What aspects of recursion lend themselves to consciousness?
and you replied:
I think there is a clear evolutionary reason why the mind would simulate itself
Which doesn’t answer the question at all. If you believe consciousness is not fundamental but rather emergent, you will need to explain your reasoning. There are plenty of examples of recursion that you would not classify as conscious and there are plenty of things that have evolutionary reasons for being that you would not associate with consciousness. You are making a leap here without explanation.
I think Hofstadter makes a pretty good case for the whole recursive loop being the source of consciousness in I Am a Strange Loop. At least, I found his arguments convincing and in line with my understanding of how this process might work.
I am not intimately familiar with Hofstadter’s work, but my understanding is that he is doing speculative and descriptive reasoning from the base premise that matter is inanimate and that consciousness is animate and that somehow consciousness arises from inanimate matter. That is his starting point. He assumes, axiomatically, materialist reductionism. This is the starting point of nearly all the concepts you’ve drawn from in your response.
You said:
Our brains construct models of the world that they are themselves a part of. […] These constructs form the basis for the patterns of thought that underpin our conscious experience.
I said:
There is no argument that patterns of thought underpin our conscious experience that isn’t inherently circular.
And you replied with:
I think patterns of thought arise in response to inputs into the neural network that originate both from within and without. The whole point of thinking is to create a simulation space where the mind can extrapolate future states and come up with actions that can bring the organism back into homeostasis. The brain receives chemical signals from the body indicating an imbalance, these are interpreted as hunger, anger, and, so on, and then the brain formulates a plan of action to address these signals. Natural selection honed this process over millions of years.
Which is literally an axiomatic statement - you assume that patterns of thought underpin our consciousness and then argue to conclude that patterns of thought underpin our consciousness. You are begging the question.
how is this fundamentally different from electrochemical signals being passed within the neural network of the brain? Voltage differentials are a direct counterpart to our own neural signalling
Good question! The answer is that neurons are not analogous to transistors because 1) they encode information through frequency not voltage, 2) frequency is mediated not only by the neuron’s “purpose” but also by environmental factors that co-develop alongside the neuron, 3) neuron’s are changed by virtue of their own activity and 4) neuron’s are changed by virtue of the activity of other neurons and other environmental factors.
I said:
If we reduce everything to the pure math of computation, then you are correct, but you are correct inside an artificial self-referential symbolic system (the mathematics of boolean logic), which is to say extremely and deleteriously reductionist .
You said:
I don’t see what you mean here to be honest. The patterns occurring within the brain can be expressed in mathematical terms. There’s nothing reductionist here. The physical substrate these patterns are expressed in is not the important part.
Mathematics is a form of linguistics. Any given system of mathematics is a system of symbols created to represent concepts. A given system of mathematics comprises a vocabulary, definition, postulates, and theorems. Any system of mathematics is inherently a self-referential system of symbols and therefore inherently reductionist, in that anything that cannot be represented by that systems is not only discarded but also not nameable or identifiable.
I said:
The only way we get to your conclusion is through the circular reasoning of materialist reductionism - the assertion that only physical matter exists and therefore that consciousness is merely an emergent property of the physical matter that we have knowledge off. It begs the question.
You said:
I don’t believe in magic or supernatural, and outside that one has to reject body mind dualism. The physical reality is all there is, therefore the mental realm can only stem from physical interactions of matter and energy.
But you missed the key point, which is that material reductionists do not merely posit that physical reality is all there is, but also that everything we observe today can be explained by the ontology we have today. It is entirely possible that physical reality has far more components to it than that which we are of today. In fact, the scientific consensus is that what we have posited in our ontology today only accounts for 3% of observable phenomena. I’ll get to that later.
You said:
I fundamentally reject mysticism.
This position is almost exclusively the position of Western dominance. Not a single culture outside of Western European culture took this position when encountering other cultures, ways of knowing, and systems of thought. It is only Western imperialism that fundamentally rejects mysticism. I encourage you to examine that.
All these human experiences are perfectly explained in terms of the brain simulating events that create an internal experience.
They aren’t perfectly explained at all. The only way to assert this is ultimately to beg the question. You assume that’s what consciousness is, therefore assert that it’s perfectly explainable as what you assume. This is why material reductionism is fundamentally circular. Nowhere else do we create identity relationships between things so fundamentally different as “patterns of electrical impulses” and “subjective experience”.
I said:
[Our current] model accounts for about 3% of reality in so far as we can tell
You said:
This statement is an incredible leap of logic. […] we very much do know what’s directly observable around us, and how our immediate environment behaves. We’re able to model that with an incredible degree of accuracy.
Which misses the point entirely. Dark energy and dark matter, combined, make up 97% of the universe. Which is just an arrogant way of saying we know that we have no idea what 97% of the universe is. Dark matter and dark energy are not things, they are names given to the gaps between our observations. The observable behavior of the universe only makes sense when we posit the existence of so much additional stuff that literally dwarfs what we currently think we know. And the history of scientific discovery has shown us that as we discover more, we open up entirely new dimensions of observation. It’s entirely possible that in the process of making it to 5% known known we end up discovering some previous unknown unknown and expanding the whole scope even further. What we have discovered is so minuscule compared to what we know we have left to discover that it is the height of dogmatic faith to champion the idea that consciousness can only possibly come from the 3% of the (assumed) scope of the universe that we have worked with so far.
Finally, you end with:
There is absolutely nothing circular in my reasoning. What I said is that patterns of thought underpin our conscious experience because the brain uses its own outputs as inputs along with the inputs from the rest of the environment, and this creates a recursive loop of the observer modelling itself within the environment and creating a resonance of patterns.
But you have no actual argument for this other than the following:
Assume that all things must be physical.
Define physical as all things that we have discovered and will ever discover.
Assume that the gap between what we know and what we will know in the future is vanishingly small and does not represent new physics.
By definition, literally every phenomenon is the result of physical interactions of matter and energy and there’s no argument to make at all. I am arguing that 3 is a faulty premise. The evidence we have is that the gap between what we know and what we will know is massive. Our known unknowns represent a body of knowledge 3000% larger than our known knowns. Our history of science has shown that our unknown unknowns are capable of being 1,000,000% larger than our total knowledge to date. It is more likely that we will discover new physics than that consciousness is explainable in our current physics, just from a pure statistical standpoint.
Which doesn’t answer the question at all. If you believe consciousness is not fundamental but rather emergent, you will need to explain your reasoning.
I did explain it though, I think consciousness is not a fundamental property, but a byproduct of the brain generating signals and those signals feeding back into the brain as part of the simulation of the world that the brain creates. I mean we could go into more detail of the specifics you want to focus on here.
That is his starting point. He assumes, axiomatically, materialist reductionism. This is the starting point of nearly all the concepts you’ve drawn from in your response.
He makes a rational argument for mechanisms that could plausibly underpin consciousness. I’m not sure why you keep using the word reudctionaism here. As far as I understand it, you subscribe to the dualism which implies that the mind is a product of some mystical forces outside the physical realm. There is zero evidence to support this notion.
Which is literally an axiomatic statement - you assume that patterns of thought underpin our consciousness and then argue to conclude that patterns of thought underpin our consciousness. You are begging the question.
The starting point is that the brain evolved to solve a specific problem, and it’s purpose is to keep organisms alive. That’s the basis for my argument. Patterns of thought are synonymous with the patterns of signals that fire within the brain. We have mountains of evidence that clearly and indisputably shows the relationship between the physical processes in the brain and the resulting thought patterns. Psychedelic drugs are a perfect example of this phenomenon. Altering the chemistry of the brain produces an immediate change in our conscious state of mind.
Meanwhile, anybody who argues that consciousness is a product of some other forces outside physical reality has a lot of explaining to do.
The answer is that neurons are not analogous to transistors because 1) they encode information through frequency not voltage, 2) frequency is mediated not only by the neuron’s “purpose” but also by environmental factors that co-develop alongside the neuron, 3) neuron’s are changed by virtue of their own activity and 4) neuron’s are changed by virtue of the activity of other neurons and other environmental factors.
These aren’t fundamental differences. These are just implementation details of how information is expressed and transferred within the computational system.
We have analog chips that can encode signals using frequqence
the same applies to any computer that has inputs, for example the state of a system is affected by user input, network calls, and so on, no fundamental difference here
Any program can change itself by virtue of its own activity, that’s literally any recursive algorithm
Computer programs are likewise changed by external factors
In fact, we can go further here. A traditional computing substrate can run a physics simulation that can express a living entity down to cellular level as seen with the OpenWorm project. The virtual worm behaves the same way as its living counterpart that exists in the physical world.
Any system of mathematics is inherently a self-referential system of symbols and therefore inherently reductionist, in that anything that cannot be represented by that systems is not only discarded but also not nameable or identifiable.
You’re using the term reductionist here again, the incompletness of formal systems does not make them reductionist. In fact, we have plenty of examples of undecidable statements being computed all the time. That’s what the whole halting problem is all about. The system does not need to be provable to do computation.
But you missed the key point, which is that material reductionists do not merely posit that physical reality is all there is, but also that everything we observe today can be explained by the ontology we have today.
This is not a statement I made here. However, there is zero evidence to suggest that our current computational models are not able to express computation done by biological computers.
This position is almost exclusively the position of Western dominance.
This is the basis for all modern science and technology. It has nothing at all to do with Western dominance. Scientists in China use exact same methods as scientists in the west do. I encourage you consider that Marxism is fundamentally a materialist ideology.
This is why material reductionism is fundamentally circular.
There is absolutely nothing circular here. In fact, there is a very clear cause and effect relationship. Once again, the onus is on people claiming that the mind cannot be explained in terms of material reality to show what specifically cannot be explained.
Which misses the point entirely. Dark energy and dark matter, combined, make up 97% of the universe.
Dark energy and dark matter aren’t proven things. You’re not apply logic with any sort of rigor here. On the one hand you dismiss science and on the other hand you use scientific theories as the basis for dismissing it. That’s actual circular logic.
Furthermore, the reality is that we have no idea what dark energy and dark matter are, or even if they exist in the first place. These are just kludges we use to make our theory of cosmology work and account for what we observe in experimental data. There alternative theories of cosmology that do not rely on these concepts.
And yes, I assume that all things must be physical because there is zero evidence for anything that’s not physical. Unless somebody can actually demonstrate a thing that we have observed experimentally that does not have a physical basis in material reality there is zero reason to assume otherwise.
All you’re doing is starting from a different assumption that has no basis, and then dismissing my assumption without presenting any actual evidence for your own position.
I think we can stop here and agree that we have fundamentally different world models. There is nothing we can say to one another that would prove that one model or the other is the correct one. I understand your position, and you understand mine. We also understand our point of disagreement. Therefore, I don’t think much else can be said here.
There is nothing we can say to one another that would prove that one model or the other is the correct one. I understand your position, and you understand mine. We also understand our point of disagreement. Therefore, I don’t think much else can be said here.
I disagree, but I respect your desire to disengage. I will not ask you further questions, but I will say these last few things to clarify my position, because I do not think you understand my position at all nor that you understand our point of disagreement. I have not seen any evidence in your writing that supports this claim.
Dark energy and dark matter aren’t proven things.
Dark energy and dark matter are words we apply to a specific problem in our current model of the universe. Specifically, there is more observable gravity in the universe than the matter we can account for. That excess gravity is represented by “dark matter”, that is to say, we believe that the gravity is caused by matter, but we have no idea what matter because we’ve never observed it. We have observed the gravity, however, and 85% of the measured gravity is unaccounted for in all of the measured matter. As deGrasse Tyson says, Dark Matter is a misnomer, because it implies the gravity is caused by matter, when in actuality, we have absolute no idea what is causing the gravity. Dark Energy is the name we give to whatever is driving cosmic expansion, because again, when we take all of our observations, everything we believe exists accounts for only 4% of the behavior we observe. Call that Dark Matter and Dark Energy, or don’t. It’s just a symbol representing a real true fact about what we know we don’t know.
On the one hand you dismiss science and on the other hand you use scientific theories as the basis for dismissing it. That’s actual circular logic.
That’s not circular logic. That’s reductio ad absurdum. I don’t dismiss science. I dismiss unscientific dogmatic behavior, like ignoring evidence that doesn’t fit the assumptions and begging the question. I’m a big fan of science, which is why I use science’s own self-criticism as well as the criticism from the philosophy of science to work with it. This is the root of your confusion about my position - I am not anti-science and I still critique it.
I assume that all things must be physical because there is zero evidence for anything that’s not physical
Any possible evidence for non-physical things would, by the definition of philosophical materialism, make those things physical. It’s not an evidence-based position. Philosophical materialism holds axiomatically that matter is the fundamental substance of nature. It is common that people don’t understand this and instead believe that philosophical materialism was arrived at through scientific inquiry. It was not. Wikipedia has a pretty decent summary, but you can also use the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy.
Unless somebody can actually demonstrate a thing that we have observed experimentally that does not have a physical basis in material reality there is zero reason to assume otherwise.
I described this happening in scientific history with the discovery of the EMF. There was a time before knowledge of the EMF where observations didn’t fit the model of the universe at the time. That means that, at the time, we experimentally observed something that did not have a basis in the consensus material reality. Then, we discovered entirely new physics and were able to explain the observations but in doing so had to expand the definition of physical to include electro-magnetic phenomena. So, it started as outside of physics and then physics expanded to include it. I posit that, likewise, given how little we know about the universe, that it is more likely we will discover new physics than it is that everything about consciousness can be explained with current physics. Again, remember that 99% of the matter in the universe is neither solid, liquid, nor gas and that over 95% of the observable phenomena in the universe is completely unaccounted for in our current physics.
All you’re doing is starting from a different assumption that has no basis, and then dismissing my assumption without presenting any actual evidence for your own position.
I have presented evidence:
The experimental observations of the universe that show the gap between what we know and what we don’t know, gaps we call “dark matter” and “dark energy”.
Previous expansions of the ontology of physics resulting in a massive multiplication of possible explanations for phenomena.
Eons of first-hand reports of experiences not explainable by current physics from all cultures, in all eras, in all locales.
Again, however, I am not arguing against philosophical materialism with evidence because philosophical materialism is an axiomatic assertion and not something arrived at by evidence. I am instead arguing against your assertion that consciousness is explainable by current physics on your purported basis that this is the only possible explanation for all possible phenomena. You will no doubt accept expansions of physics as just more physics, but you will not accept that current observed phenomena may require such an expansion and in fact denigrate such a possibility as magical/supernatural/unrigorous.
And finally:
I encourage you consider that Marxism is fundamentally a materialist ideology.
I have wrestled with this. The literature is quite clear that Marxist materialism and philosophical materialism are separate and distinct concepts with confusingly similar names. Marxist materialism is an Ethical position (not to be confused with a moral position) that states that the only things Marxism chooses to concern itself with are things that have causal relationships. Marx and Engels had debates on this topic, specifically with Engels attempting to pin down the nature of the Universe and Marx stating quite clearly that it doesn’t matter what’s happening metaphysically, all that matters is how it works to produce society. As Marx said, nature is “relevant to dialectic only when there is an implied reference to the way in which it conditions social and historical activity”. Marxism makes no metaphysical claims, only claims on what ought (ethics) to be the focus of analysis and intervention.
Marxist materialism stands in opposition to idealist conceptions of society that posit non-causal relationships as explanations for why things are the way they are. These include things like suffering is the result of failing to live up to an ideal model of morality instead of part of a direct causal chain of social elements. Marxism doesn’t have any opinion on whether magical spirits and angels and demons inhabit mystical bubbles in dimensions beyond our own, but it does have an opinion on when it would be appropriate to make them subjects of analysis and intervention - that is to say, only when such things have a causal linkage with social and historical activity.
Do not confuse Dialetical and Historical Materialism with Philosophical Materialism. They are fundamentally different despite sharing a name.
Regarding dark energy/dark matter. I’m saying that we simply have no idea what those are or even if they’re real. These things don’t represent a counter to materialism because there are plenty explanations for them within the materialist world view. For example, perhaps these are all galactic civilizations that are efficiently consuming energy in all observable spectrums leaving only a gravity footprint. It’s just a silly thought experiment to illustrate the point. More realistically, it could be that our model of the evolution of the universe is wrong or there are particles we haven’t detected yet, or a myriad other reasons. For example, MOND theory does away with the need for dark matter, and gets results that are closer to what we observe in the cosmos.
The broader point though is that our theory of cosmic evolution has little to do with us being able to understand how the immediate material world around us works. We have a very solid understanding of matter and energy down to the quantum level. We have conducted countless experiments on the behavior of particles and energy. None of that is magically invalidated by the fact that our theory of cosmology is incomplete.
I dismiss unscientific dogmatic behavior, like ignoring evidence that doesn’t fit the assumptions and begging the question
But we haven’t discussed any such evidence. Everything I’ve said is based on observed evidence and fits with our best understanding of reality. We don’t have conclusive proof of how consciousness arises in the brain, but that just means we have more research to do in this area.
It’s perfectly fine to critique science, but scientifically valid the critique has to be rooted in science which is fundamentally rooted in materialism. Invoking something that’s never been observed experimentally and for which we have no basis as a counter argument to ideas that are rooted in observation and material reality is not a sound critique from the scientific perspective.
The leap you’re making with EMF is saying that sicne our current model of cosmology has holes in it, then it follows that there are things beyond material reality. This logic does not follow. A simpler explanation is that our model is limited.
A historical example would be when we were using Newtonian physics to try and explain the universe, and a lot of observations did not fit. That didn’t mean that materialistic view of the universe was wrong, it meant that our model of the universe was limited. Einstein came along with relativity and we now have a better model. Asimov wrote a great essay on the subject incidentally https://mvellend.recherche.usherbrooke.ca/Asimov_anglosaboteurs.pdf
This is what science is all about, it’s a dialectical process of forming theories and doing experiments to come up with an increasingly more accurate description of reality.
Regarding the three points, hopefully I’ve addressed the first two above. The last point is not scientific. We have lots of anecdotal reports of unexplainable experiences, but none of these reports are repeatable or observable. The most likely explanation is that they exist solely within the minds of people who experienced them. It’s also worth noting how many unexplained phenomena started disappearing when things like cameras came into existence. A human mind is a fragile thing, and we are very much prone to hallucinating things. We have also evolved a predisposition to see agency where there is none.
Finally, the key part of Dialectical Materialism for me is that it states that physical reality has primacy. Our thoughts and actions do not exist in a separate realm disconnected from reality. They are fundamentally a product of the world around us.
We don’t have conclusive proof of how consciousness arises in the brain, but that just means we have more research to do in this area.
The hard problem cannot be solved by “more research” because it’s not a scientific question but a contradiction within metaphysical realist philosophy. Such contradictions can’t be resolved through discovery, as it’s conceptually impossible to even begin to imagine what a possible solution could even look like. A philosophy built on contradictions is fundamentally flawed and must abandon its premises to progress, and that cannot be escaped through scientific discovery.
In Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland, he discusses how Lenin misunderstood Bogdanov’s critique of metaphysical realism, falsely accusing him of idealism. Lenin couldn’t let go of the idea that what we experience is a “reflection” of reality rather than reality itself, keeping dialectical materialism tethered to metaphysical assumptions.
These assumptions boil down to Kant’s division between phenomenon (reality as experienced) and noumenon (reality independent of experience). Most modern philosophy implicitly maintains this dualism. Thomas Nagel argued that perception is brain-generated because reality, being independent of perspective, cannot match our perspective-dependent experiences. David Chalmers encapsulated this in the term “consciousness,” describing experience as distinct from reality.
This metaphysical framework assumes that reality is separate from perception, leading to the question of how the brain “gives rise” to perception. But this question is meaningless. If reality is independent of perception, it’s unobservable, and the claim becomes entirely metaphysical. Material sciences study observable reality, so distancing “true reality” from observation creates an unbridgeable gap that cannot explain how reality produces experience, and can’t even explain how we know anything at all, as supposedly the material sciences would be based in studying something we can never even hope to ever have evidence even exists!
While too many materialists cling to metaphysics and vaguely promise science will solve this problem, this “promissory materialism” fails because the hard problem stems from a flawed metaphysical premise. Idealists fare no better, adding mysticism to resolve the same contradictions. The solution is not to “solve” the problem but to reject the framework that creates it.
Metaphysical realism, logically similar to Kant’s dualism in its structure, assumes perception is separate from reality. Nagel’s and Donald Hoffman’s arguments for this fail: Nagel seems to have missed that in neither general relativity nor quantum field theory can you assign properties to physical systems without specifying a perspective, so there cannot meaningfully even be a perspective-independent reality, and thus the need for this division he demands isn’t justified. Hoffman misinterprets illusions as proof we don’t perceive reality as it really is because, supposedly, we perceive things that are false. However, reality is neither true nor false—it just is what it is. Misinterpretation is a failure of the observer, not of reality. There are no “illusions,” only misunderstandings.
Lenin still clung to the dualism implicit in metaphysical realism, insisting that what we experience is not reality itself, but a “reflection” of it created by the “mind.” He thus misunderstood and basically slander Bogdanov, accusing him of being an “idealist” for believing everything is “mind,” thinking he was denying that there even exists a reality independent of “consciousness.” But that was not even close to Bogdanov’s position. Bogdanov did not even believe experiences are “mind” or “consciousness” or some separate substance the brain “gives rise to.” The reality we experience just is reality. It is not a denial of reality, it is an embracing of it: the world we are immersed in every day, that surrounds us, that is the object of study of the material sciences, that is reality.
This supposed imaginary thing that Lenin claims is being “reflected” is entirely metaphysical. In Jocelyn Benoist’s Toward a Contextual Realism, this is why he rejects equally Kant’s notion of the phenomenon. The term “phenomenon” literally means “the appearance of,” suggesting that what is being perceived is merely the appearance of, reality as opposed to reality itself, kind of like a reflection of it. But this is not the stance of direct realism. The stance of direct realism is that what we observe is reality. It is neither the “appearance of” nor the “reflection of” anything. It just is, and what it is is neither true nor false, it is only real.
There is no “mind” or “consciousness” producing experience—it is not a product of anything or a reflection of anything, but simply is reality itself, which is precisely the subject of study of the material sciences. By rejecting this dualism, questions like “why does perception arise?” vanish because they stem from a false premise. The whole premise of Chalmers’ notion of “consciousness” is just nonsensical and should be rejected. The moment you buy into it, you have already bought into dualistic premises, and you will never “solve” this problem through some future scientific discovery, because it is not a scientific problem.
There are, of course, many scientific problems involved in understanding human brains, intelligence, problem-solving, self-awareness, etc, but there is absolutely no problem of “consciousness” because there is no such thing as “consciousness.” Indeed, even Chalmers admits that the notion of “consciousness” would be something that it would be impossible to distinguish between something that possesses it and something that does not, yet, somehow he doesn’t realize that this argument only demonstrates just how absolutely meaningless his notion of “consciousness” is, how it is just completely pure abstract metaphysics without any real content.
Even if we can create a complete replica of human intelligence in machines, there will still be people debating over whether or not it has “consciousness.” We can solve literally every scientific problem relating to understanding human minds and it would not even come close to putting to rest this debate, hence why no scientific discovery will yield anything here. We have to realize our premises are flawed and the “debate” is misguided in the first place, because “consciousness” should be entirely abandoned as a concept, as it relies on an unjustified metaphysical premise.
Yes, you’ve accurately summarized the issue. We possess subjective experiences or “qualia,” which are inherent to our individual consciousness and cannot be directly communicated or proven in others. This makes it impossible for us to confirm whether another being also has qualia, as it remains an internal property of their experience that is uniquely personal and not sharable with others.
In the absence of concrete proof, we are left with two fundamental assumptions regarding the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world. One perspective, dualism, posits that qualia or subjective experiences originate from a separate, non-physical realm distinct from the material reality we perceive. Conversely, materialism proposes that qualia is derived from physical processes within our brain and body, suggesting they should be understood as emergent properties of neural activity rather than supernatural phenomena.
In my view, dualism lacks any further explanatory value when compared to materialism. Given that it necessitates additional assumptions that require further justification, I find it more reasonable to consider qualia as an emergent property of the physical system in which our minds are a product. This perspective allows for a more straightforward explanation of consciousness and subjective experience within the framework of known physical laws and principles.
I would propose taking this argument even further by suggesting that many of the distinctions we make, such as differentiating between inorganic and organic realms or physical and mental domains, are fundamentally arbitrary constructs created by our minds to simplify complex phenomena. While these categories can be useful for comprehension, it’s important to remember that they are simply abstract constructs and not inherently reflective of an underlying reality. In essence, the world operates as a continuum of dynamic patterns, with each layer representing an emergent property of the one beneath it.
We possess subjective experiences or “qualia,” which are inherent to our individual consciousness and cannot be directly communicated or proven in others.
The whole point of my post was to say that no, there is no such thing as “subjective experiences” because experiences are not products of the subject.
This makes it impossible for us to confirm whether another being also has qualia, as it remains an internal property of their experience that is uniquely personal and not sharable with others.
This is purely a linguistic issue. Perspectives are defined according to an object used as their basis, and so it definitionally would not make sense for one object to adopt the perspective of another, because doing so would require it to become that other object, and thus would cease to be itself any longer.
For example, my perspective and yours differ, we are standing in a different location, we have a different nose in the front of our face, etc. I could make my perspective more and more similar to yours by erasing differences between us, but I will never fully occupy your perspective until all differences are erased, which would mean I would literally become you, and so I would no longer occupy your perspective, because “I” would no longer exist.
There is literally no physical reason I could gradually move closer to your perspective, it is merely a linguistic issue that would prevent me from fully occupying it, because then by definition I would no longer be me.
In the absence of concrete proof, we are left with two fundamental assumptions regarding the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world. One perspective, dualism, posits that qualia or subjective experiences originate from a separate, non-physical realm distinct from the material reality we perceive. Conversely, materialism proposes that qualia is derived from physical processes within our brain and body, suggesting they should be understood as emergent properties of neural activity rather than supernatural phenomena.
There is no “consciousness,” you have not established that there is, and so your “solutions” are not justified either. That was basically the whole point of my original comment. There is no convincing justification for such a dualistic split in the first place, so all these “solutions” are also unnecessary.
“Qualia” is also not interchangeable with “experience,” as qualia is a set of abstract objects like blue, red, loud, quiet, etc. Like all objects, they are normative and socially constructed ways of judging a set of experiences to be something. They do not fundamentally occupy any sort of different realm than any other kind of object that demands a separate explanation.
In my view, dualism lacks any further explanatory value when compared to materialism. Given that it necessitates additional assumptions that require further justification, I find it more reasonable to consider qualia as an emergent property of the physical system in which our minds are a product. This perspective allows for a more straightforward explanation of consciousness and subjective experience within the framework of known physical laws and principles.
Objects of qualia, or any category of objects at all, do not “emerge” from the brain, they are social constructs. You cannot dig into the brain and find them, you will never find “blue” or “red” in the brain any more than you will “cats” or “trees” or “circles” or “triangles.” Objects are socially constructed norms which only have ontological reality in how they are applied in a social setting, and do not have autonomous existence inside of brains.
I would recommend you research Wittgenstein’s “rule-following problem.” The book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is a good overview of this.
The whole point of my post was to say that no, there is no such thing as “subjective experiences” because experiences are not products of the subject.
I mean we all obviously have a qualia of experience. That’s not really in question. What’s in question is whether it’s a product of the physical world or not.
Perspectives are defined according to an object used as their basis, and so it definitionally would not make sense for one object to adopt the perspective of another, because doing so would require it to become that other object, and thus would cease to be itself any longer.
That’s not true. Let’s say we develop technology that allows us to connect two brains together. This isn’t purely hypothetical as there are cases of siamese twins who report having such shared experience.
There is no “consciousness,” you have not established that there is, and so your “solutions” are not justified either. That was basically the whole point of my original comment. There is no convincing justification for such a dualistic split in the first place, so all these “solutions” are also unnecessary.
I don’t see consciousness as a dualistic split. I see it as an emergent phenomena that arises from the chatter of neurons within the brain. Much the same way a virtual world in a video game can be created from the underlying computation performed on a computer chip.
They do not fundamentally occupy any sort of different realm than any other kind of object that demands a separate explanation.
Again, I’m not suggesting that there is any separate realm. I’m arguing against such notion.
Objects are socially constructed norms which only have ontological reality in how they are applied in a social setting, and do not have autonomous existence inside of brains.
I disagree here. The primary purpose of the brain is to create a simulation of the world that can be used to extrapolate into the future to facilitate decision making. The objects are a part of the model the brain constructs, and that’s the basis for social interactions. These would not be possible in the first place without our brains having a common internal representation of the world around us.
I’m familiar with Wittgenstein, but I don’t agree with all of his ideas. He also also been demonstrably wrong on a grand scale with Principia Mathematica where he tried to show that formal systems can be proven to be self consistent. This whole notion was shown to be fundamentally misguided by Gödel.
I mean we all obviously have a qualia of experience. That’s not really in question. What’s in question is whether it’s a product of the physical world or not.
Again, all objects are socially constructed norms. Objects of qualia do not demand a separate explanation from any other object.
That’s not true. Let’s say we develop technology that allows us to connect two brains together. This isn’t purely hypothetical as there are cases of siamese twins who report having such shared experience.
If you connect two brains together then they are the same physical system. I’m not really sure the point you’re trying to make here.
I don’t see consciousness as a dualistic split. I see it as an emergent phenomena that arises from the chatter of neurons within the brain. Much the same way a virtual world in a video game can be created from the underlying computation performed on a computer chip.
Both the virtual world and the computer chip can be observed, yet what you are arguing that observability itself arises from things that are fundamentally unobservable. I fail to see how this could ever be explained in a weakly emergent sense, as I fail to see how any arbitrary configuration of unobservable stuff could weakly emerge the property of observability. It would seem to inevitably have to be something strongly emergent, which is basically dualism, even if you call this strongly emergent property “physical,” it would only be a change in language, not in kind.
Although, again, I am not advocating dualism, I am rejecting the premise that the reality we perceive is an illusionary product of the mammalian brain, but merely stating that what we perceive is reality, i.e. I am a direct realist. I am criticizing indirect realism as I fail to see how you can get from nonobservability to observability, nor have you provided a reason to believe that this supposedly entirely invisible reality even exists. As far as I am concerned, what we perceive is reality.
Again, I’m not suggesting that there is any separate realm. I’m arguing against such notion.
Then stop asking for explanations of qualia if you agree that they do not demand a special explanation.
I disagree here. The primary purpose of the brain is to create a simulation of the world that can be used to extrapolate into the future to facilitate decision making. The objects are a part of the model the brain constructs, and that’s the basis for social interactions. These would not be possible in the first place without our brains having a common internal representation of the world around us.
These objects only exist as a relationship between the brain and the social structure and do not exist independently within the brain. Nobody has ever been able to peer into someone’s brain and find a conceptual object. They can only correlate brain patterns to a set of stimuli which are pre-associated with some sort of socially recognized symbol, such as the experimenter has to first specify a symbol, such a “dog,” then specify what set of stimuli would correspond to a “dog” in that particular social setting, then they have to show this to the patient, and then you can correlate these to the person’s brain patterns. Everyone’s brain patterns are different, and so it is not even possible to build a general mind-reading machine, as each machine has to be trained specifically on the person’s brain and its associations with social symbols which require a specific social setting.
I’m familiar with Wittgenstein, but I don’t agree with all of his ideas. He also also been demonstrably wrong on a grand scale with Principia Mathematica where he tried to show that formal systems can be proven to be self consistent. This whole notion was shown to be fundamentally misguided by Gödel.
Okay, but that’s not relevant, I am talking specifically about the rule-following problem. If you think objects exist autonomously inside of the brain, then how do you solve the rule-following paradox that this belief leads to? Since you are familiar with Wittgenstein, you should be able to address this paradox.
We’re talking past each other.
I asked:
and you replied:
Which doesn’t answer the question at all. If you believe consciousness is not fundamental but rather emergent, you will need to explain your reasoning. There are plenty of examples of recursion that you would not classify as conscious and there are plenty of things that have evolutionary reasons for being that you would not associate with consciousness. You are making a leap here without explanation.
I am not intimately familiar with Hofstadter’s work, but my understanding is that he is doing speculative and descriptive reasoning from the base premise that matter is inanimate and that consciousness is animate and that somehow consciousness arises from inanimate matter. That is his starting point. He assumes, axiomatically, materialist reductionism. This is the starting point of nearly all the concepts you’ve drawn from in your response.
You said:
I said:
And you replied with:
Which is literally an axiomatic statement - you assume that patterns of thought underpin our consciousness and then argue to conclude that patterns of thought underpin our consciousness. You are begging the question.
Good question! The answer is that neurons are not analogous to transistors because 1) they encode information through frequency not voltage, 2) frequency is mediated not only by the neuron’s “purpose” but also by environmental factors that co-develop alongside the neuron, 3) neuron’s are changed by virtue of their own activity and 4) neuron’s are changed by virtue of the activity of other neurons and other environmental factors.
I said:
You said:
Mathematics is a form of linguistics. Any given system of mathematics is a system of symbols created to represent concepts. A given system of mathematics comprises a vocabulary, definition, postulates, and theorems. Any system of mathematics is inherently a self-referential system of symbols and therefore inherently reductionist, in that anything that cannot be represented by that systems is not only discarded but also not nameable or identifiable.
I said:
You said:
But you missed the key point, which is that material reductionists do not merely posit that physical reality is all there is, but also that everything we observe today can be explained by the ontology we have today. It is entirely possible that physical reality has far more components to it than that which we are of today. In fact, the scientific consensus is that what we have posited in our ontology today only accounts for 3% of observable phenomena. I’ll get to that later.
You said:
This position is almost exclusively the position of Western dominance. Not a single culture outside of Western European culture took this position when encountering other cultures, ways of knowing, and systems of thought. It is only Western imperialism that fundamentally rejects mysticism. I encourage you to examine that.
They aren’t perfectly explained at all. The only way to assert this is ultimately to beg the question. You assume that’s what consciousness is, therefore assert that it’s perfectly explainable as what you assume. This is why material reductionism is fundamentally circular. Nowhere else do we create identity relationships between things so fundamentally different as “patterns of electrical impulses” and “subjective experience”.
I said:
You said:
Which misses the point entirely. Dark energy and dark matter, combined, make up 97% of the universe. Which is just an arrogant way of saying we know that we have no idea what 97% of the universe is. Dark matter and dark energy are not things, they are names given to the gaps between our observations. The observable behavior of the universe only makes sense when we posit the existence of so much additional stuff that literally dwarfs what we currently think we know. And the history of scientific discovery has shown us that as we discover more, we open up entirely new dimensions of observation. It’s entirely possible that in the process of making it to 5% known known we end up discovering some previous unknown unknown and expanding the whole scope even further. What we have discovered is so minuscule compared to what we know we have left to discover that it is the height of dogmatic faith to champion the idea that consciousness can only possibly come from the 3% of the (assumed) scope of the universe that we have worked with so far.
Finally, you end with:
But you have no actual argument for this other than the following:
By definition, literally every phenomenon is the result of physical interactions of matter and energy and there’s no argument to make at all. I am arguing that 3 is a faulty premise. The evidence we have is that the gap between what we know and what we will know is massive. Our known unknowns represent a body of knowledge 3000% larger than our known knowns. Our history of science has shown that our unknown unknowns are capable of being 1,000,000% larger than our total knowledge to date. It is more likely that we will discover new physics than that consciousness is explainable in our current physics, just from a pure statistical standpoint.
I did explain it though, I think consciousness is not a fundamental property, but a byproduct of the brain generating signals and those signals feeding back into the brain as part of the simulation of the world that the brain creates. I mean we could go into more detail of the specifics you want to focus on here.
He makes a rational argument for mechanisms that could plausibly underpin consciousness. I’m not sure why you keep using the word reudctionaism here. As far as I understand it, you subscribe to the dualism which implies that the mind is a product of some mystical forces outside the physical realm. There is zero evidence to support this notion.
The starting point is that the brain evolved to solve a specific problem, and it’s purpose is to keep organisms alive. That’s the basis for my argument. Patterns of thought are synonymous with the patterns of signals that fire within the brain. We have mountains of evidence that clearly and indisputably shows the relationship between the physical processes in the brain and the resulting thought patterns. Psychedelic drugs are a perfect example of this phenomenon. Altering the chemistry of the brain produces an immediate change in our conscious state of mind.
Meanwhile, anybody who argues that consciousness is a product of some other forces outside physical reality has a lot of explaining to do.
These aren’t fundamental differences. These are just implementation details of how information is expressed and transferred within the computational system.
In fact, we can go further here. A traditional computing substrate can run a physics simulation that can express a living entity down to cellular level as seen with the OpenWorm project. The virtual worm behaves the same way as its living counterpart that exists in the physical world.
You’re using the term reductionist here again, the incompletness of formal systems does not make them reductionist. In fact, we have plenty of examples of undecidable statements being computed all the time. That’s what the whole halting problem is all about. The system does not need to be provable to do computation.
This is not a statement I made here. However, there is zero evidence to suggest that our current computational models are not able to express computation done by biological computers.
This is the basis for all modern science and technology. It has nothing at all to do with Western dominance. Scientists in China use exact same methods as scientists in the west do. I encourage you consider that Marxism is fundamentally a materialist ideology.
There is absolutely nothing circular here. In fact, there is a very clear cause and effect relationship. Once again, the onus is on people claiming that the mind cannot be explained in terms of material reality to show what specifically cannot be explained.
Dark energy and dark matter aren’t proven things. You’re not apply logic with any sort of rigor here. On the one hand you dismiss science and on the other hand you use scientific theories as the basis for dismissing it. That’s actual circular logic.
Furthermore, the reality is that we have no idea what dark energy and dark matter are, or even if they exist in the first place. These are just kludges we use to make our theory of cosmology work and account for what we observe in experimental data. There alternative theories of cosmology that do not rely on these concepts.
And yes, I assume that all things must be physical because there is zero evidence for anything that’s not physical. Unless somebody can actually demonstrate a thing that we have observed experimentally that does not have a physical basis in material reality there is zero reason to assume otherwise.
All you’re doing is starting from a different assumption that has no basis, and then dismissing my assumption without presenting any actual evidence for your own position.
I think we can stop here and agree that we have fundamentally different world models. There is nothing we can say to one another that would prove that one model or the other is the correct one. I understand your position, and you understand mine. We also understand our point of disagreement. Therefore, I don’t think much else can be said here.
I disagree, but I respect your desire to disengage. I will not ask you further questions, but I will say these last few things to clarify my position, because I do not think you understand my position at all nor that you understand our point of disagreement. I have not seen any evidence in your writing that supports this claim.
Dark energy and dark matter are words we apply to a specific problem in our current model of the universe. Specifically, there is more observable gravity in the universe than the matter we can account for. That excess gravity is represented by “dark matter”, that is to say, we believe that the gravity is caused by matter, but we have no idea what matter because we’ve never observed it. We have observed the gravity, however, and 85% of the measured gravity is unaccounted for in all of the measured matter. As deGrasse Tyson says, Dark Matter is a misnomer, because it implies the gravity is caused by matter, when in actuality, we have absolute no idea what is causing the gravity. Dark Energy is the name we give to whatever is driving cosmic expansion, because again, when we take all of our observations, everything we believe exists accounts for only 4% of the behavior we observe. Call that Dark Matter and Dark Energy, or don’t. It’s just a symbol representing a real true fact about what we know we don’t know.
That’s not circular logic. That’s reductio ad absurdum. I don’t dismiss science. I dismiss unscientific dogmatic behavior, like ignoring evidence that doesn’t fit the assumptions and begging the question. I’m a big fan of science, which is why I use science’s own self-criticism as well as the criticism from the philosophy of science to work with it. This is the root of your confusion about my position - I am not anti-science and I still critique it.
Any possible evidence for non-physical things would, by the definition of philosophical materialism, make those things physical. It’s not an evidence-based position. Philosophical materialism holds axiomatically that matter is the fundamental substance of nature. It is common that people don’t understand this and instead believe that philosophical materialism was arrived at through scientific inquiry. It was not. Wikipedia has a pretty decent summary, but you can also use the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy.
I described this happening in scientific history with the discovery of the EMF. There was a time before knowledge of the EMF where observations didn’t fit the model of the universe at the time. That means that, at the time, we experimentally observed something that did not have a basis in the consensus material reality. Then, we discovered entirely new physics and were able to explain the observations but in doing so had to expand the definition of physical to include electro-magnetic phenomena. So, it started as outside of physics and then physics expanded to include it. I posit that, likewise, given how little we know about the universe, that it is more likely we will discover new physics than it is that everything about consciousness can be explained with current physics. Again, remember that 99% of the matter in the universe is neither solid, liquid, nor gas and that over 95% of the observable phenomena in the universe is completely unaccounted for in our current physics.
I have presented evidence:
Again, however, I am not arguing against philosophical materialism with evidence because philosophical materialism is an axiomatic assertion and not something arrived at by evidence. I am instead arguing against your assertion that consciousness is explainable by current physics on your purported basis that this is the only possible explanation for all possible phenomena. You will no doubt accept expansions of physics as just more physics, but you will not accept that current observed phenomena may require such an expansion and in fact denigrate such a possibility as magical/supernatural/unrigorous.
And finally:
I have wrestled with this. The literature is quite clear that Marxist materialism and philosophical materialism are separate and distinct concepts with confusingly similar names. Marxist materialism is an Ethical position (not to be confused with a moral position) that states that the only things Marxism chooses to concern itself with are things that have causal relationships. Marx and Engels had debates on this topic, specifically with Engels attempting to pin down the nature of the Universe and Marx stating quite clearly that it doesn’t matter what’s happening metaphysically, all that matters is how it works to produce society. As Marx said, nature is “relevant to dialectic only when there is an implied reference to the way in which it conditions social and historical activity”. Marxism makes no metaphysical claims, only claims on what ought (ethics) to be the focus of analysis and intervention.
Marxist materialism stands in opposition to idealist conceptions of society that posit non-causal relationships as explanations for why things are the way they are. These include things like suffering is the result of failing to live up to an ideal model of morality instead of part of a direct causal chain of social elements. Marxism doesn’t have any opinion on whether magical spirits and angels and demons inhabit mystical bubbles in dimensions beyond our own, but it does have an opinion on when it would be appropriate to make them subjects of analysis and intervention - that is to say, only when such things have a causal linkage with social and historical activity.
Do not confuse Dialetical and Historical Materialism with Philosophical Materialism. They are fundamentally different despite sharing a name.
Just a few closing thoughts from my end as well.
Regarding dark energy/dark matter. I’m saying that we simply have no idea what those are or even if they’re real. These things don’t represent a counter to materialism because there are plenty explanations for them within the materialist world view. For example, perhaps these are all galactic civilizations that are efficiently consuming energy in all observable spectrums leaving only a gravity footprint. It’s just a silly thought experiment to illustrate the point. More realistically, it could be that our model of the evolution of the universe is wrong or there are particles we haven’t detected yet, or a myriad other reasons. For example, MOND theory does away with the need for dark matter, and gets results that are closer to what we observe in the cosmos.
The broader point though is that our theory of cosmic evolution has little to do with us being able to understand how the immediate material world around us works. We have a very solid understanding of matter and energy down to the quantum level. We have conducted countless experiments on the behavior of particles and energy. None of that is magically invalidated by the fact that our theory of cosmology is incomplete.
But we haven’t discussed any such evidence. Everything I’ve said is based on observed evidence and fits with our best understanding of reality. We don’t have conclusive proof of how consciousness arises in the brain, but that just means we have more research to do in this area.
It’s perfectly fine to critique science, but scientifically valid the critique has to be rooted in science which is fundamentally rooted in materialism. Invoking something that’s never been observed experimentally and for which we have no basis as a counter argument to ideas that are rooted in observation and material reality is not a sound critique from the scientific perspective.
The leap you’re making with EMF is saying that sicne our current model of cosmology has holes in it, then it follows that there are things beyond material reality. This logic does not follow. A simpler explanation is that our model is limited.
A historical example would be when we were using Newtonian physics to try and explain the universe, and a lot of observations did not fit. That didn’t mean that materialistic view of the universe was wrong, it meant that our model of the universe was limited. Einstein came along with relativity and we now have a better model. Asimov wrote a great essay on the subject incidentally https://mvellend.recherche.usherbrooke.ca/Asimov_anglosaboteurs.pdf
This is what science is all about, it’s a dialectical process of forming theories and doing experiments to come up with an increasingly more accurate description of reality.
Regarding the three points, hopefully I’ve addressed the first two above. The last point is not scientific. We have lots of anecdotal reports of unexplainable experiences, but none of these reports are repeatable or observable. The most likely explanation is that they exist solely within the minds of people who experienced them. It’s also worth noting how many unexplained phenomena started disappearing when things like cameras came into existence. A human mind is a fragile thing, and we are very much prone to hallucinating things. We have also evolved a predisposition to see agency where there is none.
Finally, the key part of Dialectical Materialism for me is that it states that physical reality has primacy. Our thoughts and actions do not exist in a separate realm disconnected from reality. They are fundamentally a product of the world around us.
I didn’t want to interrupt your discussion but I just wanted to let you and @[email protected] know that I was following it and found it interesting.
The beauty of Lemmygrad is that you can have a discussion like this. :)
Yeah, I like slower forums, easier to follow and longer discussions.
indeed
The hard problem cannot be solved by “more research” because it’s not a scientific question but a contradiction within metaphysical realist philosophy. Such contradictions can’t be resolved through discovery, as it’s conceptually impossible to even begin to imagine what a possible solution could even look like. A philosophy built on contradictions is fundamentally flawed and must abandon its premises to progress, and that cannot be escaped through scientific discovery.
In Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland, he discusses how Lenin misunderstood Bogdanov’s critique of metaphysical realism, falsely accusing him of idealism. Lenin couldn’t let go of the idea that what we experience is a “reflection” of reality rather than reality itself, keeping dialectical materialism tethered to metaphysical assumptions.
These assumptions boil down to Kant’s division between phenomenon (reality as experienced) and noumenon (reality independent of experience). Most modern philosophy implicitly maintains this dualism. Thomas Nagel argued that perception is brain-generated because reality, being independent of perspective, cannot match our perspective-dependent experiences. David Chalmers encapsulated this in the term “consciousness,” describing experience as distinct from reality.
This metaphysical framework assumes that reality is separate from perception, leading to the question of how the brain “gives rise” to perception. But this question is meaningless. If reality is independent of perception, it’s unobservable, and the claim becomes entirely metaphysical. Material sciences study observable reality, so distancing “true reality” from observation creates an unbridgeable gap that cannot explain how reality produces experience, and can’t even explain how we know anything at all, as supposedly the material sciences would be based in studying something we can never even hope to ever have evidence even exists!
While too many materialists cling to metaphysics and vaguely promise science will solve this problem, this “promissory materialism” fails because the hard problem stems from a flawed metaphysical premise. Idealists fare no better, adding mysticism to resolve the same contradictions. The solution is not to “solve” the problem but to reject the framework that creates it.
Metaphysical realism, logically similar to Kant’s dualism in its structure, assumes perception is separate from reality. Nagel’s and Donald Hoffman’s arguments for this fail: Nagel seems to have missed that in neither general relativity nor quantum field theory can you assign properties to physical systems without specifying a perspective, so there cannot meaningfully even be a perspective-independent reality, and thus the need for this division he demands isn’t justified. Hoffman misinterprets illusions as proof we don’t perceive reality as it really is because, supposedly, we perceive things that are false. However, reality is neither true nor false—it just is what it is. Misinterpretation is a failure of the observer, not of reality. There are no “illusions,” only misunderstandings.
Lenin still clung to the dualism implicit in metaphysical realism, insisting that what we experience is not reality itself, but a “reflection” of it created by the “mind.” He thus misunderstood and basically slander Bogdanov, accusing him of being an “idealist” for believing everything is “mind,” thinking he was denying that there even exists a reality independent of “consciousness.” But that was not even close to Bogdanov’s position. Bogdanov did not even believe experiences are “mind” or “consciousness” or some separate substance the brain “gives rise to.” The reality we experience just is reality. It is not a denial of reality, it is an embracing of it: the world we are immersed in every day, that surrounds us, that is the object of study of the material sciences, that is reality.
This supposed imaginary thing that Lenin claims is being “reflected” is entirely metaphysical. In Jocelyn Benoist’s Toward a Contextual Realism, this is why he rejects equally Kant’s notion of the phenomenon. The term “phenomenon” literally means “the appearance of,” suggesting that what is being perceived is merely the appearance of, reality as opposed to reality itself, kind of like a reflection of it. But this is not the stance of direct realism. The stance of direct realism is that what we observe is reality. It is neither the “appearance of” nor the “reflection of” anything. It just is, and what it is is neither true nor false, it is only real.
There is no “mind” or “consciousness” producing experience—it is not a product of anything or a reflection of anything, but simply is reality itself, which is precisely the subject of study of the material sciences. By rejecting this dualism, questions like “why does perception arise?” vanish because they stem from a false premise. The whole premise of Chalmers’ notion of “consciousness” is just nonsensical and should be rejected. The moment you buy into it, you have already bought into dualistic premises, and you will never “solve” this problem through some future scientific discovery, because it is not a scientific problem.
There are, of course, many scientific problems involved in understanding human brains, intelligence, problem-solving, self-awareness, etc, but there is absolutely no problem of “consciousness” because there is no such thing as “consciousness.” Indeed, even Chalmers admits that the notion of “consciousness” would be something that it would be impossible to distinguish between something that possesses it and something that does not, yet, somehow he doesn’t realize that this argument only demonstrates just how absolutely meaningless his notion of “consciousness” is, how it is just completely pure abstract metaphysics without any real content.
Even if we can create a complete replica of human intelligence in machines, there will still be people debating over whether or not it has “consciousness.” We can solve literally every scientific problem relating to understanding human minds and it would not even come close to putting to rest this debate, hence why no scientific discovery will yield anything here. We have to realize our premises are flawed and the “debate” is misguided in the first place, because “consciousness” should be entirely abandoned as a concept, as it relies on an unjustified metaphysical premise.
Yes, you’ve accurately summarized the issue. We possess subjective experiences or “qualia,” which are inherent to our individual consciousness and cannot be directly communicated or proven in others. This makes it impossible for us to confirm whether another being also has qualia, as it remains an internal property of their experience that is uniquely personal and not sharable with others.
In the absence of concrete proof, we are left with two fundamental assumptions regarding the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world. One perspective, dualism, posits that qualia or subjective experiences originate from a separate, non-physical realm distinct from the material reality we perceive. Conversely, materialism proposes that qualia is derived from physical processes within our brain and body, suggesting they should be understood as emergent properties of neural activity rather than supernatural phenomena.
In my view, dualism lacks any further explanatory value when compared to materialism. Given that it necessitates additional assumptions that require further justification, I find it more reasonable to consider qualia as an emergent property of the physical system in which our minds are a product. This perspective allows for a more straightforward explanation of consciousness and subjective experience within the framework of known physical laws and principles.
I would propose taking this argument even further by suggesting that many of the distinctions we make, such as differentiating between inorganic and organic realms or physical and mental domains, are fundamentally arbitrary constructs created by our minds to simplify complex phenomena. While these categories can be useful for comprehension, it’s important to remember that they are simply abstract constructs and not inherently reflective of an underlying reality. In essence, the world operates as a continuum of dynamic patterns, with each layer representing an emergent property of the one beneath it.
The whole point of my post was to say that no, there is no such thing as “subjective experiences” because experiences are not products of the subject.
This is purely a linguistic issue. Perspectives are defined according to an object used as their basis, and so it definitionally would not make sense for one object to adopt the perspective of another, because doing so would require it to become that other object, and thus would cease to be itself any longer.
For example, my perspective and yours differ, we are standing in a different location, we have a different nose in the front of our face, etc. I could make my perspective more and more similar to yours by erasing differences between us, but I will never fully occupy your perspective until all differences are erased, which would mean I would literally become you, and so I would no longer occupy your perspective, because “I” would no longer exist.
There is literally no physical reason I could gradually move closer to your perspective, it is merely a linguistic issue that would prevent me from fully occupying it, because then by definition I would no longer be me.
There is no “consciousness,” you have not established that there is, and so your “solutions” are not justified either. That was basically the whole point of my original comment. There is no convincing justification for such a dualistic split in the first place, so all these “solutions” are also unnecessary.
“Qualia” is also not interchangeable with “experience,” as qualia is a set of abstract objects like blue, red, loud, quiet, etc. Like all objects, they are normative and socially constructed ways of judging a set of experiences to be something. They do not fundamentally occupy any sort of different realm than any other kind of object that demands a separate explanation.
Objects of qualia, or any category of objects at all, do not “emerge” from the brain, they are social constructs. You cannot dig into the brain and find them, you will never find “blue” or “red” in the brain any more than you will “cats” or “trees” or “circles” or “triangles.” Objects are socially constructed norms which only have ontological reality in how they are applied in a social setting, and do not have autonomous existence inside of brains.
I would recommend you research Wittgenstein’s “rule-following problem.” The book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is a good overview of this.
I mean we all obviously have a qualia of experience. That’s not really in question. What’s in question is whether it’s a product of the physical world or not.
That’s not true. Let’s say we develop technology that allows us to connect two brains together. This isn’t purely hypothetical as there are cases of siamese twins who report having such shared experience.
I don’t see consciousness as a dualistic split. I see it as an emergent phenomena that arises from the chatter of neurons within the brain. Much the same way a virtual world in a video game can be created from the underlying computation performed on a computer chip.
Again, I’m not suggesting that there is any separate realm. I’m arguing against such notion.
I disagree here. The primary purpose of the brain is to create a simulation of the world that can be used to extrapolate into the future to facilitate decision making. The objects are a part of the model the brain constructs, and that’s the basis for social interactions. These would not be possible in the first place without our brains having a common internal representation of the world around us.
I’m familiar with Wittgenstein, but I don’t agree with all of his ideas. He also also been demonstrably wrong on a grand scale with Principia Mathematica where he tried to show that formal systems can be proven to be self consistent. This whole notion was shown to be fundamentally misguided by Gödel.
Again, all objects are socially constructed norms. Objects of qualia do not demand a separate explanation from any other object.
If you connect two brains together then they are the same physical system. I’m not really sure the point you’re trying to make here.
Both the virtual world and the computer chip can be observed, yet what you are arguing that observability itself arises from things that are fundamentally unobservable. I fail to see how this could ever be explained in a weakly emergent sense, as I fail to see how any arbitrary configuration of unobservable stuff could weakly emerge the property of observability. It would seem to inevitably have to be something strongly emergent, which is basically dualism, even if you call this strongly emergent property “physical,” it would only be a change in language, not in kind.
Although, again, I am not advocating dualism, I am rejecting the premise that the reality we perceive is an illusionary product of the mammalian brain, but merely stating that what we perceive is reality, i.e. I am a direct realist. I am criticizing indirect realism as I fail to see how you can get from nonobservability to observability, nor have you provided a reason to believe that this supposedly entirely invisible reality even exists. As far as I am concerned, what we perceive is reality.
Then stop asking for explanations of qualia if you agree that they do not demand a special explanation.
These objects only exist as a relationship between the brain and the social structure and do not exist independently within the brain. Nobody has ever been able to peer into someone’s brain and find a conceptual object. They can only correlate brain patterns to a set of stimuli which are pre-associated with some sort of socially recognized symbol, such as the experimenter has to first specify a symbol, such a “dog,” then specify what set of stimuli would correspond to a “dog” in that particular social setting, then they have to show this to the patient, and then you can correlate these to the person’s brain patterns. Everyone’s brain patterns are different, and so it is not even possible to build a general mind-reading machine, as each machine has to be trained specifically on the person’s brain and its associations with social symbols which require a specific social setting.
Okay, but that’s not relevant, I am talking specifically about the rule-following problem. If you think objects exist autonomously inside of the brain, then how do you solve the rule-following paradox that this belief leads to? Since you are familiar with Wittgenstein, you should be able to address this paradox.