EPTIs the mind all chemical and electricity? - Page 98
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
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oneofthem
Cayman Islands24199 Posts
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
i mean, maybe it's not "like" anything to be you and so you have trouble understanding the problem. I can never be sure of that, you know  what if you had a big rube goldberg machine made out of ping pong balls that reproduced exactly your behavior computationally. would it be "like" something to be this rube goldberg process? if not, what is different about the brain that allows it to give rise to qualia? how is it different than a bunch of ping pong balls bumping into one another and performing computation? it must be, but how?? it seems like everyone in this thread either wants to naively refute physicalism, or just claim physicalism as a dogma and ignore the problem that results. it's fine to say you are a compatibilist, fuck it I'm a compatibilist too, but that's just a hypothesis because NOBODY HAS AN ACCOUNT OF IT | ||
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kwizach
3658 Posts
On August 30 2013 02:13 sam!zdat wrote: no, it's just restating the problem (why are they different? because they're different! you literally just said this and took yourself to be providing an answer. it's just an obvious tautology). I took an entire undergrad course on emergence, I understand what you are saying. If you think that just shouting "emergence" is an answer you are gravely mistaken. all you have done is say that you have faith that there is an answer. fine, but I'm pointing out that we don't have the first clue what kind of an answer that is, which is true. nobody has any sort of account about how strong emergence can occur. it is a fundamental mystery. Did they teach you how to word your questions correctly in your undergrad course on emergence? When you ask "how can an arrangement or aggregate of entities which it is not "like" something to be produce a higher order entity which it IS "like" something to be?", the answer to that question is that the higher order entity works differently as a structure than the entities that it is made of. Like I said, if you were to replace "which it is (not) "like" something to be" by "which can(not) make coffee", your question would be "how can an arrangement or aggregate of entities which cannot make coffee produce a higher order entity [a coffee machine] which CAN make coffee?". The answer is that the coffee machine is built in such a way that it can make coffee, while the coffee machine parts aren't. Now, again, to answer your broader interrogation beyond your poorly-phrased question, we do not have a definitive and exhaustive answer to what the detailed physical workings of the emergence of consciousness are. This doesn't mean that we "don't have the first clue" about the topic, as has been pointed out repeatedly throughout the thread. On August 30 2013 02:13 sam!zdat wrote: for the gazillionth time, I am not disputing physicalism. I am claiming that, BECAUSE I ACCEPT PHYSICALISM, our phenomenological experience shows that our understanding of physical reality must be gravely incomplete. jesus christ. I never said you were disputing physicalism. Did you even read the paragraph you were replying to? Talk about ranting for no reason. | ||
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tokinho
United States792 Posts
On August 30 2013 02:13 sam!zdat wrote: "there's a magic box.. err.. ."process"... that makes it happen! it's science!" let me know when you want to take the question seriously rather than just construct sentences that say "it happens" in more words. you beg the question consistently. edit: koreasilver, i just mean back in the day when people were arguing about whether christ was all man, all man with a little piece of god, all god with a little piece of man, totally god and totally man all at once, etc. I think they were partly arguing about the mind body problem. what that guy said just reminded me of the dudes who said that christ was partly man, but so little in relation to the divine that it was like "a drop of water in an ocean" or something like that. i agree that dualism is a dead end, despite the fact that everyone is misreading me and thinks that i defend dualism. but certainly they didn't feel that way in the 5th century or whenever, and i think the christological heresies and stuff were partly about the same thing we're discussing now. no, it's just restating the problem (why are they different? because they're different! you literally just said this and took yourself to be providing an answer. it's just an obvious tautology). I took an entire undergrad course on emergence, I understand what you are saying. If you think that just shouting "emergence" is an answer you are gravely mistaken. all you have done is say that you have faith that there is an answer. fine, but I'm pointing out that we don't have the first clue what kind of an answer that is, which is true. nobody has any sort of account about how strong emergence can occur. it is a fundamental mystery. + Show Spoiler + On August 29 2013 17:34 kwizach wrote: Considering references to qualia are often brought up in attempts to "disprove" physicalism, and you were advising a guy who is disputing physicalism in this very thread to look up qualia, this was a simple reminder, not necessarily directed at you, that what we were discussing did not challenge the physical argument in any way. for the gazillionth time, I am not disputing physicalism. I am claiming that, BECAUSE I ACCEPT PHYSICALISM, our phenomenological experience shows that our understanding of physical reality must be gravely incomplete. jesus christ. I guess my post was poorly received. "(why are they different? because they're different! you literally just said this and took yourself to be providing an answer. it's just an obvious tautology). I took an entire undergrad course on emergence, I understand what you are saying." I don't understand why you don't think that you have a larger idea from smaller parts caused by pertubative feedback phenomena. (The mechanism of the difference of the claim why are they different? because they're different) You said you took an entire class on emergence. Could you provide some sort of school and class number that i can look at the topic covered to find the concepts that are different in this debate? so far it feels like we have a lot of statements like this is the unsolvable problem, but as of now i don't really understand why emergence is an issue in understanding how the brain functions or behavioral characteristics. It would be nice to point at a specific problem that is unsolvable with an example. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On August 30 2013 03:00 kwizach wrote: When you ask "how can an arrangement or aggregate of entities which it is not "like" something to be produce a higher order entity which it IS "like" something to be?", the answer to that question is that the higher order entity works differently as a structure than the entities that it is made of. more beggings of questions. i'm done with this. go home and think about it. you just say "it works because it works" and think you are giving an answer. you are just describing the problem that needs to be solved. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On August 30 2013 03:04 tokinho wrote: You said you took an entire class on emergence. Could you provide some sort of school and class number that i can look at the topic covered to find the concepts that are different in this debate? http://www.reed.edu/catalog/programs/dept_majors/phil.html phil318 - philosophy of biology phil412 - adv. topics in epistemology (the topic was computation) both of these classes covered the topic of emergence in great detail. I understand what emergence is, which means that I understand that "emergence" is the name of a problem, not the name of an answer. | ||
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DoubleReed
United States4130 Posts
On August 30 2013 02:27 Shiori wrote: Maybe it's me, but how is this not an attempt to have your cake and eat it, too? If there is no free will, and if hard determinism is true, then responsibility isn't the only thing that becomes useless. Agency in general becomes totally meaningless. That means that your hypothetical "if you murder someone, we have to lock you up" is meaningless because all of the involved subjects aren't even capable of making choices. You don't "have to" lock me up; it's just going to happen. Similarly, whether I murder someone or not has nothing to do with my choice (on hard determinism, anyway) so there's no point talking about it. Basically, if you think hard determinism is true, all events simply are, and have no attachment to actual agents, because agents are a fiction. This means that all this stuff about the deterrence of murder or how we should move forward as a society are completely superfluous questions because they imply the ability to pick one course of action over another. I have no idea what "hard determinism" is. In the physicalist view, your motives and decisions have physical manifestations. Like if you're going back and forth on a decision, then there is a physical process of you going back and forth on that decision. It's not like your indecision is an illusion. Far from it. It's as real as a basketball. Furthermore, concepts like blame and fault also factor into our decisionmaking as well as our social dynamics with others. I don't see how moral responsibility goes away just because cognition could be calculated by a magic calculator. | ||
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kwizach
3658 Posts
On August 30 2013 03:04 sam!zdat wrote: more beggings of questions. i'm done with this. go home and think about it. you just say "it works because it works" and think you are giving an answer. You're asking the wrong question and getting frustrated at the correct answer to the question you asked. I'm not saying "it works because it works". I'm saying "X works differently than Y because X is different from Y". Once you understand this super-basic principle, the question stops being "how can X work this way when Y doesn't work this way" (what you asked) and becomes "how does X work?" (and, possibly, "how does Y work?", but since in this case "Y" is the absence of consciousness everywhere else, we only need to explain how X works). And the answer to the question "how does X work?", i.e. "what are the exact detailed physical workings of the emergence of consciousness", is that we do not have a definitive and exhaustive answer, even though we're way beyond having no idea, as tokinho mentioned. I wouldn't really consider it a "problem" though, but rather a still quite dark area whose overarching principle can already be understood. | ||
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oneofthem
Cayman Islands24199 Posts
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On August 30 2013 03:18 kwizach wrote: I'm not saying "it works because it works". I'm saying "X works differently than Y because X is different from Y". both are completely tautological On August 30 2013 03:20 oneofthem wrote: sam you do realize acknowledging that the mind is all physical mechanistical does not necessarily reduce away 'mind', nor does it restrict oneself to speaking in terms of physics or biology. yes of course, that doesn't make it not a problem. in fact, that IS the problem. how can what you say be the case? we all agree that it IS the case, but I don't believe that anyone has any sort of understanding about HOW it can be the case. curious minds want to know On August 30 2013 03:20 oneofthem wrote: rather silly problem. i tend to agree, but I'll argue about anything of course, i have the additional polemic goal of making people a little bit less secure in their New Atheistic rationalist worldview from the 18th century | ||
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kwizach
3658 Posts
No. The second one is a basic principle one needs to grasp to understand reality (and to avoid constructing one's questions poorly). | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On August 30 2013 03:28 kwizach wrote: No. The second one is a basic principle one needs to grasp to understand reality (and to avoid constructing one's questions poorly). you're right. nothing at all tautological or question begging about what you say. you have cleared away all my confusion | ||
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DoubleReed
United States4130 Posts
Your organs are arranged very particularly, as is our solar system. Things are always more than the sum of their parts. It's the difference between night and day, life and death. And I mean that quite literally. | ||
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kwizach
3658 Posts
On August 30 2013 03:30 sam!zdat wrote: you're right. nothing at all tautological or question begging about what you say. you have cleared away all my confusion The only thing that was tautological was your interpretation of what I said. With regards to what remains question begging, I already covered the dark areas that remain in the study of the brain and of consciousness. | ||
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farvacola
United States18827 Posts
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On August 30 2013 03:35 DoubleReed wrote: Sam, you don't need to go into biology to see objects which are greater than the sum of their parts. This is true of atoms and molecules. Rearranging atoms to get different shapes of molecules gets you completely different acting objects. Arrangement is far from unimportant. Your organs are arranged very particularly, as is our solar system. Things are always more than the sum of their parts. It's the difference between night and day, life and death. And I mean that quite literally. yes, that's the description of the problem. how can that be? | ||
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kwizach
3658 Posts
On August 30 2013 03:37 farvacola wrote: He isn't saying that arrangement is unimportant, he's saying that gesticulating towards a poorly defined "arrangement" a la emergent consciousness as though it ends the debate on how consciousness works is silly. Nobody is saying it ends the debate on how consciousness works. In fact, that's how you progress in the debate, by looking at the details of the arrangement and its workings. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On August 30 2013 03:40 kwizach wrote: Nobody is saying it ends the debate on how consciousness works. In fact, that's how you progress in the debate, by looking at the the details of the arrangement and its workings. what do you think "matter" is? | ||
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DoubleReed
United States4130 Posts
On August 30 2013 03:39 sam!zdat wrote: yes, that's the description of the problem. how can that be? What problem? Why wouldn't that be? You don't like it? There's nothing suggesting that physical location shouldn't matter or anything. It sounds to me like you're arguing with reality because you don't live there or something. | ||
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