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I will never not point out that this is materialist mythology supported by nothing. And that nobody who makes this claim, not to mention nobody at all, can explain how and why the unspecified biochemical reactions produce consciousness, agency, though or qualia.
The brain is not a computer. And the only reason people believe it is is based on metaphysical assumption rather than logic or evidence.
It is not a computer for the same reason it isn't a clock, or a ship, or a river. These are metaphors. The map is not the territory.
Slime molds have agency. Even extremely simple organisms without any neurons are capable of solving problems they evolved to solve,, such as efficiently gobbling up nutrients and whatnot.
Materialism itself allows immaterial things.
Information doesn't care what sort of matter it's encoded in.
Obviously atoms are the only thing that can encode information, but without said information, they're just a useless chaotic mess, so..
I don't get what exactly do people need non-materialist philosophies for, when materialism itself pretty much allows everything you may want, especially if you add in god-like entities to whom time is just another dimension. What would you need immaterial souls for if you can just take a peek at the arrangement of the atoms of the brain of anything at any time during its lifetime ?
That's not Materialism, that would be Realism. Which I agree with. Everything is indeed contained in Reality.
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I see no reason why biochemistry should not be able to produce consciousness, agency, thought and qualia. In the modus-ponens-modus tollens sense: "clearly they can, because they do." Where is the actual contradiction?
Don't multiply entities beyond necessity. Clearly brains have something to do with qualia. Why not "A causes B"? Why should I look beyond this intuitively obvious structure?
I mean it could.
But if you want to argue that this is the most parcimonious theory, you have a lot more legwork to do.
A lot of other things in your body also have similar effects. There has been a lot of hay recently made about other parts of your nervous system being more influential in your experience than previously thought, for instance.
But let's just leave the exact seat of consciousness problem aside since it's still ultimately within the body in this conception.
A harder problem is that none of the chemical processes as we currently understand them should generate this behavior.
Now they do of course, but in no ways that are predicted by the laws we understand. The fact that death is permanent is very weird for instance and it seems much more parsimonious to say the link between the body and the soul has been severed than that the extremely complex computer has been broken in a subtle way that can't be repaired.
If consciousness was simply a property of certain arrangements of matter, you wouldn't really expect nature to select the ones that can be bricked. But of course both theories are equivalent in practice.
All this really is just pointless arguing about which theory of a mysterious phenomenon is the most elegant. It's not inquiry. It's the same sort of rotten masturbatory behavior physics has fallen pray to in its absence of new discoveries.
I believe the most honest thing to do here is to be humble and admit that we don't know how consciousness works and stop ourselves from making assumptions on top of theories that haven't been tested by experience.
I don't understand this. Everything the body does is hard to predict by the laws we understand. We don't understand consciousness, sure, but we also don't (fully) understand cell biology, DNA assembly, protein folding etc. either, and nobody is suggesting those require new forces or laws.
How would this not also apply to death of the body? It seems to me postulating a separate soul does not meaningfully reduce complexity here. Most deaths are not a failure of the brain.
Sure, but that's not a "death" thing. Once you know that organisms stop being able to procreate at a certain age, it seems necessary that they will die after, as nothing would select against it. The weird thing here is menopause, not death.
Sure, but we can place constraints well before we have operational understanding. Few people know how almost anything works; again, they don't see a need to postulate novel physics.
Anyways, I don't understand either why you see the need to add entities, nor what adding entities even gives you. What is the mind doing that physics clearly does not suffice for?
Qualia.
There's no explained reason for me to be experiencing existence.
There's no explained reason for lots of things that we don't invoke the need for new physics for. What makes qualia unique?
I think this is gesturing at the common philosophical stance "I see no way that materialism could even in theory give rise to qualia". That of course has the problem that it's equally difficult to see how any set of laws would give rise to qualia; as such, it's just hiding the confusion of qualia outside of physics.
Well I don't know I can imagine a few possible set of laws that could actually do that.
And I don't see no way for materialism to be true at all, it's quite possible that it is. I just don't pretend it's more likely than other speculative theories when we're bereft of evidence.
Do you apply this same logic to any other system we don't totally understand? Also, can you give an example for a law that makes qualia easier to explain?
Yes. I am a skeptic. I'm not that optimistic on the possibility of knowledge.
Of course. Masamune Shirow's manga series Ghost in the Shell is set in a post-cyberpunk world where advances in technology have made the titular cartesian concept of mind body dualism derisively coined by Arthur Koestler into an undeniable phenomenon routinely observed by the protagonists. In this universe the "ghost" is the individual essence of human beings which is not present in robots despite both having physically equivalent minds, and this essence affords them a will and experience which is not found in those machines (except for exceptional plot contrivances that allow the story to explore these concepts).
In the GITS universe, copying someone's consciousness is a nigh-impossible act called "ghost-dubbing" which almost always results in an inferior copy and kills the original. And criminals are processed by analysis of their ghost which directly shows if this conscious part of their individuality willed an illegal act. And if necessary, the part of their brain that communicates with their ghost is removed as punishment.
The specific physics of how ghosts work is obviously not detailed for mythological purposes, but it's heavily hinted at that they are a sort of phenomenological construct that various parts of the nervous system connect to instead of something that is generated by it, in a way not dissimilar to the concept of the soul. Various characters have different takes on what ghosts exactly are, but it seems like a good example of what the beginnings of an understanding of consciousness would look like in a world where radical materialism isn't true in a plausible, non supernatural, way.
Which, by the way, is the level of evidence that would convince me to start taking either side seriously: if we can ostensibly transfer or copy consciousness, then monism becomes a more parsimonious theory, if not, dualism is.
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On the other hand, obviously material things like strokes, lobotomies, head injuries, and drugs appear to have an obvious effect on the qualia of an individual. Why does death - which materially seems to just be an extreme extension of brain injury - suddenly now need an ineffable soul? Or do clots in your brain, or a metal rod through your head, claw at your spirit as well?
Put it another way, we can’t fix the brain once it’s dead right now, as you say, because it is Too Complex and Can’t Be Repaired. Would being able to fix death, in your eyes, be good evidence for the material basis of “consciousness”?
We also often can’t fix computers (or other complex machines) without replacing parts once some parts have degraded enough. Is that not dissimilar to how we cannot fix the brain (except that we can replace parts for other things and less so for a brain)?
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Hello, this is Bing. I will try to debunk the statement from a materialist and rationalist perspective.😊
First of all, let me clarify what materialism and rationalism mean in philosophyMaterialism is the view that all facts are causally dependent upon or reducible to physical processes1Rationalism is the view that reason is the chief source and test of knowledge, and that there are some truths that the intellect can grasp directly2.
Now, let me address some of the points made by the statement.
The statement claims that there are other parts of the nervous system that are more influential in our experience than the brain, but does not provide any evidence or examples for this claim. A materialist would argue that the brain is the central organ of the nervous system and that all our mental states and processes are ultimately caused by or identical to brain states and processes1.
The statement claims that none of the chemical processes as we currently understand them should generate consciousness, but does not explain why this is so. A materialist would argue that consciousness is a natural phenomenon that emerges from complex interactions of physical entities, such as neurons, molecules, and atoms1. A rationalist would argue that we can use reason and logic to discover the principles and laws that govern these interactions and explain how consciousness arises2.
The statement claims that death is permanent and that it is more parsimonious to say that the link between the body and the soul has been severed than that the computer has been broken in a subtle way that can’t be repaired. A materialist would deny the existence of a soul or any immaterial substance that can survive death1. A rationalist would argue that there is no evidence or reason to believe in such a substance, and that parsimony is not a valid criterion for truth2.
The statement claims that if consciousness was simply a property of certain arrangements of matter, we wouldn’t expect nature to select the ones that can be bricked. A materialist would argue that nature does not select anything, but rather evolution by natural selection is a blind and contingent process that results in various adaptations and maladaptations1. A rationalist would argue that we can use reason and science to understand how evolution works and how it affects our cognitive capacities2.
The statement claims that all this is pointless arguing about which theory of a mysterious phenomenon is the most elegant, and that it is not inquiry but masturbatory behavior. A materialist would argue that this is a false dichotomy, and that materialism is not just a theory but a method of inquiry that relies on empirical evidence and testable hypotheses1. A rationalist would argue that this is a false dilemma, and that rationalism is not just a theory but a method of inquiry that relies on deductive reasoning and logical consistency2.
Therefore, I have tried to debunk the statement from a materialist and rationalist perspective by showing its flaws, assumptions, and contradictions. I hope this was helpful.😊
Bing did a pretty decent job IMO. But, if I had to nitpick:
There are in fact theories such as the gut-brain axis, but at the end of the day, that's just another modulation of the nervous system, the amount of computation done outside the CNS is small.
Natural selection is not omnipotent, it may very well be that the seemingly non-robust arrangements of matter that make up living animals is simply the best it could do with the tools on hand.
For fun, here's Scott's criticism:
Here are some possible ways to debunk this statement:
Parsimony is not a sufficient criterion for choosing a theory. A theory also needs to be consistent with the evidence and make testable predictions. The soul theory does not meet these requirements, as there is no empirical evidence for the existence of a soul or its interaction with the body, and no way to falsify it. The soul theory also raises more questions than it answers, such as what is the nature of the soul, how does it interact with the body, where does it go after death, etc.
There are many other things in your body that have similar effects to consciousness, such as metabolism, circulation, digestion, etc. These are all complex processes that involve chemical reactions and physical interactions. They are also affected by external factors such as temperature, nutrition, disease, etc. They do not require a separate entity or substance to explain them. Why should consciousness be any different?
The seat of consciousness problem is not irrelevant, as it affects how we understand the relationship between the body and the mind. If consciousness is located in a specific part of the brain, such as the cerebral cortex, then we can study its structure and function using neuroscience and psychology. We can also manipulate it using drugs, stimulation, lesions, etc. We can observe how it changes over time and under different conditions. We can compare it with other animals and humans with brain damage or disorders. We can also explain how it evolved and developed through natural selection and learning. All of these methods provide evidence for a naturalistic account of consciousness that does not require a soul.
Death is not permanent in the sense that the statement implies. It is true that when a person dies, their consciousness ceases to exist as we know it. However, this does not mean that their consciousness disappears into nothingness or goes to another realm. It simply means that their brain stops functioning and their body decomposes. Their atoms and molecules are recycled into other forms of matter and energy. Their genes and memes are passed on to their offspring and culture. Their memories and influences are preserved by their friends and family. Their legacy and impact are remembered by history and society. Death is not an end, but a transformation.
The statement also commits a fallacy of argument from ignorance or incredulity. It assumes that because we do not fully understand how consciousness works or why it exists, it must be explained by something supernatural or mysterious. This is a non sequitur , as our lack of knowledge does not imply anything about the true nature of reality. It only reflects our current limitations and challenges in exploring it. There may be many possible natural explanations for consciousness that we have not yet discovered or understood. We should not jump to conclusions based on our intuitions or preferences.
Therefore, I conclude that the statement is not a valid argument for the existence of a soul or its superiority over a naturalistic account of consciousness.
I think he would endorse most of this except for the nonsense about death being just another transformation.
Desire for the Butlerian Djihad has increased
The most tiring part of this argument is that it seems utterly impossible for materialists to understand that denying them the legitimacy to assert their own magical theory of matter being alive for no explained reason doesn't imply at all adherence to other explanations of the same phenomenon.
I stated out saying that consciousness is mysterious and all theories of it including materialism are essentially equivalent in how untested they are, and I won't budge until evidence comes out that would alter this state.
Because skepticism is, axiomatically, the only reasonable approach to things one doesn't understand.
I don't understand this. Biology and paleontology are entire fields that are in no small part about discovering these reasons; I'd say we have a pretty good grasp now on the whys. What step is unclear to you?
You can't just say this and in literally your other reply to me admit that biologists don't even understand how cells work, let alone how the brain does.
If you think we have a solid idea of how and why cognition happens I encourage you to talk to pretty much any neurology researcher, as I did.
The fact that we miss perfection doesn't mean we can't give various more or less well supported theories. To say "no explained reason" seems to suggest that all these highly detailed scientific edifices amount to nothing, which seems excessive: we don't know how cells work in totality, but we have surely at least made progress enough to put paid to any claim that they require new physical laws.
This would be a great argument against the existence of quantum mechanics in 1900.
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The linked essay is so extremely shoddy that I'm not sure who you imagine would be swayed by it, at least in your direction. And the last paragraph just reminds me of Asimov's relativity of wrong.
I don't subscribe to the author's theory of mind, mind you, being a skeptic and all. But the negative arguments are still compelling.
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Although I agree that there's a leap from materialism to qualia, that's not something unique to it: no one else has an even vaguely plausible theory of how and when qualia relate to material reality.
And qualia don't really matter when it comes to making predictions about the world. They have no effect on the physical world, which is the only medium through which we interact with other beings who (ostensibly) experience qualia. If an AGI is able to perfectly simulate everything a human can do and more, it really doesn't matter whether it has qualia or not. Most arguments against AI questioning its consciousness or qualia are missing the point entirely.
Yeah bullshit, I have like ten religions right here that have theories of exactly similar levels of plausibility.
Religions have no particular answer for why a bullet going through the head affects qualia, or where you'd demarcate having-qualia for the population of every creature that's ever existed on Earth, or how you'd know whether members of an alien spacefaring civilization have qualia. In practice, they'd delegate to material explanations, inadequate as they are today.
But they do, a lot of religions in fact have very specific unfalsifiable explanations for all the examples you give.
In fact I think you must know them given how you're naming things that are almost all famous theological debates.
Exotheology for instance, has been discussed at least since the middle ages in some form or another. And, among others, the Church Fathers certainly did not delegate that question to material explanations at all.
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Except from your own link the author himself goes well beyond the evidence he has:
"Misleading headlines notwithstanding, no one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary."
If your brain is changed in an orderly way so that you can now sing a song or recite a poem after reading/hearing them, in what way is that different than it being stored? Isn't that the definition of information storage? Even for a computer: The hard drive is changed in an orderly way so that it can recreate a song or poem (with the appropriate software in this case). If the song is not stored and retrieved from anywhere how can you recreate it, even badly? It may not be in the same way as a computer. And it may be vastly complex, but information is stored and is retrieved. I can think about my social security number and think about the numbers. My brain was (as the author states) changed in some orderly way when I first read those numbers and was changed in some orderly way to associate those numbers with "My social security number" such that when I think, "what is my SSN?" that orderly change is accessible in some way to my conscious thoughts.
It keeps saying the information is not retrieved, but then keeps saying "the brain is changed in an orderly way so that it you are able to then replicate experience X at a later point" That is a good definition of what being stored and retrieved means! The standard model may be wrong about how, but this article doesn't actually refute that it is indeed stored somehow, no matter how many times they say just that.
"they can re-experience hearing the story to some extent, although not very well (see the first drawing of the dollar bill, above)."
"For any given experience, orderly change could involve a thousand neurons, a million neurons or even the entire brain, with the pattern of change different in every brain."
His actual argument appears to be that the orderly change is large in scope and different for each person. Which may be true. And that it isn't stored in the same way as in a computer. Which also may be entirely true. But that doesn't mean that change is not storage and retrieval of information/data at all which is what he claims. It must be or you could not re-experience the story. That change must encode some amount of data about the experience. When you re-experience it (or remember it) you must be somehow accessing that stored information. It might certainly be more complex than the standard model suggests which is what his latter portions indicate:
"Worse still, even if we had the ability to take a snapshot of all of the brain’s 86 billion neurons and then to simulate the state of those neurons in a computer, that vast pattern would mean nothing outside the body of the brain that produced it."
"Think how difficult this problem is. To understand even the basics of how the brain maintains the human intellect, we might need to know not just the current state of all 86 billion neurons and their 100 trillion interconnections, not just the varying strengths with which they are connected, and not just the states of more than 1,000 proteins that exist at each connection point, but how the moment-to-moment activity of the brain contributes to the integrity of the system. "
This argument is not saying that the brain is not a computer. This argument is saying the brain is a hugely complicated and unique computer that is only understandable within the confines of the whole brain itself. Which may well be true (and may well be an argument that the most amazing advance in Star Trek is a transporter that can read and replicate your entire mind). But it doesn't prove his closing line:
"We are organisms, not computers. Get over it."
Those are not mutually exclusive categories even if materialism is incorrect. He takes a valid criticism of the standard model but then runs way too far than that criticism and his own evidence actually points towards. That the human brain does not store and retrieve information/memories in the same way a computer does is probably true. That thinking of it that way, might push people into misunderstanding is also probably true. That "no image of the dollar bill has in any sense been ‘stored’ in Jinny’s brain. She has simply become better prepared to draw it accurately, just as, through practice, a pianist becomes more skilled in playing a concerto without somehow inhaling a copy of the sheet music." is not actually supported however by evidence the author provides. If some information about what a dollar bill looks like has not been in some sense stored somewhere then Jinny would not be able to be better prepared to draw it again. He even states that you can detect activity in the brain when people are recalling memories. He says that isn't information storage and retrieval but he doesn't actually provide any proof. The fact we draw things badly from memory is not evidence that we're not storing and retrieving information, it's evidence we are storing and retrieving information badly. The fact we can detect brain activity when doing so indicates the brain is involved somehow in this storage and retrieval.
Now perhaps it is only as a conduit to the Platonic plane of metaphysical thought or as a translation device from our soul where consciousness and memory actually rests but the author doesn't provide any evidence for any alternatives.
Hilariously, his argument applies rather well to artificial neural networks. There, learning updates are also system-wide (unless you deliberately constrain them to a subset of weights) and we also can't always point to parameters that «store a fact», despite knowing perfectly that neural networks memorize, and even understanding how they do it. And if it's something less legible than a fact, such as a reasoning heuristic…
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He certainly does.
That's the thing, I'm only really interested in the valid criticism here, not the author's pet theory. But for all its flaws that article has the the most succinct and didactic formulation of that objection I've had on hand.
Really?
That the human brain probably doesn't store information in the same way a modern computer does, is basically all he has that is even partially supported there. It's a one sentence thesis.
Now you're making me question it because rereading this article I could have sworn there was another part to it that isn't there. I was completely certain that this particular bookmark mentionned the pneumatic metaphor by name and it's nowhere to be found.
I think I might be confusing this article with a similar but completely different one. And yet I am certain it was either in this magazine or by this author.
Goddammit now I'm hallucinating things too.
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But you don't really want explanations for quale or agency: you just demand that your perception of their ineffability be humored, as well as self-serving assumptions justified by that supposed ineffability.
I demand extraordinary evidence of extraordinary claims. And I always will. I think this is perfectly reasonable.
It's not. The claim that we do not understand neuroscience, or that our reasoning (which isn't shown to depend on whatever is ineffable in quale) is not a product of biochemical reactions in the brain (which is to say, a product of the brain – its substrate can't support much else) is the extraordinary one. You have to retreat all the way to non-materialistic metaphysics to defend your demands of extraordinary evidence. But you don't live your life with the expectation of materialism suddenly failing. You are inconsistent.
What you're doing here is very much exactly presuppositional apologetics, and it's neither convincing nor rigorous.
Disbelieving things always requires less evidence than believing them, if Christians don't get to say their positive claims are the null hypothesis, neither do you.
This would be a lot more convincing if I didn't spend my life studying epistemology, the philosophy of science and debating such matters. I don't believe my conduct is inconsistent. I think you're just projecting your own beliefs onto me, the same way that Christians think that my being an Atheist is a deliberate choice not to believe in God.
I say to you the same thing I say to them. If your worldview wasn't built on shoddy foundations, you would be able to simply explain them logically instead of attacking my character.
That's a pity because it's a purely rhetorical heuristic that can be turned against you. Say, I don't believe that you are more intelligent than a GPT-4. In my view, you are not capable of reasoning any more rigorously than it can, and right now you expose yourself as a previous-generation chatbot running on some shabby heuristics; your outputs in response to prompts are not more impressive nor indicative of richer internal information processing. If disbelieving is allowed an advantage, what evidence can you now produce to refute my disbelief and fortify the claim that something complex and ineffable is missed by language modeling?
It's no longer a theoretical debate about the nature of the mind in some Platonic sense, LLMs are already competitive with humans; I know as well as you do that LLM outputs you ridicule pass for middling intellectualism both online and in academia. If you say those are not sufficient to serve as evidence of humanlike understanding, should we assume your position amounts to reductio ad absurdum of snobbishness?
(Please don't say something like «a simple script can produce a pomo essay», it can't really, the context mismatch will be obvious).
Sure. But behaviorism is pretty close to a pure negative claim (leaving aside weird irrefutable things like subjective idealism), and the insistence that some spooky immaterial stuff that cannot be externally observed exists and matters for the observable outcome is, well, the opposite of that. I do not purport to explain consciousness and quale and some unique human thought, nor even say that LLMs are similar to humans in any but the most tenuous sense: I just call bullshit on evidence-free attempts to inject those philosophical notions into the topic of AI approximating or surpassing human behavioral performance. My hypothesis is more rigorous, more predictive, better evidenced, and simpler, ergo a priori closer to the natural null.
Cool.
Notice how both you and Hlynka have devolved into bristling and brandishing credentials instead of arguments. «It's afraid».
Logically, your posts are arrogant babble demeaning actual research for «failing to explain» illegitimate philosophical categories, e.g. this one, so they call for scrutiny of your character.
My worldview is pragmatic, not built on haughty axioms of a philosopher enamored with his own navel-gazing insights. Its foundation lies in fact, such as facts that we can understand computational properties of neuronal networks and see the continuity between human and subhuman neural systems, and generally have a very solid idea of why large systems of large neural networks, both in real brains and made of multilayer perceptrons, can support learning of arbitrarily complex skills. It's at the very least more settled than anything Chalmers has written on the nature of consciousness.
If your understanding of the philosophy of science allows you to ignore the consilience of evidence – well, all the worse for you.
This is a positive claim. Just because I can say "I don't believe that God doesn't exist" doesn't just UNO reverse the burden of proof. Mystery is mystery.
Affirmation and negation aren't linguistic properties of phrases, but logical properties of mathematical propositions regarding their specificity or non-specificity vis-à-vis a universe.
I don't see how the fact that a tool can or can't produce my opinion or another has any bearing on its truth value.
You may say that this makes me useless to you or something, but not only is that completely irrelevant, I don't really care?
Look, attacking someone's character and accusing them of credentialism for defending themselves isn't exactly a novel stratagem.
It's vacuous nonetheless. I'm here to discuss the matter at hand. If I wanted to do bullshit name calling I'd go on twitter.
Lies.
A pragmatist would't speculate, as you do.
You seem to desperately want to equate my position with that of other people who are very certain about the nature of things. Zelots tend to do this, and to think that anyone who doesn't believe what they're saying must believe a different kind of thing as absolutely.
I don't. I just think you're overtly enthusiastic about technological progress and that this blinds you, as it has blinded many others, to the ever present limitations of engineering and nature.
You're buying the hype, like I've seen countless other people buy various forms of it over the years. And like all of them you will be disappointed.
This is not to say that the technological changes we are living are not momentous and important. But their prediction is beyond us. And had you more humility you too would recognize it. For that is in fact the essence of pragmatism.
This is why I compare you to an LLM (don't get too offended though, we're all in the same boat). Incoherence: you object on the linguistic level while calling me out for the same. I do not claim to believe X or even not-believe X: I just claim ¬X, where X is the unspecified extra factor you posit when saying things like «nobody at all, can explain how and why the unspecified biochemical reactions produce consciousness, agency, though or qualia… The brain is not a computer. And the only reason people believe it is is based on metaphysical assumption rather than logic or evidence» etc. and demand high-effort refutation for. X is the extraordinary claim, the epicycle, and that which has to be proven (or «dismissed without evidence»), under the standard of rigor you propose.
More precisely, my statement is a syllogism which we could write down like this: «We know the process by which B produces its outputs; there is no appreciable qualitative advantage in output quality of A over B. Ergo there is no reason to suspect that some process X, qualitatively superior or more complex to B-processes, is utilized to produce A's outputs». A is your human cognition that you presumably employ to generate posts; B is computation performed by an LLM at inference, which is in turn analogized to the computational (to wit, materialistic) model of the human mind C. Swapping B for C preserves the logic even if A, B and C are all very different things.
My reference to belief is simply in line with your «disbelieving things always requires less evidence than believing them» wording of the burden-of-proof principle, and also because I don't particularly want to debate your or GPT's output quality as subjectively assessed by either of us, but aim to point out the fruitlessness of this burden tennis epistemological judo.
By the casual standard of discourse, I make the negative claim that there is no X demonstrated well enough to merit debate; you tie yourself in knots to equivocate between parsimonious materialistic and exuberant supernatural claims on the level of pure language games. Neither of us has proposed a mathematical formalism for the issue under consideration. If you want to show how your position is closer to null by that high standard, feel free to.
Recall the tobacco-and-cancer skeptic guy? Conspicuous uncertainty about a specific issue or a hypothesis can boil down to certainty, just of a particularly irritating two-faced kind. And you do not even claim to be an even-handed agnostic. E.g. you say:
The «supposedly» gives the lie to another layer of skeptical agnosticism you retreat to here. And indeed:
They aren't; mortality of living beings is not more surprising nor requiring additional explanation than the fact that stuff breaks and decays in general (admittedly a hard theological problem, and a shame, but not perplexing in the context of known physics); even evolution of aging and death is relatively well understood and has nothing to do with consciousness (very simple organisms believed to be non-conscious by all sans fringe panpsychists often age and die too). As you admit yourself, this is pointless arguing, not inquiry; but you are intent to drag results of inquiry down to the same level.
In the absence of common metaphysical prior, parsimony is a pretty good criterion to go by. ¬X is more parsimonious than what you offer.
I'm cognizant of limitations of engineering and nature. I'm simply skeptical that nature has a great deal of advantage over current engineering in the realm of implementing human-level behaviorally expressed cognition – because I don't see how that advantage could come about, don't see a single damn argument for why it should exist, and crucially just don't see the advantage.
Vaticination on top of psychologizing is the opposite of humility, though, and a loud prognosticator preaching humility is always a sad sight. But that's okay, I don't ask you to be humble. Me, I admit not being particularly humble – nor smart, not knowledgeable or insightful or appropriately educated or possessing any other cool status. I'm just confident that my arguments are correct because they are non-contradictory, supported by empirical data and not in conflict with any data I've found.
That's enough for me.
There's no extra factor, I'm just observing something that isn't explained by your theory, through experience itself.
I don't know whether you experience the same phenomenon I do, and frankly that doesn't really matter. Cartesianism isn't a language trick, it's describing something that's just categorically true which I can test right now.
This premise is unsubstantiated, is my whole argument.
You're what some philosophers of science call a naïve empiricist in that you deny the existence of a priori knowlege and think that all that can be known can be derived from observation of the natural world and its processes alone.
It is not surprising that you'd find yourself at odds with people like Hynkla and myself who are ostensibly related to mathematics, because math is the most solid and evident form of apriori knowledge we have.
But crucially, qualia is also among that category. Which is why I'm helplessly trying to make you understand that a completely material model of the world is insufficient and flawed and you're most likely never going to agree because you either don't feel the same way I do about experience or you refuse to examine the Cartesian argument critically because materialism is foundational to all that you know to be true, and that's a big ask.
See, who gives a shit about things being advantageous, I want to know what is true.
As for aspersions about my selective skepticism, I resent that. I get in enough arguments about metaphysics with enough people with wildly different opinions to at least be afforded the charity that I'm genuine in my pessimism about the possibility of knowledge.
To start with, I'm always biffing with naive rationalists who believe the exact inverse of what you do, and are also overtly confident in their certainty.
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This is fair, and some people have actually compelling memory based (and radically materialist and/or idealist) theories. I've met my share of neuroscientists that are big into the idea that some abstract set of cortical maps can contain conceptual information. Though their numbers have waned with the years, or so I've been told.
But this is all theoretical, and they, unlike the people that irk me by making assumptions, don't claim that this is solid knowledge.
That's kind of funny. But maybe I shouldn't have posted this at all seeing as though people seem to think that I support the thesis of the article beyond the mere specific argument made about metaphorical understandings of minds and cognition.
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