists are modest people !), the field of neurology is extremely advanced. The problem of consciousness is not about complexity. You're completely missing the mark. There are many things about what we ordinarily call consciousness or consider part of it that aren't subject to controversy. Aspects of memory for example are likely explainable with physical language alone. The real problem is why im actually experiencing something when I think of a particularly good moment in my life. There is currently no one who can explain or even give something close to a coherent explanaition of how the qualitative aspects of consciousness (qualia) can exist in a purely physical world. In the end we either end up with a physical world we no longer can make sense of, or we pretend there's no ghost in the machine when there clearly is (eliminativists do this). The problem is there is a ghost, that we cannot doubt, but for all we know there really shouldn't be. David Chalmers on Consciousness The appeal to qualia is so misguided; I don't get why this is still a thing. Why can't there be unique states of a system based upon unique inputs? The universe will never be in the same state twice, nor will you or I, first of all because we're different and second for the same reason the universe won't. You make a philosophical hypothetical proposition that qualia could be identified because they could be in principle, and then go on to say that physicalism doesn't handle this. You're right! Why would an impossible hypothetical be manifest in reality? This is no kind of argument against physicalism. 1. How does that have any bearing on the issue at hand? 2. I dont have to make any hypothetical proposition regarding subjective experience, its quite evident to all of us I'd say. To quote Sam Harris, "it's the one thing that cannot be an illusion". There are various reasons for why non-physical explanations of consciousness fail to deliver, but physicalism is just slightly less nonsensical.
To refer to qualia is to inject subjectivity into your ontology, and I don't see any grounds for doing this, but more importantly it's just a claim, not an argument. With regard to 2, I agree consciousness doesn't make obvious sense. It need not be intuitive, though?
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This is just another case of the same crap that happens whenever science takes a long time to explain something. People just assume that science will never explain it they go with the most comforting option they can think of. One day we will know what it is, and it will not be magic or a soul. lol
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On July 07 2013 07:54 ZackAttack wrote:
This is just another case of the same crap that happens whenever science takes a long time to explain something. People just assume that science will never explain it they go with the most comforting option they can think of. One day we will know what it is, and it will not be magic or a soul. lol
Pretty much. I guess it's just human nature to cling onto the supernatural.
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On July 07 2013 07:54 ZackAttack wrote:
This is just another case of the same crap that happens whenever science takes a long time to explain something. People just assume that science will never explain it they go with the most comforting option they can think of. One day we will know what it is, and it will not be magic or a soul. lol
Funnily enough, we call this faith 
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
ask yourself whether you need any biological knowledge to represent yourself, your mind etc etc.
if not, why not. where did this faculty ("introspection")or concept come from.
if it comes with you as well as it did for your ancestors, then it's just an evolved capacity. the associated sense of location in the world etc gives the represented 'mind' some concrete sense of existence, but that, is not enough to show that there is something more than physical matter.
the hard problem of consciousness etc can be resolved along this line.
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On July 07 2013 08:47 farvacola wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2013 07:54 ZackAttack wrote:
This is just another case of the same crap that happens whenever science takes a long time to explain something. People just assume that science will never explain it they go with the most comforting option they can think of. One day we will know what it is, and it will not be magic or a soul. lol Funnily enough, we call this faith
Faith is believing something without reason or evidence. There's reason to believe we will understand more of the brain in time with scientific methodology. So unless I'm reading you wrong, that wasn't faith.
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On July 07 2013 09:00 Roe wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2013 08:47 farvacola wrote:On July 07 2013 07:54 ZackAttack wrote:
This is just another case of the same crap that happens whenever science takes a long time to explain something. People just assume that science will never explain it they go with the most comforting option they can think of. One day we will know what it is, and it will not be magic or a soul. lol Funnily enough, we call this faith Faith is believing something without reason or evidence. There's reason to believe we will understand more of the brain in time with scientific methodology. So unless I'm reading you wrong, that wasn't faith.
There is no evidence to suggest that science will ever explain the whole of existence.
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On July 07 2013 08:59 oneofthem wrote:
ask yourself whether you need any biological knowledge to represent yourself, your mind etc etc.
if not, why not. where did this faculty ("introspection")or concept come from.
if it comes with you as well as it did for your ancestors, then it's just an evolved capacity. the associated sense of location in the world etc gives the represented 'mind' some concrete sense of existence, but that, is not enough to show that there is something more than physical matter.
the hard problem of consciousness etc can be resolved along this line.
What do you mean by "biological knowledge" and "represent yourself"? Do you mean knowledge of how biology works, in order to develop a schema of your identity?
On July 07 2013 09:01 farvacola wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2013 09:00 Roe wrote:On July 07 2013 08:47 farvacola wrote:On July 07 2013 07:54 ZackAttack wrote:
This is just another case of the same crap that happens whenever science takes a long time to explain something. People just assume that science will never explain it they go with the most comforting option they can think of. One day we will know what it is, and it will not be magic or a soul. lol Funnily enough, we call this faith Faith is believing something without reason or evidence. There's reason to believe we will understand more of the brain in time with scientific methodology. So unless I'm reading you wrong, that wasn't faith. There is no evidence to suggest that science will ever explain the whole of existence.
Funnily enough I never said that But I might be persuaded into thinking so if someone so wishes.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
biological knowledge as in opening up a skull and seeing the brain etc. the physical thing that is you. what i meant was that, without knowing any biology about the brain etc, you are still perfectly capable of speaking about 'your mind,' 'myself in the world', 'my life's meaning' etc etc. those concepts come, as a matter of their evolutionary formation, prior to the creature gaining knowledge of its own physical biology. the very capability of having these self representing concepts/mental processes is a part of our pre-built mental dictionary. epistemicly people also speak about their minds before investigating where the mind is physically.
descartes, for instance, can speak about the mind by mere introspection, and drawing on the above mentioned pre-built mentalese dictionary. he can do this and make sense to a lot of people without doing any scientific investigation into the biological body(and that would not have solved the problem for those who believe in disembodied soul). ordinarily you'll see this framed as an access problem of the 'how can you even know about this 'mind?' but here, it's quite clear that no access is being done at all, it's just a pre-built representational function.
a representation of the self doesn't have to have any real reference(see following discussion of the midn being transparent over mental objects), but still can work pretty well because evolution does take into account of the fact that the brain is in your head, but it doesn't have to represent that fact in a concept like the mind. (that there is no accidental mistake of someone speaking about her mind yet her brain isn't in her head)
representation of yourself comes in many forms
there's the indexical 'i' and myself etc.
the mind is also kind of an indexical for mental objects/thoughts. you speak about those objects with the mind as the realm in which they 'exist', but the realm is transparent, much like the concept of the "world" is not actually found in the world as any particular object. (nor can it be represented alongside any object within the world)
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Science necessarily won't explain the whole of existence; there's a hard limit on the completeness of any system, even if it's trivial in some senses haha. Besides, when we say "science" what we tend to mean is empiricism and deductive logic based on that. Certain logical/mathematical statements are more certain than scientific statements (on account of being comprised of just logic instead of logic + empiricism; probability of disjoints and stuff) even though they have nothing to do with the scientific method/experimentation.
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On July 07 2013 08:47 farvacola wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2013 07:54 ZackAttack wrote:
This is just another case of the same crap that happens whenever science takes a long time to explain something. People just assume that science will never explain it they go with the most comforting option they can think of. One day we will know what it is, and it will not be magic or a soul. lol Funnily enough, we call this faith
Note that this isn't any proof whatsoever, but we have a wealth of past experience that points to it not being faith.
Lightning, rain, sickness, sneezes, stars, electricity, mental illness, the list goes on. Pretty much every similarly hard to explain thing suggests that our intuition is very often spectacularly wrong, and therefore complete and absolute shit.
But of course if you believe our intuition is a unique gift bestowed upon us by the all-loving creator of the universe, it's pretty hard to understand that.
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On July 07 2013 09:18 politik wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2013 08:47 farvacola wrote:On July 07 2013 07:54 ZackAttack wrote:
This is just another case of the same crap that happens whenever science takes a long time to explain something. People just assume that science will never explain it they go with the most comforting option they can think of. One day we will know what it is, and it will not be magic or a soul. lol Funnily enough, we call this faith Note that this isn't any proof whatsoever, but we have a wealth of past experience that points to it not being faith. Lightning, rain, sickness, sneezes, stars, electricity, mental illness, the list goes on. Pretty much every similarly hard to explain thing suggests that our intuition is very often spectacularly wrong, and therefore complete and absolute shit. But of course if you believe our intuition is a unique gift bestowed upon us by the all-loving creator of the universe, it's pretty hard to understand that.
Physics always has to remind me how bad my intuition is. 
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On July 07 2013 09:18 politik wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2013 08:47 farvacola wrote:On July 07 2013 07:54 ZackAttack wrote:
This is just another case of the same crap that happens whenever science takes a long time to explain something. People just assume that science will never explain it they go with the most comforting option they can think of. One day we will know what it is, and it will not be magic or a soul. lol Funnily enough, we call this faith Note that this isn't any proof whatsoever, but we have a wealth of past experience that points to it not being faith. Lightning, rain, sickness, sneezes, stars, electricity, mental illness, the list goes on. Pretty much every similarly hard to explain thing suggests that our intuition is very often spectacularly wrong, and therefore complete and absolute shit. But of course if you believe our intuition is a unique gift bestowed upon us by the all-loving creator of the universe, it's pretty hard to understand that.
I have no idea what intuition is, but I will say that, at least in mathematics (my field of study at the moment) intuition is prized because it seems to work a lot of the time. Seriously, tonnes of times proving theorems is just an inspired guess, lol. Not saying that I'm disputing the efficacy of the scientific method, or anything, or advocating intuition as a replacement, but I do think intuition has its uses.
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the only conclusion to be drawn after 48 pages is that people are as determined to believe in free will as they are to believe in determinism.
why would determinism allow a determined view of its anti-self to exist?  (and no, you don't just call it stupidity and move on! )
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On July 07 2013 19:13 xM(Z wrote:why would determinism allow a determined view of its anti-self to exist? (and no, you don't just call it stupidity and move on! )
Determinism has no goals or opinions. It "allows" any effect that has a cause.
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On July 07 2013 19:17 gedatsu wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2013 19:13 xM(Z wrote:why would determinism allow a determined view of its anti-self to exist? (and no, you don't just call it stupidity and move on! ) Determinism has no goals or opinions. It "allows" any effect that has a cause.
but then it's like having 2 different effects from the same cause.
for your statement to be true you'd need to have two causes one for each efect: determinism and free will.
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On July 07 2013 19:22 xM(Z wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2013 19:17 gedatsu wrote:On July 07 2013 19:13 xM(Z wrote:why would determinism allow a determined view of its anti-self to exist? (and no, you don't just call it stupidity and move on! ) Determinism has no goals or opinions. It "allows" any effect that has a cause. but then it's like having 2 different effects from the same cause. for your statement to be true you'd need to have two causes one for each efect: determinism and free will.
What same cause? The belief in free will and the belief in determinism come from tons of causes, most of them not shared.
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On July 07 2013 19:28 Tobberoth wrote:Show nested quote +On July 07 2013 19:22 xM(Z wrote:On July 07 2013 19:17 gedatsu wrote:On July 07 2013 19:13 xM(Z wrote:why would determinism allow a determined view of its anti-self to exist? (and no, you don't just call it stupidity and move on! ) Determinism has no goals or opinions. It "allows" any effect that has a cause. but then it's like having 2 different effects from the same cause. for your statement to be true you'd need to have two causes one for each efect: determinism and free will. What same cause? The belief in free will and the belief in determinism come from tons of causes, most of them not shared.
but all those tons of causes are determined. my question still stands.
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EPT
