Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"

Is the mind the same as the body? What is consciousness? Can machines have it?

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Atla
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Re: Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"

Post by Atla »

seeds wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 5:25 pm
Atla wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 4:54 pm Yes you underlined the "layman's terms" part, now go back a little, it says universal wavefunction. That's ONE universal wavefunction.

Which has been interpreted in at least two ways. MWI has variatons, some physicists literally mean many universes, some mean one "multiversal" thing. I take the latter stance.
Again, Atla, you need to clearly define what you mean by a “multiversal” world.

And how, exactly, are we “stretched across” it in a “sideways” fashion?

And, again, are there multiple copies of us in your concept of a multiversal world?
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Multiversal here = every possible history of this universe exists as one. "You" exist elsewhere in it too. It can be identical or different too, so it's not quite "you". Also there are no separations so in some sense you are one with some of the other yous to some degrees, depending on how you want to define yourself.
seeds
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Re: Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"

Post by seeds »

Atla wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 6:29 pm
seeds wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 5:25 pm
Atla wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 4:54 pm Yes you underlined the "layman's terms" part, now go back a little, it says universal wavefunction. That's ONE universal wavefunction.

Which has been interpreted in at least two ways. MWI has variatons, some physicists literally mean many universes, some mean one "multiversal" thing. I take the latter stance.
Again, Atla, you need to clearly define what you mean by a “multiversal” world.

And how, exactly, are we “stretched across” it in a “sideways” fashion?

And, again, are there multiple copies of us in your concept of a multiversal world?
_______
Multiversal here = every possible history of this universe exists as one. "You" exist elsewhere in it too. It can be identical or different too, so it's not quite "you". Also there are no separations so in some sense you are one with some of the other yous to some degrees, depending on how you want to define yourself.
Do these multiple versions of you have a unique first person perspective of their own inner realm of thoughts and dreams?

Are their thoughts and dreams different from one another?

Can one of your yous be experiencing an earth where they are living out their life in Hawaii, while another is experiencing an earth where they are living out their life in England?

And if so, and if what you say about there being “no separation” between anything is true, do you actually believe that if you traveled far enough in the right direction within the context of this one universe, then you could meet and shake hands with one of your doppelgangers?
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Last edited by seeds on Sat Jan 06, 2018 8:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Atla
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Re: Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"

Post by Atla »

seeds wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 7:44 pm Do these multiple versions of you have a unique first person perspective of their own inner realm of thoughts and dreams?

Are their thoughts and dreams different from one another?
Yes the exact same multiplicity applies to that too.
seeds wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 7:44 pm Can one of your yous be experiencing an earth where they are living out their life in Hawaii, while another is experience an earth where they are living out their life in England?
Yes
seeds wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 7:44 pm And if so, and if what you say about there being “no separation” between anything is true, do you actually believe that if you traveled far enough in the right direction within the context of this one universe, then you could meet and shake hands with one of your doppelgangers?
No, you can't "travel" across the multiverse, that is a self-contradiction.
Londoner
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Re: Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"

Post by Londoner »

Atla wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 6:12 pm
Your experiences do not have a magical reality of their own.
Your experiences do not have special power or meaning.
They are mostly representations, but also part of the world.
They are not always accurate.
They are not showing how things "really are".
Sometimes you experience things that aren't actually out there.
Dreams are not representations of the outside world.
...
Do you understand any of this?
What I do not understand is why you are posting these remarks as they have nothing to do with anything I have written.

I do not mention 'special powers'

You write about the 'real world', not me, and you will not explain what you mean by that, so when you say 'They are not showing how things "really are" I cannot tell what you are talking about. Likewise 'out there'. What do you mean by that? Is the consciousness of rocks 'out there'? Is it part of 'how things "really are"?

If you cannot explain what you mean, just say. Don't post another set of non-sequiturs.

As I keep pointing out, we have two kinds of experiences, the kind that we can measure and the kind we can't. Nothing magical or mysterious there. I am not the one making metaphysical claims about what things "really are" 'out there'.
Atla
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Re: Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"

Post by Atla »

Londoner wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 8:09 pm What I do not understand is why you are posting these remarks as they have nothing to do with anything I have written.

I do not mention 'special powers'

You write about the 'real world', not me, and you will not explain what you mean by that, so when you say 'They are not showing how things "really are" I cannot tell what you are talking about. Likewise 'out there'. What do you mean by that? Is the consciousness of rocks 'out there'? Is it part of 'how things "really are"?

If you cannot explain what you mean, just say. Don't post another set of non-sequiturs.

As I keep pointing out, we have two kinds of experiences, the kind that we can measure and the kind we can't. Nothing magical or mysterious there. I am not the one making metaphysical claims about what things "really are" 'out there'.
There aren't two kinds of experiences. The "content" of your experience does not have a magical reality of its own. You can't literally make an extra reality out of subjectivity.
seeds
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Re: Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"

Post by seeds »

Atla wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 8:01 pm
seeds wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 7:44 pm Do these multiple versions of you have a unique first person perspective of their own inner realm of thoughts and dreams?

Are their thoughts and dreams different from one another?
Yes the exact same multiplicity applies to that too.
seeds wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 7:44 pm Can one of your yous be experiencing an earth where they are living out their life in Hawaii, while another is experiencing an earth where they are living out their life in England?
Yes
seeds wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 7:44 pm And if so, and if what you say about there being “no separation” between anything is true, do you actually believe that if you traveled far enough in the right direction within the context of this one universe, then you could meet and shake hands with one of your doppelgangers?
No, you can't "travel" across the multiverse, that is a self-contradiction.
Actually, something that is truly self-contradictory is when someone says that there is no separation between anything, and that...
Atla wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 8:01 pm there are no worlds in the Many Worlds interpretation.
...and then admits that unique and autonomous copies of themselves can indeed live out their lives in separate (inaccessible) worlds.
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Atla
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Re: Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"

Post by Atla »

seeds wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 8:52 pm Actually, something that is truly self-contradictory is when someone says that there is no separation between anything, and that...
Atla wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 8:01 pm there are no worlds in the Many Worlds interpretation.
...and then admits that unique and autonomous copies of themselves can indeed live out their lives in separate (inaccessible) worlds.
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Inaccessible for "you" does not mean separate.
Londoner
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Re: Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"

Post by Londoner »

Atla wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 8:24 pm There aren't two kinds of experiences.
Really? So you do not distinguish between your experiences in your dreams and your experiences when you are awake? No way of telling the two apart? And if you were doing a bit of scientific research, you would hesitate to include results you had imagined?

I suppose it explains your knowledge of the consciousness of rocks.
The "content" of your experience does not have a magical reality of its own. You can't literally make an extra reality out of subjectivity.
I still have no idea what this 'magical reality' stuff is about.
Atla
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Re: Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"

Post by Atla »

Londoner wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 10:08 pm Really? So you do not distinguish between your experiences in your dreams and your experiences when you are awake? No way of telling the two apart?
Of course not, I have no idea what you mean? They are very different but of the same nature, same kind.
And if you were doing a bit of scientific research, you would hesitate to include results you had imagined?
What do you mean?
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Greta
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Re: Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"

Post by Greta »

Atla wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 4:23 pm
Greta wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 12:55 pm "Life" is neither magical, nor invented, but a phenomenon. If life was an imaginary state we certainly seem to be hard wired to work tireless to avoid losing that imaginary state.
I mean we can't really divide the world into alive and not-alive, where do we draw the line anyway? These are just two made-up categories that we have agreed on. Let's say parts of the world that seem to be self-replicating and natural are alive.

It's not a special state though, we are just hard wired to work tireless to avoid losing this "state".
Ha! I have argued the same point - basically that the universe itself is a living system, full of living systems.
Atla wrote:
As noted earlier, if an organism can go into a dormant state that necessarily means it must move into an active state.
Not sure what you are trying to say with this
If we are to say than an organism is not conscious, yet it sleeps and wakes, there is surely more consciousness in the waking than the dormant state, thus it may be minimally conscious as opposed to entirely unconscious. Is a nematode exactly as unconscious as an amoeba or minimally less so?

If the rock is bigger then I guess the rock's experience is bigger. It's just that it's like a mostly random, chaotic something. A worm's experience is more structured, serves an evolutionary purpose. And with a human you get this super-HD-Dolby surround-touchy-feely stuff or whatever. What an organism experiences was mostly shaped by evolution, it's good for survival purposes.
Atla wrote:I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't talking about people with poor self awareness, I was talking about NO self-awareness. Self-awareness never spontaniously occured in ther head for some reason.
Yes, I did misunderstand. I don't believe that a human can be entirely without self-awareness unless unconscious, as in sleep, coma, blackouts and death.
Belinda
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Re: Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"

Post by Belinda »

Atla wrote:
Yeah it's true I lack the jargon, I'm sorry, that's half the problem. The other half is that I'm saying that the jargon itself is wrong and helps generate the very problem it's trying to solve. However nondualism can't really be expressed in language, as language is inherently dualistic, so I'm having trouble conveying it.

Things don't have aspects, but we make up aspects to be able to talk about them. So far so good.
The problem starts when we then start to think that the two aspects are literally two different things. And the entire Western philosophy is based on this type of thinking error.
Not the entire Western philosophy. The error is precisely Descartes's error. i.e. that the two aspects are literally two different things. I suspect that you are a Spinozan although you would not know that.
thought addict
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Re: Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"

Post by thought addict »

Atla wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 8:24 pm There aren't two kinds of experiences. The "content" of your experience does not have a magical reality of its own. You can't literally make an extra reality out of subjectivity.
If you take the view that there is some kind of physical (or external) world, then there clearly are two kinds of experiences.

If you look at someone else, you can look directly at their eyes, can't you? But you can't seem to do this when you look at yourself. You see other parts of this particular human body, but definitely not the eyes, unless you make use of a reflective surface or imaging device.

So unless you deny the existence of other humans or the view of your own body, you have to accept there is something uniquely different about you compared to other people. Yes?

As I'm sure you already know, this is the reality of subjectivity. That key difference between the subjective view of being stuck inside one particular human's head and outside all of the other humans (and animals and rocks) is all that needs to exist for there to be a Hard Problem.

It's OK to say that you don't consider the difference between first and third person perspective to be important, but at least be precise about what you do believe. You keep saying that physical and mental are the same thing but at other times you do accept small differences. You don't have to call it dualism, but at least try to recognize that it's useful for some people to want to examine these differences.
Atla
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Re: Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"

Post by Atla »

thought addict wrote: Sun Jan 07, 2018 2:35 am If you take the view that there is some kind of physical (or external) world, then there clearly are two kinds of experiences.
I can't make sense of this. You seem to be mixing together two completely different things, just like Descartes did: one is the first person view, and the other is the "I" that seems to be literally doing things.

The first-person-view is not just "yours", it is universal. The first-person-view means that we are reality itself, in "first person", what else could we be.
The "I" is just something in the head, which is a part of reality. It is you, you are part of reality. So a reality external to "you" doesn't mean two kinds of experiences in any way.

Descartes made the unbelievable mistake of thinking that the universal, eternal first person view is HIS THING. But he was probably under the influence of Platonic dualism, that may have contributed.
Londoner
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Re: Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"

Post by Londoner »

Atla wrote: Sat Jan 06, 2018 10:32 pm Me: Really? So you do not distinguish between your experiences in your dreams and your experiences when you are awake? No way of telling the two apart?

Of course not, I have no idea what you mean? They are very different but of the same nature, same kind.
If you are aware that your dreams and experience when you are awake are 'very different' then you do know what I mean.

So, if all experiences are 'of the same nature', why would some be 'very different'?
Me: And if you were doing a bit of scientific research, you would hesitate to include results you had imagined?

What do you mean?
If all our experiences are all of the same nature, than if I imagine something why can't I include it as a scientific observation?

Whereas if we do discriminate, then we are discriminating between the world described by science and the world of imagination. But then we would have introduced a dualism, which you don't like.

I think your opposition to dualism has become an acceptance that things are 'very different' , but not so different as to be actually different!
thought addict
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Re: Leibniz's mill and the "Hard problem of consciousness"

Post by thought addict »

Atla wrote: Sun Jan 07, 2018 8:55 am
thought addict wrote: Sun Jan 07, 2018 2:35 am If you take the view that there is some kind of physical (or external) world, then there clearly are two kinds of experiences.
The first-person-view is not just "yours", it is universal. The first-person-view means that we are reality itself, in "first person", what else could we be.
If one person does not possess their own first person view then do you believe there is only one first person view shared by all brains?

Are you a solipsist that believes there is only one mind?
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