https://iai.tv/articles/the-mysterious-disappearance-of-consciousness-auid-1296
created by IAI_Admin on 16/01/2020 at 17:13 UTC
1493 upvotes, 45 top-level comments (showing 25)
Comment by marianoes at 16/01/2020 at 18:45 UTC
124 upvotes, 5 direct replies
Arnt we only able to perceive conciousness because we have it?
Comment by rawrnnn at 16/01/2020 at 19:45 UTC
100 upvotes, 9 direct replies
I think that eliminativism is widely strawmanned. These philosophers are flesh and blood (and quite likeable and excellent writers, at least in the case of Dennet), of course they have the same conscious experience as you or I, I do not believe this is really in question. Kastrup wants to use this apparent contradiction to claim "CHECKMATE ELIMINATIVISTS", but this seems like a really uncharitable line of argument, as if these great thinkers somehow forget they are conscious.
My reading of eliminavism is as a sort of occams razor applied to metaphysics. There is no need for complicated metaphysical machinery beyond physicalism to explain what is around us, so to reject consciousness as an "illusion" is to reject the tempting desire to assign consciousness an extra-material characteristic.
However, physical brains embodied as people still go around talking about "what it is like to be them", and from a naive behavioralist perspective we have no good explanation for that. But again that is not because we have yet to discover some hidden essence of the soul, but because we lack deep enough cognitive/neuro/computer-scientific grounded explanation, at present.
Comment by [deleted] at 16/01/2020 at 18:39 UTC
11 upvotes, 1 direct replies
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Comment by [deleted] at 16/01/2020 at 17:28 UTC
12 upvotes, 3 direct replies
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Comment by [deleted] at 17/01/2020 at 02:19 UTC
14 upvotes, 3 direct replies
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Comment by That_0ne_again at 16/01/2020 at 20:31 UTC
11 upvotes, 2 direct replies
There seem to be two discussions going on here worth disentangling:
1. Is there consciousness?
2. Where does consciousness come from?
The question of whether or not we have a conscious experience seems like a non-starter: We go about our day-to-day lives with a conscious experience. Unfortunately, I am not confident enough in philosophy to know if this point is made well enough, but I believe asking whether or not we have consciousness is akin to asking whether water is wet: We have defined our cohesive subjective experience to mean "consciousness" and so to argue that we don't have it is to change its definition.
But then we run into trouble when trying to explicitly define consciousness and some argue that due to the purely subjective nature of conscious experience, we cannot be sure that anybody else has a conscious experience. At the other end, we cannot be sure that everything isn't conscious. Solipsism and panpsychism, respectively.
One cannot be certain that solipsism isn't true. It could just be that you are the only conscious individual existing alone in your own matrix (in that case, Hello There, this is sysadmin and I say "Hi"), but solipsism leads down the rabbit holes of narcissism (if nobody else is conscious, why do I not do to them as I please?) and paranoia (if I am the only one conscious, what is the purpose of my predicament?). Again, one cannot rule out solipsism, but the discussion is not furthered by it either, meaning that we would either redefine "consciousness" so that not only "I" have it (I guess a utilitarian argument) or apply Occam's Razor and suggest that the added complication of addressing a world in which only "I" am conscious makes it less likely to be true than the simpler observation that others who appear like me also act like me and so are likely to have an internal experience like me. Again, neither of these "disproves" solipsism.
Panpsychism's case seems weaker to me than solipsism, but it does lead to interesting discussion. I might start my disagreement with panpsychism with a statement: A rock is not conscious. Why? Because it does not behave like a conscious entity. One might counter and suggest that what I actually mean when I say "conscious entity" is "an entity that takes in information and, after processing, acts on it". This seems to open me up to counterexamples such as an unresponsive person who has internal thoughts and feelings being unconscious and my phone being conscious.
The former is sticky. The inability of patients to express voluntary actions is often taken as meaning that they are unconscious. But the inability to express oneself does not preclude consciousness. Here, I am relying on observations that suggest that neurological activity is tied to conscious experience. This seems reasonable, as different states of consciousness reliably correlate with different patterns of neurological activity. It doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that a truly unconscious individual could be distinguished from a conscious yet "locked-in" individual based on their neurological activity. Which implies that I am putting forward the argument that consciousness is in some way tied to, or even dependent on, the way our brains behave. And given that our brains are information processing structures, the position I take is that consciousness arises from information processing.
Which means that a rock isn't conscious: It does not process information in any way. It also means that my phone could be conscious but simply can't express it. It also means that I do not give credence to the "philosophical zombie", i.e. the clone of me that is exactly like me but unconscious. On that front, I borrow an analogy: "Imagine an aeroplane flying backwards. You can do it, but in reality such a thing could not exist." I do subscribe to a position of consciousness being the result or an epiphenomenon of information processing, which does raise questions about "how much processing is needed" to have consciousness and what kinds of processing are required to have consciousness. Unrefined, this implies that consciousness could arise purely from any brute force bulk information processing, which might imply that having the capacity to compute a sufficient volume of spreadsheets could eventually give rise to a conscious MS Excel. This might be a possible form that consciousness could take. Whether consciousness requires some nuanced and complex information processing to arise or will arise simply if there is enough information processing is an extension of this discussion that I haven't yet had.
Comment by IAI_Admin at 16/01/2020 at 17:19 UTC
37 upvotes, 8 direct replies
In this article Bernardo Kastrup picks apart some of the popular arguments by leading illusionists and eliminativists on the non-existence of consciousness. He meticulously goes through their theses and points out the holes and flaws, and in all cases, he discovers that they leave the salient question unanswered. His critique focuses on the works of Keith Frankish (english philosopher) and Michael Graziano (US scientist). It's a well-researched, funny and personal response to Kastrup's initial question: 'what kind of conscious inner dialogue do these people engage in so as to convince themselves that they have no conscious inner dialogue?' What are your thoughts?
Comment by [deleted] at 17/01/2020 at 12:43 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
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Comment by [deleted] at 16/01/2020 at 18:18 UTC
3 upvotes, 2 direct replies
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Comment by naasking at 16/01/2020 at 21:32 UTC
12 upvotes, 0 direct replies
No amount of material indirection can make material states seem experiential, just as no number of extra speakers can make a stereo seem like a television: the two domains are just incommensurable.
What is the evidence of this claim? It seems pretty common, but I don't see why I should accept it.
For instance, it seems pretty clear that no amount of CPU speed will make your CPU capable of true parallelism, and yet with context switching our CPU *gives a convincing illusion of parallelism*.
And this is a pretty apt analogy, because the mechanistic attention schema theory of consciousness[1] suggests something similar is happening to produce the illusion of subjective experience, ie. rapid context switching attention between internal and external models of the world.
1: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full
Comment by [deleted] at 16/01/2020 at 21:00 UTC*
4 upvotes, 2 direct replies
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Comment by Vampyricon at 16/01/2020 at 19:05 UTC
10 upvotes, 1 direct replies
These arguments about how physicalism of subjective experiences is impossible is like arguing about how atomism is incorrect during Democritus' time, but without the excuse that atomism has shown no results.
Physicalism has been a great success thus far, but there is still quite a ways to go before we will be able to understand consciousness on a physicalistic basis, or be able to show that physicalistic approaches are impossible. Arguing that it's impossible at this moment in time is ridiculous.
Comment by [deleted] at 16/01/2020 at 19:18 UTC
12 upvotes, 3 direct replies
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Comment by [deleted] at 16/01/2020 at 19:43 UTC
4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
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Comment by dmmmmm at 17/01/2020 at 04:42 UTC
4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Nothing we can—or, arguably, even could—observe about the arrangement of atoms constituting the brain allows us to deduce what it feels like to smell an orange, fall in love, or have a belly ache.
Even sentence #2 is an extremely problematic statement. No good can come from a premise like this.
Comment by [deleted] at 16/01/2020 at 17:57 UTC
6 upvotes, 1 direct replies
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Comment by [deleted] at 16/01/2020 at 18:17 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
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Comment by NainDeJardinNomade at 16/01/2020 at 22:25 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I don't think the title OP chose is very fair in regards to the content of the article. You can understand what I mean if I worded it “Bernardo dismantles the arguments causing humans to deny the undeniable”. It's not wrong, but it's not fair either — most materialists aren't eliminativists nor illusionists.
Comment by ArsDruid at 17/01/2020 at 14:28 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The following article is one of the more interesting explanations of the source of consciousness that I have run across in a while.
A 2018 paper argues the condition now known as “dissociative identity disorder” might help us understand the fundamental nature of reality.
Comment by yeye009 at 19/01/2020 at 03:26 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Nothing in life is nothing at all, and the end of things is not. Nothing has an end so the disappearance of the soul is the same as saying the disappearance of the water into our mouth, or the disappearance of the river into the ocean, the water nor the river disappear they become part of the ”be” consciousness does not disaster it bocemes part of the reality or the non-reality
Comment by [deleted] at 16/01/2020 at 19:59 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
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Comment by [deleted] at 17/01/2020 at 15:30 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Has anyone here ever heard of an argument form called modus tollens?
The argument looks like this:
If x is undeniable, then x cannot be denied.
Materialists deny x.
Therefore x is not undeniable.
Looks like I just proved Kastrup wrong with a valid argument that none of you can disprove, why don't you delete this comment since you can't argue with it.
Comment by [deleted] at 16/01/2020 at 19:44 UTC*
7 upvotes, 2 direct replies
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Comment by [deleted] at 16/01/2020 at 20:34 UTC
1 upvotes, 3 direct replies
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Comment by [deleted] at 16/01/2020 at 18:15 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
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