Materialists on suicide watch

>He also reaffirmed his belief that string theory will turn out to be “right.”

>World's Smartest Physicist Thinks Science Can't Crack Consciousness

So, what quantifies "Smartness"?

hello zombo

>It's interesting to contrast Witten's thoughts with John Horgan's End of Science thesis…
>author mentions himself in the third person

This article is cancerous on so many levels.

>Physicist Edward Witten: “I think consciousness will remain a mystery… I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness.” Credit: Institute for Advanced Study.

>"I THINK..."

He thinks that? Whoa, I think otherwise.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

There's literally no inconsistency in being both a materialist and a mysterian, you dumb faggot cuck.

sage

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

it's useless to link him to that, p-zombies can't understand what p-zombie means

...

autists confirmed without consciousness

what would be the alternative to physicalism?

>Physicalism is the idea that all aspects of human nature can be explained by physical means: specifically, all aspects of human nature and perception can be explained from a neurobiological standpoint.

this seems about right.

You've impressively discovered a way to take the already wrong philosophical zombie argument and make it even more wrong. The whole point of the p-zombie argument is that you wouldn't be able to notice any difference between a p-zombie and a normal person.

You can, if you take into account the ability to collapse quantum mechanical wave functions.

The fact that that is possible automatically means that physicalism loses its explanatory power of the phenomenon of subjective perception.

>inb4 but you're assuming it exists therefore you're being circular

Yeah no fucking shit

>So, what quantifies "Smartness"?

Willingness to opine about subjects that one hasn't studied and knows nothing about.

So Cartesian dualism wasn't bad enough for you, you had to add quantum mysticism flapdoodle to the mix.

>consciousness
>physicist

welp I guess #imwithdescartes now

>The fact that that is possible

It isn't possible. Go read some Daniel Dennett, he sorted this bullshit out for you years ago.

false, a p-zombie is exposed to the same information as a real person, except it lacks ability for introspection. What "consciousness" really mean evades him because he can't experience it. He can only grasp the behaviourist and functionalist aspect of it, and therefore reduce everything to that, failing to see the point

Dennett is a joke. He actually managed to convince me of dualism.

>he thinks
Ok.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/

>Yet zombies behave just like us, and some even spend a lot of time discussing consciousness.
>behave just like us

You don't even understand the shitty argument you're trying to appeal to.

His arguments are ridiculous and trivial I already read them.

The "yo dude I'm going to copy this physical state from a robot that experiences seeing red and map into my brain so that I get the same brain state and I will now know how seeing red is like" is the exact argument a peenor zombie would make.

brainlet pls

You can't even grasp von Neumann's IQ.

>literally admitting to being a dualist

>and some even spend a lot of time discussing consciousness.
here you are boy

Do you believe Von Neumann was as smart as the great Ancient Egyptian mathematicians

honestly?

I don't like it either, but Dennett's arguments in favor of dualism are so convincing.

I encourage you to read Christoph Kochs book, he provides a somewhat more plausible argument that allows for qualia to exist without going to this extreme, essentially he describes qualia as the 'internal' aspect of consciousness and the physical manifestation (the information of pain reception, biological processes etc) to be the 'external' aspect. I can't do it justice in one paragraph but he provides at least a consistent argument that classifies qualia as an 'aspect' of the phenomenon instead of separating it into immaterialness.

No, I appreciate it. You've brought the level of discourse down so low that I now feel OK about leaving this thread and doing something else.

>failing to see the point

why would he fail to see the point if he lacks the ability for introspection?

Oh look, it's the "qualia have to be immaterial ontological entities" strawman. Qualia is just a word for subjective experience, goofball.

You appealed to authority, and kept crying "circular argument." You have no one else to blame but yourself.

Underrated. This is exactly what people talking about "consciousness" and "qualia" today are like.

well it's phisical being fails to behave like some real individual who sees the point, I admit I got sloppy with the phrasing

If you actually read Dennett, you'll have no choice but to become a dualist. After seeing all his arguments and thought experiments AGAINST his own position, it is simply impossible to take reductionism seriously anymore. Dennett is unique in his own way, as he is the only philosopher I know of who rigorously destroys his own stance and successfully convinces the reader of the opposite.

If I may, you haven't explained away the existence of a subjective experience just by saying it exists. What are the mechanisms behind it? For example, how could you make a computer experience qualia? At best we know that mammals all experience to some level, so we can correlate something in the mammalian brain to it, for example the neocortex, but what does a qualia even look like in terms of atoms, energy, etc. It isn't as easy a problem as you say.

Leibniz

It must be confessed, moreover, that perception, and that which depends on it, are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is, by figures and motions, And, supposing that there were a mechanism so constructed as to think, feel and have perception, we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain a perception. This must be sought, therefore, in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine.

>What are the mechanisms behind it?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse

Accepting Dualism lets you quite easily then accept a ghostly free will which can impose an extra-natural force on the laws of physics, which has never been shown to occur and is probably hogwash. Dualism solves one problem and creates umpteen more.

Quantum wave functions are an explanation behind physics in very very small space. What has that to do with getting a subjective experience out of a bunch of neurons firing?

>Accepting Dualism lets you quite easily then accept a ghostly free will which can impose an extra-natural force on the laws of physics
Your ignorance is showing. I wasn't talking about substance dualism.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind
>Penrose determined wave function collapse was the only possible physical basis for a non-computable process.

>human thinking is non-computable

ok so its a theory built on a fallacy that has been proven wrong decades ago. Thanks for clearing that up.

You accept Dualism but not free will then?

>built on a fallacy that has been proven wrong decades ago
Source: Your ass?
Sorry brainlet, but just because you lack the abstract reasoning to understand theoretical models, this doesn't invalidate said models.

Free will is a logical impossibility. Not even dualism can fix that.

Debunked a thousand times over. Here's one straightforward kill shot:

arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9907009.pdf

>We find that the decoherence timescales ~10^{-13}-10^{-20} seconds are typically much shorter than the relevant dynamical timescales (~0.001-0.1 seconds), both for regular neuron firing and for kink-like polarization excitations in microtubules. This conclusion disagrees with suggestions by Penrose and others that the brain acts as a quantum computer, and that quantum coherence is related to consciousness in a fundamental way.

You have two choices:

1) Neuron firing is not involved in consciousness
2) Quantum computation is not involved in consciousness

Note that we have an incredibly massive wealth of evidence for neuron firing's involvement in consciousness.

Bringsjord, S. and Xiao, H. 2000. A Refutation of Penrose's Gödelian Case Against Artificial Intelligence. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence

Also see Wolfram's computational equivalence theory.

That interpretation does not follow from the data.

Thanks, I'll check this out.

>That interpretation does not follow from the data.

I'm afraid it does, have you ever studied probabilities? On the macro scale they average out and can be summarized with a basic average rate. if quantum effects are on a time scale 10^-13 shorter than neuron effects, in dynamical systems for example we would treat the former as a constant and get no error in our result. See oscillation relaxation if you want to understand this more.

kek

>That interpretation does not follow from the data.

It unambiguously does follow from the data.

fucking 10/10 my man

IQ TESTS INTELLIGENCE GET OVER IT YOU BRAINLET

You don't understand the model.

I'm not even saying anything Max Tegmark didn't write himself in that paper. His words:

>This conclusion disagrees with suggestions by Penrose and others that the brain acts as a quantum computer, and that quantum coherence is related to consciousness in a fundamental way.

Ok then, please refute this and enlighten me on how it is misinterpreting the model. You are at least willing to do that, are you not?

I'm still waiting for an answer.

even the smartest people are often wrong, especially when they comment on the subject they dont specialize in

What would you classify consciousness as a problem of? Philosophy? Neuroscience? Systems Biology? Chemistry?

Would you classify consciousness as a problem of theoretical physics?

I would say it depends on who you ask. Penrose has weighed in on it after all. Note how you avoided my question, not that easy to answer, is it?

Very true. They get cocky because they did well in one discipline which leads them to start believing they must be capable of solving the big problems of every other discipline.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research_and_vitamin_C_advocacy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Crick#Neuroscience_and_other_interests

>Penrose has weighed in on it

Unfortunately.

>Penrose has weighed in on it after all
did he use theoretical physics to do it?
was his impact useful in any way?

>not that easy to answer, is it
or maybe i think your question was formulated wrong, or was irrelevant and intentionally misleading

Yes, he started the Quantum Theory of Mind. Whatever your opinion about that theory itself it started a lot of interesting conversations.

You still haven't answered which field you think consciousness should be the sole possession of. My intentions in asking the question would be irrelevant if you were confident in your answer.

>My intentions in asking the question would be irrelevant if you were confident in your answer.

Lol

>string theory

This is a board avout science. Take that pseudoscience bullshit to

It would be bullshit and pseudoscience.

lol what?
Human beings don't cause wave functions to collapse. Interaction with other systems does.

You are the faghot that is flailing around magical thinking. I think you should just shut up.

why exactly should we care what a physicist thinks about biology?

Philosophically, he's 100% correct. We will never have evidence nor explanation that isn't self referential and circular reasoning.

Functionally, the world has accepted and moved on from the dilemmas of Descartes et al, there is no other approach but faith in the utilities of the mind, and the existence of the material.

And it's all quite fine. Both sides tend to be deficient in this. One denies the logical and epistemological reality, the other denies we just have to work with how it all is. Very maddening tribal state of affairs.

because biology is applied physics

...

Also this.

Physicists like to think they understand every single machine the universe is capable of producing. In reality, when it comes to biological systems, they usually don't know shit, and what they think they know is all arrogant presuppositions.

>physicists commenting on other fields
Uuuugh
>string theorist commenting on consciousness
Listen, I'm not a string theorist, but the field interests me and I could talk about it at some length. I would not, however, share my armchair views with press or (worse) put them down in book form to be immortalized for all eternity. I am looking at you, celebrity physicists. It would be like I (neuroscience) providing armchair opinions on applied mathematics (P DOES equal NP!)

dumbest comic ever

t. mathematician

hey, i'm a biologist. if physicists can comment on my field then i can comment on theirs

i don't think string theory is ever going to be more than mental masturbation

>Physicists understand every single machine the universe
correct

see
>arrogant presuppositions
calculus is straight-up not necessary for many fields of biology. if you ever need to touch math, you're using basic descriptive statistics

This physicist has already cracked it (my big toe.com )

no serious physicist entertains string theory, so what's your point anyway?

No wonder biology doesn't make any progress, while physics does constant progress

The day we are done explaining the universe, we'll go and explain your kid's field too. Just wait.

I really wish I could optimize that png right now.

/threaduk

like what?

Its file size.

>implying the self isn't an illusion