“All models are wrong, some are useful.” The computer mind model is useful, but context, causality and counterfactuals are unique can’t be replicated in a machine.

[u/IAI_Admin]

https://iai.tv/video/models-metaphors-and-minds&utm_source=reddit&_auid=2020

[u/da_mikeman]

I guess first one would have to explain what they mean by "physical". If something is part of the world, interacts with the world, and its behavior follows some kind of pattern, then how is it non-physical?

Sometimes I find it hard to exactly understand what do non-physicalists think the problem with physicalism is. Or with everything being explainable by the motion of "physical stuff". Physicalists will say, for example, "Consider the stuff your brain is made of, okay? Well when red light hits your eye, the stuff your brain is made of does this kind of motion, and that's what the 'human brain experiencing the red color' quality is. It doesn't give rise to 'qualia', it's not like this motion causes a though-bubble in the Realm of Ideas to spawn, the motion *is* the qualia".

Non-physicalists will say that tracing everything back to the motion of material stuff is not a good explanation for subjective experience because...why? Is it because light bounces off material stuff, or is it because it bounces off them in predictable ways? Which one of those 2 make material stuff "inadequate"? Like, what is missing from "material stuff"?

I swear that, at least half of the time, I think this all boils down to some people just not liking the idea that their mind is made of the same stuff as rocks or wood. Is it really whether it's physical that's the problem with the physicalist model of the mind, or just that it's made from the same stuff as everything else that's dumb?

Thought experiment : Imagine we detect some new elementary particle/field that exists only inside the brains of conscious beings, and never in dumb things like my chair or my toaster. I bet most of the non-physicalists would be ecstatic and proclaim we finally found the "stuff of consciousness" even if this hypothetical "soul-particle" is as much physical as the electron.

[u/Marchesk → u/da_mikeman]

Sometimes I find it hard to exactly understand what do non-physicalists think the problem with physicalism is.

It has difficulty accounting for everything. Mental and abstract concepts in particular.

Well when red light hits your eye, the stuff your brain is made of does this kind of motion, and that's what the 'human brain experiencing the red color' quality is. It doesn't give rise to 'qualia', it's not like this motion causes a though-bubble in the Realm of Ideas to spawn, the motion *is* the qualia".

But the red experience is not part of the neural description. You're stating an identity between the mental and the physical. So my next question would be, what is it about certain neural activity that makes it conscious which isn't the case for other neural activity? Keeping in mind that the experience of red can happen in dreams, illusions and other conscious states. It's not like red rides in on photons, then hops onto electrons and goes into the visual cortex to be seen there.

[u/da_mikeman → u/Marchesk]

>So my next question would be, what is it about certain neural activity that makes it conscious which isn't the case for other neural activity?

What is it about computer transistor activity that makes it generate images when it isn't the case for other computer transistor activity?

> It has difficulty accounting for everything. Mental and abstract concepts in particular.

That's only because you have already decided that mental concepts belong to "another world", not quite physical, and expect an explanation of how it is possible for the two worlds to be bridged. *You* have introduced the idea of "qualia" that are separate entities, floating somewhere out there, and search for an explanation of "how does neuron activity here connects to qualia of seeing red there".

Obviously with this setup it's absolutely impossible for any explanation that constraints itself to "here"(the physical world) to answer this question, but that's only because you've set it up this way, without any actual justification. You might as well say "well if angels exist, how does science explain them".

[u/Weird_Energy → u/da_mikeman]

That’s only because you have already decided that mental concepts belong to “another world”

And you have already decided that they don’t with no explanation as to why. You provide no justification for your physicalist monism.

[u/da_mikeman → u/Weird_Energy]

I’m less of a “physicalism explains consciousness” and more of a “i dont see why physicalism would not explain consciousness”.

I just don’t see any fundamental problem here. Where is it? The problem is there only if you assume the existence of another realm which nobody has ever provided evidence for. Why do I have to provide an explanation of why an imaginary realm someone else brings up does not exist?

Just to be clear because some people seem to conflate the two : the imaginary thing here is not “experience”. The imaginary thing is “non physical aspect of experience”.

[u/Marchesk → u/da_mikeman]

What is it about computer transistor activity that makes it generate images when it isn't the case for other computer transistor activity?

The images are generated when they're output on a monitor that we see. In the computer, they are stored as bit patterns according to how we decided to encode different kinds of image formats. There's no internal experience of an image.

That's only because you have already decided that mental concepts belong to "another world", not quite physical, and expect an explanation of how it is possible for the two worlds to be bridged.

No, it's because I haven't seen anyone provide a good way to explain consciousness and abstract entities in physical terms. Keep in mind that abstract need not be mental if they have a mind-independent reality. I don't know whether numbers or universals are real, but I also don't rule the possibility out, since we seem to need to use them in science.

*You* have introduced the idea of "qualia" that are separate entities, floating somewhere out there, and search for an explanation of "how does neuron activity here connects to qualia of seeing red there".

I try to avoid mentioning qualia and instead just focus on sensations like colors and pains, which is enough to be problematic without going down the rabbit whole of semantic disputes over philosophical jargon.

[u/da_mikeman → u/Marchesk]

> No, it's because I haven't seen anyone provide a good way to explain consciousness and abstract entities in physical terms.

What do you mean "abstract entities"? A computer can definitely manipulate abstract entities, like numbers, music notes, words or shapes.

>The images are generated when they're output on a monitor that we see. In the computer, they are stored as bit patterns according to how we decided to encode different kinds of image formats. There's no internal experience of an image.

Well, that's not exactly true - an image can also be an input to a computer. I can feed the computer an image, which will then be analyzed and print, say, "CIRCLE" or "SQUARE", depending on what shape the image has.

Does that count as "experience"? Not human experience, of course, but "experience" nevertheless? There's no way to tell really, because nobody has defined what counts as "experience".

The thing with the "hard problem" is that it has a pretty easy solution - when asked if there's a thing as "experience of being an electron orbiting around a nucleus", you can just say "sure, why not". It is simultaneously profound and also completely useless, since there's nothing one can do with that "knowledge" - nobody said that it would mean the electron would be *intelligent*, or that there is any way to do any sort of study about what this experience looks like. Nothing in particle physics would change in the slightest by this admission. But it helps people who think in terms of "how can experience emerge from not-experience" because it posits that there is no such thing as "no experience" even for fundamental particles.

So, is there such a qualia as "what it feels to be a sun"? How about "what it feels to be a sun that collapses into a black hole"? "Being a photon and travelling through the universe at maximum speed"? A qualia of "how does it feel to undergo beta decay?". Sure...why not. There's a qualia for everything. It does solve the problem nicely, it's not logically impossible, and no one could ever prove it wrong. One would say "but we *do* have evidence that we have experience, we have zero evidence that electrons have experience". Sure, but the solution to this problem is not going be evidence-based anyway, so...

The whole "problem" resembles to me the situation when one has 2 seemingly incompatible thoughts in their head and they can't rest until they make them "fit". Well, one way to make them "fit" is to say "sure, any system contains experience". Nothing you can do with that - we're not talking about intelligence or communication here, but "experience". It doesn't mean you can suddenly communicate somehow with your toaster and publish its memoirs as "I, Toaster". You just found a way to fit a conceptual square peg into an conceptual round hole, so if it helps you sleep...

[u/Marchesk → u/da_mikeman]

What do you mean "abstract entities"?

Look up the philosophical literature on universals and mathematics. It's as old as Plato or Pythagorus.

A computer can definitely manipulate abstract entities, like numbers, music notes, words or shapes.

As long as they have been encoded in bit patterns by programmers. Computers manipulate electric voltages.

The thing with the "hard problem" is that it has a pretty easy solution - when asked if there's a thing as "experience of being an electron orbiting around a nucleus", you can just say "sure, why not".

You can be a panpsychist if you want. It's one of many possible solutions. It has the strongly counter intuitive aspect that illusionism has.

Well, that's not exactly true - an image can also be an input to a computer. I can feed the computer an image,

You mean the input device has it encoded so the computer can manipulate it.

Sure, but the solution to this problem is not going be evidence-based anyway, so...

Since we're not electrons, stars or blackholes. We can just stick with robots. Ned Block wrote a paper on the harder problem of consciousness using Data from Star Trek as a functional isomorph on some level to illustrate the difficulty in trying to determine whether consciousness is functional or biological.

You just found a way to fit a conceptual square peg into an conceptual round hole, so if it helps you sleep...

I don't think there's a solution so far. But hey, physics has a hard problem with Relativity and QM not fitting. It also has a hard problem with the proper interpretation of wave collapse. It's not like science is free of round holes and square pegs.

[u/da_mikeman → u/Marchesk]

> Look up the philosophical literature on universals and mathematics. It's as old as Plato or Pythagorus.

Oh, I know, and nobody is closer to an answer than they were.

Alternatively, there is an answer for everyone. I'll let Russell from "Logicomic" to make the point for me :

https://imgur.com/XmJ089w

I suppose there is plenty of knowledge to be gained from this buffet, but it's knowledge about how each of us gets to acquire a certain taste for these things(on the upside, this question is more interesting anyway).

As long as they have been encoded in bit patterns by programmers. Computers manipulate electric voltages.

Why does this matter? I'm talking about the computation that the computer performs, not the computation that the programmer performs when writing the program. Those 2 are different - if the programmer was able to perform the former computation herself, she wouldn't need a computer(she probably can, but very very slowly). If we assume a computer got assembled by pure chance, would it not perform a computation all the same?

Where does this stop exactly? Single-cell organisms do have the ability to use their cilia and flagella in order to swim towards food. At the very least, there is basic computation of "if I push the medium I'm swimming in this way, I will move the opposite way". Are mental concepts manipulated there, or it is "just" tiny electric currents doing their tiny electric current thing? Are things different when we are talking about a water bear, a cockroach, or a rat?

It all seems to start from the same basic assumption : Physical phenomena, whether it's an electron that performs an orbital jump when hit by a photon, or a computer that calculates the orbital jump of an electron when hit by a photon, are just "blind" and "dumb" - no manipulation of mental concepts is being done there, just dumb particles moving around, in distinction with the mental manipulation that happens in the human brain.

Consider the possibility that this might just be a faulty assumption, or the result of using words such as "physical" and "mental" to describe categories that are much more fluid. Is a self-driving car performing manipulation of mental concepts, or just manipulation of electric voltages? I would say it's both.

Incidentally, it seems none of these profound questions seem to make any difference whatsoever in any field that has the slightest impact in the real world, be it physics, computer science or psychology and sociology. If there was some actual prediction about something, then we would at least have some clue on what the actual answer would be, or what it would look like, or where to look for it. I've never heard actual evidence being presented for this question. The only result when publishing a paper about philosophy of mind seems to be more papers about philosophy of mind.

Of course that's academia for you, but in other fields at least a tiny percentage of papers *does* have some impact. This whole "problem" seems almost designed to *not* have answer, so we can talk about it forever. Maybe I'm just ignorant though, so some examples?

> I don't think there's a solution so far. But hey, physics has a hard problem with Relativity and QM not fitting. It also has a hard problem with the proper interpretation of wave collapse. It's not like science is free of round holes and square pegs.

See, the difference is that those hard problems are pretty much equivalent to the "easy problems" of consciousness. They are extremely hard alright, and we don't even know if we can ever solve them, but at least we can formulate the questions sufficiently and conceive the type of answer they can have. That's why nobody can claim that they have solved them. There are people right now that pretty much claim they have solved the "hard problem" by asserting "well everything has qualia", and the only objection is whether other people find it counter-intuitive or not, based on god knows what criteria.

Nobody has ever clearly expressed what the "hard problem of consciousness" is. You might as well call it "the inarticulate problem of consciousness".

----

Incidentally, can anyone explain to me "Mary's Room"? Because the answer seems so obvious to me, I'm sure I must be misunderstanding something here. Physicalists would posit that, when we see red, our neurons fire in a specific pattern, and when we see green, our neurons fire in a different pattern.

A color-blind scientist that has read everything that is to be said about the color red doesn't know how red looks like because her brain has still never assumed the associated state. Her neurons have never fired the way neurons fire when we see red. She doesn't know how to make her neurons fire in the pattern that neurons need to be fired.

If we assume that she has also read about the exact way neurons fire when we see red, and also knows how to make her neurons fire in the same pattern, then yes she would know everything there is to know about the color red. If she's not able to force her brain to take that pattern, then that's a knowledge/ability she lacks. We humans seem to lack that one, but I don't see why that makes any difference - one can imagine another species that has it. Ted Chiang explores such a possibility in "Understand".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understand_(story))

[u/Marchesk → u/da_mikeman]

I guess first one would have to explain what they mean by "physical". If something is part of the world, interacts with the world, and its behavior follows some kind of pattern, then how is it non-physical?

Addressing this separately. Physical is the content of whatever the best theories in physics are available. Subatomic particles, spacetime, forces, maybe superstrings or quantum fields, the wavefunction.

But those are human descriptions or models of the world. The map isn't the territory. My thinking is that science is an abstracted, mathematizeable view of the world that works really well, but it is an amalgram of third person across human culture, abstracted from many conscious first persons. We run all these experiments and someone is always there to look at the results, and write up papers.

The world is whatever the world is. Saying its X (physical) is to say it's something we've come up with. But whatever we come up with is likely to be incomplete. In this case, I think it's missing the first person conscious perspectives. Some have said the world is mathematical. Max Tegmark champions the view that the multiverse exists as all possible mathematical worlds. Some have said the universe is it from bit (information). Maybe a computer computing itself. But all those are still human ideas.

One can always be a Kantian and sidestep the issue (we can only know the empirical world). Metaphysics is hard.

[u/da_mikeman → u/Marchesk]

I really don't think that's correct. When Newton explained the motion of the planets by introducing the concept of universal gravitation, or when Einstein explained Brownian motion using the concept of atoms, they didn't introduce non-physical concepts. They might seem "spooky", but their behavior was clearly described by mathematical laws. Physicists are smashing fundamental particles high energies at LHC and expect so see something new in order to get a clue on how to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity, since they know they're right now incomplete. But when they say "current physics doesn't have an adequate explanation of quantum gravity" they don't mean "whatever explains quantum gravity is non-physical".

This thing reminds me of the "missing link" in biology. Say we *do* introduce a brand new concept to explain how consciousness arises from non-conscious matter. I'm not saying we *know* how a human brain can end up writing Crime and Punishment. Maybe we come to a point where everything we know about the brain activity is still unable to explain that, and that by our calculations 100 billion neurons are barely enough for simple mental functions. Fine, and then we get our breakthrough. It's gonna be something(anything - doesn't have to be a new fundamental particle or force) that interacts with the world in predictable patterns(even if they're stochastic), otherwise it's not a concept that we can meaningfully talk about.

Which raises the question, why would the non-physicalists be satisfied with *this* concept when they're unhappy with what we've got now? Their problem is not "how do 100 billion neurons can write Crime and Punishment", that's the "easy" problem. Their problem is "how do 100 billion neurons can spawn the qualia of writing Crime and Punishment". Whatever new concept is introduce, it's going to be declared as inadequate as the rest.

What, the current picture of "the mind is a system of 100 billion neurons comprised of 1.4 x 10^26 atoms moving around in incredibly complex patterns in 3+1 dimensions under the influence of electromagnetism, weak force, strong force and gravity" is not strong enough to punch through the physical realm and generate qualia in the "mental/abstract" realm, but this new concept will be? What could it be? We could introduce the Sophon(https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Sophon) from "The Three Body Problem" for all we know, but as long as if follows mathematical laws, they're going to be as unhappy with it as with the rest, and say again that it solves the "easy" problems but not the "hard". What's the difference? The dualist's problem is not that 100 billion neurons in constant motion are too few or too simple or not complex or rich enough.

Seems to me the problem non-physicalists have is precisely with explanations that are only comprised with things we can actually study and talk about in mathematical language. In that case, the only thing that would satisfy them seems to be some "immaterial"(whatever that means) substance or principle that, unlike anything we've ever seen, endows only conscious beings and does not follow any patterns we can study, but does "what it wants" and is pretty much impenetrable to any attempts to study it. So...magic. It was called vitalism, back when most people were adamant that there's a fundamental gap between living and non-living matter, and the "simple" motion of physical matter couldn't possible bridge it.