> consciousness and will can be completely encoded in cause-and-effect atomic relationships. The real problem is that that belief is BS until proven true.
Wait. Isn't literally the exactly other way around? Materialism is the null hypothesis here, backed by all empirical evidence to date; it's all the other hypotheses presenting some kind of magic that are BS until proven.
True or not, materialism is the simplest, most constrained, and most predictive of the hypotheses that match available evidence. Why should we prefer a "physics + $magic" theory, for any particular flavor of $magic? Why this particular flavor? Why any flavor, if so far everything is explainable by the baseline "physics" alone?
Even in purely practical terms, it makes most sense to stick to materialism (at least if you're trying to understand the world; for control over people, the best theory needs not even be coherent, much less correct).
But the religious nuts will say "no, 'god did it' is the simplest, most constrained explanation".
I'm not arguing that they're correct. I'm saying that they believe that they are correct, and if you argue that they're not, well, you're back to arguing!
It's the old saw - you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themself into.
> But the religious nuts will say "no, 'god did it' is the simplest, most constrained explanation".
Maybe, but then we can still get to common ground by discussing a hypothetical universe that looks just like ours, but happen to not have a god inside (or lost it along the way). In that hypothetical, similar to yet totally-not-ours universe ruled purely by math, things would happen in a particular way; in that universe, materialism is the simplest explanation.
(It's up to religious folks then to explain where that hypothetical universe diverges from the real one specifically, and why, and how confident are they of that.)
I do of course exclude people, religious or otherwise, who have no interest or capacity to process a discussion like this. We don't need 100% participation of humanity to discuss questions about what an artificial intelligence could be or be able to do.
> It's the old saw - you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themself into.
There are cases where formerly religious people "see the light" on their own via an embrace with reason. (I'm not sure if you are endorsing the claim.)
Yeah. One could equally imagine that dualism is the null hypothesis since human cultures around the world have seemingly universally believed in a ‘soul’ and that materialism is only a very recent phenomenon.
Of course, (widespread adoption of) science is also a fairly recent phenomenon, so perhaps we do know more now than we did back then.
You know your experience is real. But you do not know if the material world you see is the result of a great delusion by a master programmer.
Thus the only thing you truly know has no mass at all. Thus a wise person takes the immaterial as immediate apparent, but the physical as questionable.
You can always prove the immaterial “I think therefore I am”. But due to the uncertainty of matter, nothing physical can be truly known. In other words you could always be wrong in your perception.
So in sum, your experience has no mass, volume, or width. There are no physical properties at all to consciousness. Yet it is the only thing that we can know exists.
Yet empirically we know that if you physically disassemble the human brain, that person’s consciousness apparently creases to exist, as observed by the result on your rest of the body even if it remains otherwise intact. So it appears to arise from some physical properties of the brain.
I’m ignoring the argument that we can’t know if anything we’re perceive is even real at all since it’s unprovable and useless to consider. Better to just assume it’s wrong. And if that assumption is wrong, then it doesn’t matter.
> You can always prove the immaterial “I think therefore I am”. But due to the uncertainty of matter, nothing physical can be truly known.
But the brain that does the proving of immaterial is itself material so if matter is uncertain then the reasoning of the proof of immaterial can also be flawed thus you can't prove anything.
The only provable thing is that philosophers ask themselves useless questions, think about them long and hard building up convoluted narratives they claim to be proofs, but on the way they assume something stupid to move forward, which eventually leads to bogus "insights".
Descartes. And it’s pretty clear that consciousness is the Noumenon, just the part of it that is us. So if you want to know what the ontology of matter is, congratulations, you’re it.
> You can always prove the immaterial “I think therefore I am”. But due to the uncertainty of matter, nothing physical can be truly known. In other words you could always be wrong in your perception.
Sure, you can prove that "I think therefore I am" for yourself. So how about we just accept it's true and put it behind us and continue to the more interesting stuff?
What you or I call external world, or our perception of it, has some kind of structure. There are patterns to it, and each of us seem to have some control over details of our respective perceptions. Long story short, so far it seems that materialism is the simplest framework you can use to accurately predict and control those perceptions. You and I both seem to be getting most mileage out of assuming that we're similar entities inhabiting and perceiving a shared universe that's external to us, and that that universe follows some universal patterns.
That's not materialism[0] yet, especially not in the sense relevant to AI/AGI. To get there, one has to learn about the existence of fields of study like medicine, or neuroscience, and some of the practical results they yielded. Things like, you poke someone's brain with a stick, watch what happens, and talk to the person afterwards. We've done that enough times to be fairly confident that a) brain is the substrate in which mind exists, and b) mind is a computational phenomenon.
I mean, you could maybe question materialism 100 years ago, back when people had the basics of science down but not much data to go on. It's weird to do in time and age when you can literally circuit-bend a brain like you'd do with an electronic toy, and get the same kind of result from the process.
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[0] - Or physicalism or whatever you call the "materialism, but updated to current state of physics textbooks" philosophy.
You're right. Materialism IS the null hypothesis. And yet I know in my heart that its explanatory power is limited unless you want to write off all value, preference, feeling and meaning as "illusion", which amounts to gaslighting.
What if the reverse is true? The only real thing is actually irrationality, and all the rational materialism is simply a catalyst for experiencing things?
The answer to this great question has massive implications, not just in this realm, btw. For example, crime and punishment. Why are we torturing prisoners in prison who were just following their programming?
Wait. Isn't literally the exactly other way around? Materialism is the null hypothesis here, backed by all empirical evidence to date; it's all the other hypotheses presenting some kind of magic that are BS until proven.