Eliminating Qualia

[ruby sparks]

I think the hard problem will only be solved by changing our perspective in some revolutionary way that provides a more objective understanding.

How about.....taking the view, that it doesn't really matter (whether we ever solve the hard problem or don't)?

I mean, we arguably haven't solved the hard problem for gravity, causality or life, to name but three.

In other words, certain processes/activities just feel like something to certain systems (eg ours). It most likely biologically evolved, most likely starting with some very minimal version in some system other than homo sapiens. There is probably no spechul sauce.

It could still be studied, analysed, utilised etc and the results applied, as with the other three I mentioned. And those who prefer to ponder solving the actual theoretical problem itself can carry on doing so. But it doesn't stop us from getting on with related stuff.

For example, we could consider various models, such as The Global Workspace Model (or versions of it) or Dennett's Multiple Draft Model, and compare and contrast their explanatory power, but without always interjecting, 'yes, but where's the magic bit, where it gets to feel like something?' and just accepting that somehow, biologically, it has evolved to feel like something. Get over it. Move on. Maybe in 500 years someone will know. Maybe in a hundred years we (using the term loosely since we will probably all be dead) will be able to create it, and then our descendants (possibly teenagers who can create consciousness on an app or some future equivalent) will probably stop finding it so mysteeerious and elusive.

 

[Treedbear]

I think the hard problem will only be solved by changing our perspective in some revolutionary way that provides a more objective understanding. But for now it seems we're about here:
View attachment 15808

Yeah, but we're ruminating on it. We are.
EB

Touché! How very true.

 

[ryan]

It appears that the mind is dependent on the brain/matter. So you might say that a normal working brain has a mental property the same way you might say that an electron has a charge.



Energy and especially holes are fascinating problems. We can't detect or observe holes either, but we somehow know they exist. We would need a whole thread and the world is probably going to need at least another 100 years to figure out what energy and holes are.

What other property can be said about all types of matter? I say it is its causal behavior. So there are at least two essential and very different properties in existence. Now we got one substance and two all-encompassing properties where everything we know about has either of these two properties

So are the two key 'duality' properties 'being mental' and 'being causal'? If so, if mental was causal, how would that fit?

It's fine. Mental can be causal and causal can be mental. Both properties can overlap into the universal substance of matter/energy. The "or" I was using was meant to be inclusive.

I thought the two key properties were observability and observation.

I went back and added that on the bottom.

I admit to being slightly wary of the word properties. I don't mind using it, but I'm not sure properties 'carve nature at its joints'.

A lot of the time, what is called a property just seems to be a descriptor, and sometimes the distinctions seem to be abstract or semantic as a result, so I wonder if sometimes such talk only divides up ideas, not things.

Well I don't see what other option we have. Science uses "property" to explain ontological differences. And since I think that practically everyone can agree that all there is, at least all that is that is relevant, are the mental and the physical. And when it comes to the mind, which is an abstract concept, it seems only natural that we use abstract language. If not that what then?

Thanks. I think I'm a bit clearer now. The two main 'sides' (categories? Aspects?) at least as we conceive or speak of them (an important caveat I think) are mental and physical.

Still not sure about the observer/observed thing.

Also, things (properties I suppose) such as speed don't seem to be mental, or physical (or indeed observable, or observing). So I don't know if we have enough categories. Not that I'm keen on having more, but it feels ok so long as we accept that each one does not necessarily refer to a 'completely different thing' (which imo is one big issue with for example um's model).

Also, personally, I myself would throw 'information' into the mix (as well as matter/energy) as a candidate description/property of a possible universal substance.

At this point, I'm thinking that your worldview options are not clashing much if at all with mine.

The observer/observed is more about an argument for the mind. Some people on here are temped to just do away with the mind because we can't observe it. But observing (mental) is the certain postulate. Observables (causal properties of matter) if they exist out there, are what we should be questioning.

 

[ruby sparks]

Some people on here are temped to just do away with the mind because we can't observe it.

Honestly I can't say I noted anyone suggesting that. But you could be right. Perhaps it is implied in someone's posts. Or perhaps it just seems that way to you or not that way to me.

But observing (mental) is the certain postulate. Observables (causal properties of matter) if they exist out there, are what we should be questioning.

That doesn't sound tooo bad to my ears. We should or at least could question 'what is out there', including whether 'causal properties of matter' is or isn't a good descriptor.

But, we could also question the observation, what it is, what is doing it? It could be that it's a property of the brain, not a property of mind. I grant you that we could call it a property of what we call and what feels like a mind, and I guess if you 'like duality' then you might want to carve nature at that joint, so to speak, but it is of course, to some extent, a preference.

Given that several models are possible, some dualist, some not, how should we decide on the one most likely to be closest to correct?

My suggestion is checking explanatory power (what does this model explain that that one may not etc) and prediction (if such and such a model were correct, what should we expect if we x y or z etc) and quite possibly utility.

My general impression is that duality, most sorts of it, has gone out of fashion because it lacks explanatory power and/or predictive power, and possibly utility, or, it does not add any extra of these.

 

[Subsymbolic]

I think the hard problem will only be solved by changing our perspective in some revolutionary way that provides a more objective understanding. But for now it seems we're about here:
View attachment 15808

Yeah, but we're ruminating on it. We are.
EB

The problem with this metaphor is the product of such rumination is inevitably bullshit.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Some people on here are temped to just do away with the mind because we can't observe it.

Honestly I can't say I noted anyone suggesting that. But you could be right. Perhaps it is implied in someone's posts. Or perhaps it just seems that way to you or not that way to me.

But observing (mental) is the certain postulate. Observables (causal properties of matter) if they exist out there, are what we should be questioning.

That doesn't sound tooo bad to my ears. We should or at least could question 'what is out there', including whether 'causal properties of matter' is or isn't a good descriptor.

But, we could also question the observation, what it is, what is doing it? It could be that it's a property of the brain, not a property of mind. I grant you that we could call it a property of what we call and what feels like a mind, and I guess if you 'like duality' then you might want to carve nature at that joint, so to speak, but it is of course, to some extent, a preference.

Given that several models are possible, some dualist, some not, how should we decide on the one most likely to be closest to correct?

My suggestion is checking explanatory power (what does this model explain that that one may not etc) and prediction (if such and such a model were correct, what should we expect if we x y or z etc)

My general impression is that duality, most sorts of it, has gone out of fashion because it lacks explanatory power and/or predictive power, or, it does not add any extra of either.

My biggest problem is 1) that it is an admission of defeat and profoundly anti-scientific and 2) information transmission from nowhere into the world drives a truck through the second law of thermodynamics. Oh and people who buy into it are, independently and inevitably clueless tossers.

 

[ryan]

Some people on here are temped to just do away with the mind because we can't observe it.

Honestly I can't say I noted anyone suggesting that. But you could be right. Perhaps it is implied in someone's posts. Or perhaps it just seems that way to you or not that way to me.

Oh, I just noticed you are somewhat new here. Well the physicalists are in this thread and everywhere else on the forum.

But observing (mental) is the certain postulate. Observables (causal properties of matter) if they exist out there, are what we should be questioning.

That doesn't sound tooo bad to my ears. We should or at least could question 'what is out there', including whether 'causal properties of matter' is or isn't a good descriptor.

But, we could also question the observation, what it is, what is doing it? It could be that it's a property of the brain, not a property of mind. I grant you that we could call it a property of what we call and what feels like a mind, and I guess if you 'like duality' then you might want to carve nature at that joint, so to speak, but it is of course, to some extent, a preference.

Given that several models are possible, some dualist, some not, how should we decide on the one most likely to be closest to correct?

My suggestion is checking explanatory power (what does this model explain that that one may not etc) and prediction (if such and such a model were correct, what should we expect if we x y or z etc) and quite possibly utility.

My general impression is that duality, most sorts of it, has gone out of fashion because it lacks explanatory power and/or predictive power, and possibly utility, or, it does not add any extra of these.

It puts us in false pretenses if we don't start with accepting an observer before all else. The observer is what gives access to the observed which is everything else.

Everytime we think we are looking at the universe objectively, we are really looking at it subjectively.

We have to start with the mind even if that gives us idealism.

 

[ryan]

My biggest problem is 1) that it is an admission of defeat and profoundly anti-scientific and 2) information transmission from nowhere into the world drives a truck through the second law of thermodynamics. Oh and people who buy into it are, independently and inevitably clueless tossers.

I have been meaning to ask you what your position actually is in relation to all this. In what way do acknowledge the mind, if at all?

 

[ruby sparks]

It puts us in false pretenses if we don't start with accepting an observer before all else.

But what is 'an observer'? We don't know. It feels like it's the mind, but is it the brain? Maybe there is no 'an observer' maybe there is just observation or something that feels like observation.

The observer is what gives access to the observed which is everything else.

Again, I have the distinct feeling that may be a false dichotomy, or conjecture, or arbitrary, or simplistic or something else.

And I did for example mention speed, and information, and energy, as candidates for 'things' which are neither observer or observed. So...should you have a third category? (Observer, observed, unobservable).

Everytime we think we are looking at the universe objectively, we are really looking at it subjectively.

Ok but I don't know anyone who would disagree with that.

We have to start with the mind even if that gives us idealism.

Because it's the 'only certain thing'? I get that, but it could all fall apart if mind is not what we (or you) think it is. Iow, maybe it's not a certain thing at all, because what it is is uncertain. Iow, what if we are starting with an assumption, based on introspection, about what mind or 'the observer' is. That might not be a good place to start at all.

 

[ryan]

But what is 'an observer'? We don't know. It feels like it's the mind, but is it the brain?

We had to observe the brain to know it exists, right? We had to first use our ability to observe. Then we find that this brain thing that we are observing is actually what gives rise to our ability to observe! It's like a conscious feedback loop.

Even hardcore physicalism/scientism agrees in the scientific method that we observe to gain physical knowledge/information (which is naturally better than indirect observations).

Maybe there is no 'an observer' maybe there is just observation or something that feels like observation.

But again, you have to ask yourself if it is the very act of observing that makes you "miss" the observer in all of this material, or more specifically, makes you miss the observer in the brain.

Again, I have the distinct feeling that may be a false dichotomy, or conjecture, or arbitrary, or simplistic or something else.

And I did for example mention speed, and information, and energy, as candidates for 'things' which are neither observer or observed. So...should you have a third category? (Observer, observed, unobservable).

Well speed is actually quite physical if you look at it 4 dimensionally. Speed is just a different kind of shape in 4 dimensions. From the frame of an observer, a point particle at rest will have a shape of a straight line (zero dimensions gets upgraded to 1 dimension). Something moving constantly in one direction has a shape of a triangle in 4 dimensions (1 dimension gets upgraded to 2 dimensions), etc.

Everytime we think we are looking at the universe objectively, we are really looking at it subjectively.

Ok but I don't know anyone who would disagree with that.

So then why is it hard to accept that we are observers before all else?

We have to start with the mind even if that gives us idealism.

Because it's the 'only certain thing'? I get that, but it could all fall apart if mind is not what we (or you) think it is.

The usual argument against this is, then what is making this false observation? Even the part of your sentence "what we (or you) think it is" implies something is observing/thinking even though it may be wrong.

Iow, maybe it's not a certain thing at all. Iow, what if we are starting with an assumption, based on introspection, about what mind or 'the observer' is. That might not be a good place to start at all.

 

[Subsymbolic]

My biggest problem is 1) that it is an admission of defeat and profoundly anti-scientific and 2) information transmission from nowhere into the world drives a truck through the second law of thermodynamics. Oh and people who buy into it are, independently and inevitably clueless tossers.

I have been meaning to ask you what your position actually is in relation to all this. In what way do acknowledge the mind, if at all?

It's the same position as the last two times I explained it in detail in this thread. Except I don't think I mentioned that I absolutely don't believe in beliefs there. Silly things...

And as for the scientific method. There isn't one consistent method, it's an almost religious myth.

I'm pretty certain that I'm a physicalist too, but I'm not sure the word has the same meaning to us. I'm both emergentist and constitutional in my physicalism.

 

[ruby sparks]

...makes you miss the observer in the brain.

There's an observer in the brain? Who knew?

Well speed is actually quite physical if you look at it 4 dimensionally. Speed is just a different kind of shape in 4 dimensions. From the frame of an observer, a point particle at rest will have a shape of a straight line (zero dimensions gets upgraded to 1 dimension). Something moving constantly in one direction has a shape of a triangle in 4 dimensions (1 dimension gets upgraded to 2 dimensions), etc.

Not convinced that that amounts to observation. But nice try.

Do energy. Possibly information too. Or causation.

I think you might run out of arguments that my candidates for unobservability are observable before I run out of candidates.

So then why is it hard to accept that we are observers before all else?

I don't understand the 'before all else' thing.

Analogy. You are trapped in a room which is on the 40th floor of a tall building that has no windows and no doors. Let's say, for argument's sake, that effectively, the only thing you can be sure of is the room you are in. That doesn't mean it's the room 'before all else'. There are other rooms, 39 floors below, and foundations, holding it all up.

The usual argument against this is, then what is making this false observation? Even the part of your sentence "what we (or you) think it is" implies something is observing/thinking even though it may be wrong.

My best guess is the brain.

 

[ryan]

My biggest problem is 1) that it is an admission of defeat and profoundly anti-scientific and 2) information transmission from nowhere into the world drives a truck through the second law of thermodynamics. Oh and people who buy into it are, independently and inevitably clueless tossers.

I have been meaning to ask you what your position actually is in relation to all this. In what way do acknowledge the mind, if at all?

It's the same position as the last two times I explained it in detail in this thread. Except I don't think I mentioned that I absolutely don't believe in beliefs there. Silly things...

And as for the scientific method. There isn't one consistent method, it's an almost religious myth.

I'm pretty certain that I'm a physicalist too, but I'm not sure the word has the same meaning to us. I'm both emergentist and constitutional in my physicalism.

So can something emerge from your physicalism that could not have been predicted before it emerged and became known for the first time?

 

[ryan]

Not convinced that that amounts to observation. But nice try.

Do energy. Possibly information too. Or causation.

I think you might run out of arguments that my candidates for unobservability are observable before I run out of candidates.

Then take energy for example. If a car goes 100km/h on the highway past a person, from that person's frame of reference, it has 1/2*m*v^2 Joules of kinetic energy. But if a car is beside the car travelling the same speed, from its point of view it has 0 kinetic energy. If you take relativity as a given, both amounts of kinetic energy measurements were correct. This shows that kinetic energy is an extrinsic property in this case. In other words it depends on factors of its surrounding not just itself.

The usual argument against this is, then what is making this false observation? Even the part of your sentence "what we (or you) think it is" implies something is observing/thinking even though it may be wrong.

My best guess is the brain.

So do you believe that minds exist but are really just brains. Or are you saying that there really doesn't have to be a mind at all?

 

[Subsymbolic]

It's the same position as the last two times I explained it in detail in this thread. Except I don't think I mentioned that I absolutely don't believe in beliefs there. Silly things...

And as for the scientific method. There isn't one consistent method, it's an almost religious myth.

I'm pretty certain that I'm a physicalist too, but I'm not sure the word has the same meaning to us. I'm both emergentist and constitutional in my physicalism.

So can something emerge from your physicalism that could not have been predicted before it emerged and became known for the first time?

Yup. And second and third and so on. I really have explained this all in tedious detail twice in this thread already However, the word of caution today is overdetermination... in fact, anomalous monism Just is irreducible emergecnce, just of logical rather than phenomenal states.

 

[ryan]

It's the same position as the last two times I explained it in detail in this thread. Except I don't think I mentioned that I absolutely don't believe in beliefs there. Silly things...

And as for the scientific method. There isn't one consistent method, it's an almost religious myth.

I'm pretty certain that I'm a physicalist too, but I'm not sure the word has the same meaning to us. I'm both emergentist and constitutional in my physicalism.

So can something emerge from your physicalism that could not have been predicted before it emerged and became known for the first time?

Yup. And second and third and so on.
I really have explained this all in tedious detail twice in this thread already However, the word of caution today is overdetermination... in fact, anomalous monism Just is irreducible emergecnce, just of logical rather than phenomenal states.

So the logic has the emergence (predicate dualism?)? Does this only come about when the logic is being processed in a certain way, like in a brsin for example?

 

[ruby sparks]

Then take energy for example. If a car goes 100km/h on the highway past a person, from that person's frame of reference, it has 1/2*m*v^2 Joules of kinetic energy. But if a car is beside the car travelling the same speed, from its point of view it has 0 kinetic energy. If you take relativity as a given, both amounts of kinetic energy measurements were correct. This shows that kinetic energy is an extrinsic property in this case. In other words it depends on factors of its surrounding not just itself.

Again, I'm not at all convinced that's observation of energy itself.

Try causality. Or gravity. Or life. Don't confuse 'explaining', 'modelling' or 'observing the effects' with observing the property itself.

Not sure what extrinsic has to do with it.

And really not sure why you would even try, in the first instance, to divide the world up only into observer and observable, other than that you like dualities, and possibly want to give the former much more due than it may deserve, since in my experience what comes out in the wash is that most dualists are mainly pitching the 'prime spechulness' of the mind over 'everything else' as if they had some sort of 'throne of superiority' lined up for it to sit on, even if not full-blown idealism. Which is why I wondered what you meant by 'we are observers before all else', I guess.

I'm not even sure what you mean by 'observe'. Detect? You say we have to observe brains to know they exist. But thoughts are as detectable (most likely by a brain, imo) as certain other things, right? Otherwise how would anybody even know there were any?

So do you believe that minds exist but are really just brains. Or are you saying that there really doesn't have to be a mind at all?

Are you on some sort of mission to find physicalist mind-deniers?

No, I'm not saying either of those.

 

[ruby sparks]

What do I think mind is?

At the end of the day, I don't know what mind is. Does anyone, yet? Is it physical?

My best guess though is that it consists of sensations, experienced by (in our case) the hooman brain (well the whole system I suppose, but centred in the brain it seems), because at some point in the dim and distant past, some complex biological systems probably began to experience sensations (qualia, approximately) in certain situations or during certain modes of operation, for whatever reason, and what at first may have been a basic phenomenon (or property?) evolved and became more complex and now there's what homo sapienses call minde, which I tend to see as (merely) a very sophisticated/evolved version of something very simple (perception of sensation). Don't ask me how 'perception of sensation' (or perhaps just 'perception' or just 'sensation') arises/emerges/evolved, because I don't know, but that it 'just does/did in some natural, non-magic way' seems by far the most probable explanation (not least because it happens routinely, literally all the time, in wombs for example). Not entirely unlike life arising/emerging out of non-life (somewhere between atoms and molecules, possibly), or how causality works.

But can I just say that sometimes it seems to me less important what words we use to refer to something (eg is it physical, mental, or whatever, hey maybe it's physimental or mentaphysical or something else) than for example asking what it does, in other words what role it has or what its capacities are.

Untermensche, for example, seems, to me, to be convinced of mind being a 'completely different thing', but maybe that certainty is only a necessary prelude to (or indeed step backward from) saying more about the more important (to him) proposition, what it does, as he sees it (autonomy and free will for example, in his view). And so I'm similarly wondering where you're inclined to go in that sense.

So, I guess, however it arises or whatever it is made of (maybe we will not be ultimately able to answer those, and maybe too, it doesn't really matter, all that much for a lot of our enquiries) what do you think mind is, and what do you think it does, what its capacities are?

And, to temporarily adopt your dichotomy, how do you know mind is not the 'thing observed' (by the brain) and is not itself an 'observer'? And don't say, 'because it feels like it' or we will have to talk about the unreliability of introspection. Switching from 'experience' to 'observation' may be using a slightly more 'scientific/technical' word, but I'm not sure how it gets us out of the problems I brought up with untermensche.

 

[DBT]

Mr Untermensche has plainly stated his belief in an autonomous mind;

There is your implied autonomy.

No implication.

I am saying it plainly.

The mind, some structure created by the brain, influences the brain.

It evolved to influence the brain.

That is what it does.

The mind has a passive and and an active aspect.

We have always called the active aspect the "will". I did not invent the concept. It is as old as humanity.

The passive aspect is that aspect of the mind which experiences.

 

[ryan]

Then take energy for example. If a car goes 100km/h on the highway past a person, from that person's frame of reference, it has 1/2*m*v^2 Joules of kinetic energy. But if a car is beside the car travelling the same speed, from its point of view it has 0 kinetic energy. If you take relativity as a given, both amounts of kinetic energy measurements were correct. This shows that kinetic energy is an extrinsic property in this case. In other words it depends on factors of its surrounding not just itself.

Again, I'm not at all convinced that's observation of energy itself.

Try causality. Or gravity. Or life. Don't confuse 'explaining', 'modelling' or 'observing the effects' with observing the property itself.

Not sure what extrinsic has to do with it.

If something has an extrinsic property, then it is usually a property that we attributed to it. For example, a lemon is sour. Well if there were a universe with no living creatures to taste sourness, then the lemon - itself - doesn't actually have a property of being sour. Its a property that exists because of a relationship or because it becomes an input to a process and loosing its identity as the output.

However, it does have its own intrinsic properties like mass. These are things that don't depend on the environment.

And really not sure why you would even try, in the first instance, to divide the world up only into observer and observable, other than that you like dualities, and possibly want to give the former much more due than it may deserve, since in my experience what comes out in the wash is that most dualists are mainly pitching the 'prime spechulness' of the mind over 'everything else' as if they had some sort of 'throne of superiority' lined up for it to sit on, even if not full-blown idealism. Which is why I wondered what you meant by 'we are observers before all else', I guess.

I'm not even sure what you mean by 'observe'. Detect? You say we have to observe brains to know they exist. But thoughts are as detectable (most likely by a brain, imo) as certain other things, right? Otherwise how would anybody even know there were any?

Not only do we detect thoughts, we become thoughts. For a moment that I eating my favorite candy, I am at least 90%, maybe 100% in that moment consciously. But I am not the candies I eat even though I am the experience of them my brain processes their effects.

So do you believe that minds exist but are really just brains. Or are you saying that there really doesn't have to be a mind at all?

Are you on some sort of mission to find physicalist mind-deniers?

That's usually what sucks me into these kinds of threads.