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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Well I don't know I can imagine a few possible set of laws that could actually do that.

And I don't see no way for materialism to be true at all, it's quite possible that it is. I just don't pretend it's more likely than other speculative theories when we're bereft of evidence.

Do you apply this same logic to any other system we don't totally understand? Also, can you give an example for a law that makes qualia easier to explain?

Do you apply this same logic to any other system we don't totally understand?

Yes. I am a skeptic. I'm not that optimistic on the possibility of knowledge.

can you give an example for a law that makes qualia easier to explain?

Of course. Masamune Shirow's manga series Ghost in the Shell is set in a post-cyberpunk world where advances in technology have made the titular cartesian concept of mind body dualism derisively coined by Arthur Koestler into an undeniable phenomenon routinely observed by the protagonists. In this universe the "ghost" is the individual essence of human beings which is not present in robots despite both having physically equivalent minds, and this essence affords them a will and experience which is not found in those machines (except for exceptional plot contrivances that allow the story to explore these concepts).

In the GITS universe, copying someone's consciousness is a nigh-impossible act called "ghost-dubbing" which almost always results in an inferior copy and kills the original. And criminals are processed by analysis of their ghost which directly shows if this conscious part of their individuality willed an illegal act. And if necessary, the part of their brain that communicates with their ghost is removed as punishment.

The specific physics of how ghosts work is obviously not detailed for mythological purposes, but it's heavily hinted at that they are a sort of phenomenological construct that various parts of the nervous system connect to instead of something that is generated by it, in a way not dissimilar to the concept of the soul. Various characters have different takes on what ghosts exactly are, but it seems like a good example of what the beginnings of an understanding of consciousness would look like in a world where radical materialism isn't true in a plausible, non supernatural, way.

Which, by the way, is the level of evidence that would convince me to start taking either side seriously: if we can ostensibly transfer or copy consciousness, then monism becomes a more parsimonious theory, if not, dualism is.

Ah, so substance dualism? I guess that could make sense. I have a hard time taking it seriously, because souls would just obviously have to be insanely complex objects and laws about souls would have to come to utterly dominate our world models.

(Also, Ghost in the Shell is great but Shirow is drawing from the exact same sort of uncertainty here that causes people to doubt materialistic explanations of qualia and consciousness in the first place, so this is kind of double-counting evidence.)

souls would just obviously have to be insanely complex objects and laws about souls would have to come to utterly dominate our world models

Oh come on, we literally just did this for subatomic particles, for electromagnetism, for spacetime. Physicists have gone so accustomed to being fucked with in this way by the Universe that people now mock them for speculating about "dark" thingamajigs and multiversefuls of hypothetical.

If anything there being an unexplained triviality that completely changes our view of the universe when finally observed is the norm in empiricism. I would actually be very disappointed if this particular mystery is different. Though it certainly could.

Shirow is drawing from the exact same sort of uncertainty here that causes people to doubt materialistic explanations of qualia and consciousness in the first place

You asked for a possible alternative theory. I'm certainly counting fiction as zero in the column of evidence.

Oh come on, we literally just did this for subatomic particles, for electromagnetism, for spacetime. Physicists have gone so accustomed to being fucked with in this way by the Universe that people now mock them for speculating about "dark" thingamajigs and multiversefuls of hypothetical.

I think there's a fundamental difference here. Subatomic particles, quantum physics, relativity etc. explained to us, mainly, how particles sometimes did unusual things. But given the theory, it was relatively clear in advance how the high-level properties could ensue. For instance, once somebody tells you that energy is quantized, it is clear how emitters avoid the ultraviolet catastrophe: the cause is sufficient to the effect.

Here I'll turn around and use a standard dualist argument in reverse: it is not clear to me, if you already believe that materialism as stated cannot explain qualia, how the addition of a novel property of the cosmos or law about particles could even in theory change this. Note that GitS's ghosts are precisely not this; they're a restatement of the problem, repackaged in "law" form, rather than an actual mechanistic explanation. What law about particles do you expect to give rise to a sense of self?

Of course, given that I'm a compatibilist, I already believe that the laws we know of are sufficient-in-kind to explain this. However: maybe once we understand the mechanics of the mind, we'll see that the brain really does employ a specific unique physical principle that doesn't show up anywhere else in nature, and if we understand consciousness, we also understand why this law is necessary. But given that we don't understand consciousness; I don't see how such a law would be called for: when you don't even understand fusion yet, it is simply epistemically unwise to ask for quantum physics, no matter how inaccurate your current ones are: you have not yet even begun to exhaust the limit of the tools provided to you. Physical laws are not a substitute for understanding! The way to go is to begin with the assumption that the laws as known are sufficient, and investigate until you find a clear mechanistic contradiction. IMO, this is clearly not how dualism has gone about it, which is why I predict that even if new laws are found, they will not help them.

If you lack a clear situation where consciousness requires that an electron zig, but standard physics says the electron will zag, then any new laws that are found will not help you make sense of consciousness either.