alt Hacker NewsIt is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
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> can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it?
The point of the philosophical zombie is that they don't experience anything, nor do they convince themselves of anything. If they're "experiencing" or "convincing themselves" then they're not philosophical zombies by definition.
We all (presumably, although I might wonder about the author) know that consciousness is a thing, we don't have anything like a rigid definition of it. Perhaps we never will, but this kind of hot air is unlikely to ever get us closer to understanding it.
Tiresome article by someone just being contrary for the sake of having something to say.
Personally I think the quantum immortality/suicide argument points directly at the trouble with the "duality".
It's a perfectly physical/mechanical argument that demonstrates that consciousness is much much more bizarre than we expect.
Something worth reading alongside this.
You can affect your consciousness by hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. Pretty good argument for me to believe it is a physical phenomenon.
So if I read that right, there's no difference between myself and my desk, ergo my desk is conscious and that Buddhists are probably right.
Reading Ashtavakra Gita gives me more insight into this than any other literature that I have read. The ultimate reality is that: There's nothing else other than this. This is all there is.
To anyone discussing whether or not consciousness exist, tell me do you have proof that other people have consciousness? There's simply no credible answer to this question other than "well they have to be...cause we share the same material". But that is a experiment with a sample of 1. The weird thing is, if you are able to proof someone else's consciousness, that is just an extension of your own consciousness.
Next question, how do you prove that you are not sleeping right now? What proof do you have that you are not living inside an illusion? You have surely experienced the illusion of understanding i.e. you realized that you "understanding" or the feeling of "understanding" was wrong. What is to say that this is not happening now?
In reality, there is nothing to discover. There is just this and that is all there is.
> It is time to give up the pernicious dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness and embrace the reality that our soul, or our spiritual life, is consistent with our fundamental physics.
Why is it pernicious?
How exciting to see new writing from Carlos Rovelli! He's one of the few physicists and philosophers of science (ancient or modern) who steadfastly rejects a priori assumptions that rely on things other than our observations.
He also echos the modern belief that observer and actor are two sides of the same quantum event.
I highly recommend any and all of his books.
I was watching someone doing a really deep dive into speculative biology [0], and they finally got to the sentience/sapience/intelligence/sophont episode [1]. I'm not an expert in this area, but there was a discussion about obligative sapience and facultative sapience that i found fascinating.
Obligative sapience is only know to have evolved in humans. Obligative means we cannot survive without sapience. We must learn and use tools and whatever to live and continue evolution.
While facultative sapience seems to be a broadly used survival strategy across the animal kingdom - from crows to spiders to cuttlefish. Facultative sapients are able to survive without their learned behaviors, using them instead to augment their evolution.
Viewing these issues from the point of evolution and actually having a comparison, I feel, helps ground the discussion better.
Even more so from the very strange point of view of speculative biology. The creator of the 'Neotectons' gives a very strange viewpoint on the debate too, with good reasoning though not bulletproof by any means. As with any model, you can make it tapdance if you mess with the parameters enough. But I think that more efforts into speculative arenas would be helpful. Gedankenexperiments for sophonts and not just elevators and cosmology.
The author should read up on embodied cognition. Their arguments have been discussed at length. It’s all old stuff really. Good stuff too. I don’t see how the article succinctly describes this or contributes otherwise
Good first step of demolishing (yet again) the phlogiston of the brain. Even Chalmers does not argue for the hard problem with any vigor today.
Rovelli’s arguments were made a dozen times over by Dan Dennett, and made better.
His critique of qualia is unsatisfying because it never reaches Einstein’s problem: what the heck is the physicist’s meaning and mechanism of this thing we call “Now”? Rovelli owes us that answer. He spent a decade telling us absolute time is not fundamental, no universal present, no master clock. Take the clock out of the universe and the Now gets harder, not easier: if there is no clock out there, what builds the one the organism plainly runs on? Answer that, then explain consciousness and qualia to the neurophilosophers.
Now is probably a process built by asynchronous wetware to survive. Humberto Maturana said the mechanisms that construct it are atemporal. And yet here we all are, reaching for clocks and synchrony to explain the Now. The irony should not be lost on Rovelli.
The neuroscience is in print already: Bickle et al., Eur J Neurosci 2025 (doi:10.1111/ejn.70074. interview with R. Williams) where the wall clock is named as neuroscience’s most tacit and least examined assumption.
we are caught between an evolutionary need to know that our existence is meaningful and a universe that seems indifferent.
The magazine is funded by:
https://berggruen.org/projects
The investment arm for this influencer fund is:
https://www.berggruenholdings.com/
The fund is invested in AI and Berggruen pushes the AI/UBI narrative:
https://www.ft.com/content/9b93e02a-c693-4070-9094-a2f532dfa...
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolasberggruen?trk=public_post...
You can already see from the glossy website that this is a well funded propaganda magazine, just like Quantaagazine is essentially funded by the Renaissance Fund, which is invested in AI.
Yes, these magazines do have interesting articles from time to time, but the overt materialistic (not monetary, but anti-idealistic) worldview that traditionally only appeared in communist countries suddenly infests all the rich people's outlets.
Is it time to give up on the value of (other) human beings? Time will tell.
Boom.. there we go again..
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40554217 > Philosophy seems to be concerned with furniture a lot)
> If we do not fall into the error of dualism upfront, we can safely speak of > soul and emotions just as we speak of a kitchen table, even if the table is > also a collection of atoms.
I stopped reading when the author said science is not great as they claim to to be because when my cycle breaks down, I call a mechanic not a particle accelerator.
I think part of the answer is that AI shows that intelligence and consciousness are unrelated phenomena. Humans happen to be both.
I think this has been obvious from the other side of the argument forever. Animals obviously have consciousness and emotional responses and they are made of the same living matter we are, but my pet bunnies can’t do natural language or math.
It is time to give up arguments without evidence.
The main value of this article is this absolute gold mine of a comment section.
These conversations drive me insane. There isn't even an clear or even consensus definition of consciousness, yet here we are all acting like we are talking about the same thing. "It's right there, don't you see it? That's consciousness! We just need to define what it is so we can figure out if it's real or not".
Unless someone eventually finds the consciousness center in the brain I will continue to hold the position that it is just another property of "things". I know consciousness must be real because it's the first thing I have access to without any sort of reasoning attached on top of it. Its realness is more visceral than atoms or any other physical theory because it is the way in which the world is conveyed to me, but I don't think I'm unique in any way for having it.
I feel like all systems, in a panpsychist sense, participate in consciousness, so in some way it's a property of matter or systems in our universe that we have somehow failed to account for in physics. We miss it because systems only exhibit consciousness internally like on top of having all the physical properties of rocks, rocks also have an internal state of being. That internal state of being for the most part is uninteresting cause it doesn't dictate the rocks actual form or function in the universe.
I'd argue human consciousness is the same. My conscious experience has nothing to do with the thoughts that are actually being produced. By this I mean there is no authorship of the thoughts and actions I perform by my consciousness. To me it seems more like a stage in which elements of my experience appear for brief moments before fading away, so much like the rock's internal experience my internal experience does not have any affect on the physical world.
Part of me then starts to worry why worry about consciousness at all if it's something that doesn't participate in the physical world because then what's the point of it all? Also, if all systems get to participate, then what stops things like basic logic gates on a PC from having consciousness as well. I tend to lean towards thinking that those feelings are similar to the same kinds of feelings humans used to have about thinking they were the center of the universe, but I'm not sure.
Austin
Rays of Light going through a me Prism where the Brain and senses can inflict action.
There is a problem with the thesis that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon. It implies that someone writing the "wrong" sequence of 0s and 1s, by hand, on a completely private journal, has committed a moral crime on par with slavery and genocide.
Full proof: https://outlookzen.com/2017/04/03/philosophical-proof-for-th...
There's a simpler way to state this: the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.
We understand everything a CNN or Transformer does, but we have no idea how to relate that to qualia. This may also be why we need to run endless tests and don't have a theory that let's us predict how well the network processes anything.
I am consciousness.
With consciousness and AI multiple problems are being smuggled into a single question.
1. How do we determine consciousness?
2. How should we handle moral consideration of a non-biological system?
The first question is a red herring. It cannot be answered. We need to focus on the second question.
Where we are, it is still a matter of belief.
I do believe what the author claîms, but it’s not something that’s proven so far, so it can’t be imposed as fact.
The main consequence to the “soul” being physical is that free will is an illusion. And many people can’t stand this idea. People want to believe they are more than a deterministic physical process. They want to believe the future is not already written.
They’ll look for free will in what still stands : god or quantum uncertainty.
God can’t be disproved, and quantum uncertainty leaves room for a kind of mystery, that’s appealing.
But LLMs definitely do a convincing job at “faking consciousness”.
Philosophers being philosophers and not advancing the discussion at all.
Why the complete rewriting of the title?
Making confident, sweeping claims about consciousness is proof that someone hasn't thought about it very deeply or just doesn't know very much.
Mention "consciousness" get a slew of incoherent responses. There is no "hard problem." the burden of proof has always been on those who claim there is. whats it like is what it is what it is is what it is like. the question has the innanity of a circle asking "why do I have an interior?"
For anyone interested in this subject, I found this paper to be quite helpful: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14545
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.4375
I felt like this paper nailed it years a go, and nobody has followed up properly.
The metric involved is basically impossible to compute fully, but easy to approximate. Any online approximation will model everything it can see have changes until it is satisfied.
"Consciousness" is a suitcase word. It has so many meanings that any individual speaker can't even keep them straight, much less a group discussion.
That's the reason it seems like a thorny topic.
Seems like void of any substance if one takes whatever flavor of monism for granted. Just because everything is supposed to be build on the same fundamental building blocks/fluxes/whatever doesn’t mean every phenomenon is caused by constructions of equal complexities.
That is, life referring to something inherently far more complex than inert assemblies remains perfectly valid in many monist perspectives.
[edit: took life rather than consciousness as an example, but the stated argument in the article seems to be equally applicable relevant for both concept, or any concept that suppose that emergent complexity is possible]
"You can't seperate the body from the mind", Tool told me.
There is no hard problem of consciousness not because of the baffling arguments against it in this article, but because materialism is not true. This article and the entire description around the hard problem just shows the amount of mental gymnastics needed to deny what is front of everyone in every instant of their lives.
Matter and mind are not the same and mind is not produced from matter. That there are correlates between the body of a sentient being and the content of their experience is common sense but not proof that their body is causing the very ability to experience anything.
You would think that absolutely no progress being made on how dead matter somehow produces experience would make people question their assumptions. Instead you get people denying that they have a mind or just coping by thinking that if they map yet another correlation they will finally crack the code.
blather. another example of weak blather of the weeeeeeee! I'm so full of words variety, that fails to interesting or memorable, like someone so high on mushrooms that they are claiming to be able to see there own ears, who if asked what consiousness is will give a similar answer, unless you ask how consiousness relates to rubber bands, which will get a similar answer with rubber band anologies.
Utterly asinine article that doesn't understand its own subject matter.
This entire thread is just «I am a strange loop» by Douglas Hofstadter
anyone who is atempting to define consiousness, probably isn't. and in there blind greed are trying to turn that definition into marketable property.
the single part of this article i enjoyed was the question "How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?" things were obviously the work of god for millenia. now they are obviously the work of natural processes. i wonder what the next obvious answer will be.
one may collapse the dualism dichotomy to two distinct possibilities. in both cases this existence is a subset of some larger existence (true because self implies other). the first case involves a hard boundary between existences (externally one may only only observe, therefore our existence collapses to pure solipsism). in the second case, the boundary between existences is permeable (one may interact with our existence externally, therefore our existence collapses to solipsism with the addition of brain in a jar). in both these cases soul can mean something different, but it can still be seen to exist, unless one insists on dogmatic adherence to the rules of any one system in particular.
Some good reminders in this article. However, while I, too, reject Cartesian dualism, some of the claims of the author need correction...
"Many felt confounded or degraded by the idea of sharing a family tree with donkeys. [...] Amid the current cultural backlash against progressive ideas, today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear, transcendent souls. [...] The current debate on consciousness is influenced by our entrenched traditional ideas of ourselves"
Whose fear? Don't generalize, Carlo. These may be fears rooted in the modernist and Cartesian legacy, but they are only "traditional" if you think the world came into being during the 17th-18th century. Look back further and you find an Aristotelian and Thomistic view that also rejects metaphysical dualism. The soul here is the form of the body, which is to say, its formal cause. It isn't some ghost haunting a corpse or a puddle of ectoplasm. It is a principle. In this view, everything that is alive has a soul, which, again, is the name we give to the form of a living thing. Soul is just a class of form, and everything that exists has form.
What makes human beings different from other animals is, at the very least, that we possess intellects (and so, ontologically speaking, any embodied being with an intellect is human). The human intellect, according to this view, cannot be purely material, even if it relies on matter and even though it is united with bodily operations. The reason for this is that abstraction cannot occur in matter alone, as abstraction involves a mental operation of conceptual separation of the form of a thing as given in the senses. Matter (specifically what's called prime matter) is merely the principle of instantiation, and so it cannot "host" forms without instantiating that form. In other words, form + matter = thing.
"During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul."
No that is not how people viewed the body and the soul in the Middle Ages (or in, say, Catholicism). That is a very Cartesian view of human beings, that we are two things, not one.
"The body was an interconnected bunch of matter that decayed and died. The soul belonged to a transcendent spiritual world independent from vile matter."
Matter wasn't vile, unless you were some kind of Gnostic or Cathar heretic or whatever. The physical was seen as good, as created by God, and human beings were understood as spiritual-corporeal unities that are by one nature both spiritual and physical. (The "spiritual" here has to do with the intellectual and free nature of man; again, not ectoplasm or ghosts). Indeed, if anything, Christianity elevated the dignity of the physical. Why bother with a resurrection after death if matter sucks? Why would the body and blood of Christ be so precious to Catholics if matter is evil? It is Gnostic dualism and similar movements that construed the physical as evil, but these were heretical movements, not views characteristic of the Middle Ages.
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All that being said, I think the author would benefit greatly from a rigorous study of Aristotelian metaphysics, both to avoid these sorts of caricatures (as well as any misconceptions of science), but also to deepen his understanding. I think his rejection of dualism is on the right track, but he is missing out on a rich and robust intellectual tradition that has been sidelined by exactly those sorts of modernists that perpetuated this whole intellectual muddle in the first place.
I mean, I would argue that they are right, but there is still a hard problem of consciousness. What properties must a system hold in order to exhibit consciousness? Personally, I think I could fairly capably argue that consciousness is an emergent property of any feedback loop composed of a large enough collection of highly interconnected adaptive components embedded within a sufficiently pattern-rich environment. Every feedback loop which meets these requirements is conscious, and removing any single one of those elements causes consciousness to disappear. I believe the property emerges in a similar manner to how 'heat' emerges from electromagnetic interactions of atoms. This definition has implications, and all that I have thought of are real. Total sensory deprivation results in loss of consciousness, for example.
OK, dualism. Heard that before.
The new hard problem: how do biological brains get so much done on such slow hardware? That's a real physics question. We're missing something.