What's your position regarding consciousness? Broad physicalism (we'll have a scientific explanation one day) or broad anti-physicalism (science can't give a complete account)? Or something else?
Please repost after voting, I'm genuinely curious! 🤔
I can't imagine what a scientific explanation would look like, or how we would know that it was correct, but I also have no reason (other than that) to think we won't someday have one.
Everything we know about the physical world is derived from the contents of consciousness; completing the loop and explaining consciousness in terms of the physical world would be cool. :) But I can't sketch out how it would work.
(Where by "consciousness" I mean subjective experience, not easy stuff that can be straightforwardly measured objectively.)
@ninokadic@philosophy@philosophyofmind The nature of science's relationship with the world prevents it from giving a "complete" account. It cannot be complete because there is always something else we haven't seen yet.
@ninokadic@philosophy@philosophyofmind Still unsure at this point. Took a Philosophy of Mind course last semester. Found myself strongly leaning toward non-reductive physicalism for most of it. Then, while writing my term paper, I began to realize I was oversimplifying the problem and now I'm not so sure.
On bigger questions like "What is consciousness?" I think it’s a safe bet that advancing neuroscience will radically re-define the knowns, the theories, the outstanding Qs.
Someone should take a qualitative look at how groundbreaking labs in the last 25 years have collaborated amongst themselves. How do they bounce ideas? How do they speculate creatively/effectively? What do they sketch on their whiteboards?
@ninokadic@philosophy@philosophyofmind I vote for both broad physicalism (because science will eventually be able to fully account for every detail of our mental activity) and broad anti-physicalism (because science will never be able to explain the simple fact of conscious awareness). The laws of physics would not predict that a robot was conscious, even if it perfectly modeled my mind or brain. Similarly, those same laws would predict my brain representations but not my conscious awareness.
@michaelgemar@ninokadic@philosophy@philosophyofmind We can't tell if a robot is conscious empirically. We can look at its hardware and software to infer what representations it has of the world. Of course we assume other people are conscious, though it can't really be proven. It's more like an article of faith. Some day we might be able to scan my brain to infer what representations it has of the world. If the two things match, it still doesn't prove the robot is conscious.
@ber@mildbeard@michaelgemar@philosophy@philosophyofmind It's really interesting to hear that the other minds problem is something people value as a profound realisation. I always approached it as one of those theories that, while technically true, we disregard in daily life and just assume that others are conscious too; or we use it as a technical point in philosophy of mind arguments. It's nice that it has an effect on others which is more considered than how I saw it.
Interesting discussions here. My (cellular neurobiologist's) intuition would roughly be: I'm optimistic about our ability to find a reasonable set of measurable markers for consciousness in humans.
I'm considerably less optimistic about us agreeing on an explanatory framework, let alone its validity beyond humans. It's too easy to get lost in semantics, IMO.
The hard problem, I think, arises from ambiguous definitions and questionable assumptions. Clarifications change it from an impossible obstacle to an array of difficult but scientifically tractable ones.
@ninokadic@philosophy@philosophyofmind
Dark Compatibilism: Any interesting definition of consciousness that is compatible with either physicalism or anti-physicalism will ultimately also be proven not to exist.
@ninokadic@philosophy@philosophyofmind
I think it's worse/better than that: For my money, there won't be a definition, or even a proof that consciousness exists -- much less a "definitive explanation"! -- within a physicalist/anti-physicalist dichotomy or spectrum.
If anyone manages to put together a "definitive explanation" of a provably existing phenomenon of consciousness, it will have been constructed in such a way as to falsify the terms "physicalist" and "anti-physicalist".
@ninokadic@philosophy@philosophyofmind Wittgensteinian: the hard problem of consciousness is a confusion created by the careless use of language, and the mistaking of scientific concepts with reality.
@ninokadic@philosophy@philosophyofmind Broad physicalism. It might turn out to be too complex for us to fully understand, but there is no supernatural component to consciousness in particular or existence in general.
@ninokadic@philosophy@philosophyofmind It seems to me that you are conflating epistemology with ontology. Physicalism is the ontological thesis that mind is a physical thing, that mental properties are physical properties, etc. That is compatible with skepticism about science's ability to fully explain consciousness. After all, a physicalist might think that science will never fully explain physical things. #MagnetsHowDoTheyWork
@News4wombats@philosophy@philosophyofmind Fair, but physicalists generally think that an explanation of consciousness in fully physical terms is at least possible in principle, perhaps as part of some future/ideal physics. Anti-physicalists generally think that consciousness is not the sort of phenomenon that can be explicated in third-person, mathematical-nomic language. This is a more epistemological approach because it's unclear to me that physicalists have a systematic ontology.
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