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I recently learned about Sir Roger Penrose's research about Qualia. Then I formed my own conclusion of one of the universal truths;
That the "0th Dimension (The Nothing) Emerges/Balance All Infinite Possibility Across The Conceivable & The Inconceivable Reality"
I wrote an essay on it, as well as a wrap-up of our future. What do you think?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lqBvh5xohGid4U685aJBCp1h1a2RET7Wl6gBn3GhELk/edit?tab=t.0
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1loPX-ESVGv-0EevZxYkZ9bZgRzTVxbUNlVRq05HNPh8/edit?gid=0#gid=0
Penrose is an astrophysicist. His work on neuroscience has always been one step above Time Cube. The Emperor's New Mind (his first popular book, published in 1989 when he was still doing decent physics) was a crank manifesto in the same tradition as Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach or Brian Josephson's research on psychic phenomena.
Penrose is cool. Hofstadter's book is a fun watch summary on youtube. Brain on psychic powers - just 3D print phenomena, really. I recently learned about B-theory of time and David Lewis's modal realism from the comments yesterday, which is similar to what I'm writing! Infinite possibility - all exist yeh
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Personally, I liked GEB. I think that a lot of it was just a popularization of the Incompleteness theorem.
Normally I have a working BS detector which goes off at woo (e.g. "brains are macroscopic quantum systems"), and I do not remember it beeping.
While I probably did not fully grasp the incompleteness theorem, I also did not think that Hofstadter was trying to sell me any deepisms.
In short, I see GEB like HPMOR in that it packs claims which have been made before into a narrative. Some people like to read about Mr Crab or Harry P-E-V, some don't.
The Godel stuff in GEB is good, although not as good a popular presentation of the material as Raymond Smullyan's puzzle books. I don't know enough to comment about the Bach and Zen stuff. The neuroscience is crank-tier.
My older brother introduced me to GEB when I was 12. The only sentence I can remember from it is "You're not supposed to just 'like' koans."
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Brains/Consciousness being some kind of magical quantum system was always nonsense. I took physics classes in high school as well and at least what we learned even then was enough to expose several problems with that thesis. You still see similar pseudo-science get peddled when Wolfram published A New Kind of Science, despite it not being taken seriously and the problems with it have been well known for a long time.
If you ever took a physics class in your life that did any unit on quantum mechanics, you will have watched double-slit experiments (just as we all did) that were performed in front of you using sheets of common craft material and a tank of water. Not a single thing you saw there was quantum mechanical. All that you saw was that classical systems that carry waves can do weird things very similar to what quantum mechanical systems do. You can generate static wave interference patterns with just ordinary waves in water, which is a totally classical system. No quantum mechanics is required for this. This is not quantum mechanics.
You can also have quantized interacting systems (standard desktop computers do this) where there are only two states, and the system flips between one and the other (on or off, 1 or 0, contained or flooding) once the classical system reaches a threshold. The human brain can also do this too, where you can be in two states (think of turning right or left, running mental simulations for both outcomes like we do when driving), and when a threshold is reached (eventually enough neurons fire on one side over the other to cause a cascading outcome, leading us to turn right or left), and therein a state is chosen. This is "quantum" in the analogous sense that it is an undecided either/or, on/off state that can be flipped (or "collapsed" if you want to call it that) under the right quantitative conditions. But the point remains, no actual "quantum mechanics" is involved.
You can talk about modeling consciousness by analogy to quantum mechanics if you like. Just like we can also do for wave mechanics in a bathtub, or acoustic mechanics in the construction of a concert hall, or in designing decision-making CPU's in computers. If you want to speak of a cognitive state of considering options as "quantum superposition," that's true in a very loose sense of the word (there are 2 states being considered simultaneously and 1 of them hasn’t been chosen yet, so the superposed state has yet to "collapse" into a decision), but again it's not literally true. It's only true as a useful comparison. There is no "quantum superposition" going on. The entire system is an analog "classical" computer. Not a quantum computer.
So a lot of "quantum cognition" garbage you’ll see published is doing this. It's just looking at how our brains work as classically mechanical computers, and only finding similar operations to quantum mechanics, much in the same way looking at how ocean or sound waves work in classical mechanics, and then finding behaviors that resemble ones we observe in quantum mechanics. But it’s not quantum mechanics, which means in turn that most quantum cognition models allow no indeterminate, "quantum spookiness" to hang your hat on (looking at you, Deepak Chopra). They are all deterministic macroscopic systems. They just share behaviors in common with quantum systems in physics. That's all.
It's actually evidence that quantum mechanics is itself also just classical mechanics. We just can’t observe the operating variables so it only "looks" really mysterious; just as if we could not see the ocean but could only see the peaks of waves as individual particles, and found the behavior of those particles really strange, and then we invented a bunch of woo bullshit about it, when in reality it was just a perfectly sensible deterministic system in classical mechanics. But we don’t know if this is the case. Maybe quantum mechanics behaves the way it does because it is somehow fundamentally indeterministic. At bottom it could be. But we don’t really know that either.
Physicists have been reproducing even the weirdest quantum mechanical phenomena within entirely classical systems (both with fluids and sound and even so, hydrons and phonons entirely obey classical physics). And should Superstring theory turn out to be validated one day, would even further reduce all quantum phenomena to a classical system.
Agreed.
I thought that the quantum consciousness people were claiming that QM effects (superposition, entanglement, etc) play a role at the scale of brains. Indeed, Penrose claims superposition.
Hard disagree. A quantum system is not just a classical system of similar complexity where we do not have access to all the variables. An electron is not just a point-like particle whose position and momentum is not precisely knowable to us. Instead, it is its wave function, which is a much richer object than any classical point mass.
Crucially, quantum objects can become entangled. Where a register in a classical computer holds exactly one out of 2^N possible values, N qbits can hold a linear combination of all these 2^N. If you want to simulate that on a classical computer, you need not N bits but 2^N numbers. While building an interesting QC is hard, the physics fundamentals about the speedup you would get are solid.
Are there deterministic theories with non-local hidden variables? Sure. But they only save you from god throwing dice when you measure a spin, they do not get rid of the fact that in the real world, you have particle waves, and only in the boring limit where h is too small to matter do you get objects like cannon balls which can be described with just a few parameters.
I'll seize upon your post to address your claims as well as the claims of /u/BahRamYou below since he claimed my education was amiss, and since they somewhat overlap and I won't end up repeating the same arguments. I'm also not a proponent of the Hidden Variables Theory which I got saddled up with earlier. I'm a supporter of Many-Worlds.
First, what you and him are doing to a degree is drawing light to the distinction that's already been known between quantum consciousness and quantum 'cognition'. Quantum consciousness is garbage. Quantum cognition is not. My conclusion as maybe an informed layman, or statistically/mathematically literate student is right in line with what the cutting edge of science gives you in popular format or an undergraduate textbook:
The human brain is a classical scale system and as such can't really be guided in any meaningful way by quantum phenomena. Because even a single perception or decision involves the operation of millions if not billions of neurons, which are massive systems already (even just one neuron is a cell comprised of trillions of atoms). So any quantum indeterminacy that's there will be completely washed out by the system as a whole. This is exactly the reason hardly anyone (and especially experts actually in neuroscience, rather than other fields who are nosing in) buys the quantum consciousness thesis beyond the role of analogy, which is what I was alluding to earlier. And this is the difference between the Weak vs. Strong forms of quantum cognition.
Even if quantum effects became relevant somewhere within a single molecule within a single neuron, and even if this were somehow pertinent to the I/O protocol of the neuron (and had any effect at all on computation) and that’s already two “ifs” for which still no evidence exists, that still would not explain consciousness in any way. All it would explain is how each neuron runs its I/O protocol (which is all to say how the neuron decides what the output signals should be, given the input signals). Single neurons are not conscious. And there won’t be any shared quantum states between neurons, because any molecule doing anything meaningful quantum mechanically in one neuron will be separated by any other neuron by trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms chugging right along as a classical system.
So there cannot be any superposed macrostates in the brain. Moreover, anything the proposed quantum effect “does” to determine a neuron’s I/O protocol can be replaced by a classical circuit doing exactly the same thing and therefore won’t even be necessary to the output of the neuron, much less the whole brain. This is why consciousness can never and will never be explained by quantum mechanics. All sorts of classical systems can replicate quantum outcomes (well weighted dice are just as random and classical waves do many of the same things as quantum waves; when I was in high school we were replicating matrix mechanics with any classical algorithm).
This is also why quantum consciousness can't do what some of it's advocates claim and rescue contra causal free will (which doesn’t exist, and no one should want to exist anyway). For quantum indeterminacy (if that even exists) to change the output of the otherwise deterministic system of the brain, it would require spontaneous coordinated events across trillions of atoms, which even at most (at literally the most ridiculously most) won’t happen but maybe once in a trillion decisions. Which at a decision a second is once every thirty thousand years or so. This is the problem with vast macrosystems like the brain: quantum phenomena simply can’t cause or explain anything relevant about them.
I've read Penrose's book years ago as well as the claims of many of his supporters and the ensuing criticism of his work. There's already a real good summary of this school of thought and it's why only the advocates of the 'Weak' end of quantum cognition (which is to say those who use quantum mechanics as an analogy) are worth taking seriously. The people on the other end of that argument are all cranks. Even the best supporters of legitimate quantum cognition are all rooting their work firmly in classical mechanics by viewing neural computing as a geometric process (an exploration of a vector or concept space) rather than a linear process (say a hand calculation on paper or a Turing machine, although the latter isn't entirely accurate I recognize).
So legitimate researchers can say the brain functions 'like' a wave tank that can produce analogous circumstances of superposed wave-forms, interference patterns, and quantum switching between binary states without literally being quantum mechanical. We know the human brain cycles at around 40 Hz for instance, which seems related to our conscious perceptual threshold of about 20 Hz (that's why film and television media shoot to exceed that in frame rates to get our visual system not to notice). But even then, individual perceptual events often involve waves of coordinated signals across neural nets in the brain, hence entertaining two thoughts simultaneously, and using interference patterns to locate and determine outcomes. So obviously we'll get some analogous phenomena to wave particle duality; but none of this is quantum mechanical, it is all entirely explicable with classical mechanics, just like waves and sound (even hydrons and phonons, though no analog to those has been discovered yet in neuroscience far as I know).
Real quantum cognition research doesn't have anything to do with quantum mechanics and postulates no strange or mysterious physics like indeterminism. It is classical and deterministic through and through. It deviates from classical probability theory (which is linear), not classical physics. Wikipedia even provides a good summary for why thinking the alternative is bunk.
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I think your high school physics class left out some important details about quantum mechanics. The point of the two slit experiment is that you're not just doing it with solid particles, like water... that would be a classical wave. It also works with photons, which have no mass and can travel through a vacuum like a bullet. It even works with just one photon at a time. You can see them arrive at the target with a detector, individually, and if you set it up right they'll still follow the same interference pattern of a wave, even though there's nothing for them to "wave" through. The famous Michelson-Morely experiment proved that there's no medium to carry light. It's a strange result that really does require quantum physics to explain- you can't explain it with just classical physics.
When you say:
That's a very old argument, but this point pretty much disproven unless you allow for some even stranger results (like waves travelling backwards in time levels of weird). People have been trying to knock down the standard model of QM for a long time now, but it just keeps giving correct results... at this point you kinda have to accept that it has some truth to it, even if the math looks odd.
I do agree that there's a lot of cranks and grifters using the word "quantum" to sell nonsense, and that's really a problem. It's unfortunate that Penrose (who really is a respected scientist) gave them cover by writing a book that seems to agree with their woo. On the plus side, his book forces you to wade through like 400 pages of dense math about regular physics before it gets to the woo stuff, so I think most cranks wouldn't make it that far. He's also upfront that he's just offering some speculation about consciousness, not any sort of proof.
He paired up with a professional neuroscientist to develop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction. It's still speculative, but it's a lot more detailed than just "hey dude whatever the brain is, like, quantum..." They've done recent experiments showing there really are some strange effects going on in the brain in ways that you'd normally see in quantum mechanics, not classical. EG absorbing light more slowly than would normally be possible, and than re-emitting it in a higher intensity than normal.
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I read GEB in high school and it was one of the first books that turned me onto philosophy. It's not "deep", but as a popularization it does its job well.
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It always annoys me was 'esteemed' physicists venture into woo. That is a sign they ran out of ideas or are unserious about research and should retire to let the next generation of competent researchers in. This guy way overrated relative to his contributions.
AI researchers will take over & win all the Nobel Prizes at our worldly rate
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Linus Pauling has entered the chat, and is interested in selling you some extra Vitamin C.
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Qualia always struck me as the basic material computation within biological systems. There's nothing magical about it.
If you begin things with the basic idea that consciousness is just at bottom, information processing at the level of the brain, that provides an easy pathway from hereon out to understand this. Whenever computers process information, there's always "something it's like" to be the computer doing that. That's just an inevitable consequence of computational task itself. This is just never experienced by anyone, unless the computation also includes a computed person that's experiencing it. When a computer experience's something, it's because it's computing the experience of that thing.
If you were to start with a simple visual process for example, where a computer needs to discriminate between areas of a space that are light or dark (say you're traveling to one trajectory and not the other), this will always be experienced in some way and necessarily so. The geometry that's being computed will be felt, and there will be something different about "what it's like" to be looking at a light area or a dark area. Because it couldn’t be otherwise. How could it? So there's nothing "extra" to explain about qualia. And the exact way this is experienced will depend on the computational circuit, it’s physical arrangement and how it behaves, etc. Other philosophers have reasoned the same way (including Dennett, Pat Churchland, etc).
This still sounds like a vacuous concept to me.
Also, take a 4-bit adder, which is a very simple computation device.
In the first experiment, we connect it to two digital light sensors. One reads 3, the other reads 5. The adder circuit does its job and outputs 8, which we then bitshift to get the average of 4. By your description that means our circuit is experiencing a certain amount of light.
In the second experiment, we connect two temperature sensors. One reads 3, the other reads 5. Again the adder does its job and outputs 8, which results in an average value of 4. But this time it is supposed to experience temperature, and depending on the scale of our sensors, it might experience very different temperatures!
To the degree either an adder or a human neuron experience anything, what they experience is simply voltage levels of their inputs. Either system is describable perfectly well without using a word like experience.
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Do you and I see the same red?
If we both look at the same object, which is red, we have the same wavelength of light reach our eyes. Our eyes are both human eyes and process this wavelength the same way. We both recognize that we are seeing what we commonly call red.
But, what if I am seeing what you would call "blue"? I would recognize it as red - all red objects were this "blue" to me my whole life (and all blue objects were something you don't have a concept of at all.)
These are the kinds of things I pondered as a kid and it's why I don't scoff at qualia. There are some things that we can't in principle measure, and these things are the most foundational to our subjective experience of the world.
If we're both using broadly the same kind of bio-neurological substrate (ie not colour-blind, no drugs, no pathologic photosensitivity, etc) I don't see why we would have a grossly different experience. I think there are subtle differences in processing and interpretation (some people might have visual snow, some cultures don't clearly distinguish blue from green) but nothing so different as experiencing the other person's blue qualia.
It's an interesting idea and I used to ponder it myself when I was a kid, but now I'm older I take the other side and ask why wouldn't we share similar qualia.
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If you see something crimson, and then something cardinal red, are those "the same red" to you? My guess is that you can distinguish those colors, if they are put side-by-side next to each other, but that the associations that each color in isolation brings up in your mind are quite similar.
I don't think there is "something it is like" to see the color crimson, aside from the associations with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc. And if you ask whether other people have the same associations, we dissolve the philosophical question of whether the qualia are "the same", and replace it with empirical one of "how similar are they". We know how to tackle that one.
Let's say you were to take a set of 500 colors, and a set of 50 random memories you have, you could rate how strongly you associate each color with each memory on a scale from 1 to 10. This would give you a 500 x 50 matrix of association strengths, which you could think of as a 50 dimensional space where each orthogonal direction in the space is how strongly one of the 50 random memories is associated, and each of the 500 colors is associated with one particular point in this 50 dimensional memory space. But those points will not be randomly distributed within the space, and in fact you can probably map those points to a 3 dimensional space without losing much information. The position of colors within this 3 dimensional space would be a fairly faithful representation of the association of colors with those 50 memories.
If you were to repeat the above procedure with 50 random concepts you know instead of 50 random memories you have, you would also get a 3 dimensional space with colors in particular points within that space. Generally, I would expect that the positions of colors in this space generated by concepts would be pretty similar to the positions of colors in the space generated by memories.
Well now let's say we repeat this experiment with the same 500 colors, and the same 50 concepts, but a different person, Bob. I would expect that that person maps probably maps colors to concepts in a similar way, as long as they speak the same language and neither you nor Bob are colorblind. If crimson maps to a similar location in your color map as it does in Bob's color map, I think it's fair to say that you see a similar red to Bob.
This also tracks with how we teach colors to our children. We don't say "red is an ineffable experience which I experience and you might too", we say "red is the color you see when you look at a fire truck, or a stop sign, or a strawberry". This provides anchors so that our children know how to bind qualia to language. We can see evidence that they really do bind qualia to language in similar ways to each other too.
Take two kids, Alice and Bob. Teach them red by example. This fire truck is red. This strawberry is red. This stop sign is red. Teach them orange by example. This carrot is orange. This traffic cone is orange. This orange (fruit) is orange (color).
Take Alice into a room with many objects of many colors. Ask Alice to bring you things which are halfway between red and orange. Note the things she brought you, then put everything back exactly where it was at the start. Bring Bob into the same room, and ask him to bring you things which are halfway between red and orange.
Alice and Bob probably both chose similar things. They both took two of their qualia, interpolated an intermediate quale, and mapped that quale back to the physical world. When they did, they got similar results to each other, implying that their qualia were similar (unless Bob is colorblind, in which case they got very different results, implying that their qualia were very different).
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm not talking about color associations or being able to distinguish between shades. I'm saying, when you look at an object, your brain seems to translate that into a "color" in your mind. This "color" is how you perceive that wavelenth to be, but there's no rule that says that I see the same "color" as you. All of the colors I see might be completely foreign to you. 100% of my colors might be ones you don't see at all ever. They all appear to gently blend together for me in shades and hues on a spectrum. We share the wavelengths together, but not the effect they produce in our minds.
My perception of the color is not a simple function of wavelength - see example of the blue+black/white/gold dress. My perception of a color is the effect it has on my mind. There is no perception of a color outside of the effect it has on my mind.
In terms of the effects colors have on our minds, we currently have limited direct visibility into this, but
I suppose one thing to check - do you agree that two identical-to-the-atom clones observing identical-to-the-photon sensory inputs would have identical qualia? Or do you think even that is not something we can have high confidence in?
I don't think we could have high confidence in. What if it's assigned randomly, like the first thing you ever see is assigned what I see as "red?" There's just no way of knowing, no conceivable test to find out.
Assigned by what? By "qualia" are you referring to anything you've ever experienced? If so, how do you know you've experienced qualia?
If the first color quale you ever experienced was "assigned" to red, and the second to blue, and then one day they magically switched, would you notice a difference?
If no, why do we care about "qualia"?
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I don't follow this. What is being associated with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc.? When you see a random drop of fresh blood on the ground during your walk, you might identify it as "red" because it appears similar to fire trucks and stop signs and strawberries which you were taught at a young age were "red," but what is it that you're comparing in order to associate these things in the first place? I would characterize it as comparing the qualia of observing a stop sign with observing fresh blood on the ground, which would be another way of describing "what it is like" to see the color red. If there's no there there, and there's no actual experience of seeing the color red when you observe fresh blood or a stop sign, then how is it that you're associating the color of the blood to the color of a stop sign?
You're associating your sensory inputs with your memories, emotions, concepts, behavioral associations, etc. If you sever your optic nerve, and then you point your eyes at a stop sign, you will not experience redness.
I claim that qualia are what it feels like from the inside to ascribe meaning to your raw sensory experience.
Do those sensory inputs exist as an experience that I have outside of my memories, emotions, etc. though? If they don't, then how am I able to identify colors of entirely new things sans context? I'm not sure how that would make sense, so I conclude that I do experience sensory inputs, i.e. those sensory inputs are a form of qualia. Which then raises the question of if the qualia of me experiencing the sensory input from observing a stop sign is similar to that of someone else doing the same thing. We can empirically observe that the meaning that we ascribe to these sensory inputs are very similar, but that wouldn't actually get us to the similarity of the sensory inputs themselves.
It's also possible that, since qualia is intrinsically and, as-of-yet, inescapably subjective, the very concept of comparing qualia between two people is incoherent, and the best we can do is to figure out if the qualia of the meaning that we ascribe to sensory inputs are similar, as a proxy that we can never get better than.
No? What would they even be sensory inputs to?
I don't think that's a thing you're able to do sans context. Infants, lacking context, aren't able to identify the colors of anything.
I suspect we're using the word "context" differently - what exactly do you mean by "sans context"? Are your memories a part of the context? Are the innate saccade patterns that all humans use to look at things (e.g. gaze snaps to contrast, edges) part of the context? How about the learned saccade patterns (e.g. scanning in reading order)?
You don't experience unmediated sensory inputs. The map is not the territory, and you can only experience the map, never the territory directly. See exhibit 1932741: the blue/black or white/gold dress. There's an excellent diagram on that page which shows how the exact same colors on the screen can lead to the perception of a white/gold dress or a blue/black dress, in a way that makes it very easy to verify that your raw sensory data really is the same for the blue on one dress and the white on the other.
And so if you have a quale of seeing white on the ruffles of the dress, that quale is not just your raw sensory inputs.
I would say the question should be "how similar is it" rather than "is it similar", but yes.
True, but since we don't directly experience the raw sensory inputs, I don't know how much it matters how similar the raw sensory inputs are. We could quantify the similarity of those raw sensory inputs (e.g. by doing the same dimensionality reduction trick on optic nerve spike frequencies), but I don't think doing so would buy us anything beyond pretty pictures to look at and maybe some cures for diseases.
I reject the idea that qualia are inescapably subjective. People talk about qualia all the time. Therefore, those qualia are causally upstream of what they're saying. If you can figure out the full chain of causality from sensation to perception to meaning making to conversion to language to speech, I don't think there's anything left to explain. It's a lot of stuff to understand, and we don't yet understand all the links in that chain, but that's a statement about the inadequacy of our knowledge, not the unknowableness of the phenomenon.
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Qualia, Consciousness, Sapience etc. all strike me as conversation starters that are sufficiently vague yet overloaded with implied meaning to forever escape any demands for rigor or practical application. A thousand years from now we'll probably have harnessed the power of the stars to feed unimaginably powerful thinking machines and the best insight they'll have into those topics will be something like "It's whatever the fuck you want it to be".
Of course, I'm a barely literate peasant. It's probably all perfectly sensible. But man does it look like so much pseudobabble from here.
I was going to say as well like you, I'm not terribly well versed on this subject. But I am a geek who's read a book or 12 on the present state of cognitive science.
If you're asking me what qualia is, it's simply a catch-all term for all the features that are unique to conscious experience. Thomas Nagel's “What is it like to be a bat?,” or to see the color red or hear your favorite song or smelling chocolate or feeling angry. It's one of the last scientific frontiers in neuroscience and it's one that hasn't even been resolved hypothetically. And yes, the explanation for qualia most likely does have something to do with the inevitable physical effects of information processing. All evidence that we've amassed so far is converging on no other conclusion. But that still leaves us ignorant of a lot of the details.
That's because we can’t access the information we need to answer this question. For instance to tell what is actually causally different between a neural synaptic circuit whose activation causes us to smell dog shit rather than freshly baked bread, we need to have resolutions of brain anatomy which are still far beyond any present technology. The mere arrangement of synapses won’t be enough, and we still don’t even have that; and since the IO signal for any neuron is determined by something inside the neuron, such as (maybe?) methyl groups attached to the nuclear DNA of the cell, we’d need to be able to make a map even of that, and for every single cell in the brain, which is far beyond any present physical capability. By a long shot. Maybe AI research could get there sooner, if somehow they achieve general AI and can ask it about its personal phenomenology, but that’s also just another technological capability we presently don’t have.
But no matter how you want to look at the problem, you're still stuck needing to explain why chocolate doesn’t smell like vanilla. Why does activating one neural circuit causes you to experience a smell at all and not hear a musical instrument, or see the color red or feel lust, etc. Why does any of this happens at all to begin with? We already know what it's like to process this information without any of this phenomena. We call it our subconscious. So what makes the difference between just walking though life running purely on subconscious processes, and instead experiencing all these bizarre but also specific phenomena?
In this sense we don’t really mean by this the biomechanics of our sensory systems like I led with previously above. What's really being asked is what makes the difference between chocolate smelling like chocolate and not vanilla, people don’t mean what has to be different about the molecular receptors in the nose that distinguish between these two odors. Those don’t have anything whatever to do with what things smell like. No matter what molecule stimulates a certain neural track in the nose, that’s just a binary signal, “on or off,” that flows into the brain. At best, perhaps, it has a quantity scale. But there’s nothing qualitative about it. That wire could go anywhere. It could go to the circuit that makes you see red, rather than smell anything, much less some particular thing. And actually for some people, it does. Synesthesia is a real thing. (So why are only some people synesthetes?)
Qualia are undeniable. I don't think they can 'not' exist. Because it is literally 100% impossible that “I am experiencing a black field with whitemarkings inside it right now” is false; that it “isn’t happening” and thus “doesn’t exist.” That I am seeing letters on a computer screen as I type can be in doubt, maybe I’m hallucinating or dreaming this; maybe I am mistaken about what the sensory signals my brain is interpreting as letters on a computer screen actually signify; etc. But that I am experiencing seeing letters on a computer screen is impossible to doubt. And why that is has to be explained.
Qualia are also fictional (our brain invents them to be able to demarcate and navigate through information) and yes, their “existence” will have something to do with information processing. Because we know if you remove or numb the pertinent information-processing circuit that generates any given experience, you consequently remove the experience. And you can even cause the experience to occur by simply sticking a wire into the pertinent circuit and shocking it. So we know this is simply something that circuit does, this is scientifically established, and does differently than a circuit that doesn’t generate any phenomenological experience (as most circuits in our brain don’t) or that generates a different one than this (as all the remaining circuits in our brain do). What makes a “chocolate circuit” cause that experience and not some other (or none at all)?
One thing that often throws everyone off including the eliminativists is the completely unnecessary folk assumption that qualia are 'things'. That they're objects or entities. They are not things, they are events because the mind is a process, not an object. Qualia don’t “explain” things they are the thing to be explained. And they don’t exist separately from the physical process underlying them; they are the physical process underlying them. So the question is what is different about those physical processes, and other physical processes, which don’t generate such phenomena? That is exactly identical to the question of what causes those events of experience to occur, and to have the qualities they do (rather than others instead).
As an example, if there were anyone out there who can “experience” the difference between “324” and “325” as quantities, that logically entails that for them there is something experientially different between them. And that’s exactly what the word “qualia” means. Most of us though don't qualitatively experience any difference between such abstract numbers. We comprehend them in a computational sense that's absent any unique qualia. We generally have to work out in what way they differ. We don’t experience it directly, the way we do the difference between “two” and “three,” which are quantities we can directly apprehend in experience.
All that said, my cheap theory to offer you is that all qualia are just ways of discriminating the geometry of touch as a sense. And all other 4 senses remain subordinated to touch as a primary sense, simply generating complex mixtures of touch sensations. Complex emotions like love include psychosomatic feedback. Your internal monologue relies on the same neural circuitry you use to hear spoken voice. Touch more generally is just a way of discriminating geometries. If there were no qualia, you would not be able to discriminate between those things. And I think a summary of the evolutionary history of sensation lends support to this. One of the things pointed out in the article is how touch was the first sensation that developed. Vision later developed from the same circuitry and machinery as touch. And then smell came after that. In most animals sound is processed by touch sensors on the moving hairs of the ears. There's no inherent reason why that had to be the case, which indicates an evolutionary development: all senses ultimately go back to touch. It's also pretty well known that pain sensing cells evolved from touch sensing cells as a way to detect irritants. In general 'pain' is a touch sensation so intense that it disrupts and overloads other mental computations. Which is exactly what pain computes: an attention claiming condition report that needs immediate resolution.
I could keep going with other experiences like vision and pleasure, but it still follows the same evolutionary pathway.
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Actually not vague terms at all!
If you've ever pricked your finger and felt pain, that's a qualia.
If you've ever felt a sensation of hot or cold, that's a qualia.
If you know what the color blue looks like, and how it looks different from the color red, that's a qualia.
It's just conscious experience. That's it. It's that thing you have when you're alive and experiencing things, and that you lack when you're dead. Its nature might be mysterious, but the concept itself is about as straightforward as you can get.
I think what's happening is that people correctly notice that the people who like to use the word "qualia" also like to use other strange terms like "property dualism" or "epiphenomenalism" or "p-zombies" that seem to refer to very strange ideas. So they get nervous and they assume that any talk of consciousness in general must be BS. Independent of your evaluation of the philosophical literature on consciousness, it would simply be a mistake to write off the idea completely. That would be like saying that because people have come up with crank theories of physics before, physical reality itself must be a "vague" or "nonsensical" idea.
The rigor is that you know what pain is, that's the rigor.
As for "practical application", that seems like a category error. It's not clear how you can derive from first principles, starting with our current best theories of fundamental physics, that anyone is conscious at all. And yet we know they are. Surely you can appreciate that it's intrinsically interesting to try and figure out why that's the case?
But it's not. See above.
If you have specific examples in mind, or want to talk about specific terms or ideas, I'd be happy to try to explain them.
I do not think that this will get you anywhere. At most, you can convince me this way that I have qualia. But my temperature detection circuit is nothing special, an insect might have something rather similar. Does it have qualia? What if I replace it by electronics running an identical neural network and a temperature sensor? What about a rock which gets slightly larger when it is warm?
If qualia is a useful property systems of matter can have or not have, then you automatically run into p-Zombies.
At the end of the day, I want concepts which describe reality and pay their rent in anticipation of future events. The pH value of aqueous solutions is a good (if limited) concept. I can measure it, and it will give me good predictions about which reactions will tend to take place e.g. if I decide to take a swim in it.
Qualia is not such a concept. It does not make falsifiable predictions. There is no test to determine if a dog or a LLM has qualia.
I'm not certain this refutation of qualia's validity as a concept really works unless you also throw out a large portion of commonly-used language, in other words, it proves too much. "Qualia" is just meant to be a descriptive term for a phenomenon that is experienced and individually confirmable. Claims about why qualia arises and whether it is present in someone or something else are unfalsifiable and do not meet the standard for scientific inquiry or analysis, you could argue that debating that is a waste of breath (and I may even agree, actually), but that doesn't invalidate the concept of qualia.
The structure of this argument is kind of like stating that we should discard the concept of "feelings", for the very same reasons why qualia would be invalid. Or any kind of evaluative statement, really; "good", "bad", "immoral". Sometimes we just want to be able to refer to things. People aren't making testable predictions every time they open their mouths, and as such the purpose of language serves functions outside of making such statements. Hell, people even do this in the scientific world - for example debating interpretations of quantum mechanics is a common pastime among physicists, many of which are not testable and do not meet the criteria for science.
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Assuming you're not talking to eliminative materialists/illusionists that believe phenomenal consciousness is a complete myth in the first place. "Consciousness don't real" is certainly a take, and I have always wondered if these people are actual, honest-to-God p-zombies.
I've spent a lot of time joking about that, but I regret to inform you that they're not p-zombies since the definition requires external indistinguishability from people who do have internal experiences. (My partner gets mad at my mostly-joking position of "If people tell you they don't have internal experiences, believe them." -- then again she's a utilitarian and I'm a virtue ethicist or something. Even if no-one but me was conscious it wouldn't impact my moral reasoning much).
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They're pretty well aware of how insane their claims are. But, philosophers justify insane claims for a living.
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The easiest way to get away from pseudobabble is to state a testable hypothesis. Specific, falsifiable, measurable, and ideally: interesting. Do you have one?
Well, no, not really.
We can give multiple examples of statements that are clearly meaningful and aren't "pseudobabble", but which admit of no possibility of empirical verification or falsification, even in principle.
We can start by asking what happens when you turn your statement on itself: does "the easiest way to get away from pseudobabble is to state a testable hypothesis", make a testable hypothesis? It of course depends on exactly what you're trying to say here, and what you mean by "pseudobabble". If your statement was only intended to express something purely subjective, something like "I have no interest in statements that don't make testable hypotheses", or "I have no use for statements that don't make testable hypotheses", then it perhaps could be defensible (although even then there are significant difficulties). But if your statement was intended to express something objective -- that is, you were offering an objective criteria for distinguishing "pseudobabble" from non-"pseudobabble" -- then we run into some real problems. What is the empirical test for empirically verifying the statement "statements that don't make testable empirical predictions are 'pseudobabble'"? You could point to past successful empirical predictions made using claims that make empirical predictions, and the lack of successful empirical predictions made by claims that don't make empirical predictions. But this would just be circular. If someone hasn't already accepted the assumption that empirical verifiability is a guide to meaningfulness, they're going to be unimpressed by a track record of past successful empirical predictions.
Let's consider examples of inaccessible past information. There is a fact of the matter regarding what color shirt you wore on March 1st, 2009. There are probably no reliable records of what color shirt you wore that day, nor does anyone alive have a reliable memory of what shirt you wore that day; if there are reliable records of that day, just pick a different day for which there are no reliable records. This is not a "pseudobabble" question to ask. But there is (plausibly) no way of empirically verifying what color shirt you actually wore that day, even in principle. So, here we have another counterexample.
I am aware that the idea of fully simulating the past, starting from the universe's initial conditions, is a hot topic of discussion in AI spheres. It seems at least possible to me that due to a combination of time/energy constraints, inability to know the initial conditions with enough precision, and possible indeterminacy, there may be no way of actually fully simulating all past events with perfect accuracy. If you agree that this is a conceivable possibility, that's all that's needed for the counterexample to work. We may or may not be able to know what color shirt you wore on March 1st 2009, but it seems that even if we can't, that doesn't thereby make it a "pseudobabble" question. So the meaningfulness of the claim is not dependent on its empirical verifiability.
For a more grandiose example: there may be regions of the multiverse that are causally isolated from our own such that we can never empirically verify their existence, or empirically verify certain concrete facts about those regions, even in principle (could be a parallel universe, could be regions of our own universe that are beyond the limits of the observable universe, take your pick on whichever strikes you as the most physically plausible). But the question of the existence of these regions is not "pseudobabble". They could simply... exist. And there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with that. Your inability to verify the existence of these regions has no bearing on the meaningfulness of the claim that they do exist. (You could imagine, for example, a sentient inhabitant of one of these regions claiming that talk of anything beyond his own region of spacetime is "pseudobabble". Well, you know that your own existence is not "pseudobabble"!)
For an even more grandiose example: you have no way of empirically verifying that you are not the only consciousness in existence. It's possible that you're the only conscious being who actually exists, and the rest of the universe is just your hallucination. But the existence of other consciousnesses is not "pseudobabble". When you see someone who is not you prick their finger and experience pain, there is simply a fact of the matter as to whether or not there is a conscious experience of pain happening for some consciousness at that time. You have no way of empirically verifying it, but it's still not a meaningless question.
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This is assuming computers have consciousness, which I would emphatically argue they do not because they have no intentionality or ability to act.
Is intentionality and ability to act necessary for consciousness?
Suppose you have someone with locked-in syndrome. They have no (or extremely limited) ability to effect any kind of change in the outside world; perhaps they can blink or move their eyes, but let's say that they're taped over or removed. At the least, they have less ability to interact with the world than an LLM. Are they no longer conscious? I don't think so, so current ability to act isn't necessary for consciousness.
Intentionality is a bit trickier, but I'm not sure someone who's had locked-in syndrome for a decade has any remnant of intentionality; lack of opportunities to exercise intentionality leads it to wither. I still grant that unfortunate individual consciousness.
It may be necessary for action and intentionality to have at some point existed for consciousness to exist, though; I'm not sure a being that spent its entire existence in those conditions would be conscious.
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I don't think Windows Update fighting me so hard whenever Microsoft says it's update time makes my computer conscious, but it sure resembles intention and ability to act. Or do those terms have standard definitions in philosophy that I'm missing?
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Consciousness and intentionality sound like potentially two different things (that our correlated in our experience). Perhaps they necessarily entail each other, perhaps they do not. But it sounds like a thorny philosophical question that will be around for a few thousand years
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Not just computers. If conscious experience (qualia) is just an innate consequence of information being processed*, regardless of the substrate upon which that occurs, then e.g. a sundial must be very faintly self-aware.
*And just asserting that doesn't give any actual insight into how qualia arise or work
Edit: responded to the wrong comment
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This really reminds me of timecube, where someone uses a lot of words and fancy language to say something utterly mundane. I skimmed but this just seems to be B theory of time and it's consequences.
Lul i just checked out Time Cube & it made me laugh! True, I added creativity touch/self-expression/meh humaness elements cuz I was excited - feel free to use LLM to get TL;DR if you want
The whole document is kinda more of a technological utopia manifesto - it is just the first three pages are about 'B-theory of time.
Today, I discovered B theory of time & David Lewis Modal Realism, which is mostly what I was writing about! I wish I had known about them two sooner! What do you think about these two theories? I guess they are metaphysical - can't really prove or disprove but you see - if I personally come up with it as a logical/rational universal truth, then it matches someone's smart in this world & has an interest from among the scientific community then...
I am extremely satisfied. I am not the only one!
I added the extra spice, which is the 0th Dimension, the nothing, that brings the two theories into existence? Metaphysics is cool
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Are you suggesting that you figured out what timecube is actually about?
It's really not that complicated once you get past the schizo wording.
So, you know how if it's day where you are then it's night on the other side of the earth? And half way between you and the opposite side it's sun rise and sunset?
Thats it, thats all time cube is.
Chop wood, carry water.
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Timecube is about a slightly schizo guy hating American adventurism in the middle east.
I thought that was 9/11?
Well, from what I remember he was gleeful about 9/11 or maybe its been too long.
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Under your world model, most observers would be Boltzmann brains". I observe that my experience is mostly ordered, where things that happened in the past are more likely to happen in the future, and past states of the world seem to influence present states of the world.
More generally, this does not seem coherent. Instead, it feels like you are going off the rails in the particular way that happens when your mind starts flagging random experiences and thoughts as "this was deeply meaningful".
If "sometimes I have an experience or insight which feels deeply meaningful for reasons I have trouble articulating" applies to you, there are a couple of things which might help:
I'm fairly certain Boltzmann brains are unfalsifiable. Under the theory, you think that your experience is mostly ordered only because you have randomly configured into a brain with false memories of an ordered experience.
That said, it should be treated with the same level of seriousness as other unfalsifiable theories like an invisible intangible dragon in your garage.
Boltzmann observers with a invisible dragon in their garage are exponentially more likely to exist than real observers.
I'm not sure what my takeaway should be from that, except that I don't like Boltzmann brains.
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Aren't Boltzmann Brains both implied and not ruled out by our current best understanding of physics? A truly energy-less vacuum is impossible, which means that any given volume of space-time is ergodic, and that over sufficiently long time scales, will be recapitulated. A post Heat Death universe is abundant in few things but time and space.
I would imagine that the discovery of new laws of physics could, at least in theory, falsify the notion.
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Most things are "unfalsifiable" in the strictest sense, but you can still use probabilistic techniques. The fact that the inputs coming into your brain are coherent with what your brain expects strongly indicates that it's not the case that "most" brains are Boltzmann brains.
Boltzmann pocket universes, where a fluctuation contains observers that maintain coherency over timescales of hours, still in most models are much more prevalent than real observers.
That's to say nothing of instantaneous Boltzmann brains that fluctuate into existence believing they've had a coherent history of experiences.
Eh. I find these theories extremely unconvincing. Boltzmann brains become super-exponentially less likely the more atoms are required to form them. An orderly pocket universe forming would be 10^10^"holy fuck" times less likely than an orderly brain on its own.
And there would be 10^10^"holy fuck" times more versions of you that had all the same past experiences, so were "you" in absolutely every respect, but were currently experiencing complete chaos.
You are overlooking the fact that a post Heat Death universe has infinite amounts of time at hand. It really doesn't matter how unlikely an event is, as long as it isn't categorically/logically impossible.
Being an old-fashioned meat brain? Can happen "naturally" in a very small chunk of the universe's lifespan. As far as I'm aware, our decision theories are inadequate to the task of settling this (same issue with the simulation hypothesis) so I remain agnostic as to the actual ramifications. It is instrimentally useful to me to act as if I exist as an entity that won't poof out of existence. Hasn't failed me yet!
Nope, not overlooking it. It's a probabilistic anthropic argument. It is true that, in a Boltzmann-Brain universe, a brain that is "you" will eventually show up paired with sensible input. But it will be vastly outnumbered by those brains that are "you" up until epsilon seconds ago, but are now seeing chaos. The fact that you're NOT currently seeing chaos is extremely strong evidence that a Boltzmann-Brain universe does not exist. (It doesn't matter if chaos and non-chaos events all happen infinitely many times. It's the proportions that matter.)
I admit, though, that I'm still open to debate. (Physicists really don't expect Boltzmann Brains to be real, but if Feynman can't come up with a knockdown argument, what chance do I have?) There are weird questions like "Is there such a thing as an instant of consciousness?" or "Is anthropic reasoning on the laws of existence even valid?" which might be relevant. But just waving at infinity isn't enough.
But if I were seeing chaos, wouldn't I stop evaluating evidence, thus making the Boltzmann brains where I can read your post the only ones who are convinced that they're not Boltzmann brains? I don't know how to put it in more rigorous terms.
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So I replied to self-made-human as his comment is similar to yours - I copy paste it for you my friend
self-made-human
Thank you for your lovely feedback! Psychiatrist is cool - I love watching healthy gamer & Diary of the CEO about self-improvement YT + bunch of other vids
You say I don't try hard, but I'm actually not smart enough to know how to even start to work harder, besides writing 20 pages of it already XD If you want, you can continue it for me? Do the research pHD level with constructive arguments - English essay/research is one of my weakest points - logical rigor, I don't know how to write a compelling argument ----- in fact, I will be content if no one really reads my work, so thank you so much for reading it
I understand all the fallacies you listed are true - but then again, this is the ultimate truth we are talking about here - is there a possible way to prove it or to unprove it? These fallacies hinges on it - it comes hand in hand, frustratingly! What's your take on the ultimate truth, if you have one?
The 9th dimension or infinite dimension above somehow allows contradictions/paradoxes to exist with each other - something we have yet to comprehend
It makes no sense that triangles with two sides & Escher drawings from our 3D epistemic physics standard reality. It exists in a different reality - if you believe in multiverses & infinite dimensions
Yeah, my essay is more for kinda general audience than smart 130+ iq intellectuals because frankly, I usually get 120 on IQ test and I wish I were smarter, so I'm waiting that neuralink (or any brain enhancement) that can increase all our IQ in the future & able to speak all languages & reach more understanding of peace with each other - which is why in the second link - 'Utopain Tech Society' excel sheet - i say increasing our intelligence is one of the first things we should do because I do see us being monkeys being inefficient doing things really lol
david lewis modal realism? nice - how come i never seen his name before? thank you! of course someone definitely thought up what i thought up --- the internet is big yoooo
You write smart & knowledgeable things in a short time - you must have had a good life, and the motte page is one of your sources of intellectual stimulation - keep up the good work!
You bet I have done a lot of psychedelics... of healthy stuff! - 2 x cinnamon chai coffee, creatine, omega-3 + whole foods daily + 4 x resistance training + 2x 4x4 Norwegian cardio protocol + 7.5 hours sleep + gratitude + friends & family connection + always learning - in fact I learn from you too!
when you get into transhumanist stuff, you get into longetivity (dipping in Bryan Johnson vids but I ain't buying his expensive crap) + signed up to be a cryonist for a time-being, until the rich do something to transfer our consciousness to advance nanotech robotic body - hell yeh
I wish I were rich enough to do some psychedelic stuff - they look very fun to do, but I won't get into it cuz I'm worried about the addictiveness of it. For now, I'm planning a healthy, whole food coffee shop - I won't be adding MCT/CBD oil to the menu, surprisingly --- I am really otherwise a normal person that's into utopia stuff, wants to travel around the world doing touristy things, and own a simple coffee shop - not become a reseacher of something that's hinges on fallcies and otherworldy dimensions - metaphysics imma right?
At least I do those things for the time being until post-labour society & UBI get established for everyone - (they are projecting it happens around 2060?)
Thank you, I always love to learn from everyone - I love knowing pitfalls and when to get help (usually yeh from YT vids & LLM) - I am aware that there are cases of using LLM as therapist can lead to LLM psychosis & they just be bias & agreeable to you ---- but they free yooooo - I ain't rich --- but don't worry - I super happy & grateful to even need threapy and sometimes I have to therapy my friends really
When this is fun - nice to meet a fellow tranhumanist too!
I hope it clears something!
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I mean probably not.
I mean I had most inspiration from Brain Greene if you want to give that a look - https://youtube.com/watch?v=o9z5il_FQUw&list=PLQEkPawTFlc5SM1mGE7ml0Vam_QsKhkXM&index=3&ab_channel=AlexO%27Connor
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Not enough em-dashes to be standard LLM psychosis. Perhaps standard homegrown schizophrenia?
Haha, my wife and I were just talking yesterday about how we haven't seen em-dashes in LLM output for the past couple months, so they probably retrained the models to not use them. But also that still no one is going to ever use em-dashes anymore for fear of being called an LLM.
ChatGPT 5 is still using them all the time in my experience, I haven't bothered to tell it to stop as I rarely use it's writing to communicate
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I'm still using em-dashes, and I'm not going to stop.
Somewhat similarly, I don't use them because I'm lazy and a hyphen is good enough. But if I did, I would continue to use them because I don't care what people think.
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nah, your typical neurodivergent person into existentialhope.com & effectivealtruism.com website fam
https://teatonglu.substack.com/ - here's my existential blog
utopia links - https://teatonglu.substack.com/p/anti-doomer-reading-list-50-existential
;p
& you also into tranhumanist stuff soooooo let's live long yo!
Thanks. Transhumanism is sick.
But I still have to stand by what I said. I am a transhumanist doctor, and to put not too fine a point on it, (half) a psychiatrist. It pains me to feel that duty asks me to dampen your enthusiasm.
When Sir Penrose talks about consciousness and qualia arising from strictly quantum mechanical interactions within the wetware of the human brain, he has enough street cred (courtesy of a Nobel Prize) that people listen seriously. He made testable predictions, and made world-models with a semblance of rigor. Unfortunately, he still didn't convince the wider scientific community. You are facing a far more uphill battle on the best of days, and you're not trying as hard.
As far as I can eyeball, your general thrust is:
1.It is impossible that something exists instead of nothing.
But we do exist.
Therefore, the impossible exists.
Therefore, every impossibility exists, to "balance" the nothingness of the "0th Dimension."
This is where the philosophical alarm bells start ringing. It’s a clever-sounding syllogism, but it hinges on a category error. The "impossibility" of our existence is a statement of incredulity or low probability, not of logical contradiction. A royal flush is incredibly improbable, but it's not "impossible" in the same way a four-sided triangle is. You're conflating "that which is statistically miraculous" with "that which violates logic." By treating them as the same, you're granting yourself a license to declare that anything and everything, including logical contradictions ("Infinite Paradoxes Exist Everywhere"), must be real.
That makes no damn sense. Even for something as plausible (or at least not ruled out by known and speculative physics) like a Boltzmann Brain popping up out of the quantum foam post Heat Death, there is no room for triangles with two sides.
"I imagined/conceived the above. So it has to exist." This is a souped-up, personalized version of the Modal Ontological Argument or David Lewis's Modal Realism, but without any of the logical rigor. Lewis argued for the existence of all possible worlds, not all conceivable worlds. We can conceive of Escher drawings and contradictions, but that doesn't make them physically possible.
It is slightly rude of me to pattern match your words to crankery or a slightly loosened grasp on consensus reality, but that is still my genuine personal and professional opinion. I expect you have done high doses of recreational psychedelics, and laxened your priors. It would be remiss of me to not at least politely ask that you seek help. Others are likely to be less polite, but trust me, I know where this road tends to lead.
That's not slightly rude of you, it's unprofessional as fuck. You are leveraging your medical credentials to insult a guy on the internet. What is fucking remiss of you is to diagnose someone based on a collection of posts, and then to broadcast that pseudo-diagnosis in a public forum.
You get to shitpost or enjoy the prestige and respect of a doctor. Pick one.
In what way is he being insulting? The guy is posting crazy physics word salad, strongly indicative of some sort of mental issues (which does NOT take a doctor to Notice). @self_made_human is very very gently pointing this out. If I felt like engaging (which I don't), I would be much less polite about my disdain.
You might not find it insulting to have someone casually dismiss a post that is sloppily written stream of consciousness, but expressing coherent thoughts with philosophical precedent with two fucking sentences: "Not enough em-dashes to be standard LLM psychosis. Perhaps standard homegrown schizophrenia?" but I assume you aren't fucking schizophrenic. I have said before that I have learned to tolerate that kind of casual prejudice, and you will note I didn't object to anyone else saying anything like that. It doesn't particularly bother me when members of the public talk like that. But a fucking doctor casually lobbing a term that instantly makes people lose respect for you (and any psychiatrist who doesn't know that needs to prove to me they still have a license) out like that IS insulting. It is insulting to schizophrenics, it is insulting to doctors and it is insulting to the concept of the motte as a place where fucking smart people who think things through go to talk about shit they can't talk about elsewhere.
I only objected after the pivot from that to 'well hold on I know I flippantly dismissed you with the barest thought moments ago, but I am a doctor so you should listen to me'. Like I said, you can shitpost, or claim the mantle of medical professional. One or the other. Pivoting like that, assuming the freedom of shitposting and then pivoting to demand the respect of your profession is point blank unprofessional behaviour for a doctor and just outright fucking stupid for a fucking psychiatrist.
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Do I look like I'm on the clock here?
An "insult" implies, at least slightly, that there's no merit to my claims. I am intimately familiar with crankery, and I know the symptoms of someone at very high risk of psychosis. Someone offering legal, programming or engineering advice would not be held to the same acuritny. In this case, I invite you to examine his arguments and see if your claims that I'm being irresponsible stand.
Off the clock doesn't mean ethics are optional does it? Are you allowed to fuck your patients after work?
As they used to teach journalists, the primary metrics of an insult are delivery, intent and impact. Even a merited comment can be insulting if it's used to demean someone publicly. And legally we're talking ethics, not lawsuits. Your delivery started with labeling it as 'LLM psychosis' or 'homegrown schizophrenia,' then backpedaled to psychedelics and 'high risk'. That's not constructive critique, it's pathologizing a philosophical post.
You should try focusing on ethics for a bit. Or diagnostics. I don't care how 'intimate' you are with crankery, you can't fucking diagnose it off an internet post. That's what is supposed to set psychiatrists apart from armchair psychiatrists, part of what you are supposed to learn at medical school isn't how to spot crankery it's how to distinguish between spotting crankery and being a dick and why diagnosing over one internet post is always the second one.
IANAL is an age old internet acronym because lawyers are held up to a similar level of scrutiny. You are correct that it is not the same however. NAD didn't take off the same way, because most of your profession know not to give medical advice over the internet. Most of them understand that they have traded shitposting for a higher level of respect, for the opportunity to be listened to when they do leverage their medical credentials. I can see a scenario where you notice a regular poster change over time, or fixate and spiral, and warily offering them advice. You called this guy a schizophrenic who fried his brains on drugs after ONE OP.
My claims stand. I didn't read the op again, it wouldn't change anything. My claims would stand even if he'd smeared shit and blood on a picture of the Pope, scanned it and attached it as an op. My claims are not about his behaviour, they are about yours.
If you are really determined to maintain your right to shitpost with your credentials, show me what in the op you decided met the diagnostic criteria for either schizophrenia or drug-induced psychosis.
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Legal advice is notoriously something you are not supposed to give.
But someone offering programming or engineering advice can't personally attack someone in an argument by making engineering claims. They don't have the kind of bad motivations and incentives they would for mental health.
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Thank you for your lovely feedback! Psychiatrist is cool - I love watching healthy gamer & Diary of the CEO about self-improvement YT + bunch of other vids
You say I don't try hard, but I'm actually not smart enough to know how to even start to work harder, besides writing 20 pages of it already XD If you want, you can continue it for me? Do the research pHD level with constructive arguments - English essay/research is one of my weakest points - logical rigor, I don't know how to write a compelling argument ----- in fact, I will be content if no one really reads my work, so thank you so much for reading it
I understand all the fallacies you listed are true - but then again, this is the ultimate truth we are talking about here - is there a possible way to prove it or to unprove it? These fallacies hinges on it - it comes hand in hand, frustratingly! What's your take on the ultimate truth, if you have one?
The 9th dimension or infinite dimension above somehow allows contradictions/paradoxes to exist with each other - something we have yet to comprehend
It makes no sense that triangles with two sides & Escher drawings from our 3D epistemic physics standard reality. It exists in a different reality - if you believe in multiverses & infinite dimensions
Yeah, my essay is more for kinda general audience than smart 130+ iq intellectuals because frankly, I usually get 120 on IQ test and I wish I were smarter, so I'm waiting that neuralink (or any brain enhancement) that can increase all our IQ in the future & able to speak all languages & reach more understanding of peace with each other - which is why in the second link - 'Utopain Tech Society' excel sheet - i say increasing our intelligence is one of the first things we should do because I do see us being monkeys being inefficient doing things really lol
david lewis modal realism? nice - how come i never seen his name before? thank you! of course someone definitely thought up what i thought up --- the internet is big yoooo
You write smart & knowledgeable things in a short time - you must have had a good life, and the motte page is one of your sources of intellectual stimulation - keep up the good work!
You bet I have done a lot of psychedelics... of healthy stuff! - 2 x cinnamon chai coffee, creatine, omega-3 + whole foods daily + 4 x resistance training + 2x 4x4 Norwegian cardio protocol + 7.5 hours sleep + gratitude + friends & family connection + always learning - in fact I learn from you too!
when you get into transhumanist stuff, you get into longetivity (dipping in Bryan Johnson vids but I ain't buying his expensive crap) + signed up to be a cryonist for a time-being, until the rich do something to transfer our consciousness to advance nanotech robotic body - hell yeh
I wish I were rich enough to do some psychedelic stuff - they look very fun to do, but I won't get into it cuz I'm worried about the addictiveness of it. For now, I'm planning a healthy, whole food coffee shop - I won't be adding MCT/CBD oil to the menu, surprisingly --- I am really otherwise a normal person that's into utopia stuff, wants to travel around the world doing touristy things, and own a simple coffee shop - not become a reseacher of something that's hinges on fallcies and otherworldy dimensions - metaphysics imma right?
At least I do those things for the time being until post-labour society & UBI get established for everyone - (they are projecting it happens around 2060?)
Thank you, I always love to learn from everyone - I love knowing pitfalls and when to get help (usually yeh from YT vids & LLM) - I am aware that there are cases of using LLM as therapist can lead to LLM psychosis & they just be bias & agreeable to you ---- but they free yooooo - I ain't rich --- but don't worry - I super happy & grateful to even need threapy and sometimes I have to therapy my friends really
When this is fun - nice to meet a fellow tranhumanist too!
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