My New Argument for a Nonphysical Consciousness

[ryan]

Let's say scientists want to record what happens to me when I am in pain. They record me getting poked, and a highly sensitive machine models exactly what happened. Assume that they know what every particle did during the time I am in pain. Their full physical account would not include the sensation of pain that I felt.

How do you know? This is what I mean. If you had known about the "Mary's room" thought experiment and its volumes of rebuttals in philosophical journals, would you still flatly state what you did, with such apparent certainty?

But I do know about Mary's room. Now you're the one just throwing out assumptions about things you don't know. I must have learnt about 20 times more on my own than I did with the entry course at my university.

This is different than Mary's room. They will observe - not just read about - all physical details about my pain, but they won't observe my pain. They can know everything down to what every particle did. Scientifically/physically, the sensation of pain doesn't exist. I think this is a much stronger argument for qualia than Mary's room.

 

[Juma]

They can know everything down to what every particle did. Scientifically/physically, the sensation of pain doesn't exist.

Bullshit. Just because you doesnt know how doesnt mean it doesnt exist.

 

[ryan]

They can know everything down to what every particle did. Scientifically/physically, the sensation of pain doesn't exist.

Bullshit. Just because you doesnt know how doesnt mean it doesnt exist.

They can observe everything except for the sensation of my pain. The sensation of pain is simply not there in the physical account.

 

[bilby]

No; we need to observe what is out there to destinguish between objects that are now identical, but only differ in their history.

A mind is made up of quarks, leptons and bosons. SO IS EVERYTHING ELSE. There is no special 'mind stuff'; the difference between a mind and a fire is the way those parts are arranged. A fire is made of fuel and oxygen. A mind is made of brain cells and nerve impulses. There are no particles of 'fire'. There are no particles of 'mind'.

Mind is a process. Like burning, it is real and physical, but it is not inherent in stuff; it is an emergent property of a specific arrangement of stuff.

Minds are not something special.

Let's say scientists want to record what happens to me when I am in pain. They record me getting poked, and a highly sensitive machine models exactly what happened. Assume that they know what every particle did during the time I am in pain. Their full physical account would not include the sensation of pain that I felt.

Of course it would. They may not be able to identify that that's what they are looking at, but nonetheless it would be there.

I have a picture of my dog on the hard drive of my PC. If I look at the hard drive at the molecular level, there are just iron, oxygen and silicon atoms - and nothing that looks remotely like a dog.

If I use my knowledge of hard drive design, I can extract the binary ones and zeros that constitute the picture file; and they too look nothing like a dog.

Yet the picture of my dog is real, and physically exists on the hard drive.

Pain is a software phenomenon. It cannot be directly detected by examining the hardware; but that doesn't imply that it exists independently of the hardware.

With adequate knowledge not only of the physical state of the hard drive, but also of what a hard drive does, and how it does it, I can reproduce the picture of my dog from the information on the hard drive. Not only that, but that 'adequate knowledge' can itself be derived from physical examination of the hard drive - the system contains enough information to reconstruct not just the picture, but also the protocols and encoding required to reconstruct the picture, and the basic instruction set that allows reconstruction of those protocols and encoding techniques. The system can 'pull itself up by the bootstraps', and generate all of the needed software purely from the hardware present; Understanding this process at the fine detail level of ones and zeros (or even at the level of iron, silicon and oxygen atoms) is VERY HARD INDEED, but it is demonstrably possible - it happens all the time.

The same is true of the brain; understanding exactly how to get from a bunch of neurons exchanging nerve impulses to the sensation of pain is VERY HARD INDEED, but you don't get to claim that it is IMPOSSIBLE unless you can PROVE it - particularly as we observe it happening all the time.

It is the structure of a computer that translates ones and zeros on a hard drive into clear and detailed pictures on a screen or printed on a piece of paper. It is the structure of a brain that translates nervous impulses into qualia. To do so requires multiple levels of recursion in both cases, as the system has to 'pull itself up by the bootstraps' to render the hugely complex end result using a trivially simple starting point - this is where the word 'boot' comes from to mean 'start up a computer'.

Your argument is not evidence for a non-physical consciousness; it is an argument for Ryan's inability to grasp all the steps needed to get from the structure of the brain to qualia. But your inability to grasp all the steps, or how a series of small steps can build up to a hugely complex set of emergent properties that are not discernible when looking at individual particles, is not evidence for anything other than your ignorance.

You can't understand a forest just by looking at a tree. You can't understand a tree just by looking at a leaf. You can't understand a leaf just by looking at a chloroplast. You can't understand a chloroplast just by looking at a magnesium ion. None of this means that a forest is non-physical; nor that a forest cannot exist without some magical woo that falls outside the Standard Model.

 

[Kharakov]

Bullshit. Just because you doesnt know how doesnt mean it doesnt exist.

They can observe everything except for the sensation of my pain. The sensation of pain is simply not there in the physical account.

They can stimulate the equivalent nerves- we don't see everything exactly the same either. Doesn't mean we aren't both looking at this sentence at some point in time.

 

[ryan]

Let's say scientists want to record what happens to me when I am in pain. They record me getting poked, and a highly sensitive machine models exactly what happened. Assume that they know what every particle did during the time I am in pain. Their full physical account would not include the sensation of pain that I felt.

Of course it would. They may not be able to identify that that's what they are looking at, but nonetheless it would be there.

I have a picture of my dog on the hard drive of my PC. If I look at the hard drive at the molecular level, there are just iron, oxygen and silicon atoms - and nothing that looks remotely like a dog.

If I use my knowledge of hard drive design, I can extract the binary ones and zeros that constitute the picture file; and they too look nothing like a dog.

Yet the picture of my dog is real, and physically exists on the hard drive.

Pain is a software phenomenon. It cannot be directly detected by examining the hardware; but that doesn't imply that it exists independently of the hardware.

That's a load of crap. The picture comes after a processor processes the information, and then it is represented with a different system being the monitor. The pain coincides with the process; the output, pain, is never revealed.

 

[ryan]

They can observe everything except for the sensation of my pain. The sensation of pain is simply not there in the physical account.

They can stimulate the equivalent nerves- we don't see everything exactly the same either. Doesn't mean we aren't both looking at this sentence at some point in time.

I know, but we still do not get to observe something about the system.

 

[bilby]

Of course it would. They may not be able to identify that that's what they are looking at, but nonetheless it would be there.

I have a picture of my dog on the hard drive of my PC. If I look at the hard drive at the molecular level, there are just iron, oxygen and silicon atoms - and nothing that looks remotely like a dog.

If I use my knowledge of hard drive design, I can extract the binary ones and zeros that constitute the picture file; and they too look nothing like a dog.

Yet the picture of my dog is real, and physically exists on the hard drive.

Pain is a software phenomenon. It cannot be directly detected by examining the hardware; but that doesn't imply that it exists independently of the hardware.

That's a load of crap. The picture comes after a processor processes the information, and then it is represented with a different system being the monitor. The pain coincides with the process; the output, pain, is never revealed.

You are assuming your conclusion. If there is no separate consciousness (and there isn't) then the idea that there is something to which the pain can be 'revealed' is meaningless.

All of the systems are physical. I already added some more to my post, in anticipation of your objection:

Let's say scientists want to record what happens to me when I am in pain. They record me getting poked, and a highly sensitive machine models exactly what happened. Assume that they know what every particle did during the time I am in pain. Their full physical account would not include the sensation of pain that I felt.

Of course it would. They may not be able to identify that that's what they are looking at, but nonetheless it would be there.

I have a picture of my dog on the hard drive of my PC. If I look at the hard drive at the molecular level, there are just iron, oxygen and silicon atoms - and nothing that looks remotely like a dog.

If I use my knowledge of hard drive design, I can extract the binary ones and zeros that constitute the picture file; and they too look nothing like a dog.

Yet the picture of my dog is real, and physically exists on the hard drive.

Pain is a software phenomenon. It cannot be directly detected by examining the hardware; but that doesn't imply that it exists independently of the hardware.

With adequate knowledge not only of the physical state of the hard drive, but also of what a hard drive does, and how it does it, I can reproduce the picture of my dog from the information on the hard drive. Not only that, but that 'adequate knowledge' can itself be derived from physical examination of the hard drive - the system contains enough information to reconstruct not just the picture, but also the protocols and encoding required to reconstruct the picture, and the basic instruction set that allows reconstruction of those protocols and encoding techniques. The system can 'pull itself up by the bootstraps', and generate all of the needed software purely from the hardware present; Understanding this process at the fine detail level of ones and zeros (or even at the level of iron, silicon and oxygen atoms) is VERY HARD INDEED, but it is demonstrably possible - it happens all the time.

The same is true of the brain; understanding exactly how to get from a bunch of neurons exchanging nerve impulses to the sensation of pain is VERY HARD INDEED, but you don't get to claim that it is IMPOSSIBLE unless you can PROVE it - particularly as we observe it happening all the time.

It is the structure of a computer that translates ones and zeros on a hard drive into clear and detailed pictures on a screen or printed on a piece of paper. It is the structure of a brain that translates nervous impulses into qualia. To do so requires multiple levels of recursion in both cases, as the system has to 'pull itself up by the bootstraps' to render the hugely complex end result using a trivially simple starting point - this is where the word 'boot' comes from to mean 'start up a computer'.

Your argument is not evidence for a non-physical consciousness; it is an argument for Ryan's inability to grasp all the steps needed to get from the structure of the brain to qualia. But your inability to grasp all the steps, or how a series of small steps can build up to a hugely complex set of emergent properties that are not discernible when looking at individual particles, is not evidence for anything other than your ignorance.

You can't understand a forest just by looking at a tree. You can't understand a tree just by looking at a leaf. You can't understand a leaf just by looking at a chloroplast. You can't understand a chloroplast just by looking at a magnesium ion. None of this means that a forest is non-physical; nor that a forest cannot exist without some magical woo that falls outside the Standard Model.

 

[Kharakov]

They can stimulate the equivalent nerves- we don't see everything exactly the same either. Doesn't mean we aren't both looking at this sentence at some point in time.

I know, but we still do not get to observe something about the system.

We can't tell whether another human is a philosophical zombie or not: they could have all the bells and whistles of consciousness, but nobody's home.

We don't know whether consciousness is something in addition to the brain. We just don't. At this stage in the game, it's not pragmatic to disregard or overplay the role of brains in consciousness, which is why you should sidestep philosophical zombies who think they are or are not the whole consciousness.

For now, if you stimulate similar nerves in another being, you have reason to believe that they stimulate similar sensations in the other person's consciousness.

 

[Keith&Co.]

If you could see it 4 dimensionally,

And again with the fantasy evidence for your position....
How do you know that the copy doesn't have continuity through time based on the original it's a copy of?

Or, more to the point, how would you establish this as a fact for the purpose of supporting your claim?

 

[ryan]

You can't understand a forest just by looking at a tree. You can't understand a tree just by looking at a leaf. You can't understand a leaf just by looking at a chloroplast. You can't understand a chloroplast just by looking at a magnesium ion. None of this means that a forest is non-physical; nor that a forest cannot exist without some magical woo that falls outside the Standard Model.

There is you being the system of pain, and then there is your system of pain that exists. That is one system with two different realities depending on the point of observation.

 

[bilby]

You can't understand a forest just by looking at a tree. You can't understand a tree just by looking at a leaf. You can't understand a leaf just by looking at a chloroplast. You can't understand a chloroplast just by looking at a magnesium ion. None of this means that a forest is non-physical; nor that a forest cannot exist without some magical woo that falls outside the Standard Model.

There is you being the system of pain, and then there is your system of pain that exists. That is one system with two different realities depending on the point of observation.

So what?

Lots of things look different from different points of view. That doesn't make any of the views non-physical; nor does it imply that the two points of view are not part of the same reality.

 

[DBT]

You can't understand a forest just by looking at a tree. You can't understand a tree just by looking at a leaf. You can't understand a leaf just by looking at a chloroplast. You can't understand a chloroplast just by looking at a magnesium ion. None of this means that a forest is non-physical; nor that a forest cannot exist without some magical woo that falls outside the Standard Model.

There is you being the system of pain, and then there is your system of pain that exists. That is one system with two different realities depending on the point of observation.

How do you know they are two different realities? The system has feedback loops that perceive sensation that the system itself forms in response to given stimuli. Stimuli that has been interpreted (evolutionary response) as being a sharp stinging sensation when pricked by a needle, for example.

 

[ryan]

There is you being the system of pain, and then there is your system of pain that exists. That is one system with two different realities depending on the point of observation.

So what?

Lots of things look different from different points of view. That doesn't make any of the views non-physical.

There is a process of pain that exists, and then there is experiencing that process. They are just fundamentally different. There is no physical reason for that experience to be there; it just is.

 

[ryan]

There is you being the system of pain, and then there is your system of pain that exists. That is one system with two different realities depending on the point of observation.

How do you know they are two different realities? The system has feedback loops that perceive sensation that the system itself forms in response to given stimuli. Stimuli that has been interpreted (evolutionary response) as being a sharp stinging sensation when pricked by a needle, for example.

If we look at an entire ecology, we generally see causes and effects of an evolving system that follows basic physical laws. Like I told bilby, the sensation of pain does not have to be there. We can look at a human avoiding a thorn bush simply as what the biological subsystem of the ecological system was supposed to do anyways (although I think there is come free will involved, but that's for another day).

 

[bilby]

So what?

Lots of things look different from different points of view. That doesn't make any of the views non-physical.

There is a process of pain that exists, and then there is experiencing that process. They are just fundamentally different. There is no physical reason for that experience to be there; it just is.

Of course there is a physical reason for it to be there; literally EVERYTHING else we have ever studied turns out to have a physical basis; we would need an extraordinarily clear reason to believe that consciousness is the one exception to this rule.

There is a physical reason for a picture of my dog to be on my computer screen. That I cannot describe to you exactly how to get, step-by-step, from the ones and zeros on the hard drive, the other hardware in the computer and monitor, and the electrical impulses flowing through the various components to a picture of my dog is just a statement of my ignorance; it is not evidence for the non-physical nature of any part of the process.

If "a process of pain that exists", and "experiencing that process" are fundamentally different, then you would be able to point me to that fundamental difference. But you can't.

 

[DBT]

How do you know they are two different realities? The system has feedback loops that perceive sensation that the system itself forms in response to given stimuli. Stimuli that has been interpreted (evolutionary response) as being a sharp stinging sensation when pricked by a needle, for example.

If we look at an entire ecology, we generally see causes and effects of an evolving system that follows basic physical laws. Like I told bilby, the sensation of pain does not have to be there. We can look at a human avoiding a thorn bush simply as what the biological subsystem of the ecological system was supposed to do anyways (although I think there is come free will involved, but that's for another day).

The sensation of pain is related to the evolution of conscious representation of information, which enables far more complex behaviour to develop than simple plant reflex response, which have limited mobility and few ways in which they can respond to environmental stimuli, for example.

The term 'free will' doesn't add any useful insights into the nature of either system.

 

[ryan]

There is a process of pain that exists, and then there is experiencing that process. They are just fundamentally different. There is no physical reason for that experience to be there; it just is.

Of course there is a physical reason for it to be there; literally EVERYTHING else we have ever studied turns out to have a physical basis; we would need an extraordinarily clear reason to believe that consciousness is the one exception to this rule.

The process of pain is physically there, but the experience of it is not needed. In other words, there shouldn't be a first person experience. That really does imply something else.

If "a process of pain that exists", and "experiencing that process" are fundamentally different, then you would be able to point me to that fundamental difference. But you can't.

It is only something that you can understand for yourself. It can't be pointed to because it isn't physical.

 

[ryan]

If we look at an entire ecology, we generally see causes and effects of an evolving system that follows basic physical laws. Like I told bilby, the sensation of pain does not have to be there. We can look at a human avoiding a thorn bush simply as what the biological subsystem of the ecological system was supposed to do anyways (although I think there is come free will involved, but that's for another day).

The sensation of pain is related to the evolution of conscious representation of information, which enables far more complex behaviour to develop than simple plant reflex response, which have limited mobility and few ways in which they can respond to environmental stimuli, for example.

The term 'free will' doesn't add any useful insights into the nature of either system.

If pain isn't a non-causal deterrent, then we are incredibly lucky that pain is something we tend to avoid, and pleasure is something we pursue. It could have been that to be content is to constantly feel pain, and we only feel pleasure when we do something stupid like touch a stove. That is a very convenient coincidence, don't you think?

 

[DBT]

The perception of pain is the motivator to avoid whatever causes pain, unless the reward is perceived to be greater than the pain that's likely to be experienced. Just as the sensation of pleasure is a reward, the motivator to seek the things that bring pleasure and satisfaction