We are all philosophical zombies | Response to "Within Reason #27"
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- čas přidán 1. 06. 2024
- Is consciousness a fundamental aspect of reality? Short answer: No. Long answer: No, but it's very interesting to think about why
The video I'm responding to: • Is Everything Consciou...
Some other videos about the philosophy of consciousness: • What Philosophers Mean...
Cluade Shannon's original paper on information theory ❤️: people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/...
Help me pay my student debt this month (please): / highlyentropicmind
0:00 - Context
0:41 - Recap on physicalism and dualism
8:23 - Recap on panpsychism
11:04 - The "magic trick" of dualism
12:28 - Information is a physical quantity
14:58 - Intro to sensory brain circuits
17:36 - Rational brain circuits
20:34 - Qualia as a sanity safety measure
24:52 - Intro to Synesthesia
27:47 - Synesthesia is a problem for Dualism
30:50 - Mary's Room 2: Synesthesic Boogaloo
33:27 - We are all philosophical zombies, and that's okay =3
36:59 - Panpsychism and the free will of conscious particles
38:50 - Consciousness as a hidden variable
39:55 - Consciousness X Wavefunction
The existence of a single person with eschizophrenia (that is a person with consciousness) debunks this theory, as most of the foundations for it is that rational signals cannot be mixed with sensory signals
exactly
"I don't like to be wrong. If you can correct me, I appreciate it."
Very overlooked thinking pattern that exists in neurodivergent individuals.
is that a neurodivergent thing?
Nobody is perfect but you... You are awesome and amazing and definitely a perfect example. Way cool 😎
As a Neuro divergent I get that on a deep level. So true.
I came from your Collatz video, then I watched your Speedy Gonzales video and now this. You are in the upper echelon of CZcamsrs and are wildly underrated. Keep going!!!
Consciousness is not a fundamental trait of reality. It is emergent. That makes it no less real. Temperature is an emergent property also. Both are the summation of individual physical properties that an abundance of similar components exhibit. In the case of temperature, such components are atoms or molecules or both, each with its own momentum. In the case of consciousness, it is neurons, each with its own nervous signals.
Edit: minor typo correction.
I agree, emergent properties are just as real as fundamental properties
Understanding how nervous systems manage to represent the environment and discern salient and usual situations has been my lifetime goal since I was four and didn't know yet what a nervous system was (but knew we had a mind). Fortunately for me, the said understanding was more or less mature in me one decade ago and now I can see clearly and easily how even individual neurons are able to do so. Not very difficult, but you need some knowledge of certain mathematical concepts such as subspaces and filters, vector spaces and their operations, or Boolean algebra.
You did a great job of laying out the philosophies, but I'm not convinced by the "number 4 = color green" argument. I don't think anyone is arguing that the concept of the number 4 has specific qualia associated with it. The qualia arise from what your brain's circuitry does with the understanding that it has just been reminded about the concept of the number 4. A part of your brain is capable of evoking the green qualia, and that part of your brain can get triggered by unexpected input. There is not necessarily a fundamental link between what humans happen to associate with "green" and the actual wavelength of green.
At the end of the day, we know that qualia exist, and we know that our brains are made of information, so I think it's very reasonable to conclude that information and qualia are the same thing. Perhaps qualia require a state change to occur, maybe the information systems in the brain excite some sort of unknown "consciousness field" -- but in the end, I don't think we need it.
One thing that baffles me is that you can have one part of the brain being designed to produce "red", and another part designed to produce "salty", yet a coherent "I"/"me"/ego is capable of knowing that both of these things are happening simultaneously in different local zones of space and time. The ability to assemble what seemingly should be localized phenomena into what feels like a unit in which "you" are both tasting salt and seeing red is amazing.
Not a neuroscientist. I will be very surprised if it turns out to be possible to define what exactly qualia are (beyond for "a quale is itself") using science.
Very interesting video.
I've always thought Libertarian Free Will (LFW) is incoherent and would be a nightmare i wouldnt wish on my worst enemy.
Say your thoughts, decisions, and beliefs arent determined by physical processes. Well, whatever processes they are, call it mental, logical, metaphysical, do they not string together in a coherent, logical way? Are there not rules governing these phenomena leading to recurring patterns and, you know, an intelligible inner world? That means, with requisite knowledge of the regularities and logic of your thoughts, beliefs, and decisions, one could predict what you are going to decide, and many who argue for LFW find this just as unacceptable (including my former self).
But, imagine the converse. Your beliefs thoughts and decisions actually DON'T follow from intelligible processes that have a coherent structure that, if known, would predict your next action. If there are no rules governing your mind, then your world is utter chaos and nonsense, and none of your decisions follow from anything remotely rational or reasonable. These are the only options, by definition, so I choose determinism.
Think about introspection though-- the entire point is to examine your mind and abstract out regularities governing its behavior,implying it has coherent, predictable structure, and nearly everyone agrees that yields real information and is a good, rational, and reasonable practice. We celebrate philosophy which delves into this, and we predict peoples behavior in the social world all the time. If things weren't deterministic, all those practices are futile. I don't even believe such a universe can exist, as systems that contradict themselves in a meaningful way can come to any conclusion through that little defect in intelligibility.
Ironically the only thing giving you any degree of freedom is the fact that the universe follows laws that you can understand, including yourself, affording you the possibility of Knowing. That means your mind, and the decision-maker we call the ego follows rules (they're just really complex and we likely cant hope to know them fully using that very system). I would claim that the better you know them, the MORE free you are
I know perfectly well how to express qualia mathematically. And qualia will be similar yet different among different minds, because there are no equal nervous systems, of which minds are the structural configuration as well as its status and its alterations. Qualia is ontological, not epistemological, it does not exist out of one's own nervous systems, although this may be not true in the future if brain-to-artiicial systems interfaces get much more advanced than today.
Most misunderstandings about the nature of consciousness stem from either a failure to recognise that it is a dynamic information object, or from a failure to understand how information objects differ from physical objects.
Is it not possible that physical objects are also information objects, à la Tegmark?
@@agentdarkboote it may be that in some sense there is no such thing as physically real and everything is, at bottom, information. “it from bit”, as Wheeler said.
But all that does is add more layers of abstraction beneath the ones we call “physical”. You still need to differentiate between the levels of abstraction above that. What we call “physical” objects have one kind of properties and actions that can be applied; what we call “information” objects have another. Eg you can move a physical object from one location in what we perceive as space to another location in space, but you can’t *move* information. You can move a physical object it’s encoded in of course, but as for the information itself you can only make a copy of it to another location or medium and then optionally destroy the original copy. This difference between physical objects vs information objects is absolutely invariant in any frame of reference in which such manipulations can be performed.
@@ralphclark yeah I'll agree with that. "Moving" something would ultimately correspond to changing some information in the underlying structure of the universe, and again not actually "moving" any information. I do agree that it's valuable to separate the levels of abstraction: even if we simulated a drop of water down to the quantum level, the inside of the computer would not be wet, since the abstraction level doesn't match. But I think it could be fair to say that within the simulation, the drop is indeed wet.
I believe there is a flaw in the argument that the fact that descriptions of qualia don't produce qualia is an evolutionary adaptation only. No descriptions of anything produce that thing, because a description is not the thing.
Reading a news report or first person account about an earthquake is not experiencing the earthquake. Reading a scientific account explaining why that earthquake happened and describing the earth movements with tables and equations, is also not experiencing the earthquake. Reports about something and scientific explanations of it are not the thing itself. They are not equivalent to the thing itself. They about the thing, but they are not the thing.
That shows that knowledge about how the brain works, or descriptions of specific brain events, could never produce qualia directly.
Reading about green trees before bed can result in dreams of green trees, which are constituted by qualia. We can imagine that Mary, raised in a black and white environment, nevertheless has dreams of color. That doesn't answer the argument because the thought experiment presumes Mary has no such dreams, and even if she had them they would be produced by her subconscious and not by her knowledge of human vision.
Humans communicate by symbols, including gestures and words. The symbols are not the thing described. They don't produce the thing described. I can write "a big red Delicious apple" and those symbols will indeed produce the quale of red in the mind, but a different order of qualia to a seen red apple, so there is no chance of confusion in the mind. The qualia of perception, imagination and memory are easily distinguishable from each other in the healthy mind. We can imagine that evolution provided animals with some way to communicate qualia. This can be done without confusing the animal about reality, in the same way memory and imagination produce qualia without confusing the animal about reality.
The evolutionary argument about confusion doesn't explain why animals cannot transfer qualia, nor why Mary's total knowledge of human vision would not produce color qualia in her mind.
Pheromones get closer to communicating qualia. An animal that is afraid may produce pheromones that produce fear in other animals. Fear itself appears in the mind, It is a kind of conscious perception about our own emotional state. In that sense it is a quale. It may be that an animal that becomes afraid because another animal in its tribe has become afraid, communicated by a fear pheromone. It doesn't know why it is afraid but experiences the fear in the same way as if it actually was responding to a perceived danger. However if Mary, raised from birth in a black and white environment, breathed in some kind of pheromone for green if it existed, or took LSD and saw hallucinatory colors, it would still not answer the argument that complete knowledge of vision doesn't produce color qualia. IMO, even if Mary did get color qualia from studying the science of human vision, it would not falsify the claim being made, that the color qualia have a property which is not predicted by the theories about them.
IMO, the story of Mary is not concerned with the mechanism that produces qualia, but with making clear to people a very interesting property of qualia that is difficult to bring to conscious awareness. Mary's situation is an attempt to out to people what qualia are within their own mind. It is about getting people to cognize that qualia have properties that we perceive and comprehend which are entirely and irreducibly non-verbal and non-mathematical. We also know from science that color qualia are not direct representations of external reality but inventions of the mind for the purpose of creating a map of reality, just as the colors on a map are not the colors of the territory represented by the map. The thought experiment is not about how the color qualia are produced, but about their intrinsic nature.
I'm typing this before I hear your objections (so about 12 mins into the view) as I want to write my own initial reactions without being influenced by your own views, since you tend to be pretty persuasive lol. I'll post additions after watching the whole vid but I wanted to get initial reaction out first.
I don't believe "I think therefore I am" is proof of consciousness, which seems to be that guy's pan-psychic premise. It's only proof of a "brain-like" object existing (though the word "object" is dubious too.) What I "am" is also a very complex ontological question which could have various answers depending on your priorities of how you want to describe what I am. I think "cogito ergo sum" is pretty much proof that there is some kind of brain-like system operating to produce that thought "cogito ergo sum", but what you would call those thoughts, be they consciousness or something else, shouldn't be taken as a given. So yeah, I think it's a good foundation by Descartes to prove that "something" exists, but it's not proof that consciousness necessarily exists in the way we would make assumptions around that, or even that reality as we know it exists since we could be in the Matrix. (I don't take hard solipsism seriously though because I know I am too stupid to have been the originator of great works of art and music.)
But back to consciousness... For instance, child-me can turn on my Xbox and play Halo's Assault on the Control Room. I walk around a virtual world and I see the snow, I see forerunner structures, I see covenant... but that's all software. Those things aren't real even though I'm seeing them, they are the result of the hardware and electrons moving around transistors etc. in the Xbox. I'm seeing the concept, the map, I am not seeing the tangible, the land. The virtual space of that level doesn't exist in reality, even though I experience it as real. My experience is illusory. It's an illusion created by the programmers and artists which interacts with how my brain perceives, works, and understands my reality etc. and the "game" exists in that grey space between those two things. But the qualia of the game is not a real thing, it can't exist without the meeting of a human brain, with a video game console. If even one of those two things are missing, the "game" cannot exist. Just like Green does not "exist" in reality either I would say, even though I experience it as real, it too is stuck in the grey space between the human brain/senses, and electromagnetism. The fact it exists between these two things is why it is hard to pin it down. But remove either one, and Green no longer exists. You can't say green exists in your brain, but you also can't say it exists in light... which makes it maddening to say then WHERE IS IT?? And the answer isn't nowhere, but rather in the synthesis of these two things perhaps? It could be an illusion that is evolutionarily advantageous to have. We can also experience many optical illusions that play with our qualia, including ones that play with our sense of colour and show us how easy it is to manipulate our perceptions.
Confusing the map for the place. (Or the game of chess for the physical chess board and pieces you play it with), is where I think this fellow's argument is breaking down when he tries to argue the universe is made of consciousness.
I really do not understand people who say the universe is conscious etc. It's so obvious it seems to me, that consciousness has to be some kind of emergent phenomena from a brain. In the same way that wetness is an emergent phenomena from molecules of water (cliche comparison but good one.) It's a property, in a particular domain and perspective, and so it is harder to define. Like how it's very hard to even define something as simple as a chair (unless you're Graham Linehan supposedly if you want to look that meme up.) I think consciousness and chairs don't "exist" along with wetness, only the universe "exists", whatever it is, and it gives rise to patterns that we observe and describe. Describe as these phenomena like consciousness, wetness or chairs, or cars, or video game consoles, but those descriptions are exactly that... descriptions of phenomena. They are not prescriptive, so we certainly can't put those phenomena as the base unit of reality. There is no such thing as a video game console in the universal sense. So why should there be such a thing as consciousness in a universal sense either? Qualia can't be real in the way this guy in that podcast appears to have implied (btw sorry I didn't watch that podcast, so apologies if this is misrepresenting his views.)
Btw all of what I just said may be the most obvious thing in the world, and the most rudimentary basic stuff, it may make me look like a fool, so apologies if that's the case. lol
As I predicted, your explanation blew my mind and totally made sense in a way that my own post didn't even begin to address lol. If I'm getting it right? You're saying it's a futile task to try and explain the experience of green (in terms of it being "real" - i.e. the qualia being a tangible actual thing caused by conscious particles at the core of reality, rather than emerging as a concept by the hardware of the brain.) because the processing of more basic sensory optic data is managed by a higher executive system in the brain, which operates in a different domain, or order of magnitude higher, which can't be condensed back down to something as granular as sensory input? And if it could, it would then be a very different thing to type of qualia we're talking about? Maybe I'm misunderstanding. So green is like "the game of chess" but the sensory input is the tangible board, the pieces, each of which can be different depending on which set you buy, but no matter the input (or the chess set), you would play any of them and recognise it as "chess." If you see true yellow light, or green-red pixels, you have different input (like you can buy different chess sets) but you experience the same qualia of yellow. Similar to how you could see 4 beans, 4 eggs, the number 4 as a numeral, and it doesn't matter what tangible form it takes, the result is it triggers in your rational faculties, at a level higher than your sensory input, to recognise these patterns, which triggers the qualia of 4 in your brain, which in turn is wired into the qualia of green which also goes off. But "4" and "green" are not "real" any more than chess is real, they are just relationships you link between these particular eggs, beans and numerals, much like you see the disparate chess sets as belonging to the same concept of chess.
Perhaps to put another way, the brain works syllogistically almost. You are feeding premises to your brain, and your brain rationalises conclusions. But you can get the same conclusions from different premises so long as your brain concludes them to take the same form (so different chess sets are still chess even though one is made of wood, the other plastic.) You can also put in the same premises (with different context) to get different conclusions in the instance of optical illusions. But what you can't do is describe the conclusions (qualia) as though they were premises (sensory input) because they are different parts of the brain active.
Also in terms of your debunk, I think that's a great addition to the thought experiment to make it so she can experience green without seeing it. I wonder if there are any people born blind who have synaesthesia. The only counter point I can think of, is do we actually know if it's true that the concept of "greenness" exists first in your mind before you've ever seen light input to trigger that experience (that your brain then has to categorise?) And I think of certain tribes or certain cultures that have different colour perception based on their environment, so maybe your colour perception adapts to your sensory input?
Another thing I wonder is do we see red the same way? And based on the fact people experience numbers differently as different colours, for you 4 is green but for another person, it might be blue etc., could that be an indication that we do perceive colour differently? Or just merely that your wiring takes a detour in different ways.
Very TL;DR: I agree with your conclusion whole heartedly. And nothing winds me up more than quantum woo. Saying consciousness exists on the quantum level is as farcical and meaningless to me as saying wetness exists on a quantum level. Just because those quantum systems can arrange themselves at a macroscopic level into water molecule, it doesn't mean quanta is inherently wet in some way. It doesn't make sense. Quantum particles are also not partially made of ice cream just because ice cream is ultimately made up of particles.
@@ash_yt0 Wow, I can't believe someone enjoyed this so much. Thank you
I think you were getting at the same idea I was when you said that the qualia of something requires the object and the person to perceive it, I just tried to frame it with neuroscience
That said, something I want to clarify is that between the sensory and rational brain circuits none of them is "higher" than the other, they just work with different sources of information
Also, I want to make emphasis on the importance of hallucinations. These happen when rational information becomes sensory information, and they are problematic because they make it hard to distinguish what is the real world
The reason the brain is wired in such a way that qualia canot be communicated is almost certainly because if it wasn't we'd be very vulnerable to hallucinations
Another good point you make is the importance of previous experiences on synesthesia
It is believed that all babies are synesthesic, but that as the brain learns to process information it cuts connections between neurons which are not useful. But for some reason sometimes it preserves unusual connections, presumably because that baby found some way to use that information
For this reason Mary would not have synesthesia related to color vision, and neither would a blind person, but such a connection could still be built artificially
These ideas could be tested if we found people with synesthesia related to color who also have unusual color vision, like color blindness to specific colors, or tetrachromats, and analyzed their brains with MRI machines
@@HighlyEntropicMind My bad. You're right, executive or higher is probably a bad word. I was thinking in terms of like... I assumed your experience or qualia IS the rational part and comes after the sensory part has fed it so to speak. (For instance, I assumed you can dream a scenario or hallucinate a scenario with your rational mind, bypassing sensory input being a factor.) While I also assumed you can't really do it the other way round because you need the rational mind to interpret the sensory info? But reading your post it seems I have misunderstood what you mean by sensory information. And that hallucinations aren't your rational mind ignoring the sensory input and making its own rational alternative, it's more that they hijack the sensory and cause almost a crossing of wires? Which is why it feels so real even though it's not? After all your daydreams never feel as real as a hallucination, because day dreams are more rational while hallucinations are more sensory? Am I getting closer to what you mean? I think what you're saying is making more sense to me now, sorry I am a little slow to catch on lol.
"The reason the brain is wired in such a way that qualia canot be communicated is almost certainly because if it wasn't we'd be very vulnerable to hallucinations." Yes that is what blew my mind in the video lol.
I also share your assumption that you could probe a brain and see someone's synaesthesia in theory, in much the same way you used the hard-drive example. Keep on being a boss dude, your vids are always interesting no matter the topic.
@@ash_yt0 Yes, "hijacking" is an excellent word to describe what I mean. The rational circuits hijack the sensory circuits to make you perceive as real something that should be just imaginary
Meanwhile imagination consist of the rational circuits sort of "requesting" simulations from the sensory circuits, but the mind can tell very easily that this is not sensory information
And let me tell you a secret: I am really slow too. All my teachers hated me because I never understood the lesson the first time. But being slow doesn't mean "being dumb", because eventually you can understand the lesson like everyone else, or even better. In fact before the exam it was my classmates asking help from me even though they had understood the basics faster than me
@@HighlyEntropicMind 🐢>🐇
👍
*I Wave therefore I Am*
Kinda, yes
I feel like the argument from 20:35 glosses over how central storytelling is to humans. External story telling and internal story telling. We're kinda not…us, without the ability to construct feelings from inputs. It's the foundation of empathy. It's why music… works, on us
Highly related : the Mary's Room thought experiment never hit home for me. If the feeling of seeing green is somehow new to Mary, then my conclusion is that whoever communicated green to her did not do so in sufficient depth. If one describes fire to someone *completely*, but only thermally, then sure a new person will be surprised that it is also bright. The insufficiency was in the description, not in the describability.
The thing with Mary's Room is if Mary knew all that was possible to know about the color red, she would know how her brain's neural circuits would rewire after seeing the color red, but the knowledge of how her brain would rewire is not the actual experience of red that rewires the brain. That's the difference.
And, there's certainly no chance someone can explain to someone else the experience of a color because of the prior limitation (acquiring semantic information is not the same as experiencing sensory information), but also because we are just too limited in the amount of semantic information we can transmit or the amount of semantic information we can process. Our brains perform huge amounts of computation, but we can't keep track of them by ourselves. And we already struggle to transmit much less information than what we process, transmitting the semantic information about all of the processes that a relatively small part of my neurons perform could already take me years.
@@didack1419 yes this hits the nail on the head about Mary's Room.
@@didack1419 you've described several challenges in the way of sufficiently communicating the nature of Red. Regardless of the specific challenges, they undermine the predicate of the argument, they don't support the argument itself. If for whatever reason the communication isn't sufficient (one of the reasons it may not be is that it cannot be), then the construction of the thought experiment is not achieved.
@@FrelanceEQ I'm kind off confused, it seems to me from reading you that you got the idea that I was trying to support the conclusions of the thought experiment(?
With all due respect, but you are missing the point about the hard problem i think. The whole point is "how the heck phenomenal experiences arise in the first place? How can matter and energy interacting create the "sensation of green" at all?"
Even if we have a perfect brain scan correlation like "these specific neurons firing in this specific order and pattern always create the experience of green", even if we had that it still would not be enough to actually explain where any experience comes from in the first place.
Im not a dualist, im more like a phisicalist that believes there are more physical processes out there in the universe that we just are completely unaware of today that explains this puzzle, its just that our physichs is still missing some physical laws from the universe, maybe consicousness really is a manifestation of a real physical phenomen of the universe that evolution somehow was able to explore and make use of it, but was there all the time in the universe.
Im a researcher in information theory and im very enthusiastic with these topics about mind, nice videi btw, its cool to see people enjoy discussing this topic
Few assumptions that are failrly out of place.
"If qualia real then 4 green" which is equivalent to "if physics real than 2+2=5" or "individual misattribution = not real".
Another is mistaking being able to attribute a qualia to a thing and being able to invent a qualia. No ammount of LSD will make you see a new color.
Also, information isn't physical per say, but physical things always encode information.
I think I didn't explain correctly what I meant
My point was this: People with synesthesia experience certain qualia with objects that should not have that qualia, like numbers. If qualia was real, we would be forced to conclude that numbers somehow do have those qualia, which only creates more problems
If qualia is just how our brains process information, then we can easily explain synesthesia as just a quirk opf the brain
Finally, information is something physical, as much as temprature, or energy. If you don't believe me you should read about Information Theory, particularly how it is related to thermodynamics
@HighlyEntropicMind "Should not" that's the issue.
Yes, I have, black holes increasing in mass when you stick energy in it doesn't mean information is physical. Or, more precisely, the fact that we need mass/energy to encode information doesn't make information physical.
@@lloydgush Are you saying that when people with synesthesia always experience "true qualia"? The concept of 4 really has the qualia of green?
Also, I don't know what is your background in physics, but the concept of the "wavefunction" is vital for physics today, and the wavefunction is literally just information. Information is as real as particles, or perhaps more real
@HighlyEntropicMind I'm not saying that. Where did you lose me on the last one? Even assuming we could call qualia wrong, a lack of hivemind on qualia wouldn't mean it's physical, neither would a presence would mean it's not physical and right.
Also, the "wavefunction" isn't "just information", it's an occilation in the field. The wavefunction isn't the particle, it's a description of it.
Also, remember that we lost locality. If you mean by physical "local".
That doesn't mean physical things ain't real.
@@HighlyEntropicMind I'm saying that to my point, it's not relevant if they always experience true qualia or not.
I'm anxious for your answer, knowing full well that's unlikely for obvious reasons.
Oh
Qualia can absolutely be described by mathematics! I mean think about it, the experience is neurobiological why would it be somehow detached from the math that describes physics?
That's the whole point. Dualist argue that if qualia could be expressed mathematically then a mathematical description of something should evoke its qualia, but since that doesn't happen, qualia must be above mathematics and therefore physics
My argument boils down to say that the reason mathematical descriptions don't evoke qualia is because the brain is constructed precisely to prevent that from happening. This is a "sanity safety" feature that helps us to distinguish the real world from our rational thoughts about it
@@HighlyEntropicMind Maybe I'm too stupid to understand it but the argument that "a mathematical description of something should evoke its qualia" sounds like a complete misunderstanding of mathematical description and language itself.
The math is a reference to and a representation of the phenomena as well as its properties not the phenomena itself. Sure you could argue on some meta level that they are the same but it would be like saying a two demensional representation of a cube is basically a cube. The only way to describe qualia in a way that satisfies they're argument is to build "describe" the neural circuitry or (brain if it comes to it) that exhibits said qualia.
Honestly the insistence that an equation of a nuclear reaction should cause a nuclear reaction sounds like the thoughts of a confused person. The again all this might've gone over my head.
@@HighlyEntropicMind To add further context to my example. I meant actual biological neural circuitry/brain or if you want to "describe" on a live specimen somehow cause the excitation of the circuitry responsible for the qualia.
I agree with you, I'm just trying to explain the position of dualists
@@HighlyEntropicMind I'm sorry if i came of as prick.
what is physical?
If you mean "what is physicalism?" it is the theory that everything that exist is physical matter
@@HighlyEntropicMind well, that's one view, and 'physical matter' is what exactly?
james ladyman & don ross in 'every thing must go' define physicalism as the recognition that mathematical physics, as the most basic and comprehensive of the sciences, occupies a special position with respect to the overall scientific framework. there is an asymmetry, such that fundamental physics hypotheses aren't hostage to the conclusions of the special sciences.
since fundamental contemporary physics doesn't motivate the existence of self-individuating, intrinsic property possessing proper parts, or any objects, or indeed, 'gunk', it doesn't suggest ontological physicalism.
@@real_pattern perhaps we could define physicalism as the proposition that the only existent things are those described in the standard model of quantum field theory and general relativity. Physicalism would mean only accepting as real those things confirmed to be real by physics. That might possibly include space-time, quantum Fields, and the equations that govern their behavior. This notably at the present time does not include what it is like to see green, or I think even a privileged time which is " now ".
3:44 what an idiotic take. You didn't understand the problem. Everything you apply math has a unit. Distance, angles, even color measurement. You use a ruler, a type of ruler every time. Say you want to measure gravity, you use a ruler. You say it is 9.81 m/s² yet this ruler usage made the math already non physical. The gravity is a phenomenon, the 9.81 is an abstraction that can induce mathematical behavior (algebra) which is defined by a constant ruler usage. Hence your calculations for any mass is still not gravity, you didn't produce gravity just because you wrote 9.81. you have a meaning, you conjured up a system of behavior that is parallel to constant ruler usage. That's it. Hence your usage of mathematics cannot make you understand the gravity. There are all sort of models of gravity. Yet none of them is actually gravity. Similarly, just because you cannot do its math, doesn't mean it is not real, it means every way that you use a ruler doesn't accurately track the reported behavior. The physics understanding of this era is using too many rulers and not enough reasoning ("shut up and calculate"). So a dualist say "if these are the only physical forces and interactions and calculation systems, then NO, consciousness doesn't belong here". Which actually nicely says "so your fucking job as a physicist because every 15 years the freaking cs people comes to us as they say they figured it out"
He completelly missed the point about the hard problem
2:27 if they believed it is a different aspect of reality, it would still be real though 😂 work on your definitions
I never said consciousness wasn't real, just that according to dualism it cannot be studied in the same way we study everything else in nature
He observes that no explanation of qualia will produce qualia which is correct and well known. He does not explain how neural circuits can produce qualia which is the actual hard problem that causes people to be dualist. He imagines a complete neural scan of the brain looking at something green. He claims that this is how the brain produces the qualia green. But correlation is not causation. No theory can explain the arising of green qualia that does not have a description of green qualia itself. But green cannot be described. No scientific theory has a term or entity that corresponds to what it is like to see green. Color as such does not exist in physics, Only the wavelength of photons which is a number. Without such a term or variable no scientific theory can explain not only what it is like to see green but why it is like anything to see green.
My point is that the brain is made in such a way that we perceive information from different sources in fundamentally different ways
If it was possible to communicate qualia then you could make anyone hallucinate by communicating qualia
For this reason the brain evolved in such a way that information comming from your senses couldn't be confused with information coming from other sources, like your rationality
@@HighlyEntropicMind ok but you are missing the point about the hard problem i think. The whole point is "how the heck phenomenal experiences arise in the first place? How can matter and energy interacting create the sensation of "green" at all?"
Even if we have a perfect brain scan correlation like "these specific neurons firing in this specific order and pattern always create the experience of green", even if we had that it still would not be enough to actually explain where any experience comes from in the first place.
Im not a dualist, im more like a phisicalist that believes there are more physical processes out there in the universe that we just are completely unaware of today that explains this puzzle, its just that our physichs is still missing some physical laws from the universe, maybe consicousness really is a manifestation of a real physical phenomen of the universe that evolution somehow was able to explore and make use of it, but was there all the time in the universe
Whenever I see people arguing for dualism, the main argument that they based everything on is purely intuition-based metaphysics about what qualia have to be like. An intuition that is purely based on introspection, which means that it cannot be contrasted with anything, which means that is epistemically unreliable.
The way in which people try to contrast their introspection is by appealing to the idea of p-zombies (naturalistic dualists specifically), but that just shows that they are unable to keep track about what things would need to be different if we replaced people with flesh robots with no awareness of feeling things, so it's just more appealing to intuition.
And if literal p-zombies were conceivable the way the argument goes, consciousness would be non-emergent but it would also be epiphenomenal (acausal) which doesn't track with the fact that we think we can talk about consciousness and debate it meaningfully.
_No theory can explain the arising of green qualia that does not have a description of green qualia itself_
Sure, it feels to you like 'green' is an irreducible entity that can only be described by itself, but then again, you don't have a way to falsify your intuition about your introspection.
_green cannot be described_
I could not describe 'the' disembodied green anymore that I could describe a disembodied car, but I could certainly describe a being that is experiencing green, which is what 'green' is after all. Because of epistemic limitations, I can only know for sure that I experience the specific phenomenology that I associate with the label 'green', so it would have to be a description of myself.
@@didack1419 Thanks. I completely agree that the qualia only exist in introspection. I am not sure what is meant by "contrast with anything". If that means not subject to confirmation by others, I would say that while no one can confirm that I, Naramsin, have qualia, everyone can confirm the claim that humans each appear to themselves to have qualia.
Also, a minor point, but I am not specifically arguing for dualism in my comment. I am arguing that materialism cannot explain qualia. I only use the assumption of materialism to apply "reductio ad absurdum", since the video assumes it.
(The nature and epistemic status of matter is itself another topic.)
If by no contrast you mean that there is no possibility of a healthy human not having qualia, I would agree. This is not a problem. For example, we cannot find a planet without gravity, so we cannot contrast planetary gravity with planets lacking gravity. This doesn't mean that gravity is not real. The pzombie is only intended to help with the difficult task of illustrating for people what qualia are, and helping them to put attention on the qualia "qua" or as qualia. Most people, in my experience, don't understand the philosophical definition of qualia and are blind to the fact that they have qualia, because they live in a world of naïve realism.
I totally agree that the fact we think we can talk about consciousness, or qualia as qualia, is strong evidence it and they is not epiphenomenal. This is an argument that is mostly overlooked. If we consider that to be a strong argument, we will find it humorous or ironic when people argue that consciousness is epiphenomenal. That it is not epiphenomenal is however not evidence against dualism or any other ontological status of qualia or consciousness, except that they merely epiphenomenon.
That introspection = intuition, and that introspection by definition is epistemically unreliable, I believe are positions subject to debate. Many professional philosophers would dispute those views, so they are not givens. For example, qualia are are introspectively observed, not intuited in the sense of having some vague justification. What is epistemically reliable is of course a major problem in philosophy with many contending ideas about it, including the (controversial) view that only the qualia are epistemically reliable. Cheers.
I think you're focusing too much here on for example the opposition between rational circuits and sensory circuits. Sure, a lot of behavior of neurons is described in this video. But the problem from which the term "qualia" originated concerns itself with the "hard problem of consciousness". Simplified, it's exactly the question how qualia arise, how consciousness itself is a thing at all.
You can talk about emergence, you observe and describe brain circuits, but that has not much to do with why qualia were introduced. How the hell does this thing we all experience exist? How does your *experience* of green arise from a thing out there which emits a certain wavelength of photons and a blob of neurons in your skull? That is the true problem of qualia, not which circuits your rational mind can and cannot access.
It's not sufficient to merely state that qualia is sensory information as opposed to rational information, that misses the point of the question. The elephant in the room, what you ended with, is what the debate is actually about, not whether qualia are physical or not.
Then let me ask you something: What did you think of my argument about qualia as a sanity preserving mechanism?
Because if qualia could be communicated, you could make anyone hallucinate anything. It makes sense that brains developed a defense against such a possibility
We can also show the non-physicality of green in this way. Each person can see green.
But if I could experience green the way you do, would it be the same? Nobody knows. Is it even a meaningful question?
@@ralphclark this comment was an error. the previous comment is the full, correct version.
My argument was to show that green itself is non-physical.
I agree that we cannot prove everyone's green is the same.
is it a meaningful question? We would have to define meaningful.
If we define meaningful as "most people who hear the question understand clearly what is meant", then I would say it is a meaningful question.
If we define meaningful as a question that science can currently answer, then it is not meaningful, but that is narrow definition of meaningful that rules out most of what we consider meaningful, including some questions hotly theorized about by scientists.
@@naramsinurudug9172 a meaningful question is one where BOTH of the following hold true:
(1) an answer is possible, and
(2) there exists, at least in principle, some way to distinguish between potential answers.
In this case (1) is debatable and (2) is impossible. We could all be zombies and there would be no way to tell whether we were lying about experiencing the qualia of the colour green.
Hence not meaningful.
Thank you for your noble effort to refute my claims.
'a meaningful question is one where BOTH of the following hold true:
...
"(2) there exists, at least in principle, some way to distinguish between potential answers. " .... is impossible.'
Elsewhere here I have argued that if we assume the genre of scientific methods, whose definition and nature is presently controversial and not well defined, is the only standard of truth, then your conclusions are correct.
However to prove that the genre of scientific methods, if some precise definition of it could be provided and shown to be historically correct, is a valid definition of truth, would require applying some different standard of truth. Otherwise it would be circular. The claim often made in this thread is not merely that the scientific genre of methods is a valid means of verifying truth, but that is the _only_ valid means, which is even further out of reach to prove.
Adopting the axiom that the genre of scientific methods, as currently practiced across a number of disciplines, is the only valid means of finding truth, then I would agree with your claim that 2 is impossible. That axiom is termed scientism, which is different than science which only claims validity, not exclusivity.
Each of us knows individually, with high certainty, that we are not philosophical zombies, if we understand what the term means and can observe our own minds. (I suspect that some people participating in the debate do not meet those criteria, which are not as easy to meet as it seems, based on my discussions in person with people. Mary's story about color is an effort not to prove anything, IMO, but merely to guide people toward meeting those two criteria.)
Since I don't subscribe to the axiom of scientism, for me it is proven that we are not all philosophical zombies, because I know that I am not one. This is the position of many professional philosophers, so it is clearly not an insane view of the matter. Could I be mistaken? Of course. Physicists readily agree that all current fundamental physical theories are only true within some limited domain, and need to be replaced. Denying that any scientific theory, however well established by the evidence, can turn out to be wrong, crosses the line from science to religion. It's not a fair criterion for any scientific proposition.
Furthermore, no less a smart person than Roger Penrose concludes that in the future we may be able to scientifically demonstrate that a human has qualia, which means, it is like something to see green. He doesn't believe it is epistemically categorically impossible. There is no way to do this now, but that doesn't mean, he says, there cannot in principle be one in the future. So Roger Penrose, Nobel prize winning physicist and mathematician, disagrees with your rejection of proposition (2).
These are two different arguments why your proposition 2 cannot be rejected out of hand, so whether everyone is a philosophical zombie or not might indeed be a meaningful question.
@@naramsinurudug9172 Penrose is frequently wrong these days