Phenomenal consciousness is perhaps best defined in distinction from what it is not. It is not anything to do with any behavioral properties of a thing. — Pfhorrest
The most influential formulation of the combination problem was given by William James in The Principles of Psychology (1895). In criticizing “mind-dust theory”, on which mental states are held to be compounds of elemental mental states, James made the following observations:
"Where the elemental units are supposed to be feelings, the case is in no wise altered. Take a hundred of them, shuffle them and pack them as close together as you can (whatever that may mean); still each remains the same feeling it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless, ignorant of what the other feelings are and mean. There would be a hundred-and-first feeling there, if, when a group or series of such feelings were set up, a consciousness belonging to the group as such should emerge. And this 101st feeling would be a totally new fact; the 100 original feelings might, by a curious physical law, be a signal for its creation, when they came together; but they would have no substantial identity with it, nor it with them, and one could never deduce the one from the others, or (in any intelligible sense) say that they evolved it. Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence. We talk of the ‘spirit of the age,’ and the ‘sentiment of the people,’ and in various ways we hypostatize ‘public opinion.’ But we know this to be symbolic speech, and never dream that the spirit, opinion, sentiment, etc., constitute a consciousness other than, and additional to, that of the several individuals whom the words ‘age,’ ‘people,’ or ‘public’ denote. The private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind."
James is here arguing that experiences (feelings) do not aggregate into further experiences, and that minds do not aggregate into further minds. If this is right, any version of panpsychism that holds that microexperiences (experiences of microphysical entities) combine to yield macroexperiences (experiences of macroscopic entities such as humans) is in trouble.
But in ordinary usage, something being a mind means more than just being some kind of prototypical subject of phenomenal experience, or instantiating any old function or another. It means instantiating some specific kinds of functions that we recognize as mental. — Pfhorrest
But I think that consciousness as we ordinarily speak of it is access consciousness, to be addressed later, and that access consciousness is a purely functional, basically mechanistic property that is built up out of, or weakly emerges from, the ordinary physical properties of the physical things that compose an access-conscious being. — Pfhorrest
An example of this is temperature, which is a (weakly) emergent property of the motion of molecules in a substance: if you modeled the motion of all the molecules in a substance, you would end up modeling something that exhibited temperature for free, and if that was the scale you were interested in, you could usefully model just that aggregate property of temperature instead and ignore the details of the motion of individual molecules. I have no objection to such "weak" emergentism. — Pfhorrest
:100: :up:There's stuff in between this and strong emergence. Thermodynamic properties of gases in a box are just statistical, large-scale descriptions of fundamental particulate behaviour. However, there is such a thing as collective behaviour. A phonon is an example of this. While phononic behaviour is just motion, you need at least two interacting bodies for these particular modes of motion to emerge. Likewise, while chemical bonds are just modes of electrostatic attraction, they are only possible when you have two or more atoms. There's important stuff between statistics and magic (strong emergentism). So the difference between the thermodynamics of gases, liquids, and solids is derivable but not comprehensible in terms of the dynamics of individual atoms: you have to consider at least two (often more) of something before some behaviours are possible. — Kenosha Kid
A problem completely avoided by not using terminology regarding psychological phenomena to describe non-psychological phenomena. Put it this way: a horse is just a bunch of physical stuff reacting to and acting on a bunch of other physical stuff, and everything is like this. So everything is a horse? No. Psychological phenomena regard brains. It doesn't matter if there's no fundamental difference between a brain and a bowl of soup: it's a classification for specific kinds of things (or behaviours: to be is to do). — Kenosha Kid
Being itself is purely functional though, isn't it? You went to pains in previous threads to establish that there is no real distinction between to be (i.e. to have a bundle of properties) and to do (i.e. to have the potential to behave a certain way). Seems odd now to insist on a distinction between emergent properties and emergent function. — Kenosha Kid
There's stuff in between this and strong emergence. Thermodynamic properties of gases in a box are just statistical, large-scale descriptions of fundamental particulate behaviour. However, there is such a thing as collective behaviour. A phonon is an example of this. While phononic behaviour is just motion, you need at least two interacting bodies for these particular modes of motion to emerge. Likewise, while chemical bonds are just modes of electrostatic attraction, they are only possible when you have two or more atoms. There's important stuff between statistics and magic (strong emergentism). So the difference between the thermodynamics of gases, liquids, and solids is derivable but not comprehensible in terms of the dynamics of individual atoms: you have to consider at least two (often more) of something before some behaviours are possible. — Kenosha Kid
Why are you assuming physicalism to be the case? — RogueAI
I’m mostly using psychological terminology for phenomenal consciousness just because that’s the terminology already used for it, but I can see the historical reasons for its use — Pfhorrest
I’m not trying to do that, and I don’t see how you can read that in to the passage you responded to. — Pfhorrest
That is still weak emergence, in that if you modeled the underlying system that that behavior emerges from, you would automatically model the emergent behavior (as in see that behavior emerge in your model; not that you would have a higher-level model of it). — Pfhorrest
What's your objection to strong emergence? — Olivier5
it must draw some arbitrary line somewhere, the line between things that are held to be entirely without anything at all like phenomenal consciousness and things that suddenly have it in full, and thus violates my previously established position against fideism. — Pfhorrest
It just seems like a category error to call physics 'psychology'. — Kenosha Kid
What is a 'purely functional' thing, then? — Kenosha Kid
I guess my salient point is: are you assuming some non-conscious stuff exists? If so, do you believe consciousness comes from this stuff? — RogueAI
"If you mean access consciousness, then I think there are lots and lots of things (most things) that are not access conscious, and our access consciousness, "consciousness" in the sense that we ordinarily mean it, is built up out of that stuff."
You're back to the Hard Problem: how does "active consciousness" emerge from "non-active consciousness" stuff? — RogueAI
Agreed, and that's why I wouldn't do that. — Pfhorrest
My overall position is saying that whatever metaphysics is going on with human beings that may be required for our having of a subjective experience, that metaphysics is going on with everything and is not special to humans; the important difference between humans and e.g. rocks, that makes us conscious in the ordinary sense (access conscious), is only the difference in the function of a human vs a rock, not anything metaphysically different. — Pfhorrest
I think you're misreading "access" as "active" here.
In any case, access consciousness is the topic of the easy problem. There is no mystery there. Access consciousness is just a kind of functionality. How does the function of my computer emerge from the function of the atoms it's built out of? Very carefully, but not philosophically mysteriously. Likewise, the function of brains emerges from the function of atoms in a similar fashion.
Whatever there is besides that function, whatever metaphysically special thing there also needs to be, that is phenomenal consciousness, which is the subject of the hard problem, and my solution to that is that everything has it, so nothing (phenomenally-)conscious emerges from anything non-(phenomenally-)conscious, because there is nothing non-(phenomenally-)conscious.
You sound like a panpsychist idealist. That's a contradiction — RogueAI
By describing it as panpsychism (everything is conscious), you are doing that. Yes, you are demoting consciousness in this context to any physical response function, but that itself is a result of poor choice of terminology. — Kenosha Kid
So either:
- we're zombies ourselves,
- magic happens, or
- everything "has a mind" in the sense that these people are talking about.
You mean this theoretically, or you think it is actually possible and done? Because the cases where it's actually doable are rare. The statistical reduction of temperature to Brownian movement in a perfect gas is the only case that comes to mind, and even this implies all sorts of simplifications (a perfect gas does not actually exist, it's a theoretical simplification of a physical reality). So defined as you do, 'weak emergence' is more a theoretical than proven.Weakly emergent phenomena build up out of more fundamental phenomena. The kinds of emergent phenomena that Kenosha lists are things that build up out of the phenomena exhibited by basic physical particles: if you model their motion, mass, charge, etc, and model an appropriate aggregate of them just in terms of their motion, mass, charge, etc, you get the emergent phenomena in the model for free. — Pfhorrest
LOL. Says the guy who thinks that electron have a micro dose of consciousness... Thanks for the laugh! You can't beat this place for entertainment.Basically, it's magic. — Pfhorrest
it must draw some arbitrary line somewhere, the line between things that are held to be entirely without anything at all like phenomenal consciousness and things that suddenly have it in full, — Pfhorrest
Have you ever heard of sexual reproduction? It is a universal property of living systems, and you can't find it anywhere in non living stuff. Stones and stars don't copulate. QED here is a strongly emerging phenomenon. — Olivier5
human beings are not produced by chemical synthesis. They are made by sexual reproduction — Olivier5
You and I are made of information, essentially. — Olivier5
Now you are changing the goal post. Initially you defined 'strong emergentism' as such:Do you think sexual reproduction involves any processes that are not built up out of the processes of the cells that are built up out of molecules that are built up out of atoms that are built up out of quarks etc? Is there some magic that happens somewhere in there? If not, then that's not strong emergence. — Pfhorrest
Atoms don't reproduce, and molecules don't reproduce. They don't have any 'elementary reproduction', so I don't see any reason to assume they have any 'elementary consciousness' as a way to explain our consciousness... Both are just behaviors that emerged through life., "strong" emergentism holds some wholes to be truly greater than the sums of their parts, and thus that when certain things are arranged in certain ways, wholly new properties apply to the whole that are not mere aggregates or composites of the properties of the parts. — Pfhorrest
If you wrote more succinctly, I would read your posts.If you had read the web of reality thread, you'd see I already agree that everything is made of information. — Pfhorrest
Atoms don't reproduce, and molecules don't reproduce. They don't have any 'elementary reproduction' — Olivier5
I don't see any reason to assume they have any 'elementary consciousness' as a way to explain our consciousness... Both are just behaviors that emerged through life. — Olivier5
Try and understand what I am saying about the Heraclitus river. What is a river? It is not actually defined by the specific molecules of water flowing through it. Otherwise you wouldn't see the same river twice. Likewise your body is not defined by the atoms flowing through it. — Olivier5
I never said it was magic, but it's an emerging phenomenon in the sense that it cannot happen outside of life. It has no meaning at the atomic level. No precursor, nothing that compares. It only means something at the cellular level. Below that level, it makes no sense at all.No, but sexual reproduction is not anything more than a complicated process of atoms interacting in the way that atoms do. Nowhere in that process is it required to suddenly invoke some elan vital or such to make the reproduced organism alive like its parents. — Pfhorrest
And yet there's such a thing as a dry river.A river can’t do anything that a bunch of water molecules can’t do, — Pfhorrest
I never said it was magic, but it's an emerging phenomenon in the sense that it cannot happen outside of life. It has no meaning at the atomic level. No precursor, nothing that compares. It only means something at the cellular level. Below that level, it makes no sense at all. — Olivier5
Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic. How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities? Such causal powers would be quite unlike anything within our scientific ken. This not only indicates how they will discomfort reasonable forms of materialism. Their mysteriousness will only heighten the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing. — Mark A. Bedau via Wikipedia
If I kick a rock..Will it experience anything? Will it think to itself "I have been kicked!" ?
My take is that the distinction between weak and strong emergence is confusing a quantitative difference for a qualitative one. — Olivier5
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