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So you're arguing for qualia and souls, yes? I believe I am my mind, that the mind is computation, and that its computational substrate is irrelevant. I'm honestly baffled by people who hold otherwise --- I want to be charitable, but I'm having a hard time seeing past opposition being ultimately a product of personal incredulity regarding our conscious experience being a worldly, temporal information processing phenomenon.
Our minds are worldly, temporal information processing phenomena, yes. At least mostly, as we experience them. No disagreement there. The question is whether, if and when our minds die, there is anything of us left. I think so.
We have no idea what consciousness is, how it happens, or even why it should ever arise in the first place. Until that's sorted there's a ton of room for other perspectives. Soul of the gaps, sure. That accusation wouldn't trouble me.
Perhaps I could say that I think our minds are so loud in our conscious experience that we fall into the mistaken assumption that everything occurring in our consciousness is our minds. The only way to find out is to die. In the meantime I'm not in a rush to create perfect, immortal copies of my mind which have no internal conscious experience, let the last bio-humans die off, and call it a day.
But I want to repeat the question:
Your position is fundamentally religious, isn't it? We feel that existing, thinking, being are so profound that they must continue after death. But what if they aren't? I've never seen evidence that they are. If you'd like to adopt a religiously flavored epistemology, that's fine, but having done so, you've departed from the realm of logical argumentation.
There are several parts of your comment to which I could respond, but we're fundamentally coming at this in different reference frames and it would take an entire overhaul to communicate the things I want to. All I can say is that I used to see it your way, and now I don't, and basically feel about your perspective the way you feel about mine. Also that we've had different experiences, and mine have me as entirely convinced as I can be, I think.
It would be rude to throw out a bunch of examples knowing full well that I don't intend to try to discuss them since, as I just said, that'd be pretty fruitless. So I won't.
But I do want to ask again, and let me rephrase here. Gonna ramble a bit.
Let's talk about concepts. Patterns. From a strictly reductionist standpoint, all that exists is the quantum waveform, and no part of it can be severed from the whole. It's normal to regard concepts like 'justice' or 'joy' as abstract, somehow qualitatively different from concepts like 'elk' or 'door'. But again, strictly speaking from a reductionist standpoint, none of these things actually exist. Or if you don't care for the quantum thing, let's say that all that exists is fundamental particles and energy. You can take what we call a door (or an elk) apart particle by particle -- at what point does it stop being that thing? Was it ever that thing, or are concepts like 'door' and 'elk' entirely artifacts of conscious minds? Does our categorization of a thing make it into what it is? If there were no conscious life in our universe, would there be planets? Or only the configurations of matter that we call planets? If there were humans (but without consciousness), would they still be humans?
At its root, theism is the perspective that these concepts, these 'gods', exist independently of our perception of them. An easy example which people often go to for other reasons is, do numbers exist independently of us, or is their existence intrinsic to (perhaps emergent from) the universe?
I'm throwing all of this out there to hopefully help you see what I'm asking when I ask you: Which gods do you serve? Are there any patterns, gods, that you think should exist; which deserve to be prioritized over others? What do you value? And why?
All I have from you is that you think it's good (personally preferable?) for cultural continuity and memory to be cultivated, presumably until it's all wiped away in some kind of cosmic apocalypse beyond our ability to control. And no, I'm not planning on going anywhere with this. There's no 'gotcha' waiting for you around the corner. I'm just having a hard time seeing why you're saying what you're saying.
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Regarding the realm of logical argumentation, what's your view on Determinism and the free-will problem?
"Free will" is an ill-defined concept. I've never seen a definition precise enough to be wrong. All I can tell is that "free will" is the persistent ecstatic emotion one feels when contemplating the idea that the mind is so special that it must belong to a category of object distinct from ordinary matter and exempt from the ordinary rules of causality. I see no reason to accept this premise. It's impossible to argue against a feeling.
The most parsimonious model of consciousness is that it's just computation.
To the extent that this is true, it seems to me that in this context, it's still better-defined as a concept than "computation". That is to say, we can describe free will and its apparent connection to our behavior with considerably more detail, precision and evidence than we can with "computation".
The usual argument is that physical laws are sufficient to explain all our observations, computation is the physical process that gives rise to the highest-complexity ordered behavior we observe, the apparent existence of free will appears to contradict the physical laws, and so the best explanation compatible with those laws is computation. Would that be the essence of your argument?
Could you define "free will"? I have never seen a definition of free will that didn't boil down to sentiment or incredulity. (Mathematical function evaluation, OTOH, has a rigorous definition.) I agree with the argument from parsimony that you've presented in that I don't see a need to admit anything beyond physics to explain our experience, including our perceived sentience. I additionally find that "free will" is too vague to even reject specifically notwithstanding that we don't need to specifically reject it because physics is sufficient anyway.
I want to do things, and I do them. I don't want to do other things, and I don't do them. Neither other people nor other things can directly override either my apparent individual motivation, nor my individual ability to manifest that motivation into action. Every conscious experience of my entire life serves as evidence of this apparent capacity, and every functional system humans build or interact with is based on the assumption that this apparent reality is how things actually work.
"Don't see a need" is an interesting phrase. I'm pretty sure you don't have an empirically-verifiable explanation for what caused the Big Bang, so there's at least one experience, the physical world around you, that physics as we understand and can test it pretty clearly can't explain. Nor is there empirical evidence that we can see behind the Big Bang even in principle; all the evidence we have indicates that we will never be able to. This does not mean that there might not be some deeper version of physics inaccessible to us that is, in fact, seamlessly complete, only that we have no access to any such deeper physics, and thus appeal to that deeper physics is is strictly unfalsifiable.
To the extent that you are satisfied by appeals to the unfalsifiable, I am as well. The difference is that I assert that what we see is what we get: we see apparent free will, and so I assert that free will exists. Your position is that what we see is an illusion, caused by a completely different process, which only appears to be free will in every single way we can observe or test. Notably, your general position is the end-state of a decades-long retreat into a Determinism-of-the-gaps, as much stronger and more falsifiable Deterministic claims were in fact consistently falsified.
Claims that Free Will is parsimonious are exactly backward; to the extent that Determinism must be true because Free Will breaks Materialism, the strong evidence of Free Will's existence and the consistent falsifications of testable Determinist theories are in fact significant evidence against Materialism.
So do I. My desires are outputs of a function incorporating my history and a bit of randomness. Nothing mystical about it.
"Free will" isn't required to model humans as organisms with intrinsic drives and memory that respond to incentives.
Sure, but there's a pretty strong case for post-big-bang materialism.
I'm not sure any physics can answer the question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?", at least not without recurring into a different "something ". This question vexes me, but seems independent of consciousness and experience and so on, which we can explain using physical laws given the singular prior that something indeed exists.
Can you elaborate on these falsifications? To be clear, I'm not talking about naive functionalism. Human actions are not merely the result of immediate inputs. We have state. We have an internal history. We can introspect. I'm merely asserting that parsimony suggests we treat this reflection as a computational process grounded in the material world.
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