This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I will never not point out that this is materialist mythology supported by nothing. And that nobody who makes this claim, not to mention nobody at all, can explain how and why the unspecified biochemical reactions produce consciousness, agency, though or qualia.
The brain is not a computer. And the only reason people believe it is is based on metaphysical assumption rather than logic or evidence.
It is not a computer for the same reason it isn't a clock, or a ship, or a river. These are metaphors. The map is not the territory.
I see no reason why biochemistry should not be able to produce consciousness, agency, thought and qualia. In the modus-ponens-modus tollens sense: "clearly they can, because they do." Where is the actual contradiction?
Don't multiply entities beyond necessity. Clearly brains have something to do with qualia. Why not "A causes B"? Why should I look beyond this intuitively obvious structure?
I mean it could.
But if you want to argue that this is the most parcimonious theory, you have a lot more legwork to do.
A lot of other things in your body also have similar effects. There has been a lot of hay recently made about other parts of your nervous system being more influential in your experience than previously thought, for instance.
But let's just leave the exact seat of consciousness problem aside since it's still ultimately within the body in this conception.
A harder problem is that none of the chemical processes as we currently understand them should generate this behavior.
Now they do of course, but in no ways that are predicted by the laws we understand. The fact that death is permanent is very weird for instance and it seems much more parsimonious to say the link between the body and the soul has been severed than that the extremely complex computer has been broken in a subtle way that can't be repaired.
If consciousness was simply a property of certain arrangements of matter, you wouldn't really expect nature to select the ones that can be bricked. But of course both theories are equivalent in practice.
All this really is just pointless arguing about which theory of a mysterious phenomenon is the most elegant. It's not inquiry. It's the same sort of rotten masturbatory behavior physics has fallen pray to in its absence of new discoveries.
I believe the most honest thing to do here is to be humble and admit that we don't know how consciousness works and stop ourselves from making assumptions on top of theories that haven't been tested by experience.
I don't understand this. Everything the body does is hard to predict by the laws we understand. We don't understand consciousness, sure, but we also don't (fully) understand cell biology, DNA assembly, protein folding etc. either, and nobody is suggesting those require new forces or laws.
How would this not also apply to death of the body? It seems to me postulating a separate soul does not meaningfully reduce complexity here. Most deaths are not a failure of the brain.
Sure, but that's not a "death" thing. Once you know that organisms stop being able to procreate at a certain age, it seems necessary that they will die after, as nothing would select against it. The weird thing here is menopause, not death.
Sure, but we can place constraints well before we have operational understanding. Few people know how almost anything works; again, they don't see a need to postulate novel physics.
Anyways, I don't understand either why you see the need to add entities, nor what adding entities even gives you. What is the mind doing that physics clearly does not suffice for?
Qualia.
There's no explained reason for me to be experiencing existence.
There's no explained reason for lots of things that we don't invoke the need for new physics for. What makes qualia unique?
I think this is gesturing at the common philosophical stance "I see no way that materialism could even in theory give rise to qualia". That of course has the problem that it's equally difficult to see how any set of laws would give rise to qualia; as such, it's just hiding the confusion of qualia outside of physics.
Well I don't know I can imagine a few possible set of laws that could actually do that.
And I don't see no way for materialism to be true at all, it's quite possible that it is. I just don't pretend it's more likely than other speculative theories when we're bereft of evidence.
Do you apply this same logic to any other system we don't totally understand? Also, can you give an example for a law that makes qualia easier to explain?
Yes. I am a skeptic. I'm not that optimistic on the possibility of knowledge.
Of course. Masamune Shirow's manga series Ghost in the Shell is set in a post-cyberpunk world where advances in technology have made the titular cartesian concept of mind body dualism derisively coined by Arthur Koestler into an undeniable phenomenon routinely observed by the protagonists. In this universe the "ghost" is the individual essence of human beings which is not present in robots despite both having physically equivalent minds, and this essence affords them a will and experience which is not found in those machines (except for exceptional plot contrivances that allow the story to explore these concepts).
In the GITS universe, copying someone's consciousness is a nigh-impossible act called "ghost-dubbing" which almost always results in an inferior copy and kills the original. And criminals are processed by analysis of their ghost which directly shows if this conscious part of their individuality willed an illegal act. And if necessary, the part of their brain that communicates with their ghost is removed as punishment.
The specific physics of how ghosts work is obviously not detailed for mythological purposes, but it's heavily hinted at that they are a sort of phenomenological construct that various parts of the nervous system connect to instead of something that is generated by it, in a way not dissimilar to the concept of the soul. Various characters have different takes on what ghosts exactly are, but it seems like a good example of what the beginnings of an understanding of consciousness would look like in a world where radical materialism isn't true in a plausible, non supernatural, way.
Which, by the way, is the level of evidence that would convince me to start taking either side seriously: if we can ostensibly transfer or copy consciousness, then monism becomes a more parsimonious theory, if not, dualism is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link