The hard problem of consciousness

[Gorm]

Last week, I found this guy on youtube that, in my view, nails the hard problem (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.) (or at least relocates it) in a really profound and mind-blowing way. In this video (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.) [part B here (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.)], he does this by way of discussing emergent properties.

Prepare to hear some strange claims. Bear with him, it's not as solipsistic as it may sound at first. He does believe in an external reality independent of our experience. It's just that he denies that this reality is physical in itself. In other words, all physical properties, like form and color and weight, are merely 'working models' produced by our minds when our senses encounter the world. What is true reality like? We cannot know.

To me, this guy is Kant with an xbox (you'll see what I mean in part B).

I'd very much like to know what you guys think!

[zibber]

Emergence has been the #1 thing on my mind for a while now, this looks interesting!

[blueback]

I've thought of that before. It makes sense.
The fun part of the argument is that it is impossible to validate. He explained that the argument includes the requirement that there is no 3rd party, impartial observer. Well, that means that it is impossible to ever compare objective reality to our subjective experience because all experience is subjective. It means that the hypothesis can never be disproven.

If it was possible to build a robot that could see reality the way it really was and verify the theory for us then it would be a useful hypothesis, but the argument includes the impossibility of that.

[Gorm]

It's true that it can't be falsified, but that doesn't make it useless. It's not a scientific theory, but a metaphysical theory or a meta-theory. Something to make sense of it all. Strictly scientific thinking can't acheive this.

Correspondence theory (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.), which I take to be the alternative here, seems to me a much weaker hypothesis, as its claims are very much stronger. Conventional philosophy of science (falsificationism) is more consonant with Mike Earl's theory, since he is completely agnostic about external reality. His theory is detached from the facts about external reality. It rests its entire weight on the subjective realm of experience. And not particular experiences, rather a reflection on experience as such.

Myself, I'd like to add a more computationalist emphasis to Earl's theory. He's onto it when he talks about the mind 'rendering' its concepts and percepts, but I think he should be more explicit. I might try to elaborate later.

[Noehelia]

I do not have a problem of making sense of the world. I am fully aware that what I perceive as red is what my eye can catch and how it is interpreted in my brain. But I do not agree there is no physical reality, it is just that we can only capture a fraction of it.

[Homini Lupus]

That kind of theory is not new to me (it caused some arguing with the philosophy teacher until I got the point) and yes, it makes sense, just as solipsism makes sense (probably solipsism is the most logical conclusion of a similar path). The only conclusion I found useful of that kind of reasoning is the fact that truth is a social construction. Anyway, there are experiences wich are nearer objective truth than others: take a madman and a nobel in phisics and ask them about the possible evolution of a given star system. Maybe in the madman's inner reality he's right and the nobel is wrong. But if you have the possibility to observe what really happened without social constraints (group thinking can override perceptions at times) you'll probably agree with tha Nobel. I know there are still many possible logical problems, but science as a method gave results (and it's the most similar thing we can have to an objective observer).

[Gorm]

I do not have a problem of making sense of the world. I am fully aware that what I perceive as red is what my eye can catch and how it is interpreted in my brain. But I do not agree there is no physical reality, it is just that we can only capture a fraction of it.
How do you 'capture' a fraction of truth about reality? I'm having trouble conceiving of this. You might be using it as a metaphor of course, but if so, I can't see the how it contradicts my claim that 'reality as postulated by physics' is nothing but a very precise model -- with no connection to external true reality in the ontological correspondence sense.

there are experiences wich are nearer objective truth than others
I agree, although I don't like the term 'objective truth'. I prefer something like 'perfect precision'. In my view, we're constructing models, or rather: whole virtual realities. When the virtual reality I inhabit works, it's reinforced (i.e. I trust it more). When it fails, I try to modify it to work.

A nobel prize winner in physics has built him- or herself an incredibly well-working model. Feed his or her virtual reality with certain conditions, and it will probably be able to produce the same results as those we can observe from true reality. A man on the street couldn't do this. He would make a blind guess, guided by concepts not meant for physics but for social realites (I presume that is what men in the streets are concerned with). He'll apply concepts like God or some emotional metaphor perhaps. Concepts that are not irrational in and of themselves, only really, really maladapted to the task at hand.

It is obvious to almost everyone that concepts like God and emotional metaphors (e.g. 'the sun is angry', 'the heaven is the firstborn son of the earth') is unrelated to true reality. It's just mythical language. The same goes for mathematical language, which, as you know, is what constitutes physics. Mathematics is just forms in a model. These forms aren't out there in reality. At best they are emergent properties of some extreme version of reductionism. Something like string theory. Which, incidentally, seems to be claiming that reality is in its essence mathematical... (In other words, there is no physical reality, only mathematical structures. This can't be more palatable for you than the 'physical subjectivism' of Mike Earl!)

I know one thing that is in its essence mathematical, and that is our models of reality. Reality itself -- we have no idea yet. We've got to be agnostic about it, because in spite of the best efforts of science, we still don't have a grand unified theory.

[Noehelia]

How do you 'capture' a fraction of truth about reality? I'm having trouble conceiving of this. You might be using it as a metaphor of course, but if so, I can't see the how it contradicts my claim that 'reality as postulated by physics' is nothing but a very precise model -- with no connection to external true reality in the ontological correspondence sense.



Let's say a red car passes by.
The car is an object which in its essence is matter but we are not able to conceive it in its tiny bits but only as a whole as far as the human eye can perceive. We are also limited by the dimensions that we are aware of. The object also interacts with other matter in the environment like reflecting light and our eye can catch this.
So, in these dimensions, in the size of matter and the conditions of light that the eye can perceive we see something.
Then starts the process of analyzing it, putting it in 3d dimensions, identify shape, distance, color, etc. Then starts the process of putting it in context. We know it is a car because that's what we have been taught (so we remember that this object is a car). The color stimulates us, the recognition that this is a car gets a meaning to us. Then we start adding more meanings, like what kind of car, what the type of the car says about the owner (is it a ferrari?) but we may also block further analysis if we check in ourselves that it is no interest of ours. If it was we may feel excitement, admiration, starting the process of dreaming and wishing and so on.
These were very very few of the processes that are going on in that particular moment. And it is a fraction of physical reality that we capture limited by our perceptiveness, our ability of analysis and so on for only one particular moment. The mind fills the gap of continuity. Everything changes constantly. The truth stands only for that particular moment, we are not even able to capture the whole physical reality and there is no point in doing so.

[blueback]

It's true that it can't be falsified, but that doesn't make it useless.

Well, technically I described what a useful theory would be, I didn't say that this one was useless. All I meant by that was that this one falls short of what I know would make a useful theory, I didn't mean that I know this theory to be useless.

That being said. . .I think it's pretty useless. The ability to falisify an hypothesis means that it describes something that can be tested. If a thing can't be tested then it has no effect on our lives. So, if an hypothesis describes something that is impossible to test the hypothesis is by definition probably useless. You can't build any tests off of it; the best thing it could ever do would be inspire someone to come up with a better hypothesis.

It's not a scientific theory, but a metaphysical theory or a meta-theory. Something to make sense of it all. Strictly scientific thinking can't acheive this.

Can't it?
All it takes for a theory to be scientific is for them to fully disclose the context in which the theory opperates. If that context includes the assumption that the theory can't be tested then it would be scientific as long as that fact was explained along with the theory.

I'm a fan of things that actually matter. When someone comes up with an idea about how the world works but that idea incluedes the idea that the idea cannot possibly be tested then that idea "doesn't actually matter."

Myself, I'd like to add a more computationalist emphasis to Earl's theory. He's onto it when he talks about the mind 'rendering' its concepts and percepts, but I think he should be more explicit. I might try to elaborate later.

I agree. I think he could have spent more time explaining how the binary information on the disk is like atoms in space. I think the theory might go over the heads of people who hadn't already thought of it.

[Monte314]

The notion of the world as a computation has been explored in depth by Stephen Wolfram in his magnum opus, A New Kind of Science, which is available *free* online at:

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What Wolfram does is propose a shift in the conventional scientific paradigm away from complex formal mathematical models that require simplifying assumptions, to simple recursive systems that are nonetheless capable of exhibiting fantastically complex behaviors. (The emergence of complexity was charmingly explored in less detail in the 1984 book called Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology).

Wolfram (an astonishing genius, and the creator of Mathematica) has spent the last 20 years working largely in isolation on his theory. Interestingly, he seems to be getting relatively little attention from the scientific community (probably in part because of his virulent arrogance and intentionally abrasive personality).

[kevintr]

Sounds like the implications of Hisemburgs uncertanty principal to me. Take an electron, before an observation is made to determin it's position all you can do is give odds on what it's position is, it's a wave of probability which I think is why electrons behave like waves at times. Once an observation for position is made the wave collapses and the electron has a position. Therefore an unobserved partical isn't real because it's propertys haven't been actuilized.

Some physicists think reality is really this way others say this is just the best model available for explaining the behavior of quantum phenomina.

[Gorm]

The car is an object which in its essence is matter but we are not able to conceive it in its tiny bits but only as a whole as far as the human eye can perceive. We are also limited by the dimensions that we are aware of.
You're presupposing that true reality is physical in nature, which is the contended issue. In my view, things make more sense if atoms and space are understood as conceptual rather than real. In the case of atoms this is easy to imagine. Space, on the other hand, is something we are so familiar with that we take it for granted. Therefore, I'll try to explain why space should be understood as conceptual:

Completely uninterpreted sense data are not accessible to us at all. Even our basic, unreflected perceptual experiences are interpreted by concepts. This explains the fact that, in the case of space, our most basic intuition is that real space is exactly like simple geometrical space, uniform and easy to comprehend. When Einstein explained gravity by distorting the geometry of real space, introducing things like curved space and ripples in space, this was on the one hand clearly good science, since it could predict events more accurately than Newton's theory, but on the other hand it was profoundly felt as a loss of realism. The universe was revealed to be very strange place. All our assumptions could be wrong. Then came quantum physics, and made it a lot worse. The universe is not only strange, it's bizarre.

To conclude: The human mind is very good at simplifying things. Our simplifications do not 'capture a fraction' of reality, rather, it constructs a fiction (in the neutral sense) that accurately predicts events in reality. Whether our fiction is aristotelian physics, ptolemeian astronomy, atom theory, newtonian space or string theory, it is in no direct contact with true reality. In other words: There are only truths of logic, no truths of fact. What we think of as truths of fact is 'merely' models (constructed logically) that works. (When I say that our models are constructed logically, I do not necessarily mean strict or mathematical logic. Even symbolism has a logic to it. It's just not very useful for scientific purposes.)

Then starts the process of analyzing it, putting it in 3d dimensions, identify shape, distance, color, etc. Then starts the process of putting it in context. We know it is a car because that's what we have been taught (so we remember that this object is a car). The color stimulates us, the recognition that this is a car gets a meaning to us. Then we start adding more meanings, like what kind of car, what the type of the car says about the owner (is it a ferrari?) but we may also block further analysis if we check in ourselves that it is no interest of ours. If it was we may feel excitement, admiration, starting the process of dreaming and wishing and so on.
I absolutely agree, but all of the things you're mentioning here is clearly 'virtual', won't you agree?

I'm a fan of things that actually matter. When someone comes up with an idea about how the world works but that idea incluedes the idea that the idea cannot possibly be tested then that idea "doesn't actually matter."
This is a very anti-philosophical sentiment. Besides, I think it's contradictary: Can falsificationism be falsified?

The notion of the world as a computation has been explored in depth by Stephen Wolfram in his magnum opus, A New Kind of Science, which is available *free* online
Great tip, thanks! I searched for a video to introduce me to Wolfram's ideas, and found this great talk (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.). I'm convinced that he really is onto something very important. I don't yet know how important, but I certainly will try to find out. Maybe I'll even read his book.

Sounds like the implications of Hisemburgs uncertanty principal to me. Take an electron, before an observation is made to determin it's position all you can do is give odds on what it's position is, it's a wave of probability which I think is why electrons behave like waves at times. Once an observation for position is made the wave collapses and the electron has a position. Therefore an unobserved partical isn't real because it's propertys haven't been actuilized.
There are more than one interpretation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The one you describe is the Copenhagen interpretation. Personally, I prefer the 'many worlds'-interpretation. (This is not a very well grounded preference, as I'm no expert. I just like it.)

Some physicists think reality is really this way others say this is just the best model available for explaining the behavior of quantum phenomina.
Yeah. Same with string theory, only more extreme (I think they are down to a million different possible interpretations, or some huge number like that). In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if physics will conclude with not one grand unified theory, but many, all perfectly precise, but perhaps emphasising different aspects of physics, making different things easy to calculate.

[Noehelia]

You're presupposing that true reality is physical in nature, which is the contended issue. In my view, things make more sense if atoms and space are understood as conceptual rather than real. In the case of atoms this is easy to imagine. Space, on the other hand, is something we are so familiar with that we take it for granted. Therefore, I'll try to explain why space should be understood as conceptual:

Completely uninterpreted sense data are not accessible to us at all. Even our basic, unreflected perceptual experiences are interpreted by concepts. This explains the fact that, in the case of space, our most basic intuition is that real space is exactly like simple geometrical space, uniform and easy to comprehend. When Einstein explained gravity by distorting the geometry of real space, introducing things like curved space and ripples in space, this was on the one hand clearly good science, since it could predict events more accurately than Newton's theory, but on the other hand it was profoundly felt as a loss of realism. The universe was revealed to be very strange place. All our assumptions could be wrong. Then came quantum physics, and made it a lot worse. The universe is not only strange, it's bizarre.

To conclude: The human mind is very good at simplifying things. Our simplifications do not 'capture a fraction' of reality, rather, it constructs a fiction (in the neutral sense) that accurately predicts events in reality. Whether our fiction is aristotelian physics, ptolemeian astronomy, atom theory, newtonian space or string theory, it is in no direct contact with true reality. In other words: There are only truths of logic, no truths of fact. What we think of as truths of fact is 'merely' models (constructed logically) that works. (When I say that our models are constructed logically, I do not necessarily mean strict or mathematical logic. Even symbolism has a logic to it. It's just not very useful for scientific purposes.)


I absolutely agree, but all of the things you're mentioning here is clearly 'virtual', won't you agree?




I agree that what we see and the meaning that we give is constructed by our minds.
Maybe we have a different definition of physical reality. I take it as something that exists of matter or it actual happens. As I said we are limited by our perception of dimensions. This is how we can perceive space with our abilities. But I do believe that we capture a fraction of reality and not the whole thing. Do we distort it also a bit? Υes. But it's not like we are just machines in a lab that are imagining things.
Maybe the problem of accepting that there is a physical reality causes problems to people because they want to comprehend the whole thing, but I do not have this problem, I accept that I am incompetent to understand everything on its whole.

[Gorm]

I agree that what we see and the meaning that we give is constructed by our minds.
Maybe we have a different definition of physical reality. I take it as something that exists of matter or it actual happens. As I said we are limited by our perception of dimensions. This is how we can perceive space with our abilities. But I do believe that we capture a fraction of reality and not the whole thing. Do we distort it also a bit? Υes. But it's not like we are just machines in a lab that are imagining things.
Maybe the problem of accepting that there is a physical reality causes problems to people because they want to comprehend the whole thing, but I do not have this problem, I accept that I am incompetent to understand everything on its whole.
You're obviously misunderstanding my position. As I said in the first post of this thread:
[I]t's not as solipsistic as it may sound at first. He [Mike Earl] does believe in an external reality independent of our experience. It's just that he denies that this reality is physical in itself. In other words, all physical properties, like form and color and weight, are merely 'working models' produced by our minds when our senses encounter the world. What is true reality like? We cannot know.
Needless to say, this goes for my own view as well. I can't see any reason at all to believe that I'm a brain in a vat.

The belief (your belief?) that true reality is physical in nature is far more reasonable, as it is consonant with the appearance of reality in our human experience. However, as science digs deeper, we find out that atoms consist of even tinier particles; that space only looks like simple geometry locally; that when we see, our experience depends cruxially on on the computation of the fantastically complicated neural networks in our visual system.

In other words, things are not as they seem. Reality is not physical. The physical model of reality is only a first step on our way to make sense of true reality, the nature of which we cannot say that we know yet. (I mean that in a very literal sense. We just don't know. I'm not implying that somehow the true reality is spiritual in nature or created by subjective experience. Not at all. The only thing created by our subjective experience is a model of reality. And the best, most coherent models we currently have available are those of physics. One should hold these in high esteem, but be careful not to confuse them with true reality.)

The 'physical subjectivism' of Mike Earl (or my own, slightly different position, which I call 'virtualism'), gives a comprehensive view of reality that takes the necessary agnosticism into account.

I've written a short explanation of virtualism (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.) on my blog. You might find it interesting. It explains my view of reductionism (a favorable one).

[EternalOblivion]

I haven't viewed the vids yet (I'm at work). But I've studied mysticism in relation to Yoga, Tantra, and Buddhism, and they all talk in-depth exactly what this discussion is about. That the universe as it is known through the 5 physicial senses is a mirage of formless energies that only become concrete as our awareness touches upon them through the senses their selves. And at a higher level, don't exist at all; that the only thing that does exist is the substratum that pervades them all - the absolute nothingness of Buddhism, pure consciousness of Yoga/Tantra, and the singular god of many religions. It seems intensely abstract to think or perceive that our existance is a phantom of nebulous energies interacting with other energies, or that it doesn't even exist at all, but is like a dream of mind played on the screen of consciousness.

[blueback]

This is a very anti-philosophical sentiment. Besides, I think it's contradictary: Can falsificationism be falsified?

So? For that to matter you have to define "anti-philosophical" as good or bad. Anyway, no it's not. It is, in fact, a philosophy so how can it be anti-philosophy? A philosophy of anti-itself? That doesn't make any sense.

I'm not familiar with the term "falsificationsim" but I found this on it: Claim associated especially with Austrian philosopher Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994) that science should aim not to verify or confirm hypotheses - as verificationists and inductivists in general claim - but to falsify them.

This is because science is interested (in Popper's view) in universal affirmative conclusions, of the form 'All As are Bs', and if the universe is infinite (or merely too vast to explore) such conclusions could never be verified.

However, they could be falsified by the discovery of a counter-example. Popper also rejects the possibility of weak confirmation, replacing it by his own notion of corroboration - though how far this is really different might be disputed.

However, while verificationists claim that verifiability is essential for meaningfulness, Popper claims only that falsifiability is essential for scientific - as against metaphysical - status (not that it is so for meaningfulness).

Apparently it holds that science should be concerned with statements that can be falsified because if we live in an infinite universe we will never be able to prove anything. If that is accurate, then I agree with falsificationism. However, the statement of the idea itself isn't an hypothesis, it is just a method of approaching science. I don't see how it can be falsified (or verified) because it includes the idea "should."

However this description, just like my posts, didn't say that it was wrong to present an unfalsifiable hypothesis, just that it "shouldn't" be bothered with. It is more of a desire to avoid profitless activities. I don't get much out of puzzling over ideas that I already know can never be fully explained. Maybe some people do, but their time would probably be better spent on problems that can result in a solution.

[vkut79]

This is essentially Kant's philosophy of transcendental idealism, right?

[Gorm]

I haven't viewed the vids yet (I'm at work). But I've studied mysticism in relation to Yoga, Tantra, and Buddhism, and they all talk in-depth exactly what this discussion is about. That the universe as it is known through the 5 physicial senses is a mirage of formless energies that only become concrete as our awareness touches upon them through the senses their selves. And at a higher level, don't exist at all; that the only thing that does exist is the substratum that pervades them all - the absolute nothingness of Buddhism, pure consciousness of Yoga/Tantra, and the singular god of many religions. It seems intensely abstract to think or perceive that our existance is a phantom of nebulous energies interacting with other energies, or that it doesn't even exist at all, but is like a dream of mind played on the screen of consciousness.
Well, I wouldn't say that appearance is a 'mirage' without adding that this 'illusion' is very functional. You are able to act in the world only because of this interface. It is true that objects in one's interface is not a direct representation of objects in reality, but this should not lead you to discard them. Rather, view them like simplifications that seem to correlate well with events in your experience. You need them in order to live (act, think), but you shouldn't be superstitious about them: they're not real, merely virtual.

I don't like the buddhist concept of nothingness. It seems to me that the Buddha had a skeptic's awakening, i.e. 'nothing can be known', and mistook this for 'nothing is real'. He should instead have concluded that 'what is real is unknown, what is known is virtual'. I think this would enable him to combine the ability to withdraw completely with a will to act in the world, doing science and art. The holy 'nothing' should be a holy 'je ne sais qoui' .

The notion of 'pure consciousness' also fit well with virtuality, I think. But again, I think the focus should be on transcendent/unknowable reality. Becoming absorbed in the concept of 'pure consciousness' is self-absorption (which, to be precise, is all right to be a lot of the time, but not all the time).

The singular god is a concept with too many different applications. I won't try to give my opinion on it. Suffice to say, I think it's misguided most of the time.

So? For that to matter you have to define "anti-philosophical" as good or bad.
Positivism like yours is clearly bad for philosophy. For more practical concerns it might be good.

However this description, just like my posts, didn't say that it was wrong to present an unfalsifiable hypothesis, just that it "shouldn't" be bothered with. It is more of a desire to avoid profitless activities. I don't get much out of puzzling over ideas that I already know can never be fully explained. Maybe some people do, but their time would probably be better spent on problems that can result in a solution.
I don't think you get my position. I'm not [I]giving ontological status to anything, I'm taking it away. The claims of 'physical subjectivism' or my own 'virtualism' is, so far at least, almost entirely negative.

But by all means, do spend your valuable time elsewhere. If you'd like to discuss this further, I'd like you to start a new thread (about some general theme like positivism or 'profitless activities in philosophy'), or send me a PM.

This is essentially Kant's philosophy of transcendental idealism, right?
I'd say absolutely yes! Mike Earl doesn't agree, but I'm not entirely sure why. I'm going to try to convince him of the brilliance of Kant.

[kevintr]

There are more than one interpretation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The one you describe is the Copenhagen interpretation. Personally, I prefer the 'many worlds'-interpretation. (This is not a very well grounded preference, as I'm no expert. I just like it.)

That's intersting I would think you would like the Copenhagen iterpretation since it implies what this guy is saying. Not that I'm claiming more knolidge on sutch matters than you, since my knolidge could quite easily be less.

.

I interprit the mystical contintion of ultimate reality being nothing as ultimate reality is intrinsically unlimited and so undefined. I think what they are saying is that things can be defined so ultimate reality is no-thing.