Nope. I’m just asking you to attempt to justify your dualist framing of things. — apokrisis

The justification is that there are two different things. The material structured processes, as seen from the outside, and the conscious experiences felt on the inside. You see structured processes when observing my central nervous system, I feel the things it accompanies.

The justification is that there are two different things. — Cartuna

In what sense is consciousness a “thing”. Do you want to say it has substantial being? Explain to me how that works.

The argument "science has failed to explain consciousness" against science's ability to explain consciousness is common enough, although I don't think that's Chalmers' argument. — Kenosha Kid

How long should science get a pass on failing to explain consciousness?

In what sense is consciousness a “thing”. Do you want to say it has substantial being? Explain to me how that works. — apokrisis

There are sticks and stones, noses and bones. Likewise, there are conscious experiences.The dual framing of things means indeed there are two kinds of things. Conscious experiences are irrefutably there. So are sticks and stones. They are two sides of the same medal, framed by a two-sided frame, and depending on from which side you look at the medal, the face of matter or consciousness will be seen and framed. You can look at consciousness within the frame of things or structured processes. That's usually the outside. It's you who sees the structured processes in me.You can look at the same stuff from the other side. That's usually the inside. That's me experiencing stuff. The one who looks and sees the sides of the medal lies in between.

How long should science get a pass on failing to explain consciousness? — RogueAI

About another 1,400 years seems reasonable.

The dual framing of things means indeed there are two kinds of things — Cartuna

So there are two kinds of descriptions, not two kinds of “things”? There is epistemic duality but not ontological duality?

I want to be clear what you are committing to.

The one who looks and sees the sides of the medal lies in between. — Cartuna

You lost me there.

I get that there is a third person description and a first person description. There is what we tell each other about the “world” as understood from an imagined “God’s eye” view. And then there is what we tell each other about “our selves” as also understood as … well here it gets fuzzy.

Somehow we introspect and report qualia. There is the redness of red. There is experience that is separate from the world that is being experienced. And a self that is itself seperate from those experiences. We are now in some homuncular regress of worlds, experiences and experiencer.

Yet for you, there is this analogy of a medal with two sides. You can see it from both its sides, and yet not both sides at once. And yet - wonderfully - they are really the one thing, the one medal, bound, fused, unseparated.

It is just that there is the inside and the outside view of this two faced medal. This also is how we should understand an ontology motivated by the analogy of a medal with different inscriptions to tell us we in fact are seeing two sides of one thing. Or something like that.

I don’t feel this is going that well for you. Perhaps you can clarify further.

I saw this article today:

"For decades, the idea that insects have feelings was considered a heretical joke – but as the evidence piles up, scientists are rapidly reconsidering."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211126-why-insects-are-more-sensitive-than-they-seem

The problem for this (and any theory that posits that some assemblage of matter can have subjective experience) is how do you test it? How do scientists verify that insects can in fact feel things? They can't. Theories of consciousness are, in principle, unverifiable. This seems an insoluble problem.

Theories of consciousness are, in principle, unverifiable. — RogueAI

Does science, in principle, verify or falsify its hypotheses?

And would neuroscience talk about the feelings of insects in terms of them being composed of similar matter to humans - some matching proportion of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, other trace elements? Or would the arguments have to be made in terms of having significantly similar "neural structure"?

Sorry to be nit-picky. But folk so often use the Hard Problem as something to hide behind. They want to avoid the arduous work of actually being intimately familiar with what the science of mind has to say. It is so much easier to stand outside and agree not to even bother to try.

So there are two kinds of descriptions, not two kinds of “things”? There is epistemic duality but not ontological duality? — apokrisis

Two kind of things belonging to the same stuff. They are inseparable. So actually there is a unity. On the outside the stuff is material, on the inside, it's consciousness. On the boundary, they are one and the same. The degree of consciousness depends on the structured matter involved.

Does science, in principle, verify or falsify its hypotheses? — apokrisis

It certainly tries to. Good theories make testable predictions.

And would neuroscience talk about the feelings of insects in terms of them being composed of similar matter to humans - some matching proportion of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, other trace elements? Or would the arguments have to be made in terms of having significantly similar "neural structure"? — apokrisis

Any physical theory of consciousness is going to have to make claims regarding whether certain arrangements of matter are conscious or not. Claims of that nature (that arrangement of matter a,b,c has property x) are testable. If the claim that some computer has property "is conscious" can't be tested, that would be a problem.

Two kind of things belonging to the same stuff. They are inseparable. So actually there is a unity. — Cartuna

So there is just the one "stuff". You are making some kind of panpsychic claim in regards to your ontological commitments?

Come on, be clear.

On the outside the stuff is material, on the inside, it's consciousness. On the boundary, they are one and the same. — Cartuna

This formula of words now brings you closer to my Peircean semiotic account - the ontology I am happy to commit to as the motivation for theory-spinning.

On the one side is matter - or the Brownian mechanics of dissipative structure. :razz:

On the other side is mind - of the Bayesian mechanics of modelling structure.

The central issue is then the one already well familiar in theoretical biology - Howard Pattee's symbol grounding problem. How does a molecule become a message?

And biology has also found the answer over the past decade or so. Genes code for motor proteins - Brownian ratchets. At the nanoscale of material physics, there is a "magic" convergence of all forms of energy - elastic, mechanical, electrostatic, chemical, thermal. They all happen to have the same scale - a physical equivalence that allows them to be "costlessly" switched from one form into another. All biology has to do is build the switches - the molecular machines that ratchet work for free from doing the switching.

So this the boundary between a-bios and bios, physics and life - a zone of criticality that just happens to exist for appropriate mixtures of molecules in a watery solution in a typical range of temperatures for a planet like ours.

Life was an accident waiting to happen. It just needed a coding mechanism - RNA. The coding system needed to be able to produce nanoscale switches or entropic ratchets - enzymes. The rest was evolutionary history.

And what goes for life also went for mind. Genes model their worlds at one level of semiotic engagement. Neurons took it to a new level of the same essential world modelling process.

As science, this is all so new that hardly anyone has heard about it. But an excellent primer is Life's Ratchet by biophysicist Peter Hoffmann.

Anyway, there is a theory of mind I reject - panpsychism - because it is the kind of theory that just conflates to create its unity. As a theory, it fails by being "not even wrong".

Then there is a theory of mind I endorse - pansemiosis. And I could write a whole book about that. :nerd:

Good theories make testable predictions. — RogueAI

And do the tests claim the theory is true? Or do they make the more modest epistemic claim that the theory seems pragmatically reliable in terms of the purposes you had in mind? It works reasonably enough in terms of the new things it allows us to do.

Which of these standards do you want to hold mind science to?

If the claim that some computer has property "is conscious" can't be tested, that would be a problem. — RogueAI

You are demanding truth. And yes, that is impossible. Get over it.

Science promises pragmatism. And so one suggested test of artificial consciousness is the Turing proposal. Interact with the machine and see if it behaves exactly like all the other meat puppets that surround you - the people you might call your family and friends, and to whom you pragmatically grant the gift of being conscious.

You will never know whether it is actually true that you Mom has a mind. But for all practical purposes, I'm sure you act as if you believe that to be the case.

So there is just the one "stuff". You are making some kind of panpsychic claim in regards to your ontological commitments? — apokrisis

I wanted to write that. Luckily I didn't. You have found it yourself!

Life was an accident waiting to happen. It just needed a coding mechanism - RNA. The coding system needed to be able to produce nanoscale switches or entropic ratchets - enzymes. The rest was evolutionary history. — apokrisis

Here I partially agree. Once the first protein structures had formed from amino acids, their tendency to grow and pass on their life, created the need to economically pass on their proteins. RNA-like stuff did the job.

I wanted to write that. Luckily I didn't. You have found it yourself! — Cartuna

For some reason, you didn't want to save me the trouble.

Well there are plenty of panpsychics and other variations of the same on this forum. You don't have to hide.

Once the first protein structures had formed from amino acids, their tendency to grow and pass on their life, created the need to economically pass on their proteins. RNA-like stuff did the job. — Cartuna

The current best guess theory of abiogenesis involves RNA making RNA, as RNA does an adequate job of both being an informational mechanism and a structural mechanism. A circlet of RNA makes a tunnel that can bond organic crap like polyesters and polypeptides. It can do enough on both sides of the coin to get the party started.

Later, life evolved a sharper epistemic cut. The roles of storing the genetic information and controlling the metabolic dissipation got divided into DNA and protein. The roles became too specialised for a single form of matter to do both.

You have to have a clean separation to have an effective coming together. A metaphysical unity of opposites as the Pythagoreans used to say.

You surely show that you know your stuff! You truly try, I have seen that already. I will come back later. Interesting stuff! Before I take off, one last question. Before RNA came on the scene, how looked life, according to you? RNA? I think proteins came first.

You can't explain consciousness without having objective, universal perspective as to the environment in which it exists. I'm not sure why it's so often posited that we have anything like that.

You could* figure out the brain produces it and you still wouldn't know how it relates to, for instance, time.

*You couldn't because you'd have to implicitly, magically, grant the brain universal perspective.

You surely show that you know your stuff! — Cartuna

Thanks. And I picked up that you have formal training in maths and physics. Shame you didn't seem to want to go further with the ontic structural realism angle on that.

See James Ladyman and Don Ross, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, for the philosophical rallying cry on that front a few years back.

Before RNA came on the scene, how looked life, according to you? RNA? I think proteins came first. — Cartuna

Proteins can’t have existed first. That fact is written into the architectual history of the molecular machine that synthesises all proteins - the ribosome.

See this New Scientist article explaining that - http://revjimc.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-very-first-living-thing-is-still.html

But in brief, the ancient heart of the ribosome is the tunnel that bonds the peptides. And this is still constructed of RNA. Then as the ribosome became better at making structured protein, it used those new generations of protein to improve its own protein-manufacturing structure.

At first it just tacked on simple polypeptide noodles. Then peptide sheets. Then peptide helices.

So the ribosome is its own fossil record for how life started with RNA as the first catalyst. And then each improvement is also the manufacturing material for the next step in its home renovation project. Each new wing of the ribosome reflects the new protein possibilities it had achieved.

Proteins can’t have existed first. That fact is written into the architectual history of the molecular machine that synthesises all proteins - the ribosome. — apokrisis

Thanks for all the great stuff you write! I come back later. Before leaving, I quoted this piece, because that's essentially the chicken/egg problem. I think posing abiogenetical existence of proteins solves the chicken egg problem, while it fits rather nicely in my approach to life. I have some entropy/free energy considerations for later on (physical as well as informational). I'm off for now! Later!

The current best guess theory of abiogenesis involves RNA making RNA, as RNA does an adequate job of both being an informational mechanism and a structural mechanism. — apokrisis

So do you think it's plausible to argue that all organism are intelligent, at least in some basic or fundamental respect? Not rationally intelligent like h. sapiens, but that the capacity to respond, adapt, proliferate and so on, are attributes of intelligence on some level. And that, therefore, the emergence of living organisms is also the manifestation of intelligence - not the work of an 'intelligent designer', but an incipient tendency towards conscious existence that might plausibly begin to flourish wherever the conditions were suitable. Sure seems quite in keeping with the New Scientist article you linked. 'What is latent', my Hindu philosophy lecturer used to say, 'becomes patent'.

God, according to [the Stoics], "did not make the world as an artisan does his work, but it is by wholly penetrating all matter that He is the demiurge of the universe" (Galen, "De qual. incorp." in "Fr. Stoic.", ed. von Arnim, II, 6); He penetrates the world "as honey does the honeycomb" (Tertullian, "Adv. Hermogenem", 44), this God so intimately mingled with the world is fire or ignited air; inasmuch as He is the principle controlling the universe, He is called Logos; and inasmuch as He is the germ from which all else develops, He is called the seminal Logos (logos spermatikos). This Logos is at the same time a force and a law, an irresistible force which bears along the entire world and all creatures to a common end, an inevitable and holy law from which nothing can withdraw itself, and which every reasonable man should follow willingly.

and that furthermore that while

The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – ... they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all. — The Core of Mind and Cosmos

So do you think it's plausible to argue that all organism are intelligent, at least in some basic or fundamental respect? — Wayfarer

My argument would be that all life and mind is semiotic. And so that means they have pragmatic intelligence. As levels of encoding, they can learn - in Darwinian fashion - to live and persist in their material worlds.

And that, therefore, the emergence of living organisms is also the manifestation of intelligence - not the work of an 'intelligent designer', but an incipient tendency towards conscious existence that might plausibly begin to flourish wherever the conditions were suitable. — Wayfarer

Well now you edge into language that smuggles in "consciousness" as its ultimate destination. And consciousness is a technical term employed by Cartesian representationlism. It presumes that the ultimate evolutionary goal might be the kind of rationalising philosopher who sits in an armchair in a darkened room just passively contemplating the facts of reality. Or perhaps more in your case, a guru passively engaged with nothingness in a tropical glade. :razz:

But if you stop short of that - if you retain the stress on pragmatic action, and avoid crossing over into a passive, sensory and static conception of consciousness - then you can see a natural arc of progression.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs, no less.

'What is latent', my Hindu philosophy lecturer used to say, 'becomes patent'. — Wayfarer

For sure. I do take a Hegelian dialectical view that evolution involves historical progress. We are ascending towards some antithetical bounding limit that is a triumph over unruly disorder and the arrival at Platonic/Hegelian/Peircean perfection of some kind.

But then I also stress that this "perfection" is of the pragmatic kind. Which is the unromantic conclusion that would make the happy holist upset.

So as I have said often enough, modern humans climbed the semiotic ladder. Our world encoding machinery has become increasingly abstracted from the world it would regulate. We have genes and neurons. But we have added further semiotic machinery in the form of words and numbers.

Language organises our social worlds and gives us the habit of self-addressed speech as well. We gain self-awareness, freewill, higher emotions, recollective memories, prospective imaginations. All those good things that led us to take over the planet and start bending it to our collective desires.

Then along comes maths and the power to apply its completely abstracted view of reality in terms of technology - machines and computers.

But look at what we actually do with all this semiotic prowess. In the end, we just obey the thermodynamic imperative to entropify. We don't do anything smarter that a bacterium filling up a petrie dish and choking itself in its own material waste, starving itself to death with its own depletion of the environment's limited resources.

There is no "enlightenment" that will be made patent at the end of this evolutionary journey.

Or if there is some further step that comes after the current epoch, it will have to be one that continues the same old entropic game to its next pragmatic level. And sure, I can sketch what that means in practice. It is the obvious stuff - like realising we need to invest in recycling and renewables as a properly organised living structure is all about being "closed for material causality".

The paradox is the one I describe - the need to both entropify (that is, waste energy to heat), and yet to keep the materials that do the job locked into the system that does the entropifying.

You can't drive a car far, no matter how much fuel is available, if everything is dropping off, or dripping out, as you fly along the highway. It has to hold together to be the combustion-propelled structure that is.

This Logos is at the same time a force and a law, an irresistible force which bears along the entire world and all creatures to a common end, an inevitable and holy law from which nothing can withdraw itself, and which every reasonable man should follow willingly.

Yep. This is fine as antique metaphysics. Logos and flux, order and disorder, laws and initial conditions, constraints and degrees of freedom. All ways of talking about cosmic existence as evolutionary persistence.

But what if the logos is the second law of thermodynamics?

Well it is. But maybe humans just aren't intellectually equipped to complete the technological revolution they started. Maybe burning the free lunch of a billion years of accumulated fossil carbon in a 300 year belch was a little short-sighted. And things like ecology are "just too complicated" for humanity in general to understand - in the necessary gut-felt and immediate way that would involve reversing back down Maslow's hierachy of needs. :meh:

You've got to laugh.

There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject

I see that kind of perspective as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Sorry to be hard, but hippie idealism failed for good and obvious reasons. Humanity has maths and so it builds machines. The failure of society to take a unified view of that - one that couples the subjective and objective view of reality in a pragmatic, long range, fashion - is where it all starts to go wrong.

We now run society as a machine - both a physical and intellectual one. There are transport systems and economic systems. The world that good engineering understands. Then there is the big divide that is all our culture, entertainment, consumption, social game playing.

We don't just encourage a dualistic "two worlds" approach to life, we fiercely demand it as the way humans can live with all the comforts of technology, and none of its responsibilities.

That leads to the completely predictable reckoning.

We should be busy coupling the two sides of the equation. Again, the simple and obvious stuff. Just bring in the carbon tax already. Connect consumerism and population growth to its environmental consequences. Etc.

But things are rolling too far and too fast. Smart folk will already be factoring in generalised collapse into their future models.

So if you want the complete Hegelian arc of biosemiosis, this is my summary.

History has always worked this way. The invention of photosynthesis nearly killed all life on earth because free oxygen is a deadly toxin, while using up all the CO2 turned the planet into a global snowball.

Photosynthesis might at first seem a miracle source of free energy - just point your leaves at the sun and flourish. But only 1% of life - bacteria eking out an existence in the small pools of meltwater that lingered in the ice-over tropics - survived this catastrophic innovation.

Life had to complete the job and evolve the inverse of photosynthesis, which is oxygen consuming and CO2 excreting respiration. After a few hundred million years things began to recover with that.

The Gaian material cycle was closed once more. One organism's waste was another organism's food. By complementing each other this way, a new global metabolic economy could be established - one with much more evolutionary complexity because the whole biotic game had been shifted up a gear to be driven by the "boundless" renewable energy of the Sun.

So biosemiosis is indeed a theory of everything when it comes to life and mind on Earth. The latent will be made patent.

Imagine if we did crack fusion. And the world hasn't collapsed into generalise chaos before we do. What kind of social beings would we have to be to flourish in that kind of world - where AI will also be as real as it is going to get?

How do we invent the culture, the politics, the mores, the institutions, that might intersect a future that is a step beyond the fast-failing now?

My argument is that the only framework is the one nature has always known. One way or the other, nature will fix things its way.

It will be quite hard for us to actually kill the planet. What's another half billion years for the re-emergence of something more complex than a world of cockroaches and weeds? The Sun won't burn out until another 7 billion years after that.

Yep. You got to laugh. :cry:

And do the tests claim the theory is true? Or do they make the more modest epistemic claim that the theory seems pragmatically reliable in terms of the purposes you had in mind? — apokrisis

Tests and observations are evidence. Evidence is used to confirm/disconfirm theories.

Which of these standards do you want to hold mind science to? — apokrisis

The same standards for all theories. Relativity theory has been confirmed to the nth degree at this point. I expect a physicalist theory of mind to also make testable predictions that result in it being highly confirmed. Why should a theory of mind be any different? Are minds special? Do theories of minds somehow run into an epistemic wall? I think minds are special, and I think science will continue to have nothing to say about the mind-body problem, and the failure of science so far to explain how matter can produce consciousness doesn't surprise me. I predict it will continue. Science will never be able to explain consciousness. It can't even define it.

Science promises pragmatism. And so one suggested test of artificial consciousness is the Turing proposal. Interact with the machine and see if it behaves exactly like all the other meat puppets that surround you - the people you might call your family and friends, and to whom you pragmatically grant the gift of being conscious. — apokrisis

The Turing Test is not a test for consciousness, but let's say it is. If something passes the Turing Test, we should assume it's conscious? OK, does it then have rights? Can you deactivate a machine that passes the turing test? Beat it with a sledgehammer when it malfunctions? Degrade its performance so it can't pass the test anymore and then do what you want with it? Recycle it? What obligations do we have to things that pass the Turing Test?

You will never know whether it is actually true that you Mom has a mind. But for all practical purposes, I'm sure you act as if you believe that to be the case. — apokrisis

We assume each other are conscious beings because we're all built roughly the same way. That assumption doesn't cut it with machines. At what point should we assume machines have minds? Do you think anything that passes the Turing Test should be assumed to have a mind? What about chess programs that are superior to humans? Do they have minds? What about an AI that passes Turing Tests 90% of the time? 75%? 50%? If we don't develop a theory of mind that makes testable predictions (and we won't), we're going to be in trouble before too long.

Tests and observations are evidence. Evidence is used to confirm/disconfirm theories. — RogueAI

Thank you for these tutorials in the philosophy of science. But you might want to check your facts.

Do theories of minds somehow run into an epistemic wall? — RogueAI

Of course. In the same way that all theories have to be motivated by a counterfactual framing - one which could even in principle have a yes/no answer.

So are all minds the result of a mush of complicated neurology found inside skulls? As a first step towards a natural philosophy account of consciousness, does this feel 99% certain to you.

If not, why not? Where is your evidence to the contrary?

Does poking this delicate mush with a sharp stick cause predictable damage to consciousness? Well ask any lobotomy patient.

And so we can continue - led by the hand - to where neuroscience has actually got to in terms of its detailed theories, and the evidence said to support them.

I think minds are special, and I think science will continue to have nothing to say about the mind-body problem, and the failure of science so far to explain how matter can produce consciousness is expected. — RogueAI

Bully for you. And I'm sure you are in the majority. It is the view built into our standard-issue culture, after all.

After a couple of thousand years of organised religion and several centuries of the romantic recoil from the squalid horror of technology, this is the operating system that got installed during your manufacture. The factory settings.

If something passes the Turing Test, we should assume it's conscious? OK, does it then have rights? Can you deactivate a machine that passes the turing test? Beat it a sledgehammer when it malfunctions? Degrade its performance so it can't pass the test anymore? What obligations do we have to things that pass the Turing Test? — RogueAI

All good moral questions. How do you answer them?

We assume each other are conscious because we're all built roughly the same way. — RogueAI

I thought it was because we all act the same way. Roughly. Within engineering tolerances.

You might need a neuroscience degree, along with an MRI machine, to tell if a person is indeed built the same way.

You know. Verified scientific knowledge and not merely social heuristics.

What about chess programs that are superior to humans? Do they have minds? — RogueAI

Certainly not.

But if it could get drunk and kick over the board in a fit of pique, then I might start to wonder.

If we don't have a theory of mind that makes testable predictions, we're going to be in trouble before too long. — RogueAI

Oddly, it is commonly claimed that humans do have an evolved theory of mind. We are genetically equipped to understand others as other selves taking part in the same collective social game.

That is why a Turing machine test feels like any kind of good test at all. We believe we can instinctively tell when we are engaging with some aspect of the material world that also is animate and mindful.

Of course that is also how folk arrive at the conclusion the weather gods, or the poker gods, are against them. A generalised animism was quite a tough cultural habit to unlearn.

But what if the logos is the second law of thermodynamics? — apokrisis

Which is the tendency of everything to become less organised. And evolution goes against that.

How do we invent the culture, the politics, the mores, the institutions, that might intersect a future that is a step beyond the fast-failing now? — apokrisis

A good start would be a culture based on something other than consumption and endless economic growth.

hippie idealism failed for good and obvious reasons. — apokrisis

Thomas Nagel



is not a hippie.

consciousness is a technical term employed by Cartesian representationlism. — apokrisis

'Consciousness' was coined by Ralph Cudworth, one of the Cambridge Platonists. But 'consciousness' and 'intelligence', as general attributes of organic nature, might be almost synonyms, mightn't they?

As I've said before, the major problem with the Cartesian depiction of 'res cogitans' was its tendency to 'objectify' it as a 'spiritual substance', which is oxymoronic right from the outset.

Thank you for these tutorials in the philosophy of science. But you might want to check your facts. — apokrisis

This is not clear: "And do the tests claim the theory is true? Or do they make the more modest epistemic claim that the theory seems pragmatically reliable in terms of the purposes you had in mind?"

What does "they" refer to? Tests? Tests don't make claims.

Of course. In the same way that all theories have to be motivated by a counterfactual framing - one which could even in principle have a yes/no answer.

So are all minds the result of a mush of complicated neurology found inside skulls? As a first step towards a natural philosophy account of consciousness, does this feel 99% certain to you.

If not, why not? Where is your evidence to the contrary? — apokrisis

I'm strongly in favor of idealism. I think the explanatory gap is evidence that science can't solve the hard problem. The gap will grow and grow and people will eventually abandon the scientific approach to "solving" consciousness. There's nothing to be solved because matter doesn't exist.

Does poking this delicate mush with a sharp stick cause predictable damage to consciousness? Well ask any lobotomy patient.

And so we can continue - led by the hand - to where neuroscience has actually got to in terms of its detailed theories, and the evidence said to support them. — apokrisis

There's an idealist explanation for why poking a brain causes changes to mental states. If you poke a dream brain, the dreamer alters the dream. That's clunky, I admit, and begs the question of why a dreamer would modify their dream when their dream brain is poked, but it IS a non-materialist explanation for why changes to brains results in changes to minds: it's all part of the dream. And as evidence for my assertion that it's all a dream, I'll keep pointing out that we keep running into the hard problem and science keeps not solving it. It's not even close to solving it. There's not even a coherent framework for what an explanation for consciousness will look like. Neuroscience can keep piling up neural correlates to mental states, but that hasn't solved the hard problem, and it won't in the future. There's not going to be an Aha! moment where we get x amount of neural state-mental state correlations, and suddenly grasp the answer to the mind-body problem.

All good moral questions. How do you answer them? — apokrisis

I can't. But then, idealists are very much the minority. Nobody expects idealism to solve anything. I think there's a day of reckoning for physicalism, though. Science has been solving these technical problems for a long time now. But it's going to fail people in this area (machine consciousness), and it's really going to come as a shock to a lot of people. This is still a society very much in love with scientism.

I thought it was because we all act the same way. Roughly. Within engineering tolerances.

You might need a neuroscience degree, along with an MRI machine, to tell if a person is indeed built the same way.

You know. Verified scientific knowledge and not merely social heuristics. — apokrisis

Maybe. But we all also have brains, hearts, lungs, etc. A liquid nitrogen cooled computer the size of a room that passes a turning test is not going to resemble a person at all. People aren't going to assume it has a mind. Getting people to go along with machine rights isn't going to be easy, esp. when the scientists just shrug when people ask them if the machines are conscious.

Tests don't make claims. — RogueAI

They embody claims. So they proclaim, if you like.

I'm strongly in favor of idealism. — RogueAI

Of course. And how does that square with what you also seem to believe about the mess of neurons in people’s heads and the inability of robots to have minds as they are somehow the wrong kind of stuff, or the wrong kind of material structure?

There's an idealist explanation for why poking a brain causes changes to mental states. If you poke a dream brain, the dreamer alters the dream. That's clunky, I admit, — RogueAI

No. It is a simple enough materialist account.

I'll keep pointing out that we keep running into the hard problem and science keeps not solving it. It's not even close to solving it. There's not even a coherent framework for what an explanation for consciousness will look like. — RogueAI

This is going nowhere. :mask:

Which is the tendency of everything to become less organised. And evolution goes against that. — Wayfarer

No. Evolution works by accelerating the ambient rate of entropification. It gets the second law to its destination faster.

As I've said before, the major problem with the Cartesian depiction of 'res cogitans' was its tendency to 'objectify' it as a 'spiritual substance', which is oxymoronic right from the outset. — Wayfarer

Yep.

Evolution works by accelerating the ambient rate of entropification. It gets the second law to its destination faster. — apokrisis

In addition, evolution works _because_ of the second law, not in spite of it. A little knowledge, etc.

No. It is a simple enough materialist account. — apokrisis

If it was a simple enough account, we wouldn't be posting in yet another "problem of consciousness" thread, yet here we are.

they cannot be counted as explanations, because a good explanation should be testable. — Janus

If I explain what's in my backyard, isn't that most likely a good explanation of what's in my yard, or do you need to test it. There are plenty of good explanation we use everyday that don't need testing. This gets back to the notion that somehow if science can't do experiments to confirm one's claim, then it can't be knowable, or it's somehow not real knowledge.