One of the core tasks of the contemplative lifestyle (which can certainly be practiced outside of monasteries) is to be awakened from all of the things we think we need and desire. These are usually the things that the (societally constructed) ego needs to feel secure and comfortable - hence so many contemplative traditions stress the importance of "dying to yourself". This is not 'negative' or even necessarily introverted - in fact, dealing with the insecurities that you have inherited from the expectations of the society around you can make you comfortable both alone and with people. There is no need to impress anyone; no need to feel insecure or alone; you're at peace with yourself and the world.

The contemplative tradition has a lot to teach our world - no manner of scientific or technological progress is going to help us before we're comfortable with being ourselves.

[citation needed]

“What it is like to be a bat”

“What it is like to experience something”

After having seen descriptions of all the physical components of experience:

“It is Qualia! What it is like to see red”

Having been described all the differences between sensing red and green, and people who can’t tell the difference, and the suggestion that maybe what you call consciousness is the collection of abilities to distinguish various things...

“No, it is something more”.

What is it? How is that different than saying there is a “true essence” of a thing, over and above its properties? This is what greek philosophers asked about.

“It is the sense of identity. Integrating into one experience.”

Ok so what about Theseus’ ship? If all the cells are being replaced? What about your gut brain? Coukd it have a separate consciousness living in the same body?

“These are interesting questions”.

Here is a statement I will make:

If you are careful to define your words unambgiously, in terms of RICH connections to other concepts, you will find that you won’t be able to ask a single question about the following subjects without having a straightforward and simple reductionist-sounding answer:

Morality

Consciousess

Existence

Theseus' ship is a problem for a purely materialistic explanation of consciousness, for, by that account, consciousness should be a function of your material makeup, and yet, it remains constant despite change in both what makes up your cells and the specific configuration of those cells.

As for RICH I don't know what that means.

The fact that you would continue to call a ship the same after exchanging all its parts is not an ontological problem, it is a problem arising from the imprecise use of language or intention to use an approximate/aggregate notion of identity. (I would recommend studying topology for a more modern understanding of this.)

If you're interested in having that idea challenged, I heartily recommend reading "Godel, Escher, Bach" - the book explains how complexity (perhaps to the point of consciousness) can emerge from "simple" systems.

It's not like this is a trivial problem that philosophers of mind have figured out long ago. As someone else mentioned in this thread, it is a very deep problem. If you want to have your view challenged I encourage you to read any introductory book to philosophy of mind.

Also, in terms of GEB, the book shows how self-reference leads to a system being able to make statemets about itself, leading to, eventually, something more than (apparently) the sum of their parts. It’s a funky mix of philosophy and math and I think you’d like it.

I'll read GEB :)

Theseus's ship is not a problem for materialistic views at all. A function of matter configuration is not the same as a function of matter. In the same way, a wave on water is constantly changing its material makeup, and yet you can still call it "the same wave".

> As for RICH I don't know what that means.

Rich, i.e. non-trivial. That is, no tautologies or something slightly above tautology in the depth of information.

As computers try to anticipate the future more, they may also start to "experience" things.

Furthermore, thinking and consciousness is not the same thing.

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/AnticipationControl.pdf

It could work differently, but for some reasons it doesn't, and we don't understand the reasons.

Believing that consciousness can be explained in terms of material processes is certainly a valid belief, but it is just that: a belief. Believing that a certain configuration of atoms, no matter how involved, can give rise to subjective experience is not far from believing in some kind of magic.

And before you retort that a lot of phenomena in nature are 'emergent', I will say:all those phenomena are ultimately explicable in terms of their basic atomic constituents. Consciousness is qualitatively different. You cannot start with the experience of being hungry and then somehow explain the whole process from your stomach being empty to that qualitative experience and how it feels for you.

It's a belief, true, but it's kind of a privileged one, since it's so successful at explaining literally every other thing we observe about the universe. Why brains would be different?

> Believing that a certain configuration of atoms, no matter how involved, can give rise to subjective experience is not far from believing in some kind of magic.

This argument would be stronger 500 years ago, but I don't know how one can consider this "not far from believing in magic" after seeing a computer. Or, after observing brains of different animals - from insects to simians. Or, after discovering circuit-bending and realizing how similar it is to prodding a brain. There's ample evidence against the hypothesis that the human brain is the only magical object in the universe and that it somehow transcends physics.

> And before you retort that a lot of phenomena in nature are 'emergent', I will say:all those phenomena are ultimately explicable in terms of their basic atomic constituents. Consciousness is qualitatively different. You cannot start with the experience of being hungry and then somehow explain the whole process from your stomach being empty to that qualitative experience and how it feels for you.

Why? If I gave you a device that could trace the state of every molecule and charge in my brain to the extent allowed by uncertainty principle, would you still be confident in believing that? Just because we don't have a device like this doesn't mean consciousness is magic.

It's successful at explaining everything that can be explained in material terms, yes! Science is really good at it.

>This argument would be stronger 500 years ago, but I don't know how one can consider this "not far from believing in magic" after seeing a computer. Or, after observing brains of different animals - from insects to simians. Or, after discovering circuit-bending and realizing how similar it is to prodding a brain. There's ample evidence against the hypothesis that the human brain is the only magical object in the universe and that it somehow transcends physics.

I cannot see how any one of those things you mentioned have to do with the utter strangeness that is subjective experience? I'm not saying a brain cannot perform computations, if that's what you're getting out of this. Why you mention a computer I don't know - there is nothing that indicates a computer has subjective experience and nothing about a computer makes me believe that creating subjective states is something that can be done with atoms alone. And that is what is 'magical' about this line of reasoning.

>Why? If I gave you a device that could trace the state of every molecule and charge in my brain to the extent allowed by uncertainty principle, would you still be confident in believing that? Just because we don't have a device like this doesn't mean consciousness is magic.

See above. Even if you were to trace every molecule in my brain, you would be no closer to really explaining a subjective experience. You would be able to show correlations, yes! 'Now he's angry, look at this cluster of atoms'. But that's not an explanation of the experience as such. That's the unbridgeable gap I'm talking about.

Personally, I don't see a basis to believe there's something more to it. I'd look at the cluster of atoms in your brain and say this is anger. This is the computational process that is anger in your brain. I don't see a meaningful difference between this and doing the same to a computer - I could point at a cluster of atoms and EM fields in the CPU and say, "this is factorization of numbers; this is how the cryptographic routine this CPU executes manifests". Why would there be anything else here?

Some people feel there is no way for such a "feeling" to form spontaneously out of the cold, dead matter. Since some matter doesn't experience this feeling, how does it spontaneously form, out of no-feeling, at some threshold configuration? What is this threshold exactly? These people think it must special, since we can imagine (in principle) a clump of matter interacting physically in time to simulate the external appearance of a human mind, yet remain no-feeling on the inside.

Other people don't seem to grasp what the problem the first people are posing might possibly be. The "feeling" is simply a property of the universe which arises in some physical configurations. Computers can have subjective experience and even today's computers might have it in some form. There is no discrete, magical step required.

I find myself continually switching teams on this matter. The second position might be more believable after we find some laws governing the relationship between physical configurations and the nature of the resulting experience. But since subjective experience is necessarily... subjective, it seems very hard (impossible?) to test.

The brain can compute. That's extraordinary. I say one type of thing does that, computers. You say no, two things, computers and then also brains. But when pressed to explain what is a brain if not a computer you'll just sputter (probably at length) without offering any substance.

In a sense that's the wrong way up to explain it. Church-Turing intuitively defines computation (the things computers can do) in terms of what our brains can do, so the match is not a coincidence but it also isn't there for the reason you probably expect. Because it's an intuition Church-Turing isn't provable, but you may notice that we subsequently built an _entire world-changing industry_ upon it in a lifetime.

You pointed to a review, others have written entire books, always they can be summarised as simply arguments from incredulity. "What? Nonsense, the brain can't be a computer, I simply won't believe that". It's unfortunate that we have woken such people from their daydreaming, I have no doubt that if similarly aroused they'd give the mathematicians what for too, "What? Nonsense, how can there be numbers which aren't ratios of whole numbers, I simply won't believe it".

You'll see in my comment and your quote that I don't say the brain can't compute. I agree, the brain can compute. But that doesn't mean it is a computer, because computing is an ability. People can do many other things aside from computing, none of which rely on computation, for instance they can imagine, which is the ability to think new thoughts. Computers can't imagine because all they do is compute: that's their programming. No amount of programming can produce imagination. Computation and imagination are categorically distinct as different intellectual powers and abilities.

You are conflating an ability with ontology. We know what a brain is. It's a collection of fatty material with neurons that do not explicitly fire exactly like a computer. Key word there is like. Church-Turing built a model of computational logic off of intuitions about the brain and formal mathematical logic. That's it's not provable doesn't prove your point; it removes any distinction between it being right or wrong: because it is a model (lets make something like the brain).

That an industry was built on computation doesn't prove anything. We know computation is an ability. For instance it's also something we can do with abacuses. We could have built an enormous industry on building elaborate abacuses. We built computers do be extremely fast at computation. We didn't build computers to be brains.

You'll notice, if you read the review, that the author of the review repeatedly cites cognitive neuroscientists, even evangelists of the singularity, philosophers, psychologists, and zoologists, who have published at length on this topic and repeatedly critcise and disrupt the simple idea that the brain is a computer or an algorithm or even a machine. An entire branch of philosophy developed off of Ludwig Wittgenstein to counter the computational model of consciousness. Numerous books in the Philosophy of Mind argue that the assumption that the brain is a computer is not just unsupported, it is logically nonsensical.

The brain exists in a physical universe, made out of matter/energy, and its behaviours are entirely dictated by the laws of physics; that's a fairly accepted truth unless you have solid evidence otherwise.

The laws of physics are mathematical and can be computed by their very nature, and we are already pretty good at simulating physical interactions to a quantum level, and this ability improves over time.

At some point in time, unless there is "magic" or missing physics, a sufficiently powerful computer with a physically accurate simulation of a brain would produce virtually identical results to a real brain.

So either there must be new physics involved, or, the notion that a sufficiently advanced computer simulation can't produce imagination must be abandoned.

A team of scientists able to sufficiently model the physics of the brain (and presumably the entire central nervous system, I imagine a disembodied brain simulation would experience a horrific form of locked-in syndrome) would not need to be concerned about emergent properties of the simulation such as a sense of consciousness, or thought, or imagination. Those things will just happen once the simulation is perfected.

Indeed the cognitive neuroscience folk, etc, would be invaluable to actually understanding, training, interpreting and caring for the brain simulation, and figuring out if its behaviours and interactions constitute consciousness etc, so I do not think this has to even be framed as programmers pretending to know about brain stuff vs brain people who dismiss any notion of computationally recreating consciousness. It would be a team effort that works both ways, but is already doomed to fail if half the team thinks it's impossible from the get-go.

You'll see in my comment above this one that I agree that the brain is a physical thing. But abilities and powers are not physical. That's not voodoo magic. That's what abilities are. Think about horsepower. The horsepower of a car does not reside in any one physical thing, not the carburetor, or the intake manifold, or the piston, or the wheels; it's an ability of the car: it is able to go at such and such horsepower. That is what horsepower is.

The same applies to computation. Computing something is an ability, but we have many more intellectual and cognitive abilities beside computing things.

As a result

> a sufficiently powerful computer with a physically accurate simulation of a brain would produce virtually identical results to a real brain.

is just you are assuming that it will work, but nothing about computers supports that in the slightest. That's just a guess.

> A team of scientists able to sufficiently model the physics of the brain (and presumably the entire central nervous system, I imagine a disembodied brain simulation would experience a horrific form of locked-in syndrome) would not need to be concerned about emergent properties of the simulation such as a sense of consciousness, or thought, or imagination. Those things will just happen once the simulation is perfected.

All of this is still an assumption.

Again, that doesn't mean you are right or wrong: it means its an assumption. You have to accept the limitations of your assumption and the limitations of modelling the brain on a computer are large and glaring.

> Indeed the cognitive neuroscience folk, etc, would be invaluable to actually understanding, training, interpreting and caring for the brain simulation, and figuring out if its behaviours and interactions constitute consciousness etc, so I do not think this has to even be framed as programmers pretending to know about brain stuff vs brain people who dismiss any notion of computationally recreating consciousness. It would be a team effort that works both ways, but is already doomed to fail if half the team thinks it's impossible from the get-go.

You are assuming here that only the programmers are heading down the right path. But you don't know that. It's entirely reasonable (and I would say much more supportable) to say that the programmers are heading down the wrong path: their path will lead to nothing at all. That's because the programmers have fallen to a category error.

You think they need to model the brain on a computer for it to make sense. But there is actually very little if anything to support that.

Brains are brains. Computers are computers. That computer science can be fuzzily applied to the study of brains around the ability to compute does not mean the study of brains is computer science or that brains are computers.

What you're asking is for computers to be rational. That given garbage input, it will produce intelligible output. Computers cannot do this unless you program them to.

Human minds are non-deterministic in many, many, many ways. Hand the same input to the same mind and you'll get a different output every single time, unless the mind willed itself to act rationally. But they are deterministic enough that you can study their behavior. Other brains are not as non-deterministic, so their behavior is easier to study.

Look at it from a thermodynamic standpoint. Biological systems arose to conserve order against entropy. A fully-deterministic system will shed order, it's only through non-deterministic means that biological systems can conserve order.

The mind is the most complex system nature has devised that can not only slow the aggregation of entropy, but also create order! It's not breaking the laws of physics, but yet it can create all kinds of order.

Conway's Game of Life is an excellent illustration of the concept. You have to work hard and study the domain in order to find stable systems. Otherwise they just drop to equilibrium fast.

> Human minds are non-deterministic in many, many, many ways. Hand the same input to the same mind and you'll get a different output every single time

That's not non-deterministic. That's simply stateful. Most human-made systems you interact with daily are stateful, so it's not exactly surprising.

When I say "deterministic in practice" vs. "deterministic in theory" I mean this: a system is deterministic in practice if you can actually predict its outputs based on its inputs with reasonable amount of effort. A LED hooked up to a switch and a battery is deterministic in practice. So is a program computing GCD on 32-bit integers. A system is deterministic in theory if it's deterministic, but actually predicting its outputs requires absurd amount of computation. Lorenz system and weather are two examples. So is protein folding and turbulent flow. I see no reason why a fly brain, a mouse brain, or a human brain wouldn't be such systems either. The entire universe could be one, if you subscribe to many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

You're changing the meaning of determinism and bringing it closer to rationalism. Your introduction of the element of theory to the mix is a violation of Occam's Razor. We already have philosophy and a word that covers what you want it to cover. Theory is a component of rationalism, not of determinism. If you need theory to understand a system, then it already has elements of non-determinism. Theory is what you need to make sense of the non-deterministic. Because theory deals with uncertainty, you wouldn't need any validation of your hypotheses if the system was truly deterministic. One observation would be enough to ascertain the whole thing.

A considered study of history would reveal where you're going wrong here. The Greeks invented empiricism and philosophy and science while the Egyptians never got there despite only being a tiny distance away. They wanted to distance themselves from theological frames. Despite all this, the Egyptians built pyramids. They understood determinism. They could not understand science. Determinism made them good engineers. Engineering is not science.

> A system is deterministic in theory if it's deterministic, but actually predicting its outputs requires absurd amount of computation.

Now you're starting to dip into computational complexity territory. Predicting outputs is the domain that the halting problem puts a backstop to.

To prove to you that a brain is better than a computer, all I have to do is state the obvious, humans make algorithms, not the other way around. Sure, there are programs that will devise algorithms, but humans have to understand the domain before they can make computers do their work for them.

Your examples of Lorenz systems and weather do not change things at all. Humans have a better understanding of weather than computers do. In fact, humans have an entire body of theory that attempts to make sense of why such things have difficult-to-determine causation, chaos theory. Humans devised it, not computers. And they devised it using the tools of epistemology, working out the details of justification of knowledge via seeking rigor, not in the scientific method of dreaming up hypotheses based on empirical analysis and testing them. Chaos theory is more math than science.

In other real ways, humans outclass other mammals, even though we largely share the same macro brain structures. We keep monkeys in cages, monkeys do not keep us in cages.

I'm not sure how much more I have to state the obvious here. You seem to be the one seeking out a special domain in which the rules don't apply, one in which computers are wholly analogous to brains. It may, and this is speculation, be true in degree rather than kind.

But the halting problem itself illustrates a domain in which humans are able to reason past, whereas we cannot possibly program a computer to do it. Computers cannot program themselves to find gradations of the halting problem. Humans have to write algo-generating algos. The pace of comp-sci progress at the moment is fully dictated by human ingenuity, and if you think about it, any change in this means that the singularity is upon us.

I suspect that we'll never be able to get computers to fully take the place of brains. There will always be domains where brains are better than algos. Prove me wrong. Humans are capable of wanting things, even the best machine learning algos at the moment struggle with finding purpose. Finding purpose is something even the most basic virus can achieve. And we can't even determine whether virii are alive or not.

And that's super basic. How much more self-awareness do you think algos can find before running into hard physical limits? The computational and memory concerns are huge. I predict the hard limit of engineered systems will be well below full self-awareness. Instead we'll have to create biological systems to carry on progress. Dogs will get smarter, mice will get smarter, apes will eventually start doing things that humans do now, once we can fit our ethics around it.

Are you sure? Remember that memory also counts as an input if it's used in a computation; it seems to me that this applies to both humans and computers.

For a harrowing account of what a mind may do when exposed to very nearly the same inputs, you may be interested in one segment from this Radiolab episode: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/radiolab-loops

It describes a patient with transient global amnesia who has a looping conversation with her daughter. (There's a link to a video of the conversation on that page as well.) Under normal circumstances this wouldn't happen, as once you've had a conversation you also have memories of having that conversation. But if you're unable to form memories...

No, it's not because of that. It's because it is effectively a computer. Not in the vague sense of "it has stuffs connected to stuffs and there's electricity involved", but in the more specific sense that it takes inputs, produces complex outputs, has clearly identifiable hardware and indirectly identifiable software. It even has internal structure we're only beginning to understand, but that we know enough about to reasonably infer what computations happen where. There's little reason to assume there's some metaphysical mystery here, as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic.

TL;DR: what else could it be? And before someone says "antenna", I don't buy it. "Computer" is a simpler explanation for all known facts than remote consciousness being received by the brain. See my take on this before[0]. See also: Occam's razor.

> "I know about computers. Let's assume the brain is a computer and consciousness is an algorithm. I can now comment on the brain and consciousness."

Yeah, well, sure. If I know the limit of applicability of my computer knowledge, I sure can comment on brain and consciousness. Like, I wouldn't say "it's vulnerable to SQL injection" because that would be an idiotic statement. But I could say "it implements visual processing, audio processing, collects other telemetry, and does sensor fusion in real-time in under 20 Watts, with power to spare". Because that's observation, physics, and modelling reality along a particular perspective of interest.

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19490801

You're conflating the ability to compute with ontology. Computers compute. That's all they do. They're programmed to do only that. Humans have other abilities, such as imagination, that are not computational. Computers cannot imagine, not because of limited hardware or software; they can't imagine because they only compute. Imagination isn't computational. All throughout your response you are using the terminology of computers and software as if they are completely intuitive, but we have other terminology to define those things: medical terms define parts as the brain as parts of the brain not as hardware because that's a metaphor; the cerebelum is like this part of the computer. What they are is not the same as what they can do. That's not some magical mystery, or even obscure metaphysics. A car's horsepower is not in its carburetor, or its gas, or its manifold, because the horsepower of a car is what it can do, its an ability, a power. In the same sense the brain can compute, but that doesn't mean it is a computer.

What else could it be? A brain. Animals have them. They are not computers. But they can compute. The field of computer science and software development only slightly aligns with studying the brain.

> If I know the limit of applicability of my computer knowledge, I sure can comment on brain and consciousness.

Yes and when it is no longer applicable it is no longer right or wrong: it's just assumption. That you can fuzzily attach assumptions to arguments about the brain does not mean the brain is a computer. It means you can fuzzily model the brain on a computer, but that model will have glaring gaps. You can build from your assumptions but you have to accept the limitations of that assumption. Assuming the brain is a computer comes with glaring limitations.

A car's horsepower is in the engine. That's what an engine does. Burns fuel, provides work over time. Work over time is denominated in horsepower - or, in saner company, in watts. Categories like "engine" or "computer" are not excluding. That thing in the car can be "an engine", "a hunk of metal" and "an expensive paperweight" at the same time. Similarly, if brain can compute, it is a computer. It's also an organ.

> Humans have other abilities, such as imagination, that are not computational.

Evidence needed. Why would it not be computational? We can, and do, easily build imagination-like computations. A fuzzy search on a graph. A series of simulations with relaxed constraints and somewhat randomized initial states. They all resemble aspects of imagination; it's not a big leap to conclude that imagination is nothing but a more complex variant of such computations.

> It means you can fuzzily model the brain on a computer, but that model will have glaring gaps.

Models exist on a map, not in the territory. So do brains and computers. The territory is made of whatever sub-quark substrate the reality is made of. When you say "brain", what you're really referring to is a model, and a pretty black-boxy one. Viewing the brain as a computer is an attempt to apply a model that's little more transparent (and therefore more useful); as long as it matches observable evidence (and it does), it's the right thing to do.

> A car's horsepower is in the engine.

Where is it in the engine? The engine can go 180hp. But the engine does not contain 180 hp. That's what the concept of an ability or a power is. A broken engine cannot go 180 hp. But, if as you say, it is in the engine, then that distinction would be irrelevant. We would still say a broken engine can go 180 hp. But we don't.

> Similarly, if brain can compute, it is a computer. It's also an organ.

Right, you'll see I have never said the brain can't compute. But that doesn't mean it is simply a computer. If the assumption that the brain is a computer is to stand then the abilities of a computer should be compared to the abilities of a brain, or a person. There are those that match. We agree on that. But there are those that do not. And that means the assumption that the brain simply is a computer is flawed. It is an organ that can compute. But to extend from that that it is a computer is eliding the crucial difference between the two. That is your assumption.

> Evidence needed. Why would it [imagination] not be computational?

Let's ignore that the premise you are making: that imagination is computational, requires you to support it as well;

> imagination-like computations

> A fuzzy search on a graph

> A series of simulations with relaxed constraints and somewhat randomized initial states

All require you to posit things that are -like, or somewhat like imagination. But computers are programmed. They can't think new thoughts. They are closed deterministic systems. That their output seems imaginative or novel does not mean the computer has the ability to imagine, it means the computational output was unexpected to you or the people who wrote the code. The idea that imagination is computational is a category error.

> not a big leap to conclude that imagination is nothing but a more complex variant of such computations

This is actually an enormous leap. Can computers imagine? You will find zero agreement in that regard. That doesn't prove your point. You'll need to provide evidence that computers can actually violate their programming, cannot just compute and instead imagine. But that's not what computers do. Computers compute. That they can do things that seem like imagination to you does not mean they can imagine.

>> It means you can fuzzily model the brain on a computer, but that model will have glaring gaps.

> Models exist on a map, not in the territory. So do brains and computers. The territory is made of whatever sub-quark substrate the reality is made of. When you say "brain", what you're really referring to is a model, and a pretty black-boxy one. Viewing the brain as a computer is an attempt to apply a model that's little more transparent (and therefore more useful); as long as it matches observable evidence (and it does), it's the right thing to do.

Excuse my original words, I meant "fuzzily model the brain as a computer

Again, I don't think applying the computer as a model is completely invalid. But it has limitations. You can't just brush off those limitations when you talk about the brain as a computer. They fundamentally mean the comparison is less useful. Supposing it is 1 to 1, which you are doing leads you to build on assumptions that are unsupported. You have to accept that the assumption that the brain is a computer has serious criticisms brought against it. And you have to defend that assumption. You can't simply ignore them and argue that you are right.

For instance viewing the brain as computer frequently does not match the observable evidence. We can imagine. Computers cannot. That is observable. So how do you support the assumption that the brain is a computer in spite of that?

I have those too, and no offense to you personally, but I call bullshit on both mine and your acquaintances. In case of people I know, there was not one situation for which I couldn't find a more plausible explanation - which usually boils down to that for enough trials, even the rare coincidences sometimes happen.

> there is no a priori reason to believe science can answer all questions we have.

There is this one reason that it's literally the job of science. Science isn't a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book, it's the aggregation of everything that reliably works for extracting information about observable reality. And to be clear - I'm not saying that as someone who has Faith in Science (as opposed to religion). It's just that the sentence "science can't ever answer a question about reality" is a category error - it's saying "the set of ways you can answer questions about reality with can't be used to answer a question about reality". Nonsense.

> consciousness and subjectivity is unlike anything else in the world and bridging the qualitative gap between subjective experience and the mechanistical world is a completely different task than explaining, say, what makes a stone roll the way it does

But is it? The hint is given by the fact that there's more than one thinking human in existence. You may feel that answers about your subjective experiences are out of reach of science, but to the extent subjective experiences have any impact on reality, you can use science to study my subjective experiences (as expressed by me), and I can do the same to you.

This isn't true. The word is often used to describe that. But science is first and foremost a method. It's not the knowledge itself. It's not the techniques. There are other techniques besides scientific ones that we use to obtain information about the world. Math, for instance, isn't science. Statistical methods are not scientific methods.

Science concerns itself with obtaining empirical basis for causation. Studying the physical world does not provide insight into every problem we have. You don't try to debug your software problem by hooking up a multimeter to your CPU! We need to use alternative methodologies than scientific ones.

To lump them all under one word is wrong. Your categories are off, which makes your following statement:

> It's just that the sentence "science can't ever answer a question about reality" is a category error - it's saying "the set of ways you can answer questions about reality with can't be used to answer a question about reality". Nonsense."

... even more wrong.

Science is closer to a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book than it is to your assertion. You're using the word science to describe what epistemology calls justification. In epistemological terms, knowledge is a justified true belief. Science is a form of justification. There are other forms.

Since science is empirical, relying on the material world, then the assertion starts to carry water if and only if you can first prove physicalism. I personally am fully on board with materialism, but will rebel very hard against physicalism. Calling math a form of science feels very wrong. I'm on the fence about positivism, I need to think more about it.

Fair enough - this 'statistical argument' is a convenient explanation that can always be invoked, but in this case I don't really consider it to be very satisfactory as an explanation of the phenomena I have been told about (I would put the likelihood for something like those phenomena to happen 'by chance' to be so abysmally low that it seems impossible).

> There is this one reason that it's literally the job of science. Science isn't a bunch of fixed methods from a holy book, it's the aggregation of everything that reliably works for extracting information about observable reality.

I disagree. "Science (from the Latin word scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.". This is far from saying 'science can answer any question'. But again, you're free to believe that science can do that. I just don't happen to believe it can.

> But is it? The hint is given by the fact that there's more than one thinking human in existence. You may feel that answers about your subjective experiences are out of reach of science, but to the extent subjective experiences have any impact on reality, you can use science to study my subjective experiences (as expressed by me), and I can do the same to you.

I think your answer to the other thread makes it clear that we have some insurmountable philosophical differences here. If you believe that showing the correlation between a configuration of atoms and the subjective experience that accompanies that configuration to be 'an explanation' of that subjective experience, we have very different expectations of what constitutes an explanation.

- Do you believe that there are laws of physics we can not perceive and understand?

- If no: Why? How does it interact with usual matter and physics? Is this the unexplainable magic?

- If we can perceive and thus hopefully one day understand all laws of physics, can we simulate them?

- If, in the future, we are able to simulate all physics, what stops us from simulating the life of a human? (though likely significantly slower)

- This simulated human should react undistinguishable form a real human. Would you call this simulated human conscious?

- If yes, then where does this consciousness come from except the simulation state?

- If no, how do we know if some other being except ourself is conscious?

- Can there be two similar beings demonstrating the same behavior, but with only one of them being conscious?

The belief that there could exist parts of reality that the scientific method can't explain does not require having specific examples.

Even if all of reality can be understood by physics, that doesn't mean it can be simulated.

If physical reality can be simulated, then you could simulate the physical reality that makes up a person.

There is no guarantee that your simulation of the physical reality of a person would respond identically to an actual person.

There's a large body of philosophy on this, but basically it comes down to life working out better if we all assume everyone else is conscious.

There probably can be two similar beings demonstrating identical behavior with only one being conscious. Depends on what you define consciousness as I imagine.

I happen to lean towards believing Science can explain reality and that consciousness is a physical phenomenon, but to claim that things categorically must be that way is unfounded.

As for your questions: - There seems to be aspects of the universe that are related to 'meaning' rather than to 'mechanics'. How that is related to the physical universe I certainly have no theory that hasn't been thought of before. Perhaps the physical world is the 'shadow' of the world of 'meaning'/spirit? I don't really know.

- We can certainly simulate all laws of physics as detectable by science. Whether that's all there is, however, is something I don't believe.

- Leaving the debate of free will aside, I certainly don't think we'll be able to simulate the life of a human in its completeness (unless we're somehow given some insight into how subjectiveness can exist in this universe) - i.e. including the subjective dimension of that human's life.

- Thus, I wouldn't call that human conscious, no.

- We can't :) Our own conscious experience is all we can be completely sure of (which is why I also find it so extremely odd to prefer the 'mechanistic worldview' when that involves disregarding our own conscious experience, which is the only thing we really have to start from!)

- In principle, I think so, yes, but only by somehow pre-programming that unconscious being to act in exactly the same way (this relates to the concept of free will).

As you can see, I don't have a clear theory of consciousness - mine is mostly a negative position in the sense that I don't believe matter, as described by the laws of physics, can give a coherent explanation of the phenomenon of consciousness. Where to go from there is not clear, but there are a lot of philosophers of mind thinking about the issue :)

(Also, again, I don't consider this position more 'magical' than believing that arranging atoms in a given configuration will 'somehow' give rise to subjective experience).

That "you see no way" doesn't confirm more than that. It's about your own thinking:

http://skepdic.com/subjectivevalidation.html

http://skepdic.com/wishfulthinking.html

But after further reflection I have arrived at a different conclusion.

Throwing out allegations of wishful thinking in a debate should at least be substantiated. Otherwise I can equally validly say it's wishful thinking on your part to believe consciousness can be explained in material terms.

Now if you would claim there’s a teapot orbiting Neptune I would also not be able to disprove your claim. But based on what I know about the world, I wouldn’t expect a teapot being there. So from my perspective if you claim that it’s there, you must be in the “Subjective validation” state: “validating words, initials, statements, or signs as accurate because one is able to find them personally meaningful and significant.”

So my guess is that it deeply matters to you to believe that you are fundamentally different from all other animals. Which is a wishful thinking.

Specifically, humans as spices indeed developed the capability to talk about things, for which a kind of symbolic manipulation and processing is needed. Once the capability exists, inventing the names for the abstract concepts is also just a simple process. The names like “soul” etc.

:) I urge you to read through this quote and then ask yourself who is making more assumptions and who are partaking in wishful thinking. I have already stated that I really don't have a problem with us being matter 'only' and yet you find this statement somehow so incredible that you have to claim that this 'deeply matters' to me, despite what I actually claim is the reason for my belief.

To me, the extraordinary claim is that matter arranged in a certain way can give rise to subjective experience. That is what requires extraordinary evidence, in the same way I would need evidence if you said that by putting sticks together to form a pentagram you were able to summon a demon.

Your teapot around neptune is neither here nor there as an argument, but since I have encountered it before I am guessing it's taken from some kind of 'sceptic's manual for discussion'. It has little relevance here, however, as I am not claiming something completely taken out of the blue, but rather something that is based on direct experience with the world, i. e. my own subjective experience.

My belief is that you even don't want to understand it.

There are no "laws of physics" that have to be changed to make a computer that is as complex as a person's brain: it's just that our technology is inefficient: one human's brain has some 100 billion neurons, we have had a significant effort to simulate around 100 million times less:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm

The organic cells are simply extremely efficient in the tasks they are doing, compared to our technology.

But even that small order of magnitude of cells are enough to evolve a basic "self awareness": it's simply an evolutionary advantage for multicellular life forms not to treat their own parts of the body the same as the competition and the rest of the environment. Basically a need to treat distinctively "myself" "food" "a potential sex partner" and an "enemy" is built in in the complex life forms that move (i.e. all kinds of animals).

That "special feeling" of you "being special" that you are aware of is something that you share with most of the complex life, and it is not a surprise in any way.

Your argument about the complexity of computers would have weight if I had been claiming that the reason consciousness cannot be found outside humans is because nothing can be as complex as the human brain; I am not claiming that. Hence you can make computers as complex as you want - you still haven't answered how subjective experience can arise from matter.

There is nothing about me in particular that is special, but every conscious being does possess a quality or is inhabited by a phenomenon that is unlike anything else in the universe that we know of. That makes it pretty damn special, yes.

But again, it's not the feeling of feeling special that I am talking about here. It is the phenomenon of subjective experience.

Thanks for trying to explain your belief to me. If we concentrate on exactly your last post, maybe you can understand how I see it: I see again that you claim that you came to that conclusion "intellectually and rationally" but everything else contradicts that. I see the claim to uniqueness of conscious beings (and I still haven't heard from you if you consider only humans "conscious") as a "the phenomenon of subjective experience." That is, because you "subjectively experience" it, that means to me "not rationally" and I still conclude it's your "feeling of being special."

If you would really approach your claims "intellectually and rationally" you'd understand that that "subjective experience" which you see as something special is an emerging property. And the emerging properties are seldom "intuitive" and all appear to us "unlike anything else in the universe" until we simply use enough computation to reproduce them.

If you are aware of the history of human understanding of the movements of planets you would know that even these simple paths were before seen "unlike anything else in the universe": we didn't know how anything can continue to move so, and before Galileo we didn't even know that anything could not circle the Earth -- note the Earth being completely "special" in that understanding. Then, only better measurements helped us see the truth: Galileo discovering moons circling around other planets (making our Moon not special) and proving that the circular motion around other planets exists. Tycho Brache more accurately measuring the movements of the planets, and Kepler recognizing that all the paths can be seen as ellipsoid once we accept Earth's non-uniqueness, but that it actually moves around the Sun. Note: only to come to that conclusion, Kepler needed the huge amount of precise measurements that nobody before him had! And he had to perform for that time immense number of calculations, something that was certainly out of reach to 99.9999999999% (I'm not sure about the number of nines) of the human population at that moment, especially out of reach even to those who were rich enough and knowledgeable enough to perform them, but who would still not be even willing to spend so much time of their life on that topic unless they were ready to accept that the Earth doesn't have to be special in being a center of the universe.

And finally, even after that unique amount of measurements and calculations, it was still not answerable to anybody what is moving the planets in that ellipsoid paths, that is how anything like that can "arise" from anything we "subjectively knew." That is, anybody could claim exactly what you claim now.

But then came Newton, being lucky to invent a new way to speed up the calculations: the infinitesimal calculus. It was effectively a new "language" that allowed immensely more concise description of the calculations involved, which allowed him to being able to describe the movements of the planets and moons as, up until then completely different from anything anybody "subjectively knew", the continuous free fall toward the object around which they rotate.

Note: unless you studied physics, you most probably don't even know that the planets are really continuously in the "free fall" or even that exactly that is the reason why the humans, being inside of the International Space Station orbiting only 250 mi above the Earth, still can "float" inside of it. The gravitational forces are quite strong only 250 mi above the Earth, but the cause of the stuff and humans floating is their "continuous free fall"! Both the emerging properties of a single simple law.

So was that anything of "subjective experience" before first human was in orbit? Either no, or yes, but proving the opposite, depending whom you'd ask. Is it today? Yes. It it "rationally obvious" even today? Actually no, unless you are definitely able to do the computations following the physics formulas, note, that capability is important to be able to be "rational" about that. Was it possible to calculate it 300 years ago? Yes, but made easier due to the "shortcut" of the infinitesimal calculus. What is that actually? An "emerging property" of just a simple law F = G m1 x m2 / r^2

Do all computations have some nice shortcuts? Depends, but for some emerging properties you actually have to perform all the steps! Take a Jula fractal: f(z) = z^2 + c is the whole formula, and we needed so fast computers like today's to produce this (emerging properties of calculating the formula):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rMyDWoTArU

or (Mandelbrot, also the same formula):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrtGOMKrask

Please watch it, to get an idea how much can emerge from something as simple as f(z) = z^2 + c The computations needed for video are immense, we're just at the moment that we have strong enough computers to do them, record the output and speed it up enough for you to watch it in only 10 minutes. Just 100 years ago nobody would have been able to produce that output in any form.

Note: before Newton, nobody could believe it is so simple: that all the complex (and they are complex) planetary motions are an emerging property of such a simple law.

Likewise, your "subjective experience" of being special being "conscious" is an emerging property. The underlying completely materialistic laws are simple, but simply a lot of computation is needed for the property to emerge, if you want to reproduce it with our current technology.

The nature reproduces it, of course, all the time, having much smaller "building blocks", and there is a physicist who wrote:

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/29/seriousl...

"Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood"

And he also wrote a whole book on the topic:

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/bigpicture/

I think we already here have some deep reasons for disagreement: If I understand you correctly here, you're saying that no conclusion reached on 'subjective' grounds can be rational - maybe you would even go so far as to say that what is rational is identical to knowledge gained via the scientific method? If so, I would disagree with your definition of what is rational.

(I don't know whether animals are conscious in the same way we are - I would have no problems either way. As I said, it's not about humans (or myself) being special, it is that the phenomenon of consciousness is special).

> If you would really approach your claims "intellectually and rationally" you'd understand that that "subjective experience" which you see as something special is an emerging property.

This is a really bold claim, and it is indeed the locus of our disagreement, so again I'd have to say I disagree :) Emergence is not a magic wand you can wave and make every problem go away; for all phenomena where 'emergence' have been invoked as an explanation, we are really just talking about very complex phenomena that are very very hard to reduce to their base 'constituents' (elementary particles and their force transmitters), but which we can at least imagine can be reduced to these constituent parts - in other words, I can imagine starting from some basic building blocks of matter and, through some very complex patterns of organization, I can imagine moving from that starting point to the end result - conceptually, even if I cannot trace all the steps with my current understanding.

But this is not something I can imagine with the phenomenon of subjective experience. (An aside here: It seems you take me to say that 'because of my subjective experience that I cannot imagine this, this cannot be true' - what I am saying is that it is subjective experience itself that is what we're trying to explain here. So referring to earlier people not 'subjectively experiencing' an understanding of how e.g. planets can move is not really on target: My concern here is with the phenomenon of subjective experience itself).

What I mean is that in order to explain, say, my subjective experience of how an apple tastes, it's not just a matter of saying 'well, now your neurons are firing in this way and we know this is the taste center of your brain, so that's why you have a sensation of taste'. That is showing a correlation. What I'm saying is that this is not an explanation, and to me it shows that it will be impossible to move from a purely materialistic account of this experience to my actual subjective experience of the thing. How can we ever translate the firing of the neurons in my brain into the subjective world my consciousness inhabits? How can atoms, no matter how sophisticately arranged, give rise to this type of phenomenon?

Let me try to say it in another way: You could measure the activity of the brain and give an 'objective' account of what happens to a person: Now they're angry, now they're cold, now they're slightly hungry, etc. But it stops there! How will you move from this objective description to the actual experience of these feelings and states of mind?

Sean Carroll is a great physicist, and it's great that he engages with these questions, but he is mainly a physicist, not a philosopher of mind, and he does exhibit the same hubris that many of our ilk (yes, I'm a physicist too) have when it comes to other fields. The question I'm raising here is far from being unanimously agreed upon, and when Carroll writes stuff like "To persuade anyone otherwise, you would have to point to something the brain does that is in apparent conflict with the Standard Model or general relativity.", it's either disingenous or just a bit lazy. Giving a materialistic account of consciousness is non-trivial no matter whether the brain violates SM or GR or not, and whether it does or not will have little bearing on this problem.

If you're interested in reading more, and indeed seeing that I'm not the only one who sees this as a big problem of a materialistic account of the universe, here is a book I can recommend: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1851683763

I'm sorry, but that question still sounds to me exactly the same like "how many fairies can dance on the top of the needle." It's a thing of your imagination: for me, you just imagine that there is anything more than the electrical and chemical reactions, and there isn't anything. You are just using empty words that mean something to you, but not to me. Just like fairies don't exist, but many believed.

And I've already written enough how I consider that, what you believe is "something special" just an emerging property of these electrical and chemical reactions, produced in the humans by the evolutionary forces, not different to what any other animal has in order to function. Including the worms.

I know too much math, computing and physics, that I do believe that I can actually write a program that can give exactly the same answers like you do here relatively easily, because you give that little actual arguments. Moreover, I know too much math, computing and physics and have too much experience that you can't convince me that something like that is not possible, as I saw how with my own hands I can replicate a lot of "emerging properties" that were just "uniquely human" only some decades ago, and now there are programs that do that, today. So the computation can explain everything, no need to invoke anything beyond that. Everything is information, which can be stored and processed in many different ways. The physical laws are completely consistent with and sufficient for all the computation needed for all the emerging properties that we observe.

If somebody would believe you, he would have to consider impossible most of what we already produced since we have the computers. Including the, simple as it is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

which is, as you can see: "undecidable, which means that given an initial pattern and a later pattern, no algorithm exists that can tell whether the later pattern is ever going to appear." That means that there is no shortcut for it, you have to compute it to see what happens in some future moment. What your claim boils down to is that "you know" that "what happens in the future of Conway's Game of Life can't be explained by the statement 'you just have to compute it'." Which is obviously false. So for me you are just confused by the fact that some emerging property is undecidable, and attribute that property to something coming from "outside."

You have provided ample examples of emergent properties, which are interesting in their own right for sure, but if you really imagine that Conway's game of life and the unknowable future of that game is analogous to the phenomenon of subjective experience, we either are miscommunicating or there is a quite insurmountable barrier of understanding between us.

Either way, thanks for engaging!

That's a pretty a pretty simplistic view, given history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_of_Christianity_in_civili...

Totally. That's what I meant. To me personally a meaningful day means no complaints, good connections with people, have at least a positive impact on people, etc. This doesn't have to be extreme. It's a strategy to push away negative thoughts and to focus on what really matters every single day.

My thoughts exactly. I've tried all the things in the article (inluding CBT) and they are ineffective for me. This is acknowledged in the article ("we're all different") but the overall tone is that of a "miracle cure" when it's just patiently and steadily applying well-known ways to improve sleep. This is good, but it's not revolutionary.

The only part of it which resonates for me is that the majority of doctors and other medical professionals are truly, utterly crap when it comes to insomnia. They don't think it's important and they don't care that it's a living hell - "after a couple of nights without sleep, you'll sleep through anything", as one doctor glibly told me. But I've been 100 hours without sleep and that's nowhere near a record compared to other insomniacs.

Anyway, let's not get too distracted by a flashy headline and the overall tone of the article. The very fact that a group of medical professionals is taking sleep seriously is significant in itself. I hope it starts a trend.

This REALLY helps. Last ~8 months has been a paradise for me because my insomnia was so mild (I spent maybe a total of 2 or 3 completely sleepless nights and my previous average was 2 or 3 a week). The only difference is that I stopped giving a shit, if I'm sleepy and feel like shit, that's fine. It really does help.

But I consider myself lucky. I've mostly engineered my life such that I don't need to function before 10am (I think I'm genetically predisposed to a late sleep cycle, so far it looks like 2/3 of my kids may as well). I can afford to not use alarm clocks most of the time. And, it's possible my insomnia is nowhere near as bad as others'...

And possibly related, of course, was that I got older during this period.

[1] https://github.com/wpietri/sunrise