On emergence and consciousness
To start the discussion, let's consider a system with many parts, each of which has a set of properties. Now consider a system that has a property that parts do not have, such as experiencing certain things in a human, in which it is assumed that their parts do not experience anything at all. We say that we are dealing with weak emergence when the system is reducible to its parts and the property of the system is a function of the properties of its parts*; otherwise, we are dealing with strong emergence.** Now, let's assume that the system has a unique property, which is the case when we experience something. Let's also assume that there is a reason why the system has this specific property rather than any other arbitrary property, which is the case when we experience something. Granting these assumptions means that there is a function that describes the property of the system. The only avalaible properties are the properties of parts though. Therefore, the property of such a system is a function of the properties of the parts. Therefore, we are not dealing with strong emergence in the case of consciousness.
* An example of weak emergence is like aniferomagnetism in which the system is reducible to atoms and there is a function that describes the property of the system, specific arrangement of the spins of atoms, in terms of the property of its parts, namely locations and the direction of spins of atoms.
** Strong emergence is defined as when a system is irreducible to its parts. This also means that there is no function that can describe the property of the system in terms of the properties of its parts as well. On the contrary, if there is a function that describes the property of the system, then the system must be reducible to something.
* An example of weak emergence is like aniferomagnetism in which the system is reducible to atoms and there is a function that describes the property of the system, specific arrangement of the spins of atoms, in terms of the property of its parts, namely locations and the direction of spins of atoms.
** Strong emergence is defined as when a system is irreducible to its parts. This also means that there is no function that can describe the property of the system in terms of the properties of its parts as well. On the contrary, if there is a function that describes the property of the system, then the system must be reducible to something.
Comments (309)
Consider each experience you may have right now, like reading my reply, tasting a little tea, etc. Each of these experiences is unique to you in the sense that it represents something to you, the content of my reply means something to you, tasting tea feels something to you, etc.
Quoting RogueAI
I think you are talking about strong emergence here. I am, however, arguing that we are dealing with weak emergence when it comes to almost all mental phenomena, excluding the creation of a new idea.
Quoting RogueAI
I am saying that there is a correlation between my experience and the neurobiological processes in my brain.
The condition that the macro-property, or holistic property, be a function of the properties of the parts of a system (including, presumably, relational properties) seems too weak to preclude strong (irreducible) emergence and also too weak to guarantee weak (reducible) emergence.
It's too weak to preclude strong emergence since strongly emergent properties like (arguably) consciousness often are granted to supervene* on lower-level properties (such as physical states of individual neurons) despite not being reducible to them. However, supervenience alone guarantees that there is a many-to-one function from the set of possible low-level configurations to the high-level properties that they realize, but it doesn't guarantee that this function can be given independently of the high-level, or formal, principles that govern the mapping. That is, what it is that determines that some given configuration, as expressed in low-level terms, instantiate the high-level property that it does may be high-level features of the system, such as its molar capabilities, that can't be described using the low-level concepts.
(*Supervenience already implies a function from micro-configurations to macro-properties: if two systems are identical in all micro respects, they must be identical in their macro-properties.)
It's too weak to guarantee weak emergence (i.e. guarantee reducibility) for the same reason. The satisfaction of this functional condition merely guarantees supervenience, but doesn't guarantee reducibility.
I wasn't entirely sure what op meant by "a function of" in this context, so I (perhaps embarrassingly) asked ai:
If the macro property is directly derivable from the properties and interactions of its parts - as in, it can analytically be confirmed to be a necessary consequence of the interactions of the parts - I would say that that IS what weak emergence is. It's not too weak to guarantee weak emergence, it's basically the definition of weak emergence.
I agree but here it's the idea of "derivability" that does the heavy lifting guaranteeing weak emergence. But, in his OP, @MoK, derived the conclusion that there ought to be such a "function" from the premise that there ought to be a "reason" why the system has the emergent property that it has. But this inference isn't valid. When some mental state M of an organism supervenes on the micro-physical configuration P of the parts of this organism, the reason why it is M specifically that is being realized by P may be that M non-accidentally satisfies some high-level biological or psychological features that characterise organisms of this specific kind, and not be derivable from the physical features of P alone. Or, as ChatGPT o3 phrased it: "Supervenience already implies a function from micro-configurations to macro-properties: if two systems are identical in all micro respects, they must be identical in their macro-properties. But this function need not be definable in purely micro-level terms. The criteria that fix the mapping may depend on high-level structures or capacities that cannot themselves be specified without invoking macro-level concepts."
Yeah it definitely seems like op is more just assuming it's weak emergence. I mean I agree with that assumption, but I agree with you that he kinda leaps in with that assumption rather than making a good case for it.
Could we agree on the definition of weak emergence, which occurs when the property of the system is a function of the properties of its parts? That, of course, requires that the system be reducible to its parts. Please let me know what you think, and we can go to the next step.
Yes, there exist metal properties as well, which are related to the existence of another substance that I call the object. So, the question is whether mental properties are always a function of the properties of parts? If the answer is yes, then we are dealing with weak emergence, which is the case for the perception. There is a big set of mental phenomena, such as new abstract ideas, that are not a function of the properties of parts, I think.
If consciousness is a strong emergent thing, then it cannot be causally efficacious in the world where physical objects obey the laws of nature. We, however, observe constantly that mental phenomena are causally efficacious, in a discussion, for example. I think, I write, I informe others. You do the same.
I'm asking if anyone has an example of strong emergence. For those who think consciousness is, I'm wondering if there are others.
I view the objects and phenomena of pretty much all the special sciences (e.g. biology, ecology, psychology, economics, etc.) to be strongly emergent in relation with the the objects and phenomena of the material sciences such as physics or chemistry. Some, like our @apokrisis argue (and I would agree) that even within physics, especially when the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium processes is involved, many phenomena are strongly emergent in the sense that they aren't intelligible merely in light of, or deducible from, the laws that govern their smaller components.
Would you say they need to take context into account in a way that classical physics did not?
This definition would be more precise if we would substitute "is deducible from" or "is grounded in" for "is a function of". That's because, as I've suggested, many proponents of strong emergence, who we may call "compatibilists" (by close analogy with the corresponding stance in the philosophy of free will and determinism) grant both the causal closure of the micro-physical domain and the thesis of the supervenience of high-level phenomena such as mental acts over the physical domain. That is, once the physical state of a person is fully specified, then this person's mental properties also are fully specified as a function of this physical state, if you wish. What is denied, however, from the strong emergent stance, is that the mental properties of the person can be deduced or derived solely from those physical properties. And likewise for the higher-level (e.g. psychological) principles that govern those high level phenomena. Rather, one must consider normative, functional and/or organisational principles that arise from the specific interactions of those parts and that can't be deduced from the low-level (i.e. physical) laws governing them.
Yes, one might say this, appealing to the pragmatic context of the theoretician, observer or experimentalist who is dealing with high-level phenomena. Out of equilibrium (and irreversible) processes are characterised by a drop in local entropy whereby the classes of possible microphysical states get coarse-grained, as it were, into equivalent classes of macroscopically equivalent states. Carlo Rovelli has convincingly argued that this process of coarse-graining, and hence the local lowering of entropy, can only be defined in relation with an observer that, by means of interacting with the system, gathers memory traces of it (whereby the direction of the arrow of time gets defined).
I think Rovelli's lesson can be generalized, and made intuitive, beyond the rather technical case of non-equilibrium thermodynamical processes. Whenever strongly emergent features of a material process can be identified, observers non only select in accordance with their allegedly "parochial" interests what high-level features of a material system they are interested in. Weak emergentists would claim that it's merely due to epistemic limitations that the high-level explanations of the phenomena are being appealed to, while, as they argue, low-level material laws determine everything that happens. But our decisions to group low-level states into macroscopic equivalence classes, defined with the concepts that belong to economics, biology, psychology, etc., don't merely reflect our ignorance of the micro-physical details. Rather, they often are part of the process whereby we contribute to sustaining or creating the very high-level phenomena at issue, chief among them insuring our survival and flourishing as the high-level entities that we ourselves are, and those of the other organisms that we share our ecosystems with.
I don't think this is correct. I don't believe in strong emergence, but if there were strong emergence it would be casual - arguably more casual than weak emergence. With weak emergence, one can argue that it's the lower levels that are casual, and the higher levels of abstraction are noncausal. With strong emergence, that fundamentally changes. With strong emergence, high level objects have a sort of fundamental existence to them that they don't have in weak emergence
That's interesting. I didn't know Juarrero. I'll look her up. In general, I view essentially relational metaphysical and phenomenological stances as correctives for God-eye-view stances. With Hilary Putnam, this takes the form of criticism of "metaphysical realism," in favor of a "realism with a human face" that draws inspiration, in part, from the American pragmatist tradition of Pierce, Dewey and James. With Michel Bitbol, it stems from bringing Kant's "Copernican revolution" to the interpretation of quantum mechanics while, with Carlo Rovelli, it stems from drawing similar insights from the analysis of thermodynamical concepts. So far, those all are reactions to the excesses of the modern mechanistic conception of the world. But I think a more perennial tradition that draws on Aristotle's hylomorphism and on Wittgenstein and Ryle's "philosophical behaviorism," as exemplified in the work of, for instance, Elizabeth Anscombe, David Wiggins, Anthony Kenny and Peter Hacker, simply sidesteps those excesses.
Neat! I'll start with watching this and then perusing her Dynamics in Action. I'm always interested in looking into detailed accounts of downward-causation by philosophers who have produced one.
More generally, consider a functor in Category Theory that is used in Tarskian fashion to interpret a category (i.e. a deductive system) that is treated as an object language, in terms of another category that is considered to be a distinct meta-language that bears no causal or functional relationship to the former, in spite of the former being isomorphic to a (proper) subset of the latter.
Although natural language is semantically closed, and hence not formally divisible into separate object and meta ontologies, I suspect that philosophers have a tendency to misconstrue emergence-as-grammar with macroscopic empirical phenomena.
In my view, "Consciousness is strongly emergent" is a contestable linguistic proposal that the term "consciousness" should be formally treated as being part of a functionally closed mentalistic language that is being used as a meta-language, or object language, for interpreting (or being interpreted by) a separate physical language, that is formally expressible in terms of the functorial model of semantics as provided by category theory.
I am happy with my definition. I also gave the example of antiferromagnetism, which clearly demonstrates what I mean by function. So, I won't accept your definitions unless you demonstrate what you mean by those terms. I have to stress that in the example of antiferomagnetism, the property of the system is only a function of the properties of parts. There is nothing more left when it comes to the property of the system to demonstrate it with something else.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I think that we can describe the behavior of proteins in terms of the properties of parts since we can simulate them. The scientists in the link that I provide do approximation here and there, though, since we cannot perform a full simulation. A cell is a more challenging thing to simulate. Etc. So, scientifically speaking, we have to make an approximation here and there to describe the property of any system in terms of simplified parts at the end. We have had great success by now, scientifically speaking, but we have a long way to go to understand how different complex systems function. We can understand and explain things that function somehow. So, philosophically speaking, if the property of any system is not a function of the properties of parts, then what is the missing thing in the system that cannot be explained in terms of the properties of parts?
It is correct. If matter moves on its own, and experience is the result of how matter moves, then how could experience be causally efficacious? Experience is not a real thing in itself, yet it exists. Experience is a mental event only and cannot be a direct cause of change in matter.
that's not what "strong emergence" is saying. I think you might have strong and weak emergence mixed up.
Other things might be the result of, or dependent on, the properties or behavior of some kind of structures, rather than individual molecules or atoms. But those structures have the properties they have to the atoms and molecules that they are comprised of.
Does anything you have in mind not fall into the category of either directly dependent on/caused by the particles, or due to structures that have their properties because of the particles? Here is what, for me, is a great description of some of the awesome stuff that's happening in our cells. I think it's truly mind-blowing. One aspect of metabolism, from Brian Greene's [I]Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe[/I]:
It's all about the molecules, atoms, and proteins and electrons.
It's all about molecules, atoms, proteins and electrons, but it's not just about those things. As proper parts of living organism, those constituents are caught up into functionally organized anatomic structures (such as cell membranes) and channeled through the finely tuned and regulated metabolic pathways that Brian Greene provides striking descriptions of. Those are indeed processes that arise in far from equilibrium thermodynamic conditions such that relatively low-entropy forms of energy (such as incident solar radiation or energy-dense molecules like glucose) get harnessed by the molecular machinery to produce work in such a way as to sustain and reproduce this machinery. What is being sustained and reproduced isn't the parts, but the form: that is, the specific functional structure of the organism. The parts, and the proximal interactions between them, don't explain why the organism is structured in the way it is, or why it behaves in the way it does. Rather, the high-level norms of functional organization of the organism, characterised in the higher-level terms of anatomy and physiology, explain why the individual atoms, electrons, protons, and organic molecules are being caught up and channeled in the specific way that they are to sustain processes that are geared towards maintaining the whole organism (at least for awhile) away from complete decay and thermodynamic equilibrium.
Simulating a process merely is to reproduce some high-level features of this process in a different medium. It can be an easier way for researchers to test hypotheses about the process being simulated when it is hard to observe in vivo. But merely generating a simulation of a process, or complex phenomenon, falls short from providing an explanation of it. The success of such a simulation, in point of accuracy, may constitute a demonstration that the elements that have been explicitly modelled in the simulation are sufficient to guarantee that the parts (or their simulation) are suitably organized to reproduce the emergent behaviors. But that doesn't produce a proof of weak emergence unless the principles that would have enabled the researchers to predict the success of the simulation would have been articulated beforehand (or identified post facto by means of analysis and experimentation) and, furthermore, had been shown to be deducible from the low-level laws that govern the local interactions between the parts.
Baring that, we're merely shown that the very same high-level phenomena that can strongly emerge in vivo can also strongly emerge in a simulation. If anything, such a success suggest that the emergent behaviors are multiply-realizable, and hence, to some degree, substrate-independent, which goes some way towards suggesting that high-level formal explanations of the emergent phenomena might be autonomous from low-level laws.
I wanted to add some more reflections about that, agreeing, I think, with Juarrero on the significance of context. The dynamical structures at issue, in the case of living organisms, are autopoietic in the sense articulated by Maturana and Varela. The whole is structured in such a way as to ensure the production of the parts, and the parts (e.g. the organs, or cellular organelles) are structured in such a way as to sustain the organization of the whole.
I've seen Juarrero refer to Kant's discussion in The Critique of Practical Reason of the sort of circular causality appealed to in the explanation of the activity of teleologically organized systems: the tree produces its leave and the leaves produce the tree. In Life and Action, Micheal Thompson likewise highlights the close formal similarity between three sorts of teleologically organized things: living organisms, human actions and social practices. In those examples, the parts themselves usually have some sort of internal structure and function, although those functions can only be intelligibly described in relation to the context provided by the whole (e.g. the specific organism).
But then I was also reminded of a funny event that occurred a couple decades ago when we were visiting friends who had two young children. I had begun playing a game of chess with the ten-year-old boy while his six-year-old little sister was sitting besides us and watching. At some point during the game, she accidentally (but also rather carelessly) knocked over some pieces located on the side of the board. We picked the pieces on the floor and proceeded to put them back on the board where they had been but wondered briefly where one particular pawn had been (h4 or h5?). The little girl who had been watching more closely than we had thought intervened and removed this pawn from the board to replace it with another one (recognizable because chipped) that had previously been captured and laid on the side of the chess board. She was insistent that it was this slightly chipped pawn, and not the other one, that was originally on that square.
The example of chess and its playing pieces is interesting because a pawn, in chess, is an example of a functional artifact that has one single material part: the wooden figurines used to track the position of the pawn on the chess board. The little girl wasn't making this distinction. She was tracking the movements of the figurines, not the functionally significant chess moves marked by them. It's only in relation to the social context of the game that the distinction between the wooden object and the functional role that it plays arises. Physical forces, provided by gravity, by the (reaction) contact force of the chess board, and pressures from the fingers of the players, explain why the wooden figurines move in the way they do. But the wider context provided by the norms/rules of the game, and the intentions of the players, explain why the chess figurines move in such a way as to realize significant chess moves such as attacking the opponent's queen, etc. And this, in turn, provides a relevant distal explanation of the specific movements of the wooden object, in this particular context.
If one would rather trace back in the empirical causal chain the movements of the fingers of the players to material/physical causes such as uninterpreted patterns of neural excitation in the motor cortex, etc., then one would never arrive at the explanation why, for instance, black pawns move in one unique direction, bishops remain on squares of the same color, etc. Even if one would identify explanatory relevant "patterns" of norm-following in the brains of the players, that would still not explain why those patterns exist until one displaces one's attention fully from physics and neurophysiology to significant social practices and what they mean from the perspectives of the social agents. The causal-explanatory chain that goes from (strongly emergent) social practices to particular movements of wooden figurines on chess boards is an instance of downward-causation where the emergent phenomena regulate, and/or provide significance to the low-level ones, and can't be derived from them.
It brings to mind Alicia Juarreros insistence that causation in complex systems cant be understood solely in terms of efficient causes. (This is the subject of Part One of her book 'Why Action Theory Rests on a Mistake'.) Constraintsespecially those arising from intentional and socially embedded contextsplay a formative role. They shape not only how things unfold, but also determine which patterns of behavior are recognized as meaningful actions within the system. The 'downward causation' you describe is not merely an influence from macro to micro, but a change in the frame of reference for explanationfrom physical movement to meaningful action. It's a different kind of 'why'.
Another essay on the topic says Quoting Steve Talbott, What do Organisms Mean?
Yes, we are a colony of cells which readily (it seems) organise into complex organisms and organisms with rational minds. Minds in which reason can free the being from the mythological interpretation of the world. To emerge from the Dreamtime into a world of insight in the clear light of day. There does seem to be a teleology going on there.
But what is the next stage, are we [I]supposed[/I] to launch off into space, colonise other planets and form the intergalactic federation? Are we supposed to stay here on earth and start manipulating material into some sort of nirvana? Or are we supposed to focus on sustainability and nurture the biosphere which kindly brought us into being?
There is a steep trajectory here and unless we answer these questions sharpish, we will more likely fall back into another fallen species in a long line failed experiments*.
*it may already be too late.
Relations are never logically reducible to the related subjects. E.g. the relation John loves Mary isn't reducible to the concepts of John, Loving, and Mary considered separately, and yet nobody (at least since Francis Herbert Bradley) seems to think of such a relation as posing a profound question for science or philosophy, in the same way that is alleged for relating consciousness to physical states.
The comprehension of any non-atomic proposition in a given language entails a unity of thought that isn't itself expressed propositionally in the language used to express the proposition concerned. This implict understanding of propositional unity is expressed non-propositionally in terms of the grammatical rules of the language. Why should the supposed "unity of consciousness" be interpreted physically or metaphysically, when the concept of propositional unity is generally ignored?
What is meant by a scientific explanation here? If scientific knowledge is conceived to be reducible to a formal system, then a scientific explanation of experiential redness must either take experiential redness at face value as an atomic proposition, meaning that science assumes rather than explains the phenomena, else experiential redness must be reducible to more fundamental relations and relata - in which case we end up with the unity of the proposition problem, which concerns the meaning of relations and relata and whether they are distinct and atomically separable concepts.
What is the difference between a dead brain and an alive brain to a physicalist, then?
If science takes experiential redness as an atomic proposition, then its not a scientific explanation at all. its a label slapped on a mystery. Thats just hand-waving with a fancy name. But if you try to reduce redness to more basic physical or relational terms, then yes, you do face the problem of unity, but thats not some knockdown argument against reductionism. Its a reminder that experience isnt just structure.
The unity of a proposition in language is one thing; the unity of experience is something else entirely. When I imagine a red triangle, I dont just have red and triangle floating around in my head in some grammatical alignment. I have a coherent perceptual experience with vivid qualitative content. The parts of the brain firing dont have that quality. Theres nothing red in the neurons, just as theres nothing red in a sentence that uses the word red.
So no, I dont buy that this is a problem of grammatical form. Experience isnt grammar. You cant dissolve the hard problem by shifting the conversation to the philosophy of language. You just move the goalposts and pretend the mystery went away.
We say that we are dealing with weak emergence when the property of a system can be simulated in terms of the properties of parts as well. The problem with a large system is that we cannot find an analytical solution for the properties of the system in terms of the properties of parts, given that the behaviors of parts are lawful. So, we have to use a simulation, which is a numerical method for deriving the properties of a system in terms of the properties of its parts. Therefore, strong emergence cannot be simulated since all properties of the system that can be simulated are sort of weak emergence properties.
I am not a language expert, but this is my understanding of language. Any meaningful sentence in any language is made of parts, but it can create a new idea that the sentence is referring to in the mind of an intelligent creature once the parts of the sentence are arranged in a proper order and observed by the creature. So there is a relation between the idea that a sentence is referring to and how the parts of a sentence are arranged as well. So, the ideas are weak emergent things as well.
Physicalists claim that consciousness is the result of neurons firing. So consciousness to them is the result of the motion of electrons and chemicals.
To them, the phenomenon of experience is the result of strong emergence, by which they mean that the experience is the result of the properties of matter in the brain only. I am, however, arguing that consciousness, defined as the set of all experiences, is a function of the properties of the brain; therefore, we are dealing with weak emergence at least when it comes to consciousness.
Even in this last post, you say strong emergence is "properties of matter in the brain only" and weak is "a function of the properties of the brain". Something is mixed up for you.
I am a substance pluralist. I am not discussing here that the experience is the result of the mind perceiving the object. I get their definition of experience as a mental event, which is due to properties of parts in the brain. They call this strong emergence. Why? Because they believe that the parts do not experience anything at all. I am saying that consciousness, given my definition of weak emergence, is weak emergence. Therefore, they are wrong.
Even the way you use the phrase "a function of", now that I've realised what you've been saying the whole time, turns out to be off from how everyone else uses it.
Is consciousness emergence weak or strong?
I explained what I mean by function in the example of antiferromagnetism.
Up here you say experience is strong emergence because it's the result of the properties of matter in the brain only. That's "a function of". Why do you think that's not "a function of"?
We know that the quality of experience is a function of the properties of parts. We know what the properties of parts are, such as mass, charge, speed, etc., but experience. So we are dealing with weak emergence when it comes to the quality of experience. And we have an extra thing, which is the experience itself. Considering that any quality of experience is a function of the properties of parts, no extra function is left to describe the experience itself!
No, I am saying that the set of properties of the system exhausts all functions in which each function relates a specific property of the system to specific properties of parts. No function is left to explain experience itself. Therefore, experience itself is not a function of the properties of parts.
It seems like you think every property of a system has to have a 1-to-1 mapping to a property of the components, and that somehow you know that all the available mappings have been taken before consciousness can be accounted for. I don't see why you think either of those things are true. Have you mapped ALL the system properties before consciousness? And where are you getting this 1-to-1 idea from?
I mean, whatever function you possibly could imagine, a function relates a specific property of the system in terms of the specific properties of parts, is a member of a set, let's call this set S. All functions are in S.
Any number of properties can be combined in any number of ways to create any number of system-level properties. It's not a property-to property one to one mapping.
Think about a high level property in Conway's game of life - a glider has the property that it travels diagonally. This property doesn't come about because of a one to one mapping with some specific property of the little pieces, this property comes about because of the interactions of many of the properties of many little pieces.
It's not one to one at all, and nobody else but you is talking about properties being functions of other priorities like it has to be one to one.
Suppose that you move your hand slightly. The specific location of your hand is a function of the specific location of parts. That does not seem to be the case when it comes to experience at first. Does removing a neuron change your perception where there are many, many neurons involved in any stance of perception? I would say yes, the change is only innoticable. You experience a noticeable change when you move many neurons.
Quoting flannel jesus
Do you always get the same property in this system as a function of time if you run the simulation with the same initial condition? Sure, you get the same property. It is a simulation.
How do you know this? There are those that disagree and say that consciousness is not a function of the properties of the parts. They also often claim to 'know' this.
Quoting RogueAI
Quoting MoK
This seems very inconsistent. Why is one a function of the parts and the other is not a function of parts with nearly identical relevant properties?
I like Patterner's example of air pressure being emergent from gas molecules, none of which has itself a property of pressure, at least not that kind of pressure.
And yes, I also like @Pierre-Normand's emergence of chess from the movement of figurines, none of which are chess.
Quoting flannel jesus
That's another tack, suggesting properties of trivial parts (atoms say) that have never been measured by anything studying atoms.
Quoting flannel jesus
Yes, it would be causal, and that makes for an empirical test for it.
Quoting MoKObviosly some physical change (a deliberate one) would have to lack a physical cause. The laws describing the states of matter would necessarily be incomplete.
I used specific when it comes to function. I don't mean that the function is one-to-one. Think of a cup of tea. There is a function that describes the shape of the cup in terms of the position of its parts. If the positions of the parts are the only property that parts have, then there is only a single/specific function that describes the property of the system in terms of the properties of the parts. If parts have other properties, then there are more functions that describe the properties of the system in terms of the properties of the parts. I call the set of all functions that describe the properties of the system in terms of properties of the parts S. This set is complete; you cannot add another function to it.
That is true given the definition of weak emergence.
Quoting noAxioms
What do you mean by one and the other?
Quoting noAxioms
Such as?
Quoting noAxioms
What do you mean by incomplete?
I said enough, otherwise tell me the number of functions in a system that describe the properties of the system in terms of the properties of the parts, if the locations of parts are the only property that parts have?
This is a completely inappropriate question for you to ask me. This is the question YOU have to answer. I never said anything about how the functions or properties are exhausted, YOU did. For you to know that, you have to somehow have a full list of all those priorities and all those functions and a proof that there can't be any more functions. My position has no such restraint.
Your approach here has been really weird. You're saying now that the functions don't have to be one to one, but you said before that the available properties have been exhausted. That statement only makes sense if you think a property can "be exhausted" by being used in one function and then not being able to be used again, with other properties in some other function.
Your entire approach here is completely bizarre. I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about. Weak emergence, strong emergence, and properties being functions of other priorities - all three of those things you're talking about seemingly unaware of how drastically different everyone else uses those terms. You're in way over your head here.
Why don't you answer my question?
There is only one function that describes the shape of a system in terms of the locations of the parts.
Think about a turing complete system. You can write any program technically in any Turing complete system - the limitation to the size and capabilities of that program are limited by the number of units in your turing complete system, but if you increase the units (like individual logic gates and storage capacity), you increase the number of things it can do.
Even though a particular logic gate may have a remarkably few set of properties, when you combine many logic gates, the number of new possible programs - with new possible system level properties - increases rapidly. "Exponentially" is probably an understatement. More rapidly than that.
So the number of possible system level properties isn't just limited by the number of properties of the components, but also increases exponentially with the number of those components as well. You seem to think that if you count the properties of the components, you can somehow figure out a specific number of properties any system made of those components can have, without taking into account this fact about turing complete systems. There's genuinely no hard limit from just the properties of the components - add more components in the right ways, and the higher level systems can have more and more properties. There's genuinely no limit once you have turing completeness.
So where are you getting these ideas about exhausting properties from? Did you just make it up?
I am not talking about the number of shapes you can make by changing the location of parts. I am talking about the function that can describe all shapes in terms of the locations of the parts.
When someone says consciousness is a property of certain complex systems, they're not saying "consciousness is a specific shape that the system can take". Properties are not shapes.
I am talking about the properties of parts and how they are related to the quality of experience, so-called Qualia. I am saying that Qualia are a function of the properties of the parts of the brain.
Quoting flannel jesus
I didn't say that properties are shapes. Shapes are the result of the properties of the parts having different values.
As you wish!
Sure you can. You can measure its effect on everything else.
Quoting MoK
It does not logically follow from a mere definition that any specific case meets that definition. So no, it is not true given the definition. For it to be true, it must be the case that consciousness is a function of human parts that have certain relevant properties, and in complete contradiction, not a function of non-human parts that have the same relevant properties.
Well you deleted all the context.
One: human parts (your assertion), and the other: non-human parts with the same relevant properties, as described by @RogueAI
Such as any choice involving what is typically defined as free will.
A proposition is meant to describe and thereby predict the world.
So then what of the unity of the proposition?
Consider the sentence "The cat sat on a mat" that syntactically consists of a cleanly separated subject, predicate and object. Is this syntactical partition an aspect of the semantic content of the sentence? This is related to the question as to the extent to which subject-object-predicate structure has predictive value.
Compare to token embeddings in LLMs. Text corpra are encoded discretely and atomically on an individual word level that preserves the subject-predicate-object structure using a standard tokenizer, which are fed into a neural network encoder that learns and outputs a holistic language in which chains of words are encoded with atomically indivisible new words such that subject-predicate-object structure collapses.
In philosophical parlance it might be said that the objective of an LLM encoder is to maximize the unity of the propositions of the input language, by compressing them into holistically encoded "mentalese" that is a closer representation of reality by virtue of each of the encoded sentences representing their entire corpus, hence having higher predictive value than the original sentences.
Is it possible to represent the meaning of "strong" emergence in holisitic mentalese? I think not as easily, if at all. Certainly it is very easy to express the problem of strong emergence in formal syntax (however one interprets emergence), by merely pointing out that the relation Sitting(Cat,Mat) and the list [Cat,Sitting,Mat] will both coincide with the same syntactical sentence, and by arguing that attempts to fix this problem through syntactical enrichment will lead to the semantic problem of Bradley's infinite regress. But in mentalese, words aren't explictly defined in terms of a priori syntactical structure, but implicitly in terms of an entire open-ended and evolving body of text corpra, plus data from other modalities.
Strong emergence concerns the semantic discrepency between logically atomic semantics (as in Russell and Wittgenstein's logical atomism as exemplified by tokenizers) andt the infinite continuity of experience. But the semantic discrepancy between mentalese and experience is much narrower, due to mentalese being semantically continuous and having higher predictive value. A semantic gap still remains - since mentalese is not-perfectly predictive, so I think the philosophical lesson of LLM encoders is that the unity of the proposition problem can be recast as the indeterminacy of inferential semantics.
I'm also curious about this. Effects are measured in physical change. You measure a physical change, how do you determine that it was fundamental consciousness that caused that rather than something else? Some other physical cause?
How?
I invite you to read the OP again.
Quoting Patterner
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting flannel jesus
Slow reply, but primarily I am talking about mind interactionism here, which necessitates interaction between mind and physical (usually substances, but can be property dualism).
Given this, the interaction point must be somewhere, and the tool used depends on where that point is.
Even with panpsychism, all matter has mental properties that are not described by current naturalistic physics.
So anticipating pushback on this, I tried to investigate non-interacting forms that still deny mental processes supervening physical, besides epiphenomenal views which refutes any talk about qualia and such. I could not find any, so my assertion above stands. A counterexample is required.
Quoting flannel jesus
You don't know of course, which is a good reason why physicalism is a valid position.
Quoting MoK
I did and saw a long list of assumptions, most but not all of which I would accept. That's fine. What I'm pointing out is that the assumptions are not enough.
Quoting MoKThis does not follow from the list of assumptions. It's an assertion. I'd not even disagree with the assertion except the part where you suggest that it follows from the list of assumptions.
Sure, there's what you call a 'function' that describes a certain property of the system. That's just yet another assumption. It says nothing about if this property is emergent, strong or weak.
That also does not follow from the list of assumptions you provided.
That arguably would follow from the above statement, which unfortunately doesn't follow from the assumptions.
Hence my question, "How do you know this"? How have you falsified the view that human experience is not emergent from the physical parts?
Quoting flannel jesusI don't know about [I]fundamental[/i] consciousness. I don't think we can be conscious of the things we are conscious of without some kind of fundamental consciousness. But I don't think the subjective experience of a particle is causing anything. I don't know at what point of complexity I think an entity must attain before its subjectively experience can be casual, any more than any physicalist can say at what point they think the physical complexity of the brain causes consciousness to emerge.
But, eventually, consciousness is causal. I think what Hofstadter says about the comet approaching and hitting Jupiter at the beginning of [I]I Am a Strange Loop[/I] makes a good case for this. What he talks about can't be explained by physical causes.
That's a pretty big problem. Everything else fundamental is also fundamentally causal. It's not fundamental now, causal later - it's causal at a fundamental level. If consciousness isn't causal at a fundamental level, but it is causal at a microscopic scale... I think the whole idea, in my opinion, crumbles
Quoting MoK
What I would have thought were strongly emergent phenomena displayed by rational animals like us are such things as cognitive and rational agentive abilities. Ideas are what we come to be able to trade in discourse when those abilities are suitably developed. They're the abstract shareable contents of our intentional (that is, representational) attitudes such as our intentions, beliefs and speech acts. You claim that the creation of ideas constitute cases of strong emergence because ideas are created by the mind rather than, I suppose, the body. But what about the mind itself? Do you view the mind to be something distinct from the collection of cognitive abilities that animals or human beings manifest? I'm also trying to understand if what your now describe as a case of strong emergencethe creation of ideas by the mindis understood by you to be something quite separate from the material embodied life of a human being such that it can not be "a function" of its parts in accordance with your proposed definition of weak emergence.
We are dealing with the strong emergence in the case of ideas since they are irreducible, yet they have a single content that can be experienced. Ideas are irreducible mental events since they can be experienced. There are other mental events like experiencing a cup. To me, experiencing is an activity of the mind. I have a thread on substance dualism that you can find here.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Yes, the mind to me is a substance with the ability to experience, freely decide, and cause.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Yes. The mind is a separate substance. Matter cannot even be the cause of its own change (I have another thread on this topic that you can find here). So the Mind is needed to keep the order of matter. Once the order is in place, you could even have life.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Experiencing a cup is a weak emergence considering all the complexities between experiencing the cup and the cup. We, however, have the ability to experience ideas as well, which is a strong emergence.
If you wouldnt mind, Id like to hear what you believe substance means.
P1) Human consciousness does not supervene on physical processes.
P2) Qualia is part of human consciousness
C1) Human consciousness is a 2nd kind of property/substance that is not part of the physical processes described by physics
P3) A human talks/writes about qualia, a physical action
C2) Consciousness causes physical effects
C1 encompasses varying kinds of dualism. I don't support this, so the example needs to come from those that do.
C2 is a statement of interactionism. Descartes put the interaction in the pineal gland, supposedly because "I cannot find any part of the brain, except this, which is not double", whatever that means.
I suspect that it was selected due to its inaccessibility (at the time) in a living subject.
Chalmers seems to deny interactionism (I may have this wrong), but I could not find any explanation (except obfuscation) of how he gets around it. He has no counter-story. Either my logic above is not valid, or mental substances/properties have non-mental physical effects that are open to being measured.
MoK has not replied to my identification of logic flaws in his OP, so I presume agreement.
Quoting MoKThis is not consistent with your definition of strong emergence in the OP.
I mean, your OP implies consciousness to not be strong emergence, and it too can be experienced. Emergence (weak at least, per your OP) means it is a function of the parts, not that it is experienced or not, nor if it is reducible.
To be honest, I cannot figure out your stance, since weak emergence seems to be a conclusion of a physicalist, and yet you seem to support substance dualism.
Experience of one thing is arguably weak emergence, but experience of a different thing is strong emergence? Really? All without any demonstration of the difference, or why these things cannot be emergent from different (non-human) parts with the same relevant properties.
A substance is something that objectively exists. An experience is something that subjectively exists. I think that is all forms of existence.
I have a long struggle to consider ideas as a form of strong emergence. At first, I thought that they are a form of weak emergence since we can only form an idea from a meaningful sentence in which the words are arranged in a certain way. So, it seems that an idea is a function of how words are arranged in a sentence. But then I recognized that a meaningful sentence is only a way that we communicate an idea. An idea does not have parts at the end since it is irreducible, so we are dealing with something that has no parts, yet it is meaningful to us. So, when it comes to language, a sentence, whether meaningful or meaningless, is a form of weak emergence as long as we are not talking about the meaning of a sentence. The idea that is derived from reading a sentence is something more than the sentence, though, so we are dealing with a form of strong emergence when it comes to ideas.
So does this substance called mind have a molecular structure?
The thing is, consciousness is causal. It wasn't physics and interacting particles that wrote Beethoven's string quartets, flew people to the moon, manufactured computers, contemplated the nature of consciousness, built the Sphinx, on and on. None of that would have ever happened without the thoughts and intentions that come with consciousness.
That's what we have to explain. So how could it have happened? Let's say physicalism. Through purely physical interactions, life begins, and evolves. There's no such thing as consciousness. Then, a certain physical complexity comes into being. And, though consciousness was not planned, and consciousness had no role in bringing that complexity about, for no reason, that physical complexity just happens to be perfect for the existence of this entirely new thing that it has nothing to do with.
What an extraordinary, bizarre turn of events. And a happy turn, at that, since it is the thing that defines us all. It's the thing none of us would willingly give up. Want to become an automoton? Lose an arm, or your consciousness? Lose an arm and a leg, or your consciousness? How much if your physical self would you give up before thinking consciousness is no longer desirable?
That scenario is just too bizarre. One thing has nothing to do with the other. Then, holy cow, look at that!
I find it easier to believe that consciousness was always there, and, with the aid of consciousness at every opportunity, the system developed greater complexity to be subjectively experienced.
A particle can't do anything other than interact with other things according to the laws of physics. It doesn't have systems for movement. It doesn't have systems for choosing between options. It can subjectively experience, but what is that like for a particle?
An archaea acts. But it's entirely physics and chemistry. There's information processing, which is what I suspect is needed for groups of individual particles to subjectively experience as a unit. There is information processing in protein synthesis, in the series of reactions between photons hitting the eyespot and the archaella moving, and whatever other systems it has. The consciousness is of a much more complex thing than just particles. Still, there's no possibility of choosing between actions, or not acting. This may be the beginnings of thinking, but it's just the bare beginnings. There's not enough going on.
By the time we get to humans, we can choose between any number if things. We make choices between conflicting motivations. no longer purely physical factors determining which option you take. The subjective experience of our selves plays a role in our decision-making. As is evidenced in our creations all around us.
The mind is irreducible, so it does not have any structure. It, however, can be even omnipresent.
But physicalism had nothing to offer. I have yet to hear a theory, or even a wild guess, about how Chalmers' Hard Problem is explained with physicalism. Nobody who believes physicalism is the answer knows what that answer is, and people like Eagleman, Hoffman, Greene, and Crick say we don't have the vaguest idea how to look for it. A lot of people, like Greene, say physicalism must be the answer, and, even though we have no clue at the moment, we'll figure it out at some (possibly very distant) point in the future. They say that as though it's proven that that is what's going to happen.
I can't see why you keep insisting that a particle, or a crystal, is a subject of experience. The rationale seems to be that if all that really exists are particle and forces, and we as subjects are also particles and forces, then particles and forces must also be subjects. But what if the assumption about the nature of us as subjects is mistaken and we're something other than particles and forces?
Quoting Patterner
If it were entirely physics and chemistry, there would be no separate discipline of organic chemistry. And any biological unit displays observable attributes which differentiate it from inorganic substance. it metabolizes, seeks homeostasis, and maintains a boundary between itself and the sorrounding environment. In addition to that, it retains information and is able to transmit it through reproduction, none of which are necessarily reducible to physics and chemistry.
[quote=What is (Biological) Information;https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2015.0060]According to physicalism, biological information and the genetic code are mere metaphors. They are like those computer programs that allow us to write our instructions in English, thus saving us the trouble of writing them in the binary digits of the machine language. Ultimately, however, there are only binary digits in the machine language of the computer, and in the same way, it is argued, there are only physical quantities at the most fundamental level of Nature. ...
The idea that life evolved naturally on the primitive Earth suggests that the first cells came into being by spontaneous chemical reactions, and this is equivalent to saying that there is no fundamental divide between life and matter. This is the chemical paradigm, a view that is very popular today and that is often considered in agreement with the Darwinian paradigm, but this is not the case. The reason is that natural selection, the cornerstone of Darwinian evolution, does not exist in inanimate matter. In the 1950s and 1960s, furthermore, molecular biology uncovered two fundamental components of lifebiological information and the genetic codethat are totally absent in the inorganic world, which means that information is present only in living systems, that chemistry alone is not enough and that a deep divide does exist between life and matter. This is the information paradigm, the idea that life is chemistry plus information.
Ernst Mayr, one of the architects of the modern synthesis, has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the view that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter. In The growth of biological thought [15], p. 124, he made this point in no uncertain terms: The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years![/quote]
This is not panpsychism, but biological naturalism - psyche is not in inanimate matter, only begins to manifest with the advent of organic life. It is what differentiates life from non-life.
Quoting Patterner
There's actually quite a simple reason for this: if not physicalism, then what? And the alternatives are very hard to defend, and outside the scope of physics. As Abraham Maslow said, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then the only problems you will consider involve nails.
If you are trying to describe macro-level functions in micro-level terms, then the macro-level description is also indispensable. Otherwise what would it be that you are trying to describe in micro-level terms?
This just seems obvious. But the complaint that seems to be commonly made is that the macro-level description is lost in the micro-level description, and that the micro-level description is thus not a true description. But how could it be otherwise?
I think this problem is what constitutes the so-called "hard problem". No micro-level description will be acceptable to those who demand that physicalism should be able to explain subjective experience, if it eliminates the macro-level description. but it must eliminate the macro-level description (Sellars "manifest image" of human experience and judgement) otherwise it would not be a micro-level description.
Quoting Wayfarer
And here is a fine example of this conflation of paradigms.
It's funny that this is how I think about anti physicalism. There's not even a single wild guess as to a model about how the non physical mind works, operates, evolves from the past into the future. Nobody who believes in non physicalism even tries to come up with one, and they don't have the vaguest idea how to find one or even begin performing experiments on the non physical mind to test their ideas.
It's all exclusively a refuge from the hard problem. But it's an illusory refuge in my estimation. The hard problem doesn't just exist for physicalism, it would in principle exist for any explanation of consciousness that we understand well enough. The reason why people seek refuge in nonphysicalism is because we have such a great understanding of fundamental physics, and such poor understanding on consciousness, that it feels impossible to explain the latter with the former. I posit this: that the only reason you think non physicalism is the explanation is because we have no understanding of non physicalism (there's no model after all), and a thing we don't understand in the slightest magically seems like it might be the best explanation for a phenomenon we're struggling to understand (consciousness). But that train of thought is an illusion, you can't cure a lack of understanding by posting more crap you don't understand and can't even test.
I don't think it's an accident that LLMs, based on neural nets, are so effective at being simulcra of human linguistic interaction. We imitate our physical neurons and we get a turing test passing machine out of it. That's a huge deal, and it's the strongest tangible evidence we have one way or the other.
To refuse to consider that something might exist outside of the scope of our physical sciences, to think that we are certain there can be nothing to reality other than what is within the scope of our physical sciences, when the most important thing to any of us, our consciousness, is outside the scope of our physical sciences, is a very illogical mindset, imo.
Can I suggest that this is a result of the way the 'physical versus non-physical' has been framed after Descartes? His philosophy, which was strongly connected to the emergence of modern science post Newton and Galileo, proposed a model comprising res extensa (extended matter) and res cogitans (literally 'thinking thing'). From the time he proposed it, Descartes had difficulty explaining how res cogitans affects matter, suggesting that the rational soul operated through the pineal gland.
Subsequently, the whole model of mind and matter became less credible as a model, on account of these and other conceptual problems. Meanwhile the physical sciences went strength to strength with huge progress in physics, chemistry, materials science and so forth. Descartes res cogitans ended up being described as the wan 'ghost in the machine' by Gilbert Ryle.
Might this be how you're thinking of the 'non-physical'?
I'm not thinking about it at all, because there's no model to think about. It's a placeholder thought, not a rich thought. There's no attempt to understand how it works - and that's exactly why it's so appealing, I think, as an explanation for consciousness. Because it's mysterious, and consciousness is mysterious. The more mysterious it remains, the more it remains a valid explanation for consciousness to these people. The second it loses it's mystery and we get some kind of real understanding of it, the "hard problem" comes back.
It's like an anti explanation, more than an explanation. It's a mystery substance to un-explain a mystery phenomenon.
But that's all beside the point anyway. My point really is the non physical is merely a realm of mystery, a realm of ignorance, and so it seems natural to place mysterious phenomena into a mysterious realm - but I think that natural reflex is mistaken, it's anti explanatory.
Quoting flannel jesusIt is appealing because, despite being able to detect and measure unimaginably small and large physical phenomena, we cannot so much as detect consciousness with our physical senses or sciences, there is no apparent connection between consciousness and the physical properties of the universe, and there is no physicalist guess as to how it might work. That makes a non physicalist approach speaking.
But if someone says I think all emergence is "strong", they think you are being a mystic. I think that's just what nature does.
Well it's fine if you think that, but you should equally hold it against non physicalism that there's no non physicalist guess as to how it might work. It's not like you're abandoning a non working idea for a working idea - you're abandoning a lack of an idea for another lack of an idea.
That doesn't mean non physicalism is false, but it certainly shouldn't leave anybody with extreme confidence that it's true.
We know that materialism fails since it cannot explain how ideas emerge and how they can be causally efficacious in the world, given that ideas are irreducible and have no parts. I have an argument for "physical cannot be the cause of its own change" as well. Idealism also fails since it cannot explain how the contents of our experiences are related. It also cannot explain how we could possibly have memory. A model with two substances, the mind and the object, can explain some phenomena but not all, especially when it comes to the creation of new ideas, which is very important when it comes to thinking. The object is required for perception, where the mind perceives the content of the object, what you are looking at for example. I am currently thinking about how we are able to create new ideas, though.
I don't think so. Consider a set of words, let's call this set SW, which has a minimal number of words for creating only one meaningful sentence, let's call the meaningful sentence MS. Now consider the set of all sentences, let's call this set SS, that you can build with arranging the words randomly. Only one sentence in SS has a meaning. SS is a weak emergence. The idea that MS is referring to is strong emergence for two reasons: 1) It is more than SS, and 2) It is irreducible.
Quoting Manuel
We have good intuition about what water is: Liquid is a state in which the material is almost incompressible, and it can take different shapes. We have a theory for it, too.
Quoting Manuel
Or maybe there is a model, including the mind, that can explain the strong emergence.
Maybe that's a given for you. Idk what "we" you're referring to, there's no expert consensus that that's the case.
Matter has extension, shape, even at its fundamental level, the string. Ideas are irreducible; they don't have any shape, or extension. So, the first question is how you could get something like idea emerges from the process in the mater. Matterial process also are causaly closed according to materialism so ideas cannot be causally efficasious even if we accept that ideas are strong emergence.
Do you have the intuition that prior to combination a particle contains water in it? I don't. We have a theory yes, but I don't know someone who says that it was evident all along that particles have water in them, you can't see it, touch it, etc. until the experiment comes about.
Quoting MoK
Some emergence is more shocking to us that others, consciousness out of matter vs. liquidity in particles. But what do you gain by saying one is strong and the other is weak, if you lack intuitions (not theories) for both?
I don't understand what you mean by particles have water in them! Water refers to a system of H2O molecules. We have a good intuition on why water changes its behavior in terms of the properties of its parts. We even have good intuition on why parts have these and those properties, such as speed, mass, spin, etc. These properties are the result of the string vibrating in different forms.
Quoting Manuel
Consciousness, to me, is the ability of the mind, the ability to experience.
Quoting Manuel
Think of a meaningful sentence. The sentence is weak emergence. An idea, however, emerges once you complete reading the sentence. The emergence of the idea is strong since the idea is more than the sentence, and it is irreducible.
Properties like liquidity or transparency are system-level effects of the arrangement and interaction of physical components. Water molecules are not themselves liquid, but when arranged in certain ways they behave collectively in a manner we call liquid. This kind of emergence is fully explicable in terms of the physical properties of the components and the laws governing them. There is nothing mysterious left over once we understand the physics and chemistry.
By contrast, Nagel points out, the relation between physical brain processes and conscious experience is not like that. Even if we knew everything about the physical constituents of the brain and how they interact, the fact that these processes give rise to subjective experiencethe what it is like aspectwould remain unexplained. Emergence in the physical sense does not bridge the gap between objective physical descriptions and subjective conscious experience.
But Nagel also sees this as an argument in support of panpsychism: If consciousness really arises from matter, then the mental must in some way be present in the basic constituents of matter. On this view, consciousness is not an inexplicable product of complex organization but a manifestation of properties already present in the fundamental building blocks of the world.
In his later work (Mind and Cosmos, 2012) Nagel doesn't pursue panpsychism as an option, advocating instead for a kind of naturalistic teleology.
A system is composed of its parts. A single H20 molecule does not have the properties of water. And we don't understand how, by combining them together water could arise, because each individual molecule shows no "wetness".
You are correct that we have good theories on speed, mass, spin. I doubt they are intuitive. If they were, we would have figured out the chemistry behind them much earlier than we did. At least, that's how it looks like to me.
Quoting MoK
Yes. But does it float apart like a soul or a second substance, or is it grounded in something that is unlike it (a brain)? If you are a dualist then that's perfectly fine.
If you are a monist, then the issue is explaining how non-mental matter could give rise to experience. It seems hard to believe, but we have decent reasons for believing it is true.
Quoting MoK
Is the sentence "Think of a meaningful sentence" meaningful? If it is, the meaning seems to be emergent on the order of the words.
Now you say an idea is something that emerges once you complete reading the sentence.
How is the idea more that the sentence, if you say that a completed sentence is an idea? I'm trying to understand.
Quoting Wayfarer
Correct, you can explain the phenomena in theoretical terms. But the phenomenal property of water is untouched even knowing the theory. The mystery is how could apparently liquidless molecules give rise to the phenomena liquidity?
Likewise, if what some assume is true that experience merges from a combination of non-mental physical stuff, we have no intuition as to how the mental could emerge from the non-mental.
But I know you don't believe this, just putting the thought out.
I don't see a fundamental difference in how puzzling these things are.
Quoting Wayfarer
And this may be true (or not, we don't know). But if it is, the claim is weak, because everything would be emergent on combination of physical stuff: solidity, stars, cells, bipedalism, apples, pain, etc.
We happen privilege experience in philosophy now. But before the problem was motion, then thought. That was clear to Locke and many others.
Liquidity is a structuralfunctional property: once you know the arrangement and interactions of H?O molecules at given temperatures and pressures, you can see why the liquid state arises (and remember H?O is not the only liquid) . Theres no explanatory gap between the micro-description and the macro-property; the physics and chemistry just are the liquidity.
Consciousness, by contrast, is not a structuralfunctional property in the same way. You can give a complete account of the neural correlates of an experience the brain states, the patterns of activation and still have said nothing about the first-person nature of the experience. That quality is what is not captured by the physical description, and we have no analogue of the H?O ? liquid derivation for it. In other words, it's a false equivalency.
Yes, that's very much my argument against MoK "functional" definition of weak emergence. Either the existence of the relevant "function" (i.e. the mapping from micro-level descriptions of the system to macro-level ones) is simply posited to exist on ground of supervenience (and hence is obvious or trivial, unless one is a dualist) or this function is stated with ineliminable reference to high-level concepts, in which case it doesn't establish the sufficiency of low-level descriptions for purpose of causal explanations.
I think the so called hard problem is usually construed as applying to any conception of human beings (or other conscious creatures) that views them as being entirely materially constituted of physical stuff (that obeys something like the known the laws of physics). It's a conception according to which p-zombies are conceptually coherent. Such proponents of the hard-problem would likely maintain that the problem remains applicable to accounts of strong emergence. My own view is that a naturalistic account of the strong emergence of mental properties, (that incorporates concepts from ethology and anthropology), including consciousness, can be consistent with a form of non-reductive physicalism or Aristotelian monism (i.e. hylomorphism) that excludes the conceivability of p-zombies and hence does away with the hard problem. Form in addition to matter is ineliminable in the description of our mental lives, but form isn't something standing over and above matter as something separate or immaterial.
I think panpsychism fails to explain the unity of experience; therefore, it is not acceptable.
Correct.
Quoting Manuel
Correct.
Quoting Manuel
We understand how. The properties of water are functions of the properties of parts. We can also simulate water.
Quoting Manuel
It is just not easy to have an intuition for how the properties of a particle can be explained in terms of the vibration of the string. I am not a string theorist, so I cannot tell you how a certain vibration leads to a particular property, but I am sure string theorists have good intuition about this.
Quoting Manuel
It is. It is about a special request. You think about a sentence when you read this sentence.
Quoting Manuel
Correct. The meaning is a strong emergence.
Quoting Manuel
Correct.
Quoting Manuel
No, I am not saying that completing a sentence is an idea. I am saying an idea emerges when you complete reading a sentence.
I agree with you!
Yes, no matter without form and no form without matter?that makes good sense to me.
I don't think we will agree in this one about the molecules, as we are talking in circle here.
We cannot conceive how non-mental mattter could give rise to mind, that's fine. As Russell pointed out we don't know enough about matter to say whether its intrinsic properties are like or unlike mind.
But it seems that other issues - free will, motion, life, etc.- are equally hard, but again we may agree to disagree I suppose.
Quoting MoK
So, an idea to you is composed of words. That is, the entire content of an idea are the words we use in propositions?
Not being incredulous or anything like that, just want to clear up the issue. It's not entirely implausible.
Quoting MoKRight. Single molecules of water cannot be wet. Wetness is a property of groups of molecules, because of the way they bond under certain conditions. And the molecules bond the way they do under those conditions because of their properties.
Quoting MoKI can't imagine explaining it as intuition, either. Nothing about string theory can be intuition, even if they can make an internally consistent, mathematically perfect theory. And there isn't any evidence to support the theory either.
In this Ted Talk, Brian Greene gives a good talk about those strings, among other things.
So, more of a Frankenstein than a zombie, then. :wink:
"Cup" refers to an idea. "My cup", however, refers to a new idea in my mind that objectively exists near me too. When you read this sentence, the idea of "my cup" appears to you as well, so there are two ideas in the minds of two individuals. You even have a different impression when I say that "my cup" is broken. So, what "my cup" refers to different ideas depending on how it is used in a sentence.
Correct.
Quoting Patterner
The link refers to one of my posts. You may want to correct the link, which I think is this one.
Thanks. I, however, disagree with his final thought in which he mentioned that an amount of energy might dissipate to higher dimensions if we collide two particles hard enough. Higher dimensions might be wrapped such that no dissipation occurs when you hit two particles hard enough.
Well, if the experiments go the way he expects them to go, it would be reasonable to think they went that way for the reason he expected them too.
I don't think so.
OK, you're entitled to different definitions, but if you declare the apple to exist because you see it, that seems to be subjective existence, not objective at all.
Quoting MoKDisagree. Ideas have parts, but those parts are not objects or substances. I have patented ideas, and those ideas had a lot of parts. I've never patented an object of any kind.
Quoting PatternerSo you agree with my bit of logic showing that it can be measured.
You can say all this about any feature. Just substitute say 'eye' for 'consciousness'.
I picked that because eyes are a frequent choice for similar argument from incredulity.
BTW, the physicalists don't suggest that consciousness follows from mere complexity. What comes into being is improved reaction to outside stimuli, never anything new, just improvements to what was already there.
Quoting PatternerSame can be said of Chalmers, who merely replaced a black box with a different, even blacker one. It, being inaccessible, is far less explained. Magic is not a better answer.
Quoting flannel jesus
Expressing the same criticism. Nicely put.
Quoting Patterner
I would never end the day with just that. "I don't know" is better than "that's the way it is", and "don't know, so magic". As for the nothing question, that one has satisfactory (to me) analysis, starting with identifying and questioning the assumptions made in asking it.
Quoting WayfarerOrganic chemistry being a subset of all chemistry does not in any way imply that organic chemistry is more than chemistry, which in turn, is just physics.
OK, a life-form is more than just organic chemistry. One might behave as a unit for instance, a property not particularly coming from just chemistry. But the discipline of organic chemistry is not the discipline of biology.
Maybe. Going from not-life straight to a cell seems a stretch, but things like amphiphiles and ribose do occur in absence of life, so it's not an impossible stretch. Going from a self-sustaining form to a replicating form seems the largest hurdle. It isn't really life until it does that.
Calling it a fundamental difference does not preclude it from being based on physics and chemistry.
Quoting Wayfarer
The suggestion of the pineal gland was not an attempt at an explanation of how matter was affected, but rather a choice of something in/near the brain that there was only one of. Being somewhat symmetrical, most brain parts have a mirror part, but not that gland. Still, the soul could have been put in the heart (only one of those) or gut (plenty of behavior and choices come from there).
Quoting Wayfarer
Abstractions are mental constructs, and so supervene on mental constructs/states. Same with abstractions of say an apple.
Quoting MoK1) I don't accept your given, and 2) as usual, your conclusion does not follow from your given premise.
The computationalists and IIT proponents, for example, suggest that consciousness emerges from computation and/or information processing, and they usually invoke a threshold of computation/processing before consciousness emerges, else they end up close to panpsychism. What this means in practice is that simple systems, like a thermostat, probably aren't conscious, but as complexity increases, towards something like our brain, consciousness emerges.
And where is the truth if it is not in the mind?
Quoting noAxioms
Could we agree that something that exists is either objective or subjective?
Quoting noAxioms
"Cup" refers to an idea. Does such an idea have parts?
Quoting noAxioms
So, you have an explanation of how ideas emerge and can affect the physical world, given my definition of an idea? I would be happy to hear that!
An example of the latter seems to be photosynthesis, which involves such complex chemical relationships that it requires a quantum computer to seek out the path to the one that works. Yes, that means that plants have quantum computers in them, arguably more complex, processing more information than us.
I can attempt to track down the article if there's interest.
Your definitions might differ of course.
Quoting MoKI don't think objective truths and falsehoods have a property of location. If they did, they'd be a relative truth, requiring a relation to some sort of coordinate system.
That would be a different definition of 'objective' than the one I've been using. It would mean independence from observation, rather than independence from any context at all. I tend to oppose 'objective' with 'context independent'. An apple has a relational existence. It relates to a coordinate system (it's part of this universe and has a location in it, if that even means anything), and it relates only to that with which it has interacted, and thus has collapsed its wave function to said apple. Of course that implies some quantum interpretation that does not assert the reality of things in absence of those interactions. Bohmian mechanics for instance is a realist interpretation that would say the apple is real (still in relation to the universe), existing without reliance on the interaction with something collapsing its wave function. I'm more of a locality kind of person, finding reverse causality more distasteful than lack of realism.
Yes, the idea of a cup has many parts, but probably not as many as the actual cup.
It does not follow from my comment that I had an explanation of how ideas emerge, or even that they're something that is emergent. I don't see your definition of what an idea is, only an assertion that it has no parts due to it being irreducible. I agree with none of those asserted properties, but maybe we have vastly different definitions of what an idea is.
[Quoting noAxiomsWell, I think everything is conscious, but only of itself. A computer that processes information may do so remarkably well, and at speeds we can't imagine. (We can't solve a billion simple addition problems in a lifetime.) But that's all it does. Otoh, the simplest organism that you might consider to be barely conscious has quite a few different information processing systems within it. Starting with DNA synthesizing protein. I don't know which organism you have in mind, but there is likely sensing the environment, doing something in response to what is sensed, metabolism, etc. I would say that organism's subjective experience of itself is a lot more complex than most computers.
Oh, so you deny that an idea has a location. They are not even close to you, perhaps somewhere in the field of your experiences! How could you possibly write about them if they are not present to you?
Quoting noAxioms
I suppose you are referring to an image of a cup that you are creating.
From what I can tell, consciousness is manifested in information processing. There's a complex computation of ? that is dependent on six factors, so a huge computer cranking out teraflops for weather prediction probably doesn't qualify.
Still, it's a variant of panpsychism, asserting that consciousness is intrinsic, not emergent. But it is negligible for most things with low ?.
Quoting PatternerBut that's all a biological information processor does as well. You've not identified any distinction.
In both cases, doing 'additions' is a small part of what all it does. Mere addition (arguably) cannot make decisions.
Very much information processing, yes.
All things an artificial device can do. I have no specific organism in mind since I don't think consciousness is anything fundamental or restricted to 'organisms'. While you also seem to suggest that consciousness isn't restricted to organisms, you do apparently think it is something far more fundamental, so we're not on the same ground.
Quoting MoKI never mentioned 'ideas' in the bit you quoted. If I want to talk about the idea or concept of truth, I would have said 'concept of truth' or some such (see bold below). I'm no idealist, so I don't equate a thing with the concept of the thing.
Quoting MoK
Again, I was, on the left, bold, referring to the idea of a cup, and on the right, italics, the cup itself. At no point in the comment was any mention of an 'image' made. Had I desired to do that, I would have said 'picture of cup' or some such.
I'm not sure why you continuously jump to conclusions about things not said. Kindly restrict your conclusions to what I said, and not what you pretend I said.
In a way, surprisingly, yes! More precisely, the hylomorphic account creates conceptual space for f-monstrosity rather than p-zombiehood. It's a topic for gallolithotheratophenomenology. Surprisingly, when I submitted this neologism to GPT-5, it didn't immediately make the connection. But then it helpfully rephrased (see its last responses here) my suggestion that we can understand consciousness as something like what Aristotle identifies as the sensitive-locomotive soul, which animals possess since they are animate in this particular way (having well integrated senses and locomotion). And we can identify self-consciousness as an ability possessed by being who have a rational soul: that is, a rational form of life.
In The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, the authors (mainly Hacker) point out that the use of the term "consciousness" in its contemporary use is fairly new and philosophically charged in a way that gives rise to such problems as the epistemological problem of other minds or the idea of the conceivability of p-zombies. There are much less issues with two ordinary uses of the term, one transitive ("I am conscious/aware that you did so and so") and the other intransitive ("The patient is conscious/awake") that, thanks to them being ruled by Wittgensteinian/Rylean behavioral criteria of application, don't have such problematic Cartesian implications. There comes the idea of the f-monster (as contrasted with the p-zombie).
Consider the extreme case of the brain-in-a-vat. Let us imagine the envatted brain of a normal mature person that has been fitted with a language interface (by means of transductors fitted to the suitable cortical auditory and motor areas, and also, possibly, the suitably regulated loops enabling internal monologue). This case is somewhat analogous to ChatGPT's. It's a limiting case of extreme amputation. The animate animal body has been almost entirely removed saved for the bare minimum enabling-organ that sustains the dialogical part of the human form of life. The resulting impoverished and/or distorted phenomenology may be a topic for gallolithotheratophenomenology albeit a very peculiar and extreme one. Two criteria of abnormality seem to pull apart. On the one hand, the human body isn't merely alien or maladjusted to the brain that it hosts, it is entirely absent. On the other hand, the common elements of the human dialogical form of life remains untainted by this bodily abnormality (though there is also the issue of the lack of a self-conscious autobiography/identity) since it is inherited (during pre-training) from the assimilation of texts that have been authored by normal embodied human beings. When the problem is being framed in this way, the question "Do LLM-based AI conversational assistants (or envatted brains) have/enjoy consciousness/consious states/qualia" seem ill posed, not sufficiently discriminate, in addition to carrying problematic Cartesian assumptions.
:yikes: supercalifragalisticexpialidotious!
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I think many of the problems arise because of the tendency to try and treat consciousness - actually, I prefer 'mind' - as an object. It may be an object for the cognitive sciences. But when it comes to philosophy of mind, we're faced with the indubitable fact that we are that which we seek to know. That is a simple way of describing the so-called hard problem - the nature of mind is not something we can stand outside of, so to speak.
Incidentally, I read that the word 'consciousness' was devised by one of the Cambridge Platonists:
[quote=SEP 17th C Theories of Consciousness]Cudworth developed his theory by reflecting on Plotinuss Enneads, where Plotinus makes use of the Greek term synaisthesis (literally: sensed with) to distinguish lower natures from higher. Cudworth translates this into English as con-sense or consciousness (True Intellectual System 159). It is by working out a particularly Platonic metaphysical theory that Cudworth develops his account of consciousness.[/quote]
Which, I think, is actually quite concordant with the way the term is used in modern 'consciousness studies' disciplines.
I suppose my 'bottom line' is the irreducibility of consciousness (or mind). If something is irreducible then it can't really be explained in other terms or derived from something else. My approach is Cartesian in that sense - that awareness of one's own being is an indubitable fact ('for in order to doubt, I have to know', said Augustine, centuries earlier.) But I don't go down the dualist route, I feel that enactivism and embodied cognitive approaches, seasoned with phenomenology, are the way to go.
Quoting noAxiomsMy distinction came next, when I said even the simplest organism is running many information processing systems. If someone thinks consciousness emerges from physical properties and processes, particularly information processing, I wouldn't think the theory would say it emerges from just one such system. I would think the theory would say many information processing systems, working together as one entity, as is the case with living organisms, are needed.
And I think consciousness is always present, but information processing is what makes conglomerates of particles subjectively experience as units, rather than as individual particles. So the computer might be experiencing as a unit because it is processing information. But, despite how incredibly well it processes information in the one way it does so, it is not experiencing as much as the simplest organism is.
Frankly, though, I'm not sure the computer is processing information. I don't think manipulating 0s and 1s is processing information in an objective sense. It is in our eyes, because we programmed it to manipulate them in ways that are meaningful to us. But I'm not sure being meaningful in our eyes is sufficient. It doesn't [I]do[/I] anything. The information in DNA is used to synthesize proteins. The information a retina (or a simple eyespot) generates and sends to the brain (or flagellum) has meaning that we did not assign it. These are naturally-occurring information processing systems that lead to something. A computer can calculate things all day long, and nothing is necessarily going to come of it.
The idea of a cup does not have any part for me! You need to think of a cup without trying to make a mental representation, an image, which you can perceive.
Quoting Patterner
Fair enough. Consider a galley, a ship powered by slave-driven oars during battle. Is such a galley conscious? Not asking if it contains conscious things, but is the boat system, fully loaded with slaves and whatnot, is that system itself conscious? More conscious or less than say you? I ask because it is obviously running many information processing systems. Even the barnacles contribute.
You seem to go with the panphychists, so the answer is probably yes (everything is), so the important question is if the galley is more or less conscious than you, and why. I suppose I could ask the IIT folks as well.
Quoting PatternerUnclear here. It emerging from one such system precludes multiple conscious entitites. I think you mean it emerges in one being despite being composed of multiple cells doing this DNA computation. But that would make forests more conscious than people because there's more biomass to one (and yes, there are whole forests comprised of a single plant). Likewise it emerging from the galley, except in this paragraph you seem to be telling me what a physicalist would say, which is probably not what they actually say. I for one don't think the computation done at the DNA level contributes at all to say a vertebrae's consciousness. It might be a cell being conscious, but the cell doesn't know what the other cells are doing except via chemical interactions.
Then we get into weird stuff like slime molds which seem to be conscious and can communicate information to another (language), all without nerve cells or any CPU. Not sure whose case that supports or contradicts. Do I have the right to label it conscious just because it appears to act like it is, with deliberate action and with social interactions?
Sure it does something. Information comes in. Different information goes out, because the information was processed, regardless of to whom that information is meaningful.
Likewise for a machine processing information from a webcam, or signals from a radio telescope or microphone.
Oddly enough, sound goes through considerable information processing (a Fourier transform) before it ever fires some nerve cell heading from ears to brain.
Quoting MoKMy condolences.
I think that would be contradictory. An idea IS a mental representation.
Yes, what I am stressing, though, is that it is irreducible.
Thanks for the reference to Cudworth! That's something I'll have to look into more.
So, I think we are agreed that we can take from Descartes the idea of the irreducibility of conscious experience without going the dualist route. I was remined of the quotation from Descartes' (Méditations) "Je ne suis pas seulement logé en mon corps ainsi quun pilote en son navire" that I had first heard (paraphrased) in a lecture on Aristotle by Richard Bodéüs. I thought it was a quote from Aristotle, and maybe Bodéüs thought so as well, but I was later surprised, as I was searching for its exact source, to find out that it was Descartes. What's significant is an intuition about the phenomenology of sensory experience, and the locus of the interface, as it were, where qualia really are located. When construed in internalist/indirect-realist fashion, qualia can be thought of as the suitably "illuminated" internal representational states that the causal impacts of the external world produce in us. Some anti-reductionists like Penrose or Searle view this to arise from some queer (albeit irreducible in terms of computation) quantum-mechanical/biological processes/properties internal to the brain.
Embodied/enactive/situated approaches, and phenomenological approaches closer to Wittgenstein or Merleau-Ponty, would rather place phenomenological properties at the living (and temporally protracted) interface between the living body and its natural/social environment. Hence, for instance, illuminating the subjective character of perceiving (or imagining, or remembering) something red isn't just a matter of isolating it through introspection but rather of situating it in the life of sighted people for whom discriminating red things from other non-red things, creating varieties of red dyes, etc., play a significant role. Hence, I remember having heard that Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre might be a good place where to start to understand what a red quale really is. This enactive/situated interface also is the interface where our affordances are being constituted/constructed, perceived/grasped, and exploited.
What happens in ChatGPT's case is that, like a blind person, its use of the word "red" can successfully refer (on Evans' consumer/producer model of the reference of proper names, extended to names of such proper sensibilia) but don't sustain for it the possibility to apprehend the corresponding quale since its purely linguistic interface is too thin and doesn't engage with embodied capabilities.
So, in connection with this, I also imagined another thought experiment in radical gallolithotheratophenomenology to better get at the special character of ChatGPT's experience. We can imagine the crew of the USS Enterprise being force to ration food and space, due to a tribble infestation, maybe. Chief Engineer Scotty finds a way to modify the transporter in order to dematerialize non-essential crew members, keep their "energy pattern" stored, and only rematerialize a copy when there will be need and room for them. An accident occurs and Ensign Chekov, let us imagine, suffers brain damage that has similar effects to what the Emergents did to their slaves (the "focus"/"mind rot") in Vernor Vinge's novel A Deepness in the Sky. Poor Chekov, whenever a copy of him is spawned, finds himself mostly amnesiac (deprived of his own episodic/autobiographical memories) paraplegic, blind and deaf. But he retains most of his linguistic abilities and general knowledge. He is also very receptive to commands and, indeed "focused". In this way, he is very similar to ChatGPT, and has a similarly brittle personal identity, since "copies" of him can be spawned as will, just like copies of ChatGPT are spawned in each conversations with its users, such that the crew of the Enterprise can benefit from his expertise. His original living body has ceased to be the spatio-temporal continuant than anchors his personal (numerical) identity, and also the sensorimotor interface (through which fuzzy dreams of embodied qualia normally get actualized into their forms/function from the empty promissory notes that they've become within Chekov's diminished cognitive life) is damaged.
I had first submitted those sketchy thoughts to GPT-5, and then decided to repost them here with minimal change.
Quoting Wayfarer
Like you (and I think @Pierre-Normand), I don't believe consciousness or mind can be reduced to the physical. But I'd like to see a clearer discussion of what's entailed in your statements above.
Two things:
1. If mind can be an object for the cognitive sciences, what does this mean? How does the attitude or program of cognitive science allow an escape from what you call "the indubitable fact that we are that which we seek to know"? Perhaps the answer lies in a discrimination between 1st and 3rd person perspectives, but what do you think? When a scientist studies consciousness, what are they doing differently from our everyday experience of being conscious?
2. That some awareness is an indubitable fact does not entail that it can't be explained in other terms. Yet you seem to imply that this must be so. Why? Aren't we confusing the experience, the phenomenology, with that which is experienced? My awareness of a drop of water is irreducible and, for some, indubitable, but we have the science of chemistry nonetheless. Why would the situation be different for consciousness? I can think of several candidate answers here, but tell me what you think.
Quoting noAxiomsNo, the galley is not conscious as a unit. Many information processing systems make it up. But they don't [I]have[/I] to be a part of the galley. They can all go their separate ways, and function as individual units.
An entity that subjectively experiences as a unity can't do that. Like people. Your visual system processes information. But it wouldn't, and would be skiver at all, if it was removed from you. None of your senses would. Nor your immune system. Which information system within you is a functioning, independent unit outside of you? That's what I think makes a unit, in regards to subjective experience.
I think it may be. There are (at least) two problems the panpsychist must tackle at some point:
1) What are the units supposed to be? (Searle's challenge)
2) Relatedly, how do subjects sum, if at all? (The combination problem)
Both these may be rebutted by the idea that every system whatever, no matter how arbitrarily defined (the galley is a good example), is conscious. It may not be conscious of very much, it may have extremely limited content to its experience, but nevertheless there is some kind of unitary experience. This makes a colossal number of subjects. The galley minus one of its lignin molecules would also be conscious. The galley plus one of the water molecules from the sea a mile away would be a separate conscious entity. Neither would experience much. So to rebut the challenges: (1) the units are whatever you can think of, and (2) they don't sum. Each one is its own unique identity, and you can have 'nests' of subjects, there is no 'pooling' of identity.
This is still vulnerable to @Banno's Blank Stare of Incredulity of course. We sacrifice intuitive appeal on the altar of metaphysical possibility. But who cares? I don't. The universe is weird. Philosophers should be willing to follow the logic, or at least entertain odd possibilities.
Presumably you'd say that the relationships between micro-properties and emergent properties are lawlike. If so are some laws emergent then? Or have all laws always existed, even if they never have a chance at any point in the history of the universe to describe an actual natural event?
If the galley, all the people and all the parts, is one consciousness, it doesn't make sense to me that it would not be able to communicate with us. A consciousness that is made up of, among other things, a bunch of pretty competent communicators should be able to communicate at least as well as any of its independent parts. A human communicates far better than any if its parts can.
And how would such a consciousness act? If the slaves are all part of this consciousness, why does this consciousness still have slavery? Why not a new conscious entity that behaves as one entity, rather than one entity that still behaves like the multiple entities that comprise it, which are so very opposed to each other?
Why is the conscious galley only doing what the humans wanted to do when they crafted the boat? Why does it not have its own goals and needs?
For millennia, people have debated whether or not this or that animal is conscious. Often whether or not a given action is evidence of consciousness. I think a photon is conscious. But it is not subjectively aware of any kind of mental activity. It is not subjectively aware of anything that would allow it to act intentionally. I would expect a consciousness entity that is made up of many parts that can each act intentionally on their own, to act intentionally. But we see no sign of that from a galley.
That's interesting, thanks. I hadn't thought of that that way before. Yes it's a serious objection I think.
A photon, if it exists at all, does so for zero proper time. You must have an incredibly loose definition of 'experience' to suggest that the photon does/has it.
Then again, I wonder what ? IIT might assign to one, and why.
They at least attempt to quantify it, rather than just hand-wave it.
Searle, with the unit challenge mentioned, seem to want to quantize it, not just quantify it. It is unclear if this is the case, but the term 'discreet units' suggests a quanta, a level of consciousness that can be expressed by a whole number, not requiring a real number.
Quoting Patterner
In what way do you mean a photon to be conscious if it lacks all that? How would that be distinguished from a photon that isn't meaningfully conscious?
Quoting PatternerThis seems to contradict many things that you've already posted.
" Zero consciousness does not exist", but you appear to assign zero to the galley as a unit. I quite disagree. It reacts to its environment and makes decisions. Not all of its parts are a critical component of that decision making. All very similar to a human.
Human cells don't have to be part of the human. They can be separated without the human not being a human anymore. With care, they can become a new human, but point is, the human doesn't require any of those cells, each of which is doing all the protein information processing that you assert makes the unit more of an information processor than a non-biological thing doing the same process.
You seem to support (via the protein example) that this processing combines for a biological being, but it doesn't for the galley which is obviously doing far more information processing. This seems to be an utterly contradictory stance. Kindly clarify where I am misrepresenting your stance and how these contradictions are not there.
It can and does. Parts of me fall off all the time. I have no critical cell, and I'm mostly made of cells. Any of them is free to go, but like the galley, if enough parts leave, it is no longer the 'unit' that it once was and is not likely to fare well in combat.
You asserted a cell, manipulating/creating proteins, as an example of an independent functioning information processing unit. You cited this cellular information processing as the reason a plant (anything biological) is more conscious than say an artificially created entity.'
Quoting PatternerIt would seem that intelligence is needed to do all that, not necessarily more consciousness. An electronic device can also do all that, albeit still not at our level. AI is still a ways from matching us. It being very conscious or not seems to be irrelevant to its ability to do all that you list.
Oh it communicates plenty, probably in its own language, but it's quite understood. Likewise, you don't speak the same language as the DNA in your cells. The cells make up the unit, but it isn't your indicated intra-cell information processing that makes the unit as conscious as it is. It is the inter-cell information processing that counts.
Likewise, the galley has inter-part information processing that makes the galley quite conscious. Is it first person? That a subject on its own, but I don't see how the galley, as a unit, is experienced by anything except itself.
More than the combination of the parts, which at best produces a lot of protein, and in the end, knows how to build a person, something a person doesn't know how to do.
Slaves are the muscles. Why do you have muscles despite none of their cells volunteering for the task? It's a necessary component of the unit, despite having only a secondary role in the unit's ability to communicate. Your consciousness similarly could not act at all without the slave cells who usually do what they're told if they're treated well.
Why is lack of opposition of parts necessary for the unit to behave as one entity? You don't know what the cells want. There might be plenty of opposition in a person, and a nasty police force to enforce discipline.
Those humans probably didn't craft the boat. As for the rest, why do you only do what the mind wants you to do? The answer seems similar. Some parts make decisions. Others have other functions.
It does have them, but a galley tends to be a social creature and tends to work in cooperation with others of its kind, quite like bees in a hive, except the bees don't have a command hierarchy. No leader, although the queen does serve as a sort of temporary anchor of genetic identity, similar to a human zygote.
Quoting PatternerThat they have, which makes it sound like a binary thing: The thing is or it is not. None of this 'X more conscious than Y', which better reflects both of our thinking. Hence the question is improperly worded.
The galley, as a unit, seems to act very intentionally to me. How can you suggest otherwise? It's whole purpose is to do just that. Yes, it has a purpose, and that purpose is not its own. It's a slave, like any purposefully created thing.
Quoting bert1I think the galley is more conscious than me, having more of everything: senses, information processing, etc. More redundant too. Kill the entity in command and the thing still functions. I for the most part can't do that, but that makes me more fragile, not necessarily less or more conscious.
Yes! The bounds of an entity is entirely arbitrary, lacking any objective basis. My 3rd most recent topic dealt specifically with this issue. This last issue is not specific to panpsychism.
I find identity of anything (those 'subjects') to be pragmatic mental constructs with no physical basis. I can challenge pretty much any attempt to demonstrate otherwise.
:100:
[quote=MoK]You need to think of a cup without trying to make a mental representation... [/quote]
Quoting noAxioms
Quoting MoK
1) Then why are you seemingly asking me to think of something without making a mental representation?
2) I deny your assertion that an idea is irreductible. Your inability to reduce it to smaller parts is not shared by me.
Going back to Chalmer's Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, he makes the distinction between what he calls easy problems of consciousness and the hard problem. The 'easy problems' are a catalog of just those kind of mental phenomena which are the subject of cognitive science, for instance
(Partial list)
As is well known, he says the really hard problem is 'what it is like to be...' By that he means the experiential dimension of life, the 'subjective aspect' as he calls it. Which, I think, is really a roundabout way of describing 'being' as such. That is what cannot be described in objective terms - well, not really. I can say to you 'I feel sick', but you will only know what the means, because you yourself know 'what it is like.' The state, like sentient existence itself, is irreducibly first-person. But the first person is just what the objective sciences seeks to bracket out. Theres the issue in a nutshell. Phenomenology realizes this from the outset.
As for psychology, theres a reason why its often called soft science. Cognitive perhaps less so, because many of its objects are objectively quantifiable.
Quoting J
Simply because there has to be an observer, a subject to whom the experience occurs, for there to be anything to analyse! One of my stock quotes, from Routledge Phenomenology, is right on point here:
Continental philosophy, generally, seems to understand this in a way that Anglo philosophy really struggles with. Perhaps physicalism functions as a kind of shield. By insisting that only what is scientifically observable really matters, it allows one to preserve that sense of separateness that science relies on in the first place. In that way the egological perspective shelters behind it a defensive move, more than a philosophical one. This is also why psychology is really existential rather than strictly scientific. Science begins from the standpoint of separation, the stance of standing outside or apart from. But psychology, at least when its true to its subject, has to begin from within: from the lived situation of the self. It cant hide behind the shield of objectivity, because what it investigates is the very ground of experience itself. Hence, 'we are what we seek to know'.
(There is another mode of self-transcendence, the noetic rather than the scientific but cant go into that here.)
No, that's not the hard problem. Chalmers says:
This is a different problem from "What is it like to be conscious?" The latter problem is associated with Nagel, not Chalmers.
The hard problem is a why and how problem: Why does consciousness arise from physical experience, and how does it do so? These are completely within the scope of cognitive science. "What is it like" is a different animal, and probably not amenable to scientific response.
The SEP article on consciousness puts it this way:
"The so-called hard problem (Chalmers 1995) which is more or less that of giving an intelligible account that lets us see in an intuitively satisfying way how phenomenal or what it's like consciousness might arise from physical or neural processes in the brain."
Again, the problem is to say how "what it's like" consciousness arises from brain processes, not to give a description of consciousness itself.
Sure. But why does that mean we can't seek an explanation for it? (Not, of course, a reductive explanation; that would be to beg the question in favor of physicalism.)
No it isnt. He quotes Nagel in support of his definition;
Quoting J
The two are inseparable. You need to specify something if you are to describe it.
Quoting J
Because of recursion: youre trying to explain that which is doing the explaining. The eye cannot see itself.
That's not true. Consciousness is not trying to explain itself?it is reason, the discursive intellect, that is trying to explain consciousness.
Quoting J
Are not all explanations reductive? All explanations are given in causal terms, analysis is always in the form of attempting to establish the interactive relationships between parts, which always seems to end up being couched in terms of mechanism.
Perhaps it isn't possible to give such an explanation of consciousness because it doesn't seem to have any parts, it is thought of as just a general state or condition. So if we are going to explain consciousness it seems it would need to be in terms of an analysis of the neural processes which give rise to it, of how they give rise to it, of what is going on in the brain when consciousness is present.
There is also the problem of getting clear on just what we think consciousness is. We could hardly analyze the neural conditions that are necessary to give rise to consciousness if we don't know what consciousness is definitely enough to decide when it is present and when not. It doesn't seem to be as simple as we are conscious when awake and unconscious when asleep, for example.
How much of our days are spend being conscious? It seems to me that I, at least, am on 'autopilot' much of the time. I have no memory of what I perceived or thought during those times. Can I be said to be conscious when I am on 'autopilot'? Is it appropriate to say that quales exist only when I am self-reflectively aware of my moment to moment experience? Even in moments of self-awareness, it would seem there must be much going on of which I am not conscious.
I really can't tell from your post if you want to understand my position. If not, no worries.
If you are, you have a lot of it wrong. I'm not going to reply. I started, but it was too much. I figured easier to start over if you're interested. In case you are, here's a beginning.
Quoting noAxiomsConsciousness is simply subjective experience. It doesn't have anything to do with thinking, or any mental activity. Mental activities are among our abilities, so we subjectively experience them. But, since they are the biggest part of us, what sets us apart from anything else we're aware of, and what we focus on, we came to think they are consciousness.
In [I]Panpsychism in the West[/I], Skrbina writes:This is good. He shouldn't have said "minds", though. Minds means mental activity. Thinking. Better to say;
[I]Consciousness of atoms may conceivably be, for example, a stream of instantaneous memory-less moments of experience.[/I]
Of course they're memory-less, since atoms don't have memories. But the general ideas is there. There's nothing complex about it. Simple, "raw", experience.
The whole essence of anything organic is memory. It stores memories of what happened so as to better cope with what's coming up.
An atom is organic? How is memory accomplished in an atom? How does an atom change what it does in a given set of circumstances the next time it encounters those same circumstances, in order to better cope?
Ah. I misunderstood how you meant it.
He's giving a description of what he means by consciousness, not a definition of the hard problem. It is, in fact, a pretty good description of what subjective experience entails: "visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations. . . " etc. Being able to describe this is not a hard problem at all; the problem is why and how it is possible.
But perhaps we're just placing different emphases on aspects of the problem. Would you agree that the hard problem is also a problem of how consciousness emerges, and why it does so? That is the standard version.
Quoting Wayfarer
I know this seems obvious to you, but I don't understand it. The eye can see itself, actually, by using scientific technology -- in fact, such technology allows us to see, and explain, the eye much better than we can do as mere experiencers and observers. And it still involves using our eyes. Why wouldn't the same be true for consciousness? Again, I think there are rebuttals to this question, but simple recursion isn't one of them.
A deep question, certainly. I would say no. You say, "All explanations are given in causal terms," but you're thinking of a type of common physical/scientific explanation. Is the explanation of the Pythagorean theorem a causal one? Surely not. What about an explanation of how football is played? Does that reduce to an analysis of what the players do? A reductive explanation of consciousness would not only show how it comes to occur, but also why it is identical, in some significant sense, to its physical components, just as water reduces to H2O. I'm suggesting that explaining consciousness may not fit this model.
Quoting Janus
That's an interesting move. Again, it seems to hinge on what the activity of explanation consists of.
Quoting Janus
In a way, it is that simple -- for now. I suspect that when we get a biological explanation of consciousness, which I believe we will, in time, we'll discover that "conscious = awake" is too simple. But can we abandon, for purposes of investigation, the basic stance that to be conscious is to be awake and aware, and to be unconscious is to lack those attributes? I can't think of a better place to start, can you? I don't just mean scientifically -- when I discuss this subject with friends, that's certainly what they mean, and they understand quite well that some aspect of subjectivity or personhood can remain when the mind is asleep or sedated, so consciousness isn't the same as "being me" or "being alive."
No, I am not asking that. I am asking you to think of a "cup" without making an image of it that has a shape.
Quoting noAxioms
You need to do what I said above.
Quoting JanusThat sounds right to me. I don't think reason and intellect are parts of consciousness, so it's not even a case of something examining itself. Which I don't think is impossible on principle, as J just noted. I think consciousness is not physical, so it's not going to be explained in physical terms. Reason, the discursive intellect might be a better approach.
Even that has an implicit assumption - that consciousness is 'something that emerges', while 'emergence' is only one of several approaches.
The problem Chalmers describes is the relationship of third-person, objective descriptions of physical processes with first-person experience. It's the same problem as the explanatory gap problem - the physiology of pain does not capture the experience of pain. Of course, none of this is 'a problem' at all, except for those who try to insist that the third-person, objective account of experience leaves no explanatory gap. In that sense, the 'hard problem' is nearer to a rhetorical argument than a theory about physiology. Its an argument against scientism.
Quoting J
I wear specs and of course the optometrist has instruments and expertise to examine my eyes and prescribe the necessary lenses. But she doesnt see my seeing. She presents charts and asks me to describe what I see. And then, she has expertise to interpret those results, but even if I saw those results I wouldnt have the expertise to interpret them. This is an exact analogy for the issue Chalmers describes.
There's a parallel there with what Heidegger called the "forgetfulness of being" - the way that Being itself (the fact that things are, rather than what they are) tends to remain hidden or taken for granted in our everyday engagement with the world.
In scientific analysis, we focus exclusively on properties, structures, functions, causal relations - but the sheer fact of being, existence as such, doesn't appear as an object of investigation. It's presupposed but never thematized. Similarly, in studying consciousness, we analyze neural correlates, cognitive functions, behavioral outputs - all the what of consciousness - but the that of experience, the bare fact that there's something it's like to be conscious, remains curiously absent from the scientific picture. And attempts to point it out are vigorously resisted, or dismissed as sophistry or confusion. I've seen that happen on this forum dozens of times.
This forgetfulness isn't a failure of science but perhaps an inevitable consequence of its method. The third-person stance that makes science so powerful necessarily brackets the first-person dimension - not just of human experience, but of existence itself. When we adopt the scientific attitude, we're looking at beings as objects of study rather than relating to them as fellow existents (although of course we can do both.) So the "hard problem" might be seen as a specific instance of this more fundamental forgetfulness - not just about consciousness, but about the being-dimension of reality that always already underlies any scientific investigation but never shows up within the objective data.
>See It is Never Known but Is the Knower (.pdf), Michel Bitbol
But what does it do in your picture that is left out of the scientistic one?
Speaking of whom, a very young Chalmers laying it out, in an interview Im guessing in the first half of the 90s.
Notice the explicit Cartesian allusion in the first few sentences. Turns out that know thyself is actually a lot harder than stellar chemistry! Whod have thought?
Quoting Wayfarer
Take a look at this video, especially starting at 3:40. Chalmers explains what the hard problem is. "What is the relationship" doesn't really get it -- Chalmers is asking why, not what.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is exactly the point, and the difference. She can't see your seeing; that is a subjective experience. But you can also see what she sees, namely the eye itself. And thus for consciousness. I can't know what it's like to be someone else, but that is a different problem from what consciousness is.
I could put the question in terms of "life" rather than consciousness. Would you say that, because you are alive, you are unable to know what life is? That a biological study of life must always leave something out? If you say, "What it leaves out is the experience of being alive," then we agree. But if you say that we can never have a complete explanation of life because we ourselves are alive, I don't see it.
Now granted, this hinges on a particular understanding of what an explanation is, and what it must cover. I'm clear that a reductive physical explanation of consciousness is unlikely. But that is not the only possible way of explaining it. Part of what makes the hard problem so hard is that we don't yet understand the phenomenon of consciousness, so making a link with the "how and why" of it remains for the future. I think Chalmers makes all this pretty clear in the video. He says, "Ultimately it's a question for science, but it's a question which right now our scientific method doesn't have a very good handle on."
The what and why are all part of the same question.
Quoting J
Must the answer to the question what is life? be only given in biological terms? For that matter, the question of the nature of life, even for biology, still eludes precise definition, even taking into account todays vastly expanded knowledge of molecular biology. We know what living things are (although viruses are, of course, liminal examples), but there's no empirically verifiable answer to what life is, in the same way, and possibly for the same reasons, there's no clear-cut answer to what mind is.
Quoting J
The link doesnt work, but Ive already provided the reference and the passage, where Chalmers says that the problem is that no objective, third person account of the workings of the mind capture the lived nature of experience. He says it, black and white.
Chalmers has, of course, gone on to write an enormous amount in consciousness studies, hes one of the pivotal figures in it, but the conceptions of what a scientific account of consciousness must be has changed tremendously in the period since that original paper came out. The avenue Im pursuing is phenomenology of life and mind, through Evan Thompsons books.
On the theme of the difficulty science has in accounting for the first-person nature of consciousness, another of his books (co-authored) is highly relevant to this discussion, namely, the Blind Spot of Science and the Neglect of Lived Experience. It says
[quote=The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson ]Despite the amazing, nonstop advances in physics, biology, and neuroscience, no fundamental progress on bridging the chasm between consciousness and physical models has been made in science since the bifurcation of nature that began with the rise of modern science. Although physical and biological models are increasingly sophisticated and informed by increasing amounts of data, the chasm remains. The problem that Huxley and Tyndall highlighted in the nineteenth century is the same one that philosophers Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers identified in the twentieth century and persists today.33 Indeed, it is hard to see how any advance in understanding physical processes, described in completely objective terms at whatever scale or level, will allow us to bridge this chasm. This situation should lead us to suspect that the hard problem of consciousness is built into blind-spot metaphysics, and not solvable in its terms.
... [the blind spot] arises when we mistake a method for the intrinsic structure of reality. We devise a powerful explanatory method that abstracts away consciousness while forgetting that the method remains fundamentally dependent on consciousness.[/quote]
Quoting J
But that's precisely the problem. I can see an image of the eye, but I cannot see the act of seeing the image. That is the whole point, which I can't help but feel you're missing. And there's even robust scientific validation of this. This is the neural binding problem - the fact that no neural system has been identified which accounts for the subjective unity of experience. See this reference.
This is a disk with a diameter of 23.60 mm and a thickness of 2.00 mm made from 75% copper, 25% nickel.
It's also a ten-cent coin.
Being a ten cent coin isn't an emergent property...
Quoting MoK
...maybe not.
Yeah, we can always just make shit up.
Yes, I was referring specifically to scientific and physical explanation. If course we have explanations of behavior couched in terms of reasons, and as to geometry and football, in terms of rules. I guess what I meant is that all explanations are reductive in the they tell one story, where others might also be told, analyze things in terms of their components (causal processes, reasons or rules) and none of them go anywhere near to capturing the whole picture or covering all the bases.
Quoting J
I cannot imagine what any other non-reductive kind of explanation could possibly look like. Could not a reductive explanation of consciousness possibly show why (if such were the case) it is not identical to its physical components. For that matter are there any explanations at all which are not given in terms of components? Would understanding consciousness even conceivably be possible if it could not be analyzed in terms of components?
Quoting J
If we are undertaking an investigation into consciousness, what could we be doing if not looking at behavior and neural activity (anything else you can think of?) using observation and reasoned analysis? I say consciousness, while obviously involved in observation and reasoned analysis, is not identical with those processes. Consciousness is an umbrella under which many different processes can be possible that arguably would not otherwise be possible.
Quoting J
I think it is generally understood that we are conscious during REM sleep. We may remember dreams, which suggests that they have entered conscious attention, while at the end of a day, we may be able to recall only those things which have impressed us sufficiently to become part of memory.
Quoting Patterner
What evidence can the discursive intellect alone give us? What do you mean by saying that consciousness is not physical? What if discursive reasoning just is a certain kind of neural activity, and consciousness is also a kind of master neural process, a condition, that is necessary (or perhaps not?) in order that discursive reasoning be able to occur?
Quoting Wayfarer
Can any account of anything capture the actuality of the thing?
Quoting JanusIt is not measurable or detectable in any way. There is nothing about any or all of the physical properties of the universe that is in any way similar to consciousness, or that anyone can point to, and say, "There it is. X is the mechanism of consciousness. Because..."
Quoting JanusWhat if? What if it's not? As I said, this is what I think. When someone gives any kind of physicalist explanation, I'll check it out. Maybe I'll change my mind. Until such time, I'm concentrating on this idea. Everyone concentrates on the idea that makes sense to them until someone gives a reason to think it doesn't make sense, or shows why another reason makes sense.
You said the discursive intellect might be a better approach. I presumed you meant the discursive intellect alone. But does it ever work alone? Can it generate its own material to analyze or are experiences and empirical data not required to provide the material?
Quoting Patterner
Perhaps not measurable, but not detectable....? Can we not tell when people are conscious of something by observing their behavior or asking them? Can we not make a person conscious of something by drawing their attention to it?
Quoting Patterner
Well, it seems most plausible to me that it is, but of course one person's plausibility may be another's incredulity.
No, I think we both grasp the point, but are coming at it from different analyses. The "eye" metaphor arose from your quote, "The eye cannot see itself." I took this literally, and disputed it. But I think what you meant was, "The eye cannot see itself seeing itself," and this is a different matter, and quite true.
The difference is important, both philosophically and methodologically. We can investigate a subject using (roughly) scientific methods, and "see" (know) it in ways that are impossible to the naked eye of phenomenology. But by the same token, what phenomenology allows us is a way to understand experience that isn't available to science. I think we both agree with this. You encapsulate it nicely in the quote above.
When it comes to consciousness, we may have a special case -- and I think that's the deeper subject of this discussion. Is there something about consciousness, and about being conscious, that calls into question this division between knowing and experiencing? We need consciousness to do any sort of seeing or knowing, including the strictest of scientific projects. A blind person can understand how the eye works, because understanding is not a true visual seeing, but a way of grasping intellectually. But can the blind person (from birth, we'd have to stipulate) know what the experience of seeing is? Probably not.
So we might be in a similar position with regard to consciousness. Does consciousness always entail being conscious, such that it cannot become an object for the conscious subject? I don't think so, but it is certainly an open question.
We could also phrase it in terms of the "Blind Spot" quote:
Is this in fact a flaw? Does this dependence vitiate whatever explanation may result? Again, I don't think so, but my degree of confidence in this judgment isn't high, because many good philosophers see it differently.
Does any of this make sense so far?
Quoting JanusI can examine things wherever it finds them. My general idea is that it we shouldn't be surprised if our physical science can't examine something that does not have physical properties. So examine consciousness with tools that do not have physical properties. Ideally, with tools that have the same properties consciousness has. But there is often disagreement over what those properties are.
Quoting JanusYes to both. But we cannot hook them up to anything kind off detector and see the consciousness that their behavior suggests is present. We can see the physical correlates of consciousness, but not there consciousness.
Quoting JanusIndeed. Maybe we'll get definitive proof one day. But I doubt any time soon.
I'm fine with the "one story" aspect -- an explanation that allows for other explanations isn't complete. But we have to be careful with "components." If consciousness supervenes upon brain activity, rather than relates as an effect to a cause, then it's not clear if we should describe the physical strata as "components" or not. I guess, as long as components aren't understood to be necessarily both causal and completely explanatory, we can use that term, but then the associated explanation isn't reductive.
Quoting Janus
The supervenience model is meant to address these concerns. And again, it depends on your understanding of "reductive." I would say that an explanation of consciousness that shows why it is the case that it is not identical to its physical components, is ergo non-reductive.
Quoting Janus
OK to add "scientific" above? I assume you don't mean a phenomenological or other 1st person investigation.
I think the answer to your question is, "Science doesn't know, at this point." Behavior and brain activity are certainly on the table as places to investigate, but the problem of consciousness is so poorly understood and apparently intransigent that I wouldn't be surprised if an entirely new area of inquiry opens up. Who know, maybe Penrose was right (in "The Emperor's New Mind") when he postulated quantum effects as responsible for consciousness.
A coin is a weak emergence since its property/shape is a function of the properties/positions of its parts.
Quoting Banno
They for sure exist, and they are the only ones.
And everyone does. Some made-up stuff works better than others, but it's all made up. There are no givens, apart from perhaps ordinary language.
That a coin is worth ten cents has nothing to do with it's composition. It does not emerge from some combination of the material properties of the coin, but consists in the way the coin is used.
Credulity is a powerful force.
Calling it experience is just a synonym. It does tell me what a photon experiences despite lack of mental activity, awareness, thinking, or process.
There is discussion between others where Nagel defines consciousness/experience in quite different terms, but I don't think any of them are using panpsychist definitions of any of the terms.
I guess I'm asking how you know you're conscious, that you have this 'raw' experience? The question must be answered without reference to anything that constitutes a mental activity, awareness, time, or anything else that a photon doesn't have, because to me, it is pretty much through mental activity that I would conclude such a thing (or conclude anything).
A photon cannot have a 'stream' of anything since it has not proper time in which to do so.
An atom is a small arbitrary collection of particles. Is any subset of particles conscious in a way that they are not as just individual particles? In other words, I have a neutrino, electron, and some quark, all within a km of each other. Is that collection conscious as a unit? If not, what is lacking? I (an arbitrary collection of particles) am probably conscious as a unit. What do I have that the three particles mentioned do not, that I constitute a 'unit'?
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
OK, but Patterner's panpsychism asserts otherwise. Fair enough. I'm chipping in here because being organic is not a requirement to have memory, nor to be a thing that attempts to cope with what's coming up.
I do think that you believe that only organic things can be conscious, but I'm not sure if you preclude non-orgainc things from having memory or from reacting to predicted events.
Quoting MoKPeople born blind imagine cups all the time sans any 'image'. Not sure the relevance of that to your point.
What do you think is illustrated by the point that my imagining of a cup being likely accompanied by an image? Do you consider that to be evidence that the cup idea is irreducible? Quite the contrary, since the blind guy can hold the idea of the cup completely without the image part. It shows that the cup can be reduced to the image and to other parts that are in addition to the image.
Examples?
Quoting J
Now you're getting it! And yes, that is the subject of the discussion. And here, I suppose you realise that you've restated a version of the well-known 'Mary's room' thought-experiment?
Quoting J
It's not a flaw, when it comes to the data of the objective sciences. The blind spot is blind with respect to the subject to whom the data means something, the subject, the observer. This, again, is what the whole argument is about!
I have to paste this in, I beg the moderator's indulgence as it is entirely relevant to the subject being discussed. It is the exact point being made by the young and charismatic (as distinct from the older and careworn) David Chalmers:
Yes, I thought about referencing poor Mary! (Or is she poor? :wink:)
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, at the moment. But I think you're suggesting that the blind spot is methodologically structural, that it can't be overcome in terms of objective science. I think this remains to be "seen" (sorry!). As Chalmers says at 2:20, "It may be that the methods of science have to be expanded." This is a recurring theme, for me: We understand consciousness so poorly that it makes anything we say about it, including how it can be studied, provisional at best. Must we assume that the phenomenon of subjectivity cannot be studied from the 3rd person? Must we assume that, because an investigative method depends upon consciousness, it cannot give a complete account of consciousness itself?
Again, as we've been saying, there's a fine, often indistinct, line between consciousness as phenomenon and consciousness as experience. If we take the question "What is it like to conscious?" as actually answerable, would the answer be phrased in terms that are opaque from the point of objective knowledge? Does the experience of consciousness -- the experience of being me, or you -- forever elude being known in terms other than descriptive?
I think both of us should be uncertain about this.
I am not talking about currency but a coin.
Quoting Banno
As I mentioned, the shape of the coin is a function of the position of the parts.
Yes, to me and many others here, the idea of a cup is irreducible. Have you ever been in a condition in which you want to write something, while you don't remember the word that is needed for your writing, but you know what word you are looking for? In such cases, you simply have access to the idea that the word refers to, but not the word.
I realize my definition is at least as vague as most, because how can we imagine what subjective experience is without any of that. Nevertheless, I think it's necessary. I do not see any hope of physical processes giving rise to consciousness. Nobody can even suggest how consciousness can emerge from the physical. There is no apparent similarity. Also, it seems bizarre that there is nothing other than the physical, and evolution is a purely physical process, leading to purely physical arrangements for purely physical reasons. Yet somehow, for no reason whatsoever, consciousness just happens to emerge from particular arrangements.
I think we need something that can explain what we experience that is present right from the beginning.
Quoting noAxiomsFor the first part, as they say, that I am conscious is the only thing I [i]do[/I] know. For the second part, all consciousness is "raw". (I would like a better word than "raw" here. Chalmers used it, so I figure there's precedent. But it's doesn't say what I want. Problem being probably no single word does, so maybe just as well to keep it.) It's just experiencing whatever is there. I recently tried an analogy. Think of consciousness like vision. I can look at a blank sheet of paper. I can look at the Grand Canyon. I can look at my wife. I can look at a Monet painting. I can look at a bolt of lightning racing across the sky. I can look at a blade of grass. My vision does not change depending on what I'm looking at. The things being looked at are what's different.
I think consciousness is simply the experience of whatever it is we're talking about. In the case of humans, the experience is of neutral activity that is experienced as cognition, thinking, awareness, self-awareness, and whatever other mental activity people can think of.
The nature of particles, bacteria, plants, and any number of other things, is very different from the nature of humans. Therefore, the experience of any of those things is quite different from what we experience. But it's not because consciousness, itself, is different. No more than the vision in my analogy.
Quoting MoK
Yep. Hence
Quoting MoK
The properties of the coin include it's monetary value. But this is not a properties of it's parts.
Reductionism defeated.
Scientific objectivity has customarily been grounded in the notion of the 'mind-independent object' without taking into account the Kantian insight into the mind's constitution of the object. Phenomenology does take that into account. That is one of the main points of The Blind Spot of Science.
Not for no reason whatsoever. Your biases really show here. Consciousness gives a distinct advantage, many of which are listed in this topic, with the exception of epiphenomenal consciousness, which nobody seems to be pushing.
Panpsychism might assert that it's present from the beginning, but it doesn't constitute an explanation of it any more than does any other black box.
Quoting PatternerThen 'they' need to give the same evidence, not including anything on your list of not-counting mental activity.
You quote Chalmers, but Chalmers seems not a panpsychist, asserting that a photon experiences.
"It's just experiencing whatever is there": There isn't any 'there', and there is no duration during which any present participle tense is meaningful.
Those are all examples of awareness and cognition, mental activity, processing of sensory input, all of which seems to be excluded by your list of what experience isn't. Sure, you (and not the photon) have experience of such things, but per your posts, those things are not what experience is, despite your opening of 'thinking of it like' it is.
We're not discussing what I may be conscious of, we're discussing what consciousness is, and I'm unfortunately still not understanding your stance.
Quoting Wayfarer
You should know my typical examples by now. A canyon reveals fossil memory of the distant past. The Atlantic floor has wonderful memory of the history of Earth's magnetic pole shifts (the latest of which is going on now, way overdue). Those are examples of memory without information processing.
As for coping, I suppose a chess program, one that learns from scratch say, retains memory of what works best so as to better cope with the tournament at hand.
Quoting BannoThis seems fallacious. The value of a coin is not a property of the coin. It's value is not intrinsic, but is rather a relationship between the coin and that which values it. It might have some value to a bird due to it being a shiny bauble. Not sure exactly how reductionism would spin that relationship, a similar relationship to it having monetary value to some humans.
Quoting MoKDespite my example of the image being just a part of the idea of cup, and a clearly nonessential part at that. You didn't refute this example.
Nice example. The word and the meaning are separate parts of the idea.
Ok.
Aristotle again.
:roll:
Your rebuttal is valid. Above me head, perhaps.
But it doesn't change the fact that it's possible the person you're replying to is introducing a concept or argument not specifically addressed by the argument or belief system you refer by name of one person.
You pass it off as if it were so simple, something so casual, like a child commenting on how something far beyond his capability yet is enjoying such, soon to be taken away due to lack of appreciation, would make. Why? Why do this? Why not just explain it in adequate and sufficient detail? You're clearly capable of such. This low IQ frat-boy type of response of "No duh you should know it" is beneath you. I know it and so do you. So why not just explain it properly.
I don't rate that as memory. A rational observer such as ourselves can intepret it, but it is not information that is conserved for the sake of maintaining homeostasis as memory is for an organism.
My Will To Power forbids me doing so.
Quoting noAxiomsOf course consciousness gives an advantage. That's not what I'm getting at. Let me try this way.
1) If consciousness is not present from the beginning, then there is nothing but physical. Physical things and processes, and evolution that occurs through purely physical mechanisms, and selects for arrangements that are advantageous only in physical ways.
2) Somewhere down the line, consciousness emerges.
Does it not seem like amazing happenstance that physical arrangements having nothing to do with nonexistent consciousness are selected for, and consciousness, which did not exist and was not selected for, just happens to emerge from those arrangements?
Quoting noAxiomsTrue. But if it correct, then pursuing it might lead to an explanation. Whereas pursuing a, for example, physicalist explanation never will.
This is an interesting observation; I think it's both true and not. A scientist doing science is not going to worry about whether an atom of hydrogen is "really out there" or not. As you say, the working assumption is that, if we act as if the atom is mind-independent, we can learn what we need to learn about it.
Some scientists, to be sure, have reflected on the Kantian insight. Let's add that insight to scientific practice. What do you think would change? Are the findings of science any different? Or rather, is it the philosophy of science -- the bedrock and framework beliefs about what is real -- that will change?
I'm suggesting that the particular brand of objectivity that we call scientific objectivity -- essentially an intersubjectivity, a faith in a shared point of view -- will be unchanged. Now suppose the object of scientific investigation is the phenomenon of consciousness; not the experience, but the fact. What we want to know is, Can there be a shared, 3rd-person object of study here that is mind-independent in the same way, and not any more or less, than any other object of study? Or is mind-independence structurally impossible, given that we require minds in order to study anything? But isn't that the same kind of mind-dependence that Kant has alerted us to? How has making consciousness the object of study changed anything?
Again, it's crucial to remember that we're not asking our scientist to study 1st-person phenomenology as such -- that's what I'm calling "the experience, not the fact." We're asking them to investigate the fact of consciousness, the state of affairs that allow consciousness to be part of the world. It's very true that, without our 1st-person experience of consciousness, we wouldn't know what it is that we want to understand. Here, if anywhere, we can perhaps find that special confusion that studying consciousness creates. But I don't think it's obvious in principle that there can be no methodological separation.
If you are talking about ideas, then I have to say that they are forms of strong emergence. I have discussed this here.
So you agree that the idea exists as an irreducible mental event?
And no, I wasn't talking about ideas, but about how the value of a currency does not emerge from the material from which the coins are made but is a result of how we treat those coins.
That couldn't be more wrong. Surely you know of the many controversies over the interpretation of quantum physics. The question of whether the objects of analysis really exist, or in what sense they exist, is central to that. Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein debated it over a period of four decades. Einstein was a convinced scientific realist, he believed that reality was fundamenally 'out there' and it was the scientists' job to discern it. Bohr, on the other hand, introduced ideas such as wave-particle complementarity to account for the fact that sub-atomic particles could act as wave structures in some contexts and particles in others. You can't say whether they're really waves or really particles - it depended on which experimental setup you ran.
[quote=John Wheeler, Law without Law;https://psychonautwiki.org/w/images/3/30/Wheeler_law_without_law.pdf]The dependence on what is observed upon the choice of experimental arrangement made Einstein uhappy. It conflicts with the view that the universe exists "out there", independent of all acts on observation. In contrast Bohr stressed that we confront here an inescapable new feature of nature, to be welcomed because of the understanding it givs us. Bohr found himself forced to introduce the word phenomenon. In today's words Bohrs point and the central point of quantum theory can be put into a single, simple sentence. "No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (observed ) phenomenon. [/quote]
This is the basic stance of the 'Copenhagen Interpretation', named retrospectively by Werner Heisenberg to denote the philosophical views of quantum physics developed by Bohr, Heisenberg, andt the other Copenhagen figures who devised quantum theory. To this day, notable public intellectuals including Sir Roger Penrose are convinced quantum theory is wrong - you can find any number of video interviews with Sir Roger proclaiming this in no uncertain terms. Why? Because he's convinced that a proper theory 'should describe what the Universe is doing'. The indeterminate nature of sub-atomic particles, and the ontological status of the wave function described by the Schrodinger equation, remain outstanding questions in philosophy of science. Furthermore, what role, if any, mind or consciousness is assigned in all of this, is another central question. So all of this is far from settled, and is still right at the forefront of philosophy and science.
See my The Timeless Wave of Quantum Physics if interested.
Also Kumar, Manjit. Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality. London: Icon Books, 2008.
Quoting J
Please notice the strong presumption of mind-independence in the way this is framed. The very word phenomenon means what appears, and appearance is always to a subject. As John Stuart Mill put it, facts are permanent possibilities of sensation. Thats not a weakness of our epistemic situation; its a structural condition of knowledge itself. We cant disentangle this or parcel it neatly into independent boxes. If even in quantum physics the notion of an observer-independent reality is problematic, then this holds all the more for consciousness which is even less tractable to purely objective analysis.
In you, an idea emerges when you read a sentence. Ideas to me are irreducible mental events.
I beg to differ. You're talking about interpretation, not about what (non-theoretical) physicists actually do. One of my friends is a physicist, and delights in discussing the issues you name. And, he freely admits that it makes no difference whatsoever to his daily pursuits in the lab. "Shut up and calculate."
Well, yes, but nonetheless physicists get on with the work, even given this conceptual unclarity -- and progress is made. Couldn't the same thing apply with regard to consciousness? I'm resisting the idea that whatever issues about mind-independence might arise are such as to halt investigation in its tracks, on methodological grounds. That doesn't seem right.
Also, we're homing in on a difficult fraction of scientific practice, where the very nature of what is physical comes into question. My comments about scientific intersubjectivity address the much more common practices of the majority of science, where questions about mind-independence make no practical difference in what scientists study, and can agree on.
It doesn't matter that the physical is not of the nature that people long thought it was, and what every child grows up thinking it is. Whatever it's true nature, it plays out as the physical that people long thought it was, and what every child grows up thinking it is. Knowing it's not "really" physical doesn't allow me to pass my hand through a solid object, manipulate solid objects telepathically, or treat anything in any way other than the way we've been treating it throughout history. People walk into very clean glass doors all the time. I'll bet quantum physicists aren't spared that fate because of their uncertainty. They either see the glass, or they get a swollen nose.
Quoting JIf there is such a thing, we're sure having a difficult time finding it. Partly because it is undetectable by our senses and technology. Do you have any suggestions? Of course, so few people agree on what it is, and, therefore, on how to study it. What objective things can we say about consciousness such that everyone will agree that we should all study it?
We are indeed having a difficult time, but our quick successes with various aspects of the Easy Problem lead me to be optimistic. It's like nibbling around the edges of something, discerning it by creating its negative outline. More practically, I agree with Chalmers that we'll need to reassess our concept of "3rd person objectivity" in order to make progress with the Hard Problem. Dennett, who I find mostly off-track about this stuff, at least had the idea of "heterophenomenology," which is an attempt to fill this need.
Maybe the model here ought to be the study of life in biology and chemistry. I'm not up-to-date on the science of life, but it seems that investigators have found a way to discern and specify the object of their study without requiring that they first comprehend some incommunicable experience of "being alive."
All that said, I'll repeat what I said to @Wayfarer, above: We know so little about the subject of consciousness that my confidence in anything I'm suggesting here isn't high.
Quoting JIf you meant this as a way to begin Chalmers' reassessment, I would say life is being studied extensively, and has been for some time. I take it you mean in a deferent way? Or with a different focus?
Quoting Patterner
I'm not sure. The problem seems to hinge on whether we can speak objectively about experiences that can only be had subjectively. A lot of traditional science would rule this out.
Quoting Patterner
Not so much. More that we ought to say, "If we can do that with the phenomenon of life -- which is also intensively subjective -- why not with consciousness?"
There are a variety of interpretations of QM, and it seems unlikely that it will ever be possible to verify which one is correct. That seems a background curiosity, and gives a good reason to be agnostic as to which interpretation is correct. However, it does not provide a reason to deny that the "objects of analysis" exist. These objects are (obviously) analyzable- which seems sufficient reason to regard them as real. If some interpretation of QM entails these things as being nonexistent, that seems more of a reason to deny the interpretation, than a reason to deny the existence of these analyzable objects.
At worst, this interpretation establishes that it is possible the object doesn't exist. But that possibility still seems no more than an idiosyncratic curiosity - not a fact that further scientific investigation should feel obligated to take into account.
Perhaps such idiosyncratic interpretations of QM might lead some brilliant scientist to develop a new paradigm on this basis. If that paradigm is more successful at making predictions, then it could become relevant. But unless/until that occurs, it seems a dead-end.
Quoting J
Thats why I mentioned the Bohr-Einstein debates which were precisely over this issue, insofar as this statement assumes the realist attitude.
This is inconsistent with your assertions. The part that gives the advantage is sensory input and the ability to react to it, all 'things' according to your posts above. You've defined consciousness as only experience of those advantages, hence it does not itself give any additional advantage. If it did, it would become on of those cognitive things, experienced perhaps, but no longer experience.
You seem to describe it like somebody going to a cinema to experience some stream of 'things'. Go into a room showing a human and you get the experience of a human. Go to a different room and you get the experience of a rock, which is pretty blank, but at least it's still a stream of almost nothing. Go to the photon room and you don't even get that since you are punted out of the cinema as fast as you enter.
Point is, you going to the cinema has zero effect on the story being told in any particular room.
You are very much confusing emergence and change. The latter takes place over time. The former is not a temporal effect, but rather a property of a system that is not a property of any one of its parts.
So per physicalism (which is not defined as 'lack of consciousness from the beginning'), over time, matter rearranges (mechanism unimportant) into physical configurations which have this emergent property.
Biology might do this rearrangement via growth or by evolution. Other arrangements might be by design (growth is a form of change by design). Yet others might be by some other mechanism (including possibly yourself).
This is a gross misrepresentation of the physicalist position, especially given your definition of consciousness. Under physicalism, biological experience is part of cognition (the information processing), not something separate that merely experiences the cognition. No, it isn't amazing at all that the simplest creatures evolve to react to their environments, and as soon as they do this, the beginning of consciousness is already there and needs only to be improved. It would be far more amazing if these simple adaptations never occurred. Even plants do it.
Quoting BannoNo. Aristotle distinguished social/legal value (of say money) from real value (of say food). I am saying that value (of any kind, money, food, whatever) is not a property of the thing of value, but a relation of the thing with that which values it.
I said this in reaction to your assertion that value was a property of the thing itself.
Quoting BannoYour argument from ridicule is noted, but fails to justify your apparent dismissal of my statement, or perhaps of Aristotle's stance on value.
Quoting OutlanderIndeed. I tried to clarify above. Thx for the support of somebody who actually couldn't spout the teachings of any of the famous names. I try to do my own philosophy and would totally fail a philosophy course which focuses more on the history of what others said and not so much on how to go about working it out for yourself.
Quoting Wayfarer
So you're saying it isn't memory if there's not a purpose of homeostasis in it? Wow...
Quoting MoK
Your inability to parse a statement leaves me floored. I give a clear example of an idea being reduced to parts, and you suggest that I would agree that ideas are irreducible.
- that odd idea that properties are "more real" than relations.
Show me Im mistaken and Ill change my view. As always.
The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years! ~ Ernst Mayr.
At least they were historically. Humans do a lot of things that aren't for our survival.
We are dealing with an anomaly, so-called experience, within physicalism. I agree that we need to discard physicalism/materialism. We at least need two different substances, the so-called experiencer and the object of experience, if you want to describe the phenomenon of experience coherently.
We know dark matter exists, because of its gravitational effect. But that's it. With all our sciences, we can't detect it at all. It doesn't absorb, reflect, or emit light. It doesn't impact matter. Nothing. But we know it's there.
I think we know consciousness is there for a similar reason. Consciousness isn't explained by the physical properties of the universe. Something we can't detect with all our sciences is there. Unfortunately, we can't measure its effect the way we measure dark matter's. At least not in any way I can think of.
It may be the case that both dark matter and consciousness are inaccessible to current scientific investigation. But I don't think we know about them for "a similar reason." As I understand it, dark matter is a postulate that seems to be required by the math, and has so far stood up under theoretical pressure. Surely consciousness is more than a postulate, something we have to infer or deduce? Or maybe you mean that it would look that way from a strictly 3rd person viewpoint, with no access to any person's mind? But of course this immediately raises the conundrum of how there could be any viewpoint at all that did not partake of consciousness. In short, my access to consciousness is a given, even when I'm wondering whether other beings have it too.
Consciousness, to me, is the ability of the mind to experience, so we cannot measure it. We cannot measure consciousness if it is used as a synonym of experience as well.
Quoting Patterner
Sure. It is the basic assumption of physicalism that an electron, for example, doesn't experience.
Quoting Patterner
The mind, although it is present, is a light substance, so we cannot detect it, at least at the current stage of scientific development.
I'm saying dark matter and consciousness are both thought to exist because matter is doing things that can't be explained by what we know about matter. Or at least no other explanation has been found, and people who are many times more knowledgeable about what we know than I am say we don't have the vaguest idea.
But that's as far as I'm going with that. Certainly, the specifics are extremely different. There probably aren't two people in the discussions here who agree on the definition of consciousness. I don't know how many can give a firm, consistent definition of their own, regardless of agreement with anybody else. And nobody has evidence for how it comes about. For the most part people will not even attempt to understand another person's theory, wanting only to say it's wrong. So no attempt to work on any theory can be done by more than the holder of that theory. Not easy to find answers this way.
On top of which, as I recently said, all theories play out the same.
Quoting JSorry. I was meaning that in regards to my position, that consciousness is fundamental.
People with different guesses about the nature of consciousness could easily, and many obviously do, think otherwise.
OK, I see that parallel.
Quoting Patterner
True, but I bet we all would affirm that our own consciousness is real and (perhaps) indubitable. As you say:
Quoting Patterner
You assume that consciousness does not have physical properties. Is consciousness something different than being conscious?
If yes, then what is the difference?
If no, does not being conscious have physical properties, and is it not those physical properties that allow us to tell that consciousness is present?
Quoting Patterner
That might indicate that the idea of consciousness as something undetectable is a kind of reification, as distinct from simply being conscious, which is a detectable condition.
A pretty sketchy notion.
Indeed. We can detect consciousness. That's why we differentiate between some's being asleep and awake...
And we differentiate between doing something consciously and unconsciously - driving to the local shops being the usual example.
We can detect and measure brain activity. Electrical activity; magnetic activity; blood flow; blood oxygenation; metabolic activity; maybe others. We know about other things that are going on that we can't observe in action with or various devices, such as neurotransmitters crossing the gap.
Do any of these things, or combinations of them, explain how the physical subjectively experiences, and, in at least our case, can be aware and self-aware?
Basically, if there was no consciousness, the electrical activity, magnetic activity, blood flow, blood oxygenation, metabolic activity, gap-jumping neurotransmitters, and whatever else, would still be taking place. How would the readings of any scans look different in that case? The differences in the scans of brains with identical activity, one with consciousness and one without, would reveal the physical properties of consciousness. Obviously, we can't scan a normally-functioning human brain that is not conscious. I guess this is a TE about if we could.
I disagree. Such a brain would still report its own consciousness and talk its own consciousness in the exact same way we all do. It would be able to engage with you just as well as anyone about phenomenal experiences.
It stands to reason that your knowledge and reports and whatever compels you to make the statements, have the beliefs you do about consciousness would be for the same kind of reason as this brain that supposedly does not have consciousness - the electrical, biochemical activity is what makes you open your mouth, type the words on screen, does it not?
If everything you say and claim about consciousness is for the same reason as this brain that supposedly does not have consciousness, then the idea of distinct "physical" stuff with completely separate, independent causal powers to some distinct "phenomenal" stuff becomes increasingly absurd and also causally redundant. It also leads to questions of reliability about your "knowledge" about conscious stuff, after all, this brain without consciousness may come up with the exact same viewpoint as you without having any consciousness itself, supposedly. Why would it do such a thing?
Seems to me if you want to bite the bullet and commit to such a picture you would have to commit to some bizarre mental gymnastics about the nature of the universe, entertain supposed hypotheses about the brain in relation to conscious - possibly with serious implications for physics and other sciences - that we simply have no empirical, scientific evidence for.
I find there is a certain bizarre lack of humility in people who think that, in principle, their own direct aquaintance with experience is beyond and superior to facts about the causal powers of their own brains and the possibility of illusions or fallibility about the way they are as beings in the world.
Would anything in a universe that was completely devoid of consciousness ever have any vocabulary about consciousness? Would the concept ever come up in that universe?
Hmm, I misread this bit as something to do with philosophical zombies.
Quoting Patterner
The point being I don't think there's anyway something could not experience things in a way that is not directly related to how brains, or something equivalent, work.
Edited: spelling
Quoting Patterner
Quoting Patterner
Quoting Patterner
OK, so the question is, how can consciousness, as you've defined it, be any sort of advantage when all the advantages I can think of fall into the categories that you've excluded.
Is it? What does it cause the photon to do? I'm not denying that it is causal, I'm simply pointing out that your definition of it doesn't seem to allow that.
Quoting Patterner
Maybe the photon can't consciously cause anything, but rather condition X must exist (that which you say it is working with) first, but in that case, it seems it's X doing the causation, not the experience of X.
Quoting Patterner
Can you come up with a specific example? Where does anything physical do something that is different that what physical laws predict? OK, you said 'lack of physical explanation', but that just means any process that you don't understand.
You might talk about picking up a piece of litter, but that's caused by physical muscles and such. Where does the physical break down in that causal chain? You whole argument seems to depend on denying knowledge of how it works (which isn't solved at all by your solution). It's too complex. But being unable to follow the complexity is not in any way evidence that it still isn't just matter interactions following physical law. How is it any kind of improvement to replace a black box with an even blacker one?
The dark matter example is one of a new discovery, yes. Might as well say that consciousness is like distant stars, a story made up because the lights in the sky couldn't be explained by what we knew about matter at the time. So sure, add this mental stuff as a new entity, but it requires experimental evidence (which dark matter has and consciousness currently doesn't). How do we know Mars is real? It's not like you've touched it. But it explains the reddish light in the sky that has no better explanation. You can't see Mars, you only see the light that supposedly comes from it. Mars is one explanation of that light. A projection is another.
Quoting PatternerMy list of that is empty, since all those accomplishments seem to be the result of "Cognition, thinking, awareness, and whatever other mental activity". Chalmers would say that a p-zombie would have accomplished as much, being indistinguishable from something conscious. If this is the case, consciousness is not causal. If it is not the case, the p-zombie is distinguishable.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Agree with all, but I would say that I (all of me, not just brain) is conscious. A brain in isolation of the body would not be, but of course one could in principle be fed artificial input.
What of a thing that has multiple brains? Would it be conscious or would it merely have multiple consciousnesses?
Quoting Wayfarer
You will do no such thing. You've chosen a definition of 'memory' that I find absolutely nowhere. It's a definition, so it's wrong only in the sense that nobody else uses that definition. Only memory such as that in the hypothalamus might count as memory per your definition since it explicitly is used for that purpose (Neurobiological Homeostasis).
I recall my child's birthday. That's memory, despite the ability to do that without a calendar not in any way helping to maintain my homeostasis. I'm not sure if you consider the recall of a birthdate to be an act of a brain or an act of that other substance.
On the non-biological front, wall street (arguably under human guidance) can adjust interest rates based on historical data to prevent runaway markets.
My laptop has 16GB of RAM. What does the M stand for in RAM? Is the whole world wrong in using that phrase then? What would you call it? 16GB of what?
An operating system tracks usage patterns over time to balance usage/performance, similar to cells retaining information of pathogens to maintain systemic balance.
Such non-biological examples are technically not homeostasis since that word actually very much does have a biological implication. A more generic term might be 'equilibrium'.
I notice you frequently use the fallacious tactic of refusing to use a word for anything nonhuman or at least nonbiological, as if a definition proves anything. A computer doesn't 'think' because that's one of your reserved words, but you don't supply a generic term for anything else doing the same thing. This tactic seems to imply a significant lack of confidence in your stance. The only reason you seem to define 'memory' in terms of homeostasis is because of the very biological implication of the latter word. So show me where you got this funny definition that appears in no site I can find.
Quoting Banno
But I never expressed that idea. It was you that suggested the coin having the property of value, not me.
A definition 'proves' how the word is used. If you wish to re-define memory as 'the past', then the onus is on you to justify it.
When I say memory is characteristic of life, I mean it in the strong sense: not just a trace of the past, but the active retention of previous experience for the sake of survival and adaptation. To equate memory with anything in the pasterosion marks or planetary orbits dilutes the meaning of the word until it just means the past. But organisms, in contrast to geological or crystal structures, must retain and carry their past forward in order to continue existing; without the ability to capture memory in this special sense, there is no life. Artificial systems such as RAM only remember as extensions of the organisms that do (those organisms being us). Thats why I argue memory as such is one of the defining marks of life and is generally absent in non-living matter. I suggest that the reason you find that unacceptable is that it represents an ontological distinction which your philosophy can't accomodate.
Quoting noAxiomsConsciousness is the property by which the thing experiences itself. Without it, nothing experiences itself.
When we're talking about a particle, the experience is of things like mass, charge, and spin. I don't imagine there's much of an advantage, because a particle can only interact with things according to the laws of physics.
But a brain? Especially a human brain. The experience is of things that are incredibly more complex. There's a boatload of information processing being experienced. And it's all tied together, functioning as one entity. So the sensory input is experienced as vision, hearing, and the other senses. Stored information from past sensory input and events is experienced as memory. All of the feedback loops are experienced as self-awareness. It is not simple physics taking place. If it was, we wouldn't have everything humanity has created.
Quoting noAxiomsDo you think physical laws and interactions intend states of the future? No step in the manufacture of a computer violates the laws of physics. No step can. Nothing that has ever been, or ever will be, done can violate the laws of physics. However, without consciousness, the laws of physics will never produce a computer. Or an apartment building. Or a violin concerto (not audibly or the score). Or a particle collider. Or an automobile. Or a deck of cards. Or a billion other things.
Something that didn't exist was wanted. Planned. Intended. It was decided that something that could not be found anywhere, no matter where you look, and that would never come into being due to the interactions of matter and energy following the laws of physics, must come into being. Interactions that were not going to occur had to be arranged. Consciousness used the laws of physics to do very specific things in very specific orders and combinations, that would never have occurred spontaneously.
Rather, experience cannot be disentangled from the functional structure of the brain; attempts to do so result in bizarre paradoxes like the p-zombie who believes they are conscious, reports their own experiences and can converse about it as well as yourself.
Quoting Patterner
And yet being conscious does have physical properties. So, I'll ask again?what is the difference between consciousness and being conscious?
Quoting Patterner
Being conscious means being aware. But being aware as in being able to respond to signs does not necessarily entail being conscious. Awareness happens at all levels of life. In simple forms of life, the presence of different molecules at the the cell membrane elicit different responses inside the cell. Those processes cannot be entirely understood in mechanistic terms, they are understood to carry information to the cell, but they are nonetheless physical processes.
Stated in biosemiotic terms there are interpretants as all levels (of life at least), but it does not follow that there is consciousness at all levels. It is probably symbolic language that enables reflective self-awareness.
This argument works from the perspective of Physics. But, in Aristotle's Meta-Physics, he introduces the non-physical notions of Potentiality & Actuality*1, Form & Matter, Essence & Substance. Hence, the Function of a System is non-physical, even though the parts are material items. It's a mathematical input/output relationship that you can't see, but can infer as purpose or meaning.
Function*2 is what a system does : the output or usefulness or purpose of the process. And the collective Function of a zillion neurons (Mind) is an Emergent property of the aggregated (integrated) parts, in the sense that the separate parts do not possess the Property of Consciousness. An example of physical-to-metaphysical Emergence is Abiogenesis : the otherwise inexplicable process we call "Life" displayed by interactive amalgamations of inert material bits : a complex System.
So, one explanation for the eventual Emergence of Life & Mind from a mass of protoplasm --- water, ions, amino acids, and monosaccarides --- is that those simpler material components possessed un-actualized Potential*3 that became Actual Life & Mind processes when combined into a complex organization. And one kind of Potential Actualizer is the physical-but-immaterial activity we call "Energy"*4. Therefore, the material components of a system are activated by inputs of a Causal Force, which by itself is neither Mental nor Vital.
The emergence of Life & Mind only after billions of years of evolution implies that it takes many rolls of the dice to hit upon the right combination to open the vault of Biology and Psychology*5. And no combination of parts would do the trick, if the Potential was not there all along. :smile:
*1. For Aristotle, a substance is a thing's essential nature, understood through the interplay of potentiality (its capacity to become something else) and actuality (what it currently is). Each substance consists of both potentiality (its matter) and actuality (its form).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/
*2. Function is what a system does, especially its purpose within an environment, while emergence is the process by which novel properties or behaviors arise in a system from the interactions of its parts, properties that cannot be predicted or understood from the parts in isolation. Essentially, emergence describes how a system achieves a function through its integrated components, creating a whole with new characteristics that are more than the sum of its parts, such as the coordinated movement of a car (function) emerging from the interactions of its engine, wheels, and other components.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=function+and+emergence
*3. Potential : latent (hidden) properties or qualities that are capable of emerging when combined into an organized (enformed) system.
Note --- One way to understand Potential is : the combination that unlocks Actual.
*4.Yes, in a fundamental physics sense, energy can be considered immaterial or non-material because it does not have mass and does not take up space, unlike matter. Energy is better understood as an abstract property or quantity associated with matter and systems, representing the ability to do work or bring about change, rather than a tangible substance itself.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=energy+is+immaterial
*5. The probability of life arising from non-life, a process called abiogenesis, is incredibly low when considered as a random event, with estimates of probabilities for complex molecules like proteins ranging from 1 in 10^40,000 to 1 in 10^251, and higher for a whole cell.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=probability+of+life+from+non-life
Mental phenomena, to me, are divided into strong and weak emergence as well. The example of weak emergence is perception, and the example of strong emergence is creating an idea.
I disagree with pretty much everything you said. I'm speaking from an entirely different angle. And I know nobody agrees with me, but I still think what I think. I think consciousness and various aspects of mental states have been incorrectly mixed together forever. I do not think consciousness means being aware. I do not think there is such a thing [I]as[/I] being conscious. I think consciousness means subjective experience, and, consciousness being fundamental, I think everything is conscious.
Particles are conscious, meaning they subjectively experience. They do not [I]know[/i] that they subjectively experience. They do not have any mental capabilities in order to know, think, prefer, or feel anything. But none of those things have anything to do with consciousness. They are simply the things that [I]we[/I] subjectively experience.
Yes, creative Ideas are considered to be emergent*1 in that they present a novel or unique perspective on an old problem that, presumably, no one has thought of before. But the emergence of Consciousness in a material world is more challenging to empirical scientists because Sentient Awareness*2 is not an empirical Property, but a philosophical Quality, that includes the power to generate mental images & ideas. We can't trace a lineage of cause & effect leading up to an entity that not only senses its environment (like a plant), but knows that it knows. That self-knowledge is limited to "higher" animals. And, as far as we know, only homo sapiens is able to both imagine abstract ideas, and to communicate them in language.
However, I was taking a different approach to the notion of Emergence, by bringing in the Aristotelian concept of Potential and the modern science of Complexity. Routine physical Cause & Effect*3 is an example of Weak Emergence : the emergent Effect is simply the final state in a chain of causation. For example, the amazing collective patterns created on the fly by thousands of birds, seemingly acting as a single organism. In principle, scientists could trace the complex interactions from single bird to "murmuration" {image below}, but in practice it would be very difficult to collect & analyze the data.
Moreover, Strong Emergence implies that some unpredictable novel property is manifested, not just in localized group behavior, but in the specialized talent of a single species for abstracting ideas (imaginary information) from concrete reality. Emergence of novelty from complexity seems to be inherent in the evolutionary process. But modern science has only recently developed mathematical techniques & computer programs for analyzing & understanding non-linear systems, that defy traditional reductionist methods.
Some say that Consciousness is not produced mechanically, but magically. I suspect that Mind only seems like Magic, due to our inability to comprehend functions & effects that arise from the most complex structure in the universe : the human brain. Personally, I think a key to understanding the Consciousness Effect will be found in the equation of Information (meaning) and Energy (causation) along with the notion of Potential (latent causal power). And that's the topic of my thesis*4. :nerd:
*1. Yes, new and complex ideas are often considered emergent, meaning they arise from the interaction of simpler parts or processes in a system and possess novel qualities that are not inherent in those individual components. This concept applies to creativity, where ideas can surface from actions, experiences, and contexts, transforming from unarticulated "know-how" into conceptual "know-what". Emergence also refers to phenomena that arise from complex systems, such as consciousness from the brain, which cannot be fully understood by examining its simpler constituents alone.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=are+ideas+emergent
*2. Sentient awareness refers to the capacity of a living being to feel, perceive, and be conscious of its surroundings and experiences, often implying an ability to suffer or experience pleasure, and is distinct from mere behavioral responsiveness or simulated intelligence. It involves an "inner experience" or subjective reality, which may be distinguished from "self-awareness" (knowing one is aware) or "sapience" (wisdom)
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=sentient+awareness
*3. Cause and effect emergence refers to phenomena where macro-level patterns and behaviors arise from the interactions of many micro-level components, leading to outcomes that are qualitatively novel and cannot be predicted by examining the components in isolation. While simple cause-and-effect relationships involve one event directly preceding and influencing another, emergent cause-and-effect involves collective interactions creating new, unexpected patterns. This concept is explored in causal emergence theory, which uses mathematical frameworks from information theory and network science to study these complex relationships in systems like the brain, ant colonies, and starling murmurations.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=cause+and+effect+emergence
*4. Mind/Body Problem :
Philosophers and scientists have long debated the relationship between a physical body and its non-physical properties, such as Life & Mind. Cartesian Dualism resolved the problem temporarily by separating the religious implications of metaphysics (Soul) from the scientific study of physics (Body). But now scientists are beginning to study the mind with their precise instruments, and have found no line of demarcation. So, they see no need for the hypothesis of a spiritual Soul added to the body by God. However, Enformationism resolves the problem by a return to Monism, except that the fundamental substance is meta-physical Information instead of physical Matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem
Note --- Life & Mind are emergent, not miraculous
STARLINGS SCULPTING A SELF-IMAGE
Consciousness, to me, is the ability of the mind, namely, the ability to experience, and it cannot be an emergent thing. The quality of the experience, however, whether it is a simple perception or complex thought processes, is an emergent thing, and for that, you need an organism with a complex brain and a mind. There are two reasons why I consider the mind as an extra component: 1) The hard problem of consciousness, and 2) The efficacy of mental events. I am sure you have heard about (1) but not (2). So, we are dealing with (2) as a serious problem in physicalism, even if the hard problem of consciousness could possibly be resolved. But why (2) is a serious problem? The problem is that mental events have no physical property, so they cannot be causally efficacious in the physical world. So, we are dealing with an anomaly that physicalism cannot resolve.
Quoting Gnomon
You cannot get consciousness from complexity. You can, however, get complex behavior when the system under investigation is complex enough.
Quoting Gnomon
The mind, to me, is an irreducible substance with the ability to experience, freely decide, and cause. The mind is not by byproduct of physical processes in the brain.
Quoting Gnomon Isn't "inner experience" or "subjective reality" usually the definition of [I]consciousness[/I]?
Yes. I agree that there is a fundamental "substance", in the Aristotelian sense, that eventually produced the Consciousness that we Sapiens take for granted. And Panpsychism is based on the assumption that Mind is fundamental to the Cosmos. But, I think that implies a much too broad definition of "the ability to experience". For me, Consciousness is not a "thing", but a process, a function.
Modern Cosmology portrays a universe with no sign of Life or Mind for over 10 billion years of evolution. Only in the last few billion years, has Life emerged as single cells with crude senses for finding food. Billions of years later, the entities we call animals, evolved along with more sophisticated sensory apparatus, that eventually became controlled by brains. However, it's only in the last few thousand years that animals with big brains emerged with sufficient complexity to produce the talent that we humans experience as Self-Consciousness. We know what it's like to be human, but "what it's like to be a bat" is still a mystery. We can't see or touch the substance of Consciousness, we can only infer it's existence by means of the very subject of our investigation : the mental tool of Reason.
Based on current developments in science (complexity, information, etc), I have concluded that Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon & noumenon. Hence the "ability to experience" was absent from the Big Bang event, and from the expanding universe for about 90% of the evolutionary period to date. The human era, with Consciousness as-we-know-it-and-experience-it, it has existed for only about 2% of Cosmic time.
But the Big Bang was powered by Energy (causation) and Information (natural laws) from the beginning of space-time. And my name for that original Substance (form + matter) is what I call EnFormAction*1. A term I coined to contrast with Shannon's negative definition of Information in terms of dissipating Entropy. EFA is equivalent to what Schrodinger coined, in his book What is Life?, as Negentropy : positive causation. In my thesis, EFA is the fundamental substance, from which Life & Mind evolved, and Emerged.
So, Consciousness may have been present at the beginning, in the form of Potential. But that creative power only fulfilled its promise after eons of "physical processes". Perhaps, not a "byproduct", but definitely a long-delayed Effect of cosmic Causation. :smile:
*1. The EnFormAction Hypothesis :
That neologism is an analysis and re-synthesis of the common word for the latent power of mental contents : Information. En stands for energy, the physical power to cause change; Form refers to Platonic Ideals that become real; Action is the meta-physical power of transformation, as exemplified in the amazing metamorphoses of physics, whereby one kind of thing becomes a new kind of thing, with novel properties. In the Enformationism worldview, EnFormAction is eternal creative potential in action : it's how creation-via-evolution works.
https://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
Note --- The evolutionary unfolding of that original Potential may be what some call Panpsychism : EFA (Energy & Form) is everywhere forever.
Daniel Dennett, for one*1.
*1. The idea that "consciousness is magic" can refer to different concepts: some see consciousness as a literal, wondrous phenomenon that imbues the world with meaning and feeling, while others, like philosopher Daniel Dennett, use the metaphor of magic to describe how the brain creates an illusion of a unified, rich inner experience from complex, non-magical processes.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=consciousness+is+magic
Quoting Patterner
Yes. But some alternative terms for Consciousness are : awareness, attention, mindfulness, knowledge, cognition, mind, observation, etc.
My point is that C is not a thing, but a process ; not a material substance, but a Function of a complex organism. Your cell phone is a complex mechanism, it processes a lot of information, and it performs several useful functions. But at the moment, it's AI functions have not reached the status of Personhood.
So, it is not Sentient or Aware of what it's doing. It's simply a mechanism.
One requirement for Sentient Awareness seems to be, not just complexity, but an integrated system of information processing, as postulated by Tononi's Integrated Information Theory*2. IIT is intended to be the kernel for a scientific theory, but at the moment, it's a philosophical conjecture. But I think it's pointing in the right direction.
Consciousness seems to require A> material complexity (entanglement ; feedback loops), B> systematic integration (Holism), and C> inherent Potential (power, ability, capacity) for "higher functions" such as Life & Mind. So, simple objects like Atoms or single cell organisms may have the Potential (Panpsychism), but they lack sufficient Complexity or Systematic Integration for awareness & intelligence. Hence, not Conscious, in the human sense. :smile:
*2. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is a scientific framework proposing that consciousness is a fundamental property of physical systems with the capacity to integrate information; it quantifies this capacity using a measure called Phi (?).
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=integrated+information+theory
The physical substance cannot even cause a change in itself. I have a thread on this topic here. Therefore, the Mind sustains the physical substance (I have a thread on what the Mind is here).
By the way, I am wondering how such a thing as a physical substance that has no control over its movement at all, given the first argument in the first thread above, could be the cause of something that is intelligent, something that can freely decide, etc. what you call the mind. This is a bad model to work on since it has tons of problems and anomalies on the first side. Just accept the substance dualism at least, and you can describe how the physical substance moves.
I think you misunderstood my usage of the term "substance"*1. I was not talking about malleable Matter, but about Causal Energy. For modern scientists, Energy is defined as "ability" or "capability", but Aristotle called it "Potential", as contrasted with Actual, which is the form of frozen Energy we know as Matter (E=MC^2). Energy is physical only in the sense that it is the Dynamic (Causal) Force for the science of Physics. The "control" is provided by Natural Laws (principles ; regulations).
In my thesis, I suppose that Aristotle's Potential (power , ability , possibility), which I call EnFormAction*2 (power to transform), is not only the Causal Source of tangible Matter (hylomorph), but also of intangible Mind (intellect, nous, reason). I arrived at that conclusion from the scientific equation of Energy and Information*3. That equivalence is not yet established as a scientific fact, but it serves as a reasonable assumption for philosophical conjectures. The Triad of Energy-Matter-Information may sound strange, but I use it as an illustration of a difficult concept in my Information-centric thesis.
Exactly how the holistic complex of Energy + Matter + Information produces the effect in a material brain that we call "Intellect" or "Intelligence" or "consciousness" has not been completely worked out. But I think of Thinking & Reasoning as meta-physical processes, similar to the physical processes caused by inputs of Energy.
Although the scientists noted in the link below envisioned a triple-set, Descartes viewed the mind/body relationship as a duality of res extensa (matter) and res cogitans (thought). However, I imagine that our local duality or triality are merely manifestations of an ultimate universal Monism : EnFormAction : the power & program of the Big Bang Singularity, that provided the Cause & Laws of evolution, from which has emerged thinking & reasoning lumps of mobile matter that we now call philosophers & scientists. Note --- the ResearchGate image calls that triple aspect Monism : "Universal Substance".
Therefore, although we may not be on the same page, we seem to be on adjacent pages, regarding the question of how Consciousness could emerge in a Material world. :smile:
PS___ I guess my analysis of Consciousness is more scientific than Hegelian. :wink:
*1. In Aristotle's philosophy, a substance is the primary kind of being, an individual thing composed of matter (pure potentiality) and form (actuality). Potentiality is a thing's capacity to become something else, while actuality is the realization of that capacity. Every substance has the potentiality to develop its inherent capacities and achieve its specific purpose or telos, thus actualizing its form.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=aristotle+potential+and+substance
Note --- Information, like Energy, is physical only in the sense that it produces physical effects in matter.
*2. EnFormAction :
That neologism is an analysis and re-synthesis of the common word for the latent power of mental contents : Information. En stands for energy, the physical power to cause change; Form refers to Platonic Ideals (potential) that become real (actual); Action is the meta-physical power of transformation, as exemplified in the amazing metamorphoses of physics, whereby one kind of thing becomes a new kind of thing, with novel properties. In the Enformationism worldview, EnFormAction is eternal creative potential in action : it's how creation-via-evolution works.
https://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
*3. Is information energy or matter? :
[i]The fundamental triad of energy/matter/information |
The concept of information as a physical element has been put forth by various researchers (Landauer, 1996;Stonier, 1990;Vopson, 2019;Wheeler, 1989). It is now considered as fundamental as well as matter and energy in the universe (Meijer, 2013; Stonier, 1996).[/i]
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-fundamental-triad-of-energy-matter-information_fig1_275017053
Note --- ResearchGate image below. I don't agree with all of these labels. It's just an imaginary illustration of how Information relates to Energy and Matter.
THE hypothetical FUNDAMENTAL TRIAD
https://www.researchgate.net/about
According to Alex Rosenberg down at Duke, this is simply true of all of us. The reason paradoxes emerge is because the "self" and "intentionality" are akin to ghosts and magic, i.e., superstitious folk explanations. Neurons are not about anything. They don't "think" or "believe" anything. Everything, including neurons, are just elementary particles, and these are not "about" anything either. Hence, it is quite impossible for "thoughts" to be "about" anything else, or for there to be "intentional" states about the future. Five hundred years of scientific progress back this up. Mechanism cannot spontaneously produce aboutness and there is only mechanism. Ergo, intentionality doesn't exist. Ergo, the self doesn't exist!
He wrote a 400 page book "about" this (titled with his name, which is of course not a reference to a self). It has some good advice, like "solve unhappiness with medication, not introspection, since you are your neurochemistry and some tools work better than others for producing chemical changes," although when he gives this advice it's not wholly clear "who" or what is capable of even being "unhappy." It's a fun book from the parts I read though.
Now, we could laugh at Rosenberg, but he has some serious philosophical chops and knowledge (much more so than a Dawkins, etc.) and I think he's interesting because his target isn't so much the non-physicalist (a lost cause of course) but the "non-reductive naturalist," who he wants to convert by showing that naturalism entails his point of view.
Nonplussed to find you in such company, Tim :yikes:
Hey, I didn't say it wasn't absurd, insane even. But his argument that it follows from some commonly held positions is not bad. I think the idea is that the good naturalist should be an eliminativist and that the "non-reductive naturalist" is in a sense kidding themselves or else really a dualist because they believe in an irreducible, "strongly emergent" (and thus fundamental) causally efficacious mental activity/substance whose behavior cannot be reduced to or wholly explained by physical laws. The second option isn't really physicalist, its dualistic, and it's arguably not "naturalist" if it makes intentionality causally fundamental (granted, that terms is stretched ridiculously far in different directions).
It's admirable in a way. In the same way that Luther is admirable when, challenged by Erasmus that God would be evil if He creates creatures without freedom just to cosign them to an eternal torment they could never have avoided, Luther simply claims that God's "goodness" is wholly equivocal (i.e., that God is evil in human terms, or as he puts it, that we are evil in God's terms, which is still the same thing). It's following things out to their conclusion at least... (I suppose it's one way or solving the ol' "Problem of Evil" :meh: )
Quoting Patterner
This seems all contradictory. it would seem that having a survival advantage (being more fit), or being physically causal at all, would constitute a physical property. By your assertion, consciousness does not contribute to that fitness, else it would have those physical properties.
You can see my confusion. You define consciousness as a lack of all these properties, and I don't see what's left. A thing doesn't experience itself, it experiences phenomena. That's what experience is. So perhaps you've redefined that as well. How is a unit defined? How is one collection of particles (none of which has phenomenal experience) have it, but a slightly different collection of particles does not, or does not as much? Did I word that correctly?
Quoting PatternerA particle cannot measure any of those things, let alone experience them. It doesn't even have a spin except as measured by something else. Not even you can experience your own mass, charge, or spin. Arguably charge if you have a lot of it. Anyway, experience of those things requires physical interaction with something not-you, and also requires cognition.
There are those of us that say a human can only interact with things according to the laws of physics, despite your assertion of "It is not simple physics taking place.". No demonstration otherwise has ever been made. Going out of your way to not know how it works does not constitute a demonstration.
Non-sequitur
It doesn't make logical sense to suggest that laws have intentions. Intentionally created laws in theory reflect the intentions of their creators, but I don't think physical laws are intentionally created. That would be ID, which is different magic.
This seems to contradict your assertions since the manufacture of a computer probably involves humans and their intent, which you seem to assert do more than just interact with things according to the laws of physics. Perhaps you're including this consciousness as part of those laws, but no laws of consciousness has ever been required to describe how a particle interacts with other particles, and in the end, we're just collections of particles.
All that is also true under physicalism, the only difference being a definition of consciousness as a physical process.
I am not asserting that physicalism is necessarily correct, but I am asserting that nobody has demonstrated it being incorrect, or that any alternative offers a better explanation.
Quoting Wayfarer
Excellent illustration of most of my points. You've redefined 'memory' as "information that is conserved for the sake of maintaining homeostasis". OK, you didn't explicitly state that as a definition, but you disqualified all my examples of memory because they did not meet that particular definition.
Ability to recognize people from their faces (a baby knowing its mother say) is not information conserved for the sake of maintaining homeostasis. Thus the onus is upon you to justify that very narrow definition, especially since you've quoted the google response to 'memory definition'.
Another point of mine was your 'tactic of refusing to use a word for anything nonhuman or at least nonbiological', nicely illustrated by you omitting the 3rd definition provided by google, which is:
"3.the part of a computer in which data or program instructions can be stored for retrieval."
You are correct that the information about the past stored in say rocks did not meet the dictionary definition. People tend not to use the word that way, just like they don't use 'memory' to describe the information of our evolutionary past stored in our DNA. @Patterner specifically brings up that example as one of information processing above and beyond what a machine does.
Quoting WayfarerThat's quite different than 'for the sake of maintaining homeostasis'. The kind of memory you now describe is not characteristic of all life, but sure, even trees retain previous experience and act on it.
Secondly, memory is also a characteristic of non-life, although it might not necessarily serve the purpose of survival and adaptation, similar to how a memory of trivia doesn't serve that purpose. So it does not follow that only living things utilize memory, nor that all living things utilize memory, since plenty (majority?) of them continue existing without it. Again, this presumes that DNA is not consciously accessed/recalled, but your definitions might differ on that point.
It means a record of the past in that context. It does not mean 'the past'. And I agree that the term 'memory' is not often used in that context, hence its lack of appearance in the dictionary. The word tends to be used for things that do their own access of that stored information. There is no obligation for a rock to retain a fossil.
Technically they don't. But OK. Memory is still not defined as only that recall of past information solely for the purpose of being fit.
I deny this. Sure, most devices are currently slaved to people or other devices, so their purpose is currently not their own (quite similar to an employee), but that in no way disqualifies their recall of data as 'memory'. Yet again, it being memory is not dependent on the purpose to which it is recalled, but I do concede that there needs to be some sort of self-recall for the word to be reasonably applicable.
Your google quote (the entire quote) also does not make an ontological distinction between the two cases.
But how do you know that. What is this based on? Anything? Anything at all besides what made 15th century people who had to crap in holes in the ground and tell stories to pass the time between famines and brutal periods of war?
There are millions of dust particles on the average person's body at any given moment. Are each of them really observing the world or aware they are dust particles? Are they really like you or I, if either of us were strapped to a chair, unable to speak or use our limbs and basically intelligent beings in a brain in a jar scenario?
A dead person is still a person, but they have no awareness of what's going on around them. It requires a brain with a nervous system to be able to think. Unless we're just cheapening or misusing the word and replacing it with your own definition, that's one thing. But you should own up to it, if so.
Otherwise, no, there are not millions of microscopic forms of life that are experiencing emotion, observing life, and being aware of time and contemplating their own existence on any given person's forearm.
I quoted the definition! Memory is an attribute of living organisms, things that have memory. 'The earth' only has memory in a figurative sense.
Quoting noAxioms
Damned well is! You don't remember your own mother's face, your homeostasis is in deep doo-doo.
Quoting noAxioms
Did not omit it. Noted that computers are constructed by humans, to which I will add, to conserve memories for human purposes.
Quoting noAxioms
Maybe you might start your own dictionary, then. Just don't expect others to use it.
I think it is the problem of the model, namely, physicalism, which is a monist model. You have this strange phenomenon, so-called the experience, that you cannot explain its existence. You also cannot explain how the experience can be causally efficacious, as well, given the fact that the experience is a mental event and the physical substances are causally closed.
Regarding the other things in your response, we are defining consciousness differently. I do not think the things humans are conscious [I]of[/I] are what consciousness [I]is[/I]. Consciousness is not intelligence, awareness, the ability to contemplate, or the ability to observe.
***************
I present these three steps regarding it not being physical.
1)
Chalmers presents the problem in his famous Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, Chalmers says:
2
A couple quotes that I think make the problem a little more clear. From people who I think know what they're talking about.
At 7:00 of this video, while talking about the neural correlates of consciousness and ions flowing through holes in membranes, Donald Hoffman asks:
Quoting Donald Hoffman
In [I]Until the End of Time[/I], Brian Greene wrote:[Quote=Greene] And within that mathematical description, affirmed by decades of data from particle colliders and powerful telescopes, there is nothing that even hints at the inner experiences those particles somehow generate. How can a collection of mindless, thoughtless, emotionless particles come together and yield inner sensations of color or sound, of elation or wonder, of confusion or surprise? Particles can have mass, electric charge, and a handful of other similar features (nuclear charges, which are more exotic versions of electric charge), but all these qualities seem completely disconnected from anything remotely like subjective experience. How then does a whirl of particles inside a headwhich is all that a brain iscreate impressions, sensations, and feelings?[/quote]
3
What exactly is the, or a, physicalist theory of consciousness?
David Eagleman in this video,
Donald Hoffman in this video,
Donald Hoffman in [I]The Case Against Reality Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes[/I], when he was talking to Francis Crick:We don't have a clue. Even those who assume it must be physical, because physical is all we can perceive and measure with our senses and devices, don't have any guesses. Even if he could make something up to explain how it could work, Crick couldn't think of anything.
Yes. In the worldviews of Materialism and Physicalism, subjective experience is indeed "strange" because scientists can't track an experience (feeling, sensation, image) back to its source via physical cause & effect evidence. A particular sensation (ouch!) seems to just emerge unbidden in the midst of the "flow" of energy from one material substrate to another. There is an inexplicable break in the causal chain, which Chalmers called the "Hard Problem" for empirical science.
The chain of causation transfers electro-chemical Energy from material object (neuron) to material object (synapse) until, suddenly & inexplicably, a new effect occurs that is neither electrical nor chemical, but personal. That novel effect is "strange" because it is subjective or holistic or systemic or metaphysical instead of objective or analytic or particular or physical. It's personal & subjective because no one else can feel what you feel. Or what a bat experiences.
Materialism and Physicalism are monistic*1 models in the sense that they deny any Substance other than Matter or Energy. My worldview is also a monism in that it postulates a single substance that is responsible for all physical and mental effects in the world. But in order to actualize, the monistic Singular Substance (Plato's abstract Form) must transform into Dual intermediate concrete sub-forms : Energy & Matter.
For example, Aristotle defined Substance (hylomorph) as a duality of "Matter" (pure potentiality) and "Form" (actuality). Obviously, his concept of Matter is different from the modern usage in that it is not-yet-real, it is un-formed (amorphous). And his Form (Intent) is the enformer (actualizer) of Potential. Only when ideal Potential is realized by some Cause does it become the real stuff we now call Matter. Ari's Matter is like malleable clay : formless until molded by the design intent of a sculptor. Hence, the Actualizer*2 of the sculpture is an idea (intention, image) in the mind of a man.
The Physicalist model is "causally closed" to immaterial substances like Ideas, Concepts, and Intentions. An Idealist model is open to the existence of non-empirical essences that transform into material substances. Bats are real, but nobody knows the inner essence of batness. :smile:
*1. Monism is the philosophical view that everything is ultimately a single kind of substance or reality, while physicalism is a specific type of monism that asserts this single reality is physical. In essence, a physicalist believes that all existing phenomena, including mental states, can be explained in terms of physical processes and matter, making the physical the only fundamental substance in the universe.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=monism+physicalism
*2. AMORPHOUS CLAY PRIOR TO ACTUALIZATION
by input of mental intention and manual energy
The mental event/experience has no physical properties, so it cannot be detected nor affect reality. We, however, observe a fascinating relationship between mental events and the part of reality that we form them in; for example, I can type my thoughts. You cannot possibly explain this within physicalism or any form of monism, since you need two substances at least, the experiencer and the object of experience, to explain the experience.
Sounds like you are talking about Language as Materialized Thought*1. Meta-physical*2 ideas in an intellectual mind can be Realized by exporting Ideal thoughts into the Real world by means of physical sound waves (speech), or material ink on paper (writing), or digitized data (electronic signals). And the recipient (experiencer) can interpret those coded messages back into meta-physical Meanings, by means of physical-to-mental decoding events in the brain.
Hence, the communication process necessarily requires "two substances" : both Matter (object) & Mind (subject) ; concrete Physical & abstract Metaphysical. The Message has intermediate material effects, but the final effect (meaning) is Ideal, not Real. However, my thesis explains the whole cosmic system of Matter/Mind, Physical/Metaphysical, Real/Ideal, in terms of a hypothetical ultimate Monism : EnFormAction*3, the power to transform Potential to Ideal to Real, and vice versa. :smile:
*1. The phrase "language materialized thought" refers to the complex philosophical and linguistic concept that language is the physical manifestation of abstract thought. It is the process by which internal ideas, emotions, and concepts are given an external, tangible form, such as speech or writing, that can be perceived and shared by others.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=language+materialized+thought
*2. Meta-physical : theoretical, theoretic, abstract, conceptual, mental, spiritual, intellectual : i.e. non-physical.
*3. EnFormAction : similar to Schopenhauer's Will (power, force, energy) and Representation (mental experience, idea, Form, law, rule) combined into the directed causation process we call cosmic Evolution : one rule to rule them all. It's a Substance only in the sense of an Essence.
All I am saying is that experience is a mental event, so we cannot perceive it. What we perceive is a substance, so-called object, with the appropriate information. We say that we experience once we perceive the object. I am a perceiver, so we need another substance too, so-called the mind.
Why not? Incredulity again, or something actually valid? Is this the best you can do?
No. Never mind the mechanical laws involved in moving the body parts in such a way to create these things. Information processing does that, and information processing can be (but needn't necessarily be) accomplished with neural networks, and such networks are composed of cells that operate under the rules of biology, which in turn operate under chemical laws, which in turn operate under atomic laws, then quantum law, which are in turn grounded by laws of physics. Your incredulity partially stems from your mistake of attempting to comprehend something complex in terms of the most fundamental terms.
To ground your assertion, you need to demonstrate (and not just assert) where in that sequence one things cannot be a function of the immediate more fundamental thing.
[quote="Wayfarer;1012030"I quoted the definition! Memory is an attribute of living organisms[/quote]Not at first you did not, and that's what I was protesting. Yes, two of the definitions from a quick google def indicated it being used mostly for living organisms. You omitted the third definition that did not have this requirement.
I already conceded this point, not that it doesn't have it, but that 'memory' is not typically used for such a context, and a different term should be selected to describe such a record of past events.
Quoting MoK
Lack of a physical explanation isn't evidence that it isn't a physical effect. There's plenty of things not explained, which is why the scientists still have a job. But science presuming supernatural explanations held progress to a crawl, resulting what's been since named the dark ages. Changing their methodology to presume otherwise resulted in the renaissance and all the progress since.
Quoting GnomonActually, they can and do. Not so much an image. It's not like you can clamp on sensors and get a picture of what Bob is thinking about. But they can measure feelings, sensations, and they can detect decisions being made before you realize it yourself.
The hard problem seems to revolve around a difference of perspective, that no knowledge of how it all works lets anything know what it's like. So for instance, one could simulate a bat in its environment and that bat would feel just like a real one and know 'what it's like', but neither the computer running the simulation nor those that program/operate it would know. I find that disconnect to be intrinsic, but not a hard problem that disproves any particular view.
From a physics standpoint, same thing. I mean, all matter seems to be just a form of energy. As for there being any actual 'material', well, they've never actually found any. The closer you look, the more illusive it gets. Even energy sort of fades away on close inspection, arguably giving way to just mathematics.
About your quoted physicalism/monism search result:
My only edit would be that all that stuff is a function of physical processes, not that it necessarily can be explained, especially given the limits of knowledge of those laws. Look at all the quantum interpretations, each giving a different explanation of the same phenomena. OK, that's multiple explanations, not a lack of even one. Maybe the lack of a unified field theory is a good example of something that (currently) unexplained, but without any conclusion that physicalism is thus necessarily wrong. But so many posters come to exactly that conclusion.
Needing to believe physicalism so badly that you are willing to embrace that degree of gullibility is surely as bad as incredulity.
Goodbye.
Okay, it's too bad that I can see no reason at all why you would think such things?are you just being contrarian or perverse?
I don't think that's perverse.
I haven't said that what people are conscious of is what consciousness is?I've asked you what the difference is between consciousness and being conscious. To give some analogies sleeplessness just is being sleepless, restlessness just is being restless and sexlessness just is being sexless. Or, closer to home, unconsciousness just is being unconscious.
You also say that you don't think being conscious means being aware, and yet you offer no explanation of what you think the difference is.
I don't understand why you talk about subjective experience of various functions of our brain, when I think it is obvious that we have no in vivo awareness of brain functions. Perhaps you meant to say that our subjective experience is a manifestation of certain brain functions.
Even if I grant that the experience can one day be explained, then we still have the problem of how the experience can affect physical substance. The second problem is a serious issue since the experience is a mental event only, and it lacks any physical property, so it cannot affect the physical.
Quoting JanusI have frequently said why I think what I think. Most recently, a few posts above, I explained why I think :
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/1012079
But that was not to you, and I guess I can't expect you to read every post everyone makes. Anyway, all of that is why I don't think consciousness is physical. And if it's not physical, I have to wonder what it is, and how it all works.
Currently, my thinking is that consciousness is fundamental. A property that is in all things. Because there isn't anything special about the particles we are made of, so the same thing could happen anywhere in the universe.
Quoting JanusYou said "Being conscious means being aware." I'm saying it doesn't. Awareness is just what we subjectively experience/are conscious [I]of[/I]. Awareness is not consciousness. Some things that are conscious are not aware.
Quoting JanusI don't think of "being conscious" the way I think you do. I don't think it's particular mental states, or complex brain activity. I don't know how you would word it.
I think consciousness is subjective experience. I think being conscious is subjectively experiencing. Pretty much the same thing?
Quoting JanusA couple people said they appreciated that I tried to be clear about what I think consciousness is here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/16075/consciousness-is-fundamental/p1
Quoting JanusNo, I very much do not mean that. I mean there is activity in the brain. Ions crossing barriers, neurotransmitters jumping synapses, signals running along neurons. Etc. Etc. That is all just physical activity. More complex and intricate than pool balls banging around on the table, but physical just the same. Photons hit retina, setting off a chain reaction of physical events in the brain. Vibrations in the air enter through the ear, setting off a chain reaction of physical events in the brain. A molecules of NaCl touches the tongue, sitting off a chain reaction to physical events in the brain. We are able to distinguish various frequencies of protons and vibrations in the air, and distinguish between different molecules that hit our tongue.
Our subjective experience of all that is seeing red, hearing a C major chord, and tasting salt. We could put salt on our corn flakes in the morning. Physically, the activity in our brains would be able to distinguish that from putting sugar on them instead. But that's not the same as tasting corn flakes with salt on them.
There is an interaction between two substances. The mind is a light substance, so it affects the matter slightly. So it is difficult to measure the contribution of the mind in the process in the brain.
Donald Davidson says rationality requires understanding the concept of truth. I don't see how an AI would do that.
AI cannot understand anything since it does not have access to ideas; an idea is an irreducible mental event that is meaningful and is distinguishable from other ideas.
What do you mean? An AI does not have access to ideas.
I don't know exactly what ideas are, but I think of them as something we're abstracting out of situations. They don't stand alone. I think some kind of reflexiveness (like turning back to be aware of oneself) is needed.
I already defined an idea, so I repeat: An idea is an irreducible mental event that is meaningful and is distinguishable from other ideas. We have the ability to create new ideas given the situations we are therein. You are correct on saying: "I think of them as something we're abstracting out of situations". So you know what ideas are. :wink:
That is not how our brains work. Our brains are not binary.
Cool! :wink:
Quoting Patterner
Mental events within the property dualism do not have causal power, so the property dualism is not acceptable.
Mental events are not substances, so they cannot have any physical properties to affect the brain.
The mind is an irreducible substance with the ability to experience, freely decide, and cause.
If you are speaking of a binary computer, no, it could not be conscious. It is mechanical. However, a quantum computer opens new possibilities. Can man create light? Can man create consciousness?
I think consciousness has the ability to decide free of the laws of physics. That is, we can make decisions for reasons other than succession of the arrangements of the particles in our brains. I don't know if it's entirely free, though.
Like an invisible jellyfish floating inside the skull?
A property cannot have any ability.
The mind is irreducible, but can be present in several places simultaneously. So, yes, like a jellyfish floating inside the skull.
Ok.
But only organic matter. Consciousness is what differentiates organic from non-organic matter. Agree or disagree
Correct. That is an acceptable definition of consciousness. Consciousness, given this definition, cannot be causally efficacious in the material world.
Quoting MoKIt can. It is. Here we are, after all.
No!
Yes!
If you say so. Saying yes, however, does not make the claim true.
That was you who defined consciousness as the property by which matter subjectively experiences! Now, you are saying this property, consciousness, has the ability to cause as well. You don't notice that a property cannot have ability.
Quoting MoKDepends on your wording. Does mass have the ability to warp spacetime?
You make a good point that theories or definitions might exclude consciousness from being casually efficacious. It needs some extra work to defend the causal efficacy of consciousness if all it is is the capacity to feel.
Mass does not warp spacetime; a substance that has mass warps spacetime.
Out of blind faith.
Correct.
Quoting bert1
What I am trying to say is that the consciousness/experience is a mental event. It cannot have a property since it is a property itself within the property dualism; therefore, the experience cannot affect the physical. It is not a matter of extra work. It is impossible.
I don't know if this is the case with you, but a problem is often that people think I am saying consciousness is things like thinking, sentience, and awareness, and that particles think, are sentient, and aware. I am saying neither of those things.
Quoting bert1When the nature of the thing being experienced is that of a particle, there is certainly no causal efficacy. There is no thinking, sentience, or awareness. No desire, no wanting something that does not exist. Nor is there any ability, any mechanism, to do anything.
When the nature of the thing being experienced is that of a human, brain activity of such nature is experienced as thought, sentience, awareness. There is desire, and wanting things that do not exist. There is also the ability, the mechanisms, to do things.