What is Veeky Forums's response to the hard problem of consciousness? Why is there something "that it is like" to be a brain? Why doesn't all the data processing go on in the dark, without the phenomenal experience? Do you recognize that there is a big explanatory gap between function and experience, or does this sound like hogwash?
strawpoll.me
I presented the same poll to Veeky Forums a while back. It should be interesting to see how the results from here differs.
en.wikipedia.org
iep.utm.edu
Other urls found in this thread:
thebaffler.com
youtube.com
twitter.com
fuck off autistic anglo
we jerk off to conties here
...
Metaphysically I am a non-dualist/idealist, but if I had to actually take a cautious scientific stance, it would be that consciousness and phenomenal experience/subjectivity ITSELF is at the very least causally efficacious and important, in Renouvier's and James' sense, and cannot be reduced to emanationism, either epistemologically or empirically.
Dennett's re-warmed bundle theory sucks balls but at least it isn't emanationism.
>Why doesn't all the data processing go on in the dark, without the phenomenal experience?
I get what you mean man. However I unfortunately do not know the answer.
Sounds like you need some Dōgen, son.
Subject and object are not separate entities. One does not exist without the other. Consciousness can be defined as a quality of the universe we all share, it is delusion to believe we are separate from experience, function, self, and world.
Do you even double aspect theory?
Consciousness is an immaterial projection of a fully corporeal organ. It is the subjective experience of an objective process.
This pretty much. The idea that humans constitute a second and separate order from nature has been an idea that's only been held up by ludicrous amounts of sophistry throughout the ages.
Property dualism you dummies. The mental is supervenient but not reducible to the physical. The mystics get their irreducible mental states and the physicalists can be rest assured in the understanding that there is only one spatiotemporal substance
Yeah, I like anomalous monism
It's the synthesis of all impasses inherent to Materialism.
>there is only one spatiotemporal substance
That's a growing field.
You think radio waves were a thing to materialists of the past?
>it's a rationalist tries to make a claim about what he experiences episode
I agree. "Nature" itself is a catch-all mongrel concept used to patch flimsy ideas. Mind is not separate from Matter, Matter is the fringe of Mind.
Every qualia is determined with a very specific activity pattern of neural network. Neural patterns are unique for each qualia, which means one qualia can be caused only by one activity pattern. Why can we percept a thing only in this way and not in another? Because of evolution, apparently — the way we can experience the world is good enough to survive, even if it doesn't represent the world in all its completeness. Now, when we know the origins of these patterns and can directly tie them to qualias, there still remains a huge gap between material neurons and mental experience? Well, I am not sure.
It looks to me like Kant's gap between thing-in-itself and phenomena, which can be easily removed by Husserl's phenomenology. Why we even have to postulate something like things-in-itself, if we already have a phenomena world and it is open for perception?
>Why we even have to postulate something like things-in-itself, if we already have a phenomena world and it is open for perception?
Exactly.
If something isn't in principle reducible to the physical, doesn't that imply a non-physical thing?
This is only a problem because people have been hypnotized by culture and so-called "science" to view themselves as "animate" and the world around them as "inanimate", or consciousness as a sort of "mistake" which miraculously arose from "inanimate matter".
The view that consciousness is antecedent to anything else (It was the first thing, created everything else, is a property of the universe) is the only that makes sense. All matter is conscious, animate, alive in varying degrees, we are simply more alive than other things around us.
People who view humans as islands of consciousness in a dead world are literally seeing reality backwards. They're completely blind, and don't realize that panpsychism is actually more rational than their belief.
tl;dr consciousness is inherent property of the entire world
...
-_-
and to think, all of these are subsumed under and comprehensively explained by historical materialism
I heard Chalmers talk about "Epiphenomenalism" and it was pretty interesting, does anyone have any thoughts about EPhenomenalism?
These are my thoughts.
The interaction problem (if the mental is separate from the physical, how can they interact?) is a valid criticism to all dualist ideas. Epiphenomenalism attempts to solve the interaction problem by saying phenomenal experience doesn't affect the physical, yet the thoughts and verbal reports created by the brain about the mysteries of the phenomenal seems to indicate that they do. If this phenomenal "stuff" is so different from the physical, then how is it that it manifests so profoundly in the behavioral output of me? How can a purely functional system directly speak to the existence of the phenomenal, if the very nature of the phenomenal escapes and goes up and beyond the functions of the system making the argument?
Trying to save Epiphenomenalism, a possible response is to argue that if the physical can epiphenomenally cause the mental, then it could be possible that the physical would process information that indirectly describes features of the mental without ever needing to interact with it. It's simply corresponding with the phenomenal experience without directly accessing it, like two clocks wound up at the same time. An analogy would be: when a computer burns a disc, the would-be contents of the disc is going to be in the computers memory when the disc is created, and if saved, the computer could describe the disc, without reading anything from it. The computer has then caused the disc, and is able to describe it without reading anything from its final form. This leaves the question of how exactly information crosses to the "phenomenal realm", but that gap doesn't create as many problems as causal interaction the other way.
To expand on this gap, you could ask, how is it that something as irreducible and and seemingly fundamental as phenomenal experience can directly interact with something as high level as neurobiology? Maybe phenomenal experience is not directly caused on a level where matter interacts very fundamentally, but on the higher levels where information is very integrated, and from that experience is formed through some kind of 'strong emergence', where the sum of all the parts creates something intrinsically irreducible to them.
Thanks for the write-up user
It makes more sense than all these acrobatics in this thread.
The other end is full Dennet-lunacy, literally denying that we experience anything.
>implying East Asians aren't just a horde of p-zombies
this is why Hindus recognize Atman but Buddhists are stuck with anatta
Donald Hoffman is busy with it;
youtube.com
Yes. And there's no reason to think otherwise, Hempel's dilemma notwithstanding. It may well turn out to be that the nature of the physical is far stranger and expansive than we thought, but that doesn't change the basic fact that it's physical. Perhaps one could mount a challenge and say Bell's Theorem, for all its strangeness, does undermine physicalism, but that all depends on whether it undermines realism.
Elaborate?
Yes, but it is not the basic substance of the world, which is how a dualist would view the mental. A property dualist would say that the mental is an epiphenomenon. Inert, impotent, and a property that arises from the physical without itself being a distinct substance. Think in order of relations:
>Physical Substance -- Physical/Mental Properties
Or, you could attempt to close the gap by doing away with causality altogether, and say that the physical has no causal effect on the mental either. To demonstrate how this could work, you could imagine setting two clocks at the start of the universe - one digital and one mechanical. A billions years later, their time will correspond to each other, without them ever needing to interact with each other. Just like the mechanical clock didn't cause the digital clock to match its time, the cognitive function of pain didn't cause the phenomenal feeling of pain.
>Subject and object are not separate entities
>only including those idiotic anglo-saxon 'positions'
There's a completely different theory about subjectivity and it has to do with overdetermination. But you don't know about that.
>Or, you could attempt to close the gap by doing away with causality altogether
yes, well, that's always a possibility in anything
What's it called?
Is Dennett a zombie?
>we all share
There is no "we". As soon as your coinciousness is gone, everything else goes, according to this line of thinking.
God
Why aren't you voting for my theory?