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0 pointsgonehome8y ago0 comments

Thanks for responding/explaining in more detail.

The halting problem is a good example that I'd have to think more about. My initial feeling is that while the proof shows that you can't write an general algorithm to determine if a system halts you can still understand why that's the case from the proof itself. My claim isn't that understanding things allows you to do everything, but to find out what can be done. You're right though that knowing more won't let you violate the laws of physics or computability - it just lets you learn what the laws are.

For the physics point I think it's possible that the territory is math and that's why mathematical equations do such a good job of explaining it. I read about this idea in Max Tegmark's book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DXKJ2DA/ - in that case we could be discovering pieces of it (though our syntax and such is still just a map to it). Until we have a grand unifying theory it seems worthwhile to keep working on the map. Maybe I'm just optimistic about this.

You lose me in the next section though - it seems like we agree on the soft problem, but I don't understand your classification of the hard problem.

Why is it difficult to think of a physical process leading to subjective experience? Natural selection towards a general problem solving organ that provides feedback etc. Visual inputs, audio, the ability to make predictions and act based on those - subjective experience seems like a natural outcome of all of that?

I think you and I probably agree that 'emergent phenomena' is mostly hand-wavy nonsense (http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/).

> "but as many wise people who have meditated long and hard on this matter have suggested, the nature of consciousness exists prior to concepts, prior to the division of reality by the mind into subjective and objective and therefore prior to (and so beyond the scope of) scientific inquiry."

I don't understand what leads to this conclusion - your last sentence seems to imply dualism which I think is generally pretty weak since poking someone in the brain, a brain tumor's affect on consciousness, and LSD's affect on it provide decent evidence that it's material. I don't think this is a real problem, it feels like one of those that disappears once we understand how things actually work.

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placebo8y ago

Only noticed your reply now. Can continue discussion via email if you're interested, but will quickly refer to what you've mentioned:

I'm aware of Tegmark's view and was quite intrigued by it at the time, but I see it more as statement suggesting that mathematics can serve as the perfect map for physics to eventually uncover rather than that mathematics can be the territory itself (Max might disagree though). I don't think I can put it any better than the eloquent way Hawking stated it about what is it that breathes fire into the equations. Having a perfect description does not create a reality, and even if quantum mechanics, gravitation, dark matter, dark energy and whatever other mysteries that no doubt will surface in the future will be perfectly understood and unified under an elegant and perfect mathematical description, it still won't explain how existence exists (and I'm not referring to the big bang - I'm referring to the very current reality). Putting it simply, the "is-ness" of reality is not the same as the rules it adheres to, since rules don't create a reality. We attempt to understand reality by noticing consistencies in our interaction with it, and then somehow confuse these consistencies (which we label with certain concepts) with the reality that generates them - or worse yet, think that these consistencies that we notice create reality.

Glad we are in sync regarding the soft problem. In order to be in sync regarding the hard problem, we should agree on what it is. Basically to agree on what the hard problem of consciousness is, we must agree that a subjective experience of being conscious is a very real thing, but at the same time there is nothing physical about the experience - measurable physical things can be correlated to the experience or even cause it, but there is nothing measurable about the very real subjective experience. That's the problem in a nutshell.

By the way, if my explanation implied a belief in dualism then my explanation was obviously inadequate. However, my beef with dualism comes from a completely different angle than the scientific approach (or, more accurately, the approach of physicalism). The ironic thing is that physicalism, which is so opposed to dualism, is inherently dualistic by definition. Try and imagine what any physical object is other than being an interpretation of something from the point of view of a subject that experiences it. Science is so focused on the objects and the relations between them that it completely misses the fact that any conceptual explanation is only made possible by a very subjective explainer.

Not sure I managed to get the point across. There's an article that I liked which ties some of these ideas together in a nice way - perhaps it will do the subject more justice:

http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious

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