One of the core tasks of the contemplative lifestyle (which can certainly be practiced outside of monasteries) is to be awakened from all of the things we think we need and desire. These are usually the things that the (societally constructed) ego needs to feel secure and comfortable - hence so many contemplative traditions stress the importance of "dying to yourself". This is not 'negative' or even necessarily introverted - in fact, dealing with the insecurities that you have inherited from the expectations of the society around you can make you comfortable both alone and with people. There is no need to impress anyone; no need to feel insecure or alone; you're at peace with yourself and the world.
The contemplative tradition has a lot to teach our world - no manner of scientific or technological progress is going to help us before we're comfortable with being ourselves.
Let me quote what you said when I asked how we can move from the objective facts of a thing to my subjective experience of that thing: "It's a thing of your imagination: for me, you just imagine that there is anything more than the electrical and chemical reactions, and there isn't anything." I take this to mean that you're saying the subjective experience is imaginary. If you now claim that subjective experience is an emergent property, then let me pose the question one more time: If subjective experience is an emergent phenomenon, we should ultimately be able to explain a given state of that phenomenon in terms of the material world (just like we're able to, ultimately, explain for example a state of Conway's game of life through the rules that govern that game). So, light of wavelenghts that we associate with the color yellow hit my eye and the signals eventually reach my brain. How can we go from that (objective) description of a signal entering my brain to my subjective experience of the color yellow? How can we infer from the configuration of neurons in my brain what the experience of that color is 'like'?
Also, when you say "you personally have an illusion of subjective experience as not being an emerging property, just like a traveler across the hot sand would see in the distance what would appear to him as a small lake, only to turn into a hot sand the closer he gets to that point." this is a very strange statement. I thought, up until now, that you were arguing that it was the subjective experience itself that was the illusion, but if I understand you correctly you're claiming that it is my belief in its uniqueness that is the illusion? If that is what you claim, then there is really not much to say to you, because this itself is an unsubstantiated claim. You apparently have a strong belief that everyone who believes consciousness to be a unique phenomenon is being tricked. Maybe you believe this because otherwise your belief that all of existence can be explained by the laws of physics will not be true? You want to believe in a orderly universe that we can wrap our heads around and explain, which is very natural - we humans have problems when things get too complex, but unfortunately it's not a belief that has been validated logically or scientifically. The same goes for your belief that "the gods were also invented by humans and there's nothing mysterious about that too". It's a nice thing to believe, and faith in a higher principle (like the laws of physics) is a precious thing that can help make sense of the world, but we should recognize that it is faith, not a necessary truth reached by rational thought. See this link: http://skepdic.com/wishfulthinking.html
But then later you also say "So is "subjective experience" illusory or not you ask? It exists, just like the mentioned human on the hot sand (or on the hot road) sees "water" in the distance". Now it seems it is the subjective experience itself that is the illusion, not my belief that it is a unique phenomenon. So which is it?
I thank you for all the explanations about Conway's game of life and the philosophical musings (that I emphasize, again, must not be mistaken for rational truth) that you give surrounding it. I have implemented my own (poor) version of this game before, so I am familiar with the concepts here. Just FYI so you don't have to spend too much energy explaning how the game works.
Edit:
> Moreover, it will be possible to "teach" the computer to "experience that" just like humans experience it now. Because how we think about the world is a product of what we learn and the physical inputs we become while growing and living. As our thinking is effectively just a result of 1) processing of the information we get 2) the internal state of our body and 3) external inputs; eventually we will be able to construct a machine that will be able to process enough information, to the point of "thinking" in the same symbols (language) as we do, which has big enough internal state (memory) and which has enough of external inputs to behave, for us, surprisingly humane, even to the point of that computer claiming having a "subjective experience" which would also appear to the computer as "unique."
This is not an argument, this is a restatement of what you believe to be true. Yes, if consciousness and subjective experience are emergent phenomena, then we could make such a computer.
I don't (or at least didn't mean to) claim that the emerging properties of, say, Conway's game of life are intuitive. What I am claiming is that there is a qualitative difference between the outcomes of Conway and other physical emerging phenomena and the phenomenon of consciousness (and frankly, I have run out of ways to try to illustrate just how qualitatively different these things are). Just because both actual emergent phenomena and the phenomenon of consciousness are non-intuitive does not mean that they must necessarily be explainable in the same way any more than describing 'fog' and 'thoughts' to both be nebulous terms must mean anything beyond that.
Basically your claim is that everything we see in this world must be explicable in terms of physical laws or 'emergence' simply because emergence has shown to be correct when it comes to unimaginable things before. That, of course, does not logically follow. Of course, you're free to believe that, but then your only consistent claim can be "even if it's not logically true, I don't like to think that science cannot tell us everything.". Nothing more.
But you have already said that what I consider subjective experience is just 'my imagination' (the more I think of it, the more of an empty statement it seems to be. If consciousness is an illusion, then there must still be something that is 'being tricked', and then the question becomes how that phenomenon can happen. It's turtles all the way down.) If this is your stance, why are you still trying to convince me that subjective experience is something that will somehow be shown to be an 'emergent' property? Is it illusory or not?
Ok, I think we either have some communication issues or philosophical differences (if I understand you correctly, you're saying that subjective experience is an illusion? Which to me just shows the absurd lengths one has to go to in order to rule out any question that cannot be answered by science. Your own subjective experience is literally the starting point for any investigative endeavor you might attempt in this world, so I'd be careful with claiming it is only your imagination) or a combination of both, so maybe we should recognize this and leave it here.
You have provided ample examples of emergent properties, which are interesting in their own right for sure, but if you really imagine that Conway's game of life and the unknowable future of that game is analogous to the phenomenon of subjective experience, we either are miscommunicating or there is a quite insurmountable barrier of understanding between us.
>Thanks for trying to explain your belief to me. If we concentrate on exactly your last post, maybe you can understand how I see it: I see again that you claim that you came to that conclusion "intellectually and rationally" but everything else contradicts that. I see the claim to uniqueness of conscious beings (and I still haven't heard from you if you consider only humans "conscious") as a "the phenomenon of subjective experience." That is, because you "subjectively experience" it, that means to me "not rationally" and I still conclude it's your "feeling of being special."
I think we already here have some deep reasons for disagreement: If I understand you correctly here, you're saying that no conclusion reached on 'subjective' grounds can be rational - maybe you would even go so far as to say that what is rational is identical to knowledge gained via the scientific method? If so, I would disagree with your definition of what is rational.
(I don't know whether animals are conscious in the same way we are - I would have no problems either way. As I said, it's not about humans (or myself) being special, it is that the phenomenon of consciousness is special).
> If you would really approach your claims "intellectually and rationally" you'd understand that that "subjective experience" which you see as something special is an emerging property.
This is a really bold claim, and it is indeed the locus of our disagreement, so again I'd have to say I disagree :) Emergence is not a magic wand you can wave and make every problem go away; for all phenomena where 'emergence' have been invoked as an explanation, we are really just talking about very complex phenomena that are very very hard to reduce to their base 'constituents' (elementary particles and their force transmitters), but which we can at least imagine can be reduced to these constituent parts - in other words, I can imagine starting from some basic building blocks of matter and, through some very complex patterns of organization, I can imagine moving from that starting point to the end result - conceptually, even if I cannot trace all the steps with my current understanding.
But this is not something I can imagine with the phenomenon of subjective experience. (An aside here: It seems you take me to say that 'because of my subjective experience that I cannot imagine this, this cannot be true' - what I am saying is that it is subjective experience itself that is what we're trying to explain here. So referring to earlier people not 'subjectively experiencing' an understanding of how e.g. planets can move is not really on target: My concern here is with the phenomenon of subjective experience itself).
What I mean is that in order to explain, say, my subjective experience of how an apple tastes, it's not just a matter of saying 'well, now your neurons are firing in this way and we know this is the taste center of your brain, so that's why you have a sensation of taste'. That is showing a correlation. What I'm saying is that this is not an explanation, and to me it shows that it will be impossible to move from a purely materialistic account of this experience to my actual subjective experience of the thing. How can we ever translate the firing of the neurons in my brain into the subjective world my consciousness inhabits? How can atoms, no matter how sophisticately arranged, give rise to this type of phenomenon?
Let me try to say it in another way: You could measure the activity of the brain and give an 'objective' account of what happens to a person: Now they're angry, now they're cold, now they're slightly hungry, etc. But it stops there! How will you move from this objective description to the actual experience of these feelings and states of mind?
Sean Carroll is a great physicist, and it's great that he engages with these questions, but he is mainly a physicist, not a philosopher of mind, and he does exhibit the same hubris that many of our ilk (yes, I'm a physicist too) have when it comes to other fields. The question I'm raising here is far from being unanimously agreed upon, and when Carroll writes stuff like "To persuade anyone otherwise, you would have to point to something the brain does that is in apparent conflict with the Standard Model or general relativity.", it's either disingenous or just a bit lazy. Giving a materialistic account of consciousness is non-trivial no matter whether the brain violates SM or GR or not, and whether it does or not will have little bearing on this problem.
If you're interested in reading more, and indeed seeing that I'm not the only one who sees this as a big problem of a materialistic account of the universe, here is a book I can recommend: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1851683763
I don't claim to be special - what I'm describing goes for all conscious beings, after all (and it could very well be that there are conscious animals). It seems to me you are trying really hard to make it seem like I'm uncomfortable on a personal or emotional level with the concept that consciousness can arise from matter only; please belive me when I say I am not. But on an intellectual and rational level I find the idea untenable. I don't understand why this is so hard to accept for you?
Your argument about the complexity of computers would have weight if I had been claiming that the reason consciousness cannot be found outside humans is because nothing can be as complex as the human brain; I am not claiming that. Hence you can make computers as complex as you want - you still haven't answered how subjective experience can arise from matter.
There is nothing about me in particular that is special, but every conscious being does possess a quality or is inhabited by a phenomenon that is unlike anything else in the universe that we know of. That makes it pretty damn special, yes.
But again, it's not the feeling of feeling special that I am talking about here. It is the phenomenon of subjective experience.
And yet, consciousness is something that remains, regardless of whether we name it as such, and regardless of the specific cells that make up our brains. So it's as if it is the only thing that is not named 'by us' and yet remains 'something' independent of its makeup.
I certainly am interested in this, but I also would like to note that this is not just a matter of something 'more complex' arising and that I lack the imagination necessary to see how something very very complex can arise. Rather, subjective experience is a phenomenon that, no matter how complex your system is, is qualitatively different.
It's not like this is a trivial problem that philosophers of mind have figured out long ago. As someone else mentioned in this thread, it is a very deep problem. If you want to have your view challenged I encourage you to read any introductory book to philosophy of mind.
>So my guess is that it deeply matters to you to believe that you are fundamentally different from all other animals. Which is a wishful thinking.
:) I urge you to read through this quote and then ask yourself who is making more assumptions and who are partaking in wishful thinking. I have already stated that I really don't have a problem with us being matter 'only' and yet you find this statement somehow so incredible that you have to claim that this 'deeply matters' to me, despite what I actually claim is the reason for my belief.
To me, the extraordinary claim is that matter arranged in a certain way can give rise to subjective experience. That is what requires extraordinary evidence, in the same way I would need evidence if you said that by putting sticks together to form a pentagram you were able to summon a demon.
Your teapot around neptune is neither here nor there as an argument, but since I have encountered it before I am guessing it's taken from some kind of 'sceptic's manual for discussion'. It has little relevance here, however, as I am not claiming something completely taken out of the blue, but rather something that is based on direct experience with the world, i. e. my own subjective experience.
I don't see how this is relevant? I don't have a strong need to believe there is more in the universe than matter. In fact, as mentioned earlier I believed for a long time everything could be explained in that way.
But after further reflection I have arrived at a different conclusion.
Throwing out allegations of wishful thinking in a debate should at least be substantiated. Otherwise I can equally validly say it's wishful thinking on your part to believe consciousness can be explained in material terms.
I have no problem with seeing myself 'part of nature' - in fact, I have for the longest time believed that consciousness can be explained in terms of the material universe revealed by science alone. But I see no way in which this gap can be bridged in terms of what we currently know about the physical universe.
As for your questions:
- There seems to be aspects of the universe that are related to 'meaning' rather than to 'mechanics'. How that is related to the physical universe I certainly have no theory that hasn't been thought of before. Perhaps the physical world is the 'shadow' of the world of 'meaning'/spirit? I don't really know.
- We can certainly simulate all laws of physics as detectable by science. Whether that's all there is, however, is something I don't believe.
- Leaving the debate of free will aside, I certainly don't think we'll be able to simulate the life of a human in its completeness (unless we're somehow given some insight into how subjectiveness can exist in this universe) - i.e. including the subjective dimension of that human's life.
- Thus, I wouldn't call that human conscious, no.
- We can't :) Our own conscious experience is all we can be completely sure of (which is why I also find it so extremely odd to prefer the 'mechanistic worldview' when that involves disregarding our own conscious experience, which is the only thing we really have to start from!)
- In principle, I think so, yes, but only by somehow pre-programming that unconscious being to act in exactly the same way (this relates to the concept of free will).
As you can see, I don't have a clear theory of consciousness - mine is mostly a negative position in the sense that I don't believe matter, as described by the laws of physics, can give a coherent explanation of the phenomenon of consciousness. Where to go from there is not clear, but there are a lot of philosophers of mind thinking about the issue :)
(Also, again, I don't consider this position more 'magical' than believing that arranging atoms in a given configuration will 'somehow' give rise to subjective experience).
> I have those too, and no offense to you personally, but I call bullshit on both mine and your acquaintances. In case of people I know, there was not one situation for which I couldn't find a more plausible explanation - which usually boils down to that for enough trials, even the rare coincidences sometimes happen.
Fair enough - this 'statistical argument' is a convenient explanation that can always be invoked, but in this case I don't really consider it to be very satisfactory as an explanation of the phenomena I have been told about (I would put the likelihood for something like those phenomena to happen 'by chance' to be so abysmally low that it seems impossible).
> There is this one reason that it's literally the job of science. Science isn't a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book, it's the aggregation of everything that reliably works for extracting information about observable reality.
I disagree. "Science (from the Latin word scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.". This is far from saying 'science can answer any question'. But again, you're free to believe that science can do that. I just don't happen to believe it can.
> But is it? The hint is given by the fact that there's more than one thinking human in existence. You may feel that answers about your subjective experiences are out of reach of science, but to the extent subjective experiences have any impact on reality, you can use science to study my subjective experiences (as expressed by me), and I can do the same to you.
I think your answer to the other thread makes it clear that we have some insurmountable philosophical differences here. If you believe that showing the correlation between a configuration of atoms and the subjective experience that accompanies that configuration to be 'an explanation' of that subjective experience, we have very different expectations of what constitutes an explanation.
> It's a belief, true, but it's kind of a privileged one, since it's so successful at explaining literally every other thing we observe about the universe. Why brains would be different?
It's successful at explaining everything that can be explained in material terms, yes! Science is really good at it.
>This argument would be stronger 500 years ago, but I don't know how one can consider this "not far from believing in magic" after seeing a computer. Or, after observing brains of different animals - from insects to simians. Or, after discovering circuit-bending and realizing how similar it is to prodding a brain. There's ample evidence against the hypothesis that the human brain is the only magical object in the universe and that it somehow transcends physics.
I cannot see how any one of those things you mentioned have to do with the utter strangeness that is subjective experience? I'm not saying a brain cannot perform computations, if that's what you're getting out of this. Why you mention a computer I don't know - there is nothing that indicates a computer has subjective experience and nothing about a computer makes me believe that creating subjective states is something that can be done with atoms alone. And that is what is 'magical' about this line of reasoning.
>Why? If I gave you a device that could trace the state of every molecule and charge in my brain to the extent allowed by uncertainty principle, would you still be confident in believing that? Just because we don't have a device like this doesn't mean consciousness is magic.
See above. Even if you were to trace every molecule in my brain, you would be no closer to really explaining a subjective experience. You would be able to show correlations, yes! 'Now he's angry, look at this cluster of atoms'. But that's not an explanation of the experience as such. That's the unbridgeable gap I'm talking about.
> as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic.
Rather, the things that seem somehow magical to us we either explain scientifically, or we ignore. I don't know about you, but several of my acquaintances have reported phenomena and experiences that I have no reason to doubt, that are not solely 'in their mind' (because of the external consequences of what happened), and that cannot be explained by mechanistic laws because they involve 'backwards' transfer of information and so on. These are datapoints, they're just unfortunately not datapoints that can be used for scientific inquiry. But then again, there is no a priori reason to believe science can answer all questions we have.
Regardless of this, there is a reason to assume a big metaphysical mystery, simply because consciousness and subjectivity is unlike anything else in the world and bridging the qualitative gap between subjective experience and the mechanistical world is a completely different task than explaining, say, what makes a stone roll the way it does.
What I'm saying is that consciousness doesn't add anything to the art of 'predicting the future', and plays (as far as I can see) no discernable role in this art.
I'm not really sure what you're arguing here. I would certainly say consciousness is 'something more', and that this something more has to be something non-material (or at least using 'materials' that have wildly different properties than what we observe using the scientific method).
Theseus' ship is a problem for a purely materialistic explanation of consciousness, for, by that account, consciousness should be a function of your material makeup, and yet, it remains constant despite change in both what makes up your cells and the specific configuration of those cells.
Well, that's a bold claim, and it doesn't really say anything substantial, in my opinion. What does it mean to see yourself? Are the electrical impulses of your brain somehow registering themselves and then reflecting them to yet another part of the brain which.. does what exactly?
Believing that consciousness can be explained in terms of material processes is certainly a valid belief, but it is just that: a belief. Believing that a certain configuration of atoms, no matter how involved, can give rise to subjective experience is not far from believing in some kind of magic.
And before you retort that a lot of phenomena in nature are 'emergent', I will say:all those phenomena are ultimately explicable in terms of their basic atomic constituents. Consciousness is qualitatively different. You cannot start with the experience of being hungry and then somehow explain the whole process from your stomach being empty to that qualitative experience and how it feels for you.
One of the core tasks of the contemplative lifestyle (which can certainly be practiced outside of monasteries) is to be awakened from all of the things we think we need and desire. These are usually the things that the (societally constructed) ego needs to feel secure and comfortable - hence so many contemplative traditions stress the importance of "dying to yourself". This is not 'negative' or even necessarily introverted - in fact, dealing with the insecurities that you have inherited from the expectations of the society around you can make you comfortable both alone and with people. There is no need to impress anyone; no need to feel insecure or alone; you're at peace with yourself and the world.
The contemplative tradition has a lot to teach our world - no manner of scientific or technological progress is going to help us before we're comfortable with being ourselves.