Why do particular configurations of matter give rise to consciousness?

By foliation I meant this: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2710/what-does-foliation-mean-in-the-context-of-a-foliation-of-spacetime.

For more background, see the Rietdijk–Putnam argument: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rietdijk–Putnam_argument.

>Isn't every slice of you conscious in *ITS* time? times being equally real doesn't make them equal

It seems to me that "time" isn't real, not in the sense that clocks aren't useful, but in the sense that "time" more like a coordinate like longitude and latitude than "change". In other words, there is no "sliding spotlight" to spacetime that demarcates the "true" present.

Hence what I meant is that every "slice" of you "is" conscious, in the same sense that, say, electrons "are" negatively charged, in a timeless sense. It's kinda hard to talk about in natural language, but I'm using the word "is" in a timeless sense. Thus the only thing that distinguished you-reading-this-sentence-literally-right-now from you-five-minutes ago is a difference in time coordinate, not existence.

Could you supply your definition of consciousness? It's hard to answer the question unless you have a firm grasp on what you're talking about. In a the case of consciousness especially, because I think people try to discuss it and get confused because they don't actually know what the subject of their discussing is

some cellular automata are functionally complete, so just implement the universe in it.

Subjective experience? Literally what you're experiencing right now (unless you happen to be a p-zombie...)

I intuitively understand what you mean, but just to say "what I'm experiencing right now" is not very much to work with. What can you extrapolate from that? I guess my point is that maybe you should do some research into what the scientific and philosophical consensus is about consciousness.
To answer your original question. I think consciousness is more a spectrum of self awareness, and it varies with how sophisticated a given brain is. There is no point at which a thing becomes conscious, there is not a line to draw. I think we make a mistake when we talk about consciousness metaphysically, like it is anything more than a process of our minds that developed over time, as a biological necessity. The more a mind can understand and notice, the more likely it is to survive, or something like that.

>particular configurations of matter give rise to consciousness
Why do you think that's the case?
Maybe a rock is "sentient" as well.

you are completely correct that time is an illusion, but the big mystery is why causality goes one way and not the other way
>in before “muh entropy”

Consciousness reduces to behavior.

If you can create an automaton, that is capable of tracking information about other objects, then there is no reason why it could not track information about itself.

OP here. I actually think it's plausible that things which aren't traditionally considered "conscious" do have some consciousness, but it is so minuscule as to be approximately zero for all practical purposes. For example, a thermostat might be "conscious" but only in a very minimal sense. A modern supercomputer would plausibly be "more conscious" but, again, only minimally so. Basically something along the lines of Integrated Information Theory in one of its various forms.

But the question is why is that tracking (sometimes) associated with subjective experiences?

False.

...

>arguing undefined concepts

Elaborate.

Wrong.

Incorrect.

>mfw I'm a closet dualist

Doesn't time-symmetric determinism imply that the *future* causes the past just as much as the past causes the future?

In that case, the world is like the solution of a differential equation with certain boundary conditions, but it doesn't have a fundamental "directionality."

How could you interpret someone who doesn't believe qualia are real as a dualist? That's as far away from dualism as is possible.

OH SHIIIIIIIITTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

I think he's saying Dennett is looking at him disapprovingly. Might be wrong though.

I am studying cellular automata and other simple programs right now and i think they are the most promising research areas for things like consciousness and behavior (and more).

behavior is supervenient on consciousness which is supervenient on biology

>behavior is supervenient on consciousness
Behavior isn't supervenient on consciousness. You don't even need consciousness for behavior to happen, behavior is just what entities do. An inanimate process like a storm has behavior.

conscious beings have complex, purposeful behavior that implies consciousness

What if that implication *is* all that "consciousness" amounts to? i.e. It's a product of the abstracting of behavior into a conceptual shorthand the brain makes use of?

Consciousness is not something you or anybody understands to the point where you can define it in a way that differentiates it from non-consciousness (you're arguing whether a thermometer's conscious or not).
How can you figure out what phenomena occur in which configurations of matter if you haven't even delineated the phenomenon you're observing?

Tell us more, user San.

I still can't wrap my head around how I'm able to picture things in my mind. Like what's going on inside that let's me do that?

youtube.com/watch?v=2SraJ29twdQ

I agree with you entirely. That's the whole point of this conversation. To *try* to figure these things out. I'm emphatically *not* claiming I have the answers.

You are consciously experiencing this thread right now, aren't you? Obviously consciousness is a thing. It's not a material thing but it's an emergent property of things. Stop being a faggot.

Well entanglement suggests a possible violation of space and time, like a singularity where all resides. What if the source of things is a hologram and we are also there. And one of the properties of that existence is an intelligence that spans the entire universe, just add resources

OP, this idea is plausible. It's taken seriously by some cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind.

But I think IIT has been pretty convincingly torn down.
scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

>I still can't wrap my head around how I'm able to picture things in my mind. Like what's going on inside that let's me do that?
Everyone here loves to shit on eliminative materialism, but it provides a pretty reasonable explanation for that: You don't literally have pictures in your mind, you just believe you do and behave as though you did because it's convenient and useful for you to have this behavioral quirk built in. And as for why you aren't just compelled to act without any sort of belief or behavioral schemes like that, it's because that's the difference between reflexive or instinctive behavior vs. more complex "conscious" behavior. By having you believe the notion of things "appearing" to you in your mind the brain gets behaviors in response to the abstract concept of sensory stimuli as though they were objects in themselves, which allows for the sort of behavior that distinguishes humans from other animals on this planet in most cases like the construction of elaborate technologies including the computers we're communicating through.
It all comes back to the basic point that your brain doesn't need to actually ink out a literal image to make this work, it just needs to get you to behave as though the abstract concept of "visuals" or "sounds" exist as objects so you can behave off of them, in a very similar way to how we do this more deliberately with the non-real concept of money for example (no such thing as a Euro or a US Dollar exists in physical reality, but we behave off of the notion they do exist because our behavior in this way is useful and convenient as an alternative to dealing solely with concrete bartering systems).

>Why do particular configurations of matter give rise to consciousness?
They don't.

Think about it this way. Is a particle conscious? Is there something it's like to be an electron? Of course not. But we know we're conscious and we suppose some animals might be conscious as well - if not self aware. But is a roundworm, with it's 302 neurons, conscious? What about an organism with 10 neurons? 5? 1?

At some point, arranging unconscious particles in a particular way miraculously gives rise to consciousness. There's an explanatory gap here that we will never be able to bridge - the hard problem of consciousness.

A simpler explanation would be that consciousness is the ontological primitive. In the same way someone with disassociate identity disorder has separate (dissociated) personalities (alters) within one cognitive space, we are disassociated alters within a larger cognitive space - a mind at large.

Our brains amplify consciousness to produce self awareness, but they do not generate consciousness - they are in consciousness, like whirlpools in water.

This idea is known as idealism.

This post is convincing but doesnt change my opinion of consciousness. Information integration is definitely one aspect and I think neuroscience through guys like tononi, friston, kelso, rabinovich and many others etc etc has shown we are capable of making very convincing powerful mathematical descriptions about the brain and by extension consciousness even if we havent worked out all the biological details yet.

I also think one important issue is that we define consciousness by this single token example of what is our own. How do we know to what and how far to generalize notions of consciousness. We can't. Because we define it on this one token and do so as I wd understand via our intuitions. It makes any definition of consciousness we choose to create either somewhat arbitrary or very restrictive. I think people react very strongly and emotively when faced with the possibilities of what can and cannot be conscious, and do so intuitively.

The hard problem though is one i dont think is solvable through our limited perspective and may even be illusory.

The Triforce
>Is a perfect square no. of segments
>Computes all numbers 0-9 when expressed in programming language and calculator circuitry to however much your memory can express
>Ring 0 so Terry A. Davis approved
>Euler Circuit
>Euler Path

ALSO NON-SCIENTIFIC
>Wards off evil spirits in Shinto
>Grants wishes
>Caused by hot fairy goddesses having 3 ways (3 is company and 4 is a crowd)

What does "at the same time" here really mean? It's like you're superimposing some super-time that exists up and beyond the regular time. If time simply exists as an extra dimension, it seems like you have to abandon concepts like future, past, "same time" alltogether.

Also, am I to take it that every version of "me" in the different time dimensions are separate conscious agents, such that it would be true to say the phenomenal experience I feel in 10 seconds from now belongs to a different entity? Because if all time slices belong to the same phenomenological subject, it seems all experiences should all happen at once for that subject, if time is not linear.

>Religitard shits up the thread in the first reply

This is my comfy knowledge, 4 1 m singularity with two eyes first.

Thoughts.

>If time simply exists as an extra dimension, it seems like you have to abandon concepts like future, past, "same time" altogether.
Not him, but that's not true. Replace future, past, and same time with in front of, behind, and same place and you get a location based equivalent that doesn't appeal to that fallacious "super-time" concept which you correctly identified as a problem a lot of people have when trying to talk about time in this way.
In fact relativity where this talk of four-dimensional spacetime mostly comes from deals a lot with the concept of simultaneity, you don't lose simultaneity just because you're dealing with time as an extension of space. What you do lose is *absolute* simultaneity, meaning there is no one state of "now" that all locations in the universe are synced up with at any given moment. Instead, which other parts of spacetime share in a given "now" is dependent on the frame of reference.
>the phenomenal experience I feel in 10 seconds from now belongs to a different entity?
I would personally agree that there's nothing inherently connecting any two moments of spacetime together just because they're located next to each other. We behave as though there is as a matter of convenience.
>it seems all experiences should all happen at once for that subject
"At once" is an example of that "super-time" fallacy you yourself brought up. It only has meaning inside the context of spacetime (as simultaneity), not outside. You wouldn't say every part of your body is all located in the same square inch just because it all exists. Similarly, all of a span of time doesn't exist in the same moment just because it all exists. There's a moment of you ten years ago with all the memory and conditions of that moment together and giving that "you" a sense of "now," and there's you ten years in the future from "here" where "you" might be getting ready to retire from the workforce or whatever. All observers at all moments believe it's "now."

>Suppose that just before pausing, the entity was feeling intense pain.

what if the entity didnt even have a consciousness but just acted like it did?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

>you are completely correct that time is an illusion, but the big mystery is why causality goes one way and not the other way

i recently read about an experiment that showed entropy working in reverse. last week.

Unbreak me some eggs.

>Consciousness reduces to behavior.
Not logically, since behavior can occur without any underlying experience, but consciousness is always an experience of something.

>consciousness is always an experience of something.
No, that's the thing being disputed by a stance of "consciousness reduces to behavior."

PS: This part:
>Not logically, since behavior can occur without any underlying experience
Is not a valid argument.
A reducing to B doesn't imply that there is no B that isn't A.
Or to rephrase with concrete examples, squares reduce to rectangles, that doesn't mean all rectangles are squares.
Similarly, if consciousness reduces to behavior, that doesn't mean all behavior is consciousness. Saying behavior can occur without consciousness isn't a valid argument against the claim consciousness reduces to behavior.

See, you've got things backwards with this view that your body is in some theater and you can recreate images of things outside your body inside your head.
The truth is everything you see AND think is just signs dude. Your entire lived experience is all a story you're telling yourself.
There's no such thing as like some sort of external matter some combination or arrangement of which gives rise to being and consciousness, at least not anything we can directly access or know.
The world is like a computer simulation that simulates itself, and each of us generate our own thing, clashing with each other time to time trying to impose our story on others, or syncing up stories with others, thereby driving history through the alteration of signs.

>what if the entity didnt even have a consciousness but just acted like it did?
like a computer bot?
anyway, there's probably some test someone can think up that an unconscious zombie would fail even though he appeared conscious. Something like the mirror test or asking it "What do you think I think you should be thinking right now?" or have it write an essay explaining the meaning of "I was looking back to see if you were looking back to see if I were looking back to see if you were looking back at me." just anything that requires self-reflection and theory of mind. Because I don't think you can have theory of mind or even functionally emulate having it mechanically without having a developed self-consciousness.

>here's probably some test someone can think up that an unconscious zombie would fail even though he appeared conscious
The entire point of the philosophical zombie argument is there is no observable way to differentiate them from non-zombies.
This is very important because it's what allows for the conclusion that there's something distinct from physical / behavioral details for which there's an explanatory gap constituting the "hard problem of consciousness."
If you don't respect this condition then the argument fails and dissenters can simply say "that physical / observable difference you used to differentiate zombies from non-zombies explains consciousness without the need to appeal to some new science of qualia."

underrated

No, dude. I understand Behaviorism better than they understand themselves, because they don't bother to understand things like metaphysics because they uh don't understand metaphysics usually. The behaviorism he's talking about likes to pretend like consciousness is somehow an illusion, denying any sort of real ego, subject, or anything that would actually be having that illusion. It is the stupidest shit. They also have these weird fixed definitions that lead them to argue shit like we don't have free will unless you can flap your arms and fly away, or unless it is impossible for anything to ever influence you, just real weird shit, like slept through half of college, or didn't read the whole book, but still got a degree and felt entitled to assert their half-baked theories as correct. Not saying that there isn't value in there research and a few concepts, but their attempts at philosophical statements are ridiculously juvenile.
I'll rephrase for you:
>Consciousness requires there to be a "having an experience", and "having an experience" is not reducible to behavior, therefore consciousness can not be reducible to behavior.
Behaviorists try to get around this by just saying that "having an experience" is some sort of illusion, but understanding this argument apart from its attempt at an authoritative negation, we find it to be quite meaningless, total nonsense, something that which no one can adequately explain. What on Earth could they mean, there's absolutely no content there.
Having an experience is more real than the autists who try to mechanize and abstract everything into exploitable formulas.

Well I mean it obviously just presumes that there's no observable way to differentiate them, that's part of the definition they constructed for the thought experiment. And while there might be some random event that causes a zombie to answer correctly from time to time it is just as conceivable that an empirical test could determine the non-zombies in reality.
And I don't think there is a "hard problem of consciousness" because that very problem is structured off received assumptions of humans as individuals, bags of meat walking around a planet somehow able to think.

>I understand Behaviorism better than they understand themselves
You didn't understand that the existence of behavior without consciousness isn't an argument against consciousness reducing to behavior, so I don't think it was unfair of me to point that out. In fact it would be unfair to me to not point that out because it didn't actually dispute what you were using it to try to dispute.
>"having an experience" is some sort of illusion
I make a point to never call it an "illusion" because that's a term which has connotations of the whole "experience" concept being disputed (which isn't an argument in favor of "experience" being valid by the way, any more than the word sunrise is an argument in favor of geocentrism being valid-- language reflects what people believe, and when the argument is one about people believing in something that isn't true, then of course the language will reflect that false belief).
Instead of "illusion," I'd describe the situation as us behaving and believing in terms of a false belief, that's all.

>I don't think there is a "hard problem of consciousness"
Well then there's no reason for you to use the philosophical zombie argument since that's the specific thing that argument is meant to establish.

But the brain is so much more than behaviour and theories of consciousness make you look like a caveman. You ever done neuroscience?

There's no neuroscientific evidence for your view.

A configuration of matter will never create consciousness. Consciousness comes first and then matter. The physical world is not fundamental, it is a fabrication of the spiritual world. And of course the spiritual world's master is almighty God.

>you just believe you do and behave as though you did because it's convenient and useful for you to have this behavioral quirk built in

I like the point you're making and find it quite interesting. At the end of the day, though, how do you reconcile something like the experience of pain with eliminative materialism? I mean the first-person experience, not just its biological function.

>"At once" is an example of that "super-time" fallacy you yourself brought up. It only has meaning inside the context of spacetime (as simultaneity), not outside. You wouldn't say every part of your body is all located in the same square inch just because it all exists. Similarly, all of a span of time doesn't exist in the same moment just because it all exists. There's a moment of you ten years ago with all the memory and conditions of that moment together and giving that "you" a sense of "now," and there's you ten years in the future from "here" where "you" might be getting ready to retire from the workforce or whatever. All observers at all moments believe it's "now."

This is exactly what I was trying to get at. You put it better than I did. By this hypothesis, all observers in the spacetime manifold are timelessly experiencing "now." They believe change is happening because of memory, even though their brains are "static", so to speak.

Memory is what gives rise to the "psychological" arrow of time. We remember the past but not the future. I recall reading an interesting paper about this in the context of computation, but can't find it right now.

I wonder if there are languages that are conducive to thinking about reality tenselessly, and thinking about time as a "coordinate" rather than "becoming," if that makes any sense.

>But the brain is so much more than behaviour
Two responses to that:
A) I acknowledge there's also physiology (e.g. your blood pressure increasing isn't really a behavior but is sometimes part of your responses to sensory stimuli), although that's not relevant except that I occasionally need to say something along the lines of "I acknowledge there's such a thing as physiology" so people don't try to nitpick about that.
B) If you mean "qualia" are literally real and that's the "so much more" stuff you're referring to, then I'll point out that's the thing I'm disputing in the first place so it doesn't make much sense for you to assert that, obviously that's what you believe and that's what I don't believe, the point is to argue why you believe that's the case.
There isn't neuroscientific evidence either for "qualia" being literally real phenomena or against "qualia" being literally real phenomena, and the burden of evidence is on the positive claim that it does exist in a literally real way that constitutes a "hard problem of consciousness" / "explanatory gap" in need of something extra beyond ordinary physical cause and effect relationships to account for. What I'm really arguing for is that you don't need this extra claim because everything makes sense fine without it provided you're not under the impression the brain is incapable of producing a (useful) false belief.
I personally find it much easier to suppose a false belief in literal "experience" is possible than I do to suppose what our brains do constitutes a special super-physical class of phenomena not explicable in terms of ordinary physical cause and effect relationships. I'd also argue the idea of "qualia" being literally real isn't even falsifiable since it's a claim for something that goes beyond the ordinary physical world, and if the ordinary physical world is in fact all there is then you could never find evidence either way that is anything other than physical evidence.

Have you ever experienced pain?

>I'd also argue the idea of "qualia" being literally real isn't even falsifiable
Some things are true and unfalsifiable, pace Popper.

>Have you ever experienced pain?
That's not a very good question considering "experience" being literally real is the exact thing we're debating. I'm pretty sure the only reason you're asking it is so you can go:
>Wow, look at how he's denying something so obviously real!
Which isn't an argument since it's not like a false belief has to be a weak belief, and a very strong false belief would lead you to behave as though the reference of that belief is obviously real.
That said this goes back to the "physiology too" clarification. Pain in particular involves a lot of physiological activity alongside the behavioral stuff e.g. blood pressure rising like I mentioned earlier isn't really a behavior and is potentially going to be a part of what happens when you report being "in pain." What I'm saying there isn't though is the "qualia" notion where there's an "experience" of "what it's like to feel pain." That's the part I'm saying is really a (useful) false belief where the brain abstracts out all the actual stuff going on when you report this state and encapsulates it into one convenient fictional object that it has you believe in and behave around.

>Some things are true and unfalsifiable
That doesn't matter since you would never be able to prove it wrong even if it were wrong, which is why no statements are both scientific and not falsifiable.

I haven't said anything about qualia but I'm saying the brains architecture doesnt suggest its just about behaviour.

And your view isnt supported by evidence. You suggst theres a reason why we have qualia. An adaptation. But no where in our brain does there seem to be a mechanism for this. Your idea is as unsupported as qualia...

The problem with your view is that the brains physical makeup can plausibly work for a pzombie. Yes you dont believe in qualia so good but the problem is. Wheres the mechanism for your illusion ill just call it that for short. There is none. You have no way to explain it. You say it has some value to humans as if its a real thing but you dont explain a mechanism. Thats a serious problem with your view. Based on what we know about the brain, it can also work perfectly fine as a pzombie if we substitute the lack of qualia with a lack of your imaginary mechanism.

You guys may not have qualia but I do, and you'll never convince me otherwise. I am qualia, all of my memories are of qualia, all I have right now are qualia. Qualia is everything

Tfw you dont realise your view isnt very falsifiable either. In fact i actually believe that your view is pragmatically identical to people who like the idea of qualia. Its just semantics which creates this barrier between you and everyone else. If you mean by qualia isnt real that it isnt some physical property in the universe then no one here i guarantee believes that either but qualia is a conceptual bookend for something empirical they cant explain. In some ways youre the one whos made the unnecessary step of trying to explain it. And in a way which is intrinsically difficult to falsify.

Also your language is problematic. You talk like the brain is doing something for you to make it easier for you as in theres two agents in the story. You should clarify what you mean. What is the exact function or use for this in terms of brain processing and dont use it in reference to a "you" since "you" are an emergent property of that same brain and presumably both "you" and "qualia" are parallel products of the same machinery. Not that one is for the other and vice versa. Clarity please.

Yes you think your arguments in the last few months have been successful because its a good argument. No theyve been succeasful because your whole idea is difficult to falsify and possibly impossible to unless you clarofy the exactitudes of your idea.

Id also only agree with your views on behaviour if you thought all neural activity was synonymous with behaviour which i thinm is just a srrupid thing to say.

But its plausible to have consciousness without behaviour so what are you talking about.. are you using a flimsy holistuc definition of behaviour? You know we have definitions for a reason.

Sounds more like a question made for Veeky Forums or Veeky Forums.
So far I know of no scientific explanation of why matter gives rise to consciousness.

>we finally have a cellular automation thread and its about consciousnesses
Do you hate me?

Fine. What is the best Life-like automata?

>You suggst theres a reason why we have qualia. An adaptation.
There's a reason why we *report* having "qualia" and behave *as though* "qualia" were literally real things.
That's not the same as suggesting there's a reason "why we have qualia" because that statement implies the reference of the reporting (i.e. the alleged state of "experiencing the color blue" as opposed to the uncontroversially verifiable *report* someone could make where "I see the color blue" is announced) that is "qualia" are real phenomena which is what I'm arguing isn't true.
>You talk like the brain is doing something for you to make it easier for you as in theres two agents in the story.
There are multiple processes in the brain. And there's a distinction between reflexes or even instinctive behavior vs. more complex "deliberate" behavior. And in this distinction you have brain processes influencing how that "deliberate" behavior plays out in less direct ways than with a reflex, or even an instinct, and the less direct / more convoluted way this works is through one process responding to another with the multiplicity of "agents" you've brought up as something you believe doesn't make sense. There's nothing particularly mysterious about this arrangement, you could have a relatively simple artificial program involving multiple processes responding to each other too. Just because you can refer to a brain and the person that brain resides in as though they were one single entity doesn't mean there aren't multiple processes responding to one another inside the brain.
>But no where in our brain does there seem to be a mechanism for this.
Of course there are mechanisms in the brain for producing the outward behavior we exhibit. I'm taking a reductive stance, what I'm arguing does exist isn't anything in question, the only thing in question is whether what I'm denying the existence of really does exist.

I am too much of a brainlet to understand these yet but I learned symbolic logic so its a start.

youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8

I'll also add one more point in response to this:
>But no where in our brain does there seem to be a mechanism for this.
If what I'm arguing is true and the act of reporting "experiences" / "qualia" along with the act of behaving as though these "experiences" / "qualia" were literally real are actual processes the brain supports, then we should expect to see cases where these processes get disrupted.
And we do see that, with cases like the phenomenon of blindsight where the subject *reports* being blind but it can be demonstrated they're still taking in ocular stimuli and responding to it e.g. if you put obstacles in their path like a trash can they might walk around them successfully.
This constitutes evidence there are physical / biological processes responsible for our behaving as though we have "experiences" that can be referenced since we have examples where taking in sensory stimuli and reacting to it still happen in the absence of this extra step of acting as though there were an "experience" object representing this stimuli and responding to that abstract object instead.
The difference between reporting and behaving around a *reference* of "experience" vs. just responding to stimuli while not reporting any associated reference of "experience" is what I'm arguing is the real thing going on when "qualia" is reported, If nothing else, the conclusion I'm trying to present to you with all this is to say that this difference can be accounted for entirely through physiology and behavior i.e. there is no need to appeal to some extra-physical new science of "qualia" or to believe there's a "hard problem of consciousness" that goes beyond what ordinary physical mechanisms can explain.

I didn't mean to be sneaky. Well, maybe bit ;-)

It's an honest question though. I'm open to the possibility I'm wrong, but I really just don't see how to reconcile eliminative materalism with my subjective experience. If pain is an illusion, who or what is being fooled by that illusion?

>is really a (useful) false belief
Who or what holds these false beliefs?

>you would never be able to prove it wrong
Something that is true can never be proven wrong. Therefore, all true things are unfalsifiable. :-)

This is what I'm getting at. Can posts on a basketweaving board, which I perceive subjectively, convince me that this very same subjective experience doesn't exist?

I appreciate the point is making, in that qualia isn't as clear-cut as it seems and certain aspects of it can be illusory, but at the end of the day there's still some subject being fooled. At least, that's true in my case.

Unrelated, but I've read about Langton's ant and the highway conjecture, which states that for any finite initial configuration of marked cells, the ant eventually builds a highway.

It has a resemblance to the Collatz conjecture, i.e. it's a Π2 statement of the form "for all [starting points] there exists [some stopping time] such that [a particular condition is satisfied]").

Through a simple and elegant argument, it's been proven that the ant's trajectory is always unbounded, but has there been any further progress than this? I couldn't find any on Google Scholar.

Interestingly, Dennett and others have used cellular automata to discuss free will.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/cellular-automata/#CAFreeWill

Also see Seth Lloyd's paper, A Turing Test for Free Will: arxiv.org/abs/1310.3225

>If pain is an illusion, who or what is being fooled by that illusion?
Like I said earlier, I make a point of not calling it an "illusion" because that's a term people associate with the same "experience" concept being discussed here. I use "false (but useful) belief" to describe what's going on because beliefs don't have that same semantic baggage. An "illusion" makes people think of some guy hallucinating an oasis in a desert which they then pounce on and say "see, he's still having an experience!" Belief and behavior on the other hand don't have that problem. If you believe you're having an "experience" and behave around that concept of having an "experience," this is something that can take place without that "experience" concept necessarily mapping to a literal real world phenomenon. It's sufficient that you have a (fictional) reference point you can talk about and behave in response to. Just like you behave in response to real world physical objects (e.g. you might step out of the way if a bicyclist comes up from behind you), you could behave in response to non-real world pseudo-objects, things that aren't really there and which you don't really have any sort of "experience" of, but which get their pseudo-existence from your behavior around the premise that "they" do exist. There's a major parallel to how abstract objects in computer programs work here. Instead of having to work directly with physical machinery, programmers can behave around these make believe abstract objects and get computers to respond in the ways they want. It's a convenient fiction (will continue with another post).

>Can posts on a basketweaving board, which I perceive subjectively, convince me that this very same subjective experience doesn't exist?
You're assuming your conclusion by saying you "perceive subjectively" and that you're discussing a "subjective experience." That's basically saying "if X is true how can X not be true?" And the answer is, well, X was never true to begin with, you just believe it's true.
>qualia isn't as clear-cut as it seems and certain aspects of it can be illusory, but at the end of the day there's still some subject being fooled
I don't think the existence of a "self" is the same as the question of whether "qualia" exist. I went into this a little earlier when I brought up the fact the brain has more than just one process going on at any given time. So it's not actually any sort of logical problem to speak in terms of how you're being led to believe and behave in certain ways. Yes, you could refer to both "you" and "your" brain as all the same entity, but there's also the reality that what underlies you're apparently "deliberate" / "conscious" behavior isn't the same process as other activity going on in your brain which that former underlying process might respond to. Certainly you wouldn't say for example that you are the process that leads you to believe you're in pain when you stub your toe, right? You would identify with a distinct other process that's being acted on by that "pain" process. Or if you suddenly remember something, you wouldn't identify with that appearance of memory, right? It would seem largely out of your control, like something that happens to you. There are many examples of this multiple process principle in action because the brain isn't so simple as to only run one unified program.

Yeah, it is impossible not to have similar thoughts. I tend to think cellular automata pose a significant threat to most, but not all, forms of philophical determinism.

I meant to say simple programs. The classic cellular automata with no probability/quantum twist are deterministic. Some, like Rule30 above, do have to be run to see what they produce, but they are deterministic.

Dude im aware theres multuple brain processes but thats got nothing to do with what i said about you and the brain. Theres a problematuc ontological distinction and youre not using evidence just phenomenological intuition.

When i said reason/adaptation about qualia i was just stating ur idea in shorthand. Im aware of what you mean.
Blindsight isnt the fucking same. If u knew about the brain u wd know this. Its just a disconnection problem and the product of an evolutuonarily old part of the brain.
Its just a prodyct of early visual processing connecting to motor areas such as in the midbrain.

I can show its not relevant to your view because what would be relevant is if a person could still see and respond to the same information a blindsighted person cannot see and yet still have no experience or reporting of it. You say a blindsighted person has no experience but that is only because they cannot see rhe stimuli. Thats a confound. You need them to be able to see but have no experience to bolster your view.

This is pzombie conceivable and the problen you should solve and need a mechanism for if we are designed to report qualia. It needs to either be a mechanaism or intrinaic to the brain systen which is identical to my view of qualia. Ofc you need a mechanism.

What you also dont seem to undertand is that the people youre arguing against dont see qualia as non or extra physical.
Is this all?

No unfalsifiable doesnt mean it can never be proven wrong. It means theres no way to test if ita wrong. Something true can hypothetically be wrong if it has predictions that are differentiable to other theories and arent satisfied. An unfalsifiable thing is something which doesnt make predictions which differentiate it from other theories or are ad hoc.

Unfalsifiable.

No mechanism.

Suggests. qualia false beliefs of qualia have causal impact which pzombie arguments would suggest they didnt as qualia doesnt.

Suggests inadvertantly that qualia is abstract when it is concrete.

Doesnt realise all brain constructs are pseudo ones and this has nothing to do with a false belief in qualia.

Fails to acknowledge a difficulty in distinguishing the belief someone saw something and the belief that they had a qualia. I dont believe theres a distinction and this negates the need for your false belief mechanism as qualia is ontologically indistinguiahable from the brain processes that we wd say create them.

If you have a you and qualia though, you dont address that they might emerge in parallel and not conditionally on eachother. I.e. qualia beliefs may not function to serve a you, but may emerge in parallel with you. You dont address that this is a possibility.