You're only imagining you have consciousness

honestly Dan Dennett is probably the only person that could convince me to become a dualist

he's so committed to the materialist project that he's saying obviously retarded stuff to the point that his whole career is a huge reductio ad absurdum of scientism.

>imagining you have consciousness

Wow this is so much less complicated than being conscious.

>The consciousness doesn't exist
>You're merely performing the actions that human beings have decided to call consciousness
This is Love is just chemicals in the brain tier semanticism

Does anyone want to explain the hard problem of consiousness?

Ive tried to understand the argument several times but it always seem to break down to: I don't want to believe we are just biological machines so its not true"

Or "we can't explain how certain parts of the brain work, therefore there must be a supernatural element to it"

think about it this way: it's easy to explain why people would avoid pain from a darwinian/materialist standpoint

its very hard to explain why pain FEELS bad when you experience it

> t. militiant atheist
Brought to you by TED, sponsored by George Soros the literal nazi

>its very hard to explain why pain FEELS bad when you experience it

So that you will avoid it, obviously.

Do you see an "immaterial" 3d vista whenever you have your eyes open? This isn't strictly necessary for the brain to function as intended

you don't need the negatively-valenced abstract feeling/qualia of pain to avoid pain

Honestly, I find New Mysterianism to be the only honest answer to the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

kind of

materialists are honestly talking in circles

"well, your mind is your brain, therefore the mind is physical"

dualists have no answers

I lean towards idealism and panpsychism though, these do not deserve the bad rap they get today

ted.com/talks/david_chalmers_how_do_you_explain_consciousness

I used to be a panpsychists, but I dropped it after reading Henri Bergson. I tend to lean to being a quasi-dualist now. Consciousness is simply attention directed to explicit memory and the qualitative aspect produced thereof. If you accept this claim, then The Hard Problem of Consciousness begins touching the same territory that Henri Bergson explored.

The issue with explaining explicit memory facades as emerging from brain activity is that, what is the nature of explicit memory when it is not persistently arising? Can the qualitative potentialities of explicit memory in its various forms arising from biology be said to pre-exist their temporal appearances? If not, how else can one explain a causal relation of the unique qualities arising from explicit memory in a way accessible to brain activity? What is the nature of declarative memory in relation to neural activity, what is its encodable field?

I thought about this long and hard, even with my strong Neuroscience background (got a BS), and I came to agree most with Bergson that I believe that faggot Deleuze distorted.

wasn't like all of Bergson's beliefs proved wrong by science?

>Consciousness is simply attention directed to explicit memory and the qualitative aspect produced thereof
I disagree. It's possible to be conscious of nothing, is it not?

I have my degree in Neuroscience. Science deals with falsifiable, testable hypotheses. The hypotheses are operationalized in order to avoid implicit, hidden metaphysical claims. Science and philosophy do not deal with the same things, though philosophy does give foundation to science. I could go more in-depth if need be.

No. Being conscious of nothing is still something.

>I have my degree in Neuroscience. Science deals with falsifiable, testable hypotheses.
Philosophical ideas have implications, that may or may not turn out to be incompatible with well-supported scientific theories. I haven't read Bergson though.

>No. Being conscious of nothing is still something.
It's still something, yes, but if it relates to nothing, does it stop existing? Do I die every time I enter dreamless sleep?

>Do I die every time I enter dreamless sleep?
Yes. I accept Deleuze and Dharmakirti's nominalism, and I believe it's only the persistent activity of explicit memory that creates the illusion of enduring objects. I agree with Lankavatara's Sutra notion of "Reservoir Consciousness", where the world is the encodable field for declarative memory -- not the brain. One can consider explicit memory as being akin to a field (perhaps holographic as some philosophers argue) that exists in tandem to the brain, and relevant explicit memory is consolidated and retrieved from there by the brain.

An awareness without reference to explicit memory is the same thing as death. I looked into neurophenomenological cases deeply to figure this out.

brb meditating to commit suicide

>you're only imagining you have consciousness
Obviously it's not a case of "imagination" but rather (useful) false belief. We behave as though there are "experiences" of things and it's the behavior that's real rather than the idea that behavior is in reference to.
Same sort of idea to how numbers work. The number 5 isn't something you can pick up and poke at like you could with a rock or a snail. It isn't the number 5 that's really there but instead our behavior in reference to the idea of the number 5. Because we all behave around the idea this number is a thing we can talk about and do things with in an abstract way like add it to some other number or represent the time of day it is, we gain useful shortcuts for getting things done that we wouldn't have access to if we were limited to only behaving around literally real physical things.
Now the number 5 / numbers in general are a more deliberate example of useful false belief i.e. it's something you aren't automatically born with (the capacity to think mathematically in general is somewhat automatic, but the specifics of how numbers work in your given culture is something taught). But "consciousness" works in much the same way otherwise, where instead of being taught to behave around "it" we just do so on a more instinctual level. "Experiences," like numbers, aren't things you can pick up and poke at. The real world thing is all the behavior we engage in when referring to the idea of these "experiences." The way we act in similar ways in the presence of objects that give us similar sorts of visual stimuli is what gives the non-real concept of "sights" their pseudo-existence.
I like the analogies of the eye of the storm for this concept. There isn't any such thing as an eye of a storm in reality. It's all the real stuff swirling around the "eye" that allow for it to be treated as though it were a real thing in itself.

>ben stiller
i keked

>implying the number 5 doesnt exist outside our minds
delete this post

>consciousness isn't physical therefore it doesn't exist
bud...

Every moment, everything simultaneously arises and perishes. Explicit memory fosters the illusion of continuity in time-slices of things.

What relates to explicit memory? Don't say the brain

Yes, but if we accept qualia as irreducible, then based off the anti-reductionist perspective, you cannot reduce explicit memory to the brain. You can only say it is contingent on the brain, not reducible.

You're just starting a semantics argument because you don't like that use of the word "exist."
You can say numbers "exist" as abstract objects, but obviously that's not the same sort of "existence" that physical objects like rocks have. And if you explore what physical things make abstract objects work as pseudo-things we can talk about, you'll end up finding it's our behavior. Because you and I behave as though 5 dollars means I'm entitled to a sandwich valued at that amount, the 5 dollars becomes a pseudo-real thing that gives me useful physical real world advantages even though money isn't a physical thing in itself. The paper and coin token representations of money are physical things, but money itself isn't, which is why you can have money represented entirely in terms of electronic record keeping without carrying any physical paper on your person.

Ignore autists that cannot comprehend the Hard Problem of Consciousness and prefer to remain reductive physicalist scum.

in that case, it's acceptable

obviously the mind is, in some ways, contingent on the brain. It's almost impossible to believe that consciousness and qualia are reducible.

we do not fully comprehend the nature of consciousness and only pseuds tell you otherwise

just because consciousness doesn't exist in a physical sense doesn't mean that it exists in the same way abstract objects exist

>*reads article on "consciousness" aka wakefulness and attention*
>dude consciousness has already been explained lmao, sounds like you believe in god and just really want the soul to exist

It's called New Mysterianism, and I agree with you. My point was just to point out quasi-dualism is also a tenable position, like panexperientialism.

they're p-zombies

I'm probably more of a panprotoexperientialist than a panpsychist if you want to be technical about it, I just think the former is a much clumsier term than the latter and there's no good division between the two

btw what's the difference between quasi-dualism and property dualism/epiphenomenalism?

I don't know how else you thought the "hard problem" was going to resolve. Do you think we're going to make a future scientific breakthrough explaining how qualia work in some new extra-physical way?
The much more reasonable explanation is that we're just behaving around abstract concepts that don't really exist. Our brains are perfectly capable of making us behave as though something that isn't true actually is true, and this scenario has the benefit of being completely compatible with physics.

How else exactly can something exist if it's neither physical nor abstract? What would account for this third type of "existence" you're referring to? How does it happen, what makes it work? You can answer these questions for physical objects and abstract objects, but I don't think you can for whatever third class of objects you're suggesting.

I was just arguing something like Henri Bergson's inverted cone could be possible, given we accept Hard Problem of Consciousness and cannot falsify which plausible, non-reductionist approaches is/are true:

Start reading from " Pure memory is something else, and here we encounter Bergson's famous (or infamous) image of the memory cone."

plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/#4

The reason I don't agree with panprotoexperientialism is due to the questions I posed here : I think the Hard Problem of Consciousness relates to a Harder Problem of Explicit Memory that Henri Bergson already pointed out.

>I don't know how else you thought the "hard problem" was going to resolve
Dude phenomenology lmao

but on a more serious note, I'm waiting out for more scientific theories. I don't think biochemistry and evolution have the answer, maybe some quantum weirdness holds the key.

If science discoved the immaterial cartesian soul, the physicalists would claim victory.

>Do you think we're going to make a future scientific breakthrough explaining how qualia work in some new extra-physical way?
Maybe, but it would probably be used for something worse than atomic bomb. I'd rather it remain a mystery.

>The much more reasonable explanation is that we're just behaving around abstract concepts that don't really exist.

"‘They are prepared to deny the existence of experience.’At this weshould stop and wonder. I think we should feel very sober, and a littleafraid, at the power of human credulity, the capacity of human mindsto be gripped by theory, by faith. For this particular denial is thestrangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of humanthought, not just the whole history of philosophy. It falls, unfortunately,to philosophy, not religion, to reveal the deepest woo-woo of the humanmind. I find this grievous, but, next to this denial, every known religiousbelief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green"(Strawson, 2006).

How do you explain consciousness?

This is why I'm sympathetic towards idealism, you can (tenuously) explain material phenomena solely in terms of mind, but you can't explain consciousness solely in terms of material stuff

lmgtfy.com/?q=dualism

Can anyone recommend some good books on this topic? Been meaning on getting pic related but haven't yet

I recommend these:

amazon.com/Explaining-Consciousness-Problem-Jonathan-Shear/dp/026269221X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1506735182&sr=8-1&keywords=hard problem of consciousness

amazon.com/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1506735229&sr=1-1&keywords=nagel

amazon.com/Consciousness-Confessions-Romantic-Reductionist-Press/dp/0262533502/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1506735211&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=christ koch consciousness

>dude lmao, everything will eventually be explained with science, you just have to have faith!

thank you user, what are your thoughts on consciousness?

Usually when people use the term dualist today it's as a criticism about the opponent's argument, not an actual position you purposefully adopt for yourself. Most of what you can read about dualism if you try google-ing it yourself will be all the well established ways it falls apart when scrutinized.

Well, well. What's going on in this thread?

>Usually when people use the term dualist today it's as a criticism about the opponent's argument,
maybe that's the problem

I summed up my opinion here:
On one level, I'm a New Mysterian because I accept consciousness as irreducible, but I do not subscribe to panprotopsychism because I see there are alternative ways to answer it too without reducing it brain activity.

We know for a fact that qualia depends on brain activity for its existence, but this does not mean qualia is equivalent to brain activity or how qualia fundamentally relates to brain activity. All we can say, in science, is that qualia supervenes on certain brain activity (e.g., thalamocortical loops, synchronous neural activity, etc.), that's it.

>you can (tenuously) explain material phenomena solely in terms of mind, but you can't explain consciousness solely in terms of material stuff
I think the opposite is true. We have a lot of evidence for the existence of physical phenomena that exist independent of any one person's senses, and we also have lots of good and reasonable ideas for how and why these physical phenomena happen. The idea of mental phenomena having a literal existence of their own on the other hand doesn't have any comparable explanation that I'm aware of (there are some *philosophical* attempts at explanation like what Schopenhauer came up with, but that's not really the same thing as the mathematically sound and independently verifiable principles that explain physical phenomena; you can't verify Schopenhauer's explanations through any sort of experiment).
>How do you explain consciousness?
Like this:
Short version is we don't have any reason to assume what our brains make us believe is "there" is literally there. All our brains need to do is get us to behave as though that premise is true and they will have accomplished making us behave in the useful ways that would get selected for as traits that emerge and propagate successfully.

I am a neuroscientist and so 99% of the time I behave like a materialist, acknowledging that the mind is real but fully dependent on the brain. But we don't actually know this. We really don't. We assume our sense of will is a causal result of the neurochemical processes in our brain, but this is a leap of faith. Perhaps the brain is something like a complex radio receiver that integrates consciousness signals that float around in some form. Perhaps one part of visual cortex is important for decoding the bandwidth that contains motion consciousness and another part of the brain is critical to decoding the bandwith that contains our will. So damage to brain regions may alter our ability to express certain kinds of conscious experience rather than being the causal source of consciousness itself. " "I don't actually believe the radio metaphor of the brain, but I think something like it could account for all of our findings. Its unfalsifiable which is a big no-no in science. But so is the materialist view-its also unfalsifiable (Lieberman, 2012).

Note - Lieberman is not saying he believes in the radio hypothesis. He's saying it, like reductive physicalism, is unfalsifiable. For the sake of science, you can presume physicalism as given, but it's when you propagate this metaphysical view as established scientific fact that we have problems.

Meant to put quotations around Lieberman's quote.

>I think the opposite is true. We have a lot of evidence for the existence of physical phenomena that exist independent of any one person's senses, and we also have lots of good and reasonable ideas for how and why these physical phenomena happen.
by using what? our sensations and intellect? Anyways, everything outside of our sensation could be explained as mere sense-data. Using occam's razor, you don't even need to appeal to an external world or external objects.

>Like this:
Are you a p-zombie?

>Short version is we don't have any reason to assume what our brains make us believe is "there" is literally there.
What is the "us" you're referring to?

>We know for a fact that qualia depends on brain activity for its existence,
Wrong

Well I mean that is an interesting question, but in no way does it demand a supernatural answer.

a machine made to interpret information is a usable way with interpret it that way, a working TV screen will always turn a TV signal into a recognizable image, even if to another machine the signal is just noise

If we assume humans have evolved or were designed to interpret things like pain signals in a useful way I don't see the problem

so while qualia is clearly linked to brain activity, its exact relationship/function is unknown/cannot be known?

linked to brain activity =/= brain activity

no one said shit about anything supernatural, but show me any science that can explain this

ever notice how people accusing everyone else of p-zombie status act an awful lot like p-zombies?

I'm certainly not claiming we know the exact mechanisms yet, just there is no reason to assume we cant figure it out.

>qualia has been proven

Post the data then. This always trips you faggots up. Post the fucking data. I want to see it. I want to see not just hurr this brain process is linked to hurr this sensation but actual PROOF OF QUALIA as such by lewis' definition of the word.

You can't do it. If you did, you would have had the data upfront and obvious. And you have the audacity to use "we" in a scientific sense as if pissant ever had the authority to claim such. Then you whine about how people don't take science seriously! Fuck you. Hang yourself.

>by using what? our sensations and intellect?
There's a massive difference between going off of your personal apparent "experience" vs. the sort of validation approach that goes into what gets treated as true for the purposes of physics or engineering. When you can independently verify an idea across many different independent observations and can also account for it mathematically independent of any sort of direct observation, and all those approaches point to the same very accurately predicted result, then you have something a lot more substantial than one person's memory of what he had for breakfast this morning.
>Are you a p-zombie?
You don't understand the philosophical zombie argument. No outward behavior differentiates p-zombies from non-zombies, that's the entire point-- to keep all the stuff you can outwardly observe about a person the same and argue that there's still something extra beyond all that stuff .
>What is the "us" you're referring to?
The bodies that the brains get behaving in the way we're talking about. Or to go into a little more detail, there are things our brains that determine our behavior which we don't identify with as part of who we are as decision making people. Whether or not we like watching football games on TV is something you might identify with as part of who you are, but the way your eye saccades probably isn't something you identify with as "you" even though both of these two examples are things your brain is responsible for.

how would you even START to figure it out. Also, emergence doesn't really exist, it just means that large-scale phenomena have some counterintuitive results. This doesn't mean consciousness suddenly pops into existence at some point

I see proof if it every day. Qualia is all I know. I know nothing independent from qualia (e.g. try to imagine a tree without any color, NOT black and white, but completely independent from the sensation of color entirely).

Also data =/= proof. t. data scientist

Independent observations as observed by WHAT? Rock? Animals? No, people. Conscious people, in fact.

>You don't understand the philosophical zombie argument. No outward behavior differentiates p-zombies from non-zombies, that's the entire point-- to keep all the stuff you can outwardly observe about a person the same and argue that there's still something extra beyond all that stuff .
"Behaviorism is sufficient to explain the mind (it isn't) therefore behaviorism is sufficient to explain the mind" nice circular reasoning there kid.

>The bodies that the brains get behaving in the way we're talking about. Or to go into a little more detail, there are things our brains that determine our behavior which we don't identify with as part of who we are as decision making people. Whether or not we like watching football games on TV is something you might identify with as part of who you are, but the way your eye saccades probably isn't something you identify with as "you" even though both of these two examples are things your brain is responsible for.
Something cannot trick itself. Therefore our minds =/= our brains by your reasoning, therefore we have a contradiction in your reasoning.

Yeah.

>linked to brain activity =/= brain activity
Yeah.

Qualia exists, but maybe it does NOT exist for you, 666Satan.

Bullshit. You stated point blank "All we can say, in science, is that qualia supervenes on certain brain activity".

Post the fucking data or admit you're wrong.

>I have no data so I'll call him a p-zombie

Every time lol

me: right now there is a cup of coffee on my table
you: HURR PROVE IT WITH SCIENCE SHOW ME THE DATA THEREFORE IT ISN'T REAL

>you: It's been proven IN SCIENCE this and this and x too
>me: okay post the data for it
>you: OMG ITS SUBJECTIVE SHUT THE FUCK UP OMGOOMGONGG

Why does everything need data? Post the data reductive physicalism is true.

ITT: False scientific claims by charlatans and immediate weaseling as soon as these charlatans are called out on their BS.

As I expected from Veeky Forums.

1. I wasn't the guy you were originally talking to
2. we're both arguing it exists but can't be proven with science

if you think science is the end-all-be-all of knowledge you should probably be on reddit instead

this guy doesn't even know what data is

>hurr it wasn't me

Then you have no relevance to the conversation and just wanted to insert your big fat -obvious- opinion where it wasn't needed. Prick.

Reductive physicalism is a false scientific claim too. Science is not about committing oneself to any ontological claims. It's about operationalizing hypotheses, gathering experimental data, and either rejecting or not rejecting the null hypotheses. The goal is to predict observations, not explain the intrinsic nature of things. Instrumentalism is pretty much what most scientists operate by.

*yawn*

I responded to you here, you stupid piece of shit: I'm arguing that most scientists operate based off Instrumentalism because even reductive physicalism is an unfalsifiable ontological claim. Most scientists do not concern themselves with the "ultimate nature of things". It's about predicting observations.

*yawwwnn*

Don't make scientific claims if you have no data to back them.

When we accept the logic of conditionals, equivalence, existential & universal statements, set theory, math induction, and so forth, where's the data that proves these as true? Do you even know about mathematical formalism? Not everything in science is proven via the use of data.

Fucking pleb.

I made this thread

No one said ANYTHING about science. Go back to r/atheism, watch sam harris tedtalks and watch rick and morty for the rest of your life

...

What about the claims of discrete math, which requires a logic that is not based on data, huh? Can you give data that proves set theory as true? No, that's not even how most of fucking math works.

>Do you even know about mathematical formalism?
Mathematical formalism is literally wrong

I bet you go into fits whenever someone asks you why the oceans are blue too.

you don't know what science is

you don't know what math is

you don't know what consciousness is

you don't know what qualia is

fuck off dude stop talking about shit you don't know

Well, math is based off axiomatic rules, and Platonism is wrong. Math's efficacy is not based on data though.

Nice insults, but it's still not data.

considering "why the ocean is blue" (read: not X wavelength, but blue (aka what we see as blue)) is a question of qualia, I think this applies more to you than him

One doesn't need to give ultimate explanations for everything. I am fine with giving provisional explanations that temporarily presupposes naive realism, the way you do.

You are a naive realist

>mfw snake oil salesmen on Veeky Forums post bullshit claims they can't back up about neuroscience and then try to argue that data is just a fairy tale when you call them out on it

lol guys

what's so hard about not lying?