Several readers sent me Galen Strawson’s new piece in the New York Times‘s philosophy section, “The Stone.” In his op-ed, “Consciousness isn’t a mystery. It’s matter“, respected philosopher of mind Strawson makes three contentions. I find the most important two to be uncontroversial, while the third is puzzling.
The basic premise is that consciousness is a property of matter—our evolved bodies—and one needn’t invoke spooky dualism to explain it. But I’m getting ahead of myself. His argument:
- Consciousness is not an “illusion”; it’s real because we all experience it. I find this pretty uncontroversial. When people say (and I’ve said it) that “Consciousness is an illusion,” what they mean—or what I meant, as I no longer make that statement—is that it’s not what it feels like: like a little person in the brain controlling and experiencing things. In that sense it’s an “illusion”, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.
- Consciousness derives from physical phenomena. Although dualists, including many religious people, think that consciousness is entirely detachable from physical phenomena, and not a result of physical phenomena, the evidence is to the contrary. You can make all kinds of alterations to consciousness through drugs, brain stimulation, brain trauma, and so on—or eliminate it entirely with anaesthetics. Again, this seems to be Strawson’s main point, but I find it uncontroversial. I doubt many philosophers would find it problematic, either.
- Physics itself is the real mystery, and one that is unexplainable. As the title implies, it’s MATTER that’s the mystery. Quotes:
“The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour. (Richard Feynman’s remark about quantum theory — “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics” — seems as true as ever.)”
and
“We don’t see that the hard problem is not what consciousness is, it’s what matter is — what the physical is.
We may think that physics is sorting this out, and it’s true that physics is magnificent. It tells us a great many facts about the mathematically describable structure of physical reality, facts that it expresses with numbers and equations (e = mc2, the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction, the periodic table and so on) and that we can use to build amazing devices. True, but it doesn’t tell us anything at all about the intrinsic nature of the stuff that fleshes out this structure. Physics is silent — perfectly and forever silent — on this question.”
I’m not sure what he’s saying here except for this: “Why are the laws of physics what they are?” And maybe Strawson is right; perhaps the answer is, as Sean Carroll reminds us repeatedly, “Because, in the end, that’s just the way it is.” But I’m not sure it’s forever silent on all these questions. For example, we may already know why the inverse square law holds; and we already know, I think, how some properties of matter (the periodic table) stem from their different numbers of neutrons, protons, and electrons. If Strawson is saying that physics has reached its explanatory limit insofar as the building blocks of matter go, or why the laws of physics are as they are, I think he’s wrong.
But maybe he’s raising a different question, like “why is there something instead of nothing?” Yet even that question has some tentative answers. The question, “What is matter”? seems to be meaningless in the sense Strawson asks it.
Philosophically astute readers can tell us what’s really new in Strawson’s piece.
I’m sure you’d find plenty of philosophers who would regard it as problematic! (Though also plenty who wouldn’t.)
Indeed.
I have just listened to Sam Harris and David Chalmers again.
Where consciousness derives from is a big philosophical problem.
Neither of them said unequivocally that consciousnesses derives from matter.
It is the hard question.
I might not be philosophically astute, but Strawson’s piece was complete bafflegab. It was so bad I didn’t think it was even worth drawing your attention to, Jerry. (No offence intended to those readers who did!)
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Agreed. I reread it thinking that I obviously must have missed something the first time. Nope.
Sam Harris thought it worthy of mention.
And so did Jerry! Oops. That doesn’t make the original article any better.
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“But I’m not sure it’s forever silent on all these questions. ”
Yeah, I think it is. Even if you can explain the inverse square law on the basis of more fundamental properties, you’re still left to wonder why about those more fundamental properties. It will be turtles all the way down.
“Consciousness is not an “illusion””
To say that consciousness is, or is not, an illusion strikes me as meaningless. If consciousness is an illusion, what is it that is aware of the illusion? An illusion aware of itself?
I think the idea underlying consciousness is ill-defined and I haven’t seen any discussion of it that has been enlightening.
The inverse square law of gravitation has to be true because it’s the only law of attraction between massive bodies that will produce stable orbits. If it were not inverse square, the Solar System would not exist and we wouldn’t be here to discuss it. This is a property of mathematics.
That’s kind of an anthropic principle take on it. I think of the inverse-square law in terms of radio waves: whatever it is, it spreads out in an inverse-square fashion because a surface in 3D space has two dimensions, and that makes the inverse-square relationship necessary.
Right. It’s a consequence of geometry and conservation of energy.
+1
And: minimum energy rules.
That makes sense for light and sound waves where energy is physically spreading out. I suspect that in general relativity the explanation is different.
Not as long as you have weak gravity, which is what you have when you can stand outside and see gravity waves radiate away energy (LIGO).
Dunno what happens inside the black holes as they collide.
Of course, then you have to ask “why 3D”.
And perhaps look the other way then someone points out that is the only number of macrodimensions where containesr (cells) work. (Or radiation or other phenomena of interest for organisms.)
A more apt question is perhaps why “you’re still left to wonder why about those more fundamental properties”? Either we can respond “how else could it be” or – if someone still persist in asking – “we don’t know (because your question is non-testable)”. Both perfectly fine responses, which puts an end to a chain of “whys”.
It’s the simplest law that gives stable orbits. I think, from having run some simulations in the distant past, an inverse X’th power will also give stable orbits if X is reasonably close to 2.
It’s simply geometry.
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I agree. Why quarks? Why is G so small? Why does the Born rule work? Turtles.
I do think, however, like Dennett, that consciousness is obviously real and that it is not necessarily ill defined. It is the physical state that represents my biological capability to measure the world. It only appears crazy since the machinery of my brain allows for self-reflection.
That one extra steps rewards (or punishes) so many people with confusion and/or specialness. Some philosophers think the mind is a mystery and most religionists think (because of the ostensibly inexplicable mind) that humans are the greatest thing in the universe.
It is certainly possible to measure the world without consciousness. At least, I think it is. Maybe my cell phone has some sort of subjective experience, but I don’t know how I’d ever know.
Ask Siri.
Hasn’t Sean Carroll done some work on deriving the Born rule from first principles?
I am not sure. This article (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.7907v3.pdf) attempts to explain Born’s rule, but I don’t think it says why the universe (or multiverse) is the way it is.
There is also further work, e.g. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.01471v1.pdf, that suggests some deeper understanding, but still not why it is this way (at least not yet).
That is done in great detail in Wallace’s book.
Yes, yes, I get all this, but some of the things that Strawson sees as fundamentally and unsolveably mysterious might well be understood in terms of deeper “laws.” But, in the end, I think there are turtles we can’t see on the bottom.
I think, to put it simply, that what Strawson is saying is that physics has made great strides in “mapping” the physical universe, in building models, but that the map is not the territory. Our minds and bodies operate in the classical world, which we sort of understand, but we have no intuitive understanding of how fundamental physics, the quantum world, makes the classical world. Indeed, it seems possible that we will never grasp that connection, even if we arrive at the elusive theory of quantum gravity. Our brains evolved in order to maximise our chances of survival in the classical world, and though we have learned to manipulate the quantum realm, we understand it no better than a three-year-old child who knows how to play a video game understands the mobile phone on which they are playing.
For those who don’t agree, try sitting in a room full of high-powered physicists and listening to them argue about whether, for example, Everett’s many worlds is a purely mathematical construct or genuinely implies the existence of infinite numbers of different universes brought into being each time a wave function collapses. Or whether the absence of an arrow of time in the quantum universe means that retrocausation is an aspect of reality, which can simply not be observed in the coarse-grained classical universe in which we have evolved. these things, and many others, can be modelled mathematically, some even tested empirically, but we don’t know what they mean in the sense that we know what Newtonian gravity or evolution mean.
I “hope” this is what Strawson was trying to impart, but he did a miserable job at it. Your above comment was what he should have said.
As far as truly understanding the quantum world, I think it will take time. It is an extremely foreign concept now and goes against all of our intuitions. But many other concepts were similarly counter-intuitive and foreign (negative numbers, infinity, irrational numbers, etc.)and we (well some of us) eventually became much better at accepting/grasping/understanding them through time and familiarity. I predict eventually we will similarly be able through technology (VR, Simulations) and other means come to “grasp” the very strange world of the quantum.
« I predict eventually we will similarly be able through technology (VR, Simulations) and other means come to “grasp” the very strange world of the quantum. »
Richard Dawkins suggested that quantum physics could very easily form the basis of a video game, which would allow players, especially younger ones with “bendy” minds, to achieve an intuitive understanding of the quantum world.
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PS. How’s your sibling, weak force?
I think you’re right that he’s lamenting that we don’t have an intuitive understanding of the principles of physics.
By the way, you don’t have to go all the way down into quantum theory to run into that problem. Ever tried to explain electricity to a layman? I have an EE degree, so I sometimes have conversations like that. I tell people not to think of electricity as the movement of electrons, but that electrons move because of electricity – the electric field. But what is that field, really? No one has a real understanding, it’s just a mathematical model that works.
« But what is that field, really? »
Photons.
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But then it couples to electrons it is also an electron field, or rather you have to consider the combination as electrons (or photons) travel. Matt Strassler has some neat articles on how that works on Of Particular Significance.
Hmm… but would you say massive particles are part of a gravitational field?
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PS. Is a gravitational felid a fat cat?
« … whether, for example, Everett’s many worlds is a purely mathematical construct or genuinely implies the existence of infinite numbers of different universes brought into being each time a wave function collapses. »
In Many Worlds the wave function doesn’t collapse…
As described by David Deutsch in _The Fabric of Reality_, iirc, the “infinite universes” always exist; opening the cat-box just tells us which subset we’re in.
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“In Many Worlds the wave function doesn’t collapse…”
You’re right of course. My point is that our everday intuition revolts against MWI, insofar as it can be taken to mean (if I have understood it correctly) that infinite copies of each of us coexist in infinite numbers of worlds, each of them slightly different from the self that this copy of us takes to be the real one…
Most proponents of Everettian QM don’t take it to mean that there are literally infinitely many parallel universes. (Deutsch seems to be an outlier in that respect.) Rather, the gist of EQM is that if a single photon can be in a superposition of states, passing through two slits at the same time, then likewise a single brain can be in a superposition of states, perceiving two different histories of the world. It’s still just one system of particles, not split or duplicated, but with multiple histories superposed on it.
I suppose it depends on what you think the difference is between a superposition of histories and a superposition of universes.
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Perhaps not much. But my observation is that talking about multiple universes puts you in the position of having to answer a lot of spurious objections having to do with Ockham’s Razor, conservation of energy, and so on. Superposition of histories doesn’t seem to have that sort of baggage.
If only Everett had called it “Many Histories”.
In any case, I might have misrepresented Deutsch.
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That sounds more like a rhetorical trick than an explanation then. Thing is, I do not see objections about parsimony and conservation of energy as spurious in this context. Either “every time something quantum happens our universe is copied” is an accurate description of what happens, in which case these objections apply with full force, or it isn’t, in which case the many worlds interpretation has a severe science communications issue, because that is how sensationally its proponents present the interpretation to the public.
Our usual reaction when our math or model leads to an impossible conclusion is to go back and check our assumptions; it is only in quantum physics that objections can be swept off the table with a simple “but the math says so!”, without having to explain oneself.
I don’t think it’s quite fair to hold quantum physicists accountable for the excesses of ill-informed science journalists. But I’ll agree that “every time something quantum happens our universe is copied” is a very bad way of communicating EQM to the public.
So in what sense is it even defensible to call it “many worlds” then if there are no many worlds? I see that you sensibly prefer Everettian, but it is surely not only science journalists who called it many worlds. And the scientists generally don’t explain what they really mean. For starters, if it doesn’t mean that the universe is copied all the time some quantum physicist should delete and rewrite from scratch the Wikipedia article on the subject, because it sure claims that that is what is happening. Heck, it even has what looks like an alternate history novel example at the end.
Sean Carroll, for example, is usually good at explaining, but I remember a blog post he did where he took the route “many worlds seems preposterous, but that’s what the math said, so deal with it”. Then there were comments asking him what exactly it means to have another universe come into existence “in Hilbert space” – is the claim really that every quark in the universe physically duplicated somewhere we can’t see, or is it merely an imperfect way of describing a less stupendous reality? The answer was silence.
Sorry, this seems to have gone a bit off-topic, but I guess it is still about what we can know…
As far as Everett is concerned, I’d strongly suggest the book from about 2012 by David Wallace called “The Emergent Universe”. Despite the title it is not a popularization, and fairly hard sledding. He seems to have done more than anyone else in the last 2 decades to advance Everettian quantum physics. But the earlier parts of even later chapters are accessible to anyone who has read Sean Carroll’s blog for a good example of physics popularizations. He even does a little imitation of Galileo, with characters saying the standard counter-arguments, once each at the ends of the three sections IIRC.
“the scientists generally don’t explain what they really mean” Well, he does.
“Most proponents of Everettian QM don’t take it to mean that there are literally infinitely many parallel universes.” The ‘number’ of these quasi-classical universes in this theory is not a meaningful concept.
“..asking him what exactly it means to have another universe come into existence ‘in Hilbert space’ ” That is not what is claimed. The quantum theory with a single Hilbert space ‘of the world’ in untouched. The ‘many worlds’ are an emergent phenomenon from that, and are what they call quasi-classical.
There seems to be no substitute for quite a bit of hard work here, which I certainly haven’t finished doing yet. There is also a conference proceedings Oxford book from a couple of years earlier. Wallace as one of four editors, two being ‘anti-Everett’ so to speak. Probably listed under Simon Saunders the 4th, and a proponent.
Thanks for those suggestions.
There seems to be no substitute for quite a bit of hard work here
The question is of course if it is the hard work one needs to properly understand population genetics, or is it the hard work one needs to properly appreciate sophisticated theology?
I’d say I am happy ignoring the multiple universes if they cannot empirically be distinguished from only one universe. The problem is more that people say that this interpretation should be preferred, and isn’t it an amazing conclusion that every reality that could have been if something had gone differently actually exists out there? Because at that moment I go: how do you know? (And: Do you really mean the same thing with ‘exists’ as the rest of us do?)
Alex: Deutsch argues that the two-slit experiment — a single photon interfering with itself — provides empirical evidence that multiple histories do in fact exist. Given that, you then have to do extra work (the collapse postulate) to make them stop existing at macroscopic scales. So it’s more parsimonious to simply accept that they exist even when we can’t directly detect them.
That’s the motivation for preferring EQM. Not because it’s cool, but because it’s what you get when you treat human observers as physical systems obeying the same laws as photons.
That is great, but two different histories for a proton sounds like a far shot from the claim that there is an entire parallel universe out there where a copy of England was conquered by a copy of the Spanish Armada, existing along with a copy of every other atom in the universe including the atoms of the Andromeda galaxy, and all created originally by a single electron ‘being in a different place’ (to the degree that the latter phrase even has any meaning), and so on for every single moment where a quantum effect took place for any particle in the universe and all parallel universes.
Again, I’m not endorsing the idea of wholesale copying of galaxies. The history of Andromeda galaxy most likely will not deviate in any measurable way depending on the success or failure of the Spanish Armada.
Then again it could in principle, if in one history we send self-replicating von Neumann probes there, and in another history we don’t.
But in any case the decoherence of histories propagates at the speed of light, so it will be at least a couple of million years before Andromeda notices the difference (if any).
“….the claim that there is an entire parallel universe out there where a copy of England was conquered by a copy of the Spanish Armada, existing along with a copy of every other atom in the universe including the atoms of the Andromeda galaxy….”
Alex, I know you are not claiming ‘proof’, but this is getting similar to ‘Proof by Incredulity’, and that has a pretty sorry history (e.g. motion of the earth, atomic theory). Greg’s remark about so-called parallel universes here propagating at finite speed is a good one. Again, see Wallace.
You could also say I use the argument of incredulity against the idea that the universe was created last Thursday to look like it was older.
But admittedly that is not the point. I am not saying, I reject any sensible, complicated explanation involving superimposed local histories or suchlike. I am saying: The universe being copied every time something quantum happens is so preposterous that I cannot believe any serious scientist really believes it; the most likely explanation is that the relevant scientists believe something very different, something more subtle; but if so, they do not communicate it. It is as if evolution were communicated to non-scientists as “a duck giving birth to a dog” and no evolutionary biologist bothered to correct it.
Note that it is Gregory Kusnick and not Sean Carroll who I see trying to explain what is going on. When I read the latter’s blog on the topic it was merely, the math says there are a gazillion parallel universes, so stop arguing for other interpretations. It was not: there are no parallel universes, that is a sensationalist misinterpretation, here is what we really mean…
I’m not sure which of Sean Carroll’s posts you’re referring to, but here’s one in which he defends EQM not by saying “my way or the highway”, but by saying “put up or shut up”. That is, people who think EQM is wrong should propose testable alternatives, and show how their model fits the facts better. Reject it for sound reasons, not for silly ones.
I think his argument makes a lot of sense (even if he does call them “universes” rather than “histories”).
“..the argument of incredulity against the idea that the universe was created last Thursday to look like it was older.”
Well, at a stretch, maybe that’s an idea, certainly not a theory. It utterly lacks any explanatory power, any economy of concept. To get grossly practical (that’s not everything) it would be surprising to see a laser or an iphone being invented, based on that ‘idea’. So one has much better grounds to reject that idea than simply on the basis of incredulity.
The Everettians would argue that their ‘version’ of quantum theory is simpler than any other, partly analogous to the way that the system of real numbers being described as a complete ordered field is far simpler than, say, a list of 93,187 particular reals, despite the latter being extraordinarily smaller in size.
GK,
I think that is the one I remember, but my interpretation is a bit different, and it may have something to do with this:
That is, people who think EQM is wrong should propose testable alternatives, and show how their model fits the facts better.
I am not a physicist, so maybe I am missing some nuances here, but who died and made one of several equally empirically indistinguishable interpretations the null hypothesis? Why isn’t it: people who think many-worlds makes sense should propose a test, and show how that interpretation fits the facts best?
I think his argument makes a lot of sense (even if he does call them “universes” rather than “histories”).
To me that reads a bit like “his view of evolution makes a lot of sense even if he calls it Violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics”. Whether or not extra universes poof into existence or not appears to be the one central point of contention to those who are skeptical about many-worlds.
“Who died and made it the null hypothesis?” The snarky answer would be William of Ockham. EQM explains the known facts with the fewest assumptions. A model that requires more assumptions (e.g. the collapse postulate of traditional QM) assumes the burden of showing why those additional assumptions are necessary.
As for universes poofing into existence, Carroll explains why there’s no poofing needed. Superposed states/histories/”universes” were an integral part of QM from the getgo. It’s the collapse postulate that arbitrarily poofs them out of existence, and the theory is cleaner without it.
It’s also the most “physical”. I had done a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, but had had a “just calculate” mentality, I guess, but it wasn’t until I read David Deutsch’s description of EQM/MWI in _The Fabric of Reality_ that I really felt I understood what was going on in QM (/pace/ Richard Feynman). The extremely unphysical “wave function collapse’ in the long-orthodox Bohr interpretation just skipped over what physically happens to any particular particle (or cat), and was always philosophically unsatisfying.
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“For those who don’t agree, try sitting in a room full of high-powered physicists and listening to them argue …” the number of angels on a pin. As long as QP works – and it does – and we don’t have the number of tests yet to differentiate between theories, the perfectly fine answer is that “we don’t know”.
But that doesn’t mean we haven’t grokked the territory behind the map – the Core Theory – of everyday physics. Just ask Sean Carroll.
Physics does have an excellent understanding how the classical world works but even classical mechanics is surprisingly non-intuitive. This tells us only that our intuitions are often wrong; they are not a reliable source for knowledge and facts.
There are no facts that support the correctness of “the hard problem of consciousness” or “Panpsychism”. Chambers and Strawson’s views are not real possibilities.
In contrast “Everett’s many worlds” could be in principle true; it’s a real possibility. Whether it is really part of objective reality? We simply don’t know.
I saw this written on a bathroom wall in the Philosophy building at a college:
“What is mind?- no matter;
what is matter?- NEVER MIND!”
About 60 years ago, when I was young and attended church, I knew a preacher who frequently quoted this, without your emphasis of the “never mind” part, as a straightforward assertion of dualism.
That is the conclusion of a chapter in Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy which, since it is not attributed to anyone else, I assume is his creation. Quite a nice play on words.
My understanding of the third argument is that physics today is explained mathematically, mathematics is the only language we have to convey the ideas clearly and precisely. However mathematics can never convey the true nature of matter. For instance the wet of water or the hardness of stone.
Why not? The hardness of something is easily representable. That’s what the Moh’s scale is, for example.
Exactly. Mathematics can describe anything that humans can conceive of and almost certainly much more. It is merely a form of communication. If we don’t have a math that can describe a new concept or phenomenon, some person or group of people devise new maths to describe it. The key thing is, of course, to test the maths against reality.
“The key thing is, of course, to test the maths against reality.”
And that is the failure of lots of new-age-y types.
The Moh’s scale gives you a number not an experience. Without first experiencing hardness the number would be meaningless. Math gives a number not the experience of say, an atom.
But you *can’t* experience an atom, or hardness. That is exactly what the numbers are for.
Your experience is an evolved proxy, and when expressed in the brain a useful model. But no more.
To be clear, the numbers quantify observations of hardness, or of (many) atoms (in, say, a solid).
You are exactly wrong.
The subjective experience is everything.
The rest is an explanation of the subjective experience.
It may be that it is the subjective experience that most concerns you, but it seems you and Gary are confounding your interest in subjective experience with “the true nature of reality”. It is perfectly valid to say, I am interested in how we experience the world. It is not valid to say, how I experience the world is the true nature of reality.
Wetness, for instance is not a quality of water, it is a consequence of the interaction of water, a polar molecule, with a charged surface. There are many surfaces on which water will “bead up” rather than wet. You may experience water as wetting because you have a charged surface. But you are perfectly capable of “experiencing” the “true nature of reality” by observing water beading up on some surface and realizing that water is not wet, but that wetness is an interaction between water and some, but not all, surfaces. And this interaction can certainly be modeled mathematically. So what is the experience that can’t be mathematically described except for the “experience” of an incomplete understanding of a person lacking all the relevant facts? And why should this experience be given priority in any epistemology?
Also, one can objectively study mind-world (or brain-world, better) interfaces: psychophysics, for example, is about just that. So we can learn how our subjective sense of hardness maps onto objective hardness. I don’t remember a name for the subjective property but pairs like pitch and frequency and such are well known, and the “distortions” we introduce are being studied as well (since the 1890s or so). Colour is hard, of course, but it is progressing.
Also, triage nurses routinely ask us to rate our (subjective) pain on a scale of one to ten, and apparently find the answers empirically useful. So this seems to refute the claim that subjective experience can’t be quantified.
It is a bit late to reply so I’ll be brief.
I don’t think Gary or I have confused the place of reality.
The knowledge that ‘reality’ is obtained through the senses and that that is limiting is well known and old.
The experiencing we talk about applies equally to the experiencing of wetness you describe.
Is there a formulae for the experiencing of formulae?
Any way I think I have missed the boat at this point.
I think he’s just saying maths do not explain (or map/define) subjective experience. For example use math to show what the color red looks like to humans (choose one).
Well said, thank you.
Yes, he is.
“the intrinsic nature” of matter –
This is the cruz. If Strawson means, by “intrinsic nature,” what is matter beyond any perception or observation of it, then I don’t know what he means. If he means something else, then I don’t know what he means.
Excellent typo!
And yeh, that’s what’s what I was going to say. I have no idea what kind of “answer” to this unposed question he might be expecting. “Physicists discover that matter consists intrinsically of little furry goggle-eyed gonks that jump about they feel threatened”?
Thirded, yes that’s the key point. He doesn’t define what he means by “intrinsic nature”.
At the moment we have mathematical models of matter which give incredibly accurate predictions, except when they don’t (dark matter and energy).
I think what he’s getting at is that we don’t know anything about the stuff that the models are of, beyond the models themselves. But then its not clear that such an idea even makes sense.
Agreed. Reality is only known under a description provided by a model, so there’s no way to access its intrinsic nature independently of the description, whether qualitative (as in conscious experience), conceptual, or mathematical. That said, the ideal target of knowledge is always the intrinsic nature of what we’re seeking knowledge of – what it is in itself – even though we never arrive at it.
“What it is in itself” is a meaningless, untestable deepity. (Of Kant, I think.)
Reality is what it is, and it is defined by (robust) observations. You can’t have a universe smaller than a universe, so everything depends on everything else in that sense.
I Kant even …
Yes, I think “in itself” is an incoherent criterion.
LOL, James!
« “Physicists discover that matter consists intrinsically of little furry goggle-eyed gonks that jump about they feel threatened”? »
When I was describing my Ph.D. research in supersymmetry to my almost-but-not-quite-girlfriend at university, I mentioned fermionic quarks (known) and scalar quarks (postulated), and she interpreted those as furry quarks and scaly quarks, which I later drew for her. The former might well have met your description.
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They fit right in with all the other quark flavors. 😀
But we *do* know more than that. We know how various sorts of processes occur (for example, nuclear fission), etc. all of which go beyond observation.
Fourthed, fifthed, whatever. That is the phrase that leaped out at me as well. What could that possibly mean? Usually it means that the person isn’t satisfied with what answers there are. A lot of people just can’t accept that at some level you are very likely to reach a point where the only valid answer to “why is it that way?” is simply “because that’s the way things are.”
I think this phrase is a reference to, or indicative of, the MDR (Mind Dependent Reality) concept. That since we can never have direct knowledge of reality, i.e. unmediated by minds, therefore the only conceptions of reality that we can reasonably put any confidence in are mind dependent ones.
This concept is commonly used by its proponents to argue that we should never claim to know anything about a reality not dependent on minds because it is impossible to verify such knowledge without contaminating the process with minds. Proponents further argue that the concept of a reality independent of minds is not only not a necessary premise for the process of science to work but that it is detrimental to the process of science and that there could never be, even in principle, valid evidence to support such a concept.
To be clear, to a certain degree I agree with the MDR concept. But the committed MDR proponent tends to take the concept farther than it warrants in my opinion. Basically, they say there can never be any evidence for a reality independent of minds while I say all of science is evidence in support of a reality that is not dependent on minds. They are committing a fallacy of absolute proof vs rational assessment of the available evidence, in my opinion. It is not unreasonable, given the evidence at hand, to think that reality is independent of minds regardless of not having absolute proof (an unreasonable level of proof that these same people typically do not require in order to accept almost all of the rest of main stream science), and this bears no resemblance to choosing to believe something regardless of evidence because you really want to believe it.
I may be off the mark of course, but after reading thousands upon thousands of words of MDR vs MIR arguments it sort of smells like it to me.
I agree with prinzler and others.
One thing though:
darrelle wrote: “A lot of people just can’t accept that at some level you are very likely to reach a point where the only valid answer to “why is it that way?” is simply “because that’s the way things are.”
Not that that is wrong. But it also confronts us with the philosophical Problem Of Brute Facts. Essentially, once you allow brute facts “the explanation stops here” we have to be careful because “who gets to say what is a brute fact?” Each worldview can say “well this part I don’t have to explain because it’s just a brute fact,” and place those wherever convenient in the explanatory chain.
We can try to say “Well, the place to say ‘there is no further explanation’ is when we can find no further explanation.”
But then, almost everything we know now, scientifically, could have been such a ‘brute fact’ in the past, when no one had a deeper explanation. It’s only by holding on to the idea that there is still more to be explained that we progress beyond brute facts.
So we seem sort of stuck because on one hand, in our explanations (of physics or whatever) there may BE at some point a brute fact where it’s “just the way it is.” Yet on the other hand, being ready to declare brute facts seems to hold worrying liabilities.
I fully agree with that Vaal. A warning we should always keep in mind. I sure didn’t mean to say that we should ever draw a line and say “we are finished, there is nothing more to be learned about this.”
I meant to convey that when what we have figured out as of this particular moment, as in the best explanation the process of science has yielded as of the moment, is not agreeable to you in some way it is better to accept it (provisionally! not absolute, end of story) and patiently wait for the hard process of science to continue making progress rather than to concoct just so stories based on what you feel is more appropriate.
I think he’s fallen into what Dennett thinks of as the big mistake about consciousness – thinking we understand it in the relevant way as it “seems to be”. See _Consciousness Explained_, which Strawson doesn’t seem (:)) to have learned the lesson from.
As for matter, well, that’s relatively easier: matter is that which is changeable. That’s all. Different sorts of matter have different properties (e.g., mass, charge, spin), etc. and they interact to a first approximation a way in which the universe is nicely symmetric.
And *energy is not a stuff*. Would people stop saying that, please? That was refuted by Maxwell well over 100 years ago.
I’m not sure what you mean by “energy is not a stuff”. Einstein tells us energy has mass and is interchangeable with matter. So if matter is “stuff”, how is energy not?
No, E=mc^2, contrary to popularizations (including by physicists), states that (sometimes) energy and *mass* are exchangeable. Both are *properties*, and since mass is one, energy has to be as well. (This is basically Maxwell’s argument.)
What kind of stuff?
Energy is really just a property of particles (matter or forces) and therefore of fields. (As well as felids.)
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Or you could argue that matter (and energy) just ‘is’ and the properties are useful labels we paint on the boxes we logically divide bits of matter into.
Strangely, I think there are a number of large circular structures around the world which are devoted to understanding exactly that question. Not Stonehenge and so on (though you could try to make an explanation for Stonehenge involving proto-historic efforts to understand the nature of the universe), but the Bevatron, Tevatron, LHC and IceCube.
It is rather hubristic to believe that such efforts will remain “forever silent” on the question of the fundamental nature of matter. Even if they don’t answer our questions in the way we expect, any wel designed experiment will yield data either by working, or not working. Had the LHC not, for example, discovered a particle at about 128 GeV with certain decay characteristics, then that failure in itself would have told us something about how (and where) our theories about the fundamental nature of matter are wrong.
Even the LHC weasel didn’t remain silent. We now know what 40kV-fried weasel smells and looks like, which is a rather esoteric emergent property of the big bang. But we didn’t know that before.
Yes, time to trot out that list of similar pronouncement.
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” — Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” — Attributed to Bill Gates, 1981, but believed to be an urban legend.
“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” — Western Union internal memo, 1876.
“While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility.” — Lee DeForest, inventor.
“The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C’, the idea must be feasible.” — A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)
“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” — H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.
“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” — William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, British scientist, 1899.
I have to admit, for a brief moment when I first used a Fat Mac, after using nothing but the TI-16, the TRS-80 and main-frame work stations of that same era, I thought its 512 K might be enough. Silly me. About the first thing I did on it was a presentation for a telemetry tagging timing system with an ORed power supply. That quickly crushed any notions of 512 K being enough.
Its funny remembering how you used to have to juggle a bunch of floppies to do a little project consisting of less than 100 pages of text and simple diagrams.
Hmmm, I was watching a programme about the History of Hollywood (Paul Merton ff on one of his hobby horses – which won’t mean much on one side of the British coastline) a couple of days ago who was saying the Warner Bros were actually pioneers of sound recording in movies. So that claim doesn’t even make sense.
But yeah, trying to avoid leaving hostages to fortune is time consuming.
I would guess he’s aiming for the idea that a mathematical description of something, however detailed, doesn’t seem to be the same as the thing itself. E.g., a simulation of fire on a computer is not the same as “real” fire. But I don’t think there is much substance to this kind of question. The difference is in how the two interact with the “simulation” that is our selves. That is, if we imagine that we are in fact simulations running in a big computer, then there is nothing puzzling about the difference between “real” fire and “simulated/mathematically described” fire to us. One is a simulation within the simulation but viewed from the “top” level the fact that we perceive a distinction does not mean that the real and virtual fires are in fact fundamentally different kinds of things. (They are both just data in the top level simulation.)
I think a lot of confusion in “Philosophy of Mind” stems from the unspoken assumption that our rational understanding of something should somehow be the same as our arational “direct” experience of that thing. But our brains don’t seem to be built that way. That may tell us something interesting about our brains but it’s not a good way to define different categories of reality.
Nicely said.
Does it have to be new? It does if it’s a scholarly publication, but this isn’t one – it’s an op-ed in the newspaper!
It has the familiar ring of turf-protecting rhetoric of a scientifically challenged philosopher.
Reblogged this on The Logical Place.
Got me convinced. Now, if I could just convince the homunculus topsides on the bridge manning the helm …
I’m surprised Strawson didn’t mention Max Tegmark, whose answer to Hawking’s question of “What breathes fire into the equations?” is that equations don’t need anything to breathe fire into them; rather, physics emerges as a natural consequence of mathematics in the same sort of way that consciousness emerges as a natural consequence of physics.
As I said in a previous thread, I think the so-called “hard problem” is at bottom just another instance of the same sort of confusion that leads people to wonder why there’s something instead of nothing. Our daily experience tells us that the universe exists, and that it feels like something to be a living part of it. Arguments that it ought not to feel like anything “because physics” are falsified before they get off the ground.
Could you explain how consciousness emerges from physics please?
Step by step.
I’ll admit my bias up front. I am a materialist who believes in a mind independent reality. From my point of view, you have this exactly backwards. Mathematics (the abstract idealization of the physical) emerges as a consequence of physics (the underlying physical reality which is abstracted from to get mathematics). I don’t see how it could be any other way. Of course, Platonists and other philosophical idealists would agree with your formulation. But they never seem to address how they use their bodies and brains to profess their disembodied ideas… how utterly reliant they are on the eyes and ears of the people they are trying to convince, nor how essential their brains are in generating the ideals they like to give priority.
I agree – Tegmark is just a Platonist. And he should know there are problems, even granting the weird premiss.
For example *what* mathematics? Why is *that* mathematics involved? I am not sure that even quantifying over this domain makes any sense, either. For example, one problem I worked briefly on was trying to figure out how many logics there are. I don’t know how to answer that, and each one would have its own mathematics, in a way, if Platonism were true. Alternatively, just one is correct (the one in Plato’s heaven), and then … which one? Why?
Well, I don’t claim to speak for Tegmark, but isn’t his answer to that essentially anthropic? I.e. there’s a kind of mathematical multiverse in which all (logically consistent) mathematical structures exist, but some are complex enough to support a kind of physics, and in some of those the physics is complex enough to support stars, planets, life, and consciousness. Naturally we find ourselves in one of the latter.
But consistency isn’t even a requirement for a mathematical system! There are paraconsistent logics, and even a program to develop as much classical-esque mathematics within it, some of which has been done.
Do *those* “realities” exist? How are they individuated? I was asking the ontological question, not the epistemic one (which can, I grant, be done anthropically once the first is done).
For all logics in some hypervast whatsit, …
I don’t even know how to formalize that statement. Any takers? The metalanguage is unstatable, as far as I can tell.
Also, it seems that one could “diagonalize out” of it pretty quickly, but that’s an impression. If that’s so, there *is* no “collection” of logics, and hence of mathematicses, and hence on his own terms, Tegmark is refutable.
(Also, I am not a number, darn it! ;))
It seems that the laws of physics compel me to subscribe … I cannot resist!
I take issue with Strawson’s endorsement of the Leibnizian claim that “visiting [the brain’s] insides, we will never find anything but parts pushing each other — never anything that could explain a conscious state.”
I think this view is mistaken. Once we understand the mind well enough, we’ll be able to point to subsystems and processes within it and say with confidence, “Here’s where it’s focusing attention on its own emotional state”, and know what that feels like from the inside. This kind of inference is no less legitimate, in my view, than pointing to lines on a spectrogram and inferring the existence of chemical reactions in gas clouds many light-years away.
Agreed, Gregory.
The “hard problem” has always struck me as a symptom of special pleading. We accept how we can “explain” and model phenomena in all other realms of experience…except when it comes to human consciousness, suddenly this won’t do. One is always left wondering “what type of explanation WOULD be acceptable?” But the hard problem people seem to think it’s all so mysterious, they can’t even come up with what possible explanation for consciousness they would accept.
Listening to Sam Harris’ recent discussion with David Chalmers only re-enforced this impression that the hard problem is mired in a vagueness that dooms itself to mystery.
That’s why it is called the hard problem.
That conversation was a bit vague though.
I think they were caught trying speak with the lay person in mind, but failing, due to there experience and expertise.
I was hoping for something a bit more definite too but that is the nature of this discussion.
Even if “what is matter” were a sensible question, and even if you were able to answer it, you’d still need to explain why some matter gives rise to consciousness and some matter doesn’t. That’s the hard problem.
Phrased that way, I don’t think that problem is fundamentally harder than the question of why some assemblages of matter form viable organisms and some don’t.
It may take more work to get the answer, but that’s a difference of degree, not of kind.
Granted, “hard” and/or “problem” may be inappropriate words, but the thrust of my point was that he seems to think a general explanation of matter, whatever he might mean by that, will necessarily also be an explanation of consciousness, whatever that might be. I see two questions where he seems to see one.
“Consciousness is not an “illusion”; it’s real because we all experience it. I find this pretty uncontroversial.”
Only stuff made of atoms is real.
A lot of people experience God; that doesn’t mean God is part of reality. Our intuitions have proven to be wrong with so many things (physics, biology, epidemiology); it is very unlikely that they are right on the subject of consciousness and certainly our intuitions do not count as evidence.
Neuroscience will probably explain how our experiences are produced; but we already know that our experiences are for a big part about non-existing things.
“but we already know that our experiences are for a big part about non-existing things”
That statement would seem to break the connection between physics and consciousness.
I don’t see a problem; f.i. optical illusions are experiences about things that don’t exist, these illusions are produced by physical things.
And they are perfectly real – they just happen to be processes in brains of animals.
But consciousness *is* the experience.
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I believe it is commonly used to mean more than that (wikipedia):
“Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness that is more advanced than the primitive awareness that insects have. Being conscious is also being aware of something within oneself, such as ideas and thoughts. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.”
My point was that if our brains create f.i. the experience of a self it doesn’t automatically mean that this self is part of reality.
But what is “self” other than the experience of it? What would it be like not to experience “self”?
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“What would it be like not to experience “self”? ”
Some mental diseases can give us a clue:
Some people feel like some part of their body does not belong to them.
Also we know of the Cotard syndrome; people who believe they don’t exist.
So who is it that believes he or she doesn’t exist?
There is still a conscious self experiencing that delusion!
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Some young children will keep an adult talking to the point of sheer frustration simply by asking “Why?” in response to whatever the adult says. It works because every answer seems to always leads to another question.
Perhaps these are the children who grow up to become philosophers.
Why?
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Strawson like Russell is really saying that sensations or qualia are physical and objective. They are the clothing through which we get to know matter otherwise how could we ever know the world? Brains could not have created new physical laws connecting matter to sensation but merely made use of existing principles. We are in effect observing the virtual world created inside our brains.
I agree with him so far but he doesnt take the next step or goes a step to far. He conflates the observer and the observed or doesnt address the observer at all. Some parts of the world have an inside looking out at the world. We do..maybe electrons also do. I think probably amoebas without any nervous system do. But that is a different problem, because we can never observe the observations of another observer. We can only hypothesize where they may exist.
““We don’t see that the hard problem is not what consciousness is, it’s what matter is — what the physical is.
We may think that physics is sorting this out, and it’s true that physics is magnificent. It tells us a great many facts about the mathematically describable structure of physical reality, facts that it expresses with numbers and equations (e = mc2, the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction, the periodic table and so on) and that we can use to build amazing devices. True, but it doesn’t tell us anything at all about the intrinsic nature of the stuff that fleshes out this structure. Physics is silent — perfectly and forever silent — on this question.””
I am philosophically adverse, but let me try.
As Sean Carroll notes, we now know the laws of everyday physics (Core Theory).
The detour over mathematics is Strawson’s strawman for testability.
Remains what is reality, and what are laws.
Reality are robust characteristics under observations (so says evolution,say), laws among them. Noether taught us that laws derives from symmetries, that is robust regularities.
Now Strawson wants to make laws, perhaps reality, as something mysterious, despite that it is all we know. But that would be an extraordinary claim, and he lacks extraordinary evidence – in fact he lacks any evidence.
If Strawson wants to ask “what else could there be”, the answer may be “we don’t know”. And that is perfectly fine.
I actually thought it was a pretty interesting piece. His argument seems pretty simple to me:
1. consciousness does exist
2. in some way, it arises from matter
3. we have no idea how
4. that indicates an incompleteness in our understanding of what matter really is
5. it’s not clear that we will ever be able to fill that hole in our understanding
6. it’s therefore not clear that we will ever understand what matter really is
I think that’s actually spot on. One can simply define the problem away – “matter is what gives rise to consciousness” – but there’s no mechanistic understanding there of how that happens, and no ability to predict when it happens and when it doesn’t, and so forth. Maybe science will eventually find a way to gain traction on this problem, but I’m doubtful, given the fundamentally subjective nature of conscious experience.
I dispute the claim that there’s “no ability to predict when it happens and when it doesn’t”. Confronted with an unimpaired, awake human brain, we can confidently predict that it will be conscious. We can also diagnose various sorts of impairments and predict their effects on consciousness.
In the future, we’ll be able to build robot brains with architecture similar to ours and predict that, by virtue of that architecture, they too will be conscious in every pragmatic sense.
“Confronted with an unimpaired, awake human brain, we can confidently predict that it will be conscious.” Can we? How? We have no way of even knowing whether anyone else besides ourselves is actually conscious, or whether their experience of consciousness bears any resemblance to our own. We have no way to measure consciousness. All we can do is ask someone “are you conscious?” and assume that they tell us the truth, and that they mean the same thing by the word that we do. That seems to be a problem. But in any case, your claim completely breaks down as soon as you stray from humans. Are chimps conscious? Dogs? Fish? Flies? Anemones? We simply have no idea, and it’s not clear how we ever could. Your claim that robotic brains with “similar architecture” (whatever that really means) would be conscious is nothing more than an assumption. If we can’t measure that they are conscious, we have no scientific reason to assume that they are.
“We have no way of even knowing whether anyone else besides ourselves is actually conscious, or whether their experience of consciousness bears any resemblance to our own.”
Of course we do. We talk to them, and note that their descriptions of their inner lives and subjective experiences correspond closely to our own. The alternative, that they can produce these spot-on descriptions based on experiences utterly unlike ours, or on no subjective experience at all, is in the same category as the notion that the universe winked into existence last Thursday, complete with false memories of a nonexistent past. There’s simply no reason to take such speculation seriously without supporting evidence.
On the other hand, we have ample evidence that consciousness is tied to specific kinds of brain activity. So the parsimonious assumption is that similar brains engaged in similar patterns of activity produce similar subjective sensations. If you want to argue otherwise, the burden is on you to demonstrate why this should not be the case.
“We talk to them, and note that their descriptions of their inner lives and subjective experiences correspond closely to our own. The alternative, that they can produce these spot-on descriptions based on experiences utterly unlike ours, or on no subjective experience at all, is in the same category as the notion that the universe winked into existence last Thursday, complete with false memories of a nonexistent past.” I read recently about a chatbot that passed the Turing test in a competition. Do you ascribe consciousness to that chatbot? “If you want to argue otherwise, the burden is on you to demonstrate why this should not be the case.” Nope, sorry, that’s not how it works. You’re the one making the positive claim – that you can tell what matter is having a conscious experience and what matter is not. You’re the one who needs to show proof.
bchaller
You are wrong that only Gregory has the burden of proof. You wrote:
“there’s no mechanistic understanding there of how that happens, and no ability to predict when it happens and when it doesn’t,”
That’s a claim, so you have the burden of supporting your claim.
Gregory is pointing out the special pleading you are appealing to regarding consciousness.
He is using the very same method of inference and parsimony we use to believe any other empirical propositions. It’s up to you to show how his inference is NOT reasonable and parsimonious, which you haven’t done.
Pointing to other examples of “maybe, maybe not” conscious entities – e.g. certain animals or computers – does not undermine the inference about humans. No more than it does for morality. We know that humans have characteristic necessary for moral thought – whether other creatures, or machines, have it or not is an interesting investigation, but does not entail we don’t have morality.
Is a chat bot that passes a Turing test conscious? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on what we know about how it was constructed, how much it can actually produce human-like
response (e.g. the tests that have been passed have been very limited). But we DO know that humans have consciousness, by the fact other people are produced by the same physical structures as we ourselves are made of, and report as rich an inner life as we do.
A chatbot contest is hardly a Turing test in Turing’s original sense. But I agree with Turing that if a bot could converse knowledgeably over an extended period about a wide variety of subjective experience, then we’d be justified in provisionally assuming its experience to be genuine. No chatbot to date has come anywhere close to that.
Are you not making the claim that given two physically indistinguishable brains engaged in indistinguishable patterns of activity, one of them might be conscious and one not? If that is your claim, then in effect you’re claiming that consciousness is non-physical. That’s a positive claim that you must provide evidence for — evidence sufficient to overcome the considerable weight of evidence already in hand that consciousness is a product of brain function. (Jerry alluded to some of that evidence is his original post.)
I agree with bchaller. We do accept that other people are conscious and have subjective experience, but that is not the whole story.
David Chalmers uses the notion of zombie people to explore this idea, silly though it seems, it is imaginable.
But more so, as bchaller mentioned, what about other animals?
Flies? Cats? Worms with 300 neurons? Do they have copiousness? Do they have a subjective experience?
If so, or if not, how do you know?
It is assumed that in the future we will be able to build conscious machines. But we don’t know.
Many assumptions about intelligence and consciousness have severely challenged through the development of AI.
It turns out that it is easier to model intelligence like chess playing or maths than it is to navigate an environment and walk around.
That would not have been predicted many years ago.
People have been thinking on it and meditating on it (and living in barrels) to get a handle on it for a long time.
But, if you do know how consciousness arises and can show it, you will be famous.
Can it even be firmly established that we have a material reality rather than an idealistic one?
Thoughts on this all being a simulation makes one wonder.
It would still be that which it is, but, these are valid questions.
It is called the hard problem for a reason.
It is a real problem, and it is hard to answer.
And, it is because of this that we have stuff like religion and Deepak Chopra, unfortunately.
“We do accept that other people are conscious and have subjective experience, but that is not the whole story.”
That sounds more like my position than that of bchaller, who seems to be arguing that we have no ability whatever to assess consciousness in other people, and that there is no physical difference between a conscious brain and an unconscious one.
My position is simply that there is a difference, and we can use that difference to infer consciousness in many situations. At no point have I claimed to have a complete theory of consciousness or an infallible consciousness detector that works on all species.
If you insist on 100% certainty, you’re going to be disappointed. But there’s a lot of useful ground between 0% and 100%. We can know with high confidence that other people are conscious in the same way we know that distant stars have planets: because we see the evidence of it.
+1
“David Chalmers uses the notion of zombie people to explore this idea, silly though it seems, it is imaginable.”
Many have pointed out that Chalmers’ Philosophical Zombies seems question-begging.
If the question is, does our consciousness arise as a result of how our brains work, then answering “yes, because I can imagine people just like us but without consciousness” just begs the question – just mere assertion that consciousness isn’t a result of how our brains work.
This is similar to the ontological argument for God. What does it actually *mean* to say one can “imagine” such a thing? I can contemplate the idea of a square circle, but can I really understand HOW a square COULD BE a circle?
Similarly, if you duplicated a normal conscious person physically, and the brain is doing exactly the same thing, how can it actually make sense that in one case the brain is doing consciousness and in the other it wouldn’t be. That sounds like just unexplained magic.
Vaal,
It’s worse than that. Chalmers imagines that his p-zombies can do everything normal people can do — including writing op-eds on the nature of conscious experience. The zombies have no such experience, of course; the words they type are the product of unconscious brain processes. But by a remarkable coincidence, those purely unconscious processes somehow manage to compose sentences that accurately describe the experience of being conscious.
And this is thought to be a plausible scenario.
Indeedy.
It’s just puzzling when I see someone like Sam Harris taking p-zombies seriously.
But then sometimes I get the feeling that Sam’s interest in meditation has sometimes enlightened him, sometimes bamboozled him, on the nature of consciousness.
I didn’t really like the zombie notion either. I was parroting Chalmers.
Though I am not so sure it is question begging.
Harris’s wife asked about how zombies could engage in discussions of conscious experience and Chalmers response was limited, and Sam’s acceptance of the response a little disappointing.
The Turing test doesn’t matter.
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I don’t think #4 is a valid conclusion.
We have a complete understanding of the physics of everyday life. That is true despite some areas of cosmological doubt and uncertainty. And that means we know, at a human scale, what matter is.
We also have a very good understanding of how that matter behaves in our brains, in terms of the biochemistry of nerve cells and how they interact.
What we don’t know is how the interactions among the vast number of nerve cells in the brain give rise to consciousness.
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“We have a complete understanding of the physics of everyday life.” Is our own conscious experience not a part of everyday life? “What we don’t know is how the interactions among the vast number of nerve cells in the brain give rise to consciousness.” Well, exactly.
But what do you mean by, “Well, exactly”?
What we don’t understand is not physics.
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“What we don’t understand is not physics.” You’re arguing for dualism, then?
I’m not sure how you infer that!
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No. He isn’t saying anything remotely like that. He is saying that understanding the physics of particle behavior doesn’t automatically mean you can then model all phenomena. Or would you put weather in the same category as consciousness?
Consciousness is a difficult problem lying somewhere beyond our current understanding. Throughout the entire history of science there have been many things that were beyond the then current understanding of science. Despite feelings that consciousness is somehow extra special, unique among all phenomena, there are no good reasons to think it involves anything other than the basic properties of matter and energy that we already have discovered. It may indeed be a very difficult problem. Many puzzles are, despite being able to thoroughly and accurately model the pieces.
😁
Some philosophers do not distinguish between physicalism and materialism. Bunge points out that this is a mistake, even if somehow one denies emergence properties over those of basic particles (or whatever the lowest level of reality, if there is one, is).
One should, because otherwise one has to introduce awkward terminology like “non-reductive physicalism”, which has a few other uses as well.
Ant is presumably a materialist, but not a (narrow) physicalist, because he/she believes in emergent properties at chemical, biological, etc. levels.
Yes, he is (if he understands those terms correctly).
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Beat me to it. You’ve (bchaller) got a whole bunch of work to do in supporting this assertion before you can use it to support the rest of your line of reasoning.
1 Currently we are investigating how this works.
2 Is true.
3 Is partially true. We have already a lot of clues.
4 We have a very good understanding and a lot of evidence what matter really is.
5. Empty statement; likewise we don’t know if there really is “a hard problem of consciousness”.
6. Matter is anything that has mass and takes up space. Not very difficult to understand.
{We have a very good understanding and a lot of evidence what matter really is.}
No. We have ideas about he properties of matter but not what matter actually is.
{Matter is anything that has mass and takes up space.}
No. Electrons are made matter yes? If electrons take up space, then what shape are they? Spherical? cubic? What does the interior of an electron consist of? Electron stuff? Physics has no answer to these questions.
What is matter if not the sum of its properties?
Electrons are electron shaped, of course. They certainly do take up space in stable arrangements such as atomic orbitals.
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if you are interested search for “Pauli exclusion principle”.
Matter broadly construed is just that which is changeable (=possesses energy).
Electrons don’t *have* an interior, either, or so it seems.
Unenlightening is an excellent description of this article. While attempting to clever paradox, Swanson commits the fallacy of equivocation: “to know” as experience and as understanding. In fact the whole article is equivocal, hence says precisely nothing. We may not fully understand consciousness or matter but we experience both.
Of course Swanson admits there is a “hard” problem of consciousness. “We examine the brain in ever greater detail, using increasingly powerful techniques like fMRI, and we observe extraordinarily complex neuroelectrochemical goings-on, but we can’t even begin to understand how these goings-on can be (or give rise to) conscious experiences.” Then, saying that we do not know (understand) the “intrinsic nature” (essentialism) of matter, he does the second sneaky switcheroo – matter is consciousness!
I wonder if he is a theist?
Swanson commits the fallacy of equivocation: “to know” as experience and as understanding.
Yes, that really is an excellent way of putting the equivocation I see from people promulgating the Hard Problem.
Swanson? I think you mean Samsonite.
(I apologize to those who think this joke is just dumb. Or dumber.)
like a little person in the brain controlling and experiencing things
Maybe I am weird and totally different from all other humans, but I do not recognise myself in that description at all. Consciousness is just me being awake. I have never perceived myself as being a duality.
This is a real question, now with some concern: Does anybody?
How about if you think about what you did yesterday or remember thing or feeling something another time.
Or your internal chatter. Who are you talking to?
Nobody; I just listen to how it would sound hearing that idea spoken out.
Really I would not have thought that anybody perceives themselves as a homunculus and their body as a machine. When I step on their foot, would they go “stop stepping on the foot of the body I am using” or would they go “ouch, get offa my foot”?
There are people who are unable to form visual images of remembered objects but they still manage to live unobtrusively among the rest of humanity. So it doesn’t seem particularly strange that some people might not have the experience of the ‘little man’ inside their head.
Arguably Zen practioners go to some lengths to decouple the link between the ‘little man’ and their ‘true’ selves. Whether this is more than indulging in a non-default brain state is another argument.
Is matter really alive? Maybe the distinction between inorganic and organic is false. If we push further into the nature of matter, would we find that matter is alive and conscious in a monistic, naturalistic, materialistic sense?
I am afraid we would need a completely different definition of “life” than the one that is currently used…
“would we find that matter is alive and conscious in a monistic, naturalistic, materialistic sense?” I don’t know about “alive” – I would think not – but “conscious”, yes, that has been my hunch for many years. I think fundamental particles simply must be conscious in some sense. Not in the same full sense as humans, presumably; but to build that full-sense consciousness in organisms like humans, it seems to me that you need building blocks that have some sort of consciousness themselves. I think of it as being quite parallel to how mass works. The Eiffel tower has physicality, mass, spatial extent. Fundamental particles don’t have the same sort of complex physicality, mass, and spatial extent as the Eiffel tower, but they *do* have those qualities in a very simple, “building block” sort of way that allows them to combine to make something more complex with more complex versions of those properties. It seems to me that it has to be the same with consciousness. I find explanations of consciousness that try to claim that it is somehow “emergent” from building blocks with no consciousness whatsoever to be incoherent.
It looks like you are committing a fallacy of division to me.
Human brains are information processing devices based on neurons. It doesn’t seem to me that it should be hard to recognize the need for an underlying information processing hardware architecture for consciousness. It also doesn’t seem that hard to recognize that neurons can process information in a way that individual atoms cannot.
It is interesting, indeed.
Have you listened to the Sam Harris and David Chalmers podcast?
I was interested to note that they did not rule out such a possibility.
“I think fundamental particles simply must be conscious in some sense.”
That makes as much sense as suggesting that a single copper wire in any of the computers we’re using to communicate can, by itself, process information.
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Chalmers has claimed for years (~20, as it happens) that everything has a little bit of mental life/experience. (Leibniz!) Anyway, he never to my knowledge explains what the relationship between monads/whatever and their experiences. For example, he has to hold that a water molecule has experience, so what is the relationship between the water molecule’s and the atoms that make it up? Between the atoms’ neutrons, protons and electrons? Etc.
The second point, that “Consciousness derives from physical phenomena” is utterly devoid of evidential support. Take an analogy with an old-style TV set: the image can be altered by magnets, by changing the position of the antenna, etc., and eliminated by removing the power lead. According to the logic used by those who believe that consciousness is created physically, we should conclude that the image is produced (entirely) by the TV set.
Should we? I think that’s a facile analogy.
We’d also notice that a working tv in a Faraday cage wouldn”t display any coherent images, falsifying the notion that the image is produced entirely by the tv.
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Thank you for making my case more clearly. By requiring a (nonlocal) Faraday cage, you concede the fact that local factors cannot be adduced to disprove nonlocal origins, neither of the TV image nor of consciousness.
Hardly.
What would a “Faraday cage of the mind” look like? Where does consciousness reside, if not in the brain? And how does it interact with the brain? (Remember that we know *very well* what the matter in the brain can interact with and how.)
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And how does it do it without violating conservation laws? Descartes was asked this too, and had an answer. His answer is *dead*, since it relied on an incorrect conservation of momentum law statement.
I have no idea why you think this “analogy” rebuts the physicality of consciousness. The image on a tv screen is created within the tv, but the information in the image may be introduced from outside the device. Similarly, my brain may use external information collected by my sense organs in creating my consciousness. There is nothing non-physical in that.
Physics tells us that all effects in this world are created by physical events. What more evidence do we need?
Vijen wrote: “The second point, that “Consciousness derives from physical phenomena” is utterly devoid of evidential support.”
I’m sorry, but that statement can not be taken seriously. ALL evidence points to consciousness deriving from physical phenomena; NO good evidence exists for consciousness being non-physical.
Human beings are physical – we interact with the physical world just any other physical object does (and if your physics and engineering excepts human beings from your predictions…you are going to be sorry).
Human beings start off as physical objects – zygotes – in the womb. No sane person thinks zybotes are conscious, and at the very least, no one can offer evidence that they are.
And yet, as human beings develop PHYSICALLY over time, developing a physically more complex neurology and brain…consciousness emerges. Which suggests consciousness emerges from a sufficient form of neurological complexity.
If this can’t count as “evidence” in support of the hypothesis that consciousness results from physical brain development…WHAT POSSIBLY CAN????
Your standard of evidence has reached pure special-pleading levels.
“…conscious emerges” Tah-DAH!
A risible “argument”: mere handwaving.
Do you have anything other than a snappy come-back…say…an actual argument against
what I wrote, or a positive case FOR the plausibility of consciousness deriving from the non-physical?
Since I doubt you are willing to deny the human life cycle, why not give a plausible hypothesis about at which point non-physical consciousness inserts into the process.
I’m pretty certain no such explanation will be forthcoming, and that you will fall back to “you haven’t proven consciousness derives from physical brains.” Which would put you back into the special pleading category.
You don’t seem to understand how empirical inference works in the first place. If something seems in all other respects completely physical any way you examine it, when you come to one feature that you have yet to understand the mechanism, it’s silly do jump to “Therefore this part must be supernatural.” It was only fairly recently that scientists uncovered exactly how chameleons altered their color. Was it unreasonable for scientists to think that a creature that was in every way physical they could test…would likely have a physical explanation for a feature not yet understood?
Or should they have jumped to “it’s supernatural!”
Similarly, if humans are physical in every way we can determine, and our consciousness is affected by physical stimuli, and we see
consciousness emerge from what seems only to be a physical process of maturation…then we are completely justified in expecting consciousness will be produced physically, in particular by our brain, given consciousness seems to depend on the development and health of the brain.
That consciousness emerges is not really an argument; it’s an observation.
It’s like evolution. That life evolves is an observation; how life evolves is a question that Darwin, Wallace, Dawkins, Coyne and uncountable others have answered (pace esoteric arguments about group selection, epigenetics, and so on).
We are still waiting for the “Darwin of consciousness”.
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PS. The hand does not wave; the mind waves.
We cannot learn what anything really is. The best we can hope for is to learn how it works and how one thing interacts with another.
I’d only add that “what anything really is” may be an invalid concept. Or at least not a useful one in this context.
It is a metaphysical concept. The philosophers can argue about it.
Strawson was on an episode of Philosophy Bites where he discussed Panpsychism. I don’t hold the same belief but I did find his explanation fascinating. I think the NYT article makes more sense if you consider Panpsychism.
http://philosophybites.com/2012/05/galen-strawson-on-panpsychism.html
All things have a soul? Even electrons?
For me the lack of evidence makes this view rather uninteresting.
{The question, “What is matter”? seems to be meaningless in the sense Strawson asks it.}
Why? Does it help to say that matter is matter? No it does not.
Does it help to say that matter is at bottom information?
Yeah, possibly.
But maybe he’s raising a different question, like “why is there something instead of nothing?”
FWIIW, This is what I think he is doing.
I think the general issue is this: basic attempts to reconcile consciousness and physical processes fail because consciousness is seen as too weird from our conception of physical matter to be reconcilable. What Strawson appears to be suggesting is that we’ve taken the wrong conclusion from this problem, and using that wrong conclusion to make pronouncements about the part we are most familiar with.
The empty brain
Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer
by Robert Epstein
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That is a strange article by Epstein. Actually, it is stupid. He seems to think the IP model of brain function is based on the architecture of the contemporary mechanical computer. Nobody thinks that. As for the storage of memories, he needs to read some neuroscience. We know something about how that is done. If Epstein has a better model of the brain, what is it? You can’t claim to beat something with nothing.
I was similarly unimpressed. The fact that we can (for instance) memorize telephone numbers refutes his claim that the brain does not represent or store information.
Have you read Alex Rosenberg’s An Atheist’s Guide to Reality — specifically Chapters 7 and 8?
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Yes, I have. Rosenberg does not deny that the brain stores and processes information. For example, he explains that memory and recall does not work the way we might think, but he does not claim that a general information processing model of the brain is wrong, as Epstein does. We need to understand better how the brain stores and processes information, for sure. It is not like my laptop, obviously, but no one who has considers this issue seriously thinks that anyway.
Well, that was not my recollection. It seems I need to take another look. Memory and recall …
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“That’s how the brain works. It’s more powerful and more efficient than any computer we’ll ever be able to build and program. Maybe the brain is a lot of separate computers, wired together in parallel along with other peripheral “devices”—the eye, the tongue, the ear, the nose, the skin. But that it is at least a computer is obvious from its anatomy and physiology right down to the individual neurons and their electrochemical on/off connections to one another.”
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Rosenberg has been on my reading list for a while. I’ll bump him up to the top, behind the Wallace mentioned earlier.