What's the deal with these things being lumped in with physics? This isn't physics this is just regular philosophy with some scientific sounding language. I feel like this is people reaching for religion but not wanting to admit it to themselves.
It's a shame to see so many comments engaged in this kind of pseudoscience. There's no evidence that consciousness is anything other than a state arising from the physical processes in our bodies. I'm open minded to hypothesis that are potentially testable, but people keep just repeating the implausible.
I also hate that I keep reading that consciousness, or anything else, is a universe "hack" which is several levels of stupid. From the language level, you cannot apply that word to a non engineered system with no purpose because it implies subverting the purpose.
Yes, Roger Penrose, despite his extraordinary career and contributions to science, has more recently been engaging more in this type of pseudoscience.
It can and has happened to other extraordinary minds as well - Linus Pauling, one of the forefathers of quantum chemistry and molecular biology, but also a promoter of vitamin C as a panacea in his later years.
GP asked whether we are calling what Roger Penrose is doing pseudoscience, and I responded that we do.
Now, why is it pseudoscience?
Because the parts of the theory due to Penrose are essentially philosophical, he doesn't really make any firm claims beyond "quantum effects - particularly superposition - are involved in human decision-making". The parts that Hameroff brings to the table are specific, but fanciful. The whole "microtubules observe quantum effects" is about as plausible as cold fusion - it is motivated thinking that contradicts some basic limits that we have observed, and relies on some gaps in our physical knowledge to not quite be provably wrong.
Overall they are combining musings about the universe with bits of biology and QM that are not yet fully understood into a theory that uses the trappings of science, but relies on motivated thinking to have any plausibility. It's most similar to the homeopathic quacks' claims about the memory of water: not fully proven to be impossible, but moatly on account of the vagueness of the claims. So, what they are doing fits the definition of pseudoscience.
Penrose and Hameroff's theory about microtubules is certainly science not pseudoscience. It is a specific theory with falsifiable predictions.
In the absence of a definition of consciousness, perhaps the only validation would be evidence that general anaesthetics take effect in the microtubules (Hameroff is an anaesthesiologist).
It might not be possible to show that macroscopic quantum effects are required, or that consciousness is more powerful than an algorithmic computer (Turing Machine) - two of Penrose's related speculations.
Another of Penrose's claims is that gravitational divergences collapse the quantum wavefunction. This is logically separate from, but is often linked with, the conscious perception issue, as presented in their Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (ORR):
The latter gravitational claim is being tested independently from brains, using conventional QM experiments in the presence of large masses. The precision to resolve the question is within reach.
I have watched and read his opinions and yes, he has, in my opinion, veered into pseudoscience. It's not exactly without precedence for an established and respected scientist to go all philosophical with age.
I would put his current position somewhere like "I really want free will to be true therefore..." rather than an observational approach.
Penrose, like it or not, has developed a fairly rigorous, if not flawed hypothesis that is quite a stark contrast between many philosophers who espouse such ideas as pan psychism.
I think that there is such a groundswell of articles about 'consciousness', right now, is because of the surge in AI and GPT.
If this is true.
>"state arising from the physical processes"
Then nothing prevents silicon from eventually also being 'conscious'.
Carbon or Silicon, they are both a physical processes. Electrical potentials.
So the section of population that just can't abide that AI could be 'conscious' are finding all these more esoteric arguments about the universe being 'consciousness', quantum something or other, etc... To find 'some spark' in the human, some metaphysical argument, to keep us special.
> the section of population that just can't abide that AI could be 'conscious' are finding all these more esoteric arguments about the universe being 'consciousness'
Panpsychism asserts that everything is conscious, which means that AI or silicon would already be conscious, which basically means there is no special human spark
If anything, if you are trying to prove that AI is not conscious, you would be absolutely rejecting panpsychism or anything that remotely resembles it
Agree. I'll also say it's a lot further away than your comment implies. Once ChatGPT4 can add metonymy by itself in a random discussion, talking about consciousness in silicon can be interesting.
It was only a few years ago that AlphaGo beat the best human at GO. Supposedly a game so deep that only some unknown quality of being a human could ever grasp it.
And AlphaStar also wins against humans in SC2, where there is hidden information and 'deception'.
I'd say that is more worry than GPT.
GPT is a language model.
AlphaGo is winning in a competitive game.
and
Life is just a game.
Just start adding more variables, and more goals.
Start combining GPT/AlphaGo/Visions Systems/etc.... It might not be that far.
Yeah, I’ve believed for most of my life that consciousness is some emergent thing that arises from the interaction of all the complex biological processes of our brain and its sensory input. Most people don’t like to hear this though, and I don’t express the idea often - it’s disappointing to consider this possibility (I consider it certain, as I’ve observed nothing to suggest otherwise).
I believe physics can absolutely explain everything about our behavior when viewed externally. Clearly our personalities, emotion and general behavior are the result of incredibly complex systems of molecules and electrical charge in the brain.
What you’re ignoring and what Chalmers and the folks in TFA are talking about is, the explaining the inner view. The subjective experience. In fact the only inner view I’m 100% sure of is my own. I really have no direct evidence that you or any other human is actually having a subjective experience. Nonetheless you cannot deny they it exists and we should try to explain it.
I’m not just a device responding to input. I am that, but I’m more. I have a subjective experience. There are “lights on”.
Imagine there's no internet and you don't have a dictionary.
When you've never observed the Eiffel tower and someone tells you the Eiffel Tower exists, will you tell them that they're wrong?
"There's no evidence that the Eiffel Tower exists."
Do you have any evidence the Eiffel Tower does not exist?
No?
Then it makes no sense to assume you know what's reality. The reason, why you insist that it doesn't exist, is because you're narrow minded and boring. It's not because you know better, because you can't know better.
In regards to the topic of consciousness it is not just insanely ignorant to believe that the lack of evidence is evidence that it is NOT something, it is also incredibly full of yourself to assume you're right simply because of that.
Fact of the matter is that a lack of evidence does not necessarily automatically prove anything. Us not being able to find evidence means exactly nothing, which is proven by human history itself.
For example, if Ignaz Semmelweiß would have had your flawed reasoning, he would have never tried washing his arms and hands.
That's a weak argument. The reason some of us don't believe that consciousness is something else than the state of a brain following physical processes is that the latter is a much simpler theory and matches every objective observation we can make.
If you try to explain consciousness as just the state of a physical brain, all the observations agree with you. The brain is known to be capable of computing. There are known regions inside it that activate when the subject feels certain emotions and thinks a certain kind of thoughts. There are regions that have predictable effects on the person's consciousness when damaged (see lobotomy). _And_ this hypothesis doesn't contradict any observations made until now (which is not the only argument as you're implying, just one of them, and a good one).
If you try to explain consciousness as something else, you have to change the laws of physics. You have to consider that _something_ exists that isn't in the current theories, just to explain a phenomenon that shows no evidence of needing that. There's no data to guess what it is, how it behaves, why it exists, whether it interacts with anything. Actually, you could say that all the evidence until now proves that it doesn't interact with anything in a measurable way, besides brainwaves (which are just regular electrical activity in the nervous system) and whatever the body does (which is explained by nerve signals coming from the brain).
To believe that something exists, you make observations that your current theory can't explain and try to explain them. Here the root observation is that we "feel" conscious, we feel that we are something more than the physical objects that are our bodies. This is an observation about the state of our brains, it's not an observation about the rest of the world. It doesn't need any new laws of physics to be understood and it doesn't give us any data that we could use to build such a law. The only reason you're giving weight to this is that you are wired to see humans as something special. It's a reflection of the way you think. When you correct for that bias, there's nothing left.
It's much like believing that a god exists, built the universe, looks and thinks and feels like a human, and wants us to be good. It's so obviously something that humans naturally want to think because it matches with their inner biases that it's not worth considering as a scientific hypothesis. It's completely explained by the brain being wired to see humans (and living things in general) as something "special" because that helped with natural selection.
>The only reason you're giving weight to this is that you are wired to see humans as something special. It's a reflection of the way you think. When you correct for that bias, there's nothing left.
Uh, no. The reason why you need a "conscious" universe is precisely beause humans aren't special. In a conscious universe model, the brain "abuses" the laws of physics including whatever laws that relate to consciousness to result in an organism with higher environmental fitness.
I am more than willing to consider a robot or a wet piece of cloth as conscious, but the problem is that you need to somehow unify these incredibly different experiences as conscious.
The people who believe that consciousness is just the result of processes in the brain also believe that a computer can become conscious given the right program, but this is nonsense, because the computer hardware already has all of the hardware to perform lesser forms of consciousness.
The "thoughts" of a processor don't have to be in the form of human intelligence that can be easily observed. The idea that consciousness suddenly turns on because you load a carefully crafted file from your SSD into RAM and turns off if you zero it out, is what is ridiculous to me and that is exactly what "the brain gives rise to consciousness" says to me. After all, if you could somehow simulate the brain of a crow or any other animal, you would not be able to understand what the animal is saying and discount it's consciousness the same way we discount the consciousness of farm animals. So for me, your explanation is the one that makes humans special.
> Uh, no. The reason why you need a "conscious" universe is precisely beause humans aren't special. In a conscious universe model, the brain "abuses" the laws of physics including whatever laws that relate to consciousness to result in an organism with higher environmental fitness.
> I am more than willing to consider a robot or a wet piece of cloth as conscious, but the problem is that you need to somehow unify these incredibly different experiences as conscious.
I have no idea what you mean. What does it mean to "abuse" the laws of physics? Why would you need to do that to improve an organism's environmental fitness, compared to simply developing a complex nervous system by natural selection? Do you consider these to be the same thing? Where does the "conscious universe" come up in that process?
> The people who believe that consciousness is just the result of processes in the brain also believe that a computer can become conscious given the right program, but this is nonsense, because the computer hardware already has all of the hardware to perform lesser forms of consciousness.
That sentence doesn't make sense to me either. How does the second proposition contradict the first?
"Consciousness" isn't a clearly defined line, it's a pattern of thoughts that happen in a system complex enough to be aware of itself and its surroundings. I'm conscious because my thoughts include the fact that I exist and that I am thinking, and that fact influences my thoughts. A regular computer isn't there because it follows a program without knowing that it's doing it, or having any kinds of thoughts about itself. When we program a computer to do that (and current computers are probably physically capable of some form of that, as you say), then they will fit the definition of consciousness.
> After all, if you could somehow simulate the brain of a crow or any other animal, you would not be able to understand what the animal is saying and discount it's consciousness the same way we discount the consciousness of farm animals.
Why would I want to discount the consciousness of a crow? What does the fact that some people discount the consciousness of farm animals have to do with this discussion? I really don't understand what point you're making. It seems that you're trying to put words in my mouth, creating a contradiction with things I didn't say.
Crows are probably conscious, farm animals are probably conscious, and a wet piece of cloth or a plant aren't. That's because the cloth and the plant don't have a nervous system capable of holding the thought that it itself exists. I'm open to changing my mind about plants if we discover one that does.
> So for me, your explanation is the one that makes humans special.
Defining a concept necessarily makes some things special in the context of that definition. That's what a definition does. Consciousness has a somewhat vague definition that clearly applies to humans and some mammals, while it doesn't apply to rocks and plants. Your objection is like saying that a rock is "alive" because otherwise the definition of "life" would make humans special. Of course it does! It makes every living thing "special" in that it fits the definition, while other things don't. Again, that's the whole point of defining a concept: discriminating the objects that display it from the objects that don't.
> The reason some of us don't believe that consciousness is something else than the state of a brain following physical processes is that the latter is a much simpler theory and matches every objective observation we can make.
I have personally seen and experienced things that cannot be explained by these physical theories, and while you may want to just throw those observations as delusions or fraud, consider how the standard process of deciding what counts as “scientific evidence” is biased towards those that are consistent with the status quo.
You actually don’t need to look too far to find things that don’t quite sit well with the established theories. Those that are not obviously fraud. People then just casually explain them away as coincidence or physiological illusions or the like.
I can totally understand how people can convince themselves that the established theories are sufficient unless and until they experience a dramatic event that throws them off course. That said the rabbit hole is truly deep if you actually spend time searching for info.
I’m just trying to tell you that the quoted sentence is just plainly wrong. I have no obviously better theories however, and to the extent that modern science can convince a large part of the population that the quoted sentence is correct shows how reasonably well the theories of modern science holds up to scrutiny. I just think it’s a disservice to all to brush away the weird bits that don’t fit.
I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make here. What is this hypothetical Eiffel tower situation an analogy to? Someone claiming our consciousness is derived from some ephemeral soul or spirit?
I'm not trying to assert or prove the inexistence of something (especially considering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence ). My belief is that our consciousness is a physical, organic phenomenon, directly emergent from the "circuitry" of our brain. I don't personally believe there is anything beyond that, unfortunately. Simultaneously, I'm not directly arguing that assertion or trying to "prove" it, because I'm simply stating my subjective opinion, which was clearly communicated in my post, with the wording "I’ve believed for most of my life" and "I consider it". It will never be anything more than a belief, because I will never be able to prove this. My observations and knowledge I've gained through life support my belief quite strongly, while none have ever provided a shred of support for an argument for any sort of "soul" or "spirit". I'm 100% open to the idea, but unfortunately literally all experiences related to life, consciousness and existence in my nearly 40 years alive have correlated with my "I am nothing more than my body" opinion.
Why is it pseudoscience to label the medium by which particles are entangled as consciousness? We have no better definition than that, since the observers of any delayed choice quantum eraser experiment are ultimately conscious, and we have no means of recording similar results without a conscious observer.
I used to think I was very clever for independently coming to effectively the same conclusion as Schmidhuber, that consciousness is a byproduct of data compression in the brain, and a brain needs to tell itself it has subjective qualia to do all the complex things we can do. And while that might be theoretically sound, I think it leaves high dose psychedelic experiences woefully unexplained, which I think really transcend any evolutionary or biological reason for happening and have incredible parallels across people and cultures (the consistency of seeing "machine elves" while on DMT, for example). Ultimately, an infinite consciousness experiencing infinite reality seems so much more elegant as a base level of existence than the Standard Model being the root of all existence. But, to each their own.
> Why is it pseudoscience to label the medium by which particles are entangled as consciousness
Because it's untestable nonsense. Just because all consciousness derives from physical processes that include quantum effects doesn't then lead to all consciousness being linked, being one, being infinite. Entanglement is an interaction to interaction thing, it's not a magical side channel for information.
> Ultimately, an infinite consciousness experiencing infinite reality seems so much more elegant as a base level of existence than the Standard Model being the root of all existence
There are many ideas that are more elegant than the Standard Model. One day we might find one that works and fills in some gaps, and that would be great. Coming up with a philosophical idea (consciousness is infinite and connected) with no evidence or any real basis in reality other than it sounds nice and then tying that to an existing scientific idea that sounds vaguely like it could support it (QM has entanglement of particles over distance) but actually wouldn't support the idea anyway is exactly what pseudoscience is.
What I'm saying is: even if there was some kind of consciousness network, the mechanism for that would not be entangled quantum particles.
Recognizing emergent behaviour has led to a lot of deeper understanding of the universe. Why should this be any different?
I'm not saying there's some consciousness field that my mind is a perturbation of. But it is interesting that we all have more or less the same experience of existing even though we are simply a collection of atoms in a local low entropy state.
You say you’re open to any testable hypothesis. But I’d argue that there is just as little evidence that consciousness arises from biological processes as there is that it arises from the universe. And the article talks about that. (Ie the so called “zombie” problem)
You can’t prove that I’m conscious and I can prove that you’re conscious. We only make that assumption.
I think consciousness emerge from physical processes. Imho consciousness is necessary to have a sense of self, and especially of self through time. This imply any living being capable of improvising new strategies (not randomly through chance and genetic lottery) is 'conscious' in the same sense that we are.
There are many ways to have a non-self or non-dual consciousness experience
Do some research, you can get into meditation or find a safe way to experience with psychedelics
Also, it’s a natural part of our own human experience. Babies are born without a sense of self, which mainly develops over the first few years of existence
>There's no evidence that consciousness is anything other than a state arising from the physical processes in our bodies
Actually this is backward, "I think therefore I am". There's no reason to believe consciousness is a state arising from a physical process, our experience of consciousness precedes our experience of sensory input and therefore the physical world.
There is more evidence for the reality of consciousness than there is for the physical world, in fact we know for a fact that our understanding of the physical world is aberrational.
edit: evidently alot of empiricists aren't very happy with this comment hahaha
We are able to track down and physically explain (thanks to MRI) the sentation, the objective part of consciousness (Chalmers's 'easy problems of consciousness'). That really exist and we can prove it (or we have an idea about experiments to run to prove it)
I suppose here you're talking about the subjective sentation, the phenomenal experience, the 'hard problem', and you reference the 'cogito' not because you are a dualists, but because you truly think Descartes was right on this point (and this point only, the rest was extremely weak).
I will argue that you're wrong. There is absolutely no evidence to the cogito, at most billions of anecdata from homo sapiens who all have similar brains and reactions!
Some people believe subjective experience do not really exist [0][1]. A simple explanation would be: if we are somehow able to predict, by pure observation of predictable physical reactions, how an organism will act and react, including the fact that he will believe in a subjective experience, then we do not need to think subjective experience really exist. This is merely a tool for our bodies to create a sense of self unique through time, created from our own continuous perceptions, to allow our brains to strategize and avoid dangers.
>We are able to track down and physically explain (thanks to MRI) the sentation, the objective part of consciousness (Chalmers's 'easy problems of consciousness'). That really exist and we can prove it (or we have an idea about experiments to run to prove it)
What we prove is an evidence that is filtered through our sensory faculties and experienced by our minds. Our minds still remain judge, jury and executioner and in this same sense if we are to take seriously the faculties of our minds in assessing the physical world, then we must also take seriously our experience of conciousness which remains even when we are unable to sense the physical world. In this sense our experience of conciousness is more real than our looking at an MRI.
>then we do not need to think subjective experience really exist.
What would follow is that you do not need to think subjective experiences exist for others, but for you to make this assessment you at least must have a subjective experience.
I don't really buy your argument about what's more real. If I was watching TV and a character punched the screen and I got a bloody nose from it, that's pretty real.
Similarly, if my mind experiences my body reaching out to take a drug and then my conciousness fractures, I think that's a sign that the experience is pretty damn real, regardless of whatever fragile concept of "consciousness" is floating in that reality.
If "you" are unable to sense the real world because you're unconscious, that doesn't mean your body isn't cogitating, it just means that the individual parts haven't come together to construct the illusion that is "you". Parts of your nervous system continue to work, though.
That's the beauty of illusionism, isn't it? You really have to think against yourself. If you can explain a person's reaction without 'knowing' his subjective experience, you do not need 'hard' consciousness to explain your reactions either. So you, right now, digesting this sentence and experiencing subjective thoughts, do not really experience those, you just have the illusion you do. Look at my second link.
There are plenty of reasons to believe it's physical. I mean, in some ways I can't believe I'm having to write "there are no ghosts" to a technically minded community.
If consciousness was not physical then where is it? Why would it switch on and off with physical changes to brains? Why would you be able to get altered states of consciousness with chemicals, disease and age? Why would be be able to marry some conscious activity with MRI scans?
There's quite a few bits of evidence to suggest it's physical even if we don't know how it works. There doesn't appear to be any evidence of another... what is a non physical process anyway? Surely there's only two options: the physics we know and the physics we don't know?
Yeah I’m not sure why someone would argue that consciousness isn’t physical. Take a conscious person and knock them hard in the head. Interesting, their consciousness is altered. Take drugs? Check it out, consciousness altered. People who experience head trauma have their personality permanently altered. In the course of life you will likely directly observe the effects of physical injury on a person’s consciousness, just due to how often that kind of stuff happens.
> Yeah I’m not sure why someone would argue that consciousness isn’t physical
Reading the comments, one thing that's been unsaid is whether each person discussing is religious/spiritual or not. My guess is that if you are religious then the idea of there being another layer in the universe goes without saying, and if you are not then it's ridiculous.
It's probably a waste of time debating across that line.
For me it has very little to do with religiousness but rather calming down some rather frequent panic attacks in the middle of the night. The fact that thinking the wrong thing can erase your consciousness while thinking it, doesn't help from the group that believes thinking the wrong thing erases consciousness.
The difference is people like you mean consciousness = "consciousness as the average human experiences it", whereas others include every single potential conscious experience, including the delibitated one. From your perspective, a knocked out human isn't conscious the same way a corpse is not conscious, because he does not conform to the average human experience.
Meanwhile others think that the knocked out human and the corpse and the average human are all conscious, but they experience their respective consciousnessess aka the consciousness of an average human, knocked out human or corpse. You could say that this is just a disagreement in what the word conscious means.
>Why would be be able to marry some conscious activity with MRI scans?
Does the activity cause the changes on the scan or does the changes in the scan cause the activity? How does neuroplasticity result in physical changes to the brain through, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy? Do the thoughts alter the physical structure or does the structure cause the thoughts even before the structural changes?
Internal feedback loops. Activity from the existing structure further modifies that structure. That activity is that thoughts are. So sure but it's all physical.
Think about it like in the case of computers. The claim we are making is that our thoughts are essentially the same kind of things as the states that arise in a piece of software. And we already know that there exists today computer software which can be asked to modify itself through its own APIs.
Basically the way we view this is that CBT works kind of similarly to using the JVM APIs to modify some pieces of the running Java program to try to fix a bug. In this analogy, Psychiatric medicine would then be more like directly modifying the bits in RAM that represent a certain piece of executable code. They are both physical modifications ultimately, just working at different levels of abstraction.
They are not physical alterations. The software doesn't change the physical structure of the FPGA or CPU it's running on. It is not creating new gates or transistors or how they're physically connected, only utilizing the existing physical connections differently
There are always physical changes happening. External stimuli, and time based internal changes.
> If that's the case, the physical change should precede the changes in thought patterns.
Not precede, are. These aren't separate things.
> There's no chemical emission that can force someone to have an exact thought, dream, or inner dialogue.
How do you know that to be the case? It seems likely to me that an exact set of sufficiently complicated inputs and stimuli could generate an exact thought. Actually doing so would be too complex to figure out, but many physical systems are like that.
The idea that consciousness is physical doesn't mean it's mechanical. Physical world is made of fields with no clear boundaries, while mechanical system are made of isolated deterministic and immutable parts.
> We can invert this and ask, if physicality is not ideal, then how do we come to know it?
Why would we ask that? Not ideal for what? It just is.
> The third option is that physics is unable to interrogate itself.
This is likely true. We are the product of physics and we can only delve so deep. It might be that we cannot see to the most fundamental level(s). That's not a third option though, that's just the state of any scientific investigation at any point of time. However, given all we have learnt so far, what we don't need to do is invent new gods for the levels we cannot see or the things we cannot yet understand. I mean, people will, evidently, but that's all just wishful thinking.
Meanwhile there is slow progress to piece together how the brain works. My opinion is that we will figure it out but the answers about consciousness will be unsatisfactory. Just like right now, given the current understanding of physical processes even taking into account quantum systems having probabilistic outcomes, we have no free will. It's an answer, I find it a compelling one, but most folks don't like that answer.
> Why would we ask that? Not ideal for what? It just is.
I'm pretty sure GP was using "ideal" in the sense of "made up of ideas", as in the philosophical concept of idealism, which is essentially the opposite of materialism: idealism is the position that the real world is that of the mind, and physics and the physical world is an emergent property of our minds, not the other way around.
Not that I think this is a real coherent position worth discussing.
> “the universe is the extension of the self” is precisely the idea we are talking about.
Idealists can take several possible approaches to the issue of how many people/minds exist:
1) Solipsism: only I exist, and everyone else is a figment of my imagination
2) Many minds: only minds ultimately exist, but many distinct minds exist (George Berkeley, John McTaggart)
3) Open individualism: I exist and everyone else exists too, but we are all ultimately the same person, and the idea that we are different people is an illusion (not necessarily an idealist view, but one open to an idealist to adopt; most famous notable proponent is Daniel Kolak; but Kolak in the introduction of his book I Am You extensively quotes the physicists Freeman Dyson and Erwin Schrödinger as expressing the same view)
4) Pan(en)theism: only one mind/person ultimately exists, but we are somehow "sub-minds"/"sub-persons" of that ultimate person. One might call that single ultimate person "God", albeit it is defining the term "God" in a very different way than classical Western theism does. Or, maybe we could call it the "Universe", or borrow Plato's term "the World Soul". (Maybe there is not much difference between (3) and (4), but (4) would view the distinction between different "sub-minds"/"sub-persons" as more "real" than (3) does.)
5) Panpsychism: everything in the universe (even individual atoms) is conscious, and hence has a distinct mind. This in a sense is a variant of (2), but proposes far more minds than Berkeley or McTaggart would ever have admitted. Not all panpsychists are idealists, but you can certainly be an idealist panpsychist
Critics of idealism tend to focus on (1), but in practice (1) has never had any serious proponents. All serious idealists have espoused (2)-(5) (or maybe some other variation I've missed)
As an idealist, my starting position is (2), although I have some sympathy for (4).
> And yes you can derive new “physics” with this idea alone.
I don't know exactly what you mean, but I'm not a fan of that kind of talk.
We have to distinguish between physics the natural science, and the philosophical discipline of the philosophy of physics, which is a sub-discipline of the philosophy of science
The idealism debate fundamentally belongs to metaphysics (although contemporary presentations often focus on it through the lens of philosophy of mind instead), but it has obvious consequences for other philosophical disciplines, including epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and indeed philosophy of physics
But while adopting idealism must lead us to a different philosophy of physics, the actual content of physics the natural science is unchanged. Physics the natural science is ultimately just a bunch of mathematical tools for predicting future observations. Those tools, and how you use them, are exactly the same whether you are a materialist, an idealist, a dualist, or none of the above. The only difference is your answer to the philosophical debates about what those tools ultimately are, or what they ultimately mean.
I'll admit I'm not too prepared to explicitly state what I meant by the line, but I'd personally take a more nuanced approach than "Those tools, and how you use them, are exactly the same whether you are a materialist, an idealist, a dualist, or none of the above".
I'll say that under standard laboratory conditions they should probably be the same most of the time. I hope you'll agree with me that *assuming* there are divergent predictions made by the "mind-first" approaches, they should be studied together with physics. Otherwise physics would become a study of idealized systems, much like insisting on Newtonian maths when the principles of relativity and quantum mechanics were discovered.
> I'll say that under standard laboratory conditions they should probably be the same most of the time. I hope you'll agree with me that assuming there are divergent predictions made by the "mind-first" approaches, they should be studied together with physics.
Can you give me an example of how a "mind-first" approach might give a divergent prediction, as to the outcome of a practically feasible experiment or observation? Maybe some versions of idealism might produce divergent predictions, but I don't believe divergent predictions are necessary to idealism, and many versions of idealism intentionally eschew divergent predictions.
> Otherwise physics would become a study of idealized systems, much like insisting on Newtonian maths when the principles of relativity and quantum mechanics were discovered.
Physics is a system for predicting future observations given past observations. Relativity and QM won because they generated more accurate future predictions than their predecessors.
But what, ultimately, is it that we are observing? Do the theoretical constructs proposed by physics (particles, waves, fields, forces, strings, branes, etc) "really" exist, or are they just abstract conceptual tools for accurate prediction generation? What does "really" even mean in that question? These are all philosophical questions, and idealism is one family of possible answers to (some of those) philosophical questions–but I don't see how that makes any difference to the whole business of generating accurate predictions of future observations–which is all that physics proper actually is, has ever been, or ever will be.
The reason I refrained from giving specifics is that I'm mostly trying to figure out how everything fits together in (my version of) "mind-first" concepts, so I'll try to illustrate with a grossly simplified example only for the purposes of explaining the general idea, but not as a statement of fact, nor it is intended as a serious scientific hypothesis.
Let's assume a particular universe where only minds really exist (and more than one mind). Let's further assume that the imagination of the mind can shape the physical world, and in a way that the "local" reality is more strongly influenced by the minds in the vicinity.
Let's say A and B are in an isolated room. They are into alternative medicine and strongly believe A can cure B of a disease. Because there only two minds involved, and they both believed it, B is apparently miraculously cured of the disease.
Now, let's change the setting slightly. This time, in addition to A and B, there are also C, D, and E, who are researchers trying to validate A's claims of miraculous healing. C, D, E are scientists who don't believe in such woowoo and are determined to expose A's frauds. A performs the same acts on B. This time, it does not work, because CDE did not believe in it.
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Now, back to reality. Given how modern science operates and general disbelief that mind can influence reality, you can see that it is not hard to tweak some variants of these "mind-first" approaches to fit the vast majority of modern scientific observations (i.e. there's no magic healing). But the theories can produce divergent predictions (i.e. magic healing can work if you have enough "faith") under conditions where modern science is unwilling to collect evidence.
And I personally think there should be some way to tweak such theories in a way that first and foremost respects the observations and conclusions made by modern science, but also in a way consistent with a large portion of the religious and mystical traditions. (Did you know why Jesus requested people to have faith as a condition for performing healing? Now you have a theory to explain that. [disclaimer: I'm not remotely close to being a Christian])
I understand that some philosophers may feel content arguing whether we've made up all this and it's all in our imaginations (but not claim any predictions beyond accepted modern science), but it seems (to me at least) to defeat the whole purpose of the exercise if we're positing the universe is just a thought of our minds, and not even consider the possibility that we can imagine something other than what we are imagining right now.
Yes it sounds like quackery and the grossly simplified theories has holes in them, but that's why no self respecting person dares seriously bring up these topics (or let you fully into what they're actually trying to steer the topic towards)...
A lot of people connect idealism with psychic powers, and some even view that as counterargument against idealism. The basic idea seems to be this: (1) I have full control over the contents of my own mind, but very limited control over external reality; (2) but, if idealism is true, then external reality is part of my own mind, so I have full control over it too; (3) therefore, psychic/miraculous powers exist; (4) but, (3) is clearly false, therefore idealism must be false. People who want to believe in the psychic/paranormal/miraculous/etc stop the argument at (3), people who don't and are looking to use this as an anti-idealist argument go on to (4).
But, I think (1) is false. We actually have far less control over the contents of our own minds than many of us think we do. Anyone who has ever struggled with mental illness or addiction knows this fact very well. But, even for people who are thankfully unaffected by either: how much of our choices are truly "free", and how much are they predetermined by our genetics and by social/cultural influences? We don't know for sure, but probably a lot more than many people assume. And if (1) is false, the whole argument falls apart.
A lot of what you are saying seems to be rather adjacent to this line of argument. I don't agree that idealism makes the psychic/miraculous "more likely". I agree they are possible under idealism – but they are possible under materialism too. It may so happen that the laws of this universe, insofar as we know them, don't permit psychic powers or miracles – but, that's a consequence of what those laws happen to be, not of materialism in itself, and materialism could be just as true even with very different laws of physics which did permit psychic powers and miracles and magic and so forth.
Furthermore, the known laws of physics actually do permit all those things, with unimaginably low (but non-zero) probability – quantum tunnelling, quantum fluctuations, thermal fluctuations, etc, permit just about anything imaginable to happen (or at least appear to happen, in a way which nobody could distinguish from them actually happening), with unimaginably small yet still non-zero (and non-infinitesimal) probability. But, in a spatiotemporally infinite universe, any event with non-zero probability (however remote) will almost surely eventually happen, somewhere and somewhen, even an infinite number of times; indeed, in a spatially infinite universe, every non-zero probability event is almost surely happening somewhere right now, even an infinite number of times simultaneously – including your scenario. And people call idealism crazy–is materialism really any better? At least idealists can say "we have no reason to believe the universe actually exists beyond its observable limits", thereby avoiding the threat of a spatially infinite universe in which every possible event almost surely is happening somewhere right now – that way of avoiding the threat comes naturally to (some versions of) idealism, it is much more arbitrary for a materialist.
Interesting you bring probability up. Nobody knows where these probabilities come from -- we know how to calculate it and make predictions for sure, but we don't know where they fundamentally come from.
That said, even though you say materialism permits pretty much anything, the probabilities are supposed to be radically different. Materialism predicts that "Jesus" is practically impossible, and some versions of idealism suggests it is a dime a dozen. It seems reality is probably somewhere in between.
My personal theory is that the universe pretends as if it is materialistic by fudging with probabilities. (and also with limits of computations in the sense that if you can't practically solve a computation problem the answer may not actually exist in the same sense as observable limits you mentioned)
> Materialism predicts that "Jesus" is practically impossible,
That's not a prediction of materialism itself, that's a prediction of materialism combined with natural science as we know it. In some parallel universe (a popular speculation among contemporary physicists), for all we know, the laws of physics might have been sufficiently different to make "Jesus" "practically possible". Such a universe would have rather different laws of physics to those we observe here, but if materialism is right about the nature of this universe, it would be just as right about the nature of that one too.
And, I'm not sure if "Jesus is practically impossible" is even a prediction of natural science as we know it. I mean, of course, the odds of "Jesus" happening here-and-now by science alone are hyper-astronomically low–something I doubt any Christian would deny; but just make the universe/multiverse big enough, and the odds that "Jesus" happens sometime, some place, even right now, becomes arbitrarily close to 1. "Jesus" is happening "right now" some light years away (within a googolplex or so). If many worlds is true, there are many branches of the wave function in which "Jesus" really happened, about 2000 years ago, in the ancient Roman province of Judea, even if we have to say they are vastly outnumbered by those in which it didn't but people falsely believed it did. Given materialism, and certain assumptions about parallel universes, the central claims of Christianity actually are true, somewhere, even if not here. And, that's not true of Christianity, but of every other religion too. It isn't "impossible", given those assumptions it is almost certainly true; and it isn't clear what work "practically" is doing. Claims about what happened 2000 years ago aren't "practically" anything, and what difference does it make whether it really happened in this universe or in another one?
> and some versions of idealism suggests it is a dime a dozen.
Whether "Jesus" is impossible (just "practically" or even absolutely), or "a dime a dozen"–isn't in my view anything to do with materialism or idealism in itself. There are idealisms in which "Jesus" is impossible, and there are materialisms in which "Jesus" happens, even an infinite number of times, even an infinite number of times right now (and every other moment too).
That said, most idealisms don't really have anything to say about this issue either way.
My intuition is that the "evidence" (i.e. traditional ancient texts describing "magic") do not seem to permit relying on purely materialistic mechanisms, and most seem to require some kind of mind-fu to work.
I think otherwise I broadly agree with your observations.
> My intuition is that the "evidence" (i.e. traditional ancient texts describing "magic") do not seem to permit relying on purely materialistic mechanisms,
Contemporary debates about materialism-vs-dualism-vs-idealism originate in 17th and 18th century Europe. I wouldn't assume that ancient texts had any particular opinion on that debate, because they pre-existed that trichotomy.
It is true there are some ancient views which are seen as forerunners of modern materialism – the Cārvāka school in ancient India, the ancient Greek atomists. However, it may be a mistake to simply identify their views with modern materialism, since they arose in a very different context. In any event, many of these ancient and mediaeval religious/magical/etc texts ignored (or were ignorant of) those proto-materialist positions rather than condemning them, so I'm not sure why we should take those texts as taking any particular stance on them. For example, there is no evidence that the authors of the Christian Gospels were aware of the works of Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius, so why should we interpret the Christian Gospels as contradicting them. I do know that some later Jewish and Christian sources did attack the Greek atomist tradition, but most of those attacks was focused on their (effective) atheism and positions on moral issues, rather than their "materialism" per se.
> and most seem to require some kind of mind-fu to work.
"Mind-fu" is not incompatible with materialism. Maybe, on some distant planet, there is a humanoid species who communicate telepathically via radio waves. Maybe, they even exhibit some form of psychokinetic powers, through a biological ability to manipulate magnetism or (anti-)gravity or some undiscovered physical force. Even if that isn't permitted by physics as we know it, maybe there is some physics we don't know that does permit it. Even if that isn't permitted by the physics of this universe (known or unknown), maybe there is some parallel universe with different physics that does permit it. If the materialists are right and this universe is indeed "material", why wouldn't that other universe equally be so?
1, solipsism, has the advantage that there is a solid argument to be made for it - I only have direct access to my own mind. That is why I am calling it coherent.
The other flavors don't have this advantage at all. It is impossible to trust my senses to arrive at the conclusion that other minds exist without first trusting them that they are correlated with features of a non-mind physical world. So, you can't use sense-based observations to claim that the world is made up of many minds.
Even in something like Hinduism, which could be called a form of idealism at a large stretch, the physical world exists as a shared mirage that our minds are made to experience, maya, but the true world is still a single thing, Brahman. And their claim is that this can be directly experienced by you through self reflection - so if we call it idealism, it's still a form of solipsism ultimately, albeit more interesting than I would normally give this credit for.
> 1, solipsism, has the advantage that there is a solid argument to be made for it - I only have direct access to my own mind. That is why I am calling it coherent.
In saying that, you are assuming certain standards for judging whether an argument is "solid". How do you justify those standards? Many would answer that they are axiomatic. But, if our standards for judging arguments are ultimately axiomatic, why can't the existence of other minds be axiomatic too?
By Münchhausen's trilemma, all arguments are ultimately reducible either to circularity, infinite regress, or dogma. Choose your poison, but I think dogma is least the poisonous of the three. I suppose that's another one of my axioms.
Of course, argument by axiom is sometimes very non-convincing – it can be used to defend any position whatsoever. However, most would agree that there is a big difference between defending as an axiom "1+1=2", versus papal infallibility, or the uncreatedness of the Quran, or whatever. The question is, is the axiom "other minds exist" more like the former kind of axiom or more like the latter? Surely, more like the former.
> The other flavors don't have this advantage at all. It is impossible to trust my senses to arrive at the conclusion that other minds exist without first trusting them that they are correlated with features of a non-mind physical world. So, you can't use sense-based observations to claim that the world is made up of many minds.
You can't use sense-based observations to make metaphysical claims–and materialism is just as much a metaphysical claim as idealism or dualism are. There is no possible experiment or observation that could distinguish materialism from idealism, and any possible sense data is equally explainable under other theory.
> And their claim is that this can be directly experienced by you through self reflection - so if we call it idealism, it's still a form of solipsism ultimately, albeit more interesting than I would normally give this credit for.
That Hindu position is arguably closer to my options (3) (open individualism) or (4) (pan(en)theism) than to classical solipsism (my option 1).
In classical solipsism, my mind is truly real, but yours isn't. In the Upanishads, both our minds are equally real (as Brahman), and equally unreal (as maya and karma); in their equal reality they are identical to each other, in their equal unreality they are distinct
Thank you. It's really mind boggling how many people miss _this_ especially in scientism echo chambers. My knowledge about myself (consciousness, free will...), is infinitely more reliable than any of "Scientific" input no matter what is the "impact factor" of the publishing medium, so really no amount of "science" can be enough to disprove those very basic principles that everything else is built upon them.
I think individual self-knowledge is often flawed. There are many strange, damaged, malfunctioning, drunk, medicated, hallucinating, meditating, dreaming and variously other disturbed minds, which have objectively flawed impressions of themselves and their surroundings.
Their doctors, or even a casual observer, will have much more concrete objective knowledge of their state of mind than the subjects themselves.
What you're saying does not contradict what I'm saying. The thing you're describing works on a much higher level than what I was describing, for example in this case the doctor needs to fulfill at least the following requirements (from his own point of view):
1- He's independent agent who's watching and describing another independent agent in a real objective world
2- He acknowledge that there is cause/effect in principal (that's why they can deduce that there are flaws in the patient mind just based on external behaviour)
3- The doctor is trusting that he's not himself hallucinating, and that he's indeed see'ing real things and he's not just a programmed robot doing some random job.
and so on.
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As you can see I was talking about very basic level, it's the level that allow you to build another more complex level of information, and which any other information is necessarily less reliable than it. Because trusting that I'm independent agent who exists in an objective world along another independent agents is a necessary Premise to accept any external information provided by those other agents, and any information provided by those agents that contradicts this basic experience it also destroys any reliability in the objectivity and correctness of their existence for me and any input provided by them. Hence, any "scientific" paper that contradicts my direct experience about myself (e.g Free will) is necessarily less reliable than said experience no matter what is the impact factor of the journal.
Most of what you you say is credible. But it comes down to a personal choice about the balance of probabilities for where objective knowledge really resides.
I do not trust myself, as one flawed, idiosyncratic and individual brain.
I am more likely to trust the established objective view of other consciousnesses. The scientific method is (should be) a collective network of communicating, iterating, self-correcting consciousnesses, which operates according to robust rules and procedures established (evolved) by previous generations of collaborating consciousnesses. Of course, it is also flawed, but over long periods of time, it usually gets better answers than the intuition of individuals.
If I think I can drive, but I am drunk, and a good friend tells me I'm drunk and I should not drive, then I should believe them, not me.
If I think I have some medical symptoms, I tell a doctor. However, an individual doctor can be corrupted by mis-education, ignorance, their own psychological issues, or their own financial gains for various treatments. So I ask multiple doctors, but they may have a consistent bias. But if I don't trust any rational explanation of my symptoms, then yet another doctor may diagnose shape-shifting hypochondria or paranoia against doctors. Who to believe? It's not obvious, but it's not obviously me over all others.
Still, even in your case if you slowly strip down the layers of your analysis, you will notice that it necessarily boils down to few things that you know directly and you can't build a proof for them because any other proof will be build on them being correct.
Look, there are things that you know are correct and you can't make a proof for them (even the "I think therefore I am" is a circular reasoning, the real info is in "I" itself), and in your case you believe a lot of things about yourself and world you live in before you can really start to depend on the higher order conclusions that allow you to trust your friend or your doctors.
It takes a 3rd party, someone outside the situation, and possibly some time after the fact, to decide what most approximates objective truth.
I don't trust myself here and now, I could be drunk or deluded, or vain, or biased, or self-obsessed (most people seem to be that way).
I don't trust my doctors, they could be under-educated, or self-interested to overtreat me, or publish more papers on anti-doctor paranoia, and self-obsessed (most people are that way).
I only trust some averaged, collective, rational, longer-term, reflective, investigative, independent, reviewed, challenged, criticized and doubted process to get closer to truth.
> I only trust some averaged, collective, rational, longer-term, reflective, investigative, independent, reviewed, challenged, criticized and doubted process to get closer to truth.
We're probably repeating ourselves, but this averaged process still has the same bottleneck which is your direct experience and your trust that your experience is true and contradictions are impossible indeed etc... You'll never run from this bottleneck no matter how you put this process.
I'm not debating wether we should trust the scientific process, I'm just saying to reach this stage there are lot of premises that should be established and thus the scientific process can't dispute them otherwise it will be killing it's own credibility at the same time.
Again, if I was delusional about my direct experience, then who can say then 1 + 1 really equal 2? No one can know.
With regard to Free Will, there is a little intellectual dodge called the Compatibilist solution (popularized by Dennett), which says you really feel like you have free will, but you do not. Also see Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky on the topic (but note Dennett strongly disagrees with Harris, he has no choice, it could not be otherwise :)
The feeling of Free Will is bootstrapped from making decisions in a complex world. The subconscious makes most decisions automatically, based on left-brain exploitation of the current situation for survival. The timescales are too short for slow consideration to have an evolutionary advantage. Any imprinting of this instant behavior is made by stress hormones, which enhance memory retention for unusual or extreme situations.
However, the right brain is tasked with fitting actions into a wider context of long-term survival. It can run what-if scenarios, imagine different courses of action, and different outcomes. Its view of an action is always in the belief that something could be different next time, so something could be different last time - I could have done something else. But this is false, the left-brain was in control, and the right brain just provides post hoc rationalizations for those forced actions.
So, approximately, Free Will is the story the right brain tells itself after the left-brain already made the decision.
For more on the split brain aspect of this, see McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things.
Dennett... I don't think that guy can be called a real philosopher, but at least he's not just random "Journalist" like Sam harris is :)
Again, my direct experience of free will is much stronger than any of the half ass explanations these guys have to offer (and they're obviously much more flawed, you can clearly notice the ideological motives they have in relation to these topics).
My problem with this "explanation" (you feel that you have free will but you don't, it's just a story) is that it just pushes the issue one step further, I mean just think about it, who feels this exactly? They're assuming there is another "agent" within me that have the consciousness and it's being told stories and it accepts them, and this agent can understand that and it feel it can decide another choices, so it can decide? so it means it have some type of free will or the ability to understand different choices? even if in reality it can't execute them? (similar to paralyzed people?).
Anyway, if we want to open the can of worms of telling other people you're just delusional, then maybe the real world doesn't exist? and maybe logic is not real? and scientific method is not scientific? When I was much younger, I used to imagine that I live in a huge magical theater and that everything is being rendered for me, so maybe after all I'm the only real person in existence?
I've never heard a credible explanation of free will or what someone means by that. Can you offer a description of what free will means, within known science?
I think it through several layers. At a personality layer most of the time you make decisions that are consistent with your personality. But occasionally you do something out of character.
At a lower level, a mind logic level, your mind / brain makes decisions based on weights. Should I have a coffee now - do I want one, do I enjoy it, am I trying to avoid caffeine because I felt a bit fuzzy yesterday etc. The bigger the decision the more weights go into it, but if you re-ran the same mind with the same weights then it makes the same decision every time, and if it didn't then er why? So where is the freedom there? To make a free choice at this level is to make a choice inconsistent with the experience + inputs of the mind.
Then at the lowest level, the brain is processes in the physical universe. Quantum probabilistic effects, as I understand it, don't have much effect on outcomes. And where they do, it's not like your brain controls that, it just happens. We have a physical state, time goes forward and we have a new state. And that's all there is, no concept of will, free or otherwise.
And you know, I think it's perfectly fine to feel like you have free will and not consider it often. Live your life as if you do. It's only if you focus on it that you can be like "ah, probably not then" but does it matter?
Sorry, but your position is consistent with the mainstream scientism:
"I have no explanation for X based on materialistic point of view, so either it doesn't exist or let's reduce the phenomena to fit our taste".
My point was, even if we don't know what is the deep explanation of the phenomena, my own experience is infinitely more credible than any other "scientific" stories I might hear, because to deny my own experience opens the door to deny other things including logic and everything I know and my own senses.
Also note that free will does not in any way assume that our decisions or actions are without cause, after all from religious point of view, everything in existence is caused ultimately by God. Even one can argue, that saying that free will is not based on causes, actually means free will is impossible, because that mean our will is based on true randomness which doesn't sound "free" much.
Dan Dennett is a professional philosopher. He is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, and has written several books, including Consciousness Explained.
Sam Harris is not a random scare-quoted "journalist".
He is a writer and podcaster, who has a B.A. in philosophy from Stanford, a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA, and long experience with both meditation and psychedelics, which makes him rather well qualified to comment on the topics of free will and consciousness. Even if you disagree with him.
No, it doesn't, in my very humble opinion. I know Sam harris (and Dennett) and I'm aware of his Ph.D in neuroscience, and when I put a quotation, I meant he's not really a topic expert on this or anything else based the depth of the content he provide as it makes him more like a Journalist with clear agenda, I wasn't talking about his academic credentials. I wonder why he's so hyped in certain circles though.
200 years ago, we thought the universe was just the Milky Way. You really can’t determine what consciousness is until you know what it is. There’s no evidence that consciousness arises from the physical body at all. If you look at a dead body. The “life” is gone. Who knows where or. what it is, we certainly don’t at this point.
This is the same kind of thinking that flat earthers have. 200 years ago you should have been ridiculed for claiming that something existed beyond the Milky Way without any evidence.
Why do you say there’s no evidence that consciousness arises from a physical body? If my physical body completely destroyed by an explosion, could my own consciousness still exist?
Suppose a surgeon slowly cuts out parts of my brain and at some point, I am definitely not conscious. Suppose instead, I undergo extreme mental changes but no matter what mental anguish, happiness, etc you induce, you find I remain a conscious being. To you, these two experiments don’t provide evidence that consciousness arises from the physical body?
I think it’s abundantly clear that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. If you claim otherwise, provide evidence for it.
Conscious awareness appears to be a fundamental aspect of the universe -- as fundamental as the four known fundamental forces -- and physics is concerned with describing the laws of the universe.
How could consciousness not be lumped in with physics, from this perspective?
It doesn't matter whether consciousness pervades the universe in a form of panpsychism, or is emergent out of interactions we already understand. Fluid mechanics is emergent too, in a sense -- that doesn't put it outside of physics.
Fluid mechanics might actually be a good analogy. We know that fluid mechanics happens, and it's entirely made of already known physical interactions, yet the phenomenon is so complicated that it deserves to be its own field of study.
On the other hand, asking something like "Is viscosity a part of the fabric of the universe?" would be meaningless, because viscosity is not a property of any elementary particle or force. The complication arises out of how those groups of particles interact with each other.
At least, with fluid mechanics, there's a good physical abstraction that reduces real world phenomena into partial differential equations which work surprisingly well. When it comes to consciousness, we can't even ask "What's the consciousness per gram of this substance?" and I doubt such a question will become meaningful any time soon.
> Conscious awareness appears to be a fundamental aspect of the universe -- as fundamental as the four known fundamental forces -- and physics is concerned with describing the laws of the universe.
Why do you believe this to be true?
If it's a self-evident observation, try explaining it to me like I'm 5.
Sure, ELI5: the only things we actually know are from our conscious experience. Everything else we have to logically infer from those conscious experiences. Literally everything is built upon our conscious awareness. We have direct experience of our conscious awareness before we can even do physics to determine the four fundamental forces at all.
To clarify, consciousness isn't just a fundamental aspect of the universe -- for our human minds, it's the most fundamental aspect.
That's an interesting philosophy, but I don't see how consciousness is implied by the standard model or the current investigations into physics beyond the standard model.
It isn't. It still has to be integrated with it, that's the whole point. We don't know how gravity is implied by the standard model either, but we still know it's there.
The point is that, at the end of the day, it's still necessarily going to be physics.
I'm not a philosopher. I did study physics in college.
I do not see it necessary for consciousness to be as fundamental as electroweak interactions and so on. In my mind, it's perfectly possible for consciousness to be an emergent property of a complex system that itself is not conscious in any meaningful way.
Look at other examples of this; i.e. tensegrity.
To conclude that consciousness is as fundamental as bosons or gravity needs a lot of evidence.
Since you said so definitively that you believe that conclusion is true, I was hoping you had specific evidence on hand.
Nobody said consciousness is best described at the subatomic level next to bosons. It may be, it may not be. Currently there is no evidence in either direction. Gravity certainly proves that the standard model is quite incomplete so far, and we currently don't have the slightest idea how.
But I earlier used fluid dynamics as an example of emergence. To make the point that fluid dynamics is still physics.
Philosophically, the fact that consciousness is going to be part of physics is self-evidently true. It's true by definition if you believe that consciousness interacts with the universe as described by physics -- for which the specific evidence is that we're having this conversation in the first place.
> Nobody said consciousness is best described at the subatomic level next to bosons.
Above:
> Conscious awareness appears to be a fundamental aspect of the universe -- as fundamental as the four known fundamental forces
If it's as fundamental as the four fundamental forces, then it belongs in the same level of abstraction. Fluid dynamics isn't as fundamental as quantum chromodynamics.
I found the statement that consciousness is as fundamental should be worthy of further examination. Hence, my inquiry.
> But philosophically, the fact that consciousness is going to be part of physics is self-evidently true. It's true by definition if you believe that consciousness interacts with the universe as described by physics -- for which the specific evidence is that we're having this conversation in the first place.
Okay, yes, but that's a very different notion than what was discussed above. Consciousness being purely physical is, I believe, the most likely explanation. It being as fundamental as neutrinos is not.
(My primary account is rate limited, so I'm posting my final comment in this thread from my alt.)
> If it's as fundamental as the four fundamental forces, then it belongs in the same level of abstraction.
I didn't say that it belongs at the same level of abstraction, and no that isn't necessarily implied. It might be even deeper, it might be something in parallel that then interacts at a higher level, we currently don't have the slightest idea.
And there certainly isn't any evidence that it isn't as deep as neutrinos, for example. You assert that there is a "most likely explanation", but there isn't. Nothing is most likely when there is no evidence at all in any direction.
But we know consciousness interacts with the physical universe, so we can say that it's part of physics. We're just trying to locate where. But nothing rules out the subatomic level prima facie. The root-level comment attempted to do something like that, and I am pushing back on that.
> I didn't say that it belongs at the same level of abstraction, and no that isn't necessarily implied.
The definition of fundamental is, in this context, best compared with this one from Merriam Webster: "of or relating to essential structure, function, or facts" -- https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fundamental
When you compare things using "as", you're stating equivalence.
The statement "Conscious awareness appears to be a fundamental aspect of the universe -- as fundamental as the four known fundamental forces" states that consciousness is as relative to the essential structure as the four fundamental known forces.
The most literal meaning of what you said above is: Consciousness is as relative to the essential structure, function, or facts as the four known fundamental forces.
If that's not what you intended, then you're free to acknowledge that you misspoke, and to correct your previous statement with a clearer, more precise meaning.
But to say "and no that isn't necessarily implied" is wrong.
> The most literal meaning of what you said above is: Consciousness is as relative to the essential structure, function, or facts as the four known fundamental forces.
Yes, that is absolutely what I meant.
That doesn't mean that it operates at the specific level of bosons or the force of gravity, which is what I read your comment as suggesting.
It's been a pleasure conversing -- I sadly no longer have time to continue, but these are exactly the kinds of debates philosophers of consciousness have -- there's a lot to clarify and figure out! It's a fascinating field.
> That doesn't mean that it operates at the specific level of bosons or the force of gravity, which is what I read your comment as suggesting.
This is a contradiction.
If something is as fundamental as bosons, then it operates at the same level as bosons. Otherwise, it's not as fundamental as bosons. It could be more fundamental, it could be less.
I gave the examples of tensegrity and fluid dynamics above. That they're not as fundamental as quantum fields doesn't make them any less real. They're just not as fundamental.
So which is it?
> It's been a pleasure conversing -- I sadly no longer have time to continue, but these are exactly the kinds of debates philosophers of consciousness have -- there's a lot to clarify and figure out! It's a fascinating field.
I understand. I'm leaving my response for anyone else who agrees with you to pick up should they choose.
How can you conceive of bosons or gravity without consciousness? How can you possibly prove objective reality through the filter of subjective consciousness?
It doesn't matter how I conceive of anything. They existed for billions of years before I came around.
Even if, like, I take a solipsistic approach to life, objective reality has a sort of object permanence to it that's more stable than e.g. my dreams. So even if everything is a hallucination, the mechanism for preserving the information is the closest to "real" I can identify.
And from studying the things we call real, we understand physics. And from physics, I see nowhere that necessitates consciousness at a super low level.
Care to cite and explain the specific mechanisms that I'm not aware of that do necessitate it?
Just consider that everything you come in contact with, including the assertion of the sense-data that led you to the conclusion of "billions of years", is contaminated by the fact that is utterly impossible to disprove consciousness. Everything else that comes in through the senses can be doubted, but consciousness is the only thing you are in direct contact with. But I agree partially with you that there may be a form of consciousness that is more primary than our subjective consciousness (I think we agree that reality is a "real" logical system, probably infinite, and possibly intelligent itself). But we have a relationship with reality, in fact we may be a kind of accelerated rotation of it with reincarnative compartmentalization.
> Everything else that comes in through the senses can be doubted, but consciousness is the only thing you are in direct contact with.
Every functioning human learns relatively early in life that certain experiences they have are simply fake - dreams, at the very least. Many people who suffer from hallucinations can also learn to trust that their own internal experiences are less valid than what others tell them is true.
Just as much, we may one day come to learn that our internal experience of consciousness is an illusion and that reality is we are all p-zombies. Of course, a physical theory of consciousness has to explain why and how we have this false subjective experience, but it's certainly conceivable that this might happen one day.
While you are right in some sense, your position is solipsistic, and solipsism is not considered a fruitful line of inquiry even in philosophy or religion. It is a conversation ender: there is nothing more to add to the conversation if I believe that I am the only thing that exists and there is no objective reality behind my consciousness. Even logic wouldn no longer be usable in arguments in this world view.
Not even that. There is really nothing to discuss if the only thing I believed is that I exist, and anything else is potentially a hallucination. Even p ^ ¬p could be true, perhaps I'm just hallucinating the rule that says it isn't.
In a way yes, your whole reality is your own internal hallucination, and there is no way to break out of it
That doesn’t mean you can’t explore anything within that
In fact a lot of eastern philosophical and religious traditions focus exactly on that, how exploring your inner self is a valid and very good way of discovering reality
Not sure why you fixate on “nothing to discuss” or “conversation ending”
Neither the ideas above nor solipsism are dead ends, there’s plenty of exploration to be had within those
Now if you don’t like them or want to dismiss them, you are free to do so, that’s your own personal take, but that’s not an objective absolute truth
This argument leads to solipsism, so it's not very fruitful. That is, you can easily replace "bosons or gravity" with "everything in the universe except myself, including other humans" and your argument doesn't change.
But then you actually can't say anything about anything, since you're the only thing that really exists and everything else is a just a figment of your mind.
You've just demonstrated the anthropic principle. Intelligent contemplation requires a lot of things so we will see them and can see them as fundamental, but they might be obscure in the universe.
No, you are misunderstanding the anthropic principle. That merely explains statistical things such as why it might be hard to find intelligent life elsewhere.
The anthropic principle is a concept we've created out of our conscious observation of the universe. But take away our consciousness and you take away any and all of our knowledge of any universe whatsoever.
Consciousness cannot be "obscure" when it is the basis for one's own experienced reality, the substrata underlying everything else. Consciousness experience is fact; our conceptual understanding of the universe is mere theory. Well-tested theory, but theory nonetheless.
> Consciousness cannot be "obscure" when it is the basis for one's own experienced reality, the substrata underlying everything else.
That you can do any of this has consciousness as a precondition, it is of significance to us but we are most likely a statistical anomaly in the Universe. It is statistically probable that we have this rather fragile viewpoint on the Universe, that's only available in small places for short times, because consciousness has preconditions.
For people who work in or consume TV and film maybe the video camera seems fundamental to the nature of the world, but it wasn't very important before it was created.
1. Some people believe that conscious awareness exists on top of physics. I.e., something happens and conscious awareness notes that it happens. Here there is a flow of information going from physics to (our) conscious awareness. But not necessarily in the other direction.
2. The above (1) is not likely to be the true. We discuss conscious awareness in this physical world. Hence physics "knows" that conscious awareness exists, and thus there is at least also a flow of information in the other direction.
One might go further, and start questioning whether it is physics that does not really exist, and only our conscious awareness exists ...
I've often heard some hand-wavy remarks about quantum physics, but they're largely unconvincing.
For example, a wavefunction will collapse because we use e.g. photons to measure a particle as it enters one of two slits. It's the act of measurement, not the introduction of a conscious mind, that causes the collapse. So that doesn't track.
Funny because the whole argument does work better if you imagine the proponents are 5. "I'm special therefore the universe must care about me and my thoughts"
I hate that most education systems don’t teach that physics has its roots in philosophy and some of the most rigorous recent math stems from philosophy (Gödel) leading to vacuous gatekeeping comments like this.
Chemistry has its roots in alchemy, but that doesn't mean alchemy deserves to be treated with the same respect and seriousness as chemistry.
Medicine has its roots in witchcraft but that doesn't mean witchcraft deserves to be treated with the same respect and seriousness as medicine.
Astronomy has its roots in astrology, but that doesn't mean astrology deserves to be treated with the same respect and seriousness as astronomy.
Philosophy isn't physics, and philosophy doesn't deserve to be treated like physics. The premise that panpsychism - which is essentially the basis for all animist and shamanic religions (the belief that all things have an innate mind or will) should be treated as a peer to relativity or quantum mechanics is absurd.
I mean, quoting directly from TFA:
Part of the appeal of panpsychism is that it appears to provide a workaround to the question posed by Chalmers: we no longer have to worry about how inanimate matter forms minds because mindedness was there all along, residing in the fabric of the universe. Chalmers himself has embraced a form of panpsychism and even suggested that individual particles might be somehow aware. He said in a TED Talk that a photon “might have some element of raw, subjective feeling, some primitive precursor to consciousness.”
We're to take seriously, as a scientific claim, that individual particles are aware and have feelings. That when a ball rolls downhill, it's because the ball wants to roll downhill. That when it rains, it's because Mother Earth weeps. It isn't gatekeeping to reject such nonsense, it's simply garbage collection.
Citations needed for what? The last 5000 years of human history? The individual developmental history of every branch of philosophy and science, their relationships and the iterative models of reality each developed over the centuries? You need citations to prove that witchcraft, astrology and alchemy do not provide valid models of reality?
Gödel was a logician, which is practically mathematics. “Philosophy” includes everything from that to stoned Berkeley undergrads convincing each other that getting stoned must have been what led humans to develop consciousness from other apes
When a philosophy has enough proofs and credibility, it becomes a science. Also, I do not think you can call logician philosophers. Lewis Carroll wouldn't.
Agree that the gatekeeping is a bit much, but doesn't warranted a swipe imho.
>When a philosophy has enough proofs and credibility, it becomes a science
I completely disagree with this notion of science. To me science is the practice of analysing findings from controlled experimentation and then deriving predictive, reproducible and falsifiable hypotheses.
>Why do you think that collecting evidence from experiments leads to truth though?
I don't, but I find that it produces results that are instrumental, and I assume that the past behaves analogously to the future, and similar situations behave similarly because this has generally been true in my experience.
>Why should we undertake it?
I'm religious, so certain science is useful to me in accomplishing my goal of attaining heaven.
>These are questions of philosophy, no experiments can answer them.
I'm well aware the physics is just 'natural philosophy', that doesn't make it anymore reasonable to start using it as the tool for metaphysics. It's a clear category error, like trying to use food chemistry to elucidate cognitive psychology in a literal sense.
I think the neuroscientists who question why a first-person-perspective happens in the brain generally assume it comes about from the physical formation of electromagnetic fields. Most don’t believe there’s some unexplored part of the universe that forms it, just that its something to do with the structure. So its still physics, just not pseudoscience.
I am certainly not well versed on the field though and have only read a paper on the topic, and it could have been bad science, but I did find it informative when I read it.
> What's the deal with these things being lumped in with physics?
Definition of natural philosophy:
> natural science, especially physical science
Physics at its core is philosophy, and its models, as sophisticated or complete as may be, can never be separated from an interpreter
Religion is also in great part philosophy, and both physics and religion similarly arise from a drive to understand the nature of the universe
All of these things intersect, and the article is about one of those points of intersection
Which angle you want to take is your own personal choice. But please don’t be so quick to dismiss others’ interest in probing at the fundamentals of the universe just because you don’t agree with the way they go about it
It doesn't at all seem like reaching for religion to me; seems materialist as can be. If consciousness isn't a phenomenon that requires a soul to explain, surely it's appropriate for physicists to study its nature. To call consciousness 'part of the fabric of the universe' seems like a fancy way of arguing that consciousness is a property of matter - and does it make sense, to a materialist, to call it anything else?
Crystal's syntax is somewhat similar to Ruby's, but its actual semantics (and type system) are fundamentally different.
In particular, `method_missing` and other fundamentally dynamic things that make Ruby feel like Ruby can't be done in Crystal, at least not without extensive runtime support.
(I haven't looked at this implementation, but I suspect that they end up doing similar things in C++ for the same reason.)
Absolutely do not get a loan, especially in this economy. You can very easily end up condemning yourself to years of what is effectively slavery. You would be better off just accepting your situation and finding freelance work through connections, flipping stuff on ebay, doing gig work etc.
When I was out of career-work I managed to get some minimum-wage programming jobs by targetting crypto groups and I ended up starting an ebay side-business that still brings in about 300 USD/m for not much work. My CoL is very low so that pays for everything except food for me, that's one of the advantages of moving to a low CoL area.
Any tips? The freelance sites just don't work currently, even the crappiest and shadiest 'jobs' are mobbed by 50+ proposals, and anyone new to the platform won't even have their proposals read.
Don't go through freelance sites, use Discord and Telegram 'market' communities. I also managed to get some success advertising my CAD skills on moneromarket.io (not affliated)
>If the job market is ostensibly so great, why can't I manage to find anything?
It's not, they're falsifying the numbers by double-counting people who are having to get multiple jobs to survive. The economy is totally broken right now, this is worse than what caused 2008.
