Redpill me on consciousness, /sci/.

Fuck off

And here I thought all memes were detrimental.

>>2675349
The existence of qualia still hasn't been explained. People's consciousness can change after a concussion, but that still doesn't conclusively prove the materialist worldview. For example, the brain may just be an interface between itself and a higher-dimensional entity (the source of consciousness)

Some may scream Occam's razor, but those people can't explain how wavelengths between 400 and 700 nm somehow magically become the qualia of color. Even if you explain every physical process that occurs between the eyes, optic nerve, and visual cortex, you still haven't explained where 'color' comes from.

>>2675349
>consciousness
>>/x/

>>2675349
What the fuck is it with this /pol/ meme on this board. Fuck off, cunt.

Define "consciousness".

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I don't know how the brain works, but I think I might have an idea of how the brain works if we did know how the brain works, therefore, consciousness is an illusion.

t. Dennett

>>2675349
>>2675352
>>2675356
Please kill yourself. Pseudointellectual bullshit is not science.

Consciousness is nothing to do with the real world and everything to do with electromagnetism. You are a wavelength of wavelengths.

>>2675357
Neither is playing semantics just to win arguments.

When pressed on the issue, Dennett usually retreats into a view which sounds remarkably like panpsychism, yet refuses to call it such.

Considering the case on consciousness to be closed is just intellectual dishonesty.

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>>2675357
>If you don't believe what I believe, then it is not science.

>>2675359
There are no "-isms" in science: only data. This thread is baseless speculation at best.

>>2675360
You're just inventing bullshit that's not backed up by anything. There is nothing here to believe.

>>2675354
>Redpill
Out of all /pol/ memes, this is the most innocuous along with the Bog Brothers, considering the context OP is using it. Why the fuck don't you get over yourself faggot?

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>>2675360
>bringing a philosopher into a scientific discussion
What's next? Pseuds?

>>2675361
Sorry if discussing actual scientific mysteries is too intimidating for you.

I think I found a thread more suitable for you.
>>8821378

>>2675349
>>8823948

>>2675361
>There are no "-isms" in science: only data. This thread is baseless speculation at best.

lol do you realize how much of a faggot you sound like right now.

>>2675349
I'll bite. Look into electromagnetism. I recommend starting with a book called Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology
Book by Johnjoe McFadden

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I've got a question for you smart guys. How did peahens sexually select this into existence with a brain that's supposedly the same size as one of its eyes? It seems to me like there is something with a very good sense of aesthetics in a peafowl's mind. The same mind that probably only has a handful of basic thoughts that ever go through it.

>>2675349
Fuck off queer

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>>2675368
>seeing bright and flashy=advanced cognition
I'll take bad logic for 100, please.

>>2675368
>very good sense of aesthetics
>basic computation of contrast
>simple pattern
not much needed for that really

>>2675349
heres your redpill
consciousness is a computational shortcut. Why else would it evolve? Somehow, optimization for efficient computation creates consciousness. Naturally we've evolved such that our qualia gives us information useful for survive. However some people with 'glitches' like synesthesia reveal the computational nature of it. Some can do math like a calculator, by use of color or other virtual qualia. Once we figure out more about the brain and how to control this, we'll probably start utilizing qualia in much more mechanical ways. Currently its been optimized by evolution to make us highly aware of the current moment and any potential threats etc. Imagine if you could experience qualia through a USB port. Honestly I expect this to happen within the next 20 years minimum. Virtual reality industry will help progress quite a bit too.

>>2675371
That doesn't tell us anything about why it is like something to experience qualia, why it's something beyond the functions themselves.

>>2675361
>There are no "-isms" in science: only data.
Are you retarded? Data are what we use to make conjectures about the workings of nature. Have you even done any research in your life? The conclusions aren't always salient from the data, and there's a great deal of flair and imagination required to do science.

>>2675362
Well enjoy 20+ 'redpill me on X' threads a day. This meme is cancerous.

>consciousness is just matter interacting

*tips fedora*

M'lady, I daresay thou'st have thee most *exquisite* taste in beliefs.

>>8828556
But you *are* experiencing it from my perspective. It just so happens that I'm you.

>>2675376
The plot thickens.

>>8828577
Well it's true. You're experiencing my life just fine, which also happens to be your life, because I'm literally you.

>>2675375
>*tips fedora*

You're using that meme wrong dipshit.

>>2675352
This. P-zombies will never understand.

>>2675361
>There are no "-isms" in science: only data
Do you mean empiricism?

>>2675371
>our qualia gives us information useful for survive
Our qualia do not affect the decision process.

took it in soph year of hs and then calc 2 in junior yr and then stats in seniors (ap's) public school in cali

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We are not greater than the sum of our parts. Consciousness does not exist, otherwise it would have been claimed by scientists long ago. Our brains have inputs and outputs flowing about, with an amazing amount of flexibility within the network for restructuring. Consider that a pulley system is also a network of inputs and outputs. If the brain is conscious then the pulley is conscious.If you want to read more into it check out IIT, and varying degrees of consciousness, like apes, dolphins and other animals. Chalmers is pretty good, heck, even Kurzweil talks about it a little bit in his book How to Create a Mind.

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>>2675385
i just don't believe that a pulley is conscious. But then. I ain't god. so what do i know.

>>2675385
You're just working off a shitty definition of consciousness then.

Conscious; a system is conscious of a thing if the pattern of agent within the thing is projected onto the arrangement of the system.
Agent; a force that causes change; a force that is necessary for change to occur.
Consciousness; the capacity for a system to become conscious of things.

>>2675387
By that definition, is my operating system conscious?

>>2675388
No. Conscious is likely some kind of "harmonious" property where it exists at the very small scale and can be magnified to the macroscopic scale through the right arrangement. But it has to penetrate down to the small scale first.

>>2675352

Quite right. The 'color' could be defined in multiple ways depending on the problem one might be going after, but fundamentally it is an informational structure manifesting in a particular type of neural network that can be found in the Sol system.

>>2675387
is this supposed to be clear?
your "conscious" here is a binary relation which you defined as:
conscious(x,y) iff "the pattern of agent within y is projected onto the arrangement of x"
what is "the pattern of agent within y" and what does it mean for that to be "projected onto the arrangement of x?"

>>2675388
According to Christof Koch, yes. If everything is conscious, then so is your computer. The difference is that machines don't have willings, like we do, so they appear to be dead. Their willings are our willings (for now)

>>2675391
The pattern is the future of the thing, because agent + thing = future of thing. Projected here is just a technical way of saying "knowing". So it means knowing the future of thing.

>>2675385
>otherwise it would have been claimed by scientists long ago
appeal to authority. Anon, scientist have tried for years and failed. They simply cannot find consciousness with empirical evidence (especially with the Geneva convention in place).

>Our brains have inputs and outputs flowing about, with an amazing amount of flexibility within the network for restructuring.
did you know that the brain can be rewired simply by worldview and thought? Now if thought is a part of the program itself, then thought should change as structure does, and yet thought does not. Why might that be?

>>2675388
No.
I think that consciousness is not an emergent property.

Although alternatively consciousness could be some sternal agent interacting at the interface between mind (the emergent property of brain activity) and soul (whatever the fuck it is that consciousness comes from).

>>2675393
is this standard terminology? I feel like I'm missing something because it still doesn't make sense

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I think its very possible that hard problem deniers are P-zombies. There is no way you can simultaneously experience qualia and deny its existence.

>>2675349
I swear, I apparently live within distance to Dennett but I have never seen him around once.

Oh, and since we are on the subject of him, watch Season 11 Episode 3:

http://www.chedd-angier.com/frontiers/season11.html

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>>2675394
guy you are replying to makes no sense whatsoever, but you are arguing from lack of information, twice

first part: "haven't found a perfect explanation yet" doesn't mean "obviously can't ever be found in principle"; lack of information doesn't allow any certain conclusions either way here, just speculation

second: some parts that are meant to change do indeed change, but noone has yet disabled conciousness in a functioning brain to see what such a state looks like, you again go from lack of information to some conclusion

noone knows yet how conciousness arises exactly, anyone who claims certainty here is just speculating out loud

>>2675396
They're the purely empirical properties of consciousness, as opposed to the properties that have been mutated to fit with assumptions.

There's no way it isn't derived from a physical phenomenon. For all of humanity's self aware existence, dumb cunts trying to explain otherwise have always eventually been one-upped by physicality. Always. As in, every single time. Explanation of disease, chaos, stars, memories, cognition, weather, libido, you name it. Physicality so far has a 100% win record. I don't know how to iterate this more nor why people keep ignoring this.

That being said, more should be done to study it to know exactly what "it" is and how qualia manifests. What is "cyan"? I don't know. I'm not about to jump aboard the "it can't be chemicals :DDDD" train because I don't know the answer though. I'd like it to be something more, because it would defy the above single most important, ubiquitous, and constant principle to date. It's good to be skeptical and test against fundamental principles like physicality too. It's arguably the most tested though, so good luck otherwise.

>>2675401
Qualia is a concept derived from humans' lack of imagination. People only say a mental image is not equivalent to certain brain activity because they lack the ability to parse a map of brain activity into the mental image it represents. Then they go on to say machines can never be conscious because machines are too flexible to have this limit.

>>2675399
>guy you are replying to makes no sense whatsoever, but you are arguing from lack of information, twice
that shitty grammar is making it hard to understand wtf you are saying anon.

>just speculation
And that is exactly what it is. But speculation can be supported with present evidence. The fact that in all of 200+ years of psychological research, that consciousness has not been found as a part of the brain's structure does not mean that it cannot happen.

>you again go from lack of information to some conclusion
no conclusion made. I was asking what it means. If the brain can change itself by itself from its own thoughts, then it seems like an external agent must be acting on it. I propose that is consciousness.

>noone knows yet how conciousness arises exactly, anyone who claims certainty here is just speculating out loud
never said i know for certain, just saying my current hypothesis with conviction.

>>2675349
>Redpill me on consciousness, /sci/.

Nobody knows the answer yet except. We only have speculations based on very poor evidence on what consciousnesses actually is. Scientist think consciousness can be understood through math. We'll get an answer soon once we uncover more information of the brain, technology gets better, or better understanding of physics. A physics major thought consciousness cannot be broken in half like a vase. We don't actually know yet.

>>2675401
>>2675402
Wrong. I would argue anyone who believes computers can be conscious does not know what a computer does in principle and only understand that their computer appears to perform magic. Same can be said about any machine, even a biological machine.

> Physicality so far has a 100% win record
So? That is merely inductive reasoning, qualia can be deduced meaning it is knowable and not just probable.

I believe consciousness arises out of the "physical" world however, the way we understand the physical world is incomplete. We believe it is constructed of mere particles and interactions and nothing more, however we do not understand truly what a particle or an interaction IS. We don't know the intrinsic nature of the objects of our observations. That's why I am saying the intrinsic nature is mental, or at least part mental. It can explain consciousness without forcing anyone to sacrifice science, in fact it will only bring us closer to uncovering the truth about consciousness.

>>2675405
Good post. Sums it up nicely.

Shit's a myth lol

It's a "/sci/ has yet another discussion on philosophy while thinking philosophy is for retards" episode

>>2675405
>We believe it is constructed of mere particles
I don't think modern science uses the particle model anymore except for calculating approximations. Modern physics is all about fields.

>>2675349
Some scientists argue that viruses are alive, because of their ability to replicate and other such criteria. Others disagree, as a virus is not much more than a small string of nucleotides. The line between the living and the non-living becomes blurry at this level, with the definitions becoming arbitrary. Living and non-living share the same component parts. Death is just the result of inevitable physical forces acting on you, the same forces that act on the inanimate. The only difference being that the less "complex" something is, the easier it is to predict its composition and behavior.

Things that are predictable are pleasing to us. We like patterns. This is why music is appealing. And why symmetrical faces are attractive. Why certain mathematical formulae appear elegant. Why scientists are applauded for providing new insights, insights that make sense of the world. We like patterns so much that we look for them all the time. Sometimes we see patterns where there are none. It's a nasty habit.

We exhibit fear when something challenges our notions of a particular pattern. It's the basis of cheap horror movies. Loud, unexpected noises. Images appearing with no warning. Things floating for no reason. Dead people coming back to life. It shouldn't happen. It doesn't make sense. It's terrifying. And if the terror is prolonged, it can lead to death or the onset of insanity. Going insane is a coping mechanism.

Just like how trying to find order among chaos is a coping mechanism. Because we can't handle the truth. Because we can't handle the notion of the absurd. That there is no order. That we can't know anything and anything we think we know is just a fabrication. Much like how a child fabricates an imaginary friend to cope with loneliness.

We like it in here. Form is nice. Causality is nice. We even have treats like pain to keep us distracted. Anything besides the alternative. So let us sleep a little bit longer. It gets tiring out there.

>>2675410
>We exhibit fear when something challenges our notions of a particular pattern. It's the basis of cheap horror movies. Loud, unexpected noises. Images appearing with no warning. Things floating for no reason. Dead people coming back to life. It shouldn't happen. It doesn't make sense. It's terrifying. And if the terror is prolonged, it can lead to death or the onset of insanity. Going insane is a coping mechanism.

this is where you went from agreeable to outright bizarre anon.

Firstly: jump-scares make us feel no horror but play on our startle reflex (which we are all born with), and a lack of patterns or symmetry does not induce terror (except for autistics maybe). Thing's not making sense does not scare people either, it only makes them more curious. Lastly insanity is not a coping mechanism and cannot be induced in the way you think it can.
True horror lies in atmosphere of mystery and the unknown. the Cthulhu mythos works upon the principles of the unknown and the horror of cosmicism.

>Because we can't handle the notion of the absurd.
i live the absurd anon.

>Form is nice. Causality is nice.
and then there is correlation, and such-froth. anon your argument is very poor.

>We even have treats like pain to keep us distracted.
found the edgelord.


Anon, what bubble have you been living in to have formed such absurd and unrealistic notions?

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to anyone denying that consciousness exists, you are misinterpreting what the word refers to. if you are reading this right now, you are having a first-person subjective experience of reading this. and that's the concept in question. unless you deny that you are having an experience, then you accept the existence of consciousness. as you are reading this, some sort of physical process is occurring in your brain, and that process can probably be correlated to the act of reading. but you can't say that that physical process IS your experience of reading. your experience of reading is likely to be causally related to your brain processes in some way, but that doesn't equate them as being the same thing. so neuroscience can only has so much explanatory power, because it hasn't yet explained phenomena like qualia, subjectivity, and intentionality. though I tend to agree that a complete neuroscience will explain consciousness in purely physical terms.

>>2675412
>what is the interaction problem

>>2675412
What's supposed to be hard about intentionality?

>though I tend to agree that a complete neuroscience will explain consciousness in purely physical terms
How do you reconcile your ideas that qualia poses a real problem, and that explaining subjective experience in purely physical terms is conceivable?

>>2675413
is that a response to my suggestion that neuroscience will be able to explain consciousness? you are right that if we assume mental and physical properties can causally interact then we have problems. one of the primary reasons we don't just buy into descartes. and i think mental causation has the same problem, it's unintelligible unless you assume that mental properties can be reduced to physical properties in some way. but that's what I'm assuming when I guess that neuroscience will be able to explain consciousness. it's definitely up for debate.

>>2675414
basically I think qualia etc poses a problem but I'm also optimistic about the problem being solved as we learn more about neuroscience. and I lump intentionality in there too because for thoughts or experiences to be referential to other thoughts or experiences is just another layer of complexity in somehow showing how that would work physically

>>2675415
It's a response to things like
>first-person subjective experience
The interaction problem means that anyone who talks about the problem in terms of some kind of "private experience" has misunderstood their own perception. Humans cannot speak of anything non-physical because to speak is a physical action, and physical actions must come from physical actions. Anything anybody refers to must be something that can be physically interacted with, or else there is no way to physically refer to it.

>>2675416
But the core problem about qualia and subjective experience is not about functions and behavior, which science has given us so much progress from so far. It's not a question of how something functions, but a question of why it feels like something. Even if you map out the entire brain and all the physical mechanisms, there still doesn't seem to be a conceivable solution that will explain why it is that there can feel like something from the inside to be a system of particles reacting.

To explain subjective experience, it seems we need something new and radical compared to our old buddy reductive materialism.

>>2675418
Any question anybody can ask can be reduced down to "explaining the behavior of people asking that question". So it's behavioral and there is no way to avoid it.

>>2675417
well, I'm not necessarily using the term "subjective experience". to mean something non-physical. at least for me, I believe it's fundamentally physical in some way. I probably shouldn't have used the term "first person" because if materialism is true then our thoughts won't be private given the right technology.

These threads are so god damn stupid. Rethink your lives.

Bhikkhus, for a virtuous person, one whose behavior is virtuous, no volition need be exerted: ‘Let non-regret arise in me.’ It is natural that non-regret arises in a virtuous person, one whose behavior is virtuous.

“For one without regret no volition need be exerted: ‘Let joy arise in me.’ It is natural that joy arises in one without regret.

“For one who is joyful no volition need be exerted: ‘Let rapture arise in me.’ It is natural that rapture arises in one who is joyful.

“For one with a rapturous mind no volition need be exerted: ‘Let my body be tranquil.’ It is natural that the body of one with a rapturous mind is tranquil.

“For one tranquil in body no volition need be exerted: ‘Let me feel pleasure.’ It is natural that one tranquil in body feels pleasure.

“For one feeling pleasure no volition need be exerted: ‘Let my mind be concentrated.’ It is natural that the mind of one feeling pleasure is concentrated.

“For one who is concentrated no volition need be exerted: ‘Let me know and see things as they really are.’ It is natural that one who is concentrated knows and sees things as they really are.

“For one who knows and sees things as they really are no volition need be exerted: ‘Let me be disenchanted and dispassionate.’ It is natural that one who knows and sees things as they really are is disenchanted and dispassionate.

“For one who is disenchanted and dispassionate no volition need be exerted: ‘Let me realize the knowledge and vision of liberation.’ It is natural that one who is disenchanted and dispassionate realizes the knowledge and vision of liberation.

>>2675421
Like what the fuck is this shit? >>2675422

This thread is just a bunch of NEET's throwing around big words and long-winded empty statements to appear smart.

>>2675421
>>2675423
You are cherry-picking and ignoring the logical arguments. This topic is important because neuroscientists will never be able to explain consciousness if they ignore qualia. I don't think they will ever "explain" it really, but they may be able to infer how it works. Perhaps electromagnetic fields are actually consciousness who knows. Maybe every field is consciousness, I don't know for certain.

>>2675418
so if you believe what science has to offer about the functions of different parts of the brain, you agree that there must be a causal chain leading from, for example, a c-fiber being stimulated and the qualia of pain? or do you think the correlation is complete coincidence? because if there's a causal chain from a physical event that somehow leads to a qualia, then either there's a point in the chain that a physical event triggers a non physical event, or the actual qualia is in some way physical. of course neither of those sound very appealing. possibly there are more modes of existence than physical and non-physical that just haven't entered our consideration, which would give us more options.

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>>2675425
holy shit checked

>>2675423
are you sure that >>2675422 wasn't just you samefagging so you had some material to quote in order back up your incorrect point?

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>>2675403
all good, up until
>"If the brain can change itself by itself from its own thoughts, then it seems like an external agent must be acting on it. I propose that is consciousness."
Parts of the brain (hard-drive equivalents) that are supposed to change do change to accomodate new memories etc. You then say it never changes to accomodate changes in conciousness.. and then instead of "we don't know what to measure yet" you jump (very far) to "it therefore can't be just matter". Maybe the "CPU equivalent" is hard-wired and doesn't change physicly? Maybe conciousness is closer to the effect of software running, which is not reflected in hard longterm physical changes like memory is? Just leaping directly to "it can't be just the brain because conciousness doesn't work like memory!" doesn't seem a legit move here.

Changes we can see that correlate with changes in conciousness:
-split brain patients getting two separate personalities
-physical changes in brains that practice meditation for a few years
-changes in brainwaves in coma-patients/sleep/anesthesia
-nothing even close to conciousness ever without a physical brain

People thought that temperature can't possibly be represented by just one number, because termometers were shitty. It's just too wonderous and elusive, and must be complex and maybe unexplainable! etc.

Our ego always seems to push for magical explanations when not enough facts are available. So far, that has never panned out. The solution was always more data and doubling down on exploring the naturalistic explanations.
But maybe this time, it will be "outside forces".

>>2675349
it seems to me that everybody is a retard and probably not actually conscious anyway

Ask yourself who or what benefits from you looking away from yourself.

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>>2675421
yeah wtf dude !!!1
these threads are so much better my dude xD

>>8833220
>>8833522
>>8833455
>>8827659
>>8833421
>>8833056

>>2675425
The interaction problem (if the mental is separate from the physical, how can they interact?) is a valid criticism to all dualist ideas. Epiphenomenalism attempts to solve the interaction problem by saying phenomenal experience doesn't affect the physical, yet the thoughts and verbal reports created by the brain about the mysteries of the phenomenal seems to indicate that they do. If this phenomenal "stuff" is so different from the physical, then how is it that it manifests so profoundly in the behavioral output of me? How can a purely functional system directly speak to the existence of the phenomenal, if the very nature of the phenomenal escapes and goes up and beyond the functions of the system making the argument?

One way out is to say that the physical has no causal effect on the mental either. To demonstrate how this could work, you could imagine setting two clocks at the start of the universe - one digital and one mechanical. A billions years later, their time will correspond to each other, without them ever needing to interact with each other. Just like the mechanical clock didn't cause the digital clock to match its time, the cognitive function of pain didn't cause the phenomenal feeling of pain.

There are other theories such as neutral monism that says that fundamentally, the universe is made of neither physical nor mental stuff, but this sort of neutral stuff, that depending on how it is group together, exhibits properties of physical, or mental. There are problems of such ideas too, of course, such as how small units of phenomenal experience could lead to a unity of it in a physical brain.

>>2675406
>Physicality has a 100% win record
>So?
Then it's overwhelmingly likely to be completely explicable physically. It could be something else, but likely is not.
>we do not understand what a particle action IS. We don't understand the intrinsic nature of our observations.
Not knowing how it works doesn't imply it doesn't adhere to physicality. In fact, as I've iterated like 6 or 7 times now, it always has worked out to be explicable. It's as assumable as the axioms of addition. Even when when we found out physics as we knew it broke down at a quantum level, everyone didn't jump ship to this weird "it's clearly wholly or at least partially nonphysical" ship.

>>2675433
Meant for
>>2675405

I don't have much time to discuss now and typing on a phone truly is a excruciating job, but I want to give my opinion as a compsci faggot:

The von Neumann architecture seems to solve this problem of the brain rewiring itself. And apparently we have a physical OS, that usually does not let us rewrite kernel functions. In GNU/Linux for example, it's like we conscious beings do not have root access.

>>2675433
The reason I don't think the same old principles of reductive materialism can explain subjective experience is because it deals with purely quantitative aspects. You can correlate pain with a certain area in the brain and say, when these neurons fire in this and this way with this intensity, that's pain. You can have a very complex functional understanding of how pain is caused and how it affects behavior. But with all that, it still doesn't tell us anything about what it is like to experience pain; it completely ignores the qualitative aspect. Consciousness is the only thing in the universe where asking how something functions doesn't seem to be able to give us any conceivable answers to the question of why it feels like something phenomenally from the inside. I think that highlights a big gap between explaining how something functions, and explaining experience. From this gap, we can infer that the frameworks of science clearly misses something here in terms of the structure/format of the explanation.

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>>2675349

This thread is intrinsically /sci/, I came here just to say that mods are retarded and this board should be erased from earth, with its users.

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>>2675521
>tfw we will never get a true standalone philosophy board

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Here's your quick rundown on Dennett / consciousness, op. First we have this very popular view:

>>2675352

>Even if you explain every physical process that occurs between the eyes, optic nerve, and visual cortex, you still haven't explained where 'color' comes from.

Dennett (and others, though he gets associated with this maybe the most in modern times because he dedicated an entire book to the argument) came along and said:

>Let's just stick to what we have real, heterophenomenal (i.e. not solely dependent on what one person believes they've 'experienced') evidence for and see what that tells us.
>When we take this approach, we find all the physical facts of the brain and body, along with all the behavioral facts (e.g. what a person says or does in response to being in the presence of red light). What we don't find are qualia. We find *reports of so called qualia*, but crucially reporting behavior is totally explicable and grounded in physical, heterophenomenal reality as long as you really do take it as just reporting behavior and don't try to tack on anything more than that.

Now ask yourself: Is it possible we could be compelled to behave consistent with and/or believe in premises that aren't literally true? Answer: Yes! Constantly in fact, it's the great recurring theme of perceptual psychology experiments that what we believe is happening is frequently very different from what's actually happening. Our brain has no moral objections to taking shortcuts that get us behaving how it needs us to with much less work than perfect fidelity in feeding us details of the world around us would require.

What are qualia then? They're convenient abstractions used to make it easier to navigate and communicate about ourselves and the world around us. 'What it's like to be in pain' isn't a literal object like a tree but rather a neurological / behavioral story telling and response protocol where the fictional character of 'pain' stands in for the complexities of biology.

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>>2675397

You are failing to understand the p-zombie argument. It requires as part of its prenise that you accept p-zombies and non-zombies behave outwardly in the exact same way. The whole point is to try to separate the outward behavioral stuff materialists like Dennett claim as the entirety of what's there from the non-outward qualia stuff dualists like Chalmers claim is there.

I tend to think dualists fail to understand the full extent of what their p-zombie premise requires precisely because they're aware on some level that you qualia as a real thing in itself is incoherent and the behavior is what really matters.

Words and numbers aren't real

>>2675871

Seems like a non sequitur, but abstractions like numbers and words are exactly the class of object people like Dennett categorize qualia as. They aren't literal, physical things but rather useful fictions we deal with as shortcuts to needing to constantly speak and act in terms of physical literals e.g. imagine if every time someone stubbed their toe they began describing the activity of their brain's pain receptors and how it's led to them engaging in the pain behavior of tensing their muscles, saying 'ow' and recalling memories of past toe stubbing events. Definitely a lot easier to just have people say 'ow' and talk about the abstract placeholder of 'pain' that stands in place of all those messy details.

>>2675371

Natural selection is not an optimization strategy.

>>2675810

>abstractions

'what it's like to x' is not an abstraction; it is precisely the experience of x prior to any move to categorization/propositional formation 'about x. The buzzing, blooming, etc.

Why do you feel qualia require a functionalist emanating explanation?

>>2675983

Heterophenomenal evidence tells us what we have are *reports of 'what it's like'*

You're taking an extra step and assuming this reporting behavior / belief behavior we're compelled to participate in must be indicative of a literal immediate 'experience' phenomenon beyond the stimuli and our response behaviors.

The reason you will never find a scientific answer for how this 'experience' phenomenon works is because it never existed to begin with. The stimuli and response behavior are what's really there, and the use of 'qualia / experience' language is not any more real than any other abstract fiction. We're compelled to speak in terms of these abstractions rather than in terms of what's literally going on. But you shouldn't lose track of the fact that what we have is a belief in immediate experience, not actual evidence of immediate experience. And that's all the brain needs, to stimulate belief and behavior, not to conjure literal phantasms. If you believe you're having an experience then mission accomplished.

>>2676033

How convenient.

>>2675357
That's not what psueudointellectual means. Unless you had an issue with their prose

>>2676033

And the observer's 'heterophenomenal evidence' of reports of '''experience'''-- another handy trick on the part of the brain, to get the observer to do the observing the brain requires of him? To what end?

>>2676038

Convenience is the brain's weapon of choice. Go look at one of the many psychology experiments on how bad of a liar our alleged memory recall is or how shit we are at paying attention to anything more than one tiny focus point at a time, all the while convinced we're having some vivid symphony of experience which we're unable to provide answers about when pressed on questions of details our brain didn't bother including in the fabricated story of 'what we saw'.

>>2676065

I've seen them. Not convinced by your story any more than Chalmers'.

>>2675852
There are variations of p-zombies. If the phenomenal realm has an effect on the physical, then a p-zombie wouldn't be functionally indistinguishable, just physiologically indistinguishable.

I think it would be interesting (mostly as a joke) to take a bunch of philosophers, ask them questions about the mystery of phenomenal consciousness, while at the same time monitoring and recording data about their brain activity. Afterwards, you try to see if there are any interesting differences between those who think there is a hard problem, and those who don't.

>>2676048

It's way simpler to have people engage in reporting and respond
se behavior than it is for the brain to conjure non-physical phantasms of 'experience'.

Ironically the p-zombie argument meant to support the existence of qualia as literal things does a pretty good job of outlining how things can work fine without literal phantasms of experience in the equation. Instead of a literal picture floating in the ether, just take the physical man and his visual stimuli and the things he's compelled to say and do in their presence and that's how it all works. Having him behave this way is useful in exactly the same way it'll be useful to have machines behave in this way. You won't ever make a machine with literal floating non-physical imagery in its thought bubbles, all that is metaphor / abstraction that we take for real as part of how our brains operate.

>>2676099

Occam's razor loses its edge when applied to questions of ontology.

Much simpler to entrust causation to God and call it good. But the 'nature' of causation is likely much weirder and more byzantine than that.

>>2676099

You also missed the part where I said I don't give Chalmers' account of experience any more convincing than Dennett's, so continuing to chip away at Chalmers isn't going to do much in the way of convincing me you're on firmer ground.

>>2675810
>Now ask yourself: Is it possible we could be compelled to behave consistent with and/or believe in premises that aren't literally true? Answer: Yes! Constantly in fact, it's the great recurring theme of perceptual psychology experiments that what we believe is happening is frequently very different from what's actually happening.

That argument seems all well and good, as long as you're an outsider looking in on the behavior of someone else making crazy claims about some "qualia nonsense". But I think it falls flat when you look at your own experience. That it is "something that it's like" to be you right now is not something you can deny. Saying that it's an illusion, and that your brain only makes you feel as such, is as ridiculous as claiming "the universe doesn't exist, nothing at all anywhere exists, you're just made to believe it does". It's a logical fallacy: "Hey I don't actually experience anything, my brain only makes me _experience_ the illusion of experience.

>poisoning /his/ further by moving shitposts from other boards here
& Humanities was a mistake.

>>2675349
Guys, tell me if I'm tripping. What if there are many planets with life similar to ours and consciousness is just some arrangement of the brain. After you die a infinite amount of time will pass without your notice and in the meantime there's a possibility that a brain if formed with the same properties that give the sense of me that is you. So there's a chance that you'll ""reincarnate"". What do you think?

>>2676170
Drugs is bad uuuu, yes.

>>2676132

What's your alternative to both A) qualia are literal things that need a new science to explain and B) qualia are not literal things but fictional reference points like numbers or money that our brain has us behave in terms of?

>>2675810
Qualia aren't "solely dependent on what one person believes they've 'experienced'". Qualia are reported by virtually all humans as really existing. Of course, most humans don't use the word "qualia", but it's equivalent. Any time someone refers to his or her own subjective experience, that's qualia.

>>2675921
That argument makes no sense, though. When I stub my toe, what I directly experience isn't the activity of my brain's pain receptors. What I directly experience is the sensation of stubbing my toe. The inference that the sensation has to do with the activity of pain receptors is a secondary phenomenon - a thought that arises when I consider my experience from an intellectual standpoint.

>>2675356
kek

>>2675357
But believing in reductive physicalism is the actual pseudointellectual bullshit. Accepting that there is a hard problem of consciousness isn't pseudointellectual or unscientific, it's just saying "Hmm, here's a mystery no-one has an explanation for". What's pseudointellectual is to insist that consciousness can be reduced to material phenomena, yet be unable to provide any sort of actual explanation for how this can be done.

>>2675385
>Consciousness does not exist

I really don't believe that there are any p-zombies, but man, when I read posts like this...

>>2675402
>People only say a mental image is not equivalent to certain brain activity because they lack the ability to parse a map of brain activity into the mental image it represents.
No, people say that a mental image is not equivalent to brain activity because one is a lived experience/sensation, the other is a certain arrangement of physical phenomena. Obviously the two are correlated, but to say that they are equivalent is going too far.

I don't think materialism or physicalism can explain consciousness, at least not current theories of materialism or physicalism.

I mean, materialism and physicalism almost always suffers from an explanatory gap, in that it describes a phenomena, but denies subjective phenomenology.

You can explain romantic love by reducing it to oxytocin and serotonin for example, but you can't explain why oxytocin and serotonin manifests in a way that lends you to want to put your dick in your girlfriends mouth or lick her asshole.

>>2676330

A report about qualia isn't heterophenomenal. It depends solely on one person's account. Only one person can claim they've had access to their specific instance of what they report as 'pain'.

Everyone reporting their own instances of 'pain' doesn't make any of these heterophemonal. Heterophenomenal requires evidence that goes beyond one person's alleged experiences e.g. you and I can both report the existence of a tree and this can be further corroborated through a photograph or a park map that includes that tree.

What is heterophenomenal about everyone reporting their own different instances of 'pain' is that reporting behavior exists and can be verified through more than just one party's account e.g. a group of people at a party can all witness the same guy telling them he's in 'pain'. But you need to be clear that what we can independently verify is the existence of the report itself, not what this report claims.

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>mfw /sci/ is better at the humanities than /his/

Why not just fucking merge humanities with /sci/?

>>2676419
>mfw /sci/ is better at the humanities than /his/

No they're fucking not.

>>2676287

Start here:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/

>>2676411

There's a beetle in my box.

Dennett makes this equivocal move, a little sleight of hand, like thurs magic tricks he's so fond of, where he poses that 'x' is 'like' 'y', and then goes on to say that 'y' isn't actually there. So, 'experience' is 'like' a desktop user interface, but the user interface isn't 'real', ergo 'experience' isn't 'real '. It's a transparent fallacy, but just like in a game of three card molly, there are always a few rubes that are mesmerized by the movement of the hands, and fail to see that their card was never actually on the table.

Fucking charlatan.

The moment I saw atheists try to claim that consciousness doesn't exist because they couldn't explain it is when I hopped off the atheism bandwagon.

Denying the one objective observable phenomenon an individual can experience kind of undercuts the entire premise science is based upon.

>>2676951
Does that mean you're a theist now?

>>2676961
Yep.
In fact I genuinely believe humans were better off before we started pulling at this biy of yarn called science and started unraveling the universe.

Consider the following
>Humans are animals subject to the pressures of evolution.
>Human behavior is an evolved phenomenon that is fundamental to our survival as a species.
>Therefore if the vast majority of humans since the dawn if time have been some form if theist there is probably a very good evolutionary reason for this.

This whole science thing is probably an evolutionary dead end that will result in the extinction of homo sapiens that manifest it, as they devote more and more resources to this trait to the point it impedes their own survival.

Like some kind of apocryphal animal whose highly secialized sexually selected traits become so exaggerated over time that it only takes a slight environmental shift to drive them into extinction as they collapse under the weight of their own plumage.

I liken it to the graphical user interface of a computer; a vast oversimplification of the underlying processes meant to assist in the process of active utilization. There's no reason to assume it's anything but a product of the physical structures of the brain.

>>2676951
Define existence. When they say it doesn't exist, they mean it in the sense that thoughts don't exist. Which is to say they have no existence but outside of your head.

>>2676436
They absolutely are. So far, /his/ approach to humanities is mostly just bickering between the "JESUS LMAO" people and the people that disagree.

>>2676900
Do you consider thoughts to be real in the same sense you consider a rock to be real? If you don't, then you have to apply the same to consciousness.

>>2677041
Religion likely had a huge role in bringing people together and work in big groups. Now that we have accomplished that and live in our modern society, religion isn't needed anymore.

What is evolutionary advantageous 1000 years ago might be garbage today.

>>2677070
>Which is to say they have no existence but outside of your head.
but all those other phenomenon that we observe using the exact same mechanism are totally real though, and don't exist purely in our heads, because reasons.

>>2677099
>because reasons

Mostly because solipsism is a philosophical cul-de-sac. Once you go in there, there's literally nothing to do but sit there and accomplish nothing or leave.

>>2677089
>Now that we have accomplished that and live in our modern society, religion isn't needed anymore.

You're assuming that modern society is a stable phenomenon in spite of the fact it's only existed for a few hundred years at most.

Consciousness really is an illusion, in the same way stage magic is. In a stage magic trick, you might see something like a person getting cut in half, moved around without pain, then put back together. That's what it looks like, anyway, the reality is a lot more complicated (what with the decoy, the shape of the box, etc.) There is a lot that has to be coordinated "behind the scenes" to achieve something that on the surface seems magical but simple.

In the same way, consciousness as the irreducible ego "in the driver's seat" of the brain is an illusion. The reality is a lot more complicated, what with the outcome of decisions being detectable long before conscious awareness of said decisions, the effect of various diseases and damages, etc. But like the stage magic, just because the immediate surface level impression is actually an illusion doesn't mean there isn't something arguably even more impressive occurring "behind the scenes." Don't be afraid of the word illusion.

>>2676793

That's category A.

>>2677041
Science is at its core basically an extension of banging two rocks together to see what happens, and discovering that if you hit them just right you get an even sharper rock. Combine banging rocks together with the language skills needed to communicate the technique for creating sharp rocks, and you have the building blocks of science. It is an extremely human action. We've been pulling at this bit of yarn for about as long as we've existed.

>>2677115
So in other words we reject solipsism only because it leads to an inconvenient conclusion not because we find it's arguments invalid.

>>2677213
No I disagree.
If that were the case scientists wouldn't be so hostile to religion, as religion is just a manifestation of the same phenomenon.

Science isn't just experimentation, it's a philosophical model.

>>2677254
Scientists are hostile to religion for practical reasons. If people didn't deny evolution, global warming and other extremely pressing issues on religious grounds I don't think you'd see anywhere near the hostility.

>>2677254
Pardon me. I regret my choice of words. Scientists are not hostile to religion, but people who suggest the pursuit of knowledge is a valid substitute for older religions on the other hand are.

>>2677235
Why not? The idea that the human body requires oxygen to breathe is largely based on induction, which we know isn't necessarily valid. But continuing to breathe is more convenient that not, so we continue to do so despite not being certain we must. There's no real way to reject sophism, just like there is no way for a human to avoid death. Okay, great. Now we have a context we can work within.

>>2677263
>evolution
>pressing issue
Kind of hard to take that seriously as the exact same people who claim evolution is important are often supporters of dysgenic policies.

In my experience evolution only exists subconsciously in the background for them, as a phenomenon that their belief system has delivered them from, much like how Christians believe Christ has delivered mankind from original sin.

>>2677283
Yet at the same time though we are expected to reject the validity of our own observations of self.

I don't buy it.

>>2677263
>evolution
>extremely pressing issue
except it isn't

>deny global warming on religious grounds
never seen this happen. source?

>>2677289
>>2677305
>Kind of hard to take that seriously
Antibiotic resistance is a direct result of us not taking an understanding of evolution seriously, and currently it looks like it is going to be a massive problem. We applied an unchanging selection pressure to a population and their genetic code changed to counter it and promote their survival. I suspect in the coming years there are going to be other problems in the ecosystem similar to this but that is admittedly speculation on my part.

>>2677312
>Antibiotic resistance is a direct result of us not taking an understanding of evolution seriously
It's a result of human beings having next to no foresight. Even people who accept evolution generally don't give a shit about it.

>>2677312
>Antibiotic resistance is a direct result of us not taking an understanding of evolution seriously, and currently it looks like it is going to be a massive problem.

Blame hospitals and the food industry for that, not religion. As I said it's more often than not the people who trumpet the importance of evolution the loudest who take it the least seriously under the belief that science can save them.

>>2677305
>never seen this happen. source?
Just about any YEC blog will have a page about the falseness of global warming. And I know on /his/ people only like to consider high-minded philosophical religion and pretend that everyone is an amateur Aquinas, but this undercurrent of thinking is a serious force in politics, especially in the United States where there is the most vitriol.

>>2677322
Next to no foresight, in the context of evolution. And I don't know any scientist who is informed on the potential danger we're facing due to antibiotic resistance that isn't concerned.

>>2677327
But why is it that hospitals and the agricultural industry didn't take the problem seriously? Sure, we can just say greed and leave it at that, but there is also a more fundamental belief that the world was placed here for our personal benefit, that we were "given dominion" over it rather than humans forming one particular part of an overall fragile ecosystem. Maybe religion is born out of that more fundamental belief rather than the other way around, but they are at least related.

>>2677300
Go to any optical illusion book, textbook, or website, or open an introductory psychology textbook. You'll find a self-test showing you how to find your eye's blindspot.

If you were to just use introspection, you probably wouldn't notice your blindspot, because your brain is explicitly trying to cover up its existence. But that self test is, in a sense, an observation of the self. It's just that some ways of observing the self are much more prone to being fooled than others. Hence, most people believing their eyes don't have a blindspot until the self-test proves its existence.

>>2677348
>But why is it that hospitals and the agricultural industry didn't take the problem seriously?
You'd have to ask the various scientists, doctors, and engineers who created those policies.

>Maybe religion is born out of that more fundamental belief rather than the other way around, but they are at least related.
If that's the case then you really need to reevaluate just how much of a threat you think religious people are, as they're not the source of the issues you're complaining about.

A handful of Baptists who think dinosaurs are a Satanic plot are small potatoes contained to entire industries full of people who essentially believe our big brains have allowed us to evolve beyond evolution.

>>2677375
>If that's the case then you really need to reevaluate just how much of a threat you think religious people are, as they're not the source of the issues you're complaining about.
You're saying the idea of God explicitly giving mankind dominion over the earth had nothing to do with humans acting like their actions are apart and don't have consequences, rather than just being some specific species? And while the commandment in Genesis is relevant mostly to the west, everywhere there is a fundamental idea reinforced by religion that humans are somehow above and separate.

>A handful of Baptist
Within the specific context of American politics, no, they are much more significantly powerful than a handful of people. And American politics disproportionately affects the entire world. And it is scientists who are sounding the alarm the hardest on issues like antibiotic resistance. Hell, does anyone but scientists care about the state of the world's coral reefs and the effects bleaching is going to have on the ecosystems?

>>2677394
>You're saying the idea of God explicitly giving mankind dominion over the earth had nothing to do with humans acting like their actions are apart and don't have consequences, rather than just being some specific species?

If you don't believe in God then what "God" says irrelevant. The human species does not exploit it's environment because God told them too, it exploits it's environment because that's what living things do. It's ironic that you accuse the religious of thinking they are apart from nature, when you yourself consider human actions to somehow be different in motivation than the rest of life on earth.

>Within the specific context of American politics, no, they are much more significantly powerful than a handful of people.
Horseshit.
If they're such a powerful force in society then why are they politically impotent as people like you hold them up as rubes to be shamed and mocked? Simply existing is not the same thing as possessing significant political or social power.

>>2675356
It's like a computer dude. Does you computer have the awarness when you turn it off? Didn't think so.
>le epic four HORESMEN

>>2676150
Not him but:
Saying that something is an "abstraction" is not the same as saying it's an "illusion". Think in terms of "aproximations".

Just like what you the seat under you that you feel and the roof above that you see are representations of external reality that the brain comes up with in response to external stimuli, the stuff you perceive as being non-physical, like friendship and love, joy and suffering, are representations also: self-consciousness is the organism's representation of it's internal states to itself. It isn't a process of a fundamentally diferente nature than the process by which a fly maps it's surroundings in order to determine where it should go. It's got more levels of complexity, but just so.

>>2677442
>If you don't believe in God then what "God" says irrelevant.
So the commandment is relevant to people who do believe, and scientists react with hostilty to people who act on said belief to the detriment of our collective survival. Which was my entire point.
>when you yourself consider human actions to somehow be different in motivation than the rest of life on earth
The scale is certainly different, and the fact that there is an alternative that can be envisioned but isn't taken.

>why are they politically impotent
They aren't. You might try to argue that recently they've lost some power (I would argue with that too, but 25 year rule on specific items of politics) but the Religious Right / Moral Majority etc. were all major players in politics. Do you really not remember hearing rhetoric like scientists being Gaia cultists for the obsession over global warming, when God is going to rightfully destroy the earth soon anyway in the Tribulation? Even if the politicians themselves didn't believe it, courting the people who did was politically expedient.

>>2677494
I feel like the analogies become a bit disingenuous when the very thing we're trying to explain is directly taking part in them.

Extrapolating "x feels like x but is really just y" to saying the very phenomena of feeling anything at all is just an abstraction seems like a very big stretch.

>>2677167
>consciousness like stage magic
>stage magic is an illusion
>consciousness is an illusion

that's a transparent fallacy anon you rube

>>2677235
We reject solipsism because not doing so means we'll get literally nothing done. You can feel free to do so, just please accept somewhere out of the way to go catatonic and wither away of starvation.

>>2677476
>Hurr duh brane is liek a computor

Spotted the cretin.

>>2677596
http://www.wikihow.com/Detect-Sarcasm-in-Writing

Why do people get so asshurt about the idea of consciousness being an illusion? Do these same people think daydreams represent something substantial too?

Something being an illusion isn't the same as it not existing either. The light effects that allow a mirage are very real.

>>2677596
What's wrong with that?

>>2675349
Peole fell for the natural materialism meme and trumpeted it around as some kind of truth.

>>2677561
>"x feels like x but is realy just y"
I'd say it's more like "y feels like x but it's still actually y" or "y and x are the same actual thing, but we intuitively understand it as y (common sense), though in order to actually understand it's inner workings in depth understanding it as x affords us more power to explain and predict how stuff actually goes down".

epistemological pragmatism, yo

>>2677615
Bcause that suggests consciousness is subject to illusion, but is that illusion at the same time. You have an illusion being subject to itself, do you not understand how retarded that is? As if a mirage can perceive itself in the first place, let alone as something other than a mirage.

Descartes covers this when he talks about the one thing he knew he couldn't be deceived of. This is the same man who invents analytical geometry, and has the entire coordinate system named after him, maybe don't count him out just cause he's old.

>>2677579
No, it's an analogy. Consciousness is not an illusion because it is like stage magic, consciousness as is commonly understood can be known to be an illusion because of neurology and psychology, and stage magic is a convenient illustration of the concept. If the "you" was always in control of your actions, why can your future decisions be detected electrically before the "you" is aware of having made the choice?

>>2677671
>As if a mirage can perceive itself in the first place, let alone as something other than a mirage.

But that's the thing, consciousness doesn't perceive itself. Your brain perceives and exhibits that as consciousness.

>>2677671
>>2677677
Also, while I'm at it, Nietzsche tore apart that whole "I think therefore I am" thing in Beyond Good and Evil Pretty well and Cartesian dualism is more or less flatly rejected in philosophy these days.

I don't dismiss him because he's old (I don't dismiss the entirety of his work either) I dismiss these ideas because they're stupid.

Consciousness skeptics, what is your position on intentionality?

>>2677677
>brain perceives and exhibits

What does the brain "exhibit" as consciousness? More specifically, to what is the brain exhibiting it's perceptions in the first place?

Your terms lack the proper definition to be used in sweeping universal statements like "consciousness is an illusion".

>>2677687
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/nietzsche/1886/beyond-good-evil/ch01.htm

Number 16. I'm not sure why Marxists.org would have Nietzsche on it, but there you have it.

>>2677671
>As if a mirage can perceive itself in the first place, let alone as something other than a mirage.
"Perception" is one component (which is itself made of many components) that works together to form a complex overall system. The illusion is that this complex, overall system is an indivisible and irreducible monad that is responsible for the components and behaviours that produce it, rather than the other way around.

>>2677697
>What does the brain "exhibit" as consciousness?

What do you mean?

>More specifically, to what is the brain exhibiting it's perceptions in the first place?

Itself. The brains whole function is to process information, and it exhibits the thought processes behind consciousness to itself to make active thought possible. Your consciousness however is not yourself, and it does not perceive; it is is a secondary product of both your self and your perceptions.

>Your terms lack the proper definition to be used in sweeping universal statements like "consciousness is an illusion".

It's an illusion is the same sense all thoughts are. Again, back to daydreams, are they things of substance in your worldview? Is the graphical user interface of a computer the actual computer itself?

>>2677687
The "Cogito ergo Sum" statement is not from Meditations on First Philosophy.

>Cartesian dualism

That's an entirely different proposition and is raised way after Descartes deals with the problem of certain knowledge. It's his particular attempt to reconcile consciousness with the physical world.

>Nietzsche

Contributed nothing of any relevancy to our discussion.

>X position is wrong because it is dumb.

Literally simple ad hominem.

>>2677720
>Contributed nothing of any relevancy to our discussion.

Except utterly tearing apart this little piece of "certain knowledge." >>2677704

>Literally simple ad hominem.

Mean words are not an ad hominem. My argument against "I think therefore I am" is the same as Nietzsche's.

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>>2677615

They're upset because on some level they know it's true.

Marvin Minsky did a pretty good explanation of why qualia being literal / real things is bullshit in his 'Emotion Machine' book (all the chapters are available online and linked here: http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/). The part that really rang true for me was his "easy is hard" paradox. Basically all the stuff we believe is immediate, irreducible, and pure like what we call "pain" are actually not immediate, not irreducible, and not pure at all, but rather some of the most complicated processes are brains support, and they seem simple and immediate precisely because they're so complicated that it works much better to not have our higher cognitive functions involved in the details. So what we think we're getting is a suspiciously ineffable pure event of "experience."

For a different example, try to think about how difficult it would be if one day you suddenly found yourself needing to consciously and manually coordinate every little detail of how your mouth, tongue, vocal cords, lungs, etc. need work with each other to express each individual syllable of the words you want to use to communicate an idea to someone. And to take it up a notch, imagine you need to consciously / manually review every word and its associated meanings in your memory and pick each one you need to string together a sentence before trying to manually make all the little mouth noises that embody them.

Layers upon layers of essentially impossible tasks is what you end up with. We're only able to function because our brains hide so much of the engine room from us and give us the illusion of control and imminence to keep us from collapsing in horror at the byzantine complexity of the countless little things we need to do each moment to not die.

>>2677720
>Literally simple ad hominem.
Remember >>2677671 where you ended your post with a giant appeal to authority? If you're going to just spout the names of logical fallacies at least be consistent.

>>2677531
> and scientists react with hostilty to people who act on said belief to the detriment of our collective survival. Which was my entire point.

Which is idiotic as the scientists are guilty of the exact same behavior, which was MY entire point. They're not butthurt because people are putting the collective survival of humanity at stake, they're butthurt because their status as the undisputed high priests of society are being challenged.

>Do you really not remember hearing rhetoric like scientists being Gaia cultists for the obsession over global warming, when God is going to rightfully destroy the earth soon anyway in the Tribulation?
No I can't say that I do, outside of memes spread by hysterical secularists anyway.

>>2677586
Vivisecting the human condition in the pursuit of "science" is not "getting things done". It's an artificially selected evolutionary dead end.

>>2677735
>They're upset because on some level they know it's true.

I hate to sound self-serving, but I honestly agree with you. I suspect that the butthurt at this proposition is basically just the last dying gasp of idealistic and spiritualistic thought. Of people desperate to assume that there must be something special to the inner experience of our faculties who desperately want an inner realm where something divine can hide.

>>2677750
>It's an artificially selected evolutionary dead end.

Prove it. Because that's like, just your opinion, man.

>>2677741
Undisputed high priests who can barely get public funding, whose advice is routinely ignored by congress in the drafting of almost any law, and are generally portrayed as out of touch ivory tower idiots who don't understand the real world? What the hell kind of high priest is that?

>No I can't say that I do,
Have a refresher.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/global-warming-god-and-american-complacency/5431171

>>2677729
>it's a contradiction in terms

Nietzsche is utter trash. Garbage tier thinking.

>Mean words are not an ad hominem.

Rejecting an argument with no reason besides "it's dumb" as justification literally is ad hominem. Rejection of a position justified by simple insults and nothing else, the validity of the insult is utterly crucial to the integrity of the rejection. Learn your fallacies.

>>2677718
>it exhibits

I'm not sure you really understand why this single word is fucking up your argument.

>Is the graphical user interface of a computer the actual computer itself?

What a transparent fallacy. Anon preempts you.
>>2676900

>>2677671

>Bcause that suggests consciousness is subject to illusion, but is that illusion at the same time.

This argument always comes up. It's a word game, not a real criticism. There's more than one meaning of "illusion." One meaning is when you're talking about an illusion a person is falling for. That's not the only meaning. The meaning that actually makes 100% sense for the context of what the brain does when we think we're "experiencing qualia" is:

>A false idea or belief.

And you can absolutely have a false idea or belief without needing to have "qualia" be literal things that appear to people. If a cash register scans a can of tuna as though it were sardines, that's an illusion in the same sense. If a self driving car crashes because it sees a white car as though it were a cloud, that's the same sort of illusion too. Most of us would agree the cash register and the self-driving car don't have "qualia." Suppose we're working the same way they are and don't really have "qualia" either but just even more complicated behavioral routines and you get the idea of what it means when people call this an "illusion."

Part of the problem here is that the language / word choices available are themselves the products of this illusion. I really like the example of the word "sunrise" to demonstrate how this works. At some point in human history, it was taken at face value that the sun was a ball of light that rose above us and then fell down below us. Later on, we came to accept we're actually the ones rotating around the sun and the apparent rising and setting it does is an illusion, not a literal reality. Now if I were to travel back in time and explain to someone how the sunrise isn't really the sun rising but instead us moving around the sun giving the illusion of the sun rising, that ancient person would be making a bad argument by hammering on how that doesn't make sense because I already admitted the sun rose by calling it a "sunrise."

>>2677735
>They're upset because on some level they know it's true.

This. It's the same reason the religious hate people who mock their stupidity, deep down they know they;re talking to themselves when they pray, why do you think they;re so quick to jump to "you know in your heart god is real"?Pure projection.

>>2677764
>Nietzsche is utter trash. Garbage tier thinking.
>Bitches about ad hominem
>engages in ad hominem

And before you try to throw my "mean words aren't an ad hominem" back at me, I'll point out you made no actual argument to support your rejection of Nietzsche, and did nothing to address his objections to the statement.

>Learn your fallacies.

You first. I reject it because in large part due to the arguments Nietzsche made, which demonstrate its stupidity.

>I'm not sure you really understand why this single word is fucking up your argument.

Go on, do tell.

>What a transparent fallacy. Anon preempts you.

Except I never claimed the GUI or consciousness aren't real. Just an inaccurate representation of what's actually going on, serving as a functional simplification of the underlying processes.

You're a smug little prick without reason to be so, you know that?

>>2677736

My appeal to authority comes after my main point, is completely tangential and corollary, and is actually justified.

>eat dick faggot

see what I did there? It's not ad hominem because it doesn't have anything to do with my main argument, it's completely extraneous!

>>2677764
>What a transparent fallacy. Anon preempts you.
Not him, but see >>2677708
The analogy isn't what supports the argument, it's an illustration. The evidence is what supports the argument.

>>2677785
Rather, see >>2677676

>>2677781
>My appeal to authority comes after my main point, is completely tangential and corollary, and is actually justified.

No it didn't, no it isn't, and no it wasn't. Your argument was literally "DON'T REJECT DESCARTES HE'S AWESOMER THAN YOU!"

>>2677780
>consciousness is a representation, in fact it's even an inaccurate representation

You don't know what consciousness is, if fact you more than likely have never been conscious in your life. If you have never been conscious, you would have no way of knowing what consciousness is like.

>he thinks I did an ad hom

I just insulted Nietzsche, simply and in literal fashion. As this insult predicates no argument, it cannot be ad hom.

>the arguments Nietzsche made

You couldn't rephrase those arguments in a coherent way to save your life. You're literally a sophomore year philosophy major.

>>2675368

Most of what you think of as "thinking" is actually handled by the hypothalamus, a tiny nut-sized organ at the base of your brain. Some asshole did some research on cats, seeing how much of their brains they could remove without the cat dying / becoming comatose, and found that it's pretty much the whole thing. Even if you remove the whole brain apart from the hypothalamus, the cat still walks, meows, eats, cleans itself, and in general behaves just like a regular cat. It can't work out novel solutions to problems anymore, but if you didn't know it was missing its brain you'd never guess.

>>2677795

He is more awesome than you, and Nietzsche too. Most people are in fact.

>>2675383
>qualia

I'll have an extra-mocha latte with a bran muffin, please.

>>2677801
That's not strictly accurate. Most of what humans classify as thinking is done in the neocortex. But most things required to actually live is handled by much older structures like the hypothalamus and brainstem. The cat likely could do most of the instinctual things needed to actually survive and any memorized action like licking, but much of the "thinking" would be missing (as you said, it couldn't work out novel solutions.)

>>2675395
>I think that consciousness is not an emergent property.

Why would you think this, when it so obviously IS an emergent property?

>Although alternatively consciousness could be some sternal agent interacting at the interface between mind (the emergent property of brain activity) and soul (whatever the fuck it is that consciousness comes from).

What a stupid claim.

>>2675397

Our experiences are an extremely poor guide to reality-as-it-is. We experience tables as solid, for example, when they're actually mostly empty space.

>>2677799
>You don't know what consciousness is, if fact you more than likely have never been conscious in your life. If you have never been conscious, you would have no way of knowing what consciousness is like.
>Everyone who disagrees with me is a p-zombie!

Kek. Very classy.

>I just insulted Nietzsche, simply and in literal fashion. As this insult predicates no argument, it cannot be ad hom.

You rejected his arguments out of hand with an attack on his character. That's textbook you little shit.

>You couldn't rephrase those arguments in a coherent way to save your life. You're literally a sophomore year philosophy major.

I've never been formally educated in philosophy, sue me.

>>2677802
You're possibly the worst witness of anti-physicalist thought I've ever seen.

>>2677825
>You rejected his arguments

I never said that. To compare, you specifically said "I dismiss these ideas because they're stupid."

>never been formally educated in philosophy

no way

>>2677838
>I never said that. To compare, you specifically said "I dismiss these ideas because they're stupid."

As demonstrated by those arguments, you goddamn moron. Are you retarded or something?

>>2675410
>with the definitions becoming arbitrary.

No. The definitions are ALWAYS arbitrary, there's nothing magical about the fringe areas where multiple definitions overlap. A virus isn't alive because we define "alive" to include "must be able to self-replicate", which a virus can't (it needs a host to replicate itself). There's no magical reason why "must be able to self-replicate" makes the difference between alive and unliving, it was added to the definition in order to exclude things like viruses and prions, but we could just as easily not include that criteria and "suddenly" viruses would be "alive", thanks to the magic of our (arbitrary) definition.

>>2677825
>You're possibly the worst witness of anti-physicalist thought I've ever seen.
I have a feeling it's the same guy who claims that life is miraculous/the purpose of the universe because the conditions of the universe allow for it, and when it's pointed out that the conditions of the universe also allow for everything else, like planets, he gets belligerent and claims everyone who disagrees with him is just a moron.

>>2677845
He can't be. He hasn't called any of us a brainlet or said LMAO yet.

>>2675422
>Bhikkhus, for a virtuous person, one whose behavior is virtuous, no volition need be exerted: ‘Let non-regret arise in me.’ It is natural that non-regret arises in a virtuous person, one whose behavior is virtuous.

Bullshit. Plenty of good people nonetheless have regrets, in fact there's no obvious relationship between acting in accordance with your moral precepts and regret.

>>2675424
>quailia

No such thing, there is no part of the brain that holds ideas such as "redness".

>>2677763
>What the hell kind of high priest is that?
The kind of high priest that's been the norm for the bulk of human history. The kind that has to continuously justify his funding to the princes of the world. The interests of priestly castes haves always taken a backseat to the interests of the warrior caste and other secular authorities. Even the most magnificent temples are a single facet of a much larger prosperous secular city.

>a refresher
Like I said memes spread by hysterical secularists. Feel free to blame Genesis verses for China's heedless march to industrialization, but don't expect anyone to take you seriously.

>>2677842
>those arguments

You don't even understand the basic thrust of those arguments. Someone just told you Nietzsche btfo Descartes so now you believe it.

>>2677854
How do we identify red objects in the world, or imagine a red object?

>>2677671
>>2677768

And to expand on this further, those two examples of the cash register and the self-driving car were both problematic illusions, while our "qualia" illusion is useful. So I ought to provide one more example of a non-human illusion that's similarly useful rather than problematic (because I'm pretty sure someone's typing up this exact complaint right now.

At the company I work at, I found myself needing to add a ton of orders to our system of record, but didn't have access to an API to do this in a straightforward way (and while I could theoretically just write the data directly to the production tables, editing production tables yourself instead of using an API is a good way to accidentally ruin everything).

My solution was to implement a useful illusion. Specifically, I took an application agents at my company use to submit orders one at a time, reproduced the code it runs when they hit the submit button, and wrote a program that executes this code across a population of many different accounts. No one was actually writing an order and hitting the submit button each time an order was added through this approach, but the illusion of this happening is what allowed thousands of orders to enter the system despite not having an API to do this with and while preserving the integrity of the production tables by not tampering with them directly myself.

Our "qualia" illusion is useful and false. We're made to behave in convenient ways by our brain merely leading us to believe X happened. This allows for more complicated behavioral routines than if all of our behavior were purely instinctual. It's useful for us to be influenced into doing all the things we do when we're under the impression we're "in pain." We don't always react exactly the same way, but the gist of what we do works well. We might get ourselves attention by yelling or more subtly by just looking like we're "not feeling well" so someone else can get us to a hospital.

>>2676793

He asked for YOUR opinion you dumb cunt. Use your words, or fuck off.

>>2677609
>Hurr I was only pretending to be a retarded faggot!

That's nice. Now fuck off.

>>2677609

Meet >>2677635

It is literally impossible to detect sarcasm when the thing you write is something many idiots legitimately believe.

>>2677864
So when you said "undisputed high priests of society," what you actually meant was "highly-disputed people nobody ever actually listens to?" You should have just said so, it would have saved us both a lot of time.

>Like I said memes spread by hysterical secularists.
Did the actions described occur or not? Yes or no?
>Feel free to blame Genesis verses for China's heedless march to industrialization
No, I'd blame China's heedless march to industrialization on a combination of the cultural revolution (which was indeed secular despite the deification of the leaders) but also to the underlying current of thought that China is somehow special as reflected in both very early creation myth and further religious/philosophical (the two are more intertwined outside our particular tradition) developments throughout the age. The idea of a Century of Humiliation, for example, can only really emerge from being confronted with the reality that you aren't magically above everyone else. Christianity is most relevant to us because America dis proportionally affects the rest of the world, especially the anglosphere, but I already said it wasn't limited to them.

>>2677865
No. I used to share Descartes' opinion, and ultimately found Nietzsche's tear down of that particular "certainty" to be quite spot-on when I read Beyond Good and Evil.

I'm not even a particularly large fan of Nietzsche otherwise, since I think a lot of his philosophy is an asshole factory, you butthurt lunatic.

>>2677819

My point is that you don't need much brain to select a mate on the basis of his conspicuous profligacy (as peahens do with their mates).

>>2677735
>We're only able to function because our brains hide so much of the engine room from us and give us the illusion of control and imminence to keep us from collapsing in horror at the byzantine complexity of the countless little things we need to do each moment to not die.

Which then raises the question of why materialists are so adamant about stripping away the very things that keep us from "collapsing in horror at the byzantine complexity" of our existence and allow us to function.

The most galling part is how they mock people who are outraged by their actions. They're like madmen giggling at the screams and feeble resistance of their victims as they skin them alive.

>>2677885
>How is this organ that serves a major function in processing information and coordinating bodily functions anything at all like a machine that can be used for similar tasks with machines? What an idiotic notion!

Physicalists may be soulless, but at least they aren't assholes.

File: these dogs are the same color.jpg (36KB, 500x287px) Image search: [Google]

36KB, 500x287px

>>2677866

Our brains reconstruct "redness" from a variety of cues, including the wavelength of the light reflecting off an object but also a number of secondary cues, too. This is why "color illusions" work, where two colors next to each other look "wrong" because the illusion is tricking these secondary cues. If quailia were real, then "color illusions" couldn't exist.

>>2677910

They aren't morons either, which is why no-one who studies the brain compares it to a computer. They're completely different from the ground up.

>>2677908
Knowing the function of every single muscle in the tongue and how it modulates sound doesn't actually make talking more difficult, the way it would if you had to consciously control them. Likewise, getting down to the truth of how the brain works (and it is material) isn't going to do much but make brain surgery less risky.

>>2677908

>Which then raises the question of why materialists are so adamant about stripping away the very things that keep us from "collapsing in horror at the byzantine complexity" of our existence and allow us to function.

That's fair, anon.

To answer your question, it's not because of sadism. On an individual basis yes, you wouldn't want to strip away all the convenient mechanisms that keep you from collapsing in horror at the byzantine complexity of existence. But at the collective level, it's extremely useful to go past the illusion and learn how things actually work, in limited ways, not all at once just by one person, but through multiple disciplines of scientific inquiry, gradually over time. It'd be psychotic to go around hyper-aware of all the details that happen in our bodies from moment to moment, but you definitely want some people working on these topics at reasonable doses so we can get new technology / medical treatments produced for example.

>>2677924
In what way? In broad strokes, they both process information and coordination functions from that.

Dennett studies the brain and he compares it to a computer.

>>2677943
The brain and a computer can be compared in the broadest analogical sense, what with the distinction between working memory and long term memory. But once you get down into the actual functioning of neurons vs semiconductors the similarities break down quickly. The closest thing in computing is the idea of a neural net, which more closely emulates the way neurons connect to and influence the firing of each other, but even that is in its relative infancy.

>>2677888
>So when you said "undisputed high priests of society," what you actually meant was "highly-disputed people nobody ever actually listens to?"

No I meant exactly what I said. You're the one making the claim that an undisputed high-priest must somehow also be an ultimate secular authority. Just because the Pope is the undisputed head of the Catholic church has very rarely meant the various Catholic rulers of Europe have been willing to submit their wills to his authority without question. Did the Pope suddenly stop being the undisputed high-priest of Rome when Henry the VIIIth founded the Church of England?

>but also to the underlying current of thought that China is somehow special as reflected in both very early creation myth and further religious/philosophical (the two are more intertwined outside our particular tradition) developments throughout the age.
So in other words it's a phenomenon that exists in a society entirely divorced from the religious and philosophical principles our society was founded upon.

Apparently this isn't an example of parallel evolution though it's an example of ideological creationism the mean old ancient priests of ancient China pulled out of a hat to make life difficult for "scientists" in the 21st century.

>>2677965
Ok, and I don't think anyone compares the brain to a computer in anything but the broadest strokes; using it at best as a convenient analogy to explain a conclusion.

>>2677967
>Did the Pope suddenly stop being the undisputed high-priest of Rome when Henry the VIIIth founded the Church of England?

He did stop being the high priest of society when the reformation happened. An authority without authority is not an authority.

>>2677967
>Did the Pope suddenly stop being the undisputed high-priest of Rome when Henry the VIIIth founded the Church of England?
He stopped being the undisputed high priest for the English, yes.

>So in other words it's a phenomenon that exists in a society entirely divorced from the religious and philosophical principles our society was founded upon.
Yes, but it is deeply entwined with religious principles. I never said it was exclusive to America, I said it was disproportionate in the specific context of American politics.

>Apparently this isn't an example of parallel evolution though it's an example of ideological creationism the mean old ancient priests of ancient China pulled out of a hat to make life difficult for "scientists" in the 21st century.
No, but the reason scientists are "hostile" to religion is because in certain contexts it promotes behaviours and attitudes actively hostile to humanitiy's survival. This has been my point in this entire conversation, and I have no idea where you're getting this. I'm not sure who you're arguing with because it certainly doesn't seem to be me.

>>2677943

Computers aren't nearly as bad of an analogy for the brain as people will scream at you nowadays whenever this topic comes up. It's a case of someone making a valid criticism of the way everyone would equate brains with computers and then this criticism becoming a cliche / meme so that now everyone's trained to spew out a really shallow version of that initially valid criticism every time any sort of computer talk comes up.

Similar to the 'gender isn't biological' meme. It's like "yes, we get it, this 0.00000001% of the population has this genetic abnormality where they have a Y chromosome and a vagina at the same time." But at the same time, "no, sex vs. gender isn't nearly as important of a distinction as you're making it out to be and the old fashioned, common sense notion of two category males and females as determined by biology is still plenty valid the vast majority of the time.

It's good to know there are some major differences in how computers are built and how they run vs. how brains form and how they operate. But they still serve as a really good high level analogue to the brain because in both cases you have a physical thing that responds to stimuli, transforms information, and produces output / reporting behavior. The fact our brains don't use floating point arithmetic is beside the point in most contexts where people are trying to make use of this similarity between the two objects.

>>2677971

YOU might not but "people" do this all the time. It's a poor analogy because it breaks down almost immediately under consideration, AND because it primes people to have a wildly wrong idea of how the brain works.

>>2677929
>It's not sadism
It's worse than sadism, at least the sadist gets off on causing suffering.

>It'd be psychotic to go around hyper-aware of all the details that happen in our bodies from moment to moment, but you definitely want some people working on these topics at reasonable doses so we can get new technology / medical treatments produced for example.

No I wouldn't, because some fancy new technology and medical treatments aren't worth a society that doesn't place a value on human life, individuality, or self determination. I'm not interested in a society where the perception of injustice can be cured with a pill thanks to neuroscientists isolating the exact mechanism behind the sensation.

The idea of being reduced to a machine by some elite "people working on these topics at reasonable doses" (especially when these "reasonable doses" are determined by the exact same people) doesn't appeal to me as I've seen how humanity treats machines.

>>2677971

See >>2678001

Morons like this are everywhere, they hear "the brain is like a computer" and they don't analyse what, exactly, this analogy means, they take it more or less literally and build completely idiotic understandings of the brain from it.

>>2678017

I told you exactly what it means:

>in both cases you have a physical thing that responds to stimuli, transforms information, and produces output / reporting behavior

How could you possibly disagree with either computers or brains meeting those criteria? I also specifically pointed out it was a high level comparison.

>>2677986
>No, but the reason scientists are "hostile" to religion is because in certain contexts it promotes behaviours and attitudes actively hostile to humanitiy's survival.

And as I keep pointing out most scientists don't have a problem with promoting behaviors and attitudes hostile to humanity's survival.

I don't think you grasp why I compare scientists to high-priest and think I'm just being some butthurt theist complaining about "scientism" (and truthfully I am in a way but not for the reasons you probably think). I call scientists high-priests s because they both occupy the same role in a society. The priests of the ancient world didn't hold power because they managed to bamboozle the chieftains of their societies. They held power is because they studied the stars, kept track of the calendar, and augured the signs the chieftains used to plan their futures. A high-priest only held power so long as he was considered useful by the actual rulers of society. Just like the scientists of today who only seem to get funding when it's in the interests of the politicians they beg from.

Now you may argue that science does it better but I'm sure the priests felt the same way about the shamans they'd replaced.

>>2678090

So vague as to be meaningless. It's a terrible analogy because morons don't treat it as "high level comparison" but as "analogy", which leads to moronic myths and stupid malformed questions such as "what's the TB storage capacity of the brain" and "what's the brains cpu speed" and similar stupidity, which could all be avoided by simply not using such an idiotic comparison in the first place.

>>2678097
>They held power is because they studied the stars, kept track of the calendar, and augured the signs the chieftains used to plan their futures.
If the high priest had a better method for charting the calendar and was able to prevent famine by careful observation of the river flooding vs the calendar, then good. May whatever happens to replace contemporary science be that much of an improvement.

>>2678124

>leads to moronic myths and stupid malformed questions such as "what's the TB storage capacity of the brain" and "what's the brains cpu speed"

That's not the fault of the analogy, that's the fault of people not understanding analogies are never 100% one to one mappings of every detail of the two things you're relating. If brains and computers were exactly the same then you wouldn't be able to use one as an analogy for another in the first place. Analogies only have any sort of utility at all if the two things you're comparing aren't completely identical. You wouldn't gain anything by using electricity as an analogy for electricity for example. You would gain something by comparing electricity with water flow, not in spite of the two being different but *because* the two are different. The whole point of an analogy is to find something more familiar that's different from but sharing some qualities with the initial topic so we can use it as a tool to make certain aspects of that initial topic easier to understand. Just because you use water flow to help make electricity's behavior easier to understand doesn't mean it'd make sense to expect electricity to be wet or to evaporate at high temperatures.

>>2677081

But I do.

>>2677872

My views would require several dozen pages to even summarize, an effort I'm really not about to expend for anyone's benefit but my own.

>>2675349
>Redpill me on consciousness, /sci/.
It was a mistake.

>>2677189

It's not. I figured you'd take it as such, however, blinkered as you are by the terms of the ridiculous debate you've decided to throw yourself into.

Husserlian phenomenology takes phenomenal objects to be real but not analyzable in terms of natural science, as it's not a 'physical' object. It needn't even be an actual object; imaginary tables are just as 'real' intentional objects as a table that sits before you.

Do you see how Husserl completely sidesteps the dichotomy Dennett and Chalmers have set up? If not, you needed to go bank and read the article.

>>2678613

Bingo.

>>2678597

Participate in the discussion or don't. It's not helping anyone for you to go "you didn't disprove my secret argument that nobody will ever see, just trust me that it's right."

>>2678614

>Husserlian phenomenology takes phenomenal objects to be real
>not analyzable in terms of natural science
>It needn't even be an actual object; imaginary tables are just as 'real' intentional objects as a table that sits before you.

That just takes the word "real" and redefines it to the point of not having meaning anymore.

>Do you see how Husserl completely sidesteps the dichotomy Dennett and Chalmers have set up?

I see how he's not really saying anything at all, so in a way I guess you could call not saying anything at all a distinct third take on this topic.

>>2675387

This definition of conciousness uses the word concious to define itsself, I belive that that makes it a tautology and therefore falsifiable and a weak arguement.

>>2678622

I made a gesture toward any entire field of philosophy that attempted to resolve the 'problem' under 'discussion' in this thread. Where it doesn't succeed, it fails in spectacular and fruitful ways, unlike in this shit-flinging contest.

>>2678631

While you're reading the article you might also consider taking the time to examine the roots of these words we all love to throw around so much, without really understanding what they mean. Start with 'real'.

>>2675390

Don't forget not every human can see, see color, see contrast between red and green, or see the innumeral gradients of "visible" wavelengths.

>>2678637

You're wrong, and I'd explain why, but my sophisticated views picked up from years of studying plato.stanford.edu and wikipedia would require several dozen pages to even summarize so you'll just have to trust me.

>>2678643

I majored in linguistics. You haven't made a single good point yet FYI.

>>2678648

My loss, then.

>>2678652
>I majored in linguistics.

lol

>>2678658

It's not that bad, I got a real job after college, not a linguistics job. Just pointing out he's wrong for assuming he has a great argument that we're just failing to see because we don't know enough about etymology.

>>2678660

I'm not posing an argument; I'm directing you to a rich field of philosophical inquiry. I don't give a flying fuck of you think I'm right or not, as I haven't presented you with any of my own ideas.

>>2678675

Yes, thank you for linking to plato.stanford.edu, nobody has ever seen that website before and it totally doesn't come up on the first page of every cursory philosophy google search you could make. Fuck off, idiot. You're not trying to help anyone, you're trying to make yourself feel good by dropping condescending posts about your amazing secret point of view that you conveniently can't pin down to any claims of substance.

>>2678711

Would you rather start with Logical Investigations I?

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/Editors%2520IntroductionHusserlLogical-Investigations%25202001.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwjMkJirp63TAhVLxFQKHT-KCLIQFgiLATAT&usg=AFQjCNFQN4qnjvCcl3jjCV7reJ-5yOjb6A&sig2=-uzHcaziSfzWRZtFtBrGGQ

>>2675432
I appreciate your thoughtful responses to what I had to say.

>>2678724

I'd rather you make an actual claim instead of hiding behind links to books and philosophy summary pages.

We can all shitpost external links while not saying anything of substance, it doesn't really get you anywhere. But OK, you're wrong because https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/ and http://s-f-walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/pdfs/Gilbert_Ryle_The_Concept_of_Mind.pdf and I won't explain but learn from the rich links I've posted so you can start seeing things how I do since I understand this and you don't based on secret arguments I won't post here.

So fucking obnoxious, it's almost a little depressing to learn there are people like you who prefer being cryptic bullshitters over having a real discussion. Fucking disgusting.

>>2678752

I've already read what you've posted, though, and the discussion you are trying to have is vacuous given the conceptual framework you've set up. I won't participate in empty bloviating.

>>2678763

Projecting pretty hard there, you're the poster of least substance in this thread e.g. you just made a post consisting of three redundant ways for calling something empty.

>>2678779

Astute observation! You almost understand irony! Golly.

>>2678010
You're making a ridiculous emotional leap in assuming that understanding the physical mechanisms behind the brain is a stepping stone to not valuing human life.

>>2675810
>let's just stick with objective facts. Lo and behold we find no subjective facts! Where is subjectivity? All I see objectively is people claiming subjectivity, but objectively I refer to no such subjectivity. Look at me I've disproved subjectivity.

>>2679666

None of that is really wrong. Objectively what you have is the behavior of reporting "experience," not any literal "experience" thing. It'd just sound a little better not to phrase it as "disproving" subjectivity and to instead describe it as cutting subjectivity back down to its actual size. The reporting behavior ("I'm in pain") and the other non-verbal behaviors (tensing up, groaning, limping, etc.) combined with the non-behavioral physiological processes that happen when "experience" is reported are perfectly capable of existing without there being any literal "experience" thing floating there along with everything else. All that's required is that we behave / believe / speak in reference to abstract fictions. The brain can have us believing we're "experiencing" something so we have this point of reference to behave around, and nothing is added by having this point of reference be an actual thing.

Our belief we actually are experiencing qualia because it seems real to us isn't evidence of anything except that we've been compelled to believe in this. We can be made to believe in all sorts of things with a very strong sense of certainty. If anything, I'd consider the stuff we feel extra certain about the most suspect since a good process for having us believe in something that isn't there would probably do well to crank up the emotional conviction to make up for the target of that belief not being there in reality.

>>2678827
>It's ridiculous to believe that people will actually apply the knowledge they gain from demystifying the human condition.

Lets pretend for a moment that we know exactly how the human mind works, there is no soul, free will doesn't exist, consciousness is an illusion that can be manipulated at will, etc. It's all just chemical reactions, and physical properties, like an internal combustion engine.

Aside from romantic idealism or spiritual nostalgia, what logical or economic justification can you provide to argue that human life should be treated differently from any other machine?
"It makes me feel bad to see humans treated like garbage" is not a logical argument, especially in a world where there's a pill or an app to make that feeling of discomfort go away..

>>2677918
>If quailia were real, then "color illusions" couldn't exist.
More like if quailia weren't real, the concept of color illusions couldn't exist

>>2680331
It doesn't need to be a logical argument, basic emotional ones work fine. Logic is only good for understanding logic.

>>2680157

lol at 'beliefs', which go right out the window with 'subjectivity'.

>>2680561
>basic emotional ones work fine.
Didn't you just deride my complaint as being a "ridiculous emotional leap"?

>>2680935

Beliefs can be described objectively very easily. You do it all the time in game theory.

>>2681785

You're a fucking dullard, dude.

>>2681793

Cool non-argument.

>>2681797
>>2681785

Let's take game theory as an example. Standard prisoner's dilemma. Two agents, each must determine the intention of the other without direct observation of their behavior, to inform their own decision, and so on.

This seems to require the agents to impute belief states onto each other, i.e. it presupposes a theory of mind that can determine such belief states independent of observation, i.e. a theory of subjectivity.

What's your 'objective' resolution?

>>2681893

My 'resolution' is to point out that you're overrating what a belief is. You probably wouldn't consider a modern video game AI capable of having subjectivity and they can be seen as having beliefs. If the character attacks when it believes it heard you trying to sneak by but just stands there passively if it doesn't hear you, then there's your objectively explicable belief system. The belief is information which influences an agent's behavior. None of that requires us to invoke some dualist subjective 'experience' phenomenon.

>>2681936

Except we're not dealing with AI sprites; we're dealing with humans, a different 'species' of intelligent agent. And the information available to each agent is, basically, wholly imaginary, though much of it is related to assumed 'states of affairs'. So that's 'information' sui generis, as it doesn't 'exist' beyond the 'mental projection' of it.

How does your theory account for imagination, by the way?

>>2681936

While we're at it, though, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the 'experience' of the AI. Certainly it's of a different character than a human being's, or an owl's, or a quasar's. But it impinges upon its 'environment' in a given way, just like these other things. It encounters objects as objects, even if they are 'only' 'really' strings of code (much like you and I).

>>2681973

>And the information available to each agent is, basically, wholly imaginary

I think you're overrating privacy. Telephone lines are private, and they're definitely not a super-objective / super-material philosophical mystery. Beliefs are just private information. So maybe party B doesn't have access to party A's belief. But all that really means is there's a piece of information that isn't in range of another person's eyes or ears.

And no, the person holding that belief doesn't need qualia to see or hear that private information. They just need to have behavior that's influenced by information. Vending machines meet that criteria. If you slide your credit card in one, different sorts of behavior are produced depending on what information that card gave to it. We're more complicated than a vending machine, but we still abide by the basics of cause and effect. It's just that our causes and effects from the point of information input to the point of behavioral output involves a massively larger network of intermediate steps.

>How does your theory account for imagination, by the way?

"The lady wasn't really sawed in half, you were just led to believe she was." - Dennett on how a philosopher would explain a magic trick.

We don't really have literal phantasms of visual imagery, we're just compelled to believe and behave as though we do. It's similar to the considerations that went into building the self-driving cars that are getting more mainstream now. The self-driving cars don't need to have literal phantasms of visual imagery, they just need to behave in reference to visual data. And like us, they sometimes need to communicate information about this data. So they're compelled to use the convenient abstract fiction of imagery to make this communication happen. No one has programmed imagery itself into their car 'minds'. They've merely been constructed to make some use of the same abstract referencing trick we've evolved to make use of.

>if brains weren't magic then they couldn't do anything
& Humanities was a mistake.

>>2682057

>I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the 'experience' of the AI.

Yeah, that's definitely an argument that's been made before, although it isn't a very popular one. Ever read 'What it is like to be a Thermostat'?

http://consc.net/notes/lloyd-comments.html

I think it's the logically consistent place dualists should find themselves if they're honest about what the concept of qualia as literal / real things entails. I also think it's pretty ridiculous though. It's like OK, now computers and worms and bacteria and thermostats and every other possible grouping of one or more atom has its own literal phantasms of mental 'experience'. And this thing they all have doesn't provide any utility that can't be reproduced by an identical world without it per the philosophical zombie argument that's supposed to convince us this thing exists in the first place (e.g. in one world there's a worm that 'feels' getting stepped on while in a parallel zombie world the zombie counterpart to that worm makes the outwardly identical behaviors of feeling with no corresponding qualia). I don't know, I really think when you get to this point you should at least be considering the possibility that maybe the reason this concept is conveniently beyond any sort of scientific inquiry and can be completely removed from the equation without any impact on evolutionary fitness or any difference at all that could ever be noticed in an objective comparison between the two is because it never existed in the first place.

>>2682184
>But all that really means is there's a piece of information that isn't in range of another person's eyes or ears.
>And no, the person holding that belief doesn't need qualia to see or hear that private information. They just need to have behavior that's influenced by information

Action at a distance! Amazing.

Humans might not 'need' experience to behave 'efficaciously', much like they don't 'need' an appendix to digest food. Yet they have appendices, and they have experiences. This appeal to a lack of 'need' isn't doing anything for you.

You aren't a vending machine, or a self- driving car. You encounter the world in a different way than these things, regardless of what you suppose is minimally 'necessary' for that encountering.

>>2682238

>Action at a distance

?

>they don't 'need' an appendix

Phantasms of extra-physical imagery are vestigial organs now? I have a much better explanation: We're compelled to report and behave in certain ways in response to sensory stimuli. The reports and behavior (and underlying physiology) are the whole story. We won't get anywhere searching for the new physics of 'what it's like to feel sand under your feet' because that isn't a real thing; the behavior of speaking in terms of that abstract concept is the real thing. The fact we're compelled to report having interactions with these abstract concepts isn't evidence of those abstract concepts being real. It's evidence there's reporting behavior.

>>2682217
>maybe the reason this concept is conveniently beyond any sort of scientific inquiry and can be completely removed from the equation without any impact on evolutionary fitness or any difference at all that could ever be noticed in an objective comparison between the two is because it never existed in the first place.

Or maybe evolutionary theory isn't the sine qua non for explaining reality.

>>2682288

It's not a better explanation, it's merely one that avoids an actual explanation. Even in the case of perceptual illusion--which is for whatever reason held up as this great defeating example of the unreality of experience--there is a 'what it's like to x'; namely, what it's like to be deceived. 'To be deceived about x' presupposes an 'aboutness' capable of deception.

>>2682330

>'To be deceived about x' presupposes an 'aboutness' capable of deception.

Word game, not a real argument. Yes, you can create (or make use of a preexisting) definition of deception that requires qualia. But A) that's not the only definition of deception there is and B) if you accept qualia isn't literally real and that the concept of it comes from how our brains use abstract fictions as reference points to get us to behave in useful ways, then you also need to accept that our language will be riddled with the same false but useful belief in these abstract fictions.

Goes back to the sunrise example. If we went back, back to the past (samurai jack) and tried to explain to an ancient person that sunrises don't involve literal rising of the sun because we're actually revolving around it and not the other way around, that ancient person would be making a bad argument by going "AHA, you don't even believe that yourself! Obviously it must be the case that the sun literally rises because sunrises presuppose a sun that rises! It's right there in the word 'sunrise', that's what that word means!"

What we know better about that situation with the sunrise is that the word and its apparent implication of a sun rising aren't evidence of geocentrism but instead evidence of geocentric belief influencing language. Same thing with the apparent requirement you need a 'qualia' / 'what it's like' state in order to be 'deceived'. That's not evidence of dualism but instead evidence of dualistic belief influencing language.

>>2682311

You don't need to focus on evolutionary biology to come to that same conclusion. Just change:

>maybe the reason this concept is conveniently beyond any sort of scientific inquiry and can be completely removed from the equation without any impact on evolutionary fitness or any difference at all that could ever be noticed in an objective comparison between the two is because it never existed in the first place.

To:

>maybe the reason this concept is conveniently beyond any sort of scientific inquiry and can be completely removed from the equation without any impact on physiology or outward behavior or any difference at all that could ever be noticed in an objective comparison between the two is because it never existed in the first place.

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>>2675385
This is why you don't let STEMlord functionalists do philosophy

>>2682398

No, see, you're making it into a word game by a further abstraction. I'm referring to an 'actual ' deception.

So, Three Card Molly. I am presented with a card and told to keep track of it. It is placed face down alongside two other cards and then shuffled about. I think I've managed to keep track of my card, and when the time comes to pick it out I did so with confidence, only to find that I an wrong. Further, if I were to flip overt all three cards, I would realize that none of them are my card. The card that was presented to me as my own was sequestered in a sleight of hand and replaced with another. My card was never on the table, even though I thought it was. Even so, I had a rather vivid experience trying to keep track of what I took to be my card. My pulse rate increased, my eyes flickered back and forth, I tensed my neck and shoulders--all things that could be measured by instruments, but that were also felt by myself. So, even though I was mistaken in my belief that my card was on the table, I still experienced the cards on the table.

Qualities aren't abstractions. They're as concrete encounters of things as are possible, the prime order of objects 'for us 'in' consciousness. By referring to them as abstractions toy have altered the terms such that we aren't even talking about the same order of 'things' any longer.

>>2682437

I tend to trust the STEM fag a little more than the philosophy fag since unlike with philosophy you're actually required to understand what you're doing and to implement ideas that are coherent and productive.

>STEM anon tries to run an incoherent program.
>Nothing happens because it's incoherent so he goes back and fixes it until it works.

>Philosophy anon submits an incoherent paper.
>He's given an award for postmodern publication of the year.

>>2682437
Because they reveal how petty and pointless your lives are?

>>2682418

I know.

If you're going to go the reductionist route, why stop at human-level objects? Molecules don't need human beings to form bonds with one another. Humans are just a fictitious abstraction to account for certain agglomerations of compounds, and have no reality in themselves.

>>2682494

>I'm referring to an 'actual ' deception.

I'm disagreeing your definition of 'deception' is actual deception. I'll work with your example though to continue along the same line as the argument I've already given you which explains why deception doesn't require qualia to be literal real things.

>I am presented with a card and told to keep track of it.
Visual stimuli (no qualia required), auditory stimuli (no qualia required), information storage (no qualia required).
>It is placed face down alongside two other cards and then shuffled about. I think I've managed to keep track of my card, and when the time comes to pick it out I did so with confidence, only to find that I an wrong.
Information recall (no qualia required), behavior in response to information (no qualia required), behavior in response to conflict of information recalled vs. information from new sensory stimuli (no qualia required).
>Further, if I were to flip overt all three cards, I would realize that none of them are my card.
Behavior in response to sensory stimuli and information recall (no qualia required).
>The card that was presented to me as my own was sequestered in a sleight of hand and replaced with another. My card was never on the table, even though I thought it was.
Logical inference (no qualia required).
>Even so, I had a rather vivid experience trying to keep track of what I took to be my card.
***Information / behavior in response to information referencing abstract fiction of 'experience' (no qualia required).
>My pulse rate increased, my eyes flickered back and forth, I tensed my neck and shoulders--all things that could be measured by instruments,
Physiology (no qualia required).
>but that were also felt by myself.
See***
>So, even though I was mistaken in my belief that my card was on the table,
Behavior in response to conflict between information recalled vs. information from new sensory stimuli (no qualia required).
>I still experienced the cards on the table
See ***

>>2682538
>Humans are just a fictitious abstraction to account for certain agglomerations of compounds, and have no reality in themselves.
You phrased this as a joke but it is more accurate than you might think. "Human" relies on a fairly arbitrary categorization of "species" which relies on a fairly arbitrary categorization of "life" etc. These are all actually just convenient definitions that happen to be useful but don't necessarily reflect reality at its most fundamental. Like the distinction between a chair and a stool.

>>2682538

>Humans are just a fictitious abstraction to account for certain agglomerations of compounds, and have no reality in themselves.

The concept of 'human' isn't a physical object, sure. What the concept refers to is a grouping of physical objects though, which is more than can be said for 'qualia'. Basically you're playing on confusion between the concept of 'human' vs. the physical thing that concept refers to and trying to make the unreality of the former imply an unreality for the latter, whereas with 'qualia', there is no physical thing the concept refers to. The concept of 'qualia' isn't a physical object *and* the abstract fiction that concept refers to isn't a physical object either. Which is why it makes sense to be opposed to the notion 'qualia' are literal real things while also not opposed to the notion 'humans' are literal real things.

>>2682611

Missed the point again. Oh well.

Since we're going this route, I'll refer you to one of my own posts:>>2682238
>Humans might not 'need' experience to behave 'efficaciously', much like they don't 'need' an appendix to digest food. Yet they have appendices, and they have experiences. This appeal to a lack of 'need' isn't doing anything for you.

I didn't 'need' to 'experience' the game of Three Card Molly in order to be relieved of some of my cash. Yet there it was, the game, and myself, encountering the game.

The light didn't necessarily need to reflect off the back of the cards in such a way as to remind me of my grandmother's hands, the papery look of her skin, and the sound of her finger joints lightly crackling as she shuffled a deck for another round of Bridge, seated in her parlour in her condo in Iowa City, some late afternoon in August. Yet there it was.

>>2682538
>>2682613

It's mereological nihilism that you're talking about.

>>2682613

Yet there you are, typing away, phantasmally.

>>2682647

>Yet there it was

You're confusing being compelled to believe in something with evidence for that something. You don't have actual evidence your belief in having had an 'experience' is indicative of literally having had a non-physical 'experience' thing that exists as some real object we need a new science to understand. There's a way less crazy alternative explanation where your reporting behavior is just reporting behavior and good old fashioned physics and causality are still doing a pretty good job explaining how the world works.

>>2682646

I've never claimed qulaities to be objects, though they can be taken as (logical) objects. They are what inhere in objects, when encountered in such and such a way.

>>2682669
See
>>2682673
And
>>2682494
>Qualities aren't abstractions. They're as concrete encounters of things as are possible, the prime order of objects 'for us 'in' consciousness. By referring to them as abstractions toy have altered the terms such that we aren't even talking about the same order of 'things' any longer.

>>2682658
>phantasmally
Certain divisions of reality are arbitrary but are used for practical purposes != reality doesn't exist.
Conciousness and qualia, as concepts, exist for specific cultural and historical reasons, and do not reflect the underlying reality of how brains actually work. Sort of like the modern concept of race, versus genetic ethnicity which is much more complicated and only intersects with what is percieved as race in limited ways.

>>2682673

>(logical objects)

That sounds close enough to my argument that qualia are abstract fictions.

>inhere in objects

That sounds less close, but you haven't made an argument for why inhering in objects should be the case so I won't bother trying to argue against it. You're welcome to give me an argument if you want though.

>>2682669
>some real object we need a new science to understand

You didn't read the article, did you?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/

>>2682678

>Qualities aren't abstractions.
>They're as concrete encounters of things as are possible, the prime order of objects 'for us 'in' consciousness.
>By referring to them as abstractions toy have altered the terms such that we aren't even talking about the same order of 'things' any longer.

Stating claims isn't the same as making an argument for those claims. What are your arguments for each of these claims being true?

>>2682689

Use your words or go away.

>>2682682

I mean, you could conceive of your body as a pragmatic fiction, but it's still 'there'-- even while you're asleep! Spooky.

>Conciousness and qualia, as concepts, exist for specific cultural and historical reasons

I agree. But it doesn't follow that they are also fictitious.

>>2682695

You're in the same position I am, then, having given no reason for why we should take qualities to be abstractions.

>>2682697

Why are you so resistant to reading beyond your zone of familiarity?

If a 'new' 'science' is needed to explain the nature of conscious experience of objects, then that 'science' is phenomenology. In fact, that is exactly how Husserl formulates his project.

So... get reading?

>>2682701
>I mean, you could conceive of your body as a pragmatic fiction, but it's still 'there'-- even while you're asleep! Spooky.
Is it? What percentage of it was exchanged with the environment while I wasn't looking? Presumably I'm still breathing while I'm asleep, so parts of "my body" are leaving and parts of "not my body" are entering. Where in reality is the percentage of "me" I can get rid of while still remaining "me" is etched? Or is it some metaphysical percentage written somewhere in the world of forms? Or is "my body" a useful abstraction for a set of particles with a fairly fluid definition in reality but can be thought of as standard for purely practical purposes?

>But it doesn't follow that they are also fictitious.
We know they're fictitious through the study of neurology and psychology. The complicated processes that underly "conciousness" and "qualia" are the main thing here.

>>2682669

So there was no game? What was compelling me to believe? Fictitious abstractions?

This is sounding a lot like idealism.

>>2682728

Where, in reality, is the 'object' of neurology? I.e. your brain? The carbon atoms it's composed of are undergoing decay, phase transformation, and dissipation into the environment. What percentage of those carbon molecules were necessary to create the pragmatic fiction of a field of science to explain the pragmatic fiction of belief?

lol like how are our eyes even real?

>>2682743
>Where, in reality, is the 'object' of neurology
Nowhere, because the distinction between neurology and psychology etc. is an arbitrary one chosen for convenience. I'm not committed to things conciousness, qualia or neurology being either concrete or metaphysical objects, so trying to turn the criticism around on me doesn't actually work.

>>2682756

Great. We've reached the end of discussion, as far as I'm concerned. The world is maya. Totally fucking trippy, bro.

>>2682711

No, I've made actual arguments for my claims.

See:

>>2676033

>Heterophenomenal evidence tells us what we have are *reports of 'what it's like'*
You don't disagree with that, do you? There is such a thing as people saying 'ow' when they stub their toe, right? It's something that can be witnessed by multiple parties, recorded on video, documented in medical literature, etc?
>You're taking an extra step and assuming this reporting behavior / belief behavior we're compelled to participate in must be indicative of a literal immediate 'experience' phenomenon beyond the stimuli and our response behaviors.
That's what you're doing, right? You're taking a step beyond the "people saying 'ow' when they stub their toe" and arguing there's something else attached to it, right?

That's the basic argument: When we look at what's objectively there, we get the guy saying 'ow', not a ghostly essence of 'what it's like to stub your toe'. The guy *reports* that ghostly essence, and that's his behavior which we can objectively observe. What you need to argue for is the reason why we should take what that report is claiming as a real thing when we have no evidence of what that report is claiming. We have evidence he stubbed his toe. We have evidence he said 'ow'. We even have evidence there were complex physiological processes mediating between those two events. We can't objectively observe the alleged 'what it's like' thing he's reporting though, can we? There isn't a single time anyone reports an 'experience' where the alleged 'experience' in question can be objectively observed, right? I don't think that's something you or anyone else would disagree with. Science hasn't ever made a study of a person's 'experience'. There can be studies of the physiology, correct? There can be studies of the behavior, right? There can even be studies of what people write down or say about their alleged 'experience', do you agree? So there's the argument.

>>2682780
I'm not sure why you think this is mystical. In medicine, sometimes it's useful to consider each individual organ, sometimes it's more useful to consider an organ system and sometimes the entire body working together. The level you analyze something at doesn't change the reality of the situition and you shouldn't confuse the two.

>>2682786
>we have no evidence

The evidence is the experience itself. Not evidence of an object, 'experience', but of an encounter with an object in such and such a way, i.e. experience. I already told you how fucked you've got these terms. Again, I refer you to
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ to get your head right.

>>2682795

But it isn't necessary, ergo it's not real ergo etc.

>>2682720

I'm not playing guess the argument with you. You're probably wrong about most of your ideas on this topic, but you're making a point of refusing to pin yourself down to any coherent claims of your own and are only gesturing towards entire websites and books while pretending you have it all figured out and everyone else is wrong. I don't see anything interesting or enlightening about Husserl's take on this (oh no, how horrible, he's the greatest philosopher ever and the mere mention of his existence should be sufficient for us to stop having a discussion and just accept he brought closure to one of the most contentious topics in philosophical history), but use your own words and I'll respond to them.

>>2682804

You're assuming your preferred framework for categorizing 'experience' makes sense. I disagree.

>>2682807
Right, but it is convenient. So is conciousness as it is commonly understood. It's fine, so long as we don't confuse the convenient fiction for the substrate that inspired it.

I have a feeling this might come up as an objection, so we might as well address it now. The idea of an idealized carbon atom, with a particular radius and so on is a fiction, as were earlier conceptions of matter as being "made" of air or fire, but while they are both fictions the carbon atom is a closer approximation of reality. Likewise, "consciousness" and the systems we use to describe actual brain function are also both simplified into convenient fiction, but traditionally-understood "consciousness" is much further from reality.

>>2682813

Why deal with me, I'm just a random dummy? You can contend directly with someone worthy of your time and capability. But you won't. Why is that?

>>2682851

The mysticism emerges when you propose some mysterious substrate of reality, of which higher-order manifestations are merely illusory emanations of that substrate, with no causal interdependence between orders of 'reality'. Even if you can give a consistent account of higher-order 'phenomena', it remains a fiction, and not even one that converges with the 'real', as, again, the 'real' is the substrate to which all higher-order phenomena reduce, and which cannot be explained through that higher-order phenomena.

I can fully understands the mechanics of Three Card Molly, but if I continue to play I will continue to lose my money, regardless of my knowledge.

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I still think Dennet was onto something in "Real Patterns". Especially when combined with epiphenomenalism. Consider the following:

A computer is an analogy often used for the brain, and I will do use it here too.


A computer by itself is pretty much useless. If it has no extensive software installed it must wait until it receives input to function. The big question regarding the brain on this notion is how a brain will function if it is withheld from input completely. Will consciousness persist if a brain is taken from its body and put into a jar? Science can't give us an answer on that question yet, but it can hint us into another direction: it is proven that a brain can live without a body in a jar. This has an unforseen implication: the body is merely an extension to the brain, a vessel so to speak.

The active form of the "Extended Mind Theory" states that consciousness can reach out beyond our body. If an alzheimer patient uses a notebook as his memory, why shouldn't this notebook be part of his memory? Though not everyone might agree with this ("is the internet part of our conciousness?" is a question a critic might ask), it does prove that the brain uses "extensions" in the most liberal way of the word. The body, as seen in the previous section for example, might be seen as just an extension for the brain.

Regarding conciousness one might ask oneself if conciousness too is an extension of the brain. If we look back at the computer; a computer is useless to us unless we can look at the representation of the inner workings as shown on a monitor. This monitor is therefor an extension of the computer, and the representation as given on the screen is part of the computer. One might see consciousness in the same way: the first person experience we all have is a representation of the inner workings of the brain.

Continue down below

>>2682917
>The mysticism emerges when you propose some mysterious substrate of reality, of which higher-order manifestations are merely illusory emanations of that substrate
It's only mysterious because our brains didn't evolve to deal with it and because studying it requires really hard to replicate conditions. The sun was mysterious before we understood the mechanics of nuclear fusion, but now much of the mystery is solved. So too with whatever the most fundamental level of reality happens to be, if we ever manage to study it. And it's not the organization and interactions of said reality that are illusionary, it's our conception of it. For example, you already brought up the human body. The mechanics and interactions that allow that "body" to exist and operate are real, but we speak of simplified versions of said mechanics our mind can actually grapple with, and when the definition of "body" is closely examined we can see it's much more flexible than it intuitively appears. No magic or mysticism anywhere, just an acknowlegement that our brains are not the be-all-end-all arbitrator of the universe.

>>2682940
What does this have to do with "Real Patterns" and Epiphenomenalism? Consider the following:

What do we see on a computer monitor? We see the results of a lot of ones and zeroes. All those ones and zeroes on themselves don't make sense, but together they form a pattern we humans can interpreted. What if conciousness is like this analogy? The first person experience is, if this is true, the result of neurons firing and creating a seemingly random pattern in the process that can be interpreted by the brain itself. Conciousness could then be compared to a hologram: it does exist and it is physical, but it has no causal relationship because it's merely a representation. Another analogy: It's like the representation on the screen you're looking at right now. It's there and it's physical, but you can't hold it. It's a random pattern you interpret as this post on the board /his/ on the website 4chan. But the question arises from this if this isn't paradoxical. How can the brain interpreted the randomness of itself? My best guess would be language. There are a lot of strong arguments that language is what separates us from other animals and I tend to agree. Davidson famously declared that without language there could be no thought, so if you're interested in that argument look into Davidson.

Coming back to OP's original question and summary:

TL;DR: Conciousness, so I believe, is the interpretation of the brain of itself using language as representation. It's an epiphenomenic extension that the brain uses, most likely for communication since language forms its very existence though the real answer to its function is a question for evolutionary biology.

>>2682880

>Why deal with me

It's obviously a compulsion, not a logical decision.

>You can contend directly with someone worthy of your time and capability. But you won't.

You're wrong. I don't value my time very much and I'll 'contend' with literally anyone who writes an argument (or even someone like you who just writes about having an argument but never actually posts it). Why would you assume I wouldn't? Unlike you, I'm very much compelled to say what I mean and have an honest discussion about it with anyone else who has something to say in response.

>>2682501
You obviously have no idea how philosophy works, do you? If a philosopher submits an incoherent paper it gets either destroyed by its peers, other philosophers will fine tune its theory or they will build from its idea.

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>>2682507
Well that rises the question of our very ontology. If you find fulfillment regarding this question in a fake feeling of superiority that's up to you, but that childish approach to fulfilment seems rather sad to me.

>>2682946
>The mechanics and interactions that allow that "body" to exist and operate are real

Prove it.

>>2682829

>I disagree.

You don't even know what you're disagreeing with.

>>2683175
Careful, you're edging closer to that philosophical cul-de-sac known as solipsism the clever materialists are doing their best to avoid acknowledging, even though they're getting off on rubbing their greasy intellectual dicks along it's rim.
>not cheating.webm

>>2683175
>>2683222
Unsurprisingly, my answer to sophilism is the same as most of my answers. Pragmatically, we can use non-sophilist frameworks to achieve useful ends that sophilism doesn't seem able to. Thus, it can be respectfully acknowledged but ultimately dismissed. Sure, you'really not getting Sure True Knowledge out of it, but lowercase t truth and lowercase k knowledge are close enough. The sun is probably going to rise tomorrow.