Evo said:This has become more a "random thoughts" thread suitable for GD than a discussion about the philosophical meaning, which is the intention of the guidelines.
All members need to have a working understanding of philosophy to post in this forum. Please read the guidelines, the rules for the first post apply throughout the thread.
lavinia said:The intent of this comment was to suggest the inequivalence of moral values and sensual desires. Perhaps it is you who does not understand any philosophy
You made several inapplicable posts in a row. Other members are trying to have a serious discussion.lavinia said:The intent of this comment was to suggest the inequivalence of moral values and sensual desires. Perhaps it is you who does not understand any philosophy
I am not going to argue with you, i am sure a lot people share your worldview, especially those who actively search for or research current neuroscience. I generally agree with you, but i can also see where we split in our opinions. There is something typically human to us that evades deterministic explanation. Have a look at the subforum and its name 'philosophy' that generally discusses reality and existence. I would agree that a wolf's behavior might be framed and understood as entirely deterministic but could we find a deterministic process that is specifically tailored to addressing issues like existence? Why would tissues, brain cells or neurons care about existence? It makes no sense to me to say that someone's brain was wired for it and if we stop making sense, there is no point to anything at all.Pythagorean said:You are talking about the hard problem: how we can have subjective experience, but I think this is independent of the question of determinism. I disagree that processes can't be happy or sad, but that's probably for another thread to discuss our merits.
You misunderstood something...Pythagorean said:A process doesn't need to be specifically tailored or "wired" to exist. There also doesn't have to be a point.
Maui said:How can we explain someone(the self?) taking medication to correct harmful processes like cancer cells, viruses, autoimmune disorders, etc.? Does it make sense to say the processes chose the best medication for themselves or for other impaired processes(or other more qualified processes prescribed the best medication)?
Maui said:I agree we are zombie-like most of the time, this is beyond doubt as far as i am concerned, but there is seemingly more going on - processes can't be happy or sad, a solid case cannot be made that processes can understand, dream or imagine. There still seems to be a small corner to us that is still largely unexplored.
Maui said:. I would agree that a wolf's behavior might be framed and understood as entirely deterministic but could we find a deterministic process that is specifically tailored to addressing issues like existence? Why would tissues, brain cells or neurons care about existence? It makes no sense to me to say that someone's brain was wired for it and if we stop making sense, there is no point to anything at all.
An interesting argument that relates to this point is that a lot of these difficulties of trying to understand free will and consciousness/subjectivity/existence may be epistemological in nature:octelcogopod said:Intuitively to me the power of the brain started at the moment where there could be a sensing of external objects, and the second revolution was the ability to refine that language into a symbolic meta-language (the language we have today), and all this didn't need any particular reason, it just had to evolve from a start point naturally. To me, the issue of existence comes totally natural from an animal that can sense the external world. By sensing we are automatically separating ourselves from what we're sensing, just in a very primal form.
Conceptually, it is worth distinguishing two versions of mysterianism, one ontological and one epistemological. The former would hold that consciousness is mysterious in and of itself. The latter is the more modest claim that the mystery does not lie in consciousness itself, but rather flows from certain constitutional limitations of the human intellect...
MysterianismIntrospection is our only channel to the properties of consciousness, but it does not afford us any access to the properties of the brain. Sensory perception is our only channel to the properties of the brain, but it does not afford us any access to the properties of consciousness. There is no third channel that affords us access to both consciousness and the brain. Therefore, our concept-producing mechanisms cannot in principle produce a concept for the connection between consciousness and the brain. Consequently, our knowledge of consciousness and our knowledge of the brain are doomed to be insulated from one another. More specifically, we can have no knowledge of the manner by which the brain produces or yields consciousness. The connection between the two is necessarily opaque to us. Therefore, we cannot possibly grasp the solution to the problem of consciousness.
I can confirm that i can feel pain and if the sky can confirm that it can feel pain too(esp. in a manner that i can relate to my experience of pain), i would venture to say that there's something additional(something that feels pain) to the sky that you likely have ommitted in your examination/description of it. But i am very sceptical the sky has an experience, this is very very unlikely :)someGorilla said:I've never negated the existence of the self. I have negated the independence of the self. I have argued that the apparent paradox between determinism and free will depends on assuming the self is - as you say - an entity. Of course I know that others can feel pain, just as I know that I can feel pain myself. But, to me, saying that their being able to feel pain shows there is a new entity additional to the physical body is just like saying that the sky being blue shows there is a new entity additional to the air or atmosphere.
You've got it vice-versa. If it were so, there would be no reason for the world to behave in a deterministic manner. You don't think the world is obliged to behave according to our models, do you?someGorilla said:Fundamentally I think that determinism is a property of some of our descriptions of the world, not a property of the world itself. So your critique falls short of its target.
You seem to make the typical assumption made multiple times in the past - that what is currently known is all that can ever be known. Here are a few statements that highlight this attitude:About conscious experience being transient I probably agree but I don't know exactly what you mean and I fail to understand what you want to imply. The problem with saying there is a "new entity" as you call it is the same problem dualism has always had: either you have to explain how the two planes of existence interact (and explain whether and how this does or does not violate known physical laws), or you have to suppose they don't interact but are magically synchronized by the clockmaker. Both solutions are to me unsatisfactory and plainly wrong. How do you solve the conundrum?
Maui said:You've got it vice-versa. If it were so, there would be no reason for the world to behave in a deterministic manner. You don't think the world is obliged to behave according to our models, do you?
Maui said:You seem to make the typical assumption made multiple times in the past - that what is currently known is all that can ever be known.
Maui said:[...]
It was implied in your statement that there exist an understanding of the self(the personal experience) in the determinsitic framework, which is false. Science operates on models, some models are pretty far-reaching, some are more limited and some are virtually non-existent. Conscious experience being of the latter type. Sticking to the models we have and avoiding the possibility of flooding the forum with nonsense, we can agree there is no satisfactory resolution to the conscious experience debate(certainly not through scientific models). Furthermore, all our models are deterministic in nature and to demand that there be an explanation of emergent phenomena through deterministic models is a contradiction in terms. There is emergent behavior at all scales, so the phenomenon isn't new or unfamiliar. The question is can there be a model that describes it?What exactly of what I wrote gave you that idea? Just to understand.
Where I wrote "known physical laws" you can just substitute it with "physical laws known in a distant future" or "knowable physical laws" or "physical laws known to an omniscient god" and my point will still hold.
Contrary to many people's belief, among the experts in physics there is no agreeable explanation how a physical entity interacts with the physical world, so singling out the question of how an emergent consciousness interacts with the physical is unwarranted and strange.Namely, you have to explain how a non physical entity (the self) can interact with the physical world. This was my point.
I think that if you assume it does interact, then you have two possibilities:
1) it exists, it interacts with the physical world, and this interaction can be studied scientifically and tested. In this case, its existence is no less physical than the existence of quarks. It would make no sense to call it a non physical entity.
It has everything to do with causality and determinism(possibly has some rather obscure implications for freewill). At one time it was philosophers' role to examine the assumptions and conclusions of physicists, now physicists themselves have become philosophers examing the foundations of their models. Here is a new article in Nature that addresses the same issues i raised yesterday, and while somewhat speculative(the whole field is), their articles are usually peer-reviewed and considered credible:Be it far from me to say I know everything (see above). But what does this has to do with selves being separate entities or not?
I think a lot of the difficulties it trying to reduce or expain consciousness is this implicit assumption that we have a clear concept of the reduction base itself; that is, we have a clear conception of the "physical" or the "material". The problem is that we don't. So as some have argued it's "not that all reduces to matter, but rather the kind of matter on which the two-substance view is based does not exist."Maui said:Contrary to many people's belief, among the experts in physics there is no agreeable explanation how a physical entity interacts with the physical world, so singling out the question of how an emergent consciousness interacts with the physical is unwarranted and strange.
Agreed. It's weird that when cornered by the multitude of experimental evidence people would accept that space and time are somehow one indivisible entity, but they would viciously oppose the idea space, time, matter and experience can be merged in one whole. Some would even claim to understand(make sense of) the unity of spacetime, but such claims are easily dismissed under closer scrutiny. On the whole however, people are more receptive to change in worldview.bohm2 said:I think a lot of the difficulties it trying to reduce or expain consciousness is this implicit assumption that we have a clear concept of the reduction base itself; that is, we have a clear conception of the "physical" or the "material". The problem is that we don't. So as some have argued it's "not that all reduces to matter, but rather the kind of matter on which the two-substance view is based does not exist."
Maui said:Agreed. It's weird that when cornered by the multitude of experimental evidence people would accept that space and time are somehow one indivisible entity, but they would viciously oppose the idea space, time, matter and experience can be merged in one whole.
Maui said:It was implied in your statement that there exist an understanding of the self(the personal experience) in the determinsitic framework
Maui said:Furthermore, all our models are deterministic in nature and to demand that there be an explanation of emergent phenomena through deterministic models is a contradiction in terms.
Consciousness and conscious experience, that's specifically what we were discussing. I also don't know what you mean by deterministic models explaining consciousness through basic physics(if you include conscious experience in the same group as the other emergent phenomena you referred to).someGorilla said:No.
This doesn't make any sense... there are thousands of emergent phenomena explained through basic physics, i.e. deterministic models. I don't know what you mean.