Hard Problem of Consciousness

It's not a problem materialists can solve because consciousness comes from the immortal soul, not the physical brain

>>8756848
Nice b8 m8

>>8756848
/thread

>>8756848
False. Consciousness comes from the brain as has been demonstrated via invasive surgery, drugs, blunt trauma, neurodegenerative diseases, etc.

>>8756867
That's like saying the source of television programs is your TV because when you turn your TV off they stop showing on the screen. Clearly if you break your TV there will be no more Seinfeld for anyone ever.

>>8756873

Talked like a real neuroscientist.

Why does the structure of the 'soul' have a correspondent on the physical structure of the brain?

Ex: Mess with the language area, the 'soul' unlearns how to speak, mess with the emotion area, your 'soul' will get rage attacks or depressive swings?

>>8756895
Why does the structure of your TV determine the quality of the picture it produces if the source of the programs aren't intrinsic to the TV itself? Fiddle with the contrast and the picture displayed changes, not like that could happen if some 'mysterious' intangible, invisible source was somehow transmitting the images to it. QED electromagnetic spectrum conspiracy theorists.

>>8756895
The only area you need to mess with to mess with consciousness is the claustrum. But I guess the dualist can come back and say "lol you just unplugged the part of the brain that talks to your soul"

>>8756895
>implying
If part of the receiver is 'damaged', why would you expect anything but a limited output?
Ex: Run a strong magnet over your hard drive, if any of your files are corrupted, then there clearly is no such thing as an immortal sou(l)rce

>>8756922
Why does everyone pretend that physicalism and dualism are the only two options? They've both been debunked.

>>8756907
What is the soul to you? If it's free will, then you can deconstruct virtually all of the decisions we make throughout our lives and trace them to basic needs that all animals are subject to, and to which our emotions are fine-tuned to cause us to either want or not want. Any illusion of "weighing" different options or choices is an internal struggle between immediate desires and more calculated future payoffs.

We're a lot simpler than we like to think we are.

>>8756943
Pure conjecture. We don't have a definitive answer yet, your post is just the wishful thinking of the hardened naturalist. Nothing more.

>>8756949
I didn't say we have an answer. But this seems likely from what we know so far. There is almost no need for an extra-natural explanation for anything we see in human behavior at this point.

>>8756873
There is no evidence for the "brain-as-a-receiver" model. Consciousness and other higher order functions can be fully explained with the current materialist model. Your hypothesis is an unfalsifiable one and can only have any legitimacy if it is supported empirically, which is the very thing it was invented to avoid. So I ask you, where is the evidence? And what reason is to consider a model other than materialism?

>>8756953
The problem is that your own logic makes your position untenable. If true it means you're an automaton programmed to believe what you believe. You may THINK that it's because you have good evidence supporting your position, but your own argument says that is an illusion and you ultimately only hold that belief because you were predestined to. It's a dead end. No free will means scientific inquiry is completely useless because you're not making your own conclusions, you're making conclusions the physical system you're trying to comprehend is making you conclude, because you're part of it.

Basically scientific inquiry is predicated on the fact we're able to reach our own conclusions based on empirical data. If that isn't true we might as well shut up shop and go back to being cavemen.

>>8756964
>Consciousness and other higher order functions can be fully explained with the current materialist model
This is a nice little piece of arrogant presumption. What makes you think this considering we don't have any idea about what consciousness actually IS other than the fact we experience it?

Link me a description of the hard problem that doesn't use ambiguous terms. I cannot be expected to take a problem seriously if it's not formally stated.

>>8756943
I agree with your conclusion, but not your assumption that all motive can be reduced into logical metaphor that can be calculated.
Ex: 'metacognition', what's the advantage of questioning one's thoughts? To correct?
Why aren't we simply born with 'all the correct thoughts', which would clearly be advantageous. Maybe we are, yet we're certainly able to be deceived.

>>8756971
really famous ted talk from dennett
https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness

>>8756965
Perhaps I minced my words. I meant that the presence of consciousness and other functions associated with the mind can be explained in purely physical terms. What consciousness "actually is" is something I even know how to approach, at least from a materialist point of view. There unfortunately is no other model that is as successful at making predictions.

>>8756965
I don't see how a result's being predetermined has any bearing on its validity. A computer was predetermined to arrive at certain answers, but I don't think you would argue that its outputs are meaningless just because they were predetermined.

>>8756995
>I don't see how a result's being predetermined has any bearing on its validity
You missed the point, which is you were predetermined to either accept or reject the validity. Whether or not the result is actually valid is kind of irrelevant since that stance means that you don't actually have the agency necessary to reject an invalid answer, or accept a valid one. Whatever you believe or don't believe is already determined by the system you're part of, making all inquiry pointless, the answers you accept have already been decided, you have no choice in the matter.

If you're thinking that's absurd, good, it is. Physicalism refutes itself in this way.

>>8756986
We can't be born with all the correct thoughts because our knowledge of the environment is obviously going to be very partial and imperfect. It's why we make mistakes. It's why even robots make mistakes and always will no matter how advanced they become. Like I said, self-control exists as a regulating mechanism that brings more immediate emotional responses into line with what we gather about the environment. Yes, it can all be calculated.

>>8757002
>computers can't compute anything because they have no choice

>>8757008
A computer can compute a lot of things. It just can't determine the validity of the output because it has no agency. If it's programmed to spit out "Ice cream" as the answer of "1 + 1" it will. Is that a correct answer? No, but the computer has no ability to step in and make it's own judgement on the validity of the output and according to physicalism neither do you. You only believe 1 + 1 = 2 because your brain is programmed to make you believe that.

>>8757027
Better go inform the mathematicians of the world that the 4 color theorem isn't actually proven since a computer was used for the proof.

>>8757027
>You only believe 1 + 1 = 2 because your brain is programmed to make you believe that.
And what do you believe?

>>8756841
You know what's really nutty? Imagine a person loses their consciousness but their brain remains otherwise identical. That person would continue to act in an identical manner despite this, and would insist that they are a conscious being. Somewhere in our neurons the concept of consciousness is encoded even though as a concept it's really nothing more than a passenger in a vehicle.

>>8757045
>That person would continue to act in an identical manner despite this
citation needed

>>8757035
Are you being deliberately obtuse or is the discussion going over your head? You can't 'prove' anything because if you believe the mind is purely material you are an automaton. You can't even prove 1 + 1 = 2 because you can't even discern whether logic itself is an illusion, you don't have free will, you can't come to any other conclusions.

Being able to decide if premise A or premise B is correct means you need the ability to freely pick between them. You assert you do not have that ability and were predestined to pick A or B based on your programming, not on any logic or evidence behind that. You keep talking about 'proof' like your position doesn't completely rule out any objective proof because your mind is literally tricking you into thinking you have any agency over your beliefs, actions and thoughts.

>>8757061
You're saying that anything without agency cannot reliably find right answers, which means computers are useless.

>>8757036
I do believe that 1 + 1 = 2 because I believe each person has real free will and agency over their thoughts and conclusions, therefore using logic we can prove 1 + 1 = 2 without worrying that it's a determination that our physical brain has decided on and tricked us into thinking that our logic supports.

Like I said. Physicialism refutes itself. If you believe the mind is purely the result of physical processes then you are a robot and only believe what you do because you were predestined to. Any logic you think supports your position is a trick.

>>8757072
I'm saying you lack the ability to judge those answers as right or not because the programming of your brain determines that. You're at the mercy of your programming much like the computer giving out "ice cream" as the answer to "1 + 1". You lack the ability to choose between options based on evidence, you simply follow the path your programming has determined. That means all your conclusions ever are suspect because they're not based on evidence, or logic, they're based on what your brain has predetermined you to believe, and that includes anything computers spit out.

>>8757005
Explain how 'simpler animals' such as sea turtles could have the ability to dig their way out of the sand and seek water after hatching at the precise time before it's too hot or cold to safely do so, programmed instinct through random evolutionary success? Then will is an illusion. The only way to explain this occurrence while retaining the concept of will is that 'it' is controlled by a consciousness outside the boundary of it's physical brain.
>>8757008
>>8757072
without observation and input, precisely

>>8757053
Well hypothetically speaking if you could supress consciousness while maintaining normal brain activity. I suppose that might be impossible though.

>>8757090
If you know exactly what consciousness is, why haven't you revolutionized neuroscience yet?

>>8757087
Confirmed creationist. Move along folks.

>>8757061
I'm having trouble conceptualizing this, but still have a general idea of what you're getting at. Perhaps you could help me understand. I just don't see how materialism could be wrong given its enormous predictive success. Rejecting it seems as absurd as rejecting free will does in your view (which I'm still struggling to understand). If we throw out materialism, we have to throw out all of science, which doesn't seem right to me.

>>8757061
>ecause if you believe the mind is purely material you are an automaton.

No you dumb deranged fucker. Take some drugs.

Clearly physical things ingested can cause wild variations in judgment and reasoning. Even being fat has detrimental effects to brain functioning.

You realize that a neuronal network metaphor fits far more strongly than a unitary soul. We have innumerable networks that work for both general and particular operations of the body.

The explanatory power of networking calculation is far greater than that of unitary souls.

We have both angels and demons inside us and physiological chances and interactions with the environment can unleash differences in networks, their neuronal "control", and differences of evaluation.

If you're afraid of automatons, why do you trust God to be less of one?

>>8757097
I guess that makes you an uncreationist who rejects autonomy?
I have no faith in anything but what can be observed, sorry for the narrow mindedness...
So let's stay certain all exists by chance, why not?

>>8757087
Tide comes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that.

>>8757098
>I just don't see how materialism could be wrong given its enormous predictive success
Well for starters science makes the predictions and those predictions are predicated on a philosophy of physicalism. We need to be careful about drawing conclusions because the scientific method is specifically for discovering physical phenomena and explaining them. Just because the scientific method ignores anything that isn't physical doesn't mean things that aren't physical don't exist. To illustrate this consider this:

1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has.
2. Therefore we have good reason to think that metal detectors can reveal to us everything that can be revealed about metallic objects.

But we can't determine everything there is to know about metal from a metal detector, even though the metal detector is a very successful method of discovering metal. If you have a net that is designed to catch dolphins then smaller fish are going to slip through. Basically just because our methods of learning about the universe are specifically designed to detect and identify physical phenomena doesn't mean we can automatically rule out the existence of non-physical phenomena.

>If we throw out materialism, we have to throw out all of science, which doesn't seem right to me

Not at all, we just need to realize that the physical is just one part of reality. Right now we're like a person with a metal detector scanning around the beach who surmises that because all we've ever found is metal with our detector it follows plastic cannot exist.

>>8757087
>sea turtles could have the ability to dig their way out of the sand and seek water after hatching at the precise time before it's too hot or cold to safely do so,

Evolution is partially driven by "mutants" who through quirks of luck, contain novel behaviors which might hamper them in normal times and raise their survival chance in catastrophic times.

It speaks to the impudence of evangelical Christians that they cannot be patient enough to imagine thousands of generations competing against lines of other life for thousands of generations.

Everything for the feeling of being holy.

>>8757087
I just feel that if there is an outside consciousness controlling us from without and sending us communications from some higher plane of existence, then why wouldn't it just send us all the information there is to know about all that exists, including this higher plane?

>>8757139
Could be an inherent limitation of the physical brain? How would a 6 dimensional being send information to us that would let us conceptualize it? Some things might be beyond our grasp because of our three dimensional existence, it's too hard for us to conceptualize anything beyond that because it's outside the scope of our experience.

>>8757093
give me a few years nigger.

>>8757124
>let's stay certain all exists by chance
like it or not, you don't have an alternative explanation

i'm not saying it's right, i'm just saying you can't be certain either

because you sure act like you are

>>8757093
Because Christof Koch is already doing it.

>>8757158
http://www.nature.com/news/a-giant-neuron-found-wrapped-around-entire-mouse-brain-1.21539

It won't be long now...

>>8757128
How do you explain that the brain is, by all accounts, just a complex chain of dominoes? Where does free will fit into this? The firing of each neuron is caused by the firing of a previous one. There isn't any room for "free will" (nebulously defined in the first place) in this interpretation. This is simply irrefutable from my point of view. You would have to deny what is before your very eyes to deny that the brain follows a predetermined path.

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>>8757162
>3D reconstructions show a 'crown of thorns' shape stemming from a region linked to consciousness.
Hmmmm

>>8757164
lel

>>8757163
Well if free will doesn't exist you can pretty much discard all the results of scientific inquiry anyway. If you're unable to make your own judgements and draw your own conclusions then all our accepted results are completely arbitrary. The only reason people think results match reality is because their brain tricks them.

No free will means you cannot draw any conclusions without also admitting those conclusions are not actually based on facts, logic or evidence but rather because the machinery of your brain forced that conclusion upon you. In that case all of this is pointless and like I said, we might as well wrap it up because we can never know what is objectively true and separate it from what our brain has decided what we are to believe.

>>8757129
There are examples of mechanisms that either could not function without a whole system, or would actively hinder the organism without being complete (venom sacs), making the gradual, random changes into functional adaptions theory difficult to apply, such as turtle example. Logically, they shouldn't exist from a solely evolutionary perspective.
Even so, are we to believe the mechanism that allows for mutation to occur is by chance, R/DNA's little understood translation into protein, all mechanically a fluke?

tl;dr: if all is random, nothing should exist. Que the simultaneous multiverse counter-theory, which is possible but not an elegant explanation

>>8757186
It's not exactly random. Environmental pressures weed out the maladaptive traits.

>>8757186
And by not elegant, meaning, what explains our persistent occupation of this one? The circular reasoning of chance

>>8756873
>Seinfield
kys

>>8757174
>No free will means you cannot draw any conclusions without also admitting those conclusions are not actually based on facts, logic or evidence but rather because the machinery of your brain forced that conclusion upon you.
Why do you make these mutually exclusive? A conclusion can be predetermined, correct, and based on evidence and logic.

>>8757197
The ability to base a conclusion on facts and logic requires agency. An ability to pick between competing theories and select the one that the evidence supports. No free will means no agency means you have no actual ability to select and are just riding along on the path your brain selects while being given the illusion you're making your own choices.

Can a predetermined conclusion be correct? Of course it can, we wouldn't have technology if that wasn't the case. But the sticking point is for an individual who believes free will is an illusion it means ALL your conclusions are illusory. Right and wrong. And you have absolutely no way to determine which ones are right and which ones are wrong. You're just like a computer program which by mere chance sometimes spits out the correct answer, and sometimes spits out the wrong one. The program itself has no idea which ones are right and wrong, it's just acting according to the logic which has been programmed into it. As are you.

Ultimately no free will means we'll never know the truths of the universe. We're being strung along by biochemical processes which make us believe we're acting according to some internal sense of logic, but we're really not.

>>8757211
Weighing what action to take is just a switch in the brain that gets tripped one way or the other depending on signal strength that is reaching the seat of agency. If it's receiving an overwhelmingly strong flight signal from the amygdala, the executive decision will be made to flee, and it will overwhelm any other possible course of action other signals might be prompting you to take at that moment. The "polity" of neurons causing you to make different decisions is basically a democracy. Each constituency wants different things, and they are all continually trying to exert their influence on that switch, that seat of agency, that executive center that makes the final decision on what action the entire organism takes in the end.

>>8757227
Oh and awareness itself is just the confluence of all these internal and external signals.

>>8757139
Maybe birth is a means of temporarily escaping the state of being 'all awareness', as one may imagine being a 'collective mind', rather overwhelming. Paradoxically, here we seek a return to this state in a quest for truth in an endless cycle.

>>8757163
Even if it is predetermined, this implies a design, system or will existed by definition; not chance

>>8757061
As he said what we understand as the concious mind it's a wide arrange of brain functions all mingled togheter, designed to do specific things but ultimately unpredictable.

>>8757334
>a wide arrange of functions all mingled together
>designed to do specific things but ultimately unpredictable
Then why do we intuitively perceive ourselves as conscious in the first place?

>>8757359
Not yet known. But even if a physical mechanism was established you would still ask this question. I don't see how it can be answered in a conclusive, exhaustive way.

>>8757369
I think the "reason", if there even can be a conclusive reason, that we experience this cohesive sense of "oneness" even though we're a collection of cells is to help with decision making. It's a byproduct of having to take singular courses of action despite being basically walking pillars of bacteria strung together.

>>8757373
It couldn't be as consistent as it is if that's what it was. It also wouldn't have the information exclusivity problem.

>>8757438
I don't know. It's one of the prevailing theories of consciousness.

Anyway, I don't think it's that consistent, actually. It just seems that way. It's the reason we have mood swings etc. It feels like a part of your "self" as opposed to a force that is exerting influence over your "self", which is actually what it is. This is part of the illusion of consciousness.

>>8756873
You're right. I'll change from now on.

>>8757471
Mood swings are when it disappears though.

>>8757498
What disappears? Consciousness?

Well, I mean I would think of the times when you have full control of yourself as also not "yourself". It's just a different part of the brain is exerting influence over your ego, to use Freud's terminology. In this instance, it's memory and what you have learned about your environment. But that's still not "you". It's the information you gathered from your environment. You wouldn't purposely make the wrong decision. To the best of your knowledge, you will always try to make sound decisions according to what you believe is true. If you choose to take the OPPOSITE course of action, just to prove to yourself that you are a free agent and not an automaton, that is still influenced by memory. Except that you're just doing the opposite of what you know is right.

>>8757295
>birth is a means of temporarily escaping the state of being 'all awareness'
You mean omniscience. Yeah, if you believe in panpsychism, that's exactly what it would be. We're "beings of light" to use an Evangelion trope.

https://aeon.co/ideas/panpsychism-is-crazy-but-its-also-most-probably-true

>>8757519
But there is no soul in panpsychism. All minds are equivalent and not separate.

>>8757533
I wasn't arguing in favor of the soul idea.

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Solved. You will like it. It is nice.

>>8757561
Wow! I don't get it.

>>8756967
Because literally every single other phenomenon that has been observed ever has been explainable physically, be it right then or later on.

>>8757581
I don't need to see any other arguments. This encapsulates why most people alive today think there are no gods, no magic, and nothing "extra speshul" about the world we occupy. Why should consciousness be any different?

You can't claim that consciousness is unexplainable unless you solve the interaction problem.

>>8757581
>>8757587
but everything, including consciousness, is not so easily explainable

assuming consciousness can be explained in terms of physicality, physicality itself cannot, and must therefore be explained in terms of something else that we have no access to

if you think you've solved it you don't understand it

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>>8757581
implying there are no unsolved problems in physics.

>>8757605
There is no interaction problem.

Why is existence so excruciatingly hard to bear?

>>8757629
Because we were never meant to be. Matter arranging itself into a form which can contemplate its own mortality and the pointlessness of it's existence is the cruelest joke of all.

>>8757027
Wrong, 1+1 definitely = Ice cream

>>8757636
Wrong, we were always meant to be. We are meant to be the universe experiencing itself, any alternative would be irrational.

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>>8757620
What if the interaction problem is that they don't like how I interact, and that they really don't like it that they realized they had no reasoanble expectation for me, a free man in a superficially free country, to conform to their expectations for my interactions to begin with?

Love reading your opinions, but unfortunately, under anesthesia, all there is is black

>>8757649
If I could trace all the effects that my remaining a simple cog in this society has on the likes of supergeniuses like edward witten, I would not wish for my own death.

>>8757636
This is what I always think Shakespeare meant with "to be or not to be"

>>8757663
i didnt know shakespeare killed himself

oh right

he didnt

>>8757649
Is this supposed to be evidence against the soul? Because it isn't anymore than sleep is

>>8757676
But you're essentially conscious during sleep. Unless you're a chronic pot smoker.

>>8756873
Except there's no proof that consciousness comes from a source outside of the brain and that the brain only acts as a receiver so your analogy is retarded. Quit pulling things out of your ass.

>>8756841
Your brain is the operating system upon which the consciousness is built. The brain holds data, which can be described as the electrical and chemical properties that exist in the biological structure.

When all components of the brain are integrated together in the hypothalamus, the data becomes information (you are 'informed' of reality - you are aware). This information can be called a 'consciousness'.

Your consciousness, however is better described as a self-modifying model of reality. Every model is flawed in many ways, due to the organic nature of a consciousnesses development. Hence many artificial constructs can be built within the model to solve different problems - religions, beliefs, habits etc.

Read "from bacteria to bach and back"

>>8757702
>Except there's no proof that consciousness comes from a source outside of the brain
Yes there is

>>8757708
well I'm waiting

>>8757703
Try this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kNtJ08a-ss

>>8757709
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism

Reality is fundamentally mental.

>>8757715
still waiting

>>8757720
Realism has been debunked. Idealism is the true model of how reality works

>>8757027
What the fuck are you even saying?

The brain is an organic computer. It's calculations function almost entirely off amino acids and their many arrangements. It's like a CPU -- silicon has specific physical properties that have the ability to be arranged in increasingly complex ways. Amino acids also have physical properties and thus can be used for calculatory purposes if arranged correctly.

Ironically, they both function in a similar cycle. These patterns of silicon are formed by a DNA like schematic that's stored, processed, and managed by a silicon based computer. DNA is just a specific arrangement of amino acids that do essentially the same thing -- store schematics.

AI is all about self arrangement and self programming. There's rarely anything hard coded in that isn't 100% relevant to the task. The brain is much more general, but practically the same. There's also a big difference between "programming" and one of the most defining aspects of consciousness, learning. The traditional programming paradigm that you describe is not learning, nor anything near the consciousness of the brain. Learning and consciousness are in a sense, multi-faceted pieces of general programming that are in no way binary, or perfect, but instead based on weighting, imperfect and undefined axioms, and learning from error.

Look at the differences in how Peano's axioms are interpreted in programming and the organic brain.

>>8757721
Then how about you quit throwing vague lines at me and actually provide something at least resembling any sort of proof?

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>>8757730
It doesn't matter though. It all comes down to determinism. Materialists claim consciousness is nothing more than the processes of the physical brain. If that is the case then those processes are deterministic, and theoretically if you had complete knowledge of how the brain works then by getting a snapshot of it's state you should be able to predict that persons behavior exactly. Meaning you're an automaton. Which makes all of science null and void because science depends on matching the conclusion to the data and choosing between alternative theories. If you are completely beholden to the physical processes in your brain then you didn't really do that. Free will is absolutely necessary for scientific discovery to be valid, without it there isn't any guarantee you're doing exactly what your brain chemistry says you should do and you're only making conclusions that your brain has predetermined according to it's biological processes.

If materialism is wrong you're nothing more than a highly complex biological machine who has the false impression you're in control of your decisions. In that case all knowledge you have is suspect because you never had a choice whether to accept or reject that information, your brain chemistry decided it for you. Is there any reason the brain couldn't decide to accept false information and make you think it's true? It's certainly a fact that your brain is capable of fucking with your perceptions to the point where it will force you to perceive the same color differently according to context. If you have no ability to decide things of your own free will and the brain can easily twist objective reality to make you peceive it differently is there any way you can ever know what is objectively real? Any way you can know 1 + 1 is a fact and not just false data your brain tricks your consciousness into thinking is logically sound?

>>8757629
>>8757636
>*groan*
if only there were infinite distractions to fill the void
nothing to lose = freedom

>>8757748
>if something is deterministic you should be able to make exact predictions
>what is chaos theory

>>8757756
jUsT
PoUnD
mY
MuLtIvErSe
uP
SeNpAi

>>8757748
>If that is the case then those processes are deterministic, and theoretically if you had complete knowledge of how the brain works then by getting a snapshot of it's state you should be able to predict that persons behavior exactly.

You would need a total understanding of not only the brain, but the brain's environment and sensory perceptions. It is only then that you can take the state, environment, and sensory perceptions and get something resembling a linear estimation. Your definition of free will seems to be a bit different from the general sense. These sorts of problems are based on entirely different assumptions than yours -- not to say yours is anymore wrong or right.

Relative to human consciousness, and possibly any consciousness itself, free will is relative to the consciousness's perception of entropy. Free will is a social concept more than anything. It's always relative to the entity.

>Any way you can know 1 + 1 is a fact and not just false data your brain tricks your consciousness into thinking is logically sound?

These sorts of things were meant to be practical. You are thinking to far out by most people's standards. It doesn't matter if it's false data or not -- it works relative to human consciousness and the needs of humans. Mersenne primes worked perfectly for the ancients who were only focused on elementary number theory, until it no longer became correct or useful to them, relative to what they were doing. Consciousness is all just a group of assumptions, a very complicated "if" if you will.

Basically, I don't mean you are wrong, but you are wrong relative to this problem. If you go higher up the chain, you very well might be entirely correct.

>>8757748
Deterministic philosophy gets undermined by quantum uncertainty. You cannot know something's mass and it's location at the same time.

Therefore, determinism can only be established as a probability factor, and therefore not 100% certain in every case.

>>8757798
>Deterministic philosophy gets undermined by quantum uncertainty.

Does quantum uncertainty affect the world at the macro level? Isn't it irrelevant?

>>8757798
>>8757801
It might be irrelevant.

It's entirely plausible that quantum uncertainty is what causes certainty at the macro-level. It's also plausible that organic neural nets compensate for this uncertainty(its sort of implied, considering how they work), thus causing a good level of determinism regarding consciousness.

>>8757748
>Which makes all of science null and void because science depends on matching the conclusion to the data and choosing between alternative theories.

It's not a case of free will, the correct conclusion is chosen by the data. Free will is only used initially in creating the hypothesis and this is a result of deterministic processes interacting with the environment.

Intelligence is trying to define the brains complexity (define itself).

>>8757748
>science depends on matching the conclusion to the data and choosing between alternative theories

Science observes phenomena and makes theories, but it does not 'choose'.. it tries to prove them wrong. That is the fundamental difference between a science and a religion - religion develops theories then looks for reasons why they are true, ignoring all evidence against them.

>>8757806
>Might be

But not certain... lol.

>>8757824
You choose the hypothesis that best fits the data. If the data contradicts a hypothesis the hypothesis is discarded. There can be many alternative valid theories for any phenomena. Choosing the ones that best fit the data is why some are given more attention than others.

>>8756841
It may have been solved by someone completely or partially to various degrees without making it known to the public? It's probably difficult trying to work on this problem properly when mainstream focus is on throwing around subject terms or talking about lofty philosophical experiments, with even more lofty opinions.
Some things I'm having a problem with are finding what a common denominator would look like for 7 billion different brains. Would we find a minimal set of operations required for experiencing consciousness or not? Having an answer to this would help.
Another one, using mathematical evolution theory, how often does it produce consciousness? Always, sometimes, never? What does this imply?
For the chinese room and introduce errors, what are the implications?

>>8757756
If chaos theory is right, then we're still not "free" and still don't have souls. Whether it's determinism or not, there's no room for freedom either way.

>>8759015

transfinite determinism doesn't look like ordinary determinism though

>>8759015


actually what you are looking for is called the free will theorem

>>8759015
>>8759172..cont

here have a fun video series

https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/tag/tagid/free%20will

>>8757002
Scientific inquiry aims itself at what is useful and what "seems" to be. In this way, we make no assumptions on the "true" validity of results, and the fact that we were predetermined to make any assumptions about our reality at all is in itself meaningless because science itself is concerned with our perception, naive though that perception may be, we don't really care. Other than that, you're right. I think the actual philosophy of science is woefully misunderstood, even amongst science majors.

>>8759176
Yeah. Again, a probabilistic or quantum mind yields a crappy kind of "freedom". I would not call that freedom. It's just chance. Chance is not choice. It's chance.

>>8756841
These threads always start without defining conciousness
RIP

>>8759294
it's like art

in that most people have this vague feeling that there is this thing called art out there

but when they actually go to define it, it kinda starts to look like it was an illusion all along

>>8759294
thread title contains the term "hard problem of consciousness". If that is still ambiguous to you, you can refer to the wikipedia article on it.

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>>8756841
>Consciousness

>>8756841
Solved already (~year 1960)

- Soul doesn't exist. Brain has been thoroughly imaged, dynamically and statically.

- All mental phenomena evolved by natural selection for organism to maximize its chances for survival, growth, and reproduction. Long time ago some primates evolved good eyes and nimble hands to move effectively in the woods. Good eyes favored evolution of better and better brains. With excellent brains, nimble hands, and good eyes these primates soon learned to use sticks and rocks as tools. The concept later evolved to these primates having 'ownership' of their tools, then evolution favored development of tools.

- Consciousness is (1) attaining sensory data from within and outside your body (2) comparing sensory data continually to existing data storages of previous experiences ('memories') and allowing sensory experiences to trigger pathways in memories (3) AND the sum of all wants an organism has.

- Humans have freedom in that they aren't conscious of all the barriers that constrict their freedom; to them world seems like pretty open and free possibility space. In reality, if human could be conscious of all the potential barriers he can't cross, he would see a very narrow worldline in possibility space detailing every single movement he makes from birth to death. In reality, humans have zero freedom collectively. Each individual elementary particle has some extraordinarily tiny amount of freedom and macroscopic particles have quite literally zero freedom.

So lesson of the story: don't tell humans they don't have freedom. Or damage the part of your brain intentionally that holds you too conscious of the world. In future people will probably enter simulation worlds to live life free from their overwhelming consciousness and only emerge from simulation worlds to do their minimal amount of work that is required to survive and maintain simulations/humanity.

Consciousness is nothing more than an awareness of the process of encoding information about events as memory. It's a running record of the expansions of the universe, otherwise known as time. If you were to reverse the arrow of time, you would unmake those memories. But you would have absolutely no awareness that such a reversal ever occurred.

We will thus never be able to stop or reverse the end of the universe and all our efforts are for naught.

>>8761082
*Expansion

>>8761082
Wrong.

Proof:
>Reverse time
>There exists books detailing the entire future

>>8761087
If you reverse time, you reverse the creation of those books as well. What is memory generation if not a book in the process of being written? Everything that happens is bound to this.

>>8761096
Wrong.

Reversal of time means that next day isn't 20.3.2017, but 18.3.2017.

It doesn't mean the Big Bang happened in the future; it means Big Bang will happen after 13,7*10^9 years.

>>8756971
http://www.iep.utm.edu/hard-con/

tl;dr: If our bodies are nothing more than a bunch of particles acting on each other through functions, then why does it feel like anything at all to be that body from a first person perspective.

>>8757061
I don't see how free will has anything to do with being able to prove things.

>You can't even prove 1 + 1 = 2 because you can't even discern whether logic itself is an illusion
What's to say logic isn't an illusion even if you did have free will?

You're defining free will as inherently magical if you're assuming that it has the force to somehow make decisions completely independent of the universe we live in. We are the universe, we're not independent of it. When you make a decision, you factor in all the nuances, and do the thing you want to do. Just because it could be calculated that you would do that if you knew the starting conditions of the universe, does not mean the choice was not free. This magical free will you want there to be doesn't exist.

>>8756867
Then where does universe come from?

Check and mate

>>8757084
>I'm saying you lack the ability to judge those answers as right or not because the programming of your brain determines that
Why couldn't a non-free system be able to judge answers as right or not, providing you give it a framework for doing so?

>You lack the ability to choose between options based on evidence, you simply follow the path your programming has determined.
The two are not mutually exclusive. You can follow your path of programming and still choose between options based on evidence. This is what a really complex neural network does.

>>8757061
>Being able to decide if premise A or premise B is correct means you need the ability to freely pick between them.
You do realize that being able to "freely pick between these things" is a giant abstraction complex functional operations, right? Design a computer complex enough, and it will be as free as we are, or as "non-free" as us if we go with libertarian free will.

This is coming from someone who do believes there is a hard problem, but free will is a question that functionalism can actually explain away, as opposed to subjective experience, which is way more interesting.

>>8757581
>>8757587
Conscious subjective experience is also the only thing in the world where a functional explanation isn't even conceivable, assuming you accept that we have subjective experience, that it is something that it's "like" to be you. That leads us to believe that it doesn't fit into the scientific framework we've built so far. But that doesn't mean that it's magic and forever "mystical", or even that it's non-physical, it just means it's a property very different from the things we've discovered so far.

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ITT:

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>>8761026
>>8759294
The problem is, if you don't start the thread off by stating what kind of consciousness you're talking about, and what the hard problem is, you will have a thread like this with absolutely no discussion on the hard problem at all, but endless autism about free will and rebukes about consciousness where the definition is "general intelligence" and not subjective experience.

>>8761295
>from a first person perspective.
So it's written by somebody who doesn't understand consciousness then.

Life is about validation from other people. That's all we want. Facebook is the second most popular website in the world, next to Google, because it allows us to be validated by the greatest amount of people. Stupid people never recognize that this validation is shallow and means nothing.

The reason that we want validation is that it assures us that we are solving problems well, and that we're solving the correct problems. It makes you feel useful, like you have utility. We all want to have utility - to see a problem (something is not as good as it could be) fix it (I fixed this problem now it's better) and show others to make sure you're right (look at this problem I solved, didn't I solve it well?).

We evolved to solve problems as effectively as possible. The problem is that the only problems we want to solve are that of survival of the fittest - we've solved, as a species, surviving, so we focus instead on surviving better than some other motherfucker. But the only real thing to compete for is to get more validation from others, but that validation feels hollow if you feel like you're not accomplishing anything of note.

The problem is that we're surviving to no end. There are no problems worth solving, because they've already been solved better by someone else. There's nothing we really need from life that we're not getting, which makes our brains feel like there is something we need to be doing that we're not, distracting themselves from the fact that there is nothing meaningful to do.

We post on this website because it's a safe way of expressing ideas, separate from our real identities. We get the validation for our problems without having to worry about someone else gaining an advantage over us, which speaks to innate insecurity.

Show me something I'm wrong about, give me attention, etc.

>>8761318
order comes from chaos

>>8761295
If you were to combine two people's brains into one, the resulting brain would feel itself one person. If you combined all consciousnesses, they would collectively feel like one. That should tell you a little bit about the nature of consciousness, and the illusory nature of the first person perspective.

First person experience is nothing but an imaginary wall between consciousnesses. The only thing setting us apart are our memories, which are necessarily different because we all experience different parts of the world, and because we cannot share these memories with each other. We have no internet of consciousness (yet)

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>>8761438
that's what LCL is in evangelion...

>>8756873
t. Sam Harris

>>8761438
>If you were to combine two people's brains into one, the resulting brain would feel itself one person.
How exactly would you do that? Unless you achieved enough integration, I don't believe they would collectively feel like one.

>If you combined all consciousnesses, they would collectively feel like one.
[citation needed]

>That should tell you a little bit about the nature of consciousness, and the illusory nature of the first person perspective.
Even if we accept your previous premises, how exactly do you rationalize subjective experience being illusionary? I don't deny that it can make us feel things that are not true, but that still doesn't answer the question of why it feels like anything from your perspective right now. To deny that it does feel like something beyond you just functionally reporting about it creates a logical paradox. "You don't really feel, you only feel like you're feeling."

>>8761461
Your brain is a machine that solves problems. That is all that it is.

You feel if things are good or bad in relation to if they're helping you solve a problem. Example:

Girlfriend: Good feelings
Helps me:
Get laid
Feel good about myself

Asshole at work: Bad feelings
Is hurting me:
Doing something better than me, meaning I'm not the best at my job
Fucking a girl I want to fuck

You can do it with anything. You don't feel if anything is how it is, you feel if it's better or worse in relation to you.

>>8761461
The idea of subjective experience relies on their being noncommunicable information. If you try to give an example of noncommunicable information, you communicate it, thus a paradox.

>>8761461
It's been done with monkeys and to a certain extent with humans. An opposite effect is observed when the corpus callosum is severed.

>>8761469
There are degrees of communication. Some couples become so familiar with each other that they experience their partnership as being "halves" of one thing. There is a good reason for that. Disparate parts of an individual brain can be thought of separate entities, yet they feel as one to the individual because of the degree to which they are able to communicate with each other.

>>8761469
I agree. It's a problem that I've talked about in other threads.

The fact that the neurological functions of the brain can think and create verbal reports about the nature and mystery of subjective experience creates big holes in dualist arguments, because of the interaction problem (if experience is separate from the physical are separate, how can they interact?) Epiphenomenalism solves the interaction problem by saying phenomenal experience doesn't affect the physical, yet the thoughs and verbal reports created by the brain about the phenomenal seems to indicate just that.

A possible solution to that is if the physical can epiphenomenally cause the mental, then wouldn't it be possible that the physical would process information that could in some sense describe features of the mental, explaining how the physical can come up with verbal reports/thoughts about it: It's simply corresponding with the phenomenal experience without directly accessing it. An analogy would be: when a computer burns a disc, the would-be contents of the disc is going to be in the computers memory when the disc is created, and if saved, the computer could describe the disc, without reading anything from it. The computer has then caused the disc, and is able to describe it without reading anything from its final form. This leaves the question of how exactly information crosses to the "phenomenal realm", but that gap doesn't create as many problems as causal interaction the other way around.

>>8761486
cont...

To expand on this gap, you could ask, how is it that something as irreducible and and seemingly fundamental as phenomenal experince can directly interact with something as high level as neurobiology? This is where maybe the integrated information theory can come into play. Phenomenal experience is not directly caused on a level where matter interacts very fundamentally, but on the higher levels where information is very integrated, and from that experience is formed through some kind of irreducible emergence.

>>8761486
How is something that is not physical generated from something that is? What is this "phenomenal realm" and what does it do for you? Why do you think it exists?

>>8761490
In short, because of how inconceivable functionalist explanation of the explanatory gap is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap

"the soul of an axe is to cut" -hilary putnam

>>8761432
Who or what defines order and chaos?

>>8761508
chaos is by its nature undefinable

>>8761495
That's stupid. We understand what pain is. You communicate the feeling of pain by reminding someone of a time they felt pain, it recreates that feeling for them.

"Pain is the firing of C Fibers" only makes sense if the other person understands what C Fibers are and when they fire. You could say, for instance, "C Fibers would fire if you got stabbed" and the other person would understand that you're talking about pain. There's no longer any problem.

>>8761514
So you admit to mystery?

>>8761518
I'm not sure how this solves the problem, I don't think you understand what the problem is about.

Linking the experience of pain to a physical correlate can explain the way we behave when experiencing pain fully, but it doesn't explain the feeling itself.

>>8761647
Why does there have to be a "feeling itself" for the system to work the way it does?

>>8761654
No one says there has to be a "feeling itself" for the system to work the way it does, yet somehow there is. Why that is is the hard problem of consciousness. Denying that there is subjective experience and nothing beyond the functional aspect is one way out of course, but one that is completely inconceivable for me. Whether you believe this gap is ontological or not is the big divide between people when discussing this.

>>8761673
There does have to be though, because part of the system working the way it does is saying that there is a "feeling itself".

>>8761654
The feeling itself is the coordination of different functions in order to carryout a single course of action based on disparate stimuli

you'd just be a bunch of cells floating around doing their own thing without this central coordinator (claustrum)

>>8761681
The view that there is a hard problem of course has its own problems, the interaction problem you describe is one of them. But just because it's there doesn't completely invalidate the hard problem itself.

>>8761577
i do

we won't ever truly know where it all came from

except to say that due to an infinity of chaos, a temporary order is likely to spontaneously occur (or we wouldn't be here to talk about it)

>>8756841
These feelings, experiences, thoughts everything, they're all just chemicals in the brain.

When your eyes sense a wavelength(via that light interacting with the chemicals in your eyes), your brain recognizes that wavelength(through neural synapses) and associates it with the name "red;" which is the name you were taught to associate with it. Its just some chemical reactions happening. Because some light hit some chemicals that are part of some large carbon based machine.

The configuration of neurons that fire when light of a certain frequency hits your retinas is what you were taught to call "red."

>>8757748
Free will isn't needed for an individual to have epistemic justification about his beliefs, no matter how many times you insist.

>>8761727
It is. Unless you can explain how anything supporting those beliefs is relevant when it's already been predetermined which option you'll support.

>>8761994
The thing supporting the beliefs is literally the deterministic physical system itself. I don't see why this is so hard for non-compatibilists to accept.

>>8756943
Then where does suicide come into the equation? Certainly that would never be ultimately beneficial for the self, even to avoid future pain or suffering, since there would be no future decisions to make or rewards to reap from that point, at least not for the subconscious decision-making part of our brains.

I'm not arguing for the existence of the soul, but I just don't believe that immediate desire or future payoff is the sole motivator for decision making in humans. While I agree that every decision is ultimately self-motivated, perhaps the individual is not always one's definition of themselves.

>>8761722
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

And these things, they're just... philosophers being dumb?

>>8761722
The problem is that experience seems to be more than the sum of those neuronal firings. If you had perfect knowledge of the brain and how neurons fired in response to the wavelength of light you perceive as red, would it let you intuitively know what the experience of looking at red was like even if you've never seen red yourself? If not then it would seem as though there is information that cannot be discerned from how the brain operates and therefore you're actually NOT reducible to a pattern of brain activity.

>>8762634
Even though the knowledge argument does a good job of pinpointing the elusive nature of qualia, it is fully explainable by functionalism.

It is true that no matter how much Mary knows about the physical aspects of color and the brain, she can never learn to experience what it is like to see red.

Why that is doesn't necessarily demonstrate an ontological gap between function and experience however. Mary could never learn what it is to experience red by reading/listening to information about it, simply because that information is never parsed through the same neural net configuration as the signals coming from her eyes through her visual cortex.

christoph koch is doing some of the best research in consciousness at the moment

i'd also reccomend the book "rhythms of the brain" by György Buzsáki for a good base level understanding of what is known, although its kinda dated by now

>>8757607
>Inexplicable implies transcendence of physicality

>physicality itself cannot be explained in terms of physicality
Neither can logic. I guess something "else" exists by that mechanism.

>>8757619
>unsolved implies transcendence of physicality
Ayy lmao.
That fucking dog spinning around until it shits, I swear man it break reality.

test

>>8761398
I completely agree with you.
I'm in the camp that it's physically explicable, not that it's just another thing like the dirt in my front yard. It's the most interesting thing to study. Our descendents may find ourselves in another supercluster of galaxies before we fully understand consciousness.

>>8762689
Find themselves*

>>8761398
It's because the state of being is almost entirely qualitative and science completely ignores qualitative aspects of existence to focus solely on quantitative aspects, things that can be quantified and measured. In a lot of ways this approach has been extremely successful, allowing us to discover the fundamental mathematical properties of the world around us. However it also means it can't explain the qualities we experience while we exist. Knowing what parts of the brain light up in response to stimuli don't tell us anything about what it actually is to experience. You can study a slugs neurology for an eternity and still never have a true idea of what is is to experience being a slug.

You cannot quantify conscious experience, and that's a huge roadblock for modern science because what cannot be quantified might as well not exist for our methods of scientific inquiry.

>>8762699
Sadly, science doesn't recognize quantitative aspects as an ontological aspect of the universe, but rather as simply an abstraction of language or an illusion.

To me it's baffling that there is such a big divide on whether there even is a hard problem or not. You start to wonder sometimes if subjective experience isn't something everyone has, though I'd like to believe it's simply hard to find the right language for people to really understand what you mean.

>>8763941
qualitative aspects*

>>8757193

But chance happens! For most of the Earth's history, life has built components and torn them down and rebuilt them until enough parts and pieces of accelerated development bumped into each other.

"Animal" life exists as a bookend in the chronological history of the Earth. But in that bookend you could see the success of multicellualr life and sex to achieve leaps and bounds in propagation and in selection.

There must exist a property in the universe for consciousness.
No matter what the approach is, this is the final conclusion.
If you do your homework and analyze all possible branches of logical assumptions you'll reach this end for yourself.
It's not a hard problem, it's just average difficulty.

"""Conciousness"" is just a mathematical property faggots.

>>8764520
>X is just Y

>>8756848
this

>>8756867
no
the soul is continually reading data from the brain, but supersedes it

>>8764511
What is a harder problem than one where you can't even conceive of how a solution would look like?

Have you ever thought you think you're actually conscious but the most likely thing is that you're actually not as you think consciousness must actually be.

>>8761438
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krista_and_Tatiana_Hogan

You must be confused.

>>8765415
Have you ever thought you think you're actually making a coherent sentence but the most likely thing is that you're actually not as you think coherent must actually be?

>>8766088
Sometimes