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The Hard Problem of Consciousness
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2019-03-10 at 10:40 PM UTC
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2019-03-10 at 10:51 PM UTC
Originally posted by SHARK I don't think a philosophical zombie is conceivable in a functional sense. All you have to concede is that if there is an explanation for why a particular experience is the way it is rather than some other way. What does it mean to actually have a conscious experience? If something behaves in that way in a mechanical sense, then that is what it means to have that experience. So I don't think there is a way to conceive of a universe identical to ours but minus conscious experience.
Lanny, read I Am A Strange Loop by Doug Hofstadter. Information structures can have some very interesting properties that, in a complicated relationship, could probably be conscious, or at least think they are conscious… At which point, what is the difference?
You're not even defining consciousness.
How the fuck are you going to assert claims about such a vague, ambiguous phenomenon.
You basically just created an entire thread to state that "the hard problem is a thing."
No shit, Sherlock.
Care to provide some kind of actual contribution? Or are you just trying to drop a bunch of terms of art to give off the impression that you actually know anything?
The only depth you possess is that associated with your colon being pounded by bus station hobos.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2019-03-10 at 11:11 PM UTCDon't talk to obbe about illusions, it's a dark dark road to go down.
Originally posted by SHARK I don't think a philosophical zombie is conceivable in a functional sense. All you have to concede is that if there is an explanation for why a particular experience is the way it is rather than some other way. What does it mean to actually have a conscious experience? If something behaves in that way in a mechanical sense, then that is what it means to have that experience. So I don't think there is a way to conceive of a universe identical to ours but minus conscious experience.
The idea isn't a universe identical to ours except there's no consciousness, it's a universe that's physically identical, but different otherwise. Pretty much everyone agrees that an explanation of why experience is some way and not some other involves the physical facts of the world, but there also seems to need to be some law or principle that governs why physical facts, and which physical facts, give rise to experience and which particular experience. It's this which you're asked to consider is different in a zombie-world. -
2019-03-10 at 11:15 PM UTClanny can i have all the pi you have on spectral, thanks
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2019-03-10 at 11:26 PM UTC
Originally posted by Lanny Don't talk to obbe about illusions, it's a dark dark road to go down.
The idea isn't a universe identical to ours except there's no consciousness, it's a universe that's physically identical, but different otherwise. Pretty much everyone agrees that an explanation of why experience is some way and not some other involves the physical facts of the world, but there also seems to need to be some law or principle that governs why physical facts, and which physical facts, give rise to experience and which particular experience. It's this which you're asked to consider is different in a zombie-world.
What I'm saying is that it's not conceivable that there is another universe physically identical to ours, which doesn't also include consciousness. You seem to be proposing some kind of property dualism. Why do you believe that there needs to be something extra that composes conscious experience? I think our current understanding of maths and physics already gives us everything we need to derive what it would take to make an information system conscious. The problem is how everything goes together. -
2019-03-10 at 11:30 PM UTC
Originally posted by SHARK it's not conceivable that there is another universe physically identical to ours, which doesn't also include consciousness.
Prove it, faggot.
Originally posted by SHARK I think our current understanding of maths and physics already gives us everything we need to derive what it would take to make an information system conscious. The problem is how everything goes together.
Wow, how many different ways can you re-word the exact same claim?
Is that what we're going in this thread? -
2019-03-10 at 11:42 PM UTCThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2019-03-11 at 12:37 AM UTC
Originally posted by Lanny Don't talk to obbe about illusions, it's a dark dark road to go down.
Illusion or not, consciousness is not something we just “believe in”: it is our immediate experience, and the social world as we know it wouldn’t be possible without this idea of Self endowed with consciousness and free will. The cornerstone of consciousness is metaphor. So what is metaphor, and how can it generate consciousness? The most fascinating property of language is its capacity to make metaphors. For metaphor is not a mere extra trick of language; it is the very constitutive ground of language. I am using metaphor here in its most general sense: the use of a term for one thing to describe another because of some kind of similarity between them or between their relations to other things.
There are thus always two terms in a metaphor, the thing to be described, the target, and the thing or relation used to elucidate it, the source. A metaphor is always a known source operating on a less known target. The human body is a particularly generative source, creating previously unspeakable distinctions in a variety of areas. The head of an army, table, page, bed, ship, household, or nail, or of steam or water; the face of a clock, cliff, card, or crystal; the eyes of needles, winds, storms, targets, flowers, or potatoes; the brow of a hill; the teeth of cogs or combs; the lips of pitchers, craters, augers; the tongues of shoes, board joints, or railway switches; the arm of a chair or the sea; the leg of a table, compass, sailor’s voyage, or cricket field; and so on and so forth.
In early times, language and its referents climbed up from the concrete to the abstract on the steps of metaphors, or actually created the abstract on the bases of metaphors. It is not always obvious that metaphor has played this all-important function. But this is because the concrete sources become hidden in phonemic change, leaving the words to exist on their own. Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb ‘to be’ was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the Sanskrit bhu, “to grow, or make grow,” while the English forms ‘am’ and ‘is’ have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmi, “to breathe.”
Consider any word which has meanings both from the physical-behavioural world and from the inner domain of cognition. For example, grasp: one can grasp a stone or one can grasp an idea. You don’t need to know the etymology of this verb to have a clear intuition about what is the target here and what the source, which meaning is primary and which metaphorical: the direction is always from the “outer” world to “inner”, from “objective” to “subjective”, from physical to cognitive. The mind refers to the outer, objective world to “model” its inner world of ideas: grasping an idea is like grasping a stone, not vice versa.
Have you ever wondered what actually happens in the brain when you understand a word? For example, if you listen to someone saying something as simple as that they jumped, what’s actually happening in your brain to create the understanding of what you’ve heard? There is an increasing body of evidence that such understanding involves partial simulation of the very action of jumping. The pattern of neural codes engaged in understanding the word jump and the pattern of neural codes engaged in actual jumping have a portion in common (but obviously not enough to make you jump whenever you say or hear the word). And if we hear the same word used metaphorically, for example something about someone jumping to conclusions, it would still involve processing of the word jump, and hence the corresponding neural simulation of actual jumping. The sensory properties of the source are brought in to contribute to the target meaning.
Metaphors generate the illusion of special inner mind-space where consciousness “takes place”. Every time the brain processes a sentence about grasping an idea or jumping to conclusion, it simulates a space where these actions might take place, a space where ideas, conclusions, thoughts are modelled as “things” in the outer world — something one can see, approach, jump to, or get hold of.
Consciousness itself emerges as a special kind of “metaphorical” operation in which the world around us is the source and what’s happening inside us, the target. And this internal model of the outside world contains a little “I” who acts there. If I approach a problem both “I” and the “problem” must be located within the same space. This thinking and willing “I” turns out to be a tiny little actor on the stage within my own mind-space.
A mind-space is a part of what it is to be conscious and what it is to assume consciousness in others. Moreover, things that in the physical-behavioral world do not have a spatial quality are made to have such in consciousness. Otherwise we cannot be conscious of them. This is spatialization. Time is an obvious example. If I ask you to think of the last hundred years, you may have a tendency to excerpt the matter in such a way that the succession of years is spread out, probably from left to right. But of course there is no left or right in time. There is only before and after, and these do not have any spatial properties whatever - except by analog. You cannot think of time except by spatializing it. Consciousness is always a spatialization in which the diachronic is turned into the synchronic, in which what has happened in time is excerpted and seen as a spatial projection.
This spatialization of time is what allows our little metaphorical “I”s - the actors within our mind-spaces - to travel in time: to reminiscence about the past and imagine different futures which is particularly important because of its potential role in willing and decision making. But the spatialization of time is also a metaphor: we understand time by modelling it as a kind of space, and this happens in language too. The "time as space" metaphor tends to be embedded not only into the vocabulary, but in the grammar as well - for example, when we use spatial prepositions for time periods (something may happen in America and in winter, within a building or within a month). Just as we learn to understand thoughts and ideas as objects in space when we acquire language in childhood, so do we learn to think of time as a space.
This is how consciousness is generated in each of us now: by modern languages and their metaphors. Languages were not always like this. Their inherent models of our inner worlds weren’t always there, they have evolved over time with language. And before that happened, there could have been no consciousness as we know it.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2019-03-11 at 12:43 AM UTC
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2019-03-11 at 12:56 AM UTC
Originally posted by Sophie We have at least a billion years more to go before the Sun starts to get too mean. We've been around for like 200k years look where we at, give it 200k more and i am pretty sure we've outsmarted death, time, and space. If we don't nuclear holocaust ourselves by that time at least.
Aren't the Dutch actively trying to replace themselves with the most inept people on earth? Giving preference to people based on ineptitude? I mean in that context who is "we"? -
2019-03-11 at 12:57 AM UTC
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2019-03-11 at 1:35 AM UTC
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2019-03-11 at 1:51 AM UTC
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2019-03-11 at 2:21 AM UTCwhat about subconscious ?
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2019-03-11 at 2:25 AM UTCWhy is everyone being mean?
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2019-03-11 at 2:25 AM UTC
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2019-03-11 at 3:20 AM UTC
Originally posted by MORALLY SUPERIOR BEING V: A Cat-Girl/Boy Under Every Bed Why is everyone being mean?
SHARK AKA Captain Falcon AKA Mahmoud AKA a million other alts...
Is a pseudo-intellectual blowhard who is more interested in petty e-rivalries than actually achieving intellectual growth and personal development, and so any attempt at a serious thread on this entire site that I post in will result in some kind of manifestation of his knee-jerk insecurities. -
2019-03-11 at 10:20 AM UTC
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2019-03-11 at 6:07 PM UTC@gadzooks, what do you think about the theory that consciousness is a "mind-space" created through metaphorical language?
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2019-03-11 at 6:49 PM UTC
Originally posted by Obbe @gadzooks, what do you think about the theory that consciousness is a "mind-space" created through metaphorical language?
Obbe, I absolutely loved your post on metaphor and language as a way of explaining the origins of inner experience. Like, I'm reading some stuff on that very subject right now, and academically speaking, it's RIGHT up my alley.
But, in terms of the actual "Hard Problem" of consciousness, it doesn't quite reach that level of explanation.
And that's precisely why it's called the "hard problem."
Your post kinda comes close to the topic, but it still doesn't explain PRECISELY when, and how, during the course of the evolution of these metaphorical and linguistic experiential phenomena, we went from physical automata to experiencing "I"'s.
But I do I want to reiterate that your post touched on some really good points that at least fall under the rubric of explaining consciousness, which is an endeavor that perplexes even the most prominent philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and other scholars.
The actual "Hard Problem", though, could quite possibly be relabeled the "Impossible Problem."
There's still the issue of explaining why we have inner experience when the world could just as easily exist exactly as is without any such experience.
